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  Outside, he went to his father’s toolshed. There was no lock, just a piece of twisted wire looped through the holes where a padlock would go. Inside the shed, he found what he was looking for in the same place it had always been. Johnny picked up the heavy can of gas his father kept filled at all times and carried it to the trunk of his father’s Dodge. The reservation was deep in slumber as he drove out to the big tobacco fields.

  There were no lights in the new buildings. This was all costing Cheyenne a pretty penny, but the Chowok reservation was a forgotten backwater. Cheyenne relied on security cameras rather than actual guards. There were none nearby that Johnny could see, but even if they spotted him he no longer cared. He was going to do what was right.

  Rain had been scarce in Montana during the past two weeks. The night was warm and the soil dry. The automated sprinklers would not kick on until early the next morning.

  Johnny lifted a bare arm to the breeze and felt the short hairs blow. The wind was to his back and away from the settlements. The conditions were ideal.

  Unscrewing the cap on the gas can, Johnny sloshed gasoline along the eastern edge of the field. He worked as quickly as he could, careful to soak the plants nearest the road. When they caught, the adjacent rows would go up as well, until the whole field was ablaze. He would go get more gas for the field on the other side of the road, as well as the greenhouses. He would steal a tanker truck if he had to. Johnny could not let the evil he had helped revive be unleashed on the world. He would wash the shame from his soul with a cleansing fire, just like the fire that had saved the Chowok before the great migration hundreds of years ago.

  The world would know. The fire would attract the media. Washington would be alerted. Cheyenne would be stopped.

  He reached in his pocket for the matches he had brought with him from the Cheyenne Tobacco office complex in West Virginia.

  Johnny was surprised at his own calm. His hands were rock steady as he tore a single match from the book.

  As long as the wind did not shift, he would be fine. If not, so much smoke from the genetically altered tobacco leaves might be deadly. There was no way of knowing what such a high dose could do to a human.

  Johnny brought the match to the book.

  “Dr. John Feathers.”

  The cold voice behind him made him jump, and he fumbled the matchbook out of his hand. Instinctively, he tried grabbing for it as it fell, but wound up swatting it away. He heard the matchbook rattle a big tobacco leaf a few feet away on its way to the ground.

  Johnny turned. A dark figure stood behind him.

  “What? I—I…” he stammered. “It’s okay. I’m from Cheyenne Tobacco, from West Virginia. Corporate HQ.”

  It was a stupid thing to say, he knew. The person had known his name. They knew who he was. Maybe they had followed him from West Virginia, knowing that he was about to snap. But how could they? Even Johnny hadn’t known what he was going to do until he got here. But now that he was here, standing next to the field with a useless match still in hand, they would know. Certainly they could smell the gasoline he had dumped all over their expensive crop.

  “Look,” Johnny said. “You’re just a night watchman or something? Well you don’t know what this stuff is.” He waved a hand at the field. “This is not ordinary tobacco. This is genetically altered plant life. We brought back a form of tobacco that has been extinct for hundreds of years.”

  “And you’re proud of that, aren’t you?” the cold voice demanded.

  Johnny saw something rise up in shadowed hands. A weapon. He quickly raised his own hands in surrender.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Hold on. No. No, I’m not.”

  “Dr. John Feathers, you have been judged in absentia for crimes against humanity,” the voice intoned.

  “What?” John said, confusion darkening his brow. “Listen, there’s no problem here. I’m not fighting, okay? I’m going to lower my hands. Let’s just go sit down and—”

  A loud pop, as crisp and clear as the bright stars in the moonless Montana sky.

  Johnny felt a sharp pain in his chest, to the right of his sternum. Shot. He’d been shot. Gasping disbelief, he grabbed at the bullet hole he knew must be there.

  But there was no bullet wound. His searching fingers found something flat, rounded. Hard like metal.

  Another shot. The impact trailed the pop, and he realized now this was much slower than a normal gun. More pain. The last pain. Straight into the heart.

  Johnny fell to his knees.

  The shadow moved and he felt something press against his chest. Feebly, he tried to brush it away.

  “You have been found guilty,” his executioner said.

  And before the final pop, an image sprang unbeckoned to the mind of Johnny Feathers. It was of the young college girl, textbook in hand, screaming on that long ago train.

  Murderer!

  He saw the faces of the men and women who had watched him slink guiltily down the aisle. Saw through the window the look of smug satisfaction on the anonymous girl’s face as he stood on the platform and watched the train pull out of the station.

  And then he heard a voice, but it was not the voice of his killer, or of the girl on the train, or of his father, or of any of the great spirits that the Chowok prayed to. It was a voice from inside his head, but which seemed to roll to him in warming waves from the very center of the universe. And the voice assured John Feathers that his murder would be avenged, and that his people had been mistaken these hundreds of years, and what had been thought a scourge would return once more with purifying vengeance.

  Johnny wanted to ask this voice of the heavens what it meant, but before he could there was another loud pop that seemed to come from inside his head, which was followed by another sharp pain to his chest. But this pain was less than the last, because he was already dying, and then he was on his back on the ground in a puddle of gasoline, and his killer was backing away and Johnny no longer cared.

  And as he watched the stars above him wink out one by one, Johnny was content to know that all would be made right. And then the black shroud of eternal night drew over and, as would be the same one day for all men, the shadow claimed Johnny Crow Feathers as its own.

  2

  His name was Remo and he hoped this day would not end with another dead body.

  It was an odd wish coming from Remo Williams who could not count the number of living, breathing humans who had surrendered to death at his hands. Years before, he had attempted to add them all up but very soon in the count he had felt ill and not very long after he had given up. There were some things one did not dwell on, especially when professional assassination was one’s bread and butter.

  It was not that Remo could not count them all; it was that, once faced with the cruel reality of his life, he had no desire to tally up the dead.

  But this day was different. This day would not end in death, as had so many of Remo’s days, but in life. It was a notion that sparked a tiny glimmer of hope in his breast, and he smiled at the thought.

  “Why you smiling?”

  Remo was jolted from his reverie. He turned to find a pair of suspicious eyes staring at him. The eyes and their owner were an arm’s length away. The sounds of many sets of lungs breathing heavily and of tired feet trampling brittle grass came to Remo’s ears from all around.

  “Just thinking.”

  “Ain’t nothing funny out here. Ain’t nothing anybody should be smiling at, that’s for damn sure.”

  “You’re right.” The smile fled Remo’s face, replaced with a look of grim seriousness.

  The woman next to him studied this new visage and seemed to accept it, but only reluctantly. She turned her attention from Remo. “Why you here anyway, mister?” she asked. “Fella like you don’t look like he likes crowds too much.”

  She was right. Remo mostly worked alone or with only one other individual. He glanced to his right. A line of men and women stretched across the wide field. To his left, a dozen more. They walked slowly across the field, using sticks to push aside tall grass as they went.

  “I was watching the news—” Remo replied.

  The woman nodded and quickly cut him off. “I seen it on the news, too,” she said. She was black, late middle-aged and had a kind face. She was the sort of woman who laughed easily, sang hymns while doing housework, baked cookies for her grandkids and swatted their knuckles with a wooden spoon if they tried to filch more than one before dinner. “I just had to come out here,” she said as she pushed aside a tall clump of weeds with a five-foot-long pole each searcher had been issued. “Poor little girl, getting taken like that. Shouldn’t happen in this country, no, sir. I got four of my own, and five grandchildren. Can’t think what I’d do if one of them was to be taken like this. Terrible thing. Just terrible what people can do. You from around here, mister?”

  “No,” Remo said.

  “Didn’t think so. I know everybody in town an’ everybody, they know me. Lot of faces I see today ain’t from around here. I ’spect they’re all just like you. Just want to help. You lucky you got in. Police got so many volunteers wanting to help they turning folks away.” A big hand swatted a fly on her neck. “Dang skeeters gonna eat us all alive out here,” she griped.

  She wore a tiny backpack that she’d filched from one of her grandchildren. She fished inside and pulled out the can of Away! bug spray they had each been issued. Closing her eyes, she squirted a cloud into the air and walked through it. The insect repellent mingled with the sweat that glistened on her dark skin. She applied some to her arms. When she was done, she offered the can to Remo.

  “No thanks.”

  “Don’t be like that,” she said. “Them bugs’ll eat your skinny behind for supper.”

  “Really,” R
emo said. “I’m good.”

  Her eyes narrowed and for the first time she noticed that there were no mosquitoes buzzing around Remo. The insects were making a veritable feast of the other searchers, swarming around as if the men and women were a moving buffet. Everyone else was slapping bare skin.

  Remo wore a black T-shirt and charcoal gray chinos. Not a single fly landed on his bare arms. In fact, now that she noticed, despite the stifling Virginia humidity this thin young man was fee only person present not perspiring.

  “You a robot or something?” she asked as they walked.

  “No. And shouldn’t you be watching the ground like everybody else?”

  “I ain’t missing nothing, honey. You got no flies on you? Well there’s no flies on Sadie neither.” Sadie swatted a fat mosquito that was at that moment sucking greedily from her neck. “Just my no-flies ain’t the literal kind like yours,” she said, wiping the squashed fly onto the front of her jeans. “Care to share your secret?”

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “Try me.”

  “I’ve only eaten rice, fish and fresh fruits and vegetables for the past thirty years.”

  The woman turned instantly away. “Pass.”

  “Sometimes I have duck,” Remo offered.

  “Pass,” Sadie repeated. “I’d rather get eaten by mosquitoes than give up living. Whatever cult they got you in, son, get yourself out and have some nice juicy pork barbecue.”

  The woman returned to beating the underbrush.

  For some reason, her comments stung worse than if a mosquito had bitten him.

  Remo rarely got the chance to socialize, but this Sadie seemed like a nice woman. She was volunteering her time for a worthy cause and he wouldn’t have minded making friends with her, but even in a group of strangers like this one he was always the outsider.

  Beside him, the woman whacked aside some grass, then all at once, let out a little gasp. Something round had been hiding in a little gully underneath the clump. At her cry, the nearest searchers glanced over expectantly.

  The woman’s face fell and she shook her head sadly. “Just a rock,” she called. She poked at the big black rock with her stick. “Yep, just a rock. Nothing here but rocks. Lord, I hope we find something soon.”

  She shook her head and muttered a soft prayer to herself as she moved away.

  Remo could have told her that there had been no body in the grass. Bodies gave off certain smells, even ones recently dead. It was not a body and it was certainly not anything living, which is what all the searchers hoped to find. Remo trudged along, hearing the individual heartbeats of every hunter along the line, and of the animals that scurried away from them into the tall grass. He could feel every footstep, both two- and four-footed. Despite the clomping and the crackling grass, if he strained he could have heard the blood coursing through arteries of the most distant member of their search party. There was no human in this field, living or dead, other than the men and women who had assembled with Remo on the road two miles behind.

  Yet Remo forged on. It was hope that kept him going, the same hope that sustained the other searchers. Yes, Remo could sense further than the rest, but even Remo’s senses had their limits. And every step brought him another pace closer to the shared hope of a happy ending.

  It was a strange feeling, to be part of a group effort. Not only was Remo used to working alone, he had come out in broad daylight, a great departure since much of Remo’s life seemed to be spent lurking in shadow.

  Although his own feelings should have been irrelevant, Remo could not help but feel connected to the strangers around him, a part of something noble, something good.

  But, Remo knew, not everyone shared his sentiments. He had found that out earlier in the day when he called his employer to tell him he was going to be out of town for a while.

  “For how long?” the tart voice of Dr. Harold W. Smith had asked over the phone. Smith’s voice could curdle cream at twenty paces. On the telephone he could make a crystal clear fiberoptic line sound like corroding copper.

  “For however long it takes,” Remo had replied.

  “Remo, this is not a part-time job, you know. If you are abandoning your responsibilities to go wandering around Africa for weeks again, I am going to insist that Master Chiun reduce what we pay for your services.”

  “You ever try getting a refund out of a Master of Sinanju, Smitty? Ptolemy V was the last employer who tried and they’re still finding parts of him floating down the Nile. Since then our number one rule has been etched in stone: ‘No refunds.’ You want to know our second rule?”

  “Not really.”

  “ ‘I’ll tell you anyway. Rule One is ‘No refunds.’ Rule Two is ‘Never forget Rule One.’ And anyway, I’m not going to Africa for a while. This is someplace even hotter.”

  He told Smith the story he had seen on the news that morning. A little eight-year-old girl from northern Virginia had been abducted on her way to the local community pool.

  “The Traci Rydel case,” Smith had said.

  “You know about it?” Remo asked, surprised. Smith was normally concerned about larger matters—terrorism and wars and threats to America at home and abroad. Human interest stories were lost on the cold, emotionless director of CURE, America’s most secret espionage agency, and Remo wondered idly if Smith was developing something like a human soul in his old age.

  That brief hope was quickly shattered.

  “The story is impossible to ignore,” Smith replied. “The networks are covering it as if it were a presidential funeral. I had to instruct the CURE mainframe computers to delete updates on the case from the hourly news digests they send me.”

  “You’re all heart, Smitty.”

  “Heart doesn’t enter into it. The girl will either be found or she will not. It is an unfortunate case, but there are many such cases every day across the nation. We are not here for such small matters.”

  “See, that’s where we disagree,” Remo said.

  There had been a pause on the line. “Remo, involving yourself in a common child abduction is out of the question.”

  “You must be asking a different question than me, Smitty, because I say it is. Isn’t this what we’re in business for? Saving Americans? Well there’s an American in trouble in Virginia and she needs our help.”

  “You can’t go.”

  “That’s going to be tough, since I’m already here.”

  From the sidewalk pay phone, Remo had looked around the supermarket parking lot where the volunteers were assembling. Police were dividing men and women into groups.

  He saw faces of every color, which made his heart warm. Climbing onto the bus that would take them to their search destination was a jowly black woman who wore an expression of fierce determination. Others in Remo’s group were falling in behind her. One man with greasy blond hair and torn jeans hung back, bouncing from foot to foot. When the final call for Remo’s preassigned group was shouted out, he waved a finger “one moment” at a uniformed police officer.

  “Gotta go, Smitty. My group is about to pull out.”

  Smith fumed silently. “If you are looking for my blessing, you do not have it.”

  “Don’t want it, don’t need it, don’t care,” Remo said, and hung up the phone.

  That had been hours ago, when the sun was rising higher in the sky and a hum of optimistic chatter filled the air. The late afternoon shadows were growing longer now and there was little talking among the volunteers.

  “The sun is going down,” Sadie, the woman next to Remo, observed. There was soft worry in her voice.

  Sadie had reason to be concerned. The little girl had been missing for more than two days and hope that she would be found alive dwindled with each passing hour.

  Remo’s group marched on through woods, field and woods again. They combed every square inch they passed, following instructions of specially trained state police officers who walked the line with them. When they reached another road, they set up a new line overlapping the first, and trekked back in the direction from which they had come.

  It was dark when they emerged from the woods beside their idling bus. Exhaust fumes hung heavy in the humid air. Some men wanted to go back out, but the state police and sheriff’s deputies told them no.