His clothes were soaked with sweat. He couldn’t believe how fast his
heart was thudding, and he actually winced from the chest pain.
He tapped the cabinetry in front of him; it made a hollow sound.
Obviously fashioned from veneer and plaster, it was nothing that could
be relied upon to stop a bullet. Crouching, he made his way around a
corner and to a protected stone alcove, where he could stand and catch
his breath. As he leaned back to rest against the pillar, his head
cracked into a wrought-iron lantern mounted on the stone. He groaned
involuntarily. Then he examined the light fixture that had just
lacerated the back of his head, and he saw that the whole thing, the
heavy black iron arm attached to the ornamental housing that held the
bulb, could be lifted right out of the mounting bracket.
It came out with a rusty screech. He managed to get a firm grip and
held it against his chest.
And he waited, trying to slow the beating of his heart. He knew
something about waiting. He remembered all those Thanksgivings spent
at the Greenbriar; Max Hartman was insistent that his sons learn how to
hunt, and Hank McGee, a grizzled local from White Sulfur Springs, was
given the job of teaching them. How hard could it be? he remembered
thinking: he was an ace at skeet shooting, had reason to be proud of
his hand-eye coordination. He let this slip to McGee, whose eyes
darkened: You think the hunt’s really about shootin’? It’s about
waitin’. And he fixed him with a glare. McGee was right, of course:
the waiting was the hardest part of all, and the part he was
temperamentally least suited for.
Hunting with Hank McGee, he had lain in wait for his quarry.
Now he was the quarry.
Unless … somehow … he could change that.
In a few moments, Ben heard approaching footsteps. Jimmy Cavanaugh
entered stealthily, tentatively, glancing from side to side. His shirt
collar was grimy and torn and bloodied from a gash on the right side of
his neck. His trench coat was soiled. His flushed face was set in a
determined grimace, his eyes wild.
Could this really be his friend? What had Cavanaugh become in the
decade and a half since Ben had last seen him? What had turned him
into a killer?
Why was this happening?
In his right hand Cavanaugh gripped his blue-black pistol, the ten
inch-long tube of a sound suppressor threaded to its barrel. Ben,
flashing back on target-practice memories from twenty years ago, saw
that it was a Walther PPK, a .32.
Ben held his breath, terrified that his gasping would give him away.
He drew back into the alcove, clutching the iron light fixture he had
just torn from the wall, flattening himself out of sight as Cavanaugh
made a sweep of the restaurant. With a sudden but sure movement of his
arm Ben flung the iron lantern fixture, smashing it into Cavanaugh’s
skull with an audible thud.
Jimmy Cavanaugh screamed in pain, his cry high-pitched like an
animal’s. His knees buckled, and he squeezed the trigger.
Ben could feel a flare of heat, a fraction of an inch away from his
ear. But now, instead of drawing back farther, or attempting to run,
Ben lunged forward, slamming himself into his enemy’s body, pummeling
him to the ground, Cavanaugh’s skull cracking against the stone
floor.
Even badly wounded, the man was a powerhouse. A rancid miasma of sweat
arose from him as he reared up and vised a massive arm around Ben’s
neck, compressing his femoral artery. Desperately, Ben reached for the
gun, trying to grab it but succeeding only in wrenching the long
silencer up and back toward Cavanaugh. With a sudden ear-shattering
explosion the gun went off. Ben’s ears rang with a sustained squeal;
his face stung from the blowback.
The grip on Ben’s throat loosened. He twisted his body around, free of
the choke hold Cavanaugh was slumped on the ground. With a jolt Ben
saw the dark red hole just above his old friend’s eyebrows, a horrific
third eye. He was suffused with a mixture of relief and revulsion, and
the sense that nothing would ever be the same.
CHAPTER TWO.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
It was still early in the evening, but already it was dark, and an icy
wind roared along the narrow street, down the steep hill toward the
roiling waters of the Atlantic. Fog had settled over the gray streets
of this port town, blanketing it, closing it in. A miserable drizzling
rain had begun to fall. The air had a salty tang.
A sulfurous yellow light illuminated the ramshackle porch, the worn
front steps of a large, gray clapboard house. A dark figure in a
yellow hooded oilcloth slicker stood under the yellow light, jamming
his finger against the front door buzzer insistently, over an dover and
over. Finally there came the clicks of the safety bolts, and the
weathered front door came slowly open.
The face of a very old man appeared, peering out angrily. He was
wearing a stained pale blue dressing gown over rumpled white pajamas.
His mouth was caved in, the baggy skin of the face pallid, the eyes
gray and watery.
“Yes?” the elderly man demanded in a high, raspy voice. “What do you
want?” He spoke with a Breton accent, a legacy of his French Acadian
forebears who fished the seas beyond Nova Scotia.
“You’ve got to help me!” cried the person in the yellow slicker. He
shifted his weight anxiously from one foot to the other. “Please! Oh,
God, please, you’ve got to help!”
The old man’s expression became clouded with confusion. The visitor,
though tall, looked to be in his late teens. “What are you talking
about?” he said. “Who are you?”
“There’s been a horrible accident. Oh, God! Oh, Jesus! My dad! My
dad! I think he’s dead!”
The old man pressed his narrow lips together. “What do you want from
me?”
The stranger flung a gloved hand toward the handle of the storm door,
then dropped it. “Please just let me make a call. Let me call an
ambulance. We had an accident, a terrible accident. The car is
totaled. My sister–badly hurt. My dad was driving. God, my parents!”
The boy’s voice broke. Now he seemed more a child than a teenager.
“Oh, Lord, I think he’s dead.”
Now the old man’s glare seemed to soften, and he slowly pushed open the
storm door to let the stranger in. “All right,” he said. “Come in.”
“Thank you,” the boy exclaimed as he entered. “Just for a moment.
Thank you so much.”
The old man turned around and led the way into a dingy front room,
flicking on a wall switch as he entered. He turned to say something
just as the boy in the hooded rain slicker came closer and with both
hands, clasped the man’s own hand, seemingly a gesture of awkward
gratitude. Water ran down from the sleeve of his yellow slicker onto
the old man’s dressing gown. The boy made a sudden, jerking movement.
“Hey,” the old man protested, confused. He pulled away, then slumped
to the floor.
The boy stared down at the crumpled body for a moment. He slipped off
his wrist the small device that held a tiny retractable hypodermic
needle and put it in an inside pocket of his slicker.
Quickly he surveyed the room, spotted the ancient television, and
turned it on. An old black-and-white movie was playing. Now he set
about his task with the confidence of someone much older.
He went back to the body, set it carefully on a shabby orange lounge
chair, arranging the arms and head so that it looked as if the old man
had fallen asleep in front of the TV.
Pulling a roll of paper towels from inside his slicker, he swiftly
mopped up the water that had pooled on the wide pine boards of the
entrance hall. Then he returned to the front door, which was still
open, glanced around outside, and when he was satisfied, stepped out
onto the porch and closed the door behind him.
The Austrian Alps
The silver Mercedes S430 wound up the steep mountain road until it
arrived at the clinic gates. A security guard in the booth by the gate
came out, saw who the passenger was, and said with great deference,
“Welcome, sir.” He did not bother to ask for identification. The
chief of the clinic was to be admitted with dispatch. The car turned
onto the ring
drive through a sloping campus where the vibrant green of well-tended
grass and sculpted pines contrasted with drifting patches of powdery
snow. Towering in the distance overhead were the magnificent white
crags and planes of the Schneeberg peak. The car drove around a dense
stand of tall yews, an dover to a second, hidden security booth. The
guard, who had already been alerted to the director’s arrival, pressed