The Firefly

11

Swamp balanced a paper cup of coffee in his lap as Bertie steered his Volvo sedan through the gate complex of the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. He had no government identification to show the gate guards, but Bertie was apparently senior enough to overcome that problem. Swamp was able to produce his retired Secret Service agent ID card when it came time to be badged into the building itself. The security guards had given that token offering a patronizing smile.

He was surprised when he saw Bertie's office up on the fifth floor. "I didn't know spooks had real corner offices," he said. "I thought it was all secret handshakes in dark hotel rooms."

"Most of us in the Agency are just bureaucrats with really expensive phones," Bertie replied. There were three telephone consoles on his desk, one of which was set up for video teleconferencing. "Here's the paperwork."

Swamp was surprised, and showed it.

"Yeah, well, I thought you'd bite, so I took the liberty of having the Personnel Department write up the contract last night. Your security clearances were gapped for less than twenty-four hours, so we figured you hadn't had time to go over to the Commies. That basically says you're working exclusively for us as a contract consultant, one whose duties will be specified by competent authority in the due course of time, et cetera, et cetera. Here's your walking-around paper."

Bertie passed over a leather credentials folder that had Swamp's photograph already laminated into the identification papers. Bertie smiled when he saw Swamp blink.

"This is the counterintelligence directorate," he said. "We have a photograph of every federal law-enforcement officer in the country in our databanks. Plus your fingerprints and, of course, all your personal history, based on the Bureau's background investigation. Those creds took fifteen minutes. Here's your building pass, good for six months. I assume you have your own weapon?"

Swamp was almost too surprised to answer. "Uh, yeah, I had one issued on a subcustody basis yesterday morning. But that was before, uh—"

"Before they canned you for living up to your reputation. What were your plans for today, before DHS began behaving badly?"

"I had a canvass going of all the major realtors in town to see if any of them had done any business recently for the Royal Kingdom Bank. Your idea, actually."

Bertie nodded, remembering. "When I was telling you to back off, wasn't it? But that was then. This is now. Do you have any allies left?"

"Detective Cullen over in the District. And I can touch base with Gary White to see if he's had any further responses from the realtors I called. I left them my OSI office telephone numbers. My previous office, that is. Otherwise, no. Now ask me about enemies."

"Enemies are the people who still want your hide even after you're gone. You don't have any enemies." He took back the contract, which Swamp had signed. "We'll set you up with a virtual office here. Two numbers. One will always go to an innocuous-sounding voice mail. The other will go to a human operator who will make like you're some kind of big deal. You know, 'Mr. Morgan is not available. I can put you through to one of his executive assistant's voice mail.' And both are programmable, okay?"

"So if I tell some fibs about who I am…"

"Right, as long as you also tell your assigned operator, preferably in advance, although those people are pretty fast on their feet. Here's what we want: Find this guy Hodler, Heismann, whatever his name is. Don't apprehend. Locate him; then let us take it from there. We'll probably give the arrest to the Bureau, given their long-standing love affair with the Secret Service. Plus, we all know how busy Hallory and company are just now."

"I feel faintly disloyal," Swamp said.

"Swamp, if you're right, this would be a strike against the entire American government. All of which goes to hear the address to the joint session. Which law-enforcement outfit saves the day is of no consequence, right?"

"I guess," Swamp said. Then nodded his head. "Yes, right, of course."

"Okay. There's nothing more for me to tell you. I'll get one of my staffers in here to take you to your car."

"My car?"

"It's equipped with satellite tags so we know where it is at all times, so no cathouse visits on government time. It has a dash-mounted cell phone, which should operate even when Hallory shuts down commercial service all over town Friday. If you're stopped by cops or involved in an accident, it has license plates that will come up 'Back off and call your supervisor' on any law-enforcement computer. It has a panic button, which will alert the operations directorate that you are in real trouble. To be used only when you're in real trouble, obviously."

"These wheels have an operating manual, I hope? I mean, I normally drive an extremely low-tech ten-year-old Land Rover."

"Is it green, with a dented right rear fender?" Bertie asked with a grin. "Like the one down in our garage?"

Connie won her bet with herself. Morning rounds brought a bright-eyed staff physician who wanted to do a comprehensive exam and case review, with an eye toward possible early discharge. Connie kept a straight face and displayed the appropriate reverence while he poked, prodded, watched her make a Pilgrim's Progress to the bathroom and back, discussed pain-management modalities, and then asked her if she had somewhere to go. She asked him to get Patient Affairs to help set up home health-care services and get a hospital bed, making it clear that she would be able to pay for said services outside of insurance channels. A rep from Patient Affairs showed up an hour later and put all of that in train for that very afternoon, including transport from the hospital at three o'clock assuming that was all right with her. She also showed Connie some paperwork that should get her hospitalization insurance to work even though her parent company was defunct.

Connie then decided to devote the rest of the day to getting an assisted shower, lunch, and then a long nap. Jake called in at ten o'clock and asked how she was getting on, and she told him that she was better and stronger. He asked if they were going to let her go yet and she told him that they were working on it, and that she hadn't forgotten his kind offer. The longer the day went on, the more she wanted to just go home, and she didn't need Jake or anyone else getting in the way just now. If they could turn on the nursing service today, she'd take a shot.

A different delivery company brought the rest of the marble at nine o'clock on Thursday morning. There were ten pieces in the truck, each wrapped, banded, and individually palleted in the back of a large step van. Heismann asked what the total load weight was, and the driver told him fourteen hundred pounds. Each piece was two feet long and roughly ten inches square. They'd brought a large hand truck that could be used to cart the pieces up the front steps and into the house. Heismann told them to bring it all inside and to put the pieces again at extended intervals along the living room wall to spread out the weight.

Now, for his remaining loose end. He gathered up all the faked documentation that had come along with both loads of marble and packaged it up in one bulky envelope. He addressed it to the U.S. Secret Service at the headquarters address listed in the Washington phone book. He included one of Mutaib's business cards, on the back of which he wrote in English, "Proceed with the attack." He walked back out to the street and put the envelope in the corner mailbox. Yes, the Ammies could trace the rental of the town house back to the bank, but this would make it — what was the word? — personal. The police might even check the mailbox after the attack. That would make it very personal — and quick. He still had every intention of going to the bank after the attack, but this would be insurance in case he couldn't manage it.

At 10:15, Swamp parked his Land Rover in the commercial parking lot across from the District police headquarters. Bertie's staffer had shown him all the new bells and whistles, and then how to get out of the CIA compound without getting shot. He'd used the cell phone to call Lila back at the inn, and she didn't even know the Rover had been taken. This wasn't his father's CIA, he concluded; these guys were good.

He met with Jake Cullen and Shad Howell in the Homicide office, where the coat trees were all sporting police uniforms hanging in dry-cleaning bags. Swamp suggested they go to an interview room, which they did, and there he brought the two detectives up-to-date on where he was with the Hodler matter, and also his new status as an Agency contractor.

"They do that shit?" Shad asked. "Thought they had their own operatives."

"For real operational intelligence work, yes, those are Company people. But they hire all sorts of folks to do odd jobs — language people, technical experts, journalists, ex-cops."

"And your people fired you?"

"Sort of," Swamp said. "Officially I'd been recalled for the national emergency. They mostly just unrecalled me, but, yeah, you wouldn't confuse it with a promotion. Jake, what's the news on Connie Wall?"

"Getting stronger. Walking on her own to the bathroom. We've got a picture of what happened that night, but still no description of this dude as a guy. She keeps saying there's something else she remembers, but she can't surface it. You know, pain meds."

"She going to make a full recovery?"

"As long as she doesn't pop an infection. Which is one of the reasons she wants out of that hospital as soon as possible."

"And the other?"

"This guy's still loose. And we had to pull our door cop off because of this goddamned inauguration."

"Where would she go? Not back to her house?"

Jake fingered his collar. "Um, I told her she could stay at my place for a little while. Until we get this guy."

Swamp glanced at Shad, who rolled his eyes. "I told him," Shad said. "She's a wit. They hook up, it could compromise any court case."

"We catch up with this mutt," Jake growled, "there won't be any court case. Righteous-shooting hearing maybe, but no court case."

"I didn't hear that," Swamp said, looking up at the video camera to make sure the red light wasn't on. "As of yesterday afternoon, Gary said we'd heard from about two-thirds of those realty offices. It's all I've got right now, so that's where I'm going to concentrate. Can you guys run a similar screen?"

"On what?" Jake asked.

"On the name Erich or Eric Hodler. And also that Suburban. You know, DMV, moving violations, parking tickets, the tax office, telephone company, PEPCO, traffic stops. Go back to that Saudi bank and ask if those papers have come over from the car dealer, and if anybody's been in to pick them up. They call you when and if he comes in. Like that."

"Yeah, sure," Jake said. "Actually, I had some of that done right after the car thing, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to run it again."

"Gary has flags up in the national credit bureaus and, of course, NCIC."

"If he's what you think he is, you won't see him there."

"True," Swamp said. "So maybe you guys need to keep running it, right up until that speech goes down next month. The federal systems won't comb those sources near as well as yours will."

"Okay, we're done here, I guess," Jake said, getting up. "We'll keep stroking it. You call us if your guy gets a hit."

As they left the interview room, Swamp asked if all the uniforms meant what he thought.

"The whole force is back in the bag as of seventeen hundred tonight," Jake said. "Inspection, would you believe. Then shifts starting midnight tonight. The feds have the Capitol Hill perimeter and inside; we flood the lockdown zone outside the perimeter. Everyone below the rank of lieutenant. The whole department's gonna basically shut down for this thing."

"If I surface an address, will you guys need a warrant?"

The two detectives looked at each other. "Yeah," Jake said. "We probably would. Better hope you don't turn up anything until after the inauguration, though. All those parties, there won't be a sober judge in town."

"Who wants a sober judge for a search-warrant hearing?" Swamp said.

It took three hours to get Connie out of the hospital, transported to her house, and set up on the ground floor in the dining room. The visiting nurse hadn't been too happy with the piece of plywood over the dining room window, but otherwise it was a fairly workable setup. The kitchen was right there, and there was a lavatory in the front hallway. Connie had asked the transport driver to retrieve her keys and personal effects from the Shelby, and the hospital-supply company had shown up with the bed and a wheelchair thirty minutes after Connie arrived.

The nurse had left her with a small Thermos of soup, some saltines, several bottles of water, and a number to call if she got into trouble. They'd done a practice movement to the bathroom, with Connie walking to it and then gratefully using the wheelchair to return to the hospital bed. But she was home, the heater was working just fine, the doors were locked and the alarm set, and she had that handy-dandy twelve-gauge snake gun within arm's reach. The nurse would return at eight o'clock the next morning and use the key Connie had given her to get back into the house. The West Virginia tow truck operator had parked the Shelby as far up in the drive as he could, apparently aware of how valuable it was. Someday she'd clean out that garage and get it totally out of sight.

Her innards were in that curious state of sensation where she couldn't be sure everything was all right or not. The trip across town, the new bed, all the activity, a new pain medication, and the need to be awake for most of the afternoon were all conspiring to make her feel uneasy. She felt as if her plumbing system was only loosely suspended inside, which had her taking constant inventory of every twinge and gurgle. She fell asleep at dusk with all the lights on and her right hand on the pain pump's control button.

That thing she was supposed to remember drifted tantalizingly close to her conscious mind, then wafted away again each time she reached for it. She could almost visualize it, and a part of her brain knew that it was important. Something that bastard had said.

At 5:00 p.m. Heismann drew the Venetian blinds on the ground-floor windows and turned on some lights in the living room. He'd walked over to a local bar and grill for a beer and a sandwich. It was already dark outside, and the streetlights were wearing amber halos, which promised fog and mist later. He had the heater going in the house, although warily mindful of what was lurking in that fuel tank. He'd even gone back down this morning to look again at that new wiring, but his training convinced him to leave it alone. Mutaib wasn't doing anything that he, Heismann, wasn't also planning to do. It was just that Mutaib was going to take a direct hand, while he was going to get the Ammies to solve his problem for him.

He heard noises from next door, and then the sound of his neighbor's back door opening and closing. He quickly turned out the kitchen light and peered through the blinds. The librarian was going down the steps, carrying an overnight bag. She went into her garage, and a moment later, a car he hadn't seen before was backing out of the garage. She got out, secured the garage door, and then got back in and drove off down the alley.

So she does have a car, he thought. Well, this is perfect; she's probably going to stay with a friend or relative until all this security nonsense had been lifted. Now he wouldn't have to kill her. Unless, of course, she came back tomorrow before noon. But that overnight bag indicated otherwise. And, of course, there'd be nothing to come back to as of Friday afternoon. He hoped she had fire insurance.

Now to the real business: the weapon.

Swamp went back to his apartment after talking to the two detectives. His home voice mail had one message from Gary, which said simply "No hits." He changed into jeans and a sweater, put on some music, and began collating his own list of realtors before realizing his list of calls to return had to be incomplete. He called Gary at the office and asked him to fax a marked-up list to the Kinko's across the street. He then asked him what the scuttlebutt around the office was regarding his sudden disappearance.

"Not a word," Gary said. "It's like you were never here. Mr. McNamara had the department heads in for a meeting this morning, and now everybody's radio-silent. Plus, lots of people have been drafted to help with the security detail up at the Capitol tomorrow. Me included."

"There's a good deal. Great day for some sick leave."

"Not an option," Gary said. "There's only like fifteen of those realtors who haven't answered."

"I'll take it from here. If I get a hit, I'll pass it on to the District cops." He thanked Gary and hung up. He had decided not to tell anyone in his old office about his new job. He trusted Gary, but what Gary didn't know, Gary couldn't blurt out.

Twenty minutes later, with the faxed list in hand, he started making his calls. Some of the offices came up with only voice mail, and those he put down on a recall list. By five o'clock, he was down to four offices. On the third of these, a harried-sounding woman picked up. Swamp could hear voices arguing in the background.

"Crown Realty, can I help you?"

"Yes, ma'am. This is Special Agent Lee Morgan, U.S. Secret Service. We called a few days ago, asking if you'd had any recent transactions with the Royal Kingdom Bank here in D.C.?"

"Wait a minute," she said. The background noises became muffled as she put a hand over the phone and joined the argument. Then she was back. "Do you know what you're asking? We have over two hundred and fifty local listing files, and then there's all the MLS stuff we work. It would take—"

"Ma'am?" Swamp interjected. "Could you perhaps just run quickly through your bookkeeping program? Do a global search for Royal Kingdom Bank? That would do it, wouldn't it? I'm not looking for listings, just completed transactions — rentals, sales. Like that."

There was a moment of silence, and then the woman said, "Okay, hang on while I check."

Swamp heard some keyboard clicking, and then she was back. "Good call, Mr. Special Agent. We closed a rental last week on Capitol Hill. The tenant is a Mr. Erich Hodler, some kind of artist. Sculptor, I think. He's doing lobby art for the Royal Kingdom Bank, and they're the leasee. Prepaid it for six months, in fact. How's that?"

"That is perfect," Swamp said, excited now. "What's the address?"

"Um, I'm a little uncomfortable about doing all this on the phone. Is there a way I can reach you?"

"Sure," Swamp said. "Fax it to me at the Old Executive Office Building." He read off Gary's fax number, which showed up at the top of the faxed list of realtors. "That way, you'll see who you're connecting to."

"Okay, that works for me. It'll be a few minutes, though — some people are coming in."

"As soon as you can, and thanks very much," Swamp said. "You've been a big help."

Swamp hung up and quickly called Gary. He told him about the hit and asked him to intercept that fax when it came in and then call him with the address. Gary said he'd try, but that there was an unscheduled briefing for all hands regarding tomorrow's security-detail assignments going down in five minutes. All Swamp could do was ask him to wait as long as he could for the fax. Then he called Jake Cullen, but once again, everyone was in a meeting about the inauguration preparations. He asked to be plugged in to Jake's voice mail, then left a message about making a hit with the realtor screen. Then he hung up. He wanted to bang his head against the wall in frustration. Right when he almost had locating data on their quarry, everybody in town was looking at something else.

He went into the kitchen, fixed a drink, and took it to the balcony window. It was almost fully dark outside, with a visible mist blowing by the windows. He looked at his watch. Ten minutes had passed since he'd spoken to Gary, who was now probably being dragged down the hall by his boss to attend the security-detail briefing. He tried to think of anyone else he might call. Mary. She wouldn't be at the briefing. But then he looked at his watch again and saw that it was 5:30. Mary, experienced civil serpent that she was, would be long gone. He swore out loud.

He couldn't do anything until he got that address and then talked to the District cops. And Bertie. Don't forget your new boss, there, sunshine, he told himself. But this was a significant development, and at least the District cops would be all over it, even if the feds elected not to care. He decided to go out and get some dinner, rather than sitting in the apartment and going crazy.

Heismann went upstairs and retrieved his tools and the small bag of wedges. Starting at the topmost mark on the biggest piece of marble, he cleared out a two-inch-long hatchet-shaped hole in the supposedly solid marble. Then he tapped one wedge into the hole until it just stuck. He repeated this procedure all the way down the line of holes, then began tapping the wedges in random order. After a few minutes, there was a loud click as a vertical crack appeared in the marble surface. He kept hitting the wedges, top, bottom, center, widening the opening until there was another cracking sound, and then the two halves of the block split open and fell onto the floor with a thump that shook the house. Good thing she left, he thought as he grabbed the weapon to keep it from toppling over. Then he sat back on his haunches and admired it, a dull green-colored 120-mm mortar. Soviet-born and bred, the tube was sixty-six inches long and weighed 130 pounds. With the standard base, it would weigh almost 350 pounds, but for what he was going to do, the modified wooden base he'd assembled would be quite good enough.

Mutaib's people had wanted a bomb or bombs, or even a missile, but Heismann had talked them out of that. A mortar was perfect for this kind of attack. The target was heavily defended but stationary, and a mortar required no human penetration of the building or security zone by the bomber. There were no electronic emitters to warn of an impending attack. No fancy radar guidance system to be spoofed by defensive jammers. No heat source on which defensive infrared missiles could home. The mortar rounds, themselves weighing forty-four pounds, almost all of which was high explosive, could not be diverted once fired — they were essentially dumb and blind high-explosive rocks, obeying only the immutable laws of physics. And while it was true that the American Army had a radar that could see the incoming rounds and compute the reverse trajectory to locate the firing position, that wouldn't save anyone in the target area. Downstairs were ten rounds, similarly encased in marble blocks. Five were general-purpose high-explosive rounds; the other five were fragmentation warheads, which would go off eighty feet above the grounds and shred the entire kill zone with white-hot hypersonic shrapnel.

Standing up, he dragged the tube across the floor to the wooden platform he'd built in the center of the room. The base of the tube had a projection on the bottom that was meant to fit into the receiving groove in a heavy steel base plate. Inside the crate was a much smaller version of the real base plate. It had holes drilled around its perimeter, which would allow him to bolt the plate to the plywood stack and then set the mortar down in its groove. Attached to the tube was a single tubular metal leg that could swing out and support the tube at the correct firing angle and also set the firing azimuth.

Many people considered a mortar to be a crude device, but it was actually capable of precise artillery work. The barrel, or tube, was almost five inches in diameter, and the weapon's mobility, with only a three-man crew, meant that a lot of high-explosive rounds could be rained down on a target without having to move an entire artillery company into the field. Its accuracy was a function of how precisely two sets of coordinates were known: the location of the mortar and the location of the target. He had both of those, expressed in units of accuracy of less than ten feet. Wind, atmospheric pressure and temperature, humidity, and differences in elevation between the firing point and the target point could all affect accuracy and became more important the longer the distance to the target. But this weapon could shoot effectively four miles, and his target, at a range of 2,600 meters, was just over one mile away. Given the two main coordinates, his handheld calculator would tell him the elevation angle for firing and the line of fire, expressed in degrees true. All he had to do now was establish the direction of true north in the room.

He found the magnetic compass he'd bought earlier and set it down on the floor by the north-facing bedroom window, well away from the heavy steel tube in the middle of the room. Marking magnetic north, he scratched a line in the finish of the floorboard, then repeated the process on the other side of the room. He drove a nail into each scratch and tied a string between the nails to establish a straight line that ran across the room, very near the tube. The next part would take some estimating. Consulting the GPS unit, he was able to get the correction to account for variation for the geographic position of the town house, which turned out to be a six-degree easterly difference between what a magnetic compass would read and true north. Using a protractor, he established the actual true-north line with a second string and nail set, making sure this string touched the bottom center of the tube, then removed the original string.

He again consulted the GPS unit and determined the firing azimuth, which was 342 degrees true. Then he set up the calculator and entered the range. The calculator gave him the firing solution for full-charge rounds: seventy-two degrees of elevation. He bolted the truncated base plate down onto the plywood stack and then wrestled the heavy tube onto its notch. Then, using the monopod leg, he set the tube at the required angle of elevation and locked the leg. Using a string once again, he scribed an arc in the floorboards; the origin was the tube's center notch, and the arc had a range of ninety degrees, starting on the true-north string and extending to the left, or west, of that line. Then he measured out eighteen degrees of arc, which was true north minus 342 degrees, and made a mark. Maintaining the tube's elevation angle, he swung the base of the leg to match up with that final mark. Then he looked up to see if the rounds were going to clear the skylight.

He frowned. The trajectory was going to be too close to the left edge of the skylight.

Now he had a decision to make: He could offset the entire stack of plywood and support boards and thereby move the firing trajectory closer to the center of the skylight, or he could widen the skylight. Given that his neighbor was out for the night, he elected to widen the skylight. It took an hour and a half of awkward work, because he was trying to be very quiet about the fact that he was tearing a hole in the roof of the building. It was harder than he thought it would be to get through the rafters, plywood decking, the tar paper, and finally the shingles. When he thought he had enough room, he took a break, pasted on a beard and a mustache, and went out for a coffee at the nearby all-night convenience store. He saw several police cars prowling the neighborhood streets closer to the Capitol complex, but his own street remained empty. He watched for any signs of interest in his duplex, but there was no one about and only the normal evening lights showing along the street.

The air was misty, with an underlying layer of cold air. The skylight was on the back side of the roof, so he continued past his house, turned the corner, and came back to it via the alley. He'd left the light on in the master bedroom and could see light through the skylight, but not the fact that there was now a three-foot square hole along one side of the skylight's frame. Everything was as he had left it. But when he got back into the house through the back door, he was surprised to hear a cell phone chirping somewhere in the house.

When Swamp got back up to the apartment, there were two messages on his voice mail. One was from a rather harried-sounding Gary, with the address on Capitol Hill. Finally! The other was from Bertie, asking if there were any developments. He called Bertie but couldn't get through the counterintelligence directorate's operator: Mr. Walker was currently unavailable, but he could leave a message. As patiently as he could, Swamp identified himself and said simply that the German had been located. He gave the operator the number for his apartment phone.

He went down to his Rover and found his city map. By the beam of the dome light, he located the address. He tried to remember what the perimeter for the security zone was, but he wasn't sure he had it right. Even so, the address looked to be about a mile from the Capitol. Very close to his target. He took the map back upstairs, only to find he'd missed Bertie's return call. He went through the drill again with the Agency operator, waited five minutes, and then Bertie called back.

"Where is he?" Bertie asked without preamble.

"Right up on Capitol Hill," Swamp said, and read out the address. "About a mile from the Capitol itself."

"Son of a bitch," Bertie muttered. "Good damn work here, Mr. Consultant. What do you want to do now?"

"I'm waiting for the District cops to call back. They want this guy for a cop killing. They're more than ready to move."

"Is the German likely to survive the arrest?"

"Depends, especially if he does something dumb. But there's another problem. They'll need a warrant."

"Don't they already have one?"

"They would, except for all this inauguration security. Every cop in town's getting dragged into that. Plus, this would be a tough night to get a warrant, and the courts are probably closed down by now. So we're probably looking at a twenty-four-hour delay, maybe more."

"Yeah, you're probably right," Bertie said. "You up to doing a little recon first, though? Make sure there's someone actually there?"

"Thought about that, but let me talk to the Homicide cops first," Swamp said. "That address is very close to the security zone. Not a place for Lone Rangers tonight, as nervous as everyone is up there."

"True," Bertie said. "Keep us informed. I need to brief my bosses that we may have him located."

Swamp hung up and then checked his voice mail again, but there were no new messages. He looked at his watch. It was seven o'clock. The Metro ran until 1:00 a.m., although there might be schedule changes due to the security plan. He flipped the TV on and watched the evening news, which was giving extensive coverage of the inauguration preparations. A graphic of the lock-down zone came up, and he was able to verify that the address was outside of the perimeter, although not by much.

He also learned that at midnight tonight, the Metro system would stop running on the line that went by the Capitol. Reagan National would be shut down all day tomorrow, and the entire city would become a TFR zone until Saturday at noon, which meant that no airplanes could come or go into Washington's airspace except for military top cover. In a related report, the newscaster said that there had been rumors of large Air Force transport movements for the past twenty-four hours along the East Coast but that the Pentagon wasn't responding to questions about this. Then there were quick clips of the various police and National Guard units that were being mobilized around the city tonight.

Just as Swamp was wondering if Cullen and Howell would ever be available, the phone rang. It was Jake.

"You found him?" Jake asked.

"Found an address rented by the Royal Kingdom Bank on behalf of an E. Hodler, German sculptor."

"Hot damn! Although we can't work it tonight. No one's available, including Shad and me. But give it to me and then I'll trade you."

Swamp read out the address and then said, "Trade me?"

"Yeah. My ops center people got a hit, too, while the rest of us we're doing a goddamned uniform inspection. They plugged into all those things you suggested, plus our own patrol incident logs. Something Shad suggested. Guess what? A Capitol Hill patrol car stopped an elderly foreigner who was walking around Capitol Hill at noon Tuesday. German passport, name of E. Hodler. A current work visa. Well dressed, carrying a briefcase, which had a newspaper and his lunch in it. Strong accent. Said he was out for some fresh air. He seemed harmless, so they let him go. Suggest anything to you?"

Swamp felt a sinking sensation in his gut. Oh shit. This guy wasn't targeting the joint session. He was targeting the inauguration.

They didn't have a month. They had less than twenty-four hours. Fuck me, he thought, because Hallory and his people will never believe this.

"You still there?" Jake asked.

"I was just swallowing my heart," Swamp said. "We've got to get this to the Secret Service."

"Um."

"Yeah, I know," Swamp said. "Can you guys get free to work?"

"I explored that, got shut down. I'd already told my boss what had happened to you, and so—"

"And so if it wasn't good enough for the Secret Service, it wasn't good enough to get you out of the bag."

"More like the chief of D's not wanting what happened to you happening to him. So we're all locked in until tomorrow, after all this bullshit is over. And even then, half the department's gonna be detailed to inauguration parties."

"Let me get back to my new boss at the Agency. I'll try to convince him to call in the Secret Service. They've got tons of people up there already."

"Sure they won't just blow you off again?"

"They might," Swamp said. "Especially when they hear the source. But I think it's my duty to try."

"Duty?" Jake said. "To the guys who shit on you? Then do it by phone, man. That way, they won't be tempted to bag your ass up and put you in a rubber room out in Saint Elizabeth's until it's all over."

"Good point," Swamp said. "Although that's not likely."

"You didn't see the agent who came to brief us. Talk about having your hair on fire. Stay away from those people tonight. Let your new bosses drop the dime."

Swamp nodded. "Goddamn, Jake. I know this whole thing has been an evidentiary house of cards all along, but what if there is some gomer up there getting ready to do something like that?"

"He's gonna have a hell of time getting at the Capitol, I'll tell you that," Jake said. "The feds have that whole area shrink-wrapped. The District cops are the middle barrier. None of our people allowed in or near the building."

"Could he do it with a truck bomb? Hezbollah-style?"

"No way. No vehicles anywhere. The building scrubbed once an hour for explosives. No way to get something in there."

"Unless the bomb is already in there. Down deep. In the congressional subway tunnels or—"

"You know they've checked all that," Jake said. "And sealed it. Besides, what bomb? What freaking guy? Nobody believes us!"

"Yeah, I know, I know. Lemme go. I got a call to make."

Swamp confirmed he had the number for Jake's cell phone, and then he called Bertie, hit the usual wall, and hung up to wait for a call back. But it wasn't Bertie who called back; it was the same operator he'd been dealing with. Mr. Walker was in conference and was not to be disturbed. "Is there a message?" she asked.

Swamp identified himself and said, "You need to break him out of that meeting. This is urgent. Really urgent."

"You're a consultant?"

"Yes?"

"Doesn't work that way for consultants, Mr. Morgan. Message?"

Swamp hesitated, trying for some oblique wording. "Tell him… tell him, um… Shit."

" 'Shit'?"

"No, no — tell him that I think the party's Friday, not a month from now, and I'm going to go have a look. Tonight."

There was a moment of silence as the operator wrote it down. "'Having a look tonight.' That it?"

"Yeah, that's it. He'll know what that means. I hope."

"Okay, got it."

"He can reach me on the cell number he issued me."

The operator, obviously used to oblique messages, acknowledged and hung up. Swamp put down the phone with another sinking feeling in his gut and sighed. Jake was right. If he tried to get to Hallory or even McNamara tonight, one or both of them would detonate and then send a psych team to pick him up. Find a judge at home. Recalled pensioner, Your Honor, just dying to stay on active duty, conjures up this wild-ass theory about a bomb plot. Keeps banging on about it even though there's no solid evidence and everybody tells him it's a firefly. Guy gets sent home but won't go, and now he's truly delusional, claiming his phantom German assassin is going to bomb the inauguration instead of his other crazy-ass speculation about the speech to the joint session. We need a committal order, please.

And at the moment, he had to admit he didn't know if this Hodler was even there. Just as Bertie had suggested, he ought to go see. Then cry wolf and take his chances.

He looked out the window and tried to imagine the network of edgy federal agents roaming the security zone around the Capitol. Even though he was working for the Agency, just claiming to be a consultant for the Agency to any of the Secret Service guys would bring an instant rolling of eyes. Sure you are, mate. He picked up the Agency credential folder and looked at the identification documents inside. He'd never seen a real CIA identification card. Would this thing convince a Secret Service agent? Should he even take it along? If a local cop stopped him up there, it might be useful. But if the Secret Service even saw his name, there was probably an order out from Hallory's office to bag his ass.

Screw it, he'd leave it. He'd just be a citizen tonight. All he was going to do was have a look at the house. See if it was occupied, lighted, or what. Then get the hell out of there. If anybody asked, he was out for a walk. It's a free country, right? Used to be, anyway.

He took his new cell phone anyway, even though it probably wasn't fully charged. Better than nothing. Then he went to get the Rover. He'd have preferred taking the Metro, but he wanted that panic button handy.

A telephone? Heismann thought. What telephone? Then he remembered— the cell phone in the box. But he hadn't turned it on yet. It wasn't time. So what is this? How could it be ringing?

He hurried upstairs and located the phone, still in its case by the box of tools. Remembering Mutaib's instructions, he hit the talk button but did not speak. He put the phone to his ear but heard nothing. Then he looked in the phone's illuminated text screen. Two words appeared: Warning. Intruders.

He hit the button to end the call and the light went out in the text window. From all appearances, the phone had gone back to sleep. He put the phone down on a small table in the corner of the room. Then he remembered what Mutaib had said about the thing self-destructing. But that was supposed to happen after the midnight call. What the hell was going on here? He moved the phone over to where the split blocks of marble were stacked and put it down on top of some marble. If it melted, then nothing would be damaged.

Intruders. Assuming Mutaib had sent the warning, it must mean that someone was coming here to the house. Surely Mutaib was not warning him about his own people and their deadly little present in the fuel tank. He became aware of all the lights that were on in the house, and he began turning them off, upstairs and downstairs, leaving only one small light on in the kitchen. Then he went to the bedroom and got his gun and a flashlight. No, no guns. Not tonight, with the streets crawling with security people. The Taser. He got the rig out of his closet, stripped off his coat, and put on the power pack. He checked all the connections and then put his coat back on. He found his watch cap and went out the back door. If police or security people were coming, he didn't dare get trapped inside the house. He would check his perimeter, then wait outside in the dark for a while, see what happened.

Forty minutes later, Swamp walked out of the parking lot of the Capitol South Metro station, through the concourse area, and into a foggy yet surprisingly nippy January night. He was stopped by two uniformed police officers and asked for identification. He showed his West Virginia driver's license and said that he was going to visit a friend, then gave them the address of the town house. The cops nodded him through, reminding him that the last train going back over to Virginia would be through this station at 11:30. They were obviously assuming he had taken a train.

He walked east on D Street, intent on not bumping up against the security cordon around the Capitol and its grounds. This was one night he didn't need to run into any of Hallory's people out here on the street. He was wearing woolen pants and a long-sleeved shirt under a dark woolen parka. He had his government-issue weapon in one pocket of the parka and a small flashlight and his personal cell phone, set to vibrate, not ring, in the other. He'd had some second thoughts about leaving his Agency identification credentials back at the apartment, but he finally figured that if he did get picked up, he didn't want to involve the Agency, since Bertie had not actually ordered him to do this. Sounded good anyway.

He had rented a row house up here in the Capitol Hill area a long time ago, when he first came to Washington, so he knew the general layout of the neighborhood, with its interior alleys and double garages. His plan was to scout the house from the street and then go down the alley behind it to see what he could see. If he could confirm that someone was in the house, he'd back out and call Cullen. If he couldn't raise the District cops, he'd call Bertie again. And if that didn't work, he'd call Hallory's office. No, he wouldn't. He'd wait for Bertie. Let him do it.

He thought he could count on the District cops being a lot more responsive than the feds. Rather than risk another embarrassing confrontation with Hallory and his people, get the Homicide cops, who had a personal reason to grab this guy, to come take him into custody tonight. Let the inauguration happen, and then they'd sort it all out the following day. If Swamp's final leap of logic was right, they'd prevent a terrorist attack during the inauguration. And if he had been wrong all along, Mr. Hodler would be free to go as soon as he convinced the District Homicide squad he hadn't been involved in Cat Ballard's killing or the attack on Connie Wall. They had some hair and fiber samples from both crime scenes, so they could develop tangible evidence if it was there. Or they could always deport him under the antiterrorism statutes, which would solve the problem just as well. And as for the Saudi money angle, there were people at DHS who could work that problem.

One thing Swamp was not going to do was to try to enter the town house. Take a quick look, front and rear, see if it looked lived in, back out, and then call for the cavalry.

Heismann climbed the wooden partition that divided his part of the back porch from that of his next-door neighbor. He then crept along the middle fence to her side of the garage. If she was like him, the alley door would be locked but not the yard door, and it wasn't. Her garage was exactly like his, only with more cardboard boxes stored along the walls. She'd been driving a small Japanese import tonight, so there was plenty of room for car and storage. From her part of the garage, he could watch the back of his house through the small window in the yard door, although he still couldn't see out into the alley. Unless…

He went to her garage door, tripped the inside latch, and raised the door as quietly as he could. Light from the alley flooded in. Too much light, and besides, in this neighborhood, no one would leave a garage door cracked open at night. Any police car cruising the alley would investigate that. Then he had an idea: He could pull the door back down but leave it cracked at the bottom. Then rearrange the cardboard boxes to create a hiding place in her half of the garage. He could watch the house through the window, but if he heard someone in the alley, he'd get behind the boxes and wait for the prowler to discover that the garage door was unlocked.

Yes. That would work. He pulled the door down again, doing it slowly to mask the rattling sound, and then set about building a hide. In the back of his mind, he kept wondering; Who will the "intruders" be, and how did Mutaib know they were coming? He had the uneasy sense that he was misunderstanding something here.

Swamp slowed his pace as he entered the block where the house ought to be. Checking the house numbers, he crossed the street so that he would be on the opposite side from his target. Most of the houses had lights on, and every one of them had shades fully drawn on the street-level windows. Cars were parked close together, and he wondered how some of them would ever get out. There was no traffic about, nor any other pedestrians. Given the foggy, chilly weather, he wasn't too surprised, but he was worried that he might be conspicuous on the empty street.

As he drew abreast of the house, he stopped and bent down to retie his shoelaces. The house was a duplex, and the only light showing was through the vertical windows flanking the front doors. The duplex appeared to have been restored recently, and the facade was freshly painted and neatly trimmed. He didn't see any signs of the Suburban, but there was always the alley garage. He kept walking, passing the midblock alley to his right, and then turned left at the corner, crossed the street, and went halfway down the block to the alley. He paused before entering the alley, looking around to see if anyone was obviously watching him, but there was no one about. The houses all seemed to be settling into a normal workday-evening routine. A dog started barking in the next block, and he could just barely hear the hum of traffic out on the broad ceremonial boulevards beyond the Capitol, whose upper dome glowed in floodlights about a mile away.

The alley was narrow and cambered to move rainwater, but still big enough to admit a trash truck, based on the big plastic containers lining the wooden privacy fences along its length. Each duplex had a detached double garage at the back. There was one light on a telephone pole midway down the alley, which illuminated almost the entire alley. Halfway down, there was a short T-connection alley leading out to the front street.

Swamp turned into the alley and walked slowly down toward the other end, counting houses until he saw that the trash containers had the house street numbers on them. When he got to the one he wanted, he stepped to the other side of the alley so he could see over the fence. The back of the house was dark except for one small light on one side, in what was probably the kitchen. A covered back porch was divided by a privacy partition, and the yard was similarly divided by a privacy fence. The garage looked too small to house a Suburban, but he walked up to it and tried to look through the row of dusty windows across the garage door. He couldn't be sure, but he didn't think there was a vehicle in there.

He stepped back from the windows and scanned the windows of the surrounding houses. If anyone saw him back here peering into windows, there'd be cop cars turning into the alley very soon. He'd promised himself that he wouldn't do any B and E work, not that he'd really know how. He thought about throwing a rock through a window to see if the lights came on, but then he thought better of it. How could he be sure there was someone there? He lifted the trash receptacle's lid, but the bin was empty. Go knock on the door? Flash his retired ID card, tell some fairy tale, and then beat feet? Hardly. And anyway, if his man was what he thought he was, he might rabbit. The cold night air was beginning to penetrate his coat as he stood there, and then he saw that the door on the other half of this garage was cracked open at the bottom. Suppose he lifted it enough to get in there, and then— what? Wrong yard, wrong house. But still, if he could get to a window at the back of the house…

He put both hands under the crack and lifted, and sure enough, the door came up. He raised it three feet, far enough for the top section to roll into the horizontal track, and then stopped. He had no warrant and zero authority to be doing this. But he had to know if there was someone in that house. At that moment, a police car went by on the cross street, cruising slowly. Swamp saw it out of the corner of his eye and then saw a flare of brake lights reflected in the windows of the cars parked next to the alley entrance. Oops, he thought. He got down, slipped under the door, and then lowered it back to the ground. Sure enough, headlights illuminated the alley outside and he heard the cruiser's tires crunching down the alley. He stood up and plastered himself against the wall.

The cop car stopped outside the garage, and he heard a door open. Footsteps approached the garage door on the other side and then he heard the rattle of the door handle. He quickly put a foot on the inside handle and shifted his entire weight to it just as the cop outside bent down and tried the door. Swamp hunched himself over as the cop shined a flashlight through the windows. The garage was empty except for a pile of cardboard boxes in one corner. He heard the cop say something to his partner, then more footsteps. And after that, the car door closed again and the cruiser continued on down the alley. He exhaled, turned around, and saw a figure silhouetted in the dim light coming through the windows. A man was standing in front of him with what looked like a toy gun in his hand. Before he had a chance to say anything or even focus on the man's face, an electric hammer jolted his whole body and he went down into a huge dark hole. As he struggled to climb back out, a second hammer descended, and this time he lost consciousness.

It took Heismann twenty minutes to drag the intruder from the neighbor's garage out into the alley, lock everything up again, and then drag him through his own back gate, across the yard, and up the steps into the kitchen. He almost didn't make it up the steps, because the man was big—220 pounds or more of deadweight. Once in the kitchen, he rested for a few minutes, puffing. He studied his captive's face. An older man — late fifties, perhaps — with coarse features. And big, which is why he had fired twice. Then he remembered Mutaib telling him about the Secret Service and the Washington police coming to see him at the bank. His description of the big homely man who seemed to be in charge of the questions. He closed his eyes and concentrated — he was forgetting something. Then he had it: He'd seen this man before. That day when he was watching the nurse's house to see if she'd survived the poison. The two federal policemen. This man had been one of them.

He bound the man's hands together with tape. Then he lifted the man's joined arms over his head and taped them behind his head with a swath of tape that went over his forehead, under his chin, and also over his eyes. Then he laid him back down on the kitchen floor, where he looked like someone who had decided to take a nap on his back, with his hands behind his head. He went through the intruder's coat pockets and found the flashlight, the cell phone, and a gun. He then dug deeper and extracted the man's wallet and keys. Driver's license: T. Lee Morgan, West Virginia. The same state where he had knifed that bothersome nurse. Then he found the ID card. U.S. Secret Service — retired.

What was this "retired"? He searched his English vocabulary. Retired? Ah, yes, a pensioner.

He sat back on his heels. The identification card with its notation "retired" puzzled him. He knew what the Secret Service was — they protected the president. He had read in the Washington Post about how they were in charge of the security cordon for the inauguration tomorrow. Well and good. But a pensioner? With a gun? Were they so desperate that they had recalled their pensioners to walk the streets the night before the big event? No. No. No. Pensioner or not, this man was connected to the nurse and to Mutaib. An investigator. And now he was here?

The big man stirred and then groaned. He didn't look all that old, although there was plenty of gray in his hair. Heismann stood up and backed away from him. He pulled a kitchen chair over and sat down. Why was this man, especially this man, sneaking around his back gate, and why was this happening right after he had received a warning from Mutaib about intruders? He couldn't be positive about the face, but it certainly resembled the man he'd seen from the park. The same thick brows, bent nose, coarse features.

He rested his face in his hands and watched the man work his way painfully back toward consciousness. Then he reread the man's driver's license and ID card. Both showed an address in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. He had seen that place on his map when he went to that Garrison Gap resort in pursuit of the nurse. Perhaps this was not about the big event tomorrow. It might be about what he had done in West Virginia. Perhaps the state police there had connected him somehow to that killing, alerted Interpol, and then Mutaib's spies in Europe had warned him. But why tonight, of all nights? And on a phone that wasn't even supposed to be turned on.

The big man opened his mouth, licked his lips, grunted, and then tried to get up. He tried to roll, but his own elbows prevented it. Then he raised his knees, which is when Heismann knelt down beside him and put Herr Pensioner Morgan's own gun against his left ear, racked the slide, ejecting one round onto the floor, and said, "Stay." The man stopped moving at once. Heismann got back up and returned to his chair. He waited for the man to say something, but he did not. He was breathing deeply, as if gathering his strength to do something. Heismann kicked the bullet on the floor into a corner and considered his options.

One of them was to run. Right now. Abort the entire mission. He had half his money, and he could disappear a lot more quickly than Mutaib might imagine because of his new physical appearance. He could become a woman, take his pick of the woman's clothes next door, walk, not run, to the minivan, and simply drive away. Leave Herr Pensioner Morgan right here on the floor, perhaps with one more tap from the Taser. Let him get loose finally. Let him find the weapon upstairs, sound the alarm. Let the Ammies see how close they had come. And then leave some more evidence implicating Mutaib and his Saudi clan, something besides the shipping documents.

He examined the man's cell phone. He could use that, call Mutaib directly, tell him he had this man tied up in his kitchen and ask what he should do. He smiled. The Arab would positively panic if he received a direct call, especially from here. Especially on a cell phone. This was Washington. They could probably triangulate any cell phone in the city, especially one of their own. And they were undoubtedly listening, on this night of all nights.

He looked at his watch. Almost ten o'clock. Fourteen hours.

He was probably making too much of this thing. Perhaps what Mutaib had meant was simply that there would be all sorts of police saturating the neighborhood around the Capitol Hill area. The message had said "intruders," plural, not a specific intruder. And here was the proof: They'd enlisted the help of pensioners to increase their presence on the street. This one had seen the cracked garage door and come to check. The man's backup had been outside in the alley in that car, but he'd sent them away. And down behind the boxes, it had been impossible to see what happened when the policeman outside tried the door. So, the pensioner wanted to show them he could still do the job. And when he didn't report in? Would they even notice? The old fellow probably just went home and didn't even check out.

He snorted in contempt. They were using pensioners? Even if this was the same man who'd been at the nurse's house, or even at the bank, asking all those questions, his being a pensioner clearly meant that they didn't believe there was any kind of real threat.

To hell with it, he decided. I am going to do this thing. Show these arrogant bastards what a real threat looks like. And right under their noses, too.

He stood up and gathered up the pensioner's stuff. He'd take it along when he made his run. The driver's license and ID card might be useful later.

Pensioners! Truly incredible.

Swamp heard the man get up and start moving some furniture around. It felt like he was lying on linoleum, so he was probably in the kitchen. On his back, with his hands taped together and some kind of tape lash-up holding his arms behind his head. His one attempt to move had confirmed that every joint in his body now felt like it was harboring full-blown arthritis. Even his fillings hurt. Had to have been a Taser. His eyes were taped over, but not his nose and mouth, for which he was grateful — he had a fear of suffocation. Then he felt the legs of a chair dropping over his body, followed by the sounds of kitchen utensils being piled on the chair. He kept still, and was rewarded with the feel of that gun pressing against his ear again. No, not the gun — something else. Something plastic, blocky. Then he heard the hum, felt the hair rising along the side of his head. The Taser.

"Stay," the man whispered again, as if he was addressing a dog.

Swamp said nothing. The message was clear enough. And the chair on top of him piled with kitchen utensils meant that if he moved, there'd be a clatter, and then he'd get to find out how serious this guy was about him remaining still. One thing he knew with perfect clarity: He did not want to be hit with that Taser again. Some of his larger muscles were still cramping, and his heartbeat hadn't stabilized.

He stayed quiet, desperately trying to think of a way out of this mess. He could almost hear Bertie's voice: Smooth move, Ex-Lax. At least you were right about his being a bad guy. And tell me again why you didn't call for backup? On the cell phone right there in your pocket?

That said, there was a man here with a Taser. The cops outside Connie Wall's house had been hit with a Taser. The big questions was, Did he have weeks or hours until whatever this guy was planning went down? Or maybe up was a better word.

Hell with it, he thought. It's him. It's the inauguration, not the speech to the joint session. And right now, I need to figure out how to get loose.

Heismann went upstairs and checked the cell phone. It did not appear to have melted down on its marble bed. He checked for any further messages, but the phone was dark. But it was early — midnight was the commit point. He looked at his watch. Another ninety minutes. He had some more preparations to make, beginning with final verification that the mortar rounds would clear the hole in the roof. He took a flashlight and taped it down inside the mortar tube, attaching it to the side of the tube nearest the extended hole in the roof. Then he switched it on and looked for a spot of light anywhere on the ceiling. There wasn't one. He could almost see the beam of light shining up into the blowing mist outside. Definitely clear. Good. He removed the flashlight and went back downstairs to begin hauling up the ten mortar rounds. He checked on his prisoner, whom he found still lying beneath the chair, looking for all the world as if he were taking an extended nap. And soon he might, Heismann thought. Very soon.

Each mortar round came with six yellow packets of propellant explosive in clear plastic pouches the size of fast-food condiment packages. These were taped to the projectile's cylindrical tail fin assembly. Once he had the rounds all upstairs, he consulted the handheld calculator again, this time entering the range to the target, the elevation angle of the weapon's monopod leg, the air temperature, and the barometric pressure. The answer came out two, which meant that only two, not six, packets of additional explosive propellant were needed for the range and conditions of the firing. He went to each round and pulled off all but two of the yellow packets, making sure they were distributed on opposite sides of the tail fin tube. He put all the rest of them into a plastic bag and put the bag in his backpack. Never know when something like that might come in handy. Then he recomputed the firing azimuth and range problem and checked the physical lineup of the tube with his true-north reference lines. Everything matched his original computations, but he still had this niggling worry that he'd forgotten something elementary.

He stood back and examined the setup. Then he had it: level. He hadn't checked the level of the floor. And even if he had, all that extra weight had probably disturbed the level of the base. He swore.

He retrieved the bubble level from the pile of carpentry tools and checked the base. Level on a line running from the alley to the street. Not level on the line running across the duplex from side to side. Off a half a bubble. He swore again. Now he would have to move the mortar, and do the entire damn thing again.

Idiot! You know better. A half-bubble error could throw the aim point off a hundred meters at this range. That was the length of one of the Ammies' football fields. He felt like hitting something, then thought immediately of the pensioner trussed up on his kitchen floor. It would be satisfying to go down there and stomp his face in.

His face.

He sat there, suddenly mesmerized by an exciting idea. Here was the perfect way to take care of Mutaib once and for all. If this was the same man who had questioned Mutaib, and also the nurse, then he could be used to ensure that Mutaib was taken for this huge crime. Even if he was a pensioner, he had to have been investigating the clinic fire and the killing of the nurse. Yes, yes, yes! This was much better than what he had originally planned. Yes, perfect. Absolutely perfect!

Then he set about correcting the level problem while he waited for midnight and the Arabs' final decision.

As soon as Swamp heard the man working on something upstairs, he went to work on getting out from under the booby-trapped chair. He couldn't see anything and could barely blink to wet his eyes under the tape. His arms were useless and beginning to cramp, and he could not move his head without pulling on his eyelids. He could feel the four legs of the chair wedged firmly alongside his body. But he was on his back. If he could turn on his side, he would probably be narrow enough to be able to slide free of the chair. After that, he'd find a way to get up. And then work on all this damned tape.

It took him fifteen minutes to get all the way over on his side without moving the chair, mostly because the way his arms were pinned behind his head made rotation almost impossible. Holding his body in a full twist, he began to inch his way past the chair legs until he couldn't feel them anymore. Then he ran into what felt like the refrigerator, and he couldn't go any farther. But were his feet clear? He tried to visualize it, but he hadn't had a decent look at the kitchen before being taped up. He stopped to listen, but the man was still doing something on the floor above him. Moving something heavy, from the sound of it. He decided to arch his back and try to turn to the left to get that extra two or three feet of clearance for his feet. When he felt he'd moved far enough, he relaxed his arched back and then the twist above his hips and took a breather. So far so good. No clatter of kitchen spoons to alert his captor.

He began to draw up his knees preparatory to getting himself upright. He thought he felt one of his boots touch something, so he stopped, squirming to reposition his foot to make damned sure he wasn't going to hit that chair. Then he pulled his knees up into his stomach and once again twisted his body to get his knees underneath. But now his arms got in the way. This wouldn't work.

He stopped to listen again, still heard the noises upstairs. No, he would have to do a sit-up while lying on his side, then roll onto his knees and— what, forehead? He knew he was running out of time. He had to get his arms and his eyes free or all this was for nothing. He decided to just go for it, and he pulled himself up with great effort into a position where his posterior was in the air and his torso looked like he was praying to some awful god. And then he felt himself rolling on over, losing his balance entirely and thumping down onto the floor again while falling directly into the second chair, which he didn't know about, the one filled with pots and pans, all of which came crashing down onto the floor with him.

He sighed and lay still. No point in even trying to get up again. He might be vertical, but he'd still be trussed up like a roaster, and blind to boot. He heard the man's footsteps as he came down the stairs and into the kitchen. They stopped for a moment. He heard a door open, and smelled a whiff of basement air. Then there came that deadly humming sound.

"Hey, don't hit me again," he said. "I'll be good."

"Oh, ya, you will," the man whispered, and then Swamp felt himself being dragged and then dumped headfirst onto the top few steps of what was probably the basement stairs. The man was silent, and Swamp held his breath. He wondered if he was supposed to start crawling down the stairs, but then the electric trip-hammer came again, whaling both of his shins so hard that he lurched forward in a huge spasm of contracting leg muscles and then slid all the way down the stairs for what seemed like forever, banging every protruding edge of his body several times on the way down. He fetched up on what felt like hard-packed dirt, his bruised right cheek pressed against a stone wall. He could hardly feel all the bumps and bruises through the haze of cramping leg muscles and jangling nerves.

He stopped fighting the program and just went limp instead. He heard a door close up above him, followed by the sounds of someone coming down the steps. At least no one expected him to get up and do it again just now. He barely felt the man wrapping his lower legs in tape, nor did he much care. What was a little more tape at this juncture? He was well and truly screwed.

Heismann went back upstairs after locking the cellar door. It was twenty minutes to midnight, and he wanted to be right next to that mysterious cell phone, the one that turned itself on. The mortar was perfectly level now, although he had had to reset the elevation angle to compensate for the newly level platform. He was still uneasy about the discrepancy in target coordinates, but had to assume Mutaib had access to ground-truth data. And he had the television, which would provide spotting data.

He would fire two rounds and then stop. If the television covering the inauguration proceedings showed direct hits, he'd drop in the other eight rounds and then make his run. If they were off, he would adjust the mortar one time and then fire the eight rounds. He had to assume there would be airborne surveillance over the city, and if by chance they had one of those reverse-trajectory radars, there'd be F-15's rolling in on the town house as soon as the rounds stopped falling. Even if he was off in his aim point, those big projectiles would still be devastating, going off above the packed west portico at eighty feet in the air and blasting hundred-foot-wide cones of shredded steel all over the exterior of the building. A total decapitation strike: all the important outgoing government officials, the incoming government, the Supreme Court, the congressional leadership, both presidents and vice presidents. And all this using a weapon that had been around since the late Middle Ages. Give the Arabs credit: They had seen the beauty of it at once. And as everyone knew, the Arabs held a certain fondness for the Middle Ages.

Eleven-forty-five. He turned on the phone. The text screen lighted up but remained blank. He set the phone down on the windowsill and sat down to wait. He would have to find a way to get the big man in the basement up here for the attack. His prisoner would now have a vital role to play as the witness, so he needed to leave some way for the pensioner to escape before the house burned down around him. And if the Arabs decided to abort the mission, he'd leave all the fuel in the tank and his uninvited guest in the basement. Let Mutaib's bomb take care of business. What was one pensioner? He kept looking out the windows to make sure there wasn't a search on for the man, but with all those police out on the streets tonight, he would most likely not be missed until morning. By then, it would be much too late.

The phone trilled from the windowsill. He picked it up and read the text: "Execute."

He felt a cold chill spread through his stomach. They were going through with it. He shook his head in wonder. Did they have any idea of what would happen next? He was reminded of a sick joke he'd heard circulating after the Arabs attacked the World Trade Center in 2001. A father takes his young son to view the memorial at the site in lower Manhattan. The son asks what happened there. The father tells him that Arabs attacked the World Trade Center and killed three thousand people. The son asks, "Daddy? What's an Arab?"

Very well. He felt the bottom of the phone getting suddenly hot and dropped it on the floor, where it indeed proceeded to melt itself.

Time now to double-check the structure supporting the floor, attend to the fuel tank, and then get both his body and his escape wardrobe ready. He shut off the single table lamp in the bedroom and looked out the back window at the distant Capitol dome, all lighted up for the festivities. Even from here, he could see reflections of blue strobe lights from the street in front of the Capitol, the lights playing across the towering white marble facade. There must be a thousand security people over there, he thought. He wondered if they'd get much sleep tonight. They were probably still poking around in hall closets and looking under vehicles for bombs.

He wondered if he'd get any sleep tonight. But why not? He was ready. Alles ist in Ordnung.