Dryden thought about that. He turned to Danica and spoke. “If we can pin down who’s behind this, it really can be over with. We can get our lives back. There’s something here they’re terrified to have us see. The way they’ve been after us, it’s like every play has been a blitz. I think it tells us something. They don’t just think we’ll find something important here. They’re acting like they know it. I want to see that underground complex.”

Danica nodded.

“But if you want to get out of here,” Dryden said, “I understand—”

“I want to do what I came here for,” she said. “I’m not leaving yet.”

Her tone invited no debate.

The radio crackled again. “Dryden, you still there?”

“We’re here. Give me the location of those underground stairs you found.”

It took the pilot thirty seconds to describe the spot, two miles north and just west of the road, near the ruins of a farm.

Dryden asked if there was an emergency kit aboard the aircraft, containing a flashlight. The pilot confirmed it, and Dryden asked him to drop it in the weeds beside the access stairs.

A moment after they finished speaking, the sound of the distant rotors began to fade; the chopper was moving off to the north.

Dryden thought of the underground stairs, and what sort of barrier might be waiting at the bottom of them. There was only a small chance he and Danica would actually get inside the complex; Jack Grace had been counting on heavy equipment to bust through the door.

Oh you’ll get in. You’ll wish you hadn’t, but you’ll get in.

The absurd little thought had risen out of nowhere, taking him off guard. In the autumn morning air, he shivered—just once, and then the feeling was gone.

“We’ll go south out of the woods and make a wide circle around the north end,” he said. “We can keep plenty of space between us and the FBI people—”

He cut himself off: Danica was staring raptly at a house two doors down the street.

Dryden followed her gaze; the house had vinyl siding, plain white under green asphalt shingles that had mostly fallen away. It stood on the outer curve of the subdivision, facing south, like the place they’d gone into earlier.

“That’s where I lived,” Danica said.