Pausing, he knelt at the edge of the stream to wash the blade of the hunting knife he’d used to slit the woman’s throat, and then he scrubbed his hands, even though they were already clean. His soul was clean, too. Virtuous.
He was so caught up in the righteousness of his mission that he almost missed the telltale rustle of dead leaves upstream and to his right. The sound was slight, a mere whisper in the wind, but it sent a chill up his spine just the same.
And then Fowler realized that he’d been vaguely uneasy for the last quarter of a mile or so. Even though his mind was preoccupied, his instincts had been warning him of danger.
He should have listened. Whoever was behind him had managed to get the jump on him, so that meant that the tracker was good. A professional. Someone who knew the Montana wilderness as well as Fowler.
He continued to rinse the knife as his senses came fully alert and his mind raced with possibilities. He had a semiautomatic tucked in his belt, but he’d have to wait for the right moment to draw it. A sudden move and the tracker might open fire on him.
From the corner of his eye, he scouted the terrain. When the sound came again, still to his right, Fowler pulled his gun and began firing in that direction as he simultaneously rolled to his left. Seeking cover behind a boulder, he unloaded his weapon without pause and then grabbed a fresh cartridge.
“Drop the weapon!”
Fowler froze. The voice hadn’t come from his right at all. Instead, the tracker was downstream and to his left. He’d circled his quarry and now he had Fowler trapped. The rustle of leaves had been a diversion. Pebbles tossed over his head perhaps. A trick as old as time itself, and Fowler had fallen for it.
It wasn’t like him to be so careless. While his guard had been down, the man who hunted him had moved in surprisingly close. So close Fowler could practically feel the bastard breathing down his neck.
“Drop the weapon or I’ll put a bullet through your brain.” The voice was deep, fearless, commanding. A man used to barking orders and having them obeyed.
To prove his point, he fired off a round, blasting to kingdom come a pinecone that had fallen not ten feet from where Fowler hunkered.
Fowler threw down his weapon.
The man came out of the woods then, a tall, powerfully built warrior with the darkest gaze Fowler had ever looked into. He’d killed before. It was there in his eyes. In the steadiness of his hand on his weapon. He’d kill again, too, if he had to. Without hesitation.
He was a military man. His bearing gave him away, and his tracking skills suggested someone with a Special Forces background.
“Who are you?” Fowler asked. “What do you want?”
“I want justice, you son of a bitch.” As he walked toward Fowler, rage contorted the man’s features, and in the split second it took for him to get his emotions under control, Fowler whipped the pistol out of his ankle holster and fired.
The punch of the bullet knocked the man backward, and he fell with a hard thud to the ground.
A clean shot, right through the heart.
His muscles began to twitch, and Fowler walked over to put another bullet in his head to finish him off. Kicking the man’s weapon aside, he lifted his own gun and took aim.
“For the Cause!” he cried in triumph.
Montana State Penitentiary
Monday, 0400 hours
BOONE FOWLER CAME AWAKE slowly. For a moment, he thought he was back in the Montana wilderness, facing off against an old nemesis, but as his mind began to clear, he realized that it had been nothing more than a dream. A recurring nightmare of being hunted. The scenery and the enemy sometimes changed, but the outcome was always the same. It was he who stood victorious under a clear Montana sky—not the hunter.
In reality, it hadn’t gone down that way, and now Fowler found himself confined to a six-by-eight prison cell. As he swung his legs over the cot and sat, head in hands, everything came rushing back to him. His capture. The trial. The past five years of his life spent in a hellhole called the Fortress. A maximum-security prison from which no one had ever escaped.
And all because of a man named Cameron Murphy.
While Fowler had rotted in prison for the past half decade, Murphy had recruited what was left of a Special Forces team he’d once commanded and turned them into the most successful bounty-hunter organization in the country. Although Murphy was the only one Fowler had met face-to-face, he’d made a point of finding out the other men’s names. He knew their backgrounds, their specialties, what made them tick.
But it was Murphy alone that Fowler still saw in his nightmares at night. Murphy’s face he saw when he’d beat another inmate almost beyond recognition.
His hatred of Cameron Murphy had helped him survive nearly nine months of solitary confinement in the Dungeon, and his thirst for revenge had kept his rage in check when he’d been placed back into the general population of the prison.
He’d kept his nose clean all these years because he had a plan, and for that, he needed his friends, contacts with the outside world. He needed money for bribes and favors he could call in. He needed all the help he could muster in order to accomplish what had never been done before: escape from the Fortress.
And thanks to a generous benefactor with an ambitious agenda, the moment was finally at hand. Tonight, at lights out, he would instigate a riot, the likes of which the prison guards had never before seen. During the pandemonium, Fowler and his compatriots would be led off to the Dungeon, where they would lay low until the plan could be set in motion.
If all went well, they would soon be free men.
And Cameron Murphy would soon be a dead one.
God help anyone who got in the way.
“For the Cause!” Fowler whispered as adrenaline surged through his veins.
Chapter One
Tuesday, 1400 hours
“Ken, you’re breaking up! I can barely hear you!” Pressing the cell phone to her ear, Kaitlyn Wilson tried not to panic. Rain beat like a war drum on the roof of her SUV as she slowly made her way west on Route 9. She’d turned the windshield wipers on high speed, but she still couldn’t see a damn thing. “Are you still there?” she asked desperately.
“Major flooding…highway closed…”
Static crackled in Kaitlyn’s ear. “Should I turn back? Dammit!” The phone went dead and she swore again as she frantically tried to call her boss back. But it was no use. She’d lost the signal.
Okay, situation not good, she summarized as she tossed the cell phone onto the seat and clutched the steering wheel with both hands.
Since she’d set out for the prison less than an hour earlier, Route 9 had been transformed into a lake. Kaitlyn could no longer even see the pavement. It was only by instinct and sheer dumb luck that she hadn’t yet driven off the road.
She could feel the swirling water sucking at the tires as she slowed the vehicle to a crawl, trying to decide what to do. Keep going…or turn back?
Did she really have a choice?
With near-zero visibility, turning the vehicle around without sliding into a ditch would be no easy feat, and besides, she had no way of judging whether the road conditions behind her were any better.
She was in the notorious dead zone on Route 9 where cell-phone signals from the nearest tower were blocked by the mountains.