Later, after two more rounds, LittleWolf invited him to follow them back to Crow Agency. “We’ve got a place where we can party,” she said. She looked into his eyes without a hint of guile, and for a moment he saw Alisha again.
“I’ll have to pass,” he said.
“You don’t like dark meat, either?” Alexander said, teasing him.
“Actually, I do,” Nate said. “But I don’t like that term. There’s no dignity in it.”
Chastened, they gathered their purses and shoes. He saw them to their pickup but didn’t follow.
• • •
THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, Saturday, he’d stayed hidden with his spotting scope and noted the routine of the Scoggins compound. There had been no more women brought in, and there were no outside visitors. The three outside thugs went into the main house as the sun set, and apparently had dinner at the same time as Scoggins and Thug One. They remained there for an hour, then drifted away one by one to a guesthouse located between the main house and the gate. The lights remained on in the guesthouse until twelve-fifteen a.m.
Not surprisingly, there were two house staff who exited the main house after the three thugs had gone. A middle-aged man and woman crossed the grounds from the house to a tiny cottage on the edge of the property. Nate guessed by their dress that the woman was the cook and the man was her assistant, and possibly an all-around maintenance staffer for the property. They held hands as they walked under an overhead light. Nate was charmed, and vowed to himself that no harm would come to them.
It took longer for Scoggins and Thug One to go to sleep. Light from the second-floor windows—Nate guessed it was Scoggins’s room, since it took up the entire floor—remained on until one-thirty. A ground-floor light in the corner was off at midnight. It made sense that the primary bodyguard, Thug One, would be located between the front door and the stairs to Scoggins’s floor. On the other corner of the main house opposite from Thug One, a dim light remained on the entire night. Nate guessed it was the security center, where someone sat awake with the CC monitors flickering from all the cameras on the grounds. He wondered about motion detectors, and assumed they were there somewhere.
With a choked-down mini Maglite clenched between his teeth, Nate drew a sketch on a fresh page of his notebook. He outlined the main house, the outbuildings, the guesthouse, the cottage, the wall, and the gate. Within the grounds, he drew circles with a CC inside to designate each camera. Then he scratched three large X’s to symbolize the three thugs in the guesthouse, two more for Thug One and the security administrator in the main house, and a dollar sign for Scoggins himself.
• • •
NATE HAD DETERMINED by his surveillance there was no way to access the Scoggins property from the road without a small army, which he didn’t have and didn’t want. And there was no way to sneak across it in the dark without being captured by video or confronted by bodyguards. If motion detectors were installed, Nate guessed they’d be concentrated between the wall and gate and the compound.
But like the other huge homes along the small strip of private land, Scoggins’s home fronted the water. That way, he could sit inside with a drink behind car-sized sheets of glass and see the river as the sun set or rose. Guided fly fishermen could look at his place with envy and wonder as they floated by. The ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT GETTING OUT OF YOUR BOAT and VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs—plus the rotating closed-circuit video camera and five-strand razor-wire fence—kept them out.
Having the magnificent log house on open display to the river was an act of vanity.
And it was Nate’s means of accessing the property.
Or, as his employer would say, Go do some good.
• • •
NATE MANEUVERED THE DRIFT BOAT into the slow current that hugged the right bank of the river as he approached the Scoggins compound. Thick willows bent overhead and created a black shadow that he floated through. His senses were tuned up high, and he felt more than saw or heard the presence of the compound around the next slight bend to his right. He eased the boat against the willows until the hull thumped against the grassy bank and he reached up and grabbed a handful of branches to pull him in tighter. Slowly, quietly, he grasped the rope between his feet and lowered the anchor in back until it held and stopped the boat. He swung his boots over the gunwale and stood in the cold water. It was knee-deep.
He stayed hard against the wall of willows as he waded silently downstream. After no more than a dozen steps, lights from the compound strobed through the brush and he knew that the stand of willows would end to reveal a long grassy slope all the way up to the log home. He was already behind the river fence. If he walked out in the clear, he could be seen by the closed-circuit camera that swept back and forth along the bank. It was mounted on the side of a river cottonwood and accompanied by a motion detector. Because of the roaming wildlife that hugged the river, Nate guessed the motion detector sounded off periodically throughout the night and would likely not alarm the technician inside. But a screen shot of him on a monitor certainly would.
In the shadows, Nate unbuckled his compression pack and reversed it so it covered his chest. He unzipped the top. For easy access, the items inside had been packed in the reverse order they were to be used.
For seven full minutes, Nate stood hidden in the river with his eyes closed, going over his plan. Not that something wouldn’t go wrong—it always did. The trick was to try and anticipate the surprise problems as best he could and come up with options on the fly. His assignment was to kill Henry P. Scoggins III, but with a twist of his own. The twist was important to him.
And if his plans blew up once they were under way, he had to keep the endgame in mind. Even if the result was a bloodbath he hoped to avoid.
• • •
WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES, the night seemed lighter, brighter, and suddenly charged with anticipation. The river sounds behind him were louder and more full-throated. He could distinctly smell the odors and perfumes of the world around him: the tinny smell of the moving river, the decayed mud that swirled in the current he’d stirred up along the bank, sage from the hills beyond the river, even cooking smells that lingered from the log house itself. He took a deep breath, held it, and slowly expelled it through his nostrils.
It was then he realized he was not alone in the stand of brush.
Less than three feet away was a heavy-bodied mule deer doe, her big eyes fixed on him and her large ears cupped in his direction. He instinctively reached across his body for his weapon, but paused as his hand gripped the butt of his revolver. Now that he saw her, he noticed he could smell her as well; musky, dank, sage on her breath. His movement had not spooked her out of the willows.
In falconry parlance, the state of yarak is defined as: “full of stamina, well muscled, alert, neither too fat nor too thin, perfect condition for hunting and killing prey. This state is rarely achieved but a wonder to behold when observed.”
Nate was as close to yarak as a human could be.
The mule deer could help him. She could be his partner. He noticed she was trembling, ready to spring away.
He whispered, “Go.”
She did, and with a crash of snapped willows the deer bounded from the brush into the clearing.
Nate moved swiftly, emerging from the brush right behind her, keeping the trunk of the tree between him and the CC camera. The boxy snout of the camera was pointed downriver but rotating in his direction as he approached it. The deer veered away from the tree and continued bouncing—boing-boing-boing—along the fence. As Nate ran straight toward the camera, he reached into the top of his pack and unfurled a black cloth sack that he threw over both the camera and mount before it could view him. It was like placing a hood over the head of a falcon, and he cinched the drawstring tight and stood back. The camera still rotated inside the sack, and it resembled the head of a man looking from s
ide to side.
There was another distant snapping of willows and cattails as the mule deer vanished into the brush on the other side of the clearing. No doubt the motion detector had signaled the intrusion. Perhaps the camera had caught a fleeting look at the doe—his partner—as she bounded through its field of view.
“Thank you,” Nate said to the deer.
Then he stepped back into the shadows of the willows and checked his watch and waited.
• • •
IT TOOK TWENTY-TWO MINUTES, much longer than he had estimated, before he heard the slamming of a door at the log house and heavy footfalls on their way down to the river. That it had taken the technician so long to realize his riverside camera was out confirmed to Nate that the man wasn’t anticipating trouble. Or he was simply incompetent. That bodes well, Nate thought to himself. He hoped the other thugs would be as thick.
A harsh orb of white light from a flashlight moved down the sloping grass lawn in front of the technician. Nate squinted and turned his head and followed it in his peripheral vision. It was a trick he’d learned years before in the Third World for maintaining his night sight. A blast of the flashlight in his eyes would blind him momentarily if he let it happen, and he couldn’t risk it.
He heard the footfalls stop less than twelve feet away, and heard a man say to himself, “What the fuck?”
Meaning the technician was illuminating the black hood covering the camera with the beam of his flashlight and probably wondering what it was.
Nate hurled himself from the willows like a blitzing linebacker going after the quarterback on his blind side. He dived low so his full weight would take out the legs of the technician.
The man made an umpf sound as he was hit and his flashlight flew into the air. The butt of a shotgun grazed Nate’s shoulders as he took the man down, and he quickly turned and swarmed him and wrenched the long gun away and threw it aside.
Before the technician could cry out, Nate jammed a spare black hood into his mouth with his left hand and chopped hard across the bridge of the man’s nose with his right. He heard the muffled crack of bone and smelled the hot metallic flood of blood.
The technician didn’t put up much of a fight—that usually happened from the immediate result of a broken nose—and he went suddenly limp with shock and pain. Nate rolled the technician over on his stomach and bound his hands behind his back with one of the plastic zip-tie cuff restraints he kept in the side pocket of his pack. He pulled it tight. He did the same with the technician’s ankles, and used an additional thirty-inch zip tie to hog-tie the man so he couldn’t move. Nate had done it all very quickly, he thought, and with the speed and panache of a steer roper used to winning money at the rodeo.
Nate rifled through the technician’s cargo pants and baggy shirt. There weren’t any more weapons, and Nate found a cell phone, a small walkie-talkie (turned off), loose change, a billfold, two loose marijuana joints—the reason it had taken him so long to respond?—and tossed it all into the willows. The technician’s clothing and thick hair smelled of weed.
Nate rocked back on his haunches and surveyed the slope up to the log home and the outbuildings beyond it. There was no sound or movement, no lights suddenly coming on from Thug One’s level or from the guesthouse.
He dragged the limp body of the technician out of the moonlight and left him in the shadows of the willows, then ducked inside the cover to circumnavigate the compound from the wooded right side.
• • •
WHEN NATE REEMERGED from the tangle of downed timber and river cottonwoods, the guesthouse was before him. He paused and let his breathing slow, noting the lack of movement, sound, or lights from within the building. It was a log-constructed home in the same style of the main house, only much smaller and on one level. He kept the guesthouse between himself and one of the lawn-mounted cameras he’d noted during his reconnaissance and flattened himself against the exterior wall on the left side of the front door. It was a steel door in a steel frame but had been painted to look like wood. He could hear rhythmic snoring from inside.
He drew a glue gun with the long tube of aircraft adhesive from his pack and uncapped the nozzle. The substance was strong enough to be used to bond ceramic tiles to the space shuttle. He could smell a strong whiff of the quick-drying epoxy in the still night air as he carefully wedged the tip of the tube between the door and doorjamb, then worked a glistening bead of it across the top of the threshold and down the side of the door itself. He pumped a little extra near the latch and strike plate to figuratively weld the mechanism in place.
Nate left the porch and kept his head down as he circled the house, leaving snail tracks of epoxy along the bottom of all the closed windows in their frames. He replicated the procedure on the back door, and waited a few minutes for the glue to dry. He risked tugging on the back door and found it bound tight.
He capped the glue gun and stowed it away in his pack and turned toward the main house. Nate had decided to not worry about the older couple in the bungalow.
• • •
ALTHOUGH HE APPROACHED the front door of the main log house by zigzagging from tree to tree across the lawn, Nate had no doubt that his image was being captured by video sweeps from the closed-circuit cameras, and that additional motion detectors were noting his movements. But since the technician was bound up near the river and there was no clicking on of lights or discernible movement from within the main house, he banked on the assumption that the technician had been alone with no backup.
Nate paused at the heavy front door and stared at the keypad. A wrong combination might trigger an additional alarm that could wake Thug One and Scoggins inside.
He reached down and punched 4-2-2-8.
A tiny red light pulsed on the side of the keypad, but there was no internal sound that indicated the door had unlocked. He could hear no alarm inside.
Nate drew his .500 Wyoming Express with his right hand and held the long-barreled weapon tight against his right thigh and punched 4-2-2-9 with his left index finger. There was a thunk from the locking mechanism, and Nate pushed the door open as a single high chime rang out inside.
He entered quickly and eased the door shut behind him and raised his weapon. He hadn’t been able to see inside the home before, and had only guessed at its layout. He found himself in a dark vestibule at the mouth of a great room. Coats and jackets hung from pegs on the vestibule wall, and there was a neat row of shoes and boots.
Because of the chime, his senses were on high alert. Who would have guessed a chime would ring out when the door was opened?
Nate entered the great room and felt it open up above his head. There were sconces on the walls emitting very dim light, and he took it in: heavy leather furniture draped with Navajo rugs, pine interior walls, framed paintings of fish and wildlife, a huge hoary bison head above the fireplace—all very western chic. A wide carpeted staircase rose up from the ground floor to the second, and on the second level a railed walkway rimmed the opening. A massive elk antler chandelier dropped from the roof in the center of the opening.
He glanced right and saw light leaking out from under a door at the end of a hallway: the technician’s security room. Then he glanced left, where he had guessed Thug One slept. But instead of a closed door at the end of the hallway, he saw one that was ajar.
Nate swung in that direction and cocked the hammer of his gun with a single upward motion. Would he be able to close the door and seal it with the man sleeping inside?
That’s when he heard the slap of bare feet on the other side of the great room, where the kitchen was. And a growling, “Who the fuck is coming in here for a midnight snack?”
Thug One stood in the entryway of the kitchen, naked except for boxer shorts and a shoulder holster, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a pork chop in the other. His hair was matted on the right side of his head from sleeping, but it took only half
a second for him to realize what was happening.
Thug One threw the chop one way and the bottle of beer the other and went for his pistol. No Who are you? or What are you doing here? The beer bottle smashed against the stone of the fireplace.
Nate said, “Don’t do it.”
Thug One froze, his fingertips an inch from the butt of his pistol. He was in a slight crouch, his thigh muscles taut, his eyes locked with Nate’s.
“If you pull the weapon, I’ll blow your head off,” Nate said softly.
Thug One blinked, and Nate sensed the man had made the right decision.
“Take off the holster and lower it to the carpet.”
Thug One stood up straight and glared at Nate, his head cocked slightly to the side, his face hard. His eyes shifted from Nate to the gaping hole of the muzzle.
“Why are you here?” Thug One asked. He had a saw-blade Boston accent: Why ah you he-ah?
“I’m here for your boss. He’s all I want.”
“How’d you get in?”
“Through the door.”
Thug One shot an inadvertent glance down the hallway toward the closed security room door, then made a face.
“Fuck you,” the man said, turning back. “You ain’t gettin’ back out.”
Nate sighed, tired of the game. He chinned up toward the second floor, said, “Are you willing to lose your life to save his?”
Thug One didn’t answer.
“Two seconds,” Nate said in a whisper.
Just as Nate began to repeat himself, the man slipped the leather strap off his shoulder and let it slide down his arm so he caught it in his hand. He bent and put the gun on the floor.
Nate gestured with his weapon toward Thug One’s open bedroom door.
After a glower that seemed more obligatory than dangerous, the man did a shoulder roll and padded down the hallway with Nate behind him. “He’s an asshole, anyway,” the man said.
“I’m going to close your door,” Nate said. “Stay inside and you’ll keep breathing. Open it and you won’t.”