“No fucking way,” Dulac said when the message ended; he had gotten to his feet, but he was clinging to the bed’s chrome rail, barely staying upright. “You are not doing this alone.”

Hazard stared at the frozen image of Somers on the screen and recognized, now, the stairs leading down to the sub-basement of a building on Wroxall’s campus. Despair flooded him.

“What choice do I have?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

JULY 6

SATURDAY

4:52 AM

HAZARD GOT TO THE Empire Fruit building a few minutes before five. He had his bag of gear in the van, so he had driven across town to Sexten Industrial Park, driven straight up to the gravel lot in front of the Empire Fruit building, and stopped the minivan. Like the rest of the buildings in the industrial park, Empire Fruit had been abandoned for a long time. It was one of the original buildings, and it had gone up at the same time as the Sexten Motors plant, sharing the same design: brick walls; narrow, glass-block windows; heavy metal doors that gave onto the warehouse.

Dawn had already begun, the sky lightening to steel at the horizon, but the industrial park was dark. No security lights, no sign of a lantern or flashlight inside the buildings. When the minivan’s automatic lights clicked off, the darkness swept in to press against the glass. The only illumination, faint and distant, came from the Tegula Plant back toward town. Undoing the seat belt, Hazard pushed his door open, breathing the cool, humid air of a summer morning, the scent of fresh dew, clover, the dustiness of the gravel. He shut the door; the click ran across the empty lot like a gunshot.

The duffel with Hazard’s gear could be adjusted into a backpack, and he slung it now over both shoulders, made sure the Blackhawk was clear in its holster, and readied his thumb on the flashlight. He wasn’t ready to turn it on yet; the minivan had already made him visible, but he had wanted the Keeper to know that he had arrived. That was part of the game; unless the Keeper had absolutely no sense of reality, he had to have been experiencing some degree of worry. Psychopaths needed increasing amounts of stimulation in order to feel anything; Hazard guessed that the Keeper had chosen him for this sick game precisely because he thought Hazard was a worthy opponent—a threat, in other words. Hazard was intent on proving him right.

Jogging across the gravel, Hazard chose the shortest route to the edge of the lot, where an old railroad tie greeted him with a whiff of creosote. The tie separated the gravel from the knee-high weeds that rustled around Hazard as he began moving through them. The stalks, heavy with the morning dew, soaked his sneakers and socks and jeans. His route took him up a short, crumbling hillock, where a thistle ripped out of the ground as he scrambled up the slope, and then he reached the bricks of the Empire Fruit building. He held himself against the wall for a count of ten, listening, and then crept forward.