‘This is it? Where?’ she asked.

Lucien nodded toward the front of their vehicle. ‘We have to walk the rest of the way. You can’t get there by car.’

Ninety-Two

Hunter was the first to leave the Jeep. Once he was out, he unholstered his weapon and opened the back door for Lucien. Taylor followed shortly after.

‘Now what?’ she asked, looking around her.

‘Through there,’ Lucien said, indicating a few loose tree branches that’d been piled up against each other just ahead and to the right of where the Jeep was parked.

‘We’re going to go deep into this forest with no light and no shoes?’ Taylor asked Hunter, looking down at their bare feet.

‘Not much I can do about the shoes,’ he replied, before reaching back inside the car for the glove compartment. He came back with a Maglite Pro Led 2. ‘But we do have light.’

‘That’s handy,’ Taylor said.

‘I knew night was approaching,’ Hunter said. ‘And I wasn’t counting on Lucien’s hiding place being very straightforward. So I also asked the air traffic controller for a flashlight.’

‘Robert Hunter,’ Lucien said, nodding and pursing his lips as if he was about to whistle. ‘Always thinking a step ahead. Too bad you didn’t foresee the shoe problem.’

‘Let’s go,’ Hunter commanded.

They assumed the same formation as when they were leaving the plane. Hunter took point, Lucien came second, and Taylor stayed four to five steps behind Lucien, her weapon always trained on his back, just a couple of inches below his neckline.

Hunter quickly removed the branches Lucien had indicated, and it revealed a well-worn trackers’ trail.

‘Just follow it,’ Lucien said. ‘The place isn’t very far from here.’

Despite already being in a hurry, Hunter’s gut feeling filled him with an extra sense of urgency, as if something he couldn’t quite pinpoint was off, but he didn’t have much time to dwell on it.

‘Let’s move,’ he said.

The flashlight had an ultra-bright and wide beam, which made things a little easier.

They took to the trail and, surprisingly, Lucien didn’t try to slow them down with the excuse of his shackled legs. He didn’t have to. Pebbles and little rocks and sharp-edged dried sticks forced Hunter and Taylor to move a lot slower than they would’ve liked.

They had covered only about thirty yards when the track swerved hard right, then left, and then it really felt as if they had crossed some sort of twilight gate. All of a sudden the bushes, trees and scrub gave way to a plain field – a clearing in the middle of nowhere.

‘And here we are,’ Lucien said with a proud smile.

Hunter and Taylor paused, their eyes looking around in disbelief.

‘What the hell is this?’

Ninety-Three

Hunter shone his flashlight on the structure standing before them.

It was a stiff and squared, ivy-covered brick house, with white Romanesque columns that must once have been imposing outside the front entryway. Now, only two of the original four were still standing, and those had cracks running from top to bottom.

The house had been built one hundred years earlier, and then reconfigured again twice after that, so whatever remained of its first incarnation as someone’s grand hillside home was now merely memory. Add to that the disfiguration caused by the elements and a total disregard and lack of care for a property, and you’d end up with the carcass of a house they had in front of them – a battered shell of a home of long ago.

Three out of the four outside walls still remained, but they all had several holes and major fissures in them, as if the house belonged in a warzone somewhere in the Middle East. The south wall, on the right side of the house, had almost entirely crumpled onto a pile of rubble. Most of the internal walls had also collapsed, giving the place nearly no room separation, and filling it with what looked like destruction debris. The roof had caved in almost everywhere, with the exception of the old living room at the front of the house, the corridor beyond it, and the kitchen on the left, where it was still partially in place. Weed and wild vegetation had grown through the floorboards and among the debris just about everywhere. The windows were all broken, and some of the window frames had been ripped from the walls as if by some sort of internal explosion.

‘Welcome to one of my favorite hiding places,’ Lucien said.

Taylor blinked the surprise away. ‘Madeleine?’ she yelled out, taking a step to her right.

No reply.

‘Madeleine?’ she yelled again, this time even louder. ‘This is the FBI. Can you hear me?’

She got nothing back.

‘Even if she’s still alive, she won’t be able hear you,’ Lucien said.

Taylor looked at him with fuming eyes. ‘This is bullshit. There’s nobody here.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ Lucien questioned.

‘Look at this shithole. This is not a hiding place. How can you hide or keep anyone locked in a place without doors or walls? Where anyone can simply walk in, or out?’

‘Because no one knows this place exists,’ Hunter said, trying to analyze the area surrounding the house. ‘And no one will ever come looking for it out here.’

‘Right again,’ Lucien said, looking at Taylor. ‘Hence the term hidden place.’

‘This is bullshit.’ Taylor couldn’t hide the anger in her voice. ‘You’re telling us that you left Madeleine somewhere in this ghost shell of a house – no windows, no doors, no walls, and she never walked out?’

Lucien’s gaze went to Taylor and right then his eyes looked like dark vials filled with venom.

‘Not somewhere inside it, Agent Taylor.’ He paused and ran his tongue over his bottom lip like a lizard. ‘Buried underneath it.’

Ninety-Four

Lucien’s words sent fear crawling like a rash across Taylor’s skin. Her now confused gaze immediately returned to what was left of the house, before moving to the soil surrounding it.

‘Well, not exactly buried,’ Lucien clarified. ‘Let me show you.’ He lifted both cuffed hands and pointed toward the north side of the disfigured structure. ‘Through there.’

In a hurry, Hunter and the flashlight took point again. Lucien and Taylor followed.

‘My friend’s grandfather,’ Lucien said, as they started walking, ‘and by friend, I mean the person I got this place from, was a hardcore, old-school patriot. I was told that he had his best years in this house during the USA versus USSR era. You know, “death to all communists” kind of thing. And he really subscribed to that ideology. And there was plenty of talk about a very possible atomic war.’

As soon as they reached the side of the house, Hunter and Taylor understood what Lucien was talking about.

On the ground, halfway along the north wall, they could see a very large, external, thick metal, basement-entry double door. The doors were locked together by a Sargent and Greenleaf military-grade padlock, very similar to the one they’d found in the house in Murphy.

‘My friend’s grandfather,’ Lucien continued, ‘in his paranoia and deep belief that an atomic war was inevitable and imminent, refurbished the whole place, extending and adding a substantial bomb shelter to the original basement.’ He nodded at the padlocked doors. ‘The house might look like an earthquake site, but the shelter has more than lived up to its expectations.’ He indicated the padlock. ‘The key for that is on the keychain.’