He joined the FBI.

Change…

His father reconciled himself to his son's apostasy and they enjoyed coffee and long walks in Prospect Park, during which they came to understand that, although their laboratories and techniques were different, their outlooks and insights were not.

The human condition… observed and written about by the father and experienced firsthand by the son.

In the unlikely form of undercover work. Fred's intense curiosity about and insights into the nature of life made him a natural Everyman. Unlike most undercover cops, with their limited acting skills and repertoires, Dellray could truly become the people he played.

Once, when Dellray was in disguise as a homeless man on the streets of New York, not far from the Federal Building, the then assistant special agent in charge of the Manhattan office of the FBI-Dellray's boss, in effect-walked right past and dropped a quarter into his cup, never recognizing him.

One of the best compliments Dellray ever received.

A chameleon. One week, a scorched-brain tweaker desperate for meth. The next a South African envoy with nuclear secrets to sell. Then a Somalian imam's lieutenant, lugging around a hatred of America and a hundred quotations from the Koran.

He owned dozens of outfits, purchased or hacked together by himself, which now clogged the basement of the townhouse he and Serena had bought a few years ago in BK-Brooklyn. He'd advanced in his career, which was inevitable for someone with his drive, skill and absolute lack of desire to stab fellow workers in the back. Now Dellray primarily ran other undercover FBI agents and civilian confidential informants-AKA snitches-though he still got into the field occasionally. And loved it just as much as he ever had.

But then came the change.

Cloud zone…

Dellray didn't deny that both the good guys and the bad guys were getting smarter and more tech-savvy. The shift was obvious: HUMINT-the fruits of intelligence gathering from human-to-human contact-was giving way to SIGINT.

But it was a phenomenon that Dellray simply wasn't comfortable with. In her youth Serena had tried to be a torch singer. She was a natural at all forms of dance, from ballet to jazz to modern, but she just didn't have the skill to sing. Dellray was the same with the new law enforcement of data, numbers, technology.

He kept running his snitches and he kept going undercover himself, and getting results. But with McDaniel and his T and A team-oh, 'scuse me, Tucker-his Tech and Com team, old-school Dellray was feeling, well, old. The ASAC was sharp, a hard worker-putting in sixty-hour work weeks-and an infighter; he'd stand up for his agents against the President if he needed to. And his techniques had worked; last month McDaniel's people had picked up sufficient details from encrypted satellite phone calls to pinpoint a fundamentalist cell outside Milwaukee.

The message to Dellray and the older agents was clear: Your time's passing.

He still stung from the dig, possibly inadvertent, delivered at the meeting in Rhyme's lab:

Well, keep at it, Fred. You're doing a good job…

Meaning, I didn't even expect you to come up with any leads to Justice For and Rahman.

Maybe McDaniel was right to criticize. After all, Dellray had as good a network of CIs in place as you could hope for to track terrorist activities. He met with them regularly. He worked them all hard, doling out protection to the fearful, Kleenex to the wet-eyed guilty, cash to the ones who informed as a livelihood and painful squeezes to the shoulders and psyches of those who'd gotten, as Dellray's grandmother said, too big for their britches.

But of all the information he'd gathered about terrorist plots, even embryonic ones, there'd been nothing about Rahman's Justice For or about a big fucking spark.

And here McDaniel's people had made an ID and defined a real threat by sitting on their asses.

Like the drones in the Middle East and Afghanistan? You know the pilots are next to a strip mall in Colorado Springs or Omaha…

Dellray had another concern too, one that had arisen around the same time as youthful McDaniel appeared: Maybe he just wasn't as good as he used to be.

Rahman might've been right under his nose. Cell members in Justice For might've been studying electrical engineering in BK or New Jersey the same way the Nine-Eleven hijackers had studied flying.

Then something else: He had to admit he'd been distracted lately. Something from his Other Life, he called it, his life with Serena, which he kept as separate from the street as you'd keep flame from gasoline. And that something was pretty significant: Fred Dellray was now a father. Serena had had a baby boy a year ago. They'd talked about it beforehand, and she'd insisted that even after their child was born Dellray wouldn't change his job one bit. Even if it involved running dangerous undercover sets. She understood that his work defined him the way dancing defined her; it would be more dangerous to him, ultimately, to move behind a desk.

But was being a father altering him as an agent? Dellray looked forward to taking Preston to the park or a store with him, feeding the boy, reading to him. (Serena had come by the nursery, laughed and gently taken Kierkegaard's existentialist manifesto Fear and Trembling from Dellray's lengthy hand and replaced it with Goodnight Moon. Dellray hadn't realized that even at that young age, words count.)

The subway now stopped in the Village, and passengers rustled aboard.

Instinctively the undercover operative within him immediately spotted four people of note: two almost-guaranteed-to-be pickpockets, one kid who was carrying a knife or box cutter and a young, sweaty businessman pressing a protective hand against a pocket so hard that he'd split open the bag of coke if he wasn't careful.

The street… how Fred Dellray loved the street.

But these four had nothing to do with his mission and he let them fade from his consciousness, as he told himself: Okay, you fucked up. You missed Rahman, and you missed Justice For. But the casualties and damage were minimal. McDaniel was condescending but hasn't made you a scapegoat, not yet. Which somebody else might've done in a heartbeat.

Dellray could still find a lead to their UNSUB and stop him before another of those terrible attacks happened. Dellray could still redeem himself.

At the next subway stop, he climbed out and began his trek east. Eventually he came to bodegas and tenements and old, dark social clubs, rancid-smelling diners, radio taxi operations whose signs were in Spanish or Arabic or Farsi. No fast-moving professionals like in the West Village; here people weren't moving around much at all, but merely sitting-men mostly-on rickety chairs or on doorsteps, the young ones slim, the old round. They all watched with cautious eyes.

This was where the serious work of the street got done. This was Fred Dellray's office.

He strode up to a coffee shop window and looked inside-with some difficulty since the glass hadn't been cleaned for months.

Ah, yeah, there. He spotted what would either be his salvation or his downfall.

His last chance.

Tapping one ankle against the other just to make sure the pistol strapped there hadn't shifted, he opened the door and stepped inside.