knew better than to rev it. Instead, I lifted my foot off the accelerator pedal, gave it some gas.
And I was still stuck.
A quick burst of gas, just a tap of the pedal, and it started rocking back and forth, and after a few minutes of this the car climbed out of the gulley and back through the brown soup.
Then my high beams lit up a rusty metal mailbox that said ALDERSON.
An absentee owner, a caretaker recently arrived. Earth-moving equipment: Might that include a backhoe?
Everything was pure speculation at this point.
But I had no other possibilities.
93.
The driveway to the Alderson property was the main access road. If this was indeed the right place—and I had to assume for now that it was—Zhukov was likely to have surveillance equipment in place: cameras, infrared beams, some sort of early-warning system.
Then again, it’s not easy to set up equipment like that outdoors and have it work effectively. Not without advance preparation.
But, it was safer to assume the driveway was being monitored.
So I drove on ahead, past the entrance, plowing through the muddy river another half mile or so until it came to an abrupt stop. There I drove up the steep bank as deep into the woods as I could.
According to the map Dorothy had sent to my phone, this was the far end of the property. The farm was two hundred and forty acres of land with a half mile of frontage on a paved road and a mile of frontage along this dirt path.
The house was easily a quarter mile from here. Given the topography, the road couldn’t be seen from the house.
The owner had for years permitted hunters to come through his land. Dorothy had looked at the state’s online hunting records.
This wasn’t unusual in New Hampshire. You were allowed to hunt on state or even private lands as long as they hadn’t been “posted”—in other words, unless the property owner put up NO HUNTING signs.
But I’d been concentrating so hard on trudging through the muck that I hadn’t until now noticed the NO TRESPASSING/NO HUNTING signs posted to trees every fifty feet or so.
They looked brand-new. Someone had put them up recently to keep anyone from approaching the house.
I had some decent overhead satellite photos of the Alderson property, but nothing recent. The photos could have been three years old, for all I knew. I was at a real disadvantage.
At least I had a good weapon: a SIG-Sauer P250 semiautomatic. The SIG P250 was a beautiful gun: compact and lightweight, smooth, perfectly engineered. Mine was matte black, with an aluminum frame. I’d installed a Tritium night sight and an excellent internal laser sight, a LaserMax. I’d also had a gunsmith in Manassas, Virginia, add stippling and checkering on the metal grips, round all the sharp angles for an unhindered draw, and funnel the grip for easier reloading. He tuned it like a Stradivarius, adjusting the trigger pull down to a zero sear, meaning that I hardly had to touch the trigger to fire.
There’s an elegance to a well-made gun, like any finely engineered machine. I like the precision engineering, the honed finish, the smooth pull of the trigger, the smell of gun oil and smoke and gunpowder and nitroglycerin.
I loaded several magazines with hollow-point bullets. They’re designed to do a lot of damage to a person: When they hit soft tissue they deform and expand and create a large crater. Cops prefer them because they won’t pass through walls—or the target, for that matter.
My Defender was painted Coniston Green, also known as British Racing Green, but it was so mud-spattered that it looked as if I’d sprayed it with camouflage paint. I stashed it in a copse of birch trees, where it couldn’t be seen from the road, and took some equipment out of the back. My binoculars: an excellent pair of Leicas. A pair of boots, still crusted with mud from the last time I’d worn them. I strapped on a side holster and jammed in the SIG, then clipped a few extra magazine holsters to my belt.
At the last minute I remembered something under the rear seat that I might need. It was an old military-spec Interceptor ballistic vest made of aramid fiber. It wasn’t bulletproof—no such thing, really—but it was the most effective soft armor you could get. It was supposed to stop nine-millimeter machine-gun rounds. I put it on, adjusted the Velcro straps.
If I’d come to the right place, I needed to be prepared.