The brass clock.

It meant so much to him.

Mayor Jerry Kennedy looked at it now, resting prominently on his desk in City Hall.

The gift was from students at Thurgood Marshall Elementary, a school square in the war zone of Ward 8, Southeast D.C. Kennedy had been very touched by the gesture. No one took Washington the City seriously. Washington the political hub, Washington the federal government, Washington the site of scandal-oh, that was what captured everyone's attention. But no one knew, or cared, how the city itself ran or who was in charge.

The children of Thurgood Marshall had cared, however. He'd spoken to them about honor and working hard and staying off drugs. Platitudes, sure. But a few of them, sitting in the pungent, damp auditorium (itself a victim of the school board scandal), had gazed up at him with the look of sweet admiration on their faces. Then they'd given him the clock in appreciation of his talk.

Kennedy touched it now. Looked at the face: 4:50.

So, the FBI had come close to stopping the madman. But they hadn't. Some deaths, some injuries. And more and more panic around the city. Hysteria. There'd already been three accidental shootings-by people carrying illegal pistols for protection. They thought they'd seen the Digger on the street or in their backyards and had just started shooting, like feuding neighbors in West Virginia.

And then there were the press reports berating Kennedy and the District police for not being up to the challenge of a criminal like this. For being soft on crime and for hiding out. One report even suggested that Kennedy had been unavailable-on the phone trying to get tickets to one of his beloved football games-while the theater shooting was going on. The reviews of his TV appearance were not good either. One interviewee, a political commentator, had actually echoed Congressman Lanier's phrase, "kowtowing to terrorists." He'd also worked the word "cowardly" into his commentary. Twice.

The phone rang. Wendell Jefferies, sitting across from the mayor, grabbed the receiver first. "Uh-huh. Okay…" He closed his eyes, then shook his head. He listened some more. He hung up.

"Well?"

"They've scoured the entire theater and can't find an iota of evidence. No fingerprints. No witnesses-no reliable ones anyway."

"Jesus, what is this guy, invisible?"

"They've got some leads from this former agent."

"Former agent?" Kennedy asked uncertainly.

"Document expert. He's found something but not much."

The mayor complained, "We need soldiers, we need police out on every street corner, we don't need former paper pushers."

Jefferies cocked his smooth head cynically. The possibility of police on every street corner of the District of Columbia was appealing, of course, but was the purest of fantasies.

Kennedy sighed. "He might not have heard me. The TV broadcast."

"Possibility."

"But it's twenty million dollars!" Kennedy argued with his unseen foe, the Digger. "Why the hell doesn't he contact us? He could have twenty million dollars."

"They nearly got him. Maybe next time they will."

At his window Kennedy paused. Looked at the thermometer that gave the outside temperature. Thirty-three degrees. It had been thirty-eight just a half hour ago.

Temperature falling…

Snow clouds were overhead.

Why are you here? he silently asked the Digger once again. Why here? Why now?

He raised his eyes and looked at the domed wedding cake of the Capitol Building. When Pierre L'Enfant came up with the "Plan of the City of Washington" in 1792 he had a surveyor draw a meridional line north and south and then another exactly perpendicular to it, dividing the city into the four quadrants that remain today. The Capitol Building was at the intersection of these lines.

"The center of the cross hairs," some gun-control advocate had once said at a congressional hearing where Kennedy was testifying.

But the figurative telescopic sight might very well be aimed directly at Kennedy's chest.

The sixty-three-square-mile city was foundering and the mayor was passionately determined not to let it go under. He was a native Washingtonian, a dying species in itself-the city population had declined from a high of more than 800,000 to around a half million. It continued to shrink yearly.

An odd hybrid of body politic, the city had only had self-rule since the 1970s (aside from a few-year period a century earlier, though corruption and incompetence had quickly pushed the city into bankruptcy and back under congressional domination). Twenty-five years ago the federal lawmakers turned the reins over to the city itself. And from then on a mayor and the thirteen-member City Council had struggled to keep crime under control (at times the District had the worst murder rate in America), schools functioning (students testing lower than in any other major city), finances in check (forever in the red) and racial tensions defused (Asian versus black versus white).

There was a real possibility that Congress would step in once more and take over the city; the lawmakers had already removed the mayor's blanket spending power.

And that would be a disaster-because Kennedy believed that only his administration could save the city and its citizens before the place erupted into a volcano of crime and homelessness and shattered families. More than 40 percent of young black men in D.C. were somewhere "in the system"-in jail, on probation or being sought on warrants. In the 1970s one-quarter of families in the District had been headed by a single parent; now the figure was closer to three-quarters.

Jerry Kennedy had had a personal taste of what might happen if the city continued its downward trajectory. In 1975, then a lawyer working for the District school board, he'd gone to the Mall-the stretch of grass and trees presided over by the Washington Monument-for Human Kindness Day, a racial unity event. He'd been among the hundreds injured when racial fighting broke out among the crowd. It was on that day that he gave up plans to move to Virginia and run for Congress. He decided to become the mayor of the nations capital. By God, he was going to fix the place.

And he knew how. To Kennedy the answer was very simple. And that answer was education. You had to get the children to stay in school and if you could do that then self-esteem and the realization that they could make choices about their lives would follow. (Yes, knowledge can save you. It had saved him. Lifting him out of the poverty of Northeast D.C., boosting him into William and Mary Law School. It got him a beautiful, brilliant wife, two successful sons, a career he was proud of.)

No one disagreed with the basic premise that education could save people of course. But how to solve the puzzle of making sure the children learned was a different matter. The conservatives bitched about what people ought to be like and if they didn't love their neighbors and live by family values then that was their problem. We home-school; why can't everybody? The liberals whined and pumped more money into the schools but all the cash did was slow the decay of the infrastructure. It did nothing to make students stay in those buildings.

This was the challenge for Gerald David Kennedy. He couldn't wave a wand and bring fathers back to mothers, he couldn't invent an antidote to crack cocaine, he couldn't get guns out of the hands of people who lived only fifteen miles from the National Rifle Association's headquarters.

But he did have a vision of how to make sure kids in the District continued their education. And his plan could pretty much be summarized by one word: bribery.

Though he and Wendell Jefferies called it by another name-Project 2000.