Even Willy, as the minutes stretched toward an hour, forced himself back into the room, albeit behind a blast-deflecting barricade that the TAC team had unobtrusively built near the door. He watched with growing fatalism the opposing forces of Mock’s and Joe’s composure against Seamus’s swelling hysteria. The young man was as fixated on this eerily quiet scene as he might have been watching an anaconda slowly strangle a pig.

It couldn’t stay unresolved. The warring dynamics took on a force of their own, with Seamus’s anxiety as the inevitable catalyst. In the end, there were two bombs in the room, and Mock and Joe found themselves spending almost as much time stopping Seamus from exploding as Mock was on defusing the vest.

The spark, however, when it came, was neither Seamus nor his vest, but the most benign of muttered comments that Mock made to his colleague over the radio. He had successfully navigated almost every layer of Shaw’s handiwork, when he gingerly felt along Seamus’s spine, and discovered a final small detonator—what he later admitted thinking Shaw might have thrown in as an afterthought.

“Found another one,” he relayed in his usual soft monotone. “Might be motion-activated.”

That was all it took. Wide-eyed, his face contorted, Seamus twisted in his seat, stared down at Mock, and screamed, “What?” and leaped to his feet.

Mock reacted like a dog to a whistle. Without thought or warning, he yelled, “Avalanche!” sprang from his crouch, tackled Joe head-on, and knocked them and Joe’s chair over backward, just as the entire TAC team hit the floor behind their barricade, taking Willy down with them.

The noise, when it came, proved anticlimactic. A muffled thud, like a heavy book hitting a rug.

But no less effective for that.

Finally standing, dangling a fringe of spaghettilike strands of cut wire, Seamus straightened at the muted blast and momentarily froze. He then coughed once, producing a spray of blood from his lips, and collapsed.

With one last detonator to go, Lemuel Shaw had achieved his goal.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

On the face of it, Seamus’s death should have been the day’s main feature. The fact was that, as dramatic as it had been, it didn’t mean the survivors were out of danger. Shaw’s behemoth of a building remained full of devices—some disarmed, others bypassed, and, quite reasonably, many as yet undiscovered.

That was not lost on Christian Mock, who raised himself off Joe Gunther, politely said, “Sorry about that,” and immediately began coordinating the extraction of nonessential personnel.

Joe lay on the floor a moment longer, his legs still entangled in his chair, gazing across the carpeting at Seamus’s lifeless heap, and working to put the past hour into perspective. Joe’s life had been full, varied, and inordinately eventful, including combat exposure in military service.

But this had been a corker.

“Taking a little ‘me time’?” Willy asked, looking down at him.

Joe turned his head to take him in. “How ’bout you? You okay?”

Willy frowned and reached down. “I’m not the one staring at the ceiling. You hurt?”