Where were the dogs?
His back was twisted tight and his belly muscles jumped as he stared out at the surrounding darkness with a flat wary look on his battered face. His cabin was hard to get to — built right at the base of a cliff that rose up another five hundred feet, sheer as a rock face.
The outcrop was shaped like a big scythe, a flat crescent of yellow limestone that projected out over a cliff that fell away a thousand feet to the floor of the valley. The road was the only way in, and the dogs would have told him if anyone was coming.
And nothing gets past the dogs.
Ever. So… where were the dogs?
Pete moved into the brush on the cliff side of the road and walked slowly down through the grade, the carbine up and out. He was like a soldier walking point on hostile ground. About twenty feet down through the brush a scent came to him, and a sound like a clock ticking — a steady tick… tick… tick… the scent grew stronger.
Something flashed down, a tiny red spark in what was left of the light: it hit a soft bed of pine needles about six feet in front of him, making a sharp ticking sound when it struck.
Pete looked up into the lodgepole pine and saw a tawny blunt shape in the twilight, about forty feet up the trunk. Brutus was hanging there, his stomach ripped open and his ropy guts looping down from his slit belly. He had a bright silver wire around his neck — it had cut almost through; his head was almost off. The other end of the wire was looped over a branch, from which it ran backward and down into a stand of trees about fifteen feet away, a thin silvery thread ending in a blackberry bush. The ground below Brutus was thick with blood. As he watched, another drop separated from a loop of the dog’s guts and fell down onto the nest of pine needles.
Tick.
Tick.
Pete moved past the hanging dog, his mind quite still, his breathing steady, his senses fully awake. He felt no particular fear, and he was not angry in any use of the word that would mean something to a civilian. He was set.
Focused on the outcome.
Whoever did this was good, and clever, and artful in the woods, none of which would help him one damn bit, because he was going to die anyway. Pete was going to kill him. He’d killed many a man in the woods or in the jungles and later in the dry brown hills of Afghanistan.
A few yards more and a much stronger smell of death — of sewage and fresh blood — was very close: he found Cisco dead in a tangle of pine boughs and ivy, his head twisted almost all the way around on his neck, his bowels having emptied as his spine snapped. His eyes were wide and the white showed all around. His pink tongue was out, and someone had sliced three inches off the tip with a very sharp knife.
For amusement, it seemed.
Pete looked around him and moved back into a stand of tall pine. He settled his back up against the rough bark of an old jack pine a few yards away from Cisco’s body, placed the carbine across his knees, and stared out into the gathering darkness, breathing through his slightly open mouth, his breath curling in a blue frost in front of him.
He had the cliff on his left and the tree at his back and the road in front of him and there was no way whoever was out there could get to him, unless he came straight in.
Pete looked upward and saw through the black pine boughs far above him an arc of indigo sky with a few early stars glittering. The night wind was now rising off the Great Plains, and the deeper mountain cold was coming down. In the rolling valley far below him the lights of Ranchester glimmered in the darkness, and over the mounded shapes of the faraway hills he could see the yellow glow of Sheridan. The heavy barrel of the Winchester was cold in his hands.
He looked out into the night, into the black forest all around him, the tall pines rising up, felt the soft carpet of needles under him. He wished Cisco and Brutus an easy run to green fields under a rolling sky with snow-peaked mountains in the far blue distance, and then he emptied his mind of all thought. His heart was beating slowly, his breathing was calm and steady, and when he exhaled he did it silently. The Winchester carbine had a big hollow-point round in the chamber and the hammer was cocked and the magazine held six rounds and he had ten more in his jacket pocket. Pete Kearney was ready.
5
London in the great all-surrounding English dark, a gleaming galaxy of city lights rising up at him through the cloud-rack and the fumes of the sprawling city, the pearl-string of lamps that ran along the banks of the wide curving Thames, the Gothic façade of the Parliament reflected in the broad run of the river by Westminster Bridge, the glittering disk of the Millennium Wheel slowly turning on the pier by the Jubilee Gardens as the shuddering Bell bore south for the Westland Heliport in Battersea, where a company driver — a woman named Serena Morgenstern, who looked to be about eleven — was waiting for him, leaning on a big blue Benz, her long black hair fluttering in the downdraft from the clattering machine, scraps of paper swirling into the cool weed-scented air, the lights of Chelsea across the river glimmering on the broad black waters of the Thames.
“Sir,” said Miss Morgenstern, bowing, giving him a meaningful look as she held the back door open for him. Dalton — groaning only a little — melted into the plush black leather. She closed the door with a solid Teutonic whump, rocking the machine on its springs hard enough to rouse Dalton from his confusion. He ruefully contemplated the back of her head as his driver slipped in behind the wheel, and eventually recalled with horror that she had been the girl who, after the last Christmas bun-fight, he had taken back to his flat on Wilton Row, where he had then failed quite dramatically to follow through on the agenda so clearly laid out in the protocols for these encounters.
As they rolled out onto Lombard heading for the Battersea Bridge, she confirmed his worst fears by giving him a raised eyebrow and an impish grin, which he found it possible — barely — to overcome thanks to a brutal hangover and the lingering effects of Cora’s Narcan shot. He put his head back into the rest and said, more to himself than to his driver, although she heard it anyway, and smiled when she did, “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
Dalton closed his eyes; his bones turned to lead and his blood to sand. Under the wheels the Battersea Bridge boomed with a deep metallic roar as Chelsea filled up the windshield. “Serena, got any coffee, at all?”
“Hot and hot, Mr. Dalton. In the cooler. There’s some doughnuts if you want them. And some crisps.”
Dalton, who knew what vile threats the English intended by the word “doughnut,” settled for a tall cup of strong black coffee poured straight from the pot. He leaned back again and watched the late-night strollers walking along the shops and pubs of King’s Road. He observed them with a detached out-of-body feeling, as if what was going on out there beyond the glass of the Benz was a hand-tinted film of a time long gone, all the people in it dead and their old bones burned.
Cup listing perilously in his lap, he was asleep by the time Serena pulled the limousine to a halt in front of Porter Naumann’s London town house at 28 Wilton Place in Belgravia, a four-story neoclassical town house with a white stone lower façade, a black spear-tipped wrought-iron fence surrounding a garden with two very large urns holding tall spiked dracaena, a black lacquered door between stained-glass lights, a polished brass plaque and three bricked upper floors, and tall sash windows neatly ordered row upon row, and all around the white-stone façades floated the settled comfortable air of compound interest and dependable stocks.