An agent named Charlie Kilvert from next door peeked his head inside. "You catching this, Alex? You believe it?"

"I see it. I don't believe it."

I couldn't take my eyes off the action down in the courtyard, though. Within seconds, heavily armed agents had appeared on the scene.

At first there were only three, then at least a dozen. The guards from the sidewalk booth suddenly came tearing up the driveway, too.

All the agents below had their guns pointed at the two men in fatigues. Both of them had stopped running now. They appeared to be surrendering.

The agents weren't coming any closer, though. Maybe they shared my idea about "human bombs," but more likely they were following procedure.

The suspects were holding their arms high over their head. Then, slowly and deliberately, they lay flat on their stomach. What the hell?

Then I spotted a helicopter drift around the south side of the Hoover Building. Just about all I could see was the nose and rotor.

The ominous hovering of the copter caused the agents in the courtyard to aim their weapons into the sky. This was a no-fly zone, after all. The agents on the ground were yelling and threatening with their guns.

Then the helicopter banked sharply away from the Hoover Building. It disappeared from sight.

Seconds later Charlie Kilvert was in the doorway again. "Somebody's been shot upstairs!"

I almost knocked Charlie over getting out the door.

The MD-530 was really moving as it got to Washington; the pilot was using office and apartment buildings for cover now, sliding between them like somebody playing the craziest game of hide-and-seek.

The flying tactics would avoid radar detectors and also confuse the hell out of casual observers, Nikki Williams figured. Besides, this was all happening incredibly fast. No one would be able to react, and an air force jet wouldn't fly in this close to these office buildings, anyway.

She could see the target now. Hot damn! The disturbance on the ground had been planned and lots of people were at their windows at the target building, which she knew was FBI headquarters. This is really something! She loved it! She had seen some major-league action in the army, but not enough of it, and there were always a thousand rules you were supposed to follow.

Only one rule now, baby: shoot this guy dead and get the hell out of Dodge before anybody can do a goddamn thing about it.

The pilot had the coordinates of the targeted window and, sure enough, two men in dark suits were standing there, looking down on the street action-the diversion built into the plan. Captain Williams knew what her target looked like, and by the time he saw her rifle-only a hundred feet away-he'd be dead and she'd be on her way out of there.

One of the men behind the window appeared to shout a warning and tried to push the other one away. Quite the hero.

No matter-Williams pulled the trigger. Easy does it.

Then, escape!

The helicopter pilot used the same flying technique for exfil and headed directly to the drop zone in Virginia. It took just three and a half minutes from the FBI building all the way out to the drop area. Nikki Williams was still buzzing from the shot and kill, not to mention the big fee she'd be getting. Double-fee money, and God knows, she was worth every penny.

The helicopter set down easily, and she jumped down off the skid. She flipped a salute to the pilot, and he reached out his right arm toward her-and shot her twice, once in the throat, once in the forehead. The pilot didn't like it, but he did it. Those were his orders, and he knew enough to obey them. The female sniper had apparently told someone else about her mission. The pilot knew nothing more than that.

Just his piece of the big picture.

This much we knew.

The two men captured down in the courtyard had been hustled inside the FBI building and were now being held on the second floor. But who the hell were they?

The serious rumor circulating was that Ron Burns had been shot, that my boss and friend was dead.

Sources had it that a successful sniper attack had been made and that Burns's office was the target. I couldn't help thinking of the assassination of Stacy Pollack earlier that year. The Wolf had never actually taken responsibility for the murder of the head of the SIOC, but we knew he was the one who ordered it. Burns vowed revenge, though none had been taken. Not to my knowledge, anyway.

About half an hour after the sniper attack, I got a call to go down to the second floor. That was good: I needed to do something, or go crazy in my office.

"Anything on the shooting upstairs?" I asked the ACAS who called me.

"Nothing I know of. We've heard the rumors, too. No one will deny or confirm anything. I spoke to Tony Woods in the director's office, and he won't say anything. Nobody's talking, Alex. Sorry, man."

"Something happened, though? Somebody got shot?"

"Yeah. Somebody got shot up there."

Feeling sick about everything that had happened in the past few days, I hurried down to the second floor and was led by a guard to a row of holding cells I hadn't known even existed. The agent who met me explained that he wanted me to conduct the interview without a briefing, to get my take on the prisoners.

I walked into one of the small interview rooms and found two scared-looking black men dressed in cammies. Terrorists? Doubtful. They looked to be in their mid-thirties, maybe early forties, but it was hard to tell. They needed haircuts and shaves, their clothes were soiled and wrinkled, and the room already stank with perspiration and worse.

"We already tol' our story," one of the men complained bitterly, screwing up his wrinkled face, as I entered the room. "How many times we got to tell y'all?"

I sat down across from the two of them. "This is a homicide investigation," I said. I didn't know whether they'd been told that, but it was where I wanted to start. "Somebody is dead upstairs."

The man who hadn't spoken yet covered his face with his hands and started to moan and sway from side to side. "Oh no, oh no, oh, God no," he groaned.

"Take your hands away from your face and listen to me!" I yelled at him.

Both men looked at me and shut up. Now they were listening, at least.

"I want to hear your story. Everything you know, every single detail. And I don't care that you told it before. You hear me? You understand? I don't care how many times you think you told it.

"Right now, you two are murder suspects. So I want to hear your side of things. Talk to me. I am your lifeline, your only lifeline. Now talk."

They did. Both of them. They rambled, incoherently at times, but they talked. A little more than two hours later I left the interview room feeling that I'd heard the whole truth, at least their sketchy version of it.

Ron Frazier and Leonard Pickett were drifters who lived near Union Station. Both were army veterans. They'd been hired off the street to run around the FBI building like the crazies that they probably were in real life. The camouflage outfits were theirs, the same clothes they said they wore every day in the park and panhandling on the streets of D.C.

Next I went into another interview room to brief two very senior agents from upstairs. They looked about as tense as I felt. I wondered what they knew about Ron Burns.

"I don't think those two know much of anything," I told them. "They may have been approached by Geoffrey Shafer. Whoever hired them had an English accent. The physical description fits Shafer. Whoever it was paid them all of two hundred bucks. Two hundred dollars to do what they did."

I looked across at the senior agents. "Your turn. Tell me what happened upstairs. Who was shot? Is it Ron Burns?"