"Do some reconnaissance around town today, get set up for our next...engagement. Catch a five o'clock flight to Denver and then Aspen. Check in with Ray, find out if he's heard from Allen. Tomorrow I'll see if I can fly that jet of his."

"Busy day."

"No rest for the wicked."

"Congressman, it's some reporter from the Washington Times. I tried to get rid of him, but he says he needs your approval to run a story. Something about SAT scores...? You want me to hang up on him?"

"Nonono, I'll take it. Let me, ah, go in my office, where it's quieter. What line is he on?" "Two."

"Okay. Thanks." Richard Gaines went into his private office and closed the door. "Hello?" he said into the phone.

"Congressman Gaines?"

"Speaking."

"Yeah, Jim Howard at the Times," Henry said, making up a name and saying it in a rush so Gaines wouldn't catch it. "I got a very interesting phone call from a man named William Pressler in Missouri not too long ago. He says he knows you, or used to, at least. He's got an interesting story about why your SAT scores were so high. Says you wouldn't have gone to Washington University otherwise. Would you care to comment?" There was a long silence. That's it Henry said to himself. Get that old mind working. I'll wait you out. First one to talk is the loser, and I intend to win this one, Congressman.

"I don't think you have much of a story. Not after all this time, certainly." Henry heard Gaines swallow and inhale.

"I think you're wrong, Congressman. The public loves to hear about it when you folks pay your babysitters in cash, and this is a lot more interesting than that, don't you think?"

"Ted Kennedy was thrown out of Harvard for paying someone to take his test for him, and that didn't hurt his political career." There was a whine in Gaines' voice, and Henry smiled. Wouldn't that make a great quote he thought. Wishful thinking if ever I heard it.

"As to some unproven allegation about something that supposedly happened back in the 'sixties..." Congressman Gaines left the sentence unfinished, but laughed nervously.

"Congressman, I'd say you were right if your last name was Kennedy. But it isn't. Unless you got a few million stashed away I don't know about, this thing could be very bad for you." There's the stick. "Thing is," Henry went on, "I agree with you. Who cares if you bought your SATs? Not like there's a minimum score you have to have before you can be a Congressman. But I need a story. That's my job." Now the carrot. "So help me out here. Tell me what's going on with the task force."

"Those meetings are private. With the President."

"Of course. But all the agencies are in on it, and some of those guys are already talking, like they always do. Give me something, and I'll go to them for verification."

"You won't mention my name?"

"Never. Won't even say it's from one of the people on the task force. I'll make like it came from inside ATF or FBI, wherever. We always protect our sources." There was another long pause where Henry held his tongue.

"Okay," Gaines said finally. "There's not much to report. Everybody says Blair is dead, and it's some terrorist group that's doing the killing and pretending to be him. The suspect list sounds huge, like a couple hundred thousand people. They're going after some special kind of dealer or something first, which gets it down to thirty or forty thousand."

"What kind of dealer?"

"NSA, I think they said. Not just dealers but something about dealers and people with NSA licenses. They said there were over 30,000 of them. Oh, and the FBI found a car in Philadelphia they think was used in one of the killings, with all the serial numbers ground off."

"Do they have anyone in custody?"

"No, it was a dead end. But they're looking for more abandoned cars. Then the CIA had some British guy in, talking about the IRA. You might could get hold of him and talk to him. Nigel something. Had two last names. Laughed at us and said since his soldiers can't stop the IRA, there wasn't anything we could do about these people here. He was a real jerk. ATF brought in some guy from Michigan who makes bulletproof vests." David Richards? Henry thought. Bet he gave them an earful.

"He complained a lot about the rules his company has to follow. Oh, and he told the FBI to go check out the friends and relatives of the people ATF had killed or put in prison. He said they were the most likely suspects. Talked about how he had a bunch of friends in prison, which kind of surprised me, that he'd say that in front of the President."

"Congressman, one of the things I'm trying to get a handle on is the human angle, and you just touched on that. What's the dynamic inside this task force? Can you tell how the people in it feel about each other?"

"Well, I don't think the President likes Dwight Greenwell. He hasn't seemed too impressed with anything Greenwell has said. He seems okay with the FBI guys. The younger one, Neumann, has been doing a lot of the talking and it looks like the President is listening. Schaumberg talks a lot sometimes, and I don't think the President likes him much, either. It's Harrison Potter, the old Chief Justice, that the President seems to respect the most. The rest of us don't speak much. Nobody likes Schaumberg," he added after a moment. No shit Henry thought.

"What's Potter's role been, so far?"

"It's kind of weird. He doesn't say much, but when he does, it usually makes someone nervous. Not the President, though. And he seems to be smiling sometimes when no one else is." There was a pause, and Henry decided Gaines was thinking. "He did talk a lot in the first meeting, about the gun laws and ATF procedures. He'd gone over to their office and asked a lot of questions. I don't think Greenwell liked that at all."

"You're saying some things I've heard from several of my other sources, Congressman," Henry lied. "Let me ask you something. What's the problem with Greenwell? Why don't people like him?"

"I think maybe some of the people blame Dwight Greenwell for what has been happening. Like it's partly his fault. I think maybe even the President has that feeling. A little bit, at least." Just wait Henry thought with a smile. It gets better.

"Congressman, I think I've got a much better story to write than that other one. Let me see what I can get from inside the various agencies, and talk to my editor. He may not want to blame Greenwell in print, but you've given me several angles to work. There are also some other reporters covering this, but none of them knows about the SAT stuff, so you can hang up on them. In fact, I'd prefer it."

"Okay."

"Good deal. And you can call me Bud. My friends do."

"But that...other story is dead?" Gaines asked quickly, before the other man could hang up. "Dead as Jerry Abel," Henry said immediately, and broke the connection.

At the end of the block, Billings used his outside mirrors and saw that no one was around. He pulled the Chevrolet over to the curb, and stopped. The two cardboard boxes full of old newspapers were still on the front seat, and the rack of suits and shirts still obscured the rear window.

Billings reached down, picked up the leather sandbag off the floor in front of him, and set it atop one of the boxes. Then he leaned over the driver's seat and retrieved the rifle he had stowed on the floor in the back the night before. It was a Marlin lever action in .45-70 caliber, a rifle many Missouri deer hunters favored. An old cotton dress shirt was wrapped around the buttstock and secured with tape. Another covered the entire barrel. The back half of the action, including the hammer, was exposed. Billings laid the wrapped-up weapon on top of the sandbag with its buttstock touching his chest and its muzzle pointed towards the right window. Then he dropped the car back into Drive, checked his left mirror, and pulled back out into the street.

At a few minutes before 7:00 CST, as Billings had learned to expect, the Cadillac appeared up ahead on the right, coming down the cross street. The Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency was a man of routines, and that fact made a simple task even easier. The Cadillac slowed for the 4-way stop and made a right turn onto the street where Billings was parked. Billings took his foot off the brake and drove up to the empty intersection where he made a complete stop. Then he accelerated to a point where he was about seventy-five yards behind the other man's car and maintained that distance as he followed the other vehicle through the suburban neighborhood.

The driver of the Cadillac stayed in the center lane heading west and braked on the gentle downgrade as the electric signal changed from yellow to red. Billings pressed the control for the Chevrolet's passenger window and lowered it all the way as he steered his vehicle into the left-turn lane and came to a stop beside the other car. He was familiar with all the lights in this area, and knew that at this one, left-turning traffic got a green arrow for about fifteen seconds while the straight-ahead signal remained red. Billings glanced over at the Cadillac to make sure of who was driving. Then he turned his attention to his own driver's side mirror, willing that no cars pull up behind them as they waited out the red light.

Billings adjusted the position of the rifle on the sandbag and disengaged the Marlin's safety. That done, he split his attention between his outside mirrors and the cross-traffic signal to his left.

When the light for the cross traffic turned yellow, Billings took a deep breath and swiveled his head to the right. He held the grip area of the Marlin's buttstock in his left hand, tilted his head so that his eye was directly above the barrel, and squeezed the trigger.

The 405-grain flatpoint traveled three feet in 1/400 of a second and deformed slightly as it chopped a jagged hole in the safety glass of the Cadillac's driver's-side window. It then struck the EPA Director just above his left ear with a remaining velocity of a little over nine hundred feet per second.

The blast inside the enclosed space was deafening, and Billings winced as his eardrums suffered the expected momentary agony. He saw the starred hole in the other car's left front window, within an inch of the spot he had intended, and the spray of blood on the passenger side of the Cadillac's interior. Then the other car began to roll out into the deserted intersection as the corpse's foot slipped off the brake pedal and the body slumped across the front seat.

The retired dry cleaner glanced once more at his mirrors, looked each way for anyone running a red light, then waited the final two seconds for the arrow. When it turned green, Billings cut his wheel left and accelerated at a normal rate. The other car was all the way across the intersection, gradually picking up speed on the gentle slope as it slowly drifted over into the empty oncoming-traffic lanes.

Two hundred seventeen yards past the signal, the EPA Director's Cadillac was traveling thirty-eight miles per hour when it slammed into the left front corner of a GEO sedan parked at the curb. The smaller car's right-side wheels caught on the curb and the GEO overturned before both vehicles came to rest on the sidewalk, locked in a twisted metallic embrace.

It would be twenty-one minutes before the police arrived. They would scratch their heads at the two deployed airbags and the dead driver with massive head injuries lying across the floor. Then they would discover that the crash was not what had killed the man in the Cadillac.

"You're sure about this?"

"Getting nervous, Ray?" Henry Bowman asked as he cycled the Citation's controls and continued working his way through the lengthy pre-takeoff checklist. "Want to get out, and I'll take Cindy to breakfast in Denver, meet you back here in a few hours?"

"Okay, I'll shut up."

"Good," he said, then keyed the mike. "Sardy Tower, Citation two-niner Alpha Whiskey ready for takeoff, destination Denver International, I have Tango."

"Citation two-niner Alpha Whiskey, cleared for takeoff runway two-eight, eastern departure approved."

"Two-niner Alpha Whiskey," Henry acknowledged, then stowed the mike and gently advanced the thottles of the idling engines. He gave the aircraft hard right rudder, and the big jet turned as it rolled onto the runway. As the nose swung onto the centerline, Henry fed in left rudder and gave the Pratt & Whitney turbojets full throttle. The white business jet was several thousand pounds under gross weight, and it rapidly gathered speed as it rocketed down the asphalt. The nose lifted, and a few seconds later the mains broke free of the ground. Henry checked his compressor RPM, exhaust gas temperature, and airspeed, then retracted the gear and adjusted the trim.

"All we need's a stewardess," Henry said happily as he banked the jet to put it on an easterly heading. He had to shout to be heard over the noise of 5900 pounds of thrust. "Looks like we got about a fifty-knot tailwind. Should make Denver in less than twenty minutes if they're not stacked up in the pattern."

Ray Johnson relaxed a little.

"Thank you for making time to see me, Mr. President."

"Quite all right, Alex."

"Sir, that article in the paper is really hurting us. We're up to forty-seven dead, and it's not just ATF any more. A Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency was murdered in Phoenix yesterday, and an EPA field agent was killed this morning in California. A message on one of the bulletin boards now says all EPA agents carrying guns will be shot on sight. But the-"

"What are you talking about, Alex? EPA agents don't carry guns." Oh, Christ Neumann thought. Now I get to explain this mess, too.

"Yes, they do, Mr. President. At least, they're authorized to carry guns. Just like employees of most federal agencies."

"What? Which federal agencies? FBI and DBA, you mean."

"Not just them, sir. The State Department, Department of Labor, Department of Agriculture, Department of En-"

"Agriculture?" the President shouted. "What do they need to carry guns for? What are you talking about, Agent Neumann?"

"Ah, I assumed you knew, Mr. President. It's common knowledge, at least among those who are involved in this, ah, gun issue. The gun magazines are constantly running editorials complaining about it. Would you like me to get you a list of the agencies?"

"Immediately."

"Yes, sir." Come on, Alex the FBI agent told himself. Keep cool here. "Ah, sir, the problem is getting worse with ATF as well. Three ATF agents killed and one wounded in the last twenty-four hours. One of the three had announced his resignation the day before. It's in today's Wall Street Journal. The Journal informs me that there have been nine more resignations phoned in to their classified ad department since this time yesterday."

"Tell me about the suspects you have," the President demanded. From bad to worse Neumann thought as he delivered more bad news. The FBI had few leads, and the suspects and possible witnesses absolutely refused to speak. Then Neumann made his pitch.

"Mr. President, I know this is not a hostage situation in the strict sense of the word. But I think it's time to treat it like one."

"Negotiate?"

"Yes, sir. I think you should contact the man that's behind all this, and find out what he wants. Apparently it isn't money. Maybe if you talked to him before...before things go any farther..."

"And how shall we contact this man? A full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal?"

"Sir, I'm not sure how to do that. I mean, without setting off a PR nightmare."

"Agent Neumann, the public is going to turn more against these terrorists, not more in favor of them. And if the FBI would just-" The President stopped himself in mid-sentence and took a deep breath.

"I didn't mean that. I'm proud of the job you and your men have been doing. And this negotiation idea is a fair suggestion. Maybe if we put our heads together we can think of some way to contact these people without the media eating us for breakfast. Are you willing to work with me on this?" the President asked.