“Don’t know who brought them along to the party,” Lou growled. “Maybe they were trying to protect that colonel, or shoot him, who knows? Word around town is that the air force is concerned about a video that showed up online, something they say the colonel was sent here to seek and destroy.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Wonder what that might be.”

Ed pulled out a phone and showed me a screen from YouTube. “Assassins in the Heartland” had received 1,217,836 views since going up two days ago. The freeze-frame showed Matt in the instant he’d been shot, before the blood flowered across his shirt back, just as he was starting to fall.

“People tell me the feds have been around, trying to find out who has the film and who posted it,” Ed said.

“They getting any ideas?” I asked.

“What I hear is, someone put it up in an Internet café over in Kansas City, no way of tracing who did it. They got themselves a fake Facebook page and told the whole world to come see, and by now just about everyone in the world has been looking. Might be an international incident coming out of it. Russians are peeved, on account of that lady scientist, Magda, being part of their own old weapons program. A whole lot of other people are, too, according to the papers. Of course, you can’t believe everything you read.”

Sandy Heinz, the ICU nurse, appeared and said the guests had overstayed their visiting time. “We told you fifteen minutes, we stretched it to twenty, but it’s been thirty now, so off you go.”

It was Heinz who wheeled me back to my room.

“Sonia Kiel?” I asked her.

“She’s coming around, more conscious hours than unconscious. Her parents still haven’t been to see her, but one of her brothers—one of her actual brothers, because you’d better believe we checked his ID six ways from Sunday—anyway, he flew in from Boston. He’s going to take her back with him when she’s strong enough to travel. You think she’s out of danger now?”

“I hope so,” I said soberly. “Unless the people who were after her attack her out of spite. That video the guys were just showing me has all the information they didn’t want Sonia to reveal.”

Heinz gave a crooked smile as she helped me out of the chair and back into bed. “The hospital wants to send her to a nursing home. Cost saving, you understand—she’s a Medicaid patient, and she’s beyond her limit of days here. But your Dr. Herschel has been pushing our administrators to keep her here with a guard on her room until she’s out of danger.”