Scott Turow - Personal injuries

Feaver responded with a faint fatalistic smile. It was a remote setting. We were all thinking the same thing. Even Sennett.

"I want the surveillance tight," Sennett told Amari. "I want guys dressed up as the birds in the trees. Whatever it takes. I don't want Robbie out of sight." Amari shrunk up his mouth sardonically. "We're on their turf. Literally. I bet you Tuohey can play that golf course in the dark. He knows when a twig is moved. And I gotta get my guys in place in the middle of the night? We'll be damn lucky if one of them doesn't fall in that lake and drown"

"They're setting it up to feel secure," said Sennett. "Tuohey thinks he won't have to look over his shoulder. If you do it right, Robbie, he'll let his hair down. He's got to make sure you'll stand up and take the hit for all of them. You just have to get him to say it out loud."

I cornered McManis before I left. I wanted to know what he would say if I insisted that Robbie wear body armor, a bulletproof Kevlar vest. He might be able to hide it under a jacket. Jim turned over the idea. He skipped what I later realized was the correct response: Up close, it would be a head shot anyway.

"Look, George, I can't tell you it's completely safe. Because it isn't. But we're going to have surveillance all over the area. If anybody shows up we don't like or don't know, anybody the Kindle County agents recognize as hooked up, if it looks like Milacki or Kosic are packing-if anything's wrong, I'm closing down, George. That's my word to you." His light eyes did not leave mine. "But I don't see them writing Robbie secret messages and then disappearing him ten days later. They'd have made a move last week, if they were going to do that. That's the logic, at least." Then he turned his palms up, acknowledging how little any of these efforts at prediction were worth in the end.

We met at the Hickory Stick Mall, one of those vast emporia where the immense parking lot, all but empty in the still darkness of 4:30 a.m., bore silent comment on the trivial appetites that would have this place swarming by midday. A large reader board for the multiplex, the only thing illuminated, against a ghostly sky tinctured with the first gray drops of early light, advertised a number of the films I hadn't yet seen. Last Action Hero. Jurassic Park. For the moment, I had no need for imaginary adventures.

As cover, we'd agreed to wear fishing attire, posing as a group of Center City yahoos trying to land a crappie or two before work. I'd borrowed a khaki vest with zippers and pockets from Billy, one of my sons. The surveillance van moved around the huge lot picking up each of us, our signal no more subtle than our parking lights.

Robbie and I were together on the north side of the mall. We'd had only a few moments to talk before the gray van came by. Robbie had been up all night with Rainey. Looking him over, I realized that Robbie Feaver had turned an important corner in his life in the last few weeks; he remained good-looking, but worry and sleeplessness and depression and poor diet had worn on him in a way likely to be permanent. They had stolen some of his glory. Yet he'd maintained the show-must-go-on spirit, and had done his best to look his part. He had on a snappy golf shirt, with a rich firestitch weave, and fancy golf spikes, wingtip style, with kelties over the laces.

I told him he could still say no to this.

"No I can't," he answered. "I always knew I was gonna get Brendan or die trying." The best news, he said, was that he'd be in the woods, so he wouldn't have to worry about taking a dump in his trousers.

In the van, I asked for a minute with Stan. As we stepped out, McManis handed each of us a pole. Neither Sennett nor I was much of an outdoorsman and McManis briefly called us back, warning us, completely deadpan, to watch out for the hooks. Stan and I stood out among the vacant painted stripes of the parking lot, a hundred yards from various expensive department stores, pretending to test the flex of the rods.

I told Stan that my client seemed fairly concerned he was about to be killed.

"Won't happen," said Sennett. "If I didn't think we could protect him, I wouldn't be going forward. Don't let him back out on me, George."

That wasn't the issue, I said. I just wanted Stan to assure Robbie that he'd virtually sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" every time he mentioned Feaver's name to the sentencing judge.

He did it, but Robbie didn't look much happier. In the van, we reviewed the scenario one more time and Alf readied the equipment. Odds said Milacki wouldn't frisk Bobbie again for fear that one more insult might drive him into the government's arms. Even so, with Robbie wearing neither boots nor a suit jacket, hiding the FoxBIte was a challenge. Considering everything, Alf had decided to secrete the units in the crown of a wide-brimmed Australian-style raffia golf hat, concealing them under a sturdy rubberized lining. Kiecker made Robbie go through several swings to be certain the headgear would stay on. The one serious problem was that in order to fit the recorder and transmitter within the slender space available, Alf had to use a smaller battery. That meant Robbie couldn't meander through the round with Tuohey waiting for him to get conversational at the nineteenth hole. The FoxBlte would run out of power after an hour and forty minutes.

A staticky squall of radio reports reached the van from the agents positioned in the Public Forest. The communications were easily overheard and sometimes unsettling. The surveillance was not as comprehensive as planned. Amari's guys had erected deer blinds in four of the oaks that bordered the golf course. The process of building them in the middle of the night, with the County Forest Police occasionally sweeping down the neighboring roads, had been both comical and hair-raising. But even with nightvision binoculars, it had been impossible to fully scope out the terrain. As light began to perk up, the agents were reporting that there were a number of spots-especially the deep bunkers of the sand traps-where Robbie would be completely out of sight.

There had been some discussion of putting the portable camera in Robbie's golf bag, but it would have been almost impossible to keep the lens trained in the right direction. Instead, the four surveillance agents in the trees were each equipped with cameras, two standard video cams that would record in color, and two of the 2.4 GHz models that would transmit a picture to the van. A cordon of additional agents would be poised at the perimeter of the course with binoculars, joggers and walkers, out with the first sunlight, were not uncommon, but Sennett for once seemed unconcerned about the risks of detection.

"If we get blown, we get blown," he said. Nobody could get word to Tuohey anyway in the middle of the golf course. Sennett, to his credit, was determined not to lose sight of Robbie.

Finally, at 5:30 a.m., it was time to go. Amari had a unit tailing Tuohey, and they radioed that Brendan and Kosic had just pulled out of the garage of the stone house in Latterly. Two surveillance cars, new Novas that had been fitted over with the rusted bodies of earlier models, swept into the mall lot to follow Robbie to the country club. Evon and McManis and I walked Robbie to the Mercedes.

"Any time you think this is out of control," Jim said, "you say `Uncle Petros' and we're coming to get you. You don't have to be right. If you're spooked, bring it down. Nobody'll say word one afterwards."

I shook his hand and Evon gave him a half-embrace with an arm quickly raised to his shoulder.

"Big show," she said. "Big star." He liked the thought.

We drove to a predetermined spot in the Public Forest, a small graveled area where bikers and cancers commonly off loaded their equipment. Alf and Clevenger worked feverishly on the electronics; everything functioned. From the outposts in the trees, the cameras captured an impressive panorama, and, with the benefit of manual operation, could magnify images up to 48 times as they zoomed in. Alf reported that the agent-cameramen were belted to the tree trunks like loggers.