Manning finishes his shower at 6:57 on this date. He shaves and dresses in one of his three identical gray suits, then climbs the grimy, unlit stairway from the basement of the athletic club to the grill room on the ground floor. The club’s kitchen doesn’t open till seven but the cooks put out an urn of coffee and a spread of bagels, bialys, and Danishes. Manning takes his coffee black with four sugars. He snatches two Danishes—one cherry and one prune. He wraps the prune Danish in a double-folded paper napkin and slips it into the right-hand pocket of his suit jacket. The cherry Danish he eats as he crosses the lobby toward the front double doors.

At this time Manning turns on his phone and begins receiving messages and texts. He glances down now and reads:

TO: MANNING

FROM: DEWEY

RE: CASE 426-37S

Manning stops reading when, through the club’s glass front doors, he spots me waiting at the curb beside our unmarked unit, a ’34 Ford Crown Vic Electric AV (self-driver). I would not have been sent to collect him unless there had been another murder.

Manning pushes through the doors and starts down the steps.

“Where?” he says.

3

ACELA CORRIDOR

THE TERM ACELA CORRIDOR refers to the run of states, cities, and municipalities between Boston and Washington, D.C., that lie along the route of the high-speed train service, the Amtrak Acela. The term is often employed in the demographic sense as well, as in, “Presidential candidate X can count on votes in the Northeast suburbs and along the Acela Corridor.”

The Acela used to be a decent train. I remember riding it as a kid. It hit 150 per and was operated by its crews with care and pride.

“Christ Almighty!” says Manning now as a bottle bomb explodes against the armor grille outside our window. The flash of the gasoline wicking off barely makes a dent in the steel-slat deflector, but the gel charge leaves a gooey yellow mess across the armorglass. It splats like a thrown egg.

We’re not even to Baltimore and the train has already been fléchetted and firebombed four times. The army should clean out these nests of squatters and the dispossessed.

Manning is reading the third of the seven files I have prepared for him this a.m. I’ve been up since two-thirty working on this. Manning refuses to read reports off any kind of screen. He insists on paper. He sits across from me now in the facing seat. I’m riding backward. Two businessmen commuters, buried in their (paper) copies of the Times and the WSJ, fill out our four-seat packet.

My notes are in typescript, following the form that Manning insists upon.

VICTIM #2

Justman, Michael A. 57, married (separated), 2 children.

George Washington Univ., Pol. Sci. ’05; London School of Economics, Intl. Relations, ’07; Kennedy School, Harvard, Asian Studies, Ph.D., ’10.

Deputy Assistant Undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, 26 months.