“This is the blowhole at Wupatki,” he mumbled. He remembered the park ranger’s estimation of the cavern system beneath it.
Seven billion cubic feet . . . stretching for miles.
That had proven to be true—and might even be an underestimation.
Hank could not restrain his excitement. “This must be how the surviving Anasazi escaped the massacre here. They fled down here, crossed underground through this cavern system, and set up a new home beneath the other blowhole. There they lived until the flood wiped them out.”
With one mystery solved, Painter faced another.
He reached up and rattled the grill. “It’s padlocked.”
“No worries.” Kowalski pushed forward and raised his pistol. “I got the key.”
Chapter 30
June 1, 2:08 A.M.
Nashville, Tennessee
“They’re still hunting you,” Kat said, her voice sounding tinny through the cheap disposable phone. “They will be all night.”
Gray sat in the passenger seat of a nondescript white Ford van—the more nondescript the better, it seemed, according to Kat’s report. They’d ditched the muscle car hours ago in a wooded park outside of Bowling Green and hot-wired their new vehicle from a used-car lot. The van shouldn’t be missed until the dealership opened in the morning.
Still, they kept moving, knowing that the dragnet for the escaped Fort Knox terrorists would be ever widening. To stay ahead of it, they traveled back roads, avoiding main thoroughfares, threading their way south until they reached Nashville.
“You’ve got everyone looking for you,” Kat continued. “FBI, military intelligence, civilian law enforcement. It’s still a clusterfuck out here in D.C., especially with all of this coming down in the middle of the night. Now that the terrorist flag has been raised, everyone’s scrambling.”
As Monk drove slowly through a suburban industrial park on the outskirts of Nashville, Gray glanced to the backseat. Seichan sat with her arms crossed, staring at the dark mix of warehouses, supply stores, and mechanic shops. Because of her past crimes, she was not officially a member of Sigma. She could never be. Her recruitment as an asset and spy was known only by a small handful of people within their organization, all well trusted. To the rest of the world’s intelligence agencies, she remained a wanted terrorist, a deadly assassin for hire.
“How did that alert at Fort Knox get raised in the first place?” Gray asked. “All of our identification was solid. What tipped them off? We were scanned and photographed at the depository. Did Seichan’s picture get flagged by some database?”
“I’m still working on that,” Kat replied. “But I can tell you the alert wasn’t generated from Fort Knox. It came from an outside source, but I can’t trace it. At least not right now. It’s too early. Everyone is still covering his or her ass at this point. I imagine files are being shredded all over D.C.”
“So we were set up. It was an ambush from the start.” He could guess who orchestrated it all, picturing the officer in charge at Fort Knox. “Any further news on Waldorf?”
Gray had spoken to Kat an hour ago after purchasing the disposable cell phone. The conversation had been brief as she tried to quell a hundred fires while blowing chaff to keep Sigma’s involvement a secret and misdirecting the nation’s various intelligence and security agencies to keep Gray and his teammates from getting caught.
“No,” she said. “I’ve made numerous inquires, but Waldorf vanished shortly after the base alert got raised. But he must be hunting for you as desperately as everyone else.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It was one of the reasons I was calling you back. To warn you. The Learjet that you took from D.C. was blown up in midair about fifteen minutes ago, shortly after taking off from the Louisville Airport. A blast took out the tail section. Estimates are that it was a bomb tied to an altimeter timer. The plane reached a certain height and the ordnance blew.”
Gray remembered the young pilot. A hot coal of anger settled deep in his belly. “Waldorf was gunning for us. But he must have known we wouldn’t be on that plane.”
He squeezed a fist on his knee as he realized what this meant. The bombing was an act of pure vengeance, a murderous tantrum after Waldorf had been thwarted.
“I thought you should know,” Kat warned. “It’s another reason you must keep moving.”
“Understood.” He heard her sigh loudly, sensing more was to come. “What?”
“I heard from Dr. Janice Cooper again.”
It took Gray a moment to place that name—then he remembered. “She was working with that Japanese physicist.”