and, after locking the car, began to jog back to the main gates of the Baldridge Ranch.
It took him eight minutes, but before he got there, he cleared the fence and made his way cross-country toward the distant lights. The moon was up, and very bright, and he wanted to come into the ranch compound behind the buildings, with the shadows in front of him, rather then behind. This was difficult, and he realized he would have to circle the ranch buildings in order to achieve it, but he did not want the clear, pale light of the moon in his face.
He reached the buildings and flattened himself behind them. Inside he heard a sharp thud on the wall, followed by another.
He began his circle around to the main house, creeping silently through the shadows with the soft, light steps of the Bedouin. He hoped to God no one would see or hear him, because he was not intending to kill anyone, except perhaps Baldridge, if he had to. If it became obvious that Laura would leave with him. There was a corner of Ben’s brain that was not functioning in any way accurately, or even rationally. And the master of all these Kansas acres was right in that corner.
Ben made his way softly into a place where he could observe the house, with his back to the moon. His plan was to take Bill and Laura by surprise. There was no point walking up to the door and trying to be reasonable. For all he knew this damned cowboy would gun him down in cold blood. No, he had to take control. And to do that, he must put them both on the defensive. That way he could see how the land lay.
He planned to enter the house through an upstairs window in which the curtain was not drawn, the sure sign of an empty guest room. The trouble was none of them were drawn right now, unlike the downstairs windows. And he could see light crossing the hallways between the rooms. He had seen one room on the farside of the house with a drawn curtain but no light, and he guessed, correctly, that Laura’s daughters might be asleep in there.
He waited for a half hour, until 2345. The curtains were being drawn by a figure he could not identify, and he made his move. He slipped quietly across the yard and climbed easily onto the roof of an outbuilding. From there he swung up onto a second-floor balcony, then went higher, to a gently sloping roof leading up to the one window with still no drawn curtain.
Crouching on the sill, he inserted his knife between the sliding panes and flicked the catch back. At that exact moment Laura Baldridge walked in, switched on the light, and saw the big blade of the desert knife jutting upward in the gap. She also saw a dark figure in the light, and she yelled at the top of her lungs…“BILL! BILL! COME QUICK! THERE’S SOMEONE BREAKING IN!”
Outside on the roof, Ben Adnam nearly died of shock. Two dogs were barking furiously below. He ducked low and moved higher, the only way he could go, up toward the chimneys.
Bill Baldridge unlocked the gun cupboard in the back hall, selected a D.M. Lefever 9FE shotgun, and snapped two 16-gauge shells into it, cramming four more into his jacket pocket. He took the stairs two at a time and found Laura pressed against the passage wall outside the spare room.
“Right in there,” she whispered. “I saw Adnam close against the window with a big knife…it was Ben…I know it was him…if we don’t kill him, he’ll kill us. Jesus, wait here, I’m going for a shotgun. This is bloody ridiculous.”
“I guess there are advantages in marrying a girl whose family trade is war,” he smiled. “She doesn’t lose her nerve that easy.”
At the same time Laura was going to get a shotgun, it was 0600 of the next day in Scotland and Douglas Anderson was awakening in Waverley Railway Station, in a sleeping car, on the overnight express from London. The red light on his cellular phone was flashing, and he pressed the button for his recorded messages. There was just one. The familiar voice of Beresford informed him that Admiral MacLean wished to speak to him on a matter of the utmost urgency, and would he call him at whatever time of the day or night.
Douglas was usually somewhat unnerved by the admiral, and he did precisely as he was asked, awakening Sir Iain on a misty Scottish morning just before dawn.
But the great submariner awakened fast, asked his former son-in-law to hold for one moment, pulled on his dressing gown, and hurried downstairs to his study.
“I say, Iain, I’m awfully sorry about the time…but the message did say…”
“Don’t worry about that, Douglas. I’m delighted you made it…and I did want to ask you something very important, and I wish I had been able to reach you before…you remember that South African chap who called to see Laura the other day…did he, by any chance, ask where Laura lives now? I don’t mean just America…he didn’t ask for her address, did he?”
“Yes, he did. He said his own wife would very much like to send her a Christmas card, just to show they had tried to make contact in Scotland…I wrote it down, in full, on a piece of paper for him. It seemed a reasonable request.”
Admiral MacLean’s heart missed a beat. But he steadied himself while Douglas went on, calmly, “The ranch in Pawnee County, Kansas, correct? I remember it…sounds like something out of the Wild West.”
“Yes…so it does. Thank you, Douglas. I’m sorry to have been a bother.” And with a pounding heart, Admiral MacLean replaced the receiver. “Fuck,” he said, uncharacteristically. Then he picked up the phone again and placed a call to Admiral Arnold Morgan’s office in the White House, where it just after 0100.
The main switchboard patched him through to Kathy O’Brien’s house immediately, and the national security advisor awakened instantly.
“Iain…hi. This has got to be important.”
“It is. In the last few minutes I found out that Adnam is almost certainly on his way to the Baldridge Ranch. He’s walking around with their complete address and zip code in his pocket. That’s what he went to Anderson’s house for…Arnold, trust me. He’s on his way…My God, he’s capable of blowing the house up.”
“Holy Topeka!” grated the admiral, slipping into Kansas mode. “Leave it with me, pal. I’ll have a team of heavies in there inside two hours.”
He rang off, called the CIA duty officer, and told him to put him through to Frank Reidel, the Agency’s chief military liaison man. They connected in less than sixty seconds, and the admiral wasted no time with explanations. Just told Frank to get a half dozen heavily armed hard men by helicopter to the Baldridge Ranch in Pawnee County, Kansas, IMMEDIATELY. He told them they knew the way in the control room at McConnell Air Force Base, Wichita. No, he did not care if they used civilians, agents, U.S. Marines, Navy SEALs, or King Kong. Just so long as they moved fast…who are they looking for?…an escaped Arab terrorist, Benjamin Adnam, Commander Benjamin Adnam. Certainly armed. Extremely dangerous. Preemptive action if necessary. But try to keep him alive.”
Then Arnold Morgan called Bill Baldridge and waited with mounting concern while the phone rang and rang before an answering machine picked up and requested that he leave a message.
It was just a few minutes after midnight back in Kansas, and Laura was heading downstairs at breakneck speed to the gun cupboard in search of the shotgun, left to her by her grandmother, the countess of Jedburgh. Bill Baldridge went into the small office next to his bedroom and spent five minutes adjusting the zones on the burglar alarms, activating the entire downstairs area, but only one part of the upstairs system.
He positioned himself on the main landing, in the shadows near the big fireplace along the corridor from his old bedroom. If Adnam was to enter the house, he would have to come through one of two rooms on the second floor, or else the alarms would go off, floodlighting the house, alerting every ranch worker and the local police.
Bill believed Laura. It had to be Ben, and his plan of action was clear. If the Iraqi came through either of those bedroom doors onto the landing, he would gun him down like a prairie dog, no questions asked. If he tried to gain entry through the downstairs doors or windows, the alarm system would surely frighten him off.
However the five minutes he had taken resetting the zones was critical. Out on the roof, Ben Adnam had been scared, but not unnerved, by being spotted. And like a good submarine commander, he elected to press home his attack while the enemy was in disarray. He moved from the chimneys, back down the roof, and opened the window where he had prised open the catch.
Laura, in her haste, had not relocked it, and Adnam climbed through, crossed the room, and turned out the light, positioning himself behind the door of the empty third-floor spare room. It was Bill he wanted, because that way everything else would fall into place when Laura could see clearly who the master was.
Ben stood breathing hard after his exertions, gathering his thoughts, trying to work out what he wanted most, Laura, or access to the United States national security chief. The problem was confusing him. He knew he wanted Laura more than anything he had ever wanted. But he sensed that was his heart. His brain was still a small
