Arthur Potter, who, after all, made his living with language, was fascinated.

Angie continued, "Right around that time there were protests to shift to a curriculum where ASL was taught and one of the reasons cited by the deaf teachers in favor of doing so was that so many students were using Melanie's language. But Melanie wouldn't have anything to do with the protests. She denied that she'd invented the language – as if she was afraid the administration would punish her for it. All she wanted to do was study and go home. Very talented, very smart. Very scared. She had a chance to go to Gallaudet College in Washington this summer on a fellowship. She turned it down."

"Why?"

"Nobody knew. Her brother's accident maybe."

Potter recalled that the young man was having surgery tomorrow. He wondered if Henderson had gotten in touch with the family. "Maybe," he mused, "there's just a certain timidity that goes along with being deaf."

"Excuse me, Agent Potter." Frances Whiting leaned forward. "Is that like a certain amount of fascism goes along with being a federal agent?"

Potter blinked. "I'm sorry?"

Frances shrugged. "Stereotyping. The Deaf have had to deal with it forever. That they're kings of the beggars. That they're stupid. Deaf and dumb. That they're timid… Helen Keller said that blindness cuts you off from things, deafness cuts you off from people. So the Deaf compensate. There's no other defining physical condition that's given rise to a culture and community the way deafness has. There's a huge diversity among – pick a group: gays, paraplegics, athletes, tall people, short people, the elderly, alcoholics. But the Deaf community is militantly cohesive. And it's anything but timid."

Potter nodded. "I stand chastised." The officer smiled in response.

He looked out over the scruffy field beside them. He said to Angie, "My feeling is that I can get only so far with Handy through negotiations. It could save three or four lives if somebody inside was helping us."

"I'm not sure she's the one who can do it," Angie said.

"Noted," he said. "You better go find Charlie now. He's probably wondering what's become of you."

Angie left the van, Frances too, on her way to the hotel to check on the hostages' families. Potter sat back in the desk chair, picturing the photo of Melanie's face, her wavy blond hair.

How beautiful she is, he mused to himself.

Then he sat up, laughing to himself.

A beautiful face? What was he thinking of?

A negotiator must never Stockholm with hostages. That's the first rule of barricades. He has to be ready to sacrifice them if need be. Still, he couldn't stop thinking about her. This was ironic, for nowadays he rarely thought of women in terms of physical appearance. Since Marian died he'd had only one romantic involvement. A pleasant woman in her late thirties. It was a liaison doomed from the start. Potter now believed you could return successfully to romantic love at age sixty and above. But in your forties and fifties, he suspected, the process was doomed. It's the inflexibility. And the pride. Oh, and always the doubts.

Gazing at the slaughterhouse, he thought: In the past fifteen years, since Marian, the most meaningful conversations I've had have been not with my surrogate cousin Linden or her clansmen or the women who've hung chastely on my arm at functions in the District. No, they've been with men holding oiled guns at the heads of hostages. Women with short black hair and Middle Eastern faces, though very Western code names. Criminals and psychopaths and potential suicides. I've spilled my guts to them and they to me. Oh, they'd lie about tactics and motives (as I did) but everyone told the exquisite truth about themselves: their hopes, their dreams dead and dreams living still, their families, their children, their scorching failures.

They told their stories for the same reasons Arthur Potter told his. To wear the other side down, to establish bonds, to "transfer the emotive response" (as his own highly circulated hostage negotiation guidebook, eighth printing, explained).

And simply because someone seemed to want to listen.

Melanie… will we ever have a conversation, the two of us?

He saw Dean Stillwell wave to him and stepped into the fragrant gully to meet the sheriff. He glanced at the shreds of fog wafting around the van. So Handy's weather report wasn't up to date after all. It gave him a fragment of hope – unreasonable perhaps, but hope nonetheless. He looked up at the late-afternoon sky, in which strips of yellow and bruise-colored clouds sped past. In a break between two of the vaporous shapes he saw the moon, a pale crescent sitting over the slaughterhouse, directly above the blood-red brick.

6:03 P.M.

They appeared suddenly, the dozen men.

The slippery wind covered the noise of their approach and by the time the agent was aware of them they'd surrounded him and Dean Stillwell, who was telling Potter about the dock behind the slaughterhouse. Stillwell had looked over the river and the dock and concluded that, even though the current was fast, as Budd had reported, it was too tempting an escape route. He'd put some armored troops in a skiff and anchored them twenty yards offshore.

Potter noticed Dean Stillwell look up and stare at something behind the agent. He turned.

The team was dressed in black and navy-blue combat gear. Potter recognized the outfits – the American Body Armor plated vests, the rubberized ducking uniforms and hoods, the H amp;K submachine guns with laser sights and flashlights. It was a Hostage Rescue Team, though not his, and Arthur Potter didn't want these men within a hundred miles of the Webber amp; Stoltz Processing Company.

"Agent Potter?"

A nod. Be gracious. Don't jerk leashes until leashes need to be jerked.

He shook the hand of the crew-cut man in his forties.

"I'm Dan Tremain. Commander of the state police Hostage Rescue Unit." His still eyes were confident. And challenging. "I understand you're expecting a Delta team."

"The Bureau's HRT actually. Jurisdiction, you know."

"Course."

Potter introduced him to Stillwell, whom Tremain ignored.

"What's the status?" Tremain asked.

"They're contained. One fatality."

"I heard," Tremain said, rubbing a gold pinky ring on which was a deep etching of a cross.

"We've gotten three girls out unhurt," Potter continued. "There are four other girls inside and two teachers. The HTs've asked for a chopper, which we aren't going to give them. They've threatened to execute another hostage at seven unless we have it here by then."

"You're not going to give him one?"

"No."

"But what'll happen?"

"I'm going to try to talk him through it."

"Well, why don't we deploy just the same? I mean, if it comes down to him killing her, I know you'll want to move in."

"No," Potter said, looking over at the press table, where Joe Silbert and his assistant were diligently typing away on a computer. The reporter looked up glumly. Potter nodded and glanced back at Tremain.

The state police commander said, "You're not saying that you'd let him kill the girl, are you?"

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

Acceptable casualties…

Tremain held his eye for a moment. "I'm thinking we really ought to move into position. Just in case."

Potter glanced at the men and gestured Tremain aside. They walked into the shadow of the command van. "If it comes down to an assault, and I certainly hope it doesn't, then my team'll be the one doing it – and only my team. Sorry, Captain, that's just the way it is."

Was this going to explode? Shoot straight to the governor and the Admiral in Washington?

Tremain bristled but he shrugged. "You're in charge, sir. But those men are state felons too and our regulations require us to be on the scene. And that's just the way it is too."