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“I’ll let you in on a little secret, Watson. That bullet that hit my wife through the door. The one your assassins fired. I don’t like to give you the satisfaction, but... it hit me too.”

Urgency surpassed caution in Banish’s voice. “Mr. Ables,” he said, “you require immediate medical attention. How badly are you wounded?”

“Is Banish there now?”

“No— Mr. Ables—”

“He was the one who set me up, Watson. I know that now. Him and your whole corrupt government machine.”

“Mr. Ables—” Banish was desperate. He felt as though he were melting into the chair. “All right,” he said finally. “All right, Mr. Ables. Maybe you did get a raw deal here. So maybe you did. You got screwed, all right? We all did. Now come down peacefully and resolve it.”

“What did they do with my daughter’s corpse?”

Banish was thrown again, scrambling. “She is being turned over to your relatives, Mr. Ables.”

“They won’t even let me attend the funeral, Watson. Will they. I will miss my own daughter’s funeral.”

It was there in his voice. Banish could feel the tension in the men moving behind him. He gripped the handset. “Mr. Ables,” he said, “I insist that you come down from there immediately.”

“I have prayed with my children, Watson. For guidance and forgiveness. But who will hear your confession? You, Watson, who have waged wars of the flesh—”

“Mr. Ables” — Banish was nearly yelling — “will you come down now?”

The sound of Ables’s breathing filled the van. Heavy, labored, Banish hanging on every sound.

“Watson.”

“Yes, Mr. Ables?”

Ables let out a long, hollow sigh and said, in a voice closer to a gasp than a whisper, “Maybe this tragedy will end in a greater glory.”

There was a click. Banish looked at the microphone. People started to scramble behind him in the van. He hit the broadcast switch again, hard. “Ables!” he said. “Mr. Ables!”

Perkins, moving behind him, said, “I better get up there.”

Fagin said into his radio, “Go to alert—”

Banish squeezed the handset switch and called after him. “Ables!”

“You lost him,” Fagin was saying. “We gotta get in there now. We gotta go in.”

“No,” Banish said. He stood dizzily and turned and put his arms up to stop time and everything else that was clamoring around him. He was trying to think. His head was ringing. He said to all of them running around him, “JUST LET ME THINK—”

Bridge

Marshal Orton stood quietly just before the bridge. From the enormous public gathering on the other side, formerly silent and still, he detected now a buzzing. Glimmers of excitement crackling through the people like electrical charges, growing.

He was not the first to look at the trees. The thick woods riding high on either side. It was nighttime now and he couldn’t see well into them. He didn’t have to. Movement. Like animals in the trees, where there had been no animals before. The realization of this came gradually. The huge crowd beyond the creek bed, buzzing. Other marshals coming off the bridge now too — standing before and looking deep into the towering woods as though the trees themselves were about to rush out roaring and overtake them. There were people in the trees. It was certain now. They were scurrying and moving up past the marshals.

Orton clicked on his radio. “Deputy Fagin,” he said quickly. “Agent Banish—”

There were people running up through the trees.

“Agent Banish—”

Staging Area

Banish leapt out of the sound truck in a swirl. Here was an outlet for his frenzy. He yelled into the Motorola, “I ordered radio silence!”

An explosion from across the staging area knocked him off his feet. He looked up from where he lay on the ground and watched a black-orange cough of flame rise and expand, then puff out like a popped balloon, turning to black smoke. The sound rang in his ears as the ground rumbled beneath him. He registered the general direction of the blast and realized that one or more of the generators had blown.

As he got to his knees, a flaming arrow streaked in a strangely beautiful arc over the staging area. It landed in the ground at the tree line along the low end of the clearing. Banish heard the cracking of low-caliber gunfire to his left and at first thought it was his own men, then he heard the pop-popping of the security lights high above in the trees.

As Banish got to his feet, Fagin came crashing out of the van behind him. He surveyed the clearing and drew his gun, working the radio. “Tactical support, staging area, locked and loaded—”

Banish found his own radio in his hand. He said into it, “Scattering fire only—”

Another flaming arrow streaked out of the woods and whipped gracefully over the staging area, biting into the roof of one of the holding tents. The fire spread quickly.

A strange glow caught Banish’s eye. He turned left to follow it and watched in amazement as a red laser dot slid down the black side of the sound truck to its right front tire. A bang then, separate from the other cracking noises, and the big black tire deflated with a whine.

Another explosion across the way. Banish was jerked but not thrown this time, the mountain rumbling beneath him. The staging area was being pounded like a bass drum from all sides. Gunfire took out more overhead lights. Fagin seemed anxious to start shooting.

“No killing!” Banish said, as if he could be heard amid the gunfire. “They want to draw us in!”

Fagin glared at him. A smaller explosion then, and Fagin turned. A second propane tank from the kitchen had gone up.

A brushfire burned across the clearing in the tree line where the first arrow had landed. Banish caught sight of the red beam again, now floating over the right rear tire of the van. The tire broke open and air steamed out and the sound truck sank lopsided, hobbled.

Fagin swore into his radio. Personnel were spilling out of the soft tents and running across the besieged clearing for the shelter of heavier equipment. Banish picked up the laser beam, now slinking down the flattened tire of the van and onto the ground. It was skimming along the dark dirt toward him. It came and skirted the weeds at his feet, crossing his left shoe, then starting up his leg. He did not feel a thing. It traveled along the folds of material at his waist to where his jacket was zipped over his stomach. Banish looked out across the dark clearing and could see the bright source of the beam shining small and steady within the tree cover down land beyond the spreading brushfire. He looked back down at his midsection as the beam floated up from his stomach. He did not feel a thing. It drifted upward and stopped, vibrating slightly at the center of his chest.

Staging Area

Fagin looked at Banish. Banish was staring down at a red laser dot dead center in his chest. His eyes were vague.

Fagin brought his left arm straight out and grabbed Banish back-handedly, clothes-lining him across the front of his chest and spinning him backward and down to the ground. The intended round cut whispering through the air past them and thumped into a tree trunk some meters behind. Fagin held Banish down with one hand and quickly traced the beam back to its source, raising his gun arm and wasting rounds across the clearing, blasting away at the ground before the guilty tree and the trunk and the low branches above. The laser sight quickly vanished — some Bubba’s birthday present getting a dry run.

Fagin pulled at Banish to get up. “The fuck is wrong with you?” he yelled at him over the noise.