"We're on Sixty-four," the red-haired guy said. "There's a sign."

Sally checked the sign and then turned to Lucas. "Malone was, like, ten years in service before I signed up. She was appointed to mentor some of the younger women agents, and one time she told me that I should carefully use a few words. You know, nothing really nasty, none of the gynecological stuff, but the occasional fuck or shit, just to let them know that you weren't a sissy. She said getting treated ladylike or if you were expected to be ladylike, it was the end of you. She said you had to be a lady, but not ladylike."

"A point," Lucas said.

"Back then, it was," Sally said. "Ten years ago. I don't think it matters so much anymore."

"Yeah, you've pretty well taken over now," the red-haired man said.

"Better believe," Sally said. Derik said nothing, just bobbed his skinhead to some unseen music with a jerky beat. Sally got on a radio and talked to the crew with Dallaglio. "They're just getting out to the cars," she said. "We ought to get there about the same time."

RINKER HAD AN unfamiliar weight on her shoulders, the weight of death. Not the killing of Dichter, or Levy, or Malone, or even of all of them together, but rather the killing of Honus Johnson. She'd thought about it, as she waited for Johnson to come lurching out of the basement like a frozen Frankenstein, to stand over the couch while she was half asleep… waited for the sound of the freezer lid opening, was sure she'd heard it a half-dozen times.

One of the few literary experiences of her young life had come with a Stephen King novel, Carrie, which had scared the shit out of her, as she sprawled across the bed in her apartment, alone, reading. The feeling now was the same, but even more intense: There really was a frozen dead man in the basement, and he really had been a torturer, who would come back from hell with a bloody machete…

She analyzed it, as she'd been taught in her college psych classes back in Wichita-and she decided that her problem was not so much the dead man in the basement as the fact that she hadn't left him behind. In all her other killings, she'd almost instantly walked away from the bodies. In a couple of cases, she'd had to move them, but she'd been done with them in a few hours at most. She'd been able to escape what she'd done, put it behind her and out of mind.

This one, she was stuck with, at least for a few more days. He was riding on her shoulders as she drove west into the setting sun.

She looked a little like a fashionable female Johnny Cash, she thought-thin black long-sleeve shirt, black jeans, dark blue running shoes from which she'd carefully torn the reflective patches. In the backseat she had a black silk scarf and a black baseball cap. When she had it all on, she thought, she'd be invisible in the dark.

THEY 'D BEEN IN the car for fifteen minutes when Sally took a radio call, then looked at her map. "They're ahead of us, about three miles," she said, after a minute. "Four vehicles-two of ours and two of theirs. They're staying on the speed limit, so if we can step on it a bit, we'll catch them."

They caught them a couple of miles east of the airport, rolling off the interstate and down onto a country highway. "When Dallaglio gets out of here, everything will come back to Ross, unless she's really after Ferignetti, too-but Ferignetti's so sure that she isn't, that I kind of believe him," Sally said. "So it's Ross."

"If she's really after Ross," Lucas said, as they came up behind the trailing federal Suburban.

They were all slowing down, and a quarter mile ahead, Lucas saw another Suburban take a left turn off the highway into the airport. He could see the control tower, like a lighted diamond in the dusk, atop a black cylinder, and all around it, low brick light-industrial, warehouse, and office buildings. A boulevard led into the airport, with the tower off to the right, but nothing that Lucas could identify as a terminal until they drove past a mounted military plane, which Lucas thought might have been a Phantom, and reached a T-intersection at the end of the boulevard. The red-haired agent said, "That's the terminal," pointing at a building at the top of theT, in the headlights. All the other trucks had taken a left, following signs to Executive Air.

Two hundred yards up the road, a brilliantly lighted hangar stood off to the right, with an executive jet inside; another jet, with a fold-down stairway leading to an open door, sat on the pad outside the hangar. Derik, who'd said virtually nothing during the trip, muttered, "Looks like a TV stage, a soundstage. They oughta kill the lights."

Lucas said, "Man… this looks like… this looks bad."

The lead truck had already stopped next to the jet, and a couple of agents hopped out. Then the second car pulled up, a Lincoln, and Lucas said to Sally, urgently, "Tell them to keep Dallaglio in the car. Keep him in the car."

She lifted the radio to her mouth, as they stopped at the end of the lines of vehicles and Lucas popped his door and climbed out and shouted at the agents, "Keep him in the car," and then he said to Derik, who'd scrambled across to get out with him, "Aw, shit…"

The Dallaglios were all getting out: father, mother, daughters, wandering around in the brilliant light, like so many lost mice. Lucas said to Derik, "C'mon," and hurried forward. The red-haired agent was coming around the front of the truck, to go with them, and a couple of agents from the trailing truck were getting out…

And for a few seconds, it was a very pretty Missouri evening, too hot and humid, but not a bad night to sit around a backyard swimming pool with friends and a few fruit-rum drinks with little brightly colored paper umbrellas-a night like that.

THEN PAUL DALLAGLIO stepped into the space between his car and the lead FBI truck, the agents coming up from behind him.

He stood there for a couple of seconds, then turned to say something to his wife, did a little dance, and fell down. An instant later, they heard the BANG, and then a ripping sound as Rinker opened up with the AR-15 and everybody went to the ground and bullets cracked through glass and metal and tires and ricocheted off the sides of the hangar and the jet.

Dallaglio, on the ground, made a humping motion and Lucas, in a tiny corner of his mind as he pushed himself behind a wheel and dug for his weapon, wondered why the hell he was making the humping move, and then realized that bullets were tearing through Dallaglio's body.

LUCAS COULD SMELL gas and oil and dirt and could hear people screaming, the girlish screams of a child, and then one of the agents was up and behind the Suburban and was banging away with what sounded like a. 40, and Lucas pushed up and picked up a muzzle flash and thought that unless the agent was holding about four feet above the flash, at that distance, he'd be wasting his ammunition. He didn't think anything more about it, but simply lifted his. 45 and started banging away, holding very high. Rinker was shooting from the side of a single-story warehouse or office building to their left, little sparkles of flame followed by the sounds of bullets tearing through sheet metal, and in the dark it was hard to figure the range. A hundred yards, maybe a hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred, he thought. He held four feet high and banged away, with no hope of hitting her, hoping simply to dislodge her.

Then the bolt of the. 45 banged back and open and Lucas dropped the magazine and slapped in another, his only spare, and another gust of bullets spattered across the parking area and he could hear more people screaming, but couldn't tell what they were saying. Someplace in there, he felt the tires go on the other side of the Suburban and yelled at Derik, "She's taking out the tires, so we can't chase her. She must be driving, we gotta block the road."