The prisoner pulled him to the floor and began pummeling the bleeding man with his cuffed fists. In a moment Roth was unconscious, his face swollen like a melon. Constable dragged him back to the table and propped him up on it, his back to the door. If one of the guards happened to glance in again it would look as if he were reading the papers, head down. Constable bent down, pulled off one of the lawyer's shoes and socks and wiped the blood off the table as best he could and covered the rest with documents and pads of paper. He'd kill the lawyer later. For now, for a few minutes at least, he needed this innocent-looking tableau.

A few minutes—until he was free.

Freedom . . .

Which was the whole point of Erick Weir's plan.

Constable's best friend, Jeddy Barnes, the second in command of the Patriot Assembly, had hired Weir not to kill Grady but to break the prisoner out of the notoriously secure Manhattan Detention Center, transport him to freedom over the Bridge of Sighs and ultimately into the New England wilderness, where the Assembly could resume its mission to wage war against the impure, the unclean, the ignorant. To rid the land of blacks, gays, Jews, Hispanics, foreigners—the "Them" that Constable railed against in his weekly lectures at the Patriot Assembly and in the secret websites subscribed to by the thousands of right-thinking citizens around the country.

Constable now rose, walked to the door, looked out again. The guards had no clue about what had just happened inside the interview room.

It occurred to the prisoner that he ought to have a weapon of some kind and so he lifted a metal mechanical pencil from the lawyer's bloody shirt and then nestled the butt of the pencil in the wadded-up sock to protect his palm. The sharp point would make a fine stabbing implement.

Then he sat back, across from Roth, and waited, thinking about the plan created by Weir, or "Magic Man," as Barnes called him. It was a masterpiece, involving dozens of tricks of the illusionist's trade. Feint and double feint, careful timing, clever diversions. It began with Weir carefully planting the idea with the police that there was a conspiracy to kill Grady. The Reverend Ralph Swensen laid the groundwork for this by making one attempt on the prosecutor's life. The bungled killing would reinforce the cops' belief that there was a plot to kill the prosecutor and they'd stop looking for any other crimes—such as the planned jailbreak.

Weir himself would then intentionally get caught during a second attempt to kill Grady and be taken to detention.