"Ten minutes." Atticus let the door shut.

"I don't blame him," Ru murmured as the elevator started up again.

"Sumpter is an asshole," Atticus agreed.

He and Ru rode the elevator to the top floor and found Sumpter's room.

"Yes?" Sumpter called from within the room when Atticus rapped on the door.

"It's Steele and Takahashi."

Footsteps neared the door, there was a pause to use the spyhole, and then the door opened. The wave of air brought out the reek of Sumpter's cologne, Old Spice put on heavy.

"Come in!" Sumpter murmured. He glanced beyond them. "Where's Rainman?"

"Who?" Ru chose to misunderstand him.

"Johnston," Sumpter said.

"Kyle isn't autistic," Atticus stated as calmly as he could.

"Well, there's something wrong with the dweeb."

Atticus stepped close to Sumpter. "Don't . . . insult . . . my . . . backup."

"Did you make the deal?" Sumpter ignored him, heading back into the hotel room. It was a large suite, with windows overlooking Boston Harbor. The door they came through opened to a living room with a sofa, desk, easy chair, and coffee table. A door into a second room revealed a king-size bed, slightly rumpled.

"Yes." Atticus examined the plastic bag containing the backpack a second time, looking for the drug's telltale glitter. He'd checked it downstairs in the garage while writing his name on the tape sealing it shut, but he was feeling paranoid. "We've got some information on the drug. It's a lot more dangerous than we've been led to believe. It's possible that it's lethal with one dose."

"And it's transparent—nearly invisible," Ru said.

"Invisible?" Sumpter frowned, eyes narrowing. "Are you sure you weren't gypped?"

"This is the real stuff." Atticus held out the bag. "It should be handled only while wearing plastic gloves."

"Check." Sumpter took the bag and added his name to the seal.

"We set up another buy on Saturday, but we changed the location to here."

"Here?" Sumpter asked.

"Lasker's beach house is too exposed. Also the sellers won't deal out there."

"You've made contact with them; that's all that matters." Sumpter disappeared into the bedroom with the bag. The closet door slid open, and a moment later slid closed. He returned with a DVD in hand. "The case and circuitry of the digital video recorder's hard drive were trashed, but the platters were salvageable. A few hours in a clean room and the boys in the lab managed to recover most of the drive. They burned about ten days of data onto this DVD for us." He loaded the DVD into the laptop set up on the desk. "I've scanned through the disk, and it looks like the last few minutes is the only thing worthwhile."

The Buffalo team had used a standard eight-camera system, recording the last minutes of their lives. One camera focused on the desolate parking lot in a mostly abandoned industrial park, carefully set to pick up license plates and faces of people sitting inside the cars. Four others covered different angles of the staged "office" area, well lit and painted a sharp white for better contrast. The last three cameras had been scattered through the shadowy warehouse with motion sensors and silent alarm systems attached.

Sumpter started the video with the team waiting for the buyers as caught by camera four.

The kid, Jason German, juggled while telling a joke; he arced four small cloth sacks through a continuous graceful loop. Tracy Scroggins sat on a battered desk, still and patient, quirking his mouth into a smile at Jason's nervous antics. Walt Boyes, the backup, wasn't visible, most likely stationed at the monitors in the concealed room, judging by how the camera zoomed in and out on the kid. The time stamp ticked off the seconds until they died.

". . . and she says, 'Whatever you gave me, Doctor, didn't work.'" Jason was midjoke as the video started. "'While my farts are still perfectly silent, they now smell awful. Thank goodness that no one can tell it's me farting, because they could peel the paint off walls!' 'Good,' shouts the doctor, 'now that we cleared up your sinuses, we can start to work on your hearing!'"

There was an odd noise from off camera.

"I think you just killed Walt," Scroggins said. "You okay back there, Walt?" A muffled laugh was the only answer. "You've heard that one before, haven't you?"

"It's funnier this time," Walt Boyes called from his concealed room.

"I don't know whether to be complimented or insulted." Jason sent one of the balls looping over his shoulder and deftly caught it.

"Heads up!" Boyes announced the buyers' arrival.

Jason caught the cloth bags he'd been juggling and put them aside, saying, "It's about time."

Tracy nervously checked the draw on his pistol.

The door opened. Four men entered dripping slightly from rain, just as the Iron Horses had claimed. Atticus had seen the bodies of the other three bikers, so he focused on the missing man. He was a big black man with a sleepy look to him. He leaned against the back wall, tucked between two support columns. Nothing about him suggested that he knew what was coming. While Jason and the lead biker exchanged presale banter about the heavy rain outside, Toback literally picked his nose out of boredom.

"Who gives a fuck about the rain?" Scroggins gave the banter a shove toward real business. "Are we going to do this, or talk ourselves to death?"

"Tracy! Jason! Incoming!" Boyes shouted. "Incoming!"

Sumpter reached down and slowed the playback, murmuring, "This goes too fast to see otherwise."

The door flew open and a man walked in, shotgun at his shoulder. He fired as he walked, shooting the bikers even as they turned. Others filed in after him, six in all, faces set and emotionless as they fired. The bullets slammed the bikers' bodies around like puppets with their strings randomly jerked. In the slowed replay, the blood splattered gruesomely. Scroggins and German had flung themselves behind the steel desk. The camera showed only the tops of their heads as they returned fire, pinned behind the desk. Two of the shooters went down, but the other four rounded the sides of the desk and fired point-blank. The police would find later that Scroggins had tried to shield German with his own body.

The time stamp had ticked through twelve seconds.

But the shooters had missed Toback, who had cowered between the support columns. While they started to reload, he charged, a long steel pipe in hand. The foursome glanced up, and one, handing his gun to another, stepped forward to engage Toback hand-to-hand.

The shooter ducked the steel pipe casually, and then caught hold of it. There was a momentary contest of strength that the big man should have won, but the shooter wrestled the pipe away and struck Toback down with it.

The other three stepped forward, guns now loaded, and aimed down at the prone biker. They checked, apparently reconsidered killing Toback, and turned away. They turned toward Boyes's hole instead, leveled their guns, and opened fire. They systematically shifted their fire, visibly working left to right. Atticus recalled the line of bullet holes, how they ran with machine precision across the back wall; he thought that only one marksman had made them. He watched now, stunned with the knowledge that three men had acted in unison. How were they coordinating their shots? He realized then that so far they hadn't uttered a single word.

Behind them, the impossible happened. The two dead shooters scrambled to their feet. One picked up the bags containing the money and the drugs. The other stooped down to grab Toback by the ankles and dragged him outside, leaving the swath of clean floor that would later puzzle Atticus. The shooters' clothes showed bloody bullet holes and gaping wounds, entrances and exits indicating paths through vital organs, but they seemed unhampered and unperturbed by the massive damage done to them.