“We proceed as ordered,” Underwood said after he signed off, and tried to get his horse to walk away from the glares. But the horse didn’t move.

“Click your tongue,” Joe whispered to Underwood.

Underwood clicked his tongue and his mount stepped forward. He mouthed “Thanks” as he walked the horse by Joe.

—

JOE LED, followed by Underwood and his four special agents, and they climbed slowly up the mountain. The slope wasn’t steep yet, but the constant climb tired the mounts, and he stopped every twenty minutes to allow Toby to rest. They rode in shadow broken by shafts of afternoon sunlight that penetrated through the canopy. The ground was barren of foliage in large stretches, and was covered by a carpet of dry pine needles and bits of bark fallen from dead pine-beetle-killed trees.

The trees were dead, the forest floor was dry, and the slight breeze from the south was warm. As the horses stepped they made a crunching sound, and the combined cacophony of twenty-four hooves at times sounded like applause rolling slowly up the mountain. Joe wondered how they would ever attempt to be stealthy in the parchment-dry forest. A dropped match or cigarette butt, he thought, could make the whole mountain go up in flame. He was grateful none of the special agents lit up.

—

WHEN HE SAW an aberration on the floor of the forest—a disturbance in the carpet, a flap of mulch turned over—he pointed it out to Underwood. Joe felt more than saw he was on Butch Roberson’s route.

The trunks of the trees were so dense in places that Joe had to weave Toby through them. Sometimes, he loosened the reins and trusted his horse to weave his own way through. The agents followed as best they could, but their trail horses balked at times and had to be urged to continue. It was a dangerous situation and could turn into a wreck if one of the horses panicked in the sea of trees, and he held his breath at times until the small string made it through the tightest spots. Trail horses liked trails, Joe knew. They weren’t thrilled with exploration, or tight fits, or climbing mountains, unlike Toby.

Although Joe could at times only intuit the route Butch had taken, there were places where, due to obstructions or granite walls, there was no choice where he’d had to go if his goal was to traverse the range.

His intuition was confirmed when they crossed a tiny stream of springwater from somewhere above them and he saw, quite clearly, a boot track in the mud. Joe photographed it with his digital camera to compare it with any other clear tracks they found later.

—

AS JOE RODE, he heard bits and pieces of conversation from the agents behind him. Underwood held his tongue.

The grumbling was typical of men being charged with a pointless and ill-conceived task, he thought. They didn’t like being so far from the FOB without proper food and shelter, they didn’t like riding horses, and they didn’t like Regional Director Julio Batista.

Joe thought he might be able to establish some common ground after all.

—

TWO AND A HALF HOURS after they’d left the dry camp, as the intense afternoon sun fused the forest with burnished orange, Underwood’s satellite phone burred with vibration on his chest.

Joe looked over his shoulder as he walked Toby and watched Underwood adjust the volume of the set as he listened. Something dark passed over Underwood’s face at whatever he was hearing, and after a minute or two Underwood looked up and gestured with his free hand for Joe to stop.

Were they being given the word to go back? Joe wondered. He halted Toby and sidestepped so Underwood could catch up alongside him.

As Underwood approached, he lowered the phone from his ear and covered the mic with his other hand. He said, “It’s for you.”

“Who is it?”

“Regional Director Batista.”

“What does he want?”

Underwood took a breath and extended the handset. “Our suspect somehow got ahold of a satellite phone of his own and he called the FOB. He’s on the line now and they’re patching it together into a conference call.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I’m not. He says he has a couple of hostages, including the ex-sheriff of this county. He’ll let them go, but only if we agree to a list of demands. And he says the only guy he can trust to be involved in the negotiation is Joe Pickett.”

19

“IS HE ON?” BUTCH ROBERSON ASKED JULIO BATISTA. McLanahan’s satellite phone was pressed tightly to his face. Farkus noted Butch’s fingers gripped the handset so tightly they were nearly translucent white. And he noted the line of perspiration beads under Butch’s scalp. Since the sun was sliding toward dusk and it had cooled a quick twenty degrees in the past hour, he knew Butch wasn’t sweating because of the heat.

“We’re waiting,” Batista said. “Hold on—it’s a technical thing. We’ve got some guys trying to patch us all on together.”

Farkus could hear both sides of the conversation clearly. It was still and quiet, and Butch hadn’t turned down the volume of the speaker because he likely wasn’t familiar with the phone. Butch was nervous and twitchy, and his eyes burned red from exhaustion.

“If you don’t get him on . . . where in the hell is he?” Butch asked.

“In the field,” Batista said calmly. “It’s taking a while to bring all the parties together, so please be patient.”

“Get him on,” Butch said.

—

EARLIER, AFTER ordering McLanahan, Farkus, and Sollis to dismount and disarm, Butch Roberson had emerged from the shadowed stand of timber on the west slope. Farkus hadn’t seen Butch since he’d quit his job, and he was surprised how he looked: thinner, slightly stooped when he walked, with furrowed lines in his face and tired eyes. He looked like he’d aged ten years, and Farkus knew it wasn’t just from being on the run in the mountains for the past two days. Something had happened to Butch Roberson in the last year that had changed him physically.

Butch held a semiautomatic rifle with an extended magazine and a tactical scope mounted on it, and used the muzzle to signal that they should walk away from the camp into a grassy clearing to the south of the alcove.

“What about the horses?” McLanahan had asked.

“Let them go. All except the packhorse. I want to see what you brought me.”

McLanahan protested, but Butch didn’t care. He circled the three men in the clearing and unbuckled the cinch strap on Dreadnaught’s saddle and did the same with the other two saddled horses. Then he slapped him on his flank. Dreadnaught took off as if the bell had rung and summer vacation had begun. McLanahan and Sollis’s horse and the spare followed, leaving only the packhorse and three crumpled saddles on the ground.

“How in the hell do you expect us to get back?” McLanahan asked plaintively.

“Who says you’re going back?” Butch asked.

Butch had them all sit down in the grass after he patted them down and made sure they had no more weapons. When he ran his hand over Farkus’s clothing, he said, “Dave Farkus, I’m kinda surprised to see what kind of company you’re keeping.”

“Me, too,” Farkus had said.

When Butch got to Sollis, he said: “Hell of a shot. Did you think it was me?”

Sollis nodded. Butch shook his head in disgust and moved to McLanahan.

“So you decided to freelance, huh?” Butch asked McLanahan.

“In a matter of speaking.”

“Tell me what they’re saying about me in town.”

McLanahan cleared his throat. “Every Fed in the mountain west is either here or on their way. They want you for the murder of the two EPA agents. It’s a clusterfuck of industrial proportion.”

Farkus watched Butch carefully and noted no reaction.