Found

07:48 a.m. The Colombian jungle. Day four.

By the fourth morning Vega had developed opinions about the jungle.

She disliked the mud, the heat, the mosquitoes, the leeches, and a particular small green frog that screamed like a baby every time she stepped near it. She disliked being clean of any hope. She disliked the sound her own stomach had started making, a low, resentful growl, like a dog under a porch.

She did not dislike the man leaning on her shoulder.

That was the problem.

"You're humming," said Roman.

"I'm not."

"It is a melody. You have been repeating it for twenty minutes."

"Maybe it's the frog."

"The frog has better pitch." A pause. "It is the theme from a commercial for a car wash."

"It's a good jingle."

"It is a very bad jingle. I find that I know all the words."

She laughed, and so did he, and the hand on her shoulder squeezed once, quick and warm, and let go. It had done that twenty times since sunrise. Neither of them had mentioned it.

They had left the hollow before dawn. The leg was no better, but the fever hadn't come back, and the stream had given them clean water, and she had found a stand of wild plantains, hard and green, that tasted like wet cardboard and kept them upright. By her reckoning they were four miles from the ridge she had seen from the river. If the ridge held a road, they were saved. If it didn't, they would have a pleasant view.

"There," she said at eight, and stopped.

The trees ended.

It happened so suddenly that it felt like a trick. One step they were in the green gloom, with vines in their faces, and the next they stood at the lip of a cleared slope, with the sun pouring over them like warm water. Below, in a bowl of tawny grass, a dirt road ran like a pale scar between two fences. Cattle grazed on it. A cow looked up, saw them, and went back to chewing with the air of a creature who had met stranger things.

"Civilization," breathed Vega.

"A fence."

"It's a fence with a cow. That's civilization."

"I will take your word for it."

She looked at him. He stood on the edge of the slope with his weight on her shoulder and his face turned to the sun, eyes closed, as if feeling it for the first time. The gray was gone from his skin. There was color in it, a dusting of burn across the nose. He looked ten years younger, and a hundred years more tired, and so human that she felt something fold up in her chest like a piece of paper.

"Roman."

"Yes?"

"We're going to be okay."

He opened his eyes. They were very bright.

"You seem to have decided that," he said.

"I have. It's an order."

"Then I shall comply."

She was still smiling when she heard the rotors.

…

It came from the east, low and fast, a black Bell with no markings, skimming the tops of the trees. She had half a second to see it, and half a second more to understand what it meant, and then she had Roman by the belt and was dragging him backward into the green.

"Down!"

The grass in the clearing bent flat in a wide ring. Dust rose. The helicopter swung round in a tight bank and hung there, nose down, as though it had smelled something. A side door slid open. She saw two figures in tan with rifles, and then, quite clearly, a third, leaning out with a pair of binoculars, scanning the tree line with a slow professional sweep.

They saw us. They saw us on the slope.

"Back," she hissed. "Back, back—"

"Vega."

"We'll go into the trees. They can't land. The canopy's too thick. They'll have to rope in, and that gives us—"

"Vega." His hand closed on her wrist. "Listen."

She listened.

Under the rotors, below them, from the south side of the valley, a different sound had begun. A flat, steady, rising growl. Engines. More than one.

Trucks.

The helicopter heard it too. It lifted, tilted, and swung to face the road, and from its open door a burst of rifle fire stitched the grass in a long white line.

Something answered.

It was a heavy, flat, measured thud-thud-thud, the unmistakable cough of a fifty-caliber, and the tracer that came up from the road was a long red thread, stitching up through the air with the unhurried confidence of a man who had been waiting a long time to do this.

The Bell shuddered. A puff of black smoke burst from its tail. It slewed sideways, spun twice, and went down behind the opposite ridge with a long descending scream and a crump of dirt, and a minute later a column of smoke rose beyond the trees, dark and thick and slow.

The silence afterward was the loudest thing she had ever heard.

Then, from the road, in a voice she'd have known in her sleep, flat and bored and magnificently unhurried, came a shout in English.

"Is that," called Silas Bourke, "the pair of you? Or did I shoot the wrong set of idiots?"

…

He came up the slope on foot, with a limp, and a rifle in one hand.

The other arm was in a sling made from a sleeve. His ash-gray trench coat was torn at the shoulder and burnt along the hem, and his hair stuck up in a thick filthy crest, and there was a spreading bruise across the left side of his face that went from purple at the cheekbone to yellow at the jaw. He looked like something that had been left in the rain.

He stopped ten paces away.

He looked at Roman.

He looked at the bandage, the crutch, the rusty smear of blood on the torn shirt, the dirt, the beard. Then he lowered the rifle, very slowly, with his one good hand, and stood there with his mouth working. For a long moment the Foundry's right hand, who had once shot a man through a car door without breaking stride, seemed to have forgotten how to speak.

"Sir," he said.

"Silas."

"You are alive."

"So I am told."

"You have a beard."

"I have been unavoidably detained."

Something broke in Silas Bourke's face. It was a small thing: a tremor at the corner of the mouth, a drop of water that gathered at the lashes and fell. He did not wipe it. He took three strides, and caught Roman's good shoulder in his fist, and for two seconds they stood forehead to forehead on the hillside, like men at the end of a war.

"I thought," said Silas, roughly, "that I had lost you."

"You were never in danger of it."

"I counted the bodies. I counted eleven."

"I would have appreciated a recount."

"I was busy." Silas let go. He turned, and the bruised gray eyes landed on Vega, and he looked at her for a long, level, measuring moment.

"Callahan."

"Silas."

"You pulled him out."

"It was nothing."

"I saw the wreck." His voice was flat. "I saw the cabin. I saw where he must have been lying, and where the fire went." He paused, and the pause was very deliberate. "It was not nothing."

She didn't know what to say. She stood there, filthy and gaunt and four days from a bath, and the man who had spent a month sneering at her took one step forward, pulled himself up to attention, and inclined his head.

It was a small bow. It lasted a second.

"Thank you," said Silas.

…

They sat in the shade of the lead truck while the medic went over Roman.

The medic was a stocky Colombian named Esteban, with hands like shovels and a bedside manner like a bag of wet cement, who worked in silence for twenty minutes and finally said, in careful English, "Whoever sewed this was an amateur."

"I was," said Vega.

"It is very ugly."

"I know."

"It is also perfect." He looked at her. "It is why he still has a leg."

She flushed and looked away, and found Silas watching.

He had been leaning against the fender with a bottle of water and an unlit cigarette, taking in the scene with a face that gave away nothing. It was his default expression. She had learned to read it, over the past month, the way you learn to read a barometer. There was no hostility in it now. No contempt.

What there was, she thought, was attention.

He was watching the way Roman's eyes went to her whenever she moved.

It wasn't dramatic. Roman was too disciplined for that. He sat on the tailgate with Esteban's hands in his thigh and his face composed in its usual lines, but the moment she crossed behind the truck, his gaze followed. When she came back with the water, it lifted. When she passed him the bottle, their fingers touched, and the hand did not pull away a fraction later than it should have, and it was only the fraction.

Silas saw it. She watched him see it.

He turned the cigarette over in his fingers. He looked at Roman, and at her, and at Roman again. Something moved behind the gray eyes, quick and complicated, and was gone. He didn't say a word.

Then he pushed himself off the fender, and walked over, and spoke very quietly, to no one in particular.

"The pilot is dead."

Roman's face went still.

"Marcus walked out. The co-pilot. He had a broken collarbone and a good sense of direction, and he found a farmhouse on the second day. He called Reyes." Silas tapped the cigarette against his palm. "Pereda's people were supposed to meet us at Villavicencio and did not. Reyes had a team in Bogotá in six hours. They put me in a truck."

"And the pilot?"

"Burned." A pause. "I am sorry. His name was Jim Garrity. He had three children."

"I will see that they are provided for."

"I have already done so." Silas looked at the cigarette as though he'd just remembered it. "I would like to do more. I would like to find who put a missile into a civilian aircraft with three children's father at the controls."

"So would I," said Roman.

He said it quietly. It was not the voice of a man who had lost a friend. It was the voice of a man who had lost a possession, and Vega, hearing it, felt the temperature of the afternoon drop by ten degrees.

There, she thought. That's the Harvester.

It was only a flicker. A flash of the old thing, the cold hand in the glove. Then he turned his head and looked at her, across the little patch of dust, and it softened. She could not have said how. It was something in the mouth, and the set of the jaw.

And that's the other one.

She wondered how many men there were in him. She wondered, with some alarm, how many she was prepared to love.

…

They drove four hours to a landing strip carved into the plains, a stretch of packed dirt with a windsock and a hangar made of corrugated tin. A small jet sat at the end of it, a sleek white Citation with its engines already turning. Esteban had given Roman a shot of something strong, and he'd gone quiet in the back of the truck, with his head against the window and his hand slack.

Vega sat across from him, carefully upright, with her hands clasped between her knees.

Nobody spoke to them about it.

It was a courtesy, she realized, that the whole convoy had silently extended: eight hard men and a medic, none of whom looked at her for longer than a second. They'd found their boss with a beard and a woman. They'd drawn their own conclusions and were letting it lie.

At the foot of the airstair, Roman stopped.

"Miss Callahan," he said.

His voice was perfectly formal.

"Mr. Ashcombe."

"You will take the seat beside Silas. I will require you to review the extraction route at the first opportunity."

"Of course."

"Thank you."

She walked past him up the stairs.

He did not look at her. He did not need to. She felt it in the back of her neck, a prickle like the passing of a hand, and when she reached the cabin door and glanced back, he was looking at the horizon with an expression of exemplary calm, and the corner of his left eye was creased.

It was a weather report. It said: later.

She stepped inside, and almost smiled, and then did not, because the first thing she saw was Silas.

He was standing in the aisle, with his phone in his good hand. The screen was lit. His face was an expression she had never seen on it, and could not at first identify. It took her a full second to realize that the Foundry's right hand was frightened.

"Silas?"

He didn't answer. He read the message again. His thumb moved on the glass.

"Silas. What is it?"

"Reyes," said Silas.

"And?"

He lifted his head. The gray eyes were flat and very pale.

"He pulled the logs for the Gulfstream's flight plan," he said. "It was amended on the night before departure. The final route was transmitted to four people. Four. Reyes. Vane. Me. And the man who filed it with the tower."

"And?"

"And forty minutes later, a copy of it was sent out of the Blackthorn network to a server in the Caymans. A server I have seen before."

She felt her stomach drop.

"The Meridian wire," she said.

"The same account." Silas lowered the phone. "That missile did not find us, Callahan. It was aimed. Somebody told Kessler where we would be, and when, and at what altitude, and somebody inside Blackthorn made sure that it was true."

Behind her on the stairs, a shadow fell across the sunlight. A slow, uneven footstep, the tap of a crutch.

Roman Ashcombe stood in the doorway, and looked at the phone, and then at Silas, and then at her. His face was already closing, door by door, room by room, like a house at night.

"Tell me," he said softly.

Silas told him.

It was a four-minute taxi to the end of the runway. The pilot did not wait for a clearance.