Then, in 2001, foreign terrorists struck the World Trade Center. Flying commercial jets loaded with fuel and passengers into the twin towers, they killed more than three thousand people. They also hit the Pentagon, causing hundreds more to die. And what was the effect? Did they bring down the country? No. Did they destroy the U.S. economy? No, at least not immediately.

Economic markets recovered in less than a year and came raging back to hit peaks never before seen. The damage to the Pentagon was repaired in a few months and the U.S. military set about to crush two of the regimes thought to be most antagonistic to American interests.

As he clicked on the keys, the Old Weatherman thought about his old comrade, Senator Joshua Root. He had voted for the war along with the rest of them. Back in his day, when he was young, Root used a different name. He didn’t call himself Josh to pander to voters. No, back then he was spouting a different rhetoric, the words of revolution-power to the people, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails. That was before he saw the error of his ways and sold out.

The Old Weatherman wondered if Root had ever seen him coming, or if the good senator had been completely blindsided by the first e-mail message. Of course, like himself, Root had a number of private e-mail accounts where he hid out in dark corners, places where government censors, auditors, and investigators could not see his personal musings and sins. The Old Weatherman had found them all. Even if Root closed one, the Old Weatherman could go to another. It was because the Old Weatherman had an inside connection, someone Root could never get rid of.

People like Root never expected to be held accountable for anything. Their sense of privilege and entitlement blinded them. And, of course, Root couldn’t go to the police and tell them that he was being blackmailed. The truth would destroy him.

The Old Weatherman stopped the pounding of the keys for a moment and thought about it. It had to be the work of the gods, all of it. It was too perfect.

The attack on the World Trade Center accomplished something that no one realized at the time. What became a series of protracted and unpopular wars distracted many in Washington, particularly in the White House, from the real danger. A rapidly expanding bubble of false fortunes and speculation in the nation’s housing market was threatening to take the country where it hadn’t been in more than seventy years, into the grip of another Great Depression.

When the bubble burst on the eve of the national election, it came with such swiftness and public shock that the country was left reeling. Overnight the reactionary forces in the White House and Congress were swept from power in a way that hadn’t been seen almost since the Civil War. It was something that no one could have predicted even a month before.

When all the dust had settled, the Old Weatherman sat back and pondered the stunning political landscape that lay before him. For the first time in modern American history, all of the stars were aligned, the set pieces in place. He couldn’t believe his eyes. A young, liberal president, some called him radical, was installed in the White House. His party controlled both houses of Congress with majorities that could not be overridden or stalled.

For at least the next two years, until the midterm elections, they had a free hand. It was the perfect storm and the Old Weatherman was about to add the coup de grâce. While Congress and the White House argued over health care and taxes, unemployment and trade, a new subterranean agenda of change would be moving on a parallel course, one that the powers in Washington could never anticipate.

The system was now vulnerable to true endemic change on an order that had not been seen since the founding of the country, change that, if successful, and if done soon, would alter the direction of America for the next hundred years.

The house had a dangling For Sale sign planted in the dead grass of the front lawn. A large old elm tree near the sidewalk provided shade, so he pulled up to the curb and parked. Even the words “For Sale” hung vertically from a partially broken chain. It appeared that the place was deserted, nobody there who might get nosy and come out and see what Liquida was doing.

He knew it could take hours. For Liquida it was an act of amusement on its way to becoming a labor of love.

For the man they called “the Mexicutioner,” pursuing a vendetta was a high art form. It was not something to be hurried or rushed.

He knew there was a limit to the level of physical pain a human body could endure. Liquida had often tested this boundary, looking for new horizons. But at some point the brain’s natural defenses always seemed to kick in and the object of his attentions would lose consciousness. He was able to revive the barbecued Arab three times while probing all of his nerve endings with an arc welder and tongs before the guy finally latched on to the only sedative that Liquida had never been able to reverse-death.

This might be okay for some of his guests, but not for the lawyer. For him there was no amount of physical pain sufficient to quench Liquida’s thirst for revenge.

In a single stroke Madriani had transformed Liquida’s plans for his own future into cinders.

Among his various paid chores several months earlier, the Mexican had used a chef’s knife from a Del Mar coin dealer’s kitchen to turn him into sliced sushi. As the soon-to-be cadaver lay shivering on the floor, Liquida couldn’t help but notice the glitter of heavy metal all around him, coins everywhere.

While he knew he’d been a good boy, the thought that Santa might come flopping down his chimney with a load of gold anytime soon didn’t seem likely. So Liquida decided to help himself. He hauled off enough precious metal to set up his own gold reserve and form a country, and then played the wizard doing alchemy as he transformed the rare coins into gold ingots that couldn’t be traced.

Until he could wrap it and put on a bow, Liquida stashed his early Christmas present in a safe-deposit box at a bank in San Diego under the name John Waters. With visions of sugarplums, warm sandy beaches, and bikini-clad courtesans dancing in his head, Liquida started browsing pictures of villas in exotic locations in the Wall Street Journal and on the Internet. It was about then that everything came crashing down.

Liquida was starting to get nervous. He hadn’t checked on the gold in a while. Something told him it was time to move it, and it would take a few trips. They had to roll it in and out of the vault on a heavy steel cart because of the weight. Liquida didn’t want to spend time hanging out at the bank while some clerk fished for signature cards and he did an eye tango with the security guard or anybody else who happened by. So he called the bank to tell them he was in a hurry and to ask them if they might have a signature card ready when he arrived. When he gave them the name John Waters and the box number, the clerk did a quick check and told him that, under a court order, the box was sealed.

Liquida wanted to crawl over the phone line to get at her. He asked why, and all they would give him was the lawyer’s name-Paul Madriani. If he wanted to get at the box, John Waters would have to file an objection and go to court. And Madriani knew that whoever owned the box couldn’t do that. If they showed up in court, they’d be met by a firing squad.

Some way, he didn’t know how, Madriani must have traced the name John Waters. Liquida couldn’t figure out how else it could have happened. He had picked the name himself from out of the blue. It was a play on words. “Liquida” meant water in Spanish, but he couldn’t understand how the lawyer would have either name. So how did he find the box? It would probably be the first question he asked when he got Madriani on the working end of a blowtorch.