Джеймс Паттерсон - Criss Cross

“It gave me the creeps how he’d go out there from the house,” she’d said. “Like, okay, it could have been just like Dwight said, a place to be safe if things got out of control. But I couldn’t help thinking that it could have been a prison, you know?”

When asked why she would say that, Cora James said she had gone down by the anthill one night when Rivers was inside. There were air vents in the side of the bunker.

“I thought I heard a woman crying in there,” she said.

James said she became frightened and confronted Rivers about it. He’d laughed and said she’d heard the squealing of a dumbwaiter he’d installed.

He’d even volunteered to take her on a tour of the bunker, but something about his body language had made her uneasy, and she’d declined. Rivers tried to monitor and restrict her movements after that.

“I waited until he went to town for groceries a couple of days later, and then I got the heck out of there on foot,” she’d told her interviewer.

The drone landed and Mahoney picked it up and took it back to his vehicle.

I closed the file and stared off into the distance.

“What are you thinking, Alex?” Sampson asked.

I struggled a moment, then said, “If Rawlins’s algorithm is right, if Dwight Rivers is M, then I would love to see exactly what he’s got going on inside of his anthill.”

CHAPTER 36

MAHONEY QUASHED THAT IDEAthe second he heard it.

“I tried to get search and wiretap warrants through two federal judges this morning,” Mahoney said, putting the drone in his car. “Both turned me down. Having an anthill filled with legally bought guns is evidently not enough to warrant a search.”

“Someone’s got to go in there,” I insisted.

“Not without cause, Alex,” he shot back. “If Rivers is your M, we want to get him clean, fair and square, no fruit of the poisonous tree, no giving him a way out of a prison cell or a death chamber.”

I stewed on that after Mahoney got in his car and headed back toward Quantico in the waning light.

“We done?” Sampson said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “Gonna be dark soon, and we are a ways from home.”

“Not yet,” I said, looking through binoculars across the field toward the gravel road that led past Rivers’s driveway.

“C’mon, Alex,” Sampson said. “Without a drone in the sky full-time, we’re not surveilling this guy. We’re just looking at trees.”

“Unless we go into the trees.”

“Jesus, you heard Ned.”

“What if Rivers has a woman in there, John? What if he is M , and he’s got Diane Jenkins in there?”

“What if he does?”

For a long moment, I felt conflicted, but then I didn’t.

“I’m going in there,” I said and yanked the door handle.

“If you’re going, I’m going.”

“No, you stay here. You’re still on the job. I’m a contract employee who’s not under contract at the moment.”

“Which means what?”

“I’m a civilian. The rules are different for me than they are for someone who’s full-time law enforcement.”

“Yeah, try that one in court. You’ll just be some burglar looking at ten years.”

“Hopefully, it won’t come to that. If I’m not back in an hour, use the Find My Friends app and come get me.”

I shut the door before he could protest and set off across the road to Rivers’s property with just enough light to see. Mahoney’s drone had sailed over the woods in seconds, but it took me ten minutes to reach the north edge of the meadow.

I could make out the solar panels, the anthill, and, beyond them, Rivers’s house. There were lights on.

I trained my binoculars on the windows that overlooked the pond and the meadow but I saw no movement. Was he even in there? Or was he inside his bunker?

I didn’t give myself time to think about answers to those questions; instead, I broke out of the woods and ran toward the anthill as fast as I could.

When I was within fifty yards of it, I got down on my belly and used my binoculars to study the exterior. Though the outside walls weren’t completely vertical, no one was climbing that thing without equipment. I remembered several workers quoted in the dossier had said that the entrance to Rivers’s bunker was on its southwest side.

I crouched and skirted the perimeter until I could see a recess in the side of the anthill with a padlocked steel door that looked like something you’d find on a navy ship.

I spotted a camera above the door.

That wasn’t good. I studied the camera and the angle it was aimed at, then moved west again. When I was out of its range, I went to the side of the bunker and sneaked back toward the entrance.

When I got closer, I squatted down, grabbed some loose damp soil, and spit in it to make it muddier. With my back to the wall, I edged along the anthill until I was underneath the camera.

Then I reached up and smeared the lens with the dirt.

I noticed a humming noise coming from the other side of the door. A generator? Then I caught a faint squeal. Or was it a cry?

I pulled my shirtsleeve over my hand to prevent fingerprints and tugged on the padlock. To my surprise, the hasp was not fully engaged. The lock opened.

Either Rivers had made a mistake or he planned to come back soon. I prayed it was a mistake, removed the padlock, and turned the hatch wheel. It spun easily, as if it had recently been greased.

The door swung quietly toward me.

I stepped inside and saw a short hallway lit by dim, red overhead lights leading to a metal staircase. The humming was louder now; it was definitely some kind of machine running.

I hesitated and then walked far enough to my right to look up at the house with the binoculars. No one on the other side of those windows that I could see.

I went back, set the padlock in the latch, stepped inside, and pulled the hatch door snug behind me.

CHAPTER 37

AFTER WAITING A FEW MOMENTSto let my eyes adjust to the dim red light, I crept down the hallway toward those stairs. I paused there, remembering reading in the dossier that at least twenty-five container cars were buried belowground and that there were five or six above in the cone of the anthill.

The stairs both up and down were unlit. Below me, the stairs dropped into darkness, and that gave me a claustrophobic feeling even when I turned on the flashlight and shone it down the shaft.

The workers who’d helped Rivers build the anthill had described it as a maze belowground, the kind of place you could easily get lost in. And at the back of my mind, there was the nagging possibility that the padlock had been left open on purpose because the prepper was coming right back.

My cell phone buzzed. A Wickr text from Ali: Home! So much fun! Captain W is a beast on a mountain bike!

I hit the thumbs-up emoji, wrote, Working. I will call you later.

Then I stood there, straining to hear if someone was calling for help, but I heard nothing except that hum, which seemed to boil up from below. I glanced at my watch. Twenty-two minutes had passed since I’d left Sampson.

I decided to climb. I flicked on my little flashlight, went up a flight, and found small doors, one on either side of the landing. Both were unlocked.

The container car on the left held shelves stocked deep with food supplies. The one on the right was set up as an emergency medical facility and had a safe that I assumed held medicine.

I climbed up another flight and found two more doors. The container car on the right was the armory. The place smelled lightly of oil and solvent. There were at least eighty assault rifles in racks and three hunting-style rifles with scopes.

The container car on the left was an ammo dump, with crate after crate of 5.56x44mm NATO surplus ammunition. I looked around and saw a crowbar but recognized the futility of trying to open every crate to see if it held anything but bullets. There were just too many.