"The car is heading north on Seventeenth Street." Claudia stared intently at the screen. "She crossed H…no, forget that. She just turned east on H."

Louie pulled the gear lever out of park and took his foot off the brake. He hit the turn signal and eased out into traffic. They continued east on H until they hit New York Avenue. They missed the light and had to wait almost a minute. Claudia gave him constant updates. The car was on New York Avenue heading northeast. Louie was nowhere near panicking, but he did want to at least get a visual to make sure it was Rapp's wife who was in the car. Due to the lights, she maintained a one-mile lead until they were out of the District. Then New York Avenue opened up to a three-lane highway. Gould stepped on the gas and started passing cars. Nothing too crazy, but he was steadily gaining. At some point the road changed from New York Avenue to John Hansen Highway and U.S. Route 50. By the time they reached the Beltway they had a visual on the car. In the failing light they could barely make it out a hundred yards ahead. They passed under Interstate 495 and Gould closed the distance. At Lottsford Vista Road he eased up beside her. It was now past seven and the traffic was moderate. Both he and Claudia agreed it was her. She was talking on her cell phone so her face was partially obscured, but she gave them a glance like she was thinking about changing lanes.

Gould eased off the gas and fell back several cars. He retrieved an earpiece from his pocket and stuck it in his right ear. It was plugged into a small receiver that was tuned to the frequency of the miniature listening device he'd placed under the dashboard of the BMW. A voice came over the small speaker. There was a fair amount of background noise, but even so it was unmistakably her voice. Gould listened to the one-sided conversation with a critical ear, hoping to gain any information that might involve their schedule. They continued on U.S. Route 50 for another five minutes, then took U.S. Route 301 south for approximately six minutes and then started turning down a series of county roads. They were a decent ways from the city. Gould did not know what to think. Did they live way out here? Was she going to visit someone? Was she working on a story?

"How far are we from the Chesapeake Bay?" Gould asked.

Claudia pecked a few keys on the computer. "About four miles."

Gould nodded and watched his distance. He did not want her to notice she was being followed, but it was getting harder. Sooner rather than later they were going to run out of land. He was right. They ran out of land. Claudia told Gould that the car had just turned onto a dead end road. He pulled over and watched on the computer screen as the BMW inched closer and closer to the Chesapeake Bay. It finally stopped as if it had pulled right up to the water's edge. They waited several minutes to make sure the car didn't start moving again and then Gould continued on. He turned down the dead end road and set his speed five miles an hour above the posted speed. On the right were farm fields and woods and a few scattered houses. On the left were houses every couple of hundred feet. In the failing light he could glimpse the water of the big bay as they passed between houses.

"We're close," Claudia announced. "Less than a hundred meters."

Gould was already scanning ahead, looking for the car.

"Fifty meters."

He approached a white house and saw the car. There was a second car parked next to it. Gould tensed ever so slightly. "I see it."

"Try to get an address off the mailbox if you can."

Gould took his foot off the gas but did not hit the brakes. They were on a straight, narrow road. As they passed the house he read off the numbers on the mailbox. She checked the map to make sure they were still in Anne Arundel County. They were. She accessed the county's Web site and clicked on the property information tab. She punched in the address and five seconds later the corresponding information came up on the screen.

"The house was purchased in 1997 for two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars by Bay View Shores LLC. No officer listed under the company."

"It's him." Gould looked back over his shoulder.

"How can you be so sure?"

"He would never put it under his own name."

"What if she is merely stopping by to visit a friend?"

"It's him." Gould gripped the steering wheel and then flexed his fingers. "I can feel it. He's in there right now."

Mitch Rapp ran along the gravel shoulder, pounding out each step. His mood was anything but upbeat. There was a day not long ago when he flew down this road at a clip that would have left all but a few of the world's best athletes gasping for breath and falling to their knees. Even so, Rapp was a realist. He knew it was impossible to maintain the peak performance he'd had in his twenties and early thirties, but that didn't mean he had to like the aging process. He'd dealt with pain his entire life. He knew how to taunt it, suppress it, or just laugh it off. In fact, pain was something he'd actually learned to embrace. It was a welcome ally that propelled him to the finish line while it forced others to quit. The mind controlled the body. It could tell muscles and joints to ignore all kinds of warning signals. The problem, though, was that those warning signs were there for a reason. If they were ignored for too long, the body eventually broke down.

On this warm fall morning, as Rapp took each lengthy stride, he began to wonder if there was something different about this pain. It was his damn left knee again. He'd been trying to work through it for the better part of a month, and he was finally coming to the conclusion that it wasn't going away. No matter how hard he tried to block it out or get past it, no matter how much ice or Advil he used, the pain only worsened. His body was telling him something. It was telling him to stop running.

Only thirty-seven and he was falling apart. It should not have come as a surprise to him, knowing the way he'd pushed and abused his body over the years, but Rapp was the type of man who thought any obstacle surmountable with enough will, determination, and talent. There were the broken bones and cuts from sports as a kid and then in college, there was the inevitable wear and tear that came with competing as a world-class triathlete, and then there were the scars, both mental and physical, of his trade. On the outside were four pucker marks left by bullets that were meant to kill him and two decent-sized scars left by knife blades. On the inside, most of the physical damage done by the bullets had been repaired, but the mental toll his work had left on him was something he simply tried not to think about. His wife liked to tell him his brain was like a basement filling up with years of junk. If you didn't clean it out every year, you were one day sure to be left with one hell of a mess to take care of.

Instinctively, he knew she was right, but the only person who could ever understand what he'd done was someone who had walked in his shoes. And Rapp doubted there was a therapist on the planet who had any practical experience as an assassin. One of Rapp's forms of self-therapy was to never deceive himself. He didn't sugarcoat what he was, even though other people did. In national security circles he was referred to as a counterterrorism operative. He knew it was a nice way of saying he was an assassin. This had never bothered him, but now that Anna was pregnant, it gave him cause to rethink his profession. His days of being self-sufficient, of thinking first and foremost of himself, were receding with each heartbeat of the little baby in his wife's womb. Rapp was not afraid of fatherhood in the least. He was surprised, though, by the feeling of melancholy that accompanied the news. At first he didn't know the source but it came to him soon enough. It was his own unfulfilled relationship with his father. Rapp did not want his child to go through the same agonizing pain of losing a parent that he had. He was suddenly looking at the risks he took on the job in a whole new light. He'd been fighting it since the day he'd fallen in love with Anna, but now there was no more putting it off. He owed it to both her and their unborn child. He would have to step out of the line. Let someone else take the risks.