There was a good chance he’d be long gone. He’d had more than a half hour since Greiff had tested the phone. But Cutter had insisted he’d be there waiting for them. “He didn’t set this up with all that care just to leave us with a cold trail. You’ve got to understand this is a game to him. He wants to see our faces.”

“I wish I was as sure of that as you are. Those chapters I read didn’t look like kiddy time to me.”

“They’re not. They had to be the genuine article, hot enough to scorch a lot of big people. Otherwise we wouldn’t be playing his game.”

They’d nailed him on the phone call to Ives actually but the Southworth Bond paper had brought them close and they’d have made him on that alone; the phone call had just speeded it up. He’d bought two hundred sheets of it in Chatsworth and then he’d bought a ream in Birmingham. Chatsworth was less than a hundred miles from here. But the phone call to Ives in New York had been placed from Adairsville and there were only nine phones in town, one in a pay booth between the gas station and the country store. The storekeeper knew Mr. Hannaway, recognized the composite Identikit portrait and said Mr. Hannaway had bought a big stock of groceries three days ago. The kid at the gas station described Mr. Hannaway’s Pontiac and remembered filling it and the five-gallon jerrycan in the trunk. The kingpin in town was a back-porch country lawyer who owned the lumberyard and auto repair yard, and probably a distillery and half a dozen county politicians, and sidelined in real estate; he’d rented the Scudder farm to Mr. Hannaway and had received a second month’s rent in advance just six days ago. Ross had been pleased with their detective work until Cutter told him Kendig had planned it that way.

They walked up the driveway slowly, spread out. Ross’s ankle snagged something and he heard a distant tinkle—a cowbell, he thought; he listened for it again but it didn’t repeat. They moved ever more slowly, keeping close to the trees on either side of the rutted drive. Lamplight winked vaguely through the trees. The moon was hazed with a thin cloud cover but there was light enough to see where you were going. The flare pistol in his hand was slippery with his sweat; he shifted it to his left hand and wiped his palm on his trousers.

Cutter stopped them and made hand motions. Ross took his two men into the forest and led the way with great caution, well back below the perimeter of the yard; only now and then could he catch a wink of the lamps. The footing was soft and quiet—a half-rotted carpet of needles. He touched one of the FBI men in the chest and pointed; the FBI man nodded and moved uphill and Ross waited until the man blended into the darkness. Then he took his remaining companion on with him, crossed another seventy-five yards and left the man posted in the trees and continued alone. He keened the night with eyes and ears, breathing silently with his mouth open; he shifted the flare pistol again to his left hand, dried his right hand and brought out his .38 revolver.

He crossed into a stand of younger growth; there had been a fire here at some time, there were no big trees. Younger growth had sprouted and some of the saplings were ten or twelve feet high, no more. But they were close together and he had to move by inches to avoid sound. Above and to the left he could see the lamps of the house more clearly. Every two or three steps he stopped bolt still to scan the shadows. There was a racket of insects, and he heard water running somewhere—a creek or a river.

He came to an opening that swathed irregularly from left to right. It began above him in a tangle of dead brush and it disappeared below him into heavier forest growth. He knelt and saw that some of the saplings had been sawed off close to the ground. Man-made then. For what purpose?

It was a puzzle he couldn’t solve without more evidence and in any case it probably didn’t matter. He studied it in both directions and then stepped across into the trees beyond and moved on, angling closer toward the house now. Cutter would be some-where not far to his right, having come around the opposite way. This would be about right. He settled down to wait.

He was down on one knee sweeping the yard with his eyes when he heard or felt something but he didn’t have time to move; a hand clutched his mouth and jaw, something rigid jabbed his spine and in his panic he heard a whisper:

“Freeze.”

The man was behind him, it was probably a gun in his back and no amount of hand-to-hand instruction at the academy could prepare a man to counter that. Ross didn’t stir; he hardly even breathed.

“I’m taking my hand off your mouth. Yell and you’re dead. Understand me? Nod your head.”

He nodded his head. The hand dropped away from his jaw and relieved him of his revolver.

He still had the flare pistol. The whisper anticipated him: “Don’t even think about it. Drop it easy, right by your foot.”

He let go. There was the slightest thud when it hit the pine needles.

“Hands behind you now.”

He obeyed, felt something harsh against his wrists and judged it to be heavy wire of some kind—possibly coat-hanger wire. He drew breath but then something plunged into his mouth and he sucked for breath in panic before he realized the man was gagging him with a wad of cloth. He felt a strip of fabric go around his face and then the man was knotting it tight at the back. An abstract corner of his mind appreciated the economy with which it had been done.

He kept in mind what Cutter had said. He’s not a killer. It would be an unfortunate time for Cutter to be wrong.

Then something dropped to the earth; the man stoped to pick up Ross’s flare pistol. He saw two things: Kendig’s profile and a short piece of half-inch galvanized pipe. He’d been bluffed—it hadn’t been a gun at all.

There was the scrape and growl of cars coming up the drive. He felt the pressure of the gun—his own—against his back. The two cars rolled into sight, high beams jiggling across the porch; the cars swung wide and stopped nose-out in tandem and the drivers slid out and hunkered against the fenders; Ross saw Greiff lift the bullhorn. The metallic voice was magnified and unreal: “FBI. Come out of the house with your hands empty. You’ve got one minute.”

The FBI man with Greiff lofted a shotgun and cocked its slide with a good deal of racket.

There was a whisper in Ross’s ear: “Where’s Joe Cutter?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

Greiff said on the bullhorn, “Thirty seconds. Then we fill the house with tear gas. Come on out—we’ve got you surrounded.”

“Stay put,” Kendig whispered and Ross thought of making a run for it when the gun pulled away from his back but Kendig was still right there; Ross saw the flare pistol rise past his shoulder. For a moment he thought Kendig was going to crown him with it and he flinched involuntarily but there was no blow. The flare pistol hung in the air above and behind his left shoulder.

“Ten seconds,” Greiff roared.

Simultaneously there was a whump close in Ross’s ear. It took him a moment to realize what it was: Kendig had fired the flare pistol, using Grieff’s racket on the bullhorn to mask the sound of the discharge.

Then the flare ignited. High in the air above the woods across the yard—probably not far from where Cutter was posted. It bathed the trees in harsh brilliant white light and suddenly men were crashing through the forest and Ross heard voices calling across the night in harsh tones.… Then Kendig was spinning him with a hard grip on his arm: “Come on—move.” And Ross was being propelled through the saplings, stumbling, yanked upright and pushed on by Kendig’s powerful grip.

He skittered through the trees and suddenly they were out in the open swath he’d discovered before and Kendig was shoving him down the steep pathway; he slid and stumbled his way, eyes on the ground, avoiding stumps, trying to keep his balance with his wrists wired behind him. It was getting hard to breathe through his nose but Kendig kept shoving and yanking. He caromed down into the heavier forest and then Kendig slowed them down and they were walking, following a broad path among the trees, still hearing the hunters baying up at the far side of the yard; he heard Cutter’s distinct voice, louder than the others, calling for order and after that the racket diminished.