The slope to the north is maybe two hundred feet long but not too steep to climb. When he gets to the top, there will be about a fifty-yard length of open ground between him and the Explorer.

The pistol he’s carrying is a Colt .45, but he doesn’t want to take her down with that. He needs to capture her, not kill her, if he’s going to learn where to find her child and where she’s stashed the evidence that might convict some Arcadians.

He gets out of the Rover and lifts the tailgate. He zippers open a shotgun case and removes a wireless Taser XREP 12-gauge. This pump-action weapon provides a five-round magazine and fires an extended-range electronic projectile that weighs less than an ounce but delivers a twenty-second, five-hundred-volt shock.

A classic Taser arcs up to fifty thousand volts, but this slug does more with less, because the waveform is precisely shaped to match the electric signals in the human nervous system. The four barbed electrodes on the nose of the slug hook to skin or clothes, causing intense pain and muscle paralysis, incapacitating the target with little chance of permanent injury and hardly any risk of death.

With her vehicle screening the assault from those at the truck stop, he needs to disable her only long enough to cuff her wrists and ankles, and then administer chloroform with an inhaler.

Ivan is at least a hundred pounds heavier than she is, slabs of muscle. He can easily carry her into the trees, and then either continue carrying her or drag her down the slope to the Range Rover.

He ascends through crackling drifts of dead leaves. The ground is blanketed in a camouflage of oak shadows and glimmering shapes of sunlight. It would be easy to put a foot wrong and sprain an ankle. He takes longer to reach the crest than he expected.

The delay works to his advantage. When he arrives at the rim of the glen and shelters among the last trees, he sees that he needn’t worry about the passenger-side window being open to allow a clear shot at Jane in the driver’s seat. She’s out of the SUV, kneeling on the blacktop, hammering what might be a disposable phone.

Although a standard Taser with wires can disable a target up to thirty-five feet, the XREP 12-gauge has an effective range of one hundred feet. He’s about half again that distance from the woman and needs to close the gap before he fires.

When he steps out of the cover of the trees, there is a danger that she will see him, even as distracted as she is by the phone. The field before him bristles with weeds and parched ribbon grass; but he will make little noise forging through it.

He moves fast, holding the gun with both hands, a few inches above his waist, ready to bring it up and halt and tag her with the laser sight before he fires. The powder in an XREP round is less than in a standard shell; the slug, which is comparatively light, never achieves a velocity that will kill or seriously injure.

The slug is a wonder of miniaturization: three fins that deploy when it leaves the muzzle of the shotgun, enabling it to spin to stay on target; circuitry nestled inside shock-absorbing plastic; a microprocessor that commands a voltage capacitor to fire while also modulating the shape, intensity, and duration of the current; two tiny lithium batteries to power the microprocessor and provide the disabling electrical charge; a transformer to convert battery energy to stunning effect.

He is maybe 120 feet from her, hasn’t yet drawn her attention, and decides to close to eighty, just to be sure to drop her with the first round.

Then she sees him.

22

UPON GLIMPSING THE MAN in her peripheral vision, Jane might have dropped the hammer and gone for the Heckler in her shoulder rig. But intuition inspired her instead to throw the hammer as she pivoted toward her assailant.

He wasn’t holding the weapon as if he expected a hard recoil. The sound of the shot wasn’t as loud as it ought to be, and Jane knew at once that this was a Taser XREP.

Fractions of a second mattered now.

When she moved to throw the hammer, the laser dot on her breast had been displaced to her left arm, but the shooter had squeezed the trigger just then, as the hammer left her hand.

Instantly she began to shrug off the sport coat.

On impact, four electrified barbs on the nose of the projectile hooked the coat sleeve, near the shoulder, instead of piercing her thin T-shirt over her breasts, where it would have administered a disabling shock.

Even as the projectile’s chassis separated from its nose to dangle on a copper wire, exactly as it was designed to do, Jane cried out at the initial—and smaller—localized shock to her left biceps, conveyed through her clothing. But the satin-lined sleeves were already sliding off her arms.

Nearly all people, when hit, instinctively grabbed the dangling wire—which was called the “hand trap”—to tear out the barbs that were delivering the painful localized shock. But if she grasped the live wire, her hand would contract involuntarily. Clenching the wire tightly, unable to let go, she would receive a much bigger shock as electricity flowed through her body. She would spasm, fall, lie paralyzed for twenty seconds, and be disoriented thereafter.

If she didn’t grip the wire, six longer barbs would pop through the fabric of her sleeve and deliver the disabling shock anyway.

Half a second after the nose barbs hooked her coat, even as the chassis of the projectile was separating from the nose to offer the live wire, her right arm was free. As her left arm slipped out of that sleeve, a brief hellish current stung her fingers, but the garment puddled to the ground, sparing her from the full power of the initial shock.

Although she couldn’t feel the laser dot on her body, she knew her assailant must be squeezing off another round. She dropped as she drew the Heckler, the second projectile shattered against the Explorer, and she rolled toward the front bumper.

23

THIS HATEFUL BITCH, THIS SELF-RIGHTEOUS SELF-APPOINTED save-the-world bitch, this counterrevolutionary pig, has the reflexes of a cat, a damn hyperactive cat.

She’s twisting away from the laser dot and shrugging out of the coat even as Ivan is pulling the trigger, so just for insurance he at once fires again.

He’s not thinking about the hammer; it’s a wild pitch meant to distract him, and Ivan Petro won’t be distracted, hell if he will, he’s focused on her, he squeezes off a third round.

Her aim is almost as good as her reflexes. The tumbling hammer, like some instrument in an Olympic event, arcs high and spins down to strike him just as he fires for the third time. It clips his left hand, with which he holds the slide handle that chambers each round.

The pain brings with it an instant numbness, so that he can’t keep a grip on the shotgun with his left hand. And he can’t operate it with only his right.

Two rounds remain in the Taser, useless to him for the moment. The bitch is on the ground, a difficult—almost impossible—target from this distance, when he has only one good hand. She rolls and then squirms along the blacktop toward the front of the Explorer, seeking partial cover from which she can rise into a genuflection and open fire; she’s seconds from using him for target practice. He has no prospect of cover in this open field, only below-the-knee weeds and ribbon grass. Instead of drawing his pistol, he throws down the Taser 12-gauge and runs in a crouch toward the oaks.

24

A CLOUD OF MIDGES BESTIRRED from the grass, circling around her head like some crown of damnation predictive of imminent death, the sun seeming much hotter than it was a moment earlier, and yet a thin cold sweat on the nape of her neck …

The low-velocity rounds from the Taser 12-gauge wouldn’t have drawn the attention of anyone at the distant truck stop, not with the growl of half a dozen eighteen-wheelers coming and going at any one time. The crack of the Heckler, however, might penetrate the truck drone and alert someone.

Anyway, she didn’t dare risk killing the bastard. She needed to take him down, get some answers from him. How did he find her? Was there a transponder on her Explorer? If so, who else knew about it? How many others were coming?

Holstering the pistol, she scrambled to her feet, stomped on the chassis of the Taser projectile that was attached to her sport coat and trailing at the end of the copper wire. She crushed it and stomped again, separating the nose from the wire, protected by the rubber soles of her sneakers. She snatched up the coat, shook it, casting off the debris, and sprinted after her attacker.

He was a big bull on two feet, a minotaur without a labyrinth. She needed to avoid getting close-up physical with him and take him by surprise instead.

She thought the hammer had struck him, might have done some damage, which was why he’d cast aside the Taser 12-gauge and fled.