After twenty-five years of working in the shadowy world of espionage Keith Landry is on his way home. Driving along the highway, humming a few bars of 'Homeward Bound', the twenty-five years' service he has given the US government are fast becoming a distant memory.He is safe. He is alone. And life has never felt sweeter as the signs for hometown Spencerville come into view.Keith Landry has promised himself no more violence, no more death. But a chance meeting with childhood sweetheart Annie Baxter makes it a promise he cannot keep.As passion is rekindled between them, jealousy flares. For Annie is married to a violent and sadistic bully: the man who runs Spencerville, Sheriff Baxter. And he won't tolerate any man near his wife. Especially Keith Landry.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following to quote from copyrighted material:
To Faber and Faber Ltd. and Harcourt Brace & World Inc., for lines from "Little Gidding" from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot.
To the memory of my father, with love.
I'd like to thank three fellow authors for sharing with me their expertise: Pete Earley, Washington insider; Tom Block, airline captain and novelist; John Westermann, law enforcement officer and novelist.
Also, my thanks to my Ohio in-laws, Al and Carol Schad, and Mike and Melinda Myers for their help with the research for this book and their midwestern hospitality.
Special thanks to Larry Kirshbaum, President of Warner Books, for putting this story on the right track.
Last but not least, my gratitude to the early readers and critics of this book: Pam Carletta, my assistant; Nick Ellison, my agent; Nanscy Neiman, my editor and publisher; and, of course, Ginny DeMille, master of English, Ohio State, patient wife, and good friend.
This is entirely a work of fiction, and while there is a town in Ohio called Spencerville, its location and description are different from the town I describe, and neither the town nor the people in it bears any resemblance to the town or people in this story.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
"Little Gidding"
Keith Landry was going home after twenty-five years at the front. He turned his Saab 900 off Pennsylvania Avenue onto Constitution and headed west, along the Mall toward Virginia, crossing the Potomac at the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. He caught a glimpse of the Lincoln Memorial in his rearview mirror, gave a wave, and continued west on Route 66, away from Washington.
Western Ohio, eight P.M., daylight saving time, mid-August, and Keith Landry remarked to himself that the sun was still about fifteen degrees above the horizon. He had nearly forgotten how much light remained here at this hour, at the end of the eastern time zone, and had forgotten how big his country was.
The driving on the flat, straight road was easy and mindless, so Landry allowed himself some thinking that he'd been putting off: The Cold War was over, which was the good news. Many Cold Warriors had been given pink slips, which, for Keith Landry, was the bad news.
But God had taken pity at last, Landry thought, and with a puff of divine breath blew away the pall of nuclear Armageddon that had hung over the planet for nearly half a century. Rejoice. We are saved.
He reflected, I will gladly beat my sword into a plowshare or pruning hook, and even my 9mm Glock pistol into a paperweight. Well, perhaps not gladly. But what was his choice?
The Cold War, once a growth industry, had downsized, leaving its specialists, technicians, and middle management exploring other options. On an intellectual level, Landry knew this was the best thing to happen to humanity since the Gutenberg printing press put a lot of monks out of work. On a more personal level, he was annoyed that a government that had taken twenty-five years of his life couldn't have found enough peace dividend to keep him around for five more years and full retirement pay.
But okay, Washington was two days ago and six hundred miles behind him. Today was day three of life two. Whoever said that there were no second acts in American lives had never worked for the government.
He hummed a few bars of "Homeward Bound" but found his own voice grating and switched on the radio. The scanner locked on to a local station, and Landry listened to a live report from the county fair, followed by a community bulletin board announcing church activities, a 4-H meeting, a VFW picnic, and so forth, followed by crop and livestock prices, hot tips on where the fish were running, and an excruciatingly detailed weather report. There were tornadoes in southern Indiana. Landry shut off the radio, thinking he'd heard this very same news a quarter century ago.
But a lot had happened to him in those years, most of it dangerous. He was safe now, and alive, whereas for the past quarter century he'd felt that he had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. He smiled. "Homeward bound."
Sure, he admitted, he had mixed emotions, and he had to sort them out. Two weeks ago he was in Belgrade exchanging threats with the minister of defense, and today he was in Ohio listening to a twangy voice speculating about hog prices. Yes, he was safe but not yet sound.
