For a moment she felt a wave of nausea. She’d tortured an innocent man. She put that away quickly. Time for regret later, if she didn’t die now.
The columns reversed again. Elaborate trap, not real crisis. Though she did believe the situation with de la Fuentes was genuine, she no longer believed it was quite so urgent as she’d been told. Time was the easiest small change to make to a file; the tight deadline was a distortion. Low stakes again—just her own life to save. And Daniel’s, too, if she could.
She tried to shake the thought—it felt almost like an omen—that her stakes had somehow doubled. She didn’t need the extra burden.
Maybe someone else—that brilliant and unsuspecting kid who had taken her place at the department—was working on the real terrorist now. Maybe they didn’t think she still had the ability to get what they wanted. But why bring her in at all, then? Maybe the terrorist was dead, and they wanted a fall guy. Maybe they’d discovered this doppelg?nger weeks ago and held him in reserve. Get the Chemist to make somebody confess to something, and tie a bow on a bad situation?
That wouldn’t explain the visitor, though.
It had to be near five in the morning. Maybe it was just a farmer who liked to start the day early and knew the area so well that he didn’t mind flying without radar through a bunch of tall trees in the pitch-black night and then enjoyed a good crash landing for the adrenaline kick…
She could hear Daniel’s breath rasp through the gas mask’s filter. She wondered if she had done the right thing putting him under. He was just so… exposed. Helpless. The department had already exhibited exactly how much concern they had for Daniel Beach’s well-being. And she’d left him trussed and defenseless in the middle of the room, a fish in a barrel, a sitting duck. She owed him better than that. But her first reaction had been to neutralize him. It wouldn’t have been safe to free him, she knew. Of course he would have attacked her, tried to exact revenge. If it came to brute strength, he’d have the advantage. And she didn’t want to have to poison him or shoot him. At least this way, his death wouldn’t be on her hands.
She still felt guilty, his vulnerable presence in the darkness worrying at the edges of her mind like sandpaper against cotton, pulling threads of concentration away from her.
Too late for second thoughts.
She heard the faint sound of movement outside. The barn was surrounded by bushes with stiff, rustling leaves. Someone was in them now, looking into the windows. What if he just let loose with an Uzi through the side of the barn? He obviously wasn’t worried about noise.
Should she lower the table, get Daniel down in case the tent was sprayed with bullets? She had oiled the accordion base well, but she wasn’t positive it wouldn’t squeak.
She scuttled over to the table and cranked it lower as fast as she could. It did make some low, bass groans, but she didn’t think they would carry outside the barn, especially through the foam barrier. She scooted back to her corner and listened again.
More rustling. He was at another window, on the other side of the barn. Her booby trap’s wires were inconspicuous, but not invisible. Hopefully he was only looking for a target inside. Had he gone to the house first? Why hadn’t he gone in?
Sounds outside another window.
Just open it, she thought to herself. Just crawl inside.
A sound she didn’t understand—a hissing, followed by a heavy clank from above. Then a thump, thump, thump so loud that the barn seemed to shake. Her first thought was small explosives, and she hunkered down into a protective position automatically, but in the next second she realized it wasn’t that loud, it was just the contrast with the silence before. There was no sound of anything breaking—no glass shattering or metal tearing. Was the reverberation enough to break the connections around the windows or door? She didn’t think so.
Then she realized the thumps against the wall were moving up, just as they stopped. Above her.
Major hitch—he was coming through the roof.
She was on her feet in a second, one eye to the seam in the tent. It was still too dark to see anything. Above her, the sound of a welding torch. Her intruder had one, too.
All her preparation was falling apart. She glanced back once at Daniel. His gas mask was on. He would be fine. Then she darted out into the larger space of the barn, bent low with her hands stretched out in front of her to find the objects in her way, and moved as quickly as she could toward the faint moonlight filtering through the closest window. There were milking stalls to maneuver around, but she thought she remembered the clearest route. She broke into the open space between the tent and the stalls, half running, and one hand found the milking apparatus. She dodged that and reached out for the window—