the clearing around his cabin.
The sigh of a cool breeze through the towering pines, and the earthy tang of nature enveloped him and he allowed himself to
become one with the living, breathing wilderness around him.
He was at home here.
He knew those in the vehicle would not be, and that was his one advantage. They would be pros, he was somehow certain, as
skilled in the art of tracking and killing as he was.
The station wagon halted. He heard the driver kill the engine.
A brief pause, then three men debarked to stand near each other but not clustered, two of them toting hunting rifles.
Cody recognized the one in the middle. The one without the rifle; the agent in charge. The one who lifted his hands to his
mouth to magnify his voice and shouted.
“Cody!”
Cody did not move, maintaining his position, his rising combat senses probing the thickly wooded wilderness around him in
all directions for any sign of danger, but the only other presence he could detect was the trio down there by the cabin.
Yeah, he recognized their leader all right. He’d known Lund all the way back to Nam, and had been on friendly terms with Pete
right up until Cody’s abrupt leave from government service.
The last time he had seen Pete, Lund had headed the CIA’s assassination unit.
Cody rapidly considered his options. He had hoped they never would find him but had somehow always known they would if they
really wanted to. A man cannot hide from the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America any more than he
can hide from his own past.
He had taken every conceivable step to conceal his ownership of this land, and since leaving the Company under the cloud of
what had happened in Nicaragua, he had not left his property line since arriving here except for a monthly sixty-mile round-trip
down to the crossroads country store at the base of the mountain, the nearest outpost of civilization.
He had remembered, from his long-ago days at Princeton, Plato’s dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Well,
he’d given himself a life with nothing to do but survive up here mountain-man style the year around, alone with the wilderness
and his past, with nothing more than the solitude and time to examine the life he’d led, but he could find no good in his
life that could ever balance the scales for what he had been a part of on that last mission into Nicaragua; the atrocity that
drove him to this Canadian mountaintop.
Technically, of course, the massacre of those nuns had not been his fault, but such knowledge did little to erase the stark
mental images of the bloodied, fresh corpses of Sister Mary Francine and the other three women at that little country mission.
He had spent his time up here prowling this no-man’s land, hunting, trapping, trying to somehow make sense of the ungraspable;
of what was done and lost forever. He spent his nights hitting the bottle too damn hard but he had never let self-pity or
guilt dull responses and reflexes and a soldier’s sixth sense earned in the hellgrounds of the world prior to his “retirement.”
Lund stopped calling out his name from the clearing by the cabin, he and the two men with him standing in their loose cluster
down there, gazing off in various directions toward the walls of pine that lined the ridges around the cabin.
Cody noted that the two guys with Lund had their rifles aimed at the ground, not in firing position.
He made his decision.
A hawk chose that moment to soar into the clearing, riding the air currents high beneath the cobalt-blue sky.
Cody left his concealment, not with any sudden rushing movement, but, rather, assuming an easy gait as he purposefully made
himself visible to the others, as if he were coming upon the cabin, returning with no prior realization that Lund and his
two pals were down there.
He had to keep himself visible several moments longer than he intended because Pete had his eyes
The sigh of a cool breeze through the towering pines, and the earthy tang of nature enveloped him and he allowed himself to
become one with the living, breathing wilderness around him.
He was at home here.
He knew those in the vehicle would not be, and that was his one advantage. They would be pros, he was somehow certain, as
skilled in the art of tracking and killing as he was.
The station wagon halted. He heard the driver kill the engine.
A brief pause, then three men debarked to stand near each other but not clustered, two of them toting hunting rifles.
Cody recognized the one in the middle. The one without the rifle; the agent in charge. The one who lifted his hands to his
mouth to magnify his voice and shouted.
“Cody!”
Cody did not move, maintaining his position, his rising combat senses probing the thickly wooded wilderness around him in
all directions for any sign of danger, but the only other presence he could detect was the trio down there by the cabin.
Yeah, he recognized their leader all right. He’d known Lund all the way back to Nam, and had been on friendly terms with Pete
right up until Cody’s abrupt leave from government service.
The last time he had seen Pete, Lund had headed the CIA’s assassination unit.
Cody rapidly considered his options. He had hoped they never would find him but had somehow always known they would if they
really wanted to. A man cannot hide from the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America any more than he
can hide from his own past.
He had taken every conceivable step to conceal his ownership of this land, and since leaving the Company under the cloud of
what had happened in Nicaragua, he had not left his property line since arriving here except for a monthly sixty-mile round-trip
down to the crossroads country store at the base of the mountain, the nearest outpost of civilization.
He had remembered, from his long-ago days at Princeton, Plato’s dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Well,
he’d given himself a life with nothing to do but survive up here mountain-man style the year around, alone with the wilderness
and his past, with nothing more than the solitude and time to examine the life he’d led, but he could find no good in his
life that could ever balance the scales for what he had been a part of on that last mission into Nicaragua; the atrocity that
drove him to this Canadian mountaintop.
Technically, of course, the massacre of those nuns had not been his fault, but such knowledge did little to erase the stark
mental images of the bloodied, fresh corpses of Sister Mary Francine and the other three women at that little country mission.
He had spent his time up here prowling this no-man’s land, hunting, trapping, trying to somehow make sense of the ungraspable;
of what was done and lost forever. He spent his nights hitting the bottle too damn hard but he had never let self-pity or
guilt dull responses and reflexes and a soldier’s sixth sense earned in the hellgrounds of the world prior to his “retirement.”
Lund stopped calling out his name from the clearing by the cabin, he and the two men with him standing in their loose cluster
down there, gazing off in various directions toward the walls of pine that lined the ridges around the cabin.
Cody noted that the two guys with Lund had their rifles aimed at the ground, not in firing position.
He made his decision.
A hawk chose that moment to soar into the clearing, riding the air currents high beneath the cobalt-blue sky.
Cody left his concealment, not with any sudden rushing movement, but, rather, assuming an easy gait as he purposefully made
himself visible to the others, as if he were coming upon the cabin, returning with no prior realization that Lund and his
two pals were down there.
He had to keep himself visible several moments longer than he intended because Pete had his eyes
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