Chapter 11 - The Husband at the Roadblock
For one terrible second, Emily believed the betrayal.
Mark stood beside Julian with his hands visible and his expression unreadable. Police lights flashed across his face.
“Give them Evelyn,” he repeated.
Evelyn stared through the windshield.
“I knew it,” she whispered.
Emily watched Mark more carefully.
His right hand opened and closed at his side.
Three fingers.
Then one.
Then two.
312.
The lottery amount.
Their private signal did not exist. Yet Mark had created one from the only number he knew Emily would recognize.
His gaze shifted toward the drainage ditch beneath the toll station.
Emily understood.
He was warning them.
Or guiding them into another trap.
Diane whispered, “Do not trust him.”
Emily made her choice.
“Nora, when I open the door, drive through the barrier.”
“There are rifles pointed at us.”
“Not after they see the archive.”
Emily stepped from the car holding the black device above her head.
Every weapon tracked her.
Julian walked forward.
“Place it on the ground.”
“Release Hale.”
“He is not part of this transaction.”
“Neither is Evelyn.”
Julian smiled. “She is the entire transaction.”
Emily glanced at Mark.
He looked toward the ditch again.
She dropped the device.
Julian bent to pick it up.
Mark moved.
He drove his shoulder into Julian and seized the loudspeaker. At the same moment, Emily kicked the archive device into the drainage channel.
A sharp explosion came from beneath the nearest police car.
Not large enough to kill.
Large enough to create smoke.
Mark had planted something in the ambulance.
Officers turned.
Nora accelerated.
The station wagon smashed through the wooden toll barrier and dropped into the drainage path.
Emily ran after it.
Mark caught her arm and jumped with her as bullets struck the pavement.
They rolled down the muddy slope.
The station wagon skidded to a stop below.
Evelyn opened the rear door.
Mark pushed Emily inside and climbed after her.
Nora drove into the culvert as police shouted above.
The concrete tunnel barely fit the car.
Behind them, Julian’s voice echoed through the loudspeaker.
“Seal the east exit.”
Mark pointed ahead. “There’s a maintenance ramp halfway through.”
“How do you know?” Diane asked.
“I helped design the security route.”
Evelyn struck him across the face.
“You told them to take me.”
“I needed Julian close to the device.”
“You always need a reason.”
Mark accepted the blow.
Emily looked at his clothes. No blood.
“You were not shot.”
“Blank round. Julian wanted you to believe I was dead so he could use my return.”
“Why were you standing with him?”
“Because he thinks I chose Bellweather.”
“Did you?”
Mark looked at her for a long moment. “Once.”
The culvert split.
He directed Nora right.
They emerged behind an abandoned maintenance depot two miles from the clinic.
The roadblock sirens faded.
Diane pulled a gun from beneath her coat and aimed it at Mark.
“Get out.”
Emily did not stop her.
Mark raised his hands.
“The north clinic is empty,” he said. “Vale moved everyone last night.”
“Where?”
“The hospice.”
Room 214 at the rural hospice.
“Why?” Nora asked.
“Because the hospice has an old airfield.”
Diane’s gun remained steady. “And why should we believe you?”
Mark reached inside his jacket.
Diane cocked the weapon.
He slowly removed a folded photograph.
It showed Evelyn behind glass seven years earlier.
On the back was a list of dates.
“I visited her whenever I could,” Mark said. “I tried to get her out.”
Evelyn took the photograph.
Her face changed.
“I remember these dates,” she said.
Mark looked at her. “I told you I was maintenance.”
“You wore a mask.”
“I did not want them to know you recognized me.”
Emily felt jealousy rise, then shame. Evelyn had been imprisoned. Mark’s secret visits were not romance. They were guilt.
Or perhaps love.
Either possibility hurt.
Diane lowered the gun slightly.
Mark continued. “Vale is planning a full relocation. The archive breach exposed too much. By noon, the patients and records will be flown out.”
“Where?”
“I do not know.”
Emily thought of Lena, Detective Hale, the child in the observation room, Nora’s brother perhaps listed dead but possibly alive.
“How many people at the hospice?”
“Forty-three confirmed. Maybe more underground.”
Nora gripped the steering wheel. “Then we go now.”
Diane shook her head. “We need federal authorities.”
“Julian owns judges and police,” Emily said. “We do not know who is safe.”
Mark looked at the archive device in the ditch on the map.
“That device was not the only copy, was it?”
Emily said nothing.
He almost smiled. “Good.”
Evelyn turned the photograph over again.
A small strip of paper was taped beneath it.
She peeled it free.
A handwritten message.
EVELYN IS NOT THE PRISONER.
Emily read it.
Then Mark.
His face went pale.
May you like
“What does it mean?” Evelyn asked.
Mark whispered, “It means the woman we rescued from Bellweather was placed there for us to find.”
