The Firefly

2

Swamp Morgan called Connie Wall at nine o'clock the following morning.

"Connie Wall," she said. A smoker and a drinker, Swamp thought when he heard her voice.

"Ms. Wall, this is Special Agent Lee Morgan, U.S. Secret Service, calling from the Department of Homeland Security. Good morning."

"I doubt that," she said.

Swamp smiled. "Ma'am?"

"Nobody in Washington getting a call from the American gestapo at nine a.m. on a Tuesday would anticipate a good morning, Special Agent."

Swamp laughed. "Oh, c'mon now. If we were those guys, we'd come at two in the morning and just kick your door in."

"Your department is still young," she said.

"Well, let me put your mind at ease, Ms. Wall. I'd like to talk to you, if I may. And preferably not on the telephone. It concerns that fire at your former place of employment, the Khandoor Cosmetic Surgery Clinic."

"Oh God," she said. "I've been trying to forget all that."

"I can imagine. Actually, I can't. I've never lost friends and colleagues that way."

"Nor do you ever want to," she said. "But what in the world does that fire have to do with Homeland Security?"

"I'll explain that when we talk, Ms. Wall. Now, I can invite you to come downtown to our offices here on L Street, or, if you prefer, I can go out there. I have your address, and you're near a Metro stop, correct?"

"Here would be fine."

"Ten-thirty work?" he asked.

"Sure. Although I can't imagine… I mean, I told those fire department investigators everything."

"Relax, Ms. Wall. Nobody's gunning for you. I need to pick your brains about that clinic and its operations."

There was a sudden silence on the line. He let it ride, interested to see what she'd say. "I signed an entire stack of confidentiality agreements," she said. "Plus, there are patient-doctor privilege rules. I mean…"

"Yes, I know all that and I understand," he said. "It'll be clearer when we can actually talk, face-to-face. I'll be bringing my assistant, Special Agent Gary White, with me. If you'd like to confirm that I am who I say I am, I'll give you a number you can call to verify our identities. And my name again is Special Agent Lee Morgan, and I'm from an office called OSI."

Connie put the phone down and stood there chewing on a fingernail. The Secret Service? Her immediate reaction was to call Cat Ballard, but of course that wouldn't work, because she'd have to listen to him bang on again about the damned clinic. Cat hadn't been the least bit interested in the clinic when she worked days, but the night duty had first interested and then bothered him. Her refusal to talk about any aspect of what she did there had only whetted his appetite. Then the fire, and the horror of four people with whom she'd worked for four years dying like that. And now, what he'd revealed last night, that there were still questions about the fire. And here comes the Secret goddamned Service to talk me about—ta-da—the clinic. She shook her head and went to refill her coffee cup. Then she called that number, and a DHS government operator verified that there were indeed two special agents named Lee Morgan and Gary White. The operator did not have a physical description of Agent White but was able to tell her that Special Agent Morgan was a very large and somewhat scary-looking man. She gave Connie the last four numbers of each agent's credential serial numbers, told her it would be okay to ask them to verify those numbers when they showed up, and wished her a nice day.

Yeah right, I'm gonna have a nice day, Connie thought. Especially after a sleepless night. She'd gone around the house checking windows and doors, and then spent a few minutes of each hour thereafter imagining bogeymen in the bushes every time the wind blew. She had fished out the .45 derringer and now had it in her jeans pocket, where it created a heavy and fairly obvious bulge. Should she get rid of it before the agents showed up? Surely they'd know what that was, and then she'd be explaining why she was sporting a .45-caliber belly gun in her pocket. Concealed weapons in Washington were a definite no-no. On the other hand, it was her house.

And then there was the heart of the matter: How much should she say about the clinic? The D.C. Arson cops already knew that she had been more than just a shift nurse there. Christ, this wasn't about one of those damned transcripts, was it? She suddenly had a cold feeling that it was.

Heismann, decked out as a bird-watcher, stood on a knoll in Rock Creek Park, his ten-power Leica binoculars trained in the direction of the white house on the distant bluff. He carried an Audubon guide under one arm, and he occasionally pretended to enter notes into a bird-count notebook. From his vantage point, he could see both the front door and the top of the nurse's driveway. The day was gray, cold, and damp. The race car was still parked in the drive, its back window frosted from the night's condensation. That was a good sign. He was trying to make up his mind whether or not to go up there, see if she'd had a glass of milk lately. Preferably before she spoiled, so to speak.

Then, to his surprise, he saw two men in suits and coats, a bulky one whose face looked like that of a caveman, the other average size, walking down her street and turning up the sidewalk to her front door. With the sensitivity born of almost twenty years on the wrong side of the law, Heismann recognized them immediately as police. As far as he could tell, the entire city police force was black, so, since they were both white, they were probably government police. Improbably, the big one was wearing a gray Borsalino-style hat; with that face, he needed all the style he could get. The younger one waited at the foot of the steps while the big man rang the bell. When he realized the younger one was looking around, gazing out into the park, Heismann lowered his binoculars and pretended to scribble in the book. This would be the test: Would she come to the door? He saw movement in the distance and lifted the binocs again. And, damn her eyes, there she was, standing in the doorway, looking at something the big man had handed her. Credentials, not a badge. Government police. The big man turned to say something to the other man, and Heismann got a good look at his face this time. Late fifties. Heavy eyebrows, huge jaw. A fighter's face. Then she was letting them in, closing the door.

He swore out loud and began stuffing the binocs into their side case. Then he walked down the long slope of the knoll toward his vehicle, a homely gray minivan, whose most useful quality was that it was utterly forgettable. It was a good thing he hadn't gone skulking around up there. On the other hand, why were federal police visiting Wall now, weeks after the fire? Had the bait surfaced at last? He wondered if he should ask Mutaib for a bugging system, because it might be useful to know if that was why they were there. He stood there at the door to his minivan and turned to look back toward the house, but only the rooftops were visible. The timing was about right. About six weeks since the fire. The holidays were now over. Official Washington getting back to work, so, perhaps yes?

He needed to contact Mutaib. Today.

On second thought, no. He had told Mutaib that he would take care of the nurse problem. He had failed. Perhaps it was now time to do it the old-fashioned way. No more of this indirect shit. Heave a cinder block through a back window at two o'clock in the morning to make it look like a break-in, go in there and brain her with a tire iron. Take her purse, put the spare key back on its hook, and leave.

No, no, no. Not now, not like that. Not with government agents coming to see Connie Wall, the sole survivor of the night clinic. Who then turns up dead in her bed? Too much coincidence. No.

Think, he told himself. Adhere to discipline. Execute the plan. There is still plenty of time to take her off the board. If this visit was provoked by the bait, maybe he should go back to his original plan. Let her lead them to the name. When Mutaib's resources indicated that they were focusing on that name, then kill her.

He got into the minivan, put his keys in the ignition, then paused again. Or perhaps don't kill her at all. Terrorize her instead. Make her run. He didn't need her dead as much as he needed her gone. After the attack, what would he care what she knew or told anyone, because everything would be over and he would be long gone. What had been going on at that clinic would pale into total insignificance in light of what he was going to do to them.

So yes, terrorize her. Why not? You're a professional terrorist, aren't you? He smiled. Frighten her. If she bolted, it would only make the bait more believable. Except he had told Mutaib that he would take care of the problem.

Well, if she ran, that was removal, yes? He shook his head in frustration. He hated it when he didn't know what to do. That was always the big problem with loose ends. At the very least, he would have to watch her until he made up his mind. And keep the embarrassing fact that she was still alive away from Mutaib and his helpers.

Connie Wall led the agents back to the kitchen area. It was obvious to Swamp that she, like many single people, lived mostly in the kitchen and dining room, which he saw was set up as her personal home office. Gary White followed him in, looking around at everything, as if observing a crime scene. That's good, Swamp thought. White would focus on the house, which would allow him to focus on the woman walking in front of him. She was about forty, he guessed. Dark-haired, fit, an attractive, if slightly wary, face, even without makeup. She was wearing old jeans, slippers, and an oversized sweatshirt, which did not disguise a bounteous figure. She offered coffee and he accepted for both of them. When she reached up to pull some mugs down from a cupboard, he thought he saw what looked like a derringer outlined in her jeans pocket. He glanced at Gary, who nodded slightly to confirm he had also seen it.

"January in Washington," Swamp said, making conversation. "Cold, dark, and wet."

"I expected an unmarked car with antennas all over it," she said, pouring out coffee.

"I never use a car if the Metro can get me close," Swamp said, taking off his coat and hat and draping them over a kitchen chair. "Our offices are airless cubicles. It's good to get outside, even in January."

She passed over the mugs of coffee and sat down on the other side of the kitchen table. "So," she said in a businesslike tone of voice. One that went with the gun in her pocket, he thought. "You called."

"So I did," Swamp said. "Let me begin by saying we're here to talk about the cosmetic surgery clinic where you worked. The one that was burned."

"Was 'burned'? As in deliberate fire?"

"I think so, yes," he said. "At least that's a distinct possibility."

Her complexion lost a little color, as if she had just realized something. "Am I suspect or anything like that?"

"No. Nor are we aware of any criminal enterprise at that clinic. We've come to see you basically because you're the only survivor."

"Have you talked to the owners of the building? The American doctors?"

"Yes. Or rather, the District police have. They explained the nature of the leasing arrangement, and that the night doctors, as they called them, specialized in patients who demanded absolute discretion. They also made it clear that these were two entirely separate operations."

Connie Wall nodded at that. Swamp thought that she seemed to be loosening up a bit. "I worked for them, too," she said. "Initially, full-time. Then when the other group showed up, they offered almost twice the money. So then I worked nights, but I occasionally did fill-in work in the day clinic."

"Let me get right to it, Ms. Wall: What kind of procedures were they doing in the night clinic?"

She shrugged. "The usual, except they treated only male patients. These men wanted to get work done, but gradually. A little here, a little there. Minimum bruising and bandaging. A lot of special timing if it was going to be something significant. Very little visible evidence they were having work done, but a steady cosmetic improvement. Multiple procedures."

"These were prominent people?"

"They may have been," she said, looking right at him. She had clear hazel eyes, and he could see that, under the right circumstances, he'd find her very attractive. But right now, her expression revealed nothing. She was a surgical nurse, which meant that there was a good brain under there, so that completely neutral expression was worrisome. "But we were never told who they were," she went on. "The records didn't have names, just patient numbers."

So she knew about the codes. "Who would have known who the patients were?"

"Dr. Khandoor, the boss. He acted as his own patient coordinator."

"Did you handle patient records?"

He thought he saw her tense up a bit as she fiddled with her coffee cup for a couple of seconds. "I did admin work in both clinics," she said. "Putting medical charts and case history records together. Postop documentation. Mary and Karen did admin work, too. But reservations, patient interviews, billing, that was strictly Dr. Khandoor."

"Did the doctors record what they were doing during operations? You know, speak into a microphone while they did the operation, so that there'd be a record of the procedures?"

"Yes," she said, but she did not elaborate. She had folded her hands in her lap, out of sight beneath the edge of the table. A certain stillness settled over her. Careful here, Swamp thought.

"Were these notes transcribed after the operations?"

No blink at the mention of transcripts. No reaction at all. But she did not look at him when she answered. "No," she said. "We simply kept the tapes as part of the patient's record. We wouldn't need them unless a problem came up, so there was no point in transcribing them." Swamp saw her look over at Gary White as if to say, Where is your partner here going with this?

"Were there ever problems? Complaints?"

"Not that I was aware of. Both doctors were very good at what they did. Dr. Khandoor especially — he was amazing."

"Better than the American doctors?"

"Much better. He was nearly sixty, so I think he'd been cutting for a while."

"Do you know who set them up in this country? As foreign nationals, I mean."

"That was sort of vague," she said, patting a few stray hairs back into place. "There was something about a foreign bank, but, really, I never knew."

"Did they ever work on foreigners?"

"Yes, I think so, based on some of the accents I heard. Dr. Khandoor said that they were people from the Washington diplomatic corps. He said he had an international reputation, and I believed it. Like I said, he was very good."

Swamp had been writing in a notebook as she answered his questions. So had Gary White. He took a moment to review his notes, even though Gary had a voice-activated tape recorder turning silently in his suit pocket. Swamp had already decided that he was going to reinterview her later, after they learned more about Dr. Khandoor, but right now he needed to focus the interview.

"You said they offered you twice the money. Why was that, do you suppose?"

She shrugged again. "Well, for one, I was ready-made, I guess. I knew that OR and also the computerized office-management system. I'm a very experienced surgical nurse. I have a Master's degree, in fact. It was all going to be night-shift work. They wouldn't even have to advertise." -

"Why was that last bit important?"

"Like I said, I got the impression that privacy and staff discretion meant everything to them."

"The other two nurses?"

"They came with Dr. Naziri, who was Dr. Khandoor's assistant."

"Did the docs ever hand out bonuses?"

She hesitated. "Bonuses? Yes, they did. Christmastime, usually. I think they made a ton of money."

Swamp made a note to check with IRS on her tax returns. "More than the day doctors?"

"I don't know that. The day clinic handled more patients. But yes, I think so. It was a different clientele all together. Lots of limos and drivers."

"I'm going to ask you to do something for us, Ms. Wall. Can you generate a list of the types of procedures performed at your clinic? The District Arson squad has recovered some records from the fire, but they're badly damaged. Can you do that?"

"Arson squad? So this fire was deliberately set?"

"Well, they haven't called it yet," he said. She was definitely upset now. Fair enough. She'd lost friends and coworkers in that fire. "But that's all I can tell you right now. Officially, the investigation's ongoing."

"So why are you here, Special Agent?" she asked suddenly, cocking her head to one side.

"Um, I thought I explained that the—"

"No, I mean, why are you here? You said Secret Service. What did our clinic have to do with protecting the president?"

Swamp sat back in his chair and sipped some coffee, which was getting cold. Gary White was studying his own notes now, fully aware of Swamp's discomfort. Swamp decided that the truth wouldn't hurt.

"Okay, Ms. Wall," he said. "As I'm sure you're aware, there's a war on. The D.C. Arson squad removed a lot of evidentiary debris from that clinic. The patients' records, at least the paper ones, made better debris than evidence, but there were some indications that your clinic was performing changes in physical identity. As you might imagine, that's an activity of interest to the Department of Homeland Security these days."

"Is that illegal?" she asked. He could see her forearms moving slightly beneath the edge of the table. Was she wringing her hands? Her tone of voice was still very carefully neutral. A pulse was now visible in the veins of her throat, something that hadn't been there before. She was definitely on edge.

"Changing one's physical appearance wouldn't be illegal per se. Using that new physical identity to commit fraud or other crimes would be illegal. And if a resident alien gets his or her physical identity changed, that moves into the realm of 'interesting,' depending on who that person is. Within the context of our intelligence efforts against the terror networks, that is."

She appeared perplexed. He decided to elaborate. "We're not working for the presidential protective detail right now, Ms. Wall," he said. "In fact, I'm actually a retired Secret Service agent, called back to active duty within the office of Special Investigations of the Department of Homeland Security."

"Retired?"

"Quick source of trained and experienced manpower, Ms. Wall. This is a people-intensive war we're in."

"Well," she said. "I'm not sure I can help you. I mean, I could list procedures, but I can't tie procedures to individual patients. That's what you want, isn't it?"

Definitely a good brain under there, Swamp thought as he nodded. She knows what this is about.

She hiked her chair closer to the table. "The problem is, we all worked different nights, and with different patients."

"And you don't remember any of them as unique, or special?"

"I wouldn't tell a patient this, Mr. Morgan, but as surgical assistants, we didn't see these patients as people. I mean, by the time they got into the OR, they were medium mummies scheduled for one of a hundred different 'plasty' procedures. By the time I saw them, they had become just part of a surgical procedure, requiring specific knowledge on our part, standard sets of instruments, specific draping, lights, anesthesia."

"Do you remember a sex-change operation — say in the past year?"

Her eyebrows rose, but she nodded. "One partial SRS, yes."

"SRS?"

"Sexual-reassignment surgery. That's really specialized stuff. This one was a male to female mammopexy, with prosthesis implantation. It was interesting because the patient wanted to be able to, um, inflate them, as it were."

"Inflate them? As in breasts on demand?"

"I guess. Instead of straight implants, he had his breast tissue loosened, the musculature rearranged, and specially adapted saline sacs implanted. He could then use a pump syringe, attached to a tiny stoma in his nipples, to pump them up with saline solution."

Swamp shook his head in amazement.

"Yeah," she said. "I use the word guy advisedly. Straight for his day job. TS-TV for his night games? Who knows, huh?"

Swamp smiled, but he didn't say what he was thinking, which was that any man who wanted to be a woman didn't know much about the "joys" of female physiology. "I can't imagine," he said truthfully. Then he got to the question he'd come there to ask. "Tell me, Ms. Wall, do people under anesthesia ever talk? Like people who talk in their sleep?"

She frowned, and appearing to choose her words carefully. "Ye-e-s, people sometimes do that, Mr. Morgan. But it's usually not intelligible. More like a bunch of slurred words. Gibberish, interspersed occasionally with moments of perfect clarity. It often sounds like a word-association game. Although most surgical patients just burble like a baby."

"Ever hear anything interesting?"

She laughed. "Yeah, once. A guy goes, 'Ow, that fucking hurts.' Now that got everybody's attention."

Both Swamp and Gary White laughed out loud. "What did you do?"

"Got a new anesthesia tech. But if you're asking if people admit to killing their wives, no. Besides, the patient usually had a mask over his mouth and nose and one or more tubes hanging out of the sides of his mouth. Not conducive to speech."

That makes sense, Swamp thought. "You said earlier that the docs would dictate the procedure into a taping machine. Would that machine be able to pick up anything the patient said?"

She shook her head emphatically. Too emphatically? Swamp wondered. "No. The surgeon had a lip mike attached to his headgear. And he was speaking right into it, so anything the patient might have been mumbling would just have been background noise."

She'd neatly shut off his line of questions about transcripts. He closed his notebook and stood up. "Okay. Thanks for your time this morning, Ms. Wall. We'll let you know if we need to talk to you again. Maybe if we can determine who the patients were, we might be back to see if we can put patient and procedure together."

"I doubt it, Mr. Morgan," she said, also getting up. "But I'll be glad to help out any way I can. Right now, I'm busy looking for another job."

She walked them to the front door. "This is a nice house," Swamp said, slipping on his coat.

"It was my parents' home," she said. "A little big for one person, but the price was right, you know?"

"And overlooking Rock Creek Park, too," he said, thinking of what a house with a big yard in that location might be worth in today's market. To his surprise, he saw a flicker of apprehension in her eyes.

"The park's a mixed blessing, Special Agent," she said. "Call me if you think I can help. I lost two good friends in that fire."

Gary discreetly checked the tape recorder as they walked up the block toward Connecticut Avenue. It had done its job. "Did we get what we needed back there?" he asked.

"Maybe," Swamp said. "I think she tried to disabuse me of the notion that anything interesting was ever revealed by people under anesthesia."

"Did you catch what she said at the door? About losing two good friends?"

"Meaning the doctors were not friends?"

"Yes, sir. They paid these nurses double the going rate. The women had to suspect some of this shit was a little bit out there."

They got to Connecticut and turned left down toward the Zoo Metro station. "I'm wondering if those tapes were made after an operation," Swamp said. "You know, while the patient was still under — say in the recovery room— but starting to surface."

"And no longer wearing the mask and tubes. That might make more sense."

A blast of wind shrank them into their overcoats, and they stopped talking until they were down inside the Metro station. "What I need here is a way to put that transcript together with a specific patient. I need a name, not a code number."

"We'd need to find the code list somewhere in all that wreckage. How much time do we have?"

"Good point. My tasking was to evaluate this as a firefly or not. You're right. We need something a lot quicker."

"Maybe interview her again, show her the transcript this time? She said she did admin. Go ahead and brace her up? You had a possible terrorist on the table and you changed his looks. Who the hell was it, missy?"

The tunnel to their right began to glow as the next train approached. "She could plead total ignorance about the transcripts," Swamp countered. "Maybe one of the other nurses did that. You know, one of the dead ones. And it's not likely those docs would have let the nurses see the code list."

"If she did admin, she might know where the code lists were kept — that would be something the docs would have had backed up off-site, like their medical records."

The train roared into the station, once again making conversation impossible. They boarded and rode it back downtown; meanwhile, Swamp tried to think of a way to prove the transcript, one way or the other.

"Bomb, bomb, bomb. Union Staat." Put a bomb in the Capitol? Which was getting the security scrubbing of a lifetime in preparation for the inauguration? Besides, the Capitol was a big building. That would require a big bomb.

But after that? After all the pomp and circumstance of the inauguration, the Capitol security people would naturally relax a little, stand down the surge effort. Tactically, that speech to the joint session would be a better window to try something. Maybe the right answer here was to go buck to PRU right now. Tell them to keep going full bore on inauguration preps, and then sustain that for the month between the inauguration and that first presidential speech to a joint session of Congress.

After they got by that, if some nutcase wanted to bomb Congress, he might actually do the nation a favor. Seeing Gary White looking at him, he realized he'd been smiling to himself. And that he would definitely not be explaining the reason to his new ace assistant. He wondered, not for the first time, if he'd been doing this stuff too long.

Connie desperately wanted to talk to somebody after the agents had left, but she couldn't think of anyone except Cat Ballard. And after his pointed comments of the night before about the clinic, Cat would be less than sympathetic. She knew exactly what the problem was: Those Secret Service guys had a transcript in their hands. They couldn't know that she was the one who'd transcribed the recovery room tapes, but they'd come to her because she was the only one of the night crew left alive.

She paced her dining room, trying to remember if there was anything in the transcripts, or any other documentation, that could prove she'd written them up. She didn't think so. Dr. Khandoor had made it clear that he wanted only the patient's code number on the transcripts. No other information, not the procedure or even a date. Just what the patient actually said. She'd type them up from the tapes, print one copy, and then delete the computer file. Dr. Khandoor would get the only copy. She had no idea where he'd kept them, but she'd never found any sign of them or the master code list in the clinic. All their medical records had been kept both as traditional paper records and as scanned and then encrypted computer-graphics files. Once a month she'd run a master backup routine on all the computerized records and then given the backup CD to Dr. Khandoor.

Dr. Khandoor had done the paperwork on patient work-ups. He would hand over a folder for each new patient; it contained all the forms that would apply to whatever work was going to be done. Reportedly, everyone paid cash, so she had never had to do any perambulations through the medical insurance swamp, which was a major blessing in itself. In every name blank would be that patient's assigned code number, handwritten by Dr. Khandoor. Postsurgery, she would scan all the forms into an Adobe PDF file to create the backup. There was never a name, especially on the recovery room transcripts. She hadn't been kidding about the patients being just part of a surgical procedure — the first time the nurses ever saw the patient was at the first procedure.

With a few interesting exceptions, most of the transcripts had been a hodgepodge of mumbles. That said, she was willing to bet which one the feds had their hands on. "Bomb, bomb, bomb." And a bunch of German words she hadn't understood. She remembered bringing that one to Dr. Khandoor's attention, and he had told her he'd take care of it immediately, whatever that meant. In these uneasy times, any foreigner talking about bombs should be fed right to the nearest police precinct, as far as she was concerned. But is that what the good doctor had done? The transcripts were supposed to be insurance against trouble down the line, but she'd always wondered if he and Naziri hadn't been making some extra money on what some of these people revealed. One congressman, whom the whole crew had recognized, had come in for a series of facial procedures. On one occasion, as he lay in the recovery room, he'd babbled into the microphone about how much he loved his pretty little boys. Connie had dutifully recorded it, while carefully blocking out any troubling thoughts of blackmail when she handed it in.

But now there were feds coming around, asking questions about patients getting identity changes, and confirming what Cat had been saying about arson. Damn it.

She'd known all along that place was on the fringes of medical ethics. Two slick Pakistani doctors, setting up an off-the-books practice in the capital? They had to have had an important sponsor. And a rich one. The money had been so-o-o good. And you just wouldn't face it, would you, Connie? Not with that big fat paycheck. And, of course, the bonuses. The little one for the IRS, and the much better one, the cash bonus. The Secret Service used to work for the Treasury Department. As did the IRS. She just knew that guy was going to pull her tax returns. Her brokerage submitted 1099 forms, just like the clinic turned in W-2 slips. If they did one of those reality audits, they'd see right away that she had invested more income than she'd reported.

She gnawed a fingernail as she sat down at her computer and powered it up. She spied Buster's bed in a corner of the dining room and remembered that Cat Ballard had taken the milk container.

Her stomach sank. Someone had been into her house. He'd passed up valuable stuff but taken some of her underwear. That smacked of neighborhood pervert. But what if the container did show up traces of poison? Had that been the real objective of his being in her house?

A chill went through her. Everyone else from the clinic's night crew was dead. Who would have burned down the clinic? The day docs? For the insurance money? No way — that place had to have been a cash cow for them, too. So, a disgruntled patient? Maybe someone the docs had tried to blackmail?

Or had that fire been aimed at the crew, not the clinic? The cosmetic surgery crew, who might know too much.

"Bomb, bomb, bomb." You know which one said that, she thought. The foreign-looking guy with the inflatable boobs, not to mention all the rest of the work. Identity changes, Special Agent? Well, yes, you might say that. Shit! Had he been the torch? The night she'd done that transcript was the night she first confessed her doubts about the clinic to Cat Ballard. No details, of course, but a deepening suspicion that she was getting in over her head with these guys. Cat had been as direct as ever: "They're Muslims, Connie. All this terrorist shit's being done by Muslims. Get your ass out of there. Because if one of your patients does something weird, something big and bad, the government will do one of those root-canal investigations and then they'll grind you up. Turn you over to the grieving widows."

But of course it hadn't been that simple, nor that easy to cut and run. She was single and forty years old. She knew she wasn't the marrying type and never would be. Which meant that the quality of her old age was entirely up to her. She'd worked hard her entire professional life. She'd done the additional training, gotten her master's, and invested well. She'd been able to ride the nineties boom to the point that she just about had her screw-you money. Plus, she hadn't been doing anything wrong. Just her job as a surgical and administrative assistant. The docs had been pulling in the big bucks, not the staff. Identity change wasn't illegal — even that big Secret Service agent with the Neanderthal face had agreed with that. Or mostly, he had.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when the phone rang. She glanced at her caller ID box. A 998 number, which she didn't recognize. She picked it up and said, "Hello?" She heard three coins dropping into a call box. Okay, a phone booth. Then a whispering voice said, "Everyone's dead. Except you." Then a click and the dial tone.

She lowered the phone back onto its cradle slowly, as if afraid of breaking it. She jumped when something moved past a side window, just out of her line of vision. She reached down for the derringer, then realized she'd only seen the bushes bending back and forth in the January wind. The house was still, the dining room a mix of shadows and light streamers from the midmorning sun. Her mind went blank, and for a moment she felt frozen in the chair.

Everyone's dead. Except you.

English, but English with an accent. A man's voice.

Everyone's dead. Except me.

That certainly clarifies things.

After lunch, Swamp met with Gary White to brainstorm about their next move. They needed to put some meat on the transcript's bones, something that would allow them to both evaluate it and sell it to PRU as evidence of a real threat.

"Okay, so we need the code list," Swamp said. "Ideally, we want to put a name on this guy, and, again ideally, a history of what procedures he had done at that clinic."

"If there are names," Gary pointed out. "These docs may have run the whole thing on a code basis — no names, cash only, code only. We won't ask, and you won't tell us who you are. Money up front, we'll do exactly what you want, Mr. Two-oh-oh-three-four-one."

Swamp nodded. "Yeah, but they were bugging the recovery room. My guess is that it was both insurance and a shot at a little extortion. For that, they had to know who it was they were working on."

"Yes, sir, they may have known, but if it were me, I'd never write that down. I'd give the guy a code number, show him that's what I was doing in the records, and keep the name to myself. Or in some secure off-site storage place."

"Off-site, yeah. Okay. Here's what I want you to do: go back to the D.C. Arson evidence locker and go through those records. You're looking for anything that could tie the docs, either one of them, to an off-site storage system. Like those companies on the Web that will store all your files as backup? I'm going to go get paper to search their homes, any PCs they may have had at home."

"Got it," Gary said. "But those records…" he shook his head.

"Yeah, I know. They looked like the Dead Sea Scrolls. But spend an afternoon. See what you can find. Anything that might lead us to the code list. Any other transcripts that could lead us to a name. We need a way into this hair hall."

Gary left ten minutes later, after making the arrangements with Carl Malone. Swamp then began the paperwork to get a warrant for searching the homes and personal property of the two deceased doctors. He retrieved their names and addresses from the D.C. Arson files, then generated the forms for a search warrant. This was a process that could take weeks in a routine case, but these were not routine times, and he was able to use his position in the Department of Homeland Security, plus some connections at the Justice Department, to get the package together in an afternoon. He had it couriered over to the Washington federal district court after making sure his morning calendar for the next day was clear for the hearing. He then called Carl Malone and asked him to be available for a possible probable-cause hearing in the morning. There'd been some bitching from the clerk's office until Swamp invoked the standard Secret Service mantra about presidential security. Everything smoothed right out after that, and Swamp went back to studying the case file Malone had given him.

Gary White came back into the office just before six o'clock, looking tired. Swamp was asking Malone some questions on the phone. Gary dropped his briefcase on his desk and went to get some coffee. Swamp wrapped it up with Malone and joined Gary at the coffee machine.

"I did find a partial duty roster, the one that lists which nurses worked which nights. It confirmed Connie Wall was off that night. Here's the good news: The roster also had the code numbers for the patients who'd be worked on. From that, I found that patient two-oh-oh-three-four-one was up for a one-hour procedure on the night of the fire."

"And?"

"The patient code number on the "bomb, bomb, bomb" transcript was two-oh-oh-three-four-one. That would put our transcript firefly in the clinic the night of the fire, assuming the roster is correct."

"Nice. Very nice, and also significant. What do you make of those numbers?"

"Calender year 2003, patient number forty-one?"

"Yeah, that works. But 2003? He'd been going there for a year?"

"It gets better. I found a partial invoice from an on-line file-storage service called NetZDocustorage.com. It's a site where companies can store their backup stuff. There was a single account number on the invoice, which I'm assuming was the clinic. If you've got a warrant coming clown…"

"Absolutely, I'll work up an amendment tonight. Maybe that damned code list will be in there. Hopefully, that company will have a password-recovery system."

"Even without the code list, maybe we'll get lucky and see what kind of work patient forty-one had. Although I'm not sure how that helps."

"It helps if it looks like a total identity change," Swamp said. "That plus the German plus talking up bombs and the State of the Union makes this whole deal look less and less like a firefly. And it'll help at the hearing."

"But with just a number, how do we find his ass?"

"First things first. Let's get our warrants, do the searches. I also want to know lots more about the head doc, that Khandoor guy, before I go back to PRU. See if he's connected to anybody of interest."

"Read me his card again," Cat Ballard told her. "I want to make sure I got the right guy."

Connie picked it up and read off Swamp Morgan's business card: Special Agent T. Lee Morgan, United States Secret Service, retired, Office of Special Investigations, United States Department of Homeland Security. She had to turn on a light because it was getting dark outside. She had just finished cleaning up after the security system people when Cat finally called her back.

"Yeah, that's him. Our deputy chief for intel knows him. Big, sorta ugly guy, right? Supposedly played front line at Notre Dame. Something of a legend around federal law enforcement."

"Is that good news or bad news for me?" Connie asked. She had told Cat about the agents' visit, that they were investigating the clinic fire, but that was all. She hadn't mentioned the cryptic phone call from the man with the foreign accent.

"Morgan's been around, Connie. He's a senior G-man with a reputation for playing ball with local law whenever he could, the kind of guy who banked and returned a lot of markers. Secret Service, but he knows people on both sides of the river. Intelligence guy, as opposed to a street cop. Did an exchange tour with the CIA; did a tour over in Germany back when it was still East and West. A player, in other words."

"And the answer is?"

Cat exhaled audibly. "The answer is, Conine, that this Morgan is ahigh-level, very experienced, very connected fed. If he's looking at you, pay attention. And a guy like this? He doesn't investigate fires."

She didn't say anything.

"So," Cat said, "you ready to tell me what the fuck was going on at that plastic surgery clinic that's got a daddy spook coming out to your house for coffee?"

"He said he was retired."

"They brought back a whole grunch of senior people after nine eleven. Don't let that retired bit fool you. I talked to Inspector Malone in Arson. Morgan's the real deal, and he said not to let the Neanderthal face fool you — the guy's got his brain switched in. So what's going on, Connie?"

"Cat, he told me not to talk about it to anybody. I don't think they're after me — I just happen to be the lone survivor. Me and several boxes of badly burned records. I worked admin, remember?"

"Actually, I don't remember that, Connie."

She couldn't think of an answer to that, and the silence grew uncomfortable. "Did you get anything back on that milk container?" she asked.

"Not yet. I couldn't give it a high-pri number. There's no active homicide case. Is there a hurry?"

She took a deep breath and then told him about the phone call, and he became very quiet. "Say the exact words again," he ordered. She did.

"Did you buy a security system?"

"Yes. ADT. They said it would take a week. I told them I'd pay extra if they'd set it up today. As in this afternoon. They did."

"Okay — don't go out of the house. I'm coming over."

"Cat? Should I be scared?"

"Yes. You're sitting in too many crosshairs. Let me make a coupla calls; then I'll come over. But you're gonna have to talk to me, Connie, or I can't help you. Think about that between now and then."

"Cat…"

"Or you can call that Morgan guy. Hell, now that I think of it, you probably should call him."

"I'll wait for you," she said, and then hung up.

Heismann shifted his position in the garage behind the nurse's house so that he could see both the driveway and the back windows of the house. She was downstairs, in the dining room. She'd been talking on the phone; then she'd left the room for a few minutes, turned lights on and off throughout the house, and now was back in the dining room. He'd slipped into the yard just after dusk, coming up the hill from the park again. He'd spotted the ADT decals on the back door immediately, but there were none on the windows, so he'd have to do some snooping before trying any more break-ins.

The garage was a dusty, spidery place, filled with old furniture, boxes, yard tools, boards in the rafters, and one ancient riding mower that reeked of gasoline. There were single windows on either side, but they were so covered in dust, grime, and webs as to be useless. Down one side was a workbench with a row of power tools — drill press, a large band saw, a radial-arm saw, all draped in deep cobwebs. There probably hadn't been room for a car in here for years, and hers was parked in the driveway, where it had been the last time. But there was room for him, right up at the front, where the two big side-hinged doors came together, a two-inch crack between them. He'd pulled two boxes over to the crack, blown most of the dust off, and sat down to watch.

He hadn't made up his mind as to what he was going to do tonight, but he was going to do something. The day after tomorrow he had to occupy the house on Capitol Hill. After that, he would be busy putting the cover story in place and preparing the house for the weapon's arrival. This woman was still a loose end. How important a loose end depended on who those men in suits were and what they wanted from her.

The Ammies could always get lucky. If you could believe the papers these days, the FBI, CIA, and a host of other law-enforcement bureaus and agencies were actually talking to one another. But as best he could tell, the American government, supposedly at war with terrorism, was still making the most basic error of military planning: They were hell-bent on determining their enemy's intentions, when every good planner knew that you focused on the enemy's capabilities. That's what made the fanatics in Al Qaeda, the Base, so dangerous — they did target surveillance for as long as two years, but they never set a date for action. They built up their capabilities to act, developed opportunities and only when they saw such an opportunity would they seize it, which is what rendered the Ammie predilection for focusing on plans useless.

Headlights flared in the driveway. He ducked back from the big crack between the doors. Peering through a smaller crack between two boards, he saw the nurse's car silhouetted for an instant by a car behind it, and then its lights went off. He moved back to the larger crack and watched as a tallish white man got out of the new arrival and walked up the drive to the back porch. He was wearing a suit under an open trench coat. He looked to be about her age, early forties. Handsome, well built, in shape. He watched her come to the door and let him in. Then he saw them exchange a quick kiss. Okay, her lover. For a moment, he couldn't see them anymore, until they both appeared in the brightly lighted dining room, to the left of the kitchen, whose windows gave onto the backyard.

He pulled a pair of minibinoculars from his pocket and studied the man's face. A hard, serious face, skeptical eyes. Policeman perhaps? Another federal agent? This damned nurse seemed to be a magnet for police. He put the binoculars back in his coat pocket and sat down, tapping his fingers impatiently. He'd wait until they were busy doing something and then slip down to check the car. Maybe they'd go upstairs. That would make things a lot easier.

Then he had a bad thought: If this man was a policeman, he might be here because of that menacing phone call he'd made earlier. In which case, he might have to take action much sooner than he'd wanted to, perhaps tonight. He had hoped she would just bolt and solve his problem, but now he cursed his impetuousness. Here was a prime example of his not doing his homework. He should have known about the boyfriend. Now he might have two loose ends. He swore out loud in the darkness, startling some rodent in the furniture into skittering flight across the concrete floor.

"You get the whole enchilada here with this ADT system, or just doors?" Cat asked.

"Doors. Now I just have to remember another damned password, a system number, and a name for when I accidentally set the thing off and have to call them. It's off right now, until I reread the instructions."

He grunted. "Those signs on the doors are the best part of the system," he said. "Your average burglar sees that, he'll just go creep the house next door, one that doesn't have a system. Got any coffee?"

"I thought you were cutting back on caffeine?" she said as she went back out to the kitchen to make a fresh pot. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and she'd taken a moment to run a brush through her hair. Then she remembered that the caffeine bit had been Lynn's idea. She found it amusing that Cat's wife, who was at least fifty pounds overweight, would be hectoring lean and mean Cat Ballard about his diet. But wives did that, she supposed.

"I tried," he was saying from the dining room. "Found myself falling asleep at my desk by tour. Having withdrawal headaches. Just like some damn hype. Recognized my jones when I saw it, gave up that decaf plan for Lent." He came to the kitchen doorway. "Listen, I can't stay long. Bobby's birthday — we're going to something called Chunky Cheese."

"Chucky Cheese," she said. "Kids love it. You're probably gonna hate it."

"It's a place for some 'quality time,' as she calls it." He sighed. "So, we gonna talk or what?"

She brought his cup of coffee in and sat down at the opposite side of the dining room table. She raised an eyebrow. " 'Or what'?"

"C'mon."

"The clinic?" she asked.

"Yeah, Con, the fucking clinic."

Game's over, she thought. She collected her thoughts for a moment. "There was this one patient," she said. "A European guy. Medium-medium. They did the full Monty on him over the course of the last year or so." She told him that she'd assisted at several of his procedures, and that this guy had paid to change out damn near everything. A new face, taken, as she remembered, from a picture of someone else. Subdermal smoothing grafts on fingertips and toes. Tonal changes to his vocal cords. Altered eye color. Reshaped ears. Permanent dye job on his hair—all his hair. A dentist in three separate times to alter his teeth. If they could have swapped out his DNA, he'd probably have wanted that done, too.

And then there was the SRS angle: the inflatable boobs. He'd kept the rest of his equipment, with the exception of having a pouch opened up in his groin that would allow him to bind his genitals practically out of sight. But from the waist up, he would damn well startle the good folks in church if he ever lifted his shirt. Then, switching gears, she told him about the taping system, and the transcripts. That had been her job, for which she was paid extra. Except for her, only Dr. Khandoor had handled the tapes. And finally, she told him that there had been one tape — she didn't know who it was — guy talking about bombs and shit.

Cat just listened, staring at her, his coffee long forgotten. "Bombs? You tell the feds all this?" His voice was rising. "You tell this to the Secret Service?"

"I played ignorant," she said. "But I think that Morgan guy was being coy. Asked if people talked in their sleep. I sloughed it off. Tried to change the subject. But…"

"But?"

"He looks like a big dumb… caveman. There's no other word for it. But he isn't. You can see it when he gives you that goofy smile. I felt like he was looking right through me."

Cat rubbed his chin. "You think they maybe retrieved some of this shit from the fire scene?"

"Something tells me they might have that one transcript. Heaven knows how, but I think that's why it's Secret Service coming around."

"You know who it was that actually said that shit about bombs?"

"No. Khandoor wouldn't give me a tape until it was full. He ran the machines, dictated the code numbers before each procedure. My job was to type up what I heard on the tape. It would be his voice saying the code number, then the patient's voice in the recovery room. Sometimes there wasn't anything, and I'd type the code number and then 'nothing spoken.' "

"But this one guy?"

"Whoever it was, he kept saying 'bomb, bomb, bomb,' and then some shit in German—'Heil Hitler,' Nazi staff. If that guy, whoever, whatever he is, found out about the tapes and somehow knows I did the transcripts, then that's why he's been in my house." She raised her eyebrows at him. "Cat?"

"What?"

"I think I need to get out of here."

He nodded distractedly, then suddenly shook his head, as if coming to his senses. "No, hell no, you can't just rabbit. There'd be red rockets all over town, you go disappearing."

"I haven't done anything wrong, Cat," she said, almost shouting. "I just worked there, okay? I typed those damned things. The doctors were the ones recording their own patients."

"Doesn't matter, Con. I think you need to call that guy Morgan back and lay this all out for them — the Secret Service, I mean. Hell, the inauguration's in what — ten days? The whole police department is jumping through its ass for that. Did you know they're gonna lock down the whole downtown government area starting next week?"

"I read the papers," she said. "But how can I spill my guts to federal agents without getting into trouble, Cat? I didn't do anything but my job — you know, ace surgical assistant. But you know how it's gonna look. Identity changes on foreigners?"

He eyed her across the table, suddenly looking every inch the Homicide cop now. "This guy talking about bombs — he get an identity change?"

Shit, she thought. "I don't know! Like I said, we had no way of knowing. Each tape had several patients on it. I just fucking typed."

But Cat was shaking his head. "Some lunatic gets an identity change, talks about bombs? Suppose this is the same asshole who's creeping around your house, making death threats, killing your cat because you gave him the milk instead of putting it in your coffee?"

"But why me? I don't know who any of those people were!"

"Maybe it's just like this fuck told you on the phone, Con: Everyone's dead except you. He doesn't know what you know or don't know, but everyone else at that clinic is dead. Except you. That would do it for me."

"You just don't understand. Most of it, all the transcript shit, was pure babble. Disconnected words. Like those famous monkeys at the typewriters. It's probably meaningless."

"Okay, Con," he said, clearly exasperated. "So you tell me what all this is about, then, if not the clinic. Some guy in your house, your cat poisoned, threats on the phone? You been borrowing money from the wrong people or something?"

She didn't know what to say. He slapped a hand down on the dining room table, making her jump. "Listen to me, Connie. Something bad happens, and it comes back to this guy, or anybody at that clinic with the Muslim doctors? The whole country will want to crucify you, you don't bring it in. Right now. Tonight. You listening to me? You need to tell that Morgan guy what you know."

"But—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know you don't know who or even what it's all about. But this might be the final link in some deal the Secret Service has been wrestling with for a year or two. There's no telling what might be going down. You have to call that guy."

Heismann, watching them argue, decided to go check out that car. Keeping low, he opened the big wooden door wide enough to slip out. Staying bent over, he went right, away from the back porch light, and then down the driveway to where her car was. He crouched beside it on the side away from the house, then crept over to the driver's side of the man's car. The engine was still making ticking noises as it cooled in the night air. It was a large four-door sedan. He checked the house, but the front windows were still dark. He looked inside the car and saw a radio handset and a small console below the dashboard. He looked through the back window and could see the radio antenna embedded in the glass, but there was another one, a stubby wire antenna sticking up out of the trunk. He slipped behind the car and checked the plate. District plate, but no sign of government decals. He examined the taillights and saw the extra lens for a white or blue strobe light.

Very well, then. Police.

He went up to the grille to confirm that, ran his fingers along the warm plastic louvers, where he found another pair of recessed strobe lights. Definitely police.

Talking to the nurse about what? Their sex life? Or that doctored medical file he'd left behind at the clinic?

If this was about the bait, what would the policeman do? Demand that she come in, tell all she knew about the clinic, the patients, especially the patient in that record? Federal agents, now police. Weeks after the fire. Surely they did not suspect her of starting the fire. So this had to be about something else. Something that would concern the sole survivor.

It had to be the bait.

He took a deep breath of cold night air, stood up, and then began moving back to the garage. It was too soon. Much too soon. The deception plan had been designed to play out in two stages. The first was to drop an indication that a patient at the clinic, whose name was unknown, was planning to bomb the Union State speech. That had been the point of leaving the fake record behind at the scene of the fire, in such a way as to ensure that it would survive the fire. By mentioning the Union State speech, they had established the wrong target, and, more important, the wrong time line. As long as everyone in the night crew died in the fire, stage one would initially be all they had. But for whatever reason, this nurse had survived. His reaction to that unexpected development had been to drop the second critical piece of information into the investigation, but Mutaib had scotched that idea. Told him to kill her.

Now federal police, and even a city policeman, were talking to her all of a sudden, weeks after the fire. The nurse might inadvertently compromise the timing of the second stage of the deception, which involved getting the Ammies to focus on that last name in the transcript's Nazi pantheon, Heismann. They'd need a description, and Interpol, which had a file on Heismann, would give them one. The trick was that his Interpol description no longer pertained, not after a year of cosmetic surgery. At the beginning of their search, they wouldn't know that. And they would also think they had some time, because stage one had pointed them at the Union State speech.

But everything depended on their being unaware, at least for a while, that he had a totally new physical identity. With all these policemen suddenly converging on his loose end, there was now a distinct chance that this damned woman could reveal that one crucial bit of information much too soon.

Mutaib was right. And he had already failed once to do what he had promised to do.

He would have to take her now. Tonight. Direct action. No more delay.

He'd tested the car's doors, but they had been locked. A security light had been blinking out its warning on the dashboard. Besides, he'd brought no tools, other than a small flashlight, the minibinocs, and his trusty Walther. So improvise. Do something to bring the policeman out into the backyard. But what? Shoot him? No. Too drastic. The hue and cry would be tremendous. Something else. He had to disable the policeman, not kill him. Unless, of course, the policeman himself forced the issue. But the policeman wasn't the objective; it was that damned woman he needed to silence.

He scuttled back up the driveway and into the garage again, swinging the big doors almost shut behind him. Looking through the crack, he could see that they were still in the dining room, talking, faces frowning, the policeman up now, walking around, agitated, although not shouting. Not an argument, more like a serious discussion. He needed to get that man out into the backyard, away from the woman. Disable the policeman, then disable and grab the woman, take her down the hill, drown her in the creek, and stuff her body under a rock. "Disappear her," as the Argentine secret police liked to say. Desaparecidos. Wonderful expression, that. Those Argies were German-trained, too. By real Germans. Back when Germany commanded some respect in the world. Not like now.

He looked around the garage for something to use to set up a trap. A wire of some kind. Something that would ensnare the policeman if he came running out. He spotted the band saw. It gave him an idea.

He checked back to see where they were. They were still visible in the window and still talking. He moved to the band saw and used a bench brush to wipe off all the cobwebs. He felt the band blade — a flexible steel ribbon of serrated teeth one-quarter of an inch wide and about two and a half feet long. Times two: The band would be almost five feet. That would do. He unscrewed the wing nuts that held the housing cover and pulled it off, revealing the pulley wheels and the tensioning latch. He rotated the hitch and the band sagged off the steel pulleys. He undid the bottom cover and removed the entire band. The teeth were still sharp and spiked his hands, even through his gloves. He lay the band on the workbench and searched for metal cutters, which he found on a Peg-Board wall. He cut the band, ducking his head when it snapped back into one flat ribbon of teeth and then flipped like a live thing down onto the floor.

He went back to the crack and looked out. She was still sitting there, head in hands now, while a shadow was visible moving around the kitchen. He went back and retrieved the glistening band, then spotted a miter box, its short, hard-backed, fine-toothed saw gathering webs on the bench. Perfect. Now all he needed was something large to throw through that dining room window. He looked around and spotted the vise.

"How much money we talking about?" Cat asked from the kitchen, where he was refilling his coffee cup.

"They paid eighty, base pay," she replied. "Plus overtime for day work, and benefits. The bonus I reported was five grand; the cash bonus was twenty." She was getting tired of this. She was suddenly ready for him to leave, go see his goddamned kid.

"Wow. And you invested all that?"

"Most of it. My broker, God bless her, pulled me out in early 2001, and we slapped it all in grade A, six and a half percent tax-exempt munis. Everything."

"Those guys must have been making a fortune," he said. "And you've got what — a couple hundred large working for you, tax-free? Nice."

She had a lot more than that, but he didn't need to know. Not now. "The IRS probably won't think so," she said. "Another reason I don't want to go front and center with the government."

He sat back down at the table. "I'll tell you what, Con. I think with the right shyster, you could get immunity from all that tax shit if you were willing to lay it out, everything that was going on at that clinic. You might have to pay some back taxes, but that would be negotiable. Your info is too valuable. Foreigners getting ID changes right here in Washington? Shit. Those DHS people would go nuts for that."

"And what if they lock me up?" she said, chewing a nail. "After nine eleven, they rounded up a shitload of people, and some of them are still in jail, no charges filed, no bond, no lawyers. Hitler would feel at home here these days."

He laughed. "No way. Hitler kept it simple — just the gestapo. We've still got eighty-odd law-enforcement outfits here in D.C. alone, the DHS not withstanding. It's like this Morgan guy — him and his Office of Special Investigations. That should be Bureau work."

"How's about I do an anonymous tip? Write something up, drop it into the system. Or I can give it to you — you can say you developed it from a confidential informant as part of this arson investigation."

He grunted sympathetically. "Like they wouldn't know who that was? With one person surviving the fire? C'mon, Con."

She screamed as something large crashed through the dining room window, landed on the table, and knocked her computer monitor right onto the floor, where its glass face exploded in a puff of arcing white smoke. Still frozen to her chair, she stared at the billowing curtains, stunned to see a face, a horrible face, pop up into view for a split second and then disappear. She heard Cat yell, "Hey!" and then he was running into the kitchen, trying to snag his gun out of his hip holster. She willed herself to get up, to get out of that room, trying not to step on all the glass or breathe the noxious cloud of phosphorous smoke hovering above the ruined monitor. That face— something about it. It had been all eyes and teeth, as if illuminated from below. How was that possible? She heard the back screen door open and then bang shut. And then came a strange strangling noise and then a huge thump as something — Cat? — went down in a heap on the back steps.

She snatched up the phone and dialed 911 as she backed into the living room, feeling almost naked in the light, those curtains blowing in and that ominous silence outside. The phone rang and rang and rang, but no operator picked up. Goddamned District of Columbia! She hung it up and redialed, this time getting a busy signal. She swore out loud and redialed one more time, the cord stretching all the way out now. Ringing. Then she heard footsteps coming toward the back of the house. Cat? Or that face? She was terrified to go out there, but then she remembered the derringer in her pocket. The operator came on just as she pulled the heavy little gun out of her jeans, nearly dropping the phone.

"Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?"

She froze again. What was her emergency? The footsteps were still coming, and they didn't sound like Cat's.

"Murder!" she said, blurting out the one word that ought to move their asses right along. "Help me, please." And then she dropped the phone and backed into the living room, where the lights were off, as the footsteps came up onto the back porch and she heard the screen door open slowly, then bump closed. She could just hear the 911 operator saying hello several times from the handset down on the floor. They would have caller ID, and that would give them the address. But right now, she had bigger problems, for she saw the lights in the kitchen switch off, followed by those in the dining room. Definitely not Cat.

She shuffled as quietly as she could backward across the living room carpet until she felt the couch behind her legs. Realizing she was silhouetted against the dim light coming in through the front window drapes from the street, she slipped behind an upholstered chair and squatted down. The house was silent except for the noises of the wind moving the front bushes around. She held the derringer in both hands, then remembered it wasn't cocked. The two diminutive side-by-side hammers were still down on the receiver. She heard a sound in the dining room, then another.

He was coming.

His shoes were crunching through the bits of glass from the monitor. And where the hell was Cat? She folded the derringer into her belly to mask the sound and thumbed back the two hammers. She sat fully down on the floor, her back against the wall radiator, and brought the gun up. She froze, barely breathing. Let him find me. Cat had told her the effective range of the derringer was arm's length. Okay, that's where I've got it, she thought.

She heard a small noise and what sounded like a grunt of effort, and then one of the table lamps came flying over the chair and into the front window, breaking out the glass and dropping heavily on her right shoulder. She nearly dropped the gun and had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. Where are the fucking cops? She wondered. Where is Cat? And then the man was right there, pulling the chair away, towering over her, that same face, a familiar face, something in his hand, a hammer coming down in a wicked strike at her head.

She rolled to the left, toward the hallway, aimed upward, and pulled both triggers on the derringer. Two rapid-fire blasts banged the palm of her hand and she heard him yell and stumble backward, colliding with some piece of furniture. She didn't hesitate. She scrambled away from the overturned chair, rolled into the front hall, got up, and ran as fast as she could straight out the back door, where she promptly tripped over the inert form of Cat Ballard, who groaned when she hit him. Her arms windmilling, she whacked her shoulder as she hit the railing on the back porch and slipped in something wet. She sat down abruptly on the top step, then went bumping right down the steps on her backside and hit the cold concrete of the sidewalk on all fours, her hands covered in — blood?

Cat's blood?

She heard footsteps again, this time from inside the house, thumping heavily down the front hall toward the kitchen, sounding like a drunk trying to run. She saw Cat's gun lying at the bottom of the steps and reached forward to grab it as a form filled the kitchen doorway, just inside the screen.

She raised the gun and tried to pull the trigger, but her bloody, trembling hands slipped on the butt and she dropped the gun. As she lunged to retrieve it, she heard the man laugh, and then the screen door was opening and he was silhouetted in the kitchen light, shooting at her, stars of red flame blossoming in the doorway as steel hornets slashed the air by her cheeks. She screamed and began rolling across the yard, barely conscious of bullets hammering the concrete and tearing up chunks of dead grass all around her as she kept rolling, rolling, and then she was into the cedars, Cat's bloody gun still clutched in her hand. She tumbled through the dense green branches, got up, and ran straight down the hill, bushes and branches whipping her face. She was falling forward as much as she was running, caroming off small tree trunks in the darkness, until she twisted an ankle when she finally reached flat ground. She went down with a yelp, then stopped to listen.

She got up, hopping on one leg, rubbing the throbbing ankle, trying to hush her screaming lungs, her heart pounding so hard in her ears that he had to be able to hear it. She listened for signs of somebody coming down the hill after her, and then she could hear sirens, so she slumped back against a tree and tried not to cry. The creek was right below her, and, even in the cold, she thought about sliding down the huge boulders into that black water, if only to get that sticky mess off her hands.

He lunged out of the darkness and tackled her, sweeping her sideways and down, grabbing for her mouth with one hand while she fought, twisted, bit, and tried to shout, but he was too strong, one iron arm encircling her chest and squeezing the breath right out of her. She thought she felt Cat's gun under her knee, but she couldn't reach it. Then he lost his balance for an instant and came lunging over the top of her, giving her one glorious free shot at his crotch, which she took, kicking out with every ounce of her strength. And then he was off of her, curling into a retching ball that went sliding down the stone banks of the creek and into the water. She patted the ground for Cat's gun, found it, and crawled to the edge of the rocks, looking down, determined now, waiting for him to surface, ready to kill him, to empty that thing at him in the water. But he didn't surface. There was only the sound of the creek, running high in winter, rushing over all the rocks. Rock Creek, that's why they called it that, she thought as her adrenaline began to crash and she slowly lowered the gun.

She heard voices shouting above her on the bluff and saw blue lights flickering through the cedars. Walking backward up the hill, she kept the gun pointed down the slope, waiting for him to show himself again. She trudged back up the slope the way she'd come, step by step, the backs of her shoes filling with bits of soft dirt and mud. When she neared the top, she stopped, out of breath, her ankle pounding, her ribs sore from grappling with her attacker. She could hear men shouting, doors banging, other vehicles arriving. Then she heard an authoritative voice shouting, "What've we got, Larry?" And another man — Larry, she guessed — answered in an excited voice: "You're not gonna believe this, but it looks like Cat's punch cut his throat and then shagged ass. That's his car, and that's her car. We need some fucking dogs back here."

She froze in the cedars. Cut his throat? Sweet Jesus! And they thought she did it? She started to push forward, out of the cedars, determined to clear that shit right up, but then stopped in her tracks. She didn't recognize any of those voices, and she knew most of the guys on the District Homicide squad. Could she clear this up? She felt the sticky mess on her hands, Cat's blood. She hefted Cat's gun. What would that look like to a bunch of cops who were cranking up a cop-killer frenzy out there? And the guy who'd busted into her house? Where was he?

Instinctively, she backed down the hill again, watching the bluffs this time, waiting to see if someone would come through the trees, or turn loose a pack of tracking dogs. Surely the evidence in the house would reveal— what, exactly? Two broken windows. Overturned furniture. A struggle in the living room. She thought she had hit him with the .45, but then he'd come right back after her. So there'd be bullet holes in the ceiling, right? Proof that she had — what? They'd had a lovers' quarrel, which had escalated into a shooting? The derringer was still up there, with her prints all over it.

God! She needed time to think, and also time for them to go through the house, see the evidence, put it together. She knew cops. In this situation, if one of them spotted her right now, he'd probably start shooting.

And Cat: The bastard had cut his throat? Shit, shit, shit! Poor Cat. And now their private thing would erupt into public view. Lynn and the kids would be dragged into a media circus when the truth came out. What had that cop Larry just called her — Cat's punch? These cops were strangers, and they knew?

She reached the bottom again, backed into a tree, and stopped, aware now that she was back in Injun country. Had that bastard climbed back out of the creek? Was he out there in the woods now, ahead of her, waiting for her again? She shivered, both from the cold and the memory of how he'd come out of the bushes like some blood-crazed bear. She tried to remember his face, but there hadn't really been one. She began to make her way slowly north, paralleling the creek as she went upstream as quietly as she could, keeping just out of sight of the water, conscious of the rising commotion up on the bluffs: more cars, more lights, radios on external vehicle speakers.

She needed time to think. Which meant she had to get away, at least for tonight. But she had no car, no purse, no ID, no money, and no coat. And it wasn't like she could go back to the house just now, not with dogs coming. She was reasonably at home in the woods, but she had always been afraid of dogs. Especially in packs. She squeezed her sticky fingers together. Dogs would find her, too, no sweat.

The evergreen undergrowth closed around her in the darkness, but she kept going, pushing pungent pine branches out of her face while trying to make no noise, half-expecting to see that lunging form again each time she pushed a branch aside. She held Cat's gun in her right hand, and the butt was sticking to her palm now. Peering head, she saw a flare of headlights through the underbrush as a car came down Tilden Road and rumbled across the stone bridge at the base of the hill before disappearing into the park.

She needed to get the hell out of here. She had to go to ground somewhere, somehow. No: She had to get a car.

Think, she told herself again as she arrived at the edge of Tilden Road. There were no streetlights down here at the bottom of the hill, and the water rushing under the old bridge was shiny black in the moonlight. Right or left, she wondered as she caught her breath. She had no goddamn idea of what to do next, but she was out of the underbrush now, so she'd see him if he came at her again. She checked the gun, a stainless-steel Taurus Millenium Special .45. She peeled back the slide to verify that there was one up the spout. Her older brother had taught her about guns a long time ago, and Cat had done the same thing when they had first been dating, taking handguns along when they went together on one of her photography expeditions. If that lunatic came out of the bushes, it wouldn't be hand-to-gland anymore. Unless, of course, he used his own gun. She shook her head, then went down on one knee by the side of the creek and washed her hands, keeping an eye on the edge of the woods. More headlights at the top of the hill. Maybe she ought to just wait there until the first patrol car came blasting down, give herself up. Had to be wanner than this. She washed the gun butt and dried her hands on her jeans. The lights grew brighter, so she moved closer to the road.

But it wasn't a cop car. It was a United Parcel Service truck, and the driver slowed when he saw her kneeling by the side of the road. She had stuffed the gun into the small of her back by the time he pulled abreast, but she stayed down on one knee. The driver got out of his seat, leaving the engine running, and slid open the door on the passenger side.

"You okay, lady?" he called.

"No," she said. "Someone's chasing me. I need out of here."

He was a young black man, wearing the standard UPS brown uniform. "Uh, I'm not supposed to pick up passengers, ever. Lemme call dispatch. They can call the cops. I'll stay here with you until someone shows up."

He had the door open, which was all she needed. She wasn't about to add kidnapping to her up-and-coming wanted poster, but hijacking? She stood up and produced the gun. "Step down," she said. "I need your ride."

His eyes widened in surprise, and she repeated her order, yelling it this time, waving the gun at his face. He popped right out of the truck with his hands up, looking ridiculous as he danced around, trying to keep his balance with his hands still in the air.

"Put your wallet in the truck," she ordered. "And then get under the bridge. Do it! Now! Don't make me hurt you!"

Speechless, he extracted his wallet and threw it into the truck. Then he scuttled past her, never taking his eyes off the gun, and slipped down into the bushes beneath the bridge. She leaned over the stone railing. "The whacko chasing me has a machete," she called down into the darkness. "He cuts people's heads off. I wouldn't go making a lot of noise right now."

Then she climbed into the truck, scooped up the wallet, and closed the side door. Sitting down in the driver's seat, she looked at the gearshift diagram for a second, then banged noisily into first and took off. Her first car had been a manual, so jamming gears was nothing new to her. The truck left the bridge behind in a rattling cloud of diesel smoke.

She went straight until she cut Piney Branch, then left over to Sixteenth Street, and right on down to New Hampshire Avenue and over to Dupont Circle. Going into town, against traffic, it didn't take fifteen minutes. She went completely around Dupont twice and into the first side street on the north side big enough to admit the truck. She found an alley next to a liquor store, pulled in, and shut it down. She cut off the lights and looked around. Nobody seemed to be taking any special interest in a UPS truck, even at this hour. UPS trucks were everywhere these days, which made them practically invisible.

With the gun stuck between her thighs and one eye on the alley, she looked through the guy's wallet and extracted a grand total of seventy-three dollars. But it was cash, and cash could buy a Metro ticket, and the Metro could get her out of the area faster than anything else. They shouldn't have her description out yet for taking the truck, not until the UPS driver got to the cops and reported a hijacking. The cops might have a BOLO out, though, so she had to hurry, because the Metro system was fully covered by surveillance cameras, especially after all the terrorist threats.

She threw the guy's wallet and the truck keys over the top of the heavy mesh door that led to the package compartment, which was still locked. Then she put the gun into her waistband, pushing it down in the small of her back, pulled her sweatshirt down over it, and got out. It was really cold outside. She spied the driver's brown jacket on a hook in the truck, grabbed that, and slid the door closed. She realized her hands were still sticky with Cat's blood, so she looked around for a spigot, found one on the liquor store's side wall, and cleaned her hands again. Two men walked by out on the sidewalk and glanced at her curiously, but neither of them even broke stride. City-dwellers, she thought. They never get involved.

She walked the three blocks to the Dupont Circle Metro station and went down the escalator, keeping an eye out for security people and metal detectors. Feeling conspicuous in the entirely recognizable UPS jacket, she bought a five-dollar Metro card and went through to the platform for downtown and northern Virginia. She waited back along the sloping walls of the station, leaning against the steel railing as she tried to lift the gun back out of her underwear. Then a train came roaring into the station, opened its welcoming doors, and she was gone.

It was almost midnight by the time Swamp Morgan made it out to the nurse's house in Cleveland Park, courtesy of a Secret Service driver. It had been Carl Malone who'd called him via the Homeland Security duty office when word got out about the incident. There were still several police cars parked along Quebec Street, some of them with their blue strobe lights still winking silently into the winter night. He had to show his credentials three times in order to get up to the house, where he was logged in by the crime-scene coordinator, a patrol cop who looked half-frozen despite his bulky coat. Carl Malone came out the front door and waved him through the tape.

"How's the lieutenant?" Swamp asked, buttoning up his overcoat against the cold. He wished he'd worn a hat.

"Touch'n go," Malone said, waggling his hand. "Lost a boatload of blood, but he's still alive. It's a real mess back there."

"They piece it together yet?"

"Split opinions right now," Malone said, his breath condensing in front of his face. "Homicide guys. You work with 'em for years, they still don't share so good. Couple of 'em wondering out loud what the hell I'm doing here."

"Appreciate the call," Swamp said. "I was planning to reinterview her tomorrow. I guess that's today." They both looked at their watches.

"Anyway," Malone said, "the primary now thinks the nurse didn't do it. There were two coffee cups in the dining room, and it looks like somebody outside threw a workshop vise through the window. Knocked shit all over the place in the dining room. They think Ballard went after him, ran through the kitchen, out the back door, and right into a truly wicked trap. You'll want to see this."

Swamp wasn't sure he did want to see this; he hadn't been kidding when he told Gary White that murder and its attendant gore unsettled him probably more than most cops. They walked around the driveway side of the house to avoid the crime-scene efforts going on inside. They stopped to one side of the back porch, where there was more tape and four large crime-scene floodlights illuminating practically the entire backyard. Swamp heard police dogs barking from inside a K-9 van parked on the grass.

"Look up at the top of the stairs," Malone said. "See that fucking thing?"

Swamp squinted into the bright white light and saw the serrated ribbon of bloody steel stretched tightly across the top of the steps, about throat-high.

"That's the blade from a band saw," Malone said. "Somebody cut two horizontal notches in the support posts either side of the steps, just deep enough to fit the blade flat into the notches so the teeth faced the back door. Neck-high."

"Christ on a crutch," Swamp said quietly. "He'd never have seen that."

"Got that right. Especially if he was coming through the door after some wacko pitched a table vise through the window at them. They got the perp's footprints over there by the window, and some more over there, front of the garage. That's where we found the band saw."

"How bad is Ballard, really?"

Malone shook his head. "Really bad, according to one of the medics. I didn't get out here until an hour or so after it all went down. Heard about it in the hallway as I was headed home, didn't put it together with the nurse until they mentioned her name. Had no idea that she and Ballard were an item."

"They were?" Swamp said, although he didn't see why anyone would care particularly, and then he saw the expression on Malone's face.

"Ah," he said.

"Yeah," Malone said. "His own Homicide crew apparently all knew, at least the senior people. His wife and two kids did not know. Now they will."

"Oh dear," Swamp said, mindful of things he hadn't paid much attention to as recently as a few years back.

"The nurse managed to call nine-one-one. All she got out was 'Murder' and 'Help me.' Nothing after that. The nine-one-one ops people called in the address to the street cops, and they also put a code into Homicide. Street cops found Ballard, called that in, and then, of course, the whole Homicide crew rode out on it."

"And the nurse? Where is she?"

"Some kind of struggle went down in the living room. Derringer .45 tracks in the ceiling. Front window broken. She apparently beat feet. Left everything — car, keys, purse, money, apparently just shagged ass into the night. A neighbor heard gunfire from the backyard, and the dogs found a trail down into Rock Creek Park. Perp tracks, too. Signs of another struggle down there. Get this: She makes it out to the road — that's Tilden, across that ravine over there — and hijacks herself a UPS truck. Driver stopped to be a Good Samaritan. They think she has Ballard's gun."

"This gets better and better."

"Oh yeah. Driver was a new kid. Sees this white woman down on one knee by the side of the road. Looked to be in trouble, so he stops the truck to help. She waves this cannon at him, takes the truck, and his wallet, by the way, goes downtown with it to Dupont Circle, and then disappears."

"Right into the Dupont Circle Metro station," Swamp said.

"Probably. UPS reported the truck missing; patrol cops found it in an alley off of Dupont. Keys and the guy's wallet still in it. We're holding the UPS angle back from the media. We've got Metro reviewing security tapes as we speak. But, you know, tail end of rush hour…"

"Yeah, she could be anywhere in the system. Or the suburbs. Damn. So what's it all about, Sherlock Holmes?"

Malone took his hat off and rubbed his head. "I keep coming back to that fire. There were five people worked at that after-hours clinic. Four are dead in a not so righteous fire. Now we get this mess at the home of the fifth, and last, member of the night crew. Who calls for help but then boogies."

"Was this Ballard guy on the up-and-up?"

"Outside of his love life? Yeah. Reputation as a stand-up guy. Eighteen years on the force. Made lieutenant the long way, but with style. Came around asking about you, by the way."

"Oh yeah? When?"

"Would you believe earlier this afternoon?"

Swamp nodded, "That figures. I interviewed Ms. Wall this morning, along with Gary White. She spooks, calls her boyfriend, the Homicide detective. I guess I need to talk to Ballard."

Malone made a face and shook his head. "No time soon, Special Agent. If ever."

Swamp kicked some grass around with the point of his shoe. There were several cops over by the garage now, smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet in the cold. Some of them were eyeing him suspiciously. "Well, I was slated to get a warrant to search the dead doctors' homes and bank accounts this morning," he said. "But I guess now we'd better do a full court press on finding Ms. Wall."

" 'We'?" Malone asked quietly. He turned so the Homicide cops couldn't hear what he was saying. "Secret Service gonna take this mess federal?"

Swamp eyed the older man, hearing the concern in his voice. "You've got some advice on that for me?"

Malone puffed out his cheeks. "Man, now that's a goddamn first."

Swamp smiled, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets. He'd forgotten gloves, too. It must have been in the twenties out here in the suburbs. "Remember, Carl, I'm just a retired pogue these days," he said. "Left all my rice bowls and turf shoes at the front desk the day they sent me home. I'm not listed in any government phone books. Don't have a code next to my name on anybody's spaghetti chart. No axes to grind, no hobby horses to ride."

Malone nodded. "You telling me you can work an investigation back-channel? All the way?"

"Exactly. DHS is still coming together, bureaucratically speaking. Lots of slippery cracks in the org chart. Plus, I'm intel. So what's the advice?"

Malone tilted his head imperceptibly toward the group of Homicide cops. "They're ready to rumble on this — find the fucker who laid out that blade and bring his ass in for some pointed questions, while fervently hoping he does something stupid, like resisting arrest, okay? Feds come barging in, take all that fun stuff away, be hell to pay downtown."

"Got it," Swamp said quietly. "Lemme suggest this: I want the nurse more than I want the guy who cut up Lieutenant Ballard. I'm working a potentially much bigger deal, remember? A fuse you lit with your call to the White House detail. And then again, maybe it isn't. The point is, right now, nobody knows. I do think the nurse was shining us on a little this morning."

"They'll want the nurse, too," Malone said. "She's the one can tell 'em what the fuck happened here. Brother Ballard sure as hell can't."

"So we both look," Swamp said. "I'll turn on what federal assets I can to find the runaway nurse. We find her, I'll make sure the District cops get first shot at her, too, so to speak."

"Then she needs to stop her rabbit act. Some of these guys still like her for the cutting."

"I understand. And no federal extradition bullshit, no unnecessary paperwork. They find her, I'd appreciate the same courtesy. And our side of it stays off the case-books."

"She's at least a material witness to this deal," Malone said. "They're gonna want physical custody."

"I've got no problem with that."

Malone nodded thoughtfully. "Okay," he said. "I can sell that deal. You want me to talk to them?" Two more detectives came out of the back of the house, arguing, their breath visible in the floodlights. Swamp could see them stepping carefully around the mess on the back porch.

"You're Arson," Swamp said. "No dog in this fight. How about being the honest broker? Like I said, we can keep our action all back-channel."

Malone gave him a skeptical look. "Your bosses cool with that?"

"Oh, yes. Especially since I'm the intel liaison wienie in OSI."

Malone grunted. "Okay. I'll go talk to those boys." He looked over at the group of cops, who were moving around the way hornets do when their nest has been disturbed — standing up, sitting down, looking around for something to fly at. "But probably not tonight. Later in the morning. Right now, I do believe they got their blood up, you know what I'm saying?"

Swamp agreed, said he'd be in touch, and went to find his Secret Service car. He didn't need to see any more of this scene. As he slipped into the front seat with the driver, he realized he did not want to see any more of the scene. He ratcheted the car's bucket seat back, strapped in, and closed his eyes.

The next twenty-four hours would be critical. Right now, she was apparently on the run, with no clothes except what she had on her back, no money, no car, and no ID or other plastic with her. If she'd been scared enough to hijack a UPS truck, there was no telling what else she might do to get away, but the longer she was out there, the more likely she'd think of something. She had to be desperately afraid.

He tried to put it all together. If the transcript fragment was real, then somebody at that clinic, some patient, had been talking about a possible terrorist attack. Was the patient after Connie Wall? His brain was stalling. He made a mental note to call PRU in the morning, ask them to let him talk to the agent supervising the security survey for the presidential address to a joint session of Congress. Let him know they were still pulling strings. And now he'd have to delay the searches on the Pakistani doctors' homes, which meant turning off the hurry-up push on getting those warrants. He'd tell Gary to get the warrants.

But the main thing was that he no longer thought the transcript fragment was entirely a firefly. The good news was that they had some time to work it. That joint-session speech was literally weeks away.

Heismann stared at the ceiling in his bathroom, unable to close his eyes and sleep. He lay in the bathtub, in cool water up to his chest, an ice pack pressed to his groin where she'd kicked him. As long as he didn't breathe too deeply or try to lift his legs, he could stand the pain. He ignored the scrapes, bruises, and scratches he'd sustained in his slide down into the creek, the flash burns on his right cheek from that belly gun going off in his face, and the swelling in his left knee from hitting a submerged boulder. He'd barely been able to get to his van and clear out of the park before the world at the top of the bluff flared up with blue strobe lights.

And the bitch nurse had gotten away. Again.

This was real trouble, for now she was fully alerted. She had to know.

First, he must ensure that Mutaib didn't find out. There would be reams of news coverage, a policeman getting killed like that. He must be dead, of course, with all that blood, although the first news reports had been vague on that point. His own socks and shoes, soaked in all that blood, were now safely in a plastic bag down in the apartment building's Dumpster. But he would have to communicate with Mutaib by telephone from now on. Absolutely no more face-to-face meetings, not until he could walk normally again. He eased from one buttock to the other and grunted when the pain lanced up his belly, calling forth the waves of nausea. If it hadn't been for the groin pouch, he would have been paralyzed for days. Bitch!

For some reason, she had decided to run from the police. She'd had plenty of opportunity to go back up there while he was floundering in that damned creek, but she hadn't. The television news reporting the incident said that the police were looking for a nurse named Connie Wall. Well, he would have a totally different version for the banker: I took her, killed her, and stuffed her in a hole in the banks of Rock Creek. That's why they can't find her. That would be his official line.

Back in the fall, when he was nearing completion of his course of identity-change procedures, he had begun his preparations to destroy the clinic and everyone in it. He'd come back late at night and let himself in with a stolen key and the filched code for the security system. He had gone through some of the records there and discovered that they were using code numbers instead of names. He had never found the code list that might turn numbers into names, but after an extended search, he had understood that the crooked bastards were dabbling in a little blackmail by recording the recovery-room babble of their patients. One of the transcripts had had a question annotated in the margin, and the question had been addressed to C.W., so it was a safe bet that Connie Wall was the trusted transcriber. He had mentioned the transcripts to Mutaib, and it had been Mutaib's idea to use a fake one as part of the deception plan.

If federal agents had taken the bait, that would explain the morning visit, but it wasn't likely that they knew she had been the transcriber. They were probably talking to her simply because she was the last one left alive from the clinic. But if one of them had let slip something about transcripts while interviewing her, that might explain why she was now running from the police, instead of seeking refuge with them. That and the attack. She was fleeing for her life. Especially after his last little phone call.

The question now was, Where would she go? He knew nothing about her family, relatives, place of origin. The phone call had been rash. He'd had no time to do his usual research, and this was the embarrassing result. The only good news was that she had had no time to take a purse, identification, her car keys. He had seen all these things in her kitchen. So at this moment, she was effectively homeless.

He wouldn't wait to entertain Mutaib's anxious inquires. First thing in the morning, he would ask Mutaib to use the resources of the bank to get details on the woman. He would say that he was just sweeping up, making sure there wouldn't be anxious relatives appearing out of nowhere to search for her or talk to the press. Banks, even foreign banks, could find out anything about an individual in America — account information, medical history, insurance records, credit histories, mortgages. He would ask Mutaib to put surveillance on all that — to make sure no one was tapping into the dead woman's accounts, he would say. And if they were, find who they were. And where they were. That way, if she accessed anything, it would give him a place to look. He must absolutely convince the princeling, and his factional masters back in the Kingdom, that she was dead and buried. They must have no doubts as to the efficiency of their hired gun. His reputation in Hamburg among the Arab fanatics was one of amoral ruthlessness: He would do anything or anyone for money, and without blinking an eye. That's why they'd hired him in the first place.

He'd watched enough Ammie television to know that the Washington city police would be in an uproar, searching for the perpetrator, even if the policeman didn't die right away. All points bulletin. Cop killer. BOLO. Full court press. Lockdown on the streets. Scumbags up against the wall. He knew all the police idioms. But being police, they would concentrate on the easy route — they'd be looking for her, not him. They'd know there'd been a third party to that little mess. The dining room window broken from the outside. Mud and dirt in the front rooms. Glass from the front windows outside as well as inside. But he'd left no fingerprints, and the footprints could no longer be traced to his shoes, because by morning, they would be on their way to the landfill. They wouldn't have a clue as to his identity.

Unless.

He tried deep breathing again to stabilize his feverish brain. He knew he was thinking in circles again. The bolus of pain in his groin was making him forget something important. There might be two sets of police looking for Connie Wall, local and state police. No, not state. Wrong word. Here, they called it federal. Geheim Stadt Polizei. Gestapo. State secret police. No, still not right: Secret Service, yes, that was correct. His mind was drifting badly. He figured it must be the painkillers he'd taken.

Two sets of police hunting the nurse. The federals: What if they caught her? Would that help him or hurt him? She couldn't really describe him. He'd deliberately put the flashlight under his chin when he'd shown himself through the window; she would remember only the monster's face. There was a slim chance she might remember his face from the clinic, but the light should have distorted it beyond recognition. Plus, she had been visibly shocked by the vise coming through the window. No, she could not make the connection.

But the bait might.

He forced himself to concentrate, despite the waves of pain that were keeping perfect time with his pulse. Line by line, do the logic, one more time. If the Ammies had taken the bait, they would need Wall to lead them to the name of the patient whose transcript he had faked in that record. Because that was the key to the deception: First aim them at the wrong date; all right, they'd done that. Then set them in pursuit of the wrong face. Which did exist, oh my, yes, it did, even though they'd have to look hard for details, all the way back to the Stasi files. The trick was that he no longer looked anything like Jäger Heismann, nor was Heismann even his real name. That was the whole idea behind the bait: Give them something to chew on, but tie them up in knots, focus them on the wrong target and the wrong man, make them spin their wheels hunting for code lists, patient records, anything that could identify the mad bomber. Waste their time. Tease them with a threat, but the wrong threat.

But with the woman on the run, it would now be up to him to initiate stage two. It was still a bit early, but there was probably no avoiding it now. Besides, soon he would need to concentrate on other things. Like setting up the weapon.

He leaned his head back against the cool tile. So, go forward. After calming Mutaib, he would activate the second stage of the deception. Without the woman, he would need a new channel. All right, how?

He had no idea. He shifted position in the tub and instantly regretted it as his brain was overwhelmed by new lances of pain. He couldn't think like this. His testicles were killing him. He took a long, very careful breath. His bones ached with the pain of it. Bitch!

It was already Wednesday. Tomorrow, Thursday, he was supposed to occupy the house and begin his technical preparations. He needed to be physically operational again in twenty-four hours. He rubbed his cheek and felt the stinging powder-burn specks. His brain was spinning slowly, like some great galaxy. The deception plan — had it really been necessary?

Focus. Back to the woman. He still needed to kill her. The house would occupy his days. But nights? Nights would be for hunting, injured or not. If she stayed in the Washington area, and did anything electronic, the bank would detect it. Assuming the Ammies thought they had a real transcript, his transcript, then they should be searching hard for the doctors' code list. If they found it, they'd be off after their terrorist prime suspect, Herr Jäger Heismann. They'd query Interpol. The bank would be informed. And then he wouldn't need her. If, after a few days, there was no indication of that, he'd find a way to prompt them. So either way, the nurse was now fully expendable. This time, once he found her, he'd cut her fucking head right off.

Circles again. You just went through all of this, he told himself. God in heaven! Focus, idiot.

He desperately needed to sleep, to rest. To make this pain stop. He reached for the bottle of pills sitting on the toilet lid and took two more pills. His stomach almost rebelled, but the thought of puking froze his senses. The pain would be unbearable. He drifted, trying the deep-breathing technique again. After awhile, he felt a little bit better.

And then he realized how he could do it. After tonight, the police would be all over that house. And they would most certainly monitor her telephone. Why not leave her a telephone message at the appropriate moment? Assuming all this propaganda was true, that the local and the federal police were fully integrated these days, that might get them to work on the matter of Jäger Heismann. Put Mutaib's stupid little plan behind him once and for all, and get ready for the big event.

At 11:30 p.m., Connie Wall crept out of the ladies' lounge in Lord & Taylor and into the bed and bath department. She had heard the cleaning crew come through this area an hour ago, and she had spent some anxious moments hidden behind the couch while two Hispanic ladies vacuumed the lounge and cleaned the bathroom itself. Listening at the door, she could still hear big vacuum cleaners running somewhere on the floor, so there shouldn't be motion detectors waiting for her if she left the rest room area. She figured she had thirty minutes before the crews were done and the store went on to its nighttime security system.

Keeping low to the floor to avoid cameras, she headed for a display area called Arabian Nights, which had freestanding columns, silk curtains, Persian carpets, and a half a dozen exotic-looking bed arrangements. Some delirious decorator overdid his special mushrooms, she thought as she slipped between the billowing curtains, checking continuously to make sure there wasn't a brace of rent-a-cops headed her way. On the other hand, the display provided a perfect area to hole up for the night. Assuming they didn't have Dobermans wandering around after they turned the lights off, she should be able to hide there until morning, when she'd get herself back into the ladies' room and wait for the store to open.

She'd taken the Yellow line all the way to Springfield, in northern Virginia, and then decamped into the sprawling Springfield Mall. The giant shopping center had been crowded with people. The whole place was heated, and it sported three food courts, where she could get something hot to eat and then hang out under one of the all-news TVs and keep an eye on what was happening. Once in the food court, she'd taken off the UPS jacket and turned it inside out, not wanting to display the one bit of clothing they might know she'd be wearing. But two teenage girls recognized it, and one offered to trade her brand-new L. L. Bean parka for the way cool UPS jacket. Connie took her up on it, then moved to a different food court in the next wing of the mall.

She knew she didn't have enough money for a Washington-area motel, not even one of the curry palaces down on Route 1. She'd remembered the story of the woman who had lived and even delivered a baby in a Wal-Mart store, and she began doing some reconnaissance of the various stores. The Lord & Taylor store looked like the best bet, so she had gone to ground in the rest room about fifteen minutes before the closing announcements began to purr through the cavernous store.

Now she made herself a nest behind a pile of huge cushions, pulling an entire rug over her hidey-hole in case there were security people patrolling after hours. She nestled Cat's gun under her right armpit. Right now, she was warm, secure in a locked building, and completely out of sight. She wondered if Cat Ballard was still alive. He'd been gravely injured, given the way those cops had been reacting up there in her yard. She had washed her hands several times after getting into the mall, but they still felt sticky to her. Surely by now the cops would have put the scene together and know she hadn't done that to Cat. If they'd brought in dogs, they'd have found her trail down the bluff and into the creek area, and signs of the man who'd pursued her into the park. If she was really lucky, they had him in custody. But if not, then he was out there somewhere. She had visions of him prowling the mall parking lots in a sinister-looking car, like some predator hunkering down outside its prey's burrow.

She knew that was ridiculous, but this was all new territory for her. At the very least, the District cops wanted to talk to her, and they would have her high on the suspect list when they did. The guy with the monster face was looking for her, and those two federal agents would add their own pressure as soon as they found out she was on the run.

She was pretty sure that big guy hadn't been fooled by her deflections on the transcripts. The store had gone quiet, but she had to assume the entire place was now being swept by motion and heat sensors, along with video surveillance. She was thirsty, and she wished she'd bought a bottle of water, even at the mall's exorbitant prices. But she couldn't move now. Not until she heard signs of the staff arriving in the morning. And then what? She still had no money, clothes, ID, or transportation. She could try going back to her house, but surely there'd still be cops all over it.

No, she had to get right out of town. If the clinic had not been destroyed, she could have hidden there.

The clinic. Well, part of it was still there. The daytime doctors' half. Yes, there'd been smoke damage, and the owners were probably going for a declaration of total loss, but the upstairs was physically still intact. The premises were shut down, of course, while the docs and their lawyers haggled with the insurance company and its lawyers. But the building was still there. The upstairs office. The upstairs recovery room, with its beds. And then she remembered something. The night docs had a small safe in the back of the clinic, in the cleaning closet, where they kept the petty cash. And she, as the senior administrative assistant, had the combination. She opened her eyes. Had the investigators found that safe? There was never much money in there, perhaps five hundred to one thousand dollars, except for those odd occasions when one of the clients paid in cash at night, which Dr. Khandoor would always get deposited the next morning without fail.

But if they hadn't found it, and she could get to it, a thousand dollars could get her on a Greyhound bus for parts unknown. Then maybe she'd contact the cops and begin a process of long-distance negotiation. Tell her side of the story, but from a safe distance, not from the depths of a holding cell in the notorious D.C. jail.

When to do it? Quickly. First thing in the morning. During rush hour, where she'd be one face in a crowd of thousands. Walk up Connecticut in broad daylight? Yes. Walk right up to the building and go inside. Like she belonged there. See if the money was there, and then hide out until darkness and the evening rush hour, when the Metro would again be full of people, and then get away. There were too many people chasing her right now. She wanted some distance, and then she'd sort it out — on her terms. I haven't done anything wrong, damn it, she told herself.

She revisited that terrible moment when she had tripped over Cat's body. She had a terrible feeling that all of this was her fault. And if he did survive, he would still have some problems to face. Especially at home. She wept at the thought of her predicament, and his.