He could be a hundred feet away at this moment, walking fast and quiet, coming this way.

Sam turned back toward Dani and the metal door.

“If there’s music, there’s people,” he said.

He made a fist and pounded the door with the base of it, half a dozen good, loud hits. A second later, the song shut off.

The two of them stood there waiting. There were voices beyond the door now. A woman’s voice and at least two men’s voices, coming closer. Sam couldn’t quite make out the words.

He glanced back over his shoulder into the tunnel. No sign of Pierce yet.

Maybe the people beyond the door would be armed soldiers. It didn’t seem like too much to hope for; this was a military base.

On that notion, something obvious suddenly occurred to him: he was still holding the gun.

Probably not the smartest thing to be doing, if soldiers with rifles were about to show up. Probably a damn good way to get shot, actually.

At that moment someone disengaged the door’s lock from the other side. The heavy latch mechanism clicked and thudded.

Sam turned fast, looking for any place to ditch the weapon. His gaze locked onto the only thing in sight: the metal shelf unit in the corner.

He sprinted toward it, dropping into a crouch and then down on all fours. There was an open gap beneath the very bottom shelf: a few pitch-black inches of space between the concrete floor and the shelf’s underside.

Sam gave the gun a shove and let go, and watched it slide barrel-first into the gap. He heard it click softly to a stop against the back wall.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

SEPTEMBER 2018

Dryden’s lunge put him right at the foot of the shelf unit, with his right arm drawn back like a coiled spring. In the instant it took to launch his hand into the gap under the bottom shelf, there was time to imagine the worst. Like maybe the mop-up crew had been more thorough with these shelves than the ones back in that storage room—maybe they’d actually bothered looking underneath this unit. Or maybe the gun would be there, but simply wouldn’t fire after all this time.

On that score he felt more confident: the stale, dead air of this place was bone dry, like one of those desert Army posts where they mothballed old equipment for spare parts. It was no different than keeping a pistol in a sealed case for thirty years—and Dryden had fired plenty of guns and ammo like that.

If it doesn’t work, I promise not to bitch about it for long.

A hundredth of a second later, Dryden’s hand closed around the grip of the pistol.