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him come on in here?’
    ‘ Of
course.’
    ‘ You
don’t want us to go out an’ get him?’
    ‘ No
need. He’ll walk right in.’
    ‘ How the
hell can you be so sure of that?’ Elliott wanted to
know.
    ‘ Ah,’
said Nix, with a smile like Death watching a knife fight. ‘I happen
to know the fly.’
    And with that enigmatic explanation
Elliott had to be content.

Chapter
Five
    It was a long time since Angel had lived off the
land like an Indian, but it had been part of his training and it
came back to him fast. Long ago, when they first brought him East
to join the department, he had been taken first by train and then
on horseback somewhere deep into a swampy wilderness far from any
trace of civilization. They blindfolded him and plugged his ears
before taking him out into the middle of the wilderness and turning
him loose. He had no idea where he was. They gave him nothing, no
food, water, or weapon. Somewhere in the wilderness, they said, was
a ‘safe’
house. He had to find it. He had a one-hour start over the three
men who would try to find and kill him. No other instructions, no
other rules. Survive, they said.
    He was out for four days.
    When he finally found the ‘safe’ house, he was
eighteen pounds lighter, and as gaunt as a man who’d been a year in
Andersonville. In the process of eluding his pursuers and coming
safe home, he had learned many things. How to find water where none
seemed to exist, or strain the worst filth out of brackish puddles
through the cotton of his tattered shirt. How to trap, skin, and
cook small wild things. Which berries were edible, and which would
kill you (the birds taught you that). How to make a lair and
conceal it as well if not better than any other hunted thing. All
this he learned as he learned what they wanted him to know: how to
survive. By the third day in the valley, had Nix sent his men out
after Angel, he would have been hard to find and take. But Hercules
Nix had no need to pursue Angel. He knew his quarry would come to
him, and on the fourth night, Angel did.
    He had learned a great deal about the
valley by this time. Keeping to cover, moving little during the
day, using twilight and night for exploration, the sleeping dawn
for reconnaissance, he had spied unseen on the Comanche village
upon which he had almost stumbled that first night. He assessed its
probable strength by the number of teepees, women, and horses.
Unseen in the night he watched the listless guards at the crude
barrack half-hidden in the fringe of the thornbreaks at the
northern end of the valley. He did not need to explore the breaks
themselves, for Welsh Al had told him that they stretched over a
mile, briars and thorn trees twining around the feet of logwoods
and stunted oil palms and forming a barrier of formidable density.
God alone knew what lived in there, Davis had shuddered, what
reptiles and other horrors.
    Angel had skirted the perimeter
of the swampy lake, following its outline and testing its shore
here and there. He had noted some of its denizens, moved to wonder
why Hercules
Nix had imported such exotic creatures, and to ponder over the
madness that must thread through the man’s brain. He had very soon
learned to avoid the river and its savage population waiting for
the unwary one who would use the dummy fords along its length. Only
a sharp-eyed tracker, used to noting the minute marks that might
enable him to follow where others could not, would have noticed
that on the opposite bank of the river there were no tracks of any
kind, no marks, no scarred rocks, nothing.
    Now, wary of everything he could
not see, Angel made his way along the bank of the man-made river,
using the advancing twilight to shield his movements from the
guards on the stockade. By the time he had made his way to within
striking distance of the hacienda the valley was as black as the inside of Satan’s
ovens. Through the tiny gaps between the logs of the fence Angel
could see the lights of the house.