From the dark timberline across the road, a second man emerged.
He wasn't wearing a uniform. He wore high-visibility utility bibs covered in stone dust and heavy rubberized rain gear. He carried a commercial chain binder in his left hand, the heavy iron lever swinging inches above the gravel.
"He secured?" the man in bibs shouted over the rising rumble of the river below.
"Tied to the cable," Garrett replied without raising his voice. "Pilot vehicle went into the retention ditch at the four-mile marker just like Vance told them. The heavy limousines are already past the interstate split. They’re running sixty on the lower gravel bypass right now."
"What about the state board?" the man asked, coming to a halt near the front bumper. "The dispatch in the capital isn't blind. They lose carrier on the transponder for three minutes, and they trip the statewide interlock."
"They won't trip anything," Garrett said, his tone entirely level, completely devoid of hurry. "Vance logged an auxiliary road maintenance order under my sector code an hour ago. To the state board, this looks like a routine slide clearance. They think the detour is fully staffed with county escorts."
I held my breath, sliding my left knee into the shale mud to brace against the post.
The man in bibs glanced toward Garrett's cruiser. For a second, the yellow beam of his work light skimmed across the hood, catching the wet spray coming off my shoulders. He paused.
"You should've put him in the cage, Garrett. He's Secret Service advance detail. When this clears, federal inspectors are going to turn this county inside out."
"He was outside his boundary without a verified county liaison stamp," Garrett said coldly. "He refused an order to hold his position during a hazardous materials clearance. If he gets clipped by road debris while resisting, that’s on his own reckless conduct."
Garrett reached down to the belt on his hip, pulling a brass padlock key from his pocket, and handed it to the man in bibs.
"Unlock the air valves on the trailer tandems," Garrett instructed. "Drop the landing gear right onto the asphalt. Once those pins seat in the concrete, a ten-ton wrecker couldn't budge these beds before dawn. That forces Vance's tail-end chase vehicles to bottle up behind the limestone crusher."
The man in bibs nodded once and turned toward the hauler’s undercarriage.
I had ten feet of slack on the sagging cable. If I tried to jerk the rusted loop over the sheared post, the iron would screech against the galvanized washer and bring Garrett's sidearm up before I cleared the shoulder.
I looked down at the mud beneath my boots.
In the ditch where Garrett had shoved me down, right beside the rear tire of his cruiser, something glittered in the dark. It wasn't a shell casing. It was an oblong strip of heavy cardstock encased in laminated plastic, half-buried under wet pine needles.
My transport credential folder hadn't landed empty in the footwell. When Garrett had flipped it open under his cruiser's spotlight, the secondary dispatch pass—the laminated federal route override card signed by the district supervisor at four that afternoon—had slipped free and dropped into the ditch.
Taped to the bottom corner of that pass was my backup steel cuff key.
Every advance agent carried one sealed behind the county emergency transit sticker. It was standard protocol for rural security routing, a redundant precaution in case of local vehicle entrapment. Garrett hadn't checked the back of the laminate; he had assumed it was an ordinary operator ID.
The card lay four feet outside the reach of my boots.
The sound of the approaching motorcade was no longer a distant hum. The distinct, rhythmic roar of eight supercharged engines reverberated through the gorge walls, bouncing off the wet rock faces below the quarry. They were less than two miles away, climbing the blind six-percent grade toward the blocked bridge approach.
At fifty-five miles an hour on slick, unlit shale, the lead armored Suburban would need at least three hundred yards to brake once its high beams hit the unlit flatbeds.
There was no shoulder on the bridge approach. Just eighty feet of sheer rock wall on the right, and the gorge on the left.
I lowered myself into the ditch water, ignoring the icy mud soaking through my trousers, and extended my right leg until the steel toe of my boot grazed the corner of the laminate.
Garrett’s boots crunched on the gravel as he walked back toward the squad car. He stopped at the hood, resting his hands on the warm metal, staring south toward the highway cut where the headlights would first appear.