Three minutes later they arrived at the door where two agents waited for them.

Shanelle nodded curtly to them and said, “One of you come in, the other stay outside on the door.”

The agent followed them into the room. Wilmot waited until the door was closed, then hit him in the head with a pipe wrench. As the agent felt to his knees, Collier looped tape around his mouth, then flex-cuffed him.

“You told me you weren’t going to hurt him,” Agent Klotz said.

“I lied,” Wilmot said.

Collier looked at his watch. “Fifty-three minutes.”

“Go outside and tell the guy on the door that everything’s copacetic for now, so he can go back to his regular assignment.”

Shanelle Klotz opened the door. “We’re good here. You can go back to your post.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The agent, a large man in a gray suit, lumbered up the hallway and disappeared.

“Agent Klotz,” Wilmot said, “I want you to understand that we have an extremely clear picture of how you do your job here. We know the emergency phrases, password sequences, authentication procedures, the chain of command—the whole bit. We know that today if you use the phras he Athe phrase ‘par for the course’ during a conversation with another agent, you have just signaled to him that an attack on the president is unfolding. So, unless you want Wendy to suffer whatever that maniac Lorene Verhoven has in store for her, I suggest you avoid saying ‘par for the course’ to anyone today.”

Wilmot had a certain amount of information about the Secret Service protection detail, but there were distinct holes. The trick to managing Shanelle Klotz was to use the little details he did know to make it seem as though he knew everything there was to know. The more she thought he knew, the less likely she was to do something stupid.

As he was talking, Shanelle said, “Well, then you know we need to make one final check of these tanks full of, what, nerve gas? Ricin? Zyklon B?”

“Just for your own peace of mind,” Wilmot said, “I want you to know that what we are doing is staging a massive protest. These tanks contain CS gas. I’m sure you know what it is.”

“Tear gas.”

“Yeah, well, they call it tear gas. But it makes you throw up is what it really does.”

“So you’re not trying to kill anybody?”

Wilmot shook his head. “This government is out of control. We believe that a massive shake-up is needed, and this action we’re taking here is going to show how weak and silly and vulnerable our nation’s government is. But we’re not here to kill people. So you don’t need to be wrestling with the question of whether or not to sacrifice your family to save all those fat cats out there. You’d just be throwing away your husband’s and children’s lives for nothing.”

Wilmot wasn’t sure whether the agent would swallow his lie or not. But it was worth a try. He knew getting someone to believe something—even if it was impossible—was often the difference between making him take action and succumbing to inertia. If his lie made her think for a fraction of a second longer about trying to stop them—well, that fraction of a second could be the difference between the success or failure of the operation.”

“I’m not sure if I believe you,” Shanelle Klotz said.

“I don’t give a damn if you do or if you don’t,” he said. “Call the guy with the sniffer dog. Let’s get this last thing over with.”

Klotz talked into her sleeve.

“Fifty-one minutes,” Collier said.

48

TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA

As soon as she said “It’s done,” Lorene wobbled and clutched at the stair railing. The phone slipped from her hands, and she fell backward, sliding down the wall. She left a long smear of blood on the cream-colored paint.

Verhoven rushed to her side. “Lorene!” he shouted. “Lorene!”

Lorene’s head lolled forward.

Rheiiiiiiiii D‡20;Lorene!”

Lorene emitted a soft snoring sound. Tillman had heard that sound before. It was the sound of somebody who was not going to make it unless they got help damn quickly.

Whatever the doctor had done, it wasn’t enough. The IV had given her a short burst of energy. But she’d burned through it fast, and now she was in bad shape.

Verhoven crouched over his wife, shaking her. She didn’t respond. His face hardened, and Tillman saw something in his eyes that he knew meant things were about to end badly here.

“What did you do?” Verhoven shouted at Dr. Klotz. “What the hell did you do?”

“Hold on, hold on,” Tillman said, grabbing Verhoven’s shoulder. “We both watched him. He didn’t do anything. Sugar and saline, that’s all it was. She’s just weak. She’s going into shock. We need to lay her down and—”

Verhoven lifted his AR and pointed it at Dr. Klotz.

Tillman saw the fury and hopelessness on Verhoven’s face and knew he was going to take out his rage on the doctor. Like an impotent thug, he would strike out at the closest object to his wrath.

Tillman still didn’t know the exact location of the attack, or what its precise nature would be. But he knew that a Secret Service agent named Shanelle Klotz had been roped into doing something to further the plot. If he and Gideon could find out where she was stationed, they could stop the attack.

In short, it had to be enough. There was no time to mull over his options.

Tillman fired point-blank into Verhoven, racked the 870, fired again.

The shotgun tore huge pieces of meat out of Jim Verhoven’s body, exposing blue loops of viscera. He pitched over backward, torso in one direction, legs in another.

The horrific banging of the guns must have revived Lorene. She sat up, looking around in puzzlement. It took her a moment to figure out what had happened—her husband on the floor, a wisp of smoke rising from the barrel of Tillman’s shotgun.

She clawed at her Glock. “You motherfucker! You lying bastard!” she shouted. “You betrayed us!”

“I was never with you in the first place,” Tillman said.

She continued to claw at her Glock. Because she was crunched up against the stair railing, however, she couldn’t quite pull her gun from its holster.

“Don’t do it,” Tillman said, racking another round of buckshot into the 870. “Don’t.”

Her wide, crazed eyes stared straight into Tillman’s as she finally freed the Glock. She was smiling now, a broad fierce feral grin. She knew what was coming. But in some way she must have welcomed it—this, the culmination of everything her sad life had been aiming toward.

“Don’t,” Tillman repeated.

She pushed herself slowly to her feet, laughed at him, and raised the Glock.

He fired, racked, fired, racked, fired again.

< Qp>

What was left of Lorene Verhoven fell slowly to the ground. Her shirt caught on the newel post at the bottom of the stair railing and tore free. She fell and hung there from the newel post, shirtless, her back bare and exposed. There were scars everywhere. Cuts, burns, thick ridges of pink skin—a topographical map of a stolen childhood.

“Come on,” Tillman said to Klotz. “We need to get your girls out of here.”

Klotz stood rooted to the floor until Tillman shoved him with the butt of his gun. Then he teetered forward, grabbed his daughters, and ran for the door.

Gideon heard the shots in his earphones and leaped from the seat of the car. He handcuffed Millwood to the steering wheel and sprinted across the front lawn. By the time he got to the door, Tillman, Klotz, and the two girls were coming out.

“Where’s Verhoven?” Gideon asked.

“Dead,” said Tillman. “Lorene, too.”

“You okay? Klotz? The girls?”

“We’re fine, but we need to get to the Capitol.”

“After we call this in. We’ve got a witness. Klotz can verify everything we say.” The doctor was eyeing him silently, the two girls clutching his trousers.

“We can’t wait for the bureaucrats to wrap everything up. By the time they’re finished taking our statements, the president, vice president, and most of the government will be dead.”