Secret Prey Read Free

intimate wood fire.
    The chairman sighed: so much to do.
    THE KILLER WAS DRESSED IN BLAZE ORANGE AND WAS moving quietly and quickly along the track. Dawn was not far away and the window of opportunity could be measured in minutes:
    Here: now twenty-four steps down the track. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . . twenty-three, twentyfour. A tree here to the left . . . Wish I could use a light .
    The oak tree was there, its bark rough against the fingertips. And just to the right, a little hollow in the ground behind a fallen aspen.
    Just get down here . . . quietly, quietly! Did he hear me? These leaves . . . didn’t think about the leaves yesterday, now it sounds like I’m walking on cornflakes . . . Where’s that log, must be right here, must be . . . ah!
    From the nest in the ground, the fallen aspen was at exactly the right height for a rifle rest. A quick glance through the scope: nothing but a dark disc.
    What time? My God, my watch has stopped. No. Sixseventeen. Okay. There’s time. Settle down. And listen! If anybody comes, may have to shoot . . . Now what time? Six- eighteen. Only two minutes gone? Can’t remember . . . two minutes, I think .
    There’d be only one run at this. There were other people nearby, and they were armed. If someone else came stumbling along the track, and saw the orange coat crouched in the hole . . .
    If they came while it was dark, maybe I could run, hide. But maybe, if they thought I was a deer, they’d shoot at me. What then? No. If someone comes, I take the shot then, whoever it is. Two shots are okay. I can take two. It wouldn’t look like an accident anymore, but at least there wouldn’t be a witness.
    What’s that? Who’s there? Somebody?
    The killer sat in the hole and strained to hear: but the only sounds were the dry leaves that still hung from the trees, shaking in the wind; the scraping of branches; and the cool wind itself. Check the watch.
    Getting close, now. Nobody moving, I’m okay. Cold down here, though. Colder than I thought. Have to be ready . . . The old man . . . have to think about the old man. If he’s there, at the cabin, I’ll have to take him. And if his wife’s there, have to take her . . . That’s okay: they’re old . . . Still nothing in the scope. Where’s the sun?
    DANIEL S. KRESGE WAS THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD, president, and chief executive officer of the Polaris Bank System. He’d gathered the titles to him like an archaic old Soviet dictator. And he ran his regime like a dictator: two hundred and fifty banks spread across six midwestern states, all wrapped in his cost-cutting fist.
    If everything went exactly right, he would hold his job for another fifteen months, when Polaris would be folded into Midland Holding, owner of six hundred banks in the south central states. There would be some casualties.
    The combined banks’ central administration would be in Fort Worth. Not many Polaris executives would make the move. In fact, the whole central administrative section would eventually disappear, along with much of top management. Bone would probably land on his feet: his investments division was one of the main profit centers at Polaris, and he’d attracted some attention. O’Dell ran the retail end of Polaris. Midland would need somebody who knew the territory, at least for a while, so she could wind up as the number two or three person in Midland’s retail division. She wouldn’t like that. Would she take it? Kresge was not sure.
    Robles would hang on for a while: a pure technician, he ran data services for Polaris, and Midland would need him to help integrate the separate Polaris and Midland data systems.
    McDonald was dead meat. Mortgage divisions didn’t make much anymore, and Midland already had a mortgage division—which they were trying to dump, as it happened.
    Kresge turned the thought of the casualties in his head: when they actually started working on the details of the merger, he’d have to sweeten things