The compact woman surveyed the scene, her eyes immediately coming to rest on the two canisters in the cart.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “I’d like you to explain in clear, simple language what those canisters contain and why you need them.”

“Nothing would make me happier,” said Dale Wilmot.

39

PRIEST RIVER, IDAHO

Nancy Clement left a trail in the snow as she dragged her bad leg toward the lights of the Wilmot house. She wasn’t sure how seriously injured she was. All she could tell was that her leg threatened to buckle each time she put weight on it.

The snow was getting deep now and it would have been hard slogging even with two good legs. But now it was slow-motion agony.

Finally she reached the house. The door was locked. She pounded on the door with the flat of her hand. Nancy had cuffed Margie to the bed so she wouldn’t cause any mischief while Nancy investigated, but now she worried that Evan had fallen asleep and she would freeze to death outside on the porch. Even if he were awake, she didn’t know if he had the strength to help her.

She pounded again, and this time she heard the lock unlatching and then Evan unbolted the door.

Nancy staggered in and sank onto the nearest couch.

“What happened?” he asked.

“The car turned over,” Nancy said. “I think I broke my leg.” She pulled up her leg and examined the bruiskeddddddddInsere that had already begun to swell. When she pressed on it, the pain was like something electric.

“Did you find the body?” Evan asked. He looked terrible. His lips were cracked and his skin had a splotchy look, as if it had been sandpapered, but his eyes were bright and troubled.

Nancy nodded. “You were right. They’re making cyanide in the woods.”

“Cyanide? Why?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. Of course, she had begun to nurse some theories, but she saw no reason to trouble Evan with more worries than he already had.

“Whatever they’re doing, you’ll stop them, right?”

“I have to get in touch with my office.”

“The phone lines are down. Cable’s gone, too.”

“Is there any other way to get an outside line?”

“Couer d’Alene is nearly thirty miles away. And the roads are impassable without a snowplow.”

Nancy stood. “I’ll have to risk it.”

“You can barely walk.”

It was three o’clock Eastern. The speech was at nine. That gave her just over three hours to reach a phone.

“I don’t have a choice.”

Evan thought for a minute. “My dad has a bulldozer,” he said.

“Could I drive it with a broken leg?”

“It won’t be easy. But, yeah, I think you could.”

In the kitchen she splinted her leg as best she could with a pine plank, then Evan gave her instructions on how to start the big bulldozer.

“Good luck,” he wished her.

“Thank you.” She gave him the keys to her handcuffs. “Don’t unlock Margie until nine o’clock. After that, it won’t matter.”

He nodded. “Part of me hopes we’re wrong about all this, but the other part of me knows we’re not. The crazy thing is I know he’s doing this for me, because of me. But it’s not patriotism, just insanity. You tell him that if you find him. When you find him.”

She took his hand for a moment and was surprised by how firm it felt, no hesitation in his grip. But his face looked pained, and she turned away as the tears rolled down his cheeks.

Once Nancy got the dozer started, operating it was no big trick.

Instead of having an accelerator, the big Cat had a decelerator pedal, so that you only had to mess with it when you were stopping. Otherwise she was able to do most of the work with her hands. The steering was controlled by two handles in front of her, which controlled the relative speed of the treads. Another handle operated the blade. After a brief circuit of the area around the sheds, she felt competent enough to control the slow-moving machine.

Soon she was ons s Ahe was on her way with a full tank of diesel. The storm had abated, but the wind blew the flakes in swirling drifts, and the temperature had dropped. The cab was warm inside, and she had thrown on extra clothes. It would have been cozy if not for the searing pain in her leg and the desperate circumstances she was in.

The D8 had a blade that could be tilted to better funnel snow away from the Cat. She didn’t have to completely clear the road; she just had to clear the top layer so that snow didn’t start piling up in front of the undercarriage and force the Cat to grind to a halt. There was no great trick to it. Once she’d found the right height, she just let it sit there, and the dry, powdery snow peeled off and piled up steadily in a long mound to her right.

The first sign that the bulldozer wasn’t a completely perfect solution to her problem was when she noticed that it didn’t have a speedometer. When a motor vehicle barely goes faster than a brisk walk, she realized, it doesn’t need one.

At five miles an hour, it would take nearly six hours to reach Coeur d’Alene. She only had about three hours to make contact with somebody in DC. She had to assume that somewhere between where she was and Coeur d’Alene there was a working cell tower or someone with a working phone or Internet connection. But for the time being, all she could see in front of her was snow.

The one thing that the absurdly slow progress afforded her was time to think about who she would call and what she would tell him. If she called Ray Dahlgren, there was a solid chance he would dismiss her out of hand. He was already heavily invested in the notion that she was a loose cannon, hell-bent on ruining his career and breaking every rule in the FBI personnel handbook. He was not the kind of guy to back up on something like that without a lot of evidence to the contrary.

At this point he would have nothing but her word. She had found a hand sticking up out of a patch of frozen ground, and she had found a strange lab that made her feel ill and that smelled like burned almonds. And that was about it.

So Dahlgren was out.

That left the Secret Service and Gideon Davis.

If she called the Secret Service, they’d call Ray Dahlgren. Ray Dahlgren would tell them she was a suspended agent with a harebrained theory and a grudge. He might even try to implicate her so the Secret Service would track her down. Crazy as that sounded, she couldn’t rule it out as a possibility.

Which left Gideon.

But could Gideon and Tillman actually stop the threat by themselves? It was her only hope.

In the meantime, there was the seemingly endless expanse of snow and the monotonous growl of the big Caterpillar diesel.

40

WASHINGTON, DC

The Richard B. Russell Senate Office Building is connected to the Capitol by a subway. This not only allows senators to pass from their offices to the Capitol without mixing with the hoi polloi, but it also allows deliveries to be made without backing unsightly, noisy, smoke-belching trucks up to the Capitol. It was through this tunnel that Wilmot and Collier needed to pass in order to righhhhhhhh D‡each their target. But first they had to get past Special Agent Shanelle Klotz, senior facilities specialist, responsible for security for the HVAC and related systems.

Wilmot patiently explained the likely source of the problem in the Capitol heating system in mind-numbing detail. Finally the Secret Service agent said, “Okay, that’s far more detail than I’m capable of understanding. Officer Grandison is going to run those canisters through the X-ray machines, and we’re going to take a very close look at them.”

“Sure,” Wilmot said.

Collier had assured him that the canisters would pass muster. But he couldn’t help being apprehensive.

“Want me to load them on the—”

Special Agent Klotz shook her head. “Stay where you are, gentlemen.” She motioned to one of the agents wearing tactical gear to load one of the canisters on the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt.