All this sounded fine, as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough. Too much was unknown. Gurney couldn’t escape the feeling that he was heading into a situation where the guy on the other side of the table had not only higher cards, but a better seat and a bigger gun. Not to mention a history of winning.

Gurney was tempted to blame everything on the cynical, duplicitous creeps at RAM-TV whose timing “mistake” with the Criminal Conflict promotion announcements was almost certainly a deliberate decision. More promotional exposure meant a bigger audience, and a bigger audience was their number one goal. In fact, it was their only goal. If someone should die as a result of that decision, well … that could create the biggest ratings boost of all.

But the difficulty with blaming it all on them, vile and venal as they were, was that he knew that he owned a piece of the problem. His piece had been his pretending, mostly to himself, that the plan made sense. It was hard to maintain that illusion now—as he struggled to keep the BSA upright, negotiating a tortuous route through clumps of briars, waist-high aspen saplings, and groundhog burrows that would have made the outer edge of the unmowed field a challenge even with perfect visibility. On a murky night it was a nightmare.

As he neared the foot of the hill, the terrain grew rougher and the jouncing movements of the headlight beam through the bushy weeds filled the area out in front of him with erratic shadows. Gurney had faced tough conditions before in the endgame of a battle with a dangerous opponent, but this was worse. Without time to think, to evaluate pros and cons and levels of risk, he felt forced to act.

Forced was not too strong a word for it. Now that he was within striking distance of Panikos, letting him get away was unthinkable. When he was this near his quarry, the gravitational field of the chase grew stronger and the rational assessment of risk began to fade.

And there was something else. Something very specific.

The echo of the past—stirring a force within him far stronger than reason.

That searing memory of an escaping car, Danny sprawled dead on the pavement. A memory that gave birth to an iron conviction that never again—never again, no matter the danger—would a killer so close get away from him.

This was something far beyond the niceties of rationality. This was something burned by unbearable loss into the circuits of his brain.