Page 3 of Travis
“It was absolutely your idea.”
“Of course it was absolutely my idea. Is that a yes?”
“It’s an I’ll think about it.”
“That’s a no.”
“Goodnight, Beck.”
“Eat something. Something that didn’t come in a can or have a shelf life longer than your last relationship.”
“Goodbye.”
“Something with a vegetable in it, Travis. One vegetable. I’m setting the bar so low it’s underground.”
“The bar is right where I live. I’ll see what I can do.”
He laughed again. Warmer this time. “Night, Trav.”
The connection dropped.
The control room went quiet. Just the servers and the soft, cycling rhythm of Maude running through her feeds. The rest stop parking lot. The highway. The cluster of buildings outside Polson where a van sat in a gravel lot and the thermal signatures inside hadn’t moved in forty minutes.
I didn’t stand up right away.
This was the part no one saw. The gap between the man on the phone and the man who was about to walk out the door. In between those two people was a space I didn’t have a name for—a kind of silence that was louder than anything Beckett or Maude or the servers could produce.
Beckett thought I was dying slowly in this house. Rotting in place. He pictured me sitting in front of my screens twenty hours a day, eating canned soup and slowly losing whatever social skills I’d had to begin with. Everybody who knew me thought of me that way.
They weren’t entirely wrong.
But they didn’t know about the other part. The part where the rotting stopped and something worse started.
I pulled the topographic map back onto the main screen and expanded it. Layered in the satellite imagery Maude had been compiling since the van showed up six days ago.
“Maude. Update me.”
“The van arrived at the location at 6:14 p.m. Two adults exited the vehicle and entered the main structure.” A pause that had nothing to do with processing speed. Maude liked to be a little dramatic, something I should’ve programmed out of her months ago. “Based on thermal imaging acquired forty minutes ago, there are between five and seven heat signatures inside. At least two are consistent with previous intercepts involving children.”
My hand stopped on the edge of the desk.
The first time, eighteen months ago, it had been a single blip on a feed I shouldn’t have still been monitoring. A route change in a corridor I’d mapped during my years at the CIA. I’d told myself I was just watching. Keeping track. Making sure someone, somewhere, was handling it.
No one was handling it.
And the signatures on that feed had been small. Too small. And close enough to intercept if I moved fast.
I’d thrown up in the driveway that night. As soon as I’d backed out of the garage. My body had so violently rejected the entire idea of leaving my compound that I’d slammed the car into park and jumped out, bent double, heaving on the gravel, and almost went back inside.
I hadn’t gone back inside.
Those heat signatures had beentoo fucking small.
The children I’d found that night were four and six. Brother and sister.
That was when it had started. Not as a plan. Not as a mission. As the thing I couldn’tnotdo.
I walked down the hall to the gear storage, keyed in a code then walked inside to the gun safe built into the wall. Selected a Glock, grabbed a knife for my ankle holster.
