Samantha woke shivering. She couldn’t decide if it was because she was cold, scared, or both. She wiggled her toes and decided it was both.
Someone had found invisible, paranoid Vlad through a machine that was supposed to be anonymous. The message had no name and no deadline. The lack of deadline scared her the most. Deadlines were artificial pressure. She knew how to deal with that and tested deadlines all the time to see how serious the other person was. But no deadline? She had no idea why they’d be content to wait.
She gave up on sleep and worked out of the bag without waking the men. She walked carefully in her socks to the edge of the bench, delighting in the cold now seeping into her toes. That would get her brain working quicker than coffee.
Below her the Twin Lakes basin was a black bowl. When they’d made camp earlier, Vlad had said there was nothing down there.
Now there were lights. Lots of lights.
A string of them along the north shore, not moving. Parked and spaced for setting up, not for passing through. There was another cluster a mile east, at what she was pretty sure was the South Elbert lot. And higher, off to the west, she saw a single light that moved — swung, held, swung again. And a dull, thumping sound.
Shit — it was a helicopter.
She watched the light for ten seconds. It was searching in the wrong drainage.
She woke Vlad with a hand on his shoulder.
“Helicopter.”
He bolted up, reaching for the tablet. She pointed him at the basin. He stared at it for a moment, getting his bearings.
“Get the radio,” she said.
He dug the small black receiver out of his pack and started thumbing through frequencies as he set up the Starlink with one hand. They heard hissing at first — the federal traffic would be locked — but the county was not, and mutual aid never was. In ninety seconds he had a Lake County dispatcher and a tired sheriff’s deputy reading a checkpoint list to each other. They sounded bored.
“Roadblocks,” Vlad said. “Eighty-two both directions from the village. The Leadville roads. They are stopping cars.” He listened. “They have staged at the trailheads. They are going to walk the trails at first light.” He paused and smirked. “They are looking for us in the parking lots.”
“How many?”
“A lot. More than the county has.”
He looked at the tablet, pressed on it a few times, and then tipped his head at the moving light. “That is not the county’s helicopter.”
Marcus’s voice came from the dark behind them, thick with sleep. “Is this bad.”
“Look where they are,” Samantha said, as she pointed.
“They’re loud,” Marcus said. “That seems bad.”
“That’s because they aren’t used to the mountains,” Samantha said. “They don’t know the country. They’ll block every road, surround every parking lot, and just follow their GPS maps.”
She realized she was almost smiling and made herself stop. “We could sit up here and watch them the whole time. We can see them coming from a day out.”
Marcus let out a breath. “Okay. So that’s — good. Relatively good.”
Vlad turned the receiver down but not off.
“The people who found me.” He did not look up from the tablet. “They are not those idiots down there.”
Samantha hadn’t forgotten the car at the end of Marcus’s road. So now at least three different groups were looking for them. And that didn’t include whatever Seth was up to.
She watched the lights in the basin for a little longer, wanting everyone looking for them to be this stupid and noisy.
She wasn’t worried about the ones she was looking at. She was worried about the quiet ones.