CHAPTER 26
Elias
◆
“Bridgeport tower cleared you straight-in on the return leg,” Havlin said. “Storm cell is building faster than yesterday’s model.”
He rolled the numbers over in his head. Compound to Reno by helo was forty-one minutes. He did not round it and Reyn did not ask him to.
The ridge rolled under them and he did not look at it.
He looked past it. He was running The Notch in his head, and he was running it for her.
Two routes in. One back-cut. Wind bearings for a forty-knot gust out of the west. He measured where she would stand on a rock with a forearm two weeks stitched and where she would not stand.
He measured where a two-man team would set up if they were not thinking, and where they would set up if they were.
He set her boots on the granite where the outcrop broke the west wind and where a rifle from the pedestrian traverse could not hold her at rest. He set her breath at seven a minute because that was what her breath went to when she was reading a screen and had forgotten to be afraid.
He gave her the back-cut Reyn had walked in September because it went down the sheltered face and the ice would not have found it yet in a first storm.
He did not think about the drawer.
Six years running this ridge and he had learned it the way a man learns a rifle.
He knew where a rifle line dropped off a shoulder of granite and where the pines gave a target a screen.
He knew which of his own operators broke left under fire and which broke right and which one thought first. He had put men on the ridge who thought first. He had put Havlin on the wire because Havlin heard a lie in a voice half a second before it became a lie.
That was the shape of a chain of command that had held for six years. It would hold for twelve hours.
“Cross’s cell went dark for six minutes at seven,” Havlin said. “They are up now, two vehicles in the parking structure.”
He watched the Sierra fall away under the skids. Pines and granite and a scarf of cloud building on the north face. He noted the cloud the way he noted a covered doorway.
Forty-one minutes later Reno was under them. The Bell settled onto the private pad at the north edge of the airfield and the noise dropped into the mechanical thump of the shutdown. Reyn was already unclipping.
“Six flights to the sixth floor, count them going up,” Reyn said.
“Log it at the desk,” Elias said. “Nothing else. Elevator in four.”
“Copy, boss,” Reyn said.
The Wells Fargo tower took them nine minutes on foot.
Elias walked it because a black SUV at the front of the tower drew a different kind of eye than two men on foot in coats.
Reyn carried the package under his left arm — a matte black courier envelope, sealed, the return address a firm in Carson City that did not exist. Katya’s counsel had signed the front.
Halberd’s name was on the label. Nyx was not, and would not be until it was opened.
He counted lines of sight on the approach.
The tower had a granite plaza with three benches and a pair of planters that would break a rifle line if a shooter set up on the pedestrian bridge.
He counted three cameras above the revolving door and two more inside.
He clocked the low sun bouncing off the glass on the east face and the shadow it threw across the plaza, and he walked in that shadow because a man in a coat with a courier envelope drew less notice out of the glare than in it.
He counted the doorman. He did not look at the man’s face; he looked at his hands.
Empty. He counted the exits behind the desk — one service door, one stair, one elevator bank, and one glass revolving door back the way he had come — and he counted them in the order he would use them if the morning went sideways, which it would not.
He counted the two men by the elevators and read them for lawyers by the shoes and the watches, not Cross’s men and not his own. He and Reyn moved through them without a shift in stride.
They rode up together. Reyn’s cup was gone.
Elias counted the floors on the display, then counted them again on the marker beside the door, and the counts matched.
The elevator opened onto a sixth-floor lobby he had seen in Havlin’s photos and had not seen with his own eyes.
Slate floor. Reception desk of pale stone.
Two chairs no one had ever sat in. Three doors behind the desk.
He counted twenty-eight steps between the elevator and the desk edge and he made twenty-eight steps.
Reyn set the envelope on the desk. The woman behind it took it without looking up. She scanned the barcode. She stamped the log.
“Nine-oh-two on the clock,” she said, without warmth. “Have a good morning.”
Reyn thanked her evenly. They were back in the elevator inside three minutes and twelve seconds by Elias’s read. He did not check his watch. He read time off the elevator display and off the position of the sun through the window slot behind the reception desk. Three-twelve.
“Package logged at 09:02,” Havlin said on the wire. “Front desk stamped it.”
On the sidewalk he turned east because the black SUV they had not brought was not parked there. Reyn matched his stride. The wind at street level was quieter than it would be by afternoon and the sky over the Sierra was the color of cold slate.
“They will call counsel first, not Cross himself,” Reyn said.
“Cross reads counsel’s mail,” Elias said. “He will be on it inside the hour.”
“Time on target when we lift the second time,” Reyn said.
Elias gave him the number, the wind on the pass, and the fuel margin at Bridgeport, and told him he did not want the truck late.
The Bell was where they had left it. He walked it once before he climbed in, a habit that had cost him nothing across six years and had saved him once. The skids were clean. The fuel gauge sat where he had left it. Reyn cleared the cabin and shut the door and the rotor came up.
They lifted at 09:38. Havlin called the wind out of the compound at gusts to twenty-seven knots. He filed that in the same place he filed the cloud on the north face.
Bridgeport airfield was fifty minutes from Reno at compound cruise, more or less, with the wind against them.
He did not care about more or less. He cared that the fuel would be on the numbers when he landed there because he had told Havlin he wanted it on the numbers and Havlin had told the airfield manager.
One hangar. One wind sock. One fuel truck already rolling to the pad as they came in over the low fence.
The wind sock stood almost straight west.
“Fuel truck on the numbers, one minute out,” Reyn said.
They topped off in eight minutes. The kid running the pump wore a red beanie and did not talk and Elias liked him for it.
The wind sock stiffened while they stood there and he watched the pines beyond the fence bend one direction and stay bent.
The airfield was one hangar and one wind sock and one man on the fuel truck, and the man on the fuel truck was the kid, and the kid was the son of a mechanic Elias had used for six years, and the mechanic had told Elias two winters ago that his boy could be trusted with a fuel handle in weather.
Elias had not forgotten it. He signed the log with the pen chained to the clipboard and did not put a name to it that anyone could sell.
“Two agents out of the tower, ten thirty-eight,” Havlin said, later, when they were airborne again. “Heading east.”
Reyn’s head came up half an inch.
“They’re committing,” Reyn said.
Elias watched a shadow of high cloud cross the eastern flank of the range.
Cross’s cell was moving. Two of them had left the building at 10:38, and by tomorrow at first light one of those two would be within a hundred yards of The Notch, and the other would be within two hundred, and Cross himself would come to the ground because the paperwork Katya had put on the desk at 09:02 committed his signature and his person or shut Nyx’s Reno operation in a court of law by close of business. Cross would come.
The trap was committing.
He ran the routes again. He ran them for her.
The wind on the ridge would be a hard gust into her back if she stood in the wrong place; it would be a lift off her shoulder if she stood in the right place.
He set her in the right place. He set his men in the places where a two-man team would break for cover under fire and he set the third man in the place where those two men would run.
He did not set himself anywhere in that plan.
He would put himself where the shot was after everything else was clean.
He thought of her once, sharp, twenty minutes into the flight, and then he set it down and worked the checklist. The want was the same. What he did with it was not.
He thought about the drawer.
The license was in the drawer of his desk.
Paper copy. Katya had signed it, and Reyn and Havlin had witnessed it, and Mara had slid it across the table under her wrist and pushed it back to him the same way she pushed a data file, evenly, at 9:47 p.m. on a Thursday three and a half weeks ago.
He did not know what he was going to say about the drawer.
He was not going to say it today. He was going to walk to her doorway and give her a number, and she was going to give it back to him, and then he was going to close a door and he was going to check the compound perimeter for the ninth time before he slept.
That was tenderness. He knew the shape of it. He had run the route for her; he had set the trap; he had come home before the storm. He would let that be enough.
He watched the range come up out of the haze on the compound approach and made himself catalogue what it was doing.
A wave train of cloud on the eastern face.
Snow line lower than it had been at dawn.
The air over the valley the color of a bruise.
A storm on Day 25 sat on the shoulder of a fault ladder that Mara had been reading up all week, and he did not pretend he understood what she read in it, but he understood the shape of a woman who did understand and who was still working at a desk with a lamp on low at eighteen-forty on the last quiet evening before a bad one.
He would put himself where the shot was.
She would put herself where the ground was.
Between them, if the arithmetic held, Cross would find no clean line on either.
“Scraped my elbow on that recce,” Reyn said, an hour after that. “Just so it’s on the record.”
“Noted,” Elias said.
Reyn did not say more about it and Elias did not ask.
Reyn had taken worse and had not mentioned it.
He would say it once because it was owed to the record and he would not say it again.
Elias’s gratitude for the man beside him was a shape he did not put in words.
He handed him a fresh bottle of water from the cabin console. Reyn took it.
“Wind is up at the compound,” Havlin said. “Forty knots by dawn.”
“Approach the east terrace on two-seven-zero,” Havlin said a beat later. “Bring her in over the rocks, do not overfly the ridge.”
Elias set the ship on the vector she had called and did not answer with words she did not need.
He put the Bell on the east terrace at 18:41. The sky was the color of wet iron. The pad lights kicked on as the rotor came down and the wind slapped the hangar door twice against its latch before Reyn caught it.
They walked in. Reyn’s elbow was through his sleeve in a small dark patch and he kept his hand off it.
“Ops wing, the drone imagery is up,” Reyn said. “I will find you at midnight for the north approach.”
Reyn peeled off toward the north corridor. Elias took the long way around the great room, past the fireplace, past the west corridor, and the wind was hitting the windows on the ridge side hard enough that the glass hummed. It was not yet forty knots. It would be by dawn.
The west suite was at the end of the corridor.
Her door was open a hand’s width. A lamp inside was on the low setting and he could see the corner of the bed and the corner of the desk and the corner of a paper on the desk with her handwriting on it, which meant she was working, which meant she was awake.
He stopped in the doorway. He did not step through it. He was in his flight jacket and the cold of the pad was still on him and there was road salt from Reno on the toe of one boot. He did not care about any of those things. He held the frame with two fingers on the jamb and he waited to be seen.
She came around the corner of the desk. She was in a heavy grey sweater that swallowed her wrists and grey wool socks and her hair was down for the first time he had seen it in a week, ash-blonde against the collar of the sweater. Her left sleeve covered the stitches. She saw him.
She did not say his name. She did not smile at him. She met him the way she met a magnitude on the screen — a small tightening at the corner of her mouth that took the shape of steady.
The wind hit the west window and the glass hummed low. He heard it and did not turn.
“Twelve hours,” Elias said, at the doorway of Mara’s suite.
“Twelve hours,” Mara said.
He held her eye for a beat longer than a stranger would, and he closed the door behind him, and the wind kept climbing.