Sam thought they were crazy to try to go in without more of a plan, but as Xander always said, once a Ranger, always a Ranger. He could plan a mission through a minefield in his sleep. What looked utterly insurmountable to her was a cakewalk for him.
He’d given her permission to call Fletcher only once they were ready to rock and roll, and it looked like they were about at that point. Xander was rolling up the maps. The trailhead they’d be using was fifteen miles away, up Colorado State Road 9, so they’d have plenty of time to catch a cell signal to make their phone calls.
They spooned a bit of Sunshine’s famous stew into their mouths and took the rest in thermoses and, at three in the afternoon, headed off.
Sam was incredibly uncomfortable.
She was in the backseat of the rented SUV, and felt as if there were guns and arrows and bolt-throwing crossbows pointed at her back. Which there were. Xander had loaded up the truck with gear: weapons, backpacks and tools. He wouldn’t tell her what everything was for. He and Roth were in the front, organizing, planning, discussing trailheads and alpine zones and bivouacs and longitudinal areas and taluses and walking-in.
She started thinking some hot tea and a warm fire sounded like a much, much smarter plan than the one she’d determinedly forced herself into.
She was going to hold them back, no doubt about it, but that was important, she thought. She hated that Xander was so willing—hell, excited—to run headlong into danger. At least his father was along—his pacifist father, who didn’t blink as his son loaded enough ammunition to take down a herd of moose in the back.
Great.
They were climbing now, and Sam glanced at her phone. She had bars.
“Who do you want me to call first?” she interrupted.
Xander harrumphed, but Roth said, “McReynolds.”
Sam grabbed the card Reed had given her earlier and dialed the number and, when it started to ring, handed the phone to Xander.
“Reed. Xander. Hey listen. Crawford took off into the woods last night, and his dad came by all sorts of agitated. We’re going up after him. We just wanted to let you know what was going on, just in case.”
Silence, then Xander laughed. “Yes, Sam made me call. She’s a stickler like that.”
He listened some more, then gave Reed the coordinates they were heading toward.
He listened for a minute, then Xander’s voice changed. “No, I hadn’t heard. Thanks for telling me. Right. Right. Good idea.” He paused for a minute. “Yes, I will. On my honor. Okay.”
He handed the phone back to Sam.
“You better go ahead and call Fletcher.”
“Why. What’s wrong?”
He caught her eye in the rearview mirror.
“Someone just blew up a reproductive services center in Boulder.”
Chapter 49
Washington, D.C.
Detective Darren Fletcher
Bianco put her tirade on hold long enough to let the aide fill them in on the details of the bombing, but Fletcher could feel the waves of anger coming from the other side of the desk. Poor Inez was shriveled up in her chair, completely stricken. He thought Bianco had been overly hard on the girl—it wouldn’t be the first time a little pillow talk had resulted in an embarrassing story gracing the pages of a newspaper.
Fletcher had a hard time believing the accounts he was hearing. A man was seen leaving just as the fire alarm went off. The building was evacuated successfully—thankfully, he’d struck in the afternoon instead of the morning, when the surgical procedures were normally done. Many more would have been hurt if the operating suites had been full.
There were no reported casualties, though several people had been taken to the hospital with respiratory issues. But the building itself was decimated. It was a combination research hospital for reproductive endocrinology and a fertility clinic, but not just for everyday women with fertility issues. They were doing cutting-edge work, stem cell transplants and clinical studies for in vitro fertilization in addition to the run-of-the-mill fertility treatments. The center was internationally recognized as a leader in reproductive technologies. Couples flew in from all over the world to have the very best possible care, and they had the highest success rate of any clinic in the country.
But the bombing wasn’t the weirdness. That came in the form of reports of a small girl, around six or seven years of age, who the police were convinced had set off the bomb.
According to witnesses, she’d been lost on the street, walking up and down the sidewalks crying, looking for her father. She had a cell phone in her hand, and one woman thought she meant to call her father with it. So the business owner had taken her into her store, sat her down on a stool and told her to call her parents.