Six hundred miles north.
11:30 A.M.
The Pacific storm had swept inland across the jagged granite ramparts and towering old-growth cedars of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.
The rain was cold, clean, and fierce, washing over the gravel turnaround of an ancient, heavily forested five-hundred-acre timber reserve on the bluffs of Hood Canal.
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I sat inside the heated cedar-paneled office of the restored surveyor's lodge, looking out through the four-inch-thick ballistic casement windows at the dark, white-capped surface of the fjord.
I wore a comfortable cream-colored woolen sweater, dark denim trousers with copper rivets, and a pair of hand-welted leather field boots. The physical cramping in my lower abdomen had settled into a dull, manageable ache, thanks to the specialized intravenous fluid therapy administered by my private medical team upon my arrival at dawn.
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Around my left wrist, ticking with that clean, sixty-cycle mechanical tack… tack… tack, was not an expensive Swiss chronometer purchased at a boutique.
