“Holly, listen to me very carefully. We blew it, blew it badly.”

“Who is this? Nathan?”

“We blew it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The farmhouse. I think they were there last night, the Bridgestones, Leonard and Ernie.”

“What? How? That’s impossible.”

“Get back out there Holly, get SWAT out there as fast as you can.”

“Nathan—”

“Holly, please, just do it.”

“But we’ve had the farmhouse under constant surveillance, even before the raid. Nobody’s come or gone from there.”

“Last night I saw what looked like a large diameter pipe sticking up above the ground near the property corner under the windmill. I didn’t think twice about it until now.”

“Another tunnel,” she whispered.

“Holly, be careful, have your people check the garage again, the light switch.”

“I’ll call you later.”

Nathan began pacing the room. “They played us, Harv. They put on a dog-and-pony show and we bought it.”

“You could be wrong, they may not have been there.”

“They were there.”

“Nate, you can’t know that for sure.”

“I didn’t put it all together, I should’ve. Their cousins could’ve lasted a lot longer than they did. They gave up the cabin and the cash to satisfy us, to make us think we’d gotten something valuable. They threw us a bone to get us out of there. I think they had this whole routine planned in case they were ever questioned by the FBI or police. That place was their safe house by design, from the beginning.”

Harv said nothing.

“It was the garage. It kept bugging me. I thought to myself, no way. There’s no way this garage should look this neat and tidy. These guys were total slobs.”

“What if you’re wrong? Holly’s risking a lot taking a SWAT team out there. Suppose they don’t find anything.”

“Harv, you saw those guys, they were covered with oil and grease, especially their hands. The bandage on Billy’s arm was clean. There should’ve been smudges on the tape from tearing it off the roll. It was the only thing in the entire house that was clean. I remember thinking it to myself.”

“Let’s assume you’re right and there was a tunnel and they were there. Why didn’t the cousins give them up? The money would have been theirs.”

“Maybe they were more afraid of them than us. Or maybe they were promised a bigger chunk for keeping quiet. Who the hell knows?”

“Okay, tell me this: Why were they there? What reason could they possibly have for going there?”

Nathan said nothing, didn’t have to.

“The Semtex,” Harv said. “The missing crates from the compound.”

Nathan nodded. “Yep.”

“And the cousins?”

“Dead,” Nathan said. “They wouldn’t risk leaving them alive. Those two don’t leave loose ends.”

“If you’re right, we have to tell Ortega about this.”