The big building was the Illinois State Armory, which also housed the Illinois State Police. The small building from which they'd just exited was the Emergency Services and Disaster Agency, its roof studded with funny-looking antennas. Marsha, who'd been working in the capitol for twenty years, was astonished to realize these things: that the Governor of Illinois had a secret escape route, a vestige of the Cold War, a secret bolt-hole to escape from atomic attack and deliver himself into the protection of the Illinois National Guard.

She wondered how many other secrets about the capitol and the office of the Governor, and about this Governor himself, she had never learned or even suspected. She wondered why she'd never been told about these things. And she wondered how Mel Meyer had known. For Marsha the acquisition of knowledge had always been an orderly process pursued in public schools, but Mel was different, Mel came by his knowledge in mysterious ways. He didn't even have a government job, he was just the Governor's lawyer and friend, he hardly ever came to Springfield, and still he carried all the secret blueprints and phone numbers in his head.

As the EMTs were pulling the doors of the ambulance closed on Cozzano, she saw Bell standing there, staring at Cozzano through the rear windows. As the driver shifted the transmission into forward gear, the ambulance's backup lights flashed once like heat lightning and illuminated Bell's face, burning the still image into Marsha's retinas. Bell's forehead was wrinkled in the middle, his eyebrows angled upward in the center, his eyes were glistening and red. As the engine revved, he suddenly straightened up, clicked the heels of his boots together, and snapped out a salute.

Cozzano was staring back at Bell through the tiny windows in the back of the ambulance. The Governor moved his right arm, heavy with blood-pressure cuff and intravenous lines, and returned the salute. The ambulance moved forward on twin jets of steamy exhaust and angled across the parking lot, headed for the trauma center at Springfield Central Hospital, less than a mile away.

As soon as Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano got on the down elevator, headed for the parking garage, she began to go through a ritual she had developed for passage through hostile territory. She hauled the strap of her purse up over her head so that it ran diagonally across her body, snatch-proof. It hung on her right hip so as not to interfere with her pager, which was clipped to her left hip. She unzipped the purse, pulled out her key chain, and clenched it in her right fist so that the keys stuck out from between her fingers like spikes on a medieval weapon. As she carried her keys in her purse, she observed no size limitations; her key chain was as sprawling and ramified as a coronary artery, branching out to include a miniature Swiss Army knife, a penlight, a magnifying glass (all freebies from drug companies), and a stainless steel police whistle. The whistle dangled on a thick length of metal rope. She got it between her thumb and index finger, ready to use. She had already made sure that she was wearing her running shoes - not high heels, not boots - and a pair of scrub pants that offered her legs freedom of movement. That was a given, because these were the only clothes anyone could tolerate on a thirty-hour shift in a sprawling hospital.

Finally, as the elevator was passing downward through the lobby level and into the subterranean parking levels, she reached into her purse and pulled out a black box that fit neatly into her left hand. It was rectangular with a bend near one end. The bent end was concave and sprouted four blunt metal prongs about a quarter of an inch long, making it look like the mouthparts of a tremendously magnified chigger. The prongs were symmetrically arranged: an

outer pair that stuck straight out from the end of the device, and an inner pair, closer together, angled toward each other as they sprouted from the concavity. When Mary Catherine found the box inside her purse, it fell naturally into her hand in such a way that her index finger was resting on a black button, just under the crook, near the prongs. Mary Catherine pulled it out of her purse, held it away from herself, and pulled the trigger.

A miniature lightning bolt, a purplish-white line of electrical discharge, popped between the two inner prongs. It created an alarming, crusty buzzing noise that seemed to penetrate deep into her head. The spark whipped and snapped in the air like a slack clothesline caught in a November wind.

She tested it like this, every day, because she was William A. Cozzano's daughter, and because her father was John Cozzano's son, and everyone in their family learned, when they were very young, not to be sloppy, not to assume, not to take anything for granted.

Then the elevator doors opened, like the opening curtain on a cheap horror film, and she was staring into a low-ceilinged cata­comb, filled with greenish, inexpensive institutional light that was hard on the eyes but did not really seem to illuminate anything. These were the tombs where doctors and nurses buried their cars while they worked. Most of the cars were shambling zombies, long since turned undead by the depredations of mobile chop shops that cruised up and down the ramps night and day.

During these trips through the catacombs, Mary Catherine liked to tell herself that her chosen speciality gave her an advantage in self-defense: she could diagnose people from a distance. By the way they walked, by the reactions on their faces, she could tell active psychotics from healthy, run-of-the-mill radio thieves.

Mary Catherine was not the kind of woman who would carry a weapon in her purse. She was not sure what kind of woman would, but certainly not her. She did it anyway. At first it had been a con­cession to her father. Ever since the death of her mother, her father's concern for her safety had become an obsession with him. When she had moved into her apartment, he drove up from Tuscola with all of his tools and spent a weekend reinforcing the deadbolts, putting bars on the windows, caging her in from the outside world. The people who lived in the apartment across the air shaft - an extended family of Brazilian immigrants - spent most of that weekend gathered in the living room, almost as if for a family portrait, staring in astonishment as the Governor of Illinois dangled halfway out of a sixth-story window sinking bolt hole after bolt hole into the brick window frames with a massive three-quarter-inch electric drill that he had borrowed from one of his farmer cousins.

The next time her birthday rolled around, Dad had given her a small, neatly wrapped box. Mary Catherine had been embarrassed and flushed with gratitude, thinking it was a necklace - and coming from Dad, it was sure to be too formidable to wear. But when she had gotten it out of the box, it turned out to be a stun gun instead. A fitting weapon for a neurologist.

Dad had never observed any limitations on his life. He saw nothing remarkable in assuming that one day he would be President of the United States. He had always assumed that Mary Catherine would feel the same way. He always told her that she could do anything she wanted with her life, and while she never doubted him, she always took it with a grain of salt. And when he first became aware that, as a woman, she was in danger in ways that he was not, and that this danger limited what she could do, he was deeply troubled. He refused to accept it for a long time. But he was starting to understand and was trying to find ways to exempt her from the regulations that society imposed on all women. Because, goddamn it (she could hear him say), it just wasn't fair. Which was all the reason he needed to do anything.