Spencerville

okay.”
    Keith nodded.
    Still whispering, Billy said, “I know that camouflage back there looks like Baxter’s work, but how we gonna be
sure
the house at the end of those wires is his? We don’t know what it looks like, and we ain’t gonna knock before we shoot.”
    Keith said, “It’s an A-frame, dark wood, set back from the lake.”
    “Yeah? You know more than you say, don’t you?” He added, “Typical officer.”
    Keith replied, “I think you know everything I know now. I told you up front this was going to be dangerous.”
    “Yeah, you did.”
    “I’ll tell you something else—I took you along for
you,
not for me. But I appreciate the help.”
    “Thanks.”
    “If I take you the rest of the way, I want you to promise me that you’ll finish the job if I’m not able to.”
    Billy looked at Keith and nodded. “You know I got my own reasons, and you got yours… so if one of us is down, the other guy’s gonna give it his best shot.”
    Keith hesitated, then said, “Okay… and if it turns out at the end that it’s just you and her, you tell her… whatever.”
    “Yeah, I’ll tell her whatever.” He asked, “Anything in particular?”
    There was, but Keith said, “Just tell her about today.”
    “Okay. You do the same for me.” He added, “Maybe she don’t care, but she should know.”
    “Will do.” Keith had the distinct feeling he’d had this conversation before, in other places with other people, and he was definitely tired of it. He said, “Let’s move.”
    They continued on through the forest. Keith tried to guess how thorough Baxter had been in his preparations. Camouflage was okay, but an early-warning device was essential. That was what the dogs were for, of course, but the thing that concerned him most was a trip flare, though he wondered if Baxter, who had no military experience, had thought of such a thing. Still, he stepped high as he walked, and so did Billy, he noticed, who had the same thing on his mind. It was interesting, Keith thought, how much old soldiers remembered, even guys like Billy. But after you’d seen your first trip wire set off by someone else—whether it led to a flare or an explosive booby trap—you didn’t want to repeat the experience.
    The moon was higher now and cast some light into the pine forest, but Keith still couldn’t see more than twenty feet in front of him. It was colder than Keith had imagined it would be, and a wind had come up from the direction of the lake, adding to the chill.
    They moved slowly, covering about half a mile in thirty minutes. Keith slowed down, then stopped and pointed.
    Up ahead, they could see the beginning of a clearing through the pines, and at the end of the clearing, the moonlit waters of Grey Lake.
    They moved another twenty yards and stopped again. To their right, about a hundred yards away, sitting in the large clearing that ran to the lake’s edge and silhouetted against the lake, was an A-frame house of dark wood.
    They both stared at the house a moment, then Keith raised his binoculars. The house had sort of an alpine look and was built on cement-block columns, he saw, so that it was elevated a full story above the ground. A raised, cantilevered deck ran completely around the house, giving Baxter a full 360-degree view from a raised vantage point. A stone chimney rose from the center of the roof, and smoke drifted toward them, so they were downwind from any dogs. Parked in the open garage beneath the A-frame structure was a dark Ford Bronco.
    The house was set at an angle to the lakeshore, so that Keith could see the front of the house as well as the long north side. Light came from the dormered windows set into the sloping roofline and also from the sliding glass doors that led onto the deck, and, as he watched, a fleeting figure—he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—passed in front of the glass doors.
    Keith lowered the binoculars. “This is it.”
    From the direction of the house, a dog barked.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
    C liff Baxter strapped on his holster and put on his bulletproof vest. He went to his gun rack and took down his Sako, model TRG-21, which was his night rifle, with an Army-surplus infrared scope mounted on it. The rifle, made in Finland, had cost the taxpayers of Spencerville four thousand dollars, and the scope another thousand, and in his opinion, the rifle and scope together made about the most accurate and deadly nightsniper system in the world.
    He shut off the