Page 80 of Cold Target

He'd follow the plan, Ivy thought. Maybe not to the letter. Maybe he'd substitute targets if the originals were too hard to reach. But the framework would be the same.

Five targets. Maximum impact. Simultaneous detonation.

She closed the folder, put it back in the box, returned the box to the shelf.

Checked her watch.

5:43 AM.

She walked back through the corridor. The guard was at his desk, drinking coffee from a thermos.

"Find what you needed?" he asked.

"Yes. Thank you."

He nodded. Didn't ask what it was. Probably didn't want to know.

She walked out into the cold. The sky was still dark but the quality of the darkness had changed. Morning was coming.

She got in her car, started the engine, let it warm up.

She needed to call Joe and tell him about Cold Target.

But she couldn't.

Not yet.

He was going into the lion’s den.

Calling him now might get him killed. Ivy knew she could go over Joe’s head, to Jenkins, but that was a last resort. Once she did that, it was out of her hands.

So she sat there in the parking lot, waiting and thinking about how many people would die if Kinsman succeeded.

33

Joe left Mave where she'd fallen, the sniper rifle in his hands.

He didn't look back.

The mine entrance was a hundred yards away, cut into the hillside like a wound that had never healed. The opening was maybe ten feet high, twelve feet wide. Old timber framing around the mouth, dark and weathered, the wood gone gray with age and exposure.

But the darkness inside wasn't complete. There was light back there.

Faint, but steady. Electric light, not firelight.

He approached from the side, using the terrain and the remaining structures for cover. His ribs were either numb from the cold or the nerve endings were dead. Either way, the pain had eased slightly.

The wind had carved the snow into patterns around the entrance, and Joe’s boots crunched through the crust. Too loud. But the wind covered it, howling across the hillside and into the tunnel mouth with a low moan.

At the entrance, he stopped.

The wind covered most sounds, but underneath it he could hear something mechanical. A hum. Low and steady. Ventilationequipment, maybe. Or a generator running somewhere deep inside. The sound had a rhythm to it, a pulse that suggested something industrial and well-maintained.

The smell hit him as he moved inside. Damp rock. Old timber. And underneath that, something else. Machine oil. Diesel fuel. The smell of work being done.

The temperature changed immediately. Outside had been brutal, wind-driven cold that cut through clothing and found skin. Inside was different. Still cold but sheltered. The wind couldn't reach here. And there was warmth coming from somewhere deeper.

The tunnel was wider than he'd expected. The old mining operation had been substantial. The walls were rough-cut rock, dark and wet in places where groundwater seeped through.