The guy made a quick nod and then returned his full attention to the men on the ground. In doing so, he pivoted just enough that Danica could see the back of his jacket. In big letters just visible in the indirect light of the flames, it read FBI.

Seconds later, bright flashlight beams speared the darkness from somewhere up near the road. Three lights, then half a dozen or more.

More voices, too, and a clamor of footsteps coming down.

Danica turned to Dryden, and found him ignoring the FBI men entirely. He was staring at the two attackers on their knees, his expression still tense with focus. He regarded them as if they were every bit as dangerous as they’d been a minute before.

Danica found her own gaze pulled back to them.

The men knelt there, staring up into the barrels of the M4 rifles, their hands still raised. One of the two had a dark beard, trimmed short. The other had short blond hair.

Something about the bearded guy drew Danica’s attention. Something in his manner. She stared a moment longer and realized what it was: his jaw was clenched and he was breathing fast, and his hands made little convulsive movements.

Like he was psyching himself up to do something.

It came a second later, and happened so quickly she hardly had time to flinch.

The bearded man’s hand shot to his waistband, where his shirt hung untucked. An instant later the hand was swinging up again, holding a small pistol. Danica could see the FBI men reacting, their rifles centering on the guy. The bearded man twisted on his knees and swung the gun to one side—toward the blond man kneeling next to him. He shoved the barrel against the man’s temple and fired. In exactly the same moment both M4s roared, and the bearded man’s chest was torn open by autofire.

A second after that there was only silence—the quiet of a forest in the middle of the night.

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was thirty minutes later. Dryden stood with Danica beside a black Chevy Suburban, which was parked on the grass in an alpine meadow. The Suburban was one of eight SUVs and sedans idling at random angles in the field, headlights blazing, LED strobes flashing from their grilles. Men and women in FBI windbreakers milled around, talking on phones or hunched together over tablet screens.

The meadow was half a mile up the road from the fallen pine that had blocked the way earlier—half a mile farther along in the direction Dryden and Danica had been driving, before everything happened.

From where he stood, Dryden could see over the woods that ranged down the hillside below the open field; he could see far out over the Arizona desert, where I-40 stretched away into the night, its course marked by the headlights of sparse traffic.