ONE

In Upstate New York’s Adirondacks, the two men had spent the morning in a skiff on Lake Baghdad. The older man had his fishing pole out, but he didn’t expect to catch anything. The other man was in his late forties, and he didn’t bother with fishing poles. He was there to see the man who headed up Lockwood Petroleum, which employed his investment advisory service.

“Time for you to start back,” said Arthur Lockwood.

“Arthur, I can stay the rest of the day,” Robert Brandon replied.

Lockwood shook his head. “If you don’t catch that afternoon train, you’re stuck up here for the night.”

Reaching behind him, he got the outboard motor going and pointed the skiff toward shore, trolling as they went.

“You’re certain about this project you’ve been working on up here?” Brandon asked, watching Lockwood closely.

As they approached the wooden dock, Lockwood said quietly: “Never been more sure of anything in my life.”

After tying the skiff to the dock, they walked along its planking and on up the path toward the pickup truck..

Pete Hudson emerged from the nearby boathouse where he was bunking and met them at his truck.

“Why the Winchester, Pete?” the old man asked.

Pete squinted at the surrounding tree-covered hills.

“Thought I might try for an antelope later, while they’re still in season,” he said hoarsely. Then he turned his pale blue eyes toward Lockwood. “If it’s okay with you.”

“It’s fine with me, Pete,” Lockwood grinned as he and Brandon turned up toward the lodge. Over his shoulder he called, “Good hunting.”

Brandon glanced at Pete stowing the Winchester carbine aboard the pickup behind the two cab seats.

“Why do you have Pete up here with you, Arthur?”

Lockwood shrugged. “The security people insist someone stay with me here. So-o-o . . . ”

“But why Pete?”

Lockwood stopped at the foot of the porch steps leading up to the lodge and studied Brandon with an amused glint in his eyes.

“Pete’s a rare kind of bird.”

“He must be,” Brandon smiled.

“It’s relaxing to be up here with someone like Pete. Sometimes it almost feels as if I don’t have a bodyguard at all.”

“Arthur, the world as it is now, especially for a man in your position, almost requires having a bodyguard. It’s part of the deal.”

The old man gazed off across the lake, murmuring, “I sometimes wonder if people like me didn’t have a good deal to do with making the world the way it is now . . . ”

“You really have gotten religion,” Brandon observed.

“Or something,” Lockwood laughed. “Come on inside. Your stuff should be packed and ready.”

Pete helped with Brandon’s luggage. When Lockwood and Brandon left the lodge, Pete followed them outside, closing the front door behind him and making sure the spring lock caught.

Brandon shook hands with Lockwood and got into the cab on the passenger side while Pete stacked the luggage in back. Sliding behind the steering wheel, Pete scanned the sky to the west, studying the clouds beginning to pile up beyond the rolling hills.

Lockwood noticed and turned to look, too.

“Weather spoiling your hunting plans, Pete?”

Pete grinned and shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

“I’ll probably be out on the lake when you get back,” Lockwood said.

“Arthur,” Brandon asked, “did you take your medication yet?”

“Gonna take it right now,” Lockwood assured him. “Always just before lunch.”

The old man waved as the pickup drove past the boathouse and disappeared along the dirt road into the woods.

* * *

Weaver waited back in the hardwood forest behind the lodge. He wore a black jumpsuit and a black ski mask. Surgical gloves covered his hands, which held a long extension pole with a microphone at its end. With it, he had been able to hear most of what the three men said by the dock. He had even been able to follow the conversation of two of them in the skiff earlier, out on the lake.

Now he watched silently as the yokel bodyguard drove off with the investment geek, and the old man trudged up the path and mounted the porch steps slowly. His eighty odd years were beginning to show.

Weaver retracted the extension pole, dismantled it, and then he just waited.

* * *

At the railroad station three miles from the lodge, Brandon said, “See if the train is going to be on time, will you, Pete?”

Pete went inside. The station master nodded when he asked. Brandon was on his cellular phone when Pete came back out. As he approached, Brandon punched the off-button and put the cell phone away.

“I wouldn’t know what to do without these things,” he said.

Pete unloaded the suitcase and carry-on bag.

“Will you be all right?” he asked. “Or should I wait till the train comes?”

“No, I can handle two bags. You go on back. I worry about that old guy.”

On the drive back, Pete kept an eye on the clouds in the west. They’d become veritable thunderheads. Halfway back to the lodge, Pete stopped his pickup at the turnoff into the high country and sniffed the wind. After a long calculating look at the clouds moving along up there, he finally shook his head. “Not today,” he muttered. “You’ll have to wait, Mr. Antelope.”