He walked into the woods, a spongy bed of mulched pine needles and twigs beneath his feet, and doubled back toward the small lane he had driven past. The air was filled with the resinous scent of an old-growth pine forest, a scent that recalled nothing so much as the disinfectants and air fresheners that so insistently aped it. Much of the woodland seemed wholly untouched by human habitation, a roadside forest primeval. It was through such a forest that European settlers had journeyed four centuries earlier, establishing themselves on the virgin territory, making their way by flintlock, musket, knife, and barter with an aboriginal people who greatly outnumbered them and were infinitely wiser in the ways of the land. Such were the obscure origins of what would become the mightiest power on the planet. Today, the terrain was some of the most beautiful in the country, and the less it bore the evidence of those who lived there, he reflected, the more beautiful it seemed.

And then he found the airstrip.

It was a sudden clearing in the forest, and disturbingly well maintained: the bramble and bushes had been clipped back recently, and a long oval strip of grass was neatly trimmed. It was a void, empty except for an SUV with a tarpaulin over it. How the vehicle got there was a mystery, for there was no apparent means of access to the strip, save from the skies above.

The strip itself was admirably hidden by the dense growth of trees surrounding it. Still, those trees could serve Janson’s own purposes, protecting him as he set up a one-man observation post.

He nested himself in the middle of an old pine tree, largely concealing himself behind its trunk and the profusion of its needle-laden fronds. He steadied his binoculars against a small branch, and waited.

And waited.

Hours chugged past, his only visitors the occasional mosquito and less occasional centipede.

Yet Janson was scarcely aware of the passage of time. He was in another place: the sniper’s fugue. His mind, part of it, drifted through the zone of semiconscious thought, even as another module of consciousness remained at a state of acute awareness.

He was convinced that there would be a flight today, not only because of what the grocery-store manager had reported, but because a command-and-control structure could not rely solely upon electronic transfers of information: packages, couriers, people, would all have to come in and out. Yet what if he was wrong and had been wasting the most valuable commodity of all—time?

He was not wrong. At first it was like the drone of an insect, but when it grew steadily louder, he knew that a plane was circling and slowing overhead for a landing. Every nerve, every muscle in his body strained for complete alertness.