They took the rear stairs to L1 and stepped outside to wait. The temperature had risen since sunset. A thick fog was ascending in loose coils under the lights of the parking circle, like dry ice at a rock concert. They stood together without talking; there was nothing to say. The situation was more or less a complete and total screwup. Richards thought of the photograph, the one that was all over the wires. Amy Bellafonte: beautiful fountain. Black hair falling straight to her shoulders—it looked damp, like she’d been walking in the rain—and a smooth, young face, still with some baby fat fluffing her cheeks; but beneath her brow, dark eyes with a knowing depth. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt zipped to her throat. In one hand she was clutching some kind of toy, a stuffed animal. It might have been a dog. But the eyes: the eyes were what Richards kept coming back to. She was looking straight at the camera as if to say, See? What did you think I was, Richards? You think nobody in the world loves me?

For a second, just one, he thought it. It brushed him like a wing: the wish that he were a different kind of person, that the look in a child’s eyes meant something to him.

Five minutes later they heard the chopper, a pulsing presence coasting in low over the wall of trees to the southeast. It made a single, searching turn, dragging a cone of light, then dropped toward the parking lot with balletic precision, shoving a wave of shuddering air under its blades. A UH-60 Blackhawk with a full armament rack, rigged for night reconnaissance. It seemed like a lot, for one little girl. But that was the situation in which they now found themselves. They held their hands over their brows against the wind and noise and swirling snow.

As the chopper touched down, Sykes seized Richards’s elbow.

“She’s a kid!” he said over the din. “Do this right!”

Whatever that meant, Richards thought, and stepped briskly away, toward the opening door.

Chapter Ten

TEN

They were moving quickly now, Wolgast at the wheel, Doyle beside him, thumbing away furiously on his handheld. Calling in to let Sykes know who was in charge.

“No goddamn signal.” Doyle tossed his handheld onto the dash. They were fifteen miles outside of Homer, headed due west; the open fields slid endlessly away under a sky thick with stars.

“I could have told you that,” Wolgast said. “It’s the back side of the moon out here. And why don’t you watch your language?”

Doyle ignored him. Wolgast lifted his eyes quickly to the rearview to find Amy looking back at him. He knew she felt it too: they were joined together now. From the moment they’d stepped off the carousel, he’d cast his lot with her.