"Any idea about times?"

She took a piece of paper out of her bag and pushed it across the table. "I made a copy of her schedule. I'd call at one of the first two events-the schedule there is pretty hard. Later in the day, the timetable tends to slip."

"All right," Lucas said. "Thank you. Uh, do you have Carver's double-secret cell-phone number?"

"I do." She pulled back the paper with the schedule on it, took a pen out of her bag, and wrote the number on the paper. "Don't tell him where you got it."

"I won't," Lucas said.

"Did you find out what Carver did in the army? Is that what you've got on him?"

Lucas's eyebrows went up. "You know about that?"

"I don't know what it is, but I know something bad happened," Green said. "I suspect people wound up dead. I tried to find out, but I'm told it's all very classified."

"How about that," Lucas said.

She gazed at him for a moment, then said, "But you know?"

He smiled: "That's classified."

She smiled back. "You're a piece of work, Davenport. If it weren't for Weather, I'd take you to bed."

"If it weren't for Weather, I'd go," Lucas said.

THE EXCHANGE KEPT LUCAS warm all the way out to the car. He'd jump off a high building before he betrayed Weather, but a little extracurricular flirtation kept the blood circulating; not that all of it went to the brain.

Green asked Lucas not to call Carver until at least Grant's first appearance of the day. "I want it to be in Carver's head that I was around when you called. A little psychological insurance that he doesn't think of me, when he wonders how you got the number for his phone. He's a scary guy."

"I can do that," Lucas said. "And you lay low. It should be over in another day or two, one way or another."

She said, "I feel like it's gotta happen today. Everything is coming down to today. Taryn's snap polls say she's up, but it's really, really close, and Smalls may be narrowing the lead. It feels to me like everything's going to end tonight, when the votes come in."

CHAPTER 22

After leaving Green, Lucas went back to BCA headquarters in St. Paul and rounded up Del, Shrake, and Jenkins. After talking with Henry Sands, the director, he got the green light to borrow four more male and two female agents from other sections. They'd work in two shifts; he would have preferred to use Virgil Flowers to lead the second shift, but Flowers was still in New Mexico. Instead, he assigned the second shift to Bob Shaffer, a lead investigator with whom he'd worked on other cases.

He got the working group together in a classroom and briefed all nine of them on the entire Smalls/Tubbs investigation, and told them about his planned approach to Carver.

"One of the problems we're facing is that these two guys are probably tougher than any of us, and very experienced in killing, very cool about it," Lucas said. "What I'm going to do is try to drive a wedge between them, which could create an explosive situation. Could create an explosive situation-but it might not do anything at all. There's no way to tell what will happen. We're going to spend today, tonight, and tomorrow monitoring Carver, and Dannon, too. If nothing happens before then, it's probably a bust."

When he was done, one of the agents, Sarah Bradley, raised a hand and asked, "If you really get Carver jammed up with this army case, and if he's armed, what happens if he goes off on you?"

"He's too experienced to go off on me, I think," Lucas said. "If we hook up at a restaurant or coffee shop-that's what I'm thinking-it'd be too public. He might leave ahead of me, go storming out of the place, and then try to back-shoot me, I suppose, but I don't see that, either. He'll want to think about it."

"But this army thing-it sounds impulsive, like he cracked," Bradley said. "If he cracked then, he could crack again."

Lucas said, "That's not the feeling I got. I got the feeling that the army was talking about a cold series of executions. He thought he could get away with it. Either that nobody would know, or that none of his platoon would tell, or that if somebody did, he'd be covered. He was partly right-they kicked him out but didn't prosecute. The point is, it seems to me that he ... thought about it. At least a bit."

"That's what you think, but not what you know," Bradley said. "I'm not so much worried about you. If he shoots you in the coffee shop ... then he'd have to kill the witnesses. And he could do that. He's essentially already done it once."

Lucas hadn't considered that, and said, "Huh."

"You'd be better off with a couple more guns in the shop," Bradley said. "Probably Jane and me. He doesn't sound like the type to be looking at women as potential combatants: he'd be too macho for that."

Jane was the other female agent, Jane Stack.

Lucas said, "Let me think about it."

Shrake said, "Sarah's exactly right. The rest of us look too much like cops, except Del, and he'd recognize Del. Let's put Sarah and Jane in."

Lucas eventually agreed, and divided the group in two. "I don't know when I'll be talking to him, but I expect it'll be late afternoon or evening. As soon as I find out, the first shift sets up. We'll monitor the meeting-I'll be wearing a wire-and then we'll take him all the way through the day, until he goes to bed. This could be a very long night, with the election. As soon as we're sure that the night's over, Bob and his guys will pick him up, take him all day tomorrow, and then the first shift picks him up again tomorrow evening. We're all clear on overtime. As soon as we leave here, the first shift should go on home, or wherever, get your shopping done, get something to eat ..."

When the bureaucratic details were handled, they broke up. Del, Shrake, and Jenkins followed him back to his office, where they talked some more about the surveillance aspects. A tech would put a tracking bug on Carver's vehicle, and Del would try to get one on Dannon's, if he could do it without being seen.

"The big question is: Is he gonna talk, or is he gonna stonewall, or is he gonna shoot, or is he gonna run?" Jenkins said.

"That's four questions," Shrake said. "It irritates me that you can't count."

THEY WERE STILL AT IT when Flowers called from Albuquerque. Lucas put him on the speaker phone.

"I talked to Rodriguez, and he seems like a pretty straight guy. He's going to school here, he's got a wife and a couple of kids. He's willing to make a formal statement if we need it. It's about what we thought, with a couple of other things ..."

"Do tell," Jenkins said.

Rodriguez told Flowers that military intelligence sources had pinpointed what they thought would be a meeting between two rival Taliban chieftains in a border village. How that intelligence was developed, Rodriguez didn't know for sure, but he suspected the original tip came from a paid Afghani source in the village, and that had been backed up by electronic intelligence-the army had been monitoring the relevant Taliban cell phones.

In any case, Carver's unit, which included Rodriguez, and was basically made up of a couple of officers and a bunch of NCOs, had been dropped five kilometers from the meeting site. The soldiers had followed a little-used ridge path into the village. The house where the meeting was to take place had been spotted by the informant, who'd placed a tiny multi-mirrored reflector, similar to those used on golf course pins, on the roof of the place.

When the attack team had gotten close enough, they'd illuminated the village-which was made up of forty or so houses built on the edge of an intermittent stream-with infrared light, and had spotted the sparkle of the reflector.

They'd entered the house at three o'clock in the morning, in a raid pretty much like any police raid. They'd found the Taliban asleep on an assortment of beds and air mattresses and on the floor.

One of the men had tried to resist and was shot and killed. The others had not resisted and were frisked and cuffed at both the hands and the feet and made to lie facedown on the floor, Rodriguez said.

When they'd launched the raid, they'd simultaneously called for helicopter support, which was waiting. But within minutes after the men in the house had been subdued, the raiders began taking heavy fire from neighboring houses.

"The choppers included a gunship, and Rodriguez said that from the air, they could see what looked like muzzle flashes from dozens of weapons," Flowers said. "That was not supposed to happen. They realized pretty quickly that they weren't going to be able to haul a bunch of bound prisoners out of there, so they decided to run for it."