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waited.
    Perhaps a minute went by. Then he came, following the tracks. He was wearing camo clothes and carried a silenced submachine gun in his hands, the butt braced against his right hip. I could see a slender boom mike across his face; the headset was under his camo hat. He moved slowly and steadily, scanning alternately the trail, then the woods right and left.
    He must have had a lot of experience in the woods, because when he came to the place where I left the trail, he recognized the footprints going away and turned toward me, still scanning. I held the pistol sights dead center on his chest as I squeezed the trigger.

Liars And Thieves

CHAPTER THREE
    In the silence and gloom of the forest, the shot was the loudest noise I’d ever heard.
    The man I fired at dropped instantly.
    I didn’t wait to see how bad he was hit. I leaped up and ran at him, the pistol at the ready.
    The guy never moved. Looked to me like the bullet went right though his heart and stopped it. Stopped it dead.
    The man was a stranger. He was wearing a headset that contained an earpiece and a mike. A cord led from it to a radio in a holster on his belt. I helped myself—he didn’t need it anymore.
    The submachine gun was an MP-5 with a red dot sight and a silencer. It had a doubled banana clip, each side holding forty rounds.
    I slapped his pockets, found another double clip, and took it, found he had a pistol and pocketed that, too. No car keys. My hair was soaked, leaking water down my forehead into my eyes, so I wiped my face on my wet sleeve, then jammed his camo hat on my head.
    The radio was on, but no one was saying anything.
    The heft of the MP-5 gave me a fool’s confidence. I was cold, wet, scared, and mad. I started back toward the main complex with the submachine gun braced against my hip, my thumb on the safety. The gentle mist of rain was now a drizzle.
    The dude who worried me the most was the one in the ghillie suit. When you are playing with guns in the woods, the man who sees the other fellow first has a huge advantage. The ghillie suit was the ultimate in camouflage, but only if the person wearing it stayed immobile, settled in to become one with the surrounding landscape. Movement negated the value of the suit.
    Nearing the clearing, I stopped behind a tree to look and listen. Took a few steps to the dubious safety of another tree and scanned everything. I crawled the last twenty yards to a large tree that gave me a view of the house and yard.
    I was thanking my stars the bushes and weeds were well leafed out, providing me some cover, when a large SUV drove up the road and stopped in front of the main house. The driver didn’t turn off the engine.
    “I’m here, Joe.”
    This had to be the ride they were waiting for, the one that dropped the man I killed.
    Flat on my belly, I eased the muzzle of the MP-5 through the bushes and settled the red dot of the sighting reticle on the driver of the vehicle. The range was perhaps a hundred yards, maybe a few yards less.
    The thought of the guy in the ghillie suit stopped me from pulling the trigger. Without moving my head, I scanned everything I could see in that gloomy wet universe.
    They had undoubtedly heard the pistol shot and knew their man hadn’t reported on the radio. My only edge was that they didn’t know where I was. I hoped.
    The guy in the ghillie could be anywhere in the brush surrounding the clearing waiting for me to reveal my position. I had no illusions—with an MP-5, he didn’t even have to be a good shot. Any one of that clipful of 9 mm slugs he could hose at me would be quite sufficient to terminate my miserable existence.
    A man in a camo suit with a weapon in his hand came out onto the porch. He looked around, then keyed the radio on his belt. “Report.”
    The silence that followed that word was pregnant.
    The seconds ticked by one by one, then another male voice spoke into my ear. “This intruder must have boogied, Frank. Maybe we’d better get the