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He turned back to the screen, ignoring all of the worried stares aimed in his direction. “We know Pierce was long gone by the time the quake hit. Right?”
After a beat of silence, Sawyer cleared his throat. “I did find his name on a flight passenger list out of Portland three days before the quake—which was the last time any of us saw him. Someone used the ticket, but there’s no way to know if it was actually him or not. If I were him, I’d have had someone set up to take that flight as a red herring and head in the opposite direction.”
“I really don’t think he was on that flight,” Lucy said with a shake of her head. “Remember the tour group I had on the mountain during the quake? One of the hikers claimed he saw Pierce headed down the trail that morning.”
“Chuck.” Sawyer spat the guy’s name as if it tasted bad. “I don’t know if we can take that asshole at his word.”
“But he described Raszta. How would he know about Razzy’s dreadlocks if he hadn’t seen them? It’s not a normal look for a dog.”
“She has a point,” Donovan said. “And there was the video of Pierce and Raszta at that gas station outside of Eureka.”
“Yeah, but their system was fucked,” Sawyer pointed out. “The timestamp on the video was all wrong… unless he’s a time traveler cashing in on 1997’s gas prices. As cool as that would be, I highly doubt it. So he could have been there weeks before the quake. Or days. Or hours. Or minutes. We just don’t know.”
“All right,” Zak said, his voice firm and authoritative as he took control of the meeting. “We need to figure out our next steps. Pierce… Jameson… whatever his name is… he may be a broody bastard, but we all know he’s a good guy. He only left because he didn’t want us caught up in whatever mess was following him.”
Sawyer leaned back in his seat and scrubbed his hands through his hair, making it stand up on end. “So… are you saying we need to stop looking for him?”
“Fuck no.” Donovan’s outburst drew everyone’s attention. His hands balled into tight fists at his side. “That man is our brother. Doesn’t matter what name he goes by. He’s part of Redwood Coast Rescue, and we don’t abandon our own.”
Zak nodded in agreement. “Sawyer, dig up whatever you can about Project Iron Horizon. I know it’s classified, but maybe there’s a backdoor we can use to get more intel without setting off alarms.”
Sawyer smirked. “Always a backdoor. I’ll find it.” He turned in his seat to look in Zak’s direction. “But you might want to reach out to your mercenary friends again. Something tells me they’ll be able to get the intel faster.”
Zak winced and dragged a hand around the back of his neck.
Rylan knew from their therapy sessions that Zak hated contacting the team that rescued him from Afghanistan. Not because he was ungrateful or he disliked them, but because every contact brought back the horrific memories of his captivity. Memories he had worked hard to leave behind.
“I… can’t face them again,” Zak said finally, his voice rough around the edges as he studied his prosthetic leg, a physical reminder of the hell he’d survived. “Not so soon after the last time. Seeing them fucked with my head.”
They’d already called in HORNET a few weeks ago to rescue Pierce and Cal Holden from a cult. Which, now that Rylan thought about it, seemed to have set off this whole chain of events. Pierce had been even more withdrawn after his rescue, but Rylan had just figured it was because those fuckers had tortured him with electroshock therapy. He’d planned to give Pierce some time to recuperate, then approach him about treatment. That kind of experience was enough to fuck with anyone’s head—not to mention one as full of demons as Pierce’s.
But what if his withdrawal had more to do with his past than what the cult had done to him? What if something at the Hope’s Embrace compound had awakened old ghosts?
A sick feeling curled in the pit of Rylan’s stomach. In hindsight, Pierce’s behavior now seemed glaringly obvious. The brooding silences he’d always displayed had grown heavier, more intense. He’d pulled back from everyone, even from Raszta.
“Guys,” Rylan said, drawing everyone’s attention back to him. “I think... I think Pierce’s past caught up with him at Hope’s Embrace. He saw or heard something up there that made him leave. Do we still have all the research we did on them?”
Everyone looked at Sawyer. He held up his hands. “I don’t. I gave everything I had to Alexis and Ellie. They’re doing a podcast about their sister and the cult.”
There was a chime from Sawyer’s computer, and he swiveled around to face it, shoving his headphones on as he started typing again. His fingers flew over the keys at an impressive speed, and Rylan found himself holding his breath as he waited for whatever information Sawyer was going to dig up this time.
“Fuck me,” Sawyer muttered darkly under his breath.
“What is it?” Zak asked as he leaned in closer over Sawyer’s desk, trying to decipher the sea of code and encrypted messages flowing across the screen.
Sawyer held up a finger, signaling for silence. His fingers were a blur of movement against the keyboard, and after a tense moment of silence, he finally pulled off his headphones and ran an agitated hand through his unruly hair. “There was a data dump on the dark web. Half of it is encrypted so tight it’d take me weeks to crack it, but what I can read… it isn’t good.”
Rylan felt his heart pound against his rib cage. “It’s about Pierce, isn’t it?”
Sawyer nodded grimly. “Project Iron Horizon was building a seismic weapon.”
chapter
eleven
The thingthat nobody thinks about in a survival situation is its sheer monotony.
At first, Rhiannon was shocked by the boredom that leached into the fear and uncertainty, but soon, the tedium even dulled her surprise.
