Shock Wave

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Copyright © 2011 by John Sandford
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed
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Published simultaneously in Canada
     
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sandford, John.
Shock wave / John Sandford.
p. cm.
    ISBN : 978-1-101-54765-6
    1. Flowers, Virgil (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Government investigators—Minnesota—
Fiction. 3. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.A516S54 2011b 2011027848
813’54—dc22
     

     

     
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
     
    While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet
addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any
responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher
does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or
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I wrote this book in cooperation with my friend David Cronk, a schoolteacher, golf professional, politician, Catholic catechism instructor, sometime actor—the Nazi in The Sound of Music —and longtime thriller-novel enthusiast. Dave and I have played several hundred rounds of golf, mostly at the Clifton Hollow golf course outside River Falls, Wisconsin. Soon after we began playing together, I noticed his talent for fiction: scores, stories of golf-course heroics, his attractiveness to women, etc. Dave, in fact, gave me my most valuable golf tip, one that will lower the score of even the worst duffer; that is, always carry an extra ball in your pants pocket. He is NOT the model for the golf-pro schoolteacher in this novel; any passing resemblance is purely coincidence.
     
—JOHN SANDFORD

1
    F ROM THE BOARDROOM WINDOWS, high atop the Pye Pinnacle, you could see almost nothing for a very long way. A white farmhouse, surrounded by a scattering of metal sheds, huddled in a fir-tree windbreak a half mile out and thirty degrees to the right. Another farmhouse, with a red barn, sat three-quarters of a mile away and thirty degrees to the left. Straight north it was corn, beans, and alfalfa, and after that, more corn, beans, and alfalfa.
    Somebody once claimed to have spotted a cow, but that had never been confirmed. The top floor was so high that the board members rarely even saw birds, though every September, a couple of dozen turkey vultures, at the far northern limit of their range, would gather above Pye Plaza and circle through the thermals rising off the concrete and glass.
    There were rumors that the vultures so pissed off Willard Pye that he would go up to the roof, hide in a blind disguised as an airconditioner vent, and try to blast them out of the sky with a twelve gauge shotgun.
    Angela “Jelly” Brown, Pye’s executive assistant, didn’t believe that rumor, though she admitted to her husband it sounded like something Pye would do. She knew he hated the buzzards and the saucersized buzzard droppings that spotted the emerald-green glass of the Pinnacle.
    But that