Above them, the confining walls of the staircase rose like the sides of a tight hallway with no ceiling to cap it off. Instead it opened to the dim, humid interior of the abandoned shack overhead. Sam could smell the ferns again, and the dirt, and the rotted wood—all of it like heaven after the air inside Station 9.

Dani still had her face buried. Sam sat down beside her, his shoulder against hers. She was shaken up pretty badly. Sam could feel the same reaction in himself, his arms thrumming like tuning forks—adrenaline on a delay timer.

“You’ll feel better in a minute,” he said softly.

Dani shook her head without looking up.

“I won’t.” She sounded sure of it, for some reason.

“Why not?” Sam asked.

“Because of what Mr. Coleman said. At the end. The name of the insider.”

“You heard it?”

Dani nodded. “All he said was the last name, but it was clear enough.”

“What was it?”

She raised her head at last, and looked at him in the murky sunlight filtering down from the shack.

“Ellis,” she said.

Sam thought about it. “That sounds familiar to me.”

“It should. You heard it two days ago when we shook hands. It’s my last name. And my father’s.”

PART FIVE

IN THE RUINS OF ASHLAND

SEPTEMBER 2018

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Dryden watched the meadow full of FBI vehicles drop away below him, their headlights once more filling up with dust in the downblast of the rising chopper. He was seated at the back of the passenger bay, next to Danica. Jack Grace and the pair of agents with him were belted into the remaining seats, which faced backward toward the two of them. Through the window, Dryden could see the stream of incoming emergency vehicles winding their way along the valley road.

The chopper reached the height of its climb, rotated in place, then pitched down at the nose and set off in a line toward the south.

Grace pointed to a pair of wired-in headsets hanging on the bulkhead behind Dryden and Danica: big firing-range-style ear protectors, each with a built-in microphone sticking out the front. Grace and his men were already wearing their own. Dryden and Danica put theirs on, and Grace spoke into his mouthpiece.

“We’ve got a plane waiting at an airstrip north of Phoenix. We’ll be there in twenty minutes, and on the ground in Iowa by five thirty in the morning local time. Another chopper ride puts us in Ashland right around sunrise.”

Even with the dampening effect of the headset, and the thrum of the turbine engine underneath it all, Dryden could hear the tension in the man’s voice. To him, the few hours it would take to reach Iowa probably felt like the last few grains slipping through the neck of an hourglass.