Exit Strategy

THREE

Lark stumbled across the dark room, slammed into a chair that blocked the path to the door.

She pushed the chair out of the way, raced to the door. Escape. That’s all she wanted.

But Cyrus had risked his life for her, and running meant leaving him behind. Injured? She didn’t think so. She’d tossed the lamp at John’s head, saw it make contact a split second before the room went dark. At least, that’s what she thought she’d seen. She wasn’t sure. Her hands had been shaking. Her body had been shaking, all the adrenaline and fear pouring out. She might have missed her mark, seen what she wanted to see rather than what was.

She reached the door, could have run through the hall and out back, raced through the cemetery and climbed the fence, been in the woods and heading toward civilization in minutes.

But she couldn’t leave Cyrus.

No matter how much her brain was screaming that she should.

She ran her hand along the wall, found the light switch and flicked it on. Turned to face the men.

Cyrus knelt beside John’s prone body, his eyes dark, his expression unreadable. He looked tough and hard, his black security jacket hanging open to reveal his shoulder holster.

“Is he dead?” she managed to ask, her throat so tight she barely got the words out.

“Not even close.” He took the handcuffs from his belt, turned John onto his stomach, yanked his arms up behind his back and cuffed him.

“I hope I didn’t hurt him too badly.”

“I hate to tell you this, Lark, but hurting McDermott is the least of your worries.” He removed John’s gun belt. “You know how to use a firearm?”

“Yes.” Joshua had taught her to load a rifle and a handgun, and she’d become a decent marksman in the years she’d lived in Amos Way. Owning firearms, understanding how to use them, that was part of a sustainable lifestyle, part of self-reliance and living off the grid. It had been a while since she’d been out shooting, but she hadn’t forgotten.

“Put this on.” He thrust the gun belt into her hands.

Obviously, he wasn’t worried about her using the gun on him.

She took the belt, buckled it around her waist. John wasn’t a small guy, and she wasn’t a big woman. Especially not now. Three months in Amos Way reliving all the good times and that one really bad time, a week in the prison trailer avoiding drugged food, and she’d lost any extra weight she’d ever had on her.

The belt slid to her hips, and she pulled it back up.

“Come here.” Cyrus grabbed the front of the belt, dragged her close, used his knife to dig a hole through thick leather. “Try that.”

It was perfect.

Of course.

Cyrus seemed like that kind of guy. The guy who never made a mistake, who didn’t hesitate, who knew exactly what needed to be done and how to do it.

He opened a desk drawer, rifled through it. Opened another one.

“What are you looking for?”

“Keys. Elijah’s car is parked just outside the gate. We might be able to use it.”

“Only if we can get out of the gate without being shot,” she responded. Elijah was the only member of the group allowed to have a car. The other vehicles were kept in a large garage built two decades ago. Her in-laws kept an old Cadillac there. Her car was there, too, the old Ford Mustang parked close to the garage doors, the key handed over to her father-in-law when she entered the compound. No way did she plan to go back to her in-laws’ place to look for it. She wasn’t going back for her notebook either. Maybe she should. She’d written notes in it, kept track of every delivery to the compound and every shipment that left it. That had to be the key to understanding Joshua’s death, and until she understood it, she couldn’t move forward, couldn’t move on.

“No keys anyway,” Cyrus said, closing the last drawer. “No phone. There’s no external internet connection on the computer. It’s networked with the ones in the security barracks, but there’s no access to the outside world.”

“Are you sure?”

“I snuck in here a few nights ago to check.”

“There’s a phone in Elijah’s house.”

“We’re not going to risk going there.”

John moaned, turned onto his back, his eyes open but unfocused.

“We could take him with us,” she suggested. “He could probably get us a ride out of here.”

“Get us killed you mean. We’ve got two guns and two people. The security team is ten times as strong. And I can tell you from bunking with them for a few nights, they couldn’t care less about their fearless leader.” He logged on to the computer, typed a password in. “If Elijah gives orders to take us down, they’re not going to care if John goes down with us.”

She hadn’t thought about that, but he was right. Elijah led the pack. John followed his orders. “We could break into one of the storage units. All the hunting rifles and ammunition are kept there.” Along with whatever had recently been delivered. She wouldn’t mind getting a peek at that while they were there.

“Too risky.”

“Without risk there can be no great reward.”

“You sound like Essex,” he muttered, his fingers flying over the keys. She didn’t know what he was doing, but a code seemed to be forming on the computer screen.

“Thank you.”

“Did I say that was a compliment?”

“Doesn’t matter if you did or not. I like Essex. He’s a great guy.” She took the knife from the sheath that hung from John’s gun belt, used it to pry open the file cabinet.

There wasn’t much in it. Just alphabetized birth and wedding certificates.

She closed the drawer, glanced around the room.

“You’re not going to find what you want here,” Cyrus said.

“What do you know about what I want?”

“You want to shut Clayton down.”

“True.”

“You want to prove he had your husband killed. Or that he pulled the trigger.”

“Also true.”

“You should have gone to the police. Asked for professional help.”

“I did. They needed evidence that a crime was committed. Something more than just my gut instincts.”

“You came back to find it?”

“I came back because my in-laws asked me to visit.” Looking for evidence had been a side product of that.

“Right.” He continued to type rapidly, his attention seeming to be completely focused on what he was doing.

“It’s true. They sent a couple of letters at the end of the school year, asked if I had any photographs of Joshua that they could have.”

“I thought this place frowned on cameras and photographs and all those modern type things.”

“It does, but Elijah made an exception because my mother-in-law, Maria, was grieving so much. I made some copies of our wedding photos and brought them with me.”

“You’re more naive than Essex thinks if you believe your in-laws wanted you back here for photographs.”

“I had my own reasons for coming back.” And she had believed her in-laws. At first. Later, when there’d been excuse after excuse for keeping her at the compound, when she hadn’t been allowed access to computers, cars, the outside world, she’d realized she was a prisoner. She hadn’t tried to escape. She’d been too focused on her goal to worry, too sure she’d be able to find the evidence she needed to be very concerned.

That was its own kind of naïveté.

Or maybe stupidity.

Fortunately, it hadn’t gotten her killed.

Yet.

“You do realize that we’re trapped in a compound with a dozen armed men who aren’t going to want to let us escape, right?” she asked, stepping to the door and looking out into the hall. The church was still silent, the hallway and the sanctuary beyond it dark. That didn’t mean they were safe. In Amos Way, nothing was ever what it was supposed to be. Even her in-laws weren’t what they’d claimed. They’d told her she was a daughter to them, that they loved her as much as they’d loved their own children. She doubted they’d have let one of their kids rot in a trailer for five days.

“I am very aware of our situation,” he responded calmly.

“Then, maybe you could hurry?”

“If I hurry and type in the wrong thing, we’re sunk.”

“We’re sunk anyway,” she muttered.

“Essex didn’t tell me you were a pessimist.”

“I’m a realist.” And realistically, she couldn’t see any way out of the mess she’d gotten herself into.

Faith. That’s what Joshua would have said. Faith and God could move mountains.

She’d tried to hold on to that after he’d died. Mostly she had. There were days when she struggled, when she wondered why God’s plan included pain and heartache. On days like that, she had to remind herself of the good times and the blessings.

“Got it!” Cyrus pushed away from the desk, grabbed her hand and dragged her out into the hall.

He moved so fast, they were out the back door and in the old cemetery before she could think about the danger. Moonlight shone on crumbling headstones, casting long shadows across overgrown grass and weeds. The fence was a few hundred yards ahead. She’d climbed it before, in the first heady months of marriage when she and Joshua had been giddy with happiness, when they’d thought they’d live in Amos Way for a few years, teach school there, repay Joshua’s college debt to the compound and then move on with their lives.

They’d had it all planned out. Once upon a time.

She tripped over gnarled weeds, nearly landed face-first in the fence. She grabbed the chain link, started scrambling up it without any prodding from Cyrus. They were on limited time. Eventually someone would realize the cameras were down, sound the alarm and the compound would spring to life, all Elijah’s security force rushing to find the reason why.

She reached the top of the fence, realized she didn’t have a jacket or coat to throw over the barbed wire.

“Here.” Cyrus tossed his coat over the jagged barbs.

She scrambled over the top, the barbs poking through the coat, the alarm finally sounding, screaming its warning through the still night.

* * *

Cyrus should have found a way to take out the alarm, but he hadn’t wanted to take the time to do it. Lark had been right about the number of armed men and their chances of surviving. They needed to move quickly, stay a step ahead of the men who would be tracking them. On his own, he could have done it easily. He wasn’t so sure about managing it with Lark. She was moving well, up and over the fence without a problem, but adrenaline would wear off eventually. When it did, she’d be done.

He needed to get them away from the threat before then.

That wasn’t going to be easy. No car. No phone. No means of communication with civilization. The closest highway was a few miles away, the rural road that led to it too obvious a means of escape. There’d be security guards there in minutes, blocking any chance of using that route.

He clambered over the fence, grabbed his coat as he climbed down the other side.

Lark was just ahead of him, moving at a fast jog, heading straight for the road.

“Wrong way.” He snagged the back of her sweater, headed in the opposite direction, towing her along with him.

“We need to get to the road,” she protested. “We might be able to get a ride from someone.”

“How many cars use that road, Lark?”

“Not many.”

“None. Unless they’re heading here,” he corrected. He needed her completely committed to his plan, absolutely determined to do things his way.

“You never know,” she replied. “Sometimes people get lost. Sometimes they turn onto the road and make it all the way to the compound before they realize they’re heading the wrong way.”

“And sometimes it snows in April, but not often enough to count on. The woods are a better choice.”

“The road is the quicker, straighter route out.”

She was persistent, he’d give her that, but he was calling the shots from now until they made it to safety. “If we want to die. I don’t.”

She was silent after that, stumbling along beside him as he ran toward edge of the woods that spread out from the border of the compound. He’d studied maps before he’d arrived. He knew how deep the woods were, how secluded Amos Way was. Built on land that had once housed a logging business, the compound was surrounded by thousands of acres of deep forest. To the north, fifty miles of wilderness fed into federal land. To the east, more woods and an abandoned ski lodge. From there, they could access the highway. They just had to make it across twenty miles of forest.

The siren shut off abruptly, and Lark grabbed his arm, her fingers cold through his shirt. She was shaking, and he dropped his coat around her shoulders, knowing it wasn’t the cold that was getting to her.

“It’s okay,” he tried to reassure her, but she had to know it wasn’t okay. They were in trouble, and if he’d had a cell phone, he’d have called the team, brought in the cavalry.

He didn’t have a cell phone, didn’t have any hope of backup.

He had nothing but himself, enough years and experience to get them through, and the kind of tired worn-out faith that probably should have been buried years ago.

He’d held on to it, though. It was the one thing he had left from the time he’d had with his parents. They’d believed with everything they were that God had a plan, that He’d lead them in the right direction. That direction had led them to the Congo and mission work that had gotten them killed and his sister kidnapped. Cyrus had been twelve, left with the pastor of their church because his parents had thought he was too young to travel to the Congo.

When they’d died, he’d been angry, but he didn’t blame God. They’d put themselves in a dangerous situation for the sake of people they didn’t know.

He couldn’t fault them for it either.

He knew what it was like to willingly go in where others wouldn’t, to risk everything for a stranger. Like his parents, he’d committed his life to saving others. Only he wasn’t saving souls. He was saving lives. And, he wasn’t pulling a family into it, wasn’t going to leave anyone behind if he was killed.

A dog howled. A second joined it.

Lark’s grip tightened and she glanced over her shoulder, her hair flying out in a mass of tangled curls. He should have made her tie it back, because it was bound to get caught on branches and limbs as they moved through the dense forest. There wasn’t time now.

“Looking back isn’t going to change anything,” he said quietly.

“It’s going to keep me from being surprised when the dogs lunge.”

“They’re still in the compound.”

“They won’t be for long.”

“Which is the best reason for moving forward instead of looking back.”

“Stop being reasonable and smart, Cyrus. It’s annoying when I’m working up to full-out panic.” She slid her arms through his coat sleeves, her hands trembling as she tried to zip it. He brushed her fingers away, had the zipper up in seconds.

“If you panic, we’re both sunk, so you’re going to have to hold things together until we get somewhere safe.”

“I don’t know how safe River Fork is. The town has ties with Amos Way.”

“Do they?” That was something he hadn’t known, and it wasn’t something he was happy to hear.

“Elijah grew up there. His half brother is the town sheriff.”

“You think he’s dirty?” He shoved through thick foliage, holding back a heavy pine bough as Lark stepped past.

“I don’t know. He ran the investigation into my husband’s death.”

“And ruled it accidental?”

“Yes.”

“You think he was covering up for someone?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know. He presented his findings to me and my in-laws. It all sounded good.”

“But?”

“Maybe I just don’t want to think my husband could have been careless enough to clean a loaded rifle.”

“Or maybe Elijah’s brother helped him get away with murder?”

She didn’t respond.

He wasn’t sure if she was thinking about her answer or if she was too tired to speak. Her breath panted out, hoarse and raspy and a little too ragged for his liking. They had a long way to go. All of it on foot. If she couldn’t make it, he’d have no choice but to stay and fight. He didn’t have enough firepower to have any hope of success against Elijah’s security team.

He’d try, though.

If he had to.

He prayed he wouldn’t, the words forming and taking flight before he’d even realized the depth of his desperation. He wanted out of the woods and away from Amos Way, he wanted a safe place to hunker down and come up with a plan. He might not know what was going on in Elijah Clayton’s religious utopia, but he planned to find out. When he did, he’d take the man and his followers down without a second thought or a moment of regret.

There were too many wounded people in the world searching for places to belong. Amos Way wasn’t the kind of place they should end up, because it was the kind of place people never returned from. In his estimation, that was the kind of place that should be shut down for good, and he was just the kind of guy to do it.

Behind them, a dog howled, the sound too close for comfort.

A man shouted something, and Cyrus grabbed Lark’s hand, dragging her into a full-out run.

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