And do this all over again.

It's New Year's Eve. And the Digger's in town.

While ambulances were speeding to Dupont Circle and rescue workers were digging through the ghastly mine of bodies in the Metro station, Gilbert Havel walked toward City Hall, two miles away.

At the corner of Fourth and D, beside a sleeping maple tree, Havel paused and opened the envelope he carried and read the note one last time.

Mayor Kennedy -

The end is night. The Digger is loose and their is no way to stop him. He will kill again-at four, eight and Midnight if you don't pay.

I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag and leave it two miles south of Rt 66 on the West Side of the Beltway. In the middle of the Field. Pay to me the money by 12:00 hours. Only I am knowing how to stop The Digger. If you xxxx apprehend me, he will keep killing. If you kill me, he will keep killing.

If you don't think I'm real, some of the Diggers bullets were painted black. Only I know that.

This was, Havel decided, about as perfect an idea as anybody could've come up with. Months of planning. Every possible response by the police and FBI anticipated. A chess game.

Buoyed by that thought, he replaced the note in the envelope, closed but didn't seal it and continued along the street. Havel walked in a stooped lope, eyes down, a pose meant to diminish his six-two height. It was hard for him, though; he preferred to walk tall and stare people down.

The security at City Hall, One Judiciary Square, was ridiculous. No one noticed as he walked past the entrance to the nondescript stone building and paused at a newspaper vending machine. He slipped the envelope under the stand and turned slowly, walking toward E Street.

Warm for New Year's Eve, Havel was thinking. The air smelled like fall-rotten leaves and humid wood smoke. The scent aroused a pang of undefined nostalgia for his childhood home. He stopped at a pay phone on the corner, dropped in some coins and dialed a number.

A voice answered, "City Hall. Security."

Havel held a tape recorder next to the phone and pressed PLAY. A computer-generated voice said, "Envelope in front of the building. Under the Post vending machine. Read it now. It's about the Metro killings." He hung up and crossed the street, dropping the tape recorder into a paper cup and throwing the cup into a wastebasket.

Havel stepped into a coffee shop and sat down in a window booth, where he had a good view of the vending machine and the side entrance to City Hall. He wanted to make sure the envelope was picked up-it was, before Havel even had his jacket off. He also wanted to see who'd be coming to advise the mayor. And whether reporters showed up.

The waitress stopped by his booth and he ordered coffee and, though it was still breakfast time, a steak sandwich, the most expensive thing on the menu. Why not? He was about to become a very wealthy man.

"Daddy, tell me about the Boatman."

Parker Kincaid paused. He set down the cast-iron skillet he was washing.

He'd learned never to be alarmed by anything the children asked-well, never to appear alarmed-and he smiled down at the boy as he dried his hands with paper towels.

"The Boatman?" he asked his nine-year-old son. "You bet. What do you want to know?"

The kitchen of Parker's house in Fairfax, Virginia, was fragrant with the smells of a holiday meal in the works. Onion, sage, rosemary. The boy looked out the window. Said nothing.

"Go ahead," Parker encouraged. "Tell me."

Robby was blond and had his mothers blue eyes. He wore a purple Izod shirt and tan pants, cinched at the waist with a Ralph Lauren belt. His floppy cowlick leaned to the starboard this morning.

"I mean," the boy began, "I know he's dead and everything…"

"That's right," Parker said. He added nothing more. ("Never tell the children more than they ask." This was one of the rules from Parker Kincaid's Handbook for the Single Parent-a guide that existed solely in his mind yet one he referred to every day.)

"It's just that outside… sometimes it looks like him. I mean, I looked outside and it's like I could see him."

"What do we do when you feel like that?"

"I get my shield and my helmet," the boy recited, "and if it's dark I put the lights on."

Parker remained standing. Usually, when he had serious conversations with his children, he subscribed to the eye-level approach. But when the subject of the Boatman arose a therapist had recommended that Parker stand-to make the boy feel safe in the presence of a strong, protective adult. And there was something about Parker Kincaid that induced a sense of security. Just forty, he was tall-a little over six feet-and was nearly in as good shape now as he'd been in college. Thanks not to aerobics or health clubs but to his two children-and their soccer scrimmages, basketball, Frisbee tourneys and the family's regular Sunday morning runs (well, Parker's run-he usually brought up the rear behind their bicycles as they looped around a local park).

"Let's take a look. Okay? Where you think you saw him."

"Okay."

"You have your helmet and your shield?"

"Right here." The boy patted his head and then held up his left arm like a knight's.

"That's a good one. I've got mine too." Parker mimicked the boy's gestures.

They walked to the back door.

"See, those bushes," Robby said.

Parker looked out over his half acre in an old development twenty miles west of Washington, D.C. His property was mostly grass and flower beds. But at the back of the land was a tangle of forsythia and kudzu and ivy he'd been meaning to cut back for a year. Sure enough, if you squinted, some of the vegetation did resemble a human form.

"That looks spooky," Parker conceded. "Sure does. But you know the Boatman was a long time ago." He wasn't going to minimize the boy's fear by pointing out that he'd been scared only by some scruffy bushes. But he wanted to give Robby a sense of distance from the incident.

"I know. But…"

"How long ago was it?"

"Four years," Robby answered.

"Isn't that a long time?"

"Pretty long, I guess."

"Show me." He stretched his arms out. "This long?"

"Maybe."

"I think it's longer." Parker stretched his arms out farther. "As long as that fish we caught at Braddock Lake?"

"That was this long," the boy said, starting to smile and holding his own arms out.

"Naw, it was this long." Parker gave an exaggerated frown.

"No, no, it was this long." The boy danced from one foot to the next, hands up high.

"It was longer!" Parker joked. "Longer."

Robby ran the length of the kitchen, lifting one arm. Then he ran back and lifted the other. "It was this long!"

"That's how long a shark is," Parker cried. "No, a whale, no, a giant squid. No, I know-a Tufted Mazurka!" A creature from If I Ran the Zoo. Robby and Stephie loved Dr. Seuss. Parker's nickname for the children was the "Whos"-after the creatures in Horton Hears a Who, which was their absolute favorite story of all time, beating even Pooh.

Parker and Robby played a game of indoor tag for a few minutes then he caught the boy in his arms for a brief tickle fest.

"Know what?" Parker asked, gasping.

"What?"

"How 'bout tomorrow we cut down all those bushes."

"Can I use the saw?" the boy asked quickly.

Oh, they're ready for any opportunity, he thought, laughing to himself. "We'll see," Parker said.

"All right!" Robby danced out of the kitchen, memories of the Boatman lost under euphoria at the promise of power tools. He ran upstairs and Parker heard some gentle bickering between brother and sister about which Nintendo game to play. Stephanie, it seemed, won and the infectious Mario Bros. theme wafted through the house.