LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      At six minutes past eleven, Matt Guiliani rode into view of the main house on the Bar Naught Ranch. The deep irony of his own timing didn’t escape him. Nothing much ever did.

      The window of opportunity had reached its own eleventh hour. The time to move on Kyle Everly was now.

      Matt reined the sorrel to a halt and dismounted, dropping silently to the freezing earth. He could smell winter coming in the frigid night air. He could almost smell his own anticipation. He’d been preparing for nearly seven months to go after Everly. The wealthy Wyoming rancher, never dirtying his own hands, made the shadowy vigilante organization known as the TruthSayers look like a bunch of local yokels trying to get up a lynch mob.

      Under cover of the moonless night Matt tethered his mount to a patch of scrub oak at the edge of national forest land. He crouched low and pulled a pair of high-tech night-vision binoculars, no larger than a deck of cards, from the breast pocket of his heavy flannel shirt.

      He dropped to one knee and began to familiarize himself with every detail of the landscape below—the yard, the hedges, the barn, the residence. And he allowed the thrill of the chase to seep into his awareness…Everly had so narrowly escaped their notice.

      Matt had arrived here tonight on an undercover assignment for the U.S. Attorney in Seattle. The Department of Justice wanted the TruthSayers dismantled, once and for all. This business of vigilante extremists doling out their own brand of justice had to be stopped. No one would have made the connections between Everly and the TruthSayers but for one arrogant mistake.

      Scrutinizing the main ranch house once more for good measure, Matt turned his focus upon the barn. Inside the upscale, heat-controlled, state-of-the-art facility Everly kept his horses: six polo ponies, three Thoroughbred studs, a couple of working mounts—and the ruined show-quality Arabian that belonged to Fiona Halsey. Soldier Boy, she called him.

      All the stable doors were divided in two. Only one had the top half open. From satellite reconnaissance photos, Matt knew that stall housed the viciously claustrophobic stallion. Word had it that everyone in town had warned Fiona the horse should be put down before he killed someone.

      She had grown up on the Bar Naught. The land had been passed down through her family for five generations, but her parents had lost it all eighteen months ago. She resided now in a small apartment at the west end of the barn.

      If there was a wild card in the deck Matt was about to shuffle, it was this woman. A long-stemmed beauty too perverse or sentimental, or both, to do what had to be done with a horse that had survived the fiery hell of a rollover in one of Everly’s trailers.

      As far as the neighbors were concerned, poor Fiona kept to herself, broke feral mustangs on a government contract program to adopt out the horses, oversaw the breeding of Everly’s Thoroughbred studs, and spent her evenings alone sitting with Soldier Boy. The local princess, descended from the landless younger son of a nineteenth-century British earl, brought brutally and unfairly low.

      But Fiona Halsey had a dubious past with a French playboy who had too many ties to a group of international thugs Interpol had dubbed The Fraternity. These men brokered illegal weapons, assassins, guns-for-hire and mercenaries. They fostered and gave away arms and services to vigilante groups like the TruthSayers.

      Kyle Everly was one of them, almost certainly in command, and here was Fiona Halsey, living on the Bar Naught by his leave.

      Coincidence? No one knew for sure.

      Satisfied with his survey, Matt snapped shut the binoculars, tucked them away, shouldered his duffel bag and began to pick his way down the mountainside.

      As he drew nearer and approached from a westerly angle, Matt saw flickering candlelight within the curtained windows of the ranch manager, Dennis Geary. The ramrod could be counted upon to be entertaining a lady friend in his bunkhouse quarters. Probably one of the clerks from the local convenience store.

      The main house was lit up in a couple of rooms. Matt knew Everly himself was away for a regular Friday night poker game that always lasted into the wee hours of Saturday morning. Everly was said to lose a lot, currying favor of the locals.

      Which left only Fiona’s whereabouts to account for. Her four-wheel-drive vehicle was parked beneath a pair of old cottonwood trees just outside her apartment. It took Matt thirty seconds to satisfy himself that she was inside.

      He had his doubts about her as well. Devil or angel? Player or patsy? Everly’s dupe or a woman who simply loved the Bar Naught and would live on it as an employee if that was her only option?

      Not knowing left Matt edgy. He didn’t like it, but there it was. Everly was his target. If Fiona Halsey got in his way, Matt would have his answer.

      He crouched low and circled around to the back of the main house. Vaulting easily over the pristine white picket fence at the perimeter of the lawn, he crossed to the back door of the ranch house. There on the porch he knelt to open his duffel bag. He took out a small flashlight and shone a narrow beam on the doors and windows, then disabled the security system.

      He opened the back door of the residence, slipped inside and hung his bag by its strap over the inside doorknob. But as he turned around to get a sense of the place, he had an almost visceral feeling of a plan about to go very wrong.

      Matt let the feeling spread through him. He stood there in the kitchen listening for the smallest sound, the barest hint that he was not alone. Hearing nothing to alarm him, he began a stealthy room-to-room search of the house, in the end satisfied that he was alone. Still, the feeling of something badly amiss persisted, like a distant siren that went on and on without fading away.

      A sudden memory rose up in his mind, of another night he had experienced just such a chilling, powerful presentiment—the night the TruthSayers had snatched his best friend’s young son, Christo.

      Matt dragged in a deep draught of air and blew it out slowly, letting his breath carry off the adrenaline rush and the tension the memory evoked in his body. At least no child’s life was at stake this night.

      He took a couple of powder-free latex gloves from the back pocket of his jeans, pulled them on and began going through the house, taking it apart, studying the interior and furnishings in earnest. He wanted to become as familiar with Everly’s possessions as if they belonged to him. As if he were Kyle Everly.

      Tension lingered inside him. He sat down at Everly’s computer at twelve-thirteen and set to work against the subtle ticking of an antique grandfather clock.

      He spent half an hour at the computer, finding detailed maps. He suspected these would match up perfectly with the shipments of illegal arms Interpol had meticulously tracked. In spreadsheet format he found timetables he knew would match thefts and bombings and murders carried out all over creation.

      All of these files could be explained away by a defense attorney, but the information gave Matt the leverage he needed to blackmail his way into Everly’s affairs. Tomorrow he would be back, a dangerously renegade cop, formerly of the Anti-TruthSayers squad, ready now to go on the take. Matt Guiliani would become Everly’s new best friend and partner in crime.

      He printed key files, then a household inventory as well. One never knew when it would come in handy to know the exact worth of the Renoir on the bedroom wall or the bronze sculpture in the living room. An eagle in flight, clutching its prey in fearsome claws, it was a perfect metaphor for Kyle Everly, the predator who owned the bronze.

      The psycho profilers described

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