America

cups, folding chairs, garbage cans… The crew worked quickly and efficiently, setting up shop in a square between four buildings. Four large trees in planters provided a leafy cover over the area.

Okay, if the guy is up in his building, maybe he'll eat lunch here.

Matheny walked back through the area, trying to figure out how he could escape after the hit. If he could park his car somewhere else, steal a car and park it in one of these outside handicapped spaces…

Lots of military in these buildings. Eating lunch, this guy is going to be surrounded by military. If I shoot him with the pistol while he's sitting at one of these tables, four or five of them could grab me, and that would be that.

If I use the rifle, shoot from up there, on top of that parking garage… well, I might get a shot from there through these trees.

Myron Matheny went up to the top story of the garage and looked down. The tree canopy obscured about half the area. He went down a story. Better, but not good enough. He went down one more level. He was two stories up now. This was about as good as it would get.

Sixty yards or so to the center of the square, an easy shot with a scoped rifle. Hell, at this range he could put one in the guy's ear.

After the shot he'd be standing in this garage with the rifle in his hands. He'd drop the rifle, leave the garage the way he came in, get in the stolen car he had parked in a handicapped spot.

That would work. Maybe.

Hell, that was the only way it could be done.

The alternative was to go back to Rosslyn and wait for the guy to come home tonight. If he came home tonight.

That will be the backup plan, if the guy doesn't come here for lunch.

He walked the escape route out of the garage, then went back upstairs for his car. After he paid the tab on the way out, he headed for Alexandria to steal something wearing a handicapped license plate.

'The minisub can go down to a hundred and fifty feet,' Sonny Killbuck said, as he unrolled his chart for Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington. 'I called New London to confirm that.'

'Okay,' Jake said and adjusted his reading glasses on his nose.

'With that fact in mind, I just ran off the one chart that shows water a hundred and fifty feet deep or less. If you wish, sir, I can do another with any parameters you like.'

The three were looking the chart over when Krautkramer came in with the Jouany file. He joined the three naval officers at the chart, a large computer printout.

'If the killer satellite was put in the ocean for eventual salvage with America's minisub, it would have to be in less than a hundred and fifty feet of water,' Jake explained. 'Heydrich is an underwater salvage dude, he's aboard… it fits.'

'When I was putting this file together, Admiral, I ran across an interesting fact. It seems that Antoine Jouany is one of the directors of EuroSpace. I don't know whether you knew that or—'

Jake grabbed the file and began digging through it. 'Show me,' he said.

Krautkramer found the list of Jouany's directorships and showed it to Jake.

'Heydrich? What do you know about him?'

'That's this next file. He worked for years for various salvage firms, pulling up wrecks and cargoes all over the world. Actually got an ownership interest in the company about ten years ago, just before the insurance recovery business boomed, so he's fairly well off. The Nautilus Company. It owns four ships.'

The four ships were named.

'Sonny, how about seeing if the satellite intel people can find these four ships? I want to know where they are right now.'

Killbuck took the list and left.

Krautkramer talked for a while, then left Jake and Toad to study the map and files.

'An awful lot of the Atlantic is pretty shallow,' Toad said dubiously, looking at the thousands of square miles the computer had colored yellow. 'If a fellow were picking a spot to plant a satellite, seems like he has a lot of choice.'

'Not really,' Jake replied. 'The missile is coming down without power in a ballistic trajectory. The target area of necessity must be pretty big.'

'But how is the pirate crew of America going to find the third stage if they can't use active sonar?'

'I've been thinking about that,' Jake said. 'They're going to need a noisemaker, something that puts a lot of noise into the water so Revelation can pick up the reflections off the bottom and, they hope, the lost missile. Something that looks benign.'

'So what is that something?' Toad asked.

'I don't know. I was hoping the recon satellite photos of areas of interest might give us some hints. What you and I need to do is designate areas of interest.'

Myron Matheny had a busy morning. He stole a Ford from a hospital parking lot in Alexandria, successfully got it into a handicapped parking space on the street behind the parking garage, and carried the Remington into the parking garage embedded in green plastic garbage bags. He got it arranged inside a trash can at the entrance to an elevator and finished filling the can with trash from a can near the restaurant operation.

He stood back, scrutinized his can. Few people would pass it outside this inoperative elevator. If the trash people came by while he was downstairs, so be it — he would wait for the guy tonight in Rosslyn.

He checked the shooting position on the second deck again, got a cold feeling up his spine because it was so open. He would be semihidden here behind these parked cars, which would just have to do. He certainly wouldn't have time to dawdle.

When he had done all he could, he went down to the square and walked past the food operation, checking out the customers in line and seated on the planter retaining walls and at the long tables. The guy wasn't here yet.

Matheny bought a fountain soft drink, then sat near the entrance where he could see everyone who came in.

He was nervous. This just didn't feel right — he hadn't done all the planning, hadn't eliminated controllable variables. So much could go wrong. Random chance, the friction of life… and his life was on the line. He was betting his life that the stolen car would start, a cop wouldn't turn up in the wrong place, an accident or construction project wouldn't block traffic… my God, the list of things beyond his control that could go wrong was almost infinite. Knowing, being prepared beforehand, that was how he had stayed alive all these years.

The time was 11:50.

The queue waiting to go through the food line grew steadily longer. From 12 to 1 was going to be the big rush.

At 12:01 two uniformed policemen walked up and got in the queue. Terrific. Those two were going to rabbit after him the instant the rifle cracked.

The queue was moving quickly through the food service line— this entrepreneur obviously knew the food business — yet it was growing as all the people on lunch break in the buildings in the area descended on the square.

And there he was, in line with a bunch of other people, a few in uniform.

Myron Matheny forced himself to relax. He must wait until he saw where the group sat before he left. He certainly didn't want to stand up there on the second floor of the parking garage waving binoculars or the rifle around trying to find this guy.

The knot of people the guy was in talked animatedly among themselves, enjoying the break from their desks.

They paid for their meals individually, then commandeered the end of one of the long tables.

Myron Matheny rose, threw away his soft drink as he walked toward the parking garage. Yep, the guy was going to be visible from the second deck.

This was it. It was time to kill.

Walking toward the parking garage, Myron Matheny was still thinking of things that could go wrong. The two cops were still eating nearby. They were wearing bulletproof vests but not their little two-way radios — maybe