Chapter 1
The wind was blowing at fifteen miles per hour and a heavy chop slapped at the bottom of his windsurfing board. Spray was hitting his face, but it couldn’t erase his smile. The bright sun made the water ahead a shimmering golden surface, and he was flying across it.
Michael Bridge had driven up the Columbia River Gorge Highway from Portland, Oregon, early in the morning to get a feel for the wind conditions that had been blowing all week and hopefully would last the weekend. He’d entered his first tournament, the Gorge Beach Bash slalom competition at Hood River, Oregon, and he intended to win it.
At Stanford University, he played water polo and his team had won the NCAA championship in his junior and senior years. When he was out of eligibility and couldn’t continue playing water polo, he’d looked around for a lifetime sport and fell in love with windsurfing. Offered a job after graduation working for a startup tech company in Portland, Oregon, just down the Columbia River from the best windsurfing in the world, he’d jumped at the opportunity.
Now he was twenty-eight years old and making good money working for a company that developed satellite surveillance artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s JEDI program.
Bridge caught a blur of movement out of the corner of his right eye when he was a hundred yards offshore from the Hatchery on the Washington side of the river, preparing to carve a jibe to the north. He tried to cut hard to his left but wasn’t fast enough to keep from slamming into an out-of-control windsurfer.
He looked back over his right shoulder and saw that he’d knocked the other windsurfer off his board and was bobbing in the water, shaking a fist at him.
What was wrong with the guy! He was the one who didn’t look where he was going!
Bridge didn’t remember hitting the guy so hard, but now a sharp pain in his chest was making it hard to breathe. He turned into the wind, let go of the sail, and sat down on the board to catch his breath.
Pain was spreading along his jawline to his neck, and he felt lightheaded. He looked around to call for help, but there was no one near enough to hear him.
Michael Bridge stared across the river at windsurfers racing back and forth and then slumped forward as his vision dimmed and he lost consciousness.
The windsurfer in the water watched until he was sure his target was down before getting back on his board and racing back to shore. He’d waited on the north shore of the river at a launching place called the Hatchery until he was sure it was Bridge sailing across the river and went out to intercept him.
The small poison dart from the heart attack gun developed by the CIA, and copied by China, had penetrated the windsurfer’s neoprene wetsuit disintegrated when it entered his body. The man wouldn’t have felt anything. If he had, it would have felt like a mosquito bite, nothing more.
He turned and saw a river marine patrol boat speeding across the river when he reached the shallow water and dropped his sail to walk his rig ashore. A cluster of windsurfers on the water had gathered around the man lying face forward on his board and had called for help.
No one looked his way as he pulled his board from the water and left it on the shore. The line of spectators watching the Marine Patrol boat let him walk through, saying nothing to him, except for one man who turned and stared at him.
“Aren’t you the guy that ran into him?” the man asked.
“The other way around, he ran into me.”
“Was he hurt?”
“How would I know? He knocked me off my board. I was the one in the water catching my breath, not worrying about that SOB.”
He turned his back on the man and walked toward the parking lot.
“You’d better stick around in case the police want to talk to you,” the man called after him.
“Just going to my car, I’ll be back for my rig.”
He had no intention of sticking around to be questioned by the police. He jogged toward a white Ford Transit van and jumped in. The van and the windsurfing rig were rentals and rented with fake ID.
He didn’t worry about anyone tracking him down. He’d be out of the state before the sun went down.