He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 264

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Chapter 264

Mason’s POV

I had built the passage eleven years ago.

The contractor had been paid in cash.

The documentation had never been filed.

The passage existed in no blueprint, no permit, no record that could be subpoenaed or searched or handed to an investigator who had a warrant and a team and two minutes before they reached the front entrance.

It existed because I had built it.

And I had built it because I had understood, eleven years ago, that the architecture of my life required an architecture beneath it. An Escape route should there be a need to….

My security head arrived at four-forty-seven.

“The police have surrounded the front entrance.”

“How long?” I said.

“Less than two minutes”

I looked at the bag on the desk.

At the bookshelf

At the room I had been in for nine years……

“I’ll contact you when it’s safe,” I said.

I pressed the switch beneath the third shelf.

The passage was narrow

Not uncomfortably narrow…. the width of a person moving with purpose, with a bag over one shoulder, with a small light source that I had placed here three years ago during a maintenance check and had replaced the battery on every six months since.

I had been thorough

The ground sloped downward beneath the house, then leveled, then rose.

The passage was two hundred and forty metres.

I had measured it when the contractor finished….

I had walked it twice a year since.

Behind me, faintly, I heard the front entrance.

They were in the house….

I was in the passage.

Two hundred and forty metres.

The boathouse had been abandoned for six years.

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The property adjacent to mine, purchased through a sfre!! that connected to nothing traceable, left deliberately derelict because

a maud ained structure attracted attention that a derelict one did not.

I came up through the floor hatch at five oh four…

The boathouse smelled of salt and old wood…

The car was in the structure behind the boathouse

A car that had not been registered to any name connected to me.

That had been serviced three months ago by someone who would not remember the transaction.

That had a full tank.

I put the bag in the boot….

Got in.

I looked back through the boathouse’s gap in the boards.

Across the water, across the distance, the estate….

The lights

Blue and white, the visual language of a law enforcement deployment at scale….. multiple vehicles, the sweep of torches visible even from here, the organised movement of a team conducting a search.

They were in every room by now….

Opening every safe that hadn’t been opened.

Cataloguing what they found.

Building the record.

I had taken the encrypted drives….

In the right hands, at the right time, the drives were the difference between leverage and exposure.

My hands.

My time

Not theirs.

I pulled out my phone.

Zara’s number.

The number I had been calling for hours.

Each time: voicemail.

Not the voicemail of a phone switched off….

She was declining my calls….

She was somewhere.

She was alive.

And she was not answering

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Bata Collins.

I had understood she was building something.

I had underestimated what she had built and where she had taken it.

The unknown message.

Stop looking for Zara.

Someone protecting her.

Someone who knew I had given the instruction to find her.

Which meant someone monitoring my communications. Someone within probably….

Which meant the investigation had reach I had not mapped.

I started the engine.

The car moved out of the structure behind the boathouse and onto the access road that connected, after several minutes, to the secondary road that connected, after several more, to the highway.

I drove.

Not fast

The pace of the other vehicles.

Anonymous.

The bag in the boot….

The drives.

The passports.

The cash.

The revolver that I had not used in years and had brought because the message had said stay alive rather than stay free.

The billboards were standard highway advertising

I had been on this road dozens of times.

The first one caught my eye at the junction where the secondary road met the main artery…. not because of what it was advertising but because of what it was not.

The advertisement had been replaced.

Not with a product.

With a face.

My face.

WANTED.

MASON.

INFORMATION LEADING TO ARREST: SIGNIFICANT REWARD.

I looked at the billboard.

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