"I don't need to shoot," I said, reaching into my recovered Pelican case on the floorboard and pulling out the heavy orange transponder beacon that Mitchell had tried to drown in the ditch. "I just need to light the board."
I flipped the toggle switch on the beacon's side panel, entering the emergency sequence: Bravo-Niner-Seven-Override.
The moment the circuit completed, the radio antenna on the Suburban's roof hummed with twenty thousand watts of omnidirectional tactical broadcast power. It wasn't an encrypted voice channel. It was the high-priority transponder burst that overrode every emergency receiver within fifteen square miles, burning straight through Gentry’s bypassed county frequencies, the local police towers, and the state police dispatch center in Culpeper.
The recorded automated voice of the United States Secret Service Command Desk tore through the silence of every open speaker in the county:
All stations, all stations. This is Federal Relay Alpha. A Category-One operational breach is in progress on Fauquier County Bypass Twelve. All local jurisdiction is suspended under Presidential Directive Forty-Four. Any vehicle or armed personnel attempting to approach the railway cut without transponder authentication will be engaged with lethal force by airborne assets. Stand down immediately.
Through the windshield, as we crested the high rim of the logging road, the wet valley below opened up.
Beneath the railway bridge, the stalled dump truck sat dark and lifeless across the blacktop. But the moment the transponder pulse hit the air, the two red heat blooms on the timber ridge stopped moving. One of them threw his pack down into the briars; the other turned and began scrambling wildly back toward an unmarked white utility truck parked behind an abandoned timber shed.
Vance did not slow down. He drove the Suburban off the crest of the dirt road, the heavy suspension crashing into the drainage ditch at the base of the highway grade, tires flinging mud and torn gravel forty feet into the wet trees as we slid onto the asphalt of Bypass Twelve, pinning the white utility truck against the timber shed before its driver could drop the transmission into reverse.
The driver’s door of the utility truck flew open.
A man in a brown county maintenance jacket stumbled out into the glare of our headlights, his boots skidding across the wet oil slick of the turnaround. He had an unclipped handheld radio in his left hand and an open file folder in his right.
It was Captain Raymond Gentry.
His face was flushed red, his service weapon still snapped into its leather holster, his eyes darting from our armored bumper to the black Suburban blocking his retreat. When he saw my face through the rain-streaked windshield—the torn suit, the mud from the ditch line dried across my jaw, and the orange transponder beacon humming steady on the dash—the papers slipped from his fingers, scattering into the wind and plastering themselves against the wet tires of his truck.
"Hayes?" Gentry whispered, his voice cracking against the wind. "Mitchell was supposed to have you in the basement cells at Warrenton."
"Mitchell is sitting in his own cage at mile marker fourteen," I said, stepping down onto the highway with my arm held tight against my ribs. "And your impound slip is on the federal record."
From the southern end of the bypass, the deep, rhythmic wail of six state police cruisers tore through the rainy valley, their flashing blue lights painting the underbelly of the low clouds in pulsing rings of sapphire light. The corridor was no longer silent. The trap had collapsed, and the man who built it was standing alone in the ditch with his own paperwork at his feet.
CHAPTER 4: What The Morning Disclosed
The wind off the Blue Ridge had begun to shear the rain into a fine, freezing needle-spray by the time four unmarked black Suburbans and two marked state cruisers sealed the four-way apron of the timber turnaround.
Captain Raymond Gentry remained on his knees against the crushed shale. His fingers stayed splayed in the red Virginia silt where his paperwork had plastered itself against his boot leather. He did not look at the tactical agents fanning out through the dripping scrub. He did not look up when Special Agent Vance snapped a pair of hinged peerless restraints around his wrists, looping the double-strand chain behind his lumbar spine.