For a moment, pondering Carrie’s demand, Paige appeared lost. She pulled her bangs back from her forehead and stared into empty space in front of herself. Then she looked at Carrie.
“In the archives index in Border Town,” Paige said, “on Level B48, there are seventeen entries devoted to Scalar. The first is dated June 4, 1981. The last is dated November 28, 1987. All seventeen of them are lined out in blue ink. Is that good enough?”
Carrie looked impressed. But still undecided. She took a breath to speak, but before she could, Travis finished writing and set the pen aside. He turned the pages back until his first was on top, then calmly handed the pad across to Carrie. The move surprised her, but she took it and read the few lines Travis had written:
Nod if the real Carrie Holden is still in this cabin.
If you make a sound I will kill you.
By the time the woman looked up from the pad, Travis had drawn his SIG Sauer and leveled it at her face.
Chapter Eight
She didn’t make a sound.
Her hands began to shake again, and she lowered the notepad to her lap.
Travis was too focused on the woman to see Paige’s expression, but whatever her reaction was, it didn’t freeze her. Or lead her to a different conclusion from his. She drew her own weapon and aimed it at the woman.
Travis raised his eyebrows and pointed at the pad with his free hand, prompting her for an answer.
The woman swallowed and seemed to consider her options. She didn’t have any.
She nodded forcefully. Yes, the real Carrie Holden was still here.
Paige began speaking, her tone as casual as Travis had ever heard it. Anyone listening to an audio feed of this room—as someone undoubtedly was—would’ve heard no hint of tension. “If you need me to, I can put you in touch with other Tangent personnel to confirm we’re who we say we are. We need your information, Ms. Holden.”
Travis gestured for the woman to turn the page. She did.
How many are watching this place?
Nod if they are inside.
She thought about it. Raised a hand and extended all four fingers and her thumb. Then she shrugged and added the index finger of the other hand. Five, maybe six.
She also shook her head, slowly and deliberately. No, the watchers were not inside the cabin.
“Maybe you’ve guessed,” Paige said, “but the thing that’s going on right now is tied to Garner’s assassination last night. Which in turn is linked to Scalar. How, we don’t know.”
Nothing she was saying was especially sensitive—the people listening in almost certainly had that information already.
Travis gestured again: turn the page.
The woman complied.
Say you need to use the restroom.
Make no other sound.
Another swallow. A final moment of decision behind her eyes.
“I’m sorry, I need to use the powder room,” the woman said, and before the last word was out, Travis set his gun aside and lunged across the space between couch and chair. He got one hand over the woman’s mouth and nose before she could change her mind and scream, and looped the other arm around her neck, sliding right down onto the cushion beside her as he did it.
He left plenty of space between the crook of his elbow and her throat—he had no intention of strangling her. Instead he pressed his bicep to one side of her neck and his forearm to the other, in a sleeper hold—a blood choke, as they’d called it on the force in Minneapolis. Full compression of the carotid arteries on each side. You could kill someone if you weren’t careful with this move, though admittedly Travis wasn’t all that concerned for this subject.
She lasted seven seconds, then went limp against him.
On the possibility she was faking it, he took hold of her left index finger and pried it radically backward toward the top of her wrist, far beyond the ninety-degree limit it was built with.
She didn’t react.
She wasn’t faking.
He lowered her to the chair and stood. Paige, already on her feet, handed him back his gun. He holstered it, then crossed the room to the hallway and the half bath there, wide open and empty. He closed the door loudly for effect, then turned back to find Paige right beside him.
She leaned close and whispered against his ear. “They won’t buy this for long. We’ve got a couple minutes, tops.”
He nodded.
She drew back, then pressed in again. “I suspected, but I wasn’t sure. How’d you know?”
“She didn’t react to your last name. She should’ve, if she was close with your dad.”
“I thought the rock salt out front was overdone. Should’ve just been a path to the truck. Now we know why there was so much.”
Travis nodded again. Sometime last night a group of people had descended on this place. Maybe they’d parked on the road and come around behind the house to hide their footprints. Maybe the woman—the decoy—had rung the doorbell alone and gotten Carrie Holden to open up. Whatever had followed had been fast and brutal, and left lots of tracks going in. All of which had been erased by the salt.