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By then, Wilmot was already a wealthy man, and there was nothing he didn’t give to Evan. Good genes, wealth, a big house, a healthy rural environment, an endless supply of baseballs, all the food he could eat, all the books he could read. And love—the one thing Wilmot’s own son of a bitch of a father had never once provided. Wilmot had given that to his son, too.

But he hadn’t spoiled him either. A couple of luxuries here and there, sure. What was the point of being worth several hundred million dollars if you couldn’t give your kid a horse on his eighteenth birthday? But he’d never let the boy think he rated anything just because of who his father was. If Evan wanted his three-dollar-a-week allowance, he had to do his chores, keep his bed made, pick up his room, fill the dishwasher, do his homework. You proved yourself every day. That was what Wilmot believed, and he lived by that code.

And Evan had never disappointed. Captain of the baseball team, president of the senior class, raised money for poor families at Christmas, valedictorian. Tall, handsome—Christ, what a boy he’d been!

There had been a time after Evan returned when Wilmot blamed his son for his own misfortunes. He had gone to Iraq against Wilmot’s express wishes, joining the military a year before he should have graduated from Harvard. Wilmot had been so angry that they had not talked for nearly a year. He had been against the war from the beginning, seeing it as more overreaching by a government that couldn’t even handle its problems at home. But Wilmot had come to realize it wasn’t his son’s fault. It was those bastards, those parasites, those pieces of shit in Washington, grinding up American boys—barely more than children—for some misguided principle or thinly masked greed. But soon the bastards would pay.

His mounting rage was interrupted by Collier. “Mr. Wilmot.” He was standing in the doorway, looking at him with a curious expression on his face as he took in his boss’s soaked clothing.

“John,” Wilmot said, with every ounce of self-control he could muster, “can’t you see that we have a situation here?”

“So do we,” Collier said.

“And it can’t wait until my son finishes his shower?”

Collier met Wilmot’s eyes but said nothing.

“Hang on, son,” Wilmot said, buckling Evan into his chair. “Will you be okay by yourself for a minute?”

Evan nodded.

Wilmot grabbed a towel and walked out of Evan’s room, drying himself as he walked.

“What is it, John?” he said.

Collier frowned. “Our guy Verhoven in West Virginia. One of his people is trying to sell information to the Feds.”

Wilmot swore. “How would one of his people know anything? Verhoven wasn’t supposed to say shit to any of those morons of his.”

“It’s not one of his militia kids. It’s a gun dealer who hangs out with them. I’ve met him a couple times. Shifty little prick. He’s a me>

“Tell Verhoven to pick the son of a bitch up and find out what he knows.”

“He’s already doing that.”

“He better find out every goddamn scrap of information this guy’s got. He needs to find out exactly what he said and who he said it to.”

Collier nodded. “I’ll make sure he’s doing the right thing.”

“We’re at a point where we can’t afford any loose ends. Tell Verhoven once he finds out what this guy knows, he needs to get rid of him. Make it look like an overdose.”

“Understood.”

After Evan finished showering, his cheerless nurse, Margie Clete, toweled him off as he lay on his bed. She was a large woman, nearly six feet, with no waist, thick forearms, and large breasts, which she controlled with a brassiere that showed through her overly tight uniform like the girders of a postmodern building. Evan’s father had once said of her that she had a face like a canned ham. Margie scolded him for not calling for help in the shower. Even after nearly two years of being tended to in his most intimate bodily functions, Evan still felt a wave of shame at being forced to rely on a middle-aged woman just to get dried off.

But finally it was over and Evan was left alone in his room. He lay in his bed in his clean dry clothes and reached under the mattress for his secret bottle of pills. He popped the cap off and dumped a couple of oxycodone on the blanket next to him.

What the hell had his father been talking to John about in the hallway? They’d been having these secretive, whispered conversations for months now. Evan had turned off the shower in hopes of eavesdropping on them—but hadn’t been able to pick up anything.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

What few words he could hear seemed to come out of a...

It surprised him the first time he’d heard John Collier’s voice in his home. Evan was sure at some level John hated him. They had known each other since they were kids, and had a complicated history to say the least. Now John was back in Idaho, working part-time as Evan’s caretaker and spending a lot of time with his father. Something odd was going on, but Evan was damned if he knew what it was.

He stared sourly at the pills on the bedspread. Screw it, he thought. Maybe he’d skip the pills, see how he felt. Slowly, pain-stakingly, he picked up each pill with his two working fingers and dropped them back in the pill bottle. For the first time in a long time he actually felt curious about something. Curious and a little concerned. But if he was going to give the matter some thought, he’d need to be clearer in his head.

When he finally got the pills into the bottle, he lay back and watched the television on the far wall. He could feel the pain coming toward him, slowly, sinuously, like a big hungry snake. Evan smiled. Come on, motherfucker, he thought. Let’s see what you’ve got.

4

McLEAN, VIRGINIA

He’s late,” said FBI agent Nancy Clement, looking at her watch.

“He’ll be here.”

They were waiting in Nancy’s car, a government-issued black GMC Tahoe, at a shopping mall about a mile from Mixon’s hotel. Mixon had chosen such a public place because, he said, it would make an ambush more difficult. Given Mixon’s competence tailing his car, Gideon questioned his countersurveillance abilities, but the mall was anonymous enough and would be just a short ride home in time for dinner.

Washington’s horrific rush hour had crept up on them, and drivers used the parking lot as a shortcut to avoid the lights. As a result, Gideon’s and Nancy’s heads kept swiveling to keep watch on the passing traffic.

They had met three years earlier at a national security conference in Colorado and dated briefly for six months. Nancy was a good agent whose beauty turned out to be more of a career liability than an asset in the FBI’s male-dominated culture. She navigated her way through it by cultivating a tough self-reliance that alienated her from many of her colleagues. As much as Gideon admired her independence, the sharp edges of her personality had quickly chipped away at his initial affection. Yet sitting with her in close confines in the front of her car, he couldn’t help admiring her athletic legs and honey-blond hair.

“I appreciate you coming out here,” he said.

“I appreciate the call.”

“It’s probably nothing, but I thought it was worth checking out.”

“You always had good instincts.”

“Did you tell Ray you were coming to meet me?” Ray Dahlgren was Nancy’s boss, the deputy director of the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Group. Gideon met him at the same conference where he’d met Nancy, and his impression was that the man had earned his reputation as an ambitious and arrogant bully who was smart, but not nearly as smart as he thought he was.

Nancy smiled. “What do you think?”

She was wearing a familiar perfume, something light and flowery, and its scent reminded Gideon of lying next to her in her loftlike apartment. Nancy collected medieval brass rubbings, and the apartment was decorated with expensive framed canvases. Late at night the black-and-white renderings of monks and dignitaries took on an eerie three-dimensional glow in the reflected light from the street. He had spent a good number of hours tracing their outlines in pursuit of a sleep that never came.