(с) 2009

The fullness of the moon made it all more complicated. The intense silver glow cast shadows as defined as midday despite the thin veil of cloud cover. Dressed entirely in black, with only his eyes showing beneath his hood, Jonathan Grave moved like a shadow in the stillness. Crickets and tree frogs, nocturnal noisemakers by the thousands, gave him some cover, but not enough. There was never enough cover. He reminded himself that he was in Indiana soybean country facing a clueless adversary, but then he remembered the penalty for failing to respect one’s adversary.

The Patrone brothers had been arguing for every one of the twenty minutes that Jonathan had been monitoring them. The bud in his left ear picked up every word, beamed to him from the tiny wireless transmitter he’d stuck to the lowest pane of the front window. From what he’d been able to determine from his hasty research in the past few hours, the Patrones were nobodies-just a pair of losers from West Virginia whose motives for this kidnapping adventure were unclear, and from Jonathan’s perspective, irrelevant.

The stress of the kidnappers’ ordeal had clearly begun to take its toll. They’d counted on Thomas Hughes’s parents coughing up the ransom quickly, and now they couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong.

“I’m tired of being jerked off by that asshole,” Lionel said. The older of the two, he was the hothead. “Old Stevie Hughes needs more proof, maybe we should just cut off a piece of Tommy and send it to his old man in an envelope.”

Jonathan picked up his pace, kneeling in the dew-wet grass to un-sling his black rucksack and open the flap. With his night vision gear in place, the darkness burned like green daylight.