appear older and feebler. A salty waterman, a local. How would a local respond?
He recalled his long-ago conversations with one of them, a fellow angler. “Do
you have any idea who I am, young man?” He made his face muscles slack, and his
voice developed a slight quaver suggestive of infirmity. He spoke with the
vowels of the old Eastern Shore regional accent. “Me, my family been living here
when you were still eatin’ your white bread. Been here through the rubs, been
here when things was pretty. Shoreline here is public property. My
daughter-in-law’s been five years on the Lower Eastern Shore Heritage Committee.
You think you’re going to tell me I can’t go where the law says I can, you got a
whole ‘nother think come at you. I know my rights.”
The guardsman scowled, half amused at the old salt’s line of blather and not
ungrateful for the interruption of his tedious routine. But his orders were
clear. “Fact remains, this is a restricted area, and there’s about a dozen signs
saying so.”
“I’ll have you know, my ancestors were here when the Union troops were in
Salisbury, and—”
“Listen, Pappy,” the guardsman said, rubbing the red and peeling bridge of his
nose, “I will frog-march your ass into federal custody at gunpoint if I have
to.” He stood directly in front of the other man. “You got a complaint, write
your congressman.” He puffed out his chest, placed a hand near his bolstered
side arm.
“Why, look at you, you’re just breath and britches.” Janson limply made a
swatting gesture with a hand, indicating dismissal and resignation. “Ah, you
park rangers wouldn’t know a bufflehead from a widgeon.”
“Park ranger?” the guardsman sneered, shaking his head. “You think we’re park
rangers?”
Suddenly, Janson sprang at him, clamping his right hand around his mouth, his
left around the back of his neck. They fell together, the sound of the impact
muffled by the sand, a quiet crunch lost amid the cawing of gulls and the
rustling of the salt-meadow cordgrass. Even before they hit the ground, though,
Janson had snaked his hand around and grabbed the man’s bolstered M9 pistol.
“Nobody likes a smart-ass,” he said quietly, dropping the accent, jabbing the M9
Beretta into his trachea. The young man’s eyes widened in terror. “You got new
orders, and you’d better obey them: a sound out of you and you’re dead,
greenhorn.”
With swift movements, Janson undid the guardsman’s weapons belt and used it to
bind his wrists to his ankles. Next, he ripped narrow strips of cloth from his
camouflage tunic and stuffed them in the man’s mouth, finally securing the gag
with the guardsman’s own bootlaces. After pocketing the man’s M9 and his
Motorola “handy-talky,” he lifted him like a heavy rucksack and left him hidden
amid a thick growth of cordgrass.
Janson pressed on, and when the beach disappeared, he walked farther up the
grass. There would be at least another guard on patrol duty—the undersecretary’s
weekend house had clearly been designated a federal facility—but there was a
good chance that the Motorola TalkAbout T6220 would let him know if any
irregularities had been detected.
A fast five-minute walk and Janson found himself on the south side of a sparsely
grassed dune, the cottage just out of view. His pace lessened as, with each
step, his boots sank into the loose, silty sand, but his destination was not
much farther.
He looked out once more and saw the placid water of Chesapeake Bay—misleadingly
placid, for it was invisibly swarming with life. In the distant glare, he could
just make out Tangier Island, several miles to the south. Now it styled itself
the soft-shell capital of the world; yet in 1812, the one war in the country’s
history where foreign troops were deployed on U.S. soil, it was the base of
British operations. The shipbuilding firms of St. Michaels were nearby;
blockade-runners circulated around the port. A scrap of military history
returned to Janson: it was in St. Michaels that the shorefolk conducted one of
the classic ruses of nineteenth-century warfare. Hearing of an impending British
attack, the townsmen extinguished their lanterns. Then they hoisted them high
into the trees and lit them again. The British fired upon the town but, misled
by the lantern placement, aimed too high, their shells uselessly lodging in
treetops far overhead.
That was the Eastern Shore: so much serenity hiding so much blood. Three
centuries of American strife and American contentment. It was altogether fitting
that Derek Collins should have established his private redoubt here.
“My wife Janice used to love that spot.” The familiar voice came without
warning, and Janson whirled around to see Derek Collins. Inside his jacket,
Janson gingerly fingered the trigger to the M9, testing its tension as he looked
over his adversary.
The only thing that was unfamiliar was the bureaucrat’s garb: a man he had
always seen in three-button suits of navy or charcoal worsted was wearing
khakis, a madras shirt, and moccasins—his weekend attire.
“She’d set her easel up right there, where you’re standing, get her watercolors
out, and try to capture the light. That’s what she always said she was doing:
trying to capture the light.” His eyes were dull, his customary bright and
scheming avidity replaced by something somber and careworn. “She had
polycythemia, you know. Or maybe you didn’t. A bone marrow disease, made her
body produce too many blood cells. Janice was my second wife, I guess you do
know that. A new beginning and all. A few years after we were married, she’d
start to feel itchy after she took a warm bath, and that turned out to be the
first sign of it. Funny, isn’t it? It progresses slowly, but eventually there
came the headaches, the dizziness, and just this feeling of exhaustion, and she
got the diagnosis. Toward the end, she spent most of her time here, on Phipps.
I’d drive down, and there she’d be, sitting at the easel, trying to get her
watercolors to make that sunset. She struggled with the colors. Too often, she
said, they’d look like blood. As if there was something inside her, wildly
signaling to be let out.” Collins was standing only ten feet from Janson, but
his voice was far away. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at
the slowly darkening bay. “She loved watching the birds, too. She didn’t think
she could paint them, but she loved watching them. You see that one near the
Osage orange tree? Pearl gray, white undersides, black mask like a raccoon
around the eyes?”
It was about the size of a robin, leaping from one perch to another.
“That’s a loggerhead shrike,” Collins said. “One of the local birds. She thought
it was pretty. Lanius ludovicianus.”
“Better known as the butcher bird,” Janson said.
The bird trilled its two-note call.
“Figures, you know,” Collins said. “It’s unusual, isn’t it, because it preys on
other birds. But check it out. It doesn’t have any talons. That’s the beauty
part. It takes advantage of its surroundings—impales its prey on a thorn or
barbed wire before it rips it apart. It doesn’t need much by way of claws. It
knows that the world is filled with surrogate claws. Use what’s there.” The bird
emitted a harsh, thrasher-like note and fluttered off.
Collins turned and looked at Janson. “Why don’t you come inside?”
“Aren’t you going to frisk me?” Janson asked, in a tone of indifference. He was
surprised at how unruffled Collins seemed, and was determined to match his calm.
“See what weapons I might have on me?”
Collins laughed, and his solemnity broke for a moment. “Janson, you are a
weapon,” he said. “What am I supposed to do, amputate all your limbs and put you
in a vitrine?” He shook his head. “You forget how well I know you. Besides, I’m
looking at somebody who has folded his arms beneath a jacket, and that bulge a
foot below his shoulder is quite likely a handgun, aimed at me. I’m guessing you
took it off of Ambrose. Young kid, reasonably well trained, but not the sharpest
knife in the drawer.”
Janson said nothing but kept his finger on the trigger. The M9 would shoot
easily through the fabric of his jacket: Collins was a mere finger twitch from
death and he knew it.
“Come along,” Collins said. “We’ll walk together. A peaceable dyad of
vulnerability. A two-man demonstration of mutual assured destruction, and the
deep comfort the balance of terror can bring.”
Janson said nothing. Collins was not a field agent; he was no less lethal in his
way, but through more mediated channels. Together, they traipsed over a
boardwalk of silvery, weathered cedar and into Collins’s house. It was a classic
seaside cottage, probably of early twentieth-century construction: weathered
shingles, small dormers on the second floor. Nothing that would attract much
attention, not at a casual glance, anyway.