“Tell Ramirez to get the hydraulic jack ready on the drive up. There’s going to be some kind of door we need to get through. I want the shaped charges ready to go, too—not wired up, just ready. We make every second count now. If this—”

A sound cut him off—the default tone of an iPhone receiving a text message. Still walking, Grace reached for his pocket.

But in almost the same instant, Dryden heard that tone coming from everywhere around him—a rapid, clustered repetition of the sound, like an echo rebounding in a mirror maze.

Every FBI agent within earshot had gotten the text message in unison, whatever it was.

En masse, the group came to a stop. They traded fast glances as they withdrew their phones: What the hell is this?

Dryden watched their faces as they looked at their screens. The message had to be something short; every man and woman reacted to it in a glance.

“You son of a bitch…” Grace whispered.

Dryden stepped closer and looked at the man’s phone.

The sender’s number was a line of asterisks, and the message fit in a small word-bubble:

Too late to stop me. The attack happens one minute from now.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

For the longest time, no one said a thing. It was quiet enough that Dryden could hear those around him breathing.

Then the radio on Grace’s belt beeped, and the chopper pilot’s voice came through the speaker, high-strung and almost shouting.

“Air to point, air to point, we got a problem up here!”

Grace keyed his shoulder mike. “Go ahead.”

“It looked like a bunch of quad-rotor drones, eight or ten of them. They just went right under us, moving fast. They’re coming toward your position.” Over the radio, Dryden could hear at least one of the two spotters yelling something in the background. The pilot listened, then spoke again. “Yeah, my guys are saying ten. And it’s not little camera drones. These were big heavy-lift types, like fifty pounders. They were carrying some kind of canisters. You need to get back to your vehicles right now.”

Dryden turned in place; he watched the realization hit each person standing there, all at once, the same way the text message had:

The attack was coming here.

Right here, and right now.

An instant later, Grace and his people were sprinting full-out. Grace was screaming at them to move their asses, to not stop for anything. In the middle of it all, he turned and looked for Dryden and Danica; the two of them were keeping up, no more than ten feet behind him.

They had gone only another fifty yards, though, when the sound came to them: a high, frenetic buzzing, coming down through the treetops to the north.

“Don’t stop!” Grace shouted. “Move, move, move!”