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She was convinced he had another weapon on him. Not that she could do anything about it.
He gestured toward the building, and she and Jen began walking in that direction. Jen looked shell-shocked and furious, but she stared straight ahead as her shoes crunched on the frost-covered grass. She made no further effort to protest, almost as if part of her was glad they were getting to see inside the compound.
Butler walked close behind them, his AK-47 leveled inches from Evelyn’s back.
“You staying?” Butler asked gruffly, and it took Evelyn a minute to realize he was talking to Rolfe.
She frowned and glanced over her shoulder.
Rolfe had fallen into step behind Butler, but his eyes locked on Evelyn’s as soon as she looked at him.
She stumbled, then averted her gaze. Why wouldn’t Butler’s lieutenant stay? Unless he wasn’t a lieutenant. Unless he had some other role at the cult. But what role would require him to leave? Then again, why had the driver of the truck left?
What the hell was going on at the Butler Compound?
* * *
“You’re going to Montana,” the head of BAU told Greg Ibsen as soon as he walked through the door of his boss’s office.
“What?” Greg stopped abruptly in the dull gray room. “Did Evelyn’s interview with Cartwright give us something?”
Greg tried to keep the surprise out of his voice. He’d been a profiler with BAU a long time. Long enough to know when Dan Moore was sending someone on a long-shot assignment as punishment.
Dan frowned at him, probably able to read every thought running through his mind, since he was a profiler, too. “No.” He tapped his pen against the towering pile of legal pads on his desk. “There’s another situation in Montana.”
“If Evelyn’s already there, maybe she should take it,” Greg suggested. He’d trained Evelyn, and he knew her as well as anyone could. Whatever the case was, she could handle it. And if Dan didn’t start giving her real assignments again soon, he was afraid she’d leave the unit.
“Too late. She’s on her way back,” Dan dismissed him, draining his cup of coffee as if it was water. “You’ll probably pass each other in the air. Besides, she doesn’t have much experience with this kind of case.”
“What is it?” Greg asked, dreading the call home he’d have to make, telling his son, Josh, that he’d be missing his first hockey game. Greg’s family was used to it; this was the life of an FBI agent. But it still wasn’t easy to hear their disappointment, shaded with resignation—as though they’d expected him to cancel.
“The Salt Lake City office has an agent who went off on an unsanctioned call. Her boss says she’s got a hard-on for the Butler Compound, a cult out in the Montana wilderness that’s technically under the Salt Lake City office jurisdiction. He’s pretty sure she went there. About an hour ago, her supervisor got a call from her. Apparently, she didn’t say a word when he picked up, but he heard part of a conversation, then a gunshot.”
“Okay,” Greg said slowly. “And they want a profiler because...?” It sounded like they needed the Salt Lake City SWAT team, fast.
“Because they haven’t had contact with the agent, and they don’t know her status. They aren’t a hundred percent sure she’s there, and the cult is a survivalist group. Completely antigovernment and, although they’ve never displayed aggression before, these people are skilled with their weapons. The Salt Lake City office is afraid a show of force will start a firefight.”
“Then shouldn’t I be reviewing the Butler Compound information from here to give them a profile?” Greg asked. He didn’t mind going to Montana if they really needed him, but he didn’t see how being on-site would help in this case. Especially since there wasn’t even a confirmed “site” yet.
Dan sighed and opened the top drawer of his desk, where Greg suspected his boss kept endless bottles of antacids. But instead of popping any, Dan closed the drawer again, looking pensive. “You’re heading out with a CIRG contingent. A hostage negotiator and a group from HRT.”
The Critical Incident Response Group was a special group within the FBI, made up of teams that could respond instantly to any serious emergency, anywhere in the United States or abroad. BAU was part of CIRG, the only part not located in Quantico, the next town over.
If he was going with a hostage negotiator and a bunch of Hostage Rescue Team agents, that meant someone high up expected things to turn very, very bad. The kind of bad that required more than just a local SWAT team. The kind of bad that required HRT agents, who did absolutely nothing but train for and execute tactical missions.
Unease settled in Greg’s stomach, along with the hint of anticipation that always came with a new case to profile. That was what had kept him in BAU for going on nine years. “What don’t I know?”
“Most of it you do know,” Dan replied, just as his phone began to ring. He tapped a button to silence it. “We’re looking to avoid an armed standoff here. But if this agent is inside that compound, we have to get her out.”
Greg nodded. The last time someone from the antifederalist movement had stood up to the government, it had become a media spectacle that seemed likely to turn violent at any minute. But the FBI, as well as local and state police, had walked away.
That incident in Nevada had driven all the wackos out of the woodwork. They’d shown up to pledge their support to the rancher who’d refused to move his cattle off federal land. And then they’d hidden in the surrounding brush, aiming rifles at federal agents from all directions and posting the images online.
It was a miracle no one had fired a shot. Greg knew the chances of another ending that peaceful were slim.
“I assume I need to head over to Quantico?” Greg asked, starting for the door.
“Hold on,” Dan said, his tone weary. “There’s one more thing.”
“You have a file on the Butler Compound?”
“Yes, but it’s thin. We evaluated the group last year, at the request of this Martinez agent, the one who’s missing now.”
“And?”
“And we considered them a low threat, basically a cult that wanted to be left alone to live without federal interference. They’re bound together by their desire to live off the grid. There’s probably a religious component tying them together, too, although we don’t have evidence of that yet. It’s a group that wouldn’t strike out unless the government showed up on their doorstep, but a genuine danger if that happened. Vince did the analysis.”
Vince was one of their old-timers, a legend who’d finally retired and gone into the private security consulting business a month ago. BAU was still looking for his replacement.
“That’s good, as long as we can stay off their doorstep,” Greg said slowly, because he sensed something worse was about to follow.
“Martinez kept insisting Butler was a Bubba.”
Bubba was slang in law enforcement circles for a homegrown terrorist.
Greg was skeptical. “She thought a cult leader was a Bubba?”
“Not just him,” Dan replied. “The whole group of them.”
“That’d be pretty unusual, especially for survivalist types.”
Precedent said that kind of personality—an extremist antifederal homegrown terrorist—was a lone wolf. Someone who’d try and fail to fit into fringe militia and survivalist groups, then finally set out on his own to wreak havoc.
Not a cult member, who looked to a leader to provide identity. And certainly not a cult leader, who derived power and purpose from having a group of people to do his bidding and treat him like a god. If that cult leader sent his followers out to commit terrorist acts, he’d be breaking up his little kingdom. With no one left to worship him, what would be the point of his cult?
Greg took the file Dan handed over. “You now think Martinez could be right?”
“No. But I think her constantly going there for answers might’ve pushed the group into endgame mode. We could be looking at people who are ready to barricade themselves in their compound and defend it to the death. Or mass suicide.”
Greg frowned, suddenly understanding why he was being sent to Montana. “And if there’s a chance Martinez is there, we have to go in, anyway.”
Dan nodded grimly. “Exactly.”
3
“We need to move,” Jen whispered as a faint sliver of light tracked over the right side of her face and onto the floor.
“We need a plan,” Evelyn countered just as quietly. “They took your car keys. We’re in the middle of the wilderness, without supplies.” Cold as it was inside the compound, which felt like it didn’t have any heat, at least it was well-insulated. Outside, it was much, much colder. Which could mean frostbite and death from exposure.
“Besides,” she continued, “even if we get the SUV started, I’m guessing they’ve closed that big gate by now, and they’re going to hear us. You saw what kind of shot Butler is.”
Jen eased the door closed again.
They’d been locked inside a storage room in the compound, off the side entrance. Butler and Rolfe had left them here twenty minutes earlier, so with any luck they’d gone straight to bed. Or to some room far away in the compound.
But Evelyn didn’t know anything about the place, including who else was there, or where a weapon or car keys might be located. And given the layout—with that big lookout tower on top of the building—she suspected someone would spot them long before they got to the gate.
“I have a plan,” Jen said as she tucked strands of hair back into her bun. She’d broken six bobby pins before managing to unlock the door.
“Yeah, what is it?” Evelyn asked, grabbing her arm before she inched open the door again. “Do you have any idea how many we’re up against here?”
When they’d first been shoved into the room, they’d sat silently, their ears pressed against the door, listening to Butler and Rolfe talk. Rolfe had convinced Butler not to kill them—for now.
But Evelyn had heard the words leverage and stall for time, which made her nervous. Especially since she still wasn’t sure what was going on here.
Because as much as Jen insisted they were terrorists, she had no real evidence. And nothing to support her theory except her gut.
To Evelyn, the place might not have seemed like a typical cult headquarters, but it didn’t seem like a terrorist hideout, either.
Once Butler and his lieutenant were gone, Evelyn had tried the door handle, discovering without surprise that it was locked. While Jen worked on it, Evelyn had tried to question her. But Jen had been uncharacteristically silent, pensive as she’d shimmied the bobby pins into the lock.
Rubbing her arms for warmth, Evelyn tried questioning her again now. “How many cultists are there?”
“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.
Basically it was a clusterfuck. No one knew anything useful, they couldn’t talk to the cultists—who might or might not be terrorists—and they couldn’t storm the place.
As he stood, Kyle swept the area in front of him, using his night-vision goggles. Fog had crept in, meaning his NVGs were set to Active, so they could bounce an infrared light off any objects in front of him.
Without that, he couldn’t see much of anything. But if the cultists had their own NVGs—which was entirely possible with a group of survivalists—they’d be able to see the beam. They’d be able to see him.
Worry about what you can control, Kyle reminded himself as he inched slowly forward through the dry, stiff pine needles and a layer of frost. Every step was precise, careful, silent. The survivalists might have the equipment, and they might be practiced at living off the land, but they didn’t have his training.
Snipers were in position on the peak behind the compound, with eyes on the tower, which had remained empty so far. HRT was acting on the assumption that no one knew they were trying to get a closer look.
“We think we’ve got another agent inside.” That was the voice of Sam “Yankee” McGivern, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge who ran HRT. His tone was dire and he paused long enough that Kyle froze.
“Mac,” Yankee continued, “the warden over at the prison just called BAU. Evelyn’s rental car is still in the lot. One of his guards saw her get in Jen’s vehicle hours ago. She never made her plane.”
Dread rushed over him, but he shoved it back and kept moving, until he was behind the cover of a pathetic-looking fir tree. “Anyone been able to reach her?”
“No. We’re not getting anything from Jen’s phone, but Evelyn’s cell pings off a tower around here, and we’ve got a lock on Jen’s vehicle, a few miles away from the compound. We just sent agents to check it out.”
“Okay,” Kyle said, instead of the string of curses he wanted to let loose. Mind on the mission, he reminded himself.
He understood why Yankee had wanted him, in particular, to know. Every one of his teammates, listening on the call, would realize why Yankee was telling him, too. From the second he’d met Evelyn, a year and a half ago, he’d been drawn to her. Initially it was because she was so serious, so focused on work and nothing else, that he couldn’t help teasing her. But her allure had soon become very different.
It had gotten so bad that even his boss knew he was interested—how could he not, when Kyle found regular excuses to jog over to the BAU office at Aquia to see her? What none of them knew was that, finally, Evelyn was interested in return.
She was the one who’d wanted to keep the fact that they’d started seeing each other three months ago a secret. Agents in the Bureau could date, but they couldn’t date and work in the same squad. And although BAU and HRT were different units, they traveled together regularly for critical missions.
The rules there were murky; Evelyn’s determination to protect her job above all else was not.
Or at least it hadn’t been, for most of the time he’d known her. Ever since they’d returned from solving her friend’s case, she’d slowly begun to lose the intense drive that had drawn him in from the second he’d met her. Her boss had been giving her bullshit assignments, but the old Evelyn would have fought him on it. The new Evelyn just took them. Lately, he hardly recognized her.
“Keep us updated,” Gabe said into his mic, which reminded Kyle that he’d gone silent for too long.
“Let’s move,” he whispered, treading carefully from the cover of one scraggly, snow-dusted tree to the next. They didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with here, but what they did know was that survivalists were talented at making booby traps, and cultists were notoriously paranoid. Not a good combination.
Kyle kept up his painfully slow, steady pace until they were close to the large building at the back of the compound. Behind him, Gabe moved just as silently; the only reason Kyle knew he was there was from years of working together.
Finally, Kyle’s hand grazed the solid exterior of the building. Was Evelyn in there? Was she okay?
“Technical coverage coming up,” Gabe whispered into the bone mic at his throat. He slipped a hand into one of the pockets in his flight suit, and then pressed it against the building wall, leaving behind a sophisticated eavesdropping device that actually looked like a fly.
The communications technicians who worked with HRT were not only geniuses, they also had a sense of humor. Too bad that, right now, Kyle didn’t find much of anything funny.
Gabe tapped his arm and Kyle moved around the corner, toward the side where they’d be at the highest risk of being spotted. Kyle watched every step, and nodded his NVGs at a set of deep tire tracks that rounded the bend and stopped near a steel door. Big tracks, probably from a large truck.
He couldn’t keep himself from looking back at the door, and his desire to test the lever made his hands tense around his MP-5. His feet seemed stuck in place as his need to search for Evelyn intensified.
Then Gabe was beside him, pointing forward because this close to the compound they didn’t even want to whisper.