Besides, he isn’t sure what he’ll find here. If nothing, he’ll slip out the way he came, with them none the wiser.
He eases past the doorway, unseen, then pauses to give his eyes, momentarily dulled by the office lights, a chance to acclimate to the darkness.
Then he moves on, checking each room. Most of the doors are open; most of the rooms are dark.
The music, the pounding of the dancing feet are a two-edged sword. No one can hear him approach, but he’s just as deaf. Someone could be in an empty room, having spotted him, waiting with a weapon.
Thirty feet, forty.
Empty room, empty room. He’s approaching the end, where a second hallway jogs right. There’ll be other rooms to search. How many more?
The last room. This door is closed. Locked.
He withdraws his locking-blade knife and uses the edge near the tip to ease the deadbolt back into the tumbler. He pulls on the door to keep the bolt from snapping back into place as he gets a new grip with the blade. After repeating a dozen times, the door is free. Knife away, gun drawn and raised, finger off the trigger.
Inside.
The woman is Black, in her early twenties, hair in a complicated braid. She wears jeans and a dusty gray sweatshirt. She sees the gun and inhales to scream. He holds up a hand and instantly holsters the weapon. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. I’m getting you out of here. What’s your name?”
She doesn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Nita.”
“I’m Colter. You’ll be all right.”
The place is filthy. Uneaten chili sits in a flat pool on a paper plate. A bottle of water is half drunk. There’s a bucket for a toilet. She’s not bound but she is restrained: a bicycle cable is looped around a water or sewage pipe and her ankle is zip-tied to the cable. Shaw shuts the light off. There’s enough illumination to see by.
Shaw looks back into the corridor. The flicker from the screen continues as the ball game continues. What inning is it? Would be important to know.
“Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head.
He takes his knife out and opens it with a click. He saws through the plastic tie and helps her to her feet. She’s unsteady.
“Can you walk?”
A nod. She’s shivering and crying. “I want to go home.”
Shaw recalls thinking of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors just ten minutes ago. He wishes he’d played harder, much harder.
They step into the corridor. And just then, Shaw thinks:
The third chair.
Oh, hell.
The six-pack didn’t need its own seat. Someone else was in the office watching the game.
And at that moment the third man comes down the stairs with another pack of Budweiser. Just as he sets foot on the concrete floor he glances up the corridor and sees Shaw and Nita. The six-pack drops to the ground. At least one bottle shatters. He calls, “Hey!” And reaches for his hip.
In the baseball room, the flickering stops.
Part One
June 24
The Mission
Time until the family dies: fifty-two hours
1
The safe house.
At last.
Colter Shaw’s journey to this cornflower-blue Victorian on scruffy Alvarez Street in the Mission District of San Francisco had taken him weeks. From Silicon Valley to the Sierra Nevadas in eastern California to Washington State. Or, as he sat on his Yamaha motorcycle, looking up at the structure, he reflected: in a way, it had taken him most of his life.
As often is the case when one arrives at a long-anticipated destination, the structure seemed modest, ordinary, unimposing. Though if it contained what Shaw hoped, it would prove to be just the opposite: a mine of information that could save hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.
But as the son of a survivalist, Shaw had a preliminary question: Just how safe a safe house was it?
From this angle, it appeared deserted, dark. He dropped the transmission in gear and drove to the alley that ran behind the house, where he paused again, in front of an overgrown garden, encircled by a gothic wrought-iron fence. From here, still no lights, no signs of habitation, no motion. He gunned the engine and returned to the front. He skidded to a stop and low-gear muscled the bike onto the sidewalk.
He snagged his heavy backpack, chained up the bike and helmet, then pushed through the three-foot-deep planting bed that bordered the front. Behind a boxwood he found the circuit breakers for the main line. If there were an unlikely bomb inside it would probably be hardwired; whether it was phones or computers or improvised explosive devices, it was always tricky to depend on batteries.
