"Started a pool on how many dead feds there'd be by August first. Hundred dollars a guess, enter as many times as you want before the cutoff on July fourth. Winner takes the whole pot, earliest guess wins if there's a tie. I keep the money in the safe. Pot's over twelve thousand as of this morning. He's-"

"Twelve thousand dollars?" Ray interrupted.

"Yeah. Hunter won't tell me what his own guess is, but he did say it was three figures. He said it wouldn't be just ATF agents. Looks like he was right. You want in?"

"I'll pass." The bartender shrugged.

"Oh, and one other thing. There's a rumor going around, and a lot of people think it's crazy, but I don't. What some folks are saying is that on this surveillance deal, the feds weren't looking to make a coke bust." "What, then?"

"Steroids." The bartender saw Ray's look, and continued. "Think about it, Ray. It makes sense. A bunch of those action-film muscleboys have been coming out here for a while now. And the studio heads've been buying up acreage like bandits. Hell, you know that, some of it was yours."

"And...?"

"And steroids are just as illegal as coke now, so they get imported from South America, too. Only the labs making the stuff are legit pharmaceutical companies like Searle and Upjohn and Parke-Davis, not a bunch of beaners in a dirty warehouse." Henry was right Ray thought in astonishment as the bartender continued.

"The studios have a huge investment in their stars. You think they're going to let some squirrels from the DEA throw a few hundred million bucks of their money out the window just 'cause a couple of their boxoffice studs are on the juice?"

"You sound rather knowledgeable about this, Peter," Ray said with a smile.

"Hell, it's no big secret. Half the guys in the Aspen Club have been on the juice at one time or another. Probably more than that, crazy as this town is about strong bodies. The girls, too." He smiled conspiratorially. "You trying to tell me you've never come across an Aspen chick with a clit like the end of your little finger? Ah-ha! Gotcha!" he said in triumph when he saw the look on Ray's face.

"So you think it was the head of a Hollywood studio who tortured federal agents to death and dumped their bodies up by Starwood?" Ray Johnson asked, deadpan.

"I think it could've been anybody. I know that nobody I've talked to thinks it's particularly terrible, and that if it keeps the feds away from here from now on, they're all for it. Even the local cops don't want any part of this mess. And the folks the feds have questioned? You'd think they all of a sudden turned into those stupid street mimes you see at the music festival." The bartender looked down at the hundred-dollar bill Ray had placed on the bar.

"You want your check? Your huevos aren't out yet-you got to go?"

"No, I'm in no hurry," Ray said, pushing the bill towards the man. "I just thought I'd take a chance in Hunter's pool."

"Mr. Neumann, I think we've found something."

"What is it?"

"That one in Philadelphia-the ATF agent who got burned up in his car. Remember how you said you thought somebody bumped him off the road, then went in on foot and lit his gas tank?" "Yeah...?"

"We may have found the bump vehicle." The FBI agent picked up a legal pad and consulted the notes he had just taken so as not to forget anything. "Mid-1970's Chevy Suburban. Big mother. Philly cops ticketed it next to a mall parking lot for no plates, then saw the keys were in it. Went to check the VIN, and the tag had been removed. Front corner was bashed in some, and it looked recent. That set off some alarm bells with one of the officers that had seen your FAX."

"Glad to see somebody in local law enforcement pays attention to us. Call 'em up and tell them to hold that vehicle for us."

"I already did, but there's more. When they went to check the serial number on the frame, it was gone, too. Not ground off, like they usually do. If it had been, the cops could acid-etch the steel and bring the number back up. This guy had used a hammer and punch and stippled the whole area to displace the metal."

"Cute."

"So next they look for the number on the engine block, and one of the gearheads on the force tells them it doesn't have the original motor in it."

"The guy put in a new motor?"

"No, it had been in there a while, but it was a rebuilt job." He consulted his notes. "They said the big boat had a hundred forty on the clock."

"How about on the body, or anywhere else-any numbers there?"

"They didn't do that back then. The build tag on the rearend's gone, and the keys are hardware-store dupes, so there's no code there, either. That's why the cops aren't sure what year the thing is. Oh, something else: The guy checks the oil, and it's damn near new. Said it had to've been changed a couple hundred miles ago, at most. And all four tires were new. The car guy said they were really good ones. Lots better than he'd put on an old cancered-out Suburban. They checked for prints, but the whole thing had been wiped clean, they think with gasoline." The agent looked at his boss. "What do you think?"

"I think we may have gotten a break. Get our Philadelphia office on it. Find out who locally sells those kind of tires. Check the big chains first. Try to find the guy who waited on him. Maybe he can give us a description. Get hold of copies of the want ads from the last three weeks. See can they find who sold it. It'll probably be a private seller, not a dealer." Neumann thought a moment.

"Get hold of the locals in all the other cities where ATF agents have been killed. See if they've come up with any other sterile vehicles that've been abandoned."

"I'll get on it."

"Good job," Neumann said, and was about to say more when another man came up to him. "Sir, we've run up against a wall on what blew up the helicopters."

"What's the problem, Joe?" Neumann asked.

"Choppers have been cut up. Hauled off and dismantled for scrap."

"You're kidding. Who gave that order?"

"Don't know, sir. Somebody pretty high up, I'd guess."

Greenwell Alex Neumann thought in disgust. He could get it done. The FBI agent considered this newest bit of information. Did ATF agents take out the choppers? It's a crazy theory, but even if it's true, would Dwight Greenwell have known about it? Neumann asked himself. No way. He would have stopped it Neumann decided. Greenwell's just as clueless as the rest of us. He had the wrecks destroyed to save face. Just in case.

"...matched with one of the readings we got from-"

"What was that, Joe? Sorry, my mind was elsewhere."

"I was saying that I ran the results from the mass spectrometer against all known U.S. and foreign explosives and explosive ordnance for which we've got prints. I got one match that's dead-on, sir." "What is it?"

"It's the compound inside a particular 20mm incendiary projectile used by the Air Force. Loaded for the multibarrel cannon mounted on some of their fighters, for air-to-air combat. The 20mm Vulcan. M246 is the military designation of that projectile."

"How big is the gun that fires it?"

"I can't give you an exact answer, since I've only seen pictures. But I'd say it's about eight feet long, and weighs three hundred pounds or so. Maybe more."

"Could one have been put on that third helicopter-the one that's missing?"

"That's out of my department, sir, but the Vulcan has an awful lot of recoil. I don't think so." "How about the back of a pickup truck?"

"Maybe..." the agent said dubiously. "But how would you aim it? And according to the guys I talked to, the Vulcan runs at sixty or seventy rounds a second, which is the only way to hit a flying target. Sounds like the Devil's own impact wrench when it fires, and no one in the area that day heard anything like that. Also slows those big jets down twenty miles an hour. Probably rock on the springs of any civilian vehicle it was mounted on, if it didn't flip it over."

"Just thinking out loud, Joe. So now we're looking at a bomb made out of disassembled 20mm slugs?" "Maybe," the agent said, not satisfied with that idea, either. "I sure as hell wouldn't want to cut one apart, just to get a third of an ounce of something anyone with half a brain could mix up himself." "Hm." These guys got a lot more than half a brain Alex Neumann thought. "Wish we still had those wrecks to look at."

June 21 "Feeling the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune today, Mr. President?" Harrison Potter asked as his old friend stepped into his office and sat down. The President had come to discuss task force issues with Potter before the meeting. His two Secret Service men remained outside the door.

"Only a few little ones, Harry," he said with a smile, which abruptly vanished as he thought of something. "Not like that poor woman in Missouri." Potter nodded in agreement.

"The headlines and the articles this morning were actually restrained, I thought. They could have been a lot worse." The President cocked a skeptical eyebrow.

"You wouldn't say that if you were the one who'd just had to offer condolences to the widow." He shook his head. "As if it really matters how the papers handle it when your husband's body gets found in the ghetto with a knife in the chest, wearing a cock ring and not much else."

"What?"

"It's a piece of metal or plastic that's made to-"

"I know what one is, sir," Potter interrupted with feigned irritation. "I didn't know the late Congressman had been...using one."

"Oh. Well, he was."

"Is that common knowledge?"

"Somehow I have the feeling it will be before the day's out," he sighed. "Harry, why is it that so many politicians are...?"

"Willing to engage in self-destructive behavior?" Potter suggested.

"Thank you, Harry. That's much better. 'Pussy hounds with no more brains than a load of gravel' was what I had been about to say. No matter," he said with a wave of his hand. "Rhetorical question. I guess my mam surprise is not that it happened, but that it wasn't someone else. The Senator from Massachusetts, for example."

"Mr. President, I believe that gentleman prefers, as they say, the higher-priced spread." "Good afternoon, everyone. I'm running a little late, so let's get started. Roland, you want to go first?"

"Yes, Mr. President," he said, walking over to the door and opening it to whisper to the Secret Service agent standing on the other side. Here comes Sigmund Freud Neumann thought. The agent ushered in a balding, bespectacled man who looked exactly like the way most of the people in the room expected a psychiatrist to look.

"This is Dr. Morris Berkowitz. He has been of great help to the Bureau, developing psychological profiles of criminals being sought by the FBI," Lemp said. Dr. Berkowitz nodded at the group and sat down at the front table, behind an aluminum pitcher and a full glass of icewater. He referred to some handwritten notes before speaking. Like most people speaking before the President of the United States, he wasted no time.

"For purposes of psychological evaluation, psychiatrists prefer spontaneous spoken testimony. At the moment, we have none from this person claiming to be Wilson Blair. We have only three written communications. Written words, especially those prepared on a computer before being delivered electronically, are subject to unrestricted revision and editing before they are sent. However, this in itself can be of benefit. What a person chooses to say after having a long time to think about it can tell us a lot.

"First of all, the three Internet messages were not written by Wilson Blair. Director Lemp has provided me with videotape footage of Blair speaking, as well as reports and other communications he has written. The Internet messages were not sent by the same man."

"You're sure of that?"

"Positive. Aside from substantial differences in style and construction, nothing in Blair's past indicates dissatisfaction or disillusionment with government service. The Internet messages are undoubtably the work of someone who has his own reasons for claiming to be Blair. He may believe, and with justification, that his words carry more weight if the public hears them come from a high-level government official. More importantly, however, the man who wrote these words is thumbing his nose at the federal government. He is taunting us, putting his own words in the mouths of our people." Berkowitz took a sip of water.

Here it comes Neumann thought. / wish Angela were here. I bet she'd have a better handle on it than this guy. Alex Neumann had spent quite a bit of time with the psychologist he met at the Quantico class on sexual harassment awareness training. He had taken Angela Riggs to dinner on three occasions in the last week, but was finding it harder to see her with the increasing demands of this new assignment.

"I can go into detail and explanation if you want," Berkowitz continued, "but my opinion is that the person who wrote these Internet messages is intelligent, well-educated, and thinks of himself as much smarter, more clever, and generally better than the people he normally deals with. He looks down on those with less education, and he likes to show how witty he is. In his first message, he sneered at government employees with GED degrees.

"In his last message, he used the phrase 'Sicilian gentlemen' to describe Mafia thugs. He also offers this 'suggestion' that ATF agents resign publicly by placing an ad in the newspaper. This is a smug person who likely has no close friends. His familiarity with computers is consistent with this. Ultimately, this man wants to be caught. He wants to be caught so that the whole country can see the clever individual who made the giant federal government look foolish." During this testimony, Neumann suddenly realized that the President was looking at him. Shit. Hope I wasn't rolling my eyes.