“Who’s there?” he croaked. “Come on out, or I’ll come in after you.”

He regretted how the end of his sentence had risen in pitch and revealed his fear.

He listened for a response. Nothing.

Then a small puffball of a cumulus cloud drifted across the face of the moon and plunged the meadow into gloom. Sollis waited for the cloud to pass so he could see again.

He tried to recall what it had been that spooked him, something out of the corner of his eye, something he glimpsed or thought he’d glimpsed: a huge human face. It made no sense.

But because the moonlight was muted, his eyes adjusted, and the face, measuring two feet wide by three feet tall, emerged from the utter darkness just inside the trees to his right. Sollis gasped and squared off against it, his bound hands out in front of him to ward off the Attack of the Face.

He saw eyes the size of charcoal briquettes, a wide nose, a thick mustache, and a sardonic grin. He realized he was looking at the side of an ancient cabin or line shack, and some bad artist years before had painted the face on the siding.

“Jesus Christ.” Sollis sighed, dropping his hands and letting his shoulders relax. It was just an old shack.

He went to it, and saw what a crude and stupid face it was. He wondered if the mountain man or cowboy who had painted it had been doing a self-portrait or if it’d been the face of someone he knew. Not that it mattered now.

Sollis moved around to the front of the structure and saw the open misshapen door, and two broken-out windows that seemed to squint up and to the right because the building was leaning that way and about to fall over. There was no roof on the shack because it had buckled and fallen inside, which left no room in there to stretch out and sleep and no reason to go in.

He walked to the other side of the shack and found the rusted frame of what looked like a Model-T Ford pickup in a small grove of aspen trees. The rubber was gone from the tires and the fabric on the seats had long before been eaten away. Three eight-foot trees sprouted up from beneath the car frame, one from where the motor should have been.

Sollis cursed again. There wasn’t anything in the shack or around it that could help him. The crappy old cabin looked to have been built in the 1920s or 1930s—long before there was any electrical or telephone service available. Back before the Forest Service had closed all the roads to the public. Whoever had driven up there, built a shelter, painted the face, and left his pickup, was long gone.

Then he stared at the rusted frame of the Model-T, and he got an idea.

—

THE FRONT BUMPER was thin and insubstantial by modern standards, he thought, but the top edge was fairly sharp. Sollis was on his knees in the grass, working his arms and the plastic bindings back and forth along the edge, sawing at the zip ties. It made a low moaning sound.

It took him nearly an hour to feel some give, and another ten minutes to saw completely through. The shards of the ties fell to the ground.

Sollis cried “Yes!” and stood up and rubbed at his sore wrists. His mind had wandered a couple of times as he sawed away mindlessly and the sharp rim of the bumper had scratched his skin, but the bleeding wasn’t bad.

Feeling unbelievably free, he loped from the old car frame into the open meadow and slung the daypack to the ground. He felt so much lighter without it, and he opened the top flap and rooted through it to see what the contents were. Clothing, mainly, which he had no use for. But he found a filled plastic bottle of water, and he opened it and drank. It nearly washed the taste of the deer water out of his mouth.

He found no food except a can of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. He started to root through the pack for a knife or can opener when the phone started ringing once again. He’d nearly forgotten about it, and Sollis found it in a side pocket of the pack.

The display showed a number with a 307 area code with no name attached to it. The face of the phone was confusing at first, but he saw the icon of a standard telephone handset and punched the button and held it up to his ear.

“Who is this,” Sollis said, “and why do you keep calling?”

There was a beat of silence, as if the caller was surprised there was someone on the other end.

A high voice with a slight Hispanic accent said, “Butch, this is Juan Julio Batista.”

“Who?” Sollis asked.

“Who is this?”

“Who do you think it is?” Sollis said cautiously.

“Butch Roberson.”

“Yeah, right,” Sollis said sarcastically.

“Let’s not play these games.”

“Fine, I’ll hang up.”

“No,” Batista said urgently. “Please stay on the line.”

“Technically, it isn’t a line,” Sollis said.

He could hear muffled voices from the other end, as if the caller had placed his hand over the microphone. Sollis found it annoying, and was prepared to turn off the phone and call one of his roofer buddies to come get him, when Batista came back on.

Batista said, “Can you hear the helicopter coming? It should just about be right above you.”

Sollis was confused. Then he recalled Butch Roberson’s demands, and smiled a second time. Maybe, he thought, he could get the pilot to take him away. Off the mountain, away from everything, maybe far enough the cops couldn’t find him right away.

He heard the sound in the night sky. It increased quickly in volume. Sollis had never been close to a helicopter in his life, but in the movies a helicopter made a whumping sound when it flew. This sounded more like a flying lawn mower.

“Stay right where you are so the pilot can see you,” Batista said. “Is there enough clear space where you are for it to land?”

“I’m not sure,” Sollis said, looking around at the small meadow.

“Stay where you are.”

“I am. I can hear it coming, but I can’t see anything.”

“It’s coming, believe me. Look up,” Batista said.

There was more muffled talking in the background.

Sollis did, and saw a dark cigar shape hovering over the eastern wall of trees. There were no lights on it, and he could see it only because it blocked out a line of stars. It didn’t move but stayed in one place, which didn’t seem natural.

“That doesn’t look like a helicopter to me,” Sollis said, as a red ball of flame appeared from underneath the unmanned drone.

He heard the whoosh coming straight at him.

And he never heard anything else.

27

JOE PICKETT’S EYES SHOT OPEN AT THE SOUND OF A sharp concussion. Instinctively thinking thunder, he expected the night sky to be filled with storm clouds, but it was still clear, the stars sharp and endless.

Then, like a distant thunderclap, the echo of the explosion rolled through the mountains. He sat up and rubbed his face, and noticed other bodies were stirring in the moonlight, disturbed by the sound. But no one else seemed awake.

At that moment, Underwood’s satellite phone went off and Joe got a sick feeling in his stomach.

Grunting himself awake and patting around in his blanket for the phone, Underwood sat up.

Joe was close enough that he heard Batista’s triumphant voice say, “We got him.”

Joe closed his eyes. He thought of Pam and Hannah Roberson, hoped they were sleeping, and hoped they’d be spared the news as long as possible, because their lives had just been changed forever.

—

THE TEAM OF SPECIAL AGENTS grumbled and thrashed as Underwood walked among them, nudging them with his boot to get up and get ready. Joe had already stowed his sleeping bag and pad in his saddlebags and was carrying his saddle toward Toby when Underwood said to his men, “Listen up, guys. I just talked to Director Batista. He said they located Butch Roberson west of us with the military drone and they fired a Hellfire missile and took the bastard out.”