A wave of dizziness came over her as she gazed down the shaft, and for a moment she was afraid she might fall again. Then Keith's voice drifted down from above. "You okay?"

A groan was the only sound Heather could muster until the dizziness passed. Finding her voice, she said, "A rung broke, but I'm all right now."

She took a deep breath and cautiously continued down, but now tested each rung before trusting it with her weight.

One more broke away, and two bent but held. Then she was at the bottom. Untying the rope, she called to Keith, and he pulled it up. Then he lowered it again, this time with the backpack attached to the end.

Two more of the rungs gave way as Keith made his way down the ladder, and when he dropped out of the shaft, he looked up grimly. "We're not going to get back up there," he said, then grinned in the gloom. "But on the other hand, no one else is going to be able to come down, either." His gaze shifted to the tunnels, and he studied the maps for a moment. "That way," he decided.

Heather looked at the map, but could see nothing in it that hinted about which way to go. "Why?" she asked.

Keith shrugged. "To tell you the truth, I don't have a clue. But we can't stay here." With Heather following, he headed into the darkness.

They'd gone no more than a hundred yards when they found the body. At first Keith thought it was another of the derelicts who were everywhere in the tunnels, either asleep or passed out. But shining his flashlight full on the man, he saw the crimson stain that soaked the clothes, and when he knelt down to look more closely, he noted the deep gash that had been slashed into the dead man's chest.

He was checking the inside pockets of the man's jacket when Heather gasped. He looked up at her and saw that it wasn't the gaping wound at which she was staring, but the man's face.

"You know him, too." It was a statement, not a question.

"Monsignor McGuire," she said softly. "He-he runs a shelter for the homeless."

But Keith wasn't listening. He was paging through the notebook again, turning to the page on which his son's name had been entered. He stared at the list of hunters. Adder, Mamba, Rattler, Viper, and Cobra. "This guy's another friend of your dad's, right?"

Heather nodded.

Keith looked at the list again, remembering the man he'd killed earlier.

Carey Atkinson.

Now here was Monsignor McGuire, with a hole torn in his chest.

Atkinson and McGuire.

Adder and Mamba?

He sensed Heather close behind him, felt her breath on the back of his neck as she, too, stared at the page of the open notebook.

And heard her gasp as she, too, made the connection.

"It can't be," she whispered. "My father can't be doing this."

But even as she said it, she knew that no matter how often she repeated the words, the seed that had taken root in her mind would continue to grow.

CHAPTER 36

The hunter called Viper had hardly moved for more than two hours. The activity of brushing bugs away from his face or striking out at any too-curious rats that approached had been sufficient to keep stiffness out of his joints and numbness from his muscles. But while his body had rested, his mind was humming, taking in every bit of sensory information, and analyzing it from every angle.

For Viper, the hours spent on the hunt were the best of his life, far more interesting, far more challenging, than the endless tedium of listening to lawyers debate the arcane trivia of law, precedent, and Supreme Court decisions. Viper had always known what was right and what was wrong. It was why he had become a lawyer in the first place. He hadn't gone to law school out of any interest in arguing cases, but out of the certain knowledge that he had a unique ability to determine right from wrong.

With that in mind, Otto Vandenberg had set out to be a judge, and by the time he was forty, his ambition had been fulfilled. But as the years had gone by, his own satisfaction in his judgments had first been diluted, and then washed completely away-by the steady trickle of decisions from the courts above him, limiting his discretion, establishing maximum sentences, even dictating immediate release for some of the leeches that he believed were sucking the life out of decent men and women.

But the Manhattan Hunt Club had changed all that, and from his first moment in the tunnels, when Vandenberg had shed his judicial robes for hunter's black and the role of the Viper, he'd once again experienced the deep sense of fulfillment that came not only from exercising his perfect judgment, but from having his sentences carried out as well.

Today, two of his sentences were to be enacted, and it was his intention to bag at least one of the trophies himself. Thus, after studying the records of every one of the previous thirty-seven hunts, and tracing the routes the prey had used in their attempts to escape their stalkers, he had settled on this particular spot, a nearly invisible shelf, so well-hidden in the maze of pipes and conduits running through the utility tunnel that he could stay in almost perfect concealment, his senses alert, ready to strike like the snake from which his code name derived.

His weapon was prepared-a 7.62mm M-14A1 that he had acquired directly from a friend at the Pentagon, but to which he'd added a special laser sight himself. His backpack held four magazines for the rifle, each of which contained twenty rounds, but Vandenberg fully expected to come back with three of the magazines full and the one in the rifle less than half empty.

The sporting method of bagging the prey, after all, was with a single shot.

The rest of the magazine was nothing more than insurance.

His night scope lay beneath his right hand, ready if he heard the sound of approaching prey. And his ears would have no trouble distinguishing the sound of the quarry from the background noise that constantly drifted through the tunnel. Vandenberg had long ago learned to tell the scurrying sound of mice from that of rats, the sound of a leaking pipe from that of a derelict pissing on the wall, the moans of a dying man from those of one who was merely ill. He'd learned to sort out the scents as well, sniffing out the smell of an approaching human being as efficiently as a great white shark can catch the scent of blood from miles away.

Now, as he lay concealed, all his nerves suddenly went on full alert. He couldn't have said what it was that set his senses on edge; perhaps it was a whiff of an aroma, or a nearly subliminal sound-or perhaps it was nothing more than the perfectly honed instincts of a predator.

All he knew was that something was coming.

Gotta get rid of her, Jagger thought. Gotta get rid of her before she wrecks everything. He watched Jinx following Jeff through the tunnel. She was ahead of him, but not very far, and she was staying close to Jeff.

He knew why she was doing that-so she could smell him, take his scent deep into her lungs, just the way he had last night and the night before, when he'd watched over Jeff, making sure nothing bad happened to him while he slept. But since Jinx had shown up, he hadn't been able to get anywhere near close enough to Jeff to-

He cut that thought off. He just wanted to take care of Jeff, to protect him, so they could be friends-best friends.

His fist tightened on the railroad spike, and he edged closer.

Otto Vandenberg gazed through the eyepiece of his night scope.

Three people coming.

He recognized two of them immediately-he'd sentenced Jeff Converse only a few days ago, and Jagger just last year.

But the girl…

Who was the girl?

He focused the scope on her, searching his memory.