The guy shrugged, then scratched his stubbly chin with the barrel of his gun. "Bottom line, we've got to deliver somebody back to Mr. Martino. So you do some asking around, find out what you can, or you'll be the one we bring back."

"Or the little lady up on the stairs," the other one said.

"You can have the little lady," Nicholson said. "We'll call it even."

The heavy man smiled finally, and then he stood up. Tonight's business was clearly done.

"I'll take that drink to go," he said to Nicholson. "You just stay put."

He waddled over to the bar, where his buddy was already helping himself to as many bottles as he could carry in both arms.

Once the two punks were gone and Nicholson had his drink and some ice for his head, he noticed they'd cleaned him out of Johnnie Walker only to leave a Dalmore 62 sitting right there on the bar. It was a four-hundred-dollar bottle, and seemed as ominous a sign as anything else.

If these two losers were onto him, then everything was unraveling faster than he'd thought possible.

Now, who the hell was Johnny Tucci?

FOR SUAREZ AND Overton, every exchange with Zeus was a dead drop – no face-to-face meetings, ever, by mutual agreement with whoever was actually paying their fees. They went into the suite at Blacksmith Farms after him, sanitized the space, and took away whatever needed taking away, including the bodies.

Just before dawn, their no-profile G6 bumped along the familiar dirt track in the backwoods of Virginia. Its rear end was riding a little low because of the weight in the trunk.

"Let me ask you this," Suarez said to his partner. "He's obviously filthy rich. Why does he risk it? What is he – completely crazy?"

"On some level, sure."

"On some level? How about 24/7/365 he's crazier than a shithouse rat on speed? How does he get away with it – how?"

"Well, for one thing – do you know who he is, Suarez?"

"You're right, I don't. But somebody has to know. Somebody has to stop him eventually."

"What can I tell you – welcome to the wackadoo world of the rich and famous. Can you say wood chipper?"

REMY WILLIAMS DIDN'T trust these two guys at all. Never had, not from the start of the contract. When they pulled up to the cabin and didn't even get out of the car, he knew something was up. Something more than the usual dirtbag routine.

"How's it going, fellas?" He shuffled on over like the piece of white trash he was supposed to be. "What've you got for me this time?"

"Two female." The driver looked up, though not quite into his eyes. What was this: Did the Latino have a conscience? "One of them has a bullet in the chest. You'll see."

"Oh, yeah? What'd you shoot her for?"

"I don't know, maybe because we're still chasing down the last one who ran off."

The guy was baiting him, Remy could tell, but he wasn't sure why or, really, what these murders were all about. He was just a cog, didn't have all the pieces, figured probably no one did. Like JFK. Like RFK. Hell, like O.J.

"Seems to me you shot the last one too," he said, playing along. "Maybe she didn't run off a'tall. Might just be lying out in those woods somewhere, turning into mulch. As we speak. Coulda just been found by hikers."

"Yeah, maybe." The ex-agent took a deep breath, starting to get a little showy with his aggravation. "Listen, if you could just clean out the trunk, we'll be on our merry way."

Remy scratched at his crotch – a little overkill, maybe – and then shuffled around to the back of the car. The driver popped the trunk for him. Jesus! Look at this.

The two bodies were double wrapped in black poly sheeting and sealed with packing tape. These guys were pros at what they did; he had to give them that much. But who the hell was hurting these girls in the first place? What was the big picture here? Who was the killer?

He dragged both "packages" out of the trunk and onto the canvas tarp he'd already spread. His tools were laid out on a big hickory stump, and there was an extra gallon of gas next to the chipper.

"Which one'd you say was shot?" he called over to the spooks.

"Tall one. Left chest. What a waste. Girl was a real looker."

He rolled her over and slit the plastic down the middle, pushing just hard enough with the tip of his bowie knife to leave a thin red trail in its wake. When he pulled back the wrapper, he found a small crater just above the very well-formed left breast. The body was still warm – in the nineties or high eighties. Dead only a few hours at most.

"Okay, got it. You want me to pull the slug or do you care?"

"Pull it. Get rid of it."

"All righty. Done. Anything else?"

"Yeah. Close the trunk."

A few seconds later, the two smartass bastards were gone.

Distrust aside, Remy didn't mind their arrogance, mostly because he knew it worked in his favor. It probably never even occurred to those two how expendable they were.

Or how vulnerable.

In fact, they'd already done a good bit of the work for him when they erased their own identities. Now they were just a couple of spooks, and Remy knew as well as anyone that when the time came, there was nothing easier to make disappear than a ghost.

He could do that – hell, he'd done it before. Made a career of it, actually.

He unwrapped the second girl – another real looker. Seemed like maybe she'd been strangled. And bitten? He massaged the girl's lukewarm breasts, played around a little bit more, then took the two of them up the hill to the chipper.

What a waste was right. Who the hell would do such a thing? Somebody even crazier than he was?

I HAD ANOTHER clandestine meeting with Ned Mahoney Saturday afternoon – this time at a busy parking garage on M Street in Georgetown.

As I pulled in, I couldn't help thinking about those Deep Throat scenes in All the President's Men, the book and the movie. There was a definite cloak-and-dagger thing happening here. Why was that? What in hell was going on?

Ned was already waiting when I got out of the car. He handed me a manila folder with the Bureau's seal on it. Inside, I found some notes and a collection of photos, copied two to a page. "What's this?"

"Renata Cruz and Katherine Tennancour," he said. "Both missing, presumed dead."

Each picture showed one of the girls, in several locations around town, with a variety of mostly white, much older men.

"Is that David Wilke?" I asked, pointing at someone who looked very much like the current chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Ned nodded. "That's David Wilke, all right. Both women have powerful men as regular clients, which is why we've been tracking them to begin with. And Katherine Tennancour, at least, worked at the club out in Virginia."

I didn't say a word, just stared at Mahoney.

"I know exactly what you're thinking," he said. "Might as well break out the legislative directory while we're at it."

This whole thing was getting more insidious by the minute. There was no way to track this killer – or this network, if that's what we were looking at – without exposing all kinds of very dirty laundry in the process. A lot of innocent family members' lives would be ruined – and that was just the start of it.

House and Senate majorities, not to mention presidential elections and governorships, had been lost over a lot less than this. No one would be going down without a fight either; I already had a bad taste of that from Internal Affairs. Anyone who thinks that cops look forward to these sensational "career-making" cases has never been in the middle of one.