15

I AWOKE IN A sterile room still strapped down, but this time fastened to a large metal gurney that was fixed in the middle of the floor.

A bank of fluorescent lights screwed into the ceiling shined down on me. The intensity of the light was not as severe as I had expected, given my last several memories. While the skin on my arms tingled, it did not seem to be on fire as I had experienced in the airplane.

I lifted my head and felt a mild ache, but not the throbbing pain I had previously experienced. Whatever medicine the doctors were giving me seemed to be working. Water was dripping somewhere behind me, but the plink, plink, plink was muted, not harsh.

My immediate concern was for McCool, Hobart, and Van Dreeves, as well as the rest of my crew. Two men stood outside the door, half of which was a wire-mesh window. I appreciated their concern for my safety and welfare, but honestly, I thought this level of protection was beyond what I needed or deserved.

“Hello,” I called out.

A voice came over the intercom speakers above me.

“You don’t need to shout, General. We can hear you.”

I swallowed and said, “Okay, thank you. Is there anyone who can tell me the status of my team?”

A long moment ensued before a different voice said, “Someone will come in to speak with you shortly.”

I listened carefully to the inflection in the voice, the words, the tone, and something gave me pause. I wasn’t sure just yet. I’d been wounded and obviously drugged both with some kind of poison dart in Japan and then an antidote—a simple EpiPen—that Van Dreeves had injected followed by whatever the doctors were giving me. My senses had been impacted in a way that distorted reality, or maybe I was experiencing actual reality without the filters our bodies provided us.

The door opened, and a tall man walked in. He had shaggy brown hair that fell over his ears, a hawkish nose, and narrow eyes. His forehead was pinched tightly as he looked at a tablet and then at me over wire-rim glasses.

“General Sinclair, how are you feeling today?”

“Better, I think. Can you tell me about my team? Their status?”

He pursed his lips and said, “We are still researching that. You have people spread out everywhere.”

“Randy Van Dreeves is who I’m most concerned about. He and Sally McCool and Joe Hobart. I think Rogers, Jackson, and Brown are okay.” But something clawed at the back of my mind about Jackson.

“What makes you think that?” he asked.

I was annoyed he wasn’t directly answering my questions. I never pretended to be entitled to respect or information at any rank, though as a commander of soldiers, I had a responsibility to my troops, and I needed answers to make decisions about their welfare.

“Let’s try answering my questions, and then I’ll consider answering yours,” I said.

His lips turned up in an arrogant self-assured way that reinforced the scratching in the back of my mind.

“Yes, well, I’ll see if I can get some information for you, but first I need to diagnose you.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“Yes, I’m a doctor.”

“Am I at Walter Reed?”

“Again, I’ll answer your questions in due time. It’s important that I speak with you while your mind is fresh so that we can help you and your team.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

He huffed and smiled as he smoothed his pant legs and sat in a chair next to the gurney. “We’re going to start with you telling me about what you saw in Japan, then in Heidelberg, and then in Tabas, where it all began. Now who authorized your mission in Yokkaichi?”

“Why don’t you tell me who the fuck you are,” I said. I couldn’t imagine too many people that had the authorizations, clearances, and contacts that I did, though I was sure they existed. “But first, unstrap me from this gurney.”

“You’re not leaving the gurney, General, until you answer my questions.”

He sat patiently, waiting.

“I doubt you’re cleared to know who authorizes me to take a piss,” I said. “Get me out of here.”

“I’m sure it is uncomfortable for you to not be in control—we’ve heard this about you—but you either trust me or it’s going to be a difficult road for you, I’m afraid.”

“What are you talking about?” I was incredulous. “I just got wounded on a mission of the highest importance to national security. Why are you treating me like the enemy?”

The penny dropped into the cone of my mind and began circling around slowly toward the center.

Why are you treating me like the enemy?

I always operated by the principle of Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation being true, which in this case meant that if they were treating me like a prisoner, then they most certainly viewed me as one.

But why? I wondered. What had I done to deserve this type of confinement and questioning? I reviewed the pieces of my shattered memory as best I could. Japan, Germany, Iran, other missions. Nothing seemed to resonate. All of it was executed with professionalism and as much precision as humanly possible.

Iranian helicopters chased us from Yazd Province, but casualties were minimal, and it had never been mentioned in the news. In Heidelberg, we killed four guards outside and had some scrapes inside but found a computer and confirmed Parizad’s location. In Yokkaichi, well, everything went to shit when we were in the basement. I was unsure if we retrieved anything of value, but I sure wasn’t going to reveal anything to this stranger, who may or may not be CIA.

“I’ll ask you again: What happened in Japan?” the man said.

“Let’s start with my questions. I can do this all day. I’m the one who has been locked down here. Haven’t you read anything about prisoners? They have all the time in the world,” I said.

In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, I had interacted with more than my fair share of detainees—enemy prisoners of war—captured on the battlefield. Once they knew they were locked down, they tried to escape, settled in for the long haul, or did both.

“What makes you think you’re a prisoner?” he asked.

I got the impression he might be a psychiatrist of some type. He kept asking questions in a patient and practiced manner with the underlying threat of harm just beneath the surface. My protestations were BBs bouncing off a tank. He didn’t care. He had an objective in mind and multiple strategies to achieve his desired outcome. On the other hand, I had little reliable information other than what my drug-induced mind could absorb. The gurney to which I was still strapped. The isolated room. The guards. The binds across my legs and arms.

I recalled when we had captured Abu al-Ghazni, a Haqqani affiliate in Afghanistan. He had been wounded in the kill/capture mission, and we had secured him in almost precisely the same fashion as I was bound.

“Well, I’m strapped to this gurney, that door is locked, and there are two armed goons on the outside guarding the door.”

“Is that what you think? They’re guarding the door?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Doc?”

“Do you believe I’m a doctor?”

I changed my mind. “With all these questions, I think you’re probably just some jerk-off sent in here to fuck with me.”

The arrogant smirk returned, as if he were a tolerant parent enduring a petulant child’s tantrum. Granted, these emotionally driven outbursts were not my typical style. While entirely reasonable, I was more prone to retreat inward and silently outmaneuver whoever this might be. The thoughts and memories came fluttering to my consciousness like a flock of sparrows from a barn, darting in every direction. Hobart, Van Dreeves, McCool, the Beast, Japan, Germany, Iran, al-Baghdadi … and Melissa.

“Melissa,” I whispered.

Her face hovered in front of me as I willed myself to retreat inward, riddled with pain. At her graveside I had been stoic, strong for my children and those that loved her. While Reagan and Brad had wept in my chest with my arms around them, I’d stood there like the rock that they had needed. A tear never found its way onto my face. The pain was swallowed inside my soul, now an underground lake of sorrow and guilt.

But now, in front of this nameless man with no title, I felt tears stream across my cheeks.

“Melissa,” I whispered again. “I’m so sorry.”

The image of her being interrogated by Parizad flittered through my mind, one of the darting sparrows from the barn. What had happened? How?

“Tell me about Melissa,” the man said quickly, sensing an opening, I presumed.

I turned my head away. I would rather share state secrets with this man than divulge the sorrow and guilt I felt for Melissa to him.

“Fuck you,” I said instead.

“Why are you sorry?”

“Because I’m in here with you and not with her,” I unwittingly said. I was off my game. Something had unhinged my normal thought process. For a brief second, I’d thought a snarky reply actually made sense. A moment later, I realized it came off as petulant.

He seized the opportunity.

“You’d rather be dead? Your wife is dead, and you’d rather be with her, correct?”

I turned and looked at him. “Yes.”

“Is there anyone else you want to kill other than yourself?”

It was a bold leap to go from assessing that I wanted an afterlife with my wife to believing I wanted to kill someone, even myself, but it gave me insight into what he was thinking. I could see the chart now: Suicidal ideations, possibly homicidal.

When I least expected it, Melissa’s face hovered in my mind, penetrating through the swarm of sparrows—no, becoming the swarm, the whole of my existence, all the memories captured in one place. This flock formed into Melissa’s loving face. Her soft smile with the barely discernable dimple. Radiant green eyes. Smooth skin. Wisps of reddish-brown hair over her forehead. She did what she always did. She gathered the scattered, harrowing memories and absorbed them as if she were a black hole, her love capable of devouring evil and producing good.

Good wins.

I felt for my watch by shaking my left wrist. It was somehow still present. If my watch was still there, my combat boots might also still be. I twisted my ankles and felt them covered by something, not risking a glance.

Melissa hovered in my mind and spoke to me as only she could.

“Garrett, haven’t you got the patience to let this man feel important so he’ll leave sooner?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Good. Then close your eyes and your mouth and wait him out. He’s not got your best intentions in mind, that’s clear. Remember that good winning requires skill and some luck, it doesn’t just happen. There’s too much evil in the world. And quit your crying. I know you love me and miss me.”

“Who else would you like to harm?” the man asked.

Like that, the image of Melissa shattered into a million pieces in my mind, but her message poured into me like molten steel. I understood what she was saying, and this moment, however powerful, made me miss her much more tangibly. I did as she directed, though, and closed my eyes as I turned my head away.

Sometime after I did so, I heard the chair scrape backward, the door open, and a few mumbles before the door closed. The man I had presumed to be a psychiatrist had left. I had spent an entire adult lifetime trying to figure out what our nation’s enemies were attempting to do to our country, our allies, or my soldiers. Part of that assessment included a belief that, for the most part, my government was one of the good guys, an unwieldy if not supportive bureaucracy. Now it was time for me to reassess that assumption, as any good commander should do, especially given the likelihood the shrink was an unspoken member of the U.S. government.

As always, my thought revolved around my mission and my family. I still had information about potential attacks on our country that someone needed to hear, and I personally needed to resolve Parizad’s interrogation of Melissa.

With those two guideposts, I began to consider whom I could trust. Certainly not the man who was just in here questioning me as if I were a prisoner. My list included my team, Admiral Rountree, and my children—though they could be obstinate, they were loyal. I had some friends, but working through this short list in my mind made me wonder about friendships and relationships in general. I had been a gentleman to most everyone I’d ever met, prioritized my time for my country and my family, and naturally interacted with the vast social network created by Melissa, but all of that, all of it, amounted to exactly ten people I could trust. Notably not on the list were either of my parents. I trusted my mother to an extent, but I couldn’t trust her to handle the situation I was potentially facing. Her meddling in my career, attempting to “improve upon” my assignments always resulted in embarrassing back-channel calls that required me to politely urge her to stand down her well-intentioned efforts. Mom and Dad were living in Pinehurst now, where my father, retired lieutenant general Garrett Sinclair II, played golf at Carolina Country Club every day with all the other retired generals in the area. While I had reached the same rank as my father, my endeavors as a special operations soldier had been too unconventional for him. He tolerated my path but was clear that his more conventional route to flag officer was superior.

My list assembled in my mind—my two kids, six teammates, Admiral Tom Rountree, and Israeli spy Ben David—I then had to determine a path out of my current predicament. I had missions to accomplish. The straps across my arms, chest, and legs were tight, and I suspected that any effort to wriggle free, other than being pointless, would be recorded by cameras that had to be monitoring the place. Several years ago, Reagan had been all agog about a televised talent show where a magician who was bound and dumped into a vat of hot oil, had been shot out of a cannon and landed in a pool of water, where he came free of his binds before drowning.

If that guy could do it, I could. Of course, that was a made-for-television production not involving the CIA or FBI, so I figured my chances were better given the government’s penchant for lowest-bidder materials.

There was a needle poking into my arm, which I assumed was an intravenous feeding tube. I had no concept for how long I had been without solid food. My best guess was between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. I felt fatigued but not weak. Tired but not exhausted. The morphine, or whatever painkiller I was on, was probably catching me up on sleep I’d missed over the last twenty years of nonstop combat.

“Guard!” I shouted. After a few more shouts, the guard opened the door and looked in.

“Sir?”

He was a different guy from the previous two. Short and stocky, he looked like a college wrestler. His hair was buzzed on the sides into a Ranger haircut, which gave me some optimism that he was prior military and may have a sympathetic bent toward my predicament, whatever it may be, precisely.

“I haven’t eaten for some time,” I said. “Is there any way to get some chow?”

He looked at the hall and then at me before stepping in and closing the door. As he walked the ten paces toward me, he glanced at the top right-hand corner behind me, which meant the camera was up there. He set the appropriate stoicism on his face and leaned into me.

“I’m not here to feed you, General,” he said.

As he hovered over me, I caught a scent of soap and laundry detergent. His clothes were freshly cleaned. He’d come for the next shift, so I would be seeing him for the next eight to twelve hours, I figured.

“I know that. What’s your name, soldier?”

“Sergeant Carson, sir—wait a minute. How’d you know?”

He didn’t seem pissed off, thankfully. Guard duty sucked no matter who you were guarding or for how long. It was typically a static and universally despised mission. I thought of Corporal Boone from the Eighty-Second Airborne guarding the FBI trailer at FOB Farah in Afghanistan.

“You don’t look like those other tools. Military haircut and bearing are different. I was in Farah a few days ago and ran into Corporal Boone from the Eighty-Second. They’d given him guard duty on the FBI compound. He was enjoying it about as much as you are,” I said. “Know him?”

“It’s a big army, sir. I’m Rangers. He’s Eighty-Second. Two different worlds.”

“Good to meet you, Ranger Carson.”

He pressed a button on the side of the gurney, causing it to lift past forty-five degrees.

“More comfortable?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you. If you’re Rangers, then you’re JSOC. My command.”

He nodded. “Roger that,” he said.

“Why do they have Rangers guarding this place, wherever we are?”

“Figured you’d know, being the boss man and all. I’m just a sergeant.”

“Just a sergeant? You’re a god to your men,” I said.

“Well, I did save Admiral Rountree and his Navy SEALs one time,” he said, leaning forward over the rail of the gurney. He slipped something in my right hand. I did the geometry in my head. The camera in the corner was blocked because he raised my bed. Whoever was watching might suspect something, but they certainly wouldn’t be able to see whatever he put in my hand. It might have been a key or a cyanide pill, though I wasn’t sure why the second thought crossed my mind.

You’d rather be dead, is that correct?

I wasn’t suicidal. I could long for my wife and yearn for the day we are reunited without wanting to slit my wrists, a point the shrink seemed to have missed.

“Did the good admiral say thank you?” I asked.

Carson chuckled. “Rountree is as hard as woodpecker lips. All he knows about is moving on to the next thing. All kind of shit going down soon, and I’m hoping to be out of here, ASAP, if you understand what I’m saying.”

I nodded as his hand rested on the gurney near my right hand, which was strapped with leather binding as if I were a psych patient, which maybe I was.

“Yeah, me, too. Doubtful that they’ll be letting me out anytime soon,” I said.

“No. I expect not.” He paused. “Listen, I’ll see what I can do about your food. Might be an MRE.”

I laughed. “I’d devour an MRE right now.”

“That hard up, huh? Okay, I’ll get right on it.”

He turned to leave as the shrink and the two goons came barreling into the room.

“What is going on in here?” the shrink shouted at Sergeant Carson.

“The general asked for some chow. I told him I’d see what I could do. He hasn’t eaten in days,” Carson said.

Days. Had I been in here days?

Iranian submarines floating around the ocean practically undetectable. A new mind control gas called Demon Rain. A deeply divided country. Inauguration. Super Bowl. So many high-visibility events on the calendar, though with social media today, everything every day was high visibility, one of the reasons that the general population had been desensitized to actual threats. Daily outrage wore down the spirit like water on a stone.

“You are to guard the door! Nothing more, nothing less,” the shrink said, poking his finger in the chest of Carson.

“Understand, sir. My bad,” Carson said. “He tricked me using his general’s voice.”

I didn’t mind him throwing me under the bus. My guess was that Carson was perfectly capable of holding his own, but he wanted to present a less confident image to the men who had just barreled in.

“The audio wasn’t working. Did you turn that off?”

Carson shrugged. “I wouldn’t know how.”

That wasn’t a no.

“Get out of here,” the shrink said. “You two, back on guard.”

“Let the jarhead do it,” one of the two big guys said.

“Not a fucking marine,” Carson shot back, a hint of anger in his voice, interservice rivalries being what they were.

“Do as I say,” the shrink directed.

One of the universal truths in the military, CIA, and FBI was that professional positions like doctors, lawyers, and clergy were always part of the team but didn’t really hold much sway over the operational personnel unless they had been placed in operational roles. The shrink, then, probably wasn’t a shrink. Maybe he had read a book about it, but in my four decades of service, I had never seen a doctor boss around two operators, especially armed ones, with the heft of these two thugs. Which led me to wonder whether this was the CIA or some other entity altogether.

The door closed, and from what little I could see through the wire-mesh window, one of the big guys stayed behind while it looked like the others walked to the left. I unclenched my fist and removed it from beneath the covers. As I slid my arm along the sheet, I had more room to maneuver than I’d expected.

Ranger Carson had done me a solid by discreetly cutting the leather strap securing my wrist. I glanced down, cognizant that the cameras and sound were now most likely operational again. The camera, though, I imagined, was one of those wide field-of-view home security things looking more for large movements than subtle shifts in my body position. My left hand was still restrained. Carson had done what he could, leaving the rest up to me.

He had slid into my hand a seat belt cutter that had become an essential part of every soldier’s equipment kit after Parizad’s predecessor, Soleimani, and others had begun using the lethal EFPs, which were so debilitating, each blast left soldiers inside burning vehicles with melting seat belt fasteners. Our troops had been literally locked in the burning Humvees, and the only solution was to create a device that could safely cut a seat belt without injuring the trapped soldier.

I slowly slid my right hand out of the cut leather strap and lifted the sheet with the back tips of my fingers, crawling my hand over both of my legs, and then placing the opening of the plastic-encased blade on the leather. The device was made to be yanked briskly across the seat belt, but my governing principle here was to avoid detection by the camera. I felt the blade bite into the supple strap. Over the next several minutes, I worked it back and forth, making millimeters of progress with each subtle move of my hand.

The door opened, and two guards stood outside the open passageway. “What are you doing?”

I looked at the guard, who had turned around to answer the question asked of him by the shorter of the two men.

“Video’s out still. Just checking the camera,” the taller guard said.

“We’re not supposed to be in there, man.”

“Duh. The camera’s broke, dick. Who’s going to know?”

I quickly slid my hand into the cut leather strap. I couldn’t get it to fit perfectly because it required another hand to make the two leather pieces appear seamless, but it would have to do.

The two men talked for a minute outside the door, but the taller guard kept the heel of his foot in the door. Not wanting to waste time as they argued about the broken camera, I slid my right hand underneath the sheets and ripped down on the seat belt cutter, leaned forward and cut the straps on my legs, removed the IV from my arm—all as quietly as possible—slid out of the bed, felt weak in my knees but didn’t buckle, and closed the distance to the back of the man with his heel in the door. My head swam with the morphine, but I powered through the effect of the drugs.

During their first visit with the shrink, I’d noticed the tall guard carried a pistol beneath his coat and one on his hip, specifically a Glock 19 with a magazine in the well. My guess was that he had a round chambered; most law enforcement personnel did, but politically correct culture had infiltrated all government agencies, and it was anyone’s guess what agency, if any, these people worked for. For all I knew, I was the captive of a rogue band of government contractors.

The advantage to being in a closed room with only a small window was that the tall man’s body blocked the only line of sight inside. He began to pull back from his now-whispering conversation, pushing back on the door with his elbow and creating a wedge between the door and his body.

The gun was right there in a clip-on holster.

My movements from this point forward had to be precise. I clenched my fist and released, keeping the blood pumping through my arms. He was less than two feet from me. I reached into the holster and snatched the weapon out. Metal scraped on plastic as the man jerked back and turned, but his coat snagged on the door handle. He stared at me for a brief second until I hammered the butt of the pistol into his forehead. A second blow sent him crumbling to the floor, serving a useful purpose as a doorstop.

I had the pistol in the face of the shorter guard, who was fumbling for his weapon.

“I’m two seconds from pulling this trigger,” I said.

He raised his hands slowly, discretion being the better part of valor and all. Because he could escape laterally down either hallway, I stepped closer to him, wedged my back into the door, and pushed it backward to create more of an opening for him to pass through.

“Step over your buddy and drag him to the far corner,” I said.

He kept his hands up, put his chest out, and kept his back to the opposite side of the doorjamb as he scooted through maybe three feet from me. He got a healthy look at my steady aim and the black bore of the pistol.

He moved on me quickly. I dropped the hammer of the pistol, which, if it had been loaded, would have drilled a 9 mm bullet through his forehead. However, political correctness—or maybe he wasn’t a gun guy—left the chamber empty. I parried his awkward lunge as he stumbled over his unconscious taller partner, providing me an opening to jack him across the nose with the butt of the Glock. Blood sprayed everywhere, and the wall looked like a modern artist had thrown red paint at a canvas. He tripped to one knee, a red stream pouring from his nose.

“Motherfucker,” he muttered.

I had been having success with the pistol, so instead of kicking him in the teeth, which I was perfectly poised to do but was unsure of my leg strength, I hammered the lower back of his skull, a notoriously perfect spot to kill or knock a man unconscious. He fell across the taller man already on the floor, which created a predicament for me. I had been counting on one man carrying the other while I propped the door, as I was quite certain it locked when closed. There was no keyhole on the inside of the door, so I removed the shoe of the top man, a basic leather Bass toe cap that needed shining, and used it to prop the door as I dragged the two men completely inside the cell, which was how I viewed the room now. I ensured they were tucked out of line of sight of the window behind the gurney and in the dead space of the camera, if that should ever come back on. Then I rumpled the sheets of the gurney. With the back jacked up, I hoped it would take a few seconds to recognize that I wasn’t there.

A few seconds could make all the difference in the world.

I was still dressed in my boots, black cargo pants, and black long-sleeve shirt, but my outer tactical vest had been removed. I smelled like dry sweat, and my mouth tasted like the tall guy’s shoe smelled. I scoured each man for smartphones and weapons, resulting in one iPhone and one Android, two knives, and a second Glock 19. I unlocked both phones with the thumbs of each man, quickly went to the auto-lock feature of each—a skill we had honed over the past twenty years of raiding terrorist hideouts—and hit Never on each one, which would burn more battery but ensure each one remained unlocked unless I got stupid and pressed the Screen Off button on the side.

I also found two sets of keys and car fobs, which could be useful. I stuffed their wallets in my left cargo pocket, put the phones in my right one, and checked the magazines of all three pistols: full. I jacked a round into each chamber and put one pistol in my left pocket while carrying the other in my right hand.

I kicked the guard’s shoe out of the door and wedged my back against it as I peered around the corner in each direction. The hallway to the left was longer than to the right. Thankfully, both directions were vacant. There were two closed doors to the left and what looked like an exit door to the right. I wondered about Hobart and the rest of my team. My first duty was to them, so I tested the keys in the lock while I still had cover, found the right one on the fourth try, and then pulled the door shut. The lock clicked as I moved into the hallway. I tested the doorknob, and it was locked.

Moving to my left, I tried the key on the next room’s door, and it worked. Opening it slowly, I saw a similar arrangement, but the room was vacant. Realizing that the hallway and each room probably had cameras, I moved swiftly to the next room and found the same setup. Gurney, bed, camera, but empty. Stepping into the hallway, I stopped. Something caught in the back of my mind. I looked back into the room and stared. Two chairs. Cinder-block wall. Dim light. A small pattern on the wall—like writing that had been painted over.

I couldn’t recall what it was that was bothering me or why it was important, so I closed the door and continued to the last room, which was different from all the others.

It was vacant but had a table with four chairs on either side, two iPad tablets propped up on collapsible keyboards, assorted papers, and a coatrack. There were two long winter coats, a watch cap, a tweed flat cap, and a scarf. I snagged the longer of the two coats, the beanie, and the scarf. Each of the iPads had portable USB ports with flash drives. I snatched each of the portable drives and pocketed them as I shrugged the coat over my shoulder. I looked at the iPad screens—both warning me that I had improperly removed the flash drives—and took the one with the video surveillance camera feeds, all of which were blanked out. I checked the Wi-Fi indicator at the top ribbon and saw it had an exclamation mark through it. I pocketed both on the hopes that one contained archived video feed of exactly who had come and gone. My pockets laden with a trove of intelligence and weaponry, I redistributed my haul in the large wool coat’s pockets, both interior and exterior. Lastly, there was a six-pack of orange Gatorade bottles on the table, so I snatched two from the plastic rings and stuffed them in my pockets while guzzling a third on the spot as I peered into the hallway.

The people that had come into my room had seemed to exit to the left. I walked the remaining twenty meters to the door, which had a wire-mesh window and a standard crash bar running horizontally across its length like an auditorium exit that typically declared, “Alarm Will Sound.”

No such sign existed here, yet there was no guarantee that neither alarms nor sounds would be activated if I pushed on the bar, if they hadn’t already been. Through the mesh screen, I saw a concrete pad and stairwell that led upward. The entire setup reminded me of a school or abandoned public building of some type. Even where I had been placed was the size of a classroom. Everything seemed familiar while simultaneously unnerving. I struggled to reconcile the competing emotions, and when I failed, I wrote them off to the drugs. But still, something nagged at the back of my mind.

I didn’t have time to consider the matter anymore, because as I pushed on the bar, an alarm clanged loudly above my head. It was an old-style round metal disc with a striking mechanism inside. Being so close to it, the high-pitched pinging pierced my eardrums.

I bolted through the door.

Sunlight. The sun was low in the sky to my left, southwest. The air was damp and heavy. A creek babbled somewhere not too far away. The gunmetal sky was foreboding, and the temperature was slightly above freezing.

There was a parking lot to my right. A wooded area sloped down to my left. Another building straight ahead was connected to the one I was exiting by a corrugated metal overhead cover and a cracking concrete sidewalk. Definitely an old elementary school.

There were two cars in the parking lot. I fumbled with the keys and pressed the button on the Toyota RAV4. It beeped twice, and the lights flashed on and off.

The This is too easy warning began to flash in the back of my mind—who was Carson, and where had he come from?—but I countered it by convincing myself to seize the opportunity and to go with the momentum. Sprinting to the mini SUV, I did a cursory check under the wheel wells for tracking devices, found none, slid into the driver’s seat, and pushed the Start button. I pulled away from the parking lot and studied the building.

There was yellow tape all around it with some chain-link fencing that appeared to be in mid-construction. The building was single story with a flat roof and red bricks.

In the opposite direction about a mile away there was a water tower and a cluster of buildings. A field—almost like a pasture—separated me from what looked like a village.

In the distance, two police cars began to race toward the building with lights flashing. I turned out of the parking lot in the opposite direction, casting a glance back at the sign fronting the building.

FORT DETRICK CHEMICAL TEST FACILITY