This was a first. Of the hundreds of barricades Potter had negotiated, he'd had good and bad relationships with the press as he tried to balance the First Amendment versus the safety of hostages and cops. But he'd never met a journalist who agreed to let him preview stories.

"That's a prior restraint," said Potter, fourth in his law school class.

"There've already been a half-dozen reporters talking about crossing the barriers. That'll stop if you agree to let a couple of us inside. They'll listen to me."

"And you want to be one of those two."

Silbert grinned. "Of course I fucking want to be one of them. In fact I want to be one of the first two. I've got a deadline in an hour. Come on, what do you think?"

What did he think? That half the problem at Waco had been press relations. That he was responsible not only for the lives of the hostages and troopers and fellow agents but for the integrity of the Bureau itself and its image, and that for all his negotiating skills he was an inept player of agency politics. He knew too that most of what Congress, senior Justice officials, and the White House learned about what happened here would be from CNN and the Washington Post.

"All right," Potter agreed. "You can set it up. You'll coordinate with Captain Charlie Budd."

He looked at his watch. The food was due. He should be getting back. He drove to the command van, told Budd to set up a small press tent behind it and to meet with Joe Silbert about the pooling arrangement.

"Will do. Where's the food?" Budd asked, gazing anxiously up the road. "Time's getting close."

"Oh," Potter said, "we've got a little flexibility. Once a taker's agreed to release a hostage you're past the biggest hurdle. He's already given Jocylyn up in his mind."

"You think?"

"Go set up that press tent."

He started back to the command van and found himself thinking not of food or helicopters or Louis Handy but rather of Melanie Charrol. And not of how valuable she as a hostage might be to him as a negotiator nor of how much of a benefit or liability she might be in a tactical resolution of the barricade. No, he was mulling over soft information, dicta. Recalling the motion of her mouth as she spoke to him from the dim window of the slaughterhouse.

What could she have been saying?

Speculating mostly about what it would be like to have a conversation with her. Here was a man who'd made his way in the world by listening to other people's words, by talking. And here she was, a deaf-mute.

Lips, teeth, lips.

He mimicked her.

Lips, teeth…

Got it, he thought suddenly. And he heard in his mind: "Be forewarned."

He tried it out loud. "Be forewarned."

Yes, that was it. But why such an archaic expression? Of course: So he could lip-read it. The movement of the mouth was exaggerated with this phrase. It was obvious. Not "Be careful." Or "Look out." Or "He's dangerous."

Be forewarned.

Henry LeBow should know this.

Potter started toward the van and was only twenty feet from his destination when the limousine appeared silently beside him. It seemed to the agent that as it eased past it turned slightly, as if cutting him off. The door opened and a large, swarthy man climbed out. "Look at all this," he said boisterously. "It looks like D-Day, the troops have landed. You've got everything under control, Ike? Do you? Everything well in hand?''

Potter stopped and turned. The man walked up close and his smile, if a smile it had been, fell away. He said, "Agent Potter, we have to talk."

2:20 P.M.

But he didn't talk just at that moment.

He tugged his dark suit closed as a burst of chill wind shot through the gully and he strode to the rise, past Potter, and looked over the slaughterhouse.

The agent noted the state license plate, unhappily speculating as to who the visitor might be, and continued on to the van. "I'd step back," he said. "You're well within rifle range."

The man's large left hand reached out and gripped Potter's arm as they shook. He introduced himself as Roland Marks, the state's assistant attorney general.

Oh, him. Potter recalled the phone conversation earlier. The dusky man gazed at the factory again, still a clear target. "I'd be careful there," Potter repeated impatiently.

"Hell. They have rifles, do they? With laser scopes? Maybe phasers and photon torpedoes. Like Star Trek, you know."

I don't have time for this, Potter thought.

The man was tall and large, with a Roman nose, and his presence here was like the blue glow of plutonium in a reactor. Potter said, "One moment please." He stepped inside the command van, lifted an eyebrow.

Tobe nodded toward the slaughterhouse. "As a mouse," he said.

"And the food?"

Budd said it would arrive in a few minutes.

"Marks is outside, Henry. You find anything on him?"

"He's here?" LeBow grimaced. "I made a few calls. He's a hard-line prosecutor. Quick as a whip. Specializes in white-collar crimes. Excellent conviction ratio."

"Take-no-prisoners sort?"

"Exactly. But ambitious. Ran for Congress once. Lost, but still has his eye on Washington, the rumor is. My guess is he's trying to pry some media out of the situation."

Potter had learned long ago that hostage situations are also public relations situations and careers were as much on the line as were human lives. He decided to play Marks carefully.

"Oh, write down that I've translated the message from the hostage. 'Be forewarned.' Assume she's talking about Handy."

LeBow held his eye for a moment. He nodded and turned back to his keys.

Outside again, Potter turned to Marks, the second-most-powerful lawyer in the state. "What can I do for you?"

"So is it true then? What I heard? That he's killed one of them?" Potter nodded slowly. The man closed his eyes and sighed. His mouth tucked into a sorrowful wrinkle. "Why in the name of heaven do a crazy thing like that?"

"His way of telling us he's serious."

"Oh, my good Lord." Marks rubbed his face with large, blunt fingers. "The AG and I've been talking about this at some length, Agent Potter. We've been in a stew about the whole mess and I hightailed it down here to ask if there's anything we can do on the state level. I know about you, Potter. Your reputation. Everybody knows about you, sir."

The agent remained stone-faced. He thought he'd been rude enough on the phone to keep the lawyer out of his life. But it seemed that, to Marks, the earlier conversation had never taken place.

"Play it all close to your chest, do you? But I'd guess you have to. It is like playing poker, isn't it. High-stakes poker."

Extreme stakes, Potter thought again, and wished once more that this man would go away. "As I told you I don't really need anything else from the state at the moment. We've got state troopers for containment and I've enlisted Charlie Budd as my second-in-command."

"Budd?"

"You know him?"

"Sure I do. He's a good trooper. And I know all the good troopers." He looked around. "Where are the soldiers?"

"Hostage rescue?"

"I thought for sure they'd be in the thick of things by now."

Potter was still unsure of how the wind from Topeka was blowing. "I'm not using state HRT. The Bureau's team is assembling now and'll be here in the next few hours."

"That's troubling."

"Why's that?" Potter asked innocently, assuming that the man wanted the state rescue team to handle the tactical side.

"You're not thinking of an assault, I hope. Look at the Weaver barricade. Look at Waco. Innocent people killed. I don't want that to happen here."

"No one does. We'll attack only as a last resort."

Marks's boisterous facade fell away and he became deadly serious. "I know you're in charge of the situation, Agent Potter. But I want you to know that the attorney general's position is peaceful resolution at all costs."