Travis indicated the woman on the chair. “Find something to bind her with. I’ll find Carrie.”
Paige headed for an open closet near the entry. Even from here Travis could see random articles of clothing inside. Long-sleeved shirts whose arms would do fine as makeshift ropes.
He turned his attention farther down the back hall, past the bathroom. There were two doorways at the end, facing each other, both open. One room dark, one lit.
He hadn’t bothered to ask, in writing, whether Carrie Holden was still alive. Partly that was because he’d been in a hurry, but mostly it was because he’d assumed she was. Anyone who’d gone to this much trouble to set a trap for him and Paige must have a good reason to take them alive—it would’ve been far easier to open fire on the Jeep the moment they pulled in. Certainly that approach wouldn’t have required finding a passable lookalike. It followed that the aggressors would keep Carrie alive, too—the more Tangent prisoners, the merrier.
He advanced along the hall.
Dark room, lit room.
The decoy had been waiting in the lit one. She’d turned on the light when he rang the doorbell. It seemed likely that Carrie was in that same room: the impostor would want to keep an eye on her.
It occurred to Travis that the woman could’ve lied about the people watching this place: they could well be inside right now. They could be in either or both of the rooms ahead. In any such scenario he was outgunned. It almost wasn’t worth drawing his SIG. He drew it anyway. If someone was about to take him out, he might as well return the favor as best he could.
Behind him he heard Paige tying the woman’s wrists and ankles. The sound was vague, indistinct. To a listener it might have been someone shifting awkwardly in a seat.
Travis covered the last ten feet of the hallway at a fast walk, reached into the dark room to where the light switch had to be, and flipped it.
Home office. Big oak desk with a laptop and a green glass-shaded lamp and a scattering of papers. No closet. Nowhere for anyone to hide.
Travis spun in the hall and faced the other room. Carrie’s bedroom. Bigger than the office. Walk-in closet on the far wall, full of clothes and random boxes. No one hiding there, either. No one hiding anywhere, here. There was only Carrie Holden herself, bound and gagged with duct tape on the floor beside the bed, staring up at him with wide and alert eyes.
He holstered the gun and crossed to her, kneeling and putting a finger to his lips as he met her stare.
He removed the tape from her face first; it was triple wrapped but the overlap was sloppy, leaving the lowest layer exposed at the edge. Travis tore through it easily and pulled all three pieces aside. Carrie took a deeper breath than she’d probably taken in hours.
“Do you have a gun here?” Travis whispered.
Carrie nodded.
“Are you good with it?”
Another nod, accompanied by a look—mild annoyance at the question. Which boded well.
Travis considered what he’d seen of the cabin’s layout so far. One fact stood out: there was no back door. No easy way in or out but the entry he and Paige had used.
That was good.
He met Carrie’s stare again as he turned his attention to the rest of her binds.
“We can make it out of here alive,” he whispered, “but you have to do exactly what I say.”
As he freed her wrists he began to explain the plan.
Chapter Nine
Every instinct told Dominic something was wrong. The decoy’s decision to use the bathroom was entirely out of line. Granted, she wasn’t a professional at this kind of work—Dominic had no idea where his employers had found her, though without a doubt she’d come from somewhere within their own ranks. Probably high in the ranks. She was someone. Or someone’s sister or mother. They would’ve only chosen somebody whose loyalty was beyond question.
What wasn’t beyond question was her capability. Clearly she had no experience at being a standin. Who the hell did, aside from undercover cops and a few deep-cover intel people? It was pressure work of the worst kind. Contrary to what some believed, deception did not come naturally to most people. Even telling a small lie triggered all kinds of stress reactions, and this woman was telling a big one.
For all that, she’d done well at first. Right on script, as far as Dominic could tell. Her job was to get the visitors talking. Get them to disclose what they knew about Scalar—whatever the hell that was—in a setting where they felt comfortable enough to speak freely. Later on, after the team had taken them, there would be time to interrogate them at length, but that sort of questioning was chancy at best; Dominic knew that from long experience. You could torture someone for a computer password or a vault lock combination—information that could be confirmed on the spot—but you could rarely get at their deeper secrets. Broad, general information was hard to extract by brutal means. You couldn’t force the answers when you didn’t even have the questions.
Hence the decoy.