A Merciful Promise (Mercy Kilpatrick #6)(12)

“Not very bright or in a big hurry?” Bolton wondered.

“Both?” Truman shrugged.

Bolton straightened and twisted his back, making Truman wince at the staccato cracking sounds from his spine. “I’m ready to talk to Ms. Vale.”

Truman hoped she was ready to talk to Bolton.





FIVE

Mercy glanced at the old clock on the bus station wall for the hundredth time. Her ride was nearly an hour late. Her nerves were on edge, and every possible scenario shot through her mind.

Had Chad Finn’s cover been blown somehow? Had he been tortured and killed?

Would unknown men pick her up, lying that Chad would meet her at the compound? Would she be tortured and killed next?

Flat tire? Wrong date? Wrong time?

She squirmed on the hard seat. The tiny bus station had only two benches for passengers, and they looked like church pews. The wood backs were set at an angle that offered no back support yet also dug painfully into her spine. The nearly deserted room smelled of decades of cigarette smoke and old dust, along with a pine odor of cleaning agents that grew stronger near the bathrooms. Black crud filled every crack in the ancient floor tiles, and old water leaks had stained the yellowed drop ceiling.

Occasionally Mercy heard a tinny voice from a back room where a ticket agent watched TV. The woman had poked her head out when Mercy arrived, waited to see if she needed anything, and then vanished when Mercy took a seat.

A young man wearing faded jeans shared her vigil, sitting silently on the other bench, his gray cowboy hat beside him, his attention on the ragged paperback in his hands. His suitcase was beat-up and from an era before luggage wheels. Back when people had to carry their bags by the single handle.

Her parents still had a few.

She checked the time again and then pulled a cell phone out of her bag. It was a battered off-brand smartphone. Carleen had handed it to her and stated, “They’ll expect you to have a phone, but it will be taken away and searched. We loaded a small history of calls and random texts to ‘friends’ and a bunch of photos.” On the bus ride from Bend, Mercy had studied the phone’s photos, stunned to see her face in places she’d never been and with people she’d never met. Overnight the ATF had created a visual history for her, skillfully replacing the original fake Jessica Polk’s face with Mercy’s face in social media posts and the images on her phone.

She enlarged a photo of herself and Chad, committing her boyfriend’s face to memory.

I won’t mess this up.

She was concerned about the reunion with Chad and prayed he wouldn’t reveal his surprise when he realized Jessica was being played by someone new.

Like replacing a TV actor midseason. Awkward.

Chad Finn had to be good at his job. The ATF wouldn’t have placed him undercover if it didn’t have faith in him. Mercy hoped its faith in her wasn’t misguided.

She dialed Chad’s number, knowing it would appear normal to call him because he was late. A recording told her he was unreachable. She dropped the phone in her bag and accidentally made eye contact with the suitcase man. He’d been watching her. He nodded solemnly and went back to his book.

Is he a spy from the militia?

She slowly exhaled and spun a curl around her finger. I need to chill.

If he was a spy, all he’d seen was an impatient, uncomfortable woman waiting for her ride.

When she’d stepped off the early-morning bus in Ukiah, she’d smelled snow and spotted a white dusting on the tops of the hills surrounding the area. Winter is coming. The sky was a perfect blue, but the bus had traveled east, into an area of the state where the land did not retain the heat as it did back in Bend. The elevation was slightly higher than home, and the vegetation was an assortment of hearty survivors, plants and trees that could withstand the cold dryness of the winter and the heat of the summer.

Somewhere up in those snow-dusted hills was her destination.

She’d studied the satellite photos of the camp. There were several small buildings and three larger ones scattered around a clearing. Chad had reported that the larger buildings were a mess hall, a supply depot, and the command center. Carleen had rested a finger on another big building that sat in the center of a different clearing near a large carport, several hundred yards from the other structures. “Chad hasn’t been allowed in this building. It’s brand-new. He says it’s been a priority construction project, but no one will talk about it.”

“What could it be?” Mercy had murmured.

“Your guess is as good as ours.” Concern had darkened Carleen’s brown eyes.

The forty-acre camp was bordered on two sides by a river that flowed out of the mountains and on a third side by a deep ravine. The fourth side was fenced, with constant patrols and a gate that was the only way a vehicle could enter the compound.

As Mercy sat on the bus station bench, staring out the window, her mind tried to make sense of the new building, wondering if it was used to store weapons. Stolen weapons.

A white pickup drove into her view and swung into an angled parking space in front of the bus station. Mercy glanced at her companion. He ignored the truck. She sucked in a breath and slung the ugly ATF duffel onto her shoulder, her large slouchy purse on her other arm. Two men in worn clothing got out and eyed the building. The younger removed his sunglasses and pushed up the brim of his camouflage baseball cap. Chad.