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brEAD UPON THE WATERS

A break in the trees. A swath of sky revealed. A clatter fills the heavens, and a shadow floats across the land.

At first, Galen Vector is merely surprised that a helicopter has joined this operation, but as it approaches, his surprise swells into apprehension when he discovers that no effort has been made to conceal that the aircraft belongs to one of Terrence Boschvark’s companies. The twin-engine executive chopper with high-set main and tail rotors, large enough to be configured for eight passengers, is emblazoned with the red-white-and-blue New World Technology logo.

Has Boschvark decided that killing Vida is so important, the need so urgent, he can no longer afford the delay that occurs when he works through surrogates to insulate himself from blame? What would drive him to take such a terrible risk? Maybe he thinks his political connections are so numerous and at such a high level that he is immune from not just prosecution but also accusation—and he might be right.

Perhaps he is confident that not only will he never be held to account for his crimes but also that he can set up his associates to take the fall for him. Set them up and take them out in engineered accidents or by arranging for murder to look like suicide. It’s not paranoid to consider such cold methodology. Vector himself has done as much to others who have served him well but ceased to be useful.

As if their actions are choreographed, Monger and Rackman pause in their ascent and take identical objects from coat pockets and plug them into their left ears. Communication devices of some kind.

With whom are they communicating?

No sooner is Galen Vector troubled by that question than it’s answered when the brothers tap their left ears and look up at the helo. Evidently they are receiving guidance from someone in the aircraft.

Which means they were expecting aerial support. No doubt about it now; they’re no longer his hired muscle. This is their mission, not Vector’s. They have been freed from his menagerie of psychopaths and promoted into the ranks that directly serve Boschvark.

Vector has been used to marshal the search party on short notice, call up Crockett and his dogs, and be the sacrificial goat if something goes wrong. But why? He can’t always imagine how people like Boschvark think; their extreme wealth and power free them from most human concerns and furnish them with motivations that are as incomprehensible to Vector as those of aliens from another galaxy. They aren’t as easy to understand as parasitical crime families like the one that has long fed on this county. Maybe Boschvark has lost faith in that family and in Vector because Belden Bead was bested by Vida and then Nash Deacon also proved not to have the right stuff. Men like Boschvark often act as if impatience is as much a virtue as ambition; they want what they want, and they want it now. Whatever his reasons, Boschvark evidently wants Vida dead in half an hour or preferably in ten minutes, rather than later this afternoon.

Unlike the billionaire, Galen Vector relishes the process of vengeance, not just the fact of it. He wants Vida to know terror and pain, humiliation and despair. He wants to spend hours breaking her before he kills her, whereas Boschvark wants only to have someone put a bullet in her head and dispose of her corpse, thereby quickly eliminating the threat she poses and insuring against any further delay to his project. What infuriates Vector is that he was told he could deal with the bitch as he wished, to the satisfaction of his darkest desires—and now that promise has been broken.

The helicopter executes a turn, apparently with the intent of quartering the land ahead, now moving north to south. As it changes direction, its starboard flank comes into view. The large boarding door is open. A man sits on the threshold of the passenger cabin, legs dangling, tethered to prevent a fatal fall. He is holding what appears to be a cumbersome rifle featuring a short, fat barrel with a large bore that might be three inches in diameter.

Although no gunshot is audible, scores of small objects larger than buckshot burst from the muzzle, expelled at far less velocity than from a 12-gauge. They travel perhaps thirty or forty feet in a spreading pattern before dropping into the forest. The gun must be a low-pressure air rifle, similar to toys that fire tennis balls for dogs to chase or to facilitate a game of war among young boys. In this case, the shooter’s ammunition is a mystery. He inserts into the breech a cartridge approximately the size of a can of Coca-Cola, and again a swarm issues from the device like hornets erupting in anger from a tormented nest.

There is something otherworldly about the moment that renders Vector as transfixed as if he were witnessing an apparition. The helo floats through the morning, and in Galen’s curious bewitched state, he has ceased to hear its engine or its rotary wing, so that the craft seems as quiet as a hot-air balloon, weightless yet ominous. The tethered man, sporting a beard and long hair, looks like one who sang with Creedence Clearwater Revival a long time ago, or like someone who, in robes, once walked the shore of an ancient sea. Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days it will return to you. He’s heard those words before, though he can’t recall where. The good we have done returns to us, and the bad. Karma. No. That’s bullshit. Galen Vector doesn’t believe in any of that, not in an earned fate. Yet as the helicopter floats and as the bearded man casts something other than bread, and as the inexplicable silence lacks even the sound of Vector’s hard-pounding heart, he is afraid as he has never been before.