Page 76 of The 9th Man

Sue activated the detonators.

They started retreating.

“Crusoe, come,” Sue said.

They made it about a hundred feet away before a muffled thump erupted from the safe as the plastique exploded, the force enough for the safe to tumble forward in a cloud of pale-gray smoke, coming to rest with its front side down.

“I actually thought that would have more punch,” Sue said.

They walked back and, together, Luke and Jillian rolled the safe over. The scorched, but otherwise unscathed door fell away.

“Okay, like the Monkees sang, I’m a believer,” he said. “You know your stuff.”

Inside was a single nylon bag, rectangular in shape and large enough to hold legal-sized documents.

“That’s it?” Sue said.

“Seems that way.”

They carried the bag inside the house. Like the safe, the pouch was nearly empty. Just three pages. One was another sheet with numbers and letters, similar to Benji’s. The other key, just as Luke had surmised, which Simmons had used to decode Benji’s messages. Identical to the page they already possessed from Benji. The other two pages were graph paper, covered in what looked like formulas, numbers, and symbols.

“Variables and Discrepancies?” Jillian asked. “What is this?”

“Any of this look familiar or mean anything?” he asked Sue.

She shook her head.

“Look in the upper right-hand corner,” Jillian said. “It says one of two, then two of two. These are a matched set.”

He agreed.

“What’s it all mean?” Sue asked.

He smiled. “That is the question of the night.”

33

TALLEY STUDIED THE IPAD’S SCREEN, WATCHING THE DRONE’Svideo feed. They’d sent it into the swamp of Cameron Parish to the coordinates of Ray Simmons’s former residence. With Persik gone, as expected, Rowland had ordered him to Louisiana.

“Burn it all to the ground,” Rowland said. “All of it. Nothing should remain.”

Purposefully, he’d been vague when reporting about the fate of Luke Daniels and Jillian Stein, assuring Rowland that the forty-eight hours had not yet expired.

“It will happen,” he assured Rowland.

Darkness was here. The drone was capable of night flight and high altitude where it could hover in silence, equipped with high-res nighttime vision. They’d watched as Daniels and Stein’s granddaughter, along with Simmons’s granddaughter, had explosively opened a safe, removed a bag of some sort, then retired back to the house.

“Bring the drone in,” he ordered the operator.

His team had traveled with him from Belgium. They’d only been a few hours behind Daniels. A NetJets charter had delivered them to New Orleans, then they’d driven west to Cameron Parish.

A couple of months back he’d read an article about dealing with manipulative or narcissistic people. Of course, the best option was to stop all contact and get as far away as possible. But what if that wasn’t doable? Not everyone could escape a toxic relationship. The article noted that, if you couldn’t leave, then set boundaries. Become disengaged and unresponsive. Try to make the manipulator lose interest in you. How? Avoid eye contact. Maintain a flat tone in communications. Respond with simple answers likeyes,no, orI didn’t know that. Visualize yourself as a gray rock. Become an immovable, impenetrable force, disinterested.

But there were dangers.

Unresponsiveness could aggravate the narcissist because they would not be getting the reaction they were accustomed to. They could feel their power slipping, or their control waning, which could lead to unpredictable behavior.

Best advice?

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