Hailey came to a stop by a trash can in front of one of the convenience stores. With some effort, she spit the thick putty out of her mouth and into the can, then removed her fake glasses and unzipped her backpack. As she put the glasses back in the pack, Nick saw a flash of metal—a few furls of the eagle’s wing visible from the open pack—and he shivered, still breathing hard.

His head was spinning, and not just from the jog. Everything that had happened in the past twelve hours had his thoughts tangled up, and for the moment, he believed his best strategy was to focus on the things he did understand.

The misdirection with the elevator shaft had been simple and elegant; once Hailey had set off the fire alarm, all they’d needed to do was wait for the park ranger to usher the tourists into the stairwell—giving Nick the opportunity to noisily get the grate loose. Tossing his jacket down toward one of the lower rungs embedded in the wall of the shaft had been his own idea, to help sell the story Hailey was writing. When the ranger had come storming back up the stairs to investigate, they’d been waiting on either side of the entrance—and had easily slipped out while he was occupied with the open elevator shaft. Then it had only been a matter of mixing themselves into the stream of evacuating tourists.

Hailey had assumed either the ranger would walkie-talkie down to the base about the open shaft, or the officers would send someone up—but either way, the misdirection had been designed to give Nick and Hailey the edge they needed. Even in the darkened stairwell, a face-to-face encounter would have ended badly for them; but as Hailey had predicted, once the open shaft had been discovered, they might as well have been invisible.

Still, Nick had endured a moment of true panic as the two officers had squeezed past him in the stairwell. The first had come through like a bull on steroids, and Nick had nearly taken a shoulder in his chest letting the cop through. But the second man had moved more carefully, and Nick had no doubt that if he hadn’t been rushed by the thug in front, he’d have nailed Nick right there against the granite wall.

“Worked better than I thought,” Hailey said, as Nick caught up with her. She was still moving forward but scanning around them for anywhere that looked sheltered enough to give her time to go to work on the book. “If we’re lucky, they’re still down in the shaft, trying to arrest your jacket—”