He flinched at an owl's delight in its ability to kill… In the silence of the lit room, the owl's cry intruded sufficiently to alarm them.
Strickland's shoulders twitched as his eyes automatically swept the bank of monitors. The four cameras revealed nothing. His stomach was cramped with sitting, with the effort of calm. It was hours now since he had begun to want Gant to be out there, his imagination describing the manner, the exact distances, the precise route by which Gant could fox the radar. Strickland knew Fraser wanted him dead. He had orders to that effect and no other. That much was obvious he'd traded Gant for himself, and the FBI agent had gone for it.
"He's not coming," he heard Fraser taunt Mclntyre in a whisper.
"Yes he is," Mclntyre snapped back.
Strickland watched the screens. Nothing. Fraser's next words surprised him.
"You would tell us, wouldn't you, son, if and when the man comes walking out of the trees? You wouldn't keep it to yourself, just for long enough to give him the smallest chance?"
"No," Strickland replied sullenly as a schoolboy.
"He wants to kill me, doesn't he?"
Fraser merely chuckled.
"Leave the guy alone," Mclntyre said.
"Christ, you'd give anyone the heebie-jeebies with that laugh of yours."
"Sorry, Mac I didn't realise you were so sensitive."
Fraser lit a cigarette. Strickland's inside knotted with a puritanical, angry revulsion.
"Eleven-forty. Is he waiting for midnight, do you reckon? It's when most suicides happen."
Mclntyre's stomach rumbled. There were faint noises from the kitchen as the two men relieved of patrol duty made them selves something to eat. His impatience bubbled and grumbled like indigestion.
Where in hell was Gant? Was he even coming?
"Anything?" he asked Strickland sharply.
"Nothing."
"He isn't coming," Fraser taunted, his features smug with assurance that Gant would come.
"You've screwed up, Mac."
"I'm right," Mclntyre replied, as if rehearsing some old and boring script… and so it had gone on, hour after hour, Strickland's hunched, aching shoulders reminded him. The window he could watch without attracting their attention was a black square, looking on nothing. It failed to promise Gant, who had become Strickland's only image of rescue. Listening to their pathetic banter during the last eight or nine hours had worn him down. He'd been so confined.
They could never, even with a psychological profiler on hand, have devised a better means of undoing him. Exposure at the lit windows was less wearing than the time-tunnel of their slow wrestling for dominance.
"Put money on it," Fraser mocked.
"Shove it," Mclntyre sulked in reply.
Cat-and-mouse, cat-and-mouse, endlessly… His temples tightened as the idea came to him… Expose them, make them move into the light.
Gant had better be watching' There he announced quickly.
They lurched together out of their chairs, towards the console and himself.
"Where?"
"I thought there was something…" But he could not keep them within the frame of the window any longer.
"Arsehole," Fraser concluded, but without suspicion. His breath was hot on Strickland's ear, his hand heavy on his shoulder. Strickland shivered with sudden, icy cold, at once regretting what he had done.
Eraser's intention had somehow communicated itself through the man's touch. If anything went wrong, if Fraser felt threatened, then his first move would be to kill him. If Gant looked remotely like succeeding, he knew Fraser wouldn't hesitate.
Mclntyre and Fraser sat down again, unaware that they had walked on to a stage.
Had Gant seen them? Strickland almost hoped not… The thermal sight was at his eye, the rifle butt resting against his shoulder. Two others were obviously in the room with Strickland. He recognised Mclntyre's blunt, thick-necked head and broad back. And the face that glanced sidelong at Strickland, with an evident sneer. It was Eraser
… he remembered the picture Aubrey had shown him… Winterborne's man. With Mclntyre and Strickland. They would see nothing on any of the screens, except their own two-man patrol moving in regular, undeviating progression.
The two men dropped quickly back out of sight. The screens had been blank.
Could it have been a signal from Strickland…? Gant was nervous of completing the idea. Strickland could just as well be working to their game plan. Even so, it had shown him not only who was in the room with Strickland but also that they couldn't see the screens for themselves if they remained concealed.
Eleven-fifty… The moon was reflected like a pale lantern in the smooth water of Bonner Lake. Time narrowed. The images through the thermal sight and binoculars, the sense of the Ruger and the Calico beside him, all fitted like the technology of a cockpit. The hours of waiting had drained him of Aubrey, Vance, Barbara, the general's daughter, the general even his own circumstances. He stood upright, away from the hole of the stunted tree, holding the Ruger in one hand.
The Calico was slung across his chest. There was a target and, like a missile, he locked on to it. He swung the rifle across the trees below him, picking up the first man then, after a few seconds, Chris.
The young man's features, white-on-grey, were distinct and recognisable. The map of the terrain in Gant's head began to unroll as clearly as on a screen he had just switched on. He began moving silently down the slope towards the first man, his awareness a receiver to be updated by his senses. An owl's cry, something rustling through the undergrowth, disturbed by his passage. Distances, time, location, all precise.
He stopped, using the binoculars now that he was closer to the first man. Waited-struck the man from behind with the butt of the Ruger, then squashed his limp form upright against a pine until he could safely let it slide soundlessly to the ground. He heard his own breathing, the FBI man's unconscious snores. The earpiece had flown from the man's ear as he'd struck him, his throat mike had risen above the collar of his shirt. Gant listened for Chris, for any noise. The light from the lodge was visible through the outlying trees. Chris-He slipped away from the unconscious man, towards the sound of dull, regimented footsteps. Their clockwork patrol brought them together at-this point.
Ten seconds. Chris' footsteps, the hoot of an owl, Chris' footsteps on the other side of the tree, his breathing. Gant raised the Ruger and-Chris' voice.
"Nothing, sir—" Chris' features half-turned to him, his shoulder and head already flinching away from the rifle butt. Mouth open, throat moving, struggling to shout. Chris' weapon half-parried the Ruger's swinging butt, jarring Gant's grip. His hand left the rifle, grabbing at the short-barrelled, folding-stock Springfield, twisting the barrel up and away from them as they plunged together like awkward bullies.
The Springfield flashed, deafened. Chris fell back with a groan, his only sound. Through the retinal flare of the gunshot, Gant could not locate the source of the noise. His boots touched something yielding and he bent down.
Blood on his fingers.
'-can't see," he heard.
"Can't see, Christ—" There was the tinniness of an urgent voice coming from the loosened earpiece.
Chris' curled, terrified body became an outline on the ground. The tiny voice squeaked like an injured mouse. They were alerted. Move He assessed his alignment with the lodge. Moved thirty yards farther. The cameras would pick him up, but he was in the radar's blind spot where the main chimney jutted from the deep rake of the roof. Ten seconds since Chris went down nearer fifteen his eyesight would be coming back by now, the muzzle flash clearing from his vision. No one on the verandah, Strick-land still at his console.