“I think I need that free lawyer you promised me now.”

D’Agosta stared at the guy. At this point he didn’t have enough evidence to take him into custody. “Mr. Baugh, you can call legal services—” he wrote down the number—“anytime. I’m going to verify your alibi for the evening of December fourteenth, which means we’ll be speaking to your employer, interviewing patrons of the bar, and consulting the tapes from that security camera up in the corner there.” He pointed. They had already put in a subpoena for the security tapes with the bar’s owner and he knew they were safe; D’Agosta hoped Baugh would do something stupid and try to destroy them.

Baugh laughed harshly. “Sure, do whatever the fuck you want.”

15

AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning, the mansion in East Hampton, New York, was quiet. The eighteen-thousand-square-foot house occupied a twelve-acre lot between Further Lane and the Atlantic Ocean, set amid a park-like expanse of lawns, a putting green, an artificial pond, and a “folly” designed to resemble a miniature Egyptian temple. The house itself was a three-story modernist construction in cement, glass, steel, and chrome that looked like an upscale dentist’s office. Its large plate-glass windows glowed quietly in the night air, casting a warm light across the gigantic lawns surrounding it.

The man stood on the empty December beach, in the shadow of a stone breakwater, and examined the house with a pair of night-vision binoculars. The wintry Atlantic thundered and rolled at his back. The moon had set, and the faint river of light that was the Milky Way rose from the sea horizon and arched over his head. The estate gave every appearance of quiet and repose.

The man with the binoculars was keenly aware this was only an illusion.

He scanned the grounds, the levels of the house, and the windows, committing every detail to memory. From his vantage point he could not see the first floor, but he was intimately familiar with the layout of the house, which he had been able to obtain from the absurdly open and unprotected central computer system of Cutter Byquist, the celebrity architect who had designed the house. These included CAD-CAM diagrams of construction drawings, mechanical and electrical plans, security systems, plumbing, even the music system. The electronic security system was relatively basic. The owner was an old-fashioned individual who placed his trust not in electronics but in trained, well-paid human beings, many of whom were former South African special forces soldiers of the notorious and now-disbanded 8 Reconnaissance Commando regiment.

In his fifty-five-year life span, the target who owned this fortress-estate had made many, many formidable enemies. There were a number of individuals and organizations that would very much like to kill him, either for revenge, for silence, or merely to send a message. As a result, his estate would be well prepared against any kind of intrusion.

After a few minutes of recon, the man felt a faint, quick vibration from the cell phone in his pocket. That was the first of what would be many such timed reminders.

The op would now begin.

He had mapped out the details with military precision, down to the very second. He expected the unexpected, of course—and he was prepared for that, as well—but he always liked to start off following a timetable in which every step he took, every action, had been choreographed.

He lowered his binoculars and tucked them into his backpack. He checked his Glock; his SOG knife; his GPS device. He was not yet in a hurry. The plan for this initial phase was slow and methodical. Later, at the end, there would be a rush. That was due to the one weakness in his plan: the target had a panic room built in between his bedroom and his wife’s. If there was a premature alarm raised, the target would have time to take refuge within it—and the op would need to be aborted. The panic room appeared to be impregnable. It was the one hardened technological element of an otherwise simple system. In addition to sophisticated electronic locks, it had multiple sets of dead bolts. Again, the old-fashioned approach—you couldn’t hack a dead bolt.

The man now moved up the beach, slowly, keeping to the shadows, and was soon among the dunes. He was dressed in an outfit of tight black silk, his exposed skin darkened with black greasepaint. He had selected for the operation a late-December weekday night with no moon. The beach and the town were utterly dead.

He moved soundlessly among the dunes, keeping to the low areas, until he came to the rise of land that led to the estate. A slope of brush terminated at a nine-foot stone wall that marked the property boundary, with a row of iron spikes atop it. On the far side was a thick boxwood hedge surrounding a long, smooth, open lawn that led to the front porticoes of the mansion.

He ran his hand over the face of the wall. The stone was rough, and afforded enough hand-and footholds for an experienced rock climber like himself to scramble up it. He waited for the second vibration signal, and when it came he swarmed up the wall in a few simple moves. He knew that the iron spikes were more for show than protection, and that an invisible IR break-beam ran along the top, serving as a perimeter alarm.

On his way over the wall, he made sure to interrupt that beam.

He dropped down the other side, into the hidden space between the hedge and the inside of the wall. There he crouched, in a dark corner, invisible in the deep shadow, waiting. He could just see, through gaps in the hedge, the vast sweep of lawn and the fa?ade of the house. The indirect glow from the house’s windows, along with some tastefully arranged spotlights, threw out enough ambient light to cast a glow across the greensward. The illumination was both a blessing and a curse.

Soon he heard two security men with a dog coming across the lawn on the far side. Another vibration from his phone marked his estimate of their arrival time. They were, so to speak, right on schedule. He was reassured in the soundness of his planning. He knew that outdoor IR break-beams like this one experienced frequent false alarms from animals and birds. That would probably be assumed to be the case with this beam. But to make sure, for the past several nights, at irregular intervals, he had tossed a small, weighted piece of canvas onto the wall and then pulled it back as a way to interrupt the beam at this very spot, triggering the same routine investigation that he had timed for the present moment.

He could hear the panting of the dog as the group approached the hedge, and the irritable murmuring of the two men. Special forces soldiers were normally trained not to talk and to use hand signals only. Not only that, he could smell cigarette smoke.

These men had become soft.

“I hope Scout gets the critter this time,” one of the men said.

“Yeah, fucking squirrel probably.”

The dog suddenly whined. It had scented him.

One of them spoke to the dog. “Scout, go get it. Go get it, boy.”

They released the dog and it shot through a gap in the hedge—coming straight at him, no barking, no warning: a dog trained to kill. He braced himself and met the dog straight on as it leapt at him, delivering a single swipe with his SOG knife to the animal’s throat, severing its windpipe. With a gurgling cough the animal struck him a glancing blow as it fell, tumbling to rest at his feet.

“Hey—did you hear that?” one of the men asked, his voice low. “Scout? Scout? Return, Scout. Return.”

Silence.

“What the fuck?”

“Scout, return.” A little louder now.

“Should we call for backup?”

“Not yet, for chrissakes. He’s probably off chasing the squirrel. Let me go in and see.”

He heard the first man noisily pushing his way into the hedge. This, he began to think, was proving too damn easy. But it would get harder; he was confident of that.

He set himself into a crouching position, ready to spring, still cloaked in darkness. As the blundering noise grew close, he sprang up and drove the SOG into the man’s throat, jerking it sideways, again cutting the windpipe before his victim could make a sound. Even as the man fell facedown the intruder shouldered him aside and rushed forward, driving through the hedge like a linebacker, bursting out and leaping straight at the second man, standing in the open about ten feet away, still smoking a cigarette. With a shout, the man reached for his sidearm and managed to get it partway out of its holster before the intruder, airborne, slashed him through the neck with the SOG. The guard fell backward and the man landed on top of him, taking a faceful of arterial blood. The firearm bounced away on the lawn, unfired.