by Patrick Lee
“We’re with Tangent,” Paige said. “We need to speak to you—Ms. Holden.”
If any of that startled the woman, she didn’t show it. Her eyes stayed fixed on Paige’s. Then she exhaled softly and nodded, not upset but nowhere near happy, either. She pulled open the door and stepped back to admit them.
Inside, the cabin was close to what Travis had pictured: the cozy side of rustic. Timber walls, rough-hewn beams supporting the vaulted ceiling, potbellied woodstove on the hearth. The huge living room window was a living postcard of Ouray. Travis could think of worse places to hide out from the world.
Carrie didn’t offer them anything to drink. Just led them across the entryway into the living room, sat in a chair facing the couch and left them to conclude that they should sit too. They did.
“This is Travis Chase,” Paige said. “And my name is Paige Campbell.”
Carrie nodded, politely if not quite kindly.
“I’m not coming back to Border Town,” she said. “So if that’s what you came to ask about—”
Paige cut her off, shaking her head. “We’re just looking for information. We need to know about an old Tangent investigation called Scalar. Do you remember it?”
As before, the woman showed no trace of surprise.
“I remember it to the extent I knew about it,” she said.
“Can you tell us what you know?”
“Why would you need me to? You’re with Tangent, you should have better sources than me.”
“We don’t,” Paige said. “The reasons would take a while to go into, and they wouldn’t brighten your day. Can you just tell us? I’m sorry to be this blunt, but it’s important. Something’s happening, and it relates to Scalar, and we need to know as much as we can.”
Carrie nodded, but only vaguely. Her hands, as fragile looking as the rest of her, moved nervously on her knees.
Travis studied her face. The stretched skin. The withdrawn eyes.
The voice alone was strong. Surprisingly so, for someone apparently ill.
He glanced at the end table next to the couch. Its base had shelves for magazines, all of them cluttered with old issues of Newsweek, National Geographic, and some local paper.
There was also a notepad with a pen clipped to it, its front page covered with phone numbers and random pieces of scribbled info. No doubt the pad had been there for as long as the cordless phone cradled atop the end table.
Travis indicated the pad and met Carrie’s eyes.
“Mind if I take notes?” he said.
She nodded again.
Travis took the pad, unclipped the pen, and turned to a fresh page. He began writing something immediately, though Carrie hadn’t spoken yet.
“Please start with the basics if you can,” Paige said. “What was the investigation about? What were we looking for?”
For a long time the older woman said nothing. Then her hands went still and she looked up at Paige.
“I’m sorry,” Carrie said. “Before I say anything, I need to hear whatever you know about Scalar.”
“I just told you,” Paige said. “We don’t know anything. Just the name.”
“Here’s the problem,” Carrie said. “There are at least a few people outside of Tangent who know that investigation by name only. People in the government—people in several governments. Those people were kept from knowing more than just the name, and for good reason. It’s not unthinkable that such parties, should they manage to find me here, would pretend to be with Tangent and ask me for information.”
Paige was already shaking her head. “Ma’am, I can assure you—”
“There has to be something else you know about Scalar,” Carrie said. “Some detail to prove you’re not an outsider.”
Travis turned the page he’d written on and began writing on the next. After only a few seconds he turned that one too, and continued on a third.
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 op
en 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.
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.
And she’d done fine until the bathroom thing.
Maybe her nerves had gotten to her. Maybe she’d needed a break to rein in the jitters and refocus. Splash some water on her face.
Maybe.
Offhand, Dominic could think of no other reason. If there was another reason, it was something bad. Something very fucking bad.
He spoke into the microphone that extended from his earpiece. “What are you seeing?”
The team leader near the cabin responded softly. “Nothing you’re not seeing.”
“I don’t like this,” Dominic said.
“Same. Standing by—for now.”
Travis finished whispering the plan as he got Carrie to her feet. She winced at the stiffness in her joints but looked steady enough.
Paige was standing in the doorway—Travis realized she’d been there for some time.
“Need me to repeat it?” he said.
She shook her head. “I heard.”
Travis guided Carrie into the hallway and the three of them returned to the living room.
Paige had done a thorough job on the decoy. She lay on the floor at the base of her chair, her wrists tied behind her with one arm of a cardigan, her ankles with the other. The sleeve of a wool sweater had been wedged between her teeth and tied around her head. There was some risk of her waking up and making noise—banging against the furniture if nothing else—but Travis wasn’t worried. One way or another, this would all be over in the next minute or two.
He wondered where the listening device was, but didn’t look for it. It could be anywhere. Under the couch. Tacked beneath the top of the end table.
He spoke at room volume: “She seems nervous, doesn’t she?”
“Probably just caught off guard,” Paige said. “It’s not every morning she gets a visit from Tangent.”
Travis moved silently across to the bathroom. He eased the door open, slipped inside and closed it gently behind him. Then he flushed the toilet, banged the lid down, and turned on the faucet.
Dominic relaxed a notch.
&
nbsp; “You hearing this?” he said. The running water was just audible over the feed.
“Got it. Guess she just had to go. Jesus.”
A moment later the faucet shut off and the door clicked open.
“Sorry about that,” he heard the decoy say. Her tone sounded different—probably because of her distance from the microphone. “Please continue.”
The young female visitor spoke. “As I said before, Garner’s death has some connection to Scalar—”
The young woman stopped speaking. Dominic cupped his hand over the earpiece and listened carefully, but couldn’t hear anything happening—any reason for her to have cut herself off.
“What’s going on?” the team leader said.
“Quiet,” Dominic said.
For three more seconds the silence held.
Then the older woman spoke. “Is there a problem?”
Dominic’s stomach tightened. He thought he knew what was coming.
It came.
The young woman said, “You’re not Carrie Holden.”
Fuck.
The team leader spoke up, fast and tense: “Ready to move on my mark.”
“I beg your pardon?” the decoy said.
There was no reply from either the young woman or her male friend. Instead there came a burst of commotion. Furniture sliding. Bodies interacting. Voices raised and jumbled over one another. The male visitor said, “Get her legs!”
“Move now!” the team leader said. “Now, now, now!”
Two seconds after that Dominic saw the team sprinting into the pool of light in front of the cabin. All five of them, Heckler & Koch automatics in hand, rushing the front door in a tight group. Like a sledgehammer coming down on a knuckle.
Travis gave the end table a kick to create the last of the commotion, then turned and ran for the firing position he’d picked out moments earlier. Paige and Carrie had each already settled into theirs—Paige behind the corner at the hallway’s mouth, Carrie behind the iron woodstove. Carrie had retrieved her own pistol—a Beretta 92FS—during the long silence in the living room.
