Nick didn’t have to think a second. He was in. Always had been. Had to see how it would finish. He’d given himself to this strange bird, and so he elected to stay the course, not that he had a real choice.

“Sure,” he finally said. “It’s fine. We’ll do it your way.”

“I haven’t told you everything,” said Dobbler. “And now I will.”

They both turned to look at him.

“What makes Shreck such a powerful antagonist. One of my duties at RamDyne was to interpret tests. He had once been tested, when he went to work there. The psychologist then was an idiot and didn’t understand. But the results are clear. Shreck is more than a sociopath, he’s one of those rare men who is simply not afraid to die. Who, in fact, wants to die. Payne is the same way. You see, that’s why they are so frightening. Most men care about life. In the end, most men always act out of self-preservation. But these two don’t care and won’t act that way. It’s a function of self-hatred so passionately held that it’s off the charts.”

Another pause. Then Bob said, “You know, doctor-man, you must come from some pretty soft places to find that so remarkable. You could be describing one half of the world’s professional soldiers and both halves of its professional criminals. Truth is, I used to be one of those boys. Didn’t give two hairs about surviving. Now I have something to live for. Now I’m scared to hell I’ll die. Will it cost me my edge?”

He almost smiled, one of the few times Nick had ever seen anything so gentle play across the strong, hard features of his face.

“Sure is going to be damned entertaining to find out, isn’t it?” Bob said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Nick said he’d do it.

Bob was stern. “No funny business. No heroics. You play hero, you kill us all. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I understand. I can handle this.”

“I know you can. I’m just telling you. Whatever they say, you agree. You listen hard, and you agree.”

Nick climbed into the pickup and drove down the mountain in the dark. It was a wet, shaggy predawn and tendrils of fog clung to the hollows and valleys. For Nick, it was like driving through some half-remembered land from his childhood, as if dragons lurked in the tall pines and the deep caves.

Many switchbacks and crossovers later, he came to flatland, farmland and a highway, passed the burned church, and then drove on in to the town of Blue Eye itself, which even in the rain looked festive. The sun was up as he arrived. THE BUCKS ARE STOPPED HERE, the sign still said, fluttering over the town square. Bright shiny pickups and Rec-Vs lined the street, rifles visible hanging in the racks in their back windows. Everywhere Nick could see men proud in their blaze-orange camouflage. Tomorrow was the first day of deer season.

Nick parked and pushed his way through the crowd, which seemed to have been drawn to some epic pan-cake feed put on by the Kiwanis or Jaycees. The boys were talking rifles and loads, hunting techniques, telling stories of giant animals who’d soaked up bullet after bullet and then walked away. There was a common anticipation and a sporting crowd’s fever in the air. All agreed that, what with a moist and succulent summer, the Arkansas whitetails were everywhere. It would be, everybody said, a great year for a venison harvest.

But Nick, melancholy as always with the approach of action, ignored all this, went to the square, and sat himself down on a bench near a statue of some ancient Confederate hee-row in pigeon-shit-green copper. There he slumped, a glowering figure in jeans and a rough workman’s coat, his Beretta in a speed holster upside down under his left arm, not three inches from where his right hand just happened to fall.

He sat and he sat, and in time – he had no sense of it at all – a man came and sat with him. It was very smoothly done, but then everything these birds did they did smoothly. They were professionals.

“Memphis?”

“Yes.”

“Good. There,” said the man. “Can you see her?”

“No,” said Nick.

“See, the Plymouth Voyager van. The back door is open. She’s sitting there. Can you see her?”

He could. She was a lean middle-aged woman, handsome and composed, dressed in a sweater and jeans, and with a grave look on her face. There was something stiff in the way she sat.

Sitting next to her was Payne. He remembered Payne from the swamp, and the jaunty, relishing way he had interrogated Nick and got him ready to die. And he remembered Payne from Annex B: Payne, of the Sampul River.

“Yeah, I see them.”

“Do you want to talk to her?”

“No.”

“You have the cassette?”

“The cassette, you bet. But we’ve got more than that. I also managed to dig Annex B up.”

“Oh,” said Shreck.

“There’s enough to send you and Payne to the electric chair three times. Man, they’ll deep-fat fry you to a crisp.”

Shreck laughed.

“Not this time, sonny. Now you know how this has to happen. We need that cassette. Swagger thinks the woman is important. And we both know Bob has a stubborn, romantic streak, don’t we?”

Nick turned. He looked at Raymond F. Shreck for the first time. He wasn’t disappointed. He thought of the word tough and imagined it carried out to some science fiction degree. Short-haired, steady and strong, the colonel looked like a.45 hardball round in flesh. He was all blunt force, hard eyes, sitting ramrod straight, not a tremor or a line of doubt anywhere about him.

“You know if it were up to me, and I was still with the Bureau, I’d bust your ass so fast you’d leave your teeth in the street.”

Shreck smiled.

“Sonny, people have been trying to kill me for nearly forty years. They’re all dead and buried and I’m still here. So don’t try to scare me. It’s a little late in the day for that.”

He was wearing a Trebark camouflage suit and a blaze-orange baseball cap that said in gold sans serif across the front, AMERICAN HUNTER AND DAMN PROUD OF IT. His eyes met and held Nick’s as forcefully as an assault, and it was Nick who finally looked away.

“Tell Swagger if he crosses me, I kill the woman. Kill her dead. Cut her throat, watch her die, walk away. I’ve got tons of money and a thousand new identities I can slip into. I’m home free at any second if I want to be.”

“But you want that cassette. And those documents.”

“Frankly, I don’t really give a shit about the documents. But the cassette does have my face on it; it’s the only absolute record of my appearance. Life could be difficult if it got out. But the people I work for will be excited about the documents. So bring them too, or I kill the woman. Now this is how we play it.”

Nick listened intently as the colonel laid out the plan.

At the conclusion, Shreck handed over a map, a geodesic survey of the high Ouachitas, with the start point laid out, and a 40mm brass flare pistol.

“We don’t want the Nailer nailing us. We have to see him moving so we know he isn’t setting up somewhere above us to take us down from eight hundred yards.”

“Maybe you’ll have a guy to nail him,” Nick said.

“No way. We can’t nail him because he may not have the cassette and Annex B with him. He’s got insurance, I’ve got insurance. Mutual deterrence. It kept the world alive for fifty years. I’ll set it up so the final exchange is in the wide-open spaces, way beyond any rifle range.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And when the exchange is made, we walk away. It’s over. We’re out of business, but so is he. He has his woman and his freedom. The Feds think he’s dead. He can have his whole life back if he lets it lie. He’s had a hell of a war, but the war is over now. It’s time for him to go someplace in Montana, where beaucoup deer and antelope roam, and just shoot and fuck all day long.”