英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 28
With every movement exacted in precise counterpoint to frustration and mounting anxiety, Lumani removed scope from rifle.
Twist. Breathe. Pack. Think. If ever he hated Uncle, hated him to his core, this was that moment. So close. 
Within a minute this entire ordeal would have been over, and in that minute it suddenly wasn’t.
The analysis is unassailable, Valon, the plan is perfect. If failure will be found, it can only come through faulty execution.
Uncle the planner, Lumani the doer. Clearly, the plan wasn’t perfect, because the driver had just done what Uncle had said was unthinkable, impossible.
Lumani slid out of position. He’d not wanted this assignment. Had begged off of it.
Capture the driver, yes; in spite of the warnings, he could deliver her to Zagreb and put her in Uncle’s array. 
But the obligation of bringing the merchandise to the purchaser— he’d wanted nothing of it. 
Prior deliveries had been fraught with complications while the client toyed with his abettors, a veritable match of wits with Uncle that had twice nearly ended in disaster. 
Now this third was a disaster. At least two more men, Uncle. At least one more car, please. 
No. The answer was no, made worse because the request challenged Uncle’s infallibility, spoke of doubt in the great man’s ability to predict so many moves in advance. 
Uncle had always been right. Always. Until now. Lumani had been given no room to refuse.
Uncle would hear nothing of logic or reason— weak excuses, he called them— and against Lumani’s objection put the assignment with its high price for failure on his shoulders. 
“You are the weak spot,” Uncle had said. Derision that cut like slivers of glass, disgust reserved for garbage rotting in the sun. “You, Valon. Always remember. You.” 
And then pressing those slivers into Lumani’s flesh: “Do this and I release you. 
“You can take your money and your life and go to your parties and your whores. Don’t think I’ll spare you if you refuse.”
Resentment smoldered, hatred keeping time with movement, perfect movement, as superstitious as it was mechanical, while he jogged the steps to his car.
He called Arben again and for the third time received no answer, which meant the man was dead and for this he felt nothing. 
Overconfident and arrogant, Arben hadn’t heeded the warnings and so had brought an end upon himself. 
Lumani left a voice mail for the Michael woman on the off chance she took the time to listen. Beeped open the car and tossed the briefcase into the back.
No matter what Uncle claimed, the failure was not in the doing. The failure was in the planning, in the understanding, in the predicting. 
You don’t need extra men or extra cars, Valon, the choke hold is the reason she complies. 
Yet a moment before delivery, the Michael woman had defied Uncle’s prediction and diverted. Failure that shouldn’t be his to bear.
Lumani climbed behind the wheel. Revved the engine and backed out of the parking space with more noise than necessary.
Needed to calm. Needed to think. Did she know about Logan’s rescue? She couldn’t. 
He’d listened for even the tiniest of chances that she’d somehow found a means of communication, for a signal of any kind, and had heard nothing, seen nothing. 
She couldn’t know… could she? Lumani questioned himself. His judgment. His ability.
Uncle’s voice chanted inside his head: You are the weakest of them, Valon.
She’d been parked alongside the country road in the dark when the rescue happened and still waited two hours for the footage— 
a lucky break that had been, filming before the mercenaries had come calling, though it had taken time to get the connections reestablished and the clip uploaded. 
But if she knew her friend was safe, if she was going to run, why hadn’t she done it sooner?
Lumani pulled into traffic. In the distance the sirens wailed and from them he felt a surge of pleasure. 
This part of the planning, which had been made on the go and was his alone, would be more successful than Uncle’s so-called insights: When the Opel was flushed out, he would be waiting.
That the car had to be ambushed at all, that the driver was still alive, was an unforgivable failure. 
He was expected to make a retaliatory kill and in a decisive second had chosen not to. 
Traffic and pedestrians that wouldn’t have been present even an hour earlier meant that he didn’t have a clean line of sight. 
He couldn’t afford the margin of error. Excuses, Uncle would say. 
In an endless maze of accusations and trains of thought jumping from one track to the next, logic would turn to absurdity, and always Lumani was to blame.
The injustice burned hot, burned angry. No matter how successful he might be in fixing this, he’d still be held responsible— 
responsible for a failure that had not been his, for decisions that had not been his, for actions that had not been his.
Lumani dialed Tamás. Barked a command. Hung up. 
A man’s strength was defined and proven by the strength of his enemy. He would prove to himself that he would not be beaten. Uncle be damned.
On the passenger seat the tablet blinked the red lights of the Opel’s tracker, the Doll’s tracker, the driver’s tracker, all together in one movement like a big, happy, blended family. 
Lumani noted distance and kept time. His earpiece, which had until now been silent, chirped with sound from the bug inside the Opel. 
“I know you can hear me, Valon, I know you’re listening.”
He swerved to avoid a car entering traffic. Was nearly to the border of the city, still a jump ahead of her. 
“I know your plans because I am you,” she said. “I’m inside your head. You think you know what drives me, but you don’t. You can’t outthink me, and I will outrun you.”
Lumani smiled, pleased. A man’s strength, defined by the strength of the opponent. 
In response, he checked the tablet. Tamás was closing in from the other end of the city. She was between them, moving in his direction,and then, just as she’d done on the delivery, she detoured. Up. Toward the hills, away from the plan as if she’d read him. 
With so many directions in which she could turn, he didn’t have the manpower to corner her.
He would let her run. Let her expend herself, and when she’d exhausted and slowed a bit, got to feeling safe, he would close in.
DALLAS, TEXAS
Bradford hit the call button and tried again. Maybe the fiftieth time in four hours, an unnecessary and worthless repetition, because somehow it made him feel better.
The first time had been right after he’d left the eighteen-wheeler and climbed into the Explorer. That call had gone directly to voice mail.
He’d left messages, sent texts, and without a response, kept trying, until finally he got a mechanized voice that he didn’t need to understand to know that the number had been disconnected.
Munroe’s handcuffs were off, and he had no way to communicate the news to her, no way to know if she was even still alive or if his contribution to the party had come too little or too late.
He pushed that thought aside. Logan was safe. That mattered on its own, regardless of whatever else played out, and from the whatever else followed the fear and he pushed that away, too.
If she was still alive, the most probable scenario was that she’d get ahold of another phone and call the voice drop again,but according to his frequent check-ins with Walker, that hadn’t happened, either.
It was nearing four in the morning when Bradford pulled into the parking space beside the Trooper. 
He and Jahan had dozed in the emergency room after bringing Logan in, had waited around just long enough to ensure that he was stable before making the three-hour trip back to Dallas. 
Bradford had done the driving and now, blurry-eyed and sleep-deprived, made for the office.
The Capstone reception area was empty and low-lit when they stepped through the doors,three days’ worth of boxes and mail delivery still cast to the side and ruining the carefully crafted image of the normally meticulous front room.
Jahan swiped his card and buzzed them through the panel. On the other side, Walker waited in the war room. 
She shook her head before Bradford could ask the question: Still no news out of Europe.
“Anything from Adams? Gonzalez?” he asked.
“There’s a court date, but no updates. All continues as it was.”
“Adams still in Houston?”
“Burning dollars, hanging around, feeling useless.”
“Kate Breeden will make a move,” Bradford said. “Trust me, the timing isn’t coincidental.” 
He paused. “What about Alexis? Tabitha? Have you checked them again?”
“Knocked on the door of one pretending I’d got the wrong address. Called the other, same story, and then about two hours ago Alexis called the office. Everything’s normal.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Just go sleep,” she said. “There are a few minor things on the board, not anything you have to look at right away, and there’s nothing more we can do here— not without news.”
Bradford nodded and headed for his office, for the bedroll, for whatever sleep he could grab in the moments of silence,because even with Logan tucked away and out of state, this thing wasn’t over yet, wasn’t anywhere close to over.
Underneath the desk, he turned away from the world, sleep fell hard, drawing him fast and deep into a turbid blackness,where before he’d even fully stretched out, relief from feeling and relief from burnout cocooned him in silence and forgetfulness.
Was awakened just as suddenly, thrust into the middle of war: 
explosion, shaking and reverberation, shattering glass, crunching metal, and the smell— that indelible burning, acrid stench of unnatural death.
The survival brain that had lived through more firefights than he could count had him crawling down the hallway,bracing for a secondary explosion, moving closer to the cries for help, the cries of combat, the cries of the maimed and bleeding; 
dialing 911 as he went because halfway down the hall full awareness kicked in: 
He wasn’t in a combat zone but the Capstone office; the rooms weren’t dark but filled with daylight.
Silence followed the explosion, silence like a black hole that drew in and devoured everything. 
Bradford yelled for Jahan. For Walker. Heard her plaintive wail, a call for help,and moved toward the sound, toward the paneled reception door that had blown inward, the walls ripped and twisted. 
Skirted glass from the interior, shattered and littered across the carpet. Sirens filled the background.
Walker’s plea called to him, and through quicksand and over fire, he slogged in slow motion to the reception threshold and found her just beyond the door, on the floor, her head leaning against the wall of the desk.
Blood, so much blood. On his knees, he reached for her, hands searching both tender and frantic, trying to find the source of the bleeding.
“FedEx package,” she whispered.
“Shhhh,” he said. He tore her shirt and bared her skin. Gaped and stuffed the material into the largest hole.
Helpless. He was helpless. Her skin was clammy. He reached for her wrist and checked her pulse.
“FedEx package,” she said again. 
Tenderly, he moved her so that she lay flat. Had nothing with which to elevate her feet. “Hang in here,” he said. “Help is coming.”
He leaned forward, searched beyond the desk for Jahan. Pulled back with images from another world, another life, flooding from every pore; 
unspeakable things seen and experienced, bodies charred and dismembered, combat memories shoved away and better left forgotten. 
Sweat and emotion coated his skin while Jahan— what was left of Jahan— unrecognizable to anyone unfamiliar with the nightmare that was war, held vigil at the front of the desk.
The smells. The blood. The wreckage. Jahan, who had taken the full force of the explosion, would have died instantly.
Bradford tore off his jacket, laid it across Walker’s chest. Loosened the snaps and belt at the waist of her cargo pants. 
Her blood covered his hands, his jeans. Her eyes were shut and he tapped her cheek. 
Held her jaw, turned her face toward his, screaming inside his head though his voice entered the world as authority without horror. “Samantha.”
Her eyelids lifted slowly. “Listen,” he said. She responded with another eye flutter. “The sirens are downstairs. Do you hear them? Listen!”
Downstairs— they had to be downstairs by now. Help was coming. Had to be coming.
“Here,” she whispered, teeth chattering.
“Please,” he said. “They’re coming. Please hold on.”
“Jack,” she said. “Package.”
“Shhhh,” he said, and the background filled with thunder, peripheral vision with color. Boots against the silence. Rescue.
Hands pushed him away from Walker and he fought them. “ID!” he screamed. “Need to see ID!” 
Although the verbal replies didn’t satisfy, they were enough for him to let go, to fade into the background while limbs and bodies blended into waves of patterns and Walker was lifted onto a stretcher.
Bradford followed out the door. Sat with her in the ambulance while activity rushed and blurred around him, a hurried and methodical fight to keep her alive. 
Stayed with her from ambulance to emergency room until finally hands pushed him back again and he was left staring at a threshold he could not cross,and blinded, was guided to the same waiting room that just four mornings earlier he and Walker had entered in their search for Munroe.
These were not the worst casualties he’d experienced; 
on a logical scale, a visual scale, a sensory scale, today couldn’t come close to matching mass graves of decomposing bodies, or mutilated children, or IEDs and burning personnel carriers. 
But these were people he loved and had bled for, this was his own land, the office was his home away from home. These were not strangers, this was not the battlefield.
Bradford found a seat. Fell into it more than sat and stayed staring at the floor, air seeping into his lungs incrementally. 
He would not return to the office, not when only carnage awaited him. 
For now, this room was all he had: there was no place to go, no mission to accomplish. 
Everyone near him had, within the last four days, been ripped away, leaving in the gaping holes an empty numbness.
He needed to get out before he imploded. Had to get back to the garage and move the Trooper with its war chest before investigating bodies got too far into digging for whatever they hoped to find.
One foot in front of the other, more aimless than direct, Bradford left the waiting room for the outside world. 
Called for a taxi and then dialed Munroe again, desperate for her voice, for one ray of light in the darkness,afraid of what he might say if she did answer, afraid of himself and the inner deadening that pointed to a danger far more lethal than any rage he’d felt.

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 27 

Munroe pulled Arben’s torso into the driver’s seat of the Passat, shifted his legs under the steering wheel, closed his door, and positioned him so he reclined with the seat. 
Leaned his head so that he faced his own window. Weapon to his hand, to the side of the head she’d battered, rag between her fingers and all she touched, Munroe pulled the trigger.
The pop-spit spattered bone and blood, and like the snap of a rubber band against skin, provided the shock of release.
She didn’t pause to examine the aftermath. Left behind the weapon and the temporary illusion of suicide that might, if she was lucky, buy her a fragment of time. 
Was out the passenger door with Arben’s jacket and her two pieces of evidence before she’d fully contemplated the emotional cost of what she’d just done.
Still low to the ground between the cars, Munroe opened the Opel’s unlocked door, wiped the wrench down for prints, shoved it under the seat, and closed the door. 
If Monaco’s video surveillance had been intended to prevent crime before it could be accomplished, the city had failed miserably, 
but still open to debate was whether or not the kill had been observed in real time. 
The answer would determine how far she could get before this underground world exploded in noise and commotion.
Strategy against strategy in mental triage, Munroe pulled out Arben’s phone. 
Thumbed through his recently used apps. Mixed in among a handful of games she found what she wanted. Opened. 
And there was Neeva, a little red beacon crawling along a close-cropped map, 
depersonalized into the equivalent of an object in a shooter game that might as well have had a detached floating label marked with dollar signs moving along with her.
Bearings set, adrenaline still coursing, Munroe moved in the direction of the exit, slipping between vehicles whenever possible, dodging camera angles to the best of her ability, 
until finally out on street level, she traced the path Neeva had walked, or at least something close based on the pulsating red light, moved quickly to catch up, 
but not so fast as to draw the additional attention a young man in slacks and jacket with bruises on his face running down the road without shoes would bring.
Munroe reached the seawall and followed the curve of the ocean in the direction of the port, where, in so small a space, was the world’s most expensive collection of waterborne real estate. 
Only when she spotted the back of Neeva’s costume and no longer needed digital eyes did she slow.
In this early-morning hour tourist traffic was still thin, and although the roads were full of cars, there were few pedestrians. 
Not only did Neeva in her costume stand out, so did the man who sat on the seawall fifty meters down: the segment in which Lumani, in his final text, had instructed Munroe to deliver the package.
Neeva had done well in dragging out the distance, and even now strolled casually, taking time to pause and gaze at the ocean as if she was one of those who kept house in a nearby apartment or belonged to one of the yachts ahead. 
The man on the wall, who’d been slowly turning his head from one end of the walk to the next, caught sight of the costume and stared intently in Neeva’s direction, fixated upon her.
Oblivious, Neeva walked on.
The man was middle-aged. Soft. Insecure. Scared. Another pawn.
Munroe quickened her pace. Searched out balconies and approaching cars, moving ever forward, randomly lengthening and shortening the distance between herself and Neeva. 
Wherever Lumani hid, he had to be west of the ocean, and the sun, still lifting in its arc across the sky, would work against him.
Pulling in detail, counting seconds, Munroe risked falling into the capture zone and into the crosshairs of Lumani’s rifle.
She needed to see the client. Observe him. Memorize him. He’d be here. Somewhere.
The type of man who’d set these events in motion wouldn’t be content to have the pieces fall into place without him. 
He would want to be present, watching, reveling in his own brilliance, gloating over how sure, odds stacked against him, he was to capture his quarry— certain to escape unscathed because he’d positioned others to take the fall.
Neeva kept walking. If Munroe didn’t stop her soon, she would reach the man on the wall and slip into whatever trap awaited. 
Munroe quickened her pace to close the gap and then, in a heartbeat of recognition, hesitated. He was here.
The focus of desire, in deck shoes and a sweater, clean-cut and casual, approached the sidewalk from a diverted path, 
walking a little dog in Neeva’s direction so that he might, if he wanted, draw close enough to intersect her trajectory. 
The man on the wall half stood in the presence of the newcomer and then, in a jerky movement, almost as if realizing he’d committed a faux pas and might as well have pointed out his master, sat down fully and returned his focus to Neeva.
There was nothing overly distinguishable about the man with the dog: early fifties, perhaps, average height, and fit body, as were many wealthy people; straight blond or silver hair, kept short; skin tanned and freckled. 
His presence wasn’t the tell pointing to who he was, nor was it that he was one of few along the oceanfront, nor even that he studied Neeva with a curious smirk, as any passerby might, nor his posture or his stride. 
The tell, subtle and shameless, was his expression, which screamed of recognition.
His image burned inside Munroe’s head: body shape, gait, ratio of limbs to torso, all of it etched onto a mental canvas. 
She sought out his eyes and he noticed her now, studying him, and averted his gaze while the narration of his body language turned a page 
and his lips lifted in a half-snarled grin, as if to say I know who you are, and I win: game over.
With his acknowledgment and his taunt, the euphoria that turned killing into a satisfied craving, demons battled and conquered, rose from the dead. 
Vision fading to gray and casting the target in vivid color, voices chanting, heartbeat quickening into the percussion of war, the urges sent her to the hunt. 
Lust for blood brought her to the tipping point beyond which there was no backing away from the kill. 
Panting, breathing against the pressure, Munroe pressed palms to her temples and physically pushed past the urges. 
Logic against desire. Strategy before action.
To release them now under the watchful eye of the city cameras was to seal her fate together with his. 
The client passed her, gaze locked on hers as he went, smirk still wide, the story continuing in his expression. He knew her. Somehow, he knew her.
Munroe reached Neeva and, still fighting the want, the craving, wrapped an arm protectively around the girl’s waist. 
Neeva handed Munroe the phone and pointed at it, eyes wide as if to say, It rang while you were gone.
Munroe nodded. Let go of the girl, accepted the phone, and with all of the pent-up emotional energy that had gone unused in the client’s wake, threw the phone out toward the ocean.
Munroe lifted the backpack off Neeva’s shoulders and handed her Arben’s jacket. “You did good,” she said. “Put this on, it’ll make your clothes less dramatic.”
Neeva turned her nose up slightly. “Doubt it,” she said, but took the jacket anyway, and while Munroe stepped back into her shoes, Neeva slipped into sleeves that went past her hands. 
The size added comedy to the getup, but the dull navy blue also covered so much of Neeva’s dress that the vivid color all but vanished.
The man on the wall began to stand, then paused and sat again in apparent bafflement over a course of events that had nothing to do with what he seemed to expect.
Arben’s phone rang. Munroe ignored the jolt and shifted between Neeva and the wall, positioning herself so that she could observe the mark and gloat over his reaction when he turned to watch the scheduled approach and discovered plans had changed; 
she kept her arm around Neeva and readied to cross the street against traffic when the moment arrived.
The client paused and turned back, and the quick flash of surprise that passed across his face phased into hostility. 
Munroe waited for a break in traffic. Smiled beatifically while the voices and the bloodlust urged her toward him, willed him closer, 
begged for a viable excuse and the pretense of an accident for the sake of cameras and passing cars so that the floodgates could release and her torment be satisfied.
But the client didn’t move. How could he, when the location, with its cameras and high visibility, all meant to taunt authority and possibly ensnare the Doll Maker’s operation, now had the potential to be his own undoing? 
Eyes hard and lips pressed together, his hand clenched around the leash so tightly that his knuckles whitened.
Arben’s phone rang again, reminder that Lumani, still out there, was aware that things were askew. For whatever reason, he hadn’t yet taken a shot.
Munroe said, “We need to move; stay close.” Together they stepped off the sidewalk into the street. 
Munroe guided the girl, skirting across lanes during intermittent gaps in traffic. 
For a third time, the phone rang, and once more Munroe ignored it.
From the other side of the road, she smiled at the client again, imprinted his face again. 
He would die. On Munroe’s life, she would eventually see to it that he died, but for now she had robbed him of his prize.
Munroe turned her back and prodded Neeva toward the tunnel. They used the pedestrian passage beside the road and hurried back in the direction they’d come.
At the garage entryway, Munroe scoped the distance and listened for sirens, searched out Lumani or any other person who would set off the inner warning sensors. 
The lower level had filled considerably in the minutes they’d been gone. 
Ignoring attention from passersby, arm still around Neeva’s waist, Munroe pushed the girl forward until they reached the Opel.
Munroe pulled out from the parking spot and wound through the ramps toward the exit. 
At street level came the first sound of sirens. They arrived too slowly to have been the result of Arben’s murder being caught on camera and had certainly not come as a result of his body being discovered.
Parking ticket to machine, cash to machine, machine arm to the sky. 
Seconds ticked along while the sirens grew louder. Munroe ignored the itch along her skin that told her to run. 
Monaco wasn’t more than three miles at its longest stretch, and they were about halfway in from the north. 
It would take them less than ten minutes to get beyond the judicial boundaries of the city-state. 
Notice would go out to the French police, but once outside the city proper, where every square foot was utilized and packed, there’d be a chance to hide.
“Are those sirens for us?” Neeva asked.
Munroe nodded.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Michael, stop! Stop the car. They can help us.” 
When Munroe’s response was to check the mirrors and pull around a slower vehicle, Neeva grabbed Munroe’s forearm and tugged.
The reaction to the physical contact was instant and brutal, and Munroe struck without thought. 
Pulled back before fully connecting, and Neeva stared wide-eyed at Munroe’s hand frozen in space, angled toward her throat.
“You need to be careful about the grabby thing,” Munroe said. She took her eyes off the road just long enough to glance at Neeva and added, “It’s not personal.”
“Stop the car, please,” Neeva said. “Why won’t you stop?”
“Right now, the police are not our friends.”
“Of course they are,” Neeva said. Her tone went from excited panic to pleading. “They’ll know who I am, they can get me home.”
Lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Vehicles began to pull to the sides. “The sniper sent them,” Munroe said.
The car in front of them slowed to move aside, and Munroe jumped ahead.
Like the one man running in a crowd of casual shoppers, she’d just clued them in to the chase. But now the road was clear. 
Munroe pressed foot to floor, and the Opel gave up speed reluctantly.
With a kidnapped girl at her side and a dead man in her wake, Lumani had to know she would avoid the law. 
He was forcing her to choose between evils: Allow capture and lose years of her life waiting for the authorities to sort out what had actually happened, while in the meantime Neeva was sprung and delivered. 
Or be flushed from hiding into a waiting net.
Munroe checked the rearview once more. Confirmed again that Neeva’s seat belt was fastened. 
Tight spaces and clearly defined roads be damned. The city had more than one way out.

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 26
They entered Monaco at the principality’s northernmost border without anything to mark the crossing but a change in signs and a sudden tightness in building density.
The GPS led them south along the coast, down pristine streets bordered by trees and beautiful landscaping, streets slowly filling with morning traffic;past the beach area of Larvotto; past a mix of grand architecture and block-style residential buildings making up in height what they couldn’t grab in land;past innumerable CCTV cameras, toward the area of the Japanese Garden and specifically to an underground parking not far from their final destination.
It couldn’t have been easy for Lumani to send them down— even if he had the connections necessary to tap into surveillance cameras— not with nooks and pillars and cars with which to play hide-and-seek with his nerves. 
But in a city-state where square footage consumed fortunes, street parking was nearly impossible to come by, and accessing the garages was the only way to get rid of the car and move the delivery forward.
Munroe pulled into the entry lane, took a ticket, and the beam lifted. 
Continued downward into a subterranean world reclaimed from the sea, well lit, and not yet filled with the day’s haul of metal. On cue, the phone beeped another alert. 
She scanned the text, placed the phone in her lap, and took the vehicle past long rows of sporadically spaced cars, down another level, beyond many open spots, toward the areas farthest away from the choice parking that arriving drivers would fill first.
Cameras monitored the interior in the same way their counterparts did the streets above,and so Munroe continued at a crawl, searching out blind spots, and finally, as certain as she could be under the circumstances, pulled into a space next to a Pajero where at least the vehicle’s height would shield something.
Turned off the ignition. This was the end. The final instructions required going on foot, out in the open, in public. 
Munroe left the parking ticket in the glove box and car keys in the visor, as instructed,and while Neeva sat staring, clearly waiting for some piece of advice or news, grabbed the backpack from the backseat, pulled the GPS off the dash, and shoved the machine inside. 
Paused long enough to glance over Neeva. The ripped tights had been replaced on the road toward Genoa,and although Neeva’s eyes were puffy and she was developing dark circles beneath them, the makeup had been redone well enough that she looked presentable— stareworthy, but not in a beat-up domestic-abuse sort of way. 
Munroe reached for Neeva’s hair, and when the girl winced, she stopped. Said, “May I?”[]Neeva held still.
Munroe fluffed up the curls, untwisting several that had wrapped around one another. 
Other than that, the hair, like nylon doll hair, was still perfect,and for all of the attention the getup would attract, it also provided a distraction; human nature would have observers try to make sense of the costume before noticing the person wearing it.
“You look good,” Munroe said, and Neeva rolled her eyes.
Munroe reached low and popped the hood, felt beneath the seat for the lug wrench stowed so many hours ago, and left it on the floor between her feet. 
Then, deliberately and very slowly, so that she drew Neeva’s attention to her movements, she placed Lumani’s phone on the console, opened the driver’s door, and said, “Let’s go.”
She made it around to the other side before Neeva had stepped fully to the pavement, took Neeva’s hand, guided her away from the door, and shut it. 
With her arm around Neeva’s shoulders, Munroe walked her several steps from the car and said, “We don’t have time to talk and I really need you to listen, okay? 
“I am not one of them. I’m going to find a way to get us out of this mess, but you have to do what I say. 
“Don’t try to run, because if you do, they will find you and I will be powerless to save you, you understand?”
“But what about your friend who will die?”[]“That’s my problem,” Munroe said, her voice a whisper and speech running at hyperspeed, trying to cram into fifty seconds what should take much longer to say. 
“Right now we need to focus on staying alive. I can get us out of here, but only if you do what I tell you.”
Neeva’s head tipped down, just once.[]“The sniper is out there somewhere watching us and we’re also being followed by the guy who hit you last night. 
“I need to know where he is before we do anything. I’m going to give you the phone, my shoes, and the backpack. I need you to start walking when I hand them to you.”
Munroe turned Neeva, oriented her based on what she’d seen on the GPS prior to packing it up, faced her toward an exit. 
“In that direction is a stairwell. Take it up to ground level. The exit will open to a street that leads to a seawall. 
“Follow the ocean— you’ll see a big hotel and a tunnel that runs under the hotel. 
“Anytime the path splits, keep left and as close to the ocean as possible— always follow the ocean. Walk slow and keep going until I find you.”
“What if you don’t come?”[]“Then I’m dead. Just walk. Don’t talk to anyone, don’t make eye contact, and if anyone recognizes you, pretend you’re a body double.”
Another head tip.[]“And I am not kidding, Neeva, if you run, or try to get away from me, you’ll be doing me a favor by letting me wash my hands of you, but these men will capture you again. 
“If you try to get help from someone else, people will die. You are not smarter than them. Not faster. Not stronger. I am your way to salvation. Understand?”
“Yes,” Neeva said, and Munroe, in one long, drawn-out movement, loosened her grip on the girl’s shoulders and turned her so that they were eye-to-eye. 
Searched her face, her expression, her body language, wanting and trying to read what went on behind the mask, and then let go of Neeva completely. 
Slipped off her shoes, put them in the backpack, and handed it over. 
If after this the girl still chose to flee, she did so fully aware of the cost, and Munroe’s conscience was clear.
“If I haven’t found you within fifteen minutes,” Munroe said, “then you’re on your own.”
Neeva stared at Munroe’s socks and then up again at her face. “Thank you,” she said.
Munroe turned to the car, lifted the hood long enough to grab the rag she’d once used to wipe off engine fluids, and gently, quietly pressed the engine cover shut. 
Opened the driver’s door and pulled out the phone that was already ringing.
She pressed talk and, before Lumani had a chance to speak, said, “It was an accident, I won’t forget again.”
“You need to get moving,” he said, and because of what was missing in those five words a wave of relief washed over her. 
He didn’t have visual contact, had no idea what she’d just done, and Arben or some other thug would be there soon.
“We’re moving now,” Munroe said, then paused and with a lowered voice that bordered on conspiratorial said,“Valon, is there anything I need to know? I can connect the dots. Things aren’t what you’d planned. 
“If there’s going to be a double cross, if you’re getting set up— if I’m getting set up— let me on your side, we can work this together.”
As had been typical of the man-boy so far, he waited a long while, but this time he didn’t hang up. 
“I can’t,” he said finally, “it’s not possible.” So she ended the call.
Before Munroe shut the door for the final time, she reached to the floor and pulled out the wrench. Set it on the ground and turned to Neeva, who’d remained waiting and quiet. 
Munroe put the phone in Neeva’s hand and a finger to her own lips. Pointed to her eye and then the exit, and with a slight wave, motioned the girl off.
Neeva took a few hesitant steps, past an empty space, continued beyond the nearest parked car, and then turned as if begging for reassurance.
Munroe waved her on farther.[]Neeva nodded and gave a mock salute: camaraderie— or Stockholm syndrome. 
Whatever went on inside that girl’s head was now completely beyond control,and with instinct rebelling against letting her go, Munroe remained in place, watching the rear of the departing costume as Neeva sashayed in slow motion toward the other side of the garage and out of sight.
Munroe turned to the adjacent Pajero, and with the cold wash of assignment taking over, slid beneath, elbows to the ground, head angled beside a rear tire. Body poised and ready, she waited.
Arben arrived within the minute driving a black Passat, the first Munroe had seen of his ride, tires cruising slowly past, while his head, visible through the window, swept from side to side as if searching out the Opel. 
He braked. Reversed slightly and then pulled into the spot directly on the other side of his target.
Arben opened his door, and from where Munroe lay, she had only a line to his feet. 
If he’d been smart and on his game, if he’d believed half the things Kate Breeden would have told the Doll Maker, he would have leaned down to check beneath the chassis. 
At least then he might have had a fighting chance. Instead, he stepped from his vehicle to the Opel, opened the driver’s door,and according to the sounds that followed, dropped the keys from the visor into his palm and presumably took the parking ticket as well. 
His pause was long enough to tuck them into a pocket or pouch, and then he shut the door and returned to his car.
Munroe slid out and in a crouch between the rear axles of the two vehicles, her body shielded by tires and trunk space, she stretched just high enough to observe him through the windows. 
He was in the driver’s seat on the phone, apparently on the receiving end of a one-sided conversation.
Palms to the concrete, runner on her mark, Munroe closed her eyes. 
Arben would follow on foot, but with Neeva moving slowly and the assumption that the two were together, he held back, allowing a small lead time. 
Cold fed into her hands, fueling the drive of the hunt. The voices that had for the last several hours played as backdrop to rage hushed in peaceful anticipation.
Arben’s door opened.[]She picked up the lug wrench and rag.[]His feet hit the concrete.[]She moved to a crouch.[]He stepped out of the car and turned his back.[]She stood.
She came up behind him fast, and as if in response to instinct, or perhaps the rustle of her clothes or her feet on the ground, he began to turn.
But he was dead from the time he’d arrived in the garage.[]Dead from the moment he’d laid hands on Neeva.[]Dead from the moment he’d first touched Munroe.
All the rage, all the anger, all the hatred at everything the Doll Maker stood for, the pain over Noah’s death and Logan’s loss, came through on that first and only swing.
The lug socket of the wrench connected with Arben’s temple in the same moment his face turned toward her. 
The force of the swing and the smack of the metal snapped his head to an unnatural angle,and his body, which had begun to pivot in Munroe’s direction, did a time-lapse pause before he sprawled against his car’s side and slid down.
Whether he was dead or not, she didn’t care and didn’t bother checking. He was out cold, blunt trauma, with not a lot of blood. All that mattered. 
Wrench to the ground, both hands on Arben’s collar, she pulled him closer to the car and stripped him of his jacket. 
Found his weapon, retrieved it. Checked the magazine, checked the sound suppressor, which was already attached. Stashed the piece. 
Found his phone, the Opel keys, and the parking ticket. Pocketed them. 
Thumbed through his wallet and pulled out seventy euros in cash. Not much, but better than nothing. 
Found his keys, unlocked the door, and opened. Released the lever of the driver’s seat so that the back reclined nearly horizontal. 
In a crouch, she dragged him by the underarms to the driver’s door and propped him up. 
Tossed the jacket, the rag, and the wrench into the car; climbed in after them;and then, half kneeling, half squatting on the seat, hands cupped beneath his arms again, inched him into the car;stressing over the dead weight of his body and the time it took to drag him inward;stressing over how far Neeva had already gone and how much was still left to do.

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 25 BEYOND MONTEBRUNO, ITALY
Proof of life arrived in the same way news of death had come: a noise that jarred the quiet, an alert that lit the screen with blinding revelation. 
Munroe stared at the phone a long while, neither moving nor blinking. The Doll Maker had made his play, and now it was her turn.
The signal was weak and the site to which Lumani’s text linked loaded slowly and incrementally，the status circle continuing its rounds, loading, loading, while inside Munroe’s chest the fist gripped harder, tighter，fingers wrapped around her spine, crushing her heart so that the pain made breathing difficult. 
And the voices, always the voices, incanted to the pounding of her pulse, urging toward violence，until at last, fully accessible, the video file, freeze-framed, waited to be played. Logan. Truly alive.
The entire clip was barely a minute, but without a doubt he was living— or had been when the footage was shot— horribly battered, but still breathing: 
blond hair matted with dried blood, face swollen and mottled, green eyes the equivalent of olives in tomato juice. 
Given the camera angle, she couldn’t see much of the room beyond the mat upon which he lay，but best guess said the space was narrow and the walls, if the sound could be trusted, were high and made of something other than drywall.
Logan, positioned at an odd angle, faced the camera, but his eyes weren’t focused on it. 
“Michael,” he said, and he paused in a struggle for air, and then again as if to remember. “A message for you,” he said. 
His words were slurred and garbled, the distortion made even worse by the transmission. 
“They say you’re in Italy, not Dallas,” he said. “That you’re in a car on a country road and you fought a man and hurt him worse than he hurt you. 
“There’s a girl beside you. They say these details are the proof you want.”
He paused again, had that dazed in-and-out quality of pharmaceuticals she’d seen in years past. 
Turned his head away from the camera, gazing upward at something outside the frame’s view until a noise that could have been speech drew his attention and he started again. 
“They say they’ll take more life if you don’t do what they want.” 
With an effort, he shifted to face the camera, struggled to focus directly on the lens, and said, “Michael, listen. You do what you need to do.”
The clip went dark and the connection to Logan became nothing more than a solid image waiting to be replayed. 
Munroe stared at the phone, and then in response to the night blindness, shut off the screen and closed her eyes. 
Emotion rushed in flash flood through her veins: hatred, grief, pain, and love.
Even in the face of torture and his own demise, Logan understood. Do what you need to do.
Resolve etched and cracked. Threatened to shatter completely. Logan was still alive.
She could still finish this job— deliver the package and save her brother.
No. If Logan could be freed, it would be Bradford— if he was still alive— who would have to save him. 
Mentally downshifting, she pushed aside the anguish. When this was all over, there would be time enough to grieve.
Do what you need to do.
Munroe exhaled. Pulled in another breath and held it long, and with each long draw, let go another portion of the present, bringing into its place the pure focus of assignment. 
If sacrificing Logan was the price to be paid to spare Neeva, it wasn’t enough to merely save her. 
For every Neeva with powerful parents and for whom the media hounds were out sniffing scent, there were a hundred thousand other trafficked girls and women that the world, either through ignorance or indifference, wrote off or forgot altogether. 
No, if Logan was the price, then his blood would purchase more than one life，and sacrifices be damned, she would wait as long as possible, get as near the delivery point as possible, and from there take her chances.
THE STREETS OF Genoa at five in the morning were like the streets of many cities in the early pre-dawn: relatively quiet and mostly deserted. 
Lumani’s route took them from rural roads directly into the populated areas and finally to the roadway that ran parallel to the ocean. 
Not the faster highway that tunneled through mountains and made a beeline for the French border, but the smaller provincial road, without tolls, that followed the curve of the coast.
In either direction the ocean was stippled with dots of light, spliced with harbors and coves where boats and yachts, from dinghy to the obscene, could slip in to anchor and then move on again. 
Pieces of mental strategy shifted again: Transfer Neeva from dry land into the belly of a yacht, and the girl would never be heard from again.
Dawn arrived by the time they’d passed Ventimiglia, the sun low on the horizon and the ocean’s blue now distinguishable from the sky. 
The streets were still quiet, though it wouldn’t be long before civilization began to stir, and it was helpful that Neeva had fallen asleep yet again. 
The final address in the array of texts dead-ended in Menton, a few kilometers beyond the French border.
Munroe reached the checkpoint, a setup similar to the small provincial outposts they’d passed when crossing from Croatia into Slovenia. 
She slowed the car, Lumani’s documents on hand should they have to stop，but the exit and entry booths were empty and they passed into France with the same fanfare as crossing a street.
The phone on the console vibrated. Munroe picked it up, highlighted the text, and stared hard at the newest round of driving directions.
Took her foot off the gas pedal, downshifted, and slowed, searching out an empty parallel space along the curb. 
She pulled the emergency brake and cut the engine. Neeva slept on, so Munroe removed the keys and stepped out of the car.
In rebellion she dialed, and Lumani answered on the second ring. 
She offered no hello, how are you, or are you out of your fucking mind. Instead she said, “It makes no sense to take her in there, there’s no logic to a move like this.”
“You’re not here for opinion,” Lumani replied. “You have a job to do, you follow instructions, and that’s all.”
Munroe dragged in a breath and pinched the bridge of her nose, pulled into the present and pushed past the exhaustion and emotional overload. 
With so little access to Lumani, every second mattered. She drew him into her head and breathed him into her lungs.
“You’re right,” she said, voice softer, tone contrite. “You’re right and I agree with you— I’m only here to do the job. 
“And I think, like you, I just want this over. But tell me, Valon, from a professional standpoint, does this feel right to you? 
“Having come so far, don’t we risk things going to hell at the last minute?”
“It’s not ideal,” he said.
Munroe leaned low to check on Neeva and then said, “You have no choice either, do you?”
“Always the client’s rules,” Lumani replied. “There’s nothing more to tell you than this is where we go. There will be more instructions when we reach the destination.”
“But the price for failure is yours.”
“Yes,” he said, and the word was barely above a whisper.
She pulled his mind into her body, put his emotion in her chest. 
“My delay forced this, didn’t it?” she said.
“Only the daylight,” he said.
“And because of my actions, if having to go in during the day creates failure, that failure will be yours.”
“And yours,” he added.
“There’s a horrible frustration in having to pay the price for someone else’s choices,” she said. 
“I’m sorry for having brought repercussions down on you. If this delivery blows up on us, will you suffer badly?”
A long pause of silence, then he ended the call.
Munroe focused on the ground, processing. 
He’d given her what she needed to know, and she in turn had scattered seed that might lay fallow or might, if she was lucky, eventually sprout into saplings strong enough to split the hardened topsoil that kept him as the Doll Maker’s doer.
Munroe’s fingers tapped against the hood in contemplation. 
They were heading into the Principality of Monaco, which, at less than one square mile of land, was the world’s second smallest and most densely populated country, tax haven and playground to the rich，best known for the Monte Carlo and the Formula One Grand Prix: a square mile of mountainside; tiny, winding, congested roads，of underground parking lots and tightly packed high-rises, all less than twenty minutes away along this coastal route.
Under the cover of darkness, the handoff might have made sense，but this early in the morning, taking Neeva into the heart of the city-state begged for attention and made something of a proverbial suicide mission out of what should have been a straightforward exchange, merchandise for payment.
Monaco. Insanity.
It didn’t take teenage years spent running guns and drugs across unmarked borders to know that the current arrangement wasn’t the type of planning produced by a person or organization that wanted to guarantee a mission’s success. 
This was a move that taunted and challenged authority to discover and stop it. Instructions from the client. Of course. 
A bored, intelligent, sadistic, and very wealthy client: annoyed at the delay, toying with the criminals, playing games with them. Raising the ante. Setting them up for failure.
The drop was near Port Hercules, Monaco’s deep-water port, where many of the world’s largest private yachts home-berthed or visited. 
Where better to play with your pawns or taunt the governments of the world in a completely swollen ego sort of way— the fox walking blatantly into the chicken coop and daring the farmer to catch him— than to bring a highly visible trafficked woman into the country with the world’s lowest crime rate and largest police force per capita, in broad daylight, and then silently make off with her?
Munroe reached for her pocket and retrieved the stolen phone. 
Her course of action was set, but before continuing, she hoped for news out of Dallas that might mute the inner voices and allow her to plunge fully into the task at hand.
She powered on the screen and winced. Battery— if barely— but no signal. 
Hurting against the unknown, voices running dialogue inside her head, Munroe shut off the phone for good. 
Needed to hold things together just long enough to receive the final set of instructions that would take her to the client.
She returned to the driver’s seat. The engine’s turnover, loud in the relative silence, brought Neeva’s eyes open: 
a slow rolling out of sleep that had, by the time Munroe had gotten the vehicle halfway out of the parking spot, parsed quickly into full-blown panic. 
Neeva glanced from Munroe to the road, to the sidewalk, and to the road again，as if she’d spent hours planning an escape inside her head only to wake and find time and opportunity had flown. 
Still sleep stunned, the girl twisted and clawed at the door and the seat belt simultaneously, her body tensed to bolt and run.
Munroe snapped a hand on her arm. “Don’t,” she said. 
And then, when Neeva, wild-eyed, turned back to glare, to fight, Munroe tightened her grip and yanked her close. Through clenched teeth she said, “Don’t do it. I’ll find a way for you.”
Whether or not the words meant anything to Neeva, the girl yanked back hard, got her free hand on the door latch, and snagged the handle; the door inched open. 
Unable to control Neeva and move the car forward at the same time, Munroe opted for both hands on Neeva, and a second later, resorted to using her full body.
She let the clutch and brake go. The car jumped forward just enough to tap the vehicle in front.
She leveraged her grip on Neeva into a pivot. Clamped her second hand on Neeva’s far shoulder，dragged a knee out from beneath the wheel, and punched Neeva’s pelvis with the cap, her own weight and size overpowering Neeva’s smaller frame, and still Neeva didn’t stop. 
In the space of seconds, the girl bucked, clawed, bit, and finally screamed, bloodcurdling and vicious.
Few pedestrians were on the street, but it would only take one; houses with open windows, patios with open doors, just one curious bystander and this was over. 
In a move vile enough someone might die for it, Munroe leaned back and struck an open palm across Neeva’s face.
In the shock of the blow, Neeva, eyes wide and blinking, gaped and went mute.
“Shut up,” Munroe hissed. “And stay put. I will find a way, okay?”

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 24 IRVING, TEXAS
The truck driver stayed motionless in the space of the open cab door, the dilemma clear on his face: 
return to the men on the ground who might shoot him if he jumped, or deal with the gun pointed at his head and the stranger who might shoot him when the driving was finished.
Bradford repeated the instruction, a slow and clear demand to get inside and get the rig moving, 
and when the response in those long, drawn-out seconds was a continued hesitation, he repeated the promise. “Best thing to happen to you all day.”
The driver shifted his focus from the front to the side and turned his head back as if preparing to jump, so Bradford lowered his weapon. 
Without taking his eyes off the driver, he reached inside his vest for the remote and punched in to trigger the detonation.
The warehouse explosions ripped through the night in a way automatic gunfire never could: shook the ground with enough force that even high up in the cab, Bradford felt the power. 
Whatever hesitation the driver held, whatever decision he readied to make, was resolved by the bigger noise and the flash from behind. 
The driver jerked, shoved forward into the cab, and slammed the door behind him faster than Bradford imagined possible for a man of his girth.
Once behind the wheel, the driver released the brake and the truck crawled forward toward the chain-link gate, still closed. 
The men who’d been shooting were behind the truck. Bradford could see them in the side mirror, crumpled on the ground bracing for another explosion from the warehouse.
“Get the lights on,” Bradford said. “And don’t stop for the gate.”
The driver didn’t say anything, just reached out and powered on the lights, kept moving until the grille of the truck touched the gate, advancing until even from inside the cab Bradford could hear and feel the squeal of metal twisting under pressure, and then the rig was through and the wheels were on the street.
“Head north,” Bradford said, and they swung wide with the impossible-to-hurry kind of slowness only massive trucks could conjure, 
the type of crawl that made movement feel like slugging through mud pits and created the sensation of sitting on a target in a firing range.
Far up the street came the flash of blue, red, and white— Bradford didn’t hear the sirens, couldn’t even clearly see the patrol cars, but they were coming. 
Into his mic he said, “Daddy’s on the way. Party’s over.”
The driver turned to stare at him and after a long pause said, “Where to, boss?” 
And that was the question, Where to? The problem with Irving was that the city sat nearly dead center between Dallas and Forth Worth, surrounded by thick civilization on all sides with no fast way out of town in any direction. 
North was the best bet, but Bradford didn’t want to waste time hauling ass out of the city if Logan wasn’t in the truck.
“Take I-35 toward Denton,” Bradford said. “That’ll do for now.”
The driver nodded, and as the truck picked up speed, switched gears.
Three patrol cars with sirens blaring blew past, and in the mirror Bradford watched the vehicles stop beyond the transport fence and their doors swing open. 
He had radio silence from Jahan and Walker, and that was a good thing. 
He’d only hear from them if there was trouble; if they got out clean, next contact would be a phone call.
“What’s in the back of the truck?” Bradford said.
“The manifests are there on that clipboard, if you wan’ ’em.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
The driver glanced at Bradford again, at first blankly and then the fog lifted. “You saying what I’m hauling ain’t what’s on the manifest?”
“Exactly that.”
The driver paused, then said, “What’s it you think I got? Drugs?”
“People.”
The driver let out a half-laugh that came more as an indication of spontaneous relief than humor. 
“Aw, man, no, not possible,” he said. “We don’t run up from Mexico. Down sometimes, but freight only goes one way.”
“I wasn’t talking about illegals.” Bradford stopped there because this line of discussion was pointless with an underling. 
“You know an out-of-the-way place to pull over, somewhere not too far outside the metroplex, somewhere that won’t draw any attention?”
“I might,” the driver said, “but you and that pop toy there make me real nervous. I need some guarantee you ain’t planning to use it.”
“If I was planning to kill people, those guys with the guns back at the depot would have been the first to go.”
The driver switched gears again. “I suppose you have a point,” he said, though his body showed signs of agitation, what Bradford expected in a person amped for fight or flight.
“Where were you headed with this load?” Bradford asked.
“Houston, same as always.”
Bradford repeated the answer. “Same as always?” And then, “That the only place you ever go?”
“I run the smaller trucks all over the country, but with this rig, yeah, always Houston. Though before I come on, before Katrina, it was New Orleans.”
“That doesn’t create questions?”
The man shrugged. “I do my job, I don’t ask whatfor.”
“You have a name?”
“Dave Lockreed.”
“Okay, Dave, listen. All I want right now is to get into the back of this truck.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone, definitely don’t want to kill anyone, and I’m not planning to steal anything. 
“I’m convinced there’s a person in the back, and I’m only here for that. 
“I want to be done and out as quickly as possible, and all I’m asking is for you not to make this any harder than it has to be. Can you work with me on that?”
THEY WERE JUST beyond Lewisville when the call from Jahan came in, a brief swap of details that let Bradford know his team was safe and confirmed specifics for the proposed rendezvous point.
With that settled, the remainder of the run north from DFW provided an opportunity to poke and prod at the driver’s knowledge in a not-so-subtle attempt to fill informational gaps.
Lockreed, though a slow and cautious speaker, offered far more in his stop-start moments of rambling than Bradford fished for, a nervous stringing of words, talking for the sake of talking. 
Houston, as it turned out, was where Veers operated a second truck depot, a location that hadn’t turned up in any of the war room’s digging; 
a smaller office that, as far as Lockreed knew, handled import and export, a location that tied in well with Bradford’s theories about why Veers operated in the way that it did, 
and because Houston had access to both sea and air, Bradford suspected this smaller, off-the-map arm of the Doll Maker’s network was the primary gateway for moving his merchandise in and out of the country.
The meeting spot was a park just off the interstate beyond Denton: 
trees and grass, baseball diamonds, and soccer fields with a deserted parking lot in an area both quiet and sparsely populated.
Brakes hissed, then Bradford climbed down from the cab. Rounded to the rear of the truck while Lockreed did the same along the other side. 
At the truck’s back end they stared at the door and the double bolts padlocked into place. 
“You got the keys to these things?” Bradford asked.
“Wish I did, normally would. Didn’t get that sorted before the shooting started.”
“Still no idea what’s inside?”
The driver shook his head. “Not but what’s on the manifest.”
“What do you do when you get to Houston?”
“Back the truck in, hand over the papers and keys, get a signature, and leave.”
“To where? In what?”
“Usually, there’s a company car waiting. I put up in a nearby motel for the night, come back in the morning, and make the return trip, sometimes with freight, sometimes empty.”
“But always with this exact trailer?”
Lockreed nodded.
“Nothing strange about that?”
The driver’s posture sagged. “It’s a job,” he said. “Puts food on the table.”
They waited in silence for a few minutes until Walker, in the Trooper, pulled up beside the rig. Jahan followed several car lengths behind.
Lights switched off and engines running, they stepped from the vehicles and stood beside Bradford. 
He motioned toward the padlocks. “Driver doesn’t have the keys. Anyone have any PETN left?”
Jahan pulled primer cord from his pack. Wrapped and knotted a segment around the hook of each lock and let out a lead. 
Then all four stepped a few paces away. The explosives cut through the metal, knife to butter, and the pieces fell to either side. 
Bradford pushed the scraps out of the way, slid the bolts, and pulled the doors outward. 
With a flashlight beam roaming, they peered together into a darkened container filled with oversize boxes stacked nearly the height of the interior.
Walker sighed. “They couldn’t make this shit any easier, could they?”
Bradford climbed up into the truck and Walker joined him.
Jahan said, “You want me to cuff the civie?”
Bradford said, “Nah, he’s got nowhere to go,” and then after a moment of staring at the boxes, “Hey, Dave, get in here and help us empty this thing.”
Walker said, “There’s got to be some pattern here. Some route to get to whatever is inside— makes no sense to have to load and unload all of this every single time.”
“Maybe,” Bradford said. “Do you see it?”
Walker shook her head.
“Jack?”
“I see a wall of cardboard and have a big target on my back. Can we get moving?”
Bradford reached for a box and shoved it in the driver’s direction. The thing was heavy for being nothing but a prop. 
“Check out what’s inside,” he said. “Find out if it matches your manifest.”
The document said children’s furniture, and the boxes, heavy and unwieldy, held wooden pieces sandwiched between packaging material: 
to all appearances genuine cargo, and possibly truly intended for export. 
The four worked in sweaty silence, offloading enough of the freight to create space within the interior so that they could shuffle boxes from one place to the next, looking for they knew not what but expecting to recognize the thing when they found it.
Bradford was halfway to the front when the first sound of tapping, faint and nearly imperceptible, caught his attention. 
He held up a hand to stop movement, and within the silence the others also picked up what he had, 
though the sound had no obvious source and was faint enough that one might think the taps had been imagined.
The noise— if you could call it that— seemed loudest in the direction of the far front, 
so Bradford switched focus from moving boxes from one spot to the next to clearing a path straight through until he reached the front, and there he found nothing but the end of the container.
The tapping came again, louder than it had been before, the origin still no clearer than when they’d first heard it. 
In the narrow path, Jahan squeezed beyond Bradford, knelt, and placed his palm and ear to the wall. 
Waited for the tapping, and when it came, shook his head: no vibration.
In the disappointing silence, each inhale, each exhale, reverberated loudly enough to drown out the faint link to hope until the tapping returned, 
this time louder and unmistakably an SOS that came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Finally Lockreed stated the obvious. “That can’t come from one of the boxes,” he said. “None of them is big enough to hold a whole person.”
“False front, false floor, false ceiling,” Walker said. “Those are our only options.” 
After a moment of pause, without further discussion or consultation, they started moving freight again, faster and less cautiously than before, 
shoving boxes toward the rear and out the back without regard to how the merchandise fell or if packing burst, spurred on by the confirmation that somewhere in this truck was the score they’d set out to find.
When the container was finally empty and the ground outside littered, Bradford swept the flashlight beam from corner to corner and seam to seam, 
while Jahan knocked knuckles against the walls and floor, trying to find a change in pattern that would lead them to a hidden space.
The SOS repeated, and in an automatic response, they each turned to look at the ceiling, the direction from which the sound had seemed to come. 
“Can’t be up there,” Walker whispered. “It’s gotta be front.” She begged the flashlight off Bradford, and using the light to guide her fingertips, ran her hand up along the front corner seam from floor to ceiling. 
Shook her head, backed up, and tried again. Finally she paused and said, “I got something. Jack, give me a hand.” Pointed him to a spot a couple of feet away. “Press there,” she said, 
and when he applied pressure at the same level she did, the panel clicked, moved inward an inch, and slid a few feet to the side.
The truck went silent, as if a vacuum had emptied the container of air.
Bradford fought the urge to push his way forward. Held back to allow Walker the moment she’d so rightfully earned, watched her face as she shone the light into the opening, 
and felt the disappointment when what lit up was not a hiding spot but another wall right behind where the first had been, this one with a narrow door. 
The shell of a self-contained room, installed behind the false wall, kept separate from the actual walls and floor of the semi by several inches of insulating material.
Walker motioned Jahan toward the lock. Said, “Det cord again?” and stepped out of his way. 
He knotted primer cord around this lock as he’d done on the one outside the truck. The pieces severed. Halves fell to the floor. 
Walker reached forward, opened the door, and swung the light inward. 
The expression on her face told Bradford everything he needed to know and his breath caught in his throat. Walker moved farther into the room and out of sight. 
Lockreed maneuvered forward ahead of Jahan, pushed his way in, only to turn on his heels and rush for the back of the truck. Head out, he heaved and vomited.
Jahan peered in after Walker, threw a wary glance in Bradford’s direction, and stepped aside to allow Bradford to squeeze into the interior of an area the width of the truck but less than three feet deep— a crawl space, if that. 
Vents led from the top of the space through to the roof of the trucking container, but even with the mild airflow, the interior was fetid with the smell of rot and decaying body fluid.
Walker shone the flashlight over the body, crumpled on a mat and twisted in a way the human form was never meant to bend. 
Wounds that had been hastily bound oozed pus from infection.
“Oh, Jesus,” Walker whispered, and really, there wasn’t any more to add. 
Logan’s eyes were glassed over in a drugged stupor. Leaned up against the wall, he stared in a way that would have been slack-jawed had his head not been wrapped with filthy bandages. 
His wrist was tipped back, knuckles to wall, continuing the same plaintive SOS that had first alerted them to his presence.
The euphoria of finding Logan alive— if barely— was fast followed by the nightmare of figuring out how to safely move him. 
He needed immediate hospitalization at a facility big enough to handle multiple trauma, 
and with everything that had transpired at the depot they couldn’t risk taking the truck directly to an emergency room.
Gagging against the stench, skirting urine, feces, blood, and vomit, Bradford moved behind Logan, knelt so his mouth was near Logan’s ear and his chest supported Logan’s head, 
and whispered the same shush of comfort a parent might use to calm a child from night terrors: They’d get him out of here, he’d be okay— had to be okay.
The mat, filthy as it was, became a means of transport.
Logan never cried out, never spoke at all, but as they worked him slowly out of the little room— inching forward along the floor, keeping movement as small as possible— the mixture of pain and gratitude came through the glassy gaze without the need for words.
In increments, they got the mat and his broken body through the door to the wider space of the semi’s container, to where the air was fit to breathe and they could pause to strategize. 
The Capstone team huddled so Lockreed wouldn’t overhear, but the move wasn’t entirely necessary. 
Having pushed his way into the crawl space and seen the human cargo, then come bolting out again, the driver kept a deliberate distance.
Behind his back, they formed plans in decisive whispers.
Bradford left the truck and backed the Explorer to the rear of the semi so it would be easier to shift Logan from one vehicle to the next. 
Walker transferred the weapons cache entirely into the Trooper— she would return to Capstone and man the office while Jahan and Bradford continued across the state border with Logan. 
They’d take him to a hospital in Oklahoma City, which at this point wasn’t a whole lot farther than Dallas, where it would be more difficult for anyone to connect Logan to the events in Texas. 
They wouldn’t stay gone long, not with so many threads left untied.
Using blankets already in the Explorer and packaging from the boxes on the ground, Jahan formed a cushioned platform in the back of the SUV, 
and while he and Walker worked to get Logan settled, Bradford, in an attempt to cover their tracks, took Lockreed aside.
Next to the truck the driver paced, several slow steps forward and then back again, hands in his pockets, repeating the same question over and over, not to Bradford but a mumble to himself, “What do I do? What do I do?”
At a loss for words, Bradford let the man do his thing until, finally, frustrated with the irrational drama, he said, “Look, you really don’t have a lot of options.”
Lockreed stopped pacing. Turned toward Bradford’s voice.
“First, you were at the scene of the shootout. Second, you’ve seen this— seen what you’ve been hauling. 
“Your employers are going to know and they’re going to want you dead. And, worse, even if they don’t kill you, the authorities probably already consider you an accessory.” 
Bradford paused. “Really, your best bet is to go to law enforcement. Get it out of the way, tell them exactly what happened tonight.”
Lockreed pulled his hands out of his pockets and then shoved them back again. 
“But what about when they ask me about you? Who you are and where you went? Aren’t you going to want to kill me, too?”
Bradford shook his head. “I’m not coming after you,” he said. “Tell them the truth.” 
He straightened and stepped toward the Explorer. “Tell them you have no idea.”

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 23 OUTSIDE MONTEBRUNO, ITALY
Neeva stared out the car window. Struggled to make sense of the shadowy movements, arms and blows and strikes that blended into one another while slipping farther away from the car, until, in the darkness, she couldn’t tell who was who or what was what.
Her palms were damp and heat prickled at her hairline. Everything had happened fast. 
Stunned by the speed of the violence, she strained to see outside the car 
and then, in a rush of panic, closed the windows, locked the doors, and checked the ignition in the hope that maybe, just maybe, in the hurry, Michael had left the keys. But she hadn’t.
In the terror of the moment, Neeva had lost time, and now her heart beat heavily, urging her to flee on foot. Fear alone kept her anchored to the seat. 
Down the road, in both directions, was only darkness punctuated by pinpricks of light, 
almost as if someone had chosen this precise location for a stop exactly because it was as far away from anything as Neeva could remember since they’d started the trip, 
and out there, somewhere in the empty night, was the big creep from the cell.
She didn’t know which direction to run to stay away from him, but she knew his type— the kind to get his kicks from hurting other people. 
If he was the one to find her, there was no telling what he would do. 
Visual possibilities danced inside Neeva’s head, fodder for a slasher film, 
while the image of the dead man and Michael’s vomiting played out in a background montage, heightening her fear.
That man was dead because Neeva had run. If she actually escaped, what would they do? For sure they’d kill someone she loved, maybe they already had. 
Her heart hurt. Her stomach hurt. Neeva swallowed back the pain and strained to see out the window. Saw nothing but black and then a blur of movement. 
She would have to run. Hands shaking, she reached for the dome light and moved the switch so that when she opened the door, the light wouldn’t turn on, 
then eased from the passenger seat to the driver’s, head low, movements small just in case. 
Someone outside yelled. Neeva twitched. Gunfire shattered the silence and Neeva fumbled for the door lock.
Michael was the only one without a gun, which meant Michael was the only one who could have been shot, which meant Michael was dead and now the creep would come for her.
Door unlocked, Neeva tried for the handle. Missed it and then like magic the door opened of its own accord.
Neeva stifled a scream. Her eyes tracked up from the ground, searched out the face of whoever stood outside, 
and like some miraculous apparition, Michael spoke from the darkness. Said, “Get out of my seat.”
Fear and relief and tension, and anger mixed into an emotional cocktail so overwhelmingly powerful that Neeva laughed. Nervous laughter. Crazy laughter.
Michael squatted so that their faces were level and close. 
From here, even without the dome light, Neeva could see Michael’s eyes and the way they scanned her as if searching for evidence of damage; 
she could also see that Michael’s lip was swollen and cut, and the skin on her left cheekbone split and bleeding.
“You’re not dead,” Neeva said, and her mouth felt as if it was stuffed with cotton.
“Not dead,” Michael said, and reached for Neeva’s hair. 
Neeva flinched, deflected Michael’s hand with a smack, and then, realizing in horror what she’d done, braced for a retaliatory strike that never came.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Michael said. “Put the light back on, will you?”
Neeva paused.
This wasn’t the same Michael from before the dead man’s picture and definitely not the Michael who had dragged her screaming into the road. 
The voice was the same monotone calm, but something was different in a scary sort of way. 
Wary, and keeping her face forward, Neeva reached behind, felt for the nub, then found and pushed it, and the dim light came on, painful against the darkness.
This time, when Michael moved her hand toward Neeva’s face, Neeva kept still, guarded and cautious, 
while Michael reached for the hair at her neck and lifted it, examining the area where the creep had slammed her into the window. “Does it hurt?” she asked.
“No,” Neeva whispered, body still rigid, eyes searching Michael’s in a desperate attempt to discover what was different— something about the face, the eyes— 
a glaze, maybe, or hollowness, like Michael saw without seeing: alive on the outside but dead behind the eyes.
Michael let the hair drop and nudged her gently. “Move over,” she said, 
and Neeva, her mind juggling between the danger of Michael in front of her and the creep in the darkness, worked backward to the seat she’d just crawled from.
“If you’re alive,” Neeva said, “is the guy out there dead?”
“Eventually,” Michael said, and reached behind the seat for the blanket.
“So he’s still alive? Still out there?”
“For now,” she said.
“I heard a gun fire.”
Michael nodded again, and dabbed at the blood that trailed beneath her chin. “A warning,” she said, and slid in behind the wheel. 
She shut the door and the light turned off. Then tipped the seat back as far as it would go and closed her eyes.
“What do we do now?” Neeva said.
“We wait.”
“For what?”
“I want to know that my friend is alive,” Michael said, and those words burned hot up the back of Neeva’s neck. 
The friend was the reason Michael was here, and even a fool would know that if the friend was still alive— Neeva shut off the thought. 
Michael’s head turned and her eyes, open and unblinking, stared at her with that same scary-dead gaze, like there were a hundred years of things to say and she had no life left to say them. 
Neeva said, “I thought maybe, you know. I mean, realizing you’re a woman, I just…”
“I don’t want to do it,” Michael said. “I have to choose. I don’t know how many people will die by me not doing this.” 
She faced the ceiling again and closed her eyes. “It’s not just the ones I love. I’m surprised they haven’t threatened you with your family, too.”
“They have,” Neeva said, “but I didn’t believe them.”
“You don’t strike me as stupid.”
“My parents are powerful people,” Neeva said. “They’re hard to get to, and they’re looking for me, they have to be.”
“They are,” Michael said, “and these guys”— she ran her finger in a circle in the air— “they know that now. I doubt they did at the beginning, which is why I’m here.”
She paused and opened her eyes. Looked directly at Neeva. “You pulled a fast one on the world, what with changing your name and burying your past. 
“That’s probably what has saved you now, everyone speculating about you and why you did it. 
“But none of that makes much of a difference anymore. If you don’t do what they want, they’ll still find someone to kill. Maybe not your mom or your dad, but your sisters, your cousins.”
Neeva tried to push back all the nightmare and the crazy, the confusion and the words that made no sense. 
“Saved me now?” she said. “Saved me?” Her voice went up a notch. Then, even more bewildered, she added, “You know about my family?”
“You can trust that if I know, they know,” Michael said, and then sighed. “You have no idea, do you? What’s been going on these past few weeks?”
Weeks. Neeva mouthed the word. Pressed her palms to her head and pushed against the walls that were closing inward. 
She’d lost track of time holed up in that cold stone prison with no concept of day or night, 
hours parsed by the spacing of sleep and meals and guard changes and assholes who’d arrived to assault her. 
So much precious time stolen. Weeks.
She had no words, no voice, no ability to articulate the sickening angst. 
Her parents would think she was dead, maybe, would have no closure, no way to know— no last words or good-byes or I love yous. Just this. 
This grab-and-run and cut off from the world with no way to send a message that she was alive and fighting to get back to them. 
There was no possible civil response, so all she said in answer to Michael’s question was “I’ve been locked away, so how could I know anything, really?”
The minutes ticked by and the longer the silence grew, the more Neeva’s anxiety increased. 
Unsure of what she could say or how hard she could push before Michael’s hard-assed captor persona returned, she finally whispered, “What exactly has been going on?”
Michael just shook her head and said, “You should put the tights on and get your face cleaned up. Don’t give him an excuse to come back.”
Neeva kicked off her shoes, as close to venting frustration as she dared in the moment. 
Reached for the packet that had fallen to the floor, snatched it up, and tore at the plastic. “Seriously,” she said. “I want to know.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Michael said, and put a finger to her lips, pointed at the dash, ran her finger in a circle around the air again, then pointed to her ear, 
and Neeva understood then, that for all of this time, not only were they being followed but their conversations were monitored.
MUNROE DOZED FITFULLY, an hour, maybe two, of silence and downtime and decompression during which it was almost possible to tamp down the fear of retaliation, 
the guessing game of who, out of the few people she loved, would be next on the list of Doll Maker targets, 
to pretend that having been snatched away from the first true peace she’d found in the last ten years hadn’t just thrown her back to the edge of the abyss, 
that place of madness she’d spent the entirety of her adult years trying to avoid.
The fight with Arben and the ensuing pain had been a release valve, a temporary calm from the pressure cooker of violence and voices, 
but they were back again, feeding off the rage, driving and relentless.
The shrill alert of the phone jolted through the quiet and Neeva jumped, then muttered, “No, not again.”
Munroe picked up the phone, checked the display, and in response to Neeva’s panicked deer-in-the-headlights stare, whispered, “We should be okay for now.”
The number showing on the screen was not Lumani’s, which left only the Doll Maker as the caller, 
and if what had happened over the past few days was any prediction of how things would continue, 
even though this call might be the harbinger of another battle, it wouldn’t likely announce another death 
because the Doll Maker preferred to send his minions and foot soldiers as the bearers of bad news.
Munroe answered the phone with silence and after a long pause the Doll Maker said, “My friend, you are there, are you not?” 
His voice was warm and friendly and infused with the same fractured sense of reality that had permeated his every move within the office of the dolls.
“I’m listening,” Munroe said.
“I cannot give you what you want.”
“Then I see no reason why I should continue.”
“As expected,” he said. “It’s the time frame at issue. Your friend, he is alive, this is for sure, the problem is in the timing of getting you your proof. 
“Continue the journey. A little farther down the road, a little later, and you will have what you want.”
“You killed a man for arbitrary reasons,” she said, “you lost nothing and still took his life.”
“Words like arbitrary are meaningless,” he said. “The responsibility to meet each outcome is yours. 
“No matter how failure arrives, the price for it is yours to pay. I made this clear from the beginning.”
Failure. Because Neeva had run. Noah’s life had been taken to compensate for tights and mascara.
“The dead man,” Munroe said. “What was his failure?”
“It was your failure, your punishment, and so the answers are your problem to deal with as you see fit. 
“You were given a task and failed, so there has been suffering. You can correct it now and spare further pain.”
Mental disconnect filled his answers. Her response was about the value of human life, his was about damage to a costume. 
“You said this task is about me and my debt to you. You already hold Logan as collateral, but instead you took the life of someone who has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this.”
“Truly unfortunate,” he said. “You must continue the journey now.”
Munroe drew in a breath, fought the timpani inside her head, and said, “If you can’t prove to me Logan is alive, then I have nothing left to lose, so no, I won’t continue. Not without proof of life.”
“There are others,” the Doll Maker said. “There are others who matter to you, so you would be wise to follow through and avoid further failure.”
She could hear the smile, the smirk, the gloat in his voice, and his threat was another punch to the head.
Jolting. The strategy was there, amorphous, intangible. 
There were others, as he said, and they would be used to manipulate her all the way until she had reached the end. 
Nothing would stop until he had what he wanted, and when he had won, she was destined to die, as was Logan, and eventually Neeva, and God knew who else.
The voices rose, chanting, calling. This is a day of vengeance, that he may avenge him of his adversaries.
No matter how many moves she played out in her head, the outcome was always death. 
Jumping through his hoops, sacrificing one piece to save another, she would lose everything. He controlled the elements, the power, and the board. 
The only way to end the madness was to upend the game and let the pieces fall.
“I have nothing left to lose,” she said, “and no fear of what you’ll take or what you can do to me because I am already dead.”
“The innocent will suffer.”
“Then let them suffer,” she said, and hung up.

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 22 IRVING, TEXAS
Bradford navigated the streets toward Veers Transport, head in the zone, that place where the plan of action and the action itself joined into a single point of focus.
Jahan and Walker followed in the Trooper several blocks behind and out of sight. 
As a team, they knew nothing more at this moment than they had when Bradford had first moved off the sofa to the whiteboard and followed the tenuous thread of logic from parking lot to security cameras to trucks.
The trucks were all they had left. They’d strategized, stretched possibilities, prepared for the worst, and abandoned the Capstone office for this Hail Mary foray. 
Punctuating every decision tonight, every move, was the knowledge that if they failed here, Logan was lost forever and, by implication, so was Munroe.
Reflections from amber street lamps dotted the roadway, light mirrored on streets still slick from a downpour that had blown through, 
typical of Texas weather: in, out, and gone, with only the aftereffects as evidence— a feat Bradford planned to mimic tonight.
Another intersection and the transport depot would be within spotting distance, and then there it was, on the right, with the lot lit up in a way it hadn’t been before. 
The smaller trucks had been rearranged to accommodate a semi backed into the middle. 
Two men strode across the pavement from the rig to the warehouse door, 
one leading, the other following like a hungry dog, and another two pairs of legs sprouted toward the rear of the truck.
Battle strategy churned and muscle memory amped in anticipation.
If fortune smiled, he would find Logan still alive, would bring him safely home and in his place leave behind a mess of untraceable destruction. Just like the weather.
Bradford passed the depot, pulled into the office complex next door. 
Parked in shadows, turned off the ignition, grabbed the overstuffed backpack, and stepped into the night.
Strategy for tonight had amounted to two very general scenarios: 
If there wasn’t any activity on the lot, they’d slash tires, knock down doors, and cut into truck bodies until they found what they were searching for, 
and if there was activity on the lot, they’d go after whatever target was the most highly guarded. That meant the eighteen-wheeler.
He continued through shadows in its direction, skirting between buildings to the back of the complex, where one series of offices abutted the darkest side of the transport depot. 
Wire cutters were Bradford’s key through the chain-link.
On his own soil he worried less about bad guys and things blowing up in his face than he did about being destroyed by those at whose side he served. 
His own country would crucify him if they traced tonight’s events back to him, 
and yet Bradford felt no qualms about taking the matter of Logan’s kidnapping into his own hands. 
Years spent navigating shithole situations, years surrounded by poverty and corruption in countries where life and death were ruled by the law of survival and justice was arbitrary at best, 
of never knowing if this was the day life would be cut short, had a way of changing how a person viewed the world.
He paused. Listened. Continued on.
Flattened along the windowless length of warehouse wall and measuring off paces, moved in the direction of the prefab office. 
Knelt and pulled one of the bricks of C-4 from the pack. He formed the explosive on the wall and jabbed a charge into it. 
Without enough primer cord to sufficiently run the building, he was limited to the handful of remote-activated detonators he’d taken from the armory.
The plastics had been Walker’s call. He hadn’t planned on blowing up a building, on drawing a big arrow above his head that said Hey, guys with the power to lock me up, look here, 
but now that things had come to this, he wished he’d taken more of everything: 
more explosives, more det cord, more charges, enough to make a proper job of the destruction instead of merely providing distraction.
In Bradford’s earpiece Walker whispered, “Big guy, you coming?”
“At the party,” he replied.
Jahan said, “Wingman at the party.”
And then Walker again: “Music is ready.”
Bradford crept forward another several yards and worked the next block of plastics to the wall. Set the detonator and headed on. 
No matter what happened tonight, he’d blow the charges. 
A little parting gift and an up-yours to the assholes who, a bit too comfortable on American soil, had failed to fully think through the repercussions of stealing from a group of trigger-happy gunslingers who got depressed if they went too long without an adrenaline kick.
And maybe that was part of the Doll Maker’s plan: entice and destroy.
The eighteen-wheeler could just as easily be sitting on the lot as a trap as it could be a target— or something else altogether. 
But there was only one way to discover if Logan was there, and that was to take the bait.
Another several yards forward, Bradford placed the last of the explosives and Walker said, “I think the engine on the wheels is running.”
Bradford said, “Wingman?”
“Two minutes,” Jahan replied.
Two minutes before the phones and the Internet went down and Walker killed the street and security lights. 
They would have taken out the electricity and saved the rest of the hassle if they could have gotten to the connections without drawing attention, but for that they had been out of luck.
Bradford moved faster now. If the truck engine was running, whatever was here wouldn’t be staying long. 
He was at the corner of the warehouse, rounding onto the lot itself, when Jahan said, “Ready to party.”
So came the spit-pop of the sniper rifle and the beginning of the carnage. 
Cameras on the warehouse went first, mini-explosions of glass and metal that sprinkled the area with sparkling confetti, 
followed by the halogen security lights, and finally the streetlights, one after the next, in a steady pattern that eventually plunged the entire lot into relative darkness.
The Veers response came swiftly. The men toward the rear of the eighteen-wheeler, in an automatic reaction to the gunfire, dropped and reached for their handguns. 
They twisted and shifted in a hunt for the direction of the firing— not the response to ambush or rapid deployment but of those who’d been warned against potential activity and not really believing, had only halfheartedly prepared.
The moment following darkness brought total silence. No weapon reports. No shouting. No cars on the roads. No movement at all. 
As if in acknowledgment of the attack, the entire world had frozen to regroup. 
And then the warehouse door opened, and one of the two men who’d gone in came out again, as if he’d been the one to draw the short straw and been pushed out. 
The man was in jeans and T-shirt, heavy in the middle, maybe in his early thirties, 
and because he was the only one without a weapon, Bradford pegged him for the truck driver.
Bradford skirted from the cover of one truck to the next in another surge toward the eighteen-wheeler. 
Tires on the perimeter vehicles hissed, flattening, in a steady procession, the way the lights had blown prior.
Beside the rig, shadows on the ground, with accents thick and foreign, yelled for the man at the warehouse door. 
They wanted him in the truck. They wanted the truck gone now.
At the near end of the warehouse a bay door slid partially open. Two men rolled from beneath and dropped off the platform to the ground. 
The escaping light stretched their shadows against the pavement and added the silhouette of assault rifles to lengths of limbs and distorted heads.
Walker said, “Big man, party guests coming at nine.”
Sniper on the roof with an infrared scope meant that had they been willing to take life, this sequence would have been over in minutes. 
But the conundrum within vigilante justice was differentiating between employees and criminals. 
The immediate goal was to grab Logan without killing innocent people or tacking homicide charges onto everything else. 
Cold-blooded vengeance could wait.
Across the lot, the men on the other side of the truck continued to yell for the driver, and Walker took potshots at his feet every time he moved. 
To Bradford’s left, the men with the rifles crept from the warehouse toward the perimeter, slipping out of sight and presumably continuing in the direction of the sniper fire.
With five enemy on the ground, breaching the eighteen-wheeler and getting inside would be noisy, messy, and risky, 
but whatever was in it clearly mattered most to the Veers people, and Logan or not, the contents could be used as a black eye and a bargaining chip.
Within the blind urgency of the Doll Maker’s people to get the eighteen-wheeler on its way, Bradford formed an alternative scenario, and set out strategy change in clipped commands.
The sniper fire stopped.
The driver, still rooted to the spot and afraid to move, refused to respond to the men on the ground 
and so his own people turned on him, shooting in his direction to force him into doing what they wanted.
Bradford crab-walked around the last of the trucks to the open space between him and the rig. 
Inched forward, and the crack of a rifle split the night. 
The windshield above his head shattered, and the sides of the truck dinged with hits of metal on metal.
Ignoring the instinct to dive for cover, he rushed the cab.
Each step brought another series of rifle reports, short bursts fired in his direction, interrupted by a scream, then silence, and finally strafing from both rifles in the direction of the property next door.
Introduction of the automatic gunfire created confusion on the ground by the truck. 
Bradford didn’t pause when he reached the semi, didn’t climb so much as jump the laddered steps, yanked the cab door outward, and threw himself forward.
In the open hole of the door opposite, the truck driver, seeing him, froze.
Bradford leveled his weapon at the man and said, “I’m your best friend right now, just get in the truck and get us off the lot and I swear to God I won’t hurt you.”
The driver’s mouth opened as if to say something, but he didn’t move.

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 21 WEST OF VERONA, ITALY
Under the fluorescent lights of the gas station overhang, Munroe refilled the Opel’s tank. 
The proprietor stared out from beyond the glass of the mom-and-pop-style convenience store with arms crossed，as if he was prison guard and she the only convict in this otherwise empty station.
She had no cash, no credit, nothing with which to pay for the fuel she was taking, only the word of Lumani and the instructions he’d given when he’d called ahead. 
She followed the details exactly, certain from the moment she’d reached the location and had kissed the lips of the nozzle to the mouth of the tank that the man-boy was out there, perched somewhere in the dark with the scope to his eye, watching through the crosshairs.
Munroe turned from proprietor to pump and, seeing without really seeing, watched the numbers on the display click upward. 
Neeva, who’d drifted off an hour earlier, hadn’t woken when they’d stopped, making it possible to handle the refueling without having to also guard against another episode of violence. 
The girl had slept a good deal since her failed bolt for freedom, and with any luck, she would stay under for a while.
The shut-off kicked in and, the tank full, Munroe replaced the nozzle.
In the window, the station owner still stared. Munroe tightened the gas cap and then stared back. He uncrossed his arms and waved her on. 
She knew the look: He didn’t want her inside, didn’t want to risk conversation or questions; wanted her gone as quickly as possible; 
a man caught up in the machine, blackmailed and browbeaten into submission just as she was.
She stepped around to the driver’s door and, once more, traded the cool of outside air, the taste of freedom, for the stale of the four-wheeled prison. 
Made yet another turn of the ignition, and Neeva slept on; another return to the dark and the roads and the trancelike hum of wheels against the pavement.
Along the empty kilometers, routing from one address to another, one random sleepy town after the next, Neeva’s words returned.
The rant about the them. The obvious self-defense training. The vicious refusal to quit even when she was outclassed.
The complete change when the girl realized she wasn’t dealing with a man— all of it part of a history that hadn’t shown up in any of the documents the Tisdale parents had forwarded to Bradford’s office，and Munroe puzzled over whether the catalyst had happened when the girl was still Grace Tisdale or after she’d become Neeva Eckridge.
Then she pushed aside the thoughts. Didn’t want to know, didn’t want to care.
The primal urge to fight, to win, to survive, was alive and well, but so was the darkness, licking at the edges, begging to come out and play again.
She really, really, didn’t want to care. The emotional waters were muddied enough as they were.
Munroe reached for the Doll Maker’s phone, flicked on the screen, glanced at it, and shut it off. Still nothing.
In the hours since Neeva’s run to the restaurant, the only contact from Lumani had been instructions for refueling，and although Munroe had listened for some hint in his voice, some betrayal of what retribution she might expect, there’d been nothing on which to draw.
The jolt, when it finally arrived, came not by way of a phone call but as an image downloaded to the phone. 
An alert so jarring that Neeva twitched awake when it sounded. 
Munroe took her eyes off the road longer than they’d any right to be, eased off the gas, and stared at the backlit screen. 
Neeva, yawning, shifted, turning first to look at Munroe’s face and then, following Munroe’s gaze, to the glow of the phone. 
Munroe reached for the vibrating piece, bracing for what the damage to Logan might be. 
She stared at the picture that filled the screen, stared at lifeless eyes. 
Two shots to the head, little red rosebuds an inch apart, flowers of death that never blossomed but instead trailed threads of color down the placid face.
Time imploded. Then stopped completely.
Darkness descended.
The air trembled.
Ruptured.
And the inner voices, symbols of a vicious past that had been silent for nearly two years, violent pressure that had been tamped down and muted, came rushing forth in a torrent of madness. 
Somewhere in the distance, car headlights penetrated the blackness and beside her came screaming, loud and feral, and claws like a cat’s pulling and tearing at her right arm.
And then no movement whatsoever. Munroe scratched at the door, the handle, until the barrier gave way to the cold of the night and she tipped out to the asphalt. 
Stumbled around the hood to the other side of the car, where her knees gave out. 
She heaved in rapid convulsions, an empty stomach offering up nothing but bile, and words, meaningless words, jumbled and collided inside her head，until after a time they re-ordered into form and shape and substance. According to what they have done, will he repay.
The car door behind her opened. Munroe didn’t open her eyes. Heard Neeva’s footsteps as one and, even in far-off awareness, knew the girl was still hobbled.
Inner darkness continued to swirl and, eyes shut, Munroe turned her face toward the car only enough for her voice to carry. Said, “If you run, I will kill you.”
Neeva didn’t answer. Clothing rustled and the girl’s hands touched the ground behind Munroe’s feet.
The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths.
Neeva sat beside Munroe, her breathing a shallow pant, the smell of fear on her skin. 
Munroe opened her eyes long enough to note the phone in her hand and her gaze fixed upon the image that remained on the screen, then she shut her eyes once more.
Neeva said, “Is this what they threatened?” and her voice shook, as if in spite of everything she’d endured thus far, only now had she grasped how tightly the puppeteer controlled the threads of life. “Is this the blackmail?”
Munroe, hands on her thighs, face toward the dirt, shook her head. No. 
This was a death she hadn’t seen coming, couldn’t have imagined or possibly foreseen when calculating what pawns could be manipulated in this madness.
Noah Johnson. A Moroccan-born American and chance encounter two years earlier that had turned into a six-month relationship, tender until the end. 
A lover she hadn’t seen or spoken to in nine months, a death far enough removed from her present life that she had no way to steel against it the way she could against Logan’s, against Bradford’s, or any of her family.
Crooked roads. No one who walks along them will know peace.
Unspeakable pain.
Justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us.
“Who is this man?” Neeva whispered.
“He was my friend,” Munroe said, and wiped her sleeve across her mouth. “I loved him.”
Whatever Noah’s flaws, he’d been a good man, had loved her as intensely as she’d loved him, and she’d left to protect him from herself. 
He’d moved on and found another, and still, he was dead. The shock of it wouldn’t leave her, was a truth she couldn’t acknowledge.
Munroe struggled to stand, and Neeva, beside her, stood also.
Among the strong, we are like the dead.
Munroe reached for the phone, took it from Neeva’s hand.
We look for justice, but find none.
Shut off the screen and handed it back.
“Why did they kill him?” Neeva said. 
The image burned inside Munroe’s head: Double tap to the head. Blood trickling from the wounds. Body abandoned on the concrete pavement. 
“To control me,” she said. They couldn’t kill Logan yet, because they needed the package delivered. 
But they could provide ample pain as punishment and motivation to comply. 
So they’d gone after others she loved, targets that mattered.
Innocent life.
Who else were they tracking? If Kate Breeden was the one who’d charted this course, if she still fed them information, they would find Munroe’s entire family no matter how careful she’d been over the years.
Their deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands.
They’d hunt out everyone she cared about, move fastest against those she loved most. 
Kate had been her friend once. She should have put a bullet in her head when she’d had the chance.
Bradford not attempting to return the coded calls, a silence that had until now been reassuring, turned to death and coldness, to the sickness of the unknown. 
Had they gotten him, too? With the fear, the darkness swirling inside her head thickened into a suffocating blanket. 
Munroe hooked an arm around Neeva’s neck and drew her close. Kissed her forehead. Whispered, “Forgive me,” and before Neeva had a chance to react, jerked the girl forward.
Somewhere in the darkness beyond the mind, rage- and adrenaline-charged strength turned Munroe’s fingers into vises, her own body into a machine controlled by the monsters inside her head. 
Munroe neither felt nor acknowledged Neeva’s clawing or screaming while she dragged the girl, with her bound ankles, from the dirt across the asphalt, to the middle of the road.
Munroe stopped and held Neeva’s arm high. Pulled from a pocket the strip of metal— the improvised knife with which Neeva had once tried to cut her— and held it to the girl’s arm.
Into the night, where surely Lumani lurked and certainly he listened, Munroe screamed for proof of Logan’s life. 
“Give it to me,” she yelled, “or I swear to God I will slice your precious package here and now and let her drain dry.”
Headlights down the road flashed on, then off. Just once. And then the phone, still clutched in Neeva’s hand, the hand to which Munroe controlled the wrist, began to ring. 
Without relaxing her grip, Munroe took the phone and placed it to her ear, aware now that the claws had stopped and so had the hitting, though the tears and the body trembling continued.
“Logan is alive,” Lumani said. “I can assure you no other has been killed. Get off the road. Return to the car, continue the journey.”
“Not without proof of life. No exceptions, no excuses.” Munroe ended the call before he could say more. 
The phone rang again. Munroe placed it in her pocket. Neeva’s stifled tears and shaking body returned her fully to the moment，and aware now of the strength with which she still gripped the wrist, consciously and with almost reverent tenderness, she loosened her fingers. 
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she kissed Neeva’s hand and let go.
Neeva took a trussed step backward and Munroe caught her for balance. Guided the girl’s elbow gently. “I’m sorry,” she said again，and there, in the middle of the road, staring at Neeva’s flawless skin reflecting milky white in the moonlight, looking at the long line of where she would have cut and allowed the liquid of life to trail into death，she wished for all the heartache, for all of the pain and suffering of this one drive, that against the stupid, stupid rules and client demands, against the horror of everything this trip represented，that Neeva could have been drugged and thus spared them both the long torment.
And in that heartbeat of thought, that one second of darkness-induced clarity, staring at Neeva’s beautiful skin, smelling the fear on her breath, and seeing the terror in her eyes, Munroe understood the reason behind the rules.
No drugs. No bruises. Another wave of nausea overtook her.
A client who merely wanted to own, to possess a woman like Neeva, would be content to have her gagged and drugged to expedite delivery. 
He wouldn’t mind if the package got smacked around a bit, softened up ahead of time. For that kind of depravity, bruises healed.
These rules, these instructions, had a common ancestor to Munroe’s own history, stemmed from the same sadistic psychopathic urges that had，through systematic brutalization by her own tormentor, turned Munroe into the predator she was now: 
hunting, always hunting, disconnected from and indifferent to most of humankind, allergic to all but the rarest of human touch.
Impossible choices. Impossible burdens. No drugs. No bruises.
She now knew well the why behind every rule, and what had driven each step of the journey thus far:
The client fed on fear, wanted Neeva to understand her life was his and so had instructed she be kept fully awake, fully aware; 
wanted the canvas clean and unmarred, so that when he sculpted, his tools would be the first, would be the only.
Munroe stared at the sky. Cursed her weakness, her inability to block out what it would mean to knowingly deliver the innocent into the same hell that had birthed her to life. 
In this moment of decision she condemned to death the one she would risk anything to save. 
To the night, Munroe whispered good-bye. Opened the floodgates to Gehenna— that place of the wicked, that place of the dead— and here in this deserted spot, she buried her soul.
Munroe took Neeva to the car and waited until she was seated, then reached for her legs and sliced through the tape. 
Balled the sticky mass and tossed it into the dark, and when she was once more behind the wheel, Munroe reclined her seat and cracked the windows to counter the stale air.
To Neeva she whispered, “When did it happen?”
“When did what happen?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”


Neeva stared at her hands, thumb massaging the wrist Munroe had crushed. 
“When you look like I do, sometimes guys obsess,” she said. 
“They’re convinced there’s something going on— see things that aren’t there— read meaning into things they shouldn’t, project on to you and then expect you to reciprocate. 
“They get mad and take it personally when you don’t.”
“How old were you when it turned violent?”
Neeva was silent a long while. “Fourteen,” she said finally.
“Do your parents know?”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “We’ve always been close. I was never afraid to tell them anything, not even when he threatened to kill me if I did.”
Fourteen. The same age Munroe had been when she’d maneuvered herself into the arms of a gunrunner and set into motion the chain of events that would，like a river diverted from its course, forever alter her perception of the world and mold her into the hunter— the predator— she’d become.
“My parents—” Neeva said, but before she could continue, Munroe held up a hand and stopped her.
Noise and movement beyond the vehicle had arrested her attention, but even with the windows cracked, she’d sensed, more than heard or seen, whatever was out there; 
intuition amplified by years of hunting and being hunted in the jungle dark.
A moment passed. And then Arben’s face pressed up against the passenger window and Neeva screamed. 
He laughed, vicious and sadistic, and made a lowering motion.
Munroe caressed the dull edge of the tiny blade held tight between her fingers. “Don’t let it down more than a quarter,” she said.
Neeva lowered the window several inches. Stopped. Arben waited, motioned farther down，and when Neeva shook her head, he stuck his hand inside and tossed a packet and a bag onto her lap: new tights and a small makeup kit.
“Szed 【马赛克3】ssze magad,” he said. “Try not to look like a filthy pig for your big day.” And then he laughed again.
This was the first Munroe had heard him speak, and she understood now why Hungarian had been chosen for her language immersion and not any of dozens of other languages. 
His words had been intended to provoke a reaction in her, but Neeva reciprocated as if she’d understood, gave him the finger, said, “Suck it, jerkwad,” and moved to close the window.
Arben, arm still inside the car, struck fast.
Grabbed Neeva’s hair before she’d moved the glass an inch, took a fist of it in his meaty hand, and yanked her toward him, pulling her head into the window with a thud.
If Neeva cried out, Munroe didn’t hear it. Blood pounded in her ears, a rush drowning out all else. 
Pressure and agony and desire for the catharsis of pain all spilled from the fractured dam that had until now held them back.
She was out the door, over the hood, and in Arben’s space before he’d fully let go of Neeva. 
Collided with him by the time he’d backed away from the door, rage and madness working their way from inside her head to her hands and limbs.
Arben was large. Strong. Armed. And these, his strengths, were his greatest weaknesses. 
Brute force and the ability to control others through fear and intimidation made men lazy. Overconfident. Slow.
She would never be as fast as a bullet, but in close contact, would always be faster than the hand that drew the gun. 
Speed was life. Speed was survival. Speed born from the will to live, from the necessity of staying one move ahead, speed carved into her psyche one sadistic knife slice after another. 
That which hadn’t killed her had made her faster.
Flesh against flesh, Munroe connected with Arben’s throat, and in response came a crack of pain across the side of her head, and with the pain, release. Catharsis. Laughter.
Blow for blow, Munroe fought, not with the burning, insatiable passion to kill, which so many years before had, night after night, meant the difference between bleeding to death or living through to another dawn, but to make him suffer. 
She wanted this man alive in the way they wanted Neeva alive.
Along the steep incline beside the road, attuned to his breathing, her instinct and hearing filled in the gaps left by limited sight. 
She moved one step ahead, one step aside, hunting openings at his most vulnerable points: 
jaw, knees, eyes, groin, each movement made in vented hatred toward the poison Arben was.
He connected with her chest. Knocked her back several steps. With the pain and the loss of air, she laughed again. 
Shifted before he could follow through and traced his breathing and footfalls, fingered the makeshift blade.
Taunting and singsong, she called to Arben in the same Hungarian he had used to her. 
“Gyere ide,” she said. “Show yourself a man.” He spun toward her voice, struck out.
His fist connected with her cheekbone, as did her blade to his forearm, a long jagged cut while her head rang from the blow.
Arben bellowed, the fury carrying loud in the night. He lunged, fists swinging and finding air. 
Training pushed her to incapacitate by any means necessary, to force him into a defensive position.
Arben swung again, and where she should have taken him down with a joint break, she backed off and cut the other arm.
He spun to face her and, swearing, reached for the weapon he should’ve known better than to draw. 
Munroe shifted in toward him, but before his hand returned, and before she connected blade against throat，the report of Lumani’s rifle cracked against the night, creating an instant pause to a fight barely begun.

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 20
PROVA, ITALY
Hands on the wheel, stolen phone hidden beneath her thigh, Munroe tapped her thumbs in random rhythm to thought, 
parsing kilometers, counting minutes through the silence while the sun made its final stretch across the sky.
Inside the Schengen zone, they’d transferred from Slovenia to Italy, one country to the next without a hiccup of notice, winding a sort of parallel to E70, 
the intercontinental route that began in Georgia, paused in Turkey at the Black Sea, picked back up again in Bulgaria, continued on past Croatia and Slovenia, into Italy, through France, and finally Spain.
Whatever the highway might have been, the trip she was confined to consisted of country roads, two-laned and often empty, 
except when they passed with irregularity along the edges of, or completely through, small towns: a dot-to-dot that had put her once in the path of carabinieri, military police, 
and once the polizia, state police, both of whom, submachine-gun-toting, were known for pulling cars aside at random. 
For now, there was no point in worrying over it. If disaster struck, then she would face it, not before.
Countryside, fields, hills, and townships came and went, street signs and license plates had long since transferred from Slovenian to Italian, 
architecture and landscaping subtly changed in ways that spoke of new borders and new territory, 
all of it a peripheral blur while memory loops of Logan, surrogate brother and star-crossed soul mate, morphed into images of him beaten and bloody: 
a consuming nonstop replay against the windshield that poked and prodded at nightmares, threatening to awake from sleep the whispered voices she thought she’d silenced.
Munroe glanced at the GPS. Soon enough there would be another junction and the female voice, bossy and knowing, would kick in with instructions and provide another opportunity to mask the dialing on her stolen treasure.
They were now two hours inside Italy, and although Munroe had made several attempts, it had been a half hour since her last successful connection. 
The battery would eventually die, the theft would eventually be discovered, the tenuous link to Bradford permanently severed, and she hoped only for time, that one luxury of which she had so little.
She’d managed five messages so far, all of them explicit if the Morse could be deciphered through the background noise: 
She needed the choke chain off her neck, needed Logan found and freed, and had warned the war room against trying to return contact unless Logan was safe. 
But everything became pointless if Bradford wasn’t able to discern her message from the noise.
From the backseat, Neeva said, “I’m hungry,” and Munroe ignored her as she had since shoving her into the car at the gas station those few hours earlier. 
No matter that Munroe had the phone now, or that she’d allowed Neeva the opportunity to run so as to obtain it, the girl was not blameless in whatever punishment would surely follow.
It had been risky to let her get so close to a crowd, but being kept away from the cities as they were, it had been the only way to get hold of a phone. 
Munroe had counted on human nature, that desire of the mind to believe what was most palatable, the capacity to block out 
and then fill in the blanks and more readily accept a story about a grieving sister just receiving word of a lover’s suicide, than that the screaming woman in front of them, comforted by the nice young man, was a sex-trafficking victim.
Human nature had come through, but one escape was all she could bear. 
As a message intended to prevent another run for freedom, Munroe had put a knee to Neeva’s stomach and, against her struggle, pressed thumbs to carotids until the girl had passed out.
To fight, to go down swinging, afflicting damage, however small, in recompense for your own suffering, was one thing; 
it was another entirely to be forced into the helplessness of oblivion. 
The difference, psychological and terrifying, was a lesson in survival Munroe had hard-earned. 
She had re-bound Neeva, put her on her side, and tucked the blanket tightly around her, all of it fixed within the time it took the girl to fully regain awareness.
Hours since, and there’d been no word from Lumani, not even after she’d pointed him out on the rooftop to Neeva, 
and additionally, only silence from the Doll Maker— she didn’t know when, but the promise of retribution in return for her supposed failure would certainly be fulfilled.
In the hypnotic hum of wheels against the road, Logan moved across the windshield again, picked up a cue stick, smiled, and pointed to an empty pocket; 
stepped through the door into the night and mounted a Ducati; plunged beside her in a BASE jump off New River Gorge Bridge; 
and wrested the oxycontin pill bottle out of her hands when self-medicating seemed to be the only way to deal with the trauma that had sent her running from equatorial Africa to the United States, those many years ago.
Against the glass, battered and bleeding, in a living mirage that refused to plead or beg, Logan nodded, confirming the bond that tied one outcast to the other, 
and with her eyes roving among GPS, the road, and the small town on the near horizon, Munroe slipped fingers between thigh and seat for the phone.
The first car in several kilometers approached and passed with headlights on. Dusk was fast approaching. 
Unless word from the Doll Maker’s people came otherwise, they would push through the night to wherever the final destination might be.
Munroe gauged distance on the navigation screen and took her foot off the gas to time progression toward the approaching traffic exchange. 
Nudged the phone from beneath one leg to the V between them, waited for the mechanical female voice, 
and when it came, punched the digits she’d been required to memorize as part of Capstone’s induction process. 
She worked by feel more than sight, taking her eyes off the road only for an occasional stolen glance and to confirm she’d entered the numbers correctly.
Munroe hit send and shifted her leg back over the phone long enough to mute the short recording that would answer, 
counted seconds, and then nudged the phone out and tapped her fingernail against the side of the casing in the same deliberate shorthand she’d used for each call. 
The precautions were tedious and time-consuming, but in these hours of intermittent dialing they’d appeared to prevent detection.
From the back Neeva said, “I really am hungry. One pack of crackers in over a day is a starvation diet.” 
Munroe had positioned the girl with her head directly behind the seat so she couldn’t see the phone, 
and as such wouldn’t— through ignorance or petulance— blow what little chance they had for survival, 
and this had also made it easier to ignore the occasional requests for food and water.
Munroe paused in the tapping and glanced at the phone. “I can’t feed you,” she said, though she spoke for Bradford’s benefit. 
“We can’t stop without approval, and in case the sniper on the rooftop didn’t tell you anything, we’re being followed and guarded.”
In response, silence. Hands tight on the wheel, Munroe willed Neeva to continue the conversation, to say something, anything, to provide a background of normalcy that would allow her to articulate more detail.
Instead there was a sniffle. Munroe ran a mental reconstruction, prepared her own backup, readied to speak it, but Neeva started first. 
Tears in her voice, the girl said, “Can you at least ask?” Actress or not, it didn’t matter, the words were perfect.
“A little fasting won’t kill you,” Munroe said. “I don’t expect it will be more than five or six hours if we continue to push through the night, midmorning our time if we stop for rest. 
“After that, you’re no longer my problem and you can whine for food from whoever takes you next.”
Munroe stole another glance at the phone. Two minutes and fifty seconds. 
The voice drop would allow recording for three minutes and then cut off. 
She killed the connection and slid the phone back under her leg. 
Everything she would have articulated on her own through more hours of dialing had been covered by those minutes.
This would be her last attempt at contact until Logan was safe or the girl delivered, and that would certainly help extend battery life.
From behind, Neeva’s hushed crying picked up intensity, the first true tearful breakdown since the beginning of the ordeal, every bit about it genuine and heartrending. 
Empathy threatened to well from within and overcome reason. 
Munroe punched the emotion down, fist to rising dough, until the compassionate lump was small and easier to control.
Neeva’s sniffles grew louder, more frantic, and in counterpoint Munroe more frustrated, more angry. 
This journey was that which must be done to stop the hurting. 
Eyes ahead, she held her silence. In order of priority, there was Logan, and that was all.
Neeva’s crying went up another notch. Munroe reached for the phone— Lumani’s phone— and dialed.
He picked up on the first ring.
“I’m stopping for five minutes,” she said. “I need to shift the package to the front seat and give her food.”
Lumani said, “No.”
“Don’t push me.”
“If you do this,” he said, “and she runs again, Logan will die.” 
His voice had an edge to it that under other circumstances she would have marked as concern.
“She won’t run,” Munroe said.
A long pause, and Lumani said, “It’s on your head.”
“Understood,” she said, knowing more from Lumani’s words than anything he could have consciously allowed: The best of the Doll Maker’s men was the weakest link in the chain.
Neeva continued to sniffle the stuffed-nosed, puffy-faced sound track of tears. 
Munroe slowed and pulled off to the side where field met road-fill, which in turn met road.
Hit the emergency lights, then stepped out and around the front of the car to the passenger’s-side rear door.
She tugged the blanket off Neeva and said, “Show me your hands.”
Neeva shifted, struggling against the odd angle, and with one shoulder twisted, held her wrists forward and as high as possible.
With the improvised scrap of metal blade, Munroe cut her loose, reached for a hand, and pulled her upright. 
“Scoot over,” she said, “don’t move, and whatever you do, don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve.”
Wordless, still sniffling, Neeva nodded. Munroe handed her the blanket. “Use that,” she said, 
and Neeva reached for it, rubbed it along her face, and in the process of drying her eyes and blowing her nose, smeared and smudged mascara and took off most of her makeup.
Munroe sighed. One more arbitrary act of failure for which someone would pay a price.
She fished along the floor for the items she’d thrown aside during the tussle and snagged the strap of the bag with food and water, pulled it out of the car, reached a hand toward Neeva, and said, “Come.”
Hobbled, and with the blanket clutched tightly and trailing behind, Neeva slid along the backseat bench to the door and swung her legs to the ground. 
Munroe helped her into the front seat and handed her the food bag.
“Help yourself and don’t get dirty,” she said. “And don’t drink anything because there’s no way we’re making another bathroom stop.”
Neeva nodded, still sniffling, though the tears had mostly stopped.
Before Munroe had shut the door, the girl was already digging through the bag, pulling out a packet of dried fruit. 
Once more behind the wheel, Munroe checked the rearview mirror. 
Faint in the twilight, forty meters back, without headlights and almost to the point of being invisible, another car had pulled off the road. They’d been stopped for four minutes. 
She studied the reflection, searching out shape, begging for make, model, and color. Instead she found only shadow.
Emergency flashers off, Munroe pulled back onto the road. In the rearview, the second car vanished completely; headlights never powered on, she never found it following.
Neeva finished the bag of fruit, fished out crackers and ate those, too, and kept going until the bag had been mostly emptied. 
She took a swig of water, just a swig, recapped the bottle, put everything back in the bag, and shoved it down on the floor beside her feet. “Thank you,” she said, and Munroe nodded. 
Hands folded, demure and ladylike, in her lap on top of the blanket, which had absorbed the crumbs and spills, she said, “How much longer?”
“I don’t know,” Munroe said. “If we stay on these roads we’ve got about another hour until we reach Verona, but after that I’m not sure.”
“You know,” Neeva said, and her voice dropped an octave into that same husky whisper that had become her trademark on film, “maybe we could run away together.” 
She ran her fingers caressingly over the blanket and then readjusted the top of her dress, smoothing out the wrinkles over her chest. 
“Or, you know, at least we could make a pit stop— something that would take the edge off. 
“We’ve been driving for an awfully long time— they should let us have that at least, right?”
Had the situation been anything else, Neeva’s antics would have been funny. 
“I’m not here to be your friend,” Munroe said, “and put your boobs away, I’m not interested.”
“You don’t find me attractive?”
“You’re a stunning girl, Neeva, but no, I’m not attracted to you.”
The navigation kicked in turn by turn as they passed through a small village and continued along a road that would have surely been scenic in daylight. 
Eventually, Neeva broke. “Are you gay?” she said.
Munroe checked the rearview. “No,” she said. “Not gay.”
Neeva reached toward Munroe, traced her index finger along the back of Munroe’s hand. 
Munroe resisted the urge to smack her away, and with the lines of her mouth set grimly said, “Cut it out, Neeva, I’m not interested.”
Neeva batted her eyelashes with the look of a wounded child and, with Munroe’s refusal to acknowledge the display, crossed her arms and huffed back into her seat. 
Arms tight against her chest, she tipped her head against the window and finally said, “What is it about me you find unattractive?”
Munroe forced back a bark of laughter. 
She wanted to dislike the girl. Would prefer to see her as weak or stupid because that would make resentment more emotionally palatable, but she couldn’t find it in her.
“You’re just not my type.”
Neeva sulked. “I’ve never heard that one from a straight guy before. What’s your type?”
“Tall, dark, and handsome,” Munroe said, and turned from the road just long enough to catch a glimpse of Neeva’s scowl.
“You said you’re not gay.”
“I’m not.” And then with a smirk that welled from an evil sort of satisfaction, Munroe said, “I’m a woman, and I like guys.”
The girl’s hands dropped to her lap and she stared, mouth formed into a tight O, while behind those baby blues the world appeared to shift. 
Like a snake uncoiling, everything about Neeva relaxed, as if, in spite of herself, she wasn’t able to see a woman as the enemy, 
as if what she now knew changed everything— almost as if because of this one revelation the fight had left her.
After several kilometers of silence, Neeva said, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why everything.”
“I don’t have the patience for games,” Munroe said. “Say what you want or, better yet, don’t. I like the quiet.”
“Why are you dressed as a man?” Neeva said. “Why do you act like…” She paused. “Why do you act like… like one of them?” 
Her voice rose, challenging and accusatory. “Them,” she said again. “Where women aren’t human, aren’t people, just things— objects. Them.” 
She jabbed a thumb toward the rear window, where surely one of the Doll Maker’s men followed unseen. 
“Oh, they’ll show you a real man. They’ll turn you into a real woman. They’ll fuck you hard, you’ll want it, but what you want never actually matters because everything is about their own ego. Them.” 
Neeva stopped for air; a long, greedy inhale. 
“Why?” she said. “Why would you— a woman”— she spat out the word— “you who should know what it feels like to be called a cunt and a bitch and a whore just because you voiced an opinion, to be told you’re fat or ugly as a way to make your argument worthless, that you’re stuck-up, repressed, 
“and in denial of your true feelings when you find them repulsive. Why would you be one of them? What’s wrong with you?”
Neeva’s words added weight to a history of scars the girl would never know, and cut deeply across time and continents, dragging Munroe in the emotional direction she wanted least to travel. 
When she didn’t answer, Neeva turned away toward the window.
Another few kilometers down the road, Munroe said, “I’m not one of them. I never have been, never will be. I’m only here to save a life.”
“I’m a life.”
“It’s a fucked-up choice, isn’t it?” 
And then, to change the subject before the conversation went any closer to that long-dormant mental place where the lines between want and savagery blurred Munroe said, “Why don’t you get some rest?”
Neeva didn’t bite. “What about the man disguise?”
“A man and woman traveling together doesn’t attract the same attention as two women,” she said. “As a man, I make us less visible.”
Neeva faked a laugh, folded her hands in her lap, and head still tipped against the window said, “In that case, why not just send a man?”
Munroe smiled. To herself. Humorously. Regretfully. 
At the history of survival and instinct that had made her who she was, 
and the unique set of skills both inborn and man-made that, once combined, had both blessed and very nearly destroyed her life. 
“None of their men can do what I can do,” she said.

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

Chapter 19
LAS COLINAS, TEXAS
Physical confirmation that they’d finally picked up Logan’s trail brought on the same adrenaline rush as the first crack of weapon fire in a combat zone.
Miles Bradford backed out of the bathroom doorway. Jahan’s head ticked up in acknowledgment, and they tag-teamed the return, left everything undisturbed, and didn’t bother relocking on the way out.
In the vehicle, moving away from the office as quickly as was legally permissible, Jahan said, “What the hell? Why go through the trouble of wiping down the walls only to leave the pants in the bathroom?”
“Hurry, maybe. Or because they can come back and get the pants without worrying about leaving permanent DNA evidence.”
“Maybe they forgot them,” Jahan said. “Incompetent idiots, although they took whatever they’d had covering the floor. Tarp, I think, from the size of the area.”
Bradford rubbed palms over eyes. While he and Walker had been scoping out Veers Transport and the nearby warehouse, chances were Logan had been stashed at the office, and they’d missed him by only a few hours. 
“Bread crumbs,” he said. “A nice little fuck-you gift because they know someone’s coming after him.”
“You?”
“Yeah, who else?”
Jahan said, “If he’s being kept on the move, we could play musical hiding places for days and still not catch up.”
Bradford drew a breath and mentally rewound. Started from the beginning. Tore at the facts, the threads, allowed them to unspool and haphazardly pile. 
After a long while he said, “Based on the video footage, he’s not in any condition for them to keep moving him. I think they just held him at the office temporarily.”
“How so?”
“That wasn’t the way station,” Bradford said.
“Why take him there at all, then?”
“I don’t know. Logistics, maybe?” 
Bradford pointed right. “Stop at that gas station, will you? There’s a pay phone.” 
Pay phones: In a world of cell phones and wi-fi, they were a whole hell of a lot harder to find than they used to be.
Same as he’d done after finding Logan’s place trashed and bloodied, Bradford called in an anonymous tip. 
The chance of latents getting pulled out of Akman was definitely higher than in Logan’s place, but still iffy. 
At the least, the blood should match— assuming that with no obvious sign of foul play in the Akman office, the two city police departments would connect the dots in the first place.
Jahan, as if reading Bradford’s thoughts, said, “One of us could lay the map out for them, take the heat to see what they come up with.”
Bradford shook his head. “I can’t afford to lose anyone right now, and even if the prints do ping back, knowing who they belong to isn’t going to get us any closer to Logan.”
“We try the house?” Jahan said.
Bradford nodded. Last of the possible places to find Logan was the four-bedroom house, another fifteen minutes north. 
His gut told him going there would be a waste of time, because wherever the trafficking victims were stashed between buyers, it wasn’t going to be a house— at least not in the kind of neighborhood they were headed. 
But riding one wave of burnout after another meant he wasn’t thinking straight and so the need to be thorough overrode instinct.
Valley Ranch was to residential what Las Colinas was to business: a master-planned development, new and clean and cookie cutter, 
further up the tracks and a continent away from the bare and toy-strewn yards that had backed onto Veers Transport. 
Jahan navigated turn by turn through streets of two-story brick facades, and tightly clipped lawns, yards treed with young switches that might, in a decade or two, provide some relief against the searing summer heat.
A block from their target, Jahan slowed. “Think they’re in?”
“Doubt it.”
Jahan said, “Front door, back door?”
“You’re in a suit,” Bradford said. “You get front. You can be Jehovah’s Witness.”
Jahan stared at him for a half-beat, turned back to the road, and said, “That’s fine, but you wear the tutu if we get anywhere near a dance studio.”
In response to the imagery, against his will, against the pressure inside his chest, the corners of Bradford’s lips turned up.
Jahan stopped the vehicle at the alley entrance. Bradford got out. “Meet you halfway,” he said, and stared after the SUV just long enough to ascertain where it went so he could find the getaway car in a hurry if needed. 
Then he turned and jogged the length of the alley to the back of the house, where an eight-foot board-on-board shielded the yard from prying eyes.
Bradford tapped randomly on the fence, testing for a bark, a growl, something to indicate a guarded area, but as expected, he was answered by silence. 
Veers Transport. Akman. Trucks. Slave trafficking. 
Not a whole lot to point to the kind of people with lives stable enough to provide even the basic nurturing needed to keep a yard dog alive, 
and there was nothing like a starving animal left outside, howling from hunger, to draw unwanted attention from the community.
Bradford tried the gate. Locked.
No trees or shrubs peeked out from behind the fence planks, and the two-car garage door was shut. 
Using the back fence as leverage, he pulled himself eye level to the narrow slits of glass that functioned as garage windows. 
The inside was bare. No storage. No vehicles.
From his ear piece came Jahan’s voice, confirming approach.
Bradford waited for the knock, and when it came, hoisted up over the fence, using notches in the gate for footing. Dropped into a crouch and waited again. 
The yard was overgrown grass with a weather-worn umbrella table and two chairs on an uncovered patio. Cigarette butts littered the area. 
Windows and a back door faced the yard and were covered by closed blinds. Another knock in Bradford’s earpiece. Silence.
Doing this the right way, he should have done more than put his ear to the glass to check for occupants, 
but hyped up, brain fried, running against the clock, and taking Logan’s bloody pants as a deeply personal insult, Bradford moved as quickly as possible, out of the gray area of trespassing into full breaking-and-entering.
He tried the door. Secure.
Waited for Jahan’s third knock, and when it came, with no sound or response returned from inside, aimed boot at door, and kicked it in.
He didn’t have Jahan’s skill in scrubbing locks, and what the hell, whoever had Logan knew he was on the hunt, so it was no big secret there. 
He moved into the house a second before Jahan opened the front door.
Weapon drawn, Jahan cleared the foyer as Bradford took the den.
Somewhere in the house a chime beeped, signaling an armed keypad waiting for input. 
Forty to sixty seconds tops before the master alarm went off. At best, another two minutes after that before the alarm company sent the police to the house.
“Your left,” Bradford whispered. “I’ll take the right.”
Jahan stepped out of view.
Door by door, Bradford moved through the house.
The place was lived in, every room used, the whole of it functional and perfunctory, missing a touch of permanence in the transient home-but-not-really of a dorm. 
Bradford made it down the hall and through two bedrooms before the alarm screamed, an ear-splitting howl that would surely be heard several neighbors down. Most would be at work. 
Through the master and into the bathroom, Bradford continued, and then the house phone rang: alarm company call number one. 
He backed out the way he’d come, scanning floors and walls, eyes roaming over the few furniture pieces, counting seconds in his head.
Didn’t want to be anywhere near the place when the patrol car arrived.
Here, like at Veers Transport, nothing pointed to Logan or a way station, and Bradford, brain in the overdrive of frustration, said, “Let’s move.” 
Was on his way to the rear of the house as Jahan’s footsteps worked toward him; out the back door at the same time Jahan closed the front. 
Outside, the house alarm was audible but not as ear-shattering as it had been.
Door to patio to yard to fence, Bradford went up and over the gate and then strolled down the alley, the opposite of run, head down, 
as if not seeing his face would make any difference if one of the neighbors was asked to point him out of a six-pack.
At the road he turned away from the house, kept walking, eyes to the pavement, until the rev of the engine caught up with him. 
Bradford climbed into the SUV and latched his seat belt. Jahan tossed a lump of leather into his lap. “They seem to like wallets,” he said.
Bradford flipped the billfold open and, seeing Logan’s ID with the one-of-a-kind first and middle name combo, shut it again. Sherebiah Gospel Logan.
“Everything’s there,” Jahan said. “Except for the cash if there’d been any, and I figure there was— probably why they brought it back in the first place.”
“They always take the cash,” Bradford said. “My guess is the smirking guy went out on the plane and we’re dealing with a few levels down. Thugs more than thinkers.”
“You still think they’ll keep him in one location?” Jahan said. “Because if he was my trophy and I knew someone had the drop on me— and I would have known about four minutes ago— I’d already have him on the move again.”
“What if you had him in a place you were certain he wouldn’t be found? Certain because you’d been hiding in plain sight for years and nobody had noticed?”
Jahan shrugged. “That might be different. Would depend on the place. So far we haven’t come across anything like that.”
“Because we’re still shooting in the dark,” Bradford said. “I don’t think he was ever at the house. Just the wallet.” 
He shook his head, trying to shake the fog, feeling instead the same itching frustration that had been tugging at him since the early-morning foray, 
something he’d overlooked and couldn’t quite pin— a very clear and simple unknown inside a big red circle, tapping at the periphery of his consciousness, waiting to be noticed, but which he couldn’t find through the haze of exhaustion.
Bradford reached for his phone to reactivate sound and vibration before checking in with Walker but instead gaped at a list of missed calls and texts from the war room. 
Fighting back the rush of panicked excitement, voice strained and with far too much vibrato, he said, “The phone drop in Italy triggered.”
“When?” Jahan said. “Is it her? What’s the message?”
Bradford brushed him off in favor of dialing Walker. “Drive,” he said, “to the office.” 
He was connected to the war room before Jahan had time to punch the gas.
Thumb to one ear, phone to the other, Bradford blocked out Jahan’s surge into traffic and the resultant horn blasts. 
Somewhere in the distance, police sirens wailed.
“Slow the fuck down,” Bradford said. 
He’d meant the instruction for Jahan, but Walker slowed as well, and struggling as he was to make sense of her garbled talk, he was glad for it.
She was speaking English, but the words were crazy. He had her repeat everything and said, “We’ll be there in thirty minutes.” 
Before his thumb even reached the end button, Jahan said, “Was it her?”
“The recording ran for a full three minutes,” Bradford said, “and then shut off. There’s no talking, just ambient noise.”
“But the digital transfer came through?”
Bradford nodded. “Seems like. She said there didn’t appear to be any technical problems.”
“Ambient noise?”
“Yes.”
“She describe it?”
“Yeah, wind and humming, and occasionally arrhythmic thumping, like going over speed bumps. She thinks the call was dialed from inside a moving car.”
Eyes to the road, Jahan said, “Speed bumps.” Paused. Smiled. And then he chuffed. 
Gurgled a choking sound, the beginning of one of his suppressed laughs, as if he was in on a private joke, 
a slap-happy sound that wouldn’t have been nearly as infuriating if they weren’t both so drunk on caffeine and adrenaline burnout.
Bradford glared. Oblivious, Jahan chuckled again. 
When there was a break in traffic, he turned to catch Bradford’s eye and instead caught the mood, and the laughter stopped. “You don’t see it, do you?”
Silence.
“Oh, man.” Jahan sighed. “You need sleep. Okay, think,” he said. “You put Michael at a table and you give her a problem. Something to chew on, what does she do?”
When Bradford didn’t answer, Jahan tapped the steering wheel with his thumb. Thump thump pause thump.
“Aw, shit,” Bradford said and, unable to help himself, smiled— almost laughed. 
He picked up the phone again and said to Jahan, “You’re a fucking asshole. You know that, don’t you?”
Jahan nodded. “You’re welcome.”
Bradford redialed Walker. “Morse,” he said. “The rhythm is Morse. No, I don’t care if it’s difficult to distinguish from the background, that’s what it is. 
“Break down the recording, filter through the elements. Do what you can, Jack will take over as soon as we get there.”
PAYING MORE ATTENTION to his phone than to where he was going, Bradford stumbled and nearly tripped over two days’ worth of boxes sitting in the middle of Capstone’s reception area: just another day in the endless slew of mail delivery for his boys abroad. 
However sexist it might be, Walker was way better at keeping the front office organized than any of the guys, and that she was pulling double duty elsewhere was showing here, big-time.
Bradford shoved the largest offending box with his foot and moved beyond it to the wall opening Jahan had already passed through.
The door closed behind him with a solid click. Walker was waiting on the other side, in the hallway, 
a piece of paper in her hand, nervous energy buzzing around her, bouncing on her toes in a way that made a mockery of her unwashed, unruly hair and the dark circles under her eyes.
“It’s her,” Walker said. “It’s gotta be. If I captured it right, it’s Michael, for sure, for sure.”
Bradford took the paper. “Coffee much?” he said, but his heart pounded so fast and heavy he felt his skin might burst, and his hands shook with the effort to hold himself together. 
He leaned into the wall, was forced to hold the note with both hands to keep steady enough to read Walker’s block printing: 
ALIV FND LOGN IN OFC R HSE FND LOGN SAV LOGN
Bradford took in air, slow and steady, until no more would seep in. 
Stared at the paper. Saw through it, past it. Held that breath until his lungs burned, then gradually let it out. 
Jahan reached for the note, took it from him, and gave Bradford’s shoulder a gentle jab. 
Then together, without a word, he and Walker turned and wandered toward the war room, leaving him standing there alone, staring at the reception wall, his mind replaying the words on the page over and over.
The last three crazy days tumbled headlong into a long stream of movement that blended one moment into the next and made a laughingstock of time. 
It wasn’t until the door blurred and Bradford ran his hands over his eyes and pulled them back wet that he realized he was crying.
Pressure release. Relief in knowing she was alive. That she’d found a way to communicate.
That there was still hope and the clock was still ticking. That she’d seen proof of life. That he’d been right to focus his energy on tracing Logan.
Bradford dragged his shirt across his face, blew imaginary cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, waited awhile for the nausea to settle, then straightened and followed the others to the war room.
Jahan was at the desk, headphones to his ears, and Walker, arms crossed, stood beside him. 
Pen in hand, Jahan juggled jotting notes on a pad with tweaking settings with the mouse. 
Another notation, and Jahan put down the pen, handed the pad to Walker, and taking notice of Bradford, took off the earphones. 
“We’re good,” he said. “There’s other stuff, but I can’t make it out, either.”
“Can you trace the number?”
“Yeah, but will it do us any good? 
“She’s obviously not in a place where she can talk, so there’s no reason to call back. And it’s safe to assume she’s in Europe.”
Bradford shrugged. “Just in case,” he said, then he sighed, sank onto the sofa, and stared at the whiteboard while Jahan and Walker and their hushed discussion became white noise in the background.
Find Logan. Save Logan. Office or house.
Munroe was handcuffed by Logan, as he’d expected, 
but her proof of life hadn’t come within the last three hours. Not if she’d seen him in a house or an office.
Office. Akman. Had to have been. With the table and the duct tape, the wooden bat and the Ziploc bags.
Which would have explained why they’d taken him there in the first place. 
They’d needed a place to film without giving away anything that would lead to the way station. Way station. Logan.
Bradford lay back on the sofa, head to one side, feet to the other, willing himself past the exhaustion, trying to grasp that intangible thing he’d missed, the nameless thing that whispered taunts inside his head.
Warehouse. Transport depot. Office. House.
None of their digging had turned up anything else. 
Was it possible that the way station was buried so deep that Kate Breeden had never touched it, that because of its disconnect to everything else, it essentially became invisible to the war room?
Invisible.
Bradford swung his legs off the couch, sat upright.
Visible.
Walker and Jahan stopped talking and turned to face him.
“The cameras,” he said.
Jahan’s face creased with the same psychiatrist-to-suicide-patient expression he’d worn this morning.
“The only place there were cameras or any kind of semi-serious security setup was at Veers Transport,” Bradford said. “And the cameras didn’t point in, they pointed out.”
Walker’s mouth had opened and shut again. Arguments were already tumbling and readying for formulation, but she held them back.
“The way station,” Bradford said, and he stood and strode to the board. Tapped the thread for emphasis to explain his train of thought. 
“We weren’t able to turn up anything else because there isn’t anything else. We still haven’t found their hiding spot, because it was right in front of us— but not really.”
He was talking nonsense. He could see it on their faces.
“Look,” he said. “The only place we’ve seen the potential for any serious form of security is at Veers, and there the cameras point out, not in. 
“There’s nothing on the inside, everything’s out. The security isn’t there to keep an eye on the freight, it’s there to watch the lot. 
“We haven’t found the way station because it’s mobile.” Bradford grabbed a pen. Erased a thread on the board. Filled it back in. 
“We’re looking for at least one special truck, maybe more. The lot had a few, but security was lax because the truck wasn’t there.”
Walker uncrossed her arms. Jahan leaned back in the chair and, with his feet solid on the floor, began the swivel. He was thinking. Processing.
Walker said, “If Logan was there, if anything contraband was there, we would have seen a whole lot more people. Tighter security.”
“Exactly,” Bradford said. “He wasn’t there, they had him at the office. We’ve got proof he was at the office, we just don’t know for how long or when they moved him.” 
He paused. “I’ll put money on it,” he said. “We go back to Veers and there’s going to be another truck in the lot. That’s our target.”
Jahan said, “And if it’s not there?”
“Then it’s mobile and we need to pull vehicle records. 
“Everything they have, and then we need to track down each and every one of them, because one of those trucks is the way station.”
The room was silent again but for the squeak of Jahan’s chair.
Walker, in her own form of agreement, said, “The gates and wire fencing alone would be enough to keep vandals off the trucks. 
“There’s no other reason for them to put security on that lot unless they keep something on it worth protecting.”
“It works for me,” Jahan said. “And it’s not like we have any other tails to chase.”
“Who goes?” Bradford said.
Walker looked toward Jahan, and he back up at her. To Bradford she said, “We all do.”