"Which puts an entirely different outlook on Mr. Layton's disappearance," said Creed. "If they'd known about the window, they'd have realized he bolted, and logic says he took what they're looking for with him. So now they think you still have it, and even if you tell them differently, they won't believe you, not after all this."
All this. Seven people dead. Creed wounded. An untold amount of damage to houses and vehicles, all for something that wasn't even here. Suddenly overwhelmed, Cate buried her face in her hands and wept.
Yuell Faulkner was more worried than he'd ever been in his life. He hadn't been able to get in touch with either Toxtel or Goss for three days now. He'd sent them on a simple retrieval, but they'd been gone a week. They should have been back days ago.
Bandini would be expecting to hear from him, and Yuell had nothing to tell him. He couldn't say they'd recovered the flash drive or that they'd found Layton - nothing.
He was spooked; he admitted it. He left a light on in his office to make it look as if he were still there, in ease anyone was watching the window, and left, by a basement exit that put him in an alley. Fine with him. He wasn't getting in his car and leading any watchers to his home, anyway.
He walked a couple of blocks and hailed a cab. After thirty minutes of aimlessly driving in circles, he got out, walked another couple of blocks, and got another cab. He watched carefully both times. No one appeared to be following. He took the precaution of exiting that taxi several blocks from his home and waited until it was out of sight before he turned in the correct direction.
At last he let himself into his house. The dark, familiar spaces enfolded him. Usually he could relax here, but until he heard from either Toxtel or Goss he wouldn't be able to relax anywhere. Damn it, did he need to go out to Idaho himself? If they'd screwed up, why hadn't they just called and admitted it? He'd think of something, some way to fix the situation, but he had to know what was going on.
He turned on a lamp and thought longingly of a nice stiff drink, but he needed to be in top form if anything went down. No drinks at all for him until he heard -
"Faulkner."
Yuell didn't turn toward the voice, the way most people would have. He dove to the side, toward the doorway.
It didn't work. The cough of a silenced weapon only slightly preceded an explosion of pain in his back. He forced himself to keep rolling, moving through the pain and shock, and felt another bullet enter. His legs jerked wildly, spasming out of control, and he crashed heavily into the wall. He tried to reach for his weapon, but nothing was where it was supposed to be and his hand sort of floated in the air, grasping at emptiness, which was damn stupid.
A dark, faceless shape loomed over him, but Yuell knew who it was. He knew that voice, had heard it in his nightmares.
The shape pointed at his face, and there was another cough, but Yuell didn't hear that one - or anything else, ever again.
Chapter 31
Cal lay on his stomach to the North of where he'd mentally marked the location of the farthest firing position. It was a good place. Strategically, it was where lie would have placed a shooter if he wanted to prevent someone from coming down that side of the land spit and either making it into the cut or slipping behind him. The long, narrow groove was like a bowling alley lane, without a lot of great cover - for thermal scopes, that is. He'd guessed right about them switching to regular scopes and binoculars during the day, though, and it took a sniper a helluva lot more skilled than these old boys to spot him when he didn't want to be spotted.
Creed had always called him a naturally sneaky son of a bitch. Nice to know some things never changed.
He had waited, wanting to see when the shifts changed. The first night he had counted four different firing positions, but after that only two - the two most strategically placed to knock off anyone trying for the cut. No one could man those positions nonstop for three and a half days without being relieved and do any kind of a decent job. Not only did you need sleep, you needed food and water and the occasional trip behind the bushes. If you popped enough speed, you could stay awake that long, but you'd be hallucinating, shooting at ghosts, so paranoid you'd shoot your own self for spying, so he discounted that possibility. Either the shooters were asleep during the day, or someone was relieving them. Four shooters the first night, two after that. The math was simple. They were splitting shifts.
That left a big gap in coverage over toward the bridge, and Mellor had gone to too much trouble to make that kind of mistake. There would be another guard positioned at the bridge, armed with shorter-range weapons; that meant continuing with the two-shifts per twenty-four hours theory, two more men, for a total of six.
Six men, six civilians, meant at least two vehicles, probably more. They would be parked nearby, but off-road where they couldn't be spotted in case anyone going to Trail Stop came along. Likely someone would, if they hadn't already. Conrad and Gordon Moon really liked Cate's muffins and usually made the drive at least once a week. Maybe Cate had guests scheduled to arrive. There could be a big pretense about the bridge collapse, the power and phone lines being out because of it, but that charade wouldn't last for long.
These guys had to know they were hard up against the wall, time-wise, and they would move against the people in Trail Stop soon, against. Cate, because they thought she had what they were looking for. He would have preferred not to send her back to Trail Stop, but there had been no other place. She couldn't have come with him, and she couldn't have stayed on the mountain; she had to have food and shelter. At least if she was in Trail Stop, Greed would look out for her.
Night would be the best time for these men to move. They had the thermal scopes; they could see what they were shooting at. But they'd made a tactical error by blowing the bridge, and the difficultly in crossing the stream went both ways. He'd had to go half a mile upstream to find a place where he could cross without being swept off his feet. They'd made another tactical error by waiting; now the townspeople had organized some barricades where Cal had shown them, they had spread out, and they were mad as hell.