The man in the green coat had been given those orders by his employer, whose name he didn’t know and never would—nobody knew that guy’s name.

I put their odds of showing up there at better than fifty percent, the employer had said. It’s a logical place to look for answers, and it’s plausible the Ellis woman would think of it.

The man in the green coat had positioned his team carefully after arriving this morning. He had put his spotters high above the single road leading into the valley, and set himself up right here for the stakeout, far from the sprawl of campers and trailers and cobbled-together shacks below.

Now he simply watched. And waited. He had a pair of Zeiss binoculars which he trained on Moss’s lot every few minutes, while he listened through the headphones. When Dryden and the Ellis woman left, he would easily see and hear it. His cell phone already had the word Now entered into its texting app; he needed only to switch it on and tap SEND, and the message would reach his spotters—no longer high above the exit road but tucked down right next to it, three miles away from the makeshift encampment along the river.

Get them alive if possible, the employer had said. Dead if it’s all you can do. And take the warnings about Dryden seriously—his military background is considerable. There’s a six-year chunk of it even we can’t get access to.

The man in the green coat shut his eyes and listened to the crackling campfire over the headset. He wasn’t worried. His men would have every possible advantage, and yes, they would be careful. They knew all about being careful.

For over a minute, none of the three spoke. Dryden replayed in his head what Moss had told them. He understood it well enough, though coming to grips with it was a different matter.

Danica looked up across the fire at Moss. “Did my father serve with you at Fort Leland?”

“Richard? No, he was based right there at Ashland.”

Danica seemed confused. “But I thought you two served together. I thought you were old friends.”

Moss shook his head. “No, ma’am. I never met him at all until about two years after the incident there. By then I was in a detox place in Phoenix, trying to get clean, and he was an FBI agent. He tracked me down, came to visit me, said he knew I was the one who’d given you the shots. For a minute I thought he might be there to kill me, but he told me not to worry about that. He said as far as he was concerned, I’d saved your life. If they had given my orders to somebody else, that person might have lost you.”

“He tracked you down just to tell you that?” Danica asked.