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confidence that probably no other floor of any home in America had an underbelly such as the one he’d built here. The interior walls were covered in hand-applied plaster over chicken wire. The roof was tied down to the walls as tight as anything on an oceangoing tanker. He’d used incredibly strong bolts and fasteners to ensure strength and to prevent any settling or movement. The foundation was poured cement, but there was also a sixteen-inch-high wrapped-in-cement crawlspace that ran underneath the structure. That lifted the house up by the same amount, of course, but because of the porch it was hardly noticeable.
    The furnishings were simple: a bed, a ladder-back chair, a battery-powered generator, and some other equipment, including an oxygen tank that sat against one of the walls. He stepped off the porch and turned to face his creation. Every mitered cut on the walls was perfect. He had often worked under the generator lights as he lined up the studs and joists on his sawhorses, his gaze a laser on the cut-line. It was hot, tiring work, but his limbs and mind had been driven with a determination wrought from the two strongest human emotions of all:
    Hatred.
    And love.
    He nodded in appreciation. He had done good work. It was solid, as perfect as he was ever going to make it. It looked unexceptional, but it really was an extraordinary bit of engineering.Not bad for a boy from the Deep South who’d never even gone to college.
    He looked to the west where in a tree shielded from both the burn of the sun and prying eyes was a surveillance camera. He had designed and built this too, because nothing he could afford was good or reliable enough. With a bit of careful pruning of leaves and branches the camera had a good sightline of all that needed to be seen here.
    He’d notched out a hole and a long trench in the bark on the rear of the tree and run the cable feed from the camera down it, and then glued the bark strips back over it, concealing the line completely. On the ground he’d buried the cable and run it several hundred feet away from the tree, to a natural berm that also featured one man-made attribute.
    There was another underground cable running from this same spot up to and under the little house inside a PVC pipe that Quarry had laid in before he’d poured the foundation. That cable line had a dual end splitter with more cable running in two routes off it. All of it was concealed behind lead sheathing he’d overlaid on the metal sheets in the wall.
    He locked the door to the house and climbed back in his old Dodge. Now he had somewhere else to go. And it wasn’t by pickup truck.
    He looked up at that perfect Alabama sky. Nice day for a plane ride.

6
    A N HOUR LATER the decades-old four-seat Cessna raced down the short runway and lifted into the air. Quarry looked out the side window and down as the end of his land raced by. Two hundred acres sounded like a lot but the fact was it wasn’t much.
    He flew low, keeping an eye out for birds, other planes, and the occasional chopper. He never filed a flight plan so a good lookout was essential.
    An hour later he dipped down, landed softly on the tarmac of a private airstrip, and refueled the plane himself. There were no fancy corporate jets here. Just sheet-metal hangars with open fronts, a narrow strip of asphalt for a runway, a windsock, and aircraft like his, old, patched together, but looked after lovingly and with respect. And as cheap as the plane had been when he’d bought it thirdhand years ago, he couldn’t have afforded to buy it today.
    He’d been flying ever since he’d joined the Air Force and raced his sturdy F-4 Phantom over the paddy fields and dense waterlogged jungles of Vietnam. And then later over Laos and Cambodia dropping bombs and killing folks because he’d been ordered to in a phase of the war that he only found out later hadn’t been officially authorized. Yet it wouldn’t have mattered to him. Soldiers simply did what they were