"Maybe we shouldn't have caught so many," Dan agreed. "We'd still be working riverside Philly and having a beer with the troops at night. Why do people toast success? It just screws up your life."

"We're both talking like old farts."

"We both are old farts, Bill," Murray pointed out. "But at least I don't travel around with a protective detail."

"You son of a bitch!" Shaw gagged, and dribbled coffee down his necktie. "Oh, Christ, Dan!" he gasped, laughing. "Look what you made me do."

"Bad sign when a guy can't hold his coffee, Director."

"Out! Get the orders cut before I bust you back to the street."

"Oh, no, please, not that, anything but that!" Murray stopped laughing and turned semi-serious for a moment. "What's Kenny doing now?"

"Just got his assignment to his submarine, USS Maine. Bonnie's doing fine with the baby due in December. Dan?"

"Yeah, Bill?"

"Nice call on Hoskins. I needed an easy out on that. Thanks."

"No problem, Bill. Walt will jump at it. I wish they were all this easy."

"You following up on the Warrior Society?"

"Freddy Warder's working on it. We just might roll those bastards up in a few months."

And both knew that would be nice. There were not many domestic terrorist groups left. Reducing their number by one more by the end of the year would be another major coup.

***

It was dawn in the Dakota badlands. Marvin Russell knelt on the hide of a bison, facing the sunrise. He wore jeans, but was bare-chested and barefoot. He was not a tall man, but there was no mistaking the power in him.

During his first and only stint in prison - for burglary - he'd learned about pumping iron. It had begun merely as a hobby to work off surplus energy, had grown with the understanding that physical strength was the only form of self-defense that a man in the penitentiary could depend upon, and then blossomed into the attribute he'd come to associate with a warrior of the Sioux Nation. His five feet, eight inches of height supported fully two hundred pounds of lean, hard muscle. His upper arms were the size of some men's upper legs. He had the waist of a ballerina and the shoulders of an NFL linebacker. He was also slightly mad, but Marvin Russell did not know that.

Life had not given him or his brother much of a chance. Their father had been an alcoholic who had worked occasionally and not well as an auto mechanic to provide money that he had transferred regularly and immediately to the nearest package store. Marvin's memories of childhood were bitter ones: shame for his father's nearly perpetual state of inebriation, and shame greater still for what his mother did while her husband was passed-out drunk in the living room. Food came from the government dole, after the family had returned from Minnesota to the reservation. Schooling came from teachers who despaired of accomplishing anything. His neighborhood had been a scattered collection of government-built plain block houses that stood like specters in perpetual clouds of blowing prairie dust. Neither Russell boy had ever owned a baseball glove. Neither had known a Christmas as much other than a week or two when school was closed. Both had grown in a vacuum of neglect and learned to fend for themselves at an early age.