Andrew Britton - The American

Kealey was under no such illusions. He knew that Will Vanderveen was driven by hate, and hate alone.

For Ryan, these were not specific thoughts, but vague considerations that drifted on the edge of his tortured mind. In the confusion of fact and fiction, however, he was able to grab hold of one thing that may or may not have helped him: When it comes to that man’s eyes, it all looks the same.

Listening to this strange epiphany in his head, everything else went quiet for a minute. The shrieking wind seemed to drop to a murmur, the storm fell blessedly silent, and he heard footsteps coming fast behind him.

He turned without looking, the gun coming up. As he fired, he felt a stinging in his face. Then he was falling, but still on solid ground. The muzzle flashes were lost in a sheet of lightning that briefly turned night into day.

Did I hit him? Ryan didn’t know, couldn’t see as he stood and wiped what might have been water out of his eyes. He hadn’t counted the number of rounds he had fired, wasn’t sure if it was two or three. He didn’t know how far he might be from the edge, and he was still trying to get his bearings when something slammed into his left side. He felt his ribs give way with a sickening crack.

The breath left his lungs in a rush as he crashed to the ground. Ryan tried to face the other man, but still couldn’t see much more than a vague outline through the blood streaming down over his forehead and into his eyes.

He became aware then that Vanderveen was towering over him, but when he blinked, the man was gone. Ryan wondered why until he realized that the gun was no longer in his hand. Staggering to his feet, his vision cleared momentarily and he saw a dark figure scrambling across the clearing, the outstretched hand reaching for an object in the mud.

Ryan took two steps forward when the pain hit him like a hammer in the side. His ankle felt like it had been crushed in a vise, but somehow he was still running as Vanderveen turned with the gun, getting off one shot before Ryan hit him low and sent him tumbling out into space.

Vanderveen reached back for the ground, shocked to find that it wasn’t there. He was caught by a sudden downdraft and carried away from the cliff wall, pelted the whole way by stinging beads of rain. Looking up, the clouds were getting very far away, and when he began to turn in midair, his eyes finally locked onto the churning waters below.

The impact came, crushing the breath out of his lungs as the ocean sucked him down. He was instantly paralyzed by the cold, but it couldn’t last; the pain followed a split second later, rippling through his body in an agonizing wave, pulling him back from the brink of conciousness. He struggled for the surface as the darkness closed in around him.

Ryan was still in the clearing, less than 2 feet from the edge. He lay motionless in the freezing mud, trying to take account of his injuries. He knew without looking that most of the ribs on his left side were broken. His ankle didn’t feel right at all; he remembered that it had almost collapsed when he tried to run on it. Gingerly, he reached up to touch the jagged cut on his forehead when he was stopped by another sudden pain.

It didn’t take long to locate the source. Vanderveen’s last round had caught him in the right side. Pulling back his jacket and lifting his shirt to expose the neat hole, he saw that it was bleeding slowly but steadily. Carefully reaching back with his right hand, he felt for, but didn’t find what would have been a much larger exit wound.

He wasn’t sure how much damage the bullet had done, and after thinking about it for a while, decided that he really didn’t care. Vanderveen was finally dead, but at what cost?

Katie.

He had been numb to this point, but the sense of loss he suddenly felt was far more painful than the injuries he had sustained.

Lying there in the damp, he idly wondered how long it would take for him to join her. His eyelids were already getting heavy, and the cold didn’t seem as pronounced as it had been a few minutes earlier. The pain wasn’t as bad either. Not nearly as bad.

His right hand moved up and away from the hole in his side, drifting over a lump in his jacket. He felt delirium coming on, so he double-checked to make sure he had not imagined it. No, there was definitely something there. He pulled it out to see: his cell phone.

Ryan put his head back in the mud and thought about it. If he called now, they might make it in time. They might not. He didn’t know.

Was it important?

Why should he care?

A few minutes later, he returned the phone to his pocket and settled back to wait.

CAPE ELIZABETH,WASHINGTON, D.C.

Callie Palmer hunched over her steering wheel and tried to see through the rain streaking down her windshield. The storm had gotten progressively worse since her departure from Orono more than two hours earlier, but she was now down to the last few miles of the trip, much to her relief.

She was tired after a full day of classes, but she was also worried about her best friend. That was why she had decided to drive down for the weekend, bringing with her the few things that would be needed to lift Katie’s spirits: two six-packs of Rolling Rock and a few good movies on DVD.

Usually that did the trick, but Callie wasn’t so sure this time. Her closest friend was really upset over her latest spat with Ryan, and didn’t seem inclined to stop brooding about it anytime soon.

She sighed as she turned onto Village Creek Road, the house coming up fast in front of her. As she drove up the muddy driveway — Ryan really needs to pave that — she saw something that made her frown. A black Mercedes, sitting on the grass in what had become their unofficial parking area. When she saw that it had government tags, she swore under her breath. Ryan must have returned from Washington early, and Callie knew they were probably way too wrapped up in each other at the moment to even think about answering the door.

She got out of the car anyway and ran through the rain to the shelter of the porch. She had come too far to just turn around and go right back, and she got more and more annoyed as she thought about her wasted trip.

She knocked on the front door. No answer. Hmmm. After a brief moment of hesitation, she turned the knob and stepped inside, shivering again, but with pleasure this time when the warm air hit her face.

Not that warm, though, and she could see why: directly in front of her, down the long hall, the back door to the kitchen was hanging open, swinging back and forth in the wind.

She saw shattered panes of glass.

She felt a cold ball of fear in her stomach, a wave of apprehension that turned into outright terror when her eyes moved down, and she saw what looked like thin crimson streams working their way across the wooden floor.

God, no. She was carried forward against her will. Turning the corner, she found Katie carefully arranged on the kitchen floor, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. Her friend wasn’t moving.

Then she saw why, and she started to scream uncontrollably.

Jonathan Harper was fast asleep when something roused him from the dark.

He sat up and reached out, fumbling for the nightstand without turning on the light, swearing under his breath when he heard a glass of water hit the carpet below. Then he had the receiver up and next to his ear. “Hello?”

He would have answered the telephone differently had it been the second set residing by his bedside, but this was his house phone, and not the secure unit that was checked every two weeks by DST personnel from Langley. Thus, he was surprised when he heard a young female voice: “Director Harper? Sir?”

He swore again and fumbled again for the lamp. “Yes, this is Jonathan Harper.”