"All right," the first voice said. "That's all of it. Move out."

"What about you?" the cheerful voice said.

"I'll be right there." There was a sound of a round being jacked into the chamber of an automatic pistol. "No witnesses this time." washington, D. C., june 12

"Haley!"

"Yes, sir?"

"Where the hell are Carroll and Casanare?" Special Agent Dennis Haley looked wildly around the cramped bullpen of the Russian Mafia task force, as if his extreme need would cause the two agents to crawl out from beneath one of the dozen desks jammed into the room. Instinctively he said, because even at his grade level deniability was all, "Uh, I don't know, sir."

"Well, find them, goddamn it!"

Golden slammed back into his office. Special Agent Haley's computer monitor rocked slightly on its stand from the aftershock.

Special Agent Haley was small and thin and red-haired and harried. He was also easily cowed, and in spite of the mountain of paperwork piled on his desk he didn't hesitate to go in search of the errant agents. He found them two floors down, assisting in the sorting of evidence from the bombing of an airliner which had gone into the Atlantic off the coast of South Carolina.

Carroll looked up and saw Haley in the doorway. "We're saved," she told Casanare. There were only so many ways a witness could describe a plane blowing up, all of them resulting in the death and dismemberment of everyone on board. When you've read one eyewitness report, you've read them all, whether they were knee-deep in the ocean off Myrtle Beach, revering or reviling the memory of John Brown at Fort Sumter, or visiting your mother-in-law under duress at Tybee Island.

"Who says there's no god?" Casanare replied. If he had to look at one more report of a severed limb floating to shore, he was afraid he might vomit. You just don't vomit at headquarters. In the field, yes, neatly and discreetly behind a bush, and at a crime scene no one blamed you, but not at headquarters.

Maxine Carroll was a tall blonde with deep blue, almost violet eyes.

Alberto Casanare was an inch shorter than Carroll, fifty pounds heavier, all of it muscle, and as dark as she was fair.

They were key members on the task force investigating the Russian Mafia presence in the United States, recently covering themselves with glory following the successful cracking of a multinational organization controlling but not limited to credit card fraud, money laundering, illegal alien smuggling, white slavery, weapons trafficking and tax evasion, and the indictment (if not the trial and imprisonment, Haley thought regretfully), of one Pyotr Razikin, AKA Peter the Great, the alleged leader of the organization.

"What's up?" Carroll said in the hallway.

Haley, preoccupied with watching her walk, didn't hear her at first.

Casanare, grinning, nudged him in the side before Carroll turned around and caught him. He colored and stuttered, "Uh, the boss wants to talk to you."