by Brad Parks
He shoved open the door, which swung easily on its heavy hinges, like it had recently been oiled. He turned on a light to reveal a room with two simple beds, a toilet, and shelves laden with water jugs and cardboard boxes.
“There’s another button to open and close the wall right here,” he said. “So you can seal yourself in. No one will know you’re in there.”
“Dad, why are you telling me all this?”
“Your mother and I discussed it this morning. If those buzzers go off, we want the four of you to come down here—you, Nate, and the girls. You’ll be safe in here.”
“While you and Mom, what, shoot it out with those guys?”
“If they start shooting, we’ll call 911. We can hold them off until the authorities get here. I don’t think those Praesidium fellows will want to shoot it out with the Surry County Sheriff’s Office and the state police.”
“But we can’t call the police. Nate’s fingerprints—”
“Nate isn’t here, as far as we’re concerned,” Seb said. “Neither are you. We’ll stick your truck in the barn under a cover.”
“Dad, I can’t have you—”
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “Or we won’t be. Your mother and I have made up our minds. If those buzzers go off, we want you down here—got it?”
CHAPTER 45
NATE
My next shift on watch duty started unremarkably and stayed that way, at least for a time.
I was walking a loose circle around the house, rifle in hand, keeping an eye on the distant woods. The rain had stopped, leaving a low cloud cover to cast a gloomy pall over a Saturday afternoon.
Now and then, I came close enough to the house to hear Deb with the girls, who seemed to be in great spirits, what with Grandma slathering them with attention.
Seb and Jenny were busy too. Seb had dipped into his prepper-worthy stash of spare junk and created this alert system, and they were hollering back and forth to each other, a father and daughter who didn’t even need full sentences most of the time. Warding off would-be attackers seemed to be a situation my father-in-law had been born to handle.
Otherwise, it was just the cows, the chickens, the goats, and me, the human being trying to ignore his lack of creature comforts. I had been up since 4:00 a.m. and was definitely feeling it. I had been wearing the same clothes since Friday morning. My feet, clad in jogging shoes ill matched to a soggy day on the farm, were soaked.
I was admittedly not as sharp as I should have been. So when I first heard this faint hum, almost like a swarm of bees, I dismissed it as, I don’t know, a distant chain saw.
Except it wasn’t revving up and down like a chain saw. It was more constant. And more high pitched.
Like the buzzing of a mosquito.
Or a drone.
Rogers surveilling us, getting as much information as he could about the property before he moved in with a fresh band of trouble.
It had to be, right? It certainly sounded like the whirring of tiny rotors. And it was coming from somewhere above me. What else could be causing it?
I tried to pinpoint the exact source of the noise, wanting to be able to see it and confirm my suspicions. But the humming was so diffuse—this maddening combination of everywhere and nowhere—that I couldn’t say for sure where it was.
It was also entirely possible I simply couldn’t see it, owing to the cloud cover. Though perhaps that was good news. If I couldn’t see the drone, Rogers couldn’t see us, right? Unless he had an infrared camera? Or something similar that could penetrate clouds?
Eventually, I enlisted Seb and Jenny in my drone hunt. They agreed the sound was drone-like, but they were no more successful in spotting any unidentified flying objects than I had been.
Not long after I summoned them, the sound faded into the distance, then stopped.
Taken in sum, the experience was both indefinite and unnerving.
At 4:00 p.m., when I should have been relieved, Seb was still working on his trip wire system, trying to get it just right. I volunteered to stay on watch for another four hours, feeling that was the most useful thing for me to be doing.
When Seb finally relieved me at 8:00 p.m., twilight was nearly finished. There was no moon to speak of. It would soon be a very dark night in Surry County, Virginia—the perfect time to sneak up on someone.
Jenny suggested I try to get some sleep so I could be sharp for the midnight-to-four shift, but I knew that wouldn’t be possible. Rogers was coming for us. If not this night, then the next one.
I reheated some old coffee, then returned to my search for the Praesidium. With Seb insisting the aboveground floors of the house stay dark—he didn’t want anything on the porch backlighting him and making him an easy target—Jenny and I retreated into the basement.
There, after a brief tour of the bomb shelter—because of course my father-in-law had a secret bomb shelter—Jenny and I went back to work.
She was still searching public documents, trying to get a physical address for a confirmed Praesidium resident. My focus was on Google Maps, specifically the satellite view. If the compound was home to that many people, in addition to DeGange himself, it would be a significant piece of property with a number of buildings. It wouldn’t be something you could hide, even in an area the size of Rhode Island.
The only question was: Would I be able to spot it?
If I had one thing going for me, it was that I had most likely been there. The Praesidium’s next-closest base was New York City. I was sure when I had been kidnapped, they had taken me to White Stone.
I thought of how quiet it had seemed outside that window, how it made me think I had been taken to a rural area. That description certainly fit the Northern Neck, which was now appearing in its totality on my computer screen. I zoomed in to where the satellite view gave me a 1,000-foot scale, then began working systematically through each square.
The region was bounded by jagged shoreline—formed by a series of creeks, inlets, and rivers, all of which emptied into the Chesapeake Bay.
The inland portions were a haphazard checkerboard of farms and forests. The houses were well-spaced single-family residences, most of them small.
Along the water the dwellings tended to be larger—grand waterfront homes, mansions surrounded by estates. Any number of them might have served as home to the Praesidium. Or just to a retired investment banker.
When the 1,000-foot scale yielded nothing obvious, I zoomed to the 50-foot scale, the closest Google allowed me to go.
It was slower going at this level of detail. I felt voyeuristic, like I was practically peering into people’s living rooms. I saw their cars, their boats, their docks jutting into the silty water.
I could feel my attention and energy levels starting to flag. Now and then, I grabbed the skin on my thigh and gave it a pinch.
“Honey,” Jenny said, after she caught me midpinch, “if you’re that tired, why don’t you get some sleep?”
I looked up at her briefly. She was clearly exhausted too.
“No,” I said. “I just have to push through.”
There may have been something about changing my field of vision for just a moment, because when I returned my attention to the screen, something winked at me. It was this perfectly round circle of white paint, set in a rectangular slab of asphalt.
A helipad. Who in Lancaster County, Virginia, needed a helipad?
It was set beside a large mansion, in a huge open area that—my first time through, at the 2,000-foot level—I had probably dismissed as a soybean field.
From this closer vantage point, I could tell it was grass. Whenever the satellite image had been taken, it had been mowed into a crosshatch pattern, like a Major League Baseball outfield.
In back of the grassy area, half-hidden in the trees, there was a series of smaller buildings—little houses, connected by paths, tastefully set at angles to increase the privacy for those inside.
It was definitely a high-density residential arrangement.
But could it be, say, an upscale assisted living facility? With the helipad used for medical evacuations?
The cluster of buildings and the field occupied the entire tip of one peninsula, what looked like about two hundred acres and several thousand feet of shoreline jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay. It was halfway in between White Stone and a town called Kilmarnock, though it was entirely possible someone living there would decide the White Stone Post Office was closer.
I started studying the main structure. It was a massive thing, with rooflines going in every direction. I counted fourteen chimneys and four balconies. There were probably at least a dozen bedrooms.
Did one of those bedrooms have a Rembrandt in it? My tired heart began beating stronger in my chest as I studied the entire mansion again.
That’s when I noticed, on one of the balconies, the tile had a very subtle pattern to it, formed by brown pieces that were just slightly darker than the tan pieces around them.
There was no mistaking the image being formed: a P and an R inscribed in a square.
“Jenny,” I said. “I’ve found it.”
CHAPTER 46
JENNY
There was little question in the Welker clan where Jenny had gotten her stubbornness.
It came straight from Seb. As such, Nate’s revelation about the Praesidium’s location was followed by a heated exchange between father and daughter.
This, however, proved short lived. Once Jenny convinced Deb of her way of thinking—that eliminating Vanslow DeGange was the only way to end this, and that it made sense to strike with haste—the quarrel was effectively over.
It was decided: Seb and Deb were staying with the girls, with the understanding that they would dive into the bunker the moment a buzzer sounded, or at any other sign of intrusion; and Jenny and Nate were headed up to the Northern Neck.
Because just as it was a dark night in Surry, it would also be dark in Lancaster.
The perfect night to sneak up on someone.
It was nearing eleven o’clock when they pulled out. Jenny had given Nate her silver-plated handgun, after refilling its ten-round magazine. She had taken one of Seb’s pistols, a Colt that was older than she was but still worked great, and also a rifle, one with a scope, even if it struck her as unlikely she’d need its longer range.
This was killing an old man in his bed. It would have to be done up close.
If the thought of that gave her pause, it didn’t last. From a moral standpoint, this was another one of those philosophy-class questions, the kind Rogers loved to ask. Except it was an easy one.
Would you kill a stranger who was threatening the person you loved most in the world?
Every. Time.
They had both donned black clothing, borrowing items from Seb as needed. They visited the girls because Jenny insisted, although—and Nate was firm on this—they didn’t kiss them.
It went to one of the simpler doctrines of parenting survival: never wake a sleeping toddler.
Then they departed. As Nate drove, Jenny talked through their plan. From what Nate had seen in the satellite picture, the Praesidium’s compound had only minimal security. The one entrance from the road had a small guard shack next to it, likely connected to a gate. The shack was built into a wall that ran along the eastern edge of the property—the side that wasn’t bounded by water—to discourage trespassers.
The shoreline was protected by stone riprap and nothing else. The only enemy the Praesidium appeared to be concerned about coming from the water was erosion.
And it might have seemed counterintuitive, except not when Jenny thought it through. The Praesidium was always the instigator, the agitator, the agent of change in the lives of others. Its operations were undertaken exclusively on foreign turf. Praesidium members probably weren’t even aware of the headquarters’ location until they were already in deep.
Besides, nothing actually happened at the White Stone compound. It was entirely likely no one had ever attempted to take the fight to the Praesidium before.
There was, therefore, wisdom in not having any over-the-top defenses. To anyone boating by on the Chesapeake Bay, this was just another rich person’s house on the water.
And that would be the weakness they would exploit.
The next issue would be getting inside. Nate was confident—perhaps too confident, Jenny thought—about the key card he had swiped, reasoning that since it belonged to Rogers it would give them access to wherever they needed to go.
Jenny hoped he was right.
Because sometimes hope was the only plan.
Once inside, they would just have to stay quiet and find DeGange before anyone else found them. Which was probably the biggest flaw in their strategy: Was it really possible to sneak up on someone who could sense the future?
But now that Jenny was starting to understand how the gift worked, she was less concerned about that. Vanslow DeGange truly could not see everything, particularly when it came to Praesidium-related actions.
He hadn’t seen Candy Bresnahan going rogue and getting herself killed.
Or Jenny not killing Nate.
Or those four men dying in the train accident.
Unless . . . had he actually seen those things? Had DeGange, in fact, allowed them to happen because they fit into some larger scheme? One that perhaps even Rogers didn’t know about?
There was no way to be sure. And, really, this led Jenny to the ultimate leap of faith she was making: that Vanslow DeGange, seer of death, would be so attuned to the wrinkles created by others he might not be able to sense the dip left by his own demise.
She ruminated on that for a while and, with Nate following the blue line on the GPS, tried to settle into the ride, relax, and will herself to have some glimpse of what was about to transpire.
She thought about the three most recent times it had happened: the woman with the orange hair, Martinique, and then the train.
In all three cases, she hadn’t really been trying to see the future. She hadn’t been aware of her thoughts at all. She had been hyperfocused on the moment—what Rogers was saying, or trying to get away—when, suddenly, the thought had arrived.
The currents seemed to be flowing past her all the time. So how did she make her mind grab onto them?
If Rogers was correct, and people who had this mutation were developing another sense, it was just a question of learning to pay attention to it, of becoming aware of what was always around you.
When you wanted to see something, you had to open your eyes and look at it. When you wanted to smell something, you inhaled through your nose. Touch, taste, hearing—they all had actions associated with them.
What was the action here?
She looked out into the ebony blackness of the night, at the headlights of the rare oncoming car, at the tree trunks that blurred as they passed. She purposefully chased away images of Parker and Cate, because even though she could trust Seb and Deb to keep them safe, thinking about her children still brought worry. And anxiety didn’t seem to be consistent with thoughts appearing in her head.
Now and then, she gazed over at Nate, who was taking small sips of coffee to stay alert.
That didn’t seem to help either.
Finally she turned her thoughts to Vanslow DeGange again. She wished she had met him at some point. Nate had described him: his large hooked nose, his curly white hair, the puffy mole above his right eyebrow.
She still couldn’t properly picture the man. Whenever she thought about him, he was this big blank spot.
Just the man she had to kill.
CHAPTER 47
NATE
We crossed over the bridge that spanned the Rappahannock River, then passed through the speed trap–size town of White Stone.
Maybe a mile later, my GPS told me to turn right. This was the road that would take us toward the tip of this small peninsula that contained the Praesidium’s compound at the end.
The night was dark already, and we soon entered this tunnel of tre
es that had me searching for something higher than high beams, if such a thing existed.
When we came out the other side, we were met by a fogbank, likely telling us we were getting closer to a cool body of water on a warm spring night. I kept driving east until we came to a fork in the road that I remembered from Google Maps. If we chose right, we would soon come to the main gate of Praesidium property.
I turned left.
“Where are you going?” Jenny asked, the first words either of us had spoken in a half hour.
“This road leads to several houses that are on a cove. I was going to find one that looked unoccupied and park there. We cross someone’s backyard and we’re on the beach. From there, it’s a short walk to the Praesidium’s place.”
“Got it,” she said.
We continued in silence for a quarter mile or so. The houses were low and modest until, abruptly, they weren’t. To our right there rose a row of McMansions, like some unchecked invasive species. They all fronted a small cove.
“How about that one?” Jenny asked, pointing to a property with a FOR SALE sign on it.
There were no lights on. No cars in sight. No flower boxes, outdoor furniture, or other signs of current habitation. The grass was about two weeks overgrown.
“Perfect,” I said, turning into the driveway.
Little in the way of tree cover shielded us from the neighbors, who might wonder why someone was real estate shopping at 12:45 on a Sunday morning. With luck, none of them were awake to notice.
I put the car in park.
“Okay,” she said. “Here goes nothing.”
“Wait,” I said, placing my hand on her arm. “We’re going to be careful, right? No cowboy stuff. At the first sign of anything amiss, we run back and hightail it out of here.”
“Because there’s going to be a better time to do this?” she asked. “Honey, I wouldn’t say this is now or never. But since the alternative is sitting around for whatever Rogers comes up with next, I’d rather it be now.”
