Shadowfires

subordinate to his bosom, as McClain had embraced him. It would be lonely at the top, must be lonely if he were to survive up there a long time, so he made himself get used to loneliness now: though he had protégés, he did not have friends.
    Having worked the stiffness out of his thick neck and immense
shoulders, Sharp returned to the chair behind the desk, sat down,
closed his eyes, and thought about the three people who remained on
the loose and who must be apprehended. Eric Leben, Mrs. Leben, Ben
Shadway. They would not be offered a deal, as the other five had
been. If Leben could be taken “alive,” he would be locked away and
studied as if he were a lab animal. Mrs. Leben and Shadway would
simply be terminated and their deaths made to look accidental.
    He had several reasons for wanting them dead. For one thing, they
were both independent-minded, tough, and honest-a dangerous mixture,
volatile. They might blow the Wildcard story wide open for the pure
hell of it or out of misguided idealism, thus dealing Sharp a major
setback on his climb to the top. The others-Lewis, Geffels, Baresco,
Knowls, and Seitz-would knuckle under out of sheer self-interest, but
Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway could not be counted on to put their
own best interests first. Besides, neither had committed a criminal
act, and neither had sold his soul to the government as the men of
Geneplan had done, so no swords hung over their heads; there were no
credible threats by which they could be controlled.
    But most important of all, Sharp wanted Rachael Leben dead simply
because she was Shadway's lover, because Shadway cared for her. He wanted to kill her first, in front of Ben Shadway. And he wanted Shadway dead because he had hated the man for almost seventeen years.
    Alone in that underground office, eyes closed, Sharp smiled. He
wondered what Ben Shadway would do if he knew that his old nemesis,
Anson Sharp, was hunting for him. Sharp was almost painfully eager
for the inevitable confrontation, eager to see the astonishment on
Shadway's face, eager to waste the son of a bitch.
Jerry Peake, the young DSA agent assigned by
Anson Sharp to find Sarah Kiel, carefully searched for a freshly dug
grave on Eric Leben's walled property in Palm Springs. Using a high-intensity flashlight, being diligent and utterly thorough, Peake tramped through flower beds, struggled through shrubbery, getting his pant legs damp and his shoes muddy, but he found nothing suspicious.
    He turned on the pool lights, half expecting to find a dead woman
either floating there-or weighted to the blue bottom and peering up
through chlorine-treated water. When the pool proved to be free of
corpses, Peake decided he had been reading too many mystery novels;
in mystery novels, swimming pools were always full of bodies, but
never in real life.
    A passionate fan of mystery fiction since he was twelve, Jerry
Peake had never wanted to be anything other than a detective, and not
just an ordinary detective but something special, like a CIA or FBI
or DSA man, and not just an ordinary DSA man but an investigative
genius of the sort that John Le Carré, William F. Buckley, or
Frederick Forsythe might write about. Peake wanted to be a legend in
his own time. He was only in his fifth year with the DSA, and his
reputation as a whiz was nonexistent, but he was not worried. He had
patience. No one became a legend in just five years. First, you had
to spend a lot of hours doing dog's work-like tramping through flower beds, snagging your best suits on thorny shrubbery, and peering hopefully into swimming pools in the dead of night.
    When he did not turn up Sarah Kiel's body on the Leben property, Peake made the rounds of the hospitals, hoping to find her name on a patient roster or on a list of recently treated outpatients. He had no luck at his first two stops. Worse, even though he had his DSA credentials, complete with photograph, the nurses and physicians with whom he spoke seemed to regard him with skepticism. They cooperated, but guardedly, as if they thought he might be an imposter with hidden-and none too admirable-intentions.
    He knew he looked too young to be a DSA agent; he was cursed with
a frustratingly fresh, open face. And he was less aggressive in his
questioning than he should be. But this time, he was sure the problem
was not his baby face or slightly hesitant manner. Instead, he was
greeted with doubt because of his muddy shoes, which