''Jensen's coming in,'' his secretary's voice told him without warning. He made a note to fire her in the morning.
"Everything set?" The tall, graying man approached his desk. Tillman noted Jensen's eyes running over the heavy canvas drop cloth on the floor.
"Just painters," Tillman said casually.
"Oh," Jensen said, looking as if the canvas might somehow gobble him up. "Everything is ready. Everything is exactly on schedule," he said. ''They'll make the drop from four thousand feet.. exactly five hundred feet above ground level. Then they'll pull up, and when they pass through twenty thousand feet-boom. They'll be off the Mendocino coast. Ocean's over a mile deep. I don't think there'll be a piece left bigger than a few square inches. It'll look like a fuel tank blew and then set off some oxygen bottles for the big boom. If they figure it was sabotage, we can blame one of those antitechnology terrorists."
"Mind locking the door?" Tillman asked from behind his desk. He doubted the authorities would be so easily placated, especially given the magnitude of the explosion. But he would worry about that later.
Jensen went to the door and turned the heavy brass knob.
"I'd like to show you something," Tillman said, beckoning Jensen back to the desk.
When Jensen returned, Tillman removed a Beretta 9-mm., loaded with subsonic hollow point shells and a Nexus grease-filled suppressor. This kind of silencer was super quiet for two or three shots-then the grease would require repacking. If Tillman fired only one shot, aiming square in the center of Jensen's chest, it was a virtual certainty that the bullet would not emerge from what was left of Jensen. There would be no messy lead traces in the woodwork. But it was not his plan to fire that shot unless required.
"What are you doing?" Jensen gasped.
Tillman studied the man's eyes as they widened in terror. There were creatures of flight-these were usually the vegetable eaters. Then there were those who wanted to fight before they died. For the most part these were the predators. Surprisingly, Jensen was turning out to be an herbivore. This would be easier than he'd thought.
"Relax, Jensen. I just want you to take a little nap until this is all over.'' Tillman removed a plastic bag from his desk, then rose to come around to Jensen.
"But why…? I… I've done everything you asked.. everything-"
"Stay calm and I won't kill you. Otherwise you're going to end up on the canvas, bleeding from a punctured heart."
In the bag there were several large, soaked cotton balls.
"What are you doing?" Jensen's eyes flashed to the canvas as panic began to control him.
Tillman stepped behind him, congratulating himself on his judgment. He knew he had been right. The man was weak. He could be broken. With practiced ease Tillman slipped a pair of handcuffs on Jensen. He took the bag from the floor where he had dropped it and slipped it over Jensen's head.
"Please… you can trust me-" Jensen choked as much from panic as the lack of oxygen. It took only seconds for the chloroform to do its work.
Jensen's eyes seemed to bulge, remaining open as if he were staring at some far-off place. They were brown eyes, but now appeared clearer and lighter, which Tillman found interesting. Foam collected at Jensen's lips and his hands opened and closed as if trying to grasp something. Out of interest in what might happen, Tillman undid the cuffs, but Jensen was too far gone to even try to save himself. Perhaps it was involuntary, or perhaps he could see eternity rushing at him, but Jensen now grasped at the air in front of his face, reaching for something only he could see. Around his fingernails the flesh was turning blue.
Tillman caught Jensen as his knees began to buckle, and then he smelled the man's defecation. Tillman knew from years of experience that mammals sometimes evacuate their bladders and bowels in their death throes. He had prepared for just such an eventuality with the plastic-lined canvas.
With some care, Tillman wrapped the body in the plastic-lined canvas and placed it in a giant nylon bag that would otherwise have housed his hang glider. Hang gliding was a sport whose benefits, he now decided, extended beyond the obvious.
Tillman would personally put the body in the trunk of his car, take it to the jet, and put it in the cargo hold.
Later, a witness would swear he saw Jensen walk onto the doomed plane with the other passengers.
Tillman reattuned all of his senses to the night landscape. His eyes worked the edges of the ravine and the pasture below. He listened for the slightest variation in the forest's sounds, for any sign of a creature's alarm that might signal an intruder. There were rustlings, small noises, but nothing he could identify as human.
So far Kier had preferred to fight alone, leaving the woman nearby, where he perceived she would be safe. Odds were he would follow the same pattern now-bring her partway, then leave her.
The question was where Kier would leave the woman. If she was an ordinary woman, he would leave her far back; but in her case, where she herself had killed and killed well, it could be much closer. She would be aggressive, insisting that she should come along. Perhaps she would come the whole way. Tillman would wait near the base of the ravine until daylight, when he would hunt the woman. If Kier and the woman hadn't arrived by dawn, he would change his strategy.
It was from the corner of his eye that he caught the flicker of light. What he saw lasted no more than a few seconds, but it was all he needed. It was not worthy of the Indian to make such a mistake. He knew it was either the woman's carelessness or a trap. It had come from below at the edge of the pasture. If he was correct about the light, they had slipped past him undetected or taken another route.
If Tillman could capture the woman, he would not follow Doyle's recipe in its entirety. Instead she would be suitably tormented, then brought to the Donahues', where Doyle would slip into her room and reveal his FBI status. Tillman would have her in a controlled environment where she couldn't escape. The thought of softening her up sent a wave of anticipation through Tillman. His heart quickened with the mental image of her bound and helpless. It struck him as an odd reaction. Rape was normally the province of lunatics, the exception being in war, where for centuries rape served as an effective means of subjugation. If the best means of rattling Special Agent Mayfield was to take her sexually, then that certainly made it an appropriate tool. Sexual submission would make a woman like her feel especially helpless. For that reason alone he would consider it. Once she felt weak and vulnerable, Doyle's story would come as sweet relief.
Tillman rose, using his peripheral vision to navigate in the darkness along the ravine and to the edge of the forest. The pasture grass had spread beneath the trees. Its moisture and the sodden leaves made for quiet walking. With care he could approach within inches of the woman and she wouldn't even know he was there. A cluster of three tall fir trees stood near the spot where he had seen the flicker. He guessed the distance along the fence to the fir. By his estimate, it was one-third of the way across the back of the pasture, which he knew to be approximately seven hundred feet. Merely to arrive at the juncture of the back fence and the side fence would require twenty minutes. He took one step at a time, listening before taking the next. In the forest the dark was so heavy that it seemed to have texture. Only out of the very corner of his eye could he discern rough shapes.
With every step, he made an instinctive calculation of his vulnerability to detection. In the pasture there was enough light that someone hiding in the forest might see him as a silhouette unless he kept trees between himself and the open field. As he turned down the fence line that would take him to his goal, the brush became less dense, the forest more open. Even so, if she was hiding perfectly still and low to the ground, it could take hours to find her. And then, if he did, she might see him first.