The sun beat against his neck, and his pale cotton shirt grew dappled with sweat and the salt spray that breezed in from the bay. Occasionally, as the tide gently pulled back the water level, he could make out the silhouette of an intricate tracery upon the water: he realized that flat nets had been stretched from the coastline some distance outward, held afloat by small buoys. The security measures were discreet but not negligible, for doubtless the nets were studded with sensors; an amphibious landing would have been nearly impossible without serving notice of the intrusion.

He heard the sound of heavy boots on the planked walkway just twenty feet away, where the land formed a crown near the top of the beach. A young man in a uniform of green and black camouflage, cinched trousers, a weapons belt: standard-issue National Guard attire. His gait on the boardwalk was a regular tattoo of hard rubber against wood—this was a guard doing a required patrol, not one who was alert to an intruder’s presence.

Janson continued to trudge quietly along the wet sand of the shore.

“Hey, you!” The young guardsman had spotted him, and was walking toward him. “You see the signs? You can’t be here. No fishing, no shell scavenging, no nothing.” The man’s face was sun-reddened, not tanned; this was obviously a recent posting for him, and he had not yet adjusted to the long hours of exposure to the elements.

Janson turned to face him, stooping his shoulders slightly, willing himself to appear older and feebler. A salty waterman, a local. How would a local respond? He recalled his long-ago conversations with one of them, a fellow angler. “Do you have any idea who I am, young man?” He made his face muscles slack, and his voice developed a slight quaver suggestive of infirmity. He spoke with the vowels of the old Eastern Shore regional accent. “Me, my family been living here when you were still eatin’ your white bread. Been here through the rubs, been here when things was pretty. Shoreline here is public property. My daughter-inlaw’s been five years on the Lower Eastern Shore Heritage Committee. You think you’re going to tell me I can’t go where the law says I can, you got a whole ’nother think come at you. I know my rights.”

The guardsman scowled, half amused at the old salt’s line of blather and not ungrateful for the interruption of his tedious routine. But his orders were clear. “Fact remains, this is a restricted area, and there’s about a dozen signs saying so.”

“I’ll have you know, my ancestors were here when the Union troops were in Salisbury, and—”