Dead Run

GRACE AND ANNIE watched from the trees as Sharon stood patiently in the middle of the road, her gun holstered, her badge held high. She didn't move when the patrol car stopped ten feet from her and idled there for a moment while the man inside checked her out.

Damnit, she should have left her gun with Annie. She was trying to stop a cop car with her holster clearly visible by holding up an FBI badge that probably looked like a Cracker Jack prize at this distance. "Sharon Mueller, FBI!" she hollered.

Another moment, and the driver's door opened and a man slid out to crouch behind it. She could see his eyes over the window frame and not much more. Good cop, she thought. Careful cop.

"Both hands over your head, ma'am!" he shouted. "Higher!"

Sharon complied, holding rock-still as he rose slowly and moved toward her. His weapon was drawn and in both hands, pointed straight at her.

"Now step forward, put your weapon on the hood, please, then step well back."

Sharon did exactly as she was asked, careful to point the gun away from the man.

Back in the trees, Grace had a bead on the man's forehead, hoping like hell this was a seasoned, steady cop who was just taking precautions and not the kind who got nervous, got twitchy, and sometimes made tragic mistakes, like shooting a fellow officer who'd been running for her life all night from other men with guns.

He took a look at Sharon's 9mm, then tucked it into his belt. "Thank you, ma'am. You can put your hands down now."

Grace saw Sharon frown for a moment, then lower the hand that held her badge very, very slowly to hook it back on her jacket pocket. Both the cop and Sharon moved around to the driver's side of the car and had a rapid conversation that Grace couldn't quite make out.

Sharon darted around to the side of the car that faced the woods and shouted down, "Come on, hurry!"

Grace looked at her. She looked a lot different than she had a few minutes ago. Still filthy, still exhausted, still like a woman who'd been through hell, but. . , happy. For Sharon Mueller, a cop carwas the cavalry. One of her own had come to take her home.

Grace stood up slowly, and when the man walked around the front of the car and approached her, she automatically raised the Sig. Sharon scowled down at her. "Damnit, Grace, put that down. He's one of us."

No, he's one of you. Not me, not Annie, not us.

"He's a cop, Grace, just like me. Missaqua County Deputy."

Grace never took her eyes off the man. He'd spotted her almost the second she'd stood up, and stopped dead when he'd seen her weapon, his hands up, palms out. But he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and cowboy boots that looked like they'd seen a lot of wear. He looked

like anybody. Put him in a patrol car, instant cop; put him in camouflage, instant soldier. "Where's his uniform?"

Sharon actually rolled her eyes. "He was off duty, at home, when a call came through on the fire."

Grace kept the gun steady, her lips folded inward.

"Come on, Grace, give me some credit. I asked him all the right questions; he had all the right answers."

So why is your heart beating so fast, Grace? What are you afraid of? Well, that's pretty simple: Everything. Everyone. Just life always.

Annie remained hunkered down in the bushes, looking up at Grace's face, waiting. She didn't have Grace's instincts about certain people and situations, and she knew it. If Grace was nervous, there was probably a damn good reason.

"Uh, ma'am?" the man called to Sharon. "Your friend there seems a little nervous. We've got a lot of units on the way. You all want to just sit tight here 'til you're feeling better about things, that's just fine, but I've got to get to the staging area and report for duty." He took a couple hesitant steps backward, hands still up, harmless, which finally eased Grace's mind a little-that he was willing to drive away without them.

Sharon raised an impatient brow. "We started a goddamned forest fire, Grace. Get out here and take a look. And for God's sake, holster your weapon. Cops don't like civilians pointing guns at them."

Grace thought about it. He had his gun holstered, and even if he went for Sharon's, an easier draw from the belt, she could still put him down.

She slipped the Sig back in the holster but didn't fasten the snap, released a long breath, and started forward. Annie rose out of the bushes to follow her, a fat, wild-looking woman in a tattered dress, and the man's eyes widened to see a third.

"Jesus," he breathed in an aside to Sharon as he watched Grace and Annie approach. "Your partner looks pretty wired. This must be some case you're working."

Grace stopped two feet away, enough room to get at her weapon, close enough to use her hands if she had to. "You don't look like a cop."

That irritated him. "Deputy David Diebel. Missaqua County Sheriff's Department. And as far as that goes, you don't look much like arsonists, either. But if you really did start this thing, you've got a lot of explaining to do."

Grace and Annie looked back toward Four Corners and saw what Sharon already had. Black billows of smoke stained the morning sky, and tongues of orange flame rose above the trees and pixellated into sparks that swirled in a vortex overhead. And now they heard it, faintly-a low, distant roaring sound, like an enormous animal just coming awake.

"Oh, dear Lord," Annie murmured, thinking that Smokey the Bear was going to be really pissed. She stepped out of one of the high-tops and felt the burn when the air hit her heel. The blistering had bled a little into the shoe. Sharon was going to be pissed, too.

"Listen, ladies, we're in a bad spot here, and I need to get moving. You can call whoever you need to from the staging area, and while you're there, you can explain your involvement in this fire to Sheriff Pitala."

"Sheriff Pitala?"

"My boss.. ."

Grace glanced quickly at Sharon, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

".., and my guess is, he'll be mighty interested in whatever you have to say. We've got a town right in the middle of that fire, and you better pray to God that everybody who lives there got out."

His voice was a little shaky now, with understandable rage, Grace thought. This is his county, and those were his people in Four Corners, and he thought they set the fire that might have killed some of them. Something inside her that had been tight since the car broke down finally loosened. Let it go, she told herself. He's a cop. For God's sake, he's a cop. It's over. You're safe. You're all safe now.

The sound of an explosion made the deputy look up in alarm. "Shit, the big pines are going. That thing is moving fast. Get in the back, now."

"I need my weapon, Deputy," Sharon said.

"Later," he said, running to the car and opening the back door.

Sharon stopped at the open car door. "I'm a Federal officer, Deputy. Cops don't take guns from cops."

He hesitated for an instant, then pulled her 9mm out of his belt and handed it over, grip first. "Sorry. Holster that. We're going to be moving, and the roads are rough."

Sharon crawled all the way across the backseat, moving the deputy's hat up to the back window ledge so they didn't smash it. Halloran would climb all over me for blocking the window, she thought in a sudden pang of nostalgia. Actually, Halloran would have given Deputy Diebel an even more serious dressing down for storing his hat in the backseat in the first place. Things must be a lot more relaxed in Missaqua County.

Annie clambered in next to her, feet splayed on either side of the hump, one of them bare. "Shit, my shoe . . ." But by that time, Grace was already slamming the door, the deputy was behind the wheel, stomping on the accelerator, and the rear tires were squealing.

It was a frantic sound, a sound of panicked haste, and Grace felt her stomach knot as she stared straight ahead at the cage between the front seat and back, then at the doors without handles. Being locked in your own tiny, safe place was one thing; being locked in someone else's was altogether different.

She leaned forward, closer to the cage. "We need to get patched through to a landline as fast as you can."

"We're in a dead zone," he snapped back. "Radios and cells don't work. But the staging area's less than five miles from here, and like I said, there's landlines there. You better buckle up. Another mile or so and we have to take a farm road. It's straight washboard."

Grace sat back and buckled the lap belt, and felt the wind from the deputy's open window buffeting against her face, lifting her hair away from her ears. Relax, she told herself. There's not a single thing you can do for five more minutes anyway. She glanced at her watch. Dear God. Only four hours and forty-five minutes left. Was that enough time to find two particular trucks out of the millions across the country? And even if they found them, was it enough time to disarm them?

Suddenly, the weight of a thousand lives came down on her, and five short minutes seemed like a lifetime. She tried to look forward to the end of it, when they'd get to the staging area and a phone. . . . Her thoughts stuttered to a halt. Who were they going to call? Who did you call to report something like this? She went through all the possibilities, starting with Magozzi, the one and only cop she really trusted, and she smiled when she ended up at the only real choice they had. She'd run from the FBI for ten years, maligning them every chance she got, hating them almost constantly for what a few bad agents had done to her once, and now she was sitting next to one of them, planning to call the rest in for help.

And the wheel goes round and round, she thought, rolling her head to look at Annie. The woman was going to kill herself the minute she got a look in a mirror. She didn't do disheveled. But Grace envied Annie's ability to disconnect instantly, to throw back her head and close her eyes and go from total terror to total relaxation in the space of a few minutes.

Sharon was a different story. She was buckled in but sitting straight up, her back nowhere near the seat, and that surprised Grace. Of all of them, she should have been the most relaxed in a police car with a fellow officer. Then again, maybe she was never caged in the backseat before, or maybe she was as screwed up after getting shot last fall as Grace was after Atlanta. Maybe the two of them were more alike than Grace knew.

The deputy braked suddenly and cranked the wheel to the right.

Annie's eyes flew open as she felt herself thrown forward, and her heart pounded.God, take it easy, fat woman, you're going to have a heart attach- He just made a turn, that's all.

"It's going to get bumpy now, ladies," Deputy Diebel called over his shoulder as he turned sharply off the highway and onto a dirt road carved into the forest. "Hang on."

The car's axles tap-danced over the washboard surface, jostling the women against one another in the back. Annie had her arms folded under her breasts to support them. Stupid things were about to pop out of their sockets, or whatever the hell held them in there, and theyhurt.

The car jittered over another series of bone-jarring washboards and something hard and narrow stowed under the front seat poked at Sharon's toes. She moved her foot and looked down as her eyebrows crept toward one another.

There was a ghastly scraping sound as the car suddenly bottomed out on a hard ridge of dirt, and the deputy's hat bounced off the ledge and slid down between Annie and Sharon. Sharon grabbed it automatically and set it in her lap, but her eyes were on the fields and woods and great clouds of dust flashing by the window.

Another minute, and they turned off the dirt road onto a highway. "Another mile, ladies, and we're there."

Annie patted Sharon's knee. "Relax, honey, it's almost over."

Sharon nodded slowly, turning the deputy's hat over and over on her lap, fingering the familiar rigid brim, finding an odd sort of comfort in this small piece of a uniform just like the one she used to wear. It looked just like the one sitting on her hall closet shelf, waiting for the day she might return to her job in Kingsford County, except for the size, of course, and the name on the inside label. She took a very deep breath and let it out slowly. Her hands were shaking.

"These are the last bumps now," the deputy said as he turned onto another farm road. "We set up in a machine shed at the back of this field. Only place close enough to the fire with a phone line."

The machine shed was corrugated steel, large enough to house a lot of farm equipment, and it looked old and faded and uncared for. Cars were jammed in the long grass off to the side, but there were no people in sight.

Grace was leaning forward against her seat belt. "Where is everybody?"

Deputy Diebel actually gave her a smile over his shoulder. He was where he wanted to be now, and considerably more relaxed. "A few of them are inside running communications, but most everybody is out fighting the fire. We drop our personal vehicles here, load up in an emergency unit, and take off."

He pulled to a stop next to the other cars, turned off the ignition, unfastened his shoulder harness, and reached down to unsnap his holster. It was an absolutely normal thing for him to do. You make enough road stops when you ride solo, unsnapping your holster before you got out of the car to confront God knows what becomes a habit.

Grace glanced over just as Sharon was raising her 9mm to the back of Deputy Diebel's head.

And then she pulled the trigger.

SHERIFF ED PITALA had forcibly pulled Dorothy away from the dispatch desk and sent her home at twoA.M., a full three hours after her shift had ended. Trying to pry her loose any earlier had met with about as much success as trying to get her to retire for the past ten years.

Dorothy had a face like a topographical map of the Rockies, a body like Aunt Bea, and a voice like a blowtorch. Her pictures hung on the wall with three previous sheriffs, all of whom she'd outlasted and outlived. Sheriff Pitala figured that if she ever up and died, he'd just slap a "closed" sign in the window and nail the door shut, because this place sure as hell couldn't run without her.

She was back by 5:30A.M., shoving a plate of ham, eggs, and biscuits under his nose. "Get away from my desk."

"Lord almighty, Dot, now I know how all my predecessors died. You scared them to death."

"You were sleeping on the job."

"Dozing. It's been quiet since you left, except for the boys checking in by phone. And before you ask, there's no sign of Doug yet, or those women the Minneapolis cops are looking for. And what the hell are you doing here? I just sent you home."

"Hmph. Three hours ago. I walked home, took all the snooze I needed in the recliner, then showered and made you breakfast. Eat it, you skinny old man, before it gets cold or you keel over. Don't know which is likely to happen first, the way you look."

She rolled him, chair and all, over to the other desk and grabbed the card-table chair she'd been sitting in for more than forty years. Not a single light was lit on the patrol board. It had been that way since the FBI pulled the cars off the road, and Dorothy thought looking at that black board was like looking at the end of the world.

"Don't know how you can sit in that damn thing," the Sheriff said around a mouthful. "There isn't a lick of padding left in that seat, if there ever was any to start with."

"If you carried a little more padding in that skinny butt of yours, it wouldn't be a problem."

Ed smiled, lips sealed shut with the honey she'd put on the biscuits. When he pulled them open again, he said, "Swear to God, Dorothy, if Pat ever kicks me out, I'm going to run right to your house and marry you."

Dorothy snorted. "I'm twelve years older than you. It wouldn't work out. You're too immature."

"You gotta get with the times. People do that stuff all the time now. We could be like Cher and whatever-his-name-is, or that Dimmy woman and her young fella."

"Dimmeee. How often do I have to tell you that?"

He didn't answer her, and when she glanced over to look at him, he was holding a bite of food in his mouth, not chewing, just looking at her with his eyes half screwed shut.

Dorothy cocked her head at him. "What! Don't tell me there was a bone in that ham, because it was a boneless ham. Born and died in a can, as far as I know."

It took a slurp of cold coffee for him to get the bite down his gullet. "Funny thing. I thought I heard you say you were twelve years older than me."

"So?"

"So that makes you seventy-seven years old, Dorothy, and as I recollect, the birth date on your records puts you at sixty-nine. If the county commissioners ever found out how old you really are, they'd make you retire."

"Who's going to tell them?"

"Not me."

"Allrighty, then. You quit jawing now, because I've got an honest-to-God light coming up on the 911 board, and I'm so excited I can barely stand it." She adjusted her headset and punched her buttons at the same time that the phone on the desk started ringing.

The phones kept ringing off the hook for the next half hour and Dorothy's 911 board was so lit up, even she was starting to get a little frazzled. By the time Ed Pitala had finished his fifteenth call, his face was red and his eyes were hard, and he was ready to start making some calls of his own. He stood up quickly and said, "Dorothy, you've got to cover the board and the phones for a minute. I've got to talk to Knudsen. You think you can manage?"

"Probably not. I'm seventy-seven years old."

"You don't look a day over sixty-nine."

She shooed him away with her fingers, and he crossed the outer office to the door that had his name on it. He rapped hard and stormed in before he got an answer. Agent Knudsen was talking on that peculiar thing he'd brought with him that looked something like a phone and a lot like something else. It didn't plug into any wall or phone jack, and as far as Ed knew, the thing probably ran on a can of baked beans. He raised his eyes and held up a finger, which the Sheriff thought was pretty laughable. Fingers never stopped anyone unless they were on a trigger.

"You can put that damn thing down or not, I don't care, because I've got a whole goddamned forest on fire, and I'm about to send out every goddamned truck in the county whether you like it or not."

Knudsen just stared at him with his mouth open for a second, and it was the first time Ed noticed that he was little more than a kid. It made him nervous to think of kids in positions of responsibility with law enforcement, but not as nervous as the other expression Knudsen was hiding behind the one that just looked surprised. This boy was scared.

"Stay put. I'll get back," Knudsen said into the phone, then gave Ed his attention. "I know all about the fire, Sheriff. It's under control."

"The hell it is. The last call I got was from one of my deputies who damn near drove into the thing, and it is nowhere near under control. That fire's crowning, and it's going through thirty-foot dry pines like they were matchsticks, and I did not walk into my own office to ask for your permission, I am just telling you that I am calling in every one of my people and getting them out there in patrol cars, because we are going to need every emergency vehicle we've got. . . ."

"Understood, Sheriff."

That stopped Ed's rant cold. Damn. He hated working his hackles into a bristle and then getting them hosed down like that. "What happened to all that crap about our patrols scaring off whoever you were trying to find?"

"We are not here to impede public safety; we're here to protect it."

Ed narrowed his eyes. "You already found what you were looking for, didn't you?"

"No, we did not."

"Any chance whatever it is has anything to do with this fire?"

"Anything's possible, but we don't think so. Your fire started small. We had smoke sightings a while ago that didn't raise any major alarms. The real fire started a bit later, with a few small explosions. Could have been propane tanks, something in the gas station . . ."

Ed caught his breath. "What gas station?"

Knudsen frowned. "I don't know. Is there more than one in Four Corners?"

"Four Corners?" he repeated stupidly, and Knudsen looked at him sideways.

"You didn't know the fire was in the town?"

Ed shook his head. "My people weren't close enough yet. I knew the general area, that's all."

"Oh. Sorry. We did a fly-over a few minutes ago, that's who I was talking to. All he could make out was that the center of it looked like it might have been a gas station, and it spread out from there. I'm afraid there isn't much left of Four Corners."

Ed blanched and felt his knees start to give way. He grabbed the nearest chair and nearly fell into it.

"Hazel?" The whisper came from the doorway. Dorothy was standing there with her eyes and open mouth making three circles in a face that didn't look sixty-nine anymore, or even seventy-seven-it looked a whole lot older.

Knudsen's face went still. "You knew someone in that town?"

"My sister," Ed said. "Well, half sister. She owns the cafe next to the gas station."

The agent caught his breath and took a minute, then spoke very quietly. "Remember, Sheriff, it started small. She would have had time to get out. Everyone would have."

Ed looked like he was shrinking in that chair, as if the fire were right there, sucking all the moisture out of him. "You think so? We got over fifty calls on that fire in the past half hour, and not one of them came from Four Corners or anyone who lived there. If they had all that time, why didn't one of them pick up a phone?"

HALLORAN and Roadrunner were in the back of the RV- Roadrunner back at the computers, Halloran on the satellite phone, trying to get through to Sheriff Pitala about the fire. Everyone else was in the front, looking out the big windows at the smoke cloud that had gotten more and more ominous the closer they got. The damn thing was huge now, right in the middle of the next dead zone, and they were still at least five miles away. The center of it was black and nasty and halfway up the sky; the sides were gray, expanding outward by the minute.

"That's no grass fire," Bonar said. "Something dirty's at the center of it, and that means man-made. Buildings of some kind, for sure."

Gino grunted from the sofa behind the driver's seat. Charlie sat next to him, looking out the window. "We had a big swamp fire north of the Cities a few years ago. Never could figure that one out. I mean, there's about fifty acres of waterlogged frog city burning like it was dry kindling. Anyway, the smoke was black like that."

Bonar said, "Peat."

"Who's Pete?"

"Very funny. There's a high peat content in swamps, rotting vegetation and all that. Oil in the making. Burns like a son of a gun forever once it gets a good start. Smells bad, too."

Gino sighed. "I'm on a road trip with Mr. Britannica."

Halloran came up from the back and looked out at the smoke. "I finally got through to Sheriff Pitala's office. His phones have been jammed with calls on the fire. That FBI agent who gave us the raid sites said they've got a lot of their people heading our way, fire trucks from all over the county, plus Pitala put the patrols back on the road, so we might be running into some serious traffic when we get close. There's a little town dead center in that fire. Sounds like it's gone."

Magozzi had been standing behind Harley, watching him punch commands into the GPS. He looked over his shoulder at Halloran. "What about the residents?"

Halloran shrugged. "He said it started small. They're assuming everyone had a chance to get out."

"They're not sure?"

"No. Ed's on the way for a closer look. His sister lives in there."

"Oh, Lord," Bonar murmured.

Gino stroked Charlie's back absently. "How shook up was the Fed you talked to?"

"Pretty much. But there's a lot going on up there with the phones ringing off the hook and people yelling in the background. Why?"

"Nothing. You just gotta wonder if whatever the Feebs are up to has anything to do with a fire that suddenly pops up out of nowhere."

"It's fire season, Gino."

"Yeah, well, nothing's ever that simple."

Harley had his face close to the windshield now. "Jesus. I think I just saw some flames shooting up in the middle of that cloud."

"Could be," Bonar said. "When those pines are dry enough and hot enough, they literally explode, and the flames can shoot straight up like bottle rockets."

"Shit. I gotta pull over. We are not driving into that thing unless I know we can get the hell out fast if we need to, and this damn GPS map is telling me there's only one turn off this road for the next ten miles, and that's the turn that leads right into Four Corners."

"Four Corners?" Magozzi asked.

"That's the name of the town in the middle of all this," Halloran said.

"We could turn around," Bonar offered.

"In this rig? On this peanut road? Are you kidding?" Harley pulled the RV to one side of the road and stopped.

Bonar was actually wringing his hands. "There's probably lots of little dirt roads cutting off this one that won't show up on that map. The county's checkered with them."

"'Probably' doesn't cut it for me. What if we get in there and the fire jumps the road behind us?"

"We'll all cook in here like pork roasts."

"You got that right. And can anybody tell me why we're planning to drive straight into hell anyhow? We're looking for our ladies, and I can guarantee that the one place they'renot is in the middle of that shit up there."

"Like Gino said, it's just one more coincidence in a long string of them," Magozzi said behind him. "We know for sure at least one of our missing people disappeared in a dead zone, and now there's a big fire smack in the middle of one. If we're going with coincidence and a possible connection to the Feds' operation, we've got to take it all the way. We've got no place else to go. And my gut tells me those women are somewhere near that fire, either running from it, trapped by it, or-" He stopped dead, but nobody seemed to notice.

Harley grunted derisively. "No way they're trapped in there. They're just too goddamned smart."

Magozzi looked at him. "Smart enough to send up a flare? What if Grace wasn't saying four people were dead. What if she was trying to say 'Four Corners'?"

Harley stomped on the accelerator.

BARELY A MOMENT had passed since Sharon Mueller had raised her gun and blown away Deputy Diebel's head.

Annie couldn't hear anything over the ringing in her ears, and she couldn't see very well, either, because she hadn't blinked in a long time.

Blink. You have to blink, or your eyeballs will dry up and fall out, and then you'll be blind-blind and deaf, and your last memory of sound will be the thunderous roar of a gun, and your last memory of sight will be this shocking thing that Sharon just did. Don't look-

She was actually staring at Sharon's face-the side of her face, actually-sort of three quarters, sort of profile, and she didn't recognize her at all. She blinked at last, but that didn't help. She moved her jaw, trying to clear her ears, and then someone turned down the ringing sound. It was still there, but it was softer, hiding way behind theeardrum, muffled like a jangling phone under a pillow. Another noise began to tiptoe in. Sharon, she realized, making the oddest little sound, like she was screaming as loud as she could with her mouth closed, screaming through her nose.

Oh, dear. Poor Sharon. She was staring at something awful in the front of the car, on the other side of the cage, and Annie knew what she was looking at. She'd had just a glimpse, just the tiniest flash on the back of her retina before she'd shifted her gaze to Sharon's face and refused to look forward again, just like when you went to a horror movie. You didn't keep looking at the screen when something gross happened. You just shifted your eyes a little to one side, not so far that anyone would notice, just far enough, and then later, when people asked how you could watch that stuff, you just shrugged and said it wasn't so bad, really. It was a trick, a secret trick. She should have told Sharon about it, because Sharon was still staring at all the blood and little pieces of matter sliding down the windshield.

"Sharon." Grace reached across Annie to touch Sharon's left hand, which had fallen into her lap like a dead thing. It was ice-cold. Her right hand still held the 9mm, still pointed at the place where Deputy Diebel's head had been before his body slumped to the right, over the console. "Sharon."

Annie watched Sharon's eyes move just a little, hardly far enough to notice-maybe she did know the trick. Hello, Sharon. Anybody in there?

The noises stopped, and Sharon's throat moved. Her mouth opened and a whistle came out, then a whisper: "Sorry about the noise." And then her right hand started to shake, hard, and she lowered it slowly to lie in her lap with the left one. She felt Annie and Grace looking at her, and she turned her head to meet their eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said, her tone calm, perfectly controlled, pretending to be normal but sounding hideously abnormal coming from her face. It was a ghastly gray color, and all the skin looked loose.

Grace didn't know what to say to that. Sharon had just killed the man who was driving them to safety, a deputy just like her, and now she was apologizing as if she'd burped at the dinner table.

"I have to do it again," Sharon said suddenly, lifting the gun so fast that Grace couldn't believe it, firing two quick shots and blowing out her side window.

Annie slammed her hands over her ears, but it was too late. Instant deafness. She couldn't hear the safety glass falling to the ground as Sharon pounded at it with the butt of her gun, desperate to reach for the outside door handle, to crawl through the window opening itself if she had to, anything to get out of the car.

In the end, she couldn't manage it. Not just yet. She was simply too tired. Funny how pulling a little trigger could wear you out. But that wasn't really true, either. On the range, she could get a hundred shots off without feeling the strain in her finger or the muscles in her forearm quiver. Killing an actual person was surprisingly exhausting. Sharon had never done it before, had never dreamed she would ever have to do it, in spite of all the training and preparation. She sat there on the edge of the seat, ready to do something she couldn't quite remember, her thoughts tripping away to touch on things, losing focus almost immediately. The psychology major inside her head put a finger to her mouth and nodded sagely. Oh, yes. She was going to need therapy.

"Sharon?" Grace's voice, tentative, filled with tension.

"Right here."

"Look at me."

Sharon turned and gave Grace her eyes, and then Annie. Why were they looking at her so oddly? Why did they still look afraid? She'd taken care of everything, hadn't she?

"Why?" Grace said.

Oh, that.She felt a bad, naughty smile trying to form. . . .Don't dothat, don't smile, can't excuse smiling after you filled a person, not evenwith displacement behavior or any of that gobbledy gook. . , oh, shit. I forgot to tell them why.

A wave of clarity rolled over her mind, washing away all the silly, disgusting, normal human reactions to trauma you were allowed to have when you were just a person and not a cop. She took a deep breath and came back to the here and now.

"He didn't check my badge," she said simply, because that was when it had started. That had been the first thing to bother her. "He should have looked that thing up and down and sideways, made sure I was FBI, but he didn't. All he cared about was getting my gun."

Grace and Annie were still staring at her, saying nothing. It wasn't enough.

"He had another gun under the front seat. A long one. Part of it's probably in plain view in the front, and I was too goddamned stupid to check out the car before we got in. Too goddamned relieved to see a cop to even think about checking the car. My fault."

"Cops all carry shotguns," Annie said carefully, and Sharon nodded impatiently.

"In the trunk. Always. Unless it's racked. Besides, the barrel was all wrong." She pulled an untidy memory from her brain, and her voice got hard. "I know guns. My father was a collector. Don't know where he got half of them; now they'd be illegal as hell. But one of them was an Ml6. Just like the one under the seat. Our Deputy Diebel was oneof them."

Grace was very quiet, her gaze turned inward, trying to decide if Sharon had jumped too fast and way too far, or if all her vigilance had failed her once again.

"And there's this." Sharon lifted the hat from where it still sat on her lap, undisturbed by shooting and window-breaking and madness. She flipped it over and showed Annie and Grace the inside.

Annie looked down at it stupidly. "It's a hat."

"Look at the name tag."

Grace grabbed the hat and squinted down at the small, faded printing that read "Douglas Lee." "Oh my God."

"What?" Annie snatched the hat and held it close to her face. "Oh, Lord. This ishis car, isn't it? This was Deputy Lee's car. . . ." Her eyes jerked to the front seat, then quickly darted away. "Jesus God in heaven. We went right with him. We just hopped in the car and let him drive away with us."

Sharon's neck was starting to hurt from looking to the right for so long, but she couldn't look anywhere else, she just had to keep looking at Grace and Annie because her thoughts were slipping again, like marbles on ice. "I killed him," she said matter-of-factly. "Just like he was going to kill us. They killed Deputy Lee and took his car and his hat, and that bastard up there is probably carrying Deputy Lee's gun, so I killed him right in Deputy Lee's own car." She leaned forward and hissed toward the bloody ruin that had been the man's head. "How's that for poetic justice, Deputy Fucking Diebel?" And then she scrambled right out the open window and tumbled to the ground and started to suck in huge breaths.

It was the first time Sharon had really scared Grace, even more than when she'd fired the gun in the first place.She's losing it. She's forgetting everything. Damnit, she didn't even look before she went out there.

Annie had her arm out the window, reaching for the outside door handle, but Grace was looking everywhere frantically, around every car, the sides of the building, through the tall grass, and into the trees beyond.

She was positive of only one thing-if this was where that imposter in the front seat wanted to take them, she didn't want to be here.

EXCEPT FOR ROADRUNNER, who was still back in the office, all of the men were in the front of the RV, looking worriedly at the towers of flame in the woods on their right, moving steadily toward the road.

Less than a mile from the Four Corners turnoff, Harley eased the rig to a stop at a makeshift roadblock that some firefighters had set up. There were two fire trucks ahead of them, pulled as close to the nonexistent shoulder as they could get, and it still left only about an inch of clearance for the RV to get by. One of the engines looked like it should have been pulled by horses.

Two men in heavy yellow firefighting gear were gesturing wildly for Harley to back up the rig, which was just plain ridiculous. Magozzi and Halloran went outside with their badges and guns and attitudes, and it still took another minute before they could talk the firefighters into letting them pass through. Charlie slipped out the open door before anyone noticed.

"Your dog's loose." Halloran pointed on the way back to the RV, and Magozzi saw Charlie rooting around in the ditch, running back to the woods toward the fire-stupid dog-then back up to the road again to plunge his nose into a piece of debris he'd found.

"Charlie, come!" Magozzi slapped his thigh.

Charlie looked up, then back down at whatever treasure he'd been examining, then snatched it up in his jaws and raced toward Magozzi and dropped it at his feet.

Magozzi picked up a battered, filthy, purple high-top tennis shoe and held it with two fingers. Christ. All hell was breaking loose, and the dog wanted to play fetch with a piece of someone's discarded trash. He heard Halloran whisper, "Oh, shit," and turned to look at him. The man was staring at the shoe, looking like he was about to double over.

"That's Sharon's."

Magozzi looked at what he was holding. "It's a shoe. It could belong to anyone. It could have been here for months."

Halloran was shaking his head back and forth. "It's a Converse. Lavender high-top. They stopped making them years ago. Sharon loved those stupid, ugly shoes. It was one of the first things she asked me to bring from her place when she was in the hospital in Minneapolis."

Magozzi looked into the shoe and felt his stomach turn. There was blood in there. "Shit," he murmured, glancing up as Charlie raced away. He called after him, but the dog ignored him and just pressed his nose down hard on the tar and started trotting, the dog who was afraid of anything and everything, who hid between Grace's legs when toddlers on tricycles approached, and there he was, weaving past fire engines and stepping over hoses, dodging scary, shouting men in big yellow coats, oblivious to everything except the twin streams of air and scent going in and out of his nostrils.

"Goddamnit!" Harley shouted from inside the rig, banging his hand on the wheel. "Roadrunner! Get your ass up here and get that dog!"

Roadrunner came racing up from the back, clutching a forgotten piece of paper in his hand, and jumped clear of the narrow steps instead of trying to negotiate them in his size-twelves. Gino was right behind him, both of them hurrying to catch up to Magozzi and Halloran, four grown men chasing a mangy mongrel down a road while the world was burning.

Harley and Bonar were in the RV, staring at the spectacle in disbelief.

"What the hell?" Bonar said.

"It's Grace's dog," Harley explained. "Anything happens to that dog, she'll kill us all." He moved the rig forward slowly, easing past the two fire trucks while Bonar held his breath, waiting for the sound of metal screeching against metal. A hundred yards farther, and Harley stopped to pick up the men. It had taken the dog less than a minute to leave them far behind.

"What the hell got into him?" Bonar asked when the others were back inside, panting and sweating.

Magozzi nodded at where Halloran was clutching a filthy shoe against his chest. "Charlie found that. Halloran says it belongs to Sharon."

Bonar looked at it more closely, and his face fell. "Oh my God."

Gino was banging on the back of the driver's seat. "Goddamn, that dog is a friggin' genius. I swear to God he's tracking, and there's only one thing in the world that dog would be interested in finding, and that's Grace MacBride."

Roadrunner was staring out the big front window as Harley eased the RV forward to keep pace with the dog. Charlie was moving at a dead run, covering ground at an astounding pace for a dog who sat upright in chairs and took his meals at the table like any other fat, slow human being.

Gino was bent over, still breathing hard, waiting for the heart attack. "That dog nearly killed me. How far has he gone?"

"Over a mile-maybe two."

"Jesus, he's fast."

Roadrunner caught his breath when Charlie made an abrupt right onto a narrow dirt road.

"Harley," he whispered. "I know where he's going. And you gotta catch him. He's got another three miles to go, and he'll be dead by then."

"Three miles to where?"

"I just pulled up an old deed on one of those pieces of property Hemmer owns. It has a building on it, and it's less than five miles from Four Corners."

IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for Grace to decide that this overgrown field was deserted, and that all the cars parked in the high grass were empty. There were two doors accessing the corrugated steel building-a large, rolling one for heavy farm equipment, and a smaller, man-sized door next to it. Both were chained and padlocked from the outside.

"Stay on her; stay down!" she'd commanded Annie when her friend had tumbled out of the car onto the ground next to Sharon, and Annie had done what Annie always did best. . , wrapped her arms around Sharon and held her still, kept her safe, just as she had held Grace on a few occasions, back in the days when she was the strong one.

While Annie and Sharon lay there next to what had once been Deputy Douglas Lee's patrol car, Grace did what had to be done. She crawled out the back door, around to the front, and pulled the man who had called himself Deputy David Diebel off the console so she could get to the radio and computer. The computer didn't work, and no one answered her desperate radio calls.

"He was telling the truth about the dead zones," Sharon finally called up from where she lay in the comfort of Annie's arms. Except for the few times that Halloran had touched her, each erotic memory seared in her mind, she hadn't felt genuine caring from another human being in years. Annie had been holding her close-probably to keep her still and silent-but the effect was identical to when her mother had held her as a child, chasing away the demons of the night. Mute tears leaked out of her brown eyes and onto Annie's plump forearm.

While Sharon was sitting up, wiping the embarrassing tears from her cheeks, Grace was wiping blood from her fingers. The radio had been covered with it. She looked up toward the building and wondered if Diebel had been telling the truth about the landline inside. "I'm going to try shooting off one of those padlocks."

"There should be bolt cutters in the trunk of the patrol."

Grace looked at Sharon, a little surprised by the strength she heard in her voice. "You okay?"

Sharon was already on her feet, collecting her weapon from where it had fallen in the grass beside her. "Better than that. I'm pissed." She extended a hand to Annie to help her up, then went to the car, reached into the front seat, and popped the trunk without glancing at the body a few inches from her arm, without even letting her brain acknowledge that it was there. She wiped her hand on her slacks when she was finished, but she never looked at what she was wiping off. Grace and Annie found the bolt cutters in the trunk, then the three of them moved toward the steel building together.

The inside was pitch-black and dead silent, except for a low, distant hum that they couldn't identify. Grace wished for the flashlight, wondered where she had dropped it. She found a bank of electrical switches on the wall and started flipping them up. The annoying buzz of a hundred fluorescents Bickering to life overhead, lighting the enormous space, ended the silence.

The women just stood and stared.

Seven enormous tanker trucks were neatly parked in a row facing the big rolling door. "Good Health Dairies" was emblazoned in bright blue across their silvery skin.

"Funny place to keep milk trucks," Sharon murmured.

Annie was frowning. "I thought milk trucks were those cute little white vans with the cute little bottles jangling inside."

"These are the bulk carriers. They travel from farm to farm to pick up raw milk and transport it to the dairy . . , oh, shit. Do you think these are the trucks?"

Grace looked at the lumbering, innocent-looking things with their happy blue lettering, thinking what better way to transport something lethal without detection? She pushed the thought to the back of her mind and turned away.

An elaborate computer setup on a desk against the far wall explained the humming sound. She couldn't see the phone but guessed it had to be there. By the time Annie and Sharon joined her, she had tracked the single phone line to the back of the computer and nowhere else.

"No phone set," she told them. "The only hookup runs through the modem."

Annie shrugged. "Good enough. We'll just sign on and text message Roadrunner, who is probably out of his mind by now." She jiggled the mouse impatiently and waited for the screen to wake up.

"Don't you need a password or something?" Sharon asked, and Annie chuckled.

"Oh, child, we have so much to teach you." She sat down in the cracked vinyl chair, frowned at the nonsense appearing on the monitor, then lifted her hands to the keyboard.

"ANNIE, STOP!"Grace shouted suddenly.

Annie jerked her hands up and back and froze. Sharon's eyes were wide, following Grace's terrified gaze around the side of the monitor to a rectangular box of the same color. Only it wasn't exactly a box, just a whitish brick of something that looked like modeling clay, with wires that led to the back of the computer.

"Oh, shit," Sharon whispered.

Annie was still frozen in position with her hands up by her shoulders. "Can I move?"

Grace's voice was shaking. "Just don't touch the keyboard or click the mouse."

Annie pushed well away from the desk and rolled the chair to the side to see what Grace and Sharon were looking at. She didn't trust her legs yet. "Oh, Lord in heaven, that's not Play-Doh, is it?"

Grace actually thought about it, but it didn't make sense. Why would anybody set up a dummy explosive and conceal it?

Sharon was coursing through her memories of the bomb squad demonstrating plastic explosives in her Academy class. "It looks like the real thing."

Annie laid a hand over her heart, as if to hold it in.

"Did you see this clock?" Sharon asked.

"What clock ?" Grace moved to get a better look at the monitor. Red numbers were blinking at the top of the screen, counting down. Three hours, thirty-seven minutes, forty-two seconds, forty-one seconds. . .

"This thing is counting down the time until ten, when the other two trucks are supposed to blow."

Grace was staring at the monitor, speed-reading through the lines of text, taking quick, shallow breaths. "Look at those names halfway down the screen."

Annie and Sharon scrolled down with their eyes and saw the words that had caught Grace's attention.

Schrader-off-line Ambros-target acquired Ritter-target acquired

Grace hugged her stomach and whispered, "Oh, Christ, not that," then broke down and ran toward the trucks. She jumped up on a running board, peeked in the window, then ran to the next truck to do the same thing, then disappeared around the other side.

Annie and Sharon found her on the far side of the trucks, staring at the three empty spaces right next to the big rolling door. She was still clutching her stomach, but now she was rocking back and forth. "Every one of these trucks has a small computer unit on the dash. The ones in here are turned off, but there are three trucks missing. See the tread marks? Three sets, going right out the door. Back at the lake, that soldier said the Four Corners thing was an accident-truck number one. But he was waiting for two others to get where they were supposed to be, and according to that computer, they're on target. That computer is the control. It sends the signal for the other trucks to blow, and unless we find somebody who can disable that bomb, we can't get into it to stop them."

In the next second, they were all running back toward the little door, out onto the grass, and toward the cars.

"If we can't find any keys, a couple of those look old enough to hotwire," Sharon panted.

"We don't have time." Grace veered back toward the patrol car. "There are already keys in this one."

Sharon closed her eyes.

HARLEY HAD THE RV pushed up to forty on a road that any sane man wouldn't have tried to negotiate on foot. Where it wasn't washhoard, the dips in the hardpan were so deep that a few times, the rear wheels almost left the ground. An enormous rooster tail of dust followed them.

Everyone was holding their jaws open to keep their teeth from clattering together, hands grasping whatever was nailed down. Bonar had Charlie next to him on the sofa, one beefy arm wrapped around the dog's wriggling body to keep him from flying into space. No one told Harley to slow down. They had tied the thinnest of threads together in an impossible tapestry of hope, every one of them willing to believe at that moment that everyLassie episode they had ever seen was real, and that Charlie was even more amazing than Lassie had ever been, because without believing that, they had no hope at all, and no idea where to go.

Roadrunner was clutching the back of the driver's seat, angled like a Tinkertoy man to peer out through the windshield, breathing lime over Harley's shoulder. "Okay! You're almost there! Slow down, then take a right," he shouted over the noise of the big rig. The washboard jittered his voice, making him sound like Porky Pig.

Harley slowed long enough at the intersection of dirt and tar to make sure there were no fire trucks coming, then slammed the accelerator to the floor when rubber hit asphalt and found some traction.

"Two miles, maybe less," Roadrunner said, as Halloran, Magozzi, and Bonar all stood, jamming into the space closest to the door, every heart beating fast and hard.

Charlie was weaving between their legs, whining, tap-dancing, tongue dripping doggy sweat. He gave one short howl, which frightened Magozzi. Once you started to believe in any kind of dog magic, you had to consider it all, like those stories about dogs howling when their masters had died, long before anyone else knew it.

"There it is! See it? See it?!" Roadrunner shouted. "That dirt track into the field! Slow down! Slow down!"

Harley slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel hard to the right, fishtailing the fifty-foot rig as if it were one of his Porsches. It wasn't really a road, just two tracks through the grass of an overgrown field, and this time he had to slow down.

They all saw it at the same time. Some kind of big building at the back of the field with a bunch of cars parked around it. One of them was a patrol car with the driver's door open. Three filthy, haggard people were tugging a bloody body out of the front seat. One of them straightened and turned to look in their direction, and Magozzi felt a vise tighten around his heart. He moved his lips, but no sound cameout:Thanks you.

"LORD ALMIGHTY, I don't believe it," Annie murmured as she watched the RV lumbering toward them.

"What is it?" Sharon asked, gaping at what surely had to be a mirage, or else a Rolling Stones tour bus.Special engagement, one nightonly, right here in this Missaqua County farm field. . .

"The Monkeewrench coach," Grace said, bloody hands hanging at her sides, refusing to believe what she was looking at until the rig stopped and Charlie shot out like a soaring, hairy meteor to race toward her, smiling like he always did. She wiped her hands on her jeans and caught Charlie, all eighty pounds of him, in midair. During the few seconds that she permitted this disgraceful display, she saw the men clambering out of the rig.

Her breath caught when she saw Magozzi, and then, oh my God, Gino, Halloran, and even Bonar, right there with Harley and Roadrunner. She glanced over at Sharon and saw her lips quivering and her eyes threatening to fill, staring at Halloran like he was the only thing in the world to see, and she had to look away fast.

Goddamnit. This was totally bizarre, just like all those stupid fairy tales when the men come riding in to save the women in the nick of time and the women cry and throw their arms around them.

Too bad they didn't have time for any of that.

The women sprinted toward the bus, and the men stopped as a unit, startled. Grace didn't look in any faces-she wouldn't have been able to stand that-as she raced past them up into the rig, and down the long aisle to the office. Apparently Sharon and Annie hadn't stopped, either, because they were right beside her when she grabbed the headset for the sat phone and punched frantically at the buttons.

Magozzi and Halloran were standing outside, staring at the empty air where the women they'd come to save had just raced by them as if they weren't there. It wasn't quite the reunion either man had pictured. Harley, Roadrunner, Bonar, and Gino were already following the women into the RV while the two big, tough guys trailed behind, just a little off-balance. They could hear Grace yelling the second they came through the door.

"What's the matter with this goddamned thing! It won't connect!" She was pounding one hand on the console, banging numbers uselessly with the other. No one in that room had ever seen Grace that out of control. It was Roadrunner who gently took her blood-smeared hands in his and said quietly, "Let me do it, Grace. Who do you want to call?"

"The FBI, Roadrunner," Annie said quietly. "We need them right now."

Roadrunner had Agent Knudsen on the line within ten seconds, and then all the men listened as Grace began to talk very fast. Before she finished, a hundred emotions had crossed every face in the room. Harley grabbed three bottles of water from the office fridge and handed them to women who had been through more than he could imagine-more than he'd certainly heard, because Grace was condensing everything. He came to Annie last.

She stood there in her tattered, manure-covered dress with her chaotic hair and filthy face and said, "What took you so long?" She took the opened bottle, drank from it, then reached out and patted his cheek. Harley had to look down at the Boor, because that was the nicest thing she'd ever done to him.

He saw her feet-one bare, the other in a purple high-top. "Jesus, Annie. You look like friggin' Cinderella."

Agent Knudsen had been in his car when Grace had called, only a few miles from the fire that had troubled him ever since he got the first call in Sheriff Pitala's office. Maybe Magozzi had been right: Coincidencewas the connection.

Knudsen made a dozen calls in the ten minutes it took to get to the machine shed. By the time he arrived, an astounding-looking collection of people were running from a big RV toward the shed, led by three women who looked as though they'd been to hell and back, and a dog that looked like he'd gone with them.

Knudsen joined them at the door. There was no time for introductions, but a tall, black-haired woman nodded to him brusquely, as if she fully expected he would know who she was. The woman on the phone, he decided.

"Don't touch one thing in there," she commanded them all, then opened the door and led them all to a computer against the far wall. "Just read."

The men crowded in a circle around the screen as she started to explain what was on the monitor. Every face looked ashen and ghastly under the fluorescent lights-Knudsen's most of all, and, surprisingly, Bonar's.

Agent Knudsen bolted from the building without explanation. The rest of them continued to stare at the screen, at the ominous row of trucks, at the block of plastique sitting placidly next to the computer.

An irritated Gino shoved his hands in his pockets, trying to make sense of what he'd just read on the monitor. "I don't get all the numbers. Or the stupid names. 'Schrader-off-line, Ambros-target acquired.' What the hell does that mean? I don't get any of it."

"Schrader, Ambros, Ritter," Bonar recited in a flat voice. "They're missing one-Linde-but that doesn't count for much. Germans. Those were the men who discovered sarin in the thirties. They named the trucks after them."

Every face turned toward him.

"Sarin?" Magozzi whispered.

Bonar pushed his lips out and nodded. "One of the first-generation nerve gases."

"Jesus Christ, the Feebs got it right," Gino said, looking over at the trucks, then back at the blinking numbers on the monitor: 03:14:17... 16 . .. 15 ...

THEY FOUND Agent Knudsen pacing a furrow in the long grass near his car, phone clutched in one white-knuckled hand that swung back and forth as he walked. Sharon hung back a little-the agent's car was a little too close to Doug Lee's patrol- and Halloran stayed with her.

"We've got to get rid of that bomb so we can get into the computer," Grace was telling Knudsen. "Those trucks in there all have remote computer units. The one inside that building is the host, and obviously it already sent out the detonation command. There's got to be an abort in there somewhere."

Knudsen gestured with his phone. "Nearest bomb squad is in Green Bay. We'll get them on a chopper, along with some computer experts."

"How long?" Magozzi asked.

"Two hours. At least."

Grace checked her watch and moved her head impatiently. "Not fast enough. There's less than three hours until those trucks blow."

Knudsen shot her a furious look, as if she were the enemy. Why the hell was the woman wearing riding boots? Damn things had to be hotter than hell. And that big ugly mutt glued to her leg looked like he wanted to rip his throat out. "You think I don't know that? I'm waiting for a callback from Bill Turner. He's the best bomb man in the country, but he's in D.C, and we're having trouble locating him. It's Sunday morning. He's probably in some goddamned church somewhere."

Magozzi looked at the agent who looked both twenty years younger and a thousand years older than he had ten minutes ago, a little surprised by his choice of adjectives. He was starting to sound more like a person and less like FBI, and that was not necessarily a good sign. "Even if you find this guy in the next few seconds, what's he going to be able to do from D.C?"

"He can walk me through deactivation."

"You've done this before?"

Knudsen narrowed his eyes at Grace. She sounded like an interrogator. "No. But we've run out of options. We don't even know where the targets are, those two trucks are already on-site. . . ."

"And filled with sarin," Bonar said matter-of-factly, and Knudsen jerked his head to glare at him.

"You want to tell me how you know which nerve gas it is?"

Bonar opened his hands. "The names they gave the trucks, of course."

Knudsen closed his eyes. Too many people knew too many things these days. The information age was killing them.

"What about all the other information on the screen in there?" Gino asked. "A bunch of those numbers keep changing. Maybe that's latitude or some of that shit that tells where the trucks are."

Knudsen shook his head. "The trucks aren't moving anymore, according to that computer. Besides, I know what those tables are. I've seen them before. They estimate initial dispersal distances based on a lot of factors, like wind speed, direction, humidity . . ."

"Hey." Roadrunner turned to Harley. "We could plug those numbers into that stat program and link up with the National Weather Service. What are the chances that any two locations in this country are having exactly the same fluctuations in weather conditions at exactly the same time?"

"Sounds good, but it'll take a while."

Knudsen was frowning at the two of them, then his face cleared. "Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Kingsford County undercover computer crimes, right?"

Grace and Annie looked sideways at their partners.

"Right," Harley said.

"It was a good thought, but even if we found those trucks in the next ten minutes, chances are they're in an urban area and we won't be able to get them to a safe disarmament location in time."

"So we're right back where we started," Grace said. "We have to get into that computer and find the abort."

"Looks that way . . ." Knudsen's phone rang, and he jammed it up to his ear so hard that Gino thought it was a miracle it didn't go all the way through his head. "Knudsen!" he shouted, listened for ten seconds, then threw the phone down on the ground. "Apparently, Bill Turner took a goddamned fucking Sunday drive in the country with his family."

Suddenly, Grace jerked her head to look at something, then took off at a run. She stopped at Doug Lee's patrol car and nearly ripped the passenger door off the hinges when she opened it to dig inside. A second later, she was running toward them, carrying a dripping black case. She wiped it on the grass and set it in front of Roadrunner.

"Whose laptop?"

"The guy in the car. He was one of them, but he wasn't wearing fatigues like the others. His job was something else, maybe that setup in the building, since this was where he brought us-someplace he was familiar with, someplace he knew was empty so he could kill us without any interference. . . ."

Roadrunner smiled faintly and popped open the case. "So he was the geek."

Annie and Harley had already crowded close to see the screen. "And geeks always have backups," Annie said.

The monitor came to life and proved them right.

By that time, everyone else was kneeling or crouching around them, all watching the little laptop screen like wide-eyed kids examining an exotic bug. Sharon was behind Annie, her hand on her shoulder, for balance of many kinds.

Magozzi recognized the first image as a duplicate of what had been on the computer inside the building. "So it's a sort of a mirror image?"

"It had better be."

Roadrunner punched a few keys, accessed the programming code, and scrolled down at warp speed.

"What are you looking for, precisely?" Knudsen asked from the back of the group. He was on his knees, getting grass stains on his nicely pressed pants.

Harley answered without looking around. "All this stuff scrolling by? This is the brain that runs the whole shebang, and somewhere in here, there are command lines that control whether or not that bomb goes off."

Bonar was staring, shaking his head. "It all looks the same."

Gino nodded. "Alphabet soup with numbers in it. My kid eats that stuff. How the hell do you tell when you find the right line? There must be a million of them in there."

Roadrunner stopped the scroll and pointed. "Here."

Harley looked, then nodded. "One of those two, anyway. Funny that this guy would be that sloppy on the bomb command lines, when the rest of it looks so tight."

"They didn't expect Four Corners," Grace reminded him. "This was a last-minute setup when they thought they might be discovered."

"Man, I don't know." Harley was shaking his big head. "Could be either one of those two command lines, and fifty percent are some pretty bad odds when you're talking plastique. Let's get this thing in the rig and online and see if it's a talker. If it is, we can work on it on the road while we get the hell away from that building."

The only bad part of that good idea was that it didn't work. After thirty minutes in the RV trying to connect the laptop to the computer in the building, Roadrunner disconnected the thing from his software analysis unit in the bus and headed for the door, laptop tucked under his arm. "If there ever was a communications program in here, it's been wiped. No way we can talk to the trucks through this thing, no way we can get into the main computer to stop the clock."

Magozzi was hurrying after him. "I thought it was a mirror image."

"Yeah." Harley stomped behind. "But somebody broke a piece off, and that was the piece we needed. Roadrunner, where the hell are you going?"

"To shut off the bomb."

"Roadrunner." Grace's voice stopped him when no one else's might have. He turned back and looked down the aisle at her, and then he smiled, which seemed an odd thing to do under the circumstances.

"What is it, Grace?"

"We've got two possible command-line sequences hooked up to that plastique. We don't know which one it is."

"I'll figure it out. Be right back."

Knudsen was just outside the RV, talking into his sat phone; Halloran was a respectful distance away, smoking. Knudsen was flapping his hand in front of his face as if all the outside air in the world weren't enough to save him from the ill effects of secondhand smoke. Halloran thought that was pretty funny, since they might be standing a few yards from a building that was full of nerve gas.

Suddenly, Roadrunner jumped the steps out of the RV, with Harley, Magozzi, and the women right behind him.

"You'll figure it out?!" Harley was bellowing. "You've got a fifty percent chance that you're going to blow yourself to the moon, you goddamn stupid Lycra stick!"

Roadrunner stopped right in front of Knudsen, who put down the phone and said, "Bomb squad, one hour out."

Roadrunner shrugged as if it was meaningless information. "You're some kind of a bomb expert, right? That's how you recognized those weather stats on the screen."

Knudsen didn't answer.

"So if that building over there blew, how far away do you have to be to be safe ?"

"If all those trucks are full of sarin, it could be as far as seven miles. . .." He stammered to a halt, understanding exactly what Roadrunner was going to do and what he was asking. "If you know a way to disarm that plastique, tell me what to do and I'll go in there."

Roadrunner smiled like a boy. "No offense, Agent, but that would take way too long."

Knudsen just looked at him for a second. "Five, ten minutes on these roads."

Roadrunner looked around worriedly. "Do a lot of people live around here?"

"Four Corners was about it. This is mostly state forest."

Roadrunner nodded, still troubled but resigned. It was the best he could hope for. "You've got to make everyone else leave. I'll wait ten minutes from right now," was the last thing he said before he turned around and walked toward the building.

They stood there with stricken expressions, watching Roadrunner walk away. Magozzi turned to Grace and Annie and Harley a second too late. They were already gone, following quietly in Roadrunner's wake without saying a thing. Charlie was right by Grace's side.

Roadrunner turned on them when he heard Harley's leathers swishing against the grass. "Get the hell out of here, Harley. Take Annie and Grace and get the hell out of here."

"Fuck you, you fucking fuck." Harley stomped past him, seething. "What if you hit the first line and it calls up a chain? That screen shows thirty lines at a time, and you're going to need more eyes to find the right one before it shuts you down."

Roadrunner had to trot to pass him. "That's bullshit, Harley. I'm better than any of you, and you know it."

"The hell you arc. You've only got a fourth of a brain, you dumb-shit. The other three fourths are right behind you. Keep walking. We're running out of time."

Sharon had automatically started to follow Annie and Grace. Part of it was some twisted sense of duty, part of it was guilt, and part of it was just knee-jerk. The three women had been following one another for what seemed like forever. Separating now didn't seem possible. She'd gone two paces before Halloran grabbed her by the upper arm and turned her to face him. "Not. This. Time. You get that, Sharon'" His words blew across her face. "This time, I'm not letting you go."

Sharon felt something ripping inside, pulling her in two different directions, felt Halloran's fingers tight against her arm, and figured she'd have to shoot him to get him to let her go. She decided not to.

Magozzi, Gino, and Agent Knudsen stared after the Monkee-wrench people, thinking things that none of them would ever say out loud. Finally, Knudsen spoke.

"Between the three of us, we could probably take down all of them and drag them back to the RV. Except maybe the big guy."

Magozzi smiled a little, watching Grace. Funny. It should have looked like she was getting smaller, walking away like that, but instead she seemed to look bigger. "Don't follow me, Gino."

Gino didn't look at him. "You go, I go."

"Don't be an ass. Everything I've got is walking into that building right now. Everything you've got is back in Minneapolis."

Gino watched him walking away.Not everything, buddy.

MAGOZZI WALKED ACROSS what seemed like an endless expanse of concrete floor toward the desk, the computer, the bomb, and the entire Monkeewrench crew. All he saw was Grace-and Charlie, of course. Goddamnit, she was going to get the dog killed, too.

She felt him coming. "Get out of here, Magozzi," she said without looking at him when he moved up beside her. "Go with the others. You've only got eight minutes left to get out of range before Road-runner starts hitting those keys."

It was the first thing she'd said to him directly, and for reasons that defied logic, they made him ridiculously happy. He waited until she got tired of his infuriating disobedience and turned on him, glowering. Then, the second he had her eyes, he smiled and said, "Hello, Grace."

She jerked her head back coward the computer screen almost immediately, but the corner of her mouth twitched just a little. "Seven minutes."

"Okay. You want to make out?"

OUTSIDE, Gino, Bonar, Halloran, and Sharon had piled into Knudsen's bare-bones sedan. Knudsen hadn't started the car yet. Dying in the line of duty was one thing. You accepted that the minute you put on any kind of badge. Dying senselessly was another thing. No agency pretended there was glory in pointless self-sacrifice, not even the FBI. And this would be pointless. Living to fight another day was the ticket, and this was his case. Getting blown up and gassed right at the beginning wasn't going to do anybody any good, which was why he was driving out of here. So if the unthinkable happened, he'd be around to sort through the aftermath, find the bad guys, if there were any left, and uncover the things they'd know to look for the next time, so it never happened again.

Except he wasn't driving out of here. He was just sitting like a slug behind the wheel while the seconds ticked away, thinking of the civilians and the cop inside that building who happened to think that this particular self-sacrifice wasn't that pointless after all. He waited for one of the other four people in the car to start banging on the seats and screaming for him to get the hell out of there, but none of them said a thing.

"HOW MUCH LONGER?" Annie asked. Harley looked at his watch. "Five more minutes." The waiting was killing Magozzi. Grace hadn't exactly jumped on

the making-out idea, and the others were preoccupied with the programming language on the laptop screen, which left him with nothing to do but stand there and contemplate his own death. He could have been working on what he would do with the rest of his life if Roadrunner picked the right command line instead of the wrong one, but it seemed safer to go with the worst-case scenario. Grace had taught him that.

Suddenly Roadrunner slapped his forehead, said "Duh," of all things, then moved the mouse and clicked.

Magozzi sucked in a breath and watched numbers flying by on the screen, waiting to blow up and die and see the light at the end of the tunnel or whatever else was supposed to happen.

After a few seconds, the monitor blinked black, then a new screen came up. The rest of them released a collective exhale that sounded like the wind. Magozzi looked down at his body. He wasn't dead, and he hadn't blown up. Not even a little.

"What just happened?" His voice sounded squeaky, and his face colored.

"Harley said the guy was sloppy on this. I just didn't read far enough, the command sequence was so long." Roadrunner pulled the screen back up and pointed. "It's right at the end; see those four letters? B-O-O-M at the end of this sequence"-he paged down a little-"and M-O-O-B, that's boom backwards, at the end of this one. Christ. That's absolutely puerile."

Harley looked a little tense. "So which one did you punch in?"

"Moob, of course. Boom sets the bomb, boom backwards unsets it. I mean, how obvious can you get?"

Harley smacked him across the back of the head. "You dumbshit. What if the guy had set it the other way around so itwouldn't be obvious?"

Roadrunner rubbed his head. "Shit. I never thought of that."

Harley smacked him again, lightly. "That's the trouble with you linear thinkers. You have no imagination, no understanding of human psychology, and psychology rules the world, man. Magozzi, you want to get out there and call the others-tell 'em it's safe to come back?"

Magozzi looked down at his shoes. Sure, he could do that. Just as soon as he could get one of his legs to move. "So the bomb's disabled?"

Annie gave him one of her slow, signature smiles. "Of course it's disabled, sugar. That's why it says 'Bomb Disabled' on that screen."

AGENT KNUDSEN'S car was still outside when Magozzi walked out of the shed. Knudsen was standing next to it with his phone pressed to his head; everybody else was inside the sedan.

Magozzi was furious. He stormed up to the passenger side and jerked open the door where Gino sat. "What the hell are you still doing here?"

Gino glanced at his watch. "We've still got three, four minutes."

"The hell you do. And what the/"c^ is he doing on the phone?"

"Calling off all the people coming in, keeping them away from this place."

"He couldn't do that when the goddamned car was moving?" Magozzi was nearly spitting.

"Well, it's a bumpy road. Makes it hard to dial."

"Goddamnit,Gino . .."

"Take it easy, buddy. You're going to stroke out. Glad you changed your mind about leaving, though. Hang on. I'll move over and make room."

"I didn't change my mind about leaving, goddamnit, I came out to call you and tell you it was safe to come back!"

"No fooling?" Bonar said from the backseat. "They deactivated the bomb?"

"Yeah."

Halloran and Sharon both closed their eyes at the same time. They looked like a couple of Kewpie dolls going to sleep.

Gino looked down at his knees for a minute and just breathed. When he looked up again, he was grinning. "Knudsen's going to be pissed. Now he'll have to call back all those people he just told to stay away and tell them to come back, and I wouldn't blame one of them for not believing him. What about the trucks in there? Any chance they'll blow when the two on the road go?"

Magozzi dropped to a crouch in the grass by the car, arms across his thighs. "Grace says no. There are only the two trucks online. The computers in the trucks in there aren't even linked up, which probably explains why they aren't on the road with the others."

"So we don't have to worry about dying in the next couple hours."

"No. Just about a lot of other people out there somewhere dying. Roadrunner thinks there has to be a fail-safe in the program-some kind of an abort command. They're trying to find it now."

Gino stared out the windshield and shook his head. "Godspeed.'

They waited outside as the minutes ticked by. Their guns, badges, and law-enforcement expertise-even the hotline to D.C.-were utterly useless. Everything depended on one skinny guy inside that machine shed finding one single circuit in a dizzying maze of computer language.

Halloran, Sharon, Magozzi, and Gino paced in mindless patterns close to the shed door while Halloran smoked one cigarette after another. Knudsen continued to walk his own private circles around his car, phone pressed to his ear, putting on the miles.

"You sure they don't want us in there?" Sharon asked Magozzi for the tenth time.

"They were pretty specific aboutnot wanting us in there. This is their thing. There's no way we could help them. We'd just get in the way."

"This is driving me crazy, not doing something. Anything."

Magozzi saw the hollows under her haunted eyes and thought it was all getting lost. Everything the women had been through in the last eighteen hours-things the rest of them would never be able toimagine, no matter how many times they heard the story-was getting lost in what was happening right now, and what was going to happen if they couldn't find a way to stop it. And yet there were Grace and Annie in that building, right in the thick of it, and here was Sharon, pacing around like a caged animal because she wasn't in there with them. She reminded Magozzi of a combat vet who signed up for another tour through hell because he couldn't stand the thought of his comrades fighting without him.

"You did good, Sharon Mueller," he told her on her next pass.

She stopped where she stood and looked at him, and what he saw in her face almost made him wish she hadn't. "Thank you, Magozzi," she said, and then started to pace again.

Knudsen finally signed off the phone and walked over to where Halloran was sitting. He scowled down at the burning cigarette, and Halloran glared back at him. "What," Halloran growled. He was spoiling for a fight, any kind of a fight. They all were.

"You got another one of those?" Knudsen pointed to the cigarette.

Halloran handed him the pack. "Never in a million years would I have pegged you for a smoker."

Knudsen lit up, took a drag, and coughed for a long time. "There are no nonsmokers in this business. Just people trying to quit, and people who haven't started yet. They've got the fire under control. My people are starting to move into what's left of Four Corners. The bomb squad and the computer expert should be here in thirty minutes." He took another drag and looked back toward the RV. "Monkeewrench," he recited the name painted on the side. "Those are the people traveling all over the place, donating their programs to law enforcement, right?"

"That's right."

"Huh. And you've got two of them on your force."

Halloran looked him straight in the eye. "They're kind of subcontract."

Knudsen almost smiled. "How good are they?"

"From what I hear, the best in the world."

"They'd better be. We're running out of time."

Within a few minutes, the field started to fill up with the people Knudsen had called in: a couple HAZMAT vans, sedans with more suits, and an ominous-looking black helicopter that had emptied out some ominous-looking men in black suits in the last five minutes. That contingent was standing in a tight, motionless group near the building. As far as Magozzi knew, they'd said a few words to Knudsen and hadn't talked to anyone since.

"Those guys give me the creeps," Gino said. "They all look like the bad guy inMatrix. Who are they, Knudsen?"

"Friends."

"Gee, could you be a little more specific?"

"No."

In the next minute, the sky filled with noise and a big, dirt-brown sky pig came in fast, beating all the grass in the far corner of the field down into a crop circle. It had barely touched down before men started tumbling out, then lumbering toward them. They were already in full gear-bulky, padded suits, sealed helmets, ninety pounds of protection weighing down each man.

"Don't they know the bomb's been deactivated?" Magozzi asked.

"They know," Knudsen said. "But there's still a brick of plastique in there. They'd come in like that if it were floating in the middle of a swimming pool. As far as they're concerned, no bomb is deactivated until they say it is."

"Goddamnit, that plastique is not going to blow, whether they believe it or not. You cannot let them go in there and start messing around while the Monkeewrench people are trying to . . ."

"For God's sake, Magozzi, I'm not a complete idiot," Knudsen interrupted, then trotted over to meet the bomb squad and the other men who had disembarked.

Magozzi sighed and looked at the trio from Kingsford County. Halloran and Bonar were standing close on either side of Sharon, who looked wired enough to start snapping apart. Magozzi figured they all looked a little bit like that.

There was a flurry of activity and voices for a few minutes while Knudsen made the rounds of the arrivals, barking out instructions like a drill sergeant. By the time he was finished, the field was remarkably silent. Magozzi looked around and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. There had to be at least fifty people standing in a ragged semicircle around a building that looked as benign and harmless as a thousand other old farm buildings dotting the mid-western countryside. Nobody was doing anything; nobody was saying anything. They were all just staring at the door, waiting for it to open.

INSIDE the machine shed, Grace, Annie, and Harley hunched around Roadrunner at the computer, every unblinking eye fixed on the screen as pages of command codes scrolled by. A sheen of sweat washed Roadrunner's face as his twisted fingers talked to the keys, and then suddenly, his fingers froze and the scrolling stopped."What?" Harley demanded. "Did you find it? Is that the abort?" Roadrunner closed his eyes for a moment, then swiveled his chair to face them all. "There is no abort," he said quietly.

OUTSIDE the machine shed, the semicircle of silently waiting people let out a collective gasp as Harley came barreling out the door. He was moving at a perfectly amazing speed for a man that size, a blur of beard and tattoos and black leather as he raced past all of them into the RV. He came out five seconds later waving a disk and hollering, "There's no abort-we've gotta try something else!" He was back in the building so fast that it was hard to believe he'dever been out. Everyone was standing up, hearts pounding, legs ready to run somewhere if they only had a little direction.

"What do you suppose was on that disk?" Knudsen asked.

"God knows," Gino said.

"I'm going back in there," Magozzi said abruptly, heading for the door. He had license, he reasoned. He'd been in there before when things were really tense and hadn't messed anything up. Besides, this was driving him crazy. He had to know what was going on. He had to feel like he was part of it. He'd be very quiet. They'd never know he was there.

Sharon stared after him for a moment, muttered, "Well this is just bullshit," and followed him.

It was as if she had taken a cork out of a bottle. One by one, everyone in the field started to move toward the building and slip silently through the door.

ROADRUNNER'S LYCRA SUIT was soaked with sweat, and his leg jiggled furiously under the desk while he pushed the disk Harley had retrieved from the RV into the computer drive.

Grace eyed him worriedly. "Anything you want to run by us before you try this thing, Roadrunner?"

He shook his head hard and fast, keeping his fingers over the keyboard and his eyes fixed on the screen. "No time."

"Is this what you wouldn't let me get a look at in the office yesterday?"

"Yeah. It's just something Harley and I have been working on."

Annie forced herself to take a breath and blew the exhale up toward her bangs. "Are you saying you don't even know if itworks?"

"Are you kidding me?" Harley rumbled. "Of course it's going to work." He clapped Roadrunner on the back. "Go for it, my little chickadee."

Roadrunner pushed a few keys and started the disk loading, but Grace's eyes were on Harley. His voice had sounded strong and full of confidence, but there were bloodless white lines tracing around his moustache and down into his beard, and his eyes looked sad, almost hopeless.

"How much time does it take to load?" she asked quietly when Roadrunner had finished typing.

He punched a single key and brought up a time bar that started filling with blue color, millimeter by millimeter. "Five minutes, maybe. I don't know. We only did one test run."

"And then how long to execute?"

"I don't know." Roadrunner pulled his hands away from the keyboard and stared at the time bar. Everyone else was staring at the red countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen.

37:22:19... 18... 17...

Jesus,Magozzi thought, moving a little closer to Grace, sensing her rather than seeing her because his eyes were fixed at the damn clock as it ticked down.It had to be wrong. It was going too damn fast.

"Well, what the hell is this thing?" Annie demanded harshly, but her hands were on Roadrunner's shoulders, kneading through bunched muscles that felt like tangled tree roots.

"Uh . . , sort of a virus . . ."

"What?You wrote avirus? You went to the dark side?"

"No, no, no, it's not like that." Roadrunner's mangled fingers were twisting together. "It's not really a virus. Well, it is, but it's not a bad virus. It's a good virus."

Annie dropped her hands from his shoulders. "There are no good viruses. That's why we call them viruses, for God's sake."

"It's not contagious," Harley broke in. "We only direct it to specific sites, and it can't go any farther. All it does is just eat away the guts of the computer we send it to, while the computer doesn't know it's getting eaten. It doesn't replicate, the recipient computer can't send it to anyone else-it's perfect."

"But it destroys computers."

"Boy, does it ever."

Magozzi's eyebrows shot up. Behind him, in the back of the vast room, a lot of other eyebrows were doing the same thing.

"Oh, for God's sake, you guys," Annie chastised them. "Who were you sending this to?"

Roadrunner muttered something unintelligible down at his lap.

"What?"

Harley was staring at the countdown clock, and then at the time bar, shifting back and forth on his worn-down boots. "Oh, for Chris-sake, it's no big deal. We send it to the kiddie-porn sites. Shut down a big one last night."

Annie thought about it for a minute, and then said, "Oh. Cool."

Grace was looking down at the floor, saving up a smile for later. When she looked up again, the time bar was almost entirely filled with blue, and the countdown clock was at twenty-nine minutes.

IN A SUBURB of Detroit, Michigan, a Good Health Dairies truck sat outside the entrance of a vast, sprawling building. Hundreds of people were skirting the truck as they went inside, eyeing it curiously, irritated by the group of playful neighborhood children who were gathered around the truck. They were climbing the running boards, pressing their noses against the window glass, chattering, and squealing in a most inappropriate manner.

The oldest of these children, a boy closing in on eleven years, fixed his gaze inside the truck cab and gestured to a friend. "There's a computer in there," he whispered, tapping his finger against the glass, pointing to the glowing screen that was flashing numbers in bright blue pixels. "That's gotta be worth a bundle."

His friend shaded his eyes and peered inside. "What do you suppose those numbers mean?"

"Hell, I don't know. You want to bust the window and do a grab-and-run?"

His friend looked around at all the people streaming past and the cars still pulling into the lot. "Too many people around. Wait 'til they all get inside."

They both climbed down and sat on the running board to wait, guarding their treasure.

MAGOZZI WAS frantic, watching that goddamned clock count down second by second. Finally, the last slice of blue ticked into the time bar, filling it completely, and he couldn't stand it any longer. He broke the promise he had made to himself to stay silent and out of the way. "Is that it? Is it finished? Is it over?"

Harley glanced quickly in his direction and registered a little surprise to see him there. The computer screen had been his total focus for so long that he hadn't noticed anything going on around him. None of them had. "It's loaded."

Roadrunner's fingers suddenly started flying over the keys. Grace and Annie were leaning over his shoulders, watching the text appear on the screen as Roadrunner typed.

Magozzi nodded rapidly. "Great. That's great. It's loaded. Now you execute, right?" He jumped when Grace reached back and touched his hand.

"Not yet, Magozzi. If we execute now, we destroy this computer, and this computer is the only way we have to talk to the trucks."

Magozzi tried to make sense of it, his mouth open like a fish, gasping for air. "I don't get it, goddamnit, I don't get it."

Harley took pity on him. "We're just piggybacking the virus through this computer to the trucks, Magozzi. Get it? Those truck computers are already set up to accept data from the host computer and no place else. We're just sending them a package from Mama. So we download the program here without executing, have this computer send it on to the trucks, then send the execution command."

"And what thefuck does that do?" Magozzi demanded, and Harley actually smiled at him.

"It destroys the truck computers, and that, my friend, destroys the detonate command."

Magozzi finally took a breath. "Okay, okay. I get it. So how long does it take?"

"Roadrunner just finished sending the virus program to the trucks. Another five minutes at least to execute, maybe a little longer."

Magozzi's eyes were glued to the computer screen, watching the countdown clock. "Christ, man, we've only got twelve minutes left."

"Yeah, I know. It's going to be tight. . , oh, Jesus." Harley was gaping at the screen.

Magozzi had to force himself to look. The monitor had gone black, and big, red letters were flashing in the center:

DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED

No one around the computer station moved. They just stared at the monitor, hanging on the meaning of red letters in the black box. Magozzi wanted to ask something stupid, like, What the hell does that mean? but he knew damn well what it meant, and he couldn't move his mouth, anyway. What really scared him was when Road-runner's hands started shaking visibly.

"Fuck a duck!"Harley shouted, bulldozing closer to Roadrunner, shoving his face at the screen.

The people gathered in the back of the room-Knudsen, the suits, the HAZMAT squads-all moved en masse to get closer, then froze when they were within sight of the screen.

"What's that mean?" Knudsen breathed, his face a deathly white.

Roadrunner didn't even look to see who had asked the question. "They must have rigged the detonation sequence to upload at a specific time in the countdown. It initiated when we were still executing the virus, and because the truck computers can't upload more than one program at a time, they kicked one off."

"Which one?" Gino whispered.

"Hard to say. Normally, they'd take them in order, which means they'd keep executing the virus and kick the detonation command, but if that were happening, that message shouldn't be there."

Grace closed her eyes. "The detonation sequence was a priority. If I'd set this up, I would have put an automatic override on it, so it kicked everything else off."

"Yeah. Me, too." Roadrunner's voice was shaking almost uncontrollably.

At that moment, Magozzi felt something let go in his head, then his neck, his shoulders, all the way down to his gut. A strange sense of serenity followed. He thought it was probably a lot like what terminal patients felt when they acknowledged their impending death, relaxed their resistance, and let it walk in. A thousand people somewhere had less than five minutes to live, and there wasn't a goddamned thing they could do about it. So you just shut down, let it go. Roadrunner was still talking, but Magozzi caught only the last part.

". . , so the only hope we've got is that part of the virus got through, and that it will corrupt the computer enough to keep the detonation sequence from finishing . . ."

Suddenly, "DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED" disappeared from the screen, and a new message took its place:"DOWNLOAD COMPLETE."

"Which download?!" Magozzi shouted. "The virus or the detonation code?"

Roadrunner's lips were sealed against a held breath. He raised a shaky, deformed finger toward the countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. The numbers had frozen at just under two minutes.

Magozzi had no clue what that meant. Neither did anyone else in the room. They were all leaning forward, like people bucking a strong wind, eyes wild and unblinking. Had the detonation code gone through? Was the clock wrong? Were a thousand people dead? Magozzi looked frantically from Grace to Annie to Harley, who all looked perilously close to meltdown, and figured it couldn't mean anything good. He almost turned away when Roadrunner started swiveling his chair, afraid to see the look in his face, but he made himself stand there. It was the least he could do.

And then Roadrunner finished his turn, and the eyes he met first just happened to be Magozzi's. "We did it," he said. And then he smiled. "We shut it down."

Suddenly, a tremendous noise shattered the silence. Roadrunner looked up with a baffled expression at the dozens of people he hadn't even realized were there. Harley, Annie, and Grace turned around in amazement. The place was filled with people. All of them were cheering, banging one another on the back, and moving together toward the Monkeewrench crew like out-of-control groupies at a rock concert.

Harley, Annie, Grace, and Roadrunner watched as the crowd surged toward them.

The cheering went on for a long time.

IT WAS A BLINDINGLY sunny morning in the field outside the building that had housed death and hate and destruction. Magozzi drew in a deep breath that smelled of smoke from the Four Corners fire, but even that smelled good.

His hand was glued to Grace's arm as surely as Charlie was glued to her leg, and he felt pretty good about that. He had hands and the dog didn't. Advantage Magozzi. He squinted in the sunlight and looked around at the mess of cars and trucks and choppers and people, and thought what a goddamned beautiful place the world was.

He looked at Grace's face, trying to read her expression, and realized what a fool's errand that was. He looked at Roadrunner's face instead, which always gave away emotions for free. But even that reliable countenance was impossible to read. He looked like somebody had pulled the plug on his head and there was absolutely nothing left inside.

Harley was frowning at all the confusion around him, looking like a man who had just woken up naked in a crowded room. Then he shrugged and walked over to Knudsen and handed him a piece of paper. "Here are the coordinates for the two trucks. I don't know where the hell they are; it's just a bunch of numbers to me."

Knudsen accepted the paper without taking his eyes off Harley's. He looked like he was about to burst into tears, but then suddenly, he smiled.

He had an astounding number of teeth, Harley thought. He looked a little like a mule getting ready to bray.

The field got even busier after that. A few more choppers came in, and a lot of cars and vans. A large team of what might have been men or women dressed in bulky white self-containment suits finally got permission to swarm all over the building, and disappeared back inside to take a look at the plastique and the trucks. Another HAZMAT team swarmed with equal purpose over everyone who had been in the building, sweeping them with wands from a dozen different instruments, then taking them into the back of the van for other tests.

Halloran and Magozzi watched helplessly as Sharon, Grace, and Annie got the once-over about a hundred times.

"It's just a precaution," Knudsen tried to reassure them. "Knee-jerk. They're at the highest risk. Not only were they in that building with the trucks, they were in Four Corners where the first one crashed; they've got to be cleared."

"We don't even know if there's anything in those other trucks," Magozzi complained.

"The team inside is checking on that. Until we get confirmation from them that there's no danger, we act as if there is."

"Well, that's just plain dumb," Halloran grumbled. "We were all in that building."

"Yeah, I know. We'll be next."

Gino made a face. "Shit. Are there needles involved?"

Knudsen just smiled at him.

When Gino and Magozzi were finally released from the testing van, Gino rolled down both sleeves and stomped away in search of his manhood. "Well, that was about the most humiliating experience of my life, and that includes the time when my pants split in the middle of the medal ceremony for the Monkeewrench murders. I feel like aliens just harvested my eggs or something."

Magozzi smiled, but Knudsen looked almost as distressed as Gino. His face fell when he saw a Missaqua County cruiser coming up the farm road. "That's Sheriff Pitala," he said miserably. "His sister ran the cafe in Four Corners."

"Did she get out?"

"Who knows? We're pulling a lot of bodies out of that place. No females yet, as far as they can tell."

Magozzi nodded. "So there's some hope."

"I don't know. We need to talk to the women. They're the only ones who were in there."

"So what the hell did you do with them?" Gino demanded. "I haven't seen them since you dragged me into that mobile test tube and slammed the door."

Knudsen looked a little nonplussed. "Actually, they're in your RV. The big one with the bedroom eyes?"

Magozzi smiled in spite of himself. Every single man in the world reacted the same way the first time they saw Annie. And every time after that, in fact. "Annie Belinsky."

"Yeah, her. She said she'd whip the next man that tried to talk to her before she had a shower, and I swear to God she could do it. Especially with that big undercover tattooed guy from Kingsford County backing her up. Are those two married or something?"

"Not even close."

"Whatever. Anyway, when they're finished in there, we're going to have to start debriefing. At this point, they know more than any of us.

We've got three live ones in lockup we caught running from the fire in Four Corners. Camo, Ml6s, just like that woman said on the phone ..."

Magozzi stiffened a little. "The woman's name is Grace MacBride, Agent Knudsen."

Knudsen looked at him for a second, recording the connection, finding his boundaries. "Sorry, Detective. Anyhow, we need to hear what all the women have to say before we start interrogation." He turned his head when a cruiser pulled up close beside them and Sheriff Pitala climbed out.

The man's uniform was covered with soot, his face was drawn, and he walked with a stoop that Magozzi hadn't noticed before, as if a grief he wasn't sure he should be carrying was weighing him down. He nodded to the group, then turned to Knudsen. "I can't find anybody that can tell me about Hazel," he said. "I thought maybe you could help me out with that."

"Who's Hazel?"

The voice came from the steps of the RV. Everyone turned and saw Grace MacBride, black hair dripping on her shoulders, Charlie pressed against her side, smiling inappropriately. Stupid dog had no clue what was going on here, Magozzi thought; and then he realized that he felt almost the same way. As long as Grace was in it, the world was just as it should be.

Sheriff Pitala looked up at her and swept his hat from his head in manners so ingrained they transcended everything else. "Sheriff Ed Pitala. Pleased to meet you, ma'am, and Hazel's my sister. Ran the cafe in Four Corners."

Grace looked at him for a moment, then nodded ever so slightly. "Why don't you come on in for a minute, Sheriff."

HALLORAN and Bonar were wandering through the jumble of cars closest to the building, the ones that had already been there when they'd arrived. It was a motley collection of old and new, cars and trucks and vans.

"Who do you suppose these belong to?" Bonar asked.

"Sharon figured they were the cars in Four Corners when whatever went down went down. There wasn't a single drivable vehicle in the town by the time she and Grace and Annie got there."

Bonar shuddered. "You know, it's the little details that really get to you. Like walking into a town with no people, no cars, no sounds. That had to be weird."

Halloran barely heard him. He was staring at a big faded blue sedan parked almost out of sight behind a pickup truck peppered with holes. He and Bonar walked over and looked at the side. There was a hand-painted logo on the driver's door, letters just slightly off, white paint bleeding into the faded blue.

"The Cake Lady," Bonar read it aloud like a sigh, and they were both silent for a time.

"Probably stopped at the cafe for a bite on her way to the wedding," Halloran said. "That Gretchen, she loved her donuts."

Bonar was looking across the field at nothing in particular. "Ernie's going to take this hard."

"Yes, he is."

"So what kind of a world are we living in, Mike, where people put nerve gas in milk trucks and set out to kill a lot of other people they never even met?"

Halloran thought about that for a minute. "Same old world, Bonar. Same old hate. Different weapons."

IT TOOK A FULL seven hours for Agent Knudsen and the ominous black-suited men that came from the ominous black helicopter to debrief Grace, Sharon, and Annie. TheMatrix look-alikes were well-mannered, soft-spoken, and absolutely unused to interviewing anyone with a mangy mutt at her side. Not one of them thought to ask the dog to leave. There wasn't a precedent for such a thing.

"You want to debrief them, fine," Magozzi had said. "But it'll be right here in this field, this RV, or that building. We go from here to home, and that's the only choice you have."

One fool had tried to exert a little nonexistent authority, citing all sorts of statutes and policies that mandated an FBI debriefing at an FBI office with all the prerequisite equipment and witnesses. Agent Knudsen had silenced him with a single gesture. The kid, Halloran thought, had a lot more influence than any of them had realized.

When it was all over, Agent Knudsen personally escorted the three women back to the RV. By that time, the sun was setting on the chaotic day, and most of the choppers and vehicles had already left. Magozzi met them at the door. He was wearing a dishtowel apron and a stern expression that didn't go with it. He looked at Knudsen, then at Grace. "Do we feed him or eat him?"

Charlie had made some decisions about Agent Knudsen in the past few hours. He walked over to the agent, sat down next to his leg, and lifted his head to be patted. Knudsen hated dogs. Always had, always would. Except for this one. He laid a hand on Charlie's head, and Charlie's stump of a tail wiggled.

"Feed him," Grace said.

They should have fed him sooner, Magozzi thought a few hours later, because all the fat and carbs and protein that Harley and Bonar had managed to whip up in a cooking frenzy had done little to mitigate the three glasses of Bordeaux Agent Knudsen had slammed before the meal, and they sure as hell weren't affecting the glass he was drinking now.

Grace, Sharon, and Annie had all been frighteningly quiet during the meal, and everyone else had been quiet, too, mentally tiptoeing around them as if they were recently returned combat vets, which, in a way, they were. The women were pressed close together on one side of the table, the men crowded on the other. Magozzi felt a chasm running right down the middle, and wondered how hard it was going to be to cross it. The only thing that gave him hope was when the women excused themselves and went to the back of the RV to crash on the hidden beds that pulled down from the office walls. Grace hadn't actually smiled at him, but she'd trailed her fingers lightly across his hand as she passed.

Just before Annie disappeared down the broad aisle, she paused at the doorway with a pink flounce of the chiffon-and-marabou dressing gown she'd donned after her shower. It showed a lot of cleavage and a lot of plump, delicious leg when she moved, and Gino had been wondering ever since he dropped his jaw at the first sight of it how the hell the FBI had managed to debrief a woman who looked like that.

"Not so long ago," she said, "this body was neck-deep in a scummy lake, butting up against a dead cow."

Every man in the front of the RV smiled at her. Of the three women, Annie was truly the ultimate survivor, the only one who could live through hell, then immediately let it go. Magozzi wondered what it was in her past that made her able to do that-besides knifing a man to death when she was seventeen, of course.

Agent Knudsen, who was already four or five sheets to the wind, brandished an off-center smile. He held up his glass to her. "Not so long ago, dear lady, you were neck-deep in a scummy lake next to a truck filled with nerve gas." His glass wobbled, and a dribble of wine fell to the table.

Annie gave him a quick curtsy and disappeared down the aisle.

"What truck? What lake? What the fuck are you people talking about?" Gino demanded. He looked a little blurry-eyed and aggressive.

"Have you called Angela?" Magozzi asked him.

"About twenty thousand times." He rolled his eyes toward Harley. "I sure as hell hope you get free minutes on your sat phone." He moved his head back toward Knudsen. "So what's all this lake shit?"

Knudsen was making the mistake a lot of nondrinkers make when they have a little too much. He was gesturing with his glass, and Roadrunner was frantically blotting up spills as they happened. "There were three trucks originally-three targets. The first one had some kind of accident and crashed in Four Corners. They shoved it into the lake the women ended up hiding in. It's a really long story."

Harley was immediately alarmed. "Are you shitting me? They were really exposed to that gas?"

Knudsen stuck his lips out. "No worries. You would not believe how fast sarin hydrolyzes, and there probably wasn't a whole lot left in the truck anyway." He dropped his chin and raised his eyebrows almost up to his hairline. "Now, if it had been VX, that would have been a whole different story. Big trouble. Big problem." He grinned foolishly, inappropriately, a lot like Charlie.

Up to this point, Roadrunner had been pretty quiet for a man who had literally saved the day. "What were the targets?" he asked Knudsen. His voice was polite, almost deferential. He was asking about the people he'd saved.

The question sobered everyone. Even Knudsen put down his glass, and his gaze seemed to sharpen. "I really can't tell you that."

Gino bristled a little. "You can't tell the man who saved your ass? Who has a better right to know?"

Knudsen fiddled with the stem of his glass for a minute, then laid his gaze on Roadrunner, right where it belonged. "One of the trucks was parked at a mosque outside Detroit-one of the biggest in the country, by the way. The other was at an Immigration Services field office in a Chicago suburb."

No one said a word.

Magozzi looked down at his hands on the table, thinking how accomplished they were in some things, how versatile, and ultimately, how helpless. "They were sending a message."

Knudsen nodded. He looked one hundred percent sober. "That's what it looks like. They were very careful with the target sites. The mosque and the immigration office were both quite isolated, which makes the targets pretty specific." He dug in his pocket, pulled out a wrinkled business card, and smoothed it flat on the table. "We found about a thousand of these in Hemmer's desk at the dairy."

All the men leaned over to read it. There was no name on it, no address, no logo of any sort-just a simple quote:

". . it is their right, it is their duty . . , to provide new Guards for their future security."

"Sounds familiar," Halloran murmured.

"It should," Bonar replied. "It's from the Declaration of Independence. What the forefathers said you had to do when the government wasn't doing enough to protect you."

Knudsen nodded sadly.

And this, Magozzi thought, was the dreaded black place. The desperate place where people always went when anger and fear couldn't find any other answer, the place that obliterated logic and compassion and reason and all the other higher functions of the human mind that civilization had fostered.

No one wanted to talk after that. They found their rest in leather recliners, or doubled up on the sofa beds. Roadrunner was mothering again, covering everyone with blankets before he stretched out in the middle of the aisle and immediately fell asleep.

To his everlasting shame, Harley woke up in the middle of the night on one of the sofa beds, with both arms wrapped tightly around a happily sleeping Agent Knudsen.

SHARON MUELLER was up at dawn, shrouded in a big terry robe from the RV's closet, standing near Deputy Douglas Lee's bloodied patrol car.

It was quiet in the field. Dew sparkled on the seeded heads of tall grass, and a hawk flew overhead, screeching occasionally for its mate.

She heard the RV door close softly in the distance, then felt Hallo-ran approaching. She didn't have to look to know it was him. She would never have to look to know he was there.

He moved up beside her, hands shoved in his pockets, light eyes fixed on the car. "Who killed the man who was pretending to be Deputy Lee?"

"I did."

It was amazing how easily it slipped out-no guilt clouding the issue, no lingering questions, none of the doubts that used to fill hermind whenever she held a gun so similar to the one that had ended her mother's life, hesitant-always hesitant-to pull the trigger and end someone else's. It was part of the reason she'd been shot in the Monkeewrench garage all those months ago. She hadn't been too slow to get at her gun and pull the trigger to keep a killer from shooting her. She'd just been paralyzed by the past, and that had made her a bad cop. But that was over. She could go back to Kingsford County now if she wanted. She could go back on the street. Maybe she could even go back to Halloran.

Halloran didn't even bat an eye. He just nodded. "It was a righteous shooting."

"I shot him in the back," Sharon said.

"Even so."

"I know. I'm okay with it."

Halloran swallowed hard and wondered how people did this.Youdid it when you were a kid,he told himself.You did it every time you stepped to the edge of that cliff at the lime quarry, swung the rope out over the water, and hoped you didn't shatter yourself on the sharp-edged rocks that were waiting below, always waiting.

"I was thinking maybe we should get married. Have kids. Do the whole thing."

Sharon bent in half almost immediately, laughing out loud, and Halloran thought either he'd just proposed to an absolutely insane woman or he'd screwed this up just like he'd screwed up everything else in his life.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry, Mike," Sharon finally gasped, straightening, at least making an attempt at a sober face befitting the occasion. "But we haven't even had a real date yet."

"Okay. We could do that first if you want."

She turned toward him then and grabbed his whiskered face in both hands and pulled it down to hers. Then he felt the woman beneath the thick terry robe and saw in his mind's eye the woman in the red dress, high heels, and lips like colored water, who had laid her hand on his heart in the Kingsford County Sheriffs Office way back last October, and refused to let go.

FIVE HOURS LATER, Gino and Magozzi were leaning against the side of the RV, staring across an empty tar road, across a field at a huge barn. Grace's Range Rover was parked right behind them. The road was so narrow that both vehicles blocked it, but from what they'd seen in the past hour, chances were slim that another vehicle would ever come along. Northern Wisconsin was the end of the world, according to Gino. They could hear a single blackbird calling from a cornfield next to the barn, and not much else.

"So that's what started all this," Magozzi said, tipping his head to get a different angle on the barn.

Grace walked up from the Range Rover and leaned between them. "That's it."

Gino shook his head in disbelief. "Sharon took you fifty miles out of your way to see this?"

"That's right."

Gino pushed away from the sun-heated metal skin of the RV. "Well, it's about the dumbest thing I ever saw in my life," he said, heading back inside for a little liquid refreshment and some more of that gooey chocolate crap with the unpronounceable name that Harley had made last night. He hadn't wanted to make this side trip. He'd been anxious to get home to Angela.

"I think it's pretty amazing," Magozzi said after Gino had left.

The whole side of the barn was painted in a huge, amazingly accurate replication of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, wearing a T-shirt with "On Wisconsin" emblazoned across the front.

Grace smiled at him like the Mona Lisa on the barn. "The thing is," she said, "if we hadn't gone out of our way to see this barn that Gino thinks is about the dumbest thing he ever saw in his life, we ever would have gotten lost. We never would have ended up in Four Corners, and a thousand more people would have died."

They both stared at the barn for a while longer, Grace thinking of lungs that had happened and things that might have been, Magozzi linking of things that were to come.

"You want to make out now?" he asked.

Grace looked down at the ground and smiled, thinking that you ever knew how short your time was. But sometimes, if you were sally lucky, you got the faintest glimpse of how you should spend it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LONG, LONG AGO, back when P.J.'s body parts were all still relatively close to their original locations, we sent an unfinished manuscript over the transom. The agent who read it saw through the problems to the possibilities, and championed the story and the author in spite of the book's flaws. We spent the next ten years promising ourselves that one day we would send our thanks in the form of a book that the poor woman could sell. That book wasMonkeewrench. We were not sure what a "good" agent was, so we settled for an amazing one. Ellen Geiger of Curtis Brown Ltd., this one's for you, babe.

Amazing people apparently gather in packs, because Ellen Geiger led us straight to Christine Pepe, executive editor, vice president, and all-around wonder woman at G. P. Putnam's Sons. We know what you're thinking-that every author says really nice things about his or her editor in these acknowledgment pages-but you have to understand that this woman has already earned any accolade you can think of. She is a truly gifted editor with laser-sight judgment who makes everything we write better. We respect her professionalism, we admire her intelligence and talent, and, most of all, we value her friendship.

We began the Monkeewrench series with these two women and heir colleagues in their respective firms. At Curtis Brown, a very special thank-you to David Barbor, who tolerates our nonsense with immutable grace; to Ed Wintle, who parries our nonsense with surprising skill; and of course, to Anna Abreu, who can brighten the darkest day with the sound of her voice. You people are the best.

At Putnam, we are indebted to Carole Baron, president, a consummate professional and truly a class act; to dedicated, delightful Marilyn Ducksworth, who won us over in about two seconds; to the patient and talented Kara Welsh and the New American Library family; to Dr. Michael Barson, who babies us on tour, and his staff, Megan Millenky and Lisa Moraleda. And a thousand thanks to tireless, sweet, unflappable Lily Chin, assistant to Christine Pepe.