Connecticut, 1990

A black swan landed on the frozen pond turning ice wafers blood red. A stand of fir trees blocked a cold and darkening sky.

The snow continued to fall. Thick. Impenetrable. Except for the distant cry of a flock of summer-bound geese, there was no sound at Wintercove. Only the hush of winter.

The bearded stranger waited. The temperature plummeted.

“This is no place for an old man,” he thought. “Maybe this lunatic won’t show up.”

His fingers and toes ached from the cold. He’d been lingering here for hours. Suvorov knew this would be his last act. After this, he would retire, maybe to some island in the South Pacific where no one would recognize him. A private place where he might lose himself among the natives, grow old undisturbed, feign senility and die. This he yearned for.

A coat of powdery snow rested on the tops of the soaring pines.The upper branches sported a glaze of fine powder. Everywhere he looked, it was as if he was inside a mythical kingdom. A few snowflakes landed on his open palm, revealing unique, diamond-like patterns before they melted.

Suvorov remembered how, in his youth, he and his brother used to lie on their backs with their limbs outstretched to make angels in the snow. “Whatever happened to that kind of innocence?” He wondered.

But his training did not allow for idle thought. Still, it was difficult not to let his mind drift. After ten long years of searching, he had found his brother Aleksandr and he was dead.

He glanced at his watch. Late afternoon. Goodis should be here by now. Below the forest ridge where he was sheltering and yet in clear view, lay the pond. Snowdrifts traversed a pathway that veered toward four tennis courts. Inaccessible, fenced-in, white squares. To the east was a little rock garden and a wooden bridge. It looked like toothpicks dusted with flour. High on the hill beyond the bridge stood a large stately home.

The storms had arrived early this year. No one had expected it. No one had asked for it. The forest trees were drooping to the ground, overburdened with the weight of this November gift. A crackling alerted Suvorov to the increasing burden of the snow on the branches above his head.

“This is Nature’s way of defying Man,” he thought. His dull green eyes surveyed the washed out landscape. He sucked in his breath and shifted his weight to the other foot when his eyes instinctively focused on a flash of movement in the forest.

A thin visitor in an oversized greatcoat dragged himself through the snowstorm. Coughing.

Suvorov forgot about the cold. He ignored the storm. He reached for his gun, a Mauser C96. Not a complicated weapon but a trusty piece that had served him well many times

Danny Goodis who had just turned forty, stumbled through a two- foot-high snowdrift. But he was astonished. On the half-frozen pond directly in front of him, a sleek black swan arched its slender neck. Injured. Bleeding. The ice around the edge of the pond was gradually closing in on the bird as heavy snow fell from an unforgiving sky. It glided in narrow circles through blood-red ice wafers.

“What are you doing here?” Dan shouted drunkenly. “Jesus, I hate this crap!” He stared at the tree-line, his gloomy eyes unfocused from his binge.

“I know you’re here, Lauren. I know you’re responsible for this.” The sleek bird ruffled its black feathers and raised itself up.

A frozen tear was trapped in Dan’s eye. Muffling a sneeze, he dug

deep inside his coat pockets. Muttering to himself, he pulled out a pair of blue earmuffs. He clamped them over his head. His shaking left hand returned to his pocket for a bottle of Stolichnaya. Dan wet his thin blue lips and drained the vodka. Then he tossed the bottle across the cracked ice at the bird.

“Go on! Get the hell outta here, bird. Doncha know it’s winter? Doncha know birds fly south?”

The graceful cygnet barely glanced at him.

Deep in the shadows, Suvorov loaded the clip for his weapon, just as he had a thousand times before. Slowly, methodically, expertly. The kill would be easy. “But who should go first, the bird or the man?”

Everything was a game to him. He delighted in it. That’s why he had been chosen. An expert marksman with a flawless record and a simple assignment. Ask no questions, eliminate one political troublemaker and within a few hours he would be winging his way to Bali, enjoying fresh veal and sipping Pernod. He would have done it for nothing. His sources informed him this was the guy who had killed Aleksandr Vasinoff, the great physicist, his brother.

He firmed up his stance, aimed the pistol, pulled the trigger. He designed the initial shot to pierce the ice six inches from Dan’s left foot. “Better get out of here, bird.” Dan wheezed at the swan. “Go on!

Take off!”

He flung a handful of snow, hitting the swan in its side. In a sudden

flurry of speed, the injured bird swept across the ice and lit into the air. As soon as it attained airspeed, two well-placed bullets shredded the creature’s body. A trail of red steamed across the virgin white landscape.

Dan watched in horror.

For the first time, warm blood spilled over the Goodis’ estate. Dan felt each crack in the cells of his mind. Panic rose in the woods of his youth. The golf course was deserted, the tennis courts haunted. He stared at the massive stone house on the hillside. The stink of death was everywhere. His dad’s home was no longer safe, and for the last time in his tormented life, Dan Goodis began to run. Through the snowdrift, along the sandbar, toward the bridge.

Tracking his prey, Suvorov stepped out into the open but heard a thud in the distance. It could have been the breeze or a branch cracking. Maybe a car door. Firm, solid, rich. Probably European. He leveled his gun at the escaping figure and dropped the kill shot.

Dan’s body jerked to the left, presenting a solid neck rupture. Then another in the chest. Suvorov fired again, but the projectile missed its mark as someone smashed the gun from his grip.

“You goddamned son of a Commie whore bitch,” a gravely voice hissed in his ear.

Two burly hands wrapped a garrote around Suvorov’s throat. The wire cut deep into the Russian’s windpipe. He struggled to jerk free. He thought of his island. The fishing. The payoff. But the grip on his neck was like iron. The sleet and the chill bit into his open wound and the last words he recalled hearing from his executioner was a lousy American nursery rhyme.

“Georgie Porgie puddin’ ’n’ pie.” George Arkin pulled tighter on the wire. “Kissed the girls and made them cry.”

It was clear from his grip that he wanted the steel to cleave apart the assassin’s carotid artery. “When the boys came out to play.” Arkin yanked harder on the wire as a well-placed knee to the kidney deflated the Russian. “Georgie Porgie ran away.”

Snap, snap. Arkin knew the marksman was dead when his head rolled north. Releasing the bloody garrote, he let the body crumple to the ground.

“Dan?” A woman’s cry shattered the silence. She started to run. Closer. Arkin could tell. “Dan, are you there?”

Arkin dragged the Russian’s body behind a spruce tree. He shook snow from a branch and began covering the dead man. It would be spring before anybody discovered him unless the wolves got him first.

Lauren cried out again. “Dan, where are you?”

Then she noticed the mess of entrails where the swan or what remained of it lay. Sinew, guts, plume and shattered bone formed a trail of blood through the snow. Lauren screamed. The bird’s neck and parts of its head lay several feet away by the water’s edge.

She bolted toward the pond, trying to keep from throwing up. Nearing the hill she tripped on a root. Caught her balance, looked up and found Dan’s blue earmuffs. She picked them up and followed his fresh tracks past the drift, beyond the sandbar, across the bridge and toward the house.

Arkin wiped the steel cable on his sleeve and stuffed it back inside his coat. He pulled up his collar, took one last look at the property and melted into the dense forest. He made the road in a matter of seconds.

Though the trees and the sleet and the storm always had a tendency to muffle human terror, George heard the scream. Chilling, unending. It was always the same. He never looked forward to winter.

Chapter 2

Los Angeles, 1980

If Dan had known where this would lead, he never would have left teaching, bought a dog, or gone jogging, and he never would have met Lauren.

A sliver of light pierced through the skylight to the lower level of his Brentwood apartment. A thin beam shot across the teal carpet. It climbed up the side of the ottoman and swept through a forest of potted plants until it reached the antique mahogany roll-top desk. Tracing a path over a stack of unopened mail and unpaid bills, the ray spread its glow across a beveled mirror hanging on the wall. It reflected off the mirror and raced up through the air, attacking Dan’s unopened eyes.

He rolled over onto his stomach and covered his head with a pillow. Opening one tired blue eye, he glanced across the bed. Lady Hunt, his three-month-old English sheepdog, poked her little black nose out from under the down comforter.

“Well, Merriedip Phillimore Hunt III, did you sleep, OK?”

The little sheepdog sprang to its feet with a Nike in her maw, and jumped on top of her master’s head.

Dan sauntered outside into the backyard. Mumbling to himself, he watered the plants, dug at a few weeds, and then heard chirping. He looked up at the stately palm tree with its brown fronds dried and ready to fall off. He picked up some broken pieces when he looked down.

There on the grass was a small baby bird. Blue, spotted, fluffy. A baby owl had fallen from its nest. Chirp, chirp. He wondered if its parents could somehow rescue it, but knew that they couldn’t. He collected the bird from the ground, took his T-shirt, and carefully wrapped it in the folds.

“What are you doing here? How are you going to get home?”The owl couldn’t fly. It would never make it back to its nest.

The bird was cute. It chirped softly at him. It couldn’t have been more than a week old. He wasn’t sure if he should leave it or take it inside.

Dan returned inside and set the bird on a towel on the kitchen table and started thumbing through an Audubon book until he focused on the Western screech owl.

Hunt took a quick, curious look.

“I know you think we should keep her, right?”

He tried a spoon, then a small syringe to see if it could take some

water through its tiny beak.

“I don’t even know what to feed you. Imagine, we could raise our

own owl.”

Reluctantly, Dan picked up the phone and dialed.

A half-hour later, an animal control officer knocked at the door.

Dan kissed the owl on the head and passed the little creature over. “We’ll take care of it, and if it’s healthy, we may return it here to

its home.”

“Thanks,” said Dan.

Chapter 3

In his Langley, Virginia office, George Arkin, a rugged career spy in his mid-forties, passed a disk file to two gray-suited agents a few years out of college. The label on it read VASINOFF.

“We found him, and you’ll never guess where,” Arkin informed the agents.

In intelligence circles, they called them The Gardeners, the first team in the field to take action on long-term projects. After the initial security assessment of a disappointing harvest, seven highly trained agents were dispatched through Top Secret directives. They would plant industrial-grade hybrid seeds—scientists, and engineers from foreign countries for which emigration was not a choice. It was a necessity.

The Gardeners would nurture them, prune them, and, as needed, clear away any weeds growing among them.

George Arkin had been one of the best. Now he was the team leader. With the cold war out of the way, he could afford to focus on his ripe crop, and before the next round of budget cuts, he was determined to see his projects bear fruit. For years he had sewn and reaped. Like a gentleman farmer. The practice of crop rotation of sensitive information became second nature to him. When you were looking for it, it wasn’t there, and when you least expected it, it could rear up and make life uncomfortable.

In the early days, the goals of national security were clearly defined.

The practices,however,were not.They changed,shifted with the wind, with the current Administration and the ambition and needs of the Director of Central Intelligence.

On the way to the airport, the agents, Bolt and Stats, perused the file. Aleksandr Vasinoff had been a Sleeper, a seed. Planted thirty years ago in the upstanding east bay community of Piedmont, his career had taken him inside Martin Marietta, later Xerox PARC. At Stanford, he taught a class in nuclear physics and the effects of gravity on sub-atomic particles, and was eventually tenured. No Eastern Bloc scientist could have asked for more. But when it was time to go home, Vasinoff had fled.

Over the years, the CIA’s hunt for him proved disheartening. All it turned up was a fractured trail of family problems, career setbacks, and financial reversals buried underneath the glowing outer persona. The Gardeners could not interfere.

By the time they discovered the root rot, Vasinoff had disappeared. He had been on the run from Cuban agents seeking to sell information he insisted he didn’t have to Iraqi secret intelligence operatives. It was time to bring Vasinoff in and debrief him. Critical information might slip into the wrong hands, and it was Arkin’s job to clean up the mess. Besides, he had a personal stake.

Chapter 4

Twenty-three hundred miles away in Malibu Canyon and drenched with sweat from his seven-mile run, Dan Goodis pushed himself over one more misty crest. Lady Hunt panted alongside, chasing the yellow and navy blue-clad figure in front of her.

Almost thirty, with a runner’s body, Dan had a quick wit and a faster mind.There was an intensity about him that masked a particular emotional vulnerability. But if you really knew him, which few people did, you would find he was a guy who was wound up very, very tight.

“So, I ran into this guy, see,” Dan spoke to himself, forcing the words as he regulated his breathing. He dictated into a Panasonic RN-122 microcassette recorder. Every six months, he broke the door hinge. But at $34.95 at Adrays, they were cheap enough to throw away and replace.

“And he owned this bakery, you see. Well, one day, me and my buddy walked in there when his wife was behind the counter, and we asked if she had any hot buns. Just then, this nun walks in behind us.”

Dan ran another ten yards and shook the sweat from his forehead. He was working on a comedy routine. With enough practice, he pretended one day he could do stand-up.

“And the nun says, ‘I beg your pardon.’ And I look at my buddy, and I say, I tell you what. You beg the nun’s pardon while I eat the baker’s buns.” Dan spat phlegm from his throat.

“What a stupid joke. Hunt, come on, girl. You’ve got to keep up. Just a few more hills, and we’re done.”

Two cars flew past, breaking the monotony of the exercise.

Dan started again. “There was this guy, you see, and every morning he used to get on his Nikes and his sweats and go for a run. The first

day he almost collapsed.”

Dan suddenly stopped and stared at the climb ahead of him. His

little dog pulled up right behind.

“Whew. We can’t keep going like this, Hunt. Let’s just cut through

here and head back,” Dan panted.

“Good thinking, Dan,” a deep voice complimented his decision.

“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day.”

By talking to himself in different voices, Dan kept himself company.

It was better than nothing.

“Gee, thanks,” his normal voice responded.

He and Hunt turned up a dirt trail that ran across a wooded property. A rusty sign read ‘NO TRESPASSING.’

Seventy-five yards further along the path, Dan passed a solitary shack. Broken auto parts littered the yard, and a rusted fence surrounded the clapboard structure. Peeling dried patches of green paint decorated the exterior.

A man’s resonant voice boomed from within in a foreign accent Dan couldn’t be sure of.

“But that thou wouldst have ridden thyself of this famine nigh unto this time, the journey would be swift.”

Dan stopped by the fence.

The voice continued. “I do not live by my own father nor mine self my own son for this is not what I am. Contempt and murder have ravaged these hills.”

“Hello,” Dan called out. “Are you all right?”

The voice stopped. A set of dark eyes appeared from behind the open door of the shack as a tall bearded man dressed in rags presented himself at the threshold.

“This guy’s unbelievable,” Dan thought as his thumb pressed the RECORD button on the cassette. The disheveled figure glared at him. “There is a tumor amongst us, and those who witnesseth it shall be no better than dust for you and this creature make not haste before my eyes for I have seen what cancer penetrates thy soul, oh murderous villain. Would that I could shed my sorrow and take the dagger unto mine own hands, but that the blood of mankind would stain my

house. Banish thee, demon, from this land.”

“What?” Dan cried out. “Who are you talking to?”

Above them, a buzzing noise turned to thunder and ricocheted off

the surrounding hills. Within seconds an unmarked black helicopter circled overhead, spitting up dust, hovering closer. The copter twisted around, nose down, pushing the trees and grass away with its force. The rotor wash turned particles of dirt into tiny tornadoes, whipping them high into the mountain air.

Dan took cover behind a tree. He stuffed his shaggy dog inside his shirt to protect her from the dust. The chopper circled three more times before vacating the premises.

When Dan looked up, the old man was gone. Prying his way through the fence, Dan stepped onto the porch. He forced open the door and looked inside.

“Are you in here?” he asked.

No answer.

The inside of the house looked worse than the yard. Rust, dust,

filth, mice. Miscellaneous junk and the odor of garbage penetrated the hermit’s living quarters.

“Hello?” Dan shouted again.

Lady Hunt growled and tried to appear fierce.

“What’s the matter, Hunt?” he asked her.

A team of oversized cockroaches played stick hockey with a scrap

of bread in a drawer.

“Gawd, I’d hate to have dinner here.”

Dan spun around to leave, but the old man suddenly appeared, holding a machete, blocking his retreat.

“Who are you?” the hermit Aleksandr Vasinoff snarled.

“Woah, woah there. I’m just a comedian looking for material,” Dan stammered.

“What kind of material?”

“Funny stuff, light things.”

The old man brushed past Dan and took a drink from the tap,

swallowing the brownish water.

“Like not heavy?” he asked, setting the machete aside.

“Yeah, not heavy, like humor, you know, levity,” said Dan.

The old man smirked, revealing a yellow, un-flossed bite.

“I used to work with levity.” He moved to block the door. “Really?” Dan looked for a way past him.

“Anti-gravity,” the hermit returned, trying to gauge if this was his

contact.

“Did you float?”

“Are you famous?” asked the hermit.

“On my way. I play some clubs,” Dan boasted.

“So I could find you?”

“Sure, but you’d probably have to clean up a little, and there’s usually

a two-drink minimum. So, why were you quoting all this doom and gloom stuff ? Things aren’t that bad.”

“Shhhh. They can hear us up there.” He pointed overhead. “Really?”

“By satellite.”

“Seems safe to me.”

The hermit sized him up and relaxed.

“You probably think I’ve lost it after all this.”

Out from under the sofa, he pulled a black leather briefcase and

opened it. Inside was a manila envelope. “Take this. It’ll explain everything.”

“What’s in it?” Dan asked.

“The biggest joke on mankind; my humorous scenario. Read it. Tell me if they like it, if they think it’s funny.”

“Well, I can’t promise anything,” Dan stammered. “Timing is everything,” smiled Vasinoff.