The illegal alien part was difficult, because they were, in fact, illegal aliens. But in America, no issue was so clear-cut that it could not be obfuscated beyond recognition by a talented lawyer. The Ramirezes now had one: a nationally famous hell-raising San Francisco lawyer who liked to do pro-bono work if lots of TV cameras were present; he insisted that he was going to get these people green cards real soon.

The part about being bad parents was different. The Ramirezes were actually known in their community as very good parents. Carlos was a teetotaler who spent every minute of his free time with his children, and Anna was a domestic saint. Ray had arranged for character witnesses to show up at the safe house and say as much.

Eleanor Richmond's part in the endgame was a different matter. She snuck into, and ransacked, the office of her young colleague Shad Harper. This was easily enough to get her fired and possibly even enough to get her thrown into jail. She understood this clearly and had already typed up a letter of resignation for Senator Marshall. She had been working at this job for exactly one month and had received exactly one pay check.

It was completely insane for her to be doing this. If she had been looking for snippets of information that she could have kept to herself and used discreetly, that would have been one thing. But her entire goal was to dig up some dirt that she could turn around and release to the media. Eleanor Richmond had gone native. She was out of control.

She had lost it sometime over the weekend. The realisation that Sam Wyatt, her boss' main man, had triggered this whole chain of events was bad enough by itself. For a day or two she had wavered, mostly because she was turned off by Ray's tactic of planting toys in the grass for photographers. When the INS had come around looking for Carlos and Anna, she had been annoyed. But when the state had tried to take Bianca away from her parents, Eleanor Richmond had gone nuts. That was no fair. She'd rather be a bag lady than a conspirator in an affair that involved breaking apart a family.

So on Thursday, whenever Shad Harper left his office for more than ten minutes, Eleanor went in and made herself at home. It would be worth destroying her own career if she could find anything to bring Shad down along with her. It would have been nice to find something on Sam Wyatt, or on the aide in D.C. who had made the fateful phone call to the Forest Service, or even on Senator Marshall himself. But she was willing to settle for Shad Harper's head on a platter.

Somewhat to her own astonishment, she didn't get caught. Once or twice, someone poked their head into Shad's office while she was there, and she explained that she was looking for a stapler that Shad had borrowed. This explanation worked because Shad was always borrowing stuff, including money, and not returning it.

Shad himself spent most of his day out of the office, deeply enmeshed in some kind of plot involving the Ramirez family.

By the time the sun rose on Friday morning, illuminating the new headline:

"BIANCA: I WANT MY MAMA!"

nothing had really changed. Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre was going to release Bianca at 6:05 p.m. By an astonishing coincidence, this put her release just a few minutes into the local evening news programs, making it an ideal candidate for live TV coverage. Their new PR Director, who had been on the job for five days and had already received a raise and a bonus, insisted that this was just a coincidence and that the time of the release had been set for purely medical reasons.

He deserved his raise. From a media/PR standpoint, Highlands had started out the week gut-shot and had made a miracle recovery of their own until they now looked like archangels in white coats, their arms brimming over with fuzzy stuffed animals. At 6:05, they would roll Bianca Ramirez out into the horseshoe drive where their uniformed valet parking attendants stood guard twenty-four hours a day, and release her into the world. This would be good for two reasons: it would cement their reputation as medical geniuses and it would clear out the hyperbaric chamber so that heavily insured middle-aged diabetics could get into it again.

The question was: who was going to take charge of Bianca when her wheelchair reached the curb? The fact that no-one knew the answer to this question turned the entire scenario into a certified Real-Life Drama and insured vast saturating media coverage.

Colorado was still trying to get a court order making Bianca a ward of the state, but the Ramirezes' high-profile lawyer and his team of young legal ninjas had thrown this action into a procedural snafu that would take weeks to un-tangle. Barring any last-minute action by the judicial branch, Carlos and Anna would still be Bianca's legal guardians as of 6:05.

But Carlos and Anna were illegal aliens and the INS was still looking for them. As a matter of fact, the INS was right there at the hospital, and had been for three days, waiting for them to show up.

So if Bianca's parents actually showed up at 6:05 to take custody of their daughter, they would immediately be taken off to the slammer and someone else would have to step in to take care of Bianca. This would probably end up being Anna's sister Pilar, but there had been rumours that the state might use the arrest of Carlos and Anna as a pretext to seize Bianca, in which case the media could look forward to a tearful three-way Solomonic showdown right there in the horseshoe drive.

All the networks showed up, and as early as six o'clock on Friday morning, twelve hours before the Big Event, Highland's new PR man was already out in the horseshoe drive with a thick piece of blue chalk, marking out camera position: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CHAN 4, CHAN 5, CHAN 7, and more.

As one journalist could be heard remarking to another journalist while they waited in the car-rental line at Stapleton Airport: "It's got a coma baby. It's got a miracle recovery. Weepy parents. A crooked senator. And it's even got a fucking cowboy!"

By itself, the story was plenty, but things got even better, if that was possible, in the middle of the day, when rumours began to circulate that one of Senator Marshall's staff members had documents incriminating another staff member in the Lazy Z Ranch grazing scandal that had triggered this whole mess, and that she was going to be there this evening to lay the whole thing out before the massed forces of the national press. And when this rumour was embellished a little, to the effect that the woman in question was the famous bag lady who had recently cut Earl Strong's nuts off in public, journalists all over Denver had to put down their drinks and breathe into paper sacks for a while.

Eleanor Richmond strode like a gunslinger into the horseshoe drive at 5:55 p.m. cradling a three-inch-thick stack of xeroxed handouts. Before she said a word, she held out one of the handouts up next to her face and stood motionless for a few seconds. She had learned this from watching pros in action. It gave the video people a chance to adjust the white balance on their cameras so that she, and everyone who followed her into the centre of the maelstrom, would not look pink or green on television. At the same time, it was a great pose for the still photographers. Dozens of motor drives whined, clearly audible in the astonishing silence that had suddenly fallen over this makeshift technological amphitheatre.

If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had chosen this moment to gallop through the horseshoe drive on their fiery mounts, the journalists would have chased them out of the shot with verbal abuse, and possibly interviewed them later, after the main event. The only figure who dared break into the frame was a helpful reporter from the Washington Post who scurried up to Eleanor, relieved her of the stack of handouts, and frisbeed them wildly into the crowd.