It took a few minutes to reach the top floor, the eighth if he had counted correctly. He tried the door and it opened. He turned on his flashlight and checked his weapon. He was now on a small landing with doors on either side. Shining a light through the glass windows, he could see they led off to different parts of the floor. Both were locked. Between them was a shoulder-width opening that looked down over an eight-story airshaft. All at once he could see the vastness of that part of the prison. Each floor was ringed with a catwalk accessing hundreds of cells. Underneath the railing at the edge where he stood was another glowing arrow, this time taped to the floor and pointing straight out. West leaned out through the opening without touching the ancient railing. On the deck one floor down was another arrow pointing back toward the stairwell. Was he supposed to rappel down to the next floor? He stepped back and tested the railing and, surprisingly, found it was rock solid. He leaned over again, trying to see what was on the landing below, but it was shadowed in darkness, and he couldn’t get enough of an angle to use his flashlight. Quietly he tried his transmitter once more, but there still was no answer. He turned off the light and listened. Suddenly he felt the damp coldness that surrounded him, and shivered involuntarily.

Rappelling without a harness was chancy, but it was only about eight feet to the floor below. The nine-foot webbing was going to leave his descent a little short because of the four-foot-high railing and the knots at both ends, so he untied the bag, looping the webbing through the handles. Then, leaning as far over the side as he could, he swung the bag back and forth toward the landing below. When he was sure it would clear the railing, he released one end of the strapping, and the bag landed softly on the concrete deck below.

He pulled the webbing back up and tied it to the railing. Slowly he started to lower himself. When he came to the end of the strap, he could just reach the railing on his tiptoes. He took a moment to gain his balance on it and then let go of the webbing. As soon as his full weight transferred to the seventh-floor railing, he heard the horrifying sound of metal tearing. Both uprights supporting the crosspiece had been almost completely sawed through. He tried to grab the strap but it was already out of reach.

As he started to fall, he felt adrenaline explode through him. He turned himself in the air as best he could, hoping to catch a railing of one of the six remaining floors. But he was accelerating; it wasn’t going to get any easier. He threw his hands at one of them, but because his body was askew, his right hand caught the railing before his left. With a sickening crack, his right shoulder dislocated as his left hand grabbed the railing, stopping his fall.

Blinding pain shot through the entire right side of his body, and he could hold on with only his left hand. Unable to pull himself up, he looked down, trying to count the railings below. The flashlight dangled from his useless arm as its beam swept the airshaft haphazardly. He was still three stories up. Something streaked by him and he thought it might have been the railing. Then he saw the cut and bundled magazine pages hit the ground and burst apart. The moneybag, now empty, floated by. Helplessly he watched his left hand, as if it belonged to someone else, come off the railing.

DAN WEST DIDN’T think he had been unconscious very long. The first thing he became aware of was footsteps. Help had arrived.

But there was something wrong with the approaching steps; they were too slow. And they belonged to only one person. West tried to look around but the flashlight had come off his wrist and lay beyond his grasp, giving off only a small fan of light in the opposite direction. He was lying uselessly on his gun as his entire right side was all but paralyzed by the searing pain. Slowly so his movement wouldn’t be detected, he reached back with his left hand and pushed the body recorder’s button to the On position.

A man came up behind him and stood silently for a few seconds before walking around and standing in the flashlight’s beam. Enduring the pain, West looked up as well as he could but still wasn’t able to see his features in the shadows.

“Did you want to see my face?” he asked in a cold whisper that caused West to understand the consequences of being able to identify the individual. He picked up the flashlight and scanned the agent’s sweating face. “You are young. That would explain the lack of self-preservation.” He then shrugged and turned the light on himself. “Here you go.”

West stared at the man’s face, memorizing it. It was unremarkable except for his eyes; they were a stony gray but beginning to widen with pleasure. The agent tried to bring his injured right hand to his holster, but the extortionist easily kicked it away. “And they say the old BU was tougher. That must have been very painful.”

Hoping the recorder wasn’t damaged, West grimaced and said, “I don’t suppose you’d want to tell me your name.”

“What good would that do you now?”

“One last bit of satisfaction.” He laughed painfully. “It’s not like I’ve got much else to look forward to.”

“And what’s in it for me?”

“Come on. It’s the ultimate act of control. Completely exposing yourself and then completely taking it away. For someone like you, that has to be damn near sexual.”

The man’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Someone like me?” the extortionist said, his voice amused but still in that hissing whisper. He then drew a black automatic. “I’m sorry, but we’d better move things along. I would imagine surveillance is getting close.”

“I was hoping you’d stick around. Give them the opportunity to meet you and, with a little luck, shoot you to death.”

“That’s the saddest thing about being young—you actually believe there is such a thing as hope.” He raised his gun and fired one round that hit Dan West in the right temple. The shot echoed metallically for a few moments, and the killer closed his eyes as if trying to prolong its sound.

When it was completely quiet, he scanned the floor with the flashlight until he found the spent cartridge. He picked it up and slipped out a side door.

THREE

ROBERT LASKER KNEW THAT IN WASHINGTON, D.C., THE QUICKEST way to have one’s public-service résumé reduced to a one-line obituary was to get caught lying to the White House, especially if that individual happened to be the director of the FBI. But that was what he had just done. Anyway, he wasn’t sure what the truth was, or whether he cared if, as director of the FBI, he ever found out. He told his driver that he needed to clear his head and would walk back to the office.

Pushing his hands deeper into his pockets as he walked along, he tried not to think about the meeting with the White House staffer who had summoned him because of the press the Bureau had been receiving about the Rubaco Pentad murders. “After three murders of well-known people, silence is not an option with the media. It looks like you’re hiding something. You have to make some sort of statement,” the staffer had said.

Actually, they were hiding something, not only from the public, and now the White House, but from most of their own agents as well. Lasker, without giving any details, told him that the investigation was at a critical juncture and the smallest miscalculation could cause additional deaths. The fear of the administration being dragged into the circle of responsibility for more murders was enough for the aide to back off, at least for the time being.

In truth, the FBI had not developed a single lead as to who was responsible for the murders or how to stop the killers from striking again.

Twelve hours earlier, the Rubaco Pentad had claimed its third high-profile victim, Arthur Bellington, a nationally known defense attorney who took particular delight in preventing or overturning FBI convictions, which he often followed with a press conference detailing the Bureau’s ineptitude.