“What are we waiting for?” he asked no one in particular.

“That’s what I’m wondering,” said Officer Millwood.

Gideon turned to him. It was the first agreeable comment the cop had made. Maybe it meant the ice was melting.

But before he could respond, he was pulled from his reflections by a faint sound through his earpiece. A phone was ringing at the Klotz house. He heard Verhoven say, “Answer the phone. It’s your wife.”

46

WASHINGTON, DC

Ten minutes earlier, when the temperature in the House chamber had reached sixty-one, Collier opened the door, looked out at the Secret Service guard, and said, “I think you better call Special Agent Klotz. We’ve got a temperature control problem here.”

The agent nodded, then summoned her on the mic in his sleeve.

When Shanelle Klotz entered the room, Wilmot explained that the heating problem was worse than expected, and that the chamber would be roughly the temperature of a meat locker within the hour.

“What do you need to do to fix it?” she asked.

“I’ll need to check the panel in the hall while John feeds data into the controller. I figured you’d want to be here while I go out in the hall.”

Agent Klotz nodded, then leaned out into the hallway. “Mr. Wilmot is going to come out here. I’ll be inside.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the agent said.

Wilmot came out with the voltmeter, looked up and down the hallway, and waited for the door to close. Other than himself and the Secret Service agent, the hallway was empty.

“It’s down this way, bud,” he said, pointing to his left. “Did you need to come with me?”

“Yes, I do, sir,” the agent said.

Wilmot started walking. “Oh, shoot, wrong panel,” he said, turning abruptly.

This put him within arm’s reach of the agent. Wilmot pretended to stumble, reaching out as though to keep the agent from bumping into him.

The device in his hand appeared to be a voltmeter. But it was not. In fact, it was a stun gun. A normal stun gun emits around 50,000 volts of electricity at a mere .01 milliamps. This stun gun, however, contained a very different capacitor and transformer than the normal commercial variety and produced roughly three amps.

Wilmot jammed the two nearly invisible spikes on the end of the voltmeter into the agent’s chest and pressed the on button, dumping the entire contents of the capacitor into the agent’s flesh. The amperage of the charge—enough to briefly power a toaster—was sufficith=========ight=ent to stop the agent’s heart in midbeat.

The agent spasmed so hard that his head smashed against the wall, making a sound like a machete cracking open a coconut. The agent was dead by the time his body hit the floor. Wilmot pulled the agent’s SIG out of its holster, dragged him fifteen feet by one leg, then rapped smartly on the door.

When Shanelle Klotz opened the door, Wilmot grabbed her by the throat and propelled her back into the room, the SIG pressed into her face.

According to her records—which Wilmot had studied with great care—she had received the intense self-defense training given to all Secret Service agents. But he was more than a foot taller and outweighed her by 130 pounds.

She didn’t have time to scream or grab her weapon before Collier had disarmed her and wrapped duct tape around her mouth. She struggled wildly with Collier as Wilmot quickly dragged the dead agent back into the control room, but by then it was too late. Wilmot closed the door and pointed his pistol at her face again.

“If our plan was to kill you,” he said, “you’d already be dead. So you might as well calm down and find out what we have in mind.”

She continued to struggle as Wilmot slipped flex cuffs over her arms and wrists. Soon she seemed to see the futility of further struggle so she stopped fighting. Wilmot could see she wasn’t beaten, though—she was just conserving her energy and appraising her situation, looking for an opportunity to turn the tables. Her eyes still burned with controlled anger. The more he saw of her, the more he liked her.

“Phone,” he said. “Unless you want your little girls hurt.”

Her eyes widened, and Wilmot could tell he had gotten to her. Wilmot had spent a substantial amount on private investigators for this operation. He had read her psychological profile and chosen her because she was a mother of young children.

Collier pulled her cell phone off Shanelle Klotz’s belt and plugged it into a thin cable that was already attached to the USB port in the HVAC system controller.

“We recognize,” Collier said, “that the Secret Service jams all cell phone frequencies here during the State of the Union address. But the hard line to the diagnostic computer at National Heat & Air works just fine. It’s part of the secure comm links that connect the Capitol to the government’s secure backbone. So we’re able to dial out on that line using the SIM card identifier on your phone. My friend John here could bore you to tears with the technical details. But the bottom line is that whoever picks up the phone on the other end will see your name on the caller ID.”

Collier dialed her security password into the phone and then said, “According to my information, you’ve got your home number on speed dial number two.”

He held down the two key. When it began to ring, he switched to speaker and held the phone out toward Special Agent Klotz’s face.

After three rings, a man’s voice, sounding terribly frightened, said, “Sweetheart? Is that you?”

“Hello, Dr. Klotz,” Wilmot said. “At the moment, I have your wife standing right next to me. She has duct tape over her moutn t belh and her legs and arms are cuffed. But she’s listening very carefully. Right now I need you to give her an honest and clear assessment of your situation.”

Wilmot could hear the Secret Service agent’s husband breathing on the other end—a rapid, near-hysterical panting. “Sweetheart? Are you there? There are . . . there are two men and a woman in our house. They’re heavily armed. Not just guns. They have plastic explosives and stuff. They seem to have defeated the alarm, so there are no police here or anything. These are . . . I don’t know, I mean, these are really—these are really serious people.”

Shanelle Klotz looked furious. Her eyes were wide with anger and fear.

Wilmot put his finger over his lips. “Talk to him, Agent Klotz,” he said. “But just understand that if you make a big fuss, your husband and your daughters will be killed.”

Collier ripped the tape off her face.

“Nathan,” she said, “You know I can’t—” She couldn’t finish her sentence.

“Please, sweetheart! Do what they say!” Her husband’s voice was high and tremulous. “They have the girls.”

Shanelle Klotz stared straight ahead, looking at the blank wall. Her face was hard, but tears were running out of her eyes.

“All we want you to do, Agent Klotz, is open a door for us,” Wilmot said.

Shanelle Klotz didn’t speak for several seconds. Then, finally, she said, “I can’t, Nathan. I swore an oath.”

Wilmot was astonished. Knowing how he felt about his own son, he couldn’t believe a mother would be so callous with the life of her child. It had never once crossed his mind that a woman might make the decision that she had made. It was the reason he had chosen her. And now, President Wade was scheduled to make his speech in one hour and forty minutes.

In the living room of the Klotz home, Tillman was a little surprised to see Lorene Verhoven stand up suddenly from the couch where she had been lying. Although she looked half dead, the manic shine remained in her wild eyes.

She walked slowly to the phone, took it from her husband’s grasp, switched off the speakerphone, and held the phone to her ear. Then she took the hand of Klotz’s younger daughter.

“Hi, honey,” she said, smiling at the little girl. “What’s your name?”