By Sunday evening they were ready to make their move.

Fifty-three minutes before sundown, as soon as Joe was up and fed—Lacey's turn tonight—he got behind the wheel of the Navigator and drove down Broadway. Lacey sat up front next to her uncle; Carole had the rear to herself.

"Are we ready for this?" he said as they approached Thirty-fourth Street.

Carole wasn't sure. She hoped so.

They'd learned through three days and three nights of steady surveillance that the Vichy—the more time she spent with Joseph and Lacey, the more Carole found herself using that designation—stuck to a fairly rigid schedule of two shifts: a large contingent of perhaps twenty-five or thirty worked the days, while only a half dozen or so manned the entrance at night.

They'd taken over Houlihan's and turned the bar-restaurant into a cafeteria of sorts. It served two meals a day—breakfast and dinner—at change of shift. Using binoculars, Carole and Lacey had watched from their perch across the street as the Vichy attacked heaps of scrambled eggs every morning—the cook had to be using the powdered kind—and pots of some sort of stew every evening.

All three agreed that the meal break at shift change was the time to strike. All the Vichy were concentrated in Houlihan's then. They'd settled on dawn, Monday, for their assault.

But assault how?

Joseph and Lacey had wanted to find a way to use the napalm, rig it somehow to explode and turn the restaurant into an inferno while the Vichy were eating their breakfast. But the "somehow" eluded them. And even if they did manage to come up with a way to explode it, the napalm presented too many chances for something to go wrong. If they were only partially successful—if they killed some but not all of the Vichy—they'd have to abandon all hope of success. They couldn't win a fire fight with them, and from then on the Vichy would be warned and on full alert.

Carole had had a better idea. This was why she'd brought along the canister of sodium fluorosilicate. She'd had a feeling they might need a more silent form of death than bullets and napalm. She'd found canisters of the chemical at one of the local municipal utility authorities where it was used to purify the water supply. At a few parts per million, sodium fluorosilicate was harmless. But ingestion of half a gram of the odorless and tasteless powder interfered with cellular metabolism, making you deathly ill. A gram caused convulsions and death. Not a pretty way to go, but probably better than being burned alive by napalm.

Carole wished there were another way, one that could be delivered by someone else and not multiply the number of lives she'd already taken. But there was nothing and no one. It was her idea, her responsibility. She couldn't shirk it off on someone else.

The question was, how to get it into the Vichy? Obviously via their food. This evening's sortie would accomplish that—they hoped.

Joseph turned the big SUV onto Thirty-fourth and said, "Let's pray that those technicians I've been watching don't eat with the rest of them tomorrow. We need them. And besides, they appear to be innocent. The three of them seem older than the typical Vichy, they're unarmed, and dress like middle managers. They arrive in a group every morning, flanked by two Vichy.

They're not tied or manacled, but I get the impression they're prisoners of some sort."

"But they could wind up sick or dead," Lacey said. "Then what do we do?"

"Please, God, don't let them," Carole said. She had blood on her hands, she was crimson to her elbows, but so far none of it was innocent.

"But what if they do?" Lacey persisted.

Joseph shook his head. "I've been watching three dawns in a row and not once have they eaten with the others. In fact, by the time they're brought in, breakfast is just about done, and they're taken directly inside. Let's hope tomorrow is no exception."

Halfway between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, Joseph slowed the car to a crawl. Carole leaned forward, peering ahead between Joseph and Lacey toward the lighted windows of Houlihan's, glowing like a beacon in the fading light. She searched for signs of stray Vichy who'd wandered away from the Fifth Avenue entrance around the corner where they usually hung out. But nothing was moving on the street except their car.

"Damn!" Joseph said. "The earring. Would somebody do the honor?"

Lacey fished the Vichy earring off the dashboard and punched it through his earlobe.

"Didn't feel a thing," he said. "Are you ladies ready?"

"Ready as I'll ever be," Lacey said. "How about you, Carole?"

Carole could only nod. Her mouth was too dry for speech. They were entering the belly of the beast.

Joseph swung the car into the curb and stopped. Houlihan's lit-up interior was empty. Dinner wasn't ready yet. The cook was back in the kitchen.

"I'll turn the car around and wait here. Hurry. And be careful."

Carole watched Lacey shove a pair of steel bars she called "nunchucks" up the left sleeve of her sweatshirt. She turned to Carole and took a deep, quavering breath.

"Let's roll."

Carole alighted with her backpack in her hand. She'd removed the stakes and crosses and hammer and replaced them with a football-size sack of sodium fluorosilicate. A pound of the stuff. Enough to kill the Empire State Building's Vichy contingent a dozen times over.

They hurried across the sidewalk, pushed through the revolving glass doors, and headed straight for the rear of the restaurant area. The air smelled sour. The bar, tables, and floor were littered with paper plates, food scraps, and empty beer cans. Waves of glistening brown beetles scurried out of their way as they approached.

"Cockroaches," Carole whispered. "I've never seen so many."

"Maybe they feel some kinship with the clientele," Lacey replied.

They paused outside the swinging doors to the kitchen. Light filtered through the two round, grease-smeared windows.

"Okay," Lacey said. "I go first."

She pushed through the doors; Carole followed. A fat, balding, cigar-chewing man in a bulging tank top stood before a stove, stirring a big pot. He looked up as they entered.

"Who the fuck are you?" he said.

"A couple of hungry ladies," Lacey said. "Got any dinner you can spare?"

"Yo." He grinned and grabbed his crotch. "I got dinner right here."

"That's not exactly what we had in mind."

"You eat some of this, you get to eat some of what's cookin in the pot. Capisce?"

While Lacey talked, Carole looked around the filthy mess of a kitchen. She didn't see a gun. The cook probably couldn't imagine he'd need one. Immediately to her right she spotted the other thing she was looking for: half a dozen ten-pound canisters of powdered eggs. One was open, its lid slightly askew.

"I'm kind of cranky right now," Lacey was saying. "I'm hungry, I've got low blood sugar, and I'm feeling premenstrual. You'll like me better when I'm not hypoglycemic."

"Ay, this ain't no Let's Make A Deal." He jabbed a finger at Lacey. "You do me before you eat"—then at Carole—"and she does me after. Otherwise you can get the fuck outta here."

Lacey sighed and took a step toward him. "Oh, all right."

He grinned and started loosening his belt. "That's more like it!"

Lacey's hand darted to her sleeve and came up with her nunchucks. She whipped her hand around in a small circle, snapping her wrist and slamming one of the steel bars against the side of the cook's head. He grunted and staggered back, clutching his head. Lacey followed, swinging her nunchucks left, right, left, right, then vertically, connecting each time with either the man's head or his raised elbows. With blood spurting from his face and scalp, the cook turned away, dropped to his knees, then fell forward, covering his head with his hands and groaning.