Over dinner down the road at a Sykesville diner, Brower had listened patiently as VanderMeer lobbied him on the merits of starting up a Web site to supplement the editorial content of his soldier-of-fortune magazine. She’d put forth a convincing argument—citing increased revenue from merchandising and a wider advertising base—and had offered to not only personally help set up the site but to also bring in someone who could maintain the site. Brower was old school when it came to favoring the printed page as the best means of getting his message across, but he knew there was a ring of truth to VanderMeer’s sales pitch. Furthermore, a part of him was resigned to the fact that his dwindling subscription base was due largely to the growth of the Internet. If he didn’t change with the times, Brower suspected that he would eventually find himself obsolete, along with the magazine he’d spent more than twenty years running.
“You’re as headstrong as your father used to be, you know that?” Brower told the woman as he led her down a long corridor to the dining room.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” VanderMeer said. “But you’re still not answering my question.”
“All right, all right, I give up!” Brower said with mock exasperation. “My God, woman, you’re more persistent than my athlete’s feet.”
“Just don’t get any ideas about rubbing some kind of ointment on me.” VanderMeer smiled back at him. “Unless I ask first, of course.”
The pair shared a laugh as they entered the dining room. Jason Cummings and the rest of the fantasy staff were finishing their chicken dinners. Cummings was Brower’s age, a bald man with an antiquated handlebar mustache and nearly the same physique he’d had more than thirty years earlier when he’d played nose tackle in the Rose Bowl for Army. His eyesight hadn’t fared quite as well, but he was too vain for glasses; the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes elongated as he looked up from his plate and squinted at Brower and VanderMeer.
“Sounds like you got yourself another convert, there, Joanie,” he said, smirking at the woman. Cummings had succumbed to VanderMeer’s sales pitch more than a year earlier, bringing her in to upgrade the fantasy camp’s Web site.
“Something like that,” Brower conceded.
Cummings was seated at the end of an elongated dining table. The four other men at the table, all in their mid-forties, were all absorbed with attacking the food heaped on their plates. Louie Paxton, a long-haired, potbellied veteran of the NASCAR circuit, oversaw most of the camp’s road tests. The man seated next to him, Xavier Manuel, had served four stints as a Marine drill sergeant, making him the natural choice to lord over the workout area. Similarly, Ed “Charlie” Chang’s years as a stunt double in Japanese kung-fu movies had given him the experience to run campers through a rudimentary course in the martial arts.
Paxton, Manuel and Chang had been hired solely to keep up the pretense that Cummings and Brower ran nothing more than a bona fide fantasy camp. They were well-compensated for their work, and even if they had reason to suspect Wildest Dreams was a front for other activities, their weekly paychecks left them disinclined to ask questions.
The fourth staff member, Marcus Yarborough, was another matter. Hired based on a referral by Joan VanderMeer, Yarborough was in charge of the camp’s shooting range, trading in on his purported experience as a Navy SEAL marksman. Cummings and Brower had been told the man had done some trigger work outside the Armed Forces, as well, and twice over the past three years Yarborough had been contracted to kill fantasy camp participants who’d unwittingly stumbled upon evidence of clandestine activity. In both cases, the murders had been carried out after the victims had been lured from the premises: one wound up dead in a supposed hunting accident while the other’s death went down in the books as a suicide. Yarborough had carried out the hits without being told what evidence his victims had come across. He’d convinced Cummings and Brower that the less he knew about their illegal activities, the better. In return, he demanded the same discretion with regards to his past, about which he was resolutely tight-lipped.
Thin and clean-shaved, the sharpshooter rarely smiled and always seemed preoccupied with some grave matter that took precedence, at least in his mind, over what was going on around him. When introducing him to campers, Brower and Cummings took a good-natured swipe at Yarborough’s brooding nature and invariably referred to him as the Grim Reaper. The campers lapped it up, and the ex-SEAL commando was almost always mentioned whenever people wrote back to say what a good time they’d had at the camp. Yarborough was, after all, the embodiment of the cold, detached assassin they’d seen in countless spy thrillers.
By the time Yarborough finished eating, Cummings and Brower had left the dining room to confer down the hall at the camp’s administrative office. Joan VanderMeer had remained behind and was flirting with Louie Paxton and Eddie Chang, but when she finally caught the sharpshooter’s gaze, she twitched her head slightly, indicating the door that led out to the back patio.
Yarborough nodded faintly, then took care of his dishes and fished through his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarillos. There was no smoking allowed in the building, so Yarborough headed for the patio.
“Got a spare one of those I could try?” Joan called out to him, giving herself a reason to follow Yarborough outside.
“Suit yourself,” the marksman told her.
VanderMeer finished the joke she was telling the other men, then excused herself and followed Yarborough outside. The patio was little more than a small, square slab of concrete crowded with a couple of warped Adirondack chairs and a propane-fueled barbecue. Yarborough offered Joan one of his cigarillos, but she waved him off.
“You know I hate those things,” she told him.
Yarborough shrugged and lit up, then spoke through a cloud of smoke. “You wanted to see me?”
VanderMeer nodded. “You know about the heist at Aberdeen the other night, right?” she said.
“Maybe,” Yarborough replied. “It’s none of my business.”
“You helped unload the crates this afternoon,” VanderMeer said.
“Doesn’t make it my business,” Yarborough countered. A sudden cough rumbled up through his chest. The sharpshooter doubled over, as if trying to force the cough down. It didn’t work. He hacked violently, then spit into the gravel at the base of the barbecue.
VanderMeer couldn’t be certain, but it looked as if he was coughing up blood.
“Jesus, are you okay?” she asked.
Yarborough shrugged. “Down the wrong pipe,” he said. “Don’t sweat it.”
VanderMeer stared at Yarborough, then went on, “Look, there’s something you should know. Not everything from that heist was stashed away in the shed here. There was one piece that—”
The woman was interrupted as the door to the patio swung open and Jason Cummings poked his head out, a 9 mm Uzi submachine gun clutched in his right hand.
“There you are,” he told Yarborough. “Grab a gun, quick!”
“Problem?” Yarborough asked, grinding his cigarillo into the gravel. His coughing jag had passed as quickly as it had overtaken him.
“Somebody tripped an alarm out on the grounds,” Cummings said. “They’ve broken into that storage shed near the pond.”
THE ALARM WAS SILENT, but Bolan spotted the separated sensor pads above
