Chapter 104 - The Cabin in the Crosshairs
The sudden silence inside the cabin was heavier than the wind howling through the eaves. The battery was still sputtering in the stove, sending up thin blue spirals of chemical smoke that stung the back of my throat.
Alistair pushed himself up against the heavy timber wall, his face the color of skim milk. "He told you twenty minutes?"
"He did," I said, tucking the micro-laminated key into the zippered interior pocket of my down coat.
"Then we have six," Alistair wheezed, cocking an ancient Walther PPK with trembling fingers. "Arthur never gives an accurate timeline to an asset he intends to scrub. If he said twenty, the sweep team was already cresting the gravel road when he dialed Zurich."
As if summoned by his words, the snow-covered pine trees outside flickered with twin beams of halogen light. A dark SUV—heavy, reinforced, and running without clearance markers—slowed to a halt fifty yards down the winding logging trail, its tires crunching over the hard-packed crust of ice.
"Front door is dead ground," Alistair said, his teeth clicking together from the cold. "They’ll throw flash-bangs through the front glass to clear the floor before entering. Standard maritime extraction protocol."
"Not on my watch," I said.
I picked up the Remington 12-gauge leaning against the firewood crate. The barrel was cold and oiled. I racked the slide back with a sharp, mechanical clack that brought a strange, settling quiet to my chest. For seventy years, I had been Martha Vance: the woman who organized church bake sales, who ironed Caleb’s school shirts, who stayed quiet when the men closed the study doors to talk about shipping manifests. That woman had died in Lisbon, right about the time Patrice handed me the ledger and told me my life was a forgery.
"The root cellar," I said, nodding toward the trapdoor behind the stove. "Does the drift tunnel still lead out to the drainage culvert?"
"Built it in seventy-four," Alistair coughed, spitting a fleck of blood onto the floorboards. "Before Arthur sold his soul to the Swiss. It drops into the dry creek bed behind the ridge. But Martha... I can't climb that ladder."
I looked at him. The man was dying. The gunshot wound from the orchard was festering under the crude gauze, and his eyes were already glazing with fever.
"Alistair—"
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"Go," he growled, slamming a fresh magazine into his pistol. "I was paid to guard Arthur's secrets for thirty years. Let me spend my last five minutes making sure he doesn't get them back."
A heavy thud rattled the front porch. The external timber grooved under the weight of combat boots.
