The Firefly

12

Swamp awoke to the sound of the Taser humming nearby and flinched. He lay partially on his side on the cold floor, his arms still heisted above his head. His shoulders were numb and his back and sides ached so much that he could barely move. He had no idea of what time it was or how long he'd been out on the basement floor. He seemed to remember the man coming back down the stairs last night and doing something that produced a stink of fuel oil, which he could still smell. Now the man was doing something at his feet, and suddenly his legs were free. Kick him hard, his brain said, but his leg muscles just laughed at him. They were far more interested in the restoration of normal blood circulation than in launching any surprise attacks. A wave of pins and needles flooded through his feet.

"Up," the man ordered. Swamp thought the guy was trying to disguise his voice, because the word came out sounding more like "op" than "up."

"Can't move," Swamp said as he tried to raise his knees.

"Up," the man said again from behind his head, and then he emphasized the point with the hum of the Taser. Up it is, Swamp thought.

It took him a full minute of bending, twisting, and gasping as his body resisted the maneuver. One of the problems of being a big guy, he thought. Lots of muscle mass to unkink. He got on his side, then to his knees and then, using the wall, pushed himself relatively upright, although off balance because his arms were pinned in the air like that. The man closed in again with the Taser and attached something around his neck. It felt like a rope. He could see dim light through the tape but not much else. He leaned on the stone wall for a moment, but then the rope was pulling and he had to follow it or fall down. Getting up had been much too hard, so he followed the pull.

"Stairs," the man said after Swamp had taken four painful steps. He felt with his right foot and encountered the lowest tread. The rope tugged again and up he went, leaning against the wall all the way up to make sure he didn't fall off the outer edge. He didn't know whether or not there was a railing and didn't want to find out the hard way. He concentrated on remembering what he was doing as they went up the stairs, the man in front of him; then they reached the top and turned left and left again. Hallway? His head collided with something and he bounced back, lost his balance, and slipped sideways up against what felt like a plaster wall.

"Up," the man said again, impatient this time. He reinforced the order with an ugly jerk on the rope. Swamp went through the whole process again, his arms and shoulders complaining now as he tried to use them for balance. Once vertical again, he resumed his forced march, going down the hallway, then right and up more stairs. He could see light through the duct tape, so he knew it must be morning. This time, he felt the presence of a railing and climbed with a bit more confidence. The man took a right at the top of the stairs and then tugged Swamp through a doorway, which scraped both his extended elbows. As he regained strength and flexibility, he began to think of what he should be doing to escape, but then the man ordered him to sit and pushed him back against a wall. He slid down obediently, grateful for the sudden support the wall provided for his arms and shoulders. It was much colder up here on the second floor, and Swamp thought he could hear tree branches moving around, as if the room was open to the outside air. His feet and legs were free, and now he needed to get this tape away from his eyes.

The man left the rope around his neck and went out of the room, coming back in again after a minute. He came over to where Swamp was sitting with his back to the wall and then put a foot on Swamp's knees and forced them flat to the floor. With the humming sound of the ever-ready Taser in his ears, Swamp just had to sit there as his feet were rewrapped in tape. So much for some sudden karate moves, Swamp thought, as if he remembered any. Then the man moved to Swamp's right side, and the humming noise got louder. He felt steel on his cheek and the sharp point of a knife working its way beneath the duct tape over his eyes. He froze, not wanting his captor to make any mistakes just now, and then the man began sawing at the tape. Then he was working his fingers under the edge, and Swamp squinted his eyes shut as hard as he could, knowing what was coming. The man ripped the tape off in one sudden move and Swamp grunted with the pain of it as his eyelids tried hard to go with the tape. He struggled to open his eyes, but there was enough mastic from the tape on his eyelids to stick them together. The man dropped the knife with a clatter on the floor and then pried Swamp's right eye open with his fingers. The sudden exposure to daylight made him blink furiously, which opened his other eye, and then both his eyes filled involuntarily with tears and he couldn't see a thing.

The man got up and backed away from him, waiting for Swamp's vision to adjust. Then he stepped right around in front of him. Swamp blinked several times again and looked up. He was stunned by what he saw when his eyes finally cleared.

"You!" he exclaimed as he looked into the dark eyes and hawk-nosed face of Emir Mutaib abd Allah, managing director of the Royal Kingdom Bank.

"Hello, old chap," the Arab said. "Remember me?"

The Arab straightened up and walked out of Swamp's sight before he could reply. My God! Swamp thought. This was Erich Hodler? As he was trying to assimilate the idea, he saw the giant mortar poised out in the middle of the room. He looked up and saw the skylight, with the big bite taken out of the roof structure to its right. He looked left out the window and saw the Capitol dome bathed in noontime sunlight.

Son of a bitch! Could that thing reach the Capitol? There were ten rounds clustered around the mortar, looking like olive green demon spawn clustered around their mother. He looked back out the window. It was a huge mortar, nothing like the 60-mm Army weapon he'd seen demonstrated at agent school. And those things could go a mile, so what could this monster do? Then he understood precisely what it could do. There was a small television behind the mortar, on which coverage of the inauguration ceremony was in full progress. Ten rounds, properly aimed, fired right at noon, fragmentation warheads, and they'd get the whole government. Correction: the old and the new governments. He remembered every picture he'd ever seen of an inauguration, with all those people packed in like sardines all over the Capitol steps. It would be a massacre. Then the man was back, and so was the duct tape around his eyes. He tried to lunge forward, to do something, but he got absolutely nowhere as the Arab grabbed that rope and pulled hard, toppling Swamp over on his side and cracking his head against one of those pieces of marble littering the room. He fought to stay conscious, but it was very, very difficult. So much easier to just give into the beckoning red haze.

Heismann checked his prisoner's pulse and found it strong. He hadn't meant to knock him out, but the man was truly large and he'd startled him with that sudden move. But he would still remember that face. And with luck, this man would escape and tell the world who had been in the room with the mortar. Nothing like an eyewitness who was also a federal agent. Even if he was a pensioner. Mutaib was a dead man, and he, Heismann, wouldn't have to go to the bank after all.

He got up and kicked the knife away from the prostrate pensioner and then made sure the man's arms were still firmly pinned. He tied the end of the rope to a radiator and tightened the noose. He'd go make his transformation, then come back and cut through enough of the tape that the pensioner would be able to get free once the attack was completed. And, of course, he'd let him watch, as long as he remained compliant. He'd leave him with one good chance to get free. Or not, as the case might be, he thought with a shrug. Pinning all this on Mutaib was a nicely satisfying wrinkle, but not vital to his own escape or the success of the attack. But still…

He looked at his watch: 11:20. Forty minutes to go. The television camera was panning over the crowd on the Capitol steps, stopping to zoom in each time the announcer identified an important official. Time to reincarnate himself as the lady next door. He pulled the curtains, being careful to remain out of sight, and checked the street outside. More cars than usual were parked along the street because most people had stayed home from work today. The morning news had reported that most of the country was as shut down as the capital, with all government offices closed, as well as the banks and all the major stock markets.

He'd not been able to detect any lurking shooters sent from Mutaib parked out in the street, but that didn't mean they hadn't rented two town houses on this block. He could just imagine telescopic sights focused on his front door, and probably his back door, too, for that matter. But they would have to be circumspect. Looking through the crack in his curtain, he saw a police car cruise slowly down the street, the cops visibly scanning the parked cars and house fronts. Mutaib's people would wait for that bomb in the basement to do its work, but if it didn't — and it wouldn't, not now — that's when he'd expect long guns to begin poking out of windows.

But Mutaib's assassins, if they were there, wouldn't see what they expected to see. Instead of Jäger Heismann slipping out a door or a window, what they would see was the beginning of a house fire and then an almost naked woman come screaming hysterically out of the house next door and run right across the street and into that mid-block alley.

He checked on the pensioner once more, but he was still down. Then he left the room and crawled through the hole in the middle wall. He pushed the boxes aside in the closet and went into the woman's bathroom, where his makeup, clothes, wig, and the breast pump were all laid out on the counter. He checked his watch again. He had thirty-seven minutes. He stripped off all his clothes, sat naked on the chair he'd pulled up to the bathroom countertop, and went to work.

Connie propped herself up in the hospital bed to watch the inauguration. She had muted the sound, tired of the newscasters' lame attempts to fill the time until the proceedings began. The visiting nurse had come, then left after arranging a few more things to her satisfaction. She had inspected the wound, changed the bandages, and adjusted the settings on the pain pump. She'd warned Connie that she was beginning the weaning process on the pain meds and that she would have to evaluate her tolerance for the new settings. Connie had a chart and the appropriate instruments for measuring her vitals, as well as water and food, books, the TV remote, and a telephone, all within reach.

None of it probably would have been possible if Connie hadn't been a nurse. But as it was, she thought she was medically safer here at home than she would have been in any hospital. She'd tried to reach Jake, but the headquarters operator had told her that everyone was on the street today to handle the inauguration. Connie had declined to leave a message on his voice mail, unsure of who might have access to it. She dreaded all the upcoming paper work and legal documents that would be necessary because of Cat's murder and also the Bladensburg woman's death in Garrison Gap. Jake had promised to help her through all that, but she was probably going to need a lawyer.

She finally saw the two presidents, the new and the outgoing, along with their wives, step out of the ornate Capitol doorway and approach the dais. The cameras did enough of a close-up to contain both men, and Connie thought they looked a little different, until she realized they were probably wearing makeup, which in the cold light of day subtly altered their features. They both wore long, bulky overcoats, made even bigger by their bullet-resistant vests. Her cable system had gone dark this morning, so she could only receive the three major networks via her rooftop antenna, and the quality of her picture was definitely diminished. She unmuted the set and sat back to watch.

Swamp came to with a painful headache and a sense of total dread. He halfheartedly tested his bonds and confirmed that he had been trussed up again and was completely immobile. He thought about his options. Muster the strength to roll across the room and knock that damned mortar over? Or dislodge it enough to throw off the aiming point? But where was his captor? He listened carefully but could hear only the wind outside. The television— why couldn't he hear the television? Had it been on mute before? There was tape over his ears, which might explain it.

He tried to move — nothing major, just an inching movement with his hips and upper legs. He was almost getting used to this business of having his arms lashed up over and behind his head, and except for the cramp in his neck, he found he could move his upper body along the floor on the points of his elbows. But then the rope noose tightened about his neck, cutting off his air. Okay, so much for that idea, he thought, swallowing as he felt the sudden constriction, then easing back toward his original position.

The knife. The guy had dropped a knife not too far away. He remembered hearing it hit the floor. Maybe he could pivot on his upper body and find that knife with his feet, maybe kick it back this way, get his fingers on it and — what? His headache was getting worse, and it felt like his scalp was bleeding a little. What time is it? he wondered. And what's going to happen in this room when this crazy bastard fires that mortar? The noise is going to be incredible, even with that big hole in the ceiling and roof. And won't the recoil from that thing damage the floor? He'd gotten a quick glimpse of plywood where the base plate ought to be, but surely that wouldn't resist the impact of a five-inch mortar firing multiple times. He heard a noise and relaxed his body, trying to feign unconsciousness. But then a stream of cold water hit him right in the face and he spluttered as he tried to catch his breath.

He felt the man move behind him, heard that familiar humming sound. He tensed, expecting the hammer, and tried not to whimper. Instead, the man did something with the rope, and then he felt himself being pulled by the rope across the floor. He could either help by pushing with his feet or strangle, so he helped. The man dragged him for several feet and then did something with the rope. Probably securing it again, Swamp thought.

"Stay," the man said, quickly passing the Taser by Swamp's right ear. Swamp didn't move. Then he heard the man kick the knife across the floor, grunt in irritation, and then walk across the room to retrieve it. He felt the man approach again, and then his feet were free as the knife sliced through the tape. He definitely heard the knife drop, close by this time, and the man was back at his head. He felt the cold plastic snout of the laser come to rest against his temple.

"The knife," the man said, his British accent less pronounced than it had been at the bank. "A meter from your feet. Once the mortar stops firing, the house is going to burn. You may go for the knife once the shooting stops. Not before, or I will hit you with this" — the Taser pressed hard into his forehead for emphasis—"set on full power this time."

Shit, Swamp thought, what was it set on before? He heard a strange swishing sound as the man stood up, but he couldn't fathom it. He actually thought he could smell perfume. Then the man was moving around the room, positioning some kind of cans and moving some heavy objects. He waited, frantically trying to think of some way to prevent this, but the man had rendered him helpless. Where the hell were Bertie's people? They knew where he'd been going. Or did they — had that message ever gotten through?

And the cops. Where were Jake and the cops? They had this address, didn't they? Surely Jake would have sent someone to take a look, especially since Jake had figured out that the real target might be the inauguration. But then he remembered why they hadn't come. By now, Jake, Shad, and a thousand of their professional brethren were schlepping around town in their blue uniforms, probably directing traffic.

He tried his bonds again, but the tape did not yield. His heart sank. There was no way to stop this thing. Well, he'd tried. He hadn't felt so hopeless since that day at the Tidal Basin.

Then the mortar went off.

Heismann had put his fingers in his ears after he dropped in the first round, but he'd forgotten to bend away from the blast. His fingers weren't nearly enough protection against the reverberation and the noise. He was actually knocked backward, as much by surprise as by the actual concussion. He scrambled back to load the second round, this time bending way over and clapping both hands over his ears, but the monster muzzle blast still boomed hard enough to make him squeeze his eyelids shut. He grabbed up the third round, positioned it over the smoking muzzle, and then focused on the muted television. The new president was taking his oath of office. The robed chief justice was reading the words out and the new president was dutifully repeating them, when suddenly a bright light flooded the picture frame and the camera jumped off its focus point and panned crazily across the ground, getting a fuzzy picture of several dozen legs and feet. Then another flash, and more jumping camera shots. He waited a couple more seconds to see if the camera would zoom out and show the whole scene, but the cameraman had apparently hit the ground, leaving the camera to its own devices. He dropped the third round in, saw it slide out of sight, bent over again, and pressed his hands against his head as tightly as he could. A third tremendous blast, only this time a large part of the ceiling fell in, raining plaster and lathe wire all over the place.

Squinting through all the hot smoke, he grabbed the fourth round and tried to see the television, but the plaster dust and smoke were too thick. Then he caught a glimpse of the picture, in black and white now, where a different camera was panning across the portico, revealing a scene of total pandemonium. Another brilliant pulse of glaring light, and this time he actually saw the spray of white-hot shrapnel flatten the crowd of scrambling bodies, knocking over metal folding chairs as if they were made of paper.

It was perfect: The rounds were landing exactly on target! He dropped in the fourth round, followed quickly by the fifth. By now, there was so much dust and smoke in the room, he couldn't see very much at all, but he knew right where the rounds were, each cradled in its marble nest in a semicircle surrounding the mortar. He dropped in the sixth round, and then the seventh. He was dimly aware that there was fire now in addition to the smoke, and he was having real trouble breathing. He caught a quick glimpse of the television screen through the smoke, and he saw that the screen was alternating between black-and-white test patterns and fuzzy, jerking pictures. There was another flare of whiteness across the screen as one of the rounds slammed directly into the portico area.

Quickly, finish it.

The eighth round brought down the whole skylight and its frame, showering him with broken glass, but he kept right on loading and firing. The ninth round went in, followed at last by the tenth and final round. The last two seemed to cause less damage to the ceiling. He glanced up and saw why: The ceiling and a good part of the roof were totally gone, which probably accounted for the huge pile of debris that now trapped his feet. The pensioner was a white lump over in the corner of the room, but he was struggling to get loose. Good.

He wiped the dust and glass out of his own face, took a deep breath, choked on it, and then pushed through all the debris out to the hallway, where he grabbed one of the one-gallon cans of gasoline, popped the top off the spout, and threw it down the stairwell. He could hear flames crackling in the bedroom walls behind him. The pensioner better move quickly, he thought.

He ducked through the hole between the buildings and popped out of the closet on the other side, where he could finally get a clear breath. There he took the second can of gasoline and splashed it all over the closet and the upstairs hallway of the neighbor's house, being careful not to spill any on himself. He threw the partially empty can back through the hole and into his own upstairs hallway. At that instant, he felt and then heard the bomb in the basement next door, a heavy double thump that shook even the walls in the woman's apartment. But it did not blow the building to pieces. Success there, too. He grinned.

He'd been right again: a fond farewell from Mutaib. Now he really hoped the pensioner would get out.

He unwrapped the bath towel from around his head, stripped off her bathrobe, which was now covered in plaster dust, and dashed down the stairs. Despite the turbanned bath towel, he had a couple of small cuts on his head, and they were bleeding out of all proportion to their size. He smeared some blood across his face and forehead. He peered carefully out the front windows at the houses across the way. No open windows, but there were people standing in their doorways, gaping in the direction of the house. There was a whumping sound from upstairs as some of the gasoline caught fire. Then a police car was skidding to a stop right in front of the duplex, the cop on the passenger side opening his door before the car had even stopped, his gun drawn and a wild, horrified look on his face.

Now. Go!

He kicked over the third can of gasoline onto the living room rug, adjusted his neighbor's now-rumpled black wig on his head, made sure his genitals were firmly pressed back into the groin pouch, and snatched open the door. He burst out onto the front steps, screaming hysterically in his best impression of a female voice. He stumbled down the front steps, bare from the waist up, breasts bouncing everywhere. He was wearing a plain white half-slip, white nylon briefs, one beige knee-high stocking, and flat leather slippers that he'd taped to the bottoms of his feet. The blood on his face and cheeks had conveniently smeared all the makeup. He ran right past the astonished cop, screaming and gesturing that there was a man up there in the other house, and that there was fire everywhere. The policeman on the driver's side had started to open his door but then stopped, gaping at those naked bobbling breasts. Heismann tore away from the reaching hands of the first policeman and bolted across the street and into the alley, still screaming. And still running.

He heard a second and then a third police car come screeching into the street behind him, just as there was another thumping explosion from the house. Some flaming debris shot right out into the street. He could hear the parked cars being hit by some of the debris, which meant that the police were all flat behind their cars. But by then, he was through the connecting middle alley and had dodged left into the back alley. He ran a hundred more feet to the oversized green trash can that held his clothes. Squatting down in a corner between the nearest privacy fence and its garage, he kicked off the shoes and stripped off the wig and the slip. He then jumped into suit pants, a white shirt, and a matching suit coat. Buttoning only the top button, he clipped on a tie, then put on black socks and brown leather loafers. Just then, he heard the first fire engine come blatting down the street out in front. There was another thumping explosion from inside the house, this one propelling some debris over the rooftops and into the alley, twenty feet away from him. He took a quick look up the alley, but there was no one pursuing him — yet.

Clear. Go.

He stood up and quickly pulled on a hat and a London Fog-style raincoat, picked up the briefcase, which contained the pensioner's papers, and the transformation was complete. Using the slip, he wiped as much of the blood and makeup off his face as he could and then shoved it and the shoes under a stinking garbage bag in the adjacent trash can. After one more quick look around, he trotted down the alley to the next side street, wiping his face again with the sleeves of the raincoat. At the street, he slowed, turned right, and began walking east, away from the growing commotion behind him. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward to mask the breasts.

He walked two more blocks as calmly as he could, heading to where he'd parked the minivan. Seemingly oblivious to the excited people running past him to see what had happened, he continued to wipe as much makeup and soot off his face as he could. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a thick cloud of black smoke rising above the row houses and trees and heard several more emergency vehicles converging on his street. There was an even bigger smoke cloud hovering over the Capitol precincts in the distance. Two police cars came roaring past him on the street, but the policemen inside paid him no attention. He was just a nondescript office worker, complete with briefcase, walking down the street. They saw thousands of them every day. He was invisible. And he was certainly not a hysterical naked woman.

Five minutes later, he was driving out of the area. The column of smoke in his rearview mirror was getting bigger, not smaller. The third can of gasoline must have gone off. He surely hoped the pensioner had made it out. Roasting alive was such a hard way to go.

Swamp was almost totally deaf by the time all ten rounds had been fired. He'd had nothing to protect his ears other than his own arms and the duct tape that was already taped around his head, and the muzzle blast from the huge five-inch mortar bounced him around like a dog under a bus. A large piece of ceiling fell on him halfway through the firing, and in his frantic attempts to seek cover, he tore off the duct tape that had been pinning his hands and arms. Still blind, he'd begun scraping at the tape on his face, but as more ceiling fragments rained down on him, he had to curl up into a ball to protect his head and face. It wasn't until the firing stopped that he realized his arms and hands were actually free, and then he smelled fire, overlaid with the rich stink of gasoline.

He stripped the rest of the tape off, pried open his sticky eyelids, and saw the smoking mortar still pointed up at the huge hole in the ceiling. The hole was now framed in crackling flames. He climbed painfully out of the pile of wreckage that covered the entire floor, took a deep breath, and promptly inhaled a lungful of heavy smoke, which doubled him over in a paroxysm of coughing. While he was still down, he sensed a flare of overpressure out in the hall and then felt the hot breath of a fireball flash into the room over his head and billow out the hole in the roof. A distant rumbling, crackling noise followed the fireball, and he knew he had to get out of there quickly. He couldn't understand why the fire didn't sound louder, until he realized what the problem was: He'd been deafened by the mortar.

Gasping for air, he started crawling over the piles of smoldering rafters and ceiling debris, making his way toward the front window of the bedroom, which faced the street. All the glass was gone, so he poked his head out, conscious of the soundless boiling cloud of black smoke that was streaming out around his head and shoulders. He pulled his head back in. He had seen the roof of the front porch below. It was tiny, but it looked like salvation to him. He put his head through the window, took another deep breath of clean air, and then jerked his head back as the windowsill next to his check exploded into a shocking blur of splinters. He sat down heavily and then bounced right back up again when he realized there was no breathable air left in the room. He staggered sideways to get to the other side of the window, just in time to see another bullet come blasting in, tearing out the bottom of the windowsill and stinging his face with brick dust.

Okay, not this window, he thought, and, ducking low, he scrambled through all the wreckage once more, kicking burning wood and debris out of the way before tripping over the mortar's support foot and sprawling up against the back window, which had also been blown out by the muzzle blast. Most of the smoke was going up through the hole in the roof, so back here he could at least breathe without sticking his head out the window.

Who were the shooters? And why were there shooters? Cops? He felt the floor lift and then begin to sag as something blew up downstairs. There was a much stronger stink of gasoline again. He spied a plate-size patch of plaster at his feet and reached down to pick it up as the volume of smoke grew exponentially, enough to start it boiling out the window. Holding the plaster by its edge, he slid it out into the window aperture and waited. He was hoping that in all the smoke, it would look like a face. But nobody shot at it. Either they weren't fooled or they weren't there. He realized he was having to hold his breath, so he dropped the plaster and risked a quick look over the lower sill. The long expanse of the back porch roof beckoned, even as he felt the floor sag behind him again and saw a ragged edge of fire come up through the center of the floor and envelop the mortar. The sagging floor was again threatening to suck him down into the fire on the floor below.

No more time, he thought. He thrust his legs out the window, rolled over onto his stomach, winced when a wall of flame lunged at his face, and launched himself feetfirst over the sill and down onto the back porch roof. He landed hard on the metal roof, dimly aware that there were cops in the alley and still others running into the backyard. He managed to grab hold of a metal protrusion and stop his slide toward the ground, but then a gout of fire billowed out from a crack in the wall, singing the tops of his hands. He let go involuntarily, sliding down and then dropping heavily into the yard. He landed on his feet and staggered backward, right into the arms of two uniformed policeman. They slammed him down to the ground and stuck a variety of guns into his neck and back, screaming soundlessly at him to get down, wildeyed blood lust on all their faces.

He went limp and closed his eyes, momentarily grateful for the fact that he couldn't hear them. He felt his arms being pulled roughly behind him and the cuffs going on, and then he was jerked upright, frog-marched out into the alley, and thrown into the back of a cruiser. He felt a moment of panic as the door was slammed in his face, but then he realized that, even cuffed and surrounded by hostile police, he was probably safer than he had been for several hours. They obviously thought that he was their Capitol bomber.

Two men who looked like federal agents appeared at the windows, followed by several others, all brandishing machine pistols and staring in at him with the same furious expressions that the cops had, until one of them blinked, grabbed another agent's arm, and pointed excitedly at Swamp, saying something Swamp couldn't hear.

But he knew what it meant: The man was probably Secret Service, and he'd been recognized. Now the real fun would begin.

Connie, along with millions of viewers around the world, had watched in complete horror as an obviously unmanned television camera recorded the carnage on the west portico. The audio had been cut off right after that first flash of reddish white light, and then it had come back on for thirty seconds, filling her dining room with the screams of the dying and wounded, who were visible but out of focus in the skewed picture. Then the sound cut out again as the picture turned black and white. At one point, a black river of what had to be blood had appeared on one side of the picture, spilling down the white marble steps. Within a minute, it had grown large enough to cover all the visible steps. There was smoke boiling across the scene, and blurred figures moving in and out of the picture. Without sound, it looked like some kind of horrible documentary from World War II. Then there was a test pattern, which came up momentarily in color. But that soon disappeared and the transmission continued in black and white. The bottom half of two policemen appeared in the picture, dragging a body across the scene. As they did, the body's right hand dropped off and lay right in the center of the picture, at which point Connie looked for the remote, her fingers scrambling for the off button.

Before she could press it, the carnage disappeared and in its place the United States seal appeared on the screen. The audio signal returned. A calm, sonorous voice announced that a state of grave national emergency existed. All citizens within the Washington metropolitan area were directed to remain at home and off the city streets. Those citizens who were at work were told to go home and stay home until further notice. Then a caption began crawling across the screen, indicating that all highways, major thoroughfares, bridges, airports, and Metro trains into the city were closed and that only outbound traffic would be allowed to move within the city.

A human face from the Federal Emergency Management Agency appeared on the screen and a news bulletin of sorts was issued. It stated only that there had been a terrorist attack on the inauguration proceedings, that there were many casualties, that all lines of communication within the city were being shut down, and that military Defense Condition One was being set within the continental United States. Then the government seal reappeared, along with the tape loop about everyone being requested to remain at home. The message along the bottom of the screen requested that emergency medical personnel report to their respective hospitals throughout the city, and that they should make sure they were carrying proper identification, as anyone attempting to evade or interfere with police were liable to be shot on sight. Then a pause, and a new message began unfolding at the bottom of the screen. It stated simply that the president and the vice president were unharmed and moving to a safe, undisclosed location.

Connie felt her pulse racing. No mention of which president, old or new. Or what kind of attack had been mounted. But surely it had been a pretty huge deal, based on those grainy, slightly out-of-focus pictures she'd seen before somebody had gotten to the camera. She knew that most federal government offices would have been shut down because of the inauguration, but there were still a lot of nongovernmental people downtown, including the thousands of families who would have begun mustering along Constitution Avenue to see the parade later that afternoon. She suddenly felt glad to be sitting at home in bed, despite how she'd ended up here. And then she remembered that Secret Service agent telling her about a possible terrorist plot.

Good God! Had he been talking about this?

Then it hit her — what it was that she needed to tell someone. Jake, or the Secret Service. What her would-be killer had said in the bathroom as he was stabbing her in the back. She grabbed for the telephone, only to discover that it didn't work. All communications sealed. She looked across the room for her purse and cell phone, but that system would be shut down, too.

She felt a cold chill ripple through her. If she was right about this, the bastard who had just executed the unspeakable crime she'd seen on the television was coming right here.

"But I will need your house," he'd said.

Heismann had made it all the way down to the bridges area and was actually driving down the ramp when a policeman stepped out in the road with his hand up. In a split second, Heismann saw the police car. There was no partner, no other police cars. He made a decision to run smack into the man, knocking him sideways into the grass. Heismann got the minivan stopped fifty feet past the bottom of the down ramp and quickly backed up, his right front wheel protesting as it rubbed against the smashed-in grille. The policeman, a black man in his late forties or early fifties, was sprawled on the grass embankment, his cap, one shoe, and his flashlight lying nearby.

Heismann jumped out and ran over to the man. The policeman was still breathing, but there was a trickle of blood coming out of his mouth and his right knee was bent at an odd angle. Heismann looked around, but there was still no one in sight, so he got back in the minivan, drove to where he'd parked the Suburban, and changed vehicles. He then drove back to the ramp, put the Suburban's emergency lights on, got out, and opened up the back doors.

He dropped the second seat and then went over to the injured policeman. He threw the flashlight and the shoe into some bushes and then hauled him into the back of the Suburban. He knew he was probably doing some more damage, but the man was still unconscious, and he would serve his purposes, dead or alive. Once he had him secured in the back, he fished out the policeman's handcuffs and cuffed his hands across his belly. He removed the officer's gun and stuffed it under the driver's side of the front seat. He retrieved the officer's cap and put it on his chest. Then he took off his raincoat, folded it into a rolled pillow, and put it under the officer's head. He covered the man's supine form with his own suit coat and then got back into the driver's seat. He drove under the bridge and stopped to take stock.

He'd tried to find news of the attack on Capitol Hill on the minivan's radio, but all the stations were off the air. He finally found something calling itself the civil defense station on the AM band. It was announcing that a state of emergency existed in the national capital area and that martial law was being imposed. All citizens were directed to go home and stay there. This message was in the form of a continuous tape loop.

He examined his face in the mirror, wiped a few more traces of makeup off, and centered his hat. He then drove east one block before turning down Seventh Street, SW, and heading for the Washington Navy Yard on the Anacostia River. From there, he turned back west and drove all the way to Maine Avenue, going right past the spot where he'd parked the Suburban. All he could see of the Capitol was that cloud of grayish smoke and a host of twinkling blue and red strobe lights. He had been passed by several police cars and three ambulances, all headed back toward the Capitol precincts.

He pulled over for a moment and fished out his city map. He'd already seen blue lights on the other side of the river, so he knew that within minutes they would be locking down all the bridges over the Potomac. His only option was to drive back into town from the river. The injured policeman was going to be his passport through any roadblocks, as long as he made enough noise and could convince the officers posted there that he was rushing to get their comrade to a hospital, preferably one in the city's northwest quadrant, in the direction of the nurse's house. He quickly consulted his city map and saw that Georgetown University Hospital would be a plausible destination. He heard sirens up on the bridge above him, emergency vehicles headed across the bridge toward Virginia. No more time for thinking; he must move, and fast.

He drove out from under the bridge, did a U-turn, and drove back toward the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin. He turned on his high beams, buttoned the rest of his shirt, and straightened his clip-on tie. The policeman gave a low groan as they roared down the narrow road surrounding the Tidal Basin, but then he went silent. Heismann ran into the first roadblock as soon as he turned out onto Twenty-third Street and headed up toward Constitution Avenue. He got the pensioner's identification out of the briefcase, snapped on his seat belt, put on dark glasses, and drove right at the cluster of police cars blocking the intersection, laying on the horn.

He screeched to a stop with the nose of the Suburban pointed between two police cars wedged in the middle of the intersection. There was traffic on Constitution, but it was creeping as a crowd of police went from car to car, looking inside each one. He lowered his window and the back window on the left side as three cops came running over, hands on their gun butts.

"Secret Service," he yelled, flipping open the pensioner's wallet, waving his ID at them, and pointing with his thumb into the back. "Georgetown Hospital. Let me through!"

All three cops tried to stick their heads into the back window at the same time, but then they backed out, swearing, and one, a sergeant, yelled for another cop to open the roadblock. The sergeant came up to the driver's window, staring at the mask of smeared blood, soot, and grime on Heismann's shirt collar.

"How bad?"

Heismann shrugged and then shook his head.

"Shit! Shit!" the sergeant exclaimed, and then waved him through as one of the blocking cop cars backed out, creating a space. Heismann hit the gas and roared right through it and up Twenty-third Street. He saw a constellation of emergency lights to his right, on the major avenues, and Army helicopters circling the downtown area. The pall of smoke farther down Constitution seemed to have thickened. He drove at high speed on the nearly empty street, passing some more roadblocks, which were placed across the intersecting streets. The police were making cursory checks of vehicles, but they seemed mostly interested in getting the downtown streets cleared out. At Washington Circle, he headed west toward the Whitehurst Freeway and Georgetown. Once on the freeway, he went a quarter of a mile and then cut off onto the stub connection, which became Wisconsin Avenue. From there, he had a clear shot into northwest Washington and his safe haven. He turned off the emergency lights and his headlights and slowed down to normal in-town speed.

He passed several more emergency vehicles headed into town, but there were no more roadblocks. He tried the radio again, but there was still nothing but that annoying tape, with the rest of the stations reduced to a hiss of static. He had expected much more traffic, but with the federal holiday, the lanes headed out of town had been practically empty, as were the sidewalks. Then finally, halfway up Wisconsin Avenue, he ran into a traffic jam as he caught up with the general exodus. Everyone who'd been home watching the inauguration, which was probably everyone in the city who had a television, was staying put.

He began looking for a parking lot on a side street, anywhere that he could get off the main avenue for an hour or so while the traffic sorted itself out and the streets opened up again. Ideally, he would approach the nurse's house at dusk. The sky was becoming increasingly overcast, which meant that darkness would come early.

All good omens, he thought. Very good omens. He wondered if the pensioner had gotten out. If he had, and he was the man Heismann thought he was, darling Mutaib was in for some interesting times.

Swamp closed his eyes and sat back against the smelly rear seat of the police cruiser, giving in to the waves of pain that were sallying back and forth through his body. Getting much too old for this shit, he thought with a sigh. Outside, there was a growing crowd of local cops and federal agents, with everyone seemingly trying to talk on a radio at the same time. A fire engine had come down the alley and parked immediately in front of the police car where Swamp sat in splendid isolation. Firemen in full gear gave him interested looks as they trotted past, unrolling a fire hose. The duplex was fully engaged now, with both sides burning fiercely. The firemen in the alley appeared to have given up on the duplex and were playing hoses on adjacent roofs to keep the fire from spreading. He could barely hear the rumble of the fire engine's pumps. He thought about asking for the cuffs to be removed, but right now he was exhausted and he hurt in more places than he could count. And he was heartsick about what that goddamned Arab had managed to do.

A mortar. The original artillery. The ancient Chinese had used them. Right up there with catapults. Perfect for a surprise attack. He'd seen those glaring white blooms on the screen before the picture had been obliterated by all the smoke, the camera being knocked this way and that. I was right all along, he thought ruefully. All except for those minor details, such as the date and the target. But would Hallory and company have paid any more attention if he had keyed the thing to the inauguration instead of to the address to the joint session? He doubted it. Still, he wondered what more he could have done. Or should have done. He knew he should never have opened that damned garage door. What in the hell had that bastard been doing in the garage?

He felt a rush of air as the rear door was unlocked. With difficulty, he opened his eyes, which were still sticky from the duct tape. Some smoke blew into the backseat of the car, and he could actually feel the heat from the house fire. A federal agent he didn't recognize was saying something, but Swamp could only shake his head. Then a police lieutenant appeared with cuff keys, shouldered him forward in the seat, and undid the plastic bracelets. Swamp gestured for a pen and paper, and the agent produced a notebook and a ballpoint.

"Can't hear," Swamp wrote, then showed it to the agent. The man took the pen and notebook. "Was this where the attack came from?" The agent scribbled.

Swamp nodded.

"What were you doing here?" the man wrote, and then passed back the notebook and pen.

"Chasing the bad guy," Swamp wrote. "Got caught instead. He used a mortar."

"We know," the man said, and Swamp read his lips. Then a hand appeared on the agent's shoulder and he stepped back. To Swamp's immense surprise, Lucy took the agent's place in the doorway.

"Come with me," she said, stepping back to let him get out of the car. He still couldn't hear her, but her meaning was obvious. Based on their hostile expressions, there were still lots of cops around who thought Swamp was the bad guy. They were milling around with drawn weapons and patently itchy trigger fingers. The roof of the duplex caved in with a great shower of sparks, making everyone flinch.

Swamp followed Lucy as they squeezed around the fire engine to a black Crown Vic bristling with antennas and emergency lights. A large man in Secret Service tactical gear was in the driver's seat, and Lucy indicated for Swamp to get in the back while she got in the front. The driver, who had a beefy red face to match his red hair, began backing the car down the entire length of the alley before Swamp even had a chance to close the door. Lucy turned around to look at him.

"You look like shit," she said, and once again, Swamp could read her lips. He shrugged and instantly regretted it. "Can't hear," he announced, barely able to recognize his own voice. Lucy nodded and then turned around to put on her seat belt.

"How bad is it up there? And where we going?" Swamp asked, but she didn't answer. The driver reached the end of the alley and backed straight out into the street, causing two cop cars to slam on their brakes, veer sideways, and lay on their horns. The driver, still stopped in the middle of the street, turned around to glare at Swamp and then reached into his jacket and produced his .357 Sig. "You shut the fuck up," the man said, pointing the weapon right at Swamp's face. Swamp still couldn't actually hear him, but that message was abundantly clear. Lucy tapped the man's arm and told him to put it away. Swamp sat back and fumbled for his own seat belt as the furious driver put his weapon down on the front seat and then began wrenching the car around. He flipped on his brights and took off down the street, scattering cops, firemen, and curious civilians alike.

They drove quickly up toward First Street and the Capitol grounds. The driver had to slow down and then stop when he got to First, as there was a solid phalanx of federal agents and vehicles blocking the way. A nebulous cloud of grayish smoke still rose from behind the Capitol, but Swamp couldn't see anything in front of them except wall-to-wall blue lights. He did notice that the District cops were all outside the federal perimeter. He wanted to get an answer to his questions from Lucy, but, mindful of the enraged driver and that .357 on the front seat, he kept quiet. Lucy got out and went to confer with a small crowd of agents inside the perimeter, and there was another round of radio talk. The big man up front glared at Swamp again, this time via the mirror.

Swamp was suddenly grateful that he'd left those CIA credentials back in his apartment. That Arab banker would have taken them when he escaped, and Swamp had a strong feeling he was going to need them later today. Lucy came back to the car, got in, and said something to the driver that Swamp couldn't hear. The driver nodded, gave Swamp another glare via the mirror, turned the car around, and drove down toward Independence Avenue.

They negotiated another six roadblocks before getting clear of Capitol Hill and abreast of the Mall. Swamp turned around to look back up at the west portico, where there were dozens of blue and red strobe lights blinking through the lingering smoke. He thought he saw several small white mounds out on the grass at the base of the portico steps, but then the National Arboretum buildings blocked his view. Lucy was talking on an encrypted radio as they drove down the river side of the Mall. Whatever pedestrians were still out on the mall were being herded toward the Metro station by District police. Something popped in Swamp's right ear and suddenly he could hear what Lucy was saying.

"— in custody." She paused to listen. "Yes, sir, he was definitely in the house." Another pause. "Yes, sir. Right away." She put the radio in her purse, loosened her shoulder belt, and turned around to look at Swamp, who decided to give no sign that he could hear again. Before she could speak, Swamp saw a moving blur to their left as they entered an intersection, and then the driver swerved and hit the brakes hard enough to throw Lucy sideways against the right side of the windshield. The car then got slammed on the left side, spinning out in a blur of noise and screeching tires. Swamp, who was still belted in, struggled to keep upright by grabbing the top of Lucy's headrest, but he could no longer see her. The car tilted onto its right-hand wheels, banged back down onto the pavement, and then lurched to a stop with the engine still running and the smell of radiator fluid filling the air.

Swamp unbuckled his belt as the driver wrestled his way out of the car and hurried around to the right front door. He wrenched it open and pulled Lucy out from between the seat and the dashboard. The side of her face was bloody from a cut on her forehead, and she looked dazed. Swamp tried the right rear door, but it was jammed. The left rear door was already partially open, so he got out and came around to look at the front of the Crown Vic. The left front fender was hashed in, as was the left rear wheel well. The grille and radiator assembly were protruding out of the front of the car. He moved back to the side of the car, crunching through glass and plastic on the pavement. A green trickle of radiator fluid was leaking out onto the street. The other car, a District police car, also a Crown Vic, was fifty yards away, out on the Mall lawn, having come to a standstill at the end of two muddy ruts. A dazed-looking cop was getting out, talking on his radio. Steam rose from the front of his wrecked cruiser.

The redheaded driver, who had a bloody nose and the beginnings of a shiner, was kneeling by Lucy's head as he fished out a radio and started calling someone. His seat belt must have failed, too, Swamp thought. Then he saw that .357 down under the accelerator pedal. Seeing the gun and realizing that both of them were out of the vehicle gave him an idea. The engine was still running, the lights still flashing up top, and the left front wheel looked like it would still roll. He had no idea of where they had been taking him, but wherever it was, it wouldn't get him to the Royal Kingdom Bank and face-to-face with the bastard who'd fired the mortar. Assuming that's where he'd run back to. But either way, he knew these two would never believe him, so he decided to stop wasting time and go get the murdering bastard himself.

He slipped into the driver's seat without closing the door, got the gun out of the way of the pedals, and dropped the shift into reverse. The car backed right away from Lucy and the driver, who looked up in astonishment. Swamp popped it in drive and hit the gas, watching the agent reach for his gun, then realize that it must be in the car. Lucy, obviously still out of it, just stared at him. He drove around them, fishtailing and scattering broken glass and pieces of fender, went three blocks, and then turned off Independence at the next corner. Which is when red lights appeared all over the instrument panel and the engine made a shrieking sound just before the car shuddered to an ominous, jerking stop.

Swamp retrieved the gun from the floor and then spotted Lucy's purse, its contents spilled all over the seat. He grabbed her credentials folder and then piled out of the ruined vehicle and looked around. He saw the Capitol South Metro station one block away. His Rover should still be in the parking lot. He stuffed the gun into his waistband, covering it with his coat, and put her credentials into a pocket. Then he walked as fast as his aching legs could go toward the station, aware of the cop cars that were whizzing by on their way to and from the Capitol area. He climbed a low barrier to get into the nearly empty Metro lot and saw his Rover. He patted his pockets for keys, but they were gone, as was his wallet. He swore and then remembered he had a spare key in a magnetic box under the trailer hitch. He found the key and let himself in, then took a minute to think out his next move. He saw the fancy Agency cell phone unit and remembered that it had a button for serious trouble. But what would happen if he pushed that button now? Had Lucy's driver managed to alert the entire federal law-enforcement apparatus that he was a fugitive? That he had been in the building from which the attack had come? Was he a suspect?

And the tags — Bertie had said they were satellite tags. He got back out and examined the license plates, but he could see nothing on them or near them. Two more cop cars went roaring by the Metro lot, lights and sirens blazing. A third, seeing the disabled federal vehicle, slowed to a stop and then backed up to have a closer look. Swamp realized he couldn't stay here, nor anywhere in plain view. Lucy and her driver would have assets coming fast. Once the car was identified, they'd all be looking for an ugly man, limping away on foot.

Okay — boogie time. He didn't know where he stood with the Secret Service, but he did know what his objective was, and that was to get to that goddamned Arab bank.

He had to push his way through the lot's flimsy ticket barrier, but then he got back out to Independence and blew down the empty avenue as fast as he thought he could go without attracting police attention. When he got to Thirteenth Street, he turned right and headed north, across the Mall and across Constitution, where the District cops clustered around the major intersections were no longer inspecting cars. They waved him and a few other civilian cars through, as if anxious to get everyone out of the downtown area. There was almost no traffic higher uptown as he went left on P Street and drove the two blocks down to the Royal Kingdom Bank. As he got halfway down the block from the bank building, he pulled the Rover to the side of the street and shut it down.

He pulled the mirror over and examined his battered face. He used a packet of Kleenex from the glove compartment to clean himself up a bit. There was nothing he could do about his clothes, which were a mess of plaster dust and soot and which still stank of gasoline smoke. He could see the entrance to the bank, but the security people were not in evidence. A large black Mercedes was parked out front, but there was no other sign of activity.

He knew what he was supposed to do — hit that emergency button on the Agency's cell phone and then wait for the cavalry. If the cell phone still worked, call into Operations Control at Langley, tell them that the guy who had mortared the inauguration was the managing director of the Royal Kingdom Bank. Except he didn't know the number for the Agency's OpCon center. Okay, call the Secret Service control center, a number that every agent knew by heart. Ask for massive backup and then wait for the entire Secret Service to arrive.

Except that it wouldn't. Lucy's driver would have called in with an "agent down" report and what he would describe as the hijacking of a Secret Service vehicle by a rogue agent. In a very few minutes, if not already, the streets around the Mall would be as warm with agents and District cops looking for him. They had already found the damaged Secret Service vehicle. His only chance was to go into that bank and hope like hell that his emirship had come back here after what he'd done. It was a reasonable possibility: This bank probably had some kind of diplomatic immunity, unless he'd run for the embassy itself. So, get in there, find out if he's there, grab the son of a bitch, try to restrain yourself from killing him, and then call into Operations Control. He patted the Sig in his waistband, zipped up the jacket, and got out of the car. Then, just to make sure, he leaned back in and smacked the panic button on the cell phone. A red light came on and stayed on. Good, he thought. Something's working.

Ignoring all his protesting joints and muscle spasms, he walked straight up to the front doors of the bank, but they were locked. A small brass sign inside one of the windows said closed. He looked up and found the security camera pointed right at him, its tiny red light clearly visible. He extracted Lucy's credentials, which displayed a Secret Service badge and a picture ID, and held them up for a second where the camera could see them, but not long enough for the operator to zoom in on the actual picture.

"Secret Service," he declared in his most authoritative voice. "Open up, please."

A moment later, the door was being unlocked and one of the young men he'd seen before was backing away as Swamp pushed through the door. The two German security guards were standing at one end of the lobby, hands held tensely inside their coats. Swamp stopped and looked pointedly at those hands. The two guards straightened up and withdrew their hands from their jackets, but they didn't move.

"I want to see the managing director," Swamp announced. "Right now."

A second young assistant came out into the lobby. Four against one, Swamp thought, measuring the angles.

"May I inquire as to the purpose of your visit, sir?" the first assistant asked, taking in Swamp's disheveled clothes.

"You may not," Swamp said. "U.S. Secret Service Agent Morgan wants to talk to him. That's all he needs to know."

The second man looked again at Swamp's clothes. He appeared to be older and better dressed than the others, and he had a tiny radio or cell phone in his hand. "And the other officers, the ones who were with you the last time?" he asked. "Where might they be today?"

"On their way," Swamp said. He pushed past the first assistant and headed for Mutaib's office. One of the guards reached inside his suit jacket again, and Swamp drew the gun, a Secret Service standard-issue Sig Sauer .357. He was suddenly aware that he hadn't checked to see if it was chambered. He put his back to a counter, swept the lobby with the muzzle, and surreptitiously felt for the extractor, which protrudes slightly on a Sig .357 if it's chambered. He couldn't be sure.

The four men in the lobby froze when Swamp drew the gun. He waved them all to get in front of him and then motioned them toward Mutaib's ornate office door. The assistant with the cell phone surreptitiously began to key in numbers. Swamp saw it but didn't do anything, because, if he remembered correctly, there would be no service. Especially now. He lined himself up in front of the door and told one of the men to open it. They all just looked at him.

"Open that goddamned door," Swamp growled. His fleeting vision of uncounted injured or dead Americans under all those white sheets up on Capitol Hill put something in his voice that made the man nearest the door grab the handle and push the door open.

"Now, single file. Go in. You first. And if I can't see your hands, I'll shoot whatever part of you I can see."

The man with the cell phone backed into Mutaib's office, followed in turn by the two security guards and then the younger assistant, all of them holding their hands out in plain sight. The office was empty.

"Where's your boss?" Swamp asked, eyeing a single closed door in one corner of the office. He got shrugs and sideways looks all around.

"You," he said to one of the security guards, "open that door and step away from it."

"It is just the emir's private lavatory," the older assistant said. "There is no one in there."

Swamp stared at the security guard and then raised the .357. "If there's no one in there," he said, "then you won't mind if I do a little reconnaissance by fire, will you?" He aimed the gun at the wooden door, but the security guard moved quickly to open it, only to find that the door was locked.

"Tell him I will start shooting through the door if he doesn't come out right now," Swamp said, moving across the room to a position from which he could cover them and better carry out his threat. The security guard spoke softly in Arabic, and a moment later, the door swung open and Mutaib came out. He was dressed now in traditional Saudi garb, and he blanched when he saw Swamp's gun.

"I say," he began, but Swamp told him to shut up. He ordered everyone in the room to get down on their knees and put their hands behind their heads, including Mutaib. In that instant, he saw the security guards exchange glances, and he pointed the gun at the space between them and pulled the trigger. The gun produced the snapping sound of an empty chamber. The instant the security guards heard that, they both drew their weapons as Swamp racked the slide while doing a drop and roll in the direction of Mutaib's huge desk. As soon as he could focus on the security guards, he opened fire, dimly aware that they were both already shooting at him. The room was filled with the sound of gunfire, and he felt more than heard the hornet sounds of bullets around him as he let his years of annual qualification training take over. Lying prone now on the rug, part of his body protected by the desk, he maintained an iron-fisted two-handed grip while he fired in quick succession at the two blurred figures still standing on the other side of the room, not stopping until they weren't standing anymore.

He checked his gun and saw that the slide was still closed. He didn't know how many rounds he had, but there was at least one left. His face and neck were covered in mahogany splinters as he heard a wet cough come from the other side of the room. He then rolled as fast as he could toward the still-open office door. Staying down on the floor, he saw that both security guards were down, the fronts of their suits covered in dark stains. The two assistants were huddled together against the far wall, arms over their white faces, hands buried in their hair.

Mutaib had vanished, but then Swamp saw the open French door. He got up, rushed to where the filmy curtains were dancing, and looked out. Mutaib was already across the small parking lot behind the bank, opening the door to what looked like an armored, silver Mercedes. Swamp didn't hesitate. He quickly knelt down at the window, rested the gun on the sill, and took careful aim. Mutaib must have sensed it, because he looked back over his shoulder at the window. Swamp fired once, his last round, as it turned out. He aimed for Mutaib's midsection but hit him in the throat, spinning the Arab sharply back against the glistening car. Then the banker slid down onto the pavement and proceeded to generate a lake of blood, arms and hands out at his side, as if in astonished supplication.

Swamp pulled his head back in from the billowing curtains and pointed the now-empty gun at the two quivering assistants. They both still had their eyes closed, and it was obvious they were fully cowed. The breeze from the open window started to clear the air of gun smoke as Swamp picked up the telephone to call for some backup. But the phone was dead. As he was trying to figure out what to do next, he heard vehicle sounds out front and then the front doors of the bank were banging open, followed by the sounds of several people running across the lobby. He reversed his grip on the gun so that he was holding it by the barrel as the first agents rushed into the room, all pointing either handguns or submachine guns in his direction. A full dozen of them spilled through the doorway before the tactical supervisor realized Swamp was holding his gun out for someone to take. Everyone froze for a moment, and then one agent came across the room and snatched it out of his hand while three others went over and stuck guns in the faces of the assistants, one of whom was now crying. Then Lucy VanMetre and Carlton Hallory came into the room, both of them brandishing handguns, as well.

"Where's Mutaib?" Lucy asked. One side of her face was puffy and bruised, and her normally immaculate clothes were rumpled.

"He's dead," Swamp said. He pointed to the open window. "Out there."

She put a hand to her mouth and looked over at Hallory. Then she asked what had happened.

"Well, Lucy, that dead Arab out there was the son of a bitch who fired those ten rounds into the Capitol this morning."

"Not possible," Lucy said, gesturing in his direction with her gun. The other agents, sensing trouble, began to ease out of any possible lines of fire.

"Oh yes it is," Swamp said. "I was there, remember? And I physically saw him do it. From about ten feet away." He pointed to the blowing curtains, where two agents were already peering through the window. "That guy, out there. He even spoke to me. 'Hello, old chap. Remember me?' I figured he'd come back here. Foreign bank, maybe diplomatic immunity. Call the embassy, which would get him out of town. That's why I came here. To arrest his ass. Those two started the shooting, and then that bastard went out the window. But it was him."

All the agents in the room was just staring at him now. Hallory raised a radio to his mouth and started talking quietly. Lucy walked past him to the window, looked out, and swore. "This isn't possible," she said again.

"It was this morning. That guy was your mortar man."

"Sir," one of the assistants said in a tiny voice.

Lucy turned to look at him. It was the younger man, and he had visibly urinated in his trousers. "What?" she snapped.

"The emir? He was here all morning. He was here, in this room. We watched the… the incident on the television, but he was here. Right here."

Lucy turned to look back at Swamp, who felt the first twinge of uncertainty. "You are in such deep shit," she said to Swamp. "And you are never going to get out of it."

"I don't care what his minions say," Swamp replied. "I know what I saw. It was him in that town house. Him or his identical twin brother."

"Get those two out of here," she ordered, pointing to the cowering assistants. "And remove the bodies. Make sure you clear the street of civilians before you bring anyone out."

Four agents grabbed the two assistants and manhandled them to the door and out into the lobby, while four more began dragging the two dead security guards across the rug. Two stepped through the French doors to see about Mutaib. The rest went out front to clear the street. Hallory finished talking on the radio, watched for a moment as the agents cleared the room, and then spoke for the first time, asking the tactical supervisor, the only agent remaining, to give them a moment. He closed the office door behind them and then dropped into one of the armchairs. Lucy exhaled noisily and leaned against a wall, looking at Hallory. She was still holding her weapon. Swamp suddenly needed to sit down, but he wasn't sure what would happen if he moved. Hell with it, he thought. He pulled Mutaib's executive chair out from behind the desk and sat down with a groan.

"Okay," Hallory said. "Now we can talk."

Lucy started to shake her head.

"No," Hallory said. "We have to tell him. This" — he pointed at the open French door—"this is really unfortunate."

"Unfortunate?" Swamp said. "Unfortunate? That bastard lobs mortar shells into the inauguration and kills how many people, and this is unfortunate?"

Hallory was looking at Lucy. "We have to tell him," he said. "He's done his part. Now we have to tell him."

"We should wait," she said. She looked at her watch. "Another five hours at least. No one outside the primary loop until midnight in Europe."

"Tell me what, for Chrissakes?" Swamp said, totally confused.

Hallory gave him a sad, tired smile. It was the first sympathetic look he had ever seen on the executive's face. "This Mutaib guy was one of ours," he said. "He didn't do the mortar attack."

"Goddamn it, I fucking saw him!" Swamp shouted.

Hallory put up a placating hand. "No, you didn't. But I think I know what's happened."

Swamp felt his face getting red. "I saw that bastard out there drop ten rounds into the world's biggest mortar. He burned the house down doing it. I was there! He had a fucking television in the room. I saw the rounds hit. I saw—"

"What we wanted you to see, Mr. Morgan," said Hallory interrupting Swamp and then pausing to let that sink in. "You and the rest of the world. The German fired ten rounds, but they never got there. They were BL and P rounds. That stands for blind-loaded and plugged. The 'warheads' contained plaster and a small bursting charge. When the rounds reached their apogee, they blew up into a cloud of plaster dust about four hundred feet in the air on the other side of the Capitol building."

"What?"

"Nobody died at the Capitol, Mr. Morgan. It was all a fake. Everyone's safe. The new government is installed." He stopped and rubbed his face with both hands. "But Lucy's right. We shouldn't talk here. I guess you'll have to come with us. We'll leave as soon as they get the mess cleaned up. In the meantime, relax. I think this is going to come out okay. You did well, actually. Except for the bank manager, perhaps."

Heismann drove to within a mile of the nurse's house and then pulled off the avenue and into the parking lot of a large church. He drove around to the back of the lot and parked the Suburban in a corner, well out of sight of any passing police cars out on Wisconsin Avenue. The injured policeman was still breathing, albeit with audible difficulty. His face was bruised and swollen, but one eye was partially open. Heismann thought about what to do with him. He could smother the man and simply end the problem. Except the officer hadn't really seen him, and he had served a useful purpose in getting the Suburban through the immediate security cordon around the downtown area after the attack. He decided to leave him to his fate.

Although it was just midafternoon, the skies were growing dark and overcast. Rain tonight, he thought. Help them clean up the Capitol steps. He flipped on the radio, but both bands were silent except for the emergency broadcast station, which was still telling everyone to go home and stay there. Otherwise, there was only an electronic wall of static.

They had obviously shut down all the commercial stations, trying to limit knowledge of the extent of the disaster. Well, that made sense. He consulted his city map and fingered his way to the nurse's house through the nearby residential streets. He retrieved his raincoat, grabbed the briefcase, got out of the Suburban, and locked the doors. He felt like he should leave a note somewhere, but he did not dare draw attention to the vehicle until he was well clear of the area, probably in twelve hours or so, once the initial search frenzy died down. Anyway, someone would see it. Even these police would find it soon enough, once they started looking.

He walked through a side gate and turned right, still just another commuter, hurrying home a little early, as requested by his devastated government.

Forty-five minutes after the shoot-out in the bank, a government limo pulled up and Swamp, Hallory, and Lucy got in. Hallory pointed Swamp into the back left corner, so Lucy ended up in the middle. She seemed to be avoiding even looking in Swamp's direction. Her face was still puffy and she sat down carefully. He wanted to ask where they were going, but he was still trying to absorb what Hallory had told him in the bank.

They drove in silence down Seventeenth Street. Swamp observed many police cars but no pedestrians and zero civilian traffic. The city's office buildings appeared to be virtually deserted. As they got closer to the Mall and the White House, he began to see military police vehicles, Humvees and even armored personnel carriers, parked along the broad avenues. He couldn't tell if they were manned or just parked there. He could hear but not see helicopters flying low over the city. They drove into the precincts of Lafayette Park and the limo pulled over to the sidewalk.

"We walk from here," Hallory announced.

"Where?" Swamp asked.

"Crown," Hallory said, using the Secret Service code word for the White House.

They walked southwest across the park, which was surrounded by military vehicles, many with engines running. Looking through the bare trees, Swamp could see what looked like Army troops up on the roof of the White House itself, the men carrying rifles and other weapons. As they arrived at the West Executive gate, a large limo with diplomatic plates, dark-tinted windows, and headlights blazing exited past them, while another one was easing up to the gate for inspection. A single heavily armed Apache helicopter was flying a tight orbit about a thousand feet above the White House, turning slowly in a continuous 360, as if looking for something to kill. Secret Service Uniformed Division officers processed them through the gate security equipment.

Five minutes later, they were in the White House Situation Room. Swamp caught a glimpse of a video screen showing a nighttime scene of what looked like a dozen large Air Force transports at an air base somewhere, surrounded by military and civilian vehicles of every description. A second screen showed a picture of a devastated and still-smoking west portico at the Capitol. The ground was littered with the wreckage of the viewing stands and what looked like dozens of sheet-covered lumps.

The main conference table was filled with officials in their shirtsleeves, working phones or conferring with staffers. The sitroom seemed smaller than he had remembered it, and those screens were new. Swamp recognized at least three cabinet secretaries, including the secretary of defense from the outgoing administration. Or was he still the SecDef? Was there a new government or not? Hallory had said there was.

Hallory nodded at a side conference room, then led Swamp into it and closed the door. Bertie Walker was inside, talking on a secure phone. He hung up and got up to greet Swamp and shake his hand, a sly grin on his face. Lucy had remained outside to talk to a cluster of Secret Service people.

"Oka-a-y," Swamp said, grateful to sit down again. His various aches and pains were becoming more than just an annoyance. "Whiskey-tango-foxtrot, over?"

"Mutaib's dead," Hallory announced, and Bertie's grin faded.

"How?" he asked. Swamp thought his question sounded rather offhand.

"Our trusty firefly hunter here popped him when he tried to run from the bank."

"The bank? I thought Lucy was supposed to take him to Langley?"

Hallory shrugged. "Shit happens, I guess. Lucy's car collided with a cop car out on the Mall. Mr. Morgan here was in the backseat and seized the opportunity to commandeer the vehicle and go to the bank. And now I think we know precisely what Heismann/Hodler looks like, by the way."

Bertie sat back down, trying to digest the news. Then he understood. "Ah. He had himself recut to look like Mutaib?"

"Clever bastard, huh? And then apparently he made sure Mr. Morgan here got a look at his face, in hopes, I suspect, that he would go take care of business. Sooner or later. He was the eyewitness, after all."

"I'm going to break somebody's head, somebody doesn't tell me what's going on," Swamp said.

Hallory looked at his watch, as if trying to make up his mind. Just then, a muted cheer went up out in the Situation Room. Bertie got back up, opened the door, and looked out. Swamp heard someone say "Almost two thousand, not six hundred. More being brought in. First C-seventeen is rolling as we speak."

"They gonna do it, Jack?" Bertie called over the general conversation out in the main room. "The whole enchilada? OPEC, too?"

Swamp couldn't hear the answer, but Bertie was closing the door, a satisfied expression spreading over his face. "It worked," he announced to no one in particular. "It fucking worked. Amazing."

"What fucking worked?" Swamp asked, almost shouting himself.

The door opened again and in walked Tad McNamara. He was grinning as he came over to shake Swamp's hand. Everybody wants to shake my hand, but nobody will tell me shit, Swamp thought. He repeated his question.

Bertie and McNamara sat down at one end of the conference table, flanking Hallory, who finally explained it.

"You've been the victim of a Communist plot," Hallory said.

"There aren't any more Communists," Swamp said, and Hallory grinned.

"Figure of speech, Mr. Morgan. But you've been running a script ever since we first dropped that firefly in your lap. And today is payday. As I told you earlier, the attack was a fake. The German, Heismann/Hodler, was real, and he really thinks he's done his job. But his controller worked for us."

"You're telling me you people knew where this guy was all along?" Swamp asked.

Bertie and McNamara looked down at the table. Hallory was nodding. "More or less," he said. "His campaign to kill the nurse was not in the plan, of course, but we had to let that play out."

"Jesus Christ, you let that guy damn near kill that woman."

Hallory was shaking his head. "We didn't know he could change shape like that. We didn't really know what he looked like, because not even Mutaib knew what he looked like. The guy always wore a disguise of some kind after he went through all those surgeries."

"Is that why Immigration came back with oatmeal when we pulled the string on Heismann and Hodler?"

"They were following instructions, Swamp. A lot of people followed instructions in this op without knowing what or why they were doing it."

"And the fire at the clinic?"

Hallory looked uncomfortable for the first time. "That again was at Heismann's initiative. When we started this thing, Mutaib warned us that Heismann might wipe out his trail. The problem was that we didn't know when he would actually finish his plastic surgery program, other than it would be before the inauguration, because after that, he'd go to ground. There were admittedly some unknowns loose in this little equation."

"And what equation was that, exactly?" Swamp asked. "Anybody?"

"Did you see all those transports out there?" Hallory said. "On the screen when you came through the Situation Room?"

"Yeah. And?"

"Those transports were all staged last week at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. Now they're convened at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. They began landing two hours after the 'attack' took place, coincident with an ultimatum from the United States. Right about the same time as we sealed their borders and their airspace."

"Ultimatum."

"Yeah. An ultimatum that said we had direct, incontrovertible, eyewitness proof that a faction of the Saudi royal family was behind a decapitation strike aimed at the inauguration proceedings. That American transports were loading up every American citizen who could get to the air base. And that unless the Saudi government handed over everyone involved in this attack, plus every swinging dick currently in the country who'd ever been associated with, a member of, a supporter of, an ally of, a relative of, a business or banking partner of — you name it, anyone, and especially Saudi government and military officials who'd ever even thought about or mumbled the name Al Qaeda — a dozen or so hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads would soon be arriving to turn the entire Kingdom into green glass."

"Wow."

"The Agency had a preliminary list of about six hundred people 'of interest.' The Saudi royal family has informed us they're going to hand over some two thousand sweating bastards, who apparently are on their way to Prince Sultan Air Base as we speak."

"Mutaib was dealing with the Saudi royal family?"

"He was dealing with a Saudi prince," Bertie said. "Admittedly, there are dozens of them, so one can just about always say he's dealing with the royal family."

"Was the king involved in this?"

"No. This was one faction, one of many. They owned the bank, they'd installed Mutaib, and they approached him about doing the attack. Unbeknownst to them, he'd gone infidel on them. He contacted us in Langley when he finally understood what they were contemplating. We brought it to the fusion committee, where someone came up with an interesting idea."

"Which was?"

"Which was, in essence, why not take over the plot? Let them think they'd actually executed the attack, and then, once and for all, beat the Saudi problem into complete submission. And one of the things we'd need was an eyewitness."

"Eyewitness proof," Swamp said. "And that would be me?"

Hallory nodded his head. "Right after this fake attack, we told them that land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles were being retargeted and readied for launch. We showed them some video of what that looks like. We told them that we would turn every horizontal habitable acre of the Kingdom into the world's biggest caldera if they didn't meet our demands. Like I said, we said we had lists. And if anyone on our lists didn't show up under guard at Prince Sultan Air Base in four hours' time, we would launch."

"And they believed it?"

"Hell yes. The whole world has been watching a very carefully and elaborately staged disaster scene play out on the Capitol steps. We've got footage of the attack. We've got footage of the terrible damage, hundreds of bodies. We've got smoke, ambulances racing through town, because ambulances did race through town. They just didn't go anywhere."

"Holy shit."

"The whole world got to see what we allowed them to see, because this is probably the only city in the country where we could pull this off. We're the feds. Mediawise, we own this town. We've got every channel — visual, data, voice, broadcast, satellite — including all the foreign embassies' comms, locked down or jammed down. We have all the major networks clamped off, with only one television channel going. And that channel is ours."

"Wouldn't they figure that out?" Swamp asked. "That all their regular sources had been shut down?"

"A total national emergency," Hallory said. "The government took over everything immediately. Foreign governments would expect that. It's what they would do. And brother Mutaib, who, as the head of one their most important banks, was de facto an important member of the Saudi establishment here in Washington, dropped a hint to the Saudi security service in Riyadh about thirty minutes before the ultimatum hit. Said there was a rumor circulating in Saudi circles here in Washington, to the effect that the attack was the responsibility of this faction. And then he, as well as their embassy, went off the air. Yeah, they believed it."

Swamp shook his head in wonder. "And the president, the presidentelect? They're safe?"

"As I explained, everyone is safe. We fed the target coordinates to the German via Mutaib. He did do his own little reconnaissance, but there was no way he could get the exact coordinates without waltzing up to the steps of the west portico and pointing his GPS at the sky. Plus, we provided the Russian mortar, and the mortar rounds. The German had no way of knowing. He was totally dependent on Mutaib for logistics."

"But what about all those people? The people invited to be there?"

"All hustled inside the Capitol when the first round was fired. We took over the TV coverage and began transmitting some really good special-effects work, courtesy of our friends in Tinseltown. They do that shit pretty well, don't they?"

Swamp nodded. "I saw it. It was very realistic. Even the bit where the cameraman dropped his teeth and left the scene. But after that, it was all smoke and noise in that house. My ears are still ringing."

"Especially that," Hallory said. "They set it up to look like the one camera still going was unattended. The actual TV signal was running thirty seconds delayed, so we had time to switch over. We cut off the other networks, and we cut off all the sound. But we let it run for about three minutes before we showed a Secret Service agent, all bloody and bandaged, run up to the camera, and then it went off, too. After that, it was all government statements, official briefings, like that. But the whole world, including the Saudis, of course, got to watch what looked like unfiltered, if totally doctoral, video of mass murder and mayhem. Good stuff."

"And your eyewitness?"

"That was going to be you. Which is why Lucy was right there, waiting to pick you up. When the time comes, you are going to be taken before some cameras to tell the world what you saw and that a German terrorist, hired by the Royal Kingdom Bank, did it."

Swamp finally asked the question he'd been wanting to ask for several minutes. "How did you guys know that the German wouldn't just shoot my ass the moment he caught me sneaking around there?"

Hallory looked at McNamara for a second before answering. "I guess we didn't."

"You guess you didn't."

"No, we didn't. We had the house wired, of course, so we could hear some of what he was doing in there. But we had to be very, very careful with that — if he'd tumbled to surveillance, he'd have been gone. We did know that you'd gone there, and we did know he'd taken you prisoner."

"So there was a plan B?"

"Another agent."

"An actor, actually," Hallory said.

"So the whole time—"

"The whole time you were running with the firefly, you were headed toward the second floor of that town house," Hallory said. "We knew you'd keep going on it. That's what you were famous for. Swamp Morgan, the closer. At some point, we had to kick you out of OSI, but when we thought you might be hesitating, you got a new job offer. From Bertie here."

Swamp suddenly remembered Bertie's speculation about a decapitation strike, back when he'd provided the details on Heismann. He had to admit he'd been skillfully steered — suggestions, musings, planting the seeds of every action he took. They weren't kidding. They'd been playing him right from the beginning. Now they were playing the whole world. Bertie was watching him work it out. Bertie, who'd come out of the dark just a couple weeks back, renewing old acquaintances.

"How long do you have to keep this thing going?"

"It'll be dark here in a couple hours. Europe's quit for the day. Going on midnight over there in Arabia, of course. But everyone who was at the Capitol for the inauguration will stay there, inside the building, until the last plane leaves Prince Sultan Air Base. Probably early tomorrow morning, our time. In the meantime, we've got crews working hard to provide the appropriate visual fodder for all the foreign intelligence satellites — cleanup crews at the Capitol, emergency vehicles, signs that we're treating the wounded inside the building, smoke generators, all the appropriate infrared signals, the military at DefCon Two, warships leaving port, AWACS and F-sixteens on station — the whole bit."

"You've got both presidents held at the Capitol?"

"Their doubles anyway," Hallory said. "The real deals might have actually been here in the White House, with the real chief justice."

Another muted cheer sounded from the Situation Room. McNamara slipped out to find out what has going on.

Swamp's head was spinning with the sheer scale of it. The whole damn thing would depend on the feds being able to totally isolate Washington electronically. Landline telephones, radios, cell phones, satellite phones, microwave links. And most of all, the media sources — which depended on these means of communication. Show them pictures, cut off the sound. Hell yes, that would work. They only had to do it for about twelve hours, too. And after that…

McNamara came back into the room. "They've loaded and launched eight C-seventeens so far. The Saudi secret police are bringing people in by the truckload and in helicopters from places all around the country. We're talking bankers, bureaucrats, clerics, students, and not a few senior military officers. Not to mention over a thousand detainees, and that many again are expected shortly. A second wave of C-seventeens is leaving Dee-Gar right now for Sultan. And, best of all, the OPEC deal is confirmed."

"What OPEC deal?" Swamp asked.

Hallory hesitated for a moment. "This is what makes the thing really worth doing: The Saudi's have agreed to opt out of OPEC. From now on, they will sell oil as an independent producer — at prices within a range acceptable to the United States, at least for a while anyway."

Swamp thought about it. "I can see us being able to force them to do that now, but when they find out the attack was a fake…"

"The results of the attack were fake," Hallory said. "But the plot to make the attack itself was not. That faction hired the German. He did fire those mortar rounds. The original plot was not a fake — that was entirely their idea. The deception today nets us the heart and brains of Al Qaeda. The fact that they started it in the first place will net us the destruction of OPEC as an effective cartel. Which is going to dampen a lot of the outrage from our Western brethren, once they understand OPEC has been gutted."

"And how docs this collection of prisoners square with our own suspect lists?" Swamp asked.

Bertie smiled. "An amazing congruence of suspected Al Qaeda supporters to actual detainees has been achieved," he announced in his best PR voice. "Of course, we knew who they were all along, you understand."

"Yeah right," Swamp said.

Bertie just grinned.

"They just showed the Saudis some footage of a Trident submarine surfacing in the vicinity of Dee-Gar and opening its missile tubes," McNamara said. "Just in case any of the top-echelon princes start to lose focus now that they've been up most of the night."

"I thought those things launch from underwater," Hallory said.

"Well, yeah, but you can see the palm trees on Dee-Gar behind the sub, and British patrol boats providing security. They shot it earlier from a helicopter, and you can see down into the missile tubes. Scary shit."

"They really believe we'd nuke the oil fields, too?"

"They were told we'd use neutron bombs. High-altitude detonations that kill all living things but do almost no physical damage. No sense in losing a big chunk of the world's supply of oil just because its owners went extinct."

Swamp watched the excited confusion in the Situation Room through the open door, and he marveled at the pictures streaming in from the other, now-dark side of the world. On one screen, there was file footage rolling of two American aircraft carriers plowing through cobalt seas, pushing up house-size bow waves, their flight decks bristling with fighter-bombers. On another, three busloads of American citizens carrying bags were debarking from buses in front of a C-5 transport, obviously bound out of a country that was now square in the crosshairs of an aroused nuclear-armed state. That footage was replaced with some of an entire field of ICBM silos with their armored caps rolled aside, showing glistening ten-story high missiles connected to umbilicals and venting oxygen. A third screen showed an entire flight line of huge Air Force transports glinting dangerously in white sodium-vapor lights at the Saudi air base as streams of captives, bound and hooded, were channeled up into ominously dark aluminum wombs by American military police.

The dark side of the world, it occurred to him, in more ways than one. "How'd you get all the American businessmen and contractors out before this went down?" he asked.

"Christmas," Hallory said. "We made damn near everyone come home for Christmas home leave, or they'd lose their passports. Only a select few went back. They were all ordered to be at Sultan this morning, our time, including the diplomatic staff. Supposedly to watch the inauguration on a special American television channel. We've had people leaving for many hours."

"So where's the German?" he asked.

Hallory shook his head. "We don't know. The first responders at the duplex reported a nearly naked woman running out of the other side of the duplex, screaming hysterically about some guy being up there where the fire was."

"Sure she was woman? Sure it wasn't Heismann dressing up again?"

"Guys swore she was real. Naked from the waist up. No Wonderbra or falsies. A full rack, and they were real. Female underwear on the bottom, and no compromising equipment in view. The neighbors reported that a middle-aged woman did live in the other half of the duplex, so now the cops're looking for her."

"Was this running woman middle-aged?"

"She was mostly naked, Swamp. That's what the cops remember. Naked and hysterical. They probably weren't looking at her face."

"So where's the German?" Swamp asked again.

"We've given that problem to the District cops," Hallory said. "And, of course, we have some of our own assets looking, too. But we almost don't care now. If they find him, he's probably not going to survive the arrest. Thanks to you, they want him for a cop killing, plus we kept the District cops, and everyone else in the city, at arm's length from the Capitol. The folks looking for the German don't know this wasn't real."

Swamp saw Lucy giving him a cool, appraising look through the partially opened door. He wasn't sure he cared for that look. "And if he does survive the arrest?" he asked.

"Then he's also an eyewitness. You make a pretty good one, but the shooter himself?"

Another pawn, Swamp thought. Just like me. Who's probably going to get dead before morning. Just like me?

Heismann retraced his original route down into Rock Creek Park, where he had begun his frustrating campaign to tie off the loose end named Connie Wall. It took him forty-five minutes to reach the stone bridge, from which he could see the bluff on which the nurse's house stood. He'd attracted some curious looks from passing cars while walking down the hill road, which had no sidewalks, toward the bridge, a man in a raincoat and suit, carrying a briefcase. But most people seemed to be intensely interested in getting home. It was getting darker as the winter sun gave up on the day. There had been no police cars. Probably all still downtown, he thought. Sometime in the next few hours or so, if they didn't already know it, the disaster would be pinned on his former employers, whether by the pensioner, if he survived, or by the documents he'd put in the mailbox. The mailbox decals said they emptied those boxes six days a week, rain or shine. Then the world might get to see some real fireworks.

No great loss, he told himself as he left the road and merged into the underbrush near the stone bridge. The Arab States had stopped evolving somewhere back in the 1500s and offered nothing but religious barbarism these days. And oil, of course. Fortunately, the precious oil was all safely thousands of feet below ground. He wondered if you could burn radioactive oil as easily as the original stuff. Probably. The hard part would be drilling through all that crusty sand.

He took a quick look in both directions along the road and then slipped deeper into the woods.

Swamp was stiffening happily in a corner chair, dozing while Bertie and Hallory worked separate phones, coordinating the cleanup at the bank and steering assets toward the growing logistics problems up on Capitol Hill. The airlift operation was about two-thirds complete on the other side of the world, and the controlling factor now was how many hours of darkness remained in Washington. The consensus in the room seemed to be that the hoax would be sustainable only until daylight returned to Washington. The major Western governments and permanent members of the UN Security Council had already been briefed secretly that both presidents were alive and well and that the American government was intact. They'd also been told that what had been shown on global television might not be entirely accurate, except for one solid fact: There had been a Saudi plot. The only place the faked attack itself had to be believed was in Riyadh, and that only until all the prisoners were out of the country.

A Uniformed Division officer pushed the side conference room door fully open and told Hallory that they were ready. Hallory terminated his phone conversation and motioned for Swamp to go with him. Swamp rubbed his eyes and then rose carefully out of the comfortable chair, checking all his major joints for full range of motion before actually trying to walk. He felt pretty scruffy compared to everyone else in the Situation Room, some of whom stared at him as he was led out of the conference room.

The officer took them past the Navy mess, the Secret Service command post, upstairs to the foyer coming off the West Wing colonnade, and into the staff office outside the Oval Office. Whoa, Swamp thought, thinking about how he looked, but Hallory was guiding him through the ornate doors. The new president was sitting behind the famous desk, and he got up to come over and shake Swamp's hand.

"Mr. Eyewitness," he said with a tired smile.

"Mr. President," Swamp croaked out. He hadn't voted for this man, but that invisible presidential mantle was fully in place, and Swamp was suitably awed. The president had them both sit down and asked if they wanted coffee. Following Hallory's lead, Swamp shook his head. It hurt when he did it, and the president noticed.

"Mr. Morgan, you've done the country a significant service. I apologize that you weren't exactly given a lot of choice in the matter."

Swamp thought for a couple of seconds. "Well, Mr. President, did we get what we wanted out of this?"

"Oh yes, I think we absolutely did. You've been down in the Situation Room, so you know what's been going on. It's a pretty amazing bag. Plus, there's the OPEC arrangement."

"As I understand it, sir, Al Qaeda is a lot more than Saudis," Swamp said. "Those bastards are everywhere."

"They are indeed, but their heart and soul, not to mention their principal funding source, has always been Saudi. We've known that for a long time. And right now, the bulk of that cancer is being transported to a special internment camp on Diego Garcia, courtesy of our British allies. More permanent facilities are being readied at an air base in Texas. I suspect my predecessor is looking forward to seeing some of them up close and personal."

"You took some big chances today, sir," Swamp said.

"So did you, from what I've been told. Again, I apologize for not giving you a vote."

"I take the king's shilling," Swamp said. "But won't there be pandemonium in the rest of the world?"

"For the most part, our real friends have been put into the picture, Mr. Morgan. And our sometimes friends might prosper from a little pandemonium these clays."

"And the world financial markets?"

"All the New York markets are closed, tomorrow begins the weekend, and the after-market operations are experiencing some significant communications problems. The 'disaster' will be exposed tomorrow, and the money guys will have two days to think about it. If the premarkets still seem to be unstable by Sunday night, we'll announce the new OPEC situation."

"What will happen when the Saudis find out they've been duped, if I may ask?"

"The plot to decapitate the government was real, Mr. Morgan," the president said. "Right now, the principals in the Kingdom are fairly quivering with gratitude that they're not all in low earth orbit. We had two objectives: To eviscerate Al Qaeda. We won't kill it, but we've hurt it grievously, and to achieve that, we needed blood and gore on the Capitol steps. Those pictures are what's driving them to fill those transports, before we change our minds."

"And the second objective was the OPEC concession."

"Correct." The president was looking at him with speculative eyes, and Swamp wondered if he wasn't getting out of his depth asking these questions.

"Will they hold to that OPEC agreement, sir? After they discover the hoax?"

"You mean might they get angry and slap a Persian Gulf oil embargo on the West again?"

"Yes, sir."

The president sighed. "You can't quote me on this, Mr. Morgan, but the mirror image of an embargo is a blockade. They slap an embargo on us, we'll put the fleet across the Straits of Hormuz, take out every facility that makes or pumps water over there, and then wait for the hammer of Allah to work. In the meantime, nobody will get Persian Gulf oil. Maybe some genius will find a way to drink it."

Swamp nodded, suddenly awed by this glimpse of absolute power. "I assume we're looking for Heismann or Hodler, whatever his real name is," he said, glancing at Hallory. "I wouldn't mind joining that hunt."

"First, we need you to make an appearance before the Joint Committee on Intelligence, Mr. Morgan. Up on the Hill."

"Yes, sir, I understand."

"Do you?" he asked, his eyes boring into Swamp's. "The entire free world has a lot to gain tonight. You'll be given a briefing paper before you go before the committee. At this juncture, it's supremely important that you adhere to that paper."

Swamp frowned. He was tired and beat up after his experience in the town house. The president was trying to tell him something, but without coming right out and saying it.

"What is the official line, sir?" he asked.

"You recognized the terrorist who fired the mortar," Hallory prompted. "You pursued him to the bank, where you made a positive identification that this was the man. When he attempted to escape, with the aid of armed accomplices in the bank, you shot him and them dead."

"And that's the end of the story, Mr. Morgan," the president said.

"Ah," Swamp said.

"We didn't start this," the president said as he stood up. "They did. But you personally can go a long way toward finishing it."

"Yes, sir," Swamp said again, beginning now to understand fully what was expected of him. Both he and Hallory rose, as well.

"Thank you, Mr. President," Hallory said.

"Thank you, gentlemen," the president replied. "Thanks to the three of you, and my predecessor's huge cojones, America struck a real blow for freedom today. Everyone involved will be suitably recognized once the dust settles."

An officer opened the doors to the Oval Office and they went out into the secretarial area. Lucy was waiting for them there. She handed Hallory a piece of paper and then turned aside to answer her cell phone.

"Aha," he said.

"Find him?" Swamp asked.

"His trail, maybe," Hallory said. He looked at his watch. "We've got time before your briefing. Up to a little ride in the dark?"

Lucy was looking his way again as she talked on her cell phone. "Am I going to survive this one?" Swamp asked.

Hallory blinked but then smiled. "That game's over, actually," he said.

"Just checking," said Swamp.

The director of the Secret Service appeared and signaled Hallory that he wanted a word, which left Swamp standing alone with Lucy. She had cleaned herself up a bit, fixed up that golden hair, but she still looked like she'd been on the losing end of a domestic dispute. She closed the cell phone and gave Swamp her full attention.

"How are you feeling?" she asked. Her expression was fathomless.

"Like a puppet who's just had all his strings cut," Swamp said. "Now I'm supposed to walk on my own again."

"You were very lucky back there, in that bank."

"I guess so."

"Two on one at close range. Assuming they were trained security guards, one of them should have hit you."

"I did a Marco Polo. Dropped flat and looked for China. I wish I could say that was due to years of great tactical training, but the truth is, I think I was looking for China. They went rapid-fire. Which usually means high."

She nodded. "And you?" she asked. "You went rapid-fire, too?"

"Yeah. But of course for me, being down on the floor, shooting high was good."

"And the Arab? The scene report said you fired just once?"

"Only had one round left," he said. "Although I didn't know that at the time. I was just bound and determined that he wasn't going to get away, not after what I'd seen him do. Hitting him was pure luck." He stopped, regretting his words. "Or maybe not, as the case might be, I suppose."

She nodded thoughtfully, suddenly preoccupied again, and then Hallory was back. As they headed for the east entrance, Swamp wondered about Lucy's sudden interest in his tactical ability. And also why the president had mentioned three of them as being responsible for this amazing caper. His joints were still aching after being zapped by that Taser, and it was an effort just to keep up with them.

Connie collapsed back into the bed, her heart pounding and her breathing ragged. She'd just managed a halting tour of the entire ground floor, checking windows, pulling drapes and lowering Venetian blinds, and making sure the doors were all locked. She'd used the wheelchair and the walker to get around, but it had been much harder than she'd anticipated. She had no reserve of strength. She'd thought about going upstairs, but stairs were clearly out of the question. Besides, the danger, if it came, would come from ground level.

It was almost dark outside, and she'd turned off all the lights in the house except the one in the dining room, where the hospital bed was. She wished she could raise someone on the phones, but they were still all shut off. And Jake might not even know she'd left the hospital yet. Probably did not know, she realized, remembering her somewhat evasive answer to his question about her leaving.

Okay, so she was on her own. She reached over to the dining room table and pulled the small oxygen bottle with its attached mask over, cracked a valve, and took some hits to get her breathing stabilized. The doors were all locked. The lights were off, all but the small bedside lamp here in the dining room. There was no way he would know from the outside that she was in the house.

The car. He'd see the car. But if he thought he'd killed her up there in Garrison Gap, then he'd have to assume someone else had brought the car back. As they had, in fact, done.

"But I will need your house," he'd said.

For what — to hide out until the hullabaloo all died down? They'd expect him to try to get as far from Washington as possible, not hide out right here in town, so it wasn't a bad move.

She looked over at the dining room curtains. They were moving around, billowing in slightly as the night wind probed the edges of the plywood. If he came around to the back of the house, he might see this light. That won't do, she thought, so she reluctantly switched it off. The room dropped into total darkness, except for a small green diode on the pain pump and the green clock numerals on the microwave in the kitchen.

The wind seemed more audible now, and she could almost hear the drapery material rustling above the noises of bushes scratching against the living room windows. She tried the phone again, but it was still dead. Were they all dead, or just hers? Was he here already? Had he cut the wires? Was he out there right now, crouching in the bushes in her backyard, figuring out how he was going to get in without setting off the alarm system? She felt around under the bedcovers for the snake gun. Had she loaded it? She couldn't remember.

With trembling hands, she cracked the awkward thing open. She put a finger in the back of the barrel and felt nothing at all.

She hadn't loaded it!

And where was that box of special twelve-gauge shells? Somewhere here in the dining room with the rest of her stuff. But where? And should she turn on a light to see? No. Seen from outside, a light coming on would mean that someone was in the house.

She lay back on the covers and thought hard. Where was the damned box of shells?

She heard a noise outside that was not the wind. She was sure of it. Something different from tree branches or the usual creaks and cracks of an old house in winter. She felt his presence, and then she held her breath when a thin white beam of light came through the crack between the edge of the sheet of plywood and the curtain. A small spot of white light began to traverse the room, starting at the door into the kitchen and moving slowly, very slowly, across the dining room-living room wall. She pulled the covers right up over her head and got as flat as she could under them, all the while keeping one edge pushed up by her face so she could watch that spot of light.

It traveled slowly but purposefully across the wall, but higher than it should have been if he wanted to see everything in the room. Then she remembered that someone on the ground outside looking in would have to have a box or a small ladder to really see, because the ground was almost six feet below the windowsill.

The beam went across the china cabinet, slowed, and then kept coming, now illuminating the serving surface of the buffet. There was all sorts of stuff up there.

Including the small green rectangular end of the box of shells.

She watched the spot of light slip across the box, go past it, and then stop.

Shit! He'd seen it.

But when the light came back, it didn't stop on the box. It stopped on the shiny scale of the sphygmomanometer, which the nurse used to take her blood pressure. The light lingered on that for a second and then moved left again, continuing its inspection of the wall.

If I slip out of the bed right now, before it gets to me, she thought, then maybe I can get to the box. And the light, if he does get it low enough, will reveal an empty bed, too.

Have to do it, she told herself. Now, right now. Before he puts a crowbar into that crack and levers the plywood out of the way. The alarm system is only on the doors, not the windows.

The tiny spot of light was illuminating the tops of the living room curtains twenty feet away, but still moving left. Pretty soon now, it would hit the headboard of the hospital bed. She dreaded making the move — it would put direct pressure on the bandaged area of her back.

You have to move now, she told herself again. Before he sees the bed. Without that gun, you are dead meat.

She stopped thinking about it and forced her bare feet to move left and out from under the covers. The floor was colder than she had expected. She hesitated, trying to figure out the best way, and then decided to slip down onto her knees at the side of the bed, as if she were saying prayers. That would allow her to hold on to the sheet so she wouldn't fall, while getting her down on the floor with the least wrenching of her back.

She rolled carefully over on her left side, clutching the covers, thankful for the traditional nurse's tight tucks at the corners, and then felt her knees slide off the edge of the mattress and then down onto the frame, and finally onto the floor with a bump that jarred her wound and caused some of the bandages to pull taughtly across her skin. But she was on the floor.

She could see the beam of light coming closer, so she smoothed out the covers as best she could and began to crawl over toward the buffet on her hands and knees, each movement a little more painful than the last. She kept her head hunched down so as not to pass out, but the dizziness wouldn't go away. It hurt to move, but she had to get to the buffet.

She couldn't see the light anymore from her head-down position on the floor, but she could see the legs of the buffet, and they were right in front of her face. Her knees were stinging and the stitches around her wound felt like they were tearing, but now she had to stand up, or at least reach up, and get that damned box. She lifted her head but then put it right back down again. She was much weaker than she'd thought. She looked left, searching for the beam of light, but it wasn't there anymore.

Show time, she thought to herself. He's done looking. Now he's coming. She grabbed one of the legs of the buffet and began to lever herself off the floor.

"Where we going now?" Swamp asked as they headed up Wisconsin Avenue in a Secret Service sedan. Lucy was in the front seat with the driver, seat belt fully on this time. Hallory and Swamp were in the backseat.

"District cops report a church warden finding what he's calling a government Suburban. There was a badly injured cop in the back. This was the same cop who's been missing from the downtown Mall area for a couple hours. And it sounds like the same Suburban that was seen going through a police checkpoint, supposedly en route to Georgetown University Hospital."

"Why do we think it's him?" Swamp asked.

"Because the VID numbers make it as the Suburban bought last Friday," Lucy said. "By a Mr. E. Hodler."

Swamp nodded his head in the darkness as the car went through another roadblock checkpoint on its way uptown. The cops examined ID cards, looked inside, and then waved them on. Swamp could just about imagine what had happened: The guy had had a vehicle prepositioned, maybe two, but he'd rigged one out as federal law-enforcement vehicle. He'd done it before, if that was the same Suburban that had been behind Wall when she fled to West Virginia. Find a cop on the way, run him down, throw the body in the back, and then get through the rest of the roadblocks with an injured cop, one of their own, in the back. Yes indeed, that would work.

"The cop alive?"

"Was when they transported him. Came to long enough to say the guy ran him down in the street near the Jefferson Memorial."

Ten minutes later, they stopped next to the entrance to the church parking lot, which was shimmering with flashing blue strobe lights. The lot was filled with vehicles and both District cops and Secret Service agents.

"We really want to go in there?" Swamp asked.

"It's the hottest part of the trail right now," Hallory said.

Swamp looked out the window, searching for a street sign. "Where are we now, exactly?"

"Quebec Street and Wisconsin," the driver announced. Swamp turned to Hallory.

Quebec Street, Swamp thought. That's her street. The nurse. Who'd been trying to tell them one more important thing. "I have a hunch," he said. "He's obviously abandoned the vehicle. He either had another one set up here or he's on foot. And if he's on foot, I think I know where he's headed."

"And the answer is?" Lucy said skeptically, turning around in her seat.

"This is Quebec Street. That nurse's house is on Quebec Street. On the other side of Connecticut. That's only — what?"

"Five, six blocks," the driver said, pointing. "That way."

"Okay. He thinks he killed her up there in West Virginia. After trying more than once. Why did he want her dead so bad?"

"Because she could ID him, of course," Lucy said wearily.

"But she couldn't. This guy had totally changed his face, not to mention the ability to grow breasts on demand and fool even Ms. Wall into thinking 'he' was a 'she.'"

"Excuse me, 'grow breasts'?" Lucy asked, exchanging glances with Hallory. The driver was listening with rapt attention.

"When I first interviewed Connie Wall, she told me that they'd done a partial sexual-reassignment procedure on one male patient. Gave him the ability to pump some kind of fluid into skin pouches on his chest that would give him totally realistic breasts. One procedure among many, but what if that patient was him? That naked lady running out of the burning duplex? I'll bet that was him. And he needed the nurse dead because he needed her house when it was all over. To go to ground, right under our noses."

Hallory looked at Lucy. She shrugged. "It's possible, I guess," she said.

"Anybody got a better idea?" Swamp asked.

Heismann swore under his breath. He hadn't been able to find anything to stand on, so he'd been able to see little through the crack between the plywood and the window frame. The problem was that antique race car. What was it doing back here at the nurse's house? Would the police have just returned it to her house, even though she was dead? The car salesman had indicated it was valuable. Wouldn't they lock it up?

He shivered in the cold night air. The neighborhood was as quiet as a graveyard. He'd seen no police vehicles anywhere since crossing Connecticut Avenue. The house was dark and locked up tight. Those security company decals on the doors and out in front of the house meant that there was an alarm system, but would it sound if all the telephone systems were still down? It might not ring in a central office, but the system could have a locally audible alarm that would bring neighbors if he smashed in a door.

So, it would have to be a window, and this one was already broken. Leaving his briefcase, he went over to the garage, but now it was padlocked. Then he saw the trash cans. There were two. He rolled them both over behind the house to the dining room window and turned them over on their sides. But when he tried to stand atop them, the plastic gave way and he sank silently down into the grass. He stepped back from the house, backed into the shadow of a tree, and examined all the windows again. Then he saw movement up on the second floor, in a window above the back porch roof. Was there someone in there? He stared hard at the window, and then saw it again: A curtain or drape moved. He finally realized it was moving in time to the occasional gusts of wind.

That upstairs window was cracked open.

He stared at it for a few more minutes before he was convinced. Then he saw that one of the tree branches above him could get him to the porch roof.

Connie heard the scuffling noise out on the back porch and held her breath. Had she imagined it? But then it came again, a sound of something heavy moving on the roof of the back porch. Then silence, then a sound from inside the house: a window being raised. She swore silently: She hadn't been able to check upstairs. She knew exactly which window it was, the one she cracked open to provide some cross ventilation when the house was all shut up in winter.

She heard him drop down onto the floor and then slide the window back down. The floorboards creaked above her head, although he was otherwise moving quietly. She could imagine that white flashlight beam probing the upstairs rooms and hallway. She lifted the phone again, but there was still no dial tone. She put it back as quietly as she could and lay back on the covers, gripping the snake gun between her knees.

Okay, he's going to search the house and eventually come in here. What do I do then? She tried to remember what the dealer had told her about the snake gun: It was originally a flare pistol. Twelve-gauge gun, but only an eight-inch barrel. You needed to hold it with both hands, because it would kick like a mule. Around six feet for an effective range. And you had to use only the special shells, or it would blow up.

She heard footsteps coming down the stairs. He was confident now, sure that there was no one home. Connie gripped the gun with both hands. She raised her knees under the sheets, and twisted her body slightly so that she could cover both doorways, the one to the kitchen and the one to the living room. Then she took a deep breath and waited.

Heismann stopped two steps from the bottom. His mental antennas had detected something. What, exactly, he didn't know, but his instincts were buzzing, and he drew out the Walther. He remained on the stairs for a whole minute, wondering if he was imagining something or if there was someone in the house. Because that's what it felt like — someone in the house.

All right, if there was, where would he be? The stairs gave him a view of the living room, where he'd encountered the nurse's derringer that night and nearly had his head blown right off. The chair was upright but still askew in the living room, but the drapes were drawn, admitting almost no light except across the very tops. That left the kitchen and the dining room. He tried to remember the layout. If he went through the living room and into the dining room, someone in the kitchen could get behind him by coming down that front hallway. But if he went the other way, left through the hallway, into the kitchen, and then into the dining room, anyone trying to sneak up on him would have to come down that narrow hallway, and thus present a much better target.

He listened some more, but he heard only the outside sounds of wind and shrubbery. He felt his heartbeat accelerating. He'd been on the run ever since noon, and he was tired, thirsty, and hungry. His "breasts" hurt. But he was almost safe. No one would look here for the Capitol bomber. All he had to do was wait for a few days. They couldn't keep the capital of the entire free world sealed for more than a day or so, and then he'd find a way to start that car out there and simply drive away. He'd go west and then south, sell the old race car and get himself another invisible minivan. He had two other passports, so from Florida to the islands, and from there to his money. And from there, anywhere at all.

There was no one in this house. It was just his overactive imagination. He pocketed the gun and stepped down onto the main floor and walked into the kitchen, where he turned on the light. He saw the hospital bed in the dining room out of the corner of his eye and stopped dead, one foot just off the floor. There was someone in the bed.

He turned his head and stared, amazed to see that damned nurse looking right at him, her knees raised as if she were about to give birth, the sheet pulled right up to her chin.

He turned slowly to face her, casually dropping his right hand into his pocket to grip the Walther. When he had his fingers wrapped securely around the gun, he stepped toward her, forcing a smile.

"I am impressed," he said, although his throat was dry. Where were her hands? Did she have a gun under those sheets? But then he saw that she was trembling, and that her lower forearms were visible just above the hem of the sheet, which she must be clutching. Hands trembling, too. He took another step, approaching the foot of the bed. Her face was very white, and there were pouches under her eyes.

"You should be dead," he said in German.

She just looked at him, her eyes bright with fear. He took in the pain pump's tubing, the walker, and the wheelchair. She was here, but she was gravely injured. And so helpless, those knees drawn up like a child's, as if she'd just awakened from a bad dream and found her nightmare at the foot of the bed.

He stood there for a long moment. Well, there was nothing more to say here, now, was there? He withdrew the gun, glanced at it to make sure it was ready for business, and then lifted it.

Something changed in the woman's eyes, and then the sheet billowed out towards him and the world ended in a shattering roar of noise, bright red light, and incredible pain.

Lucy got up off one knee, the edges of her mouth working, as if she was trying to contain something in her stomach. "Took his face right off," she announced unnecessarily. "And his chest… well…"

Swamp could see that Hallory was a little green around the gills, too, which wasn't surprising, given the mess on the floor. He didn't feel so great himself. Connie Wall had her head back on the pillows, her eyes shut. Her face was pale in the light from the overhead fixture. They had driven up right before the shooting, and there was still a strong smell of gun smoke in the room. And some other smells, too. They'd been getting out of their car in the driveway when they heard the truncated roar of a shotgun in the house. The driver had broken down the back door and then had to silence the alarm siren with a hammer while the other three assessed the situation in the dining room.

The blast from the snake gun had blown Heismann's body back into the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, where it proceeded to create a large, wet, and still-spreading mess all over the kitchen linoleum. The driver was talking on his radio to the agents still gathered in the church parking lot.

"What is that thing?" Hallory asked, looking at the snake gun lying on the scorched sheet. Swamp explained it to him.

"On their way," the driver announced.

Hallory stepped delicately through all the blood. "So, is that him?" he asked Swamp.

"Who could tell?" Swamp replied.

"Open his shirt," Lucy said. "See if—"

"We shouldn't disturb the body," Hallory told her. "Technically, this is a crime scene."

Lucy made a rude noise. "You want a scene?" she said. "Go to Capitol Hill. I need to know if this is what those cops saw."

Hallory looked to Swamp as if seeking some support, but Swamp just shrugged. He wanted to know, too. They sure as hell weren't going to get anything from the wreckage of this guy's face. Lucy walked out of the dining room, going the long way around to the kitchen. She rooted through drawers until she found the cutlery. She took out a knife, then threw a pile of dish towels next to the body so she didn't have to walk in all the blood. Bending over, she cut his shirt off from neck to waist, then pulled the material aside.

Swamp looked but couldn't tell. The bottom half of the shotgun pattern had hit the man in the chest, and where any breasts would have been was now a field of tattered hamburger. It was possible. There was one rather pronounced fleshy pouch on the right side. Was that a gleam of plastic? A plastic sac? Yes, it was.

"Son of a bitch," Hallory whispered.

"Got that right," Connie croaked from the dining room. "Is he dead?"

Just before sunrise, Swamp took his seat at the folding table in the makeshift hearing room, which looked like a plain staff lunchroom. He was flanked at the table by Hallory and the director of the Secret Service. Sitting behind Swamp, their chairs against the wall, were the United States Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security. Some of their staffers were standing alongside. Swamp felt uncomfortable sitting at the witness table while cabinet officers were sitting behind him like support staffers, but that was the way they had wanted it. We'll be behind you all the way, Mr. Morgan, the AG had said. Wa-a-y behind me, Swamp remembered thinking.

Seven tired and harried-looking legislators were facing him at a second folding table on the other side of the room. They were variously dressed— some in shirtsleeves, some with ties, others with no ties. Only the chairman had a suit coat on. The room was already hot and musty. Attempts to open some windows had failed as they were apparently painted shut. There were no thrones, no individual microphones, no raised dais — none of the accoutrements Swamp normally associated with a congressional hearing. Each legislator had been allowed one staffer, who had to stand right behind his principal, his back against the wall. The chairman, a white-haired senator, had a single yellow legal pad in front of him. The other legislators had a variety of folders, notebooks, coffee cups, and legal pads. Arrayed against one end wall was a bank of television cameras surrounded by portable stage lights. The reporters were trying hard not to stand on the snake's nest of thick black cables littering the floor.

The chairman knocked an empty coffee mug against the table to bring the session to order. He said good morning to the cabinet officers and then addressed the director of the Secret Service. "Mr. Director," he began, "I understand that you've brought us an eyewitness to what happened yesterday."

"Yes, sir, that's correct," the director replied. "This is Special Agent T. Lee Morgan, U.S. Secret Service, retired. He was recalled to active duty in the Department of Homeland Security after nine eleven, and he now serves in the Office of Special Investigations, DHS."

"Very well. Mr. Morgan, please stand to be sworn."

As if upon signal, the floodlights came up and Swamp had to avert his face to avoid the sudden glare. The chairman himself, apparently used to bright lights, stood and administered the oath, and Swamp stood to solemnly swear that he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing already that he was about to do just the opposite. He had had one hour to read and reread his White House-prepared statement, an exercise that had required more coffee than he'd had in many months. Now his hands were jittery as he gripped the statement folder, which bore the gold seal of the Secret Service. Hallory scribbled something on his legal pad and then turned it so Swamp could read it. It said, "Relax — they think you're a hero."

"Mr. Morgan, we've not been given a copy of your statement, so if you'd like to just say what you have to say, we'll proceed from there." He paused to rub the side of his face wearily. "It's been a long day and night for everyone, and I apologize for the rather Spartan setting. But the building is very full right now, as I'm sure you know."

He proceeded to introduce the other members of the hastily convened Joint Committee on Intelligence for the benefit of the television cameras, then signaled for Swamp to read his statement. Swamp could almost feel the cameras swiveling to focus on him. One of the attorney general's staffers got up and passed copies of the statement down the table to the legislators, while another gave some copies to the press representatives.

He read the statement, which consisted of ten pages of double-spaced fourteen-point text. The statement gave the antecedents of his original investigation, and then the sequence of events Swamp had experienced personally, up to and including the shoot-out at the bank. It ended with Swamp saying that he could unequivocally certify that the person who fired the mortar rounds was the same person he had met before during the course of his investigation: the managing director of the Royal Kingdom Bank. He closed his folder and waited for questions.

The chairman started it off. "Mr. Morgan, did you have the bank manager under surveillance after you and the District police interviewed him?"

"No, sir."

"Why not?"

"No probable cause, Senator. At the time of the interview, it appeared that their only connection to the German was essentially a money-changing operation. An entirely legal one, which they did report."

"How about after you realized they had rented the town house to this German assassin?"

Swamp hesitated. The whole truth, as much as I can, he thought. In fact, both Hallory and the director of the Secret Service had coached him to channel all the questions, if he could, toward blaming the Secret Service for not listening to him. "Congressional hearings are always about blame," the director had told him. "They'll know the attack failed, but not why yet. We need twenty-four more hours of confusion to tie off all the loose ends."

"By the time we — I—realized that there was a connection, and that the target might be the inauguration, not the speech to the joint session, I was no longer inside the system, Senator."

"You'd been fired, I understand. They thought the whole thing was a firefly."

The director raised his hands. "Special Agent Morgan wasn't fired, Senator," he said. "He was on recalled annuitant status, and he was simply relieved of his active duties."

"With all due respect, Mr. Director," the chairman said, "that's a distinction without a difference. Mr. Morgan, did you feel like you got fired?"

"Yes, sir," Swamp said, remembering his instructions.

"Yet you persisted, Mr. Morgan. You'd been a member of the SES, a high-level official at Secret Service headquarters. Surely you knew the rules."

"I judged these to be highly unusual circumstances, Mr. Chairman," Swamp said. "Just as the security precautions for the inauguration were unprecedented. It seemed to me that I had little to lose if I was all wrong, but the government had a lot to lose if this guy managed to bomb the inauguration."

"You got that goddamn right, Mr. Morgan," the Senator said. Murmurs of agreement filled the room. "I was in the Army, in Vietnam, seems like a hundred years ago. I heard that mortar thump when it started firing. I knew what that sound was. I knew that it had to be a big-ass mortar, too. And when stuff started going off in the air above the Capitol, I was looking for my trenching tool." There was some subdued laughter.

"I was in the room with him, Mr. Chairman," Swamp said. "And with the mortar. I still can't hear so well. But the main thing is, it was him. The manager of the Royal Kingdom Bank. He even taunted me. I think he wanted me to watch him do it."

"So, Mr. Morgan," the chairman said, his genial smile fading, "if the bank manager executed the attack, where the hell was the German during all this?"

Swamp just looked at him for a second. The smile was gone, and the Senator now looked like the prosecutor he had been. Shit, Swamp thought. He knows. He knows this is all bogus. Hallory cleared his throat gently, as if to nudge Swamp to respond. "All I can surmise, Senator," Swamp said, "is that something happened right there at the end that necessitated the bank manager's direct intervention. We think the German had had a year's worth of identity changes at that clinic, which was owned in part by that bank. That may have been part of his payoff — he was known in the Interpol system as an associate of Muslim terrorist organizations. They used him to destroy his trail — to burn the clinic, to kill the one possible witness who was still alive and who might remember what he looked like when he was finished with the ID changeover. They used him to set up the town house for the attack. To receive the weapon. To set up the weapon."

"And then what, they kill him right before the attack? Why would they do that?"

"I don't know, sir. Perhaps they were cleaning up their last remaining loose end. I don't know."

"You don't know," the chairman stated, more than a hint of skepticism in his voice.

Swamp decided to just stay on message. "There's a lot we don't know here," he said. "But what I do know is that the man I saw firing that mortar into the Capitol was Emir Mutaib. And when I confronted him at the bank, he ran."

"And you just shot him?" This from another senator.

Swamp nodded. "That's right, Senator. His security guards opened fire on me. I returned fire. When the smoke cleared, he was in the parking lot, about to get away. At that time, I had no idea the attack had failed. In fact, I was pretty much convinced that the attack had succeeded all too well. So, yes, I shot him down."

"Was this man working for the government of Saudi Arabia?" another legislator asked.

"I don't know, sir," Swamp said.

"Does the government of Saudi Arabia own that bank?"

"I don't know, sir," said Swamp. "I would assume that the same people who run Saudi Arabia run that bank. That's the way things seem to work over there. But technically, I don't know."

The chairman leaned forward intently. "So you don't know for a fact," he said, "that this man you shot, this Mutaib, was an agent of the government of Saudi Arabia?"

"What I know, Senator, was that this was the man who fired that big-ass mortar at you yesterday noon."

There was a sudden silence in the room. But the senator then came right back at Swamp. "The fact that you were all on your own, both in that town house and, later, in that bank, indicates to me a pretty massive failure of the government's intelligence operations, Mr. Morgan. Can you explain how that happened?"

"No, sir, I cannot. I can speculate, maybe."

"Yes, by all means, speculate for us, Special Agent Morgan."

Swamp resisted an urge to wet his lips. "I think that the entire security apparatus here in the capital was totally focused on the inauguration. You also have to remember that my theory of this so-called firefly was that the attack was aimed at the joint session. Mr. Hallory here was not convinced. He thought it was a firefly, and if it wasn't, he had almost another month to deal with it. But the correct answer is, I don't know."

"There's an awful lot you don't know, Mr. Morgan," the senator said.

"I'd have to agree with that assessment, Senator," Swamp said. "I suspect there will be the mother of all investigations into this one once the smoke clears."

"You all can count on that, sir," the senator said, then sat back in his chair, his lips pressed together. Swamp didn't know what to say to that, but it was clear that some, if not all, of the legislators knew or at least suspected that they were being had. He was saved by the attorney general, who announced from behind Swamp that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which, unfortunately, had not been brought into this matter, had already launched an in-depth investigation into all aspects of this breach of homeland security. To Swamp's surprise, the secretary of Homeland Security echoed those sentiments, choosing to ignore the AG's cheap shot. Or was he reading from his own carefully prepared script?

"This is all passing strange, Mr. Attorney General," the chairman said. "But as for me, I'm presently satisfied that the actions now being taken against the government of Saudi Arabia as a result of this incident are justified. Especially given the fact that we have an eyewitness. And, for my esteemed colleagues' information, yes, there will be a great deal of sorting out to be done in the days ahead by the new Congress. Gentlemen, I'm exhausted. I see no purpose to prolonging this little… exercise. Do I hear a motion?"

The representative to his right moved to adjourn, and this was seconded immediately by another senator. The television lights hissed off and the media people began a scramble to get through the door at the same time.

"Good job," the attorney general murmured as he brushed past Swamp on his way over to talk to the chairman. Hallory said the same thing, then indicated that they should leave through the room's other door to avoid any media ambushes. They succeeded in doing that and made their way down to the congressional subway, which would get them back to one of the House office buildings.

"I felt like I was standing in front of a campfire, kicking up smoke and ashes," Swamp said.

"Exactly so," Hallory replied. "Trust me, some of them knew it was Kabuki. But now the whole world knows we have an eyewitness to what they were trying to do. Consider yourself the smoking gun."

Swamp had a thought. "This was really all about the OPEC thing, wasn't it?" he asked. "The Al Qaeda prisoners — they were the bonus, not the other way around."

Hallory didn't say anything as the two-car train pulled quietly alongside the platform. "That's well above my pay grade, but I think you may be right," he said finally. "I mean, hell, what's the Persian Gulf always been about, Swamp? Bombs and oil. Bombs and oil. That's all those people seem to be good for."

"Why do I know I'll be coming back here for the entire next year?" Swamp asked as they waited for the doors to open.

"Not necessarily," Hallory said. "I will, for damn sure, and lots of folks senior to me, too, especially when the full scope of this becomes known."

"How about Lucy?"

"What about Lucy?"

"She was kind of intimately tied up in this thing, wasn't she?"

Hallory looked at him with a tired smile. "Two things you don't know about Lucy, Swamp. One, she doesn't work for me. She works for Bertie. She's his direct liaison officer to the Homeland Security fusion committee. And, two, this whole goddamned thing was her idea."

Swamp was stunned. "She works for Bertie? She told me she was your deputy."

Hallory shrugged. "I guess she lied," he said. "She does that, you know. All those people across the river do that."

Union Station was starting to fill up with nervous travelers at ten o'clock that morning as Swamp and Bertie sat in the Amtrak passenger lounge, having a cup of coffee. The city had been unsealed at 7:00 a.m., and there'd been a government announcement on all the television channels that the national emergency was over. The new president had come on the air to give a reassuring speech, accompanied by his principal cabinet officers. He said that details of the terrorist attack on the Capitol would be forthcoming later in the day. And then he declared the capital and all members of the government were safe and that the conspiracy, which had originated in Saudi Arabia, had failed. He hinted broadly that what people had seen on their televisions might not have been entirely accurate. Swamp had watched the news back at Secret Service headquarters, including three minutes of his own testimony before the hastily assembled Joint Intelligence Committee, and then he'd grabbed a quick nap in Hallory's office. A while later, Bertie'd showed up from Langley to announce that they were going to Union Station. Swamp had cleaned up in one of the office bathrooms.

On the drive over in the Agency limo, Bertie had explained that the government wanted their eyewitness out of sight and out of town for the next few weeks. The airlift of over two thousand Al Qaeda suspects was almost complete, and all Americans were either out of Saudi Arabia or safe at the Prince Sultan Air Base there. The Saudis, along with the rest of the world, were going to learn over the course of the weekend the full extent of the American deception. All this would be clear once the government restored the phones and the airwaves to civilian control.

"There's going to be medium chaos in the network news departments," Bertie'd said. "Not to mention some pointed questions in certain diplomatic channels. You know, why the governments were not given a heads-up last night at the White House."

"Pointed questions."

"Well, you know how they get," Bertie had replied with a weary smile. "This is going to be a really interesting weekend here in Fun City."

Swamp had tried to stifle a yawn but failed. "Where's Ms. Wall?"

"That cop you were working with? Detective Sergeant Cullen, was it? Word is that he's taking her in."

"Is that smart, legally speaking?"

"Not like there's going to be a court case," Bertie'd said, and Swamp had smiled, remembering what Jake had said earlier. Then they'd arrived at the station, where there were still squads of cops milling around out front and within the great hall. Bertie had ushered Swamp through the security cordon with the help of some Secret Service agents, handed Swamp a ticket to Harpers Ferry, and then suggested coffee, as they had about a half hour to kill.

"We're going to need a full-scale deposition for the classified case record," Bertie told him, lowering his voice as the passenger lounge filled up now that the station was coming back to life. "That will include input from Special Agent White, of course, and the District police and Arson officers involved."

"And your own case executive, Lucy VanMetre? Gonna depose her, too?"

Bertie's eyebrows rose. Swamp told him what Hallory had said earlier. Finally, Bertie nodded. "That's probably more than you needed to know."

" 'Liaison officer' to the fusion committee? That could mean anything at all, Bertie."

"As you should know, Swamp. Anyway, we'll have a full-scale deposition team out there later today. Get it all on tape. Then you're expendable."

"Again."

"Like you told the Man, you take the king's shilling. We're all expendable in this business."

"Back there in the Situation Room," Swamp said. "You said you people had surveillance set up in that duplex. So you guys had to know that Heismann looked like that banker."

Bertie took a sip of coffee. "Not really," he said. "We had no phone line in there. We could listen via a radio device, but video requires a much bigger pipe. Besides, we had no reason to know what he looked like."

"But you owned Mutaib from the time his German went under reconstruction. Mutaib's bank owned the Paki doctors. You could have followed every procedure done on the German."

Bertie's face hardened. "And your question is?"

"You knew I'd go after that guy."

"Yes, we suspected you might."

"The cop car, the one that crashed into Lucy's official car down on the Mall — accident?"

"Looked like one to me," Bertie said.

"And yet their seat belts failed, while mine worked."

"Government cars. What can I say? Maintenance often isn't what it's supposed to be. The front ones get a lot more use."

"And the car was hit hard enough to hurt the people in the front seat, and yet it was still drivable."

"Swamp," Bertie said patiently, "you're starting to bore me."

"Who were the shooters at the town house, Bertie? Right after the attack?"

"Shooters?"

"Yeah. Long guns. When I tried to get out of the burning building. On the front side."

"This is news. Did you report this to Lucy when she picked you up?"

Did I? Swamp asked himself. No, he had not. He'd been deaf and his adrenaline had been crashing. He said as much.

Bertie gave him an elaborate shrug. "And your real question is?"

"You knew I'd go after him, and that Mutaib might get killed in the process, especially after what I'd seen on television."

"Perhaps." Bertie sighed. "There was also the chance that he'd just put up his hands and surrender. He was our Arab, after all. He didn't have to admit that in front of all those people, but he could have just gone along quietly when you showed up."

"Until his security guys drew down on me. Who were they really working for, Bertie?"

"Oh, c'mon, Swamp."

"They working for you, too?"

"Listen to you."

"But if he did try to escape, there was a pretty damn good chance his ass'd be a grape. As, in fact, it turned out."

Bertie looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. "What's your real problem here, Swamp?"

"Two problems: One, you let your pet Arab authorize a fire that killed four innocent people. Okay, maybe two not so innocent. But two were. And second, I think you used me to take your Arab out. Something I suspect you were going to have to do, one way or another."

Bertie shrugged again, but he said nothing.

"I didn't sign on to be one of your executioners, Bertie."

Bertie's face settled into a cold mask. "Correct," he said. "You were Mutaib's executioner. And we, of course, don't employ executioners;"

"Oh right."

"We don't," Bertie insisted. He looked around for a moment. "They're all contractors."

"I was carrying Agency contractor credentials when I did that," Swamp said.

"Actually, you weren't. You left them back in your apartment, remember? Where I suspect they've since gone astray."

It was Swamp's turn to stare. "Look," Bertie said. "Okay, you were used. To very good effect, as it turns out. We've bagged the heart and soul of Al Qaeda and split OPEC right down the middle. Prices are going to fall like a stone. If your conscience is really bothering you, balance one turncoat Arab banker, two shady foreign doctors, and two — okay, three — innocent American women against all those folks in the World Trade Center back on nine eleven. That do it for you?"

"I can't believe I'm hearing this, Bertie. This is America, for God's sake."

"It's America at war, Swamp. Wake up and smell the body bags. War's hell, just like Sherman said." He sat back in his chair. "If it's any consolation, the German told Mutaib he was going to kill the next-door neighbor, and we did get her out of there. But that's not what you're really worried about, is it?"

Swamp stared down at his coffee cup for a moment as the first departure calls of the morning echoed through the cavernous station. "No, that's not what I'm really worried about," he said finally.

"You have to say it."

"The Arab banker's dead, which solves one of your problems. The mortar man's dead and his face is conveniently gone, which solves another problem. Which leaves me. I'm the only outside guy left alive who knows what actually happened here."

Bertie smiled then and patted Swamp's hand reassuringly as he got up to leave. "You just get on your train and go home, Swamp Morgan. The deposition team will be up shortly."

"How do I know it's a deposition team," Swamp said, "and not a disposition team?"

"Because you're the eyewitness. That committee tape this morning was nice, but a live agent will be better, you know, once Congress really gets rolling."

"Hallory said this morning that I wouldn't be needed on Capitol Hill."

"He was probably trying to make you feel better. Of course you're going to be going back there. We all are. You're our only inside guy."

"Would that be the case if Mutaib were still alive?"

"But he isn't, is he?"

"Hell, I don't know," Swamp said. "That body at the nurse's house had no face. Who's to say that wasn't the German at the bank? Who's to say you and Lucy don't have Mr. Mutaib squirreled away in a safe house somewhere?"

"So who was the guy at the nurse's house, then?"

"Some body you planted?" Swamp said. "Shit, Bertie, which guy did I kill, and which guy did she kill?"

Bertie just shook his head. "You're tired and you're getting paranoid in your old age, pardner. You'll be just fine. Just catch your train. We'll talk later, when you've had a chance to rest up a little, get your head right."

Swamp couldn't think of anything else to say, so they shook hands and Bertie left. Swamp exhaled forcefully as he watched Bertie walk across the concourse, and then he saw Bertie acknowledge the three large men who came out of nowhere to assume protective flanking positions around him. Swamp wondered how long they'd been there while he and Bertie had been having their little talk. Or who else was still in the great hall, watching him.

He got out his ticket and then looked up at the scrolling arrival and departures board for his train time. The train to Harpers Ferry always went through Baltimore, and the next train to Baltimore was boarding in eight minutes on Track 9. He finished his coffee, left a tip, and headed for the bathroom. From there, he went out to Track 9, walked up the line of cars until he finally saw some empty seats through the windows, and slipped into the lead car.

Once in his seat, he tried to reassure himself that everything was going to be all right, despite his many misgivings. This wasn't Russia. The Agency wasn't the KGB, or whatever it was called these days. Yes, there would be hell to pay from several quarters, but the timing had been pretty clever— precisely at the change of administrations. If any truly ugly stuff came out, the new people could always blame the previous people, which probably had been the original agreement. And, yes, there were still lots and lots of Muslim and other terrorists out there bent on the destruction of Western civilization in general and America in particular, but the United States had stabbed the Arab piece of the puzzle right in the heart. Take down the terrorists' brains and money, get your hands around the oil monster's neck, if only temporarily, and you'd done a good day's work.

Bertie was right: He was exhausted, and his physical exhaustion was making him paranoid. And he was not the only one who knew what had happened — everyone involved in the planning of this thing knew it. Those security guards in the bank couldn't have been working for Bertie, because that would mean the Agency had put out orders to kill him.

The train lurched into motion and began to gather speed. But something Bertie had said was still nagging at the back of his mind — some phrase. He closed his eyes and thought about it.

What had Bertie said about the deposition team? "Get it all on tape." Right. "And then we're all expendable."

No, wait — he actually said, "Then you're expendable."

And they already have me on tape. Saying the most important thing anyway. And not saying anything about what happened later, or why. Surely they're going to explain, or are they just going to hunker down and make inquiring minds find out?

"Get it all tape. Then you're expendable." That's what he'd said. Right out loud.

He opened his eyes as he felt the train slowing. Why are we stopping? he wondered. And then he remembered. The commuter trains always stopped at the New Carrolton Metro station, out along the Capital Beltway, en route to Baltimore and the northeast corridor.

But wait a minute, he thought. Not going this way. Not outbound in the morning. They stop at New Carrolton on the way in, but not on the way out. They only do that at night, to pick up outbound passengers.

In fact, he thought as he looked at his watch, this can't be a commuter train to Harpers Ferry. It's too late in the morning. It might be going to Baltimore, but it sure as hell won't be going over to Harpers Ferry. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs. He knew he was still missing something important here.

And then it hit him: It wasn't a workday. This was Saturday. There weren't any commuter trains to Harpers Ferry on Saturday.

So why had Bertie put him on this particular train? Maybe he'd forgotten it was Saturday, too?

The train slid into the New Carrolton station and squealed to a stop. On impulse, Swamp got up, walked quickly to the back of the car, and got off. He saw the backs of a few people as they climbed into the train but otherwise the upper station platform appeared to be empty. The train's doors remained open.

What am I doing? he thought, even as he acknowledged a strong and certain urge to get off that train. He couldn't have put it into words, but he just knew.

Get out of here. Move.

He walked quickly over to the down escalator, which would take him to the tunnel leading over to the Metro side of the station. He caught a glimpse of some other men getting off at the far end of the upper platform, but right now he was unwilling to turn around and show his face.

Move. Get off this platform.

He kept his face averted and started down just as he heard the train doors close behind him. As the train began sliding out of the station, his head was just about to descend below the escalator's threshold. He chanced a look just as the sixth and last car pulled abreast. The train was accelerating, going fast enough to blur the faces visible inside the windows. Which is when, just as his head submerged below the platform, he caught one quick glimpse of a woman sitting all the way in the back, next to the very last window. A woman whose hair looked like a glowing mass of spun gold in the midmorning light.

Lucy?

He felt his pulse begin to pound and his face flush in fear. He started to trot down the descending escalator. As he stepped off at the bottom, his mind was already arguing with itself. Couldn't have been. Sure looked like her. You couldn't see her face. That hair. Had to be. Couldn't be.

He turned right and headed for the street-level tunnel that went under the tracks for the main line. There was no one else about, and he hesitated as he got to the entrance. It was a short tunnel, maybe a hundred feet, but brightly lighted, with clean white-tiled walls. Nothing in the least sinister about it. But still he hesitated. Tunnels were traps, and if that had been Lucy in the train, he needed to watch his ass here. He was physically and mentally exhausted, so he really had to concentrate.

He glanced around one more time, but there was still no one in the lower station, not even an Amtrak attendant in the ticket kiosk.

That's strange he thought. There's always — no, not on Saturdays. On weekends, they check the tickets on the train. Right.

He started into the tunnel, already planning out his route. He'd take the Metro's Blue Line all the way over to the Rosslyn station, then transfer for Ballston. Get to his apartment. Get his Rover. No, the Agency had his Rover. Or did they? He'd left it in Arlington, hadn't he? What seemed like a hundred years ago. He was getting confused.

When he was three-quarters of the way through the tunnel, he stopped short as four large men appeared in front of him. They were all in suits and trench coats, and all wore mirrored sunglasses. Instinctively, he turned around, but a fifth man was walking into the tunnel behind him, dressed like the others, but without the sunglasses.

It was Gary White.

"Gary?" Swamp called, hearing his own voice break in nervous relief.

"Mr. Morgan, sir," Gary said as he closed the distance. "You look like hell, if I may say so."

"What—"

"Relax, Mr. Morgan. We're the good guys. We've got cars out front."

Swamp didn't know what to do. The other four had closed in from their end of the tunnel, but nobody was taking a threatening stance. A man and a woman came into the tunnel, saw the group of men in suits, and walked right by them.

Swamp and Gary ended up in the backseat of a gray Crown Vic; two of the other men sat up front. The other two were in another Crown Vic behind them. Swamp rested his head on the back of the seat as the cars pulled out.

"Okay," he said wearily. "Where to this time? And what's going on?"

"What's going on is that Carlton Hallory had some reservations about Mr. Walker sending you on a train ride. So he sent us to ride with you."

"I'm really losing my touch," Swamp said. "I never made a one of you."

"You weren't exactly looking, sir," Gary said.

"Been a year or two since I've been a street agent."

"You never really were a street agent, Mr. Morgan."

Very true. Swamp nodded. It hurt his neck. "You said Carlton Hallory."

Gary grinned. He still looked like a twenty-year-old to Swamp. "Nothing wrong with your hearing now," he said. "I didn't call him Mr. Hallory today because he and I are the same rank."

Swamp turned to look at him in surprise. Gary was still grinning. "That's right. I was part of it. Right from the git-go. When did you ever get an assistant so easily?"

"I'll be damned," Swamp said. "You never worked Homicide in Fairfax County?"

"Nope. Been Secret Service for a whole lot longer than my dashing good looks would indicate."

"So what's going on? Where are we going?"

"You recall when they had your apartment phone up? La Mamba set that in motion, but she ran it out of Hallory's shop. Even got a warrant, but she-used the Secret Service to get it. Secret Service operators, too. Anyway, I was your intercept supervisor."

"Cute."

"Well, we were keeping it en famiglia. Anyway, after the big op went down, some of the equipment operators came to see me. Said they were concerned because of some things they'd heard Lucy say in Hallory's office."

"They had her phones up?"

Gary shrugged. "Her office, not her phones. The Agency can always detect shit on their phones. Carlton thought as long as the Agency was going to bug a Secret Service operative, it was only fair that the Secret Service bug an Agency operative in return."

"Hallory didn't trust Lucy?"

"She didn't get that nickname working with us," Gary pointed out. "It was mostly insurance. Anyway, I took their concerns to Carlton early this morning. When Bertie said he was going to get you out of sight after the hearing, Carlton felt uneasy. So did I. So here we are."

"And where are we going?"

"Home, Mr. Morgan. We're going to take you out to wild and wonderful West Virginia, see you through your front door, and then some guys are going to hang around for a while. Remember the agents who took you back to the apartment the day you were fired? Remember them asking you what was going on? They're back there in that other car. That's how the word got around headquarters."

"And you'll do this long enough for Bertie and company to get the message?" Swamp said.

"That's right. The director has approved this, by the way. Care to guess why?"

Swamp thought for a moment. "This whole thing was a very dangerous gambit," he said finally. "Even though it succeeded, Congress is going to investigate." He turned to look at Gary. "This was an Agency operation. Lucy's brainchild. The Secret Service was used. I'm living proof of that."

Gary smiled again. "Exactomundo," he said. "Emphasis on that word living.

"The Secret Service, looking after its own."

"Ass," Gary added. Swamp laughed.

"This is the Agency we're talking about," Swamp said as the cars accelerated down the on-ramp to the Capital Beltway. Westbound, he noted with some relief. "They're not the goddamned KGB. I'll admit that this was a pretty daring thing for them to attempt, much less pull off. But they'd never go so far as to put a hit on another government agent, right?"

"Right," Gary said.

"Right," Swamp echoed, nodding his head. The other two agents were nodding, too.

There was a five-minute silence in the car as they drove around the top of Washington, D.C., headed for the Cabin John Bridge. The Beltway traffic was its usual swirling mass of aggressively incompetent drivers. Then Swamp couldn't stand it any longer. He turned to look Gary in the eye.

"Okay," he said. "Was that or was that not Lucy I saw on that train?"

All three answered in perfect unison: "Yes."

Swamp leaned back, exhaled, and closed his eyes.