by Paula Graves
Snow blanketed the area with white, and, while inside the backyard the snow was neither smooth nor pristine thanks to the snowman building earlier in the day, the field beyond was a featureless white void. If anyone had approached the house from that direction, he would see their footprints in the snow.
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone out there. From his vantage point at the window, he couldn’t see past the eaves that covered the back porch.
He headed back into the hall to see if he could find a room that wasn’t blocked by the eaves. But before he had taken more than a couple of steps, a call rang out from downstairs. It was Cade’s voice, sharp with urgency. “Bogeys from the east. At least five.”
“Bogeys to the north, as well,” Julie called. “I count three on this side.”
“Four from the west!” Lacey came out into the hall, her eyes wide with alarm. “I saw four men in white outside, barely visible against the snow.”
“My view of the yard closest to the house was blocked by the porch eaves,” Jim said, already pushing her toward the front stairs. “But I think we have to assume they’re out there, as well.”
Lacey stumbled as her foot hit the first stair, and Jim had to grab her to keep her from tumbling down the steps. She clung to him, her grip tight on his arms. In the low light, her gray eyes glittered with fear.
“We’re trapped in here, aren’t we?” she asked.
He nodded, unable to do anything but tell her the truth. “We are.”
Chapter Sixteen
Lacey had been under fire in Afghanistan. She’d waded into the middle of a Baltimore riot to interview protestors. She’d even been caught in a hostage crisis in one of the most dangerous prisons in the world. She’d thought herself nearly bulletproof, and certainly strong enough emotionally and physically to hold her own.
But when she thought about Katie sleeping in her crib downstairs, innocent and unable to protect herself, Lacey knew a fear as profound as any she’d ever known.
When she reached the first floor and came face-to-face with Julie Beckett, she saw a reflection of her own fear in the other woman’s eyes. “If they’re setting explosives,” Julie said urgently, “where is the safest place in this house?”
“Is there such a place if they’re setting explosives?” Jim asked, his grip on Lacey’s shoulder tightening.
“We have children in here that we have to get out!” Julie turned to her husband. “Cade, we have to get the kids out of here. Can we create a diversion to open up an avenue of escape?”
“No,” Cade said, his gaze fixed on a point beyond where they stood. Lacey and the others followed his gaze and saw the flames licking at the wood porch outside the farmhouse. The smell of gasoline hit Lacey’s nose around the same time.
“They’re burning us out,” Jim growled.
Already the air in the house was growing thick with smoke and fumes. Lacey didn’t wait another second; she raced down the hallway to Katie’s nursery and flung open the door.
Flames climbing the outer walls of the farmhouse cast a flickering glow across the dark room. Lacey reached into the crib and lifted her sleeping niece into her arms, trying to think past her terror to find some sort of solution to their dire problem.
Heat rises to the top. So upstairs was no answer. But maybe the basement would give them some measure of protection? The basement had been the original foundation of the antebellum house that had once stood where the farmhouse now sat, a stone-and-mortar home that would have been built to withstand fires.
But would the musty basement be protection enough if the house above them burned? Or would it prove another trap from which they couldn’t escape?
Jim found her in the doorway of Katie’s room. “Julie is getting Samantha. Cade’s wetting towels for us to breathe through. There’s a stone foundation on this house, isn’t there?”
“Yes, but—”
“No buts. There’s fire surrounding the house. No breaks in the flames. We looked.” He touched Katie’s face, then Lacey’s. “This is our best hope. Let’s do this.”
Tugging Katie’s sleepy body closer to her, she nodded and followed Jim down the hall to the basement stairs.
* * *
“SOMETHING JUST AIN’T RIGHT.” Charlotte Brady hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after her call to Jim Mercer. The call had cut off in the middle of her words, and when she’d tried to call him back, it had gone straight to voice mail.
“He probably didn’t appreciate your calling him in the middle of the blasted night,” her husband, George, grumbled into his pillow. “Sort of like I don’t appreciate you keeping me awake blathering about it.”
“There was something not right about those trucks, and all of a sudden, while I’m trying to tell that man about possible trouble coming his way, the call cuts off? Nope.” She pushed herself into a sitting position in the bed and reached for the phone. “I’m calling Roy.”
“He ain’t gonna be any happier about being jerked out of bed in the middle of the night, either.”
“Maybe not. But he knows I’m not one to make up stories.” One benefit of having a brother who happened to be the county sheriff.
As George predicted, Roy hadn’t been happy about being awakened at two in the morning. But he listened to what Charlotte had to say with interest. He might just be a small-town lawman, but he knew the troubles Lacey Miles had been through in the past few weeks.
He also knew his force might not be enough firepower to handle whatever might be happening out there at the farm. “I’ll call in the state boys. We’ll get people out there right away to see what’s happening.”
As she hung up the phone with her brother, Charlotte was beginning to have a sinking feeling that she’d left the call to her brother a little too late.
* * *
“WE’VE GOT A couple of 911 calls about a fire out at the old Peabody farm.” Roy Dobbins hadn’t gotten more than half his order out when the dispatcher interrupted him. “Neighbors in the area called it in, but it sounds like the house is fully involved already. I’ve sent two trucks out that way.”
“Send every deputy available out there, too,” Roy ordered, pulling on his uniform pants. Behind him, his wife was already rolling off the bed to head into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. “And call in the state police and surrounding counties. This may not just be an ordinary fire.”
By the time he’d dressed, Addie had the coffee made. She poured a couple of steaming cups into a thermos and handed it to him on his way to the door. “Come home safe, you hear?”
He kissed her cheek and headed out into the bitter cold, tucking the collar of his uniform jacket more snugly around his neck. He got on the car radio as he turned the heater on high blast and located a deputy already approaching the scene of the fire. “The whole place is up in flames already,” Deputy Breyer said loudly, having to compete with the roar of flames and the moan of sirens audible over the radio. “Lots of footprints in the snow around the house, but we couldn’t get real close yet. The fire crew has just arrived.”
“What about the occupants of the house?”
“No sign of anyone.”
Roy’s chest tightened with dread.
* * *
BOTH CHILDREN WERE CRYING, their soft sobs swallowed by the sounds of rushing flames and crumbling timbers coming from the house overhead. Cade had pushed wet towels into the gap between the heavy oak door and the stairs below, but the fire would soon take those pieces of kindling as surely as it was consuming the beams and floorboards upstairs.
The only light in the basement was the glow from Cade Beckett’s cell-phone app, barely enough to see a foot or two in front of their faces. But Lacey was close enough to Jim for him to see the bleak despair in her face as she pressed a damp cloth over Katie’s weeping face to keep
out the smoke growing inexorably thicker in the small basement.
The howl of sirens outside was muted by the thick stone surrounding them, but Jim knew the fire crew would be looking for survivors. Maybe there was still a chance for rescue.
But not if the house fell in on them, and it sounded as if it was gearing up to do that.
“Is there any other way out of here? Some chink in the foundation where we could dig our way out?” he asked Lacey.
She swung her troubled gaze to his face. “What?”
“This is an old house. Maybe there’s a part of this basement that was patched up recently. We might be able to dig a way out.”
She stared at him for a moment, almost uncomprehendingly, before her eyes lit up from inside. “The tunnel.”
Cade Beckett moved closer. “What tunnel?”
“When the workers were shoring up the foundation, they found an old tunnel. It’s over there, behind that door. I don’t know if it leads anywhere, but it’s still there, because it’s considered a historic artifact. The local historians believe the original house was part of the Underground Railroad. I remember Marianne and Toby were excited to be living somewhere that had such an important role in history.”
“And you’re sure it hasn’t been filled in?”
“No, like I said, it’s considered a historical artifact. The builders had to make sure it was structurally sound for the house, and that was it. The historical society was planning to take a better look at the tunnel come spring.”
“Let’s try it,” Julie said, already moving toward the door.
Cade caught her arm. “Wait a second.”
“For what? For the house to fall down on top of us? Listen!” She waved toward the ceiling, where the roar of the fire was louder than before. “Let’s go, for God’s sake. Now!”
The door covering the entrance to the tunnel was made of stone, and it took both Cade and Jim working together to make it budge. They could only pull it open a couple of feet, but that was enough for them all to slip through the opening. “Close it behind us,” Lacey urged. “It might stop the fire from entering the tunnel if the house collapses into the basement.”
They had barely gotten the door pushed back into place when the ground beneath their feet shook and the sound of breaking timbers and rushing flames penetrated the solid wall of rock. But no sign of flames penetrated the closed door, and only the tiniest tendrils of smoke seeped into the tunnel and floated up to the curved stone ceiling.
Beside Jim, Lacey was trembling wildly as she clutched her crying niece to her chest. Jim wrapped his arms around them both, pressing a kiss against Lacey’s forehead. “We’re safe for now.”
“Do you feel that?” Julie asked.
“What?”
“Cold air. Moving air.” She nodded toward the dark mouth of the tunnel ahead. “I think there’s air coming in from somewhere ahead. And if there is...”
“Then we may have a way out,” Jim finished for her.
* * *
ALEXANDER QUINN HAD long ago learned to trust his instincts, even when they seemed to make no sense. It had saved him from a terrorist attack in Iraq in 2003, and from sniper fire in Yemen a few years later.
Tonight, despite the assurance from Cade Beckett that assistance could probably wait for morning, Quinn’s instincts had told him he needed to get to Cherry Grove, Virginia, as quickly as he could. Which meant gassing up one of Campbell Cove Security’s pair of helicopters with all hands on deck.
The chopper was a modified CH-53E Super Stallion, equipped to carry a combat-ready assault team. Quinn had called in his best men and women for this mission, aware that the quarry they were hunting would be armed and dangerous.
Luckily, so were his agents.
His pilot landed the Super Stallion in a flat field about a half mile north of the Cherry Grove farmhouse just a few minutes past two in the morning. To Quinn’s dismay, the glow on the snowy horizon suggested they might be too late to help his imperiled agents.
But they had another mission, already approved by an in-air radio call to one of the top commanders in the Virginia State Police, who happened to be an old friend of Quinn’s from his days in the CIA. Ethan Tolliver had been an FBI legat before he’d taken the job with the state police, and he and Quinn had shared many a drink and a tall tale at the US embassy in Turkey when they’d both been assigned there in the late nineties.
“I’ll let all the locals know you’re coming in hot,” Tolliver had assured him after catching him up on all that had happened since their liftoff back in Kentucky. “We’ve got unknown targets out there, probably up to no good. You folks try to hunt them down, and we’ll do all we can to get your people out of that house.”
Quinn gave the glow on the horizon another grim look, then barked orders at his team. “They’ll still be around here somewhere. Track them down. And bring them all in. Alive is better than dead.” He checked the magazine of his Ruger. “We have some questions we need answered.”
* * *
THOUGH IT FELT as if they had been walking forever, a glance at her watch told Lacey that it had been only a half hour or so, each step taking them closer and closer to the source of the icy air that seemed to permeate her bones until her teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Jim had taken Katie from her earlier, wrapping his big frame around the little girl to keep her warm. Before they’d headed into the basement, Jim had been clearheaded enough to grab coats for them all, while Julie did the same for her family, so even though they were all cold enough to shiver in the frigid tunnel, they weren’t likely to reach full hypothermia before they reached the end of the tunnel.
But what then? She had no idea where the tunnel came out, if it came out at all. Would they have to dig their way through some sort of collapse at the end? Or would the tunnel open into the snowy woods, where they’d have no protection from the elements at all.
“I think I see it.” Cade stretched his cell phone toward the darkened tunnel ahead, and Lacey saw it, too. A steep stairway built of stone, extending upward into a hole in the roof of the tunnel.
“Wait,” Lacey said as the others started moving faster toward the stairs. “Just because the people who burned us out of the house probably didn’t stick around after it started to collapse, that doesn’t mean they’re not still out there somewhere, waiting for final confirmation that we died in the fire.”
“She’s right.” Jim shifted Katie in his arms, tugging her even closer to him. “If we’re right about those people out there being some sort of al Adar sleeper cell sent to take out Lacey, they won’t go away until they have some sort of evidence to show for their actions.”
“They’ll want confirmation that I’m dead,” Lacey said flatly. “They’re out there, waiting to see the bodies pulled from the ashes.”
“Well, we can’t stay down here and freeze to death,” Julie protested, hugging Samantha closer. The little girl had stopped crying, but she still looked terrified. Lacey wished they had a way to deal with their reality without terrifying the little girls, but they didn’t have the luxury for anything but blunt talk at this point.
“Jim and I can go out there and scout around,” Cade suggested. “See if we spot anyone.”
“What about your cell phone?” Lacey asked. “Are you getting a signal now?”
Cade peered at the display. “No. But the stone walls may be blocking it. I need to get outside and see if I get any bars.”
“If they’re hanging around, they may still be jamming cell signals,” Julie warned.
“We have to take a chance.” Jim turned to look at Lacey, his expression intense. “You and Julie keep the children down here. Cade and I will go out and see what we’re up against.”
She shook her head. “None of you would be out here if it weren’t for me. I’m the one they wan
t dead. I can’t send you out there like cannon fodder while I hide down here in safety.”
“Lacey—”
“Let her go,” Julie said flatly. “It’s her fight as much as it’s any of yours. I’ll keep the girls safe down here.”
“No.” Jim shook his head. “There’s no reason for you to martyr yourself, Lacey. Katie needs you alive.”
“She needs us both alive. Both of us. I can’t just send you out there for me, don’t you get that? If something happened to you because I stayed back here like a coward... I’m going. We’re going to find a way to safety. And then we’re coming back for the others. End of story.” Lacey leaned forward and gave Katie’s cold cheek a swift, fierce kiss, her heart feeling so full she feared it would explode.
Jim closed his eyes for a long moment, his expression pained. Then he kissed the top of Katie’s blond curls and handed the little girl to Julie. “Take care of my Katiebug.”
“Y’all be careful,” Julie said, lifting her face for her husband’s kiss. “I’ll keep these rug rats safe and warm, I promise.”
Jim went up the stairs first, pausing as his head breached the top. He swiveled his face slowly, twisting on the stairs until he could see all the way around. He dipped his head back below the hole. “I don’t see any movement, but we can’t assume there’s not someone out there.”
“Just be careful when you go out, okay?” Lacey stood at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for her turn to go. Once she saw Jim’s feet disappear through the hole, she started up behind him.
The stone steps were slick with moisture and age, making it hard to keep her footing. She had pulled on sneakers rather than boots when Jim woke her, not expecting to have to trek through the snowy woods. But it was better than being barefoot, she supposed.
Like Jim, she paused at the top of the exit and took a look around. The tunnel came out in thick woods that would have been thicker still with summer foliage. As it was, there were enough evergreen trees and bushes to make the woods around them seem nearly impenetrable. Snow here lay only in scabrous patches, the forest floor protected by the trees overhead from the worst of the snowfall.
