Jodie returned to his bed and sat on the sagging mattress. He picked up his battered, stained copy of Dependent No More.

Let’s get to work, he thought.

He opened the book wide, the glue cracking, and tore a small patch of tape off the bottom of the spine. A long knife slid onto the bed. It looked like black metal though it was made of ceramic-impregnated polymer and wouldn’t register on a metal detector. It was stained and dull, sharp as a razor on one edge, serrated like a surgical saw on the other. The handle was taped. He’d designed and constructed it himself. Like most serious weapons it wasn’t glitzy and it wasn’t sexy and it did only one thing: it killed. And it did this very, very well.

He had no qualms about picking up the weapon—or touching doorknobs or windows—because he was the owner of new fingerprints. The skin on the pads of eight fingers and two thumbs had been burned away chemically last month by a surgeon in Berne, Switzerland, and a new set of prints etched into the scar tissue by a laser used for microsurgery. His own prints would regenerate but not for some months.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes closed, he pictured the common room and took a mental stroll through it, remembering the location of every door, every window, every piece of furniture, the bad landscapes on the walls, the elk antlers above the fireplace, ashtrays, weapons, and potential weapons. Jodie had such a good memory he would have been able to walk through the room blindfolded, never brushing a single chair or table.

Lost in this meditation, he steered his imaginary self to the telephone in the corner and spent a moment considering the safe house’s communications system. He was completely familiar with how it worked (he spent much of his free time reading operating manuals of security and communications systems) and he knew that if he cut the line the drop in voltage would send a signal to the marshals’ panel here and probably to a field office as well. So he’d have to leave it intact.

Not a problem, just a factor.

On with his mental stroll. Examining the common-room video cameras—which the marshal had “forgotten” to tell them about. They were in the Y configuration that a budget-conscious security designer would use for a government safe house. He knew this system too and that it harbored a serious design flaw—all you had to do was tap the middle of the lens hard. This misaligned all the optics; the image in the security monitor would go black but there’d be no alarm, which would happen if the coaxial cable were cut.

Thinking about the lighting . . . He could shut out six—no, five—of eight lights he’d seen in the safe house but no more than that. Not until all the marshals were dead. He noted the location of each lamp and light switch, then moved on, more phantom walking. The TV room, the kitchen, the bedrooms. Thinking of distances, angles of view from outside.