They made a long circle through the forest around Drake’s cabin, pausing every minute or so for one of them to tell the other to be more quiet. That was almost impossible. The brush was so dense that they were constantly tangled up in it. Virgil finally took out a flashlight and splashed its beam on the ground at his feet, tilted back enough that Johnson could see where to step. They emerged behind the garage, with the secondary cabin to their left. The garage had a back window and, through it, they could see that the second and third stalls were empty. Nothing inside but some lawn-care machinery and the Jeep.

  “Now what?” Johnson whispered.

  “Let’s take a look at the small cabin.”

  “Could be alarmed.”

  “If it is, we run.”

  Johnson handed Virgil a piece of cloth.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bandanna. Cover your face. Like a cowboy outlaw. In case there are cameras.”

  “Jesus, Johnson. Just because we’re in Montana.”

  But Virgil did it anyway.

  He was carrying Johnson’s gun, not because he wanted to, but to keep it away from Johnson. A tire iron was Johnson’s weapon because he didn’t want to go unarmed. Virgil also had his Nikon, with the 14–24 zoom lens, in a day pack.

  At the corner of the garage, they sat and waited, watching the house. There were two lights on inside, one in back, one in front, but none on the second story. A satellite dish sat on the roof, but there was no visible light from an operating TV. The lights never flickered, as they would if somebody walked between them and a window, and after five minutes, Virgil whispered, “Let’s go.”

  They snuck, bent over, to the cabin, and stopped, crouching, by the corner and out of sight from the house, listening again. Nothing but the sounds from crickets and frogs, along with a bit of wind sighing through the trees rimming the property. Not a peep from within the house. After a while, Johnson said, “Weird.”

  “What?”

  “No windows on this side. I didn’t see any windows or a door on the back, either. Only windows in this place are on the front.”

  “Cover me,” Virgil said.

  “With what? A tire iron?”

  He laughed. “Okay. Keep an eye out.”

  Silently, Virgil crawled past the front of the cabin, staying in shadow, to the first window. He sat still for a moment, then rose up to look through the pane.

  Couldn’t see anything.

  A minute later was back with Johnson.

  “What’d you see?”

  “Nothing. It’s a fake window. It’s a board with some curtains painted on it.”

  Johnson said, “Cover me.”

  “What?”

  But Johnson was already headed for the front of the cabin. A minute later, Virgil heard a crackling sound, like wood splintering and then Johnson saying, low voiced, “C’mon.”

  Through the still damp weeds and grass Virgil crept the length of a cabin, where he found that Johnson had jimmied the door with the tire iron and had gone inside.

  Virgil followed. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Let me close the door.”

  With that done, Johnson turned on the flashlight app of his iPhone and panned the illumination around the inside of the cabin. There was a bed in one corner with an end table and a couple of rolled-up carpets next to it. Three rolls of seamless paper lay along one wall, and a fourth roll was mounted on a roller behind the bed. Camera stands with umbrellas and soft boxes were crowded across the room along with their power supplies.

  Virgil turned on his own cell-phone light, and said, “I need photos of the bed and the walls.”

  “The walls. That oughta do it,” Johnson said, looking at the knotty pine planks that crawled up the sides of the room. “They’re like the world’s biggest fingerprints.”

  Virgil pulled off his pack, took the camera out, mounted the compact flash, set everything for automatic, and started shooting.

  Quickly.

  Efficiently.

  He shot everything twice, then packed up.

  Two minutes later they were gone, and twenty minutes after that they were talking with Pescoli.

  THE PHONE RANG JUST AS Regan was getting out of the shower. She wrapped a towel around herself, picked up her phone, and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “It’s Virgil. I’ve got the photos.”

  “Send ’em.”

  “I will. But the connection out here at the ranch, in the bar, is slow. Wi-Fi’s not the latest in technology. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll be sending you nine shots.”

  “I’ll move them to the FBI guy.”

  “Call me in the morning, when you hear back.”

  “First thing,” she said and couldn’t wait.

  She threw on her pajamas and waited, pumping milk again, of course. Fortunately, the motel had a minibar fridge.

  The last of the photos came in a half hour later. They were, she thought, some of the most boring photographs she’d ever seen. But they were sharp, and exactly what the feds had asked for. She sent them on. After a quick call to Santana explaining that she was staying over and would be home the next day, she charged her phone, turned in, and thought about her family, her job, and the balancing act that was her life.

  The feds called at seven o’clock the next morning.

  Regan was still asleep and for a second was disoriented, fumbling her phone off the nightstand before answering.

  “What time is it?”

  Burch, the FBI agent, said, “Nine o’clock.”

  “Or seven o’clock, Mountain Time,” she said around a yawn.

  She needed coffee.

  Then remembered she was still on decaf.

  “I’ve got a lot to tell you,” she said into her cell. “Did you see those photographs?”

  “I saw them two hours ago, at seven o’clock Eastern Time, because I get up at dawn.”

  “Good for you. What do you think?”

  “It’s not what I think. It’s what I know. This is large. We got an ID on the two people in Vegas. We’re not sure we’ve got their real names, but we know them as Carla and Allen Dickerson.”

  “I got those names last night from the Weeks kid.”

  “We’ve had warrants for the Dickersons for years but haven’t been able to nail them down. We thought they were somewhere in Central America. Anyway, we got their address from the Vegas guys, we’ll be hitting that apartment—it’s a condo, really—in a couple of hours. These are bad, bad people. In fact, the only worse guy I can think of is probably this Drake guy you say you’ve got up there. We’ve got flashes of those knotty pine walls in twenty-three films so far, the worst kind of porn you can imagine, which means he’s probably made a couple hundred of them. We had no idea who was shooting it. We need this guy. Can the Weeks kid identify him?”

  “Not only identify him, he’s actually worked for him in a porn film when he was a kid.”

  “Ah, shit. There’s a kid who’s going to need some help.”

  “Yeah. We got him safe for the time being.”

  “So we’re flying in a heavy SWAT team from Denver, but they probably won’t get there until early afternoon,” Burch said. “I’ll be there at the same time; I’m on my way to National right now. The director actually got me a Justice Department jet. We’d like you to wait for us in Butte. That’s as close as we can get to your target, and then guide us up there. We don’t want to spook this Drake guy, but it’d be good if Flowers could check on him. You know, cruise the place. The thing is, we’ve got nobody named Michael Drake on file. We’ve looked at the county clerk’s records up there, and they go back to a post office box with a fake name. If we lose him, we might be losing him for good.”

  “Alternatively, I could go up there right now and bust his ass,” she suggested.

  “I appreciate that, but one-on-one, too much could go wrong. Like I said, we really don’t want to lose this guy. He’s a genuine, no-shit monster.”

  “I’ll call Flowers and tell him.”

  “One other thing. I’m sending you an encrypted link to a file here at the bureau. In another e-mail you’ll find a code number to open it. You won’t be able to download it. It’s read only. A selection of clips from the knotty pine films. You ought to know what we’re talking about.”

  “I’ll take a look,” she said. Then added, “Maybe.”

  “If you want to get in touch with me, it’ll have to be in the next half hour,” Burch said. “After that, I’ll be up in the air and the connections to this phone won’t be good. I’ll have other com equipment, though, and I’ll call you if anything changes.”

  Regan didn’t really want to look at the films, but thought she had to. She sat staring at the iPad for a minute, then finally opened the mail from Burch, found the code number, copied it, went to the other e-mail from him, and pasted the number in the small square of the encrypted link.

  Six links.

  Six minutes.

  Children.

  She didn’t even want to speculate on their ages.

  Mostly little girls, with an occasional weeping little boy.

  “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she whispered, tears in her eyes.

  She didn’t know if she was praying or cursing. Her stomach turned over and something ugly took hold of her heart and twisted.

  “You sick, sick bastard,” she whispered thinking of the man she’d never met, the man who went by Michael Drake. When she was done, she clicked away and received a warning that said, When you leave this link, you will not be able to reenter without obtaining a new authorization and a new password.

  Thank God.

  She closed the link.

  That was something no one should ever see.

  The feds were late, as usual.

  Burch had called from the plane in early afternoon.

  “Had a problem.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We hit the condo, the Dickerson-Foley-whoever condo in Riverdale. The Foleys are retirees, eighty-four and eighty-two, respectively. Never had the Visa account the RV was charged to. That account was active, but was paid online, no paperwork, so they never knew. The driver’s license data goes to Clark Foley, but he hasn’t had a license for four years.”

  “What, they pulled these old people at random?”

  Damn, damn, and double damn.

  Her fist clenched the cell phone in a death grip.

  “Worse than that. We showed the Foleys the Dickerson photos, and they identified them as a couple named Smith who live in the same building, directly below the Foleys. We got a new warrant and hit that place. But it was empty, except for one of those cheap cell-phone-linked security systems. As soon as our guys cracked the door, a silent alarm went to a cell-phone number. So the Dickersons, whoever they are, could look at full-color moving pictures of our guys coming in. We didn’t find it for three or four minutes after kicking the door.”

  “Shit,” she muttered.

  “One good thing. We got a quick fix on the cell phone, which was in Green Valley, Arizona, about forty-five miles north of the border. It looks like they’re making tracks for Mexico. We were on to the border guys in ten minutes, and they had pictures five minutes after that. I think we got a good shot at them.”

  Burch told her that he’d be arriving after four o’clock.

  “My plane didn’t have quite the speed or the range that I thought. I kinda got shuffled off to a cheaper machine. We had to stop in Minneapolis to refuel and it took forever.”

  “What about your SWAT team?”

  “They should be there before me, but not much.”

  VIRGIL GOT THE CALL.

  The Dickersons, who were really Ned and Jennifer Boniface, last known address Bakersfield, California, had been picked up, without incident just before reaching the border. The kids with them were safe and being identified, each with a story to tell. No word yet on if they were part of a bigger ring, but the feds were checking. He and Johnson set up across the river from Drake’s house at midafternoon. The BMW was still parked in the yard, but the Jeep was missing.

  He called Pescoli to tell her.

  “We’ve got the plates, we’ll find them. Problem is, about everybody who doesn’t drive a pickup out here drives a Jeep.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  But then she drove one. Fairly new, with lots of power, fastest model available.

  “Maybe so, but not much,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you something, Virgil. I saw some of the film that Drake apparently shot, stuff that was filmed for sure in that back cabin. It’s sick. The worst.” She hesitated, felt that same terrible feeling she had when she’d viewed the porn. “I’ve dealt with a lot in my career as a cop, but this is worse than murder. Drake is worse than a killer.”

  “Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he probably did murder somebody in cold blood.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” Pescoli said. “It’s the homicide that will get him the needle.”

  “When was the last time someone was executed by the State of Montana?” he said. “I wouldn’t count on that. But we can put him away for life.”

  “Not good enough,” she said.

  REGAN MET THE SWAT TEAM on the tarmac at Bert Mooney airport. Burch arrived forty-five minutes later. They all shook hands, went to a prearranged conference room where Burch reviewed the action with the SWAT team, which had been briefed before leaving Denver, and then they moved off to three waiting Chevy Tahoes, rented from the local car agencies, loaded the team’s gear, and found the road to Grizzly Falls. She led the way in her own Jeep with Burch in the passenger seat.

  He was a slender, tough-looking man who, it turned out, had spent six years with the Navy SEALs before joining the FBI. He skillfully extracted a brief autobiography from her and told her a little about himself. He was smart and engaging, but she got the impression that he badly wanted to be in on the raid for bureaucratic reasons. Taking down the knotty pine filmmaker would be a major coup, a step toward promotion.

  Nothing wrong with that, she thought.

  Except it annoyed her.

  She and the SWAT team would have pulled off the raid in broad daylight, if they’d left without waiting for Burch.

  Her cell phone rang.

  “Got a break,” Flowers said as she answered and negotiated a curve as they headed west. “Drake just got back. He’s around behind the house where we can’t see him, but I got a good look at him when he came in. He’s there. Where the hell are you guys?”

  “We’re still about an hour out,” she said.

  “We could take him right now,” Flowers said. “You could get the sheriff to deputize me.”

  “Let me check on that,” she said, though it galled her to think Blackwater would be in on the takedown.

  She passed Flowers’s suggestion on to Burch, who shook his head. “No way. I spent some more time reading Flowers’s file on the way here, and he has a way of making simple things complicated. Let me talk to him.”

  She handed the phone to Burch. “We appreciate what you’re doing, but we mostly need intel. Eyes on the place. You were an army guy, right? So you know what we need.”

  She thought she heard a protest from Flowers, but Burch clicked off and she kept driving, her jaw set, her fingers tight on the wheel, the Montana countryside flying past, the sun sinking lower in the sky.

  Flowers called back forty minutes later and said, “Drake just went up to Weeks’s place in the Jeep. We could see him turn in, but we can’t see what’s going on.”

  “Call us back if anything changes,” she said and Burch nodded.

  As the miles had passed he’d grown more silent, his eyes steady on the road, he, like she, getting ready.

  Twenty minutes later, another call. “Drake’s gone back to his place. I don’t know, Johnson and I are talking it over, I think he might be packing up or something. We can see him moving around inside the house, but we can’t tell what he’s doing.”

  “We’re coming,” she said. “We’re five minutes out. Hold on.” She glanced at Burch, then hit the gas.

  “Stay on the line,” she said to Flowers and punched the phone to speaker, so both she and Burch could hear.

  Then she drove like hell.

  Nothing changed during the last few minutes of the drive. According to Flowers, Drake was still at his house when she, leading the caravan, drove past the dude ranch. The sun was now down below the mountains, but the sky was still bright.

  She pulled over when she was certain the vehicles could no longer be seen from the ranch, and the SWAT team armored up and went through a preraid routine, checking weapons, communications, and armor.

  Burch, now out of his sport coat and slacks and into jeans, boots, and armor, told her to stay back. “I know you want to go in, but we don’t know you. I don’t mean to be offensive, but we’ve all trained for this and we’ve got communications and lights and there’s lots of firepower out there. We don’t want an accident.”

  She was pissed. “No way. That bastard is mine. I’ve been right on top of this.”

  Burch put a finger to his lips. “We really need you to wait here. Believe me, you’re going to get a lot of credit in our reports. You wait here, talk to Flowers on your cell phone. If anything critical comes up, we’ll leave a radio. You call me.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about credit,” she said, her lips barely moving, rage burning through her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the porn films again, the scared children, the predatory adults. “I want in.”

  But Burch wasn’t having any of it. “We’re doing this military style. You know the area, so you call me. Any communication you get from your office, even from Flowers goes through you. I’m not taking any other calls. Only from you. You got that? Pass it on to Flowers. We have to run this tight. He calls you. You pass on the important information. Same with any calls from your sheriff. We do this my way.”

  Five minutes after they pulled over, and five hundred yards down the road from Drake’s house, the SWAT team, with Burch at the point, slouched up the shoulder of the road, looking more like a squad of SEALs in Afghanistan than a bunch of cops in Montana.