But these two were doing a lot wrong. They weren’t on security detail; they were on prisoner detail. They should have glued their eyes to their targets and not blinked. The guy on the left should have said, I’ll watch the left one, you watch the right one. They should have pretended both captives had their hands free, and a belt of grenades around each of their waists. They should have been that paranoid and vigilant. And they weren’t.

It reminded Dryden of something one of his instructors had told him about, long ago. The concept of danger in numbers.

Most people thought in terms of safety in numbers—being part of a big group was safer than being alone. Which it was. The problem was that it made you feel safe, and that took the edge off your focus—if you let it. That was the danger in numbers. Dryden and his guys, back in the day, had trained against it continuously. It was one of a thousand human biases you had to work around.

Pierce’s men were good, probably even great—but a long way from perfect.

And none of that mattered.

Not in the least.

The math was still two against eight, and the two were bound and unarmed, and the eight had seven guns among them.

Pierce’s guys could have been stumbling idiots and it still would have been no contest.

Dryden listened to the thudding drumbeat of the cart. He felt it, too, each tiny impact transferring through the metal deck into his shoulder blades.

He watched the tunnel go by, yard by yard. The tunnel that was just like the last one.

More like it than you think.

It was another of those spooky intuitions, the same as before. A stir of lost memory just below the surface, working its way up.

There were things to remember at the end of the first tunnel. There’s something to remember at the end of this one, too. Something important happened there.

What the hell did that mean?

And what did it matter?

So what if something had happened in this tunnel in 1989? How could remembering it make any difference now?

There was no intuition in response to that. Nothing but his own confused thoughts trying to make sense of it all.

Yet the memory was certainly there, trying to come back to him. Fighting to come back. It was right at the threshold. It was—

It was all he could do not to gasp, when it hit him. It came to him all at once, the understanding and the mental picture and everything else about it. The whole memory of what had happened at the end of this tunnel, fresh and clear as if he’d lived it five minutes ago.

And it mattered.

It mattered right now.

He kept his breathing steady. Kept his body still, and his face slack. This was not the time to start drawing attention.