LITMIR.BIZ

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doing it, so maybe she could find an ally here.

      “You realize it’s illegal to keep me here against...”

      “Illegal?” The skin around his eyes crinkled, and she had the distinct feeling he was trying not to laugh at her. “You trespass on land that doesn’t belong to you, and then you have the nerve to claim we’re doing something wrong? We have every right to protect our land, every right to protect our liberties against a tyrannical government. You have no authority over me.”

      He took a breath, and then shook his head, visibly composing himself. “What happened with your friend was wrong, though, and I’m sorry.”

      She didn’t want to talk about Jen—didn’t want to remind him of the trouble he could be in—so she tried another tactic. “What good does keeping me here do? You said yourself I don’t belong. So, let me go, and...”

      “Keeping you in here keeps your friends out there.”

      Before she could ask what friends, he tugged on her wrist, harder this time, making her lose her balance as he opened the door and pulled her out.

      “If you let me leave, they have no reason to come in,” she insisted, her heart rate picking up. Whoever was outside—if Rolfe was telling the truth—was probably here because they’d realized Jen was missing. Would they have any idea she was in here?

      Rolfe pulled her back the way they’d come, stopping at a room smaller than the closet. She discovered it was a bathroom. Survivalists with indoor plumbing—thank goodness.

      “Why don’t you wash your hands?” he suggested softly.

      She lifted them, palms up, and saw the blood caked in the creases of her hands. Hurrying to the sink, she turned on the water, not even caring that it was freezing, and scrubbed and scrubbed until her hands hurt.

      “I think you got it out,” Rolfe said, turning off the water and passing her a threadbare towel. After she’d wiped her hands, he nodded and led her down the hall again.

      As he opened the hidden door, a voice boomed over a bullhorn. “Ward Butler, this is Adam Noonan, from the FBI. We just want to talk. Please pick up the phone we tossed in.”

      Evelyn’s pulse accelerated. Adam was from the Crisis Negotiation Unit. And if CNU was here, surely HRT was, too. Which meant Kyle was here.

      Hope began to build again. If anyone could get her out of here, it was Kyle and his teammates.

      “Ward.” Adam’s voice came over the bullhorn, and it sounded as if he’d been talking for a while, maybe during the time she’d been unconscious. “Let’s start a dialog, one leader to another.”

      “Moron,” Rolfe muttered, then said to her, “Watch your step.” He lifted his feet carefully over the taut wire, finally dropping her wrist.

      She followed, resisting the urge to rub her arm, then asked softly, “Doesn’t it seem a little dangerous to have a trip wire inside?”

      He gave her another of those mocking smiles. “You’ve never lived off the land, have you?” He seemed equally disgusted and perplexed as he added, “You wouldn’t last a day if your comforts suddenly disappeared and you had to try to survive off what the mountain had to offer. You’d be dead before dawn.” With that chilling prediction, he turned and kept walking, clearly expecting her to follow.

      It was the first time he’d put real space between them. She couldn’t stop herself from looking at the back door, within running distance, but Rolfe had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and something else strapped under his camouflage shirt. And she had no idea how far away HRT was. Most likely they’d set up a perimeter outside the fence. Too far to run without being shot in the back.

      Still, her whole body tensed as she tried to decide if she had a better chance of outrunning Rolfe out there than she did of weathering Ward Butler’s temper in here.

      “I wouldn’t do that,” Rolfe warned, without turning.

      She walked a little faster, toward him, even as a voice in the back of her mind told her she’d missed what might have been her only chance to run. “What does living off the land have to do with a booby trap inside your own home?”

      Did the other cultists know it was there and always remember to step over it? Or was this a part of the compound only Butler and his lieutenants were allowed to enter?

      If so, that was a hell of a way to keep out your own followers.

      She glanced back at it one last time, wondering what would happen if it was tripped. Wondering what else was behind that door that she hadn’t been able to see in the darkness.

      “Keep moving,” Rolfe said instead of answering her question, and she had to increase her pace to keep up with his longer stride.

      She followed him back down the dim hallway, toward the room where she and Jen had seen the supplies and weapon lockboxes. As he stopped in the doorway, she discovered that the room was now filled with cultists.

      There were about twenty of them, and they were all men. Evelyn did a double take, looking for any women or children, but saw none. A cult without women or kids was unusual. And although survivalists could be loners, they were equally likely to prepare a bunker for an entire family. Did this cult not have any families or were they somewhere else?

      The men ranged in age, but otherwise they looked the same to her. They were all white, their eyes glued to Ward Butler, who stood facing them, radiating power.

      There was plenty of camouflage in the room, and a lot of weaponry, casually slung over shoulders. Everything from AK-47s to shotguns to bows and arrows. Most of the men wore thick facial hair and had rough, weathered skin and angry expressions.

      The anger seemed to intensify as Ward Butler announced, “Here she is, our own personal symbol of government tyranny who thought it was her right to enter uninvited into our refuge.”

      Twenty faces swung her way, and all that fury directed solely at her made Evelyn instinctively take a step backward.

      “Kill her,” someone shouted and, as one, the group surged toward the doorway. Toward her.

      * * *

      “The shit’s really hit the fan,” Sam “Yankee” McGivern, the head of HRT, announced as he walked into the Tactical Operations Center.

      TOC was a glorified tent, but inside were state-of-the-art communications devices, hooked up to satellites that worked even in the inhospitable Montana wilderness. Greg’s spot was crammed into a corner of the tent, next to the negotiator, Adam Noonan. He glanced around, realizing Adam had left the tent without his noticing.

      Then he raised his eyes from his pop-up desk, seeking the sound of Yankee’s booming voice. At six and a half feet, the man’s head scraped the top of TOC, and he exuded strength, exactly the kind of figure FBI headquarters probably loved having as the lead in their version of special operations. He even had a scar running across the left side of his face, marring otherwise completely smooth, dark skin.

      He strode through TOC, weaving around the operators and directly over to Greg, who sat a little straighter.

      The sounds around him filtered back in again as his focus lifted more fully from his laptop. HRT agents, a Special Agent in Charge from Salt Lake City and support staff were all working frantically around him, but with a common discouraged slump to their shoulders. From outside the tent, Adam’s voice came over the bullhorn.

      Greg wrapped his hands around his thermos, hoping warmth from the coffee would penetrate where his gloves were failing. Judging by the temperature of the thermos, he needed a refill. “What now?” Greg asked Yankee, hearing the exhaustion and worry in his own voice.

      It was approaching midmorning, and despite Adam’s repeated attempts to contact the cultists, no one had responded. But somehow, word had spread about what was happening here, because the protesters and news crews had appeared in much bigger numbers than they’d expected.

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