“We’re going to go somewhere and talk,” Pierce said. “Just need to know who you’ve spoken to, how much you remember, what you told Grace and his guys. I know I won’t get everything out of you, but … I’m thorough. I’ll get as much as I can, within reason.”

His tone was devoid of anything like gloating. He sounded like a dentist saying, This shouldn’t hurt much, might just feel some pressure.

“And then you’ll kill us,” Danica said.

“It’ll be quick,” Pierce said. “I’m not a sadist.”

Dryden ignored the guy and studied the layout of the situation. The room, the people, the hardware, the firing angles.

None of it looked good.

The five gunmen still in the room had their MP5s trained and level. The blond woman still had her Beretta leveled, too. Pierce himself had no weapon in hand, for what it was worth, which was nothing.

There was no move to be made against these people.

Not here and now, at least.

From far away outside the room there came a rumble, deep and resonant. Heavy-duty wheels on concrete. A metal surface vibrating and thrumming and bouncing. Dryden pictured the big flatbed cart he’d seen earlier. The one that belonged in a Home Depot.

“No maps of Ashland left, you know,” Pierce said. “Not even for the FBI. No schematics to show how far these underground complexes actually go. Or the old service tunnels for plumbing and wiring. You’d be surprised where some of them lead to.”

Pierce nodded through the wall toward the unseen third room, where the melamine cabinet had concealed a doorway.

“Past that animal containment, there’s another corridor, then one more empty complex at the end of it. Then there’s a service tunnel running to an old power substation two miles outside the boundary fence. When they shut Ashland down in 1989, the Army filled the last twenty feet of that tunnel with concrete, out there at the substation. And then … the records got shredded with everything else tied to this place. These days nobody knows about that tunnel at all. Things in Ashland just have a way of being forgotten.”

Pierce wandered to the doorway and turned an ear toward the sound of the distant cart.

“That old tunnel is how we came in,” he said. “And how we’re going back out. We’ll have you a thousand miles from here before they figure out what happened.”

Dryden took a last sweeping glance at the guns and then looked away.

Pierce came forward again from the doorway and stood watching the two of them. Dryden looked up and met his gaze.

“How the hell could you count on us getting away from the gas?” Dryden asked. “It was one in a thousand we could’ve done that.”

“Probably not even those odds,” Pierce said.

Dryden waited for him to go on.