Chapter 6 - The Safe House in Pine Ridge
We arrived at Pine Ridge at three in the morning.
The safe house was not a house at all; it was an abandoned limestone quarry office tucked deep within the dense pine forests bordering Mount Hood. Decades of moss covered the corrugated tin roof, and rusted machinery sat like prehistoric skeletons among the encroaching ferns.
Miller killed the engine fifty yards away, coasting the car into the shadow of an overgrown gravel hopper.
“We have about four hours before sunrise,” Miller said, checking the magazine of his sidearm before sliding it back into the holster. “We copy David’s files onto three separate encrypted flash drives. One goes to the Department of Justice via an emergency dead-drop terminal I have access to. One goes to the state attorney general. The third stays with Evelyn.”
“And what about Arthur Vance-Sterling?” I asked, stepping out into the cold, pine-scented air and lifting Oliver out of the backseat. The boy was exhausted, his head resting heavily against my shoulder, his small fingers tangled in my coat collar. “A man with that kind of money buys judges, senators, police chiefs.”
“Not when the media gets the unredacted files simultaneously,” Miller replied grimly. “David’s old editor at the *Chicago Chronicle* has been sitting on an encrypted receiver for ten years. If we transmit the cryptographic key from this terminal, the whole story goes live on every major wire service in thirty seconds. Not even Sterling’s money can stop seventy-two counts of child kidnapping once the public sees the documentation.”
We walked up the rotting wooden steps of the quarry office. Miller picked the padlock with a practiced flick of a tension wrench. Inside, the air was thick with mildew and old paper, but the space was functional. Beneath a moth-eaten tarp in the back corner sat an industrial power generator hooked to a satellite uplink terminal.
David had built this place as his final redoubt.
Miller flipped the switch on the auxiliary battery. The monitors hummed to life, casting an eerie emerald glow across the peeling wallpaper.
“Sit him down there,” Miller said, nodding toward a beat-up vinyl sofa.
I laid Oliver down, tucking my coat around him. He looked up at me, his eyes glassy with sleep. “Aunt Evie?”
“I’m right here, sweet boy. You’re safe.”
“My dad said… he said when I found you, I didn't have to hide under the floorboards anymore.”
Tears burned my eyes. I leaned down and kissed his forehead, breathing in his scent. “You are never going under the floorboards again, Oliver. I swear to you on my life. From now on, you sleep in a room with windows, and you play in the sun.”
He smiled, a tiny, fragile curve of his lips, and closed his eyes.
Across the room, Miller was furiously typing on the console, uploading the contents of David’s micro-SD card to the server. A progress bar inched across the screen: *24%... 28%... 32%...*
“How long?” I asked, walking over to Miller’s side.
“The file size is massive,” Miller grunted. “Ten gigabytes of raw video depositions and banking spreadsheets through an encrypted satellite link. Twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five.”
Suddenly, the satellite terminal beeped—a sharp, high-pitched double tone.
Miller froze. His eyes narrowed at the terminal screen.
A video feed had just forced its way through the uplink connection, overriding the transmission queue.
The screen flickered, showing a sterile, brightly lit hospital room. In the center of the frame sat an old man in a wheelchair, surrounded by IV drips and dialysis machines. His skin was the color of old parchment, his eyes sunken and yellowed with jaundice, but his gaze was as sharp and predatory as an eagle’s.
Arthur Vance-Sterling.
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And standing directly behind his wheelchair, handcuffed to a steel support pillar with a bruised face and blood running from his split lip, was Julian.
***
