And sirens—lots of them, threading their way along the interstate in this direction. Police and fire units, no doubt. The big pine down on the slope was still burning, though the FBI personnel didn’t seem worried about it. Over one of their radios, Dryden had heard mention of a chopper en route with a water bucket.

Otherwise, he and Danica had been told very little. A young guy with some kind of medical training had shone a penlight into their eyes to check for dilation, then asked the standard raft of emergency questions about pain, double-vision and light-headedness. Finally a man in his fifties had asked them to stand here and try to relax—someone was coming to speak to them soon.

Now they were waiting.

Danica looked around at the FBI vehicles and the gathered agents.

“So the guys who dropped that tree onto the road must have been watching us in the camp,” she said, “and they were waiting to get us on the way out. And these FBI people were … watching them?”

Dryden nodded. “One way or another.”

He pictured the attackers staking out the encampment with spotting scopes, and the FBI watching the attackers with a high-altitude drone—a Global Hawk or a Reaper with a million-dollar thermal camera, looking down from three miles up in the darkness. Maybe these agents had been staged right here in this meadow, far back from the road, waiting for a surveillance tech a thousand miles away to start yelling go into their headsets.

All of which meant one thing for sure: both the FBI and the bad guys knew about Shiprock Forest, and that it was a good place to watch for at least Danica to arrive.

“All this for a missing person from a murder scene in Thousand Oaks?” Danica asked. The skepticism was evident in her tone.

“Seems a bit much, doesn’t it? Usually they put your picture on the news and flash a tip-line number.”

“Then what’s really going on? What is this about?”

“Something a hell of a lot bigger than either of us,” Dryden said.

As he finished saying it, he heard the sound of distant rotors—a helicopter coming in from somewhere to the south. He turned and saw its winking lights just rising into view over the treetops along the meadow. He guessed it was the fire chopper finally arriving; then it got closer and he saw that it was a standard-sized utility type, the kind that news channels and police forces used. It came in low over the field, its rotor-wash whipping the grass and stirring dust up into the headlight beams. It was black with FBI in big white letters on the side. Dryden watched it touch down twenty yards north of the assembled vehicles.