His lungs burning, Jagger slowly began letting his breath escape, struggling against the urge to exhale in a sudden burst and gulp in a fresh supply of oxygen. He could sense the presence in the darkness now, feel it edging closer. Keeping his back pressed against the end wall, he twisted his head until his neck started to cramp, straining his eyes against the darkness and his ears against the silence.

The barrel of the rifle appeared first. It crept into the range of Jagger's vision and paused, as if the cold metal itself sensed danger. Then it began to move again, lengthening until Jagger could see the end of the weapon's telescopic sight and the hand that gripped its stock.

Still he didn't move, waiting until his instincts told him the moment had come. The fingers of one hand closed tightly around the wide end of the railroad spike, while the fingers of the other flexed in the darkness, readying themselves.

The hunter's other hand appeared, its forefinger curled around the weapon's trigger, and Jagger knew this was his chance. He whipped one arm up, his fingers closing around the stock of the gun, and jerked it forward so fast that the hunter had no time even to release it from his grip. In almost the same movement, Jagger's other arm arced around, his hand wielding the point of the spike as if it were a stiletto, plunging it deep into the man's chest.

The gasp that escaped the man's lungs was his final breath, for the spike had already slashed through his heart before he even knew what had happened. His lifeless fingers slipped away from the rifle and he crumpled to the floor, leaving his weapon in the hands of his executioner.

The tunnel containing the alcove where he'd left Jagger was only a few yards ahead now, and Jeff froze, his arm coming up to stop Jinx, who was half a pace behind him.

A sound had stopped him, an expulsion of breath, as if someone had just taken a blow that knocked the wind out of him. But now, instead of hearing low moans of pain, or the gasping of someone struggling to regain his breath, all he heard was silence.

Jinx remained frozen beside him as they both listened, but the silence stretched on, and Jeff began to wonder if he'd really heard anything at all. He started forward again, moving more slowly than before, still sensing that something ahead had changed.

He came to the intersection of the two tunnels, with the alcove several paces in from where the passages met. He paused there, listening.

Nothing.

Finally, he stepped out of the shelter of the cross passage and turned toward the alcove.

A shaft of red light shot out of the darkness, and Jeff's heart leaped as he realized what it was.

The hunters had found Jagger, and now he himself was pinioned by the slim shaft of a rifle's laser sight. But instead of a shot, he heard a voice.

"I got one of ‘em," Jagger said, his voice echoing off the hard concrete walls.

The shaft of red abruptly disappeared, and Jeff felt the tension drain from his body as Jagger appeared. "Jesus, Jag, I thought you were going to shoot me!"

"An‘ I was startin' to wonder if you were comin‘ back at all," the big man replied. A second later he was sucking the last drops of moisture out of the cup Jeff had brought him.

Jeff saw the crumpled figure of a man sprawled on the floor of the tunnel and moved closer, feeling oddly numb as he gazed at the dead man on the floor.

The man was dressed in black clothing and had a small pack strapped to his back. Jeff could see that he wasn't one of the normal denizens of the tunnels, if there was anything normal about the strange tribe of society's detritus that had accumulated beneath the streets. Clearly, this man was one of the hunters, and as he stared at the fallen figure, Jeff felt not even a twinge of remorse at what Jagger had done.

He knelt down and pulled the backpack loose, then began going through it.

There were a couple of sandwiches in a bag from a deli on Broadway, and a bottle of expensive spring water whose flavor wasn't quite as good as what came out of the city's taps but would certainly slake Jagger's burning thirst as well as his own. In addition to the food and water, he found a flashlight, a pair of night vision goggles, some kind of two-way radio, and a notebook. He turned on the flashlight and was just opening the notebook when Jinx swore softly.

"Jeez! It's that priest!"

Jeff, puzzled, shined the flashlight in the ashen face of Monsignor Terrence McGuire.

"It's the guy from that place on Delancey Street," Jinx went on. "You know-they'll give you a free meal if you let them preach to you awhile."

"You sure?" he asked.

But before Jinx could answer him, Jagger spoke up, his voice full of suspicion.

Suspicion, and menace.

"What's she doing here?" he asked, his eyes fixed on Jinx as his right hand tightened on the railroad spike, which was still stained with the priest's blood.

"She knows the tunnels," Jeff replied, still trying to digest this new information, and overlooking the menace in Jagger's voice. "She can help us get out."

Eve Harris hovered restlessly behind the small bar in the room deep beneath The 100 Club that served as the sole meeting place for the Manhattan Hunt Club. In fact, she had been responsible for the design of the room. It had been an empty storage chamber when she first saw it, the walls and floor constructed of the same cold, moldering concrete that made up the catacomb of tunnels beneath the streets. She'd seen the possibilities of the space at once, the huge beams supporting the concrete of the first basement reminding her of a hunting lodge, and as she chose the paneling, the carpet, and the furniture, she never wavered from the lodge motif. It was more elegant and urbane than one might find in Montana, but perfectly matched the sensibilities of the members of the Hunt Club. The fireplace had presented no difficulties at all, since there was already a chimney for the furnace directly overhead-the masons only needed to tap into it. Its mantelpiece, from a Victorian gamekeeper's lodge in Northumberland, fit the room perfectly, and the bar, replicating one she'd seen in a small pub outside of Ulster, complemented the fireplace perfectly as well.

After pouring herself two fingers of the ancient cognac that had been her husband's favorite, and returning the decanter to its place of honor in the exact center of the second shelf of the back bar, Eve Harris regarded the trophy above the fireplace. "Bastard," she murmured, raising her glass to Leon Nelson, though there was no one else in the room to hear her. Nelson's sightless eyes stared back at her, and as she gazed at the impassive expression on the face of the mounted head, she wondered if it was the same expression he'd had when he killed her daughter. For a moment she almost wished he were still alive, so she could have the pleasure of killing him the way he'd killed Rachelle, slowly and painfully. Her eyes roamed over the rest of the trophies, and as always happened when she was in this room, the heat of vengeance began to thaw the cold hatred that had filled her soul for so many years. And it wasn't over yet, she thought. The prisons were still filled with criminals whose rights the courts had somehow held to be more important than those of the people whose lives they had ruined.

As she poured herself another two fingers of cognac, this time leaving the decanter on the bar, she glanced nervously at her watch.

The hunters had been gone more than two hours, and it had been an hour since any of them had checked in.

That was unusual.

Even more unusual was her growing sense that something had gone wrong. Eve Harris had long since learned to trust her instincts. So she picked up the two-way radio-a specially designed unit not available to the general public- and began going through the five frequencies programmed into it, a single frequency dedicated to each of the hunters, which allowed all of them to communicate with her but not with each other. It was both part of the sport and an extra precaution-if any of the radios fell into the wrong hands, nothing any of the other hunters said could be overheard by the wrong people. When the first of the five frequencies was glowing brightly in the LED screen, she held the miniature radio close to her lips and pressed the button.