"Uh-huh," Evans said. He reached inside the backpack and took out the thermos.

Hardy continued, chatting away. "He nearly nailed me. Shook me up some. I was maybe thirty feet from him. Saw his eyes, saw the muzzle of his gun. Man… I was suddenly real happy to be alive."

"That happens," Evans said. Where the hell was the elevator?

Hardy glanced at the silver metal cylinder. "Say, you know where Agent Lukas is?" the detective asked, looking up the dark corridor.

"I think she's downstairs," Evans said, unscrewing the lid to the thermos. "She had to brief somebody. The lobby on Ninth. Didn't you just come that way?"

"I came in through the garage."

The doctor pulled the top off the thermos. "You know, Detective, the way you told everybody about the Diggers and Levelers? You made it sound like you didn't trust me." He turned toward Hardy.

Evans looked down. He saw the black, silenced pistol Hardy was pointing at his face.

"Trust didn't have anything to do with it," Hardy said.

Evans dropped the thermos. Coffee splashed onto the floor. He saw the flash of yellow light from the muzzle of the gun. And that was all he saw.

The agent was young enough to still be thrilled at the idea of being an FBI employee. So he didn't mind one bit that he'd been assigned the midnight-to-8 shift New Year's Eve in the Bureau's Security Center on the third floor of headquarters.

There was also the fact that Louise, the agent he was working with, wore a tight blue blouse and short black skirt and was flirting with him.

Definitely flirting, he decided.

Well, okay, she was talking about her cat. But the body language told him it was flirting. And her bra was black and visible through the blouse. Which was a message too.

The agent continued to gaze at the ten TV monitors that were his responsibility. Louise, on his left, had another ten. They were linked to more than sixty security cameras located in and around headquarters. The scenes on the monitors changed every five seconds as the cameras sequenced.

Louise of the black bra was nodding absently as he talked about his parents' place on the Chesapeake Bay. The intercom brayed.

It couldn't have been Sam or Ralph-the two agents he and Louise had replaced a half hour ago; they had total-clearance entry cards and would've just walked inside.

The agent hit the intercom button. "Yes?"

"It's Detective Hardy. District P.D."

"Who's Hardy?" the agent asked Louise.

She shrugged and went back to her monitors.

"Yes?"

The voice crackled, "I'm working with Margaret Lukas."

"Oh, on the Metro shooter case?"

"Right."

The legendary Margaret Lukas. The security agent hadn't been with the Bureau very long but even he knew that Lukas would someday be the first woman director of the FBI. The tech pushed the ENTER button, spun around to face the door.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm afraid I'm lost," Hardy said.

"Happens around here." He smiled. "Where you headed?"

"I'm trying to find the document lab. I got lost on the way to get some coffee."

"Documents? That's the seventh floor. Turn left. Can't miss it."

"Thanks."

"What's this?" Louise said suddenly. "Hey, what is this?"

The agent glanced at her as she hit a button to stop the video camera scan and pointed to one of the monitors. It showed a man lying on his back not far from where they were now, on this floor. The monitors were black and white but a large pool of what was obviously blood ran from his head.

"Oh, Christ," she muttered and reached for the phone. "It looks like Ralph."

From behind them came a soft thunk. Louise gave a sudden jerk and grunted as the front of her blouse disappeared in a mist of blood.

"Oh," she gasped. "What-?"

Another pop. The bullet struck the back of her head and she pitched forward.

The young agent turned toward the doorway, lifting his hands, crying, "No, no."

In a calm voice Hardy said, "Relax."

"Please!"

"Relax," he repeated. "I just have a few questions."

"Don't kill me. Please-"

"Now," Hardy asked matter-of-factly, "your computers're running SecureChek software?"

"I-"

"I'll let you live if you tell me everything I ask."

"Yes." He started crying. "SecureChek."

"What version?"

"Six oh."

"And if you don't log in at regular intervals a Code Forty-two goes out over the Inter-Gov System?"

"That's right… Oh, look, mister." He glanced at the body of the woman beside him, which twitched twice. Blood flowed into the control panel. "Oh, God…"

Speaking slowly, Hardy asked, "You started your shift at midnight?"

"Please, I… "

"Midnight?" he repeated, a schoolteacher coaching a child.

The agent nodded.

"What was your first log-in time?"

He was crying hard now. "Twelve twenty-one."

"When's the next time you have to log in?"

"One-oh-seven."

Hardy glanced at the clock on the wall. He nodded.

Panic in his voice, the young agent continued. "On holidays we use a pattern of increasing intervals, so after the second log-in we-"

"That's all right," Hardy reassured the agent then shot him twice in the head and pushed the button to release the door.

The man who was not Detective Len Hardy, a fictional name, but was in reality Edward Fielding made his way to the elevator.

He had until 1:07 before the automated alarm would go off.

Plenty of time.

The building was virtually deserted but still he walked the way he knew he should walk. With an aura not of urgency but of preoccupation. So if he were to run into one of the few remaining agents here they'd merely glance at his pass and, judging Fielding's demeanor, decide to let him continue on to wherever he was headed on his important business.

He inhaled deeply, took in the smells of the laboratory, the offices, the morgue. Feeling a wrenching thrill to be here-in the center of the law enforcement universe. The corridors of FBI headquarters. He remembered, a year ago, the Digger muttering insistently about going to an art museum in Hartford. Fielding had agreed and the crazed man had stood for an hour in front of a Doré illustration from the Divine Comedy: Dante and Virgil about to descend into hell. This is just what Fielding felt now-as if he were on a tour of the underworld.

As he walked through the hallways he spoke silently to his teammates. No, Agent Lukas and Parker Kincaid and Dr. John Evans… No, my motive isn't revenge for faded politics or terrorism. It's not exposing social injustice. Nor is it greed. Twenty million? Christ, I could've asked for ten times that.

No, my motive is simply perfection.

The idea of the perfect crime was a cliché, true. But Fielding had learned something interesting when he'd been studying linguistics, looking for just the right words and phrases to use in the extortion note. In an article in the American Journal of Linguistics a philologist-a language expert-had written that although serious writers are told to avoid them, clichés have value because they describe fundamental truths in universally comprehensible terms.

The perfect crime.

Fielding's holy chalice.

Perfection… It was intoxicating to him. Perfection was everything-the way he ironed his shirts and polished his shoes and trimmed his ear hairs, the way he set up his crimes, the way they were executed.