Brady reached into the Suburban and removed the Saint Christopher medal he kept hanging from the rearview mirror. He’d wound it tightly so as to attract no attention from the boss, and it took him a minute to get it free now. But he wasn’t leaving without it. Christopher was the patron saint of travelers in general and motorists in particular, and he had some serious motoring to do.
Medallion in hand, he turned to the BMW, opened the driver’s door, tossed his lightweight gym bag in the back seat, and slid behind the wheel. The leather crunched in a pleasing manner. Brady had tried hard to get Thom’s attention regarding this car, which was, after all, the ultimate go-car, and he hoped some of it had gotten through.
Because this fucking BMW was where it was at.
Brady lifted the lid on the storage compartment between the two front seats, revealing a lock with a three-digit tumbler. He spun the digits to 0-4-4—Mr. Banning’s personal choice for the code—and opened the MicroVault gun safe he’d had installed. He pulled the Glock G23 from its sleeve inside the vault. The Glock was a tight little forty-caliber, solid and reliable, with a modified mag capacity of sixteen shots. More than enough for anything that might come up along the way.
But Brady believed in the inviolable principle of redundancy and hadn’t stopped there. He squeezed the left armrest in the driver’s door with one hand, popping the lever just under its lip with the other and flipping it open. He’d sent the armrest back for two redesigns, unsatisfied with the trickiness of its release the first couple of times. Like a mystery box he’d once bought in a souk in Marrakesh （awful, sweaty trip with bad food, it had been Paula’s idea early in their relationship）， the armrest needed to be easy to open only once you knew how.
He knew how. He pulled out the J-Frame M&P Scandium he kept there, the one he’d special-ordered with the external hammer. Sometimes you wanted a weapon that operated on simple mechanical basics: pull this back, squeeze the trigger, bang. It was the type of gun with which nothing could possibly go wrong.
The M&P was there, it was loaded, and it had been cleaned and oiled recently.
Brady put both guns back in their sleeves and shut the lids. He gave the driver’s door a tug and it closed with a soft whoosh. He hung Saint Christopher around the rearview, letting it dangle at whatever height he pleased, adjusted the seat and mirrors, and started the engine.
He’d be at Sanctuary in eleven hours.
Battle Mountain, Nevada, was just off the I-80, more or less midway between Silicon Valley and Thom’s silo complex in Utah. The unincorporated town was, at its roaring peak, home to about three thousand citizens, most of them spread out on the flat, arid badlands surrounding it. Its high-desert location meant hot days, cold nights, and a scarcity of population that suited some people well. There were three reasons to settle in or around Battle Mountain: you were born there, you planned to die there, or you couldn’t stand the sight of people but still liked the idea of running water.
The old Arco station two miles outside of town had once done a decent business, until the local highway, 51, was killed off by the construction of the interstate and the slow death of the area’s mining facilities. With no more copper or ore to mine and truck away, there was little demand for gas this far off the beaten path. When Thom was looking for a wholly-owned refueling station, the Arco’s location, rock-bottom land value, and pristine underground tanks made it a perfect choice.
The late-afternoon light was fading into a cold blue as Brady pulled the BMW to a stop, got out, and stretched his back. He’d made the drive out of San Francisco easily enough, after steering his way through surface streets to escape the clutch of refugees on the 580. He’d gone due north from Mill Valley instead of east, getting on and off the 37 as traffic dictated, then north on the 29 and east on the 12, until finally hooking up with the I-80 at Cordelia. It was refreshing to be forced to use his memory to find the route instead of his phone; it had been years since those old synapses had been asked to connect, and to him they felt grateful for the use. It was like putting his fingers on a manual typewriter again, after all these years—you forgot how physically satisfying the act of typing used to be and how pleasantly drained you could be afterwards.
He’d stopped to pee only once, so now he hurried across the gravel parking area to get inside the old Arco building, noting with some satisfaction that his breath was curling up in little clouds in front of him. He’d always loved getting out of the city and didn’t understand why he didn’t do so more often, especially when there was so much natural beauty within a short drive of San Francisco. It was funny, he thought, turning the key in the lock of the old service station’s front door, how it always seemed to take a crisis to remind a person of the extremely simple things that were important to them. It was then, mid-thought, that he first noticed the shadow moving on the tile floor in front of him, growing bigger at his feet, and right around the moment that he realized the shadow was not his, the crowbar whooshed through the air beside him, coming down toward the crown of his head.