Night Moves Read Online Free Page A

flatly impossible for such a creature to fly. Bzzzzt! Oops, there went another one.
It must have been terribly frustrating to look at a paper filled with precise mathematical calculations about flow and lift and drag, to know that bees couldn't fly, and then have to watch them flitting from flower to flower, oblivious to man's certainty that they simply couldn't do that. The obvious deduction was that the researchers had missed something. They went back to their bamboo slide rules and pencil stubs, did more observations, filled dozens of legal pads, and eventually they figured out how the synergism of bee flight worked. If you already have the answer, you damn sure ought to be able to at least figure out the question. Bees had been flying about their business for millions of years, despite what anybody thought otherwise, and that had to be factored in.
So here was a file that couldn't be brute-forced, and it had been broken open like an eggshell in the hands of a giant. What was it Sherlock Holmes had said? "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." This break-in couldn't be done by any method Jay Gridley knew about and, modesty aside, he was as good as anybody when it came to computer rascalry. But since it had been done, then there must be a new tiger out there in the tall grass. All he had to do was figure out what it looked like, find it, and capture it. Without getting eaten.
He grinned again. That brought up another bit of hunting wisdom. The recipe for rabbit stew? First, you catch a rabbit.
Friday, April 1stStonewall Flat, Nevada Mikhayl Ruzhyo squinted into the desert sun. Although he was relatively fair-skinned, he had tanned since he'd moved here, and now he was the color of good holster leather, lines etched into his face, veins prominent on his bare arms. The days were not as hot here in Nevada as they would be in a couple of months, and the nights were still chilly, but it was warm enough out. He stood in front of the small Airstream trailer he had purchased and towed to the five-acre plot of sand and scrub weed he had also bought, feeling the hot wind play over him. He was more or less alone. Only one of the other five-acre "estates" within a mile had a structure on it, and that was a green plastic dome lined with what appeared to be aluminum foil, full of packets of freeze-dried food, like campers and hikers used. Ruzhyo had picked the simple padlock keeping the

place shut and checked it out within a few hours of locating this property. Every couple of months, an old
man who drove a large GMC pickup truck would arrive at the dome, unload more of the freeze-dried packets from the vehicle and store them in the building, then lock up and drive away. Ruzhyo wondered why the old man brought the stuff out. Was he storing it against some future catastrophe? Worried about a war? Or plague? Or was it part of some commercial venture? It was hard to determine the motivations of Americans at times. Back home in Chetsnya, even in Russia, he had never seen old men hoarding this kind of food. Of course, maybe that was because nobody thought such things were worth hoarding. Or they couldn't get it if they did think that. Ruzhyo shrugged mentally. No matter. The dome was the only building close, and the next structure past that was a cabin near the small river that was a dry bed most of the year, almost three miles away. The cabin belonged to a Methodist church, and it had been used by hardy campers but three times since Ruzhyo had lived here, never for more than two nights at a time. None of the campers had hiked close enough to speak to him.
He was grateful for the solitude. Since retiring from wet work he'd had few occasions to even talk to people, much less have to kill them.
He had money banked he could retrieve as needed, using a computer card. Once a week or so, he drove almost two hours into town and bought his supplies in one of several large supermarkets where