pushed on. When he was walking, he drank, checked his position with the map and GPS, and judged his progress toward the dark silhouettes of the distant hills. He could easily tell he was gradually climbing into higher country. By the end of three hours he had noticed that the vegetation was thicker, with a few woody plants with leaves, and soon there were stands of pine. He moved to the inside of the groves for shade and cover.
Before the fifth hour the sun was low in the sky and he judged he was getting close to the ranch. He found a copse in the middle of a pine woods, half covered by a rock shelf and sheltered by trees that had grown close to it. He crawled under the shelf, opened his pack, and sorted his gear. He assembled his rifle, loaded it, then put another five rounds in the spare magazine and put it into his pocket. He rechecked the adjustments of the scope and mounts to be sure they were in the midrange-essentially the factory setting. He would have liked to zero in the rifle before he tried to do anything risky with it, but that had been impossible. He would have to move in as close as he dared, fire his first round, and adjust to improve the precision of his aim. He plotted his route to the ranch and identified a mountain as the landmark he would still be able to see later in dim moonlight.
He drank more water, lay down, and slept for a time, then awoke in the dark. He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock in the evening. He took with him his night-vision scope, his rifle and ammunition, and his camouflage poncho. He left everything else in his pack and pushed it far back under the rock shelf.
The night was quiet in the dry, rocky hills. The birds that had sung at twilight were all quiet now. His own footsteps seemed to be the loudest sounds. Now and then some small animal skittered away into the brush ahead of him. After another quarter mile he would stop occasionally in cover, take out his night scope, and study the next stretch of visible ground before he stepped into it. He searched for the shapes of men waiting for an intruder, and then for electronic devices that might have been installed around the perimeter of Silver Saguaro Ranch.
He saw nothing and heard nothing that indicated men had been here. Probably anyone on the path he was blazing would have traveled on horseback, but he could see no signs that horses had been up here. As he approached what his map indicated was the last ridge before the ranch, he became more wary. There could easily be men posted up on the high ground watching the approaches to the resort.
He knelt in some fragrant brush, put on his camouflage poncho, concealed his rifle under it, and looked through his night scope. He saw pale green rocks and trees, black sky, pale green clouds. He looked, he waited, then moved ahead to a higher plateau with a few jagged rock outcroppings on it. He sat in front of an outcropping, spread his poncho so he wasn't shaped like a human being, and stared through the night scope, looking down the slope toward the ranch.
A hundred yards ahead there was a fallen log on the ground, a big pine that had once stood at the edge of the nearby stand. After a few seconds he saw part of it move. It moved again and he made out the shape of a head, a shoulder, and then the whole shape separated itself from the background. It was a man lying down, leaning on the log, and staring up the mountainside in his general direction.
He had to find a way past this sentry. If he passed far enough to the left or the right, he might avoid this man's notice, but there would be others stationed at intervals. One sentry was like one ant-an impossibility. He studied the area with his night-vision scope, but he couldn't see a good way around. He also knew that it would be foolish to leave an armed enemy behind him. Getting past him on the way out, after things had happened, might be impossible. But if the man was dead, this spot would be clear.
Schaeffer moved to his right, away from the sentry, and slipped into the pine woods. He felt extremely lucky that the trees up here were pines. The ground had a thick, soft carpet of fallen needles, and he could walk without making a sound. As he circled back to the left, he considered the proper method. Shooting the man would bring the rest of the watchdogs. Cutting his throat would be difficult to do without some sort of a struggle and the chance of being soaked with the man's blood. The best way would be a ligature. He pulled the cord from the neck of his poncho, tested its strength, and then looked for the right sort of branch as he moved in the woods. When he found it, he used his knife to carve it into two pieces, each about an inch thick and four inches long. In the center of each he carved a groove, then put the knife away. He tied the ends of the cord to the handles, keeping the cord in the groove. Now the cord was about two feet long with a sturdy handle on each end.
He moved on through the woods, looking in his scope until he could see the sentry again. The sentry was staring up at the slope of the hill, watching for intruders. Schaeffer began to advance toward the sentry. He stayed low, but moved steadily, and soon he was directly behind him, on the other side of the log. He gripped the handles, crossed his wrists, and dropped the loop around the man's neck. He tightened it and kept it tight. The man struggled to get the cord off his neck, then to reach for the hand that held it. But Schaeffer pulled backward hard and set both feet against the fallen tree trunk.
As he tightened the strangling cord and the man lost consciousness, Schaeffer thought about strangulation. As he had thrown the loop over the man's head, the man had done the wrong thing instinctively. He had dropped the objects in his hands and used both hands to try to pull the cord away from his throat, then to wrench his attacker's hands off the cord. Before he could change his tactic and reach down for the gun in his jacket, his brain had been denied oxygen for a couple of minutes so he was already weak and dizzy. A few seconds later he was unconscious. What amateur killers didn't realize was that strangling took patience. The amateur might consider the job done right about now. But to be sure the man wouldn't start breathing again and regain consciousness after he was gone, it was necessary to deny him oxygen for much longer. Eddie Mastrewski had always insisted on seven minutes.
While he held the cord tight and waited, he watched and listened. There was no sound up here except the whisper of wind in the tall trees. He studied the view up the hill from here so he would be sure to come back past the dead sentry instead of some live one. He looked down at the sentry. He was about thirty years old, wearing new blue jeans and a black shirt cut like a cowboy's, with snaps instead of buttons. He was beginning to lose his hair prematurely, with a receding hairline and a bare spot at the back of his head about the size of a silver dollar. On his feet were a pair of clean, new hiking boots.
Schaeffer held both handles in his left hand, touched the man's wrist, and felt for a pulse: nothing. He unwrapped the rope, found the man's wallet, and looked inside. His driver's license was from New York and said he was Raymond Agnetti. There was a thick layer of hundred-dollar bills, so Schaeffer took them. Agnetti's jacket was lying on the log beside him. When he lifted it, he felt the weight of a gun. He took it out and looked at it in the moonlight. The etching on the slide said it was a Springfield Armory XD. He'd never seen this model before, and so he knew it must be new. He released the magazine and saw it held about sixteen nine-millimeter rounds in a double stack. He pushed it back in and put the pistol in his belt and its spare magazine in his pocket.
He found Agnetti's cell phone in the coat, but he had no radio for talking to all the other guards at once. Schaeffer turned the phone off, put it back in the coat, dragged the body into the low brush at the edge of the pine woods, and covered it with branches from a broken sapling. He retrieved his gear and went on.
Moving slowly and carefully, he made his way down the hill toward the ranch. There were clearly marked hiking trails now, and he stayed in the woods that bordered them. After a quarter mile he saw the complex and realized why the families had posted guards up the hill. The hill offered a good view of the whole re-sort. He kept moving downward looking below for ways to accomplish what he wanted to do.
When he was only a few hundred feet from the populated area, he stopped and surveyed it. From the website he recognized the Lodge, a big, barnlike building with a high roof and big windows. He could see there were many men inside it right now. Parked beside it on the side away from the main entrance were three big white Fibbiani trucks marked GOLD SEAM CATERING, with white-coated hotel staff walking back and forth unloading supplies.
There were cabins along a network of paved roads surrounding the lodge. Many cabins had cars parked in front of them, and quite a few had lights glowing in their windows. There were small knots of men who had gathered to talk at various places along the paths to the lodge or on the wooden porches of the cabins. The thing that struck him as he looked down on the scene was that every human being he saw was male. This was not the sort of conference where they brought wives and girlfriends. It looked like a military encampment.
He found a small level space on the hillside that served as a foothold for some spiky plants, sat down, and spread his poncho on the plants so his body was under it, and its shape merged into the brush. He trained the rifle scope on a group of men standing near the lodge and studied them, then moved the rifle to other groups, searching for familiar faces. It took him several more minutes before he found one he knew. It was Gino Castelletti, an old caporegima from Brooklyn. He was fat and stooped now, and Schaeffer judged he must be around seventy. His hair was so thin that it looked like lines drawn on his bald head.
The five men standing around him listening to him talk were all about twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and
