The Barnard Son

Patrick had been watching the yard for three weeks before he made his move.

This was not impatience. This was the opposite of impatience — the particular discipline of someone who has learned that the most important information about a person is not what they say but what they do when they believe nobody is watching.

RJ Barnard did the same things every morning. He arrived at the yard before five. He watched the first lot work in the half-dark, stopwatch in hand, saying very little. He drank one cup of coffee from a flask he brought himself. He spoke to his two stable hands with the quiet efficiency of a man who respects work and expects it to be done properly. He left by eight, drove a clean but unremarkable car, and did not look around him the way a man who expected to be watched would look around.

He wore one watch.

Patrick had checked this carefully. Every morning, the same left-wrist watch. The right wrist bare. Not two watches — one. This was, in Patrick's considered assessment, either completely meaningless or the most significant detail he had found in three weeks of observation.

He was eighteen years old and had the patience of someone twice that age and the instincts of someone who had been absorbing intelligence methodology from his mother since he could read.

On the twenty-second morning, he got out of the car.