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  In his early thirties, Penney was unmarried and lived with his mother. Dartley broke in while she was out. He picked the lock of a desk and found a typewritten numbered list of six drop-off locations. The first four had been methodically ticked off in ballpoint pen. It was the only incriminating document Dartley could find, and by itself it proved nothing. He photographed the paper, relocked the drawer, and left the house undisturbed. Next day Penney was fed fourteen phony blueprints with top-secret classification. He did not take them home after work that day, but then he did not have to because he had easy access to a photocopier. The fifth drop-off location was a hollow in the trunk of a diseased tree in a remnant of an oak forest out past the factory belt. Dartley had been watching the place from dawn to eight A.M. and from four P.M.till dark for two days now. If Penney left the drop-off until the week-end, Dartley would have to keep watch from dawn to dusk both days. Sitting in the branches of a tree that long would just about cripple him.

  It was full daylight by the time Dartley got out by the underdeveloped area where the small oak forest grew. He hid his car among the trees a distance from the road. He walked back to the edge of the road, pulled on tight leather gloves, and climbed one of the larger trees. Having made himself as comfortable as possible in a fork, he made the final adjustments on the camera. Then he waited patiently. This time he was rewarded. At seven-twenty the yellow Vega arrived, and Penney climbed out, leaving the engine running and the door open. He hurried across the ground between the road and trees, carrying a white package. Dartley photographed him as he came. The Nikon shutter and automatic film advance was almost totally silent. Penney placed the white package in the hollow of the trunk, about six feet above the ground. He pushed it carefully in, stood back, and looked to make sure it could not be seen. Satisfied, he turned and hurried back toward the car. Dartley snapped one last shot, pocketed the Nikon, and dropped out of the tree in front of Penney. The man yelped with fright as Dartley came at him.

  Unarmed, Dartley moved in fast before Penney would have a chance to draw a weapon. He spun him around, pushed him face-first against a tree trunk, and slapped him down. He was unarmed. Dartley dragged him by a jacket sleeve back to the hollow in the tree trunk. He reached up and pulled the package out. It consisted of paper inside doubled white plastic supermarket bags, knotted by their handles. Grabbing Penney by the sleeve again, Dartley pulled him out of the trees toward the Vega.

  “Who are you?” Penney asked in a tremulous voice as he was being hauled along.

  Dartley said nothing, only threatened to drive his fist in the man’s face.

  Penney cowered. “Don’t hit me, please. I can’t stand violence!”

  Dartley grinned malevolently at him and pointed toward the Vega’s open door. He himself walked quickly around the car and opened the passenger door. Penney hesitated a moment, then climbed in beneath the wheel. Dartley pointed where he wanted him to go, and Penney drove the Vega slowly along until it was out of sight of the road, at the back of the woods, near Dartley’s car. Dartley reached over and pushed the gear into park and turned off the ignition.

  “Put you hands behind your back,” were the first and last words Dartley spoke to the frightened man.

  Penney complied, half twisting in the seat while Dartley bound his forearms over his jacket sleeves with a short length of fine rope. While Penney looked on, he untied the handles of the plastic supermarket bags, which took time because of the gloves he was wearing. He drew out the papers inside and counted them. Fourteen sheets. All the planted, phony, top-secret blueprints. Dartley folded them and put them in an inside jacket pocket.

  He looked at Penney and smiled at him. Penney’s eyes were bugging with fear, and his upper lip was quivering uncontrollably, but he did his best to smile back. His cowardly expression brought out the worst in Dartley. He didn’t want to look at this fawning traitor’s face one moment longer, so he pushed the doubled plastic bags over his head and tightened them around his throat.

  Penney shouted at him from inside the bags. Although the sound was distorted, Dartley knew he was begging for mercy. He was asking the wrong man.

  Penney didn’t start panicking until he had used up the air inside the plastic bags. Dartley leaned down on his shoulders while keeping the bags airtight around his neck, yet not strangling him. He had to kneel on him in the end to keep him in the seat, as Penney thrashed wildly and sucked against the plastic skin of the bags. This physically weak and cowardly man was suddenly strong and savage in his desperate gulping for air. Dartley’s eyes were cold, and his face was unmoving as he held his victim down and let him suffocate slowly.

  After the traitor had quit struggling, Dartley pulled the plastic bags off his head and pocketed them. He checked the dead man’s neck for marks he might have made but found none. He unbound the man’s forearms and placed his hands naturally on the steering wheel. He pocketed the rope. There would be no rope marks on the corpse’s arms. Dartley did not want to make this easy for the coroner. The chickenshits at Continental Laser hadn’t directly asked him to make a hit, but it went without saying that this was the only way of keeping things quiet. If the coroner came up with death by natural causes, it would make them all very happy. He looked over everything inside the car before closing the door after him. The key was in the ignition, Penney was slumped over the wheel, he had left no prints, nothing was stolen, and it might be a week or more before they would find him…. Dartley was content. He now had to deal with Penney’s contact.

  Before returning to the hole in the tree, Dartley went to his car, put a new film cartridge in his camera, and fetched a flat cardboard box with a picture of a muskrat on it from the trunk. He stopped by the hole and then climbed his lookout tree. He was there for more than an hour, with nothing happening except a few cars and trucks passing by. He had to consider that the contact might have come while he was taking care of Penney, found the hole empty, and left. That would be too bad. It would mean that he had done only half the job. Dartley knew he could not kill the contact, who would most likely be on an embassy or consulate staff and have diplomatic immunity. To kill him, besides raising a media fuss, would probably result in a payback death for an American agent abroad. Most important, Dartley had to ID him through photos, then let him go. His orders were strict on that score.

  The black Mercedes pulled into the ground between the road and the wood. The driver was alone, and he took his time, looking around, before he got out. Like Penney had, he left the engine running and the car door open. Dartley worked with his camera, getting close-ups of the man’s face and the car’s license plate numbers. The man walked quickly to the dead tree. He wore an expensive-looking dark blue overcoat and a white silk scarf over a charcoal suit. His face was broad and he had high cheekbones. Dartley even noticed that his shoes were highly polished. The man reached up and put his hand in the hole in the tree trunk. He fumbled inside for a moment, then howled and twisted his face in an undignified grimace. He pulled his hand from the hole. The steel jaws of a gin trap were snapped shut across it.

  He pulled at the metal trap in blind, unthinking attempts to rid himslf of this instrument of pain, but when he pulled at it with his left hand, its teeth ripped the flesh of his right hand. He staggered about, roaring and waving the trap and its dangling length of chain before it occurred to him how to free himself. He placed the trap on the ground and pressed down on the spring with his left heel, moaning as he pulled out the steel jaws buried in his flesh. Once his hand was free, he stepped off the trap and its jaws snapped together again. He stared down at it for a second, then ran out of the trees to the Mercedes. He made it as far as the driver’s seat before he passed out.

  Balanced in the fork of the oak tree, Dartley shook his head and cursed. He watched the man slumped over the steering wheel, hoping he would recover before some busybody interfered. Several passing drivers slowed and looked. None stopped. Finally the man sat up and gazed around him. He closed the car door in a little while, slipped
the Mercedes in gear, and slowly and unsteadily moved off down the road.

  Dartley jumped out of the tree and picked up the trap before checking on Penney and driving away himself.

  CHAPTER

  2

  At least Dartley had not been bored. At times he thought that the only reason he did things was to escape. He was not sure what he was escaping from. Himself, he supposed. Accepting a mission was a surefire way for him to occupy his mind, but there were not all that many missions, even now that he had made a reputation for himself. There were always the long, empty stretches between, and the continual temptation to grab at anything just for the sake of something to do. That could be very dangerous. The only way a professional assassin could hope to survive was to accept only those missions in which he could stack the odds in his favor. The amount of money offered was never the deciding factor. There were constant big-money offers to do somebody’s dirty work—Richard Dartley had always stayed away from that. He would not do things that violated his own moral code. True, his moral code was highly personal, maybe even eccentric, but it was his own and he stuck with it. He didn’t need the cash, since he had already made a bundle, now safely stowed in offshore numbered bank accounts. He would never have to work again in order to pay the rent. The thing that often tempted him to accept missions was the tedium of having nothing to do.

  Not knowing where he would be on the same day next week was the way Dartley liked to live. When he was idle, he tried to fill up his time with women and weapons and keeping himself fit. His schedule would have daunted most men—at night, a beautiful woman; in the morning, running and weight lifting; in the afternoon, target shooting and military studies; come night, another beautiful woman…. This, to Dartley, was only marking time, treading water, until something big came along that he could really sink his teeth into.

  Like every free-lance professional, when time passed and he heard nothing from the “outside world,” he began to wonder if he had been forgotten, if there wasn’t someone else out there, younger and better, taking all the work he used to get. He was caught in a bind since he could not let his name become known, and yet he had to be reachable by the knowledgeable few whose problems his skills could solve.

  He had flown from Chicago to Denver and spent a few days driving in the mountains, doing nothing much, solely to avoid traveling straight to home base after completing a job. He went to endless trouble to avoid establishing patterns of behavior through which he could be traced, knowing that the inhumanly methodical search methods of computers went to endless lengths to detect such patterns. After a few days in the Rockies he flew from Denver to Washington, D.C., picked up his car in the airport’s long-term parking lot, and set out for Frederick, Maryland, northwest of the city.

  His Uncle Charley had a fifty-acre farm near Frederick. Dartley had a studio apartment over the barn, the only place he had ever kept returning to as if it were his own. In a way it was. His uncle had taken him in after his father was murdered and had stuck by him through some bad times.

  While people regarded Richard Dartley as a mystery man, so did they often regard his uncle in the same way. Charles Stuart Woodgate walked with a limp, said to have resulted from a war wound in the fight for Monte Cassino, when the Allies were driving the Germans north along the Italian peninsula. Restricted by his handicap from more active pursuits, Woodgate became a master gunsmith, known for his work on rare and antique weapons. He had a large collection of unusual guns and was a registered dealer. The mystery that struck some of his Maryland neighbors was how this man—nothing more than a glorified antiques restorer in their view—could show up so often in the corridors of power. Over the years people had seen him coming and going from government offices and foreign embassies, and they had wondered what he could have been doing. According to gossip, he was with one of the federal agencies in an undercover role, and the agency varied according to who was doing the gossiping, all the way from the Secret Service to the IRS.

  It never occurred to any of them that Charley Woodgate was merely following his calling as gunsmith. But instead of working on old muzzleloaders, he was crafting state-of-the-art custom-made weapons for select clients. These varied from personal adjustments to target-shooting pistols to complete modification of bolt-action sniper rifles. Silencers, weapons that broke down for easy concealment, and fragmentation bullets were his specialties.

  The fact that Woodgate was an armchair version of his nephew in profession was more than a coincidence. Woodgate had taught Dartley a lot of what he knew, and the younger man had learned his lessons well. In fact, it was the big difference between them that worried Woodgate most. Charley had none of the cold, ruthless killer’s instinct that was so evident in his nephew. Woodgate like to think that whatever emotional damage had made Richard Dartley the cold-blooded assassin he had become, it had already taken place by the time his nephew came under his influence.

  When Richard arrived, he dropped by the farmhouse. “How’s everything?”

  “The people at Continental Laser are worried. Harold Penney is missing. They think you may have killed him.”

  “They knew when they hired me that I’m not the Legal Aid Society.” Dartley said.

  “They were all for getting you when they felt threatened. Now it’s just a case of cold feet, out of fear that they could be tied in to something. The FBI has taken your word that Penney is permanently out of circulation, and they have declared the case closed. To show their goodwill they sent me this.” He handed Dartley a large film negative. “Mean anything to you?”

  Dartley grinned as he looked at the X ray of a right hand with fractures showing in some of the bones.

  Woodgate went on. “Your photos identified Penney’s contact as an assistant military attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. He came for treatment to a local hospital in D.C. The FBI traced him to a commercial flight from Chicago. He had an assumed name, but a stewardess took one look at the photos and remembered fetching him aspirin during the flight for what he said was arthritis in his right hand. What happened to him? I guess he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar? Poor bastard was in a lot of pain.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer person,” Dartley said.

  Charley was used to his nephew being closemouthed about the details of missions, trusting that he would communicate anything important to know. It was not mere curiosity on Charley’s part. He acted as go-between for Dartley and the outside world. Only one other person knew that Dartley was now one of the top hit men in the world, and that was Herbert Malleson. This Englishman functioned as Dartley’s data bank and research expert on just about anything, while his Uncle Charley took care of the business end of things. Charley’s own secret business of turning out sophisticated weapons brought him in contact with potential customers for Richard Dartley.

  “Well, the FBI is pleased with how the Continental Laser thing worked out,” Charley said. “It won’t do us any harm to have a good relationship with them. The Bureau was a bit pissed off when Langley and those senators stopped them from looking into the activities of Paul Savage.”

  Paul Savage was the name Richard Dartley often worked under, although Richard Dartley was also an assumed name. Dartley knew by now that no matter how careful he was, no matter how tight his security, he could not realistically expect to go undetected by federal spooks. He could only hope to buy peace by cooperating where and when he could. Thus, when the FBI had gotten on his case, the CIA had said hands off. No man is an island. Least of all a professional assassin.

  “Anything new?” Dartley asked.

  Woodgate shrugged. “There’ve have been some feelers from some Filipino businessmen, but I don’t think you should get involved with politics there. It’s too much of a damn mess.”

  “People usually don’t need me when everything’s shipshape and organized,” Dartley pointed out.

  “The Philippine thing is a real tangle, with old family rivalries and years of violence and corruption. It�
�s never the main movers you have to watch but the ones behind them who control everything they do and say. I’m not having one family use you in their blood feud with another family. I’ll look into it further when I meet with them tomorrow. But right now I don’t see much future in it. If you’re going to be at loose ends for the next few days—”

  “You know damn well I am,” Dartley said with a laugh.

  “I have something I need tested.”

  He led Dartley into a workroom off the farmhouse kitchen where two long benches were equipped with lathes, saws, vises, and other equipment. Woodgate took a rifle from a wall rack and handed it to Dartley. Dartley saw immediately that it was not a Dragunov, although it had the type of stock characteristic of that Soviet sniper rifle, in which the wood pistol grip was the foremost part of the stock with a hole for insertion of the hand, and a second hole farther back to give lightness. The rest of the gun was a takeoff on the Soviet Kalashnikov with a Japanese Hakko Electro-Point Mark VIII scope.

  “Israeli?” Dartley asked.

  “Finnish.”

  “A Valmet?” Dartley knew that both the Finns and the Israelis manufactured AK imitations that were better than the Soviet originals.

  “It’s the Valmet M78/835, a kind of combination of Dragunov stock with the heavy-barrel Valmet M78 to give both heft and stock geometry, that gives almost no recoil from a 7.62 mm shell, and none at all from a 5.56. This one is chambered for 5.56, and I’ve changed it from semi to full auto and put in a set trigger.”

  Dartley knew that his uncle was making a big deal out of this weapon in order to give him something to do. He often tested weapons for Charley, cheerfully undertaking the often grueling sessions in which more than two thousand rounds might have to be fired from a single gun in the soundproofed range in the farmhouse basement. This rifle would need minimum testing, since most of the conversion was factory-done. A few hundred rounds would break in the mechanisms, test the scope, and bring the hair trigger to a maximum sensitivity.