“They look like munitions storage,” Jonathan observed, pointing to the screen.

“They’ve got themselves a damn city,” Boxers said. “We can’t take that. Not the two of us.”

Truer words were never spoken.

The next step in building the computer image was to superimpose data from the public record onto the satellite image. That way, they could locate the known roads, as well as-if they were so inclined-the location of the septic fields, the aquifers, and even family burial plots. If it was in an accessible database, they could put it on the map.

Finally, with the entire infrastructure in place on the screen, the program used data from the U.S. Geological Survey to add elevation data. When Venice was done, they had a three-dimensional rendering of the area that could be rotated in any direction, for either a plan view or a more useful elevation view.

“No fuckin’ way,” Boxers said.

And it wasn’t just a matter of real estate. The map showed the heat signatures of several dozen people sleeping in the various walking along the street. The two of them together would undoubtedly spook his prey.

He didn’t have to wait long. Within a minute, he heard the sound of a door opening and closing, followed a few seconds later by the sound of a substantial lock being turned. A moment later, he saw the woman he’d been waiting for. She turned the corner to walk up the hill where he was stationed, but on the opposite side of the street. She walked hurriedly, with her head down. She looked preoccupied to Charlie, oblivious to him or his car or the night air or anything else that was not going on inside her head. He waited for her to get fifty yards ahead, and then he followed. He stayed on his side of the street; he never tried to close the gap between them.

He thought about how easy it would be to wreak havoc in a town like this. Watching her navigate the night as if there were no danger lurking, he thought about how easy it would be to take her. To have her. No doubt about it, she was hot in her own right. All he’d have to do, he wagered, would be to walk up to her and ask her for the time. She’d stop to help and then he could make her pay for the mistake. He imagined it was that way for everyone in this little burg. People who’ve never known violence never stop to think about it. It was the kind of naïveté that conquerors dreamed of.

But tonight, his mission was not conquest; it was intelligence gathering. This was the night when he would come to know his enemy.

His earbud buzzed, “How’s it going?”

“Keep the channel clear,” he hissed, hoping that his annoyance came through. If he needed help from Frick and Frack, he’d ask for it. Meanwhile, he just wanted them to quietly do their jobs.

He was across the street from a church now, St. Katherine’s Catholic. It was a big place with spires and the kind of traditional architecture that you just don’t see much anymore. As the Alexander chick walked past, she slowed and looked across the vast lawn, as if hoping to see someone.

Her pace slowed even more as she approached the walkway that led across an even bigger lawn and then to the wraparound porch of a mansion that made Tara from Gone with the Wind look like a guest cottage. The place had to be 12,000 square feet, and it seemed to stretch forever. It was difficult to make out details in the darkness, but the house painted a hell of a stain against the sky.

Charlie found himself staring in disbelief as he watched his prey climb those stairs, navigate the walk, and then disappear through the front door. “Just how successful can the private investigating business be?” he mumbled aloud.

Gail Bonneville had to admit that she loved the town. Fisherman’s Cove was the kind of place she thought of when she thought of a quaint riverside refuge. She loved the fact that New World efficiency had not yet run off Old World charm. She could see why a man like Jonathan Grave would be drawn to a place like this, even if she couldn’t begin to wrap her mind around why a town like this would want a man like Jonathan Grave as a resident.

“I wish I knew what those guys were up to,” Jesse Collier said yet again. When they’d arrived in Fisherman’s Cove forty-five minutes ago, they’d noticed the Mercury parked across the street from the firehouse that served as the offices of Security Solutions and according to the public record also doubled as Jonathan Grave’s residence. From that very first moment, they’d assumed that someone else was surveilling the place, but they couldn’t be certain if they were working for Grave or against him.

Rather than litter the street with a second susations through the very kind of diplomacy that he pretended to hate. He’d also seen him wreak a special kind of havoc after the other side failed to realize that the “negotiation” was in fact the terms of their surrender. Boxers was the wrong guy to point a gun at.

Glancing at his GPS locator, Jonathan pointed up the hill and they started walking.

“Suppose they don’t want to fight?” Boxers asked.

“Then we’re carrying way too much firepower.”

“No, I don’t mean now. I mean at all. Suppose they’re not up for this battle you’re planning?”

Jonathan had thought about that. “Everybody’ll fight if the stakes are high enough,” he said.

“But not everybody’s good at it.”

Jonathan shrugged. “If it falls that way, we’ll all share a righteously shitty day.” He could speak this bluntly because it was Boxers. Both of them had stopped worrying about death a long time ago. “We’ll have to train them, and hope they can shoot straight.”

Thomas Hughes was living a nightmare.

Over the course of a single week-no, less than a week, six days-he’d gone from getting his knob polished by Tiffany or Christine or whatever the hell her real name was, to getting kidnapped, shot at, and now living out here in the middle of nowhere. Just the three of them-like the happy family they’d never be.

And if that wasn’t a thick enough shit sandwich, the police thought they were murderers. Oh, yeah, and his dad was some kind of WMD trafficker.

They called this special corner of hell “the lodge,” but it was really a cabin. Built of hewn heavy timbers, and designed to look a hundred years older than it actually was, the place had a certain Abe Lincoln look to it. The lodge itself sat on a footprint of 20 by 30 feet, and was more or less an unadorned rectangle. A second floor had been raised somewhere along the way on the back half of the house, providing additional sleeping space. When Thomas was little, Mom and Dad took the upstairs for themselves while he was consigned to the sofa in the “living room,” which was separated only by an imaginary wall from the “dining room,” which in turn sat adjacent to the way-out-of-date kitchen in the back of the house. Without gas or electricity, cooking power came from the logs that they piled into the wood stove.

It was stiflingly hot in the summer, and freezing cold in the winter (kerosene heaters and fireplaces couldn’t touch the February chill). Thomas hated this place. Once he’d gotten his driver’s license and access to his own car, he’d stopped coming. Keep your primitive and your rustic; give him new and shiny any day of the week. At least give him running water. And a toilet that was more than a hole in the ground.

Presently, Mom and Dad were at it again, blaming each other for all the crap that was going wrong. They kept screaming at each other about a plan. They needed to have a plan.

Well, Thomas had mapped out a pretty nifty plan for himself: he was getting the hell out of here. He was done with Chef Boyardee and boredom. He was done with hiding. He didn’t have a dog in this fight. Even if he did, wasn’t it way harder to hit a moving target than a stationary one?

The barn full of synthetic smallpox complicated things for his parents, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he didn’t care about what happened to everybody else-not even to the poor bastards that got spr’d been able to read a musical score the way most people read books. The dots and spaces on the page converted directly to music in his head. His parents and friends called it a blessing, but to him it was equal parts curse. By reading the music, he was blessed to hear a perfect performance every time. When he performed, however, there were always flaws, most never heard by the audience, but they resounded like errant cymbal crashes in Thomas’s mind.