Книга - Seized

Seized
Elizabeth Heiter


Danger is all around her…What should have been a routine investigation for FBI profiler Evelyn Baine turns ominous when she’s kidnapped by a dangerous cult of survivalists. As her worst nightmares become a reality, she begins to question what she’s seeing. Because the longer she’s inside their compound, the more she realizes this group is not what it seems to be.The next terrorist threat is right beside her…As the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team closes in, Evelyn suspects she's stumbled onto an emerging terrorist threat—and a cult leader who has a score to settle with the FBI. If Hostage Rescue breaches the compound, Evelyn’s dead for sure. If they don’t, the cult may unleash a surprise attack that could leave the whole country shattered."Gripping from the first page, Vanished will keep you on the edge of your seat all the way to its searing conclusion…a roller coaster of a thriller." —New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver







Danger is all around her...

What should have been a routine investigation for FBI profiler Evelyn Baine turns ominous when she’s kidnapped by a dangerous cult of survivalists. As her worst nightmares become a reality, she begins to question what she’s seeing. Because the longer she’s inside their compound, the more she realizes this group is not what it seems to be.

The next terrorist threat is right beside her...

As the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team closes in, Evelyn suspects she’s stumbled onto an emerging terrorist threat—and a cult leader who has a score to settle with the FBI. If Hostage Rescue breaches the compound, Evelyn’s dead for sure. If they don’t, the cult may unleash a surprise attack that could leave the whole country shattered.


Praise for the novels of Elizabeth Heiter (#ulink_21f01cba-1a5c-5b9a-888d-3a9fb385f721)

“Elizabeth Heiter does her research, and it shows in this superb FBI thriller. With a ripped-from-the-headlines plot and excellent characterization, Seized is a true winner. Don’t miss it.”

—J.T. Ellison, New York Times bestselling author of What Lies Behind

“Gripping from the first page, Vanished will keep you on the edge of your seat all the way to its searing conclusion. Heiter has given us a roller coaster of a thriller, sure, but this novel is also a rich and harrowing story of the psychology of evil and those who strive to stop it, insights that will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book. And what a heroine we have in Evelyn Baine!”

—New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver

“A handsomely crafted mixture of police procedural and thriller, Vanished is a book whose events will haunt you well after you finish.”

—Mystery Scene Magazine

“Elizabeth Heiter rises to the top of [a crowded field] featuring serial killers with her sterling Vanished…

A splendid and scary read.”

—Providence Journal

“Hunted is a nonstop, thrilling read that will leave you breathless, and Evelyn Baine is a sharp and gutsy heroine you’ll want to follow for many books to come.”

—Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series

“Hunted is a terrific, gripping, page-turning debut by a talented new voice in suspense. A great read.”

—Allison Brennan, New York Times bestselling author

“Elizabeth Heiter has written a thriller that grabs readers from the first page...Hunted is a fast read because the pages fly by as the narrative gets more and more exciting and suspenseful.”

—Book Reporter




Seized (The Profiler, Book 3)

Elizabeth Heiter





www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)


This book is for my uncle Tom Dunikowski and

my aunt Andy Hammond. Thank you for

your belief in me, your support no matter what,

and for always being there when I need you.


Dear Reader (#ulink_4f7acd43-6a5a-5e94-bca8-518daa068347),

Welcome to the world of The Profiler! If you’ve already read the first two books in the series, thank you for returning as Evelyn Baine tackles what looks like a routine investigation—until it lands her on the wrong side of a hostage situation and in the middle of an emerging terrorist threat. If this is your first visit to the series, Evelyn’s story began in Hunted, where she tracked down a deadly serial killer known as the Bakersville Burier and learned just how deadly it can be to get inside the head of a killer. In the sequel, Vanished, Evelyn tackled the case she’d waited most of her life to investigate—the disappearance of her best friend—when the Nursery Rhyme Killer resurfaced after eighteen years of silence.

Seized marks the return of Evelyn and fellow agent Kyle McKenzie as a case takes them to the remote Montana wilderness. Writing this story meant delving into new research, including cults and brainwashing techniques, survivalists, homegrown terrorism and how to profile a person’s next move by his or her past actions. I hope you enjoy the result!

After Seized, Evelyn will be back for a brand-new adventure, and I hope you’ll continue to come along for the ride. You can keep up with me and the books (as well as get extras and join my newsletter) on my website at elizabethheiter.com (http://elizabethheiter.com). You can also find me on Facebook at facebook.com/elizabeth.heiter.author (http://facebook.com/elizabeth.heiter.author) and Twitter as @ElizabethHeiter (https://twitter.com/elizabethheiter). I love to hear from readers.

As always, my heartfelt thanks for reading!

Elizabeth Heiter


FBI Terms and Acronyms (#ulink_2baa7788-4009-56ab-b8b5-ea45611992e3)

ASAC—Assistant Special Agent in Charge. Working directly under the SACs (Special Agents in Charge) who run divisions or field offices, the ASACs run programs.

BAU—Behavioral Analysis Unit. The BAU is where FBI “profilers” (the official name is Criminal Investigative Analysts) work. BAU is a part of CIRG (Critical Incident Response Group) and is located at Aquia. BAU agents provide behavioral-based support to the FBI, as well as other federal, state, local and international law enforcement agencies, including profiles of unknown subjects (UNSUBs).

CIRG—Critical Incident Response Group. CIRG provides rapid response for crisis situations around the country and integrates tactical, negotiations, behavioral analysis and crisis management resources. BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) and HRT (Hostage Rescue Team) are part of CIRG.

CNU—Crisis Negotiation Unit. Also part of CIRG (Critical Incident Response Group), CNU trains the FBI’s field office negotiators and deploys with HRT to domestic crises. CNU’s motto is Pax Per Conloquium (Resolution Through Dialog).

CODIS—Combined DNA Index System. It describes the FBI’s program for DNA databases, including NDIS (the National DNA Index System), which contains DNA profiles from federal, state and local sources.

ERT—Evidence Response Team. ERT agents are specially trained FBI agents who collect evidence at crime scenes. Being on ERT is a secondary position, so these agents also work regular special agent duties.


Contents

Cover (#u013671e3-59cd-534b-8dc3-9b465590ca51)

Back Cover Text (#u29810c18-8668-5784-b398-80b19671484b)

Praise (#u6e51826a-f280-5848-b04c-fa349ca8cd0c)

Title Page (#ue5d38d5a-411a-54cc-85fa-af862791fdfd)

Dedication (#u3db25755-2b2d-5dec-ac20-6c3835249105)

Dear Reader (#u540551c8-8d65-551f-afb6-a2a5ec68efed)

Glossary (#u13c513fa-fc5d-5385-8cde-22599bf585e1)

Prologue (#ufd154428-d1bd-5baf-a70d-e2e5d6fbe20b)

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Prologue (#ulink_16136b65-acc5-5564-9dbf-d0a2931e3e7a)

The Freedom Uprising was coming.

John Peters had waited a long time for this. He could feel the anticipation building inside him, and he wished he could share it with someone other than Bobby Durham.

John glanced at his partner, perched silently in the passenger seat of the truck, arms crossed over his chest, supplies packed in at his feet. Bobby was okay, as partners went. Not exactly a strategic thinker, but he was a die-hard believer. He’d do whatever was necessary to complete the mission.

Still, John wished his half brother was here, the man who’d brought purpose to his life.

He lowered the window, let the familiar scents of dirt and pine and fresh snow creep into his nostrils as he drove. It was so close now. One more day in this place, and then he could move on, begin the mission.

If only he could be the one to end it, be there for the final target and see it with his own eyes, instead of just on the news. But he’d be the one to start things off. And they’d start off with a bang.

He smiled at the thought and felt Bobby’s curious gaze.

“Are you ready for this?” John asked.

“Damn right I am,” Bobby replied, his young voice full of boastful confidence.

“When we get back you’ll need to clear out your bunk. Everything goes.”

“I know. The maps, the guns, the supplies.” Bobby repeated John’s words from earlier. “I’ll get rid of everything. We’ll be set as soon as we’ve got the go-ahead.”

“Good.” Before they left, John would double-check, of course, and he’d empty his own bunk, too, although he never wrote anything down. He kept it all where it belonged, locked in his mind, where no one could accidentally discover it.

Never leave behind anything they can use.

The reminder ran through his head, but he didn’t need reminding. He’d been training for this mission all his life. He just hadn’t realized his true purpose until recently.

And his purpose was great. The lesson he would help teach this country was crucial.

“No one will suspect a thing till we get back.” Bobby’s words interrupted his thoughts.

John grunted noncommittally. Bobby was willing to die for the cause, but John knew the kid imagined himself returning a hero.

John was resigned to the truth. They’d never be coming back here. If they made it through their mission alive, they’d spend the rest of their days in hiding. But it would all be worth the sacrifice.

He pictured the final target, the one he’d never get to personally see, and he felt his anticipation shift into something hard and powerful and bigger than any one person.

He’d seen a video of the target once, from a long time ago, taken with a shaky old video camera. An elite group of men, so cocky and righteous. Standing on land that wasn’t theirs, using bullets to enforce their pretend authority.

He could almost see them now, still thinking they were untouchable. Thinking their bloody hands had somehow come clean.

They were wrong.

And soon, very soon, the whole world would know it.


1 (#ulink_761371ed-2136-5244-a502-ddeb0d47b7bc)

Lee Cartwright wanted to kill her.

Evelyn Baine didn’t need to be a profiler with the FBI’s elite Behavioral Analysis Unit—BAU—to know it. All she needed to do was stare into Cartwright’s angry, narrowed eyes and look at the snarl quivering on his lips, the thrust of his jaw as he leaned toward her across the table.

The bare bulb flickered overhead, deep in the bowels of the Montana State Prison. The distant chorus of prisoners’ voices reached her ears, but it was just the two of them in the tiny, dingy interview room. Just her and the convicted bomber. They were separated only by a flimsy table and a pair of standard-issue handcuffs. Those were bolted to the table, but looked as if they’d barely closed around Cartwright’s meaty wrists.

His eyes skimmed over her once more and she knew exactly what he saw—a perfect victim.

She gave him steady eye contact, refusing to react as he flexed his hands. He seemed to be testing the strength of those cuffs. The fact that Cartwright wanted to kill her was one of the reasons she’d been chosen for this interview.

Lee Cartwright had been convicted of bombing two black churches and one mosque. Two people had died, and dozens more were injured. It was his way of sowing fear; like a lot of bombers, he wasn’t just targeting a specific group, but also seeking notoriety. He’d wanted people to fear him, the man who’d been dubbed the “Nail Bomber” because of the materials he used.

He was antifederalist and anti-anyone-who-wasn’t-white. Sending her—a biracial federal agent—was her boss’s way of telling Cartwright that he didn’t call all the shots. The idea was to piss him off enough to get him to brag. He’d told prison officials that he had a copycat, and the FBI wanted to find out if it was true.

The other reason the head of BAU, Dan Moore, had sent her was that she was on his shit list.

Interviewing felons, even felons who claimed a copycat was contacting them, wasn’t usually a BAU job. But the file had crossed Dan Moore’s desk and apparently it looked like yet another suitable punishment for her refusal to follow orders three months ago.

She’d never been his favorite person; she was too young, too female and too poor a team player. He’d always treated her like the newbie who needed babysitting, but lately, it had gotten much worse. Lately, she felt as if she wasn’t even on the team anymore.

Worse, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be. And that was something she’d never questioned, not since the time she was twelve years old and her best friend, Cassie, had gone missing.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Cartwright muttered for the third time in the half hour they’d been having this little staring contest.

“You told two guards you had a copycat, Lee. You said you wanted to talk to someone about it. I’m here. Talk to me,” Evelyn pressed, trying to sound earnest.

The truth was, she felt discouraged. She’d already asked the warden about Cartwright’s incoming mail and his visitors. Since the only person who visited him was his mom, and his mail had never been flagged as suspicious, she was pretty sure his request was more about attention than a real threat.

But someone had been setting off explosions in the Montana wilderness about an hour away. There was no indication these had anything to do with Cartwright—he used a distinct method for creating his bombs, as telling as a signature, that local law enforcement hadn’t found this time.

The current explosions were a nuisance, but they’d happened far from anyone. And the reality was, this area had several groups with fringe militia ties, and explosions like the ones in the wilderness had happened before. Cartwright’s claim of a copycat was unlikely.

Still, he’d been convicted of hate crimes and murder. If there was even a tiny chance he was telling the truth, someone had to check it out.

That someone shouldn’t have been her. There was no reason to fly her across the country when there were perfectly capable agents here, and the case didn’t need a profiler at all.

And she was tired of the bullshit assignments when there were plenty of real cases she could be profiling.

Maybe, if she could ever get back to those legitimate cases, she could figure out whether she still belonged. Maybe it would tell her if, after finally unraveling what had happened to her best friend when she was twelve, she had any drive left for profiling.

Cartwright did nothing but snarl back at her, the muscles flexing in his prison-pumped arms.

Evelyn held in a sigh and leaned forward. “Who’s been contacting you, Lee?”

“I’m not telling you shit.”

Frustration built up. He should’ve seen her—exactly the kind of person he’d love to target at one of his bomb sites—and wanted to brag about the copycat. They hadn’t expected him to hand over a name, but they had expected him to taunt her with whatever he might know. Assuming the threat was real, which seemed more and more unlikely.

This complete refusal to talk was surprising.

“What’s your copycat planning to target? If he’s really copying you, he doesn’t seem to be doing a good job.” She tried to appeal to his vanity and his need to prove himself at the same time.

Cartwright scowled at her. “Forget about it.”

“Did you teach someone how to make a bomb?” she asked, leaning back in her chair. She tried another route. “It’s not like you used the most sophisticated method we’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah?” he barked. “Have you tried it? Packed in all those nails...?” He cut himself off and smirked at her. “My method was just fine.”

“But not so complicated that you’d need to teach someone else to do it, right? I mean, they could just figure it out on their own?” It probably wasn’t true. Cartwright had used easily accessible materials to create his bombs, but they’d been sophisticated in the detonation. The FBI hadn’t seen anything quite like them before—or since.

“Whatever,” he said. “I didn’t ask for you. I got nothing to tell you.”

“Why? Because there is no copycat?”

“Believe what you want.”

“I believe you’re wasting my time,” she snapped, bracing her hands on the table and leaning forward again so she could glare at him.

In that instant, he lunged toward her, shooting out of his chair and driving his elbow at her face.

She leaped back, cursing herself for not properly gauging the distance he could move while tethered to the table. But she wasn’t fast enough and his elbow clipped her cheek. It sent her flying backward.

She slammed against her chair, then tripped over it, falling onto the ground, her head slamming the concrete floor.

Behind her, she heard the guard wrestling with the locked door. Cartwright’s grating laugh sent fury racing through her veins.

She should’ve expected it. Cartwright had nothing left to lose. Thanks to a lenient judge, he’d avoided the death penalty, but he was never leaving this place.

She got to her feet before the guard had the door open, and resisted the urge to react. Instead, she righted her chair and sat back down as though everything was fine, waving the guard off. “Does it bother you that this is the worst you can do? Is that why you’re making up claims of a copycat?”

His face flushed an angry red and a vein in the center of his forehead popped up. “Get out.”

“If you’re not making it up,” she challenged, ignoring the way her cheek throbbed, “then prove it.”

“I didn’t make any damn claim to the Zionist...” He cut himself off again, blew out a noisy breath.

But she knew what he was going to say. Zionist Occupational Government. It was what a lot of fervent antigovernment groups called the federal government. She tried not to roll her eyes.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Cartwright finally finished.

She stared at him a minute longer, but a year and a half as a profiler—or behavioral analyst as they were officially called—told her she didn’t have anything to gain here. Her six years before that as a regular special agent told her she needed to find a real case.

“Nice talking to you, Cartwright,” she said, the sarcastic response so different from the way she would’ve handled an interview like that three months ago.

Cartwright just sat there, jaw and arm muscles flexing in unison, and Evelyn stood and motioned for the guard.

The keys jangled in the lock again for so long Evelyn was glad Cartwright had only winged her with his elbow. Eventually the door opened and the guard beckoned her forward.

She moved to his far side, practically sliding along the wall as he led her down the hallway, past a row of cells. They were in the supermax portion of the prison, filled with lifers, which made them especially dangerous. But the inmates were a lot less likely to lodge spit—or other bodily fluids—at a guard they had to deal with every day than a visiting federal agent.

Luckily for her, the guard was six feet tall and as broad as a small car, making her five-foot-two, one-hundred-and-ten-pound frame virtually invisible. Still, the catcalls and obscene comments trailed behind her, leaving an imaginary layer of filth under her loosely tailored suit.

“You get anything good from Cartwright?” the guard asked, sounding completely uninterested in the answer as they reached the front of the prison.

He was slow getting her weapon out of the locked box where she’d had to leave it when she entered, and Evelyn shifted her weight impatiently. Less than two hours in this building and already she felt desperate to breathe fresh air.

How must Cartwright, who’d been locked up for three years of a life sentence, feel? Was that why he’d claimed he had a copycat? To waste the government’s time and amuse himself? With someone like him, it was entirely possible.

Evelyn hooked her holster back onto her belt and tugged her jacket down over it. “Thanks. Nothing useful from Cartwright.”

She checked her watch. A few hours to grab a late dinner, pack up and catch her flight. She’d follow up with the warden when she was back in Virginia.

As soon as she stepped outside, Evelyn drew in a lungful of fresh, clean air, shivering in her wool suit. It was twenty degrees colder in Montana than in Virginia, and a light dusting of snow covered her rental car. The sun had begun to sink while she was inside, and the parking lot looked eerie in the semidarkness.

As she hurried toward her car, her fingers seemed to drain of warmth as fast as her breath puffed clouds of white into the November air. She strode away from the fenced area around the prison, anxious for the heater in her rental—and saw someone standing beside her car.

She could tell from twenty feet away that person was in law enforcement, probably FBI. It was the way she stood, angled to see any approaching threat, the way she held her hand near her hip, where her weapon would be holstered.

Evelyn glanced down at her watch again as she reached her car. The Montana State Prison wasn’t exactly a short jaunt from the closest FBI office. Which meant this agent wanted something. Evelyn’s stomach grumbled as she sensed her chance for dinner slipping away.

“Evelyn Baine?” the woman asked. She stuck out a hand and shook with the precision of a military officer and the force of someone used to working in a predominantly male profession. “I’m Jen Martinez. Salt Lake City office.”

She flashed a set of FBI credentials and Evelyn squinted at them. “Good to meet you.”

Jen frowned as she dropped Evelyn’s hand. “What happened to your eye?”

Evelyn gingerly touched the tender spot high on her cheek where Cartwright had winged her. It was swelling underneath her eye. “An accident. What can I do for you?” She tried not to shiver outwardly as she crossed her arms over her chest to preserve whatever warmth she could.

Jen must have lived in the area long enough to be used to the cold, because she looked comfortable, even with her blazer unbuttoned. She was a few inches taller than Evelyn, with white-streaked blond hair pulled into a bun nearly as severe as the way Evelyn wore her own dark hair. She probably had fifteen years on Evelyn, and everything about her, from the laser-sharp gaze to the polyester-blend suit, screamed longtime law enforcement.

“When I heard BAU was sending a profiler to talk to Lee Cartwright, I had to come and get your input.”

“You have some insight into Cartwright’s copycat?”

Jen waved her hand dismissively. “No. But I do have another situation where I’d like a profiler’s take.”

Evelyn looked pointedly at her watch. “My flight takes off in a few hours.” Actually, it was four, but that wasn’t a lot of time to fully review a case and give case agents a profile of their perpetrator.

Not to mention the fact that she wasn’t supposed to review a case at all until it was vetted at the BAU office and brought to her officially. Then again, maybe Jen had a case that would allow Evelyn to use her profiling abilities for a change. “Did you bring the file with you?”

“Not exactly,” Jen hedged. “I was hoping we could take a ride.”

Evelyn moved from one foot to the other, trying to generate more warmth. “Where?”

“Ever heard of the Butler Compound?”

“No.”

Jen’s lips tightened. “Figures. I’ve tried to get BAU to look more closely at it a couple of times, but I keep getting denied.”

Probably for good reason—but Evelyn didn’t say that. The BAU office received hundreds of requests every single week, from federal, state and local law enforcement offices all over the country, plus the occasional international request. There was simply no way to take them all on. And many of them genuinely didn’t require a profiler.

“If...” Evelyn started.

“You’re here.” Jen cut her off, hands on her hips. “Just take a look, would you? There’s something there. I know it, and I need help.”

The desire to follow procedure, to do things by the book, rose up hard. Once upon a time, she’d been a stringent rule-follower. But the desire to contribute again as a real profiler—to get out of limbo—was stronger.

“Tell me what you want,” Evelyn said. “And where’s your partner?” As a profiler, Evelyn didn’t have one, but that was rare. Like most law enforcement, the FBI liked to pair up their agents.

Relief rushed over Jen’s face. “I’m between partners. Mine just transferred to another office. But I heard you were here, and I couldn’t miss this chance.” She suddenly seemed to notice Evelyn shivering. “Want to get out of the cold?”

“Yes.”

Jen laughed and nodded at the battered SUV next to Evelyn’s rental. She beeped open the doors and climbed inside, turning on the engine. “Hop in.”

As Evelyn got into the passenger seat of what was obviously Jen’s Bureau-issued vehicle, she flipped the heat up to high, then said, “Give me the basics.”

“I can do better than that.” Jen buckled up, gunning it out of the parking lot.

A bad feeling came over Evelyn—the strong, sudden certainty that she was heading into something she shouldn’t. It mingled with annoyance that Jen had tried to trick her, instead of just asking Evelyn to go somewhere.

“Where precisely are we going?” she demanded, buckling up even as she debated asking Jen to turn around.

“Butler Compound,” Jen replied.

“How far is it?”

“About an hour,” she answered, but from the way she said it, Evelyn could tell it was actually longer. “And then I’ll drive you right back.”

Evelyn frowned down at her watch. If she missed her plane, she’d be even higher on Dan’s shit list. Which hardly seemed possible.

And if she was going to leave BAU, she wanted it to be her choice, not because Dan Moore had kicked her out.

Jen must have seen her annoyance. “I want you to see the place for yourself,” she blurted. “Maybe then BAU will finally believe it’s not just some harmless cult.”

“What do you think it is?”

Jen glanced at her, intensity in her eyes, then back at the road. “A threat.”

* * *

“This is remote,” Evelyn said, staring out her window at the woods. The trees were thinning as they climbed in elevation, but it was still wilderness. The sun had fully set now, so she found it hard to see much beyond the headlights of Jen’s SUV.

They’d been driving just over an hour, and Evelyn had seen nothing more than the occasional lean-to or shack. Snowcapped mountains rose up in the distance. The view was beautiful, but she couldn’t imagine anyone living out here.

“Yeah,” Jen agreed. “Very remote. Good place to hide out, away from prying neighbors. Away from law enforcement, too.”

Jen had finally hung up the call she’d taken almost as soon as they’d gotten in the car, which had prevented Evelyn from getting any more information about why they were going to the Butler Compound. But she’d learned plenty about Jen from her half of that conversation.

“That was your supervisor, huh?”

“Yes,” Jen said. “And before you ask, no, I’m not supposed to be doing this. He thinks I’m running down a lead on another case. Which was probably obvious from that call. He has no idea I tracked you out to the prison.”

Evelyn nodded. “He may not know about me, but he knows what you’re doing.”

“What?” Jen whipped her head toward Evelyn, and the SUV jerked. She corrected quickly on the poorly maintained road. “Why do you say that?”

“I could tell from your call.”

“You could hear him? What do you have, bat ears?” Jen asked. She’d taken the call on her Bluetooth, instead of putting it on speaker.

“No. But that’s what makes me a profiler,” Evelyn replied. “Trust me, Martinez. He knows.”

It had been obvious from the way Martinez had kept repeating answers to the same questions about her location. Detailed questions, as though her boss didn’t believe a word she was saying.

“Shit,” Jen muttered. “He warned me to stay away from this.”

“Want to tell me what I’m getting into here?”

“Okay. So, the compound is pretty isolated, as you can tell. This group is cut from the same cloth as Cartwright.” She glanced over at Evelyn. “Which reminds me, while we’re there, call me Jen. Not Martinez. Just Jen. That’s how they know me.”

Evelyn shot her a disbelieving look. “They know you?”

“Yeah, I’ve been out there a couple of times. Kind of unofficial, doing the rounds, that sort of thing. They come out and meet me, talk for a while. Usually Butler himself, sometimes with a few of his followers.”

“And they bought your reason for visiting?”

“Oh, yeah. Salt Lake City is a big field office, but this area is sparsely populated. People around here are used to law enforcement periodically making goodwill calls.”

Evelyn frowned, but didn’t argue.

“You ever work at an RA?” Jen asked.

Evelyn shook her head. Most agents now started at one of the bigger field offices, but back when Jen had begun her FBI career, they were still sending a lot of newbies to resident agencies, smaller satellite offices.

“Well, I have. Place quite a bit like this actually, out in Nevada. And it was par for the course, law enforcement checking in on everyone now and then.”

Evelyn nodded, still not sure it was a good idea for Jen to be making these visits. On the other hand, direct contact was the best way to get information on a potential problem group.

“Anyhow,” Jen continued, “my last partner and I introduced ourselves as FBI, but with first names only. No reason to tell a bunch of racists that I’m married to a Hispanic man.”

“They’re going to love me,” Evelyn muttered. Her mother was of Irish-English descent, but her father had been Zimbabwean. There was no hiding her heritage.

“Yeah, well, the profiler who showed up being a big, white, Aryan-looking guy was probably too much to hope for. Don’t worry. The most they’ll do is glare at you.”

“That’ll be fun,” Evelyn said, already regretting that she’d agreed to this as she glanced at the dashboard clock. She didn’t really mind the animosity of suspects—that was pretty common—but this visit was sounding more and more like a bad idea.

And if the most she had to fear from them was the evil eye, what kind of threat were they?

“The leader, Ward Butler, was friends with Lee Cartwright when they were kids,” Jen explained as she sped along the barely paved roads.

Evelyn stared at her. “You know Cartwright’s claiming he’s got a copycat, right?”

“Yeah, I heard. I wouldn’t take anything that guy says at face value, though. He’s not exactly the type who’d warn the government. He’s more likely to watch the news from prison and cheer when it happens. Or taunt law enforcement, acting like he knows who’s copying him, just to get a rise out of us.”

“Okay,” Evelyn said. “I can see that. But if Butler and Cartwright are friends...”

“Were friends,” Jen corrected her. “Like twenty years ago. They grew up together, but there’s no indication they’ve been in contact in a long time. Then they had a complete falling-out when Cartwright went violent, and Butler started his compound.”

“So you’re saying Butler’s group isn’t violent,” Evelyn said, getting frustrated. “Why are they a threat?”

“They haven’t been violent yet,” Jen replied. “But I think they’re going to be.”

“Why? And how long have they been nonviolent?”

Jen slowed the SUV and turned off onto a dirt path. “Just because they’ve been quiet for a few years doesn’t mean they plan to stay that way. Butler refers to the place as a ‘refuge’ for other survivalists. And we have a lot of those—people who want to live off the land, with no interference from anyone. Most of them wish they’d been born a couple of centuries ago, with no law except maybe a local sheriff, and the chance to be as isolated as they want.”

“I know about survivalists,” Evelyn said. “And sure, some of them are a problem, but plenty of them just want to be off the grid. Leave them alone and they leave everyone else alone.”

The SUV bounced along the potholed trail, and Jen’s silence dragged on until she said, “You know the Unabomber’s cabin was only about twenty miles from here? His neighbors probably thought he was harmless and just wanted to be left alone.”

Evelyn held in a sigh. “You still haven’t told me why you think this particular group is more dangerous than any of the dozens of other cults we’ve got.”

Jen’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “You’re too young to remember some of the crap from the nineties, but...”

“I know enough.” Evelyn could see where this was going. “And yes, there’s been an uptick in homegrown terrorism chatter over the past few years, but...”

“Officially, the Butler Compound is a low threat,” Jen broke in. “The FBI thinks Butler is more likely to feed his followers Kool-Aid than plan an attack against anyone. But I’ve been around cults. One of my very first assignments was in Waco, Texas.” She gave Evelyn a meaningful look.

“The Koresh disaster? You were there?” David Koresh and his followers had been in a fifty-one-day siege after Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents tried and failed to deliver a warrant. Koresh and his followers had fired on the ATF agents and barricaded themselves in the Apocalypse Ranch—a name that should’ve set off warning bells from the start. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had eventually surrounded the place. In the end, Koresh and the cultists had set their own compound on fire, and most of them died.

“Yeah, I was there. Mostly getting senior agents coffee, but trust me, I have experience with cults. I heard the crazy ranting, I saw the few cultists who came out, I saw the place burn. Hell, I even walked through crowds of protesters and had egg thrown at my face. But this compound is different. It’s got some of that same creepy vibe, but I’m telling you, this is more than a simple cult. There’s just something off about the place. I know there’s more happening. And I’m not going to be the FBI agent who overlooks it.”

No wonder BAU had refused to take on the file. The Butler Compound had already been evaluated and Jen had nothing but her gut to say there was a genuine threat.

Evelyn was probably going to find a group of survivalists who wanted nothing to do with her or Jen. She’d come home with nothing useful from Cartwright, and an unsanctioned side trip that would make her miss her flight.

Jen must have sensed her frustration, because she said defensively, “See for yourself.”

The SUV rounded another bend and the compound seemed to appear out of nowhere. It was a larger building than she’d expected in such a remote place, and much more sophisticated, too. Usually survivalists built small, and used the materials they found in their immediate vicinity. Not this group.

The compound looked more like an aboveground bunker than a house. Windows were barred as if they lived in the city instead of the wilderness, and there was a tower at the center, rising high in the air, that Evelyn hadn’t seen until they’d gotten close. But if anyone was up there, they would’ve seen her and Jen coming for miles—a single set of headlights approaching through the darkness.

Evelyn peered through the windshield, squinting at the rooftop. “Are those...?”

“Solar panels,” Jen broke in. “Yeah. Judging from the chimneys, they have a couple of fireplaces. And I know they’ve got some massive generators, but they’re not hooked up to the grid at all. As far as we can tell, they have no electricity and no internet. They’ve even rigged their own system to bring in water. They’re totally off grid.”

What a way to live, Evelyn thought but didn’t say. Then again, there were plenty of cultists who lived without electricity while their leader had excessive luxuries.

And this group was supposedly made up of survivalists, so maybe they really didn’t need modern comforts.

The compound was nestled at the base of a steep, curved peak that would prevent anyone from approaching on either side. The rest of it was surrounded by a tall, chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire. But the gate at the entrance hung open.

“Well, this is kind of weird,” Jen said as she drove in.

“What is?” Evelyn asked, sitting straighter.

The group had cut down trees to put up the fence and to keep anyone from scaling a tree to hop over it; inside they’d left the environment alone. There wasn’t much more than a few scraggly pines, but they were still big enough for someone to hide behind. No one emerged. She didn’t see anyone at all. A nervous shiver crept up Evelyn’s spine.

“Usually they meet me at the gate,” Jen said, her tone wary.

“How often have you come here?” And how clearly had she advertised her suspicions?

“Just three times.”

That would make her interest obvious, Evelyn figured. But where was everyone?

“Maybe BAU was right about the Kool-Aid,” Jen joked. Her voice held no humor.

She parked close to the compound, took out her cell phone and started to call someone. She had her door open and was hopping out of the vehicle before Evelyn could suggest they wait.

Swearing, Evelyn followed. Even if Jen had made her suspicions obvious, she knew the people better than Evelyn did. They’d talked peacefully with her in the past, so theoretically they wouldn’t overreact to having her return.

Regardless, Evelyn didn’t like it. Not the open gate, not the stillness of the place, not Jen’s stubborn insistence that there was danger here.

Cold air stung her throat as soon as she slammed the car door behind her. Either because it was later now, or because of their elevation, it felt another twenty degrees cooler up here. In the Montana wilderness, she needed more than a wool suit and a pair of low heels. She’d taken barely five steps when her fingers started to throb from the cold.

Still, she unbuttoned her suit coat for quicker access to the SIG Sauer P226 strapped at her hip.

Jen followed the set of thick tire tracks that ran off the hard-packed trail and into the looser dirt. As she stepped around the corner of the building, she called out, “Hello?”

Evelyn picked up her pace to follow when she heard Jen exclaim, “Hey, I know you!”

Then Jen walked around the corner again, this time backward, with her hands up and held out to her sides.

Evelyn reached for her weapon, but before she could unholster it, a man came into view.

He was nothing more than a big blur of angry features and camo, because all she could focus on was the modified AK-47 aimed directly at Jen.


2 (#ulink_357d32d2-46e9-5e85-ad80-0264d976aef8)

“What are you doing here, Agent Martinez?” the armed man demanded, his voice a deep, harsh rumble.

Next to her, Jen jerked at the news that Butler knew her last name. Then she tried to recover, and her voice was surprisingly calm as she took another step backward, both arms up and out. “Just a friendly visit. Nothing more, Ward.” Ward Butler, Evelyn realized as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The leader of the Butler Compound. The man Jen suspected of being a homegrown terrorist.

Standing there now, holding an illegally modified weapon, wearing a thick, scruffy beard and dressed in camouflage and a skull cap, he looked like one.

“Drop that,” Butler barked, ignoring Jen’s conversational tone entirely.

Jen’s eyes went to her phone. The readout was lit up, probably because she was on the line with whoever she’d started to call in the car.

“Drop it now!” Butler yelled, his voice echoing across the compound.

As the phone fell from her hand, Butler casually redirected his AK-47 and shot it, midair, blasting the phone to pieces.

Instinct made Evelyn lurch backward, and she went for her weapon.

Before she reached it, the AK-47 was pointed at her.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Butler warned. “Hands up.”

As Evelyn raised her arms, they started to tingle. Because of the cold or because she’d seen how good a shot Butler was, she wasn’t certain.

Although Jen’s boss certainly suspected she’d come up here, he probably wouldn’t expect her back at the office for hours. Maybe not until tomorrow.

And no one knew where Evelyn was.

“Let’s try this again, Agent Martinez,” Butler said slowly, a sarcastic emphasis on the word Agent. “What are you doing here?”

Most cult leaders were charismatic. Narcissistic sociopaths, too, but they had to be able to conceal that. They had to exude enough charm to get a group of people to give up everything they owned and follow them.

Not this guy. As far as Evelyn could tell, he was a hundred and eighty solid pounds of pure menace.

She didn’t have much experience with cults, but Butler was setting off all kinds of alarm bells. If he was a cult leader, where the hell were all his followers?

“I’m at the end of a shift, Ward,” Jen said. “I’m taking my new partner on the rounds.” She lifted her shoulders and gave a little smile. “You know, to meet all the neighbors before we head back to the office.”

Butler turned toward Evelyn, looking at her with a disgust he didn’t bother to hide. “You’re the newbie in the Salt Lake City office?” he asked, skepticism dripping off every word.

“That’s right,” Evelyn replied, uncomfortable with Butler’s tone. Had he mentioned the field office to let her know he was familiar with how the Bureau worked? Or was there more to this?

Jen put a little steel in her voice when she said, “There’s no need for this to get ugly.”

A sneer crossed Butler’s face. He didn’t move his gaze from Evelyn as he told Jen, “You made it ugly.”

The force of his hatred had Evelyn stumbling back on her heels, and Butler’s sneer turned to a tight smile.

But instead of saying another word to her, he looked at Jen again. “This is private property. Trespassing without announcing yourself isn’t very smart.” He made an apologetic face. “You’re likely to get yourself mistaken for an intruder and shot.”

Chills danced across Evelyn’s skin. After Butler’s display with the phone, she absolutely knew there was no way she could get her gun out of its holster before he pulled the trigger on both of them.

If he did, she’d never get the chance to decide what to do about her FBI career. Never get to say goodbye to her grandma. Never get to figure out where her brand-new relationship with fellow agent Kyle McKenzie was headed.

She should’ve taken more time off after solving her friend’s case. She should’ve extended that vacation with Kyle, never mind what the FBI wanted. She thought of that quiet, secluded beach, with nothing for miles but ocean and sand and Kyle’s deep blue eyes staring back at her...

For that one brief week, she’d felt like a different person. Someone whose life wasn’t completely consumed by her job. Someone who didn’t have an overwhelming need to chase down the demons of her childhood until they were all she could see.

She’d felt normal, something she couldn’t remember feeling in a long, long time. Not since her best friend had disappeared from her life, which had started her down the path to becoming a profiler.

With Kyle, she’d felt as though the whole world was finally beginning to open up. Then she’d gone back to work, thinking everything would be different.

But for the past three months, she’d felt lost. Without purpose. A feeling she’d never experienced in her life.

And now, here she was, back in the job that had taken everything she had. And if she didn’t get her profiling instinct back, it just might take her life.

“Now toss over your gun. Real slow,” Butler said.

Jen reached for her weapon and Evelyn tensed as she watched. She readied herself to dive for the ground if Jen didn’t toss it. Readied herself to reach for her own gun as a desperate last effort if Butler’s finger moved inside the trigger guard of his AK-47.

Jen hesitated only a second before tossing the gun into the brush.

Then the sudden rumble of a powerful engine sounded from around the corner. A big black truck hurtled past her, close enough to blast heat across her back and rip hair loose from her bun.

It kept going, through the gate and out of the compound. A moment later, another man turned the corner, arms swinging loosely, an AK-47 slung over his shoulder.

This guy looked like a cult leader. Taller and leaner than Butler, he had sandy blond hair that curled around his ears and a face that was probably attractive when he wasn’t scowling.

Evelyn risked a glance at Jen, wondering who the newcomer was, but Jen stayed silent.

Still, Jen and Butler were obviously familiar with each other, so this must’ve been the person Jen had spoken to when she’d first left the SUV. The one she’d claimed to know, sounding surprised.

“We’ve got to take care of them,” Butler said in the sort of casual tone that was more appropriate for ordering dinner than discussing the murder of two federal agents.

The new guy shook his head. “I don’t think you should do that.”

“They could ruin things for us.”

“It’s a problem,” the blond guy agreed. He was dressed in camouflage, too, but wore no hat or gloves. Although his pale skin was ruddy from being outside, he looked comfortable.

Evelyn spoke up. “There’s no problem here.”

“Shut up!” Butler shouted at her. “This is the start of everything,” he said to his companion. “It doesn’t matter what we do with these two.”

“Killing them will just bring more feds,” the other man argued as Evelyn tried to work out his role.

Other than as a possible voice of reason. She inched her hands down slightly, praying that this guy could convince Butler to let them go.

If this was set up like a typical cult, maybe he was a trusted higher-up who took orders from Butler and enforced them with the followers? Cults often referred to guys like that as lieutenants.

Evelyn glanced quickly around. But if she was right about that, where were the followers? Were there any? If so, why hadn’t they appeared when the gunshot went off? And what did Butler mean when he said this was “the start of everything”?

“That one—” Butler waved his gun at Evelyn “—is the newbie. The other one, Jen Martinez here, has been sniffing around our place for months.”

“Who cares? We’re not doing anything wrong,” the new guy said smoothly.

Except owning illegal weapons, but Evelyn didn’t mention that.

“Well, now I can’t let them leave,” Butler said, and there was a little too much glee in his tone.

Evelyn glanced at Jen again, willing the other agent to look at her. How were they going to get out of this? Did Jen have any kind of connection with Butler or the new guy that she could use?

Talking seemed like their best bet, especially now that there were two cultists with weapons and Jen was unarmed. But Evelyn couldn’t decide which approach to take.

Jen kept her gaze firmly on Butler. “Of course you can let us leave,” she told him. “You haven’t taken things too far. Not yet. Let’s keep it that way.”

“Maybe you should lock them up,” the blond guy suggested, ignoring Jen. “Drive their vehicle out of here.”

“Why would you need to do that?” Evelyn asked. “If nothing’s happening—and we certainly haven’t seen anything that would require our attention—why would you want the FBI out here searching for us?” Before he could respond, she added, “And if you think her supervisor doesn’t know we’re here, you’re mistaken. This is the first place they’ll look if we don’t show up in the next hour.”

Butler shrugged. “Can’t be helped.” He nodded at his lieutenant. “Maybe you’re right about hanging on to them for a bit. Check them, Rolfe.”

“Ward.” Jen tried again as Rolfe frisked her for any hidden weapons. “I’ve always been straight with you. This isn’t necessary.”

He ignored her and then Rolfe was standing behind Evelyn, close enough to make all her muscles tense. He emptied her holster and took her cell phone. Then he patted her down so thoroughly that Evelyn knew he was practiced at carrying concealed.

She was convinced he had another weapon on him. Not that she could do anything about it.

He gestured toward the building, and she and Jen began walking in that direction. Jen looked shell-shocked and furious, but she stared straight ahead as her shoes crunched on the frost-covered grass. She made no further effort to protest, almost as if part of her was glad they were getting to see inside the compound.

Butler walked close behind them, his AK-47 leveled inches from Evelyn’s back.

“You staying?” Butler asked gruffly, and it took Evelyn a minute to realize he was talking to Rolfe.

She frowned and glanced over her shoulder.

Rolfe had fallen into step behind Butler, but his eyes locked on Evelyn’s as soon as she looked at him.

She stumbled, then averted her gaze. Why wouldn’t Butler’s lieutenant stay? Unless he wasn’t a lieutenant. Unless he had some other role at the cult. But what role would require him to leave? Then again, why had the driver of the truck left?

What the hell was going on at the Butler Compound?

* * *

“You’re going to Montana,” the head of BAU told Greg Ibsen as soon as he walked through the door of his boss’s office.

“What?” Greg stopped abruptly in the dull gray room. “Did Evelyn’s interview with Cartwright give us something?”

Greg tried to keep the surprise out of his voice. He’d been a profiler with BAU a long time. Long enough to know when Dan Moore was sending someone on a long-shot assignment as punishment.

Dan frowned at him, probably able to read every thought running through his mind, since he was a profiler, too. “No.” He tapped his pen against the towering pile of legal pads on his desk. “There’s another situation in Montana.”

“If Evelyn’s already there, maybe she should take it,” Greg suggested. He’d trained Evelyn, and he knew her as well as anyone could. Whatever the case was, she could handle it. And if Dan didn’t start giving her real assignments again soon, he was afraid she’d leave the unit.

“Too late. She’s on her way back,” Dan dismissed him, draining his cup of coffee as if it was water. “You’ll probably pass each other in the air. Besides, she doesn’t have much experience with this kind of case.”

“What is it?” Greg asked, dreading the call home he’d have to make, telling his son, Josh, that he’d be missing his first hockey game. Greg’s family was used to it; this was the life of an FBI agent. But it still wasn’t easy to hear their disappointment, shaded with resignation—as though they’d expected him to cancel.

“The Salt Lake City office has an agent who went off on an unsanctioned call. Her boss says she’s got a hard-on for the Butler Compound, a cult out in the Montana wilderness that’s technically under the Salt Lake City office jurisdiction. He’s pretty sure she went there. About an hour ago, her supervisor got a call from her. Apparently, she didn’t say a word when he picked up, but he heard part of a conversation, then a gunshot.”

“Okay,” Greg said slowly. “And they want a profiler because...?” It sounded like they needed the Salt Lake City SWAT team, fast.

“Because they haven’t had contact with the agent, and they don’t know her status. They aren’t a hundred percent sure she’s there, and the cult is a survivalist group. Completely antigovernment and, although they’ve never displayed aggression before, these people are skilled with their weapons. The Salt Lake City office is afraid a show of force will start a firefight.”

“Then shouldn’t I be reviewing the Butler Compound information from here to give them a profile?” Greg asked. He didn’t mind going to Montana if they really needed him, but he didn’t see how being on-site would help in this case. Especially since there wasn’t even a confirmed “site” yet.

Dan sighed and opened the top drawer of his desk, where Greg suspected his boss kept endless bottles of antacids. But instead of popping any, Dan closed the drawer again, looking pensive. “You’re heading out with a CIRG contingent. A hostage negotiator and a group from HRT.”

The Critical Incident Response Group was a special group within the FBI, made up of teams that could respond instantly to any serious emergency, anywhere in the United States or abroad. BAU was part of CIRG, the only part not located in Quantico, the next town over.

If he was going with a hostage negotiator and a bunch of Hostage Rescue Team agents, that meant someone high up expected things to turn very, very bad. The kind of bad that required more than just a local SWAT team. The kind of bad that required HRT agents, who did absolutely nothing but train for and execute tactical missions.

Unease settled in Greg’s stomach, along with the hint of anticipation that always came with a new case to profile. That was what had kept him in BAU for going on nine years. “What don’t I know?”

“Most of it you do know,” Dan replied, just as his phone began to ring. He tapped a button to silence it. “We’re looking to avoid an armed standoff here. But if this agent is inside that compound, we have to get her out.”

Greg nodded. The last time someone from the antifederalist movement had stood up to the government, it had become a media spectacle that seemed likely to turn violent at any minute. But the FBI, as well as local and state police, had walked away.

That incident in Nevada had driven all the wackos out of the woodwork. They’d shown up to pledge their support to the rancher who’d refused to move his cattle off federal land. And then they’d hidden in the surrounding brush, aiming rifles at federal agents from all directions and posting the images online.

It was a miracle no one had fired a shot. Greg knew the chances of another ending that peaceful were slim.

“I assume I need to head over to Quantico?” Greg asked, starting for the door.

“Hold on,” Dan said, his tone weary. “There’s one more thing.”

“You have a file on the Butler Compound?”

“Yes, but it’s thin. We evaluated the group last year, at the request of this Martinez agent, the one who’s missing now.”

“And?”

“And we considered them a low threat, basically a cult that wanted to be left alone to live without federal interference. They’re bound together by their desire to live off the grid. There’s probably a religious component tying them together, too, although we don’t have evidence of that yet. It’s a group that wouldn’t strike out unless the government showed up on their doorstep, but a genuine danger if that happened. Vince did the analysis.”

Vince was one of their old-timers, a legend who’d finally retired and gone into the private security consulting business a month ago. BAU was still looking for his replacement.

“That’s good, as long as we can stay off their doorstep,” Greg said slowly, because he sensed something worse was about to follow.

“Martinez kept insisting Butler was a Bubba.”

Bubba was slang in law enforcement circles for a homegrown terrorist.

Greg was skeptical. “She thought a cult leader was a Bubba?”

“Not just him,” Dan replied. “The whole group of them.”

“That’d be pretty unusual, especially for survivalist types.”

Precedent said that kind of personality—an extremist antifederal homegrown terrorist—was a lone wolf. Someone who’d try and fail to fit into fringe militia and survivalist groups, then finally set out on his own to wreak havoc.

Not a cult member, who looked to a leader to provide identity. And certainly not a cult leader, who derived power and purpose from having a group of people to do his bidding and treat him like a god. If that cult leader sent his followers out to commit terrorist acts, he’d be breaking up his little kingdom. With no one left to worship him, what would be the point of his cult?

Greg took the file Dan handed over. “You now think Martinez could be right?”

“No. But I think her constantly going there for answers might’ve pushed the group into endgame mode. We could be looking at people who are ready to barricade themselves in their compound and defend it to the death. Or mass suicide.”

Greg frowned, suddenly understanding why he was being sent to Montana. “And if there’s a chance Martinez is there, we have to go in, anyway.”

Dan nodded grimly. “Exactly.”


3 (#ulink_7d13748c-02e0-5d7a-a2a0-db9f21f7d46b)

“We need to move,” Jen whispered as a faint sliver of light tracked over the right side of her face and onto the floor.

“We need a plan,” Evelyn countered just as quietly. “They took your car keys. We’re in the middle of the wilderness, without supplies.” Cold as it was inside the compound, which felt like it didn’t have any heat, at least it was well-insulated. Outside, it was much, much colder. Which could mean frostbite and death from exposure.

“Besides,” she continued, “even if we get the SUV started, I’m guessing they’ve closed that big gate by now, and they’re going to hear us. You saw what kind of shot Butler is.”

Jen eased the door closed again.

They’d been locked inside a storage room in the compound, off the side entrance. Butler and Rolfe had left them here twenty minutes earlier, so with any luck they’d gone straight to bed. Or to some room far away in the compound.

But Evelyn didn’t know anything about the place, including who else was there, or where a weapon or car keys might be located. And given the layout—with that big lookout tower on top of the building—she suspected someone would spot them long before they got to the gate.

“I have a plan,” Jen said as she tucked strands of hair back into her bun. She’d broken six bobby pins before managing to unlock the door.

“Yeah, what is it?” Evelyn asked, grabbing her arm before she inched open the door again. “Do you have any idea how many we’re up against here?”

When they’d first been shoved into the room, they’d sat silently, their ears pressed against the door, listening to Butler and Rolfe talk. Rolfe had convinced Butler not to kill them—for now.

But Evelyn had heard the words leverage and stall for time, which made her nervous. Especially since she still wasn’t sure what was going on here.

Because as much as Jen insisted they were terrorists, she had no real evidence. And nothing to support her theory except her gut.

To Evelyn, the place might not have seemed like a typical cult headquarters, but it didn’t seem like a terrorist hideout, either.

Once Butler and his lieutenant were gone, Evelyn had tried the door handle, discovering without surprise that it was locked. While Jen worked on it, Evelyn had tried to question her. But Jen had been uncharacteristically silent, pensive as she’d shimmied the bobby pins into the lock.

Rubbing her arms for warmth, Evelyn tried questioning her again now. “How many cultists are there?”

“I don’t know,” Jen whispered. “Maybe a dozen. Maybe two dozen. I’ve never gotten inside before.”

“I didn’t see anyone besides Butler and Rolfe.”

“Trust me. They’re here,” Jen said, her tone certain.

“Did you recognize Rolfe? Is he Butler’s second-in-command?”

Jen frowned. “No. Not him. I’ve never seen Rolfe before tonight. But I recognized the one driving the truck.”

Evelyn leaned closer. “Who was he?”

“I’m not sure.” She sounded frustrated. “I know I’ve seen him before, and he doesn’t belong here. He’s not a survivalist. I’m sure I know him in connection with work. I can’t remember exactly where I’ve seen him. But it’ll come to me.”

“Okay. Well, do you think the fact that you recognized him had anything to do with Butler freaking out? Or was it just because we’re on his land and we saw him carrying illegal weapons, something we could charge him on?”

“I honestly don’t know. Let’s talk about it later. Right now, we need to go.” She peeked out the doorway again, then nodded at Evelyn and stepped through it.

Holding in a curse, Evelyn followed. She squinted in the dim light of the hallway, before glancing back.

“Wait,” she told Jen, noticing bottles of bleach and other cleaning supplies in the cabinet. Maybe there was something in there they could use.

But Jen must not have heard her whisper, because she was still moving. And she was moving in the wrong direction. Farther into the compound instead of back toward the exit.

Evelyn hurried after her, running on her tiptoes to avoid clicking her heels on the wood slat floors. A pair of sconces, mounted on the walls and giving off less light than a twenty-five-watt bulb, cast shadows as she hurried forward. Grabbing hold of Jen’s sleeve, she demanded, “Where are you going?”

Jen tried to shake her off. “I’ll never get another chance to be inside this place. We have to see what’s in here.”

Evelyn gripped the older woman’s sleeve tighter. “Butler wants to kill us. We need to get out of here. And we need a plan, because driving out the gate seems like a long shot.”

“I’m not leaving,” Jen insisted. “I already told you. I’m not going to be the person who missed a threat inside our borders. This is my chance to get real intel on these people. And this is your chance to get a close-up look and give me a profile.”

“Damn it,” Evelyn muttered as Jen pulled free and darted through the doorway ahead.

Was this how her own colleagues felt working with her? Evelyn knew she had a reputation as someone who wasn’t a team player, and she could admit to herself that it was deserved. But Jen’s tunnel vision was ridiculous.

This was a really bad idea. Why the hell had she agreed to come with Jen? She should’ve left the prison, gotten some dinner while she wrote up her report about yet another worthless assignment, then gone home.

She could’ve been asleep on the plane now, getting a little extra rest so she could stop by the nursing home where her grandma lived on the way to work in the morning. Instead, she was sneaking around inside a damn cult. Chances were, if they came across Butler without his more even-tempered friend, he’d use them as target practice.

Controlling her frustration, Evelyn followed, still on her toes and cursing her low-slung heels. She couldn’t leave another agent behind.

When they turned the corner into a larger room, Jen thrust out her arm and blocked Evelyn from moving any farther.

Jen put a finger to her lips and nodded toward the other end of the room.

Evelyn blinked, urging her eyes to adjust faster. This room was even darker than the short hallway, but it was big. She looked around at the three large tables, the shelves stacked with canned goods, water and MREs and a big lockbox near the back. The kind of lockbox meant to hold weapons. Unnerving, but not exactly unexpected for survivalists who carried around AK-47s.

She squinted at Jen, trying to figure out what she’d seen—and then she realized. Voices from somewhere beyond this room. Evelyn strained to make them out.

“—for bringing the supplies, Rolfe,” someone said.

“Not a problem,” Rolfe returned.

“I saw that feeb drive up again,” the first guy said. It wasn’t Butler, so Evelyn assumed he must be one of the cultists.

She glanced at Jen, who was frowning at the slur.

“It’s taken care of,” Rolfe replied.

“It’s a sign,” the first guy said, anticipation in his voice. “She’s the first of them, isn’t she? A Babylonian.”

Swear words lodged in Evelyn’s throat and she clamped her teeth together to keep them in, but she couldn’t stop herself from shaking her head at Jen.

The other agent’s jaw had gone slack with surprise.

This group was deeply mired in cultist philosophy; taking a page from the Book of Revelation, they subscribed to the idea that the end times would be heralded by the arrival of “Babylonians.” It wasn’t the first time Evelyn had heard of a cult twisting the Bible, claiming that “Babylonians” were law enforcement officials and a sign of the apocalypse. This was the clearest indication yet that they were dealing with a regular cult, and possibly one that would fight to the death to protect its land.

“No,” Rolfe said, sounding exasperated. “She’s an enemy, but she’s been handled.”

A weird response if Rolfe was the second-in-command and expected to follow Butler’s preaching, which apparently included a focus on the end times.

Evelyn frowned. This place was full of inconsistencies. But if Butler believed their arrival heralded the end times, she wasn’t going to give him any excuse to take action.

She gripped Jen’s sleeve again and tugged, gesturing back the way they’d come. If Rolfe was telling the cultist that Jen had been handled, it could mean more than just locked in a closet. It might mean that, despite his words to Butler, he expected them to be dead soon.

Jen took one last look around the huge, well-stocked room they’d entered. To Evelyn, it seemed like the domain of a group who planned to ride out a rough winter in hard terrain, not a terrorist plot in the making.

She nodded and the two of them spun back toward the hallway. In a pair of gym shoes and with longer strides, Jen made it down the hallway and to the back door faster.

Evelyn was still a few feet behind her, heart thudding and toes aching as she tried to run silently, when the back door opened from outside.

Framed in the open doorway was Ward Butler, holding his AK-47 in one hand and Jen’s car keys in the other. There was shock on his face, followed by rage.

As Evelyn slid to a stop in the center of the hallway, Butler calmly shook his head. Then he lifted his machine gun and fired.

* * *

“We’ve got a problem.”

The words echoed through Kyle McKenzie’s earphones as he slithered through the hole they’d cut at the bottom of the six-foot fence surrounding the Butler Compound. That definitely wasn’t what he wanted to hear at 6:00 a.m. as he snuck up on a group known to have stockpiled weapons.

Dampness seeped through his HRT-issued flight suit, and he fought back exhaustion. After arriving in Montana after a last-minute flight from Quantico, they’d joined the rest of the team in setting up an immediate perimeter around the Butler Compound. Now he and his partner, Gabe Fontaine, were tasked with getting closer.

“A problem. What else is new?” Gabe muttered, close behind him.

It had been nonstop since they got to Montana. They couldn’t confirm that Special Agent Jennifer Martinez, a twenty-three-year veteran with the FBI, was in the Butler Compound at all. The place had no working phone, and the leader, Ward Butler, had no cell phone registered in his name. So far, the cultists had ignored the battle phone the negotiator had tossed over the fence, as well as the requests to talk through the bullhorn.

For all they knew, no one was even here. The place looked like a ghost town, with the compound shut tight and no response at all to the FBI’s arrival.

Basically it was a clusterfuck. No one knew anything useful, they couldn’t talk to the cultists—who might or might not be terrorists—and they couldn’t storm the place.

As he stood, Kyle swept the area in front of him, using his night-vision goggles. Fog had crept in, meaning his NVGs were set to Active, so they could bounce an infrared light off any objects in front of him.

Without that, he couldn’t see much of anything. But if the cultists had their own NVGs—which was entirely possible with a group of survivalists—they’d be able to see the beam. They’d be able to see him.

Worry about what you can control, Kyle reminded himself as he inched slowly forward through the dry, stiff pine needles and a layer of frost. Every step was precise, careful, silent. The survivalists might have the equipment, and they might be practiced at living off the land, but they didn’t have his training.

Snipers were in position on the peak behind the compound, with eyes on the tower, which had remained empty so far. HRT was acting on the assumption that no one knew they were trying to get a closer look.

“We think we’ve got another agent inside.” That was the voice of Sam “Yankee” McGivern, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge who ran HRT. His tone was dire and he paused long enough that Kyle froze.

“Mac,” Yankee continued, “the warden over at the prison just called BAU. Evelyn’s rental car is still in the lot. One of his guards saw her get in Jen’s vehicle hours ago. She never made her plane.”

Dread rushed over him, but he shoved it back and kept moving, until he was behind the cover of a pathetic-looking fir tree. “Anyone been able to reach her?”

“No. We’re not getting anything from Jen’s phone, but Evelyn’s cell pings off a tower around here, and we’ve got a lock on Jen’s vehicle, a few miles away from the compound. We just sent agents to check it out.”

“Okay,” Kyle said, instead of the string of curses he wanted to let loose. Mind on the mission, he reminded himself.

He understood why Yankee had wanted him, in particular, to know. Every one of his teammates, listening on the call, would realize why Yankee was telling him, too. From the second he’d met Evelyn, a year and a half ago, he’d been drawn to her. Initially it was because she was so serious, so focused on work and nothing else, that he couldn’t help teasing her. But her allure had soon become very different.

It had gotten so bad that even his boss knew he was interested—how could he not, when Kyle found regular excuses to jog over to the BAU office at Aquia to see her? What none of them knew was that, finally, Evelyn was interested in return.

She was the one who’d wanted to keep the fact that they’d started seeing each other three months ago a secret. Agents in the Bureau could date, but they couldn’t date and work in the same squad. And although BAU and HRT were different units, they traveled together regularly for critical missions.

The rules there were murky; Evelyn’s determination to protect her job above all else was not.

Or at least it hadn’t been, for most of the time he’d known her. Ever since they’d returned from solving her friend’s case, she’d slowly begun to lose the intense drive that had drawn him in from the second he’d met her. Her boss had been giving her bullshit assignments, but the old Evelyn would have fought him on it. The new Evelyn just took them. Lately, he hardly recognized her.

“Keep us updated,” Gabe said into his mic, which reminded Kyle that he’d gone silent for too long.

“Let’s move,” he whispered, treading carefully from the cover of one scraggly, snow-dusted tree to the next. They didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with here, but what they did know was that survivalists were talented at making booby traps, and cultists were notoriously paranoid. Not a good combination.

Kyle kept up his painfully slow, steady pace until they were close to the large building at the back of the compound. Behind him, Gabe moved just as silently; the only reason Kyle knew he was there was from years of working together.

Finally, Kyle’s hand grazed the solid exterior of the building. Was Evelyn in there? Was she okay?

“Technical coverage coming up,” Gabe whispered into the bone mic at his throat. He slipped a hand into one of the pockets in his flight suit, and then pressed it against the building wall, leaving behind a sophisticated eavesdropping device that actually looked like a fly.

The communications technicians who worked with HRT were not only geniuses, they also had a sense of humor. Too bad that, right now, Kyle didn’t find much of anything funny.

Gabe tapped his arm and Kyle moved around the corner, toward the side where they’d be at the highest risk of being spotted. Kyle watched every step, and nodded his NVGs at a set of deep tire tracks that rounded the bend and stopped near a steel door. Big tracks, probably from a large truck.

He couldn’t keep himself from looking back at the door, and his desire to test the lever made his hands tense around his MP-5. His feet seemed stuck in place as his need to search for Evelyn intensified.

Then Gabe was beside him, pointing forward because this close to the compound they didn’t even want to whisper.

Forcing himself to move, Kyle passed the door, rounding another corner. He almost wished someone would appear outside and engage, so he’d have an excuse to go in there and get Evelyn out.

But the compound remained eerily silent.

Still beside him, Gabe pressed another bug to the wall, moving a little faster now. They needed to place two more bugs, then go back the way they’d come. It would start getting light soon, and they had to be out of here before anyone inside woke up.

Assuming anyone was in there at all. So far, they had no indication of it. There’d been no response to their calls, and the snipers hadn’t been able to pick up anyone at the windows. Shades were drawn over all of them, and it was dark inside, with no hope of spotting even shadows.

Was it possible they’d fled before HRT had landed in Montana?

As Kyle moved away from the building and behind the cover of a tree, Yankee’s voice came over his radio again. “The technical coverage is picking up voices from the building. Head back here, guys.”

Desperate for information on Evelyn, Kyle moved even faster. He told himself to slow down, but he couldn’t seem to do it as he darted from the cover of one tree to the next, following their original route.

Then a hand slapped him hard on the shoulder, and Kyle spun around, his heart thudding a tempo that sounded like stupid, stupid, stupid.

But it was just Gabe. “Sorry,” he mouthed.

In return, Gabe whispered, “Don’t move.” He lifted a fallen tree branch off the ground and held it out a few inches past Kyle’s foot. When he pushed it down, a piece of metal snapped over it, breaking the branch in two.

Bear trap, Kyle realized, nodding his thanks at Gabe. That would’ve done irreparable damage to his foot. And ended his career in HRT.

Keeping watch for more booby traps, Kyle slowed down, feeling antsy every second he wasn’t back in the Tactical Operations Center—TOC—set up outside the fence.

Finally, finally, he followed Gabe back under the fence, then jogged over to the temporary post that would manage tactical decisions. Inside the large tent, his boss looked up, expression grim, at Kyle and Gabe’s entrance.

“What is it?” Gabe asked from behind him as Kyle’s voice refused to work and fear stampeded through his veins.

Yankee put down his earphones and stood, his head skimming the top of the tent. “We’ve got at least a dozen voices inside the compound.”

He moved forward and placed a hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “We don’t know any details right now, but they just talked about a dead federal agent.”


4 (#ulink_34a9a86f-2e80-5497-a75c-db08ec7e38f0)

“You brought this on yourself.”

Evelyn focused hard, trying to bring the world into focus, but pain sliced through her head and Ward Butler seemed to sway in front of her, wavering as if they stood on the bow of a ship. He was still holding his AK-47, and Evelyn felt nauseated as she touched the side of her face, where he’d smashed her with that gun, knocking her out. But first, he’d taken a shot.

The memory rushed over her, the panic of seeing Butler appear in the doorway, having no time to run, nowhere to hide. The horror of watching him spray bullets, of seeing Jen go down. The fear of thinking she was next.

She’d run for Jen, anyway, slipped in her blood and hit the ground hard. That had probably saved her life, because Butler’s next barrage of bullets had gone over her head.

Then he’d strode to her side, and just when she thought it was all over, there’d been a yell and he’d slammed the butt of his AK-47 into her face instead. She had no idea how long ago that had been.

“Where’s Jen?” she managed to ask. Moving her jaw made pain travel down her neck, but she kept blinking and eventually Butler came into focus.

The compound was dimly lit, either darker than it’d been before, or her vision was compromised. The coppery smell of blood was in her nose, the residual taste of fear in her mouth.

“Martinez is dead,” Butler replied, no remorse in his voice.

Evelyn gulped in a deep breath, even though she’d known. Blood clogged in her throat and Evelyn choked on it, realized the inside of her mouth was bleeding badly, that her jaw might be broken.

She tipped her head and spat out blood, got a full breath. “Why?” she rasped.

Butler smiled—a hard, tight, angry smile. “Shouldn’t you be asking if you’re next?”

Before Evelyn could form a response, he stepped aside, and Evelyn’s range of vision widened. She discovered she was still lying on the ground where she’d fallen. She jerked, trying to push herself up as she saw all the blood surrounding her. Jen Martinez’s blood.

It was dried on her arms, soaked through her suit. There was a lot, still sticky in places, but much of it hardened, like a brownish-red cast over her skin.

Just as she was getting off the ground, Butler jammed a booted foot into her chest, knocking her back down. Back into the pool of blood.

Panic burst inside her, a desperate need to move, to escape the feel of another agent’s blood. To escape the fear that she could have prevented Jen’s death, that she’d signed her own death warrant by following Jen here. She tried to ignore it, and instead focus on assessing.

How long had she been unconscious?

She looked around frantically, praying that by some miracle Butler was lying, that against all odds Jen had survived this kind of blood loss, but she wasn’t there. Standing in the doorway where Butler had been when he’d shot her was Rolfe.

“We need this one,” Rolfe said, and his eyes darted to her, lingering just long enough for hope to bloom.

They’d kept her alive so far. It hadn’t been Butler’s idea, because he’d tried to shoot her. And that shout she’d heard seconds before he’d knocked her unconscious teased at the edges of her memory. She had to assume it was Rolfe, asking him to wait. She locked her eyes on him, trying to make a connection.

Butler shrugged at his lieutenant, radiating power and rage and something else, something Evelyn couldn’t quite pinpoint. “So you said. And you could be right, considering what they’ve brought to our doorstep.”

His grip on his weapon suddenly tightened. “Deal with her. I’m going to talk to everyone.” He glared at Rolfe, almost as though he was daring him to disobey, then turned and moved deeper into the compound.

As he walked away, her panic began to subside and new sounds penetrated. Some kind of thumping, like metal against wood, and the low mumble of too many voices. So, there were more people in here. The rest of the cultists?

She struggled to hear, to gauge how many cultists were here, what she might be up against. But her ears were still ringing, and it was hard to tell. There might’ve been a dozen, might’ve been a hundred.

Evelyn watched Butler go, and the world started to sharpen. She couldn’t see anyone, but they had to be gathered in that large room she and Jen had walked into earlier.

She saw movement in her peripheral vision and turned to discover Rolfe holding out a hand to her.

She hesitantly put her hand in his, and he yanked her to her feet so fast that she fell into him. She automatically threw her free hand up to brace herself and landed flush against his chest. He was lean, so she hadn’t expected the taut muscles underneath her hand. Still, there was something else, something that didn’t belong.

He moved away from her, but not before she realized what he had on underneath his camouflage shirt. A shoulder holster.

“Come with me,” he said, not giving her a choice, because he hadn’t let go of her hand. He pulled her with him as he began walking in the opposite direction Butler had gone.

He passed the utility closet where she’d been stuck with Jen, and she felt new hope flare inside her—hope that he’d open that big steel door and just push her outside. After watching Butler shoot Jen, she’d prefer to take her chances in the inhospitable Montana mountains than stay here. Frostbite and death from exposure be damned.

But instead of opening the door, he suddenly whirled around, and pushed on the wall, which popped open into a new hallway. A door without a handle, practically invisible in the dim light.

Before she could move, he grabbed her around the waist, then lifted her up easily and set her down on the other side of the doorway. She didn’t have time to protest; he took her hand again and started pulling her along.

She glanced behind her in time to see the door slide quietly shut, in time to see something shimmer along the ground in that doorway. She squinted, trying to make it out. A trip wire? Inside the compound?

She stumbled and righted herself, eyes forward, though she couldn’t see anything.

It was even darker in this hallway, and quieter. Evelyn followed blindly, intensely aware of her hand crushed in Rolfe’s, the squish of her shoes every time she took a step, Jen’s blood between her toes.

Where was he taking her? What did he plan to do with her?

She opened her mouth to ask, but what came out was, “Where’s Jen?” She didn’t think Butler had been lying about her death, but what had they done with her body?

She sensed more than saw Rolfe glance back at her, before he stopped, opened a new door and dragged her inside.

“She’s gone. I’m sorry. She shouldn’t have brought you here. Now we’re going to have to figure out what to do with you.”

He finally released her and wiped the blood off his own hand on his pant legs. He did it distractedly, as if the blood didn’t bother him. Or worse, as if he was used to it.

Then a dim light came on, illuminating a small, sparse room. Wooden shelves along one wall were lined with stacks of neatly folded utilitarian clothing, bars of soap and threadbare towels. She turned, discovering buckets and shovels stacked against another wall.

“There are smaller sizes in the left corner,” Rolfe said as she heard the door close. “Those should fit you. Go ahead and change.”

She spun around to find him standing close to her in the tiny room, anger and annoyance etched on his face. But at Butler or her? She wasn’t sure.

She backed up, bumping the shelves hard enough to send a splinter through the sleeve of her suit and into her arm. “Can you wait outside?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Leave a cop alone in a room full of potential weapons? I can’t do that. Come on, change. You don’t want to wear that.”

She hesitated, and he took a step back, leaning against the door, his eyes steady on her. “Just pretend I’m not here.”

She felt an acute sense of discomfort, but the reality was, she had no idea how long she’d be here, or if they’d decide to toss her outside. In this weather, she’d be better off in warm sweats than her blood-soaked suit.

Evelyn shivered as she slid her suit jacket off, watching Rolfe carefully for any sign of sinister intent. She ripped the splinter out of her arm. The camisole she wore underneath her jacket had splotches of dried blood, too, and Evelyn yanked it over her head, replacing it with a sweatshirt that hung down to her hips. But it was warm. And dry.

Rolfe shifted his gaze to the wall as she changed out of her pants. The back of her underwear was sticky with blood, but she wasn’t changing out of those in front of Rolfe, no matter how indifferent he seemed. Quickly, she stepped into a pair of big gray sweatpants she had to cinch tight at the waist. They pooled at her ankles as she put on a pair of thick wool socks.

Her skin felt tight where Jen’s blood had soaked through her clothes and dried, but at least she wasn’t drenched in it anymore. When she reached down to pick up her suit, Rolfe grabbed her arm, stopping her.

“Leave it. You don’t want that.”

He was right. Covered in Jen’s blood, it would’ve gone straight in the trash if she was at home. She didn’t need it, anyway. Butler had already taken her weapon, handcuffs and cell phone. She had no way to protect herself, and no way to call for help.

The only way she was getting out of here alive was if she convinced someone to let her go. And Rolfe was her best bet, since he was the only reason she was still breathing.

Stuck this close to him in the small room, she could see the tiny lines under his hazel eyes, and she had a sudden, unexpected flashback to college. To another pair of hazel eyes, eerily similar.

Except for his blond hair, Rolfe looked a lot like Marty Carlyle. The older brother of one of her best friends, and her first serious boyfriend. Someone she’d thought she could trust, who’d broken her heart.

She took a step backward, bumping into the shelf again as Rolfe’s grip tightened on her wrist. She couldn’t trust Rolfe, either, but she needed him to trust her. She needed him to connect with her.

And yet...if he was a racist who hated the federal government, why had he convinced Butler to let her live at all?

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Where?” Talking made her jaw throb, and she probed a raw spot on the inside of her cheek with her tongue, tasting more blood. With her free hand she gingerly touched the side of her chin, but even that slight touch was painful.

A hint of a frown curled his lips, and now that she’d noticed the resemblance to Marty, it was all she could see. Marty was Jewish, though, and Rolfe would surely have hated him, too.

“What’s so funny?” Rolfe asked.

“Nothing’s funny,” she snapped before she’d thought it through. A federal agent was dead, a federal agent who’d been right about one thing. Something strange was happening at the Butler Compound.

But it was better not to remind him of Jen, so she said, “Butler’s followers aren’t going to want me among them. You can’t want me here, either, a black woman...”

His eyes seemed to bore into her as he studied her too closely. “One of your parents is white. That’s true, isn’t it?”

She nodded, not sure if that improved things or made them worse.

“I don’t care about that, anyway.”

She frowned, and knew he’d seen her disbelief. “Butler...”

“I’m not Butler.”

She tried to tug her hand out of his grip, but his fingers tightened around her wrist. “You’re his lieutenant, aren’t you?” she demanded, before figuring out a real strategy.

Some emotion flashed in his eyes at her words. Anger? Regret? Cunning?

She couldn’t tell. Did he resent Ward’s position as leader? Was Rolfe hoping to overthrow him? That would be a hard sell in a cult, but at least Rolfe didn’t seem to want her dead. Still, she didn’t want to be in the middle of a power play. Especially with Ward Butler surrounded by survivalists who’d chosen to leave behind everything they knew, and live where and how he demanded.

There were lots of different kinds of survivalists, and most of them prided themselves on being able to live off the land. They knew how to hunt. And they knew how to kill. Most of them didn’t make a habit of killing people, but they hated the federal government, and anyone who represented it. She didn’t want to discover what they were capable of doing to her.

“This may be Ward’s place, but we’re not what you think.”

“Explain it to me, then,” Evelyn said, trying to sound earnest. The more clearly she understood the dynamics, the more likely she’d be able to profile the players. And if she could do that, maybe she could get out of here alive.

Just when she thought he was going to shake his head and drag her off somewhere, probably back to the supply closet—although undoubtedly he’d tie her up this time—he spoke. “This isn’t a cult.” He spat the word out, as though it was dirty, beneath him.

She’d never used the word cult. Was he denying what others had called them? Or was he more intelligent than she’d suspected? She mulled that over as he continued.

“I’m not Ward’s lieutenant or anything else. It may be Ward’s land—and it’s definitely Ward’s rules—but everyone who lives here made the decision to come because they all share one thing. They want to be left alone, to live how they choose, without interference from a government we don’t recognize.”

He scowled at her, then started to pull her forward.

She dug her heels in, sliding forward, anyway, in the wool socks. “Just let me go. I promise, I...”

“You know Butler’s not going to allow that, Evelyn.”

Her name on his lips made her uncomfortable; it sounded as though they knew each other. As though he and Butler weren’t holding her against her will. But he’d claimed Butler was 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.

Meanwhile, Greg had spent the time trying not to think about Evelyn, the closest thing he had to a partner at BAU. Instead, he’d been reading and rereading everything he could on the Butler Compound and its members, hoping he’d find some way to help her. Assuming she was still alive.

He tried to push the thought aside, but it had been intruding for hours now, ever since word had come down that the cultists had been overheard talking about a dead federal agent. He needed to focus on whatever he could do to help Adam make a connection with someone inside; if the group wouldn’t talk to them, it limited their options significantly.

Details about the compound members were sketchy at best. According to the old profile written up by BAU, Ward Butler was a hard-core survivalist with a handful of weapons possession, resisting arrest and tax evasion charges lodged against him over the years. He’d spent some time in jail, but had always gotten out, and as the years went by, he’d slipped farther and farther off the grid. He’d risen to the top of a local militia group before dropping out entirely and forming his compound, supposedly a gathering place for like-minded survivalists.

As a fringe militia leader, he fit the bill. Obsessed with weapons, antigovernment, believing that society would ultimately crumble and he’d need a bunker and the skills to live off the land. A man seeking power in a like-minded community. But he didn’t seem like a typical cult leader—primarily because they tended to be charmers. They were usually as good at manipulating words and ideas as they were people. Ward Butler, on the other hand, had an outright angry, almost antisocial personality. But then, there were as many cults as there were personalities.

“There’s something going on inside,” Yankee said in his deep Southern drawl. Apparently, his nickname was ironic, given to him by the other members of HRT.

“What is it?” Pinpricks of pain shot through his fingertips as he gripped his thermos harder, and he realized his hands were frozen. Apparently, the heating system in TOC couldn’t handle the Montana mountains.

“Take a listen, would you? I want an assessment.” Yankee nodded at the headphones, discarded on Greg’s desk, that would hook him up to the parabolic mics.

“Mic three,” Yankee added as he hurried back the way he’d come, to talk to the Special Agent in Charge who’d arrived from the Salt Lake City office.

Greg traded the thermos for his earphones. As soon as he slipped them over his ears and turned to the right mic, a flurry of loud, angry voices made him cringe. It was hard to understand anyone with all of them talking at once, but one voice stood out.

“We need her alive,” the man yelled over the fray.

Her. They had to be referring to Jen or Evelyn. One of them was still breathing. Relief and fear coursed through him in equal measure as his eyes were drawn to the picture brought in by an agent from the Salt Lake City office.

Jen Martinez was a forty-five-year-old mother of two. In the picture, she seemed happy and confident, a grin on her face and her arm around the waist of her husband of more than twenty years. Standing on either side of the couple were their kids. A daughter in high school and a son in middle school. The daughter resembled her mom, in appearance and attitude. The son took after his dad—or would, as soon as he emerged on the other side of his current awkward stage.

Every time he looked at the photograph, Greg felt the immediate need to avert his eyes. It was too close to the pictures he kept tacked up in his cubicle back at Aquia, of his wife, Marnie, and their two children, Lucy and Josh, the same ages as the Martinez kids.

He’d made the call to Marnie on the way to the plane, and she’d given the phone to Josh. His son had put on a good front, but Greg had heard his disappointment. Josh’s very first hockey game, and he’d missed it. Worse, Josh had sounded hurt, but not surprised.

Greg loved his job. He couldn’t imagine leaving it. But he spent too much time away from his kids—time he was constantly trying to make up to them when he was home.

If his partner was alive, that meant Jen Martinez was never going home to her children.

His eyes were drawn once more to the photo, to the kids who were waiting to hear if they still had a mother. Then he forced himself to look away, forced his mind back on the mission.

He glanced over at his cousin Gabe, a member of HRT who’d recently come off shift and was listening through his own earphones, frowning. He remembered the years after Gabe’s mother was killed overseas. She’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time during a spree shooting.

Greg’s parents had tried to help Gabe and his sister get through it, while their dad grieved by pushing everyone away. Greg recalled all the times Gabe had spent at their house, staying in Greg’s old room while he was away at college. All the times Greg’s parents had spoken about the hell Gabe and his sister and father were going through. Shut it down, Greg told himself.

“We know who’s talking?” he asked loudly. Who was trying to keep Evelyn or Jen alive?

Gabe looked up, his angular face creased with concern. He shook his head and went back to jotting notes.

Through Greg’s headphones, the flurry of voices continued. Some were arguing that they should throw her outside, let her fend for herself—an idea quashed by a voice Greg did recognize. He’d spent hours online searching for feeds of Ward Butler, and he’d found a few. Mostly old militia meetings, and they’d told him that the man was definitely radical, even for fringe militia. They’d also told him that Butler had a distinctive growl of a voice, as though his vocal cords had frozen years ago and never properly healed.

Ward’s deep voice cut through the followers’, reminding them that the FBI was outside, and insisting that if they let her go, the FBI would invade.

There was a surge of voices, mingled with other sounds—booted feet on hard floors, the slap of something against skin, guns being racked.

Then the distinctive boom from a shotgun blast split the air, and Greg instinctively sank lower in his seat.

Around him, HRT agents lurched to their feet and swarmed the entrance to the tent. A mad rush of big men trained in specialized tactical response, each carrying sixty or so pounds of equipment, all trying to race outside at once.

Over his headphones, the shuffling of feet and the loud arguments continued, and it took Greg a minute to understand. The gunshot hadn’t come from inside the compound.

It had come from the FBI’s perimeter.


5 (#ulink_e588d65c-6680-529a-b898-3bcfb798300c)

Evelyn gasped for breath, the smell of blood and sweat and too many bodies squeezed closely together burning her nostrils. Pressed against the rough, hard wall, with Rolfe’s back against her, and her heart pounding, she could barely breathe.

The cultists had chased them back into the hallway, had managed to flank her and block her way before she could make a run for it. Somehow, for some reason, Rolfe had stood in front of her, trying to convince Butler to keep her alive.

A few of the cultists had stayed in the main room or followed and leaned against the wall, as if waiting for the show to start.

But most of Butler’s followers had entered full-on mob mentality. If Butler was still giving orders, she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the other cultists. Their screams all mingled together, becoming little more than a blare of words she couldn’t make sense of.

Until someone shouted, “String the bitch up!” Then a rope came lassoing from somewhere to her right, passing behind Rolfe and snagging her bun, snapping tight. It wrenched her head hard enough that if it had gone around her neck, she’d be dead. Then the rope slipped off.

“Try again!” someone demanded. “Make an example of her!”

“Feeb!” someone else screamed. “How do you like your false power now?”

“Babylonian!” A third voice, shrill and excited, rose above the others. “Your time has come! We’ll defeat your evil army!”

“Stop with the Babylonian bullshit,” a tall man with a knife in his hands and a scowl on his face snapped back. “She’s just another government pawn, trying to take from others. We need to make her pay for it, like Ward always says.”

“Back off!” Rolfe shouted with so much rage and authority that the crowd actually did take a collective step backward.

But it didn’t last. The cultists surged forward again almost immediately, and in front of her, Rolfe’s hands locked around his AK-47.

To protect her? Evelyn didn’t know, but it probably wouldn’t matter. Just Rolfe against more than a dozen frenzied survivalists? Even if he handed her a weapon—which he wasn’t likely to do—it wouldn’t be enough.

A strong hand wedged itself between her and Rolfe, gripping her upper arm and trying to wrestle her free.

Evelyn pushed hard against the wall, and managed to get her hand up, digging her short nails into the man’s wrist as hard as she could until his grip loosened. But just as fast, there was someone else on her other side, reaching for her, too.

Then Ward Butler’s distinctive growl cut through the noise, so loud and angry it made her jump.

“Enough!”

As one, his followers stopped, but Evelyn didn’t have to see them to feel the blast of hatred aimed at her. Rolfe’s body eased forward a little, finally allowing her to draw a full breath, but setting panic free. She latched on to the rough folds of his camo, hoping to keep him there. He was all she had besides Butler’s whims protecting her from a lynching.

“We hang on to her for now,” Butler said, and a grumbling that sounded like an angry lion’s roar filled Evelyn’s ears.

Still, the crowd eased farther back, and most of them returned to the main room where Butler had preached earlier. Rolfe moved away from her, too, pulling out of her shaky grasp with ease.

He left her there, trembling in the hallway. A few scowling cultists prevented her from running for the door as fast as she could. Although it occurred to her that if they had trip wires inside the compound, there was probably something at the back door.

Evelyn slid along the wall, the three men who’d stayed behind tracking her closely as she slunk into a corner of the room. She didn’t want Rolfe out of her sight.

He was at the front now, standing next to Butler, talking. Evelyn turned to scan the rest of the room, and discovered that the other men had taken seats at the three tables and were talking among themselves as if nothing had happened, suddenly as docile as a group of survivalists could get.

Her heart rate wasn’t as quick to decelerate, and she pressed a hand to her chest as she swiveled her head, looking for the next threat.

Snippets of conversations drifted her way as the sound of her heart pounding in her ears slowly faded. Some of the men had moved on to mundane topics, like how brutal they predicted this year’s winter would be, the best methods for finding food on the mountain and where to scavenge for supplies. Others still grumbled about letting a federal agent live when they needed to teach the government a lesson. A handful just eyed Butler and Rolfe with interest.

The few who’d stayed behind in the hallway still stood within arm’s reach. The guy with the lasso—a small, heavily bearded man, probably in his twenties, with beady eyes and a snarl—kept glancing between her and Butler. The other two were calmer, hands lingering near their weapons, but displaying no obvious fury. More of Butler’s lieutenants?

She squinted at them, trying to remember where they’d been during the mob, although she hadn’t been able to see much around Rolfe. She had no idea if they’d swarmed her or if they’d been among the few who’d stood back and watched, ready to jump in or break it up, depending on Butler’s orders.

“...question me!” Butler’s furious voice caught her attention. Evelyn shifted her head toward him again, straining to hear, but he quieted down as Rolfe, his back to her, gestured with his hands. He seemed to be arguing aggressively.

New worry rushed into her mind. What would Butler do—or have his followers do—to Rolfe if he didn’t obey orders? And what would happen to her without Rolfe?

How the hell had she let herself get mixed up in this mess? Would she have recklessly accompanied Jen if she hadn’t been looking for a way to decide whether she still belonged in BAU? Or would she have done what Dan wanted and headed home on schedule?

Was this just one more sign that it was time to move on? To leave profiling behind for good? To leave the FBI?

To start over somehow? Of course, that meant she’d have to figure out what she wanted to do—who she even was—without the mission that had been driving her since she was twelve years old.

The very idea made her uneasy. The need to find out what had happened to Cassie had pushed her through college, through her advanced degrees, through the FBI Academy. It had motivated her to work impossible hours, striving for a perfect record, until she’d been accepted into BAU.

Now, her desperate need to solve Cassie’s case was gone, because she’d done it. What was left?

She’d never know unless she could make it out of here alive, Evelyn reminded herself as she tried to hear what Rolfe was saying.

“...need her! Don’t forget why you’re here,” Rolfe’s voice carried toward her.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to go,” Butler boomed. “Not here! This place was supposed to stay invisible.” Then he seemed to realize how loud he was being, and glanced around as Evelyn wondered what exactly his words meant.

Ward caught her eye and Evelyn lowered her head, but not before she saw him look back at Rolfe and give him a toothy, insincere smile.

“I never would’ve let them kill her,” Butler said, clearly intending for her to overhear as he added, “Not yet.”

Rolfe said something in response, but all Evelyn caught was an ominous-sounding, “Don’t forget what we agreed,” before he stalked away from Butler and toward her.

“Let’s go,” he barked, grabbing her arm and dragging her along with him back the way they’d come.

She stumbled, trying to catch her footing. “Where?”

“You want to stay with me or them?” Rolfe replied, the fury in his tone telling her now wasn’t the time to test his determination to keep her alive.

“You,” she whispered, as if she had a choice.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, still pulling her along so fast she had trouble keeping up.

The beady-eyed guy with the lasso spat at her, but kept quiet as Rolfe dragged her back the way they’d come.

He slowed down just long enough to let her step carefully over the trip wire, and the way he glanced at her gave her the impression that his anger was directed more at Butler than at her. It was hard to tell how far they’d walked in the semidarkness, but Evelyn thought they’d passed the closet where he’d brought her earlier to change.

How big was this place? And where were they going?

She could sense Rolfe’s mood in his painful grip, so she didn’t ask, just let him push her through another door and shut her inside. She heard him storm off, and as soon as he left, she reached out blindly and tested the handle. It was locked. A second later, footsteps approached again and she listened as something scraped the floor as it was wedged under the handle from outside.

She stood in the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust. No matter how much she strained, she couldn’t see anything at all, not even shapes. She gave up and stretched out her arms. Her right hand bumped into something wooden, sending another splinter into her arm. She ignored the pain, sliding her hand forward, identifying shelves. They were lined with plastic containers, but she couldn’t guess what might be in them.

Carefully, she took a step to the left, and immediately bumped into another shelf. So she was probably in a different closet, like the one they’d originally shut her in with Jen.

What had they done with the other agent? Evelyn sucked in a deep breath, suddenly afraid to move backward. What if Jen’s body was in here with her?

As a profiler, she’d seen a lot of death. Usually in crime scene photos, as she consulted from her office in Aquia, but up close and in person plenty of times, too.

In her job, getting called in on a case meant the death was probably gruesome. During her year at BAU, she’d seen depravity she couldn’t possibly have imagined.

But she’d never had to watch another agent being shot, then been drenched in her blood. She’d never been locked in pitch darkness, hoping not to stretch out her arm and encounter a body.

Panic threatened, and Evelyn tried to ignore it, to think. Her best chance of getting out alive was to profile the people inside the compound, to understand them well enough to predict what they’d do next.

It was easy to see that Rolfe was her best ally. But why? What kind of lieutenant so openly questioned his leader?

The survivalists who’d chosen to live here did seem united in their hatred of the federal government, in the “prepper” ideology—the idea that they needed to be prepared for the collapse of civilization. Maybe instead of trying to go it alone, they’d banded together to ride out the end times together. They all appeared to be single, without families, so perhaps this was the family unit they’d created instead. Maybe those things formed the basis of the cult structure, instead of a typical religious belief, since they didn’t seem to share a religion.

Was it enough? Preppers who’d put their faith in Butler as a leader? Except the conversation she’d overheard between Butler and Rolfe went through her mind as she absently tried to yank the splinter out of her arm. Butler had talked about the compound as though it wasn’t the only place he controlled.

Could Jen be right? Could they be more than a cult? Could there be a terrorist connection?

Evelyn sighed, sinking slowly to the ground, feeling her way before she sat. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth as she considered.

The mob of cultists who’d come after her had been disorganized, abrupt. Could a group consisting of members who didn’t share a religious connection band together effectively enough to fuel a terrorist ideology? Could they really follow orders and act on their leader’s plan?

Images flashed through her mind. The frenzied delight in the eyes of the man who’d hoped to lynch her. The shrill voice and sudden furor of the one who believed her to be a Babylonian heralding the arrival of an apocalypse. The grim, disgusted tone of the guy who just hated agents of the government.

They were unlike any cult she’d ever seen or studied. Unlike any terrorist group she’d come across.

There was no real unity here. So what kept them together?

When the FBI didn’t just go away, would they turn on one another? And what would that mean for her?

* * *

“Move, move, move!” Yankee yelled, leading from the front as he raced toward the perimeter.

Kyle finished strapping on the extra weaponry he’d set down after coming off shift. The MP-5 slung over his back, the extra Glock strapped to his chest, the magazines on one thigh, flash bangs on the other. Hopefully he wouldn’t need any of it.

He raced up next to Yankee, his breath puffing clouds of white into the frigid Montana air, his boots crunching in the frost, his gaze swiveling left and right. As far as he could tell, no one had breached the perimeter. But nothing was certain, and he pulled his MP-5 to the front for easier access.

“We have intel?” Gabe asked their boss.

“All we know is that someone took a shot near the perimeter the local police established.” As more HRT agents joined them, Yankee continued. “We don’t know who fired. We don’t know what the target was, or if anyone was hit.” Yankee’s speed increased, but his voice remained calm. “Remember, unless there’s an immediate risk of loss of life, no one fires. We’re not giving them any excuses.”

The local PD was handling the perimeter, along with agents from the Salt Lake City FBI. What made this different from most standoffs was the fact that they were dealing with a lot more than just reporters and camera crews.

Antifederalist numbers had risen rapidly in the past few years, and they’d proven their willingness to flaunt their beliefs at other standoffs around the country. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just beliefs they were flaunting, but also an arsenal of weaponry that rivaled HRT’s equipment. And the know-how to use it.

The Salt Lake City office had already beefed up security at the perimeter twice since HRT had arrived early that morning, and reports had come back that the crowd of protesters was still growing. And too many in that crowd had come armed for war.

Kyle’s stride faltered as he finally caught sight of the perimeter. “Shit,” he mumbled, and kept going, gripping the stock of his gun, knowing that if he had to fire it casualties would be too high.

There was no other outcome, not with the sheer number of people pushing their way toward the perimeter. The sound seemed to reach him all at once, the roar of twenty-five furious voices without a united message.

How had they gotten here so fast? This part of Montana was remote, isolated. The population was fewer than five hundred and most of them didn’t live here year-round.

Some of the crowd had come in heavy winter coats and carried handmade signs. Those were the ones who would eventually give in to the need for warmth and head home, watch the outcome on TV. But about half the protesters were wearing serious outdoor gear, mostly in camouflage colors, and they were armed. A cursory sweep of the crowd showed him a few shotguns, some handguns and far too many rifles. He glanced around and spotted additional shooters perched in the spindly pine trees.

“Get the negotiator here,” Yankee said into his mic as he looked up into the trees. “The profiler, too.”

Kyle glanced across him at Gabe, whose jaw had clenched at the mention of his cousin.

“We’ve got protesters with radios,” Yankee muttered. “Are they talking to one another or did we miss something?”

Were all these people here because of an antifederalist principle, and not Butler specifically? That was definitely possible, given the number of fringe militia groups and antigovernment extremist movements in the area. Or could Butler be giving orders from inside the compound, bringing supporters here himself? Did he have a bigger reach than they’d realized?

If Butler could contact the outside world, that might explain the size of the crowd. Then again, it could also be due to the reporters jostling for position amid the protesters.

Kyle stared up at the closest shooter, braced near the top of a pine tree. It swayed under his weight, but he seemed at ease, holding a semiautomatic in gloved hands, a radio painted in camo colors strapped high on his chest along with enough extra ammunition to take on an army. A canteen was hooked to his waist next to a sheathed knife, and he wore a bulletproof vest under all the packets of ammo. He caught Kyle’s gaze and seemed to smile, though it was hard to tell through the heavy salt-and-pepper beard. The pine tree bounced as he lifted his weapon higher, lining it up with Kyle’s head.

Kyle instantly tensed. His gut reaction was to swing his own weapon into position...and to wish he’d taken the time to grab his helmet. But this guy could hit a target; Kyle didn’t need to see him try to know that. He had fringe militia written all over him. A helmet wouldn’t make any difference. And aiming his own weapon could set the supporter off, give the guy an excuse to shoot first.

So, instead, he kept his MP-5 clenched close to his body, aimed down at the ground and said into his bone mic, “Inactive shooter, pine tree, at my three o’clock.”

“Got him.” Wyatt Thompson, the brand-new sniper on their team, came back immediately.

Kyle had no idea where Wyatt had positioned himself, but Wyatt’s father was a big deal in the army and apparently Wyatt had learned to shoot around the time he’d started walking. He was one of the best shooters they’d ever seen in HRT. The tension in Kyle’s shoulders loosened instantly, even as a reporter pointed directly at him, and then the cameraman behind her swung his lens to film them.

“There go your future undercover jobs,” Gabe joked, sounding calm as always, a hint of amusement in his tone.

Kyle resisted the urge to look over at his partner and roll his eyes. Hopefully someone on the FBI’s media team would stop that coverage from going anywhere, but undercover work wasn’t in his future, anyway. He planned to stay in HRT until they forced him to retire.

“I’ve got news on Jen’s car.” Greg’s voice suddenly came over Kyle’s radio and he pushed his hand over his earphone, although he could hear perfectly. The screams of the protesters seemed to fade into the background as his hands clenched his weapon too tightly.

If they’d found the car, did that mean they’d found Evelyn or Jen? Or, God forbid, a body?

“Evelyn’s cell phone was inside the SUV, but nothing else,” Greg said, his steady profiler voice giving nothing away, even though it was his closest friend in BAU who was missing. “The SUV was abandoned a couple hundred yards off the road. Someone was clearly trying to conceal it, and I doubt it was Jen or Evelyn.”

Someone from the Butler Compound had taken the SUV, probably hoping to hide the connection between the agents and the compound. Probably after they’d killed one of them. But which one?

“Mac!” Yankee yelled, and Kyle realized he’d stopped moving, that his teammates were still advancing toward the perimeter.

The Salt Lake City agents had brought in police barriers to halt the crowd, but several of them had been knocked over, and the agents and local cops had been pushed back twenty feet. The crowd was still swarming toward them.

“Where the hell is the negotiator?” Yankee demanded.

“We’ve got movement in the tower.” Wyatt’s voice came over the mic before anyone could reply about Adam’s whereabouts. “It’s not Butler, but the subject is armed. He can definitely see the protesters from there. A picture is coming at you,” he finished, and Kyle knew that last part was for the support staff in the tent, whose job it would be to try and identify the guy.

“I’m here!” a voice panted behind Kyle, and he recognized Adam an instant before the negotiator raised a bullhorn to his mouth and addressed the crowd. “We need you to move back behind the barricades. This is private land.”

“It’s not your land,” the protester closest to Kyle screamed. The Salt Lake City agents and the local cops moved backward, slipping behind the lines of HRT but staying close, some of them readying riot shields.

“Brothers!” They heard a new voice over a loudspeaker blaring from the compound. Ward Butler’s stones-on-a-grinder voice.

The crowd suddenly quieted, going still, their faces lifted toward the sound. “Thank you for showing your support today. We stand united against a tyrannical government. An illegitimate government!”

A cheer rose up from the crowd as Yankee looked back at Adam. “Get their attention.”

“We have a bigger problem,” Greg said over the mic.

“Where are you?” Yankee asked.

“Back at the tent. We identified the man in the tower. He’s small-time in the states’ rights movement, but he’s got a handful of arrests under his belt, and a very active blog.”

“And?” Yankee asked through his teeth.

“Unless Butler’s changed this guy’s tune drastically since his last blog post a month ago, he’s convinced the end times are coming. His blog is full of fictionalized accounts—Babylonians in the form of government agents storming the strongholds of the righteous and the battle to end it all. By his account, the FBI’s arrival is a sign of the apocalypse. That’s gotta be Butler’s view, too.”

Kyle glanced at his partner. If they stormed the compound, the cultists would fight to the death. And if there was a federal agent alive inside, she’d be dead as soon as that happened.

He looked back at the crowd, still waiting silently, anticipating Butler’s next words. If those words urged his followers to fight, could HRT hold them back? And even if they could, would it matter? Or would Butler begin his endgame?


6 (#ulink_f9122632-f4c5-5118-b9c6-de04a21d6d86)

The closet door opened fast, and Evelyn scrambled to her feet, her fists instinctively coming up, even though she knew it was futile.

Ward Butler stood in the doorway, a furious glower on a face that already seemed permanently bent in a sneer. “Move,” he growled, gesturing for her to come out from the corner.

She squinted; the dim light in the hallway seemed bright after the total darkness of the closet. She considered refusing, but it wouldn’t help her.

Stomach churning, she stepped slowly toward him, peering down the hall. She’d expected a crowd of cultists, begging for another try at a lynching, but it was quiet. Not even Rolfe was with Butler this time, and it made everything seem ominous in a different way.

“Let’s go,” he said, pointing with his rifle back down the hall, over the trip wire and into the main hallway, which was also empty.

“Where?” she asked, glad to discover her voice didn’t squeak. It came out strong and clear, as if she still had some say in what happened to her.

“Upstairs,” he replied, and he opened another nearly invisible door, revealing a curving staircase.

The lookout tower. She’d wondered how they accessed it. Did he plan to throw her off it?

No, she decided as he slammed the rifle barrel into her back when she didn’t immediately start climbing.

The force of it shoved her forward, and she hit the first step with her shins, then went down on her hands. Her knees hit the edge of the metal stair, shooting pain through her legs and up her spine.

She pushed herself to her feet and began climbing, sensing more than hearing Butler behind her. The rumble of his voice reminded her of driving too fast over loose gravel, but he moved silently, with stealth, like a man who was used to stalking prey in the mountains.

He wouldn’t throw her out the window; it wasn’t high enough. She might survive that fall.

He was taking her up there so the FBI surrounding the building would see her. He was showing his hand, betting it was good enough to get him whatever he wanted.

Her pace quickened. Maybe she could tell them something, give them some kind of message.

But what? Her mind blanked. What did she really know that they wouldn’t already have discovered themselves?

Before she could come up with anything, Butler was jabbing her with the rifle barrel again and she stepped into the lookout room. It was a tiny space, with barely room for two people to stand, but there were windows on all sides, and the sloping mountains toward the entrance provided a view well into the distance.

Ward didn’t climb up into the room with her. He stayed on the stairwell, just out of sight of any snipers who might be watching. He kept his rifle aimed at her, despite the fact that there was nowhere for her to run, no room to fight.

She spun in a slow circle, looking through the windows, knowing for certain that an HRT sniper was staring back at her. Probably several. But wherever they were, she couldn’t spot them.

She took in the steep mountain behind the compound, protecting the cultists on two sides. It was covered with new snow, and in other circumstances, it would have been a gorgeous view. A little stark, but this was nature in a purer form than she usually got to see, mostly untouched by man.

She turned toward the front of the compound, and saw a crowd of protesters. Their features were blurred from up here, but signs rose above them. Facing the protesters was a line of men and women, some in blue; they had to be FBI and local police.

While she was locked in the closet, she’d heard Butler’s puffed-up voice talking about how the protesters were ready to fight the police, that all he had to do was say the word. She’d scooted closer to the door when she heard Rolfe reply, trying to make out his words, but he’d kept his voice so much softer than Butler’s. She still wasn’t sure what he’d said; her best guess was “Not yet.”

She’d also heard them say something about April 19—a date a lot of antifederalists held in high regard. She couldn’t tell what they’d been saying about it. That had worried her, because violent believers had used April 19 as a battle date—it was when the raid on Waco had happened, when the Oklahoma City bombing had happened. But April was a long way off, and right now she had other problems.

As she gazed out the window, she saw that the protesters were contained, although there were more of them than she’d expected. She could see the signs bouncing up and down, but there was no mad rush toward the compound.

The sound of Adam Noonan’s voice made her jump, even though she’d heard him speaking all morning. She looked up at the sky, at the sun casting pink over the mountains. Was it evening already? The hours had blended together while she’d hunched in that closet, trying to create a strategy to stay alive.

“Mr. Butler, let’s meet face-to-face.” Adam was pushing the same message Butler had ignored all day.

To Evelyn’s surprise, Butler lifted his own bullhorn, one she hadn’t even realized he was carrying. “We have your agent. It’s within our rights, when someone trespasses on our land, to execute them.”

Evelyn felt her whole body jerk, and instead of looking at Butler’s other hand, the one still holding that rifle, she looked past him, down the staircase. But it was empty. No Rolfe to talk Butler out of killing her. Was Butler’s plan to shoot her while her friends watched, too far away to do anything about it?

“Let’s talk about what you want, Ward,” Adam said, and nothing in his tone revealed that he’d known her for the entire time she’d been at BAU—not quite two years. He sounded neutral, invested only in making peace between Butler and the government.

That was his job, but it still left a sour feeling in Evelyn’s gut. She studied the distance to the protesters now, the distance to any police presence, and knew for certain that HRT would never be able to storm the compound. Not before she was killed.





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