Chapter 10 Ten

I stared at those three words until they stopped meaning anything.

Then I got up, unlocked the door, and walked straight to Dax's office.

She opened it before I knocked. She had the signal detector in one hand and her burner phone in the other and the expression on her face told me she'd already seen the same message or something close to it.

I held my phone out. She read it. Her jaw tightened once and then she was moving, crossing to the desk, pulling the laptop open.

"Sit down," she said. I sat.

"The number that sent that," she said without looking up from the screen. "It's the same prefix as my source. The one who went quiet six days ago."

"So he's alive."

"He's alive and he's scared enough to break six days of silence at midnight." She turned the laptop toward me. A map on the screen, real time, with two red dots moving slowly along the east corridor road. "Kane's men. They've been running a patrol circuit around this compound for the past forty minutes."

I looked at the screen. "You have eyes on the road?"

"I have eyes on everything." She turned the laptop back. "The patrol started at eleven fifteen. Twenty minutes after Reaper left the garage."

The timing sat between us like a lit fuse.

"He made the call from the storage room," I said. "Yes."

"And Kane moved within twenty minutes."

"Yes." She closed the laptop. "Which means whatever Reaper told him was enough to make him want eyes on this compound tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight."

I leaned forward. "What could Reaper have told him that made it that urgent?"

Dax was quiet for a moment. She set the burner phone face down on the desk and looked at it like she was deciding something. Then she looked at me.

"Three days ago I moved the core evidence files," she said. "The originals. Everything I've built for two years. I moved them out of this office and into a location only I know." She paused. "Reaper saw me carrying the case. He didn't see where I went. But he knew what it meant."

"He told Kane you were getting ready to move."

"He told Kane the operation is closer to finished than Kane thought." Her voice was steady but there was something underneath it, tight and controlled, the sound of someone keeping a very large thing in a very small space. "Kane doesn't wait when he's cornered. He acts."

"So what happens now?"

"Now we find out how much they actually know." She stood up and crossed to the filing cabinet, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a handgun. She checked the chamber with the ease of someone who'd done it ten thousand times and set it on the desk between us. Not pointing at anything. Just there.

"I'm not here to scare you," she said. "I'm telling you that tonight the compound is not the safe place it was yesterday and you need to know that."

I looked at the gun and then at her. "I'm not scared."

"Good." She pulled on her jacket. "I need to sweep the storage room personally. You're coming with me."

We moved through the compound quietly. The main room was empty, the bar dark, chairs still up from the evening clean. The hallway to the garage was lit by a single bulb that had been threatening to blow for days. Dax moved like she knew every floorboard that creaked and which ones to avoid. I followed her lead.

The storage room was at the back of the garage, a narrow space that ran along the rear wall, shelving on both sides, spare parts, oils, tools that didn't have a home anywhere else. Dax ran the signal detector slowly along the shelving units, crouching to get the lower sections, reaching up for the higher ones.

Halfway down the left wall it chirped.

She stopped. Reached behind a row of oil canisters and came out with something the size of a thumb drive. She held it up in the light. A listening device, the cheap commercial kind, available from any electronics supplier, but planted deliberately and recently.

She looked at it for a long second. Then she put it in her jacket pocket.

"He planted it this week," she said. "Probably the same day you heard the voices."

"He's been listening to everything in this garage."

"Everything." She stood up and turned to face me. "Every conversation you and I have had here. Every course debrief. Everything Tank said to you this morning."

Tank. I thought about his voice, low and close, telling me about Reaper and two months of watching. All of it recorded. All of it was sent back to Kane.

"Tank needs to know," I said.

"Tank already knows more than he's told me." She moved to the door. "I'll deal with Tank. You go back to your room and you stay there until I come for you."

"Dax."

She stopped.

"You can't do this alone tonight," I said.

She turned around slowly. In the low light of the storage room she looked exactly like what she was. A woman who had been carrying a war by herself for two years and was watching it accelerate past the pace she'd planned for.

"I'm not asking for help," she said.

"I know you're not." I held her gaze. "I'm telling you that whatever happens in the next few hours, I'm not sitting in a locked room while you deal with it."

She looked at me for a long moment. The signal detector was still in her hand. The garage was silent around us, the compound quiet outside, two red dots moving in slow circles on a map on her desk two hallways away.

"Fine," she said. It wasn't warm. I wasn't grateful. It was a decision, the same way everything with Dax was a decision. "Stay close. Don't speak unless I ask you something. And if I tell you to move, you move. No questions."

"Understood."

We went to find Tank.

He was in his room at the end of the east corridor, awake, boots on, like he'd been expecting someone to knock. He opened the door and looked at both of us and then stepped back without a word.

Dax told him about the device. About the patrol on the east road. About Reaper and the storage room and the message from her source.

Tank listened with his arms crossed and his face doing nothing. When she finished he was quiet for a moment.

"The prospect," he said. "Lenny. He's not in his room."

Dax went still. "Since when?"

"Since at least ten. I checked an hour ago. Habit." Tank looked at the floor. "I should have come to you sooner. About Reapers."

"Yes," Dax said. No anger in it. Just the fact of it, sitting there clean and honest. "You should have."

Tank nodded once, accepting it. "What do you need?"

"I need you to find Lenny. Quietly." She looked at him steadily. "And I need you to bring Reaper to me without telling him why."

Something moved across Tank's face. The same thing I'd seen that morning when he told me about Reaper's eleven years and the three days searching for Marcus. I didn't hesitate. It was the look of a man paying a debt he'd been trying to avoid.

"I'll find them," he said.

He pulled on his jacket and walked out.

Dax watched him go. Then she turned and looked at me and for just a second, one unguarded second, she looked tired. Not weak. Not broken. Just tired, the way anyone looks when the thing they've been bracing for finally starts moving and they realize the bracing isn't over, it's just changed shape.

Then it was gone and she was Dax Steele again.

"Come on," she said. "We go back to the office and we wait."

I followed her down the hall and the compound was so quiet around us that I could hear both our footsteps clearly, separate rhythms on the same floor.

The red dots on her map were still circling.

And somewhere inside these walls, Reaper was about to find out that patient people could run out of time too.