“That again.” Collins rolled his eyes. “Like I said, calling off the termination order would have raised too many questions. The cowboys at the CIA got credible reports that Novak had been killed and that you had something to do with it. Cons Ops got hold of the same info. The last thing any of us at Mobius wanted bruited about, but you play the cards you’re dealt. At the time, I did what I thought was best.” The words were mere words, expressing neither sadism nor sorrow.

A scrim of red momentarily suffused Janson’s vision: which was the greater insult, he wondered—being executed as a traitor, or being sacrificed as a pawn? Once more the fishing vessel caught his attention, but this time the sight was accompanied by a wrenching sense of danger. It was too small to be a crabber, and too near the shore to be after rockfish or perch.

And the thick staff that extended from the flapping tarpaulin on the deck was not a fishing pole.

Janson saw the bureaucrat’s mouth moving, but he could no longer hear him, for his attention was wholly devoted to an immediate and deadly threat. Yes, Collins’s bungalow was on a narrow, two-mile-long spit of land, yet the sense of security conveyed by the isolation, Janson realized now, was an illusion.

An illusion that was shattered by the first artillery round that exploded in Collins’s living room.

A torrent of adrenaline constricted Janson’s consciousness to a laserlike focus. The shell smashed through the window and hurled into the opposite wall, spraying the room with splinters of wood and chunks of plaster and fragments of glass; the blast was so intense that it registered on the ears less as sound than as pain. Black smoke began to billow and Janson understood the fluke that had saved them. A howitzer shell, he knew, spun more than three hundred times a second, and the result of its force and spin was that the shell had burrowed far into the cottage’s soft-pine and plaster construction before it exploded. Only this had spared them a deadly blast of jagged shrapnel. Seemingly conscious of every millisecond, Janson realized, too, that an artillery gunner’s first few shells were fired in order to zero in on the mark. The second shell would not arrive ten feet above their heads. The second shell, if they stayed where they were, would not leave them to ponder shell rotation speeds and detonation times.

The old wood-frame house would offer them no protection at all.

Janson leaped from the couch and raced to the attached garage. It was his only hope. The door was open and Janson took a few steps down to the concrete floor, where a small convertible stood. A yellow late-model Corvette.