“He’s still got this guy in Silver Spring -what’s his name?”

“Coulter. Coulter died this afternoon.”

“What?”

“He had a second stroke, died before the ambulance could get there. He was getting out of his car, with his wife’s help, when he collapsed. The two FBI agents who were watching his house called an ambulance and tried to help, but it was no use.”

“So now we have no suspects at all?”

“I’m afraid that’s the case.”

“Poor Kinney. And I had such hopes for him.”

BOB KINNEY, drained of sexual energy, had kissed Nancy Kimble goodbye and put her in her car for the drive back to South Carolina. Now he was at his desk, staring straight ahead, when Agent Kerry Smith knocked and entered. “Good morning, sir.”

“Hmmm?”

“Sir, are you all right?”

“Just tired, Kerry.”

“You can’t let this get you down, Mr. Kinney. We’re going to get something on this guy soon, and when we do, he’ll be toast.”

“You know Coulter’s dead?”

“Yes, sir. I told you, remember?”

“Oh, yes.” Kinney made an effort to bring himself fully alert. “What have we failed to look at, Kerry? What have we failed to do?”

“I think we’ve looked at and done everything anyone could reasonably expect us to do, in the circumstances, sir.”

“There are two things wrong with your statement, Kerry: One, we are not expected to act reasonably, only effectively; two, nobody cares what the circumstances are, they just want results.”

“That’s unfair, sir. We have to work within the constraints of the evidence.”

“No we don’t. A prosecutor has to work within the constraints of the evidence; investigators have to be brilliant, even when there is no evidence.”

“Well, we have some, sir.”

“Oh, yes? Tell me.”

“He has hairy wrists and a strong neck.”

“That’s not going to look very good on a wanted poster. We can’t even put this guy on our list of top ten criminals, since we don’t have a name or a description. How do you organize a nationwide search for someone with hairy wrists and a strong neck?”

“Well, not nationwide, sir, just the Eastern seaboard, from Atlanta to New York. I-95, basically.”

“So we put out an APB to the state troopers along the route, telling them to look out for a suspect with hairy wrists and a strong neck, driving an RV?”

“Well, we’re not exactly sure about the RV, are we?”

“All right, Kerry, put out a bulletin to all the state police units that patrol I-95. Anytime they stop an RV, they’re to pay particular attention to the wrists and neck of the driver and report any similarities to our description at once. And for Christ’s sake, don’t put this out to the press. It’ll make us sound like idiots.”

“And what’s wrong with our computer people? Why haven’t they tracked down the ACT NOW website?”

“It’s not as easy as it seems, sir. The guy keeps changing things, so that we have to contact it through different servers.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It’s as if we went to search a house for him and he’d moved to another house.”

“Oh.”

“They’re still working on it, though. We might get lucky.”

27

KATE HAD BEEN AT HER DESK in Langley for half the morning when the mail arrived. She had a personal mailbox at CIA headquarters, just as she did at the White House, but mail rarely arrived that way. This morning, though, there was one letter, and she recognized it immediately.

Kate,

How long does this have to go on? How many people have to die before you will address the issue at hand? I can help you take this guy out of circulation within a very short time, if only you will help me. I’m old, I’m ill, and I don’t want to spend my last days in this joint.

You ask, how could a man in prison help to catch a rampaging murderer on the outside? The answer is, I once knew him, and I recognize his technique. I want to be a good citizen, but I want to die free, too. Help me help you.

Kate slid the letter and its envelope into the shredder, which, after shredding, reduced the paper to ashes. First of all, she didn’t believe Ed Rawls; second, she was still extremely angry with him because of his betrayal of the Agency. He had been her mentor for all of her early career, and a close, personal friend.

She thought about it some more, and decided that she did believe Ed. But if Ed knew this guy, it would have been through work. She might even have known him, too. Still, they had run all the records of former employees of the technical services department and had come up with nothing. She buzzed her secretary. “Please call Harold Broward in personnel and ask him to come up here soonest.”

Broward appeared within minutes. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Harold, I want you to do another personnel search-same time parameters, but I want you to expand it from technical services to the whole of operations. Some of our agents have had the training it would take to pull off these murders, and I want to isolate all possible candidates.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How long do you need?”

“We’re talking about more files, but I’ll try to have something for you by the end of the day.”

“Bring all the files to me, just like last time, and we’ll go through them together.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Broward went back to his office, and Kate called Bob Kinney.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Morning. It’s occurred to me that some of our operational people have the training it would take to pull off these murders, so I’m expanding our search to other areas of the Agency.”

“Excellent idea,” Kinney replied. “I’ll look forward to the results.”

“I suggest you do the same at the FBI and at the other agencies you’ve been looking at.”

“I’ll issue the instructions immediately, Ms. Rule, and I appreciate your suggesting this.”

Kate hung up and tried to think about something else.

KINNEY WAS ANNOYED that he had not thought of this; it was simple enough. He called Kerry Smith in and issued the instructions.

“I’ll get on it, sir, and a man in computer operations has some information for you. Shall I send him up?”

“Right away, please.”

THE MAN LOOKED like no more than a boy. He had an awful haircut and a scraggly beard. The kid could not be an agent; he would never have made it through Quantico, Kinney thought. “What have you got for me? And skip the gobbledygook, because I won’t understand it.”

“Okay…” the kid began.

Kinney hated people who started sentences with “Okay…”

“Okay… this guy is very smart. He changes his setup daily, sometimes more often, which makes it harder for us to trace him back to his home server. But I’ve got it, now.”

“Let’s have it.”

“Have you ever heard of Sealand?”

“No. Sounds like a contradiction in terms.”

“It’s an island in the North Sea, off the coast of England.”

“What does this have to do with our suspect?”

“As I understand it, we don’t have a suspect, exactly, but let me finish.”

Kinney sighed.

“A few years ago a group of-I don’t know-anarchists, radicals, whatever…”

Kinney hated the use of “whatever.”

“… landed on this island, claimed it for themselves, and proclaimed it the Republic of Sealand. They waited for the Brits to come get them, so they could get on TV, but they didn’t bother, and they haven’t bothered since. So these people stayed on the island, and to support themselves, they set up an Internet support and cell phone service, offering confidential Internet access to individuals who didn’t want to be traced. It’s sort of like the electronic equivalent of a Swiss bank. Our guy’s website is based there.”

“Can you hack into it and find out who he is?”

“Well… not yet is the best answer I can give you. It involves more than hacking into his website. That doesn’t contain his identity. It involves breaking into the Sealand company records for the information, and they have very good and constantly updated security software in place.”