I’ve been having second thoughts on our ability to catch him here. The Santa Lucia clue had a capital C. It was intentional.

He might want us to know where he’s planning his next deception. Or this is just one giant red herring. A fake-out. We’ve got another team outside Boulder, Colorado, the fifth point on the pentagram, and a third team on standby at Quantico, ready to jet anywhere in the United States in five hours.

So far the group in Michigan hasn’t found anything more about what he has planned next. In the warehouse they found an empty freezer inside the hidden passage and several tons of explosives, enough to have taken out the entire industrial area, but no future plans.

The bomb squad opted to dismantle the bomb but leave the warehouse looking as if we’d never been there. To the best of our knowledge, the Warlock still hasn’t figured it out. Ailes turned his computers back over to him when power was restored to the area, and has been monitoring the signal traffic while a surveillance team keeps watch.

My bet is that he doesn’t go back there. The staged police helicopter crash was a close call, but not so close that he pulled the trigger.

I sit down at the table and look over a map with highlighted points of interest around our Texas town. The town church has the unique honor of having been struck by lightning twice, burning down both times. A schoolhouse was wiped away in a tornado twenty years ago, killing three students and a teacher. Since then, the kids have been getting bused to a school near Brownsville.

Part of me suspects that what makes the town special isn’t anything about it, other than the name and it was one of the possible locations on the pentagram. The real reason he singled it out is because it fits a larger pattern of escalation.

The first murder happened in a cemetery, hours before we cracked the code and got there. The second one took place in a more public place in Fort Lauderdale, yet nobody was watching when he dragged the plane onto the sandbar. The third murder was the most overt one of all, before thousands of people. Video of the New York City illusion is playing on the television in my room. To my frustration, it alternates with a clip of me repeating Katya’s disappearance on top of the Empire State Building. The security camera techs recorded the whole trick and made an edited tape that makes it look a lot smoother than it actually was. At Chisholm’s suggestion, this was given to the media as proof that the FBI is on top of things and not deceived by the Warlock’s stunts.

The problem is that, even with the edits, my impromptu vanish looks different. People who want to believe in the Warlock, and there are many of them on television, aren’t convinced by the demonstration. It’s the debunker’s dilemma. If you don’t replicate the exact effect, then they have reason to believe.