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I told her Delilah knows my walk. She learned every man down there by his boots, and she'll know mine.

Torres had the tech switch my earpiece over to her team's channel and gave me my orders.

'You're not leading anybody. You're behind my team. When we hit the door, Beckett kills the generator. My people have weapon lights, and theirs go dark. She hears you on those stairs and knows you're not one of them. That's your whole job.'

I hated it. I took it anyway. Her people go in with rifles and lights, and all I'd bring is a pistol I can't draw and my fists.

From the cedar, I watched Delilah turn her back on Dutch at the shed and walk toward the shut gate like she'd keep going. His hand came off his pistol the second she moved. If she walked out that gate, Dutch would have to tell his boss how he lost her.

He waved Hector loose instead, and Audrey has Hector halfway to Fredericksburg by now. Delilah got him out with nothing but her mouth and her nerve.

Underground, the wire came in broken. Every other word dropped out in the hall. Once they took her into whatever room sits against the tunnel, the signal leaked out through the opening and came through clean.

I heard her tell Ochs he held the crop and tell Lindner he clears his throat before he laughs. She called Harold Fenske Commissioner to his face. Her voice broke when she put the three of them together.

The last voice I heard was Whitlock's, asking who she was talking to.

"Tracker?" Torres asks.

"No signal," Raven says from beside the tech. She has Audrey's tracking account open on a laptop on her knees. "She's still somewhere inside that hill."

Under all that rock, the tracker can't get a signal out. It can't show us whether she's in a cell or in the back of a truck.

The Texas Ranger who followed Gil Strackbein's truck up from the low-water crossing comes over the radio. "His stock truck is still sitting in Whitlock's tunnel with the engine running. I'm on the service road behind it."

"Block the roll-up door," Torres tells her. "Nobody drives off this hill."

Wherever Delilah is, that truck hasn't left with her. That's the only thing keeping me in this seat.

The ranch road runs the long way around the foot of the hill, and I hate every bend in it. The service gate hangs open where the Ranger followed Gil through, and the van takes it without slowing. The gravel road curls up behind the building.

Security lights burn white along the west wall. Below them, at the foot of the slope, a truck's headlights glare out of the mouth of the tunnel.

The driver brakes hard at the barrel room's back door. Torres is out before the van stops rocking, and her team piles out behind her.

Raven peels off down the slope toward the tunnel with a couple of agents. I'm the last one off the van.

"Beckett," Torres says into her radio. "Now."

Down the slope, the roll-up door stands open around the truck's headlights. Beckett has been on the fence above it since dusk, listening to the generator running somewhere inside.

He drops off the fence and ducks under the door into the tunnel. A few seconds later, the generator down there sputters and dies.

The barrel room's lights stay on. They must run off the winery's power, not the cellar's.

The first agent in line hits the back door, and we go through.

Just inside, I pass the cooper's bench by the loading door, where the barrels get built and patched. An iron brazier stands beside it, full of glowing coals.

A long branding iron lies across the rim with its end buried in them. The circle and crook on that end is the brand Delilah inked on my forearm. The wire was still clean up here when Dutch held it to her face. 'I'll put his mark on you myself for Royce.'

We're halfway down the main aisle when I see three men in rubber masks bunched at the tasting-room door. One of them is jabbing keys at a lock that won't turn. None of them has the right key, and the man who does isn't with them.

When they see the rifles, one of them bolts for the racks. An agent slams him down into a stack of empty barrels, and the whole stack goes over with a crash. The other two put their hands up.

None of these men is built like Whitlock, and I heard his voice on that wire minutes ago.

"Whitlock's not here," I tell Torres. "He was downstairs with them when the wire died."