Dead Run

Bonar nodded, reluctant to move. "Man, I'm tired. You want to check with Green Bay again before we take off?"

"Called them before you got here. Sharon and the others still haven't shown up. The detective I talked to earlier went home an hour ago, but the patrols up there are running a watch-and-stop on the Rover."

Bonar held his gun tightly in the holster as he got up. "Not so long ago, I was thinking we were like a couple of old ladies, worrying about a woman who won't even give you the time of day just because she's a few hours late. But I started counting those hours while I was loading the car, and there's just too many of them."

Halloran gave him a steady look and nodded.

"Damn, Mike, this is scaring me to death."

THE GOOD THING about Bonar's Camaro-aside from the 427 big-block Chevy-was that he'd put in one of the county's new radio units just last year.

There was the usual weekend chatter coming out of Kingsford County-a couple of drunk-and-disorderlies, a bar fight with minor injuries, and poor old Ron Rohner, who saw aliens landing in his back forty almost every Saturday night-but when Bonar switched over to Missaqua's frequency, there was nothing but dead air.

"Ah," Bonar sighed. "The soothing sounds of the FBI."

"Why don't you put out a prank radio call to that jackass Well-spring up at the lime quarry? They'll never catch us in this car."

"Not with you driving."

"I'm not even going forty-five, which is just about impossible in this thing."

"Seems like you're going faster."

Halloran reined back the Camaro's 450 horses even further as they hit the Missaqua County line, which was a cruel irony, since this was the one place in the state they knew for sure didn't have a single patrol on the road. They both kept a close watch for Gretchen Vanderwhite's car, Grace's Range Rover, and anything else out of sorts, but the roads across the county were as quiet as the radio.

Exactly two minutes on the other side of Missaqua County and still twenty miles from Hamilton, Bonar fell sound asleep, and judging by the depth and volume of his snoring, he would probably stay that way for a while. He didn't even stir when Halloran pulled into the gas station where they were meeting Magozzi, got out and slammed the door. By the time Halloran finished his calls in the station and came back out, there was a shiny silver thing big enough to be its own tourist attraction pulled up in the truck lot. Bonar was walking around it with his hands in his pockets, his head tipped back and his mouth open. Harley Davidson, bearded, tattooed, and leathered, looking like a biker version of the gigantic Paul Bunyan statue in Bemidji, walked next to him. Magozzi and his partner, Gino, were stretching their legs in the lot, heads close together as they talked, and Roadrunner was bent in half under one of the big station lights, a collection of sticks hanging on to his ankles for some reason Halloran didn't even want to think about.

They gathered in a circle in the far corner of the lot. Greetings and quick handshakes were exchanged before Halloran got into it. "We've got a new wrinkle. I just talked to Ed Pitala-the Sheriff over in Missaqua County that the FBI shut down-and sometime in the last ninety minutes, one of his deputies went missing. Guy was off shift on his way home in his patrol and just disappeared."

Bonar's face tightened. "Which one?"

"Doug Lee. Know him?"

"Hell, yes, I know him. That guy drank me under the table with the most god-awful sloe gin you ever tasted at the association dinner last year. What the hell was he doing on the road, anyway? I thought the Feds pulled all the patrols."

Halloran scuffed at a stray stone on the asphalt. "He was already on his way home and in one of the radio dead zones when the order came down. As far as Ed knows, Lee never even heard about it. Thirty minutes ago, Lee's wife called in a panic and the agent that set up shop in Ed's office tried to keep him from sending out his officers to look, so Ed slammed the guy against the wall and gave him a black eye."

Bonar grinned happily. "Good old Ed. Pushing sixty-five, and he's slamming Feds against the jailhouse wall and looking at twenty years. They just don't make them like that anymore."

"Amen," Magozzi added.

"So the agent finally agreed to let him put all his people on the road, as long as they used their personal cars," Halloran continued. "No patrols. No radios. They're all checking in on landlines, and they all have the descriptions of the Rover and the cake lady's car, too, but you know they're looking hardest for their own man."

Gino threw up his hands. "Jesus Christ, they've got four women and now a cop gone missing in that cluster fuck they've got going on over there, and they won't tell us whatthe fuck is going on?"

Halloran started to shake his head, then stopped abruptly. "That agent who took over our scene at the lime quarry said it was a national security operation. I didn't put a whole lot of stock in that, because that's what they told me five years ago when they were trying to bust some morons who were running a multistate dog-fighting ring out of Wisconsin. Back in those days, the Feds hollered national security whenever they wanted the local law to butt out. Thinking anything they ever said was a load of crap was a way of life. Hell, maybe this time they really meant it. Maybe something bigger than missing people is going on here, and we're about to storm right into the middle of it." He looked around at each of them. "Anybody here have a problem with that?"

"Hell, no." Harley spoke for them all. "As far as I'm concerned, Grace, Annie, and Sharon missing is about as big as it gets. I don't give a shit what kind of operation the Feds are running, national security or not. But if those women are somewhere in the middle of that operation, and figuring out what the hell is going on will help us find them, then I say let's just get down to it."

Magozzi said, "Any way you and Roadrunner can tap into the land-lines coming out of the Missaqua County Sheriff's Office?"

Roadrunner bobbed his head enthusiastically. "No problem."

"I want to catch every report from the officers Ed has out on the road when they call in."

"We'll trap all the calls, in or out."

Harley spoke up, looking at Halloran. "And the Feds are crawling all over that county, right?"

"So Ed says."

"Well, they've gotta be talking to each other somehow, operation that big. We need to figure out what kind of a network or frequency they're using, tie in, and find out what the hell is going on and where."

"You can do that from this rig?"

"You bet we can."

"Let's move, then," Magozzi said. "We'll head for the middle of Missaqua County, park this thing in a wayside somewhere, and be ready to move in any direction the information points us."

"We'll follow in our car," Halloran said. "In case we have to head out somewhere fast."

Harley smiled at him and jerked a thumb toward the rig. "She may look like an elephant, but she runs like a cheetah. You aren't going to need your car."

Bonar gave a short nod and started to walk away. I'll grab our stuff and load up."

Harley trailed along to help while the others climbed into the RV. "We've got about everything you need in there already."

Bonar kept walking. "I got a riot gun, a shotgun, goodies like that."

"Cool. Where's your car?"

Bonar pointed. "That one. Couldn't take the county vehicle through Missaqua."

Harley's mouth hung open. "Jesus Christ. That's your ride?"

"That's it. The old clunker."

Harlcy laid reverent hands on the Chevy while Bonar leaned into the backseat. "Old clunker my ass, I'm touching the Hope Diamond here. The Holy Grail. Hose me down and hang me out to dry, this is a Yenko Camaro."

Bonar passed Harley the shotgun and reached in deeper for the riot gun. "I don't know what Yenko is, but this is Charlie Metzger's old car. No real beauty, but it runs nice. Here, take this."

Harley grabbed the not gun without looking at it. He was still staring at the car. "427-cid L72 engine, front disc brakes, ducted hood, heavy-duty radiator, special suspension, and a 4.10:1 rear axle. Quarter mile in the high elevens. I'll give you a hundred right now."

"In your dreams." Bonar chuckled and slammed the door hard.

Harley winced. "One twenty-five."

"You're a penurious son of a bitch, aren't your"

Harley tightened his mouth and stomped after Bonar toward the rig. "All right, all right, you hard-ass, a hundred and fifty."

"Give me a break, Harley. I paid three thousand for this car and you want to give me a hundred and fifty dollars for it?"

Harley stopped and looked at the man. "A hundred and fiftythousand, you moron."

THE DEAD, empty weight of perfect silence lay over the little lake behind the barn. Beyond the broad clumps of cattails, the water's black surface reflected the full moon's stark light like a bottomless mirror. No water bug skated on its surface; no frog sang from its shore; no cricket scraped the hairy bow of one leg across the other. There was no night music.

For several moments after they heard the last jeeps pull away Grace, Annie, and Sharon remained perfectly still, kneeling in the water like three soggy penitents.

Annie's nose itched. Were they really gone? If she lifted her hand to scratch her nose, if a drop of water plunked back to the surface, would a dozen men leap from hiding and start shooting?

Slowly, carefully, she lifted her left hand from the water and raised it to her nose. It was covered with thick clots of swampy mud. She scratched her nose and no one shot her. "Can we get out yet?" Her whisper was barely a breath.

Grace's shoulders lifted under the surface, and the water around them rippled. "Carefully," she whispered back.

Annie rose from her knees, wobbling, water sheeting from her tattered dress, her eyes almost screwed shut when the body of the cow behind her shifted. "There's a cow in here." She moved aside to show them.

"Good Lord," Sharon whispered, staring at the thing. It looked peaceful lying there, only a portion of the belly rising above the water's surface like a hairy black-and-white rock. "That's where all the animals went. They pushed them into the lake."

The three of them waded hurriedly out from among the cattails onto the mud-flattened grass of the shore, water running from their clothes to puddle at their feet. Sharon and Annie both sagged to the ground like dazed, broken-stemmed flowers pummeled by a heavy rain. Grace stayed upright a moment longer, standing straight and tall and still, a motionless vessel for her busy eyes. Finally, she took a deep breath, and Annie knew it was safe. "That's what happened here," she said. "They were moving some kind of gas in trucks, something went wrong, and they killed a whole town."

"Oh, shit." It was the first time Grace had ever heard genuine panic in Annie's voice. "So we've been sitting in a lake filled with animals that died from poison gas?"

Grace sat down next to her, lifted a soggy piece of silk away from her neck, and laid it back on her shoulder where it belonged. "It's been hours. Those soldiers weren't worried, so we shouldn't be. Whatever it was isn't here anymore."

"So I don't have to strip down and look for lesions?"

Grace shook her head. "There wouldn't be lesions, anyway. It wasn't a chemical agent. It was nerve gas."

Sharon looked at her. "How do you know that?"

"Chemical agents are all corrosive. From what I saw of that cow, it was clean, and there wasn't a mark on that dog back in the house, either."

Annie thought about that for a second, then breathed out and nodded, completely satisfied, and Sharon wondered how the hell she learned to do that. She shivered, hugging her knees, feeling the very careful world she'd created for herself crumbling around her. Suddenly, what she had chosen to do with her life, profiling one killer at a time, maybe saving a life or two along the way, seemed terribly insignificant. While she was so busy-and Grace and Annie, too, for that matter-tracking single serial killers all over the country, mass murder was happening right in her own backyard. "Christ, I don't believe this. Nerve gas? This is Wisconsin, for God's sake, not the Middle East. Where the hell did they get nerve gas?"

Annie patted her on the knee. "Actually, Wisconsin's a pretty good place to get the stuff. It's pretty much pesticides on steroids. You've got the main ingredient on every farm in the Midwest, and instructions on how to make it all over the Internet."

Sharon closed her eyes. "It just can't be that easy, or every nutcake on the planet would be using it. We're not talking about fertilizer bombs here."

"It isn't that easy," Grace said quietly. "But it isn't impossible, either. Remember the sarin release in the Tokyo subway? They didn't buy that stuff from an arms dealer. They made it themselves."

Sharon rubbed at her eyes and took a couple deep breaths, thinking that this was what had killed all the people and animals here. Just breathing. "They've got two more trucks filled with the stuff out there somewhere." Her voice was trembling now, and her hand shook as she fumbled with the button to light up her watch face. "And in about nine hours, they're going to gas a thousand people if we don't do something. We have tohurry."

Grace's voice was maddeningly calm. "We need someplace to hurry to first."

"Out of here! We have to get out and let someone know what's going on!"

Annie grabbed Sharon's hand and shook it with a little scold. "You have to calm down. Just think for a minute. . . ."

"We don't have a minute!" Sharon hissed. "This isn't just about us anymore. What are we supposed to do? Sit around here, thinking, while a lot of other people die?"

Grace blew out a sigh, reminding herself that this wasn't just a panicked woman talking-the cop in Sharon had just taken over, and as far as cops were concerned, immediate action was the answer to everything. "Fine," she said quietly. "Just what would you like us to do?"

"Head for the roadblock, take out the men guarding it, steal one of the jeeps."

"You and me with our nines against who knows how many men with Ml6s?"

Sharon didn't want to hear about problems, just solutions. She spoke quickly, fueled by the desire to make things happen. "So first we try to pick them off from some kind of cover, even if we don't get all of them, we'll at least improve the odds, then we rush the jeep while we're still firing. . . ."

"Honey, that's just plain suicide."

Sharon glared at Annie. "There's too much at stake here not to try it."

"There's too much at staketo try it," Grace corrected her, speaking very slowly, very clearly. "Because if we die trying, a thousand other people die with us." She let that sink in for a minute. "We have to think of another way."

"Goddamnit, thereis no other way. We've been trying to get out of here since we got in and couldn't do it, and it's even worse now. Now they're all out there in a big circle, just waiting for us."

"Then we have to break the circle."

Annie nodded. "What we need is a diversion."

Grace eyed her. "You've been watching old war movies again." "Lots of movies. And that's what you do. You get all the enemy in one place, then you slip out in the other direction."

Sharon snorted. "Great idea. How do you propose we do that?" "Hell, I don't know. How do cops do it? If you're in the field, on the job, and surrounded, what do you do?"

"The one thing we can't do. You call for backup." Grace spun her head to look at her, went very still for a moment, and then a rare smile spread slowly over her face. "Maybe we can do both." She took a breath, looked up the slope toward the paddock, then back down at Annie and Sharon. "What if we set the whole goddamned town on fire?"

DEPUTY DOUGLAS LEE was in the one and only place he considered safe at the moment-twenty feet up in the knobby clutches of an old box elder tree.

He'd always hated the messy box elders and the massing, flying beetles they hosted. Damn things took root anywhere-in the sand or the clay, in the sun or the shade, in the middle of a cornfield or a crack in the sidewalk if you didn't keep after them. Even in the middle of a first-growth pine forest, thank God. One day a spindly sapling, the next day a monster like the one he sat in.

The lowest branches of the white pines had been too high for him to reach, and too well spaced for easy climbing. The box elder had been a godsend with its fat, sharply angled limbs and broad, cupped crotches. If he managed to live through this, he had the box elder to thank, and by God, he'd never uproot another seedling from his yard.

He didn't know how long he'd been in the tree-near half an hour, he figured. Long enough to doze off and jerk awake to a terrifying volley of gunfire that turned out to be only in his brain. The wound on the side of his head had run like a faucet while he was tearing likehell through the woods, and for long minutes after, he'd settled in the tree to listen to his heart thunder in his chest. He reached up and touched the side of his head with one of the few clean spots remaining on his bloody handkerchief. Hardly bleeding at all now. Maybe it wasn't too deep, just a bleeder like all head wounds.

He moved his head to peer down at the ground, then jerked back against the trunk when the ground moved.

Shit, Lee. You're a little woozy. Must have lost a little more blood than you thought.

Twisting his arm until the filtered moonlight hit his wrist, he peered down at the face of his watch, careful to move only his eyes and not his head. He blinked hard in disbelief, then raised his wrist closer to his face.

Jesus. Two o'clock in the morning. He'd been in this goddamned tree forhours, not minutes. He closed his eyes and thought it through. Maybe he hadn't been dozing. Maybe he'd blacked out. Maybe the head wound was a hell of a lot worse than he imagined.

His heart stuttered in his chest and his breath started to comefaster.Easy, Lee. You're okay. You've come this far, so don't panic now.

He forced slow, deep breaths, and when he was calm again, he opened his eyes and looked around. If he moved his head very slowly, very deliberately, he found he could keep a measure of equilibrium.

Even with the dense canopy of branches blocking the moon, enough light filtered down to make spotty shadows on the ground below. None of them moved. There was no sound... .

Son of a bitch. He remembered now. Earlier, he'd fluttered into wakefulness long enough to hear a disturbance in the forest beneath him. The sounds had been different than the frantic, whispered shouting of the men who had shot at him on the road. This time, the noises had been slow, more orderly. Soft murmurs, twigs snapping regularly under carelessly placed boots, underbrush swishing with the passage of a body. They'd come right under the tree, some of them, all dressed in camo like that bastard at the roadblock, all toting M16s and heading in the same general outward direction.

The direction you don't want to go,he told himself, and that was the first time he realized he planned to leave the safety of his perch.

Jesus. What the hell was going on here? No way they were National Guard on maneuvers. No way they were U.S, military of any kind, or by God he was moving to China. But there were a lot of them; they were organized; they were well armed. Christ, it wassomebody'sarmy.

He pressed his hand against his forehead and tried to rub somesense through his skin.Think, Lee. You're in some deep shit here. If they wanted you dead back there at the roadblock, they want you dead even more now. Dear God. You killed one of them.

The memory stunned him for a moment, left his eyes open and staring until he caught hold of his thoughts and made himself blink.

Never mind that. Don't think about that now.His right hand fumbled at his side until his fingers closed around his holster, and he sighed with relief. Thank God. Delirious or not, at least he'd had the sense to hang on to his weapon.

Suddenly, his mind went blank. Now what? What the hell was he supposed to do now?

Get out of here, of course. Get away from these bozos and call it in. Oh, Lord, wouldn't Dorothy just pitch a fit. Hey Dot, I've got an army out here by Four Corners trying to blow my brains out with automatic rifles. Send backup, will you?

He started to chuckle, then closed his throat, horrified by the sound. He'd sounded crazy.

Get a grip, Lee. Cheryl's waiting.

The thought of his wife paralyzed him for a moment. Ah, Jesus, poor Cheryl. Two o'clock already. She must be half mad with worry, bugging the hell out of dispatch .., oh, hey. Lee, you stupid jerk, of course. Cheryl would have called in hours ago. They must have thewhole force cruising by now . . , shit. He had to get out, get to a highway, get visible. . . . But first, he had to get past the bad guys, and the problem with that was he didn't know where the hell they were.

FIFTEEN MINUTES GONE, Grace thought when they finally started to move up from the lake toward the paddock. It took fifteen whole minutes to work it out and find the holes and agree on the timing, and if the damn thing worked and they were fifteen minutes too late for a thousand people, how the hell were they going to live with that?

After the illusion of shelter between the lake and the side of the hill that led up to the paddock, she felt dangerously exposed standing on top of the slope. They all did. They moved quickly to crouch in the tall grass next to the tractor and froze there, breathing through their mouths, straining to hear the slightest sound, to see the merest hint of movement in the lifeless landscape. Heat seemed trapped in the muggy air around them, as if a great, stifling lid had been clamped down on the world.

It's all right, Annie kept telling herself. He said the town was ours for the night, and he didn't know we were listening, so why would he lie? It wasn't a trick, it wasn't a trick, the soldiers really are waiting for dawn somewhere out there on the perimeter. It's safe to move. We have to move. We have things to do and places to go, and never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, and he who hesitates is lost. . . . Inane axioms crowded her thoughts in a traffic jam of words.

Finally Grace eased away from the tractor and moved quickly down the right side of the paddock fence toward the barn, with Annie and Sharon trailing her silently. They all kept their eyes averted from the ghastly things rising like a crop of horrors from the paddock's soil.

Annie glanced toward the open barn door once, caught a glimpse of moonlight laying a dirty glow on the oblong steel collars of the stanchions inside.

Horrible things, she thought, imagining what it would be like to be a cow and hear that brace snap closed around your neck for the first time, to try to back up and find to your amazement that what you'd put your head into, you couldn't pull your head out of. Probably not a whole lot different than what we're feeling right now, she decided.

They stopped at the corner of the barn. The setting moon washed the farmyard in a sickly crust of light that seemed bright after the shadowy recesses by the lake.

A few stones in the driveway reflected a dull gleam. Beyond that, the black windows of the house seemed to stare like the hollow sockets of a dead man's eyes. Shade trees stood in the yard like weary black sentinels, their leaves drooping and motionless in the still air. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, as if someone had pushed the pause button on the world.

And apparently, they had pushed the pause button on Grace as well. She'd stopped moving in mid-stride, scaring Annie to death.

Suddenly Grace turned toward her, her face clouded with an emotion that was impossible to read. She was frantically digging into her jeans pocket, pulling out her tiny cell phone, flipping it open. Annie's mouth dropped open when she saw the screen, miraculously aglow, the phone shaking a little as it vibrated in Grace's hand.

WHEN BONAR FOLLOWED Harley up the steps into the RV, a big, wirehaired Slinky was creeping up the aisle on his belly. It took Bonar a second to realize it was a dog, and then he was all over him. He hadn't had a relationship with a canine since his boyhood dog had tangled with the wrong end of a badger, but it only took sixty seconds for Charlie to remind him what he'd been missing all these years.

"I get the copilot's seat; I get the dog." It was Gino's voice, right behind him.

Bonar kept his arm around Charlie's neck and grinned as the big, wet tongue scraped at the blond stubble on his cheek. "You can have the copilot's seat. I'll fight you for the dog. Where'd everybody go?"

"Halloran went in the back with Magozzi and Roadrunner. You ought to take a look. They got an office back there right out of a James Bond movie."

Bonar found a seat on an upholstered silk sofa right behind Harley in the driver's seat. "I'm good here. Besides, this is my neck of the woods. I'll be the navigator."

Gino slid into the shotgun recliner and buckled up. "Hell, we don't need no stinkin' navigator. We got a GPS that'll knock your socks off."

Harley gave him a look. "You sure you got a handle on that thing?"

"Damn right. I spent the last two hours learning how, and I've got it down. You want to get out of the parking lot?" He pushed some buttons and peered at a screen. "Straight ahead sixteen-point-three-seven feet, turn right, bearing north-northeast oh-point-one-one-eight-four .. . Jesus Christ, where'd you get this thing?"

"Took it off a nuclear sub," Harley grunted.

"Seriously?"

"For Chrissake, Rolseth, of course not. They don't have anything this good. Now pull up Missaqua County and point me toward the center."

"Hold on a minute." Magozzi came striding up from the back with Halloran and Roadrunner. He looked paler than he had under the mercury lights in the lot, and his voice sounded like someone had wound it too tight. "Roadrunner just ID'd your three sinkers from those prints you sent."

Bonar, Harley, and Gino all turned to look at him.

"They didn't pop up on any of the databases because the Feds made sure they wouldn't. Those bodies were their boys-so far undercover they didn't even have names, just numbers."

Bonar had the kind of sigh that could make a grown man ache just listening to it. "Undercover agents. Damn me. It's the one thing that makes a little sense-why they snatched the bodies so fast, took over our crime scene, and shut us out-and it never once occurred to me."

"Or me," Halloran said.

Magozzi was standing rock-still, all his body parts quiet except for his brain. "You said it looked like an execution, right?"

Halloran nodded grimly. "Looked like they were lined up in a row, nearly stitched in half. Doc Hanson was thinking an M16."

Magozzi tried to pace but couldn't find enough room with five big men cluttering up the place. "So they were undercover and into something big-something worth killing three Feds over-and got caught." He was thinking out loud now. "Probably just dumped in Kingsford County, a good distance away from where they were operating, since all the Feds want there is the crime scene at the quarry. Missaqua has to be the source."

"Which is where we were headed for anyway," Gino complained. "We may have another piece of the puzzle, but it doesn't tell us a thing about where to start looking. Doesn't do us a damn bit of good at all."

Magozzi almost smiled. "It might. It might make all the difference. Roadrunner?"

"Right here."

"I need an off-the-books FBI number. Far as I know, it isn't listed anywhere. Think you can manage that?"

Roadrunner's grin was his answer.

Gino was on his feet in a second, brows cocked at Magozzi. "You old dog. Don't tell me. You're going to call Plastic Paul."

"That I am."

"Who's Plastic Paul?" Bonar asked.

Gino was already following Roadrunner and Magozzi toward the back. "That would be Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer, back in Minneapolis. He and Magozzi have a special relationship."

Halloran stumbled behind them, frowning. "That guy we met when we were in Minneapolis on the Monkeewrench thing? I thought you hated him."

"That's the special nature of the relationship." Gino smiled as the four of them clustered around a communications console. "Come on, Leo, have a heart, you gotta put this on speaker."

It took Roadrunner thirty seconds to find the number. A sleep-thickened voice came through the speaker before the first ring was completed. It was the kind of phone the owner answered instantly, twenty-four-seven. "Shafer here."

"Paul, it's Leo Magozzi, MPD."

There was silence for a moment. "How the hell did you get this number?"

"Information."

"Bullshit. This is a closed Federal line, Magozzi, and you just bought yourself a world of hurt. I'm hanging up now."

"Good idea. After you hang up, you can write your letter of resignation, or shoot yourself in the head. Your choice."

Silence again. And then, "You have thirty seconds."

Magozzi took a quick breath. "One of your agents is missing in an area where three other agents were found murdered."

There was a lot of noise coming through the speaker then-covers being thrown aside, feet hitting the floor, a little static. "Okay, you got my attention, Magozzi, but if this is bullshit, I will personally see to it that you get your first glimpse of sky in about forty years."

Gino watched Magozzi's face redden and his chest swell, and wondered if he'd just blow up. You could almost smell the testosterone shooting right up to the satellite. "Bullfight." He nudged Harley.

But Magozzi's voice was deceptively calm when he spoke. "Sharon Mueller's missing."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Magozzi, she's not missing. Is that what this is about? She went to Green Bay with those Monkeewrench women to do some profiling on her own time."

"She never got that far." Magozzi let that register, then went on to tell him about all the missing people, the dead undercover agents, the FBI taking over Missaqua County. "We think Sharon and the others are somewhere in the middle of whatever the hell is going on, but it's a huge search area. We're on-site, or close to it, but we need your people to narrow it down so we know where to start looking, and they aren't telling law enforcement over here shit. She's your agent, Paul, not theirs. You have enough pull in that organization to get something done that might save her life? Because that might very well be what's at stake here."

Shafer answered quickly. "You have a secure line wherever you are?"

"We're on it."

"Then give me the number and fifteen minutes."

They'd only gone ten miles toward the Missaqua County line when Shafer called back. "Do you know where Beldon is?" he asked without preamble.

Halloran nodded at Magozzi.

"Yes."

"Missaqua County Sheriff's Office is there. They're setting up a command post. Talk to Agent Knudsen. He'll share what he can with law enforcement. Who do you have with you?"

"Rolseth and I are here, Sheriff Halloran, and Deputy Carlson"- he hesitated for only a second-"and a couple others out of Kingsford County."

"I'll give them the heads-up, then. Call from there if he gives you any trouble."

Magozzi released a breath. "What's going on over here, Paul?"

"I don't know yet, but I sure as hell am going to find out. And I want to hear from you people. You're riding on my rep now, and I want to know every step you take before you take it, understood?"

"You got it."

Gino went back up to the copilot's seat and brought Harley and Bonar up-to-date on the word from Shafer. Harley was doing hands-on, eyes-on driving along a tar road that looked about six feet too narrow to accommodate the RV's width. "So punch Beldon in on the GPS and take us there," he told Gino. "Shit. Saturday night with the FBI. I haven't had this much fun since I got mugged and Tasered during Carnival in Rio a few years back."

Gino took a quick sideways glance at the size of the man behind the wheel, and marveled that a Taser would actually bring him down. "One of these days, I'd like to hear the rest of that."

Harley shrugged. "It's an okay story. Nothing epic. Hey, Bonar, grab me a carton of OJ out of the fridge, would you?"

Bonar was still planted on the sofa; Charlie happily sprawled all over him. He turned his head to browse a kitchen area that was bigger than Margie's. It was all wood-teak, if he wasn't mistaken-and not a hint of enamel anywhere. "You don't have a refrigerator in here."

"Third drawer to the right of the sink," Gino said without looking away from the GPS readout. "We've got another two-point-seven miles on this one, Harley, then right on some road-County pee-pee is what it says, but that's gotta be wrong."

Bonar eased Charlie off his lap and went to find drawer number three. "That's County Double-P. All the county roads in the state used to be letters. Great idea back in the 1800s. Sort of went to pot when they built too many and ran out of alphabet, so they just started doubling up."

Gino shook his head. "I am a stranger in a strange land."

Bonar was in deep reverence once he found the refrigerator drawers, completely concealed behind the polished teak fronts. A whole slew of them. One for liquids, one for produce, one for meat, and a big one that held more wine bottles than the cast-iron display rack down at the Municipal Off-Sale. "Amazing," he murmured, snooping without shame, finally grabbing an OJ for Harley. "You mind if I grab a cherry soda for myself?"

"Anything you want, buddy," Harley said, downshifting for a mean curve. "You like the kitchen?"

"Are you kidding? Haven't seen anything this beautiful outside the pagesof Bon Appetit."

Gino rolled his eyes. "Ah, Jesus, next thing you know, you two guys'll be trading recipes and watchingOprah together."

Harley glowered at him. "I loveOprah."

In the back office, Road runner was running multiple programs full-blast, digging as deep as he ever had into closed Federal sites, looking for the tiniest piece of data on whatever operation the dead undercover agents had been running. So far he hadn't found a scrap, which was extraordinary.

Halloran and Magozzi were planted at a small booth next to the windows, alternating between looking over at Roadrunner when he cursed at the keyboard and looking out at what Halloran saw as a quiet country night, and what Magozzi saw as a black landscape of nothingness. "Christ, somebody turned the lights out in the whole state."

Halloran smiled a little. "It's pretty empty up this way. The Silver Dome should be coming up soon, though."

"What's the Silver Dome?"

"Supper club. Dining, dancing, tablecloths and everything."

Another half mile around a long curve, and Magozzi saw what looked like a dollhouse-sized Vegas in the middle of a black hole. Christmas twinkle lights were strung all over a dirt parking lot jammed with pickups, and a pink-and-green sign with neon letters as tall as he was blinked on and off, announcing, "Fine Dining, Dancing, Entertainment." The sign was attached to a Quonset hut.

"What's the entertainment?"

"Bowling." Halloran kept his eyes on Magozzi, who didn't even crack a smile. He liked him for that. He looked back out the window and sighed. There was nothing left to see for miles after the Silver Dome, just trees that blocked the moon and an occasional piece of empty land that didn't. "I don't mind telling you, this is one of the few times on the job I've been seriously scared."

And that, bizarrely, was when Magozzi smiled. "Who are you kidding, Halloran? We're not on the job. What we really are is a couple of frantic guys chasing a couple of skirts. Saving our women. Caveman stuff."

Halloran put his big hands on the table and sighed again. "You, maybe."

Magozzi raised a brow.

"Sharon isn't coming back."

"To you, or Kingsford County?"

"Neither."

"Well, Jesus, Halloran, she took a bullet in the neck. And like it or not, you and the job are all wrapped up in that. That kind of thing shuts you down for a while, makes you afraid to get back out there."

Halloran was quiet for a long time, and then he said, "I should give it some more time."

"Damn straight. You know what, Halloran? Come to think of it, the last time we were together, we were busting into a gunfight, chasing after the same two women."

Halloran blinked. "My God. You're right."

"Maybe we should get together a couple of times between catastrophes, break the monotony."

Suddenly the shriek of an alarm blasted through the back of the rig and Roadrunner exploded out of his chair and stabbed a button on the console. "GRACE!?"

Magozzi was halfway out of his seat, frozen, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. And then he heard the sound of a dial tone buzzing through the big speakers. "What just happened?" he asked, his voice shaking.

"GODDAMNIT!" Roadrunner stabbed another button, and the sound of numbers dialing filled the rig. "We had a sat line rigged on auto-dial to rotate every five minutes on all three of the women's cells. Someone just answered Grace's cell, and then I lost the signal. ... CHRIST, THERE IT IS AGAIN!"

The speakers hissed with white noise, then an earsplitting shrill tone, and then, by God, Grace's voice, garbled and fuzzy and broken, coming through the speakers: ".., need help .., four . ., people dead . . . Roadrunner... ?"

And then, abruptly, nothing. The speakers went silent.

TWENTY MINUTES after hearing Grace's disconnected message, the atmosphere inside the Monkeewrench RV was supercharged, almost electric.

Even working together with all the legal and illegal computer resources they could muster, Roadrunner and Harley hadn't been able to reconnect with Grace or pinpoint the tower that had picked up the call from her cell. Not one of the cell-provider sites they'd hacked into had registered any activity from Grace's cell in the past hour. After fifteen frustrating minutes on the side of the road, Harley was back behind the wheel, driving toward Beldon at an alarming clip on the dark, twisting road, praying that this trip to hook up with the Feds wasn't taking them in the wrong direction.

Bonar was riding shotgun, holding Charlie in his lap with one hand, manipulating an outside spot with the other, supposedly lighting the road beyond the headlights to spot deer. A useless venture at this speed, he thought-they'd never be able to stop in time-but it never occurred to Bonar to suggest that Harley slow down. The call from Grace had been chilling.

Gino was in the back office, poring over a map of Wisconsin cellphone towers that Roadrunner had printed out. As far as he could tell, there wasn't a single one anywhere near Missaqua County. After ten minutes of working the map and abusing his haircut, he was absolutely convinced that they were way off track, and almost afraid to say it aloud. Roadrunner already looked insane, attacking the computers, spewing profanity like a Marine, and Magozzi and Halloran both seemed so brittle that it was a miracle they hadn't snapped into pieces. Gino went back to the map, looking at the sites marked for upcoming cell-tower construction, wondering how current the map was.

Halloran was monopolizing one sat phone line, trying to find the tower that had picked up Grace's call the old-fashioned way, by calling all the cellular providers in the state, pushing his badge on sleepy flunkies on weekend duty, trying to get some help from part-time workers with an average IQ in the single digits who thought they could coast through the late shift. He'd finally connected with someone who seemed to know what he was talking about, who proceeded to tell Halloran how it was possible that no one had a record of a call that had obviously gone through. The explanation gave Halloran a headache. He hung up and tried to rub the lines out of his forehead.

"Did you get anything.?" Gino asked him.

"Yeah, I found out why there's no record of the call. The guy who runs the whole network for Wisconsin Cellular just told me it was black magic. How's that make you feel? The people who run the system can't even explain why it works the way it does. Christ. He said if the conditions were perfect, there's a solar storm or sunspots or maybe goddamned Jupiter aligns with goddamned Mars, then sometimes a phone can snatch a tower's signal way beyond the normal range. And if the connection is short enough or distorted enough, it might not register in their software at all."

"I tried to tell you that," Roadrunner called from across the room.

"Yeah, well, this guy said it in English."

They all looked up when Magozzi started to raise his voice. He'd finally gotten through to Minneapolis SAC Paul Shafer, and now he was snapping out an exact quote of Grace's call. He'd memorized every word. He stood up and yelled down the aisle toward the front of the rig, asking how far they were from Beldon, totally forgetting they had an intercom, then he went back to the phone, listened for a second, then exploded: "Jesus Christ, Shafer, were you listening? She saiddead people, at least four of them, and they're right in the middle of it. . . . Fuck tracing the call; we already tried that, and if these guys can't do it, your guys sure as hell aren't going to be able to manage it. . . ." And then he shut up and just listened for a long time before replacing the receiver and looking helplessly at Gino. "You aren't going to fucking believe this."

Everybody in the office stopped what they were doing.

"Shafer's been rolling some people out of bed, pretty much laying his career on the line, calling in favors, and when that didn't work, making some threats. He says the Wisconsin Feds moved their undercover guys in when a few of the people they were watching made some unusual purchases. They think they might be making nerve gas."

Halloran's pencil froze on a pageful of scribbles. Roadrunner sat perfectly still, staring at lines of data scrolling by on the monitor, seeing nothing.

"How sure are they?" Gino asked, his voice tense, his words clipped.

"Shafer didn't know, but he called the agent in Beldon, gave him some background, told him about the call from Grace." He took a breath, upset by the mere mention of her name. "He'll fill us in on what they know when we get there."

Up front in the cab, Harley listened to the exchange on the intercom and pushed the accelerator to the floor.

Ten minutes later they drove into Beldon, flying past a speed-limit sign so fast that Bonar couldn't read it. The streets were dark and quiet, but the parking lot of the Missaqua County Sheriff's Office was lit up like one of those casinos in the middle of the prairie, crowded with dark, nondescript sedans. Magozzi suspected the inside of the cinder-block building was equally crowded with dark, nondescript suits. Harley rocked to a stop and within seconds, all of them exploded from the RV's front door like fizz from a punctured pop can.

Sheriff Ed Pitala was waiting for them outside the front entrance, a cigarette smoldering at the corner of his mouth. He looked lean and mean and nowhere near his sixty-plus years, and it wasn't a stretch to imagine him slamming a Federal agent up against a wall. But he was all smiles when he saw Halloran and Bonar.

"Mike Halloran, it's been too damn long. You missed the Association golf tournament.. . Jesus, Mike. You look like roadkill that isn't quite dead yet. What the hell is going on?"

Halloran grabbed his hand and kept shaking it the whole time he was talking, as if he'd forgotten to let go. "The women we're looking for are in big trouble, Ed, and we've got no time at all. Anything we should know before we go in there?"

Ed crushed his cigarette out in a flowerpot of dirt that was sprouting Marlboro filters. "Just a bunch of spooks running around chewing up my place and bossing me around for no reason they'll tell me. That phone call from your friend in Minneapolis shook 'em up some. It was chilly in there to begin with, but now I'm skating on a real thin patch of ice. But I'm still the head rooster. I got my people out looking for Doug Lee, and that's all I care about."

"Have you heard anything from the road?" Bonar asked.

"A couple deputies have called in. Nothing yet."

Agent Knudsen intercepted them in the lobby, and, given the circumstances, he was surprisingly cordial. Magozzi figured him for one of the public relations front guys that the FBI used to smooth ruffled feathers while they ran interference. His expression remained neutral until Magozzi introduced Harley and Roadrunner.

"And this is Officer Davidson and Officer . . . Road."

Harley tried his hardest to look legit, but Roadrunner didn't even bother-it was hopeless for him.

"Undercover," Magozzi added quickly.

Knudsen still looked skeptical.

"Computer crimes," Harley said, and Knudsen nodded as if that explained everything.

Knudsen glanced at the sat phone clutched in Roadrunner's hand. "Did you have any luck reconnecting with your women?"

Magozzi shook his head. "No luck reconnecting, no luck tracing. You've got to give us something, Agent Knudsen. They're in the middle of this somehow, and we need every scrap of information you've got so we know where to start looking."

"That's already been negotiated. I'll give you what I can, although I don't think it will help. But you gentlemen need to understand something up front: This is our show. Paul Shafer and the Minneapolis Field Office have no jurisdiction, and we call the shots. Letting you in so you can find your missing agent is a personal favor, but if you interfere in any way with our operation, we'll pull you off the road, is that clear?"

Everyone nodded.

"As you already know, we've lost three agents, and we certainly don't want to see the Bureau lose another one, but we're talking about many more lives at stake here, and thatwill take priority."

And that was the sentence that brought it all home. Everyone was momentarily shocked into silence. Magozzi was thinking that just a few hours ago, he'd been pelting softballs at a circular target, trying to send Gino into a dunk tank, rubbing a stomach abused by more deep-fried food than he normally ate in a year. A few hours. Apparently, that was all it took for the world to tilt on its axis and send everything that made sense sliding off.

"Well, Christ, man, then give us something we can use."

Knudsen's eyes went over his head. "Sheriff Pitala? May we use your office?"

"Why the hell not? You'd use it anyway. But gee, thanks for asking."

Sheriff Ed Pitala was in his office even when he wasn't. The place was cluttered with dozens of family photos, most of them featuring big, dead fish on stringers.

Agent Knudsen helped himself to the desk and chair while the others stood. Harley and Roadrunner hung back by the door, Hallo-ran and Bonar kept a respectful distance, but Magozzi and particularly Gino were in-your-face close to the desk.

"As of this moment, you're an official part of an FBI operation, and you will remain in Missaqua County after this wraps up for debriefing." Knudsen looked at each of them. "All of you. Understood?"

"Understood," Magozzi said, and everyone nodded.

"All right. We've had a watch on a cell up here for over two years."

Halloran, who had some familiarity with Wisconsin's penchant for creating and attracting fringe groups, frowned. "What kind of a cell? White supremacists? Militia?"

Knudsen made a face. "That's the problem. They don't fit the standard profiles. They're farmers, business owners, working-class men, some of them decorated veterans, and no history on any of the men that attaches them to groups like that. No suspicious activity of any kind, except what attracted our attention in the first place."

"You found out they were making fucking nerve gas."

Knudsen's eyes twitched at Gino's interruption and his language. He found a photo of an obscenely whiskered fish on the wall and just stared at it. "We do not have any confirmation on that, and I will not discuss the details of our investigation. All you need to know is that something they did rang a lot of bells in Washington recently, and we immediately sent in three men to try to infiltrate the group. Three days ago, those men called in their first success and gave us two things: next Friday's date and the letter E."

"What's the E mean?" Magozzi asked.

"Event." He paused a moment, let that sink in, then gave Sheriff Halloran a nod. "The next thing we knew, you had our agents on slabs down in Wausau."

Magozzi watched the man take a breath. It was the first visible break in his demeanor, and he wondered if Knudsen had known the murdered agents personally, if maybe they'd been friends.

"So," Knudsen continued, "we moved in fast, really fast. Within four hours, we had every agent we could get on the ground here. We had a few names of people our agents thought were key. We just finished executing warrants on the homes and businesses of all of them. If there was anything there in the first place, it's not there now. Neither are the men. We've got the county locked down tight, and we're watching every vehicle in and out."

"Oh, yeah?" Harley challenged him. "Well, we just drove in here in a rig big enough to carry a hundred if we packed them in, and we didn't have any trouble."

Knudsen gave him a nasty smile. "You've had two cars on you since you crossed the line."

Gino's brows went up to impressed height, a place they'd never been when the FBI was involved.

Magozzi said, "So something's going down, and you've got until Friday to stop it."

"It might be worse than that. We suspect the call from our agents was intercepted-that's what got them killed-so they could have dismantled the entire operation and moved it somewhere else .., or,worst-case scenario, maybe they moved up the schedule and we don't have until Friday anymore."

Magozzi felt his stomach drop. "You have a target?"

"No."

Gino was dumbfounded. "Jesus Christ, these people are going to hit something and you don't even know what?"

"Correct."

Magozzi felt like he was swimming through Jell-O. "We need the names of the men you identified and the sites you raided."

Knudsen shrugged. "You can get them from the man out at the front desk, but if you ask me, it's a waste of time. Agents are still crawling all over every site, and for miles in every direction, and we haven't turned up anything. Listen. We appreciate your concern over your missing people, and we're impressed with what you've put together so far. So impressed, in fact, that we're going to have a long talk with you all later about how you managed to do that. But we can't see any kind of a possible connection between your missing people and our operation. Just a freak coincidence."

"The coincidence is the connection," Magozzi said.

"Whatever. At any rate, we're willing to give you the run of the roads in the county, as long as you keep watch for a few things we're looking for and report back immediately if you see them."

"So what are we looking for?"

"Milk trucks."

Knudsen stayed in Sheriff Pitala's office to make some calls while the others went out to the lobby. Harley strutted up to the suit at the front desk to collect the names and raid sites that Knudsen had promised.

Halloran signaled Sheriff Pitala with a jerk of his head, and the rest of them went outside.

Halloran was face-to-face with Sheriff Pitala, but both men had their hands in their pockets and were looking down at the ground.

"That little twerp in there ask you to do anything for him?" Pitala asked.

"Yep."

"He told you to look for something, right?"

"Right."

Pitala nodded, looking off into the night. "Yeah, well, he told us to look for something, too. That was the only way he'd let my people out on the road to find Doug Lee. Wonder if it was the same thing."

"Milk trucks," Magozzi said, and Sheriff Pitala smiled and pulled out a Marlboro.

"Thank God. Didn't know how long I'd be able to keep that one under my hat."

Harley burst out the door and thrust a sheet of paper at Magozzi.

Magozzi glanced at the sheet, then passed the paper to Roadrunner. "Three names, three places of business, three houses. Maybe you can do some computer magic with these the Feds can't, but to tell you the truth, I think it's pretty much a dead end."

"No shit," Gino said. "The Feds are all over those sites already. No reason for us to travel down that road. So once again, we get a piece of the puzzle, and we aren't any farther ahead. We still don't have a clue where to start looking."

Magozzi turned to Sheriff Pitala. "You have your people covering the whole county, looking for Deputy Lee?"

"I've got thirty-five people out there, including a couple of secretaries." He raised his eyes to Magozzi. "It's a small department. That's damn near my whole roster. Most of them are concentrated in Doug's patrol area-that was the northern sector tonight. Five hundred square miles."

"Jesus," Gino murmured. "You could have a thousand men out there who'd still miss him if he was standing behind a tree."

"Yep."

Halloran was looking out at the cars in the lot, rubbing the underside of his lip the way he always did when he was thinking hard. "On the phone, you said you tried to radio Lee when the Feds first pulled your patrols."

Sheriff Pitala nodded. "Tried to. Couldn't reach him, but didn't worry about it. Figured he was on his way home anyhow."

"But you said you thought he was probably in a dead radio zone, that's why you couldn't reach him."

"That's right. We've got a few of those in the hollows where we don't have enough repeaters around, and some more near the high tension lines. . , oh, shit. Goddamnit.Goddammit."

"It might not mean anything."

"Maybe not, but it's a connection I should have made. Stay put. I'll be right back."

Gino nudged Bonar with an elbow. "That was a nice call your boss made."

Bonar beamed like a proud parent. "That boy shines under pressure. Always did."

Inside of a minute, Sheriff Pitala was back with a copy of a county map with all the dead zones marked; another two minutes, and he was inside, sharing the information with Knudsen, begging to contact the few people he had on the road who had radios in their personal cars. Knudsen wouldn't let him.

Pitala went over to a side desk and sat by the phone to wait for check-in calls on the landline, his head in his hands. By the time the first call came in, the RV was long gone.

GRACE, SHARON, and Annie had been stunned into immobility by the startling cell-phone call. They'd heard a fragment of a single shouted word that Grace and Annie had been absolutely certain was Roadrunner calling Grace's name, and then nothing but static. Grace had talked into the phone anyway, words tumbling over one another, and then the cell had abruptly gone dark.

They tried everything they could think of to get the phone to work again, to recapture that fragile connection, not knowing if anything that Grace had said went through.

"It's not the signal," Grace finally said. "The phone's dead. It's a miracle it ever connected after being in the water that long."

Annie was glaring at the useless phone in frustration. "I didn't even know you had that thing with you."

"I always have it with me."

Sharon sagged against the corner of the barn, devastated to have been so close to salvation, only to have it snatched away. "Stupid.Stupid," she hissed bitterly. "We finally find a place high enough and open enough to catch a signal, and we don't have a goddamned phone because we were so stupid that we left them where those guys could find them."

Grace took Sharon's arm and shook it a little. "We don't have one second to think of things like that. We've wasted too much time already. We have to hurry."

They backtracked the same way they had come: into the cornfield at the side of the farmhouse, between the rows, green leaves rustling at their hurried passage, down onto their hands and knees when they broke out of the corn into the tall grass of the field that abutted the road.

This used to be fun, Annie thought as she crept ahead on all fours. When you're a child, dropping to your hands and knees and scrabbling through the grass was something you did for the sheer joy of it. But once you reached a certain age, the posture implied degradation, submission-"he was brought to his knees," "she came crawling back on her hands and knees"-even the language recognized that somewhere between age five and ten, crawling ceased to be fun and became humiliating.

Grace paused at the edge of the field while the others came alongside. They all dropped to their stomachs and peered through the last fringe of tall grass before the land sloped gently down into the ditch, then up onto the road.

To their left, the asphalt climbed the small rise that kept them out of sight of the roadblock; to their right, it rolled gently down into the deeper blackness of Four Corners.

Grace held her breath, listening, watching, caution pressing on her back and tapping her on the shoulder. Crossing the road was the only time they would be totally exposed. She clenched her jaw and concentrated on the evidence of all her senses.

Nothing. No sound, no lights, no sign of life.

She nudged the other two, then held up a forefinger. One at a time. They'd cross one at a time, just in case all the soldiers hadn't gone to the perimeter, just in case they'd left an odd one here and there to keep watch, just in case anything.

Annie and Sharon nodded understanding, then watched with wide eyes as Grace slipped down into the ditch, up the other side, hesitated, then darted across the road and disappeared into the ditch on the other side.

Sharon caught a deep breath, then followed; Annie went a few seconds later.

On their bellies once more, single file, they wriggled like the disconnected segments of a crippled worm back toward the deserted town.

The ditch seemed like an old friend now, its banks rising as if to shelter them from the road. Annie made a face as they slipped into the rank water puddling around slimy grass stems, and it occurred to her that she had to go to the bathroom. Bad. It seemed preposterous. You shouldn't have to go to the bathroom when you're busy running for your life and the lives of a thousand other people. Certainly Superman never had this problem.

Gradually, the ground beneath them began to rise again, and they were on dry grass. A few more yards, and the old lilac hedge bordering the cafe and house behind it popped into view on the left.

Grace scrambled around into the deep shadows between the cafe and the hedge, the other two close behind. For a moment, they all huddled close to the lilacs, blunt-nosed twigs poking their backs. The wall of the cafe blocked their view of the town, and the only thing they could hear was the sound of their own labored breathing. Eventually, even that quieted and the world was perfectly still.

The peculiar silence of this place had become normal, almost restful. Grace was kneeling comfortably, hands on her thighs, eyelids at a heavy half-mast as she rested her body and mind. In a minute, they'd head back toward the basement to gather what they needed. In just a minute . . .

"I have to go to the bathroom," Annie whispered. "Right this second."

Sharon rolled her head to look at her, amazed to feel a smile come from somewhere. It didn't make it to her mouth, but it was there, on the inside. A stupid smile, really, and all because there was something strangely comforting about Annie having to go to the bathroom. It was so wonderfully ordinary, so damnnormal.

Without thinking about it, she reached out and touched Annie on the arm, one of those priestly gestures that seem to convey some kindof a blessing:Go to the bathroom in peace, my child.

Annie pressed back into the embrace of the lilacs' greenery while Grace and Sharon crawled a few feet away, more to get out of the splash zone than to give her privacy. They hunkered down close to the hedge, facing each other like two Aborigine elders in the bush. They grinned like guilty, eavesdropping children when the silence was broken by the unmistakable sound of a stream of liquid hitting dirt.

Annie's black lace underwear was puddled around her ankles, her eyes closed in almost euphoric relief, her bare backside jammed against the impenetrable tangle of the lilac hedge's thick, horny trunks. After the first few seconds, the muscles in her legs started to quiver with the strain, and she thought she'd finally found something else that a penis might be good for.

She wiggled her butt in a vain attempt to shake herself dry, then, discouraged, started plucking glossy leaves from the tangle of branches. It was more noise than she'd made crawling all the way from the farmyard, but for the first time, she was beginning to believe they really did have the town all to themselves. She could make a little noise gathering makeshift toilet paper, she decided, and no one would shoot her.

She had almost enough when a huge, calloused hand shot around from behind her and clamped down hard over her mouth, jerking her backward.

GRACE AND SHARON were crouched by the side of the lilac hedge, waiting for Annie to finish. It seemed to be taking her forever.

Sharon shifted her shoulders anxiously. The skin on the back of her neck seemed to be moving. She shuddered and pulled the sides of her mouth down. Lord. So that's what it felt like when something really made your skin crawl. It was this blasted, deadly-silent town. The slightest noise sounded malevolent, like Annie jerking leaves off the branches to use as toilet paper. And just when you got used to the noise, it stopped, and that seemed more malevolent still.

"Annie?" Grace leaned forward on her knees, peering back along the hedge at the spot where Annie was still hidden in greenery.

Silence.

Sharon frowned and moved a little closer to Grace. If she'd been an animal, her ears would have been pricked forward. "Annie?" she echoed Grace's whisper.

More silence.

Grace hadn't moved; she was barely breathing, her eyes fixed on the wall of leaves where Annie had been just a moment ago-where Annie absolutely, positively still was, still had to be ... "Annie!"

"Be quiet."

Sharon shrank back and her mouth dropped open. The voice had sounded like God-big and booming, even in a whisper, coming from a bush, no less.God isn't really a bush, Sharon, honey. That's just how he talked to Moses.

She could feel Grace's arm pressed tightly against hers. They trembled in unison, shudders passing from one body to the next, because somebody else was in there with Annie.

Sharon slammed her mouth closed, trapping a scream that belonged to a woman, not a cop. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Grace fall to her belly, elbows braced on the ground, the big Sig pointed at the bushes before Sharon's gun had even cleared the holster. Grace's expression was tight and hard, and her eyes were so big that they looked like they were eating her face.

The big whisper, definitely male, sounded again. "Who are you?"

Sharon swallowed. It was one of them. God in heaven, one of the soldiers had Annie.

Grace moved her hands slightly, drawing a bead on the sound of the voice, but she kept her eyes forward, her gaze laying right on the barrel of the Sig.

There was a little squeaking Annie-noise from deep inside the hedge, and Grace nearly fainted with relief. Annie was in there, she was alive, but then there were muffled grunts and sounds of a struggle and oh, God, he was hurting her. "Let her go!" Grace's voice was the one that boomed now.

"Quiet! I have a gun to your friend's head. How many of you are there, and what are you doing here?"

There was a sudden commotion in the bushes-a loud cracking of branches, a gut-deep grunt, then a high, whistling sound as branches burst open and Annie came tearing out on her hands and knees like an enormous motorized toddler, her underwear tangled around her ankles, her face horribly contorted. She plowed into Grace and nearly knocked her backward. "That goddamned son of a bitch grabbed me while I wasgoing to the bathroom, for Christ's sake. What kind of a person does that? Shoot the bastard." She tugged furiously at her panties, struggling to pull them up while she was still kneeling. "I got him a good one with my elbow, but he's still wiggling. Go on. Shoot him!"

"Don't shoot," the man's voice said weakly. "Don't. . , please . . . Jesus.. . I'm already shot. ..."

Grace's eyes narrowed. He was lying. He wasn't shot. She hadn't pulled the trigger yet.

".., your friends . . , already shot me . . ."

Grace frowned.Their friends? Not his? Was he telling the truth? Or was it a trick? Was he sitting in there perfectly all right, pretending to be shot so she'd creep over and peekaboo in and then he'd yell, "Surprise!" and blow her off?

"Who are you?" she demanded.

".., deputy . . , deputy . . ." the voice faded.

The three women exchanged glances, then jumped when something small and metal sailed out of the bushes and landed in front of them. Moonlight glittered on it, outlining it on the dark grass blanket. It looked like a perfectly shaped star had fallen from the sky.

"Oh, God," Sharon murmured, leaning forward to pick up the Missaqua County badge. "Who are you? Who's the Sheriff of Missaqua County?"

No answer.

"Hey, you. Throw out your gun."

Silence.

Grace glanced at Annie. "Did you see him? Is he one of them?"

Still outraged, Annie shrugged. "He grabbed me from behind."

Sharon was already moving cautiously up to the hedge, creeping forward to where Annie's exit had left the greenery in disorder. She stopped just shy of the spot, then led the way in with her 9mm. It was a thoughtless act, automatic. She'd done it a million times before. Sure, she'd been stuck behind a desk for the past several months, hiding from the memory of what it felt like to have a bullet plow through your neck, losing her edge and dulling her senses, but she was back in full cop mode now.

She saw him behind the tangle of thick branches at the roots, slumped into it, his arms snaked around from behind as if he were hugging the hedge. His shirtsleeves were light tan, not camouflage. His gun had fallen from his hand and lay in the dirt in front of the bush, beyond his reach.

Sharon released a soft breath, looked at his head, and saw blood. His eyelids fluttered and he groaned.

It took them ten minutes they didn't have to get him down into the basement.

A miracle, Grace thought, grunting as they negotiated the last step down. He had his right arm over her shoulder, his left over Sharon's, and Grace wasn't sure he'd been entirely conscious during the halting trip from the lilacs. Her back ached from the weight of his arm. He was a big man.

"Maybe if I could just sit for a minute," his voice strained.

Annie closed the doors behind them while they eased him down to the dirt floor. He leaned back against a wooden support beam and closed his eyes.

He was Deputy Douglas Lee, according to the County Sheriff ID card in his wallet. They'd gone through it hurriedly while he was blacked out under the hedge. Grace thought they must have looked like criminals, peering at their booty in the moonlight.

She looked him up and down while his eyes were still closed,

thinking that unless the local Sheriff's Department was involved in this whole thing, he probably wasn't one of the psycho warriors. Then again, identification could always be faked, and the uniform could just be part of an elaborate disguise.

She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose hard. Nothing was what it seemed anymore. What looked like pretty Wisconsin countryside was really a bloody battlefield; men who looked like U.S, soldiers were really stone-cold killers who shot women in print dresses and wanted to shoot them, too.

Suddenly, the man's chin sagged to his chest and his eyelids went still.

Annie peered down at him. "Is he dead?"

"He's not dead," Grace said, watching his chest rise and fall. "He just blacked out again."

"You think he's really a deputy?"

Sharon shrugged. "The badge looks legit. Which doesn't mean anything."

No, Grace was thinking. We can't trust anyone except ourselves. "I don't know," she said aloud, looking at the wound on his head. One side of his face was streaked with dried blood-a lot of it-and fresh,shiny seepage trickled over it.See that? That's real. And even a crazy man wouldn't shoot himself in the head as part of a disguise, right? So he is a deputy. One more for our side. The odds are improving. We're now up to four against. . , how many?

"Lord God," Annie murmured, staring at the wound. "Who would have thought I could do that much damage with one little ol' elbow."

Sharon had already wet a rag at the sink and was bending from the waist to dab ineffectually at his wound. "Your elbow didn't do this. Might have made it worse, but he really was shot. See the graze right here?" When she pressed a little harder, he groaned awake and leaned forward, grabbing his head in both hands. "Ah, shit, that hurts."

Sharon jerked back involuntarily, holding the rag out at arm's length. He reached for it with a shaky hand and pressed it against his head.

"Who shot you?" Grace said.

"You tell me."

There wasn't much moonlight filtering through the high, narrow windows, but there was enough to show the steadiness in Grace's hand as she raised the Sig and let him see it. "You first."

His eyes widened a little at the gun. "Christ, who are you people? Your goddamned soldiers at the roadblock shot me. I thought they were Guard. Are they?"

Sharon dropped to a crouch and looked right at him. "Who's the Sheriff of Missaqua County?"

"Ed Pitala."

"Tell me something about him a stranger wouldn't know."

The man looked at her hard. "Sixties, hard as nails, two tours in 'Nam, wife Pat, who's about four times tougher and ten times smarter than he is. Loves his wife, his kids, and Jim Beam, in that order. Smokes Marlboros. And he's stone deaf in his right ear."

Sharon raised a brow. Anybody could know most of what he said, except for the deafness. That was under wraps, information for good friends like Halloran, and maybe this man, because if the county commissioners ever found out, old Ed would be out of a job. She held out her hand. "Deputy Sharon Mueller, Kingsford County."

It took a second for Deputy Lee to absorb the information. "Mike Halloran's woman?"

Sharon reddened. "One of his deputies." She looked up at Grace. "He's okay."

"You sure?"

"As sure as I can be."

Grace still didn't trust him. "How'd you get here?"

Surprisingly, Lee felt a nudge of angry indignation. He'd never been on the wrong end of an interrogation before, and he didn't like it. But there was an undercurrent of fear in the woman's voice, and that tempered his response.

"I told you all that. . , didn't I?" He frowned hard, squinting at the dim outline of his legs sprawled before him on the dirt floor, trying to remember.

"You started to, then you passed out."

Lee sighed and squinted as his pupils tried to find enough light. He could almost see her now-see them. Three woman-shadows in this strange, shadowy place. A basement, he decided. Of course. They'd told him they were taking him to the basement, or had that been a dream? "Is there water?"

One of the shadows moved, and he heard water running into something metal. A moment later, a tin cup of some sort was pressed into his hand. He drank, tasted soap, then suddenly remembered grabbing the woman in the hedge. She'd gone immediately rigid- he remembered what that had felt like, like when you pick up a wounded bird and it freezes in your palm, terrified-but then later, she'd started to flail, and . . , had he hit his head on something? He had a vague tactile memory of sticky warmth coursing down his cheek, then nothing.

"Tell us!" the interrogator woman hissed. "How did you get here?"

Still scared, he thought. And scared people were dangerous people. He felt for his gun, panicked when he found his holster empty. "I was at the end of my shift, heading home, stopped at a roadblock that shouldn't have been there. The soldier guarding it shot me as soon as I turned my back."

"How'd you get away?"

His head turned toward a new voice. "I killed him," he said, and although his tone was flat, there was a tremor beneath it.

It made Grace feel better. It made her believe he really had killed one of the soldiers, and that killing wasn't something he was used to.

She felt her way to the sink, filled a hand with water and drank, then crouched next to him and met his eyes in the near dark. She could see only the whites. "We don't know who we can trust."

He almost smiled. "Join the club. Are you supposed to be a Kings-ford Deputy, too?"

"Sharon's the deputy. Annie and I are from Minneapolis."

Something clicked in Deputy Lee's head, and he struggled to focus on it. "Shit," he muttered, almost to himself. "Three women in a Rover."

Grace caught her breath. "How do you know that?"

"Highway Patrol had a watch-and-stop on three women in a Minnesota Rover. Figured it was some rich housewives got lost on the way home from antiquing or something." His eyes moved down to Grace's weapon. "But I don't expect all Minnesota housewives carry guns like that."

"Sure they do," Grace told him, because he deserved that after the assumptions he'd made. She hesitated for a moment, then thought, What the hell. If they told him everything and he turned out to be one of the bad guys, they'd just shoot him again. So she let him hear all of it: the car breakdown, the deserted town, the murder of the young couple in front of the cafe, but when she got to the mass grave in the paddock and the things they overheard at the lake, Lee interrupted.

"Wait a minute, just wait a minute." He was pressing his hands to the sides of his forehead, trying to take it all in. "You're trying to tell me this group of whackos accidentally killed the whole damn town with some kind of gas, and now they're killing more people just to keep it quiet? Do you realize how crazy that sounds?"

Grace lost her patience instantly. "You stupid man. One of them shot you in the head. Did you think that was an accident?"

He was glaring at her for calling him stupid, but her gun was still right out there, so he kept his voice soft and even. "No, I do not think it was an accident, ma'am. Right-wing crazies, militia types-Lordknows we have enough of them in this state-but nerve gas? Mass murder? I'm having a little trouble getting my head around that."

"Well, you'd better hurry up," Grace snapped. "Because at ten o'clock, two more of those trucks are going to blow somewhere."

Lee's mind stumbled through all the information she'd fired at him, his thoughts rattling around in his brain like bumper cars at the county fair. His head was killing him. He wasn't a hundred percent sure he could trust his own judgment at the moment, but one thought kept rising to the top like oil on water, and that's the one he focused on. "We've got to get out of here. Tell someone what's going on."

Annie elbowed Sharon. "Gee, why didn't we think of that?"

Lee recognized the voice of the big one he'd caught in the bushes- the wild one. Who the hell was she? And who the hell was the one with the gun and the attitude, and what were they doing with a Kingsford deputy? Do they have husbands, kids? Hell, he didn't even know their names. Someday, when he got them all out of this, they'd all go out for beers and he'd ask them those things and a million others, but not now.

"I told you, we already tried to get out of here," Grace said rapid-fire, angry and impatient because the fool didn't listen. "Twice. There are too many of them, and right now they're all out there on the perimeter, just waiting for us to try again."

Lee gritted his teeth against the pain in his head, against the nausea that rose like a black bubble when he pushed himself away from the post and sat erect. He didn't pass out, though.Good. Step one, getit together, Lee,he told himself.Itall depends on you.

"The road that runs through Four Corners is almost a mile long. It's too big an area for any kind of effective perimeter. They'd have to have a thousand men to keep it tight."

Annie snorted. "Do the math, honey. Line-of-sight average, oblong, not a circle, they could do it with less than a hundred."

Lee blinked in the general direction of the voice. The wild one again. Christ, what was she, a mathteacher.? "I was raised in these woods, ma'am. Unless there's enough of them to hold hands, there's a hole in their line somewhere. I'll find it."

Annie just closed her eyes in sad resignation. You couldn't talk to a man when he was thinking like a man. He wanted there to be a hole in the perimeter, therefore there was a hole in the perimeter. Penis is genius.

Lee was trying to stand now, fingers hooked around the post to pull himself up. There was an instant of dizziness, then Sharon was next to him, supporting his elbow. "We already decided that was too dangerous. We have another plan."

Lee shook his head with a smile but immediately regretted the motion. He breathed deeply, waiting for the nausea to subside. "I'm sure you do, ladies, but I'd feel a whole lot better if you just sat tight and waited for me to come back with help."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Grace said, totally disgusted and then infuriated when Lee started to talk again with one of those condescending tones a lot of men still used on women.

"Listen," he said gently. "I know you think trying to walk out of here is hopeless, or you would have done it yourselves. Hell, there's a bunch of boys out there with automatics; that's enough to intimidate anyone. I understand that. But you have to know they're not supermen. There has to be a way past them; you just haven't found it yet. I need to go look. It's my job."

Sharon took a step away from him and tried to keep her voice from shaking. "What do you think you're dealing with here? A bunch of simpering women in long dresses waving white hankies, waiting to be rescued? I had the same training you did; I'm a deputy sheriff and an FBI agent to boot, and as far as the other two go, they're just plain scary. I get the serve-and-protect impulse. I know what you think you have to do and why you think you have to do it. But we did not veto trying to walk out of here because we're intimidated. We vetoed it because it's suicide.

Lee waited a moment before he spoke, responding to that singular male sense that instinctively retreats from the murky, unspoken undercurrents that sometimes pass between women when they've decided that men are idiots. Once they got to this point, trying to talk some sense into them was like beating yourself over the head with a hammer. It was better to just slip away and do what needed to be done, and let them see the right of it later. "I'm going to need my gun," he said quietly.

Grace took a step closer so he could see her eyes. "That's too bad, because we could use another weapon after they kill you."

Lee actually smiled, although no one could see it very well. "Tough lady," he said, then held out his right hand. "Deputy Douglas Lee, Missaqua County Sheriffs Department. I didn't catch your name."

The hand hung there alone for a moment while Grace tried to process the gesture. Tough, maybe. Rude, never. She shifted the Sig to her left hand and gave him the other one. "Grace MacBride."

"Pleased to meet you, Ms. MacBride." His face searched the darkness in the basement. "And the woman I met in the bushes?"

A drawl answered him. "Annie Belinsky. The womanyou attacked in the bushes."

Lee dropped his eyes. "I do need to apologize for that. Never once in my life did I think I would lay violent hands on a lady."

Grace handed him his gun, butt-first, and he slid it into his holster in a smooth, powerful movement. Then he moved toward the door, his gait growing more steady with every stride.

He's huge, Grace thought as his shadowed form passed her. And he seems stronger now, almost whole. Rationally, she knew that just because they were bigger and stronger didn't automatically make men more competent, more capable of accomplishing what a smaller person could not-but sometimes it was a comfort to wish it were thatway. It was part of the male mystique so deeply ingrained in women that you grew up wanting to believe it, even though it didn't make any sense at all. Or maybe there was a God and miracles and truth in biology, and Deputy Lee would find a way out and come back and save them all. Wouldn't that be lovely. Grace closed her eyes.Youthinks of Magozzi that way, too. Even you, with all you've seen and all you know, still want desperately to believe the lie of fairy tales.

Deputy Lee opened the wooden door that led to the concrete stairs, then turned and looked at them, standing there in a pathetic little semicircle, watching him leave. It occurred to him then that he hadn't really seen their faces, not clearly; that he wouldn't recognize one of them on the street; that if he didn't make it back in time and, God forbid, they disappeared forever in this town, he wouldn't even be able to give a description. At least he'd gotten their names.

He gave them a bleak smile. "Well, I guess I'll see you later."

The three women watched in desolate silence as he crept up the steps and slowly raised the slanted storm door on the outside. A slice of fading moonlight came down the stairs and lay a lighter stripe on the black dirt floor in front of their feet. They all stared down at it, listening to the storm door's soft thump as it was closed.

Lee straightened, releasing a long exhale, then looked around carefully. Shadows. Nothing but black, silent shadows everywhere. He had his 9mm back in his hand, safety off, and he could smell the sweat of his own fear. Still, it felt better out here than it had in the clammy basement-better to be moving, to be taking action, than to be hiding and waiting for the bogeyman to come.

And it felt better to be alone again. There was a small twinge of guilt as he realized how glad he was to be away from the women.

He was a short distance into the trees when a small yellow fireburst bloomed in the woods directly ahead. His brain never had time to process the sound or the image that his senses recorded, or even the great pressure of the projectiles that drilled into his body.

For an instant that imitated life, he remained erect, then he toppled backward slowly, his body rigid, like a giant redwood severed from its trunk, reluctantly yielding to gravity.

Back in the basement, all three women closed their eyes at the same time. "Ml6, triple burst," Sharon murmured. "No nine millimeter. He didn't have a chance to shoot back."

GRACE, ANNIE, and Sharon stood immobile in the dark basement for a full minute after they heard the triple burst from the Ml6.

Grace's eyes were fixed on some distant point in the blackness as she remembered how ready she'd been to kill Deputy Lee when he'd been holding Annie in the lilac hedge. Not a quiver of guilt, not a single thought of hesitation, finger tight against the trigger. And then she remembered the big man stretching out his hand to her less than an hour later, and the way that hand had felt in hers."Pleased to meet you, Ms. MacBride." She gave herself that full minute to think of these things. It was all she had to give.

Sharon was scowling at the floor, damning her mother, her upbringing, the religion that had pounded the mantra into her head day after day, year after year, because for the second time this terrible day she was hearing it pop to lite inside her brain and she didn't know how to make it stop.Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. And once again, holy Mary was just sitting up there, watching the innocent and maybe the foolishly brave get killed, and it was such a lie. It was such a goddamned fucking lie, and oh, Lord, she'd never said that word before, never even let it form fully in her thoughts, because that was a sin, and there was no confession for little Sharon Mueller, not now or ever again, and they were innocent, and now they were about to do something foolishly brave, and did that mean they would die, too, with the sin for thinking the f-word so fresh and unforgiven.

Annie was just plain furious, because that was the one emotion she really had a handle on. They told him flat out that he was going to die if he went out there, and the stubborn fool went on ahead and got himself killed anyhow. Sure, she'd been thinking about killing him herself in the lilac hedge, and she'd thought about it again when he'd fluffed out his strutting ruff like some randy grouse hell-bent on beating the shit out of some other randy grouse, but then the bastard had shown his true colors as a good and decent man and apologized. It was a purely mean thing to do. Annie didn't know what to do with sadness.

Grace was the one to break the silence. "We're down to six hours

and ten minutes. We've got to hurry."

The three of them felt their way to a workbench on the stairway wall. Grace and Sharon stooped to pull out the filthy wooden crate under the bench they'd seen earlier, the first time they'd been in this basement. While they were dragging the thing out into the open, Annie found treasure on top of the workbench and flicked the switch. The old flashlight shot a beam across the floor and startled them all.

"Good find, Annie," Grace said. "You have any pockets in that dress?"

Annie shone her light down on the eight-thousand-dollar ruin and sighed. "I have a bra."

"Same thing. Tuck a couple of these in." She handed her two of the old Coke bottles, and Annie struggled to find a place for them.

"Could probably sell these things for some serious money on eBay."

"The bottles or the boobs?" Sharon asked, and the second the words were out of her mouth, she snapped it shut in horror. Oh, God. Had she really said that? A thousand people were going to die, poor Deputy Lee was already dead, and a minute later, she was making jokes? What kind of a person was she?

Annie had slapped a hand to her mouth to cover the laugh, but it kept squirting through her fingers in little breathy snorts. Not funny, not funny, none of this is funny, she kept telling herself, but once she'd started to laugh, she couldn't seem to stop. It didn't help that Grace was laughing, too. Grace hardly ever laughed. It was scary. "Omigod," Annie gasped. "We're hysterical."

And that made Sharon start laughing, too, because she'd seen hysterical, and this wasn't it. Hysterical was when your mother raced stark-naked through the house, wailing at the top of her lungs, wringing her hands, settling briefly in this chair and that, until finally the chair she chose was the one behind the desk with the big, ugly gun in the center drawer.That was hysterical. And then there was the ten-year-old daughter crouched on the floor, legs scrambling as she tried to push herself into the wall she was leaning against, her mouth open in a silent scream, her eyes fixed on her mother's blood and brains sliding down the plate-glass window behind the desk.That was hysterical, too. But not this.

She took a deep breath that erased everything. Displacement behavior, she remembered, was the body's defense against stress. People laugh at funerals. Cats stop fighting and spontaneously groom themselves. Cats licked, people laughed.

Annie and Grace were letting out the last long, shaky exhales, letting it all go, and then Grace was passing out bottles again, and it was as if the laughter had never happened.

They started upstairs to leave the house by the front door-not outthrough the basement and into the backyard. The perimeter was out there, in the woods but closer than they'd thought. Deputy Lee had proven that. There was less chance that they would be seen with the protection of the buildings between them and the trees.

Grace was in the lead, shining the flashlight down on the risers, making the climb easier.

It's the flashlight, Sharon thought as she followed. Whoever has the flashlight is automatically the leader, as if light was some kind of royal scepter, even more powerful than a gun. Maybe in the Bible, she thought wryly.

In the feverish religion that her mother had practiced, plowshares were mightier than swords, and things like light and goodness and mercy always won out over the lesser weapons, like atomic bombs.God's sword will not be beaten, Sharon. Man's weapons are puny in theface of the Word of God. . ..But in the end, her mother hadn't stuck a Bible in her mouth and blown her brains out, now had she?

"Wait a minute," she whispered, thinking of something as Grace prepared to open the door at the top. "We don't have a lighter, or matches."

"There are matches in the glass display case at the gas station," Grace said.

Christ, Sharon thought. She sees everything. The tiniest detail. And never forgets it. Like a really excellent cop. She saw all the things that you should have seen, drew all the conclusions that you should have drawn, and that's how she knew that this town was wrong before we ever walked into it. You're not just a good cop scared off the street by a bullet in the neck-you were never that good to begin with. And Grace isn't the leader because she's carrying the flashlight- she's the leader because she just is. Something big and dark seemed to open a little in Sharon's head, and her next breath felt like the first one she had taken in a very long time. It almost made her smile.

Grace opened the door to the upstairs and turned off the flashlight, and they were all lost in a black void. They felt their way to the front door and slipped outside. The moon was below the tree line now, and the darkness seemed to have texture, it was so impenetrable. Grace could barely identify shapes more than ten feet distant. This must be what it's like to be blind and deaf, she thought-no sound, no light, no motion, not even a breath of air stirring in the hot, still night.

The hulking outlines of the cafe and gas station were barely visible, but the outside air had that sweet, wet, predawn smell that seems to gather in the last hours before sunrise on a hot summer night. We have to hurry, Grace thought.

They carefully crept across the broken asphalt between the house and the gas station-this was the one place they would be fully exposed to any line of sight from the woods. Once inside the gas station, Grace felt around the display case until she found the matches, tucked them into her jeans pocket, and they all moved into the adjacent garage bay. There were no windows in here; even the narrow back door was solid, and it was safe for Grace to turn on the flashlight.

Ten minutes gone, six hours left.

Grace found a red gas can with a gooseneck nozzle next to the hydraulic lift, checked it and found it nearly full, then swept the walls with the beam of light. "Can't see it."

"Give me the light," Sharon said. "They're usually somewhere near the counter." She found the master switches that turned the pumps on and off under a shelf near the register that held about a decade's worth of dusty Veterans Day poppies. She pushed the two levers to the off position and hoped they worked.

When she came back to the garage bay, she shined the light on Annie and Grace, who were filling the Coke bottles with gas by touch. The smell was cloying in the closed space. Grace looked up at her. "Pumps off?"

"Yes."

"There's a box of disposable rags on the bench behind you. I couldn't find them in the dark."

"Got 'em," Sharon said after a few seconds with the light.

Annie gave up crouching after a few minutes and sat down on the filthy garage floor, fat legs crossed, expertly twisting and stuffing rags into the bottles. "Haven't done this since I tried blow up Cameron DuPuy's BMW convertible sophomore year in Atlanta. Remember, Grace?"

"No. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't there."

Annie chuckled softly and kept stuffing, and Sharon wished for a moment that she had been there, committing a felony with these two women. Maybe life would have been different then.

When the bottles were ready, they moved out to the pumps. Sharon removed the nozzles and locked them open, watched the trickle of gasoline that remained in the hoses seep out onto the concrete, then stop. The shut-off switches had worked.

Annie started laying a trail of rags from where the nozzles lay on the concrete back to the big garage bay door. Grace followed, soaking the rags with gas from the can. Back inside, they cracked the big garage door, then Grace continued the flammable trail, sloshing gas over cases of motor oil and cans of solvent stored inside the garage. She felt the cold, slimy wetness on her hands as she continued the trail out the back door, through the junked cars behind the station. They piled more rags there, and then all three of them stood, looking down at the pathetic pile of dirty, pale blue.

"No way we are ever going to hit that little bitty pile," Annie said worriedly, glancing over her shoulder at the woods behind them.

"Softball," Sharon murmured. "All-state pitcher, three years in a row."

"Honey." Annie gave her a soft punch in the shoulder. "Way to go."

It was too dark to see her face-they didn't dare use the flashlight out here-but Sharon thought she might have been smiling.

While Grace soaked the pile of rags with gasoline, hoping it wouldn't evaporate too fast, Annie and Sharon collected the Coke-bottle Molotov cocktails from the gas station and carried them back to the edge of the woods. The reek of gasoline was in their mouths, their noses, bathing their sinus cavities, and by the time they were finished, it seemed that there was no fresh air left in the world. But they were ready.

Carefully, carefully, but hurrying now, graceless and more daring in their haste, they skittered back to the house, in the front door, and on to the kitchen.

They clustered around the big, old four-burner gas stove, the fumes from the pilot lights mingling with the gasoline stench in their nostrils. Sharon thought it was probably a miracle the three of them didn't just burst into flames.

Grace lifted two heavy skillets off hooks behind the stove and placed them on the burners. "Cast-iron," she murmured. "Makes the best hash browns in the world."

Sharon pulled her one and only spare clip out of her blazer pocket, fingers tight around it, reluctant to let go. God, what were they doing? What if they needed these to save their lives? "Are you sure this is going to work?"

Annie felt for the clip, tugged it away from Sharon, then expertly started ejecting bullets into the two skillets. They made tiny, clinking sounds. "Don't ask me, darlin'. I haven't cooked bullets in years."

Sharon half believed her.

"Lord, we must look like the three witches inMacbeth." Annie turned on the burners, and there was asoft poof as blue flames sprang to life beneath the skillets, warming all the little bullets inside. "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble."

"Let's get the hell out of here," Grace said, glancing at her watch.

Five and a half hours left.

GRACE AND ANNIE waited at the open door of the gas station while Sharon went in with the flashlight to turn the pumps back on. Before she came outside, the sound of liquid hitting concrete broke the silence of the night, and the smell of gas polluted the sweet air.

"Lord, that sounds like it's coming out fast," Annie whispered.

"It's a lot of gas," Grace said. "It's going to hit the woods."

Great, Annie thought. Even if we do manage to get out of here, they'll slap us in Federal prison for setting a forest fire. Unless, of course, we burn to a crisp first.

Grace was squinting into the dark, trying to pick out the rag trail that led from the pumps to the garage bay. How long for a fire to follow that trail? Two seconds? Two minutes? Would it take too long, or move too fast?

By the time they all had crept back to the edge of the woods where they'd stashed the Molotov cocktails, Annie was beginning to understand the truth of the old saw about it being darkest before the dawn. As a rule, she was seldom up this late, and never up this early unless she was in Vegas, and they didn't have any windows there anyway, but this was ridiculous. She was staring right down at her feet and couldn't even see the white trim on the purple high-tops. Not that the trim was all that white anymore. Not after crawling through that ditch and crouching in that filthy lake with that positively disgusting dead cow .., the memory made her shudder, but it also took her back to the paddock where the real heart of this godforsaken town lay buried under four inches of manure, and that was good. It was a reminder of why she was huddled in the dark woods like a barbarian, next to a row of IIDs, as Sharon called them back in the garage.

"What the hell is an IID?"

"Improvised Incendiary Device."

"Don't talk in initials. You sound like a man. Drives me crazy the way they make up acronyms for everything. It's exclusionary, that's what it is, little boys talking in code. For heaven's sake, it's just a gas-filled Coke bottle with a rag stuck in the top, and they've got to put initials on it so it sounds like some technological marvel. Damn, now look what you've done. You got me all riled up. Let's just get out there and KSA."

Grace was staring into the darkness, eyes wide open in a futile search for light. She couldn't see the rag pile. It was too dark, and the pile was too small and too far away. Sharon's collegiate softball career seemed like a very fragile thing to carry the entire weight of what they intended to do, but there weren't a lot of choices.

They'd decided to risk the flashlight once, just to spot the pile and give Sharon something to aim at. When the time was right, Grace would hit the rags with the light, Annie would strike a match to one of the bottle wicks, then Sharon would hit the gas-soaked pile on the first throw and they'd all live happily ever after.Yeah, right.

But first the bullets had to work.

It was a simple plan, really. Primitive. First, the diversion. Bullets exploding in the house, soldiers running in from the perimeter to see what was going on, getting distracted by the fire in the garage before they realized it was following a trail that would make it a hell of a lot bigger, giving the women enough time to run out the way the men had run in.

Simple,If the bullets went off.If the men ran in.IfSharon could hit that pile with one of the bottles. Grace closed her eyes. For a woman who left nothing to chance, this was agony. Too many ifs, and this time, there were no contingency plans.

The three of them waited there in the dark, breathing through their mouths, hoping for noise and hearing nothing but silence. It was taking too long. Grace felt a trickle of sweat roll from her hairline down her cheek as she revisited the argument Annie had made at the lake, back when they were putting all this together.

"Why mess with the bullets at all? Why not just open the pumps right away, let the gasoline fill the whole damn town, and then light it up?"

"Would you run into a burning town? If the fire starts too big, they'll just sit out there on the perimeter and wait for us."

Sharon and Annie were both on the edge of panic. Sharon was holding out a bottle toward Grace in question. Grace shook her head strongly. No. The bullets had to go off first. They had to.

Back in the kitchen of the dark house, there was no noise save for the soft, breathy sound of flame. They'd turned the burner under one skillet higher than the other, hoping to prolong the noise, and ever since that moment, the immutable laws of physics had been at work, transferring heat from flame to skillet to bullets. When the proper temperature had been reached, the primer and powder so tidily contained within each bright, brassy casing ignited and then exploded.

Popcorn! Annie thought instantly, jumping at the sharp crack that split the silence. The second crack seemed louder than the first, but it didn't really sound like the shots Annie fired off at the range-more like the explosion of a small firecracker, which was just fine with her.

The louder the better. Another one went off, then a short, chattering salvo, like stuttering, and then nothing.

One skillet down.

Annie opened the matchbook and peeled off the tiny cardboard strip with the sulfur tip. Her hands were shaking.

Sharon crab-walked a few steps out of the sumac thicket that sheltered them and held a bottle at arm's length, back toward Annie. Grace pointed the flashlight like a gun, her thumb on the switch.

The seconds ticked by as their ears hummed in the silence. Then the first bullet in the second skillet did what it was supposed to do, and Annie struck the match and leaned forward to touch it to the cloth wick. It exploded into flames instantly, with a foul stench and an accompanying puff of oily smoke. Grace turned on the flashlight and trained it on the rags as Sharon jumped to her feet and flung the bottle toward the gas station in a panic. It hit the dirt, bounced, then rolled, but it didn't shatter and it didn't explode. Gasoline spilled out through the cloth into a puddle of fire that made a soft whooshing sound, a good ten feet from the pile of rags. It burned merrily on the ground, harmlessly contained by the bare dirt around it. "Shit," Sharon hissed, grabbing another bottle.

Annie was scrambling with a second match, trying once, twice, then ripping off a new one, goddamned cheap gas-station matches, and then there was another soft explosion from the house, the third match blossomed, and almost immediately a man's voice from the woods behind them, shouting, and it sounded so close, so damn close. . ..

Sharon let the second bottle fly toward the rags, arcing it upward, a flaming arrow soaring through the air, then coming down. It hit the ground with enough impact to shatter, and the explosion of fire seared the back bumper of an old junked Buick, but it didn't spread to the trail of gas leading into the station.

Her eyes were watering from the smoke and the terror because there were more voices now, closer still. They'd be here in a minute, and then they'd see the bottle flying, they'd seethem, and Grace and Annie would die because the all-star pitcher of the women's Badger softball team choked the one time in her life that it really mattered.

She held out the third bottle for the kiss of flame, tears running from her eyes, then took a breath and turned her back on the woods and gave the bastards a better target.Concentrate, Sharon. Focus. Mencan always do that better than women, so narrow that brain bridge, be a man.Ychromosome, come to Mama. You're Robert Redford in The Natural.You're Kevin Costner in For Love of the Game,and there is nothing else in the world except this single pitch. Bases loaded, two outs, full count, bottom of the ninth, but don't thinly of any of that. Just thinly of the ball and the stride zone, and black out everything else. . ..

The flaming bottle wobbled through the air, end over end, whishing like a huge pendulum, writing with a jagged contrail of black smoke. It shattered on impact within inches of the rags, and instantaneously, the pile exploded in a pillar of fire, sucking oxygen out of the air with the throat-deep woof of the world's biggest Great Dane.

In that first second of combustion, Sharon imagined that she could actually feel the change in air pressure, feel herself being sucked toward the column of black smoke and fire.

Strike three.

Shouts. Lots of them. Much closer now.

"Hurry!" Grace hissed from behind her.

But Sharon hadn't moved. She was standing perfectly still, a paralyzed lawn-ornament woman, grinning fiercely, her gaze fixed hypnotically on the circle of fire.

"Sharon!"

The rags were burning furiously, noisily, but there was no fiery snake rushing toward the station, no fire at all along the trail of gasoline they'd poured from the rags to the inside of the garage, andhowmany soldiers does it take to put out a burning rag pile? Fifty? A hundred? I don't think so.

There would be no trail of fire to the garage. Goddamnit, too much of the gas had soaked into the dirt or evaporated or God knew what, but now there would be no explosions as cans of flammable liquid blew up, no danger at all of a raging conflagration spreading to the pumps and the gas pouring out of the hoses. There was just a little circle of flames now, burning in the dirt-a little girl's campfire, that's all it was.Bring hot dogs.

Grace and Annie were hissing-whispering-squealing at her, panic fragmenting their words into unintelligibility, and now Grace was starting to scramble away from the trees on her hands and knees to come and get her. . . .

Sharon spun and dipped and grabbed another bottle and shoved it at Annie. "Light the goddamned thing and get out of here!"

Annie lit the rag wick and smiled at her, looking genuinely wicked in the reflected flames. "KSA, honey."

Okay, Sharon, here you go, Kicking Some Ass. So throw long-very, very long, all the way to that back door, because if God is great, God is good, then there would still be gasoline on the concrete floor.

She hurled the bottle, and as she dove back into the shelter of the trees, the interior of the garage flashed with a greatwhoosh, a sudden and early sunrise in Four Corners.

Instantly, the shouts in the woods behind them multiplied and increased in volume. The women crowded together, peering out through the spaces between the sumac, their hearts hammering.

Within seconds, a line of men pounded down the cartway less than twenty feet away through the trees. Just as the first of these darted out onto the broken asphalt of the cul-de-sac, dozens of others seemed to materialize magically from every direction, popping from the forest, appearing around buildings, all converging on the fiery furnace still contained within Dale's garage. They seemed to pour into the once-quiet clearing of Four Corners, as if someone were spilling bottomless bottles of men into the town.

Grace stared without blinking at the cartway, waiting for it to clear. Breathing fast, her hand clenched around the Sig, every muscle in her body tensed and ready to run.Hurry up, hurry up, she screamed at the men in her mind. By the time it seemed safe to slip out the back and into the emptying woods, the heat from the fire was rolling over them in palpable waves.

Doubled over their bent knees, their faces running with sweat, the women clambered from their hiding place, dodged from tree to tree until they were on the other side of the cartway, then plunged into the deepest part of the forest.

COLONEL HEMMER and Private Acker were at the back of an old hay field five miles from Four Corners. An overgrown, two-track field road led deep into the property, where a large metal machine shed stood crumbling into its own rust. Meryll Christian had stored some of his farm equipment there, back when the old bachelor had still been alive and farming, but with no heirs to claim the property, the State took possession. Hemmer had picked it up for back taxes five years ago, thinking he'd reseed that field one day, never dreaming of the grand purpose it would eventually serve.

Acker and Hemmer were in a jeep in the middle of a cluster of other vehicles parked in the long grass. Acker had the field radio mike off and held it to his chest, waiting for Colonel Hemmer to speak. He'd been silent for almost thirty seconds-Acker timed such things on his watch-and he'd served the man long enough to dread the silences that almost always meant that the Colonel was quietly seething, mentally busting some heads.

In this case, the heads Hemmer was wishing he could bust belonged to women he'd never met. Jesus. They'd set the goddamn gas station on fire. "Is it contained?" he asked suddenly, making Acker jump.

"Sounds like it's just in the garage bay at this point, but there are a lot of flammables in there, and the pumps out front were running full blast. The men shut them off, but there's a lot of gasoline everywhere."

Hemmer puzzled over that for a second, then shook his head in disdain. "They were trying to set the whole town on fire."

"Looks that way. They had some half-assed trail running from the garage to the pumps, but the men took care of that. They're using some on-site hoses to keep the fire down in the back so it doesn't hit those dry pines, but as soon as daylight comes, you're going to be able to see the smoke from the garage for miles if they can't get it under control."

Hemmer's pale eyes rolled skyward. It wasn't exactly light yet, just showing a little indigo in the black, but even that was too close for comfort. They had maybe an hour tops. "They're certain the gunfire came from the house?"

"Yes, sir."

"And no one got out?"

"No, sir. They were in sight of the house within seconds, and we've still got men around it."

Hemmer nodded, pleased and a little troubled, all at the same time. "So the women are still in there."

"They have to be. We've got them, sir."

"Possibly."

"Sir?"

Hemmer rolled his head toward him. "Doesn't it bother you at all, Acker, that they would set the gas station on fire and then try to hide in the house next door?"

Acker's shrug was hapless. "They're women, sir."

Hemmer had a deep scar on the left side of his mouth that pulled it down a little when he tried to smile, which he didn't do often. Very few people realized that the resulting grimace when he heard

something that pleased him was a sign of approval. Acker was one

of them.

"You want to send some men into the house, sir?"

"No. Everybody on the fire. You and I will take care of the women."

This time Acker smiled back at him.

EVERY SINGLE MAN in the Monkeewrench RV was running on adrenaline, and not much else. They'd covered only two of the seven dead zones in Deputy Lee's patrol sector in the past hour, no joy in either, and the next one was a good twenty miles away. They'd run through four pots of coffee and all the high-energy snack food left in the bus from the last trip, but it wasn't doing Harley much good. He'd been night-driving since Minneapolis, and his eyes were starting to look like two pinwheels spinning in opposite directions. Bonar, who'd been riding shotgun with Charlie in his lap since Gino went in the back with Magozzi, Halloran, and Roadrunner, feared that the shoulder harness was the one and only thing holding the tattooed giant upright.

Back in the office, Roadrunner looked up from his computer station for the first time in an hour. Up until now, he'd been in some strange cybertrance, punctuated by occasional violent outbursts of furious typing. He was running multisite cross-checks on the suspect men and sites on the FBI raid list, hoping to find things the Feds had missed, printing them out, then feeding the papers to Magozzi, Gino, and Halloran. "Goddamnit, this is going nowhere!" His voice was a frustrated whine. "I didn't get a single red flag on any of those men, and unless you can find something I didn't, they're just as clean as Agent Knudsen said they were. Just ordinary people."

Magozzi tapped one of the papers he was speed-reading. "If the Feds are looking for milk trucks, this Franklin Hemmer has to be the primary target."

Gino fanned through the sheaf of papers he was holding. "Which one's Hemmer?"

"The guy who owns the dairy."

"Oh, yeah. Christ, what kind of a sick fuck would fill up milk trucks with nerve gas? I'm never going to be able to eat cereal again."

Roadrunner punched the print key, and more papers started spewing out. "This is kind of interesting. I just pulled the county tax rolls on Hemmer, and it seems he has about a thousand acres scattered all over the place."

Halloran held up his own stack of papers. "His tax returns list him as businessman and farmer, which explains the thousand acres."

Magozzi grunted. "The only thing I see on the raid list is Hemmer's house and the dairy. How come none of that acreage was searched?"

"The FBI must have done drive-bys. It's probably all just cropland, and there's no way he's cooking nerve gas in the middle of a hayfield." Halloran sighed, setting the papers aside for a minute. Roadrunner was right. This wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't getting them any closer to finding the women.

He looked out the back window to rest his eyes. The sky had been gradually lightening for the past half hour, as if someone had spilled a big bottle of bleach on it.

He glanced over at Magozzi and wondered if he looked that bad. The skin across Magozzi's face was taut, as if he were about to jump out of it, he had a black five o'clock shadow twelve hours gone, and it was getting hard to tell where the beard ended and the black circles under his eyes began.

They'd talked the case inside and out nonstop since they left Beldon, like tired dogs chasing their tails, never getting anywhere. Every scrap of information they had blew into a brick wall, and the frustration was building to that dangerous point where you start thinking that there just isn't a goddamned thing you can do. If they didn't find Sharon, Grace, and Annie standing in the middle of the road in one of the dead zones, they'd be right back where they started with no clue where to look next, getting eaten alive by the thought that the women were out there somewhere in a bad place.

He turned back toward the window and looked out at the kind of wild country he'd loved all his life, and thought he'd gladly blow up every square inch of it if that would put them one step closer to the missing women. He wondered how old you had to get before you stopped making mistakes. He shouldn't have let Sharon go into the Monkeewrench warehouse last fall. He shouldn't have stopped trying to call her, just because she never answered. And he sure as hell shouldn't have sent that goddamned form letter that said she was going to be fired. Christ. Hurt feelings could mess up a man's head beyond recognition. And pride.Pride goeth before the fall, Mikey. It was another one of those blasted Bible quotes that his mother and Father Newberry had been so fond of spouting when he'd been a kid, and it had taken him twenty years to hear the truth in it, because he surely was taking a tumble now.

He wasn't all that sure he could stand it if he lost another deputy.

No, goddamnit, that wasn't right. He wasn't sure if he could stand it if he lostSharon.

The admission, even to himself, was almost his undoing. He rubbed at his eyes because they were tired and starting to water, blurring the colors that were beginning to show up outside the window.

"Dead zone coming up," Harley s voice boomed through the RV intercom. "And this is a big one. We've got about five square miles to cover. Eyes front."

They all got up instantly and started to head for the front of the bus and the big windows. By the time they got there, Bonar and Harley were looking at a smear of smoke on the horizon.

"I wonder what's burning," Harley was saying.

Bonar shrugged. "Could be anything. Folks still burn garbage up this way, and every now and then, one of those hundred-year-old barns with hundred-year-old hay in it goes up. And it's been real dry. Could be a grass fire. Long way away, though."

Magozzi was half listening to their conversation, but most of his attention was focused on the road ahead and the passing countryside. It was a lot lighter now, and the sky was taking on that early-morning frosted-blue color that promises heat to come. He could see patches of woods, fallow fields, and not a single sign of human life anywhere. It seemed that you could call a place like this a dead zone for a lot of reasons.

His eyes kept going back to that smudge of gray on the horizon. For no good reason he could think of, the smoke bothered him.

BY THE TIME Hemmer and Acker got into Four Corners, the town wasn't quiet anymore. Dozens of shouting men had converged with shovels and hoses on the fire that had once been Dale's garage bay. There were still occasional minor explosions as something inside reached ignition point, but they were beating it.

Jesus, there was a lot of gasoline. An unbelievable amount of gasoline around the pumps and all over the road, but other men were shoveling dirt on it as fast as they could. To a civilian, it would have looked like mass confusion, but Hemmer recognized it for what it was-ordered chaos. Yes, it was loud, but there was no one for miles around to hear the noise, so that didn't bother Colonel Hemmer. The smoke cloud did.

The damn thing was huge; acrid, black smoke billowing into an enormous, oily, reeking mass spreading over the town like a visible, airborne cancer. It boiled into a huge cauliflower shape directly over the station while its edges sank toward the ground, a dark and deadly blanket settling onto a fiery bed. Soon enough, someone would see it and raise an alarm, if they hadn't already. But he didn't need a lot of time. The women in the house were the last loose end, and with the deputy dead, the last witnesses. Even if outsiders did come in, it was going to take them far too long to find out what had happened here. He glanced at his watch. The two trucks they had left on the road were already nearing their destinations. Innocent, lumbering things that looked like they belonged where they were going, and there they would sit, benign, unmanned, unnoticed-until ten hundred hours, when they would automatically send out a wake-up call that the whole world would hear.

Gagging against the smoke and the odious stench of burning rubber, Acker and Hemmer crept up to the house and slipped inside, their minds and bodies in full fighting mode. Well, not fighting exactly; this time, it would really be murder, but it was necessary. Christ. Goddamned women. Setting a gas station on fire as if it were a fucking flare and now they were cowering in a dark hole somewhere inside this house while his men were risking their lives trying to undowhatthose stupid bitches had done. . . .

Don't do that. Rage is a distraction. It slows reaction time and dulls the senses. Let it go.

Colonel Hemmer fought for control, but he kept a small bit of the rage going, too, so what he had to do would be easier. He wasn't a killer, not by nature, and he found no pleasure in it. But he had never shirked in his duty. Not once.

With the door closed behind them, the house was almost blessedly quiet after the din outside. He and Acker moved silently, carefully, like the soldiers they were, from room to room.

Hemmer shivered a little beneath his sweat-soaked shirt, disturbed beyond all reason that the house was so still, so oddly pristine, while all hell was breaking loose just outside. His thoughts galloped down that never-forgotten path of memory where he was lost in the blowing sand, separated from his unit until a smiling American soldier came out of nowhere to lead him to safety. Only it hadn't been a fellow soldier, and although the soldier looked and talked and dressed the part, he hadn't even been an American, not in the way it mattered. One goddamned turncoat in the entire U.S. Army, and he had managed to find Hemmer and lead him right to a cage in the middle of the desert, where things happened that he'd never told a living soul. He'd seen and felt the horrors of extremism in that cage, but that wasn't what had opened his eyes. It was the American who'd led him there.

Hemmer shuddered as that particular memory surfaced, sensing on some primal level that at this moment, the house he was standing in and that smiling American face, they were the same. Good and right on the outside, quivering with evil just beneath.

Something was wrong here, and for the first time in a long time, he was afraid.

He pushed that fear back, reminding himself that a lot of people would think what he was doing was evil. But they hadn't learned the lesson yet: that sometimes pure evil hides beneath apparent goodness, and sometimes it was the other way around. His own government hadn't learned that lesson yet. So dogmatic in their adherence to human rights that the founding fathers had mandated hundreds of years ago that they were afraid to take the single, pathetically simple action that would end the threat instantly. When people were trying to get into your country to destroy it, youclosed the goddamned door. It was so easy, and yet unbelievably, they wouldn't do it. So good Americans-faithful, loyal, patriotic Americans like Hemmer and allhis men-had to do it themselves, because the government had also forgotten another thing that the founding fathers had said about power reverting to the people when their government failed to provide protection: ". . , it is their right, it is their duty . . , to provide new Guards for their future security."

Hemmer and Acker found a few things that were glaringly out of order in the otherwise tidy kitchen. Acker's flashlight beam picked up brassy bits of shrapnel glinting from odd points all around the room-punched into the plaster and scattered across the counters and floor like tiny, sharp sequins flung at random, and the room was filled with mingled, rank smells. Empty metal skillets left on open flames, old fat smoking and vile, and something else elusive yet oddly familiar. Only the skillets weren't entirely empty. There were a few bits of brass in them as well.

"Oh, shit." Hemmer closed his eyes the moment he finally identified the strange, underlying odor as the gas that escaped from his grandmother's stove when the pilot light went out. But the pilot lights weren't out on this stove, because the burners were still producing flame.

It came together in a hurry. The women were not in this house- they'd left long ago. And the bullets that went off in here hadn't come from any gun. They'd been fired from two goddamned stupid skillets, and at least one of them had pierced a gas line.

He could almost imagine narrow streams of invisible vapor shooting from tiny cuts in the line, gathering in a dense mass in the confined area of the stove, sinking inexorably toward the burners.

And then, very suddenly, he didn't have to imagine anymore.

THE SOLDIERS fighting the fire in the garage bay had been feeling pretty good about themselves. By the time the Colonel was finished in the house, he would be very pleased to find the fire almost totally under control. And sure, the sky was lightening by the minute, but the coming dawn had brought a breeze with it, and already the huge cloud of black smoke was beginning to dissipate. By full sunrise, it would look like the remnants of a smoky garbage fire.

And then something inside the house had exploded, and the back half of the building seemed to suck in a huge breath and swallow itself. That was the funny part-that the damn thing had seemed to explode inward. And the Colonel and Acker were still in there.

A few of the stunned soldiers called out and made hesitant moves toward the house, but others had their eyes lifted skyward, watching in horror as minor debris from the roof-pieces of flaming shingles, mostly-initially flew away from the blast, over their heads, and into the forest. More ominous yet were the ones floating down toward the lake of gas that had collected on the other side of the pumps and spread onto the road. They'd shoveled dirt between the garage bay and the pumps, soaking up what they thought was the immediate danger, but they hadn't worried about the gas out by the road. Hadn't they been silly.

THE SOUND of the explosion stopped the women in their halting run through the still-dark woods. They were all breathing hard from both panic and exertion, and sweat soaked their clothes and streamed down their faces the instant they stopped moving.

They turned and looked back toward the town, eyes lifting to see the tower of fire they had hoped for. "Damn," Grace said softly.Something had exploded, but it hadn't been all that loud, and she could barely see the new fire through the trees. Even the oily cloud from the initial fire was beginning to dissipate. There wasn't a chance in hell that someone miles away would think it was worth traveling to.

"Was that the pumps?" Annie asked, and Grace shook her head.

"The pumps won't blow. Too many safeguards. Something in the garage, maybe. It's probably not going to bring in help, but our chances of getting out are a whole hell of a lot better. Keep your eyes open, though, just in case they left some soldiers out here somewhere." She turned and started running through the forest again.

So help was not on the way-no fire trucks, no police cars, no gawkers, bless them all, coming to see the show, because the plan hadn't worked. The goddamned fire hadn't been big enough.

It was a bitter pill for Annie. As independent and self-reliant as she was, this was one time when even she wished the cavalry would come riding over the hill-preferably with a martini.

She kept trying to swallow, but she didn't have enough saliva left to soothe the soreness in her throat. They should have stopped for a drink. Yes, indeedy, that's what they should have done. Stopped somewhere between cooking bullets and committing arson to have a glass of iced tea or something.

She wondered how far they had come and, at the angle they'd traveled, how much farther before they'd hit the highway that they'd been on when the car had broken down. My God. She'd almost forgotten the car breaking down. Was that only yesterday?

Dodgeball,Grace thought, twisting and weaving through the spindly trunks of second- and third-generation pines packed closely together, starving for light beneath the canopy of their giant parents. A great many of them were already long dead, canted and leaning against their siblings, propped up in a sorry parody of life simply because there wasn't room to fall down. Kindling waiting for flame.

She misstepped only once and stumbled, but Annie's voice was quick behind her.

"Careful, careful!"

Grace almost smiled at that, even though she kept right on running. Annie was protecting her again. (You've got to eat more. You're not sleeping enough. You didn't wear a hat? What is this? You think pneumonia is a joke?) She hadn't seen that side of Annie since this whole nightmare had started. It was almost as if Four Corners had sucked away part of her identity, and it was only now, as they were finally leaving that place behind, that the old Annie was coming back.

After five minutes of running, even Grace, who was in amazing physical condition, felt a searing pain in her side, and every breath she drew seemed to contain less and less oxygen. They hadn't covered very much ground-the woods had been damn near impassable at first-but she felt like they'd been running for hours.

"Stop .. ." She heard Annie panting breathlessly from a few yards behind her. "I've . . , got.., to .., stop .., for just a minute."

They all stumbled to a halt and just stood there with their heads bowed, chests heaving, breath rasping through dry throats. Finally, they turned and looked back the way they had come. They listened for the sound of crazed men crashing through the woods in hot pursuit, but all they could hear was a faint crackling sound far behind them, and the answering wheeze of their own ragged exhalations.

They stumbled on, running as long as they could, finally slowing to a gasping dog-trot, then to a walk through trees that were starting to thin. The only noises they heard now were the ones they made with their feet and breath.

Around them, the forest floor had begun to open again, the canopy of old pines so thick overhead that there wasn't enough light to support undergrowth and they were able to walk abreast.

"We must be close to the highway now," Grace said. "But we'll have to stay out of sight of the road. Some of them might drive out this way, and they still want us dead. More than ever. We're the only ones who know what really happened back there."

Annie made a disgusted noise with her lips. "Terrific. So what are we going to do? Hike all the way to the next town through the woods? Do you remember how far that was?"

"We need to check out anyone who comes along before they see us."

Damnit, damnit, no fair,Annie thought, watching the filthy toes of the purple high-tops as they popped into view in front of her.Left,right, left, right, onward Christian soldiers, marching, still marching, god-damnit, off to war.

"Hold it." Grace stopped, her eyes fixed straight ahead. "There it is." She pointed through a curtain of trunks to a ribbon of asphalt less than a hundred feet away, riding high on the top of the berm, separated from the woods by a ditch full of wild grass.

Less than five minutes after they'd started walking parallel to the highway, just inside the cover of trees, all three women heard the car. A big car, not a jeep, Grace thought, roaring up the other side of the hill they were walking toward.

Sharon was through the trees and into the ditch in an instant, peeking through the dewy grass to catch first sight of the car as it topped the rise. And when it did, she jumped to her feet and walked smack-dab into the middle of the road and started waving like crazy.

She turned toward the woods with a fierce grin and looked straight at where Grace and Annie were standing. "It's a goddamned fucking police car!" she yelled happily, and turned to face the oncoming car as it slowed, still smiling so hard that her cheeks hurt.

Grace looked at her watch.

Five hours until Armageddon.