Dead Watch

attract attention; you’d be trespassing. This parking area, you see a car in there fairly often. We just have to take care that they don’t blindside us.”
    “Or send in the Virginia State Police. We don’t want to shoot any policemen.”
    “That’s a problem. But they won’t. They won’t want anybody to see the package until they get a look at it first. It’s gonna be Darrell and whoever was with him at Madison.”
    “You’re too confident, Jake,” Madison said.
    “I know how these guys think,” Jake said. “That’s how they’d do it. That’s how I’d do it.”

    “What if they’re already there?”
    Jake smiled: “Then we’re toast. But I don’t think they’d start shooting if they saw you. You’d be too hard to explain.”

    The question of Darrell Goodman’s arrival was the one that bothered them most: they talked about it, off and on, all the way down to the cabin. If the bug in Madison’s house was monitored often, Jake thought, they’d come in at dawn. If it was monitored less frequently, they might not come until evening, or the next morning.
    “If they’re not here by then, we’ll have to pull out,” Jake said. “Danzig will be going public with the package.”

    From the parking area to the end of Billy’s driveway was a long loop of narrow blacktop. The driveway began with a nearly invisible indentation in the tree line. Fifty feet in, invisible from the road, was a locked gate and the beginning of a gravel track. “Billy’s is the only place back here,” Jake said. “We’re on his land now.”
    “Dark,” Madison said. Then: “What if they have those night-vision things? Darrell was military, he probably could get National Guard equipment.”
    “If they can’t see us in the daytime, they can’t see us at night. And if you keep yourself down, they won’t see us.” He got out and opened the gate with his key, drove the truck through, and locked the gate behind them.

    The cabin was built on a wide spot of a crooked valley nestled in a series of steep, heavily forested hillsides. Just below the cabin, on the creek that cut the valley, Billy had excavated a three-acre pond and filled it with bass. The shallow, six-foot-wide creek trickled down over a rocky bottom, past the cabin, into the pond, over a concrete lip, and then down and out of the valley.
    They came around the last turn in the gravel track, and the cabin glowed like a piece of amber in the headlights. A motion-sensing yard light flicked on. Jake parked, and feeling the hair rippling on the back of his neck, climbed the porch, unlocked the door, turned on the lights. Madison helped carry the gear bags inside.
    Were they out there? Up the hill, arguing what to do about Madison? Hurried calls going out of the ridgetop? He didn’t think so, but it was a possibility.

    The cabin was big enough to sleep eight, with two bedrooms, a bath, and storage on the upper level. The first floor had two more bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen and a great room, and a set of high windows that looked out over the pond. A large-scale geological-survey map of the property was framed and hung on the wall of the great room.
    Jake took Madison to the map. “This is probably the same map they’d be looking at, if they pull it off the Internet.” He tapped a tightly bunched strip of contour lines south of the cabin. “Up here, we’ve got this really steep hillside—it’s virtually a bluff. It’s unlikely they’d come in over the bluff, because it’s just too steep, and there are springs all along the side of it, it’s pretty slippery in there. I don’t think they’d come in from the west, because they have to cross too much of the open valley, and the creek, and it’d add a couple of miles to the approach. They could come north, up the drive, park far enough up the driveway that you couldn’t see their car from the road. The thing is, they can’t be sure from this map that there aren’t any more cabins up here, or that we might not have a gate with an alarm.”
    “We have an alarm on our gate at the farm . . .” She peered at the map. “So the best way is over the hill.”
    He nodded. “From the east. From the parking lot I showed you. That’s right here.” He tapped the map again. “They leave their car at the trailhead, cross the hill in the dark, taking it slow, watch the cabin for a while, then come in at dawn and take me out. They dump the body in a hole somewhere, then exfiltrate during the day,