Sal shouted from the doorway, to be heard above the storm.Ray came to a halt thirty feet from where he could see an indistinct human shape that was only a shade lighter than the blackness of the interior of the building behind it. The deep puddle he was standing in came two thirds of the way up his sports trainers, and the water was icy cold for the time of year. His guts clenched. He felt like a rat in a barrel, or more appropriately a condemned man in front of a firing squad. A rush of adrenaline urged him to flee or fight, but he could do neither.A lightning bolt crashed into the forest, and the half-second glow of coruscating light brightened the entire area. Sal smiled. Darrow was drenched, blinking with fear-filled eyes as rivulets of water ran down his face from hair that was flattened, matted to his skull.Sal waited for over a minute. His instincts told him that they were alone. There was no feasible way that Brandon or anyone else could know where Darrow was…unless there was a tracker on the BMW. He doubted that. Brandon was basically a coward. He would just want the transaction over with and be able to go back to business as usual. Logan cut the lights and drove slowly along the narrow road. When he saw the blurry red glow from the BMW’s taillights he slowed to almost walking pace. He pulled up onto a verge that was thick with weeds and wild flowers twenty yards back from the other car, close up to thorny bushes that almost formed a hedgerow, and switched off the dome light so that there would be no telltale flare of illumination when he exited the Discovery.Once outside, Logan moved fast, skirting the other car and checking that Ray was not inside it before finding a break in the foliage that he could push through to enter the forest. He could see the mine’s entrance gates in the glow from the BMW’s headlights, and made his way forward through the trees to the right of them, to follow the rusted, sagging fencing that had been erected many decades ago.He stopped next to a crumbling concrete post, where the diamond-patterned wire had parted company with it to create a nine-inch gap that he widened by wrenching it back with his bare hands.Slipping through the break, Logan bent low and jogged toward the side of the large building that he could now see Ray Darrow standing in front of.The darkness made Logan invisible, and the noise of the storm, the fencing rattling, and the tin panels of the building clanging, masked his footfalls as he edged slowly nearer to Ray.“OK, Ray,”
