Free The Naked Edge by David Morrell

out who it was and give him the worst duties imaginable. Since Jackson didn't have a TV station or a large newspaper, most of the men and women converging on him must have come from Idaho Falls (a drive-able 180 miles away) or from Casper, Laramie, and Cheyenne (much farther away—to get here this soon, the reporters would have needed to charter planes). Then it occurred to Garth that the person who alerted the media might have been somebody on the hit team. Get as many reporters and TV cameras here as possible. In the ensuing chaos, the gunmen could blend. Any of the supposed news people shouting questions at him could be a killer.
    “Is it true that six men were shot—”
    “Ranch thirty miles north of—”
    “Explosion destroyed—”
    “Sniper—”
    “Helicopter—”
    “Okay, all right.” Garth gestured for quiet. “If all of you talk at once, I can't hear your questions.” The television lights glared at him, hurting his eyes. “I have a brief statement. At four-thirty this afternoon—”
    Suddenly, the front door to the barracks banged open. As Garth turned, he saw a trooper hurrying toward him, a concerned look on his face.
    “What's the matter?” Garth asked.
    Cameras flashed as the trooper motioned Garth away from the reporters and spoke in urgent hushed tones.
    Garth spun toward the reporters. “This'll have to wait. There's been a—”
    “Captain!” a trooper yelled from the front door.
    A siren wailed in the fenced-off parking area behind the barracks. Roof lights flashing, a highway patrol car rounded the building and skirted the reporters. An officer was silhouetted in the front seat as the car reached the main road and sped north toward Jackson, disappearing around a curve in this sparsely populated section of the valley. Moments later, a second patrol car followed, lights flashing, siren wailing.
    Some of the reporters raced for their cars.
    Or possibly they aren't reporters , Garth thought.
    Others stayed, demanding to know what was going on.
    “Tell us what happened this afternoon!”
    “Are these incidents connected?”
    Headlights blazing, a state police van hurried past, reached the road, and followed the three civilian cars that chased the cruisers.
    6

    Opening and closing his knife, the man who'd shot the sniper watched from a road on a bluff across from the police barracks. He was forty years old, tall and lean, with an etched face. His powerful forearms resulted from years of pounding a hammer onto an anvil, forging blades. He used various names. Currently, his devotion to knives had prompted him to choose the alias of Bowie. Sitting in his car, he used a night-vision magnifier that wasn't affected by the stark contrasts of light and darkness in the parking lot a quarter mile from him. While he listened to the sirens, he studied the sequence of vehicles speeding away: the first cruiser, the second cruiser, the three civilian cars, then the police van.
    Damned smart , Bowie thought.
    He spoke into a two-way radio. “It's a shell game. The target's in one of the police vehicles. The question is which.”
    A voice from one of the pursuing civilian cars said, “I vote for the van.”
    “Or maybe the target's still in the barracks,” Bowie replied. “Maybe those police vehicles are decoys. We don't have enough personnel to follow everybody.”
    “Wait!” the voice blurted. “Ahead of us. One of the police cars is pulling to the side of the road.”
    “For God's sake, don't stop,” Bowie ordered.
    “But we need to act like real reporters. Real reporters would stop.”
    “That's what they want you to do. You'd be caught between the cruiser that stopped and the van behind you. Meanwhile, the first cruiser would get away. That must be where the target's hiding.”
    “Okay,” the voice said five seconds later, “I didn't stop. In my rearview mirror, I see the other cars—the reporters who left with us— they're stopping. Shit. The cruiser ahead of us. It's