The threadbare quality of his brother’s life saddened him. Tillman seemed to have so little: neither material possessions nor someone to share his life. And yet, if Gideon were honest, there was a part of his brother’s life he envied. The ruggedness; the immediacy; the visceral thrill of the hunt. Waiting for Tillman to radio him, Gideon felt the excitement he recognized from his time on the Obelisk, and from when he first met with Mixon. He had spent his entire adult life avoiding conflict, and now it seemed that part of him craved it.
As he was musing, his cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number.
He answered the phone and a female voice returned: “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a pay phone in America today?”
“Nancy?” he said.
Gideon's War and Hard Target
“Just listen,” she said. “Ray Dahlgren knows everything....
“What about Tillman? Does he know about Tillman?”
“No.”
“When’s he coming?”
“Don’t know. It’s a two-hour drive up to Verhoven’s place. My guess is that he’ll wait until the morning. But whatever you’re going to do, you’ve got tonight to do it. Tomorrow will be too late.”
“I’m waiting for Tillman to contact me.”
“I think he should just clear out, Gideon. Both of you should.”
Gideon thought about it. “I can’t reach him right now.”
“Then get him out as soon as you can. It’s not worth it.”
“Are you serious about Dahlgren bugging your phone?”
“He’s threatening to open an OPR file on me. He wouldn’t even need a warrant, not for an internal investigation. FBI agents give up their rights on that score when they sign on to the job.”
“Then how can I reach you?”
“I’ll contact you.” Nancy’s voice sounded shaky.
“But—”
The phone went dead.
Dammit, Gideon thought, gathering up the FBI surveillance package. I better get over there.
17
ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA
Lorene was a night owl. Tillman could hear her moving about the house after he went to bed. He could tell it was Lorene because Verhoven called out for her a couple of times. Finally, she stopped prowling and returned to the bedroom, for which Tillman was grateful. But then the bedroom gymnastics began. Lorene was a howler, and just when Tillman thought she had finished, she started up again. It seemed like several hours before all was quiet and Tillman could finally begin looking for Mixon.
He got up and slipped out of his room, then eased down the front hallway to the door.
Gideon had given him an aerial photo of the property. Verhoven owned several hundred acres, most of it in hardwood timber. But in the center was a clearing of fifteen or twenty acres surrounding Verhoven’s house. Behind the house was a horse barn, a toolshed, and some other outbuildings. Another 150 yards away—toward the front of the property—lay a long shedlike barracks where the “soldiers” bivouacked. As far as Tillman could tell, there were a good twenty young men in the building, staying there in preparation for the maneuvers in the morning.
The air was cold and clear, and a thin sliver of moon gave Tillman just enough light to move around the property without using a flashlight.
He crossed the grass to the horse barn. Once he was out of earshot of the house, he screwed the radio Gideon had given him into his ear. It looked like a Blue tiiiii T‡tooth for a cell phone but it wasn’t. According to Gideon, it ran an encrypted signal on a law enforcement frequency, with an operational range of around a mile.
“I thought you’d fallen asleep.” Gideon’s voice came out of the earpiece. “I’m freezing my ass off out here.”
“I got detained,” Tillman said. “Give me a sit-rep.”
“Change of plans,” said Gideon. “We have until dawn to find Mixon.”
“That’s not a lot of time.”
“Long story, but Nancy’s boss is coming down here looking for me.”
“So where do we start?”
“There’s a guard stationed at the gate on the gravel road coming up from the highway,” Gideon said. “He’s armed with an AK. The lights went off in the barracks shed about three hours ago.”
“Dogs?”
“Nope. I guess Verhoven’s a cat person.”
“That explains a lot,” Tillman said.
Gideon chuckled. “Stay on the radio.”
Tillman headed into the horse barn. Three horses slept in their stalls. They didn’t even stir at his entrance. He began checking the floor for trapdoors. With all the straw on the floor, it was a painstaking business. The cold was already seeping into his bones.
The brothers had agreed that Tillman would take the area closest to the house and the interior buildings while Gideon scouted the perimeter and the roads. The Verhoven property was vast. Tillman wasn’t sure quite where the edges of the property were, but it was clearly well over a hundred acres. Maybe several hundred. After the stables, he searched the barn, and the hayloft. Soon, it was 3:15 A.M. The barracks shed was situated near the gate at the front of the property where upward of a dozen of Verhoven’s “soldiers” were spending the night. And after his eyes had adjusted to the light, he had seen that one of the young men was actually standing post at the gate, guarding against interlopers. Which meant he not only had to be quiet, but he also had to move slowly and carefully so as not to attract attention.
Next came a low crawl to the last of the outbuildings clustered near Verhoven’s house. Despite the cold, a thin sheen of perspiration covered his brow by the time he’d reached the shed. It contained a tractor, a hay baler, an aging International Harvester stake-bed truck, and a white van with ladders on the top. There was no evidence of any sort of basement, no blood, no handcuffs, no evidence anybody had been tied to a wall or chained to a floor.
He peeked out the various windows, surveying as much of the property as he could, and saw nobody. A sudden idea came to him, and he raised his radio, his voice low. “What’s your twenty?”
Gideon’s voice answered, “I’m up in the woods about a quarter mile west of you.”
“Is there a guard at the gate?”
“Yeah, but he looks like he’s sleeping. You find anything?”
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“Zilch. No blood, no hidden rooms, no nothing.”
“Maybe they’ve got him in that barracks shed with his militia guys.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Tillman said. “He’s creating twenty potential witnesses to a federal crime if he sticks him down there. You think he trusts all twenty of his guys that much?”
“Not likely. What about the house? Maybe there’s a basement.”
“No, it’s just a typical old farmhouse with a crawl space underneath. There’s no basement. But I have an idea where Mixon might be.”
“I’m listening,” Gideon said.
“Verhoven cooks crystal meth, right? So where does he make it? I didn’t see any evidence of chemical manufacturing, no test tubes, no beakers, no pressure vessels. Didn’t even smell anything. I mean supposedly meth cooking is the most horrible-smelling thing in the world.”
Gideon didn’t respond for a moment. “Maybe there’s another property somewhere. He might have a cabin up in some holler or something.”
“What if it’s underground? There’s some kind of entrance up near the shooting range.”
“Worth a try,” Gideon said. “But I still have to scout twenty percent of my grid.”
“I’ll check it out.” During their conversation, Tillman had been making his way toward the front gate where he saw the guard Gideon had spotted. Gideon was right: The kid was totally motionless, slumped over in his seat. Probably dead asleep.
Still, he couldn’t take any chances. He dropped to his knees and high-crawled toward a pair of berms four or five hundred yards away. After he’d crawled ten feet, he flattened out, surveyed his surroundings for about a minute, then crawled another slow ten feet. Hunting boar was one thing, but this excruciatingly slow process made him realize how old he’d gotten since he’d last done this as a sniper. Five hundred yards was a hell of a long way at this pace. But it was the only way. He sighed and began to crawl again.