Robert Bidinotto - Hunter

She rubbed her cheek against his stomach.

“So you’re okay with this.”

She raised her face, looked at him, and blinked.

“But this time Dylan Lee Hunter can’t go it alone. It’ll have to be a team effort.”

He turned the biographical sheets toward the cat and fanned them out. Five names. For all the specialized roles. Planning, logistical support, intelligence, infiltration, and field operations.

“What do you think of these five characters?”

She jumped down from his lap and trotted away, back toward her bowl.

“Nice vote of confidence.”

Connor’s Point

Maryland’s Eastern Shore

Friday, September 5, 9:35 p.m.

Victor Edward Rostand had come home late this afternoon after a ten-day business trip. That’s what he told his neighbors, Jim and Billie Rutherford, when they saw him changing a dead light bulb outside his three-car garage and walked over to say hello. Vic explained that he was only stopping in for a few hours to pay some bills and check on things. He had to leave again later that night.

Vic had moved into the brick-faced Colonial on Connor’s Point a couple of years earlier. His marketing consulting took him out of town a lot. Business must have been good, Jim and Billie figured, because the man sure liked his toys. He kept three vehicles in the garage: a blue Honda CR-V, a black Ford E-Series SUV van, and his latest: a sweet new Honda motorcycle. He had a boat tied up in his slip at the end of the street-a nice 28-foot Bayliner 285 Cruiser. There was a rumor that he also kept a small plane over at the Kent Island airport, too, but Vic laughed it off when they asked him about it.

If Vic had money, he certainly didn’t put on airs about it. He dressed casually, shaved sporadically, bought Girl Scout cookies outside the local supermarkets, ate at unpretentious neighborhood restaurants, and put in brief appearances at cookouts on the Point during the summer, where he cooked up some mean chili. Most of the time, he even cut his own grass with an old-fashioned push-type lawn mower. About the only quirky thing about him was that he wore tinted glasses day and night, because he said his eyes-which Billie guessed might be “a rich, coffee brown”-were overly sensitive to light.

Just a regular nice guy.

Like a few of the other neighbors, Jim and Billie had tried to socialize with him a bit more. He accepted a dinner invitation once, and they had a nice time. Vic brought a couple of bottles, a Syrah and a Chenin Blanc, and mentioned some of his foreign travels to places they’d never been, like Dubai and Cairo. Jim asked him about marketing, and Vic talked a bit about “positioning” and “branding,” but stopped after a short time because, he said, he didn’t want to bore them. Billie asked if he managed to do any dating. Vic smiled and replied that he was in a long-distance relationship with a business woman in Chicago, but their schedules weren’t very compatible, so he doubted it would last much longer. He complained that his work schedule just didn’t allow much time for relationships, either social or romantic.

At nine-thirty this evening, Billie sent Jim out to the Safeway to pick up some eggs and half-and-half for breakfast. Backing out of the driveway, he saw that Vic’s garage lights were on and he was putting some boxes in the open back doors of his Ford van. Jim shook his head. He’d never seen a guy stay so busy. He tapped his horn as he drove off.

*

He set the box down in the bed of the van, then heard a horn beep. He looked back to see Jim Rutherford’s car pulling away. He waved casually at the departing vehicle, closed the rear doors of the Ford, then went to the wall switch and lowered the garage door. For the next few minutes, he would need privacy.

He left the garage by its back door. He paused a moment in the darkness to savor the moonlight shimmering on the water of Connor’s Creek behind the house. A few Canada geese were honking out there in the marsh somewhere. Or was it the trumpeter swans? He wasn’t sure; he just didn’t spend enough time out here, much as he loved the place.

He moved behind a large pine near the house and over to the wooden shed. He opened the padlock and entered, closing the door behind him. By feel, he found and pulled a drawstring; a bare bulb lit the interior. He slid the door bolt, locking it from the inside.

The shed contained nothing but heaps of crumbling storage boxes. They were crammed with old file folders containing billing statements to a variety of companies. None of the paperwork meant anything; he’d retrieved it all from a Dumpster two years ago. He moved aside a stack of the boxes, one by one, clearing a space on the floor. You had to look very closely to see the thin slit across the dusty floorboards. He stuck a screwdriver into the crack, levered it up, grabbed the edge of the hinged trap door, and hoisted it the rest of the way open.

He made his way carefully down a crude set of wooden stairs into a small underground room with concrete walls and floors. He pulled another drawstring down there, and a second, brighter bulb illuminated his armory.

He drew two sheathed combat knives, one large, one small, from a leather-lined wooden case and placed them on a wide bench. He opened a cabinet and selected several makes of handguns and corresponding suppressors and ammo. He assembled an array of electronic equipment, burglary tools, and other useful items. These items he wrapped carefully in lint-free cloths and placed in a couple of olive-green duffle bags. Shouldering them, he turned out the light, climbed from the room, and replaced the trap door and the boxes over it. He left the shed as he had come and re-entered the garage.

He glanced at his watch. The timetable still allowed him plenty of time to get to D.C. and make the weapons transfer to the operations vehicle, so that the rest of the plan could proceed on schedule.

Ten minutes later, he backed the black Ford van out of the garage.

*

Safeway didn’t have the small size of half-and-half, so Jim had to go another mile to the Acme. By the time he returned home, he noticed that all the lights were off at Vic’s place.

That guy. Never gives it a rest. Always up to something.

Alexandria, Virginia

Saturday, September 6, 11:27 p.m.

The bearded man parked his nondescript old Chevy Metro hatchback on a side street just a couple of blocks from the Braddock Road Metro Station. Then he settled in for what would likely be several hours of surveillance outside the target’s place.

The Chevy was cramped and uncomfortable, even with the seat pushed back. But so was the motel room he’d stayed in down on Route 1 the night before. The stained, peeling wallpaper, once beige, looked as if it had acquired a case of jaundice over the decades. The cheap nightstands and bathroom sink were criss-crossed with brown scars from unattended cigarettes, and he had to work under the light of the room’s single functional lamp. One glance in the bathroom convinced him to pass on taking a shower, just as a look at the carpet convinced him to keep his sneakers on.

He’d had no choice, really. He needed a base nearby to run this op, but it had to be the sort of place where he could pay cash and not have to show a credit card or his New York driver’s license. It was out of the question to let the clerk see the name Shane Michael Stone-however unlikely it was that anyone would track him to a place like that. So he peeled off fifty-five bucks for two nights and signed in, using an alias that appealed to his sense of irony.

It had been very late when he arrived at the motel. But rather than get some sleep, he spent the remaining hours before dawn conducting a recon of this neighborhood. When he returned to his room, he covered the stained bed cover with newspapers before lying down fully dressed. He woke in the late afternoon, grabbed a bite at a Wendy’s up the highway, then returned to the motel to check his gear and mentally walk through the plan, which included contingency options at every stage.