"Tell me." Trying not to sound too eager.

"There's not enough to tell. It's smoke." He added, "And the people who can tell me? I can't let you contact them directly."

"Could it be terror related?"

"I don't know."

"Which means you can't say it isn't."

"True."

Dellray felt an uneasy clicking in his chest. He'd run snitches for years and he knew he was close to something important. "If this group or whoever it is keeps going… a lot of people could be hurt. Hurt really bad."

William Brent made a faint, candle-extinguishing noise. Which meant that he didn't care one bit, and that appeals to patriotism and what was right were a waste of breath.

Wall Street should take a lesson…

Dellray nodded. Meaning the negotiation was under way.

Brent continued, "I'll give you names and locations. Whatever I find, you get it. But I do the work."

Unlike Jeep, Brent had himself displayed several qualities of dharmic enlightenment when Dellray had been running him. Self-control. Cleanliness of spirit-well, body at least.

And the all-important honesty.

Dellray believed he could trust him. He snared him in a tight gaze. "Here it is. I can live with you doing the work. I can live with being cut out. What I can't live with is slow."

Brent said, "That's one of the things you'd be paying for. Fast answers."

"Which brings us to…" Dellray had no problem paying his snitches. He preferred to bargain favors-reducing sentences, cutting deals with parole board case officers, dropping charges. But money worked too.

Paying value, getting value.

William Brent said, "The world's changing, Fred."

Oh, we're back to that? Dellray mused to himself.

"And I've got some new prospects I need to pursue. But what's the problem? What's always the problem?"

Money, of course.

Dellray asked, "How much?"

"One hundred thousand. Up front. And you have a guarantee. I will get you something."

Dellray coughed a laugh. He'd never paid more than five large to a snitch in all his years running them. And that princely sum had bought them indictments in a major dockside corruption case.

One hundred thousand dollars?

"It's just not there, William," he said, not thinking about the name, which Brent probably hadn't used in years. "That's more than our entire snitch bag put together. That's more than everybody's snitch bag put together."

"Hm." Brent said nothing. Which is exactly what Fred Dellray himself would have done, had he been on the other side of the negotiation.

The agent sat forward, his bony hands clasped. "Give me a minute." Like Jeep in the stinky diner earlier, Dellray rose and walked past a skateboarder, two giggling Asian girls, and a man handing out fliers, looking surprisingly rational and cheerful, considering his cause was the 2012 end of days. Near the dharma tree he pulled out his phone and made a call.

"Tucker McDaniel," was the clipped greeting.

"It's Fred."

"You got something?" The ASAC sounded surprised.

"Maybe. A CI of mine, from the day. Nothing concrete. But he's been solid in the past. Only he wants some money."

"How much?"

"How much we got?"

McDaniel paused. "Not a lot. What's he got that's gold?"

"Nothing yet."

"Names, places, acts, numbers? Scraps?… Anything?"

Like a computer rattling off data in a list.

"No, Tucker. Nothing yet. It's like an investment."

Finally the ASAC said, "I could do six, eight thousand probably."

"That's all?"

"How the hell much does he want?"

"We're negotiating."

"Fact is, we've had to adjust bottom lines for this one, Fred. Took us by surprise. You know."

McDaniel's reluctance to spend was suddenly clear. He'd moved all the money in the Bureau operating accounts to the SIGINT and T and C teams. Naturally one of the first places he'd raided was the snitch fund.

"Start with six. See the merchandise. If it's meaty, maybe I could go nine or ten. Even that's pushing it."

"I think he could be on to something, Tucker."

"Well, let's see some proof… Hold on… Okay, Fred, it's T and C on the other line. I better go."

Click.

Dellray snapped the phone shut and stood for a moment, staring at the tree. He heard: "She was hot, you know, but there was this one thing didn't seem right… no, it's the Mayan calendar, I mean, maybe Nostradamus… that's totally fucked up… yo, where you been, dog?…"

But what he was really hearing was his partner in the FBI some years ago saying, No problem, Fred. I'll take it. And going on a trip that Dellray had been scheduled to handle.

And then hearing the voice of his special agent in charge of the New York office two days later, that voice choking, telling Dellray that the partner had been one of the people killed in a terrorist bombing in the Oklahoma City federal building. The man had been in the conference room that Dellray should have been occupying.

At that moment, Fred Dellray, in a comfortable air-conditioned conference room of his own many miles from the smoking crater, had decided that a priority in his law enforcement career from then on would be to pursue terrorists and anyone else who killed the innocent in the name of ideas, whether political or religious or social.

Yes, he was being marginalized by the ASAC. He wasn't even being taken seriously. But what Dellray was about to do had very little to do with vindicating himself, or striking a blow for the old ways.

It was about stopping what he thought was the worst of evils: killing innocents.

He returned to William Brent, sat down. He said, "Okay. One hundred thousand." They exchanged numbers-both cold phones, prepaid mobiles that would be discarded after a day or so. Dellray looked at his watch. He said, "Tonight. Washington Square. Near the law school, by the chess boards."

"Nine?" Brent asked.

"Make it nine-thirty." Dellray rose and, according to the tradecraft of the CI world, left the park alone, with William Brent remaining behind to pretend to read the paper or contemplate the Krishna elm.

Or figure out how to spend his money.

But the CI was soon lost to thought, and Fred Dellray was considering how best to plan the set, what part the chameleon should now play, how to cast his eyes, how to convince and wheedle and call in favors. He was pretty sure he could pull it off; these were skills he'd honed for years.

He'd just never thought he'd ever be using his talents to rob his employer-the American government and the American people-of $100,000.

AS AMELIA SACHS followed Charlie Sommers to his office on the other side of the Burn in Algonquin Consolidated, she was aware that the heat was rising along the complicated route he was taking. And the rumble filling the halls was getting louder with every step.

She was totally lost. Up stairways, down stairways. As she followed him she sent and received several text messages on her BlackBerry but as they moved lower and lower she had to concentrate on where she was walking; the hallways became increasingly visitor-hostile. Cell reception finally turned to dust and she put her phone away.

The temperature rose higher.

Sommers stopped at a thick door, beside which were a rack of hard hats.

"You worried about your hair?" he asked, his voice rising, since the rumbling from the other side of the door was very loud now.

"I don't want to lose it," she called back. "But otherwise, no."

"Just getting mussed a bit. This is the shortest way to my office."

"Shorter's better. I'm in a hurry." She grabbed a hat and squashed it onto her head.

"Ready?"

"I guess. What's through there exactly?"

Sommers thought for a moment and said, "Hell." And nodded her forward.