Chapter 9 - THE TRAITOR AMONG USSamuel survived surgery.
Mara later told me I broke a chair.
Captain Ross told me it took two agents to stop me from running into the street.
All I remember clearly is Eli’s stuffed fox lying on the floor.
Samuel Mercer had taken my son.
Federal investigators locked down every road.
Air patrols searched the desert.
Border alerts went out.
Every known Desert Line property was raided.
Nothing.
Then Sophie gave us the clue.
“He likes circles.”
Mara frowned.
“What?”
“Bishop always said circles were safer than roads because nobody knows where they begin.”
That sentence meant nothing to me.
Caleb understood.
“Our grandfather built circular emergency tunnels.”
Walter had experimented with mining layouts that connected multiple properties through loops.
The farmhouse tunnel might not simply connect to the quarry.
It might circle beneath several parcels.
If Samuel had taken Eli underground, roadblocks were useless.
We returned to the farmhouse.
Engineers mapped remaining passages with ground-penetrating radar.
A previously unknown tunnel curved south beneath our pasture.
It ended beneath an abandoned church.
St. Agnes Chapel.
Rachel and I had been married there.
Samuel had chosen the place deliberately.
Agents surrounded it.
The chapel appeared empty.
But beneath the altar was a trapdoor.
I followed Mara underground.
This time nobody stopped me.
The passage descended steeply.
Halfway down, we found Eli’s sneaker.
Then his jacket.
Then blood.
My world narrowed.
Mara touched it.
“Not his.”
She was right.
Too much.
Someone injured had passed through.
We continued.
At the bottom, the tunnel opened into an underground storage chamber.
Samuel Mercer stood beside a lantern.
He looked nothing like the photographs Rachel once showed me.
Older.
Lean.
Gray beard.
Scar beneath his ear.
But the eyes were unmistakable.
Rachel’s eyes.
Eli sat ten feet away.
Alive.
Untied.
Holding a juice box.
Samuel had given him food.
That made the scene even more disturbing.
“Dad!”
I moved.
Samuel raised a pistol.
“Stay.”
Eli started crying.
I stopped.
“Let him go.”
Samuel looked at me almost sadly.
“You always were predictable, Daniel.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I watched you for eleven years.”
My stomach turned.
“You were beneath our house.”
“Sometimes.”
Eli sobbed harder.
Samuel lowered the gun slightly.
“I never wanted to hurt the boy.”
“You put a rattlesnake in his room.”
“No.”
That answer surprised me.
“The snakes were an accident. Construction disturbed their den.”
“Construction for what?”
Samuel smiled.
“A way out.”
Mara stepped from the shadow with her weapon raised.
“Samuel Mercer.”
He laughed.
“Thomas’s daughter.”
“It’s over.”
“No. It ended years ago.”
He held up a small black drive.
“Walter copied everything. Rachel stole everything. But neither understood the purpose.”
“Human trafficking had a purpose?” I asked.
Samuel’s expression hardened.
“Desert Line became something I never intended.”
“You kidnapped children.”
“Other men did.”
“You led them.”
“I controlled men who otherwise would have been worse.”
The excuses of monsters always sound reasonable to themselves.
Samuel said Rachel confronted him fourteen months before her death.
She had discovered he was alive.
He begged her to walk away.
She refused.
He claimed he never ordered her death.
“Who did?”
He looked toward Mara.
“Ask your father.”
Mara’s face tightened.
“You’re lying.”
“Thomas has lied to you your whole life.”
Then a gunshot exploded from behind us.
Samuel jerked.
Blood spread across his shoulder.
A second shot struck the lantern.
Darkness.
Agents shouted.
Eli screamed.
I lunged toward where I remembered him sitting.
My hands found his body.
I pulled him against me.
Gunfire echoed through the chamber.
Then stopped.
Emergency flashlights appeared.
Samuel lay on the floor.
Alive.
The shooter was gone.
Again.
But this time Samuel laughed through the pain.
“You see?”
He looked at Mara.
“The real Bishop is still protecting himself.”
Everyone stared.
“What are you talking about?” Mara demanded.
Samuel smiled.
“You thought Bishop was me?”
Sophie’s description.
The scar.
The smoke.
The motorcycle.
All Samuel.
But perhaps those details had been deliberately borrowed.
Samuel coughed.
“Bishop isn’t a man.”
He looked at the black drive lying on the floor.
May you like
“It’s a title.”
And according to him, the person currently holding that title had been standing beside us throughout the investigation.
