Seized

“I don’t know,” Jen whispered. “Maybe a dozen. Maybe two dozen. I’ve never gotten inside before.”

“I didn’t see anyone besides Butler and Rolfe.”

“Trust me. They’re here,” Jen said, her tone certain.

“Did you recognize Rolfe? Is he Butler’s second-in-command?”

Jen frowned. “No. Not him. I’ve never seen Rolfe before tonight. But I recognized the one driving the truck.”

Evelyn leaned closer. “Who was he?”

“I’m not sure.” She sounded frustrated. “I know I’ve seen him before, and he doesn’t belong here. He’s not a survivalist. I’m sure I know him in connection with work. I can’t remember exactly where I’ve seen him. But it’ll come to me.”

“Okay. Well, do you think the fact that you recognized him had anything to do with Butler freaking out? Or was it just because we’re on his land and we saw him carrying illegal weapons, something we could charge him on?”

“I honestly don’t know. Let’s talk about it later. Right now, we need to go.” She peeked out the doorway again, then nodded at Evelyn and stepped through it.

Holding in a curse, Evelyn followed. She squinted in the dim light of the hallway, before glancing back.

“Wait,” she told Jen, noticing bottles of bleach and other cleaning supplies in the cabinet. Maybe there was something in there they could use.

But Jen must not have heard her whisper, because she was still moving. And she was moving in the wrong direction. Farther into the compound instead of back toward the exit.

Evelyn hurried after her, running on her tiptoes to avoid clicking her heels on the wood slat floors. A pair of sconces, mounted on the walls and giving off less light than a twenty-five-watt bulb, cast shadows as she hurried forward. Grabbing hold of Jen’s sleeve, she demanded, “Where are you going?”

Jen tried to shake her off. “I’ll never get another chance to be inside this place. We have to see what’s in here.”

Evelyn gripped the older woman’s sleeve tighter. “Butler wants to kill us. We need to get out of here. And we need a plan, because driving out the gate seems like a long shot.”

“I’m not leaving,” Jen insisted. “I already told you. I’m not going to be the person who missed a threat inside our borders. This is my chance to get real intel on these people. And this is your chance to get a close-up look and give me a profile.”

“Damn it,” Evelyn muttered as Jen pulled free and darted through the doorway ahead.

Was this how her own colleagues felt working with her? Evelyn knew she had a reputation as someone who wasn’t a team player, and she could admit to herself that it was deserved. But Jen’s tunnel vision was ridiculous.

This was a really bad idea. Why the hell had she agreed to come with Jen? She should’ve left the prison, gotten some dinner while she wrote up her report about yet another worthless assignment, then gone home.

She could’ve been asleep on the plane now, getting a little extra rest so she could stop by the nursing home where her grandma lived on the way to work in the morning. Instead, she was sneaking around inside a damn cult. Chances were, if they came across Butler without his more even-tempered friend, he’d use them as target practice.

Controlling her frustration, Evelyn followed, still on her toes and cursing her low-slung heels. She couldn’t leave another agent behind.

When they turned the corner into a larger room, Jen thrust out her arm and blocked Evelyn from moving any farther.

Jen put a finger to her lips and nodded toward the other end of the room.

Evelyn blinked, urging her eyes to adjust faster. This room was even darker than the short hallway, but it was big. She looked around at the three large tables, the shelves stacked with canned goods, water and MREs and a big lockbox near the back. The kind of lockbox meant to hold weapons. Unnerving, but not exactly unexpected for survivalists who carried around AK-47s.

She squinted at Jen, trying to figure out what she’d seen—and then she realized. Voices from somewhere beyond this room. Evelyn strained to make them out.

“—for bringing the supplies, Rolfe,” someone said.

“Not a problem,” Rolfe returned.

“I saw that feeb drive up again,” the first guy said. It wasn’t Butler, so Evelyn assumed he must be one of the cultists.

She glanced at Jen, who was frowning at the slur.

“It’s taken care of,” Rolfe replied.

“It’s a sign,” the first guy said, anticipation in his voice. “She’s the first of them, isn’t she? A Babylonian.”

Swear words lodged in Evelyn’s throat and she clamped her teeth together to keep them in, but she couldn’t stop herself from shaking her head at Jen.

The other agent’s jaw had gone slack with surprise.

This group was deeply mired in cultist philosophy; taking a page from the Book of Revelation, they subscribed to the idea that the end times would be heralded by the arrival of “Babylonians.” It wasn’t the first time Evelyn had heard of a cult twisting the Bible, claiming that “Babylonians” were law enforcement officials and a sign of the apocalypse. This was the clearest indication yet that they were dealing with a regular cult, and possibly one that would fight to the death to protect its land.

“No,” Rolfe said, sounding exasperated. “She’s an enemy, but she’s been handled.”

A weird response if Rolfe was the second-in-command and expected to follow Butler’s preaching, which apparently included a focus on the end times.

Evelyn frowned. This place was full of inconsistencies. But if Butler believed their arrival heralded the end times, she wasn’t going to give him any excuse to take action.

She gripped Jen’s sleeve again and tugged, gesturing back the way they’d come. If Rolfe was telling the cultist that Jen had been handled, it could mean more than just locked in a closet. It might mean that, despite his words to Butler, he expected them to be dead soon.

Jen took one last look around the huge, well-stocked room they’d entered. To Evelyn, it seemed like the domain of a group who planned to ride out a rough winter in hard terrain, not a terrorist plot in the making.

She nodded and the two of them spun back toward the hallway. In a pair of gym shoes and with longer strides, Jen made it down the hallway and to the back door faster.

Evelyn was still a few feet behind her, heart thudding and toes aching as she tried to run silently, when the back door opened from outside.

Framed in the open doorway was Ward Butler, holding his AK-47 in one hand and Jen’s car keys in the other. There was shock on his face, followed by rage.

As Evelyn slid to a stop in the center of the hallway, Butler calmly shook his head. Then he lifted his machine gun and fired.

* * *

“We’ve got a problem.”

The words echoed through Kyle McKenzie’s earphones as he slithered through the hole they’d cut at the bottom of the six-foot fence surrounding the Butler Compound. That definitely wasn’t what he wanted to hear at 6:00 a.m. as he snuck up on a group known to have stockpiled weapons.

Dampness seeped through his HRT-issued flight suit, and he fought back exhaustion. After arriving in Montana after a last-minute flight from Quantico, they’d joined the rest of the team in setting up an immediate perimeter around the Butler Compound. Now he and his partner, Gabe Fontaine, were tasked with getting closer.

“A problem. What else is new?” Gabe muttered, close behind him.

It had been nonstop since they got to Montana. They couldn’t confirm that Special Agent Jennifer Martinez, a twenty-three-year veteran with the FBI, was in the Butler Compound at all. The place had no working phone, and the leader, Ward Butler, had no cell phone registered in his name. So far, the cultists had ignored the battle phone the negotiator had tossed over the fence, as well as the requests to talk through the bullhorn.

For all they knew, no one was even here. The place looked like a ghost town, with the compound shut tight and no response at all to the FBI’s arrival.