“Forty yards,” Diana said quietly. “Third bench. Frank chose it because on a clear day you could see Mount Hood from there.”
A pause.
“It was never clear enough. We always said we’d go back on a better day.”
Sarah looked at the men Hank had placed.
“I’ll go.”
“No,” Hank said. “They’re watching for you. If you walk in, every one of them goes to high alert.”
She held his eyes.
“But a woman walking to a bench at 6:00 in the morning looks like someone who needed air. They won’t move until I find the box. They want to see where it is first. That gives you time.”
“Time for what?”
“To come in from the north and flank whoever’s covering the bench.”
Hank looked at her for a long moment.
“Your father used to think tactically like that,” he said.
“The combination,” he added as she reached for the door. “Your birthday, written out fully. Month, day, year. No abbreviations. Frank was precise about everything. Be precise.”
She nodded. Stepped out into the cold. Slipped the phone into her apron pocket, screen facing out, already transmitting.
The gravel crunched under her shoes. She kept her pace even.
A woman with somewhere to be but no urgency about getting there.
The bench appeared ahead. Wooden slats. Iron armrests.
The river moved behind it, dark and indifferent, and somewhere above the cloud cover, Mount Hood stood exactly where it always stood. Invisible this morning, like most mornings.
They always said they’d come back on a better day.
Sarah sat down, looked at the river, then leaned forward, elbows on knees, and let her hand drop to the side of the armrest support.
Cold concrete. A seam too clean to be a crack. A sealed panel that gave under pressure.
It came free with a sound like a held breath being released.
Inside was a metal box the size of a hardcover book, wrapped in heavy plastic, the tape yellowed with age but holding.
Sarah’s hand closed around it.
“Don’t move.”
The voice came from directly behind her.
She didn’t move.
The man who stepped around the bench was the one Hank couldn’t place. Mid-forties, calm in the way men are calm when violence is just a professional tool.
“Put it on the bench,” he said.
“No,” Sarah said.
Gravel shifted left and right, the others converging. Four of them now. Maybe more.
Then, from the far side of the park, an engine.
A black SUV rolled through the north gate, slow, the way things move when they believe they’ve already won.
The rear door opened, and Dale Cutter stepped out into the gray light. Sixty years old, silver hair, a jacket that cost more than Sarah made in two months, and an expression of mild, weary disappointment.
“You look exactly like him,” he said. “Same stubborn jaw, same eyes.”
He almost smiled.
“Frank was the best operator I ever had. I didn’t want what happened to happen.”
“But it happened anyway,” Sarah said.
“He made a choice. Choices have consequences.”
He held out his hand.
“Give me the box. Walk away. Your mother walks away. This ends here.”
“Like my father got to live whatever life he wanted?”
“Your father is twenty-four years gone. Nothing you do this morning brings him back. But you can still walk away from this.”