Page 96 of Ruthless Enforcer

The sound is faint, barely louder than the snap of kindling in the hearth, but every man in the room moves instantly. Luke’s hand drops to the frame of his sidearm. Jake straightens, his broad shoulders squaring against the light. Harper looks up from the laptop monitors, her thumb hovering over the security override switch.

The door swings open, letting in a swirl of damp pine scent and subfreezing mountain air and Mason steps inside.

His suppressed bolt-action rifle is slung diagonally across his back in a scabbard, and his face is flushed red from the wind, but his gray eyes are as calm and flat as slate. He closes the door behind him with his heel, throws the deadbolt, and shrugs out of the heavy scabbard in one continuous, efficient motion. "The feed loop was a cover."

Motherfucker. I reach for a gun on the table and check the magazine. The waiting is finally over.

"Jake was right about the tree line,” Mason continues. “Someone bridged the antenna relay on the old grain silo and spliced an eight-minute camera reel from yesterday morning. If you're looking at the monitors, the ranch looks abandoned."

"And on the ground?" Jake asks.

"It’s not abandoned," Mason replies, stepping up to the map table. He reaches into his chest pocket, pulls out a ruggedized digital camera, and connects it to a laptop. "I took high ground four hundred yards out on the timber ridge overlooking the west side of the main house. Set up behind a deadfall with a forty-power spotting scope."

The laptop screen flickers, then populates with a high-resolution grid of raw optical stills.

The first image shows the main house at the Turner Ranch. It looks like it did two months ago the first time we moved on the asshole.

Then he clicks to the next frame.

Mason reached through the second-story master window with an optical zoom. Inside the dust-streaked glass, silhouetted against the yellow glow of a single battery-powered work lamp, is a man standing over a folding card table.

Cole Turner.

He's wearing a dark-charcoal wool coat, tailored across the shoulders, but the left side hangs an inch lower than the right. His posture is rigid, probably because of the ribs I cracked while he was my guest. The jawline is unmistakable: sharp, arrogant, carrying the faint, pale scarring from where my knuckles tore open his cheek.

"Son of a bitch," Luke murmurs, a vicious little smirk breaking across his face. "The bastard really went home."

"He didn't just go home," Mason says, tapping the screen with a calloused finger. "He brought company. That frame right there."

He zooms in on the lower quadrant. In the shadow of the barn behind the house, a second man in a black tactical jacket is kneeling next to an open equipment crate. A portable satellite transceiver is set up on the tailgate of an unmarked, mud-splattered dark-gray 4Runner.

"That's his comms technician," Mason says, nodding to the setup. "He's running a localized RF jammer and cycling the video loop through our relay tower."

"Look at the rear cargo bay of the truck," Harper says, pointing.

I lean over the screen, my eyes narrowing.

The tailgate of the 4Runner is down. Inside the bed are four heavy-duty Pelican cases, two duffel bags, and three spare five-gallon fuel cans strapped down with ratchet webbing. In the foreground, Turner is holding a satellite phone in one hand while checking the slide on a standard-issue Glock.

"He's staging," I say, the cold certainty settling into my gut like lead. "He’s got another target in mind."

Jake nods. "Since the bomb failed to trigger an immediate Whitlock retaliation against you, my guess is he’s targeting Whitlock."

"He was loading the last of the dry boxes into that truck when I pulled off the ridge," Mason confirms, looking directly at me. "The tech runner was securing the hitch on the trailer. If I had to put a clock on it, they’re wheels-up within forty-five minutes. An hour at the absolute outside."

"He doesn't leave the valley," I say, my voice dropping an octave, flat and final.

The room goes dead quiet.

Everyone knows that if we wait for nightfall, Turner is across the Idaho state line under a fresh alias before dawn. If we wait for Alessandro to mobilize a full Reyes assault team from Helena, forty heavily armed men will roll up on an empty barn and leave a trail of state police investigations from here to Bozeman.

We don't have hours. We have minutes.

"We hit them now," I say, looking across the table at Jake, Luke, Mason, and Harper. "Preemptive strike. We take the approach road before he gets that 4Runner out of the gate, we lock the perimeter down, and we end this on our terms."

"Agreed." Jake turns to a cabinet next to the fridge and opens it to reveal a wall-mounted steel gun safe. He punches in the digital combination with swift, heavy keystrokes, and the heavy steel pins disengage with a solid clunk. "If Cole makes it to the interstate, he turns into a ghost again. We take him on the dirt."

"What's the play on the approach?" Harper asks, pulling up a topographic satellite overlay of the Turner access road. "The main driveway is a single-lane gravel track with dense pine on both flanks. If we come in hot through the front gate, that tech runner will spot our dust a mile out."