“You were right,” Golden said.
Gant ignored the acknowledgement. He stared at Caulkins. “Who was the Agency liaison? Jim Roberts?”
Caulkins nodded. “Yes.”
“And you don’t know who the man with the badge in the village was?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t DEA?” Gant pressed.
“As far I knew, he wasn’t.”
“This is bullshit,” Neeley said.
Everyone turned to her in surprise. Neeley looked at Caulkins. “I’m sorry about your daughter, but everyone has a different story about what happened to these three guys. The only thing everyone agrees on is they thought the guys died in a chopper crash and we know for sure that wasn’t true. Since one of them was killing people this morning and the other two are on the loose.”
“Believe me,” Caulkins said, “I want to know the truth too. I’ve checked as much as I can here and as far as I can tell the DEA did not have an agent in that village. And the decision to abort the mission came from the CIA — I only relayed it.”
“Why did the CIA want you to abort?”
“I don’t really know.”
Gant stood. “Is there anything else you can think of that might help us figure out what these guys are up to?”
Caulkins nodded. “There is something — it was only a rumor and I didn’t think much of it at the time, but in light of what I’ve since learned, there might be more to it.”
Gant waited.
“There was talk among my field agents about the CIA running some sort of black op in Colombia. Lots of money exchanging hands.”
“With who?” Gant asked.
“The cartels of course,” Caulkins said.
“Why?” Gant was getting tired of digging into darkness.
“I don’t know and I’m not likely ever to find out,” Caulkins said. “And neither are you.”
“We’ll see about that,” Gant said.
They walked out of the room and headed for the waiting helicopter. Gant turned to Neeley. “After the chopper drops us at Langley it will take you to the airfield. There will be a jet waiting for you to fly you to Alabama and the cache site.”
“Emily Cranston’s not there,” Neeley said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Get a feel for the site. For the person who did this.”
Neeley reluctantly nodded.
The first conscious thought Emily Cranston had was that she was no longer moving. The next was that she was lying on something hard. She was on her back and she realized that she no longer had the blindfold on.
Still, she didn’t open her eyes. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see where she was now. The air was different. Warmer. Drier.
She could sense she was not in an enclosed space. At least not as enclosed as the van had been.
And the damn shackle was still on her ankle.
Emily opened her eyes and blinked. A clear blue sky was above her, framed by a perfect circle of wood. Emily blinked once more, turning her head. She was surrounded by a wooden wall, perfectly round, eight feet high. She was chained to a bolt set in the very center of the wood floor, the open space about twelve feet in diameter.
Not as tight as the van but still enclosed. So much for her senses.
“What the fuck?” Emily muttered as she struggled to get to her feet.
The wood was old. Bleached by the sun. There was a trace of sand on the floor.
Emily stomped her foot and was surprised to hear an echo. The floor wasn’t solid. She got on her knees and wrapped her hand around the metal bolt that the chain to her shackles was locked to. She pulled as hard as she could but it didn’t budge in the slightest.
She continued to try for several minutes until she was panting. Finally she gave up for the moment and sat down, running a swollen tongue over her parched lips. It had been over two days since she’d had anything to drink other than the scant drops of dew. She was grateful that she had been drinking water in the night-club rather than alcohol.
Thinking that made her realize how long ago that seemed. To be part of the real world, the normal world. Where her largest concern had been not getting asked to dance. When she had worried about the extra weight that was now coming off faster than any diet in the latest fad. Emily would have laughed if her parched throat would have allowed — now she was grateful she’d had that weight on.
Emily looked up at the wooden ring above her head, then at the planks making up the circular wall. She’d never seen anything like this. Had the crazy man built this just to stash her? It didn’t make sense, given that he had simply chained her to a tree at the last place.
She got to her feet and stomped down, listening to the slight echo. That meant there was empty space beneath her. A cellar? But then what had happened to the roof? Had there ever been a roof? And there were no doors. Emily walked to the end of the chain and was just able to touch the wall. The wood was old. Each plank was about eight inches wide. She slapped her hand against one and it felt very solid. She slowly walked the circumference of her new prison, checking each plank, one by one, hoping perhaps that one would be rotted or weak.
No such luck.
Emily returned to the center and sat down next to the bolt that held her in place. She had thought the tree was bad, but at least there had been things to look at and the feeling of space. Emily felt closed in, more imprisoned than she had before. She had no idea where she was, what was on the other side of the wooden wall.
“Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. She repeated the cry several times, but there was only silence, not even an echo of her scream. Which made her miss the sounds of the forest even though those sounds had turned threatening at night. All she had was a uniform wooden wall and the blue sky overhead.
Emily lay on her back and stared up at that sky and felt as if her heart were going to sink through her back, into the floor and keep going down into the earth itself.
It had taken the explosives experts three hours to remove the rest of the mines from the clearing. They were all not only rigged to trip-wires, they have been booby-trapped. Bailey recognized the handiwork and the pattern: it was the way Special Forces demolitions men were trained to prepare an ambush on a potential helicopter landing zone. It had just been pure luck that neither of the insertion choppers had hit a trip wire with a skid. If that had happened there would have been a very high body count and a destroyed chopper — stuff that would have been hard to keep out of the news.
Still, two men were dead and three wounded. Emily wasn’t here, nor was the target. Mister Nero would not be happy. Nor would he be particularly unhappy, Bailey knew. Bailey paused as he walked toward the oak tree as he suddenly remembered it was Ms. Masterson who sat behind the desk now, not Nero. Since joining the Cellar over thirty years ago, Bailey had known no other boss than Nero. In fact, to Bailey, Nero was the Cellar. Ms. Masterson’s placement behind the desk was the most disconcerting thing Bailey had ever experienced and he had seen many strange things in the employ of the Cellar.
Bailey had instructed Special Agent in Charge Bateman to keep her people at the perimeter after the area had been cleared. He wanted to see the site alone and without interference. She had not been pleased — with that or with two dead agents. Lots of paperwork, lots of explaining, lots of sadness over loss of life. Bailey wasn’t into any of the above so he didn’t concern himself.