"Which means they're inside or they're holding position outside with eyes on the doors." "Most likely split. Some inside, some on perimeter." "How many do you think?"
Priest considered. "The two from the SUVs plus whoever was on foot at the tunnel. Minimum four, could be six." "Against five of us."
"Against five of us who know the building and they don't." Priest looked at him. "And against the fact that they're trying to take people alive. We're not."
That last sentence landed in the air with a precision that clarified everything. Cal looked at Mara. "You know what I'm going to ask." "Yes."
"And?" "Let's go get them," she said.
They came at the cannery from three directions simultaneously, which required splitting the formation for the first time all night. And splitting felt wrong in the body the way it always did. The specific vulnerability of separated riders. The way the absence of the others in your peripheral vision registered as a kind of cold.
Cal had Priest with him on the eastern approach, moving on foot from where they'd left the bikes on the service road, coming through the drainage ditch with the frozen mud pulling at their boots, and the winter grass catching on their jackets, and the distant sound of something. A voice, low, indistinct, coming from inside the cannery structure. Hatch and Dex were coming from the west through the cornfield, moving in the residual row structure, using the dead stocks as cover at a crouch. Mara was alone on the south approach, which was the main vehicle access, which was the position nobody had volunteered for, and which she'd simply said she'd take with the flat efficiency of someone who'd been a corpsman long enough to know that the most dangerous position went to the person most capable of managing it.
Cal had told her to wait for his signal. She told him she'd use her judgment, which was as close to agreement as Mara ever got. He moved through the ditch with Priest 2 m behind him, and counted the structure's eastern windows, three, dark, and the single east-facing door that was original to the cannery construction, heavy steel on industrial hinges, currently closed. He could hear two voices inside now.
Not the three people they'd left here, different voices, the specific register of operational coordination. He had his hand on the door handle when Dex's voice came in his earpiece, barely a breath. "West side, one exterior near the corner. He's watching the field."
Cal pressed himself against the doorframe, waited. "I can get to him," Dex said. "Clean?" A pause that was itself an answer.
Then, clean. "Go." Seven seconds of silence. Then, done.
He's secure. "Not dead?" "Secure." Dex had done 3 years as a ranger before the IED.
Secure meant zip cuffed and zip gagged with the hardware Hatch carried in his saddle bag that he'd never specifically explained why he had, and nobody had specifically asked. "Hatch? West door?" "Got it. Locked from inside, but the frame is soft. Give me 4 seconds on your mark."
Cal looked at Priest. Priest gave him the nod. "Mark." He pushed through the east door the same instant Hatch's shoulder hit the west door, and the combined entry from two directions did exactly what two direction entries were designed to do.
It split the response, forced a choice, and in the half second that a person spends choosing which threat to face, they're facing neither effectively. There were two men inside the main cannery floor. One near the south wall, one near the center. Both armed, both in tactical configurations that said private contractor rather than anything governmental.
The center man had a weapon up and turning toward Hatch's entry when Cal covered the distance between the door and the man's weapon hand in four strides, and made the encounter brief and unambiguous, the way two deployments had taught him to make things when ambiguity was a cost he couldn't afford. The man went down. The weapon didn't fire. The south wall man made the decision to raise his weapon toward Priest, and Priest made a faster decision, and the south wall man ended up on the floor with Priest's knee on his back and his weapon 3 m away.
8 seconds, door to floor. Mara came in through the south door 30 seconds later, which meant she hadn't waited for a signal, which Cal had expected. "Clear," Hatch said from the west side. "Clear," Dex echoed from the doorway, the secured exterior man behind him.
Cal was already moving toward the back storage room where they'd left the others. The door was closed. He tried the handle. Locked from outside.
A simple barrel bolt, new, not original to the structure. Someone had brought it. Someone had planned for exactly this use. He slid the bolt and opened the door.
Noah was on his feet before the door was fully open, which told Cal that the boy had been standing against the wall beside the door waiting for it to open rather than sitting, which told him something about Noah Mercer that he filed and kept. Ruth was seated on a folded tarp in the center of the room, her hands zip cuffed in front of her, but her back straight, and her expression the specific expression of someone who is furious and controlling it for operational reasons. Briggs was beside her, also cuffed, with a cut on his forehead from what looked like a single impact. Not beaten, just subdued.
And his eyes doing rapid assessment inventory as the door opened. Noah looked at Cal. His face cycled through several things in rapid succession. Relief, anger, the residue of fear, something that landed finally as a question he didn't ask aloud, but that Cal could read.
"Everyone's okay," Cal said, first thing, always first thing. "You're all okay." Noah closed his eyes for exactly 2 seconds. When he opened them, they were wet at the edges, and he was already looking somewhere else, which was his version of privacy, and Cal respected it by looking at Ruth.
"Mrs. Mercer." "I'm fine," Ruth said, and the compression in those two words contained about 14 different things that she'd work through later on her own time, in her own way. "Cut these, please." Hatch had a blade.
He cut them free in 4 seconds. Ruth stood and rolled her wrists and looked around the room and then looked at Cal with an expression that had passed entirely beyond fear into something that was almost administrative. "Now what?" "Now we finish it," Cal said.
Finishing it took the shape of a phone call made from Mara's phone at 12:40 in the morning to a number that Warren Briggs had carried in his memory for 3 years because he'd never trusted it to any device. The number of a federal judge in the Eastern District who had, in 2019, been the only person in Briggs's former professional network to respond to his third attempt at contact with something other than silence or a transfer to Alaska. The judge's name was Eleanor Fassbender. She was 68 years old.
She had 31 years on the federal bench, and she answered her personal cell phone at 12:40 in the morning on the third ring, which told Cal something about the kind of person she was. Briggs talked to her for 11 minutes. Cal sat outside the cannery on an overturned crate and listened to the night while Briggs talked inside. And what he listened to was the specific quality of silence that follows violent action.
The way the world outside reassembled itself around the edges of what had happened, indifferent as always. The winter fields exactly as they'd been, the stars doing what stars did. His hands had stopped shaking at some point. He hadn't noticed when.
When Briggs came out, his face had a quality Cal hadn't seen in it before. Something loosened, a tension that had been structural finally beginning to release. Not relief. Too early for relief.
But the first intimation of it. "She's sending people," Briggs said. "Her own people, federal marshals she trusts personally. They'll be here by 4:30."
"She believed you." "She's been waiting for this call for 3 years." Briggs sat on the ground beside the crate, which was not a dignified position, and which he took without any apparent concern for dignity. "She knew Ellen Cho. She went to the memorial service."
Cal looked at him. "You never told her about Cho." "I didn't have to. She already knew something was wrong."