His name was Geoffrey Shafer, but I knew him better as the Weasel.

What was he doing here?

There were a couple more crystal-clear shots as the hateful Weasel got closer to the photographer.

Just the sight of him sent my brain reeling, and I felt a little sick. My mouth was dry, and I kept licking my lips. What is Shafer doing here? What connection does he have to the bomb that leveled this small town? It was crazy, felt like a dream, completely unreal.

I'd first come across Colonel Geoffrey Shafer in Washington three years ago. He'd murdered more than a dozen people there, though we could never prove it. He would pose as a cabdriver, usually in Southeast, where I lived. The prey was easy to grab, and he knew D.C. police investigations weren't as thorough when the victims were poor and black. Shafer also had a day job-he was an army colonel working inside the British embassy. On the face of it, he couldn't have been more respectable. And yet he was a horrible murderer, one of the worst pattern killers I'd ever come across.

A local agent named Fred Wade joined me near the helicopter I'd come in on. I was still studying the climber's photos. Wade told me he wanted to know what was going on, and I couldn't blame him. So did I.

"The man who videotaped the explosion is named Geoffrey Shafer," I told Wade. "I know him. He committed several murders in D.C. when I was a homicide detective there. The last we heard of him, he'd fled to London. He murdered his wife in front of their children in a London market. Then he disappeared. Well, I guess he's back. I have no idea why, but it makes my head hurt just to think about it."

I took out my cell phone and put in a call to Washington. As I described what I'd discovered, I was reviewing the last few photographs taken of Colonel Shafer. In one of the photos he was climbing into a red Ford Bronco.

The next was a rear shot of the Bronco as it rode away. Jesus. The license plate was visible.

And that was the strangest thing of all so far: the Weasel had made a mistake.

The Weasel I'd known didn't make them.

So maybe it wasn't a mistake after all.

Maybe it was part of a plan.

The Wolf was still in Los Angeles, but reports were coming in from the Nevada desert on a regular basis. Police arriving near Sunrise Valley… then helicopters… the U.S. Army… finally the FBI.

His old friend Alex Cross was out there now, too. Good for Alex Cross. What a good soldier.

Nobody understanding a goddamn thing, of course.

No coherent theory about what had happened in the desert.

How could there be?

It was chaos, and that was the beauty of it. Nothing scared people more than what they didn't understand.

Case in point, a local L.A. hot shit named Fedya Abramtsov and his wife, Liza. Fedya wanted to be a big Mafiya gangster, but also lead the life of a movie-star type in Beverly Hills. This was Fedya and Liza's house that he was staying in now, but really, the Wolf thought of it as his house; after all, their money was his money. Without him, they were nothing but small-time punks with big ambitions.

Fedya and Liza hadn't even known he was at their house. The couple had been at their place in Aspen and finally got back to L.A. at just past ten that evening.

Imagine their surprise.

A powerful-looking man sitting by himself in the living room. Just sitting there. So peaceful. Rhythmically squeezing a rubber ball in his right hand.

They had never seen him before.

"Who the hell are you?" demanded Liza. "What are you doing here?"

The Wolf spread his arms. "I am the one who gave you all of this wonderful stuff. And what do you give me in return? Disrespect like this? I am the Wolf."

Fedya had heard enough already. He knew that if the Wolf was there, letting himself be seen, then he and Liza were as good as dead. Best to run and hope to God the Wolf is here alone, unlikely as that may be.

He took a single step, and the Wolf raised a handgun from out of the seat cushion. He was good with a gun. He shot Fedya Abramtsov once in the back, once in the back of his neck.

"He's very dead," he calmly said to Liza, which he knew to be a nickname of hers. "I prefer Yelizaveta," he said. "Not so common, so Americanized. Come and sit. Come. Please."

The Wolf patted his lap. "Come. I don't like to repeat myself."

The girl was a pretty one-smart, too-and apparently ruthless as a snake. She walked across the room and sat in the Wolf's lap. She did as she was told, anyway. Good girl.

"I like you, Yelizaveta. But what choice do I have-you've disobeyed me. You and Fedya stole my money. Don't argue. I know it's true." He looked into her beautiful brown eyes. "Do you know zamochit?" he asked. "The breaking of bones?"

Apparently Yelizaveta did, because she screamed at the top of her lungs.

"This is good," said the Wolf as he grabbed the woman's slender left wrist. "Everything is going so well today."

He started with Yelizaveta's little finger, just the pinkie.

Had a war started? If it had, who was the enemy?

It was pitch-black, and it was freezing cold in the desert. Scary and disorienting, to put it mildly. No moon out. Was that part of the plan? What was supposed to happen next? Where? To whom? Why?

I tried to collect my thoughts and make a rough plan to take us through the next few hours in at least a semiorganized manner. Difficult to do, maybe impossible. We were looking for a small convoy of army trucks and jeeps that seemed to have disappeared, to have been gobbled up by the desert. But also a Ford Bronco with the Nevada license tags 322JBP and a sunset design.

And we were looking for Geoffrey Shafer. Why would the Weasel be here?

While we waited for something to break, maybe a message or a warning, I walked around what had been Sunrise Valley. Where the bomb had actually detonated, buildings and vehicles hadn't just been flattened, they'd been practically vaporized. Little bits of death and destruction, sparks and ash, were still floating in the air. The night sky was masked by a dark and oily cloud of smoke, and I was struck by the unsettling idea that only man could create something like this, and only man would want to.

As I wandered through the mounds of debris, I also talked to agents and techs involved in the investigation and I began to make a few crime-scene notes of my own:

Bits and pieces of the mobile-home camp are scattered everywhere.

Witnesses describe canisters dropped from a prop plane.

One falling can seemed about to strike a trailer home, then exploded in midair above the town.

At first, the explosion was like a "white, undulating jellyfish cloud," then the cloud ignited.

High winds from the heat of the fire, convection whirls, apparently blew at gale force for several minutes.

So far we had discovered only one body in the rubble. Everyone was wondering the same thing: why only one? Why spare the others? Why blow up this trailer-park town at all?

It just didn't make sense. Nothing did so far. But especially Shafer's presence.

One of the local FBI agents, Ginny Moriarity, called out my name and I turned. She waved excitedly for me to come over. Now what?

I jogged back to where Agent Moriarity was standing with a couple of local cops. They all seemed exercized about something.

"We found the Bronco," she told me. "No army trucks, but we located the Bronco in Wells."

"What's in Wells?" I asked Moriarity.

"An airport."