Condon had used the money to buy the land we were walking through.
Dolores said Condon was a hermit who liked to farm and go fishing on his boat out on the ocean alone. He distrusted anybody involved in the government. His only visitors, and they were rare, were the men and women who’d served with him in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I’d asked Dolores how she knew so much about him.
She’d hesitated and then said, “Once, a long time before he met Paula, I was the love of Nicholas’s life.”
There was a picket stake in the trail with a piece of orange tape fluttering off it. We went around it and entered the field forty yards from its eastern end, where there was a ten-foot-high dirt embankment with a large red tub of Tide detergent sitting on top.
The field to our right lay fallow. It was long and narrow, three hundred yards to the other end and maybe fifty yards to the far tree line.
“The house is in the next field?” Sampson said as we started across.
“That’s the way I-”
We never heard the shot, just the bullet ripping the air before the Tide detergent tub on the embankment erupted like a land mine, throwing dirt, rock, and melted plastic everywhere and sending a plume of gray smoke toward the sky.
34
AS SOON AS we heard the bullet ripping past us, instinct kicked in. We were both diving when the bomb went off.
Sampson and I hit the ground and put our arms over our heads as debris rained down on us. My left ear rang and for a moment I was disoriented.
Then, like a boxer recovering from a glancing blow, I became more alert. I dug at my back for my service pistol and then followed Sampson as he squirmed forward into high grass and weeds.
“Where’d the shot come from?” Sampson asked in a harsh whisper.
“From Condon’s sniper rifle?”
“I meant from what direction?”
“No idea, but it had to have been far away if we didn’t hear the report before whatever was in that Tide thing exploded.”
“We need to reach the trees and call for backup,” Sampson said.
“Backup first,” I said, and pulled out my cell. “Great-no service.”
“I had it over by the road.”
“Not here,” I said, and then I heard something over the ringing in my left ear.
Sampson heard it too, rose up to look, and then ducked down.
“That’s an ATV,” Sampson said. “He’s coming for us. Two hundred yards out. Near the tree line.”
We stared at each other, thinking the same thing: Do we run for the trees and risk getting shot by a world-class sniper? Or-
I pushed myself to my feet, held out my badge, and aimed my pistol at Condon, who was less than a hundred yards away in a green Polaris Ranger. Sampson stood up beside me and did the same.
Condon pulled up at ninety yards, snaked a scoped rifle over the wheel, and shouted, “You trying to get yourselves killed? Didn’t you see the goddamned orange flag in the road?”
“We didn’t know what it meant,” I shouted back. “We’re detectives with Washington Metro Police. We just want to ask you a few questions.”
Condon was hunkered over the rifle, aiming at us through his scope. At ninety yards, any shot we might take with the pistol would be a Hail Mary. But ninety yards with a precision sniper rifle was a chip shot.
I had a funny feeling in my chest, as if he’d put the crosshairs there. Then he lifted his head. “You the Alex Cross? FBI profiler and all that?”
“I was,” I called back. “That’s right.”
That seemed to satisfy Condon because he slipped the rifle into a plastic scabbard mounted to the side of the ATV and started driving toward us.
“How’d he know your name?” Sampson asked.
“I’m thinking he read our credentials through his scope,” I said, lowering my gun but not holstering it.
Condon pulled up about ten yards away. Late thirties and rawboned, he had silver-and-red hair and a matching beard. Both needed cutting.
“Azore,” he said. “Denni.”
Two German shepherds jumped down from the flatbed carrier behind the sniper. They stopped and stood there, panting, at Condon’s side.
“You mind telling us what the hell that was all about?” Sampson asked. “Shooting at us?”
Condon said, “Practicing my trade. You walked into a hot rifle range, my place of business, unannounced and forewarned. That’s what happened.”
I said, “You didn’t see us before you shot?”
He looked at me, blinked, said, “Hell no, I was in the zone. In the whole wide world, there was nothing but the I and the D and the trigger and me.”
“What’s the I and the D?”
He spelled it out. “T-i-d-e.”
“What was in that container?” I asked.
“Tannerite,” he said. “Exploding target material. Shot indicator.”
Sampson said, “You almost killed us with that stuff, which is illegal in Maryland, by the way.”
Ordinarily the mere presence of a pissed-off John Sampson was enough to shake the toughest of criminals. But Condon looked at ease.
“Not for me,” he said. “I have a federal permit through Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. And, like I said, I didn’t know you were there. If I’d wanted to kill you, Detectives, you’d already be dead, and I’d have a shovel-and-shut-up mission on my hands. Know what I mean?”
I did know what the sniper meant and absolutely believed him.
35
CONDON CROSSED HIS arms and said, “So go ahead, ask your questions.”
“Somewhere we can sit down?” Sampson said. “Get out of this heat?”
Condon considered that, said, “Two weapons each? Primary and backup?”
I nodded.
“Azore,” Condon said. “Denni.”
The dogs circled us in easy lopes. Both hesitated, turned noses toward our ankles, then wagged their tails.
The sniper whistled and they went back to his side.
“Always like to know for sure,” Condon said, and he started up the Ranger. “One of you can sit up front. One in the back.”
“I’ll take the back,” I said, then I holstered my pistol and climbed up onto the little flatbed carrier beside several tool-boxes that presumably held the tools of Condon’s trade.
Sampson had to duck his head to squeeze into the passenger seat.
Condon put the Ranger in gear, glanced at Sampson, and said, “Guys big as you don’t last long when the shit hits the fan.”
“Which is why I like to be holding the fan at all times,” Sampson growled.
Condon almost smiled.
The German shepherds ran along as we drove to the tree line, where another picket with orange flagging blocked the road. The sniper got out, drew it from the ground, and handed it to me.
A minute or two later, we pulled up by a black Ford F-150, a Harley-Davidson, and a John Deere farm tractor parked in front of a white ranch house in need of scraping and painting. A Grady-White fishing boat sat on a trailer near a red barn in need of shoring and paint.
The long field in front of Condon’s house was shoulder-high in corn. His grass needed mowing, and the air smelled of stale dog dung and urine.
Condon turned off the ATV, tugged the rifle from the black scabbard, and got out. He walked with a slight hitch in his stride to retrieve one of the toolboxes.
“Nice gun,” I said.
“Designed it myself,” he said, grabbing one of the toolboxes and showing me a.338 Lapua with a Timney trigger, a Lone Wolf custom stock, and a Swarovski 4 to 18 power scope.
No wonder he’d been able to read my credentials at ninety yards.
“How far can you shoot something like that?” Sampson asked.
“Wind’s calm and I’m right, a mile,” Condon said, and he went with a slight hitch in his gait up a cracked walkway to the front porch.