Secret Prey

fresh ground for Sandford.’’
    —Chicago Tribune
    ‘‘With its pulse-quickening plot and attractive heroine, you’ll be hooked to the finish.’’
    —People
    ‘‘This is riveting, intense crime fiction . . . lean-andmean . . . Perfect for the high-tech ’90s, replete with bursts of black prose that zap the reader like quick video cuts.’’
    —Cedar Rapids Gazette
    And don’t miss John Sandford’s thrilling novels of stings and swindles . . .
    T HE E MPRESS F ILE
    Kidd and LuEllen are a pair of lovers and liars plotting the ultimate scam . . . until everything goes wrong . . .
    ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock would have been delighted.’’
    —Philadelphia Inquirer
    ‘‘The imaginative con scheme is clever . . . but the biggest thrills occur when events don’t go as planned.’’
    —Library Journal
    T HE F OOL’S R UN
    Kidd and LuEllen return for a killer con in the high-tech world of industrial espionage . . .
    ‘‘A gripping, ultramodern novel . . . fast-paced and suspenseful.’’
    —Chicago Tribune
    ‘‘Fast-paced action, high-intellect puzzle-solving, dandy characters . . . if you start guessing outcomes, you are fooled.’’
    —Minneapolis Star & Tribune
    ‘‘Sandford is one of the most skilled thriller writers at work in this country or any other.’’
    —Richmond Times Dispatch

Berkley Books by John Sandford
    RULES OF PREY
SHADOW PREY
EYES OF PREY
SILENT PREY
WINTER PREY
NIGHT PREY
MIND PREY
SUDDEN PREY
THE NIGHT CREW
THE EMPRESS FILE
THE FOOL’S RUN
SECRET PREY
CERTAIN PREY

SECRET
PREY

ONE

    THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD PULLED THE DOOR shut behind him, stacked his rifle against the log-sided cabin, and walked down to the end of the porch. The light from the kitchen window punched out into the earlymorning darkness and the utter silence of the woods. Two weeks of nightly frost had killed the insects and had driven the amphibians into hibernation: for a few seconds, he was alone.
    Then the chairman yawned and unzipped his bib overalls, unbuttoned his pants, shuffled his feet, the porch boards creaking under his insulated hunting boots. Nothing like a good leak to start the day, he thought. As he leaned over the low porch rail, he heard the door opening behind him. He paid no attention.
    Three men and a woman filed out of the house, pretended not to notice him.
    ‘‘Need some snow,’’ the woman said, peering into the dark. Susan O’Dell was a slender forty, with a tanned, dry face, steady brown eyes, and smile lines around her mouth. A headlamp was strapped around her blaze-orange stocking cap, but she hadn’t yet switched it on. She wore a blazeorange Browning parka, snowmobile pants, and carried a backpack and a Remington .308 mountain rifle with a Leupold Vari-X III scope. Not visible was the rifle’s custom trigger job. The trigger would break at exactly two and a half pounds.
    ‘‘Cold sonofabitch, though,’’ said Wilson McDonald, as he slipped one heavy arm through his gun sling. McDonald was a large man, and much too heavy: in his hunting suit he looked like a blaze-orange Pillsbury Doughboy. He carried an aging .30–06 with open sights, bought in the thirties at Abercrombie & Fitch in New York. At forty-two, he believed in a certain kind of tradition—his summer car, a racing-green XK-E, was handed down from his father; his rifle came from his grandfather; and his spot in the country club from his great-grandfather. He would defend the Jaguar against far better cars; the .30–06 against more modern rifles, and the club against parvenus, hirelings, and of course, blacks and Jews.
    ‘‘You all ready?’’ asked the chairman of the board, as he came back toward them, buttoning his pants. He was a fleshy, red-faced man, the oldest of the group, with a thick shock of white hair and caterpillar-sized eyebrows. As he got closer to the others, he could smell the odor of pancakes and coffee still steaming off them. ‘‘I don’t want anybody stumbling around in the goddamn woods just when it’s getting good.’’
    They all nodded: they’d all been here before.
    ‘‘Getting late,’’ said O’Dell. She wore the parka hood down, and the parka itself was still unzipped; but she’d wrapped a red and white kaffiyeh around her neck and chin. Purchased on a whim in the Old City of Jerusalem, and meant to protect an Arab from the desert sun, it was now protecting a third-generation Irishwoman from the Minnesota cold. ‘‘We better get out there and get