Which is when the spotlights slammed on, fixing Chambers, Faust and the others in searing glare.

The restaurant worker dropped to the grass and scuttled away as a loudspeaker blared, “This is Emmett Kalmbach, Chambers. We’ve got snipers and they’re green lighted to shoot. On the ground. All of you.”

The DHS man blinked in shock but he hesitated only a moment. He’d been in this business a long time. He was four pounds of trigger pressure away from dead, and he knew it. He grimaced, dropped to his belly and stretched out his legs and arms. The two thugs did the same.

Faust, though, hesitated, the gun bobbing slowly in his hand.

“You, on the ground now!”

But undoubtedly Faust knew what awaited him—the interrogation, the conviction and either life in jail or a lethal needle—and chose desperate over wise. He fired toward the spotlights, then turned and began sprinting.

The lanky man who’d made a job of running from the consequences of his actions got six feet before the snipers ended his career forever.

Harry Middleton walked forward into the lights set up by the FBI Washington field office crime scene team.

He glanced at Faust’s body then shook the hand of the man who’d been their undercover decoy—the one who’d pretended to have seen Faust sneak from the recital hall.

“Jozef. You’re okay?”

“Ah, yes,” Padlo said. “A scrape on my palm getting under cover. No worse than that.”

The Polish inspector was stripping off the restaurant worker’s uniform he’d donned for the takedown. He’d flown in that morning. It was true that getting credentials for a foreign law officer to come into America was difficult, but red tape did not exist for men like Harold Middleton and his anonymous supervisors.

Padlo had learned that Faust was instrumental in the death of his lover M. T. Connolly and called Harry Middleton, insisting that he come help to find Faust and his co-conspirators. There’d be no extradition of any perpetrators to Poland, Middleton had said, but Padlo was willing to give the Americans evidence in the Jedynak murders, which could prove helpful in any prosecutions here.

Middleton joined Kalmbach and, flanked by two FBI agents, cuffed Dick Chambers, who was staring at the colonel.

“But . . . The fire. You were . . . ” His voice faded.

“Supposed to die? Along with a thousand other innocent people? Well, a team disarmed the bomb this afternoon, pumped the gas out. But we needed to buy some time while we set up this sting. If there was no fire at all, I was afraid you might panic and stonewall. So we lit a controlled fire in the construction site next door to the hall. No damage, but a lot of smoke. Enough to get us some ambiguous breaking news reports.