Shadow Watch

THREE

FROM AN ASSOCIATED PRESS BULLETIN:

When Nimec and Megan spotted the police cruiser, it was parked at the gravel shoulder of the road, about a car length behind a red Toyota pickup, its roof racks throwing off circus strobes of light.

The two officers, who had obviously arrived at the scene in it, were scuffling with a third man outside the pickup.

One of the lawmen was fortyish and burly and wore a Hancock County deputy’s uniform and badge. The other was perhaps twenty years younger and forty pounds leaner and wore a State of Maine warden’s uniform and badge. The civilian, a tall, dark-haired man in a green chamois shirt, tan goose-down vest, jeans, and hiking boots, was standing out on the road with his back pressed up against the driver’s door of his truck. The warden was jammed halfway inside the door, his head under the steering column, his body bent across the front seat, his backside sticking almost comically out of the cab. The deputy had the pickup driver’s collar bunched in his fist and was attempting to wrestle him away from the door, but he was putting up a hard fight, shoving the deputy back with one hand, throwing punches at his face and neck with the other. The cop had an open cut below his right eye. A pair of mirrored sunglasses lay on the blacktop near his feet, one lens popped out of the wire frame. He was shouting furiously in the pickup driver’s face, but neither Pete nor Megan could make out what he was saying through the windows of their Chevy.

“What in the world’s going on up there?” she asked, peering out her side of the windshield.

Nimec breathed deeply and slowed the car.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But you see the guy in the green shirt?”

She glanced over at him, reading his face. “Pete, don’t tell me.”

Nimec breathed again.

“Tom Ricci,” he said.

She looked outside again, rolling down her window to try and hear what the shouting was about.

Unable to pry him away from the truck, the thickset deputy had switched tactics and moved in on Ricci, throwing his greater weight against him, getting him in a clinch. Standing his ground, Ricci caught him on the cheek with two quick overhand punches, then followed through with a right uppercut to the jaw. The deputy rocked backward on his heels, breaking his hold, his Smokey the Bear hat sailing off his head to the ground, where it flipped over once and then landed beside the broken sunglasses.

“You crazy son of a flatlander bitch!” he shouted, spitting blood. “I’m tellin’ you, move away from that door or you’re gonna be in deeper shit than you already are!”

Ricci stood there looking at him, hands balled into fists. The warden he’d pinned in the door squirmed a little, and Ricci kicked him in the back of the shin with his heel. A string of curses gushed from inside the cab.

Ricci seemed to pay no attention to them. Nor were any of the men yet paying attention to the Chevrolet that had eased to a halt some ten yards down the road.

“I already explained how it has to work,” Ricci told the deputy. “I get to keep my product, your boy Cobbs gets to pull his ass out of the air. Otherwise we can all stick around here from now till Saint Swithen’s Day.”

The deputy wiped his mouth, glanced at the red-flecked saliva on his hand, and spat again.

“You got balls,” he said, glaring. “Givin’ me orders, expectin’ me to believe some concoction about—”

“The catch is legit, Phipps.”

“Says you. As Cobbs tells it, you ’n’ your crackpot tender were way out past your zone.”

“We can talk about Dex later. You and Cobbs saw my license.”

“But I didn’t see where your boat was, or where you was divin‘, or where you come up, and besides, that’s all his area of respons’bility.” Phipps poked his chin out at the pickup. “You let Cobbs be ’n’ leave us the totes without any more carryin’ on, maybe I let you slide for assaultin’ an officer.”

“Two officers! Don’t you let the wicked fuck forget about me, Phipps!” Cobbs shouted from inside the cab. His head was still wedged beneath the steering wheel. “Don’t you goddamn let him—”

Ricci kicked Cobbs with the heel of his boot again and his sentence ended in a yelp of pain.

Phipps released a heavy sigh.

“Two officers,” he said.

“Two crooked officers.”

Phipps frowned indignantly.

“That’s it, no more crap from you,” he said, dropping his hand to his holster and bringing out his side arm, a.45 Colt automatic.

In the Chevy, Megan turned to Nimec.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “Looks like trouble.”

He nodded and reached for his door handle.

“Sit tight,” he said.

“Pete, you sure it’s wise to—”

“No,” he said. “I’m not.”

And then shouldered open the door, exited the car, and walked toward the pickup over the narrow country road.

That was when Sheriff’s Deputy Phipps seemed to take notice of him — belatedly and for the first time. He cast a quick glance at Nimec, then past him at the parked Chevy, keeping the pistol trained on Ricci… who had also partially turned in Nimec’s direction.

“You blind, mister?” Phipps said. One eye on him, the other on Ricci. “Or did you just happen to miss what’s going on here?”

Nimec shrugged.

“Tourist,” he said. “We’ve been waiting awhile.”

The deputy said nothing. He looked at the Chevy again, this time suspiciously checking out its front tag.

“It’s a rental,” Nimec said. Stalling, trying to cook up some kind of plan that would extricate Ricci, not to mention himself, from the situation.

Whatever the hell the situation was.

“Wife and I are headed for Stonington,” he said. “Figured I’d ask when we might be able to pass.”

Phipps stared at him, vexed and confused.

“You see,” Nimec said, “we’ve got reservations at an inn that they’ll only hold for another half hour. And being that we just drove all the way up from Portland on Route 1—”

“Which is what you’re gonna have to swing back around onto,” Phipps interrupted. “Right this minute.”

Nimec shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “Can’t do that.”

Phipps looked incredulous. “What did you say?”

“Can’t do that,” Nimec repeated, knowing he’d really stepped into it now. “There aren’t any other inns open. Being that this is the off-season.”

Phipps flushed. Though he was still pointing his gun at Ricci, his attention had turned fully to Nimec.

“Another fuckin’ flatlander, why the fuck we let them people into the fuckin’ state of Maine?” Cobb screamed from inside the truck, his voice only slightly muffled. “You better arrest the whole queer bunch of them, Phipps, ’cause my back’s gonna snap like a twig I stay stooped over like this!”

Phipps eyed Nimec with a kind of hostile exasperation, unconsciously wagging his head, looking uncertain about what to do next.

An instant later Ricci made the decision for him. Taking advantage of Phipps’s distraction, he suddenly stepped away from the door of the pickup, caught hold of his outstretched gun hand at the wrist, and bent it sharply backward, simultaneously turning sideways and snatching the pistol with his free hand.

Phipps released a cry of pain and surprise as the pistol was torn from his grasp. He was still gaping in disbelief when Ricci’s leg snapped forward and up in a powerful front kick, the ball of his foot striking him in the broad, chunky stretch of his stomach. The air whoofing out of him, he stumbled backward and landed hard on his bottom, his legs wishboned in front of him.

Cobbs, meanwhile, had pulled his head out of the pickup’s open door and come charging at Ricci from behind. But before he had gotten more than a couple of feet, Ricci spun in a smooth circle on his left leg, his right leg swinging parallel to the ground and thrusting out at the knee, catching Cobbs in the groin with a roundhouse kick. He flew back against the side of the car and doubled over, groaning, his hands between his thighs.

Ricci ejected the Colt’s magazine and tossed it into the spindling roadside brush, then shoved the gun into his vest pocket. Nodding at him, Nimec rushed over to Cobb and took his pistol from its holster. Its clip joined the one that was already in the bushes.

Ricci knelt over Phipps and patted down the bottom of his trouser legs.

“Nothing there to say peekaboo?” he said.

Phipps glared and shook his head.

“Okay,” Ricci told him, stepping back. “Here’s how it goes. We’re all driving off, me with my catch, you two without your guns, our friendly tourist with his nice wife and rental car. You forget about this thing, maybe I don’t report the little scam you and Cobbs tried running on me to Fish and Game or the attorney general’s office down in Augusta. You really behave yourselves, maybe I won’t tell anybody in town how I kicked both your asses and disarmed you barehanded. In two seconds flat.”

Phipps continued glaring at him in baleful silence for another moment, then slowly nodded.

“Good,” Ricci said. “Stay right where you are until I’m gone. Ground needs thawing anyway.”

Phipps snorted, hawked over his shoulder, and looked back up at him. “How the hell am I supposed to explain losing my gun?”

Ricci shrugged.

“Your problem,” he said.

Behind them, Cobbs was still leaning against the pickup, moaning and clutching himself. Ricci turned, strode over to him, grabbed his shoulder, and shoved him roughly away from the truck. Cobbs tripped and fell on his side, drawing his knees toward his chest.

Ricci looked at Nimec, then moved up close to him.

“Poor bastard should’ve kept his hands off my ignition keys,” he said in a voice too low for the others to hear. “Welcome to Vacationland, Pete. Better get back in your car and follow along behind me. I’ll explain everything once we’re at my place.”

They had come in from the rugged plateau country of Chapada dos Guimarães, a convoy of four dusty jeeps bumping along the unpaved track in the deepening dusk, traversing the seventy kilometers to their destination with arduous slowness. After many long hours of riding shotgun in the forward car, Kuhl had finally seen the compound through a break in the overhanging foliage, and then ordered their headlights dimmed and their vehicles pulled off the road.

Once under cover of the trees, he turned to his driver. “Que horas são?”

The driver showed him the luminous dial of his wristwatch.

Kuhl studied it a moment without comment. Then he glanced over his seat rest and nodded to the man behind him.

“Vaya aqui, Antonio.”

Antonio returned the nod. He was dressed entirely in black and had a Barrett M82A1 sniper’s rifle across his lap. Accurate to a range exceeding a mile, it utilized the same self-loading, armor-piercing.50-caliber ammunition normally fired by heavy machine guns — bullets capable of pounding through an inch or more of solid steel armor. The weapon’s incredible firepower and semiautomatic action were its notable advantages over other sniper guns. On the negative side, it was weighty, long-barreled, and would kick back with a recoil matching its destructive performance. But Antonio’s targets would be shielded, and he would need to penetrate that shield at a considerable distance.

Slinging the Barrett over his shoulder, he opened his door and slipped from the jeep into the darkness.

Kuhl settled back and looked out the windshield. His team was right on schedule despite the wearisome inconveniences of their ride. There was nothing to do now except wait for Antonio to complete his work, and then for the others to arrive and give their signal. Perhaps he would even be able to glimpse them coming over the treetops.

They sat in absolute silence, hard, lean men in black combat outfits, their faces daubed from chin to forehead with camouflage paint. All but the sniper who’d gone on ahead carried French FAMAS assault rifles fitted with modular high-explosive munition launchers and day/ night target-tracking systems.

Still undergoing field trials by the French military, these adaptations of the standard FAMAS guns represented the state of the art in small arms, and were not slated for mass production or issuance to general infantry troops until 2003—two full years in the future.

Kuhl always made it a point to stay ahead of the game. It cost money, true, but unless one was willing to accept failure, the expense was more than acceptable. And he himself was paid handsomely enough that he didn’t mind spreading the wealth.

Impatient, he raised his night-vision goggles to his eyes, swung them from the compound’s checkpoint gate to the pair of men occupying its sentry booth, then studied the irregular outline of the buildings that lay beyond. He wanted nothing more than to get moving. While his team might be outside the observable range of the compound’s guards, he had seen enough in his mercenary career to know that only a fool or an amateur neglected to consider the unpredictable, and that each passing second brought an increased risk of discovery. It mattered little how well they formulated their plans, or how careful they were in bringing about their execution.

Secrecy, he thought. It was an essential requirement of his profession, and yet the very idea paradoxically seemed a joke. In an age when satellites could photograph a mole on your chin from somewhere up in space, there were no true blind spots, and nobody was ever out of sight for long. The best one could wish for was temporary concealment. If his men failed at that, if they were noticed too soon, all their elaborate precautions would be worthless.

Kuhl sat, watched, and waited. In his taut silence, he could almost feel that gigantic, damnable eye overhead, looking down, pressing down. Seeing what it wanted to see, peering through every shadow, its relentless gaze scouring the world….

Yes, Kuhl felt it up there, he did, and was only hoping it would once again blink as he went about the lucrative business of destruction.

“There’s smoke in the cabin. Elevated CA 19-9 and CA 125 levels. LH2 pressure’s dropping. Terra nos respuet. ”

Annie feels her book about to slip off her lap, catches it just in the nick of time. She blinks once or twice, completely out of sorts, guessing she’d sunk into a light sleep while reading on her sofa.

She had been reading, hadn’t she?

She readjusts the book and glances up at the man standing in front of her, the man whose voice startled her from her doze. In his midfifties, he has reddish-brown hair, a full mustache, and is wearing a white doctor’s frock. Phil Lieberman, she thinks. The oncologist who has taken over her husband’s case, not exactly the type to make house calls. She wonders what he’s doing in her living room, wonders whether one of the kids might have let him in the door… but then suddenly realizes that this isn’t her living room after all, isn’t even part of her home, and that the children are nowhere around her.

She straightens, blinks again, rubs her eyes.

The chair on which she is sitting is contoured plastic. The air has a recycled quality and carries commingled antiseptic and medicinal smells. The walls are an institutional noncolor.

It abruptly dawns on her that she is in the hospital.

In the hospital, in the third-floor waiting room that has become so numbingly familiar over these past few months, and where she must have dropped off like a stone with an open book on her lap. The hospital, of course. However strange it might ordinarily seem for her to have forgotten, these are far from ordinary days, and her brief disorientation is understandable in view of what’s been happening in her life. She has gone for weeks with precious little rest, rushing from her husband’s bedside to her training sessions at the Center and back again, trying not to neglect the kids amid her compounding pressures. It would not be the first time lately that the effort of keeping everything together has caught up to her without warning.

Looking at the doctor, she begins fidgeting nervously with the edges of the book — actually, she sees now, it is a magazine, a dog-eared copy of Newsweek with a featured piece about upcoming space shuttle launches connected with the ISS program — the magazine, then, that is spread across her thighs. The doctor’s expression is unrevealing, his voice without intonation, but there is a sobriety in his eyes that sends a cold, silent shiver running through her.

“Like the old Titan rockets,” he says. “Third stage fires, you’re up and out. ”

“What?” she says. “What was it you—”

“Mark’s latest tests, we need to discuss their results, ” he interrupts with the kind of patronizing abruptness medical professionals seem to take as their right, an exalted privilege bestowed on them the moment they recite the Hippocratic Oath. It is as though even the ones capable of showing some compassion — and Annie acknowledges that Lieberman has, by and large, been decent with her — must insist on reminding you they have other patients, other cases, more urgent demands than having to explain their findings.

“Laparoscopic exam revealed metastic tumors in the liver and gallbladder,” he says rapidly. “Statistically common once the disease has spread from the intestine to so many of its associated lymph nodes. Would have had a better chance with three lymphomas, but five is quite a bad crop. Very, very unfortunate. ”

Annie sits very still as she listens, but can feel herself crumbling from the inside out, truly crumbling, as if her soul is made of brittle, hundred-year-old plaster. She gives him a decimated look.

“He’ll be gone in five months,” she says, the absolute certainty behind those words filling her with horror and bewilderment. She feels weirdly detached from the sound of her own voice, almost as if she hasn’t really spoken at all, but is listening to a tape recording of herself, or maybe even some flawless impersonation issuing from a concealed intercom.

Dr. Lieberman regards her a moment in that serious yet matter-of-fact way of his. Then he shrugs his sleeve back from his wristwatch, glances down at it, and holds it out to her, turning his arm to display the dial.

“Yes, five months, three days, to be precise,” he says. “We’re on the fast track now. Time runs by until there’s none left. ”

Perplexed by his comment, Annie looks at the watch.

Her eyes quickly grow enormous.

Its face is a blank white circle. Perfectly featureless, without digits, hands, or markings of any kind.

She feels another chunk of herself give way.

Blank.

The face of the watch is blank.

“Stay calm, Annie, it tends to run a bit ahead,” Lieberman says. “There’s still a chance for you to say good-bye. ”

Annie suddenly finds herself out of her chair, and this time makes no attempt to catch her magazine as it spills off her thighs, landing on the floor at her feet. From the corner of her eye, she sees that the cover, which has partially folded under one of the interior pages, consists of a photo of a shuttle and launch tower consumed by a roiling ball of flame. Its bold red copy — also less than altogether visible from where she stands — screams something about an explosion involving Orion, one of the mid-schedule ISS assembly flights.

Confusion churns within her. How can this be? Orion’s mission is still a couple of years off, and besides, the article had been an overview of the ISS program… at least she’d thought it had…

All at once Annie isn’t sure she remembers, just as she’d initially been unable to remember being at the hospital. Her memory seems a flat, slippery surface without depth or width.

“Your husband is in Room 377. But you already know that, you’ve been there before,” Dr. Lieberman is saying. He gestures toward the far end of the corridor. “Not often enough, perhaps, although I’m no one to talk. We’re both busy professionals. ”

Annie watches Lieberman turn in the opposite direction, her eyes following him as he starts up the hall. While his voice had remained neutral, that last remark had been superloaded with accusation, and she is unwilling to let it pass. He might think it is his God-given prerogative to relate his test results without climbing down off his perch to tell her what he means to do about them, but if there is some criticism he wants to level at her, then he damn well ought to be saying it in plain English.

She starts to call out to him, but before she can utter a sound, Lieberman pauses and looks back at her, giving her a thumbs-up.

“Turnips first and always,” he says, and grins. “I’d advise you to hurry. ”

Then he tips her a little salute and hustles up the hall, dwindling in perspective like a motion picture character about to vanish over the horizon.

I’d advise you to hurry.

Her heart stroking in her chest, she forgets about Lieberman and whirls toward the room in which her husband lies dying.

In instant later Annie is standing at its door. Breathless, she feels like she’s come running over to it at full tilt, yet has no sense of her legs having carried her from the waiting room, of physically moving from point A to point B, of transition. It is as if she’d been staring at Lieberman’s back one moment, and found herself here in front of the door the next, trying to stop herself from falling to pieces in spite of the death sentence that has been pronounced upon her husband.

For his sake, trying to hold up.

She takes a deep gulp of air, another. Then she reaches for the doorknob, turns it, and steps through into the room.

The light inside is all wrong.

Odd as it may be for her to register this before anything else, it is nevertheless what happens. The light is wrong. Not exactly dim, but diffuse enough to severely limit her vision. Although she can see the foot of her husband’s bed without any problem, things start to blur immediately beyond it. As if through a layer of gauze, she sees the tubes, fluid drains, and monitor wires that run to the bed, sees the outline of Mark’s legs under the blankets, sees that he is resting on his back, but his face…

She thinks suddenly of those televised news reports in which someone’s features are concealed to protect his or her anonymity, the sort that might involve use of a hidden camera, or show crime suspects being led toward their arraignments by the police. Pictures in which it almost looks as if Vaseline has been dabbed over the part of the frame in which the person’s face ought to appear.

That is how Annie sees her husband from the doorway of Room 377 in the hospital where he will die of cancer in five months and three days. Five months, three days that have somehow collapsed into a dreadful and inexplicable now.

“Annie?”

Mark’s voice is a hoarse whisper. Its weakness shakes Annie, and for an instant she thinks she is going to burst into tears. She covers her trembling lips with her palm.

“Annie, that you?”

She stands there, trying to regain her composure, the room silent except for the quiet beeping of the instruments at Mark’s bedside. The fuzziness of the light makes her feel strangely lost and isolated, like a small boat adrift in fog.

Finally she lowers her hand from her mouth.

“Yes,” she says. “It’s me, hon. I’m here. ”

He slips his right arm partially out from under his blankets and beckons her with a feeble wave. His face is still a blur, but she has no difficulty seeing the gesture.

Her eyes fall briefly on the sleeve of his pajama.

“Come over here, Annie, ” he says. “Hard to talk when you’re standing there by the door. ”

She steps forward into the room. His sleeve. Something about it isn’t right, something about the color of it—

“Come on, what are you waiting for?” he says. Pulling his arm further out from underneath his blankets and tapping the safety rail of his bed. “You belong with me. ”

There is a harshness in Mark’s voice, an anger that has become huge within him in recent days — but although Annie often brushes up against its sharp outer edges, she is aware that the cancer is its real target. In the beginning it had flared up from beneath the surface only on occasion, but its progression has matched that of the disease, consuming him, ravaging his personality. He is resentful of his loss of independence, resentful of his inability to care for himself, resentful of his neediness… and beyond all else resentful of having his future stolen from him by something as insipid and indiscriminate as an uncontrollable growth of cells. Annie has come to accept those feelings as constants that she is helpless to relieve, and can only hope to skirt past on delicate tiptoes.

She wades through the filmy light toward her husband. His IV stand and the wall of beeping instruments are on the left side of the bed, so she walks around its foot to the right and rolls back his plastic hospital tray in order to approach him.

Suddenly his hand reaches over the safety rail and clutches her wrist.

“Give it to us, Annie, ” he says. “Let’s hear how sorry you are. ”

She stands there in shock as his fingers press into her with impossible strength.

“We trusted you,” he says.

His fingers are digging deeper into the soft white flesh under her wrist, hurting her now. Though Annie knows they will leave bruises, she does not attempt to pull away. She looks at Mark across the bed, wishing she could see his face, mystified by his words. Their hostility is more intense, more cuttingly directed at her than at any time in the past, but she can’t understand why.

“Mark, please, tell me what you mean—”

“My girl,” he breaks in. “Always in a hurry, rushing from one place to another without a look back. ”

She winces as his grip tightens.

Us. We.

Who can he be talking about? Himself and the kids?

Annie can scarcely guess.

No, that isn’t the truth. Not really.

The simple, inescapable truth is that she’s afraid to guess.

His grip tightens.

She wishes she could see his face.

“You were supposed to be responsible. Supposed to look out for us, ” he says.

Annie still doesn’t pull away, absolutely refuses to pull away. Instead she moves closer to him, pressing up against the bed rail, thinking if she could just see his face, if they could just see each other eye-to-eye, he would stop this nonsense about her leaving him—

The thought is abruptly clipped short as her eyes once again fall on his sleeve. The color, yes, the color, how had she failed to identify it right away? She doesn’t know the answer, but realizes now that what he’s wearing isn’t a pajama, its carrot-red color and heavy padded fabric marking it as, of all things, all impossible things under the sun, a NASA flight/reentry suit. At the same instant this occurs to her, the quiet beep of the instruments measuring her husband’s vital functions pitches up to a shrill alarm, an earsplitting sound she recognizes from some other place, some other when.

It is a sound that makes her gasp with horror.

The faceless man in the bed is shouting at her at the top of his voice: “H2 pressure’s dropping! Look for yourself! Check the readings!”

On impulse, Annie shoots her gaze over to the right side of the bed, recognizes the forward consoles of a space shuttle where she had seen hospital instruments only moments before. For some reason this causes her little surprise. She takes in the various panels with a series of hurried glances, her eyes leaping from the master alarm lights to the smoke-detection indicators on the left-hand panel of the commander’s console, and then over to the main engine status displays below the center CRT.

Again, what she sees is not unexpected.

“Stay calm, Annie, we’re on the fast track now! Better reach for that ejection lever or nobody’s making it home!” the man in the bed practically howls, and then wrenches her arm with such violence that she stumbles off balance and crashes forward against the rail. She flies across it, whimpering, throwing out her free hand to check her fall. It lands on the mattress beside him, preventing her from sprawling clear across his chest.

“The world spits us up and out, so where’s our goddamned parachute?”

He keeps holding onto her right arm, keeps shouting at Annie as she braces herself up over him with her left. Though their faces are just inches apart, his features are still too distorted for her to make them out.

Then, suddenly, the sense of disconnection she had experienced in the waiting room recurs for a fleeting moment, only now it is as if she’s been split in two, part of her watching the scene from high above while the other struggles with the man on the bed. And with this feeling comes the whole and certain knowledge that his face would not belong to her husband if she could see it; no, not her husband, but someone else she has loved in a very different way, loved and lost. Annie doesn’t understand how she knows, but she does, she does, and the knowledge terrifies her, seeming to rise on the crest of a building hysteria.

“Where’s our goddamned parachute?” he shouts again, and yanks hard at her wrist, pulling her down onto himself. As she finally tries to break away, Annie catches another glimpse of his clutching fingers… and sees for the first time that they are horribly burned, the fingernails gone, the outer layer of skin sloughing off the knuckles, baring raw, strawberry-red flesh underneath.

She wants to scream, tells herself she must scream, thinking… still without knowing why… that it might somehow bring her ordeal to an end. But it refuses to come, it is trapped in her throat, and all she can do is produce a small cry of anguish that is torn to shreds by her vocal cords even as she wrings it out of them—

Annie awakened with a jolt, her heart knocking in her chest, the trailing edge of a moan on her mouth. She had broken out in a cold sweat, her T-shirt plastered to her body.

She looked around, taking a series of deep breaths, shaking her head as if to cast off the lacy remnants of her dream.

She was home. In Houston, in her living room, on her sofa. From the TV in the kids’ room she could hear the Teletubbies carrying on with manic effervescence. On the carpet at her feet, her newspaper was still folded to the article she’d been reading when she’d fallen into an exhausted sleep. Its headline read: “AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY.” Above the columns of text was a photo of Orion in its catastrophic final moments.

Annie bent her head and covered her stinging eyes with her palm.

She’d flown back from the Center after having been there since very early that morning and attended meeting after meeting in which the participants — NASA executives, government officials, and representatives of the various shuttle and ISS contractors — had ostensibly been trying to sift through what they knew about the accident and lay out a preliminary framework for an investigation into its causes. Instead, they had spent the majority of the time staring at one another in dazed silence.

Perhaps, Annie thought, it had been a mistake to expect anything more constructive so soon after the explosion. At any rate, she had felt nothing but a sense of leaden futility by the end of the final session, and been grateful for the chance to go home.

Home sweet home, where she could take her mind off what had happened, enjoy some light reading and a refreshing nap before getting started on dinner.

Her hand still clapped over her eyes, she felt a small, bleak smile touch her lips.

An instant later the tears began streaming between her fingers.

The Barrett rifle against his shoulder, his cheek to its stock, Antonio aligned his target in the crosshairs of its high-magnification sight.

Moments after leaving Kuhl’s vehicle, he had scurried up a tree that afforded a direct line of fire with the guard station, and was now half-sitting, half-squatting in the fork of its trunk, his feet braced on two strong branches. The thirty-pound weapon ordinarily required a bipod for support, but here on his treetop perch he’d been able to rest its barrel over his upraised knees.

He inhaled, exhaled, gathering his concentration. A series of dry trigger pulls had helped him find a comfortable body position and make minor adjustments to his aim. He would be shooting across a distance of over nine hundred yards, and could not afford to be even slightly off balance.

There were two guards inside the booth. One stood at a coffeemaker, pouring from its glass pot into a cup. The other sat over some papers at a small metal desk. He would be the second kill. The man on his feet would have greater mobility, and a mobile target always had the best chance of escape, requiring that it be the first to be taken out.

Antonio took another inhalation, held it. The guard at the coffee machine had filled his cup and was putting the pot back on its warming pad. He raised the coffee to his lips, but would never get a chance to drink it. In a practical sense he was already dead. The booth’s bullet-resistant window would be easily penetrated by the tungston-carbide SLAP rounds chambered in Antonio’s weapon, doing the men behind it no good at all.

“Mi mano, su vida,” he whispered, releasing his breath. As always before a kill, he felt very close to God.

He pulled smoothly on the trigger of his weapon, his eye and forefinger welded in seamless action.

His gun bucked. A bullet split the air. The window shattered. The guard spun where he stood and went down, the coffee cup flying from his hand.

Antonio breathed again, took aim again.

Still behind his desk, the second guard barely had the time to turn toward his crumpled partner before another bullet whistled in from the night and caught him in the left temple, tearing through his skull and snapping him up and out of his seat.

The sniper remained in position a short while longer, wanting to be thorough, watchful of any hint of movement in the sentry booth. Nothing stirred in the pale yellow light spilling from its blown-out window. Satisfied he’d gotten two clean kills, he shouldered the rifle, and was about to slip from the tree when a fluttering sound overhead gave him momentary pause.

A glance up through the foliage revealed that he’d been none too hasty in executing his task.

The jump team had arrived and was descending from the darkness.