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particularly the sniper teams—the years of training to kill, and the killing itself, the flattened value structures and suppressed emotions necessary to carry out their work. Some could be flat and cold for only so long, living as they did with the recollections of blood and brain shots clearly monitored down the long lens of a twenty-power spotting scope.
    Walter McGrane studied the map and wondered which way Clayton Price would run. North probably. Or maybe he’d bolt for the jungles of Central America. Price understood jungles as well as anyone and far better than most. He’d been one of the best shooters who’d ever worked for them, one of the best who’d ever lived, strange and distant, with more patience than a boulder. That’s why he’d been called “Tortoise” in his Vietnam years, slow and methodical and patient. Somebody once said if Clayton Price slowed down any more, he’d be moving backward. That is, until the right moment came and he instantly evolved into something more like a snake. Reptilian, in any case, whether he was waiting or striking.
    That’s what was said about Clayton Price when he was young and fast. But it was generally agreed now that he was getting old, too old and out-of-date, thinking too much and asking questions about things he didn’t need to know, losing his edge. The Covert Operations Unit had stopped using him five years ago except in certain circumstances where an extra hand was needed.
    Old and out-of-date. Out of round. Out of step and style, out of order and out of tune. Clayton Price— Tortoise—and Nightingale and Centipede and Broadleaf, a few others. The shadowmen, operating in the information penumbra cast by governments when moments of secrecy are required and things need to be accomplished without the rest of the world knowing about them. Well, scratch Centipede. He’d never made it out of some godforsaken Middle Eastern place last year—South Yemen, the rumors said—land mine or gunned down by laser-controlled Gatling as he cut his way through concertina wire. Whatever got him, it was something metallic and forever and final. That’s what Clayton Price had heard. And political repercussions afterward; that’s what Walter McGrane knew for sure.

    The radio Danny Pastor had slung from the dash kept on playing: warriors and wise men, flowers and sad songs, Mexican night rolling by. Luz María was awake, saying nothing. Clayton Price was awake and thinking about Centipede, about the time they’d gone into Ecuador as a team and taken out three revolutionaries who were using the drug trade to finance leftist efforts on behalf of a better world. That was damn near the end for both of them. If it hadn’t been for the gutsy pilot in the old C-47, it would have been the end. He’d landed on grassed-over asphalt and slowed only enough to let them run alongside and climb in the cargo door, as if they were hopping a freight. Tortoise and Centipede, tight-lipped at first, then laughing and giving each other a high-five when they’d made it over the Andes. Insertion was hard enough, extraction was where it always got real close. Like now, in Mexico.
    His shoulder pressed against the Bronco’s door as Danny Pastor took Vito around a hard, left-bending curve. A long, strange life, it had been that all right. From the beginning, it seemed, promised to the field of battle. Way back in another time, he might have been something else, a sailor on one of Cook’s voyages or a mountain man in the high evergreens.
    Mountain men… from the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, you could see Manhattan across the East Paver, and on foggy days the towers resembled mountains; that’s how he’d imagined it when he was young. He’d sat in the bay window of his parents’ fourth-floor walk-up, three floors above an Italian restaurant taking up the whole bottom floor, and had thought about mountain men. He’d read about them in a library book and after that wanting to be one and having the