“No,” Larson answered, pained to do so. “Not until I get inside and confirm she’s there.”

LaMoia explained to her, “He’s federal. Right now there’s some AUSA working up papers to justify his snooping around. For us it’s a different story.”

“There are bound to be people coming and going,” Larson said, thinking of the meeting. “I’d like to get her”-he indicated Hope-“closer to the gate. She was an eyewitness several years ago. It may help us with probable cause if she can make a face.”

Hope’s look of total confusion nearly wrecked things. Larson tried to quell her expression with one of his own: a scornful drop of the brow and a hardening of the eyes. Yes, it was a gross exaggeration-a lie-but he needed them out of this truck and closer to the estate. Thankfully she caught this, and stopped herself from saying whatever it was she’d had on the tip of her tongue.

LaMoia instructed Billy to reposition the camera that covered the gate. The image moved as the camera-mounted temporarily atop a telephone pole, it appeared-panned to the left. LaMoia pointed out an area on the screen. “You should be able to make your way up into this ground cover by crossing the road right where we are and going it on foot. Through the woods maybe a quarter mile this direction. Just make sure you stop well short of where you might be seen.” He pointed again. “About here. You know the drill.”

“Yes, I do.” Larson knew LaMoia might offer advice but would not try to stop him. If a federal agent wanted to take a damn fool position, LaMoia was ready to allow him that mistake.

But not without a word of caution, as it turned out. “If you decide to go in there without a call from the U.S. Attorney’s Office-well, it’s clearly posted as private property. Without some kind of warrant, that makes you the criminal, not those assholes. We get a call, and we gotta come bust you, not them. So think about that.”

For Larson, it was a matter of getting free ahead of Rotem’s arrival, of establishing that Penny was captive and getting a firsthand look at the setup.

He, Stubblefield, and Hampton were going in there, and he wanted a firsthand look, not Spectravision.

The woods were dense. Slow going. Deadfall and thornbushes caused them several detours as Larson fought to maintain his sense of direction. After ten minutes they arrived at a spot with a distant view of the gate. Larson hunkered down.

“How are we going to get in there?” she whispered, echoing his present thoughts. The two of them were on their haunches with a view of the gate now.

He wished he’d come alone, that he’d left her safely behind in the step van.

From within his coat pocket, he removed her original cell phone and its battery.

“Hey,” she said, recognizing it. “What are you doing?”

“I’m putting the battery back into it.”

“I can see that.”

“We have to consider another possibility.”

“The first possibility being?”

“Maybe we weren’t as smart as we thought,” he told her, clearly frustrating her with his obliqueness. “I’m thinking now we may have been suckered into that mess in Florida. That it all went horribly wrong for them but that Markowitz not using a firewall was no mistake.”

“They wanted us to find him?”

“They wanted you to find them. To lure you there. What have they ever wanted? You dead, right? Listen,” he said, answering her doubting expression, “it’s just conjecture. But they were so quick to get over to the hotel, and they only sent the one man. I’m just saying there are a lot of things that don’t add up perfectly.”

“So they’ve lured us here.” She made it a statement.

“I’m just saying they wouldn’t mind if you walked through that gate.”

“Penny’s not in there,” she moaned. “Is that what you’re saying? It’s all a trick to get to me?”

“I hope not, but I can’t rule it out.”

Indicating the Siemens phone, he said, “The point is, in terms of psychology with guys like this, you work their blind spots as much as possible. You exploit their weaknesses. You feed them what they want, but not when or how they expect it.”

“You’re losing me.”

“We’ve kept your phone off, meaning they had no way to locate you,” he said, clicking the battery in place. “And we’ll keep it off until we want them knowing you’re here. At that point, I’m convinced they’ll try to track you down and kill you.”

She laughed at that. “Whose side are you on?”

He placed the phone into the pocket of his black windbreaker, waiting to activate it.

“Once it’s on, it shouldn’t take them long to know where you are. At that point, if Penny’s in there, they’ll want to reinforce her position, or even attempt to move her.”

She speculated, “And by doing so, they reveal her to us.” She nodded, understanding his thinking now. “And if they don’t react as you want them to, aren’t we seriously outnumbered? I count five of us, one of whom’s a video technician and another a driver.”

“There’re more than that,” Larson assured her. “The radio tech had a list in front of him with seven call signs-handles-written out. He keeps LaMoia in radio contact with his teams.”

“I didn’t catch that.”

“That could mean seven to fifteen or twenty of their guys around here someplace,” he speculated. “There are only two ways to do something like this. You go in small and quiet or big and noisy. If you go big, you have to go very big.”

“And you obviously don’t like that.”

“My squad is small, but we work very fast.”

“Hampton and Stubblefield.”

“That’s right.”

“So we wait for them?” Her voice returned to anguish.

Headlights.

Larson reached out and placed a hand on her forearm. She was unusually warm, the shirt damp from the thick air.

The headlights were from a car on the inside of the compound. It slowed as it approached. The gate opened-perhaps automatically, perhaps not-and a sedan pulled through, turning out onto the road. A high-end Mercedes four-door. It stopped at a stop sign twenty yards to the right and then continued on.

When it was well out of earshot, he tugged on her and whispered, “Okay, let’s go.”

She shook off his grip. “Go where?”

“Back to the van.”

“I want to stay here!” she protested. “This is the closest I’ve been to her. I’m not leaving.”

“You’re cold.”

“We stay here until your friends arrive. I’m not going back to that van.”

He stripped off his windbreaker and made her accept it. It was heavy on the side with the phone.

“When do we turn on the phone?”

“Soon.”

In a sudden burst of light, the gatehouse and entrance were illuminated as a pair of overhead lights came on.

For the second time he noticed the ornate ironwork above the gate. But this time it wasn’t on a small TV monitor in the back of a stuffy van that smelled like a locker room.

His breath caught in a gasp as he picked up the significance of the M and the W encircled in an oval of twisted wrought iron.

He mumbled, thinking aloud. “That’s not a W. It’s an inverted M. Meriden Manor.”

Hope followed his line of sight and turned her attention to the logo as well. “Yeah?”

“M,” he said, “and M.” Sounding foolish. “ Meriden Manor.” He made the fingers of both hands into Ws and connected them.

“Yeah? So?” She didn’t see it.

He spread his fingers, making what vaguely looked like a diamond. Like a bowtie.

“The scar on the cutter’s forearm.”

Then she saw it.

A gleaming razor’s edge sparked across Larson’s memory. He felt it like a clean cut down his spine.

“I think we’ve got the right place.”