“I think the governor’s right,” I said. “We’ll get him. And Wardell knows that as well as anyone. You kill on a stage like this and there’s no disappearing act afterward.”
“But . . .” Banner prompted, sensing what I hadn’t said.
“But he’ll keep going until it’s over. Just a matter of how many more people he can kill before we get him.”
“Yeah,” she agreed quietly. “It was bad today, Blake.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to do. Then I said, “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” she answered. Too quickly.
Banner had mentioned having a young daughter earlier. As she looked out into the night, I knew she was thinking about the young girl in the translucent blue raincoat. She’d been twelve, a little younger than my estimate. I thought again about not pulling the trigger in Mosul, about how such a tiny physical action could result in so much death. The Buddhists believe if you save a life, you’re responsible for that life from that day forward. I guess that applied to sparing a life too; and I felt the weight of that responsibility grow with every new body.
Wherever the multiple shootings in Rapid City had been reported, the adjective “senseless” headed up the trail with grim inevitability. And they were senseless, in the moral sense. Utterly so. But despite that, the atrocity had accomplished exactly what Wardell had intended it to: He’d demonstrated how powerless we were—to us and to the world. If it was intended to unnerve us for the job of protecting Hatcher, it was working. He’d made a point of telegraphing it in code, like a cocky pool shark calling his next bank shot.
The color blue. The number six.
The last question of his telephone call to Whitford. The last question to the waitress he’d terrified in Rapid City. He’d made a point of doing that, so those particular details would be remembered and commented upon and analyzed for meaning. And then he’d gone out and calmly killed exactly six people, chosen for no other reason than because they were all wearing the color blue. It sent a message. It said, “I control the rules of this game.”
And now here we were, in place for the next move in Wardell’s bloody game. I wasn’t worried about a misdirect anymore. He wasn’t interested in giving himself a handicap. He was far too arrogant for that. His play with the waitress was evidence of that: She’d called the cops as soon as he’d walked out of the diner. She’d been far too late to prevent the slaughter on Main Street, but her account of the experience meant we now had an up-to-date, detailed description of his appearance, purely because he’d wanted to show off. But if my instinct about his arrogance was right, then what did that say about the red van?
The door opened and Castle walked in, his hair soaked. He was loosening his tie with his right hand. “How was it?” he asked.
“Fine,” I told him, which was the truth. From the perspective of catching our man, it was neither a positive nor a negative. It was just something he’d needed to get out of the way. I understood the need for regular media briefings, but I also completely understood Castle’s loathing for them.
“Not bad, Castle,” Banner agreed. “You’re almost starting to look like you’re not in the tenth circle of hell every time somebody points a camera at you.”
Castle allowed himself a brief but genuine smile, and I found myself starting to like him a little for it. It vanished from his face as the door opened and a tall female agent entered, her hands filled with three Kevlar vests. “Sir?” she said, as though offering canapés at a drinks reception.
Castle stripped off his jacket and lifted one of the vests. Banner and I followed suit. I looped the straps through the buckles and fixed the Velcro tabs, feeling the weight settle on my upper body.
“Back in the city,” Banner remarked as the agent who’d brought the vests disappeared back into the corridor, “Wardell chose head shots around eighty percent of the time.”
“Thanks for the statistic,” Castle said.
“Any trace of him so far?” I asked.
Castle shook his head. “We know he’s in the area, of course, but it’s a big area and there’s a shitload of trees out there. Our search helicopters would have their work cut out for them even without this goddamn rain. Rapid City is shut down. Half the state is shut down.”
I believed him. Banner and I had driven up to the house following the shootings, and the roads leading out of the town toward the Black Hills had been utterly empty. It was eerie, like the town and its surrounds had been evacuated before an imminent nuclear meltdown.
Castle continued. “The only road in here is blocked at the highway, and we’ve got surveillance every quarter mile up to the house. For all the good that’ll do us.”
“It pays to cover the bases,” I said.
Like Castle, I doubted Wardell would use the road, not when there was an infinite variety of off-road approaches. The house was built on a plateau midway up a steep incline into the hills, and it faced onto the lake. There were thick woods on the other three sides, encroaching to within a hundred yards of the building—Hatcher had picked an interesting location in which to build his home, given how the profits that enabled it were generated. It was an ideal spot from the point of view of any attacking force. I wondered if any of the multitude of shrinks currently drawing network television consultancy fees had noticed this and what conclusions they might have drawn.
The advantage we had was manpower, and for the first time we had been able to focus that resource on a clearly defined area, one that we could be reasonably certain was the right one. Had we been resisting an attack from an army, we’d have prepared differently—laying fortifications, barricading the doors, arranging a ring of men around the three land-facing sides of the house, patrolling the front with gunboats. But none of that would do any good against a sniper intent on taking out a specific target.
There was a strange atmosphere about the house as the agents on Castle’s task force carried out their duties, one that either hadn’t been present until tonight, or that I hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t the usual tension that saturated the preparations for a big event, it was more like the vibe in the locker room of a world champion sports team that finds itself losing badly going into the second half and not knowing quite why. The storm and the claustrophobia of the woods didn’t help. Maybe it was the sheer number of kills Wardell had racked up in less than four days, but it seemed like everyone was having to make a conscious effort to remember that they were engaged in a manhunt, not a siege.
The task force had focused on making life difficult for Wardell by boarding up the windows and stationing tactical teams throughout the woods around a half-mile radius. A couple of helicopters circled the lake, casting search beams on the choppy waters as small motorboats swept across the surface. We were about as well prepared as it was possible to be, and now we were going to discover just how good Caleb Wardell was.
There was an antique grandfather clock in the south corner of the study. Banner eyed the clock face as the minute hand clicked up to read quarter to twelve.
“You think he’ll really come at midnight?” she asked.
“We’re expecting midnight,” I said, “so the smart thing to do would be to let us wait, get tired, come in at two or three. But I wouldn’t bet against midnight.”
Castle’s cell rang. He answered it immediately. He listened for a second, asked a couple of questions, and then said he wanted the last of the boards up on the lake-facing windows. The windows on the other three sides had been attended to hours before. A minute later, a dressed-down agent with his sleeves rolled up beneath a Kevlar vest arrived, holding a cordless drill. We watched as he screwed sheets of plywood into the PVC window frames.
“How’s Hatcher?” Banner asked.
“Why don’t we go see him?” Castle said. “You can ask him yourself.”
As the three of us left the study, I cast a glance over my shoulder in time to see the last rectangle of rain-soaked night shut out as the final piece of plywood fitted into place. It made a sound like the lid closing on a coffin.
11:57 p.m.
Now, this was more of a challenge.
The rain, the woods, the pursuit, had all created a different environment from that which Wardell was accustomed to. He had experienced similar conditions during basic training in Virginia, but never during actual warfare. In Iraq, rain had been as scarce as mercy. He was no meteorologist, but he guessed it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that South Dakota had soaked up more precipitation in the last twelve hours than that godforsaken dust hole saw in the average year.
The ponderosa pines closed around him, blotting out the sky and filling his field of vision with shadows and random movement—again, the diametric opposite of the blinding, blazing desert heat. And he was alone. In the war, he’d fought in a small unit, often with just one partner, and that had been against impersonal, almost random targets. Now he faced an army of a different kind. Without backup.
He couldn’t think of anywhere in the world he’d rather be.
He’d chosen his observation position that morning, a couple of hours before he’d made his midday trip to town. The spot was ideal: a tiny crevice under an overhang created by the gap left by some long-forgotten landslide. The ground that had given way had exposed the roots of a fifty-foot pine that still stood, reaching out over a sixty-degree incline, defying gravity. Wardell had nestled between the roots, camouflaging his position with sticks and dirt. He’d smeared mud on his exposed skin and around the hollows of his eyes. From the crevice beneath the tree, he could see only the southwest corner of the house. That meant it was no good for taking the shot, but it was an excellent spot from which to sit and patiently survey the feds laying their traps and looking in vain for traces of him.
They were doing a decent job, to give them their due. The
FBI
tactical teams patrolling the strike zone were well drilled and were leaving no easy gaps. Maneuvering out of range of one team would bring him too close to the next. It was a tight net. They had countersnipers of their own, too. He’d spotted a few of them hunched down in makeshift hides. It had been tempting to kill one or two of them, or maybe a member of a patrol, but Wardell had held off all day, keeping his powder dry. He wasn’t hunting brain-dead shoppers now, and taking out one of the feds would put an end to the evening’s performance.
They’d made the house pretty secure, all in all. Boarding up the windows—all of the windows—had been an excellent move, if not an unexpected one. It meant he was going to have to find a way of flushing Hatcher out, and perhaps more worthy targets.
More worthy targets; he paused to think about that again. His initial list was getting shorter. Nolan was history, and if all went well, Hatcher would join him within the hour. That left two names, and he’d discovered earlier today that one of them—the late Detective Stewart—was entirely beyond his reach. Room for some new recruits.
Agent Castle from the television interviews seemed like a good candidate, him and perhaps the woman who sometimes appeared alongside him, Banner. Wardell was almost positive that had been her back in Rapid City, the one who’d returned fire from the kill zone. He’d had her in his sights; she was even wearing blue. It was a pity he’d already claimed his six victims. On the other hand, there was always next time. Taking out one of the task force leads would certainly throw a wrench in the works of their manhunt. And then there was the man from the cabin, of course.
He wasn’t sure if they’d managed to sneak Hatcher out of the house, but in truth he’d started to question whether Hatcher was even worthy of killing. He was a phony, a minor irritation when you really thought about it. Wardell was more interested in taking out somebody of substance this time, even if it meant relinquishing his stated goal, diverging from the plan. Dwight Eisenhower once said that plans are often useless, but planning is indispensable. Wardell had no great liking for generals, still less for presidents, but as a motto he couldn’t fault it.
He’d had the germ of that plan before he’d seen the house in real life. He thought back to the truck stop in Kentucky, the morning after his escape, how he’d flicked through Hatcher’s book with amusement.
The selection of photographs reproduced in the middle of the book had been predictable, some from the aftermaths of his shootings intermingled with pictures of the key players and a whole lot of pictures of Hatcher himself. The final one had shown Hatcher in front of his house: a sprawling wood-clad building on the shores of Pactola Lake. Wardell’s eye had been drawn by the small outbuilding visible in that shot. Having had time to think and to survey the house, he was convinced that this outbuilding would give him the opening he’d need. But only if he could get a little closer—because this was one task he couldn’t guarantee executing at long range.
The major problem was the tac teams. The net around the house was a little tighter than he’d anticipated. That was his own fault, of course. He’d told them exactly where he’d be this time, allowing them to focus their manpower without spreading themselves as thinly as they had before. Had he been overconfident? He doubted it. Confidence and overconfidence were essentially the same thing. It was only after the fact that you could tell one from the other. No, he would adapt and triumph once again. After all, he’d been looking for a challenge this time, hadn’t he?
He checked his equipment again. Much of what he’d taken from the steel trunk in the shack was stashed at his camp, deeper into the hills, but he’d brought the essentials. The most important item was, of course, the Remington 700. It was a top-of-the-line civilian model, and Wardell had to admit Nolan had done well on this: It bore a close similarity to the M40 that Wardell was accustomed to from the Corps. Nolan had accessorized it with a high-spec bipod, a decent scope, and a sling, too. Whether or not the Remington was superior to the
PSG
1 was a matter of opinion, but Wardell preferred it. It just felt better in his hands.