He was confident the brass would buy his pitch; undercover agents like himself, Dellray had learned; are among the best persuaders – and extorters – in the world.

Dellray snagged his office phone and called his own number, his apartment in Brooklyn.

"Hello?" a woman's voice answered.

"I'll be home in thirty," he said softly. With Serena he never used the unique patois he'd developed working on the streets of New York and slung about as his trademark on the job.

"See you then, love."

He hung up. No one in the bureau or the NYPD knew a single thing about Dellray's personal life – nothing about Serena, a choreographer with the Brooklyn Academy of Music he'd been seeing off and on for years. She worked long hours and traveled. He worked long hours and traveled.

The arrangement suited them.

Walking through the halls of the bureau's headquarters, which resembled the digs of a big, moderately unsuccessful corporation, he nodded at two agents in shirtsleeves, ties loose in a way that the Boss, J. Edgar Hoover, would not have tolerated (just as, Dellray reflected, he himself wouldn't have been tolerated by the old G-man, now that he thought about it).

"So much crime," Dellray intoned as he stalked past them on his long legs, "so little time." They waved good night.

Then down the elevator and out the front door. He crossed the street, heading for the federal parking annex.

He noticed the scorched frame of a van that had burned earlier in the evening, still smoldering. He remembered hearing the sirens, wondered what had happened.

Past the guard, down the ramp into the dim garage, which smelled of wet concrete and car exhaust.

Dellray found his government-issue Ford and unlocked the door. He opened it and tossed in his battered briefcase, which contained a box of 9mm ammunition, a yellow pad filled with his jottings, various memos on the Kwan Ang case and a well-read book of Goethe's poems.

As Dellray started to climb inside the Ford he noticed on the driver's side of the car the window weather stripping was unsealed, which told him immediately somebody had wedged the window to open the door. Shit! He glanced down and saw the wires protruding from under his seat. He lunged for the top of the door with his right hand to keep from putting all his weight on the seat and compressing what he knew was the bomb's pressure switch.

But it was too late.

The tips of his long fingers flapped against the open door frame and slipped off. He began to fall sideways onto the seat beneath him.

Save your eyes! he thought instinctively, lifting his long hands toward his face.

"The Changs're somewhere in Queens," Sachs said, writing this bit of information on the whiteboard. "Driving a blue van, no tag, no make."

"Do we have anything specific about it?" Rhyme muttered. "Cerulean, navy, sky, baby blue?"

"Wu couldn't remember."

"Oh, my, now, that's helpful."

As Sachs paced, Thom took over as the scribe.

The information about the Ghost's four-by-four, which the snakehead had abandoned at the site of the Wu shoot-out, wasn't any better. The Blazer had been stolen and had current but fake dealer tags. Tracing the vehicle identification number revealed only that it had been stolen in Ohio months ago.

Sonny Li sat nearby but wasn't offering his Asian detective insights at the moment; he was rummaging through a large shopping bag he'd brought back from Chinatown a short while before. Lon Sellitto was on his phone, apparently learning that the Ghost had successfully vanished after the shoot-out, to judge from his scowl.

Sachs, Mel Cooper and the criminalist turned to the trace evidence she'd found in the Blazer. She'd located a few small grayish carpet fibers under the brake and accelerator pedals and two matching fibers in the cuff of the dead shooter outside the Wus' apartment. The fibers didn't match the carpet in the Blazer or any of the prior scenes and therefore might've come from the Ghost's safehouse.

"Burn 'em and let's check the database."

Cooper ran two of the fibers through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, which produced a record of the exact substances that went into this type of carpet.

As they waited for the results there was a knock on the door outside and a moment later Thom ushered in the visitor.

It was Harold Peabody.

Rhyme assumed that he'd come here to talk to them about Coe's carelessness at the Wus' apartment. But there was a grimness on his face that suggested something more. Then behind him another man appeared. Rhyme recognized him as the assistant special agent in charge – the ASAC – of the Manhattan office of the FBI, a too-handsome man with a perfect chin and smug manners. Rhyme had worked with him several times and found him efficient and unimaginative – and given, as Dellray had complained, to bureauspeak thick as honey. He too was grim-faced.

Then a third man appeared. His crisp navy-blue suit and white shirt suggested to Rhyme that he was bureau as well, but he identified himself tersely as Webley from State.

So, the State Department was now involved, Rhyme thought. That was a good sign. Dellray must've indeed used his guanxi in high places to get them reinforcements.

"Sorry to intrude, Lincoln," Peabody said.

The ASAC: "We need to talk to you. Something happened downtown tonight."

"What?"

"About the case?" Sachs asked.

"We don't think it's related. But it's going to have some implications, I'm afraid."

Well, get on with it, Rhyme thought and hoped his impatient glare conveyed this message.

"Someone planted a bomb in the garage across from the federal building tonight."

"My God," Mel Cooper whispered.

"It was in Fred Dellray's car."

Oh, Lord, no, thought Rhyme, "No!" Sachs cried.

"A bomb?" Sellitto blurted, snapping closed his cell phone.

"He's okay," the ASAC said quickly. "The main charge didn't go off."

Rhyme closed his eyes. Both he and Dellray had lost people close to them thanks to explosive devices. It was, even unemotional Rhyme believed, the most insidious and cowardly way to kill someone.

"Not hurt?" Li asked, concerned.

"No."

The Chinese cop muttered something, a prayer perhaps.

"What happened?" the criminalist asked.

"Dynamite with a pressure switch. Dellray triggered it but only the detonator fired. Maybe the cap wasn't seated right. They don't know yet."

The ASAC said, "Our bomb unit rendered safe and handed the parts over to PERT."

Rhyme knew most of the agents and the techs in the bureau's Physical Evidence Response Team and respected them. If there was anything to find he had confidence that they would. "Why don't you think it's related?"

"Anonymous nine-one-one call about twenty minutes before the blast. Male voice, undetermined accent, said the Cherenko family was planning some retaliation for the bust last week. It said more would follow."

Dellray, Rhyme recalled, had just finished running a huge covert operation in Brooklyn, the home of the Russian mob. They'd nailed three international money launderers, their staffs and several supposed hitmen and had confiscated millions of dollars and rubles.

"Origin of the call?"

"Pay phone in Brighton Beach."

The largest Russian community in the area.

"I don't believe in coincidences," Rhyme said. "The Ghost spent some time in Russia, remember? To pick up the immigrants."

He glanced at Sachs, an inquiring eyebrow raised. She answered, "The Ghost and his buddies were pretty hot to get the hell away from the scene of the Wu shooting. I can't see them detouring down to the federal building to set up a bombing. Not to say they couldn't have hired somebody."