"Wish it would happen," Phoebe said.

"What?" Dewey, his legs dangling over nothing, lifted the night goggles and looked at her.

"Whatever's going to go wrong."

"Try to be less optimistic, darling."

Phoebe couldn't see his grin, but she heard it in his voice. He repositioned his goggles and started his descent. Phoebe checked the guards one last time before starting down, as that feeling of someone walking over her grave got stronger.

Stern paused to light a cigarette-and to study the desolate street-before entering the rundown garage. Inside he found Billy and two other men pitching pennies by a dark car that wasn't as ramshackle as it appeared to be. The enclosed place was fetid and stuffy. Underpinning the acrid stench of sweat were a variety of petroleum-based scents, stale and fresh cigarette smoke and...Cheetos?

He turned toward the smell and found Farley munching out of a bag of the bright orange puffs. Farley, Harley and the other three men were to lead the assault on TelTech tonight, but only Farley and Harley were...scheduled to return with RABBIT. They were the only ones Stern trusted to keep their mouths shut. Since Farley had inside help, he could have walked in and out of TelTech with his eyes closed, but that wouldn't look good on the six o'clock news.

Appearances were everything in politics.

Stern took a last puff of his cig, then dropped it onto the gritty cement and ground it out with his shoe. Interesting that he felt so much more comfortable here, with Farley and his doomed goons, than in Harding's lofty office. Even more interesting that he'd worked so hard to get away from places like this. He'd hooked his life to Harding's ruthlessly rising star and never looked back.

Until now.

Stern had seen and recognized the look in Harding's eyes. Trust was gone. Perhaps Harding had been receiving anonymous notes like the ones being sent to him? Someone was sowing the seeds of distrust. Someone was succeeding. An uneasy truce was in place until the RABBIT problem was taken care of, but after? Only one of them would be left standing. Harding had never been one to take prisoners.

"Your men ready?" he asked Farley.

Farley tossed the empty bag into a greasy barrel, grabbing an even greasier rag to wipe the orange residue from his hands. "You guys ready?"

They shuffled into what passed for a line.

"When do we get paid?" Billy asked, appointing himself spokesman for the group.

"Like always," Stern said. "When the job is done." He walked toward Billy, not stopping until Billy took a step back. "And done...right." He looked at Farley. "Hit the road."

Farley met Stern's eyes until ten seconds had ticked away, then moved toward the car. His men in black followed.

From an air conditioning grill, Phoebe watched the guard finish his round and head for the elevator with the eagerness of a horse heading for the barn. Phoebe wasn't surprised. The Broncos game was heating up nicely. An unexpected bonus. They'd picked up almost five extra minutes thanks to the home team.

Using her keypad, Phoebe created a film loop of the empty hall, then nodded at Dewey. In short order they were moving toward the second-to-the-last barrier between them and RABBIT. Dewey attached the device to the keypad that operated the lock and popped open the door.

Inside, Phoebe headed straight for the row of state-of-the-art research and development computers, offering up a silent prayer that Ollie had finished his work here before he died. If he hadn't, she wouldn't be able to get into RABBIT's data files. Dewey was on the safe before Phoebe could sit down and start the boot-up. Other than the computers, the room was oddly barren, as if the occupants had already moved on to other things.

She checked the guards again, noticing that the camera was recording them for some reason. No time to worry about it now and it wouldn't hurt anything. Maybe she and Dewey could watch the game later. It was in the final quarter with the Broncos still ahead.

"We've picked up six minutes."

"I'll be done in three," Dewey said.

They went in quietly, their weapons camouflaged by cleaning equipment. Farley and Harley stayed in the rear, using the other men as cover from the surveillance cameras. A guard strolled out to meet them, his attention still drawn toward the office blaring with the sounds of the Broncos game.

The guard had a heartbeat to realize they weren't the regular cleaning crew before Billy took him out with a silenced gun. The men moved into the office and took out the other guards quickly and quietly.

Farley stopped by the first guard and picked up his weapon before he followed them in. Two shots and Billy was down.

The other two men didn't blink. They'd already been told that Billy wasn't supposed to come back from the job. They hadn't heard about their own demise. Harley used another guard's gun on them, then dropped the weapon by the guard's body. Farley returned his gun to its dead owner while Harley found the security tapes and removed them.

Farley dialed Stern on his cell phone. "The building is ours." He hung up without waiting for an answer and followed his brother to the elevators.

"I'm in." The safe door swung open with a soft swish.

"So am I." Phoebe looked up from the terminal. "I'll be done downloading data in five. Then I'll activate the virus." She looked at her watch. "We're still ahead of schedule and-"

She stopped as something odd in the security office caught her attention.

"Houston, we have our problem."

"Cops?" Dewey swept everything in the safe into his pack, closed the door and spun the dial.

"I wish." A few keystrokes pulled the camera up on her monitor so Dewey could see what she was seeing.

"Crap! Do you think they're headed here, and what do we do about it if they are?"

Phoebe didn't answer. Her mind was racing, exploring various options, searching for the path out of the maze. "First"-even as she spoke, she was typing again, tapping into the security terminal inside the tomb that had been the security office- "let's get the cops involved." She activated the silent alarm.

"Okay." Dewey didn't sound thrilled by her action, but he didn't argue. "Though you might have waited for your data download to get done."

"Oh yeah. Three minutes." She pulled up the camera in the elevator the two guys were coming up on. "And they'll be here in two minutes unless..." It seemed to take a long time to get into the elevator controls while Dewey counted off the floors.

"Five...six...seven...we're next."

"I'm in." Just as eight lit up on their panel, she managed to stop the doors from opening. "I think I'll leave them there for the cops."

"It would be poetic justice." Dewey's chuckle was absentminded. "Download?"

"Done. Virus uploading." In the monitor, the two guys were punching buttons and trying to pry open the door. One pulled out a crowbar. "Oh, oh. They don't want to wait. We're done. Disconnect."

Dewey removed the satellite uplink from the computer, while Phoebe tossed her gear back in her pack.

"Up or down?"

"Up."

"You killed all the elevators, didn't you?"

"Didn't have time to be selective."

They were at the stairwell door when Phoebe heard a shout. She looked back and saw that the two men had managed to force a crack in the elevator door. The one not holding the crowbar reached for his gun. Phoebe didn't wait to see what he'd do with it. She slid into the stairwell barely an inch ahead of Dewey and started up the steps.

"You just had to pull the tiger's tail, didn't you?" Dewey said, the words panting out between the sound of their feet slapping the concrete stairs. They had rounded the last flight when the echoing sound of pursuit reached their ears.

The police file was depressing reading. According to the autopsy report, Kerry Anne Beauleigh had been pregnant and nearly flunking out of university when she apparently slit her wrists. The report assumed it was someone at school who'd gotten her pregnant. It theorized that she'd returned home despondent over that someone's rejection and killed herself. The assumption: Nadine had come home and found her dead-her bloody fingerprints had been all over the bathroom and her bedroom-and taken off "in a fit of grief." The sisters had been close, and Nadine had been having problems at school, too. The file also noted that their mother had been "sickly" and unable to supervise the girls closely. No mention of where she'd been when Kerry Anne slit her wrists, but the stepfather, Montgomery Justice had been playing cards with his hunting buddies-one of whom was the doctor who performed the autopsy.