The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

trouble in the marriage.
    Karl reached deep inside the overlap of the suit and took hold of what he’d found in Ellis’s nightstand.
    Icons bloomed on the computer screen.
    Ellis sat in his chair.
    Karl drew the chrome-plated .45, put it to Ellis’s temple and fired.
    Immediately came shouts from security outside the house. Screams, too, from Lauren’s room. Seconds left to finish the job.
    Karl lifted Ellis’s hand, wrapped the man’s fingers around the pistol grip, and fired again, this time into the framed photo of Mrs. Cook. Powder burns now assured, he let both the hand and the pistol fall free. Not two seconds later the bedroom door broke in, almost off its hinges, and four security men were in the room, MP5s shouldered and covering all angles.
    “Room clear.”
    Two broke formation, one to the master bath and another to the enormous closet.
    “Bathroom clear.”
    “Closet clear.”
    Karl chose the broadest stretch of the wall, far out of the way, and simply stood. Outside in the hallway, other security men were holding Lauren back as she screamed and demanded answers. The men in the room spoke over headsets with other teams outside, locking down the grounds, though a certain calm had descended in their eyes. They could see what had happened.
    Watching from the perimeter of the chaos, Karl felt his cell phone vibrate. He was expected to answer under all but the most unforgiving circumstances. These qualified.
    Ten minutes later, in the lull between the security response and the arrival of local police, Karl went to the balcony, slipped over the rail and dropped to the patio. He saw two security officers just inside the living room—one of them a woman—sitting with Lauren, holding on to her and speaking softly.
    He went to the far end of the patio, where a six-foot drop put him on a gentle slope to the beach.
    A quarter mile up the shore road he found an empty bench, and sat. He took out his cell phone and, as expected, found a text message.
    RETURN TO AIRPORT, NUL CURRENT JOB IF NECESSARY. TAKE UNITED 820 TO CHICAGO, THEN UNITED 71 TO FAIRBANKS, AK. WEAPONS/INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE WAITING IN YELLOW LAND ROVER W/GREENPEACE STICKER, LONG-TERM PARKING D. THIS WILL BE DIRECT AGGRESSION AGAINST TANGENT PERSONNEL.

CHAPTER TEN
    Even after the sound of the helicopter faded, Travis watched the ridgeline through the cedar boughs for ten minutes. The way ahead, visible from this rise, stood bare and shadowless for more than two miles. Getting caught in the open would be suicide.
    The going had been as rough as he’d expected. Five times now, in just over twelve hours, the chopper had come hunting the valleys for them, making slow and methodical passes or simply stopping to hover for minutes on end. Concealment had been sparse but always reachable within the short warning time provided by the incoming rotors, echoing among the peaks.
    They’d reached these cedars by the breadth of a wish, Travis setting Paige deep beneath the branches and pulling his own limbs under just as the aircraft rounded the nearest bend in the valley.
    Now the silence felt sturdy again. As sturdy as it was going to get, at least.
    Paige had drifted off—had barely been awake to begin with, in fact, even when the drumbeat of the blades had passed within a hundred feet. She was in bad shape and getting worse by the hour. The skin around the fissure in her upper arm had grown angry red, and the infected tissue inside appeared to have tripled its presence since Travis had first seen it. Most frightening of all, the veins visible in her forearm had distended and darkened, at least some aspect of the infection spreading that far. And that was only where he could see it. Where else was it branching to?
    His first-aid kit might as well have been a make-believe set for a toddler playing nurse. It had nothing that could deal with this injury, though he’d tried the spray can of bactine anyway, with her assent. The only clear result had been searing pain, which she’d tried her best to hide from him. She’d failed—you could only blink away so many tears.
    By the time they’d ditched the ATV in the river—after skirting the bank for miles to find a stretch of rapids foamy enough to conceal it—Paige was running a high temperature and unable to stay conscious for any real amount of time. So Travis had dumped his eighty-pound backpack into the rapids as well—keeping only the smallest water pouch—and carried her.
    It was harder than