Out of caution he left the car hidden in a different spot from last night, nearly half a mile away among the dense pine cover close to the western shore. It was cold out here. Seriously cold. Stepping from the warm Mercedes into the subzero wind chill made the skin on his face feel raw and papery-thin. Snow clumped heavily on the pine branches, dragging them low to the ground. Now and then one would shake itself free of its load and spring up, adding a cascade of powdery snow to the depth that was already on the ground. The going was tough in these conditions. An ordinary person would have left a trail of prints that a blind man could follow. But Ben Hope was no ordinary person. Moving slowly and carefully without leaving a trace of his passing, he spent nearly an hour working his way back to the spot where only luck had spared him from getting shot the night before.

Surveilling the terrain by daylight only confirmed to him what he’d already known. Whoever had been behind the rifle was a hell of a shooter. Probably almost as good as Ben was himself. Only a supremely skilled marksman would have attempted to steer his bullet through dense tree cover, in darkness and fog. There weren’t many angles from which he could have done it; and it was by calculating the bullet’s likely trajectory over the challenging terrain that Ben was able to work out the possible origin of the shot. His best guess told him that the shooter had been positioned on a tree-lined ridge to the west, about sixty metres above the waterline. Ben used the crossbow’s laser rangefinder to confirm the range. Two hundred and eleven yards.

It took another thirty minutes to trek around the shoreline and clamber up the ridge. When he finally got there, Ben soon found that his best guess had scored a bullseye. Fresh snowfall couldn’t quite mask the man-sized indentation in the ground where the sniper had lain marking his target. But the real proof was the small hole in the snow a few inches to the right. Ben dug his fingers into the hole and found the ejected shell casing which, hot from the rifle’s breech, had melted the hole and buried itself among the grass underneath. The case was shiny and new. The headstamp markings on its base said .308 WINCHESTER. A chambering almost identical to the military 7.62 round used by NATO forces. It could punch through a human target with devastating effect at over a thousand metres.

Ben was feeling luckier than ever.