"Baby, no!" Elena heard her own voice break across the church before she felt her feet moving.

The descent through the hemlocks was silent as an owl’s wing.

Elena moved with the muscle memory of a girl who had spent her childhood hunting whitetail deer across these very ridges. She kept her weight on the balls of her feet, stepping only on damp moss and bare earth, avoiding the dry pine twigs that lay like tripwires across the slope.

The cold air burned her lungs, but her pulse remained steady at sixty beats per minute.

Behind the weathered cedar woodshed, thirty yards from the cabin’s western foundation, she dropped to her stomach. The scent of damp, decaying sawdust and iron filings was thick in the dirt.

Through a gap in the stacked cordwood, she saw him.

A guard in a tactical fleece jacket, armed with a suppressed Sig Sauer submachine gun, was pacing the perimeter of the western wall. He was twenty-five, with a buzz cut and nervous, twitchy eyes, checking his watch every twenty seconds.

Thump.

A dull, concussive pop echoed from the eastern ridge across the hollow.

Instantly, a plume of thick, blinding white phosphorus smoke bloomed across the front lawn, swallowing the two parked Tahoes in an opaque, blinding wall of chemical fog.

"Contact east!" a voice roared from the front porch. "We have hostiles on the ridge! Suppressive fire! Suppressive fire!"

The guard behind the woodshed whirled around, his weapon coming to his shoulder, taking three hurried steps toward the front of the house to reinforce his team.

Pop-pop-pop.

Vance’s suppressed rifle spoke from the tree line with surgical, terrifying precision.

The two tires on the lead Tahoe exploded; the engine block erupted in a shower of sparks as two armor-piercing rounds shattered the radiator; and the horn began to blare continuously as a ricochet struck the steering wheel hub.

Elena didn't watch the firefight.

She slid from behind the cordwood, vaulted over the low stone wall of the drainage ditch, and dropped into the shallow, muddy depression beneath the kitchen foundation.

The wooden hatch was weathered, covered in dead oak leaves.

She wedged her fingers beneath the swollen cedar plank, pulled upward with all the strength in her shoulders, and felt the rusted iron hinges scream in protest. She slipped through the eighteen-inch gap like water, dropping onto the dirt floor of the old root cellar.

The air here was freezing, smelling of turnip rot, dry mortar, and fifty years of undisturbed dust.

Above her head, the pine floorboards rattled under the heavy, running boots of Corbin's contractors.

"Check the attic!" someone screamed through the floorboards. "Sterling says if we don't have that drive in five minutes, we burn the whole damn ridge!"

Elena crept up the narrow, steep wooden ladder leading to the kitchen pantry.

The trapdoor at the top was unlatched. She pushed it open half an inch, peeking into the main room.

The cabin had been utterly dismantled.

Daniel’s grandfather’s hand-carved rocking chair lay in splinters near the hearth; the oil paintings of the Catskills had been slashed from their frames; and the cushions of the sofa had been gutted with combat knives, white foam batting drifting across the pine floor like dirty snow.

The room was momentarily empty. The guards were drawn to the front porch by the blaring car horn and Vance’s diversionary fire.

Elena scrambled out of the pantry on her hands and knees.

She moved directly to the massive stone fireplace on the western wall. Beside the black cast-iron woodstove sat the woodbox—a four-foot-long chest constructed of heavy, rough-sawn white oak planks, bound with rusted iron straps.

She threw the heavy lid open.

Inside lay twenty split logs of cured white birch.

Elena’s fingers flew, tossing the heavy logs onto the rug behind her with muffled, urgent thuds.

At the bottom of the chest, beneath the woodchips and bark shavings, lay a flat piece of quarter-inch plywood.

She wedged her fingernails into the seam, prying the false bottom upward.

There it sat.

A military-surplus olive-drab steel ammunition box, secured with a four-dial brass Master Lock.

Elena didn't need to look at the dials. Her fingers spun the wheels by touch, entering the four numbers that were engraved upon her soul:

0 – 4 – 1 – 2.

Click.

The heavy steel hasp popped open.

Inside, nestled within custom-cut foam, rested a matte-black Samsung ruggedized solid-state drive, accompanied by an Olympus digital voice recorder and a bound, leather notebook filled with Daniel’s neat, microscopic engineer’s handwriting.

"Got you," Elena whispered, tears hot against her cold cheeks.

"Step away from the box, Mrs. Mercer."

The voice was like dry gravel scraping across an iron shovel.

Elena didn't jump. She didn't scream.

She closed her fingers around the black Samsung drive, slipping it into the front pocket of her Kevlar vest, while her right hand dropped smoothly, invisibly, beneath the fold of her heavy wool sweater.

She slowly stood up, turning to face the center of the room.

Standing in the doorway of the bedroom, holding an un-holstered Glock 17 with a threaded barrel, was Paul Sterling.

He was forty-five, broad-shouldered, with cold, predatory gray eyes, a jagged scar running from his left temple down to the corner of his lip, wearing a mud-splattered tactical fleece. He looked at Elena with the clinical, unhurried assessment of an abattoir worker inspecting an animal that had wandered out of its pen.

"Julian told us you were a schoolteacher," Sterling said, his voice flat, completely devoid of emotion. "He told us you were soft. That you would be weeping in the church rectory until the burial was complete."

"Julian was wrong about a lot of things, Mr. Sterling," Elena said, her posture relaxed, her weight perfectly balanced over her heels.

Sterling’s eyes flicked to the open ammunition can in the woodbox, then up to the slight bulge in her sweater pocket.

"Hand over the drive, Mrs. Mercer," Sterling said, raising the weapon until the front sight was aligned with the center of her forehead. "And I promise you will die quickly. A clean shot to the brainstem. You won't feel the fire when the cabin goes up."

"You shouldn't have touched my husband's things," Elena whispered.

Sterling’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Elena didn't try to out-draw him.

She dropped straight down, her knees collapsing as her left hand grabbed the heavy, six-pound iron fire poker leaning against the hearth, hurling it with all the leverage of her twisting torso directly at his knees.

The iron bar struck Sterling’s left kneecap with a sickening, hollow CRACK.

Sterling roared in agony, his shot going wild, the 9mm hollow-point punching through the pine mantelpiece above Elena’s head, showering her in cedar splinters.

Before he could correct his sight alignment, Elena was already up.

Her Glock 43X cleared her holster in zero point four seconds.

She didn't aim for his head. She didn't try to be a marksman from a cinema screen.

She drove three rounds of high-pressure 9mm jacketed hollow-points squarely into the center of his chest.

POP-POP-POP.

The heavy rounds struck his body armor with the concussive force of an iron sledgehammer. Even with a ceramic strike-face, the kinetic energy of three consecutive impacts broke his sternum and two ribs, driving the air from his lungs in a violent, bloody spray.

Sterling crashed backward into the doorframe, his weapon flying from his hand, his back sliding down the splintered casing until he sat in the ruins of the sofa cushions, gasping for air like a landed carp.

Elena stepped over him.

She didn't fire a fourth round. She picked up his fallen weapon, dropped the magazine, racked the slide to clear the chambered round, and tossed the useless frame into the cold ashes of the fireplace.