She saw the realization in his eyes that the gun was out of bullets, that Hernandez had fired the last four rounds. He dropped the gun to the foyer floor and looked around, obviously searching for something to use in its place.

“Stop right there, Tom,” she said.

“You’re not going to fire that,” he said, his eyes still roaming the foyer. “You’re a lawyer. You work within the system. You play by the rules.” His body seemed to be coiling again. “I know you’ll do the right thing. For Annie.”

She saw his snake eyes a light on something. She followed his line of sight, saw it was a small marble sculpture on the hall table, and as he suddenly darted forward toward the table, she inhaled, then breathed out noisily. She shuddered. “You’re right,” she said, and she pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled backward, almost flew from her hand. A bright strawberry of blood appeared on his white shirt at the center of his chest. He sagged to the floor and emitted a horrible, low, animallike sound. She aimed again, and fired. The bullet exploded in his chest. His eyes stared, unseeing, and she knew he was dead.

Her hands began to tremble first, then her shoulders. Her entire body shook violently. She too slumped to the floor.

A great sob welled up in the back of her throat. The floodgates had opened, and the sobs had broken loose and were coming in powerful waves.

She saw that she was kneeling in a pool of Tom’s blood, seeping from the wounds in his chest. The fine gray wool of her skirt darkened as the stain spread.

In the distance the wail of sirens grew steadily louder. She caught a sulfurous waft of cordite, then the smell of blood, pungent and metallic, and as she cried she thought of Annie, who’d been no less trusting than she, whose life would never be the same, and yet, at the same moment, for the first time, she felt at peace.

Acknowledgments

We should all have editors as dedicated as Henry Ferris. Just hours after his twin daughters were born, when most new fathers can’t think straight, he was tirelessly exchanging faxes and FedEx packages from the hospital. I’m grateful for his sound judgment, his taste, and his determination. (If it were up to him, he’d have deleted this paragraph as needless excess in a section already too long.)

With each of my four novels, I’ve been privileged to have such superb and generous sources, above all my friend Jack McGeorge of the Public Safety Group in Woodbridge, Virginia, expert in security, munitions, terrorism, and just about everything else. The longer I know him, the more he seems to know. Once again I’m indebted to other friends who’ve given freely of their expertise, contacts, and advice: Paul McSweeney of Professional Management Specialists; H. Keith Melton, expert in (and world-class collector of) surveillance devices; Peter Crooks of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers; the remarkable Paul Redmond of the CIA; Thomas Powers, for his wise counsel; and Marty Peretz, for his generous and unflagging support from the very beginning of my writing career.

A number of experts in various fields provided valuable assistance: in voice and tape identification, Lonnie Smrkovski; on the military and its security procedures, Mickey Connolly; on the U.S. Marshals, Dick Bigelow; and on government secrecy, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International furnished useful background on American involvement in El Salvador. In the Cambridge Police, I was helped by Kathy Murphy, Alisse Cline of the Identification Unit, and Detectives Lester J. Sullivan and John Lopes of the Criminal Investigation Section; and in the Massachusetts State Police, by Chris Dolan in Crime Scene Services. Tom Williams helped make the polygraph scenes as authentic as possible. At Quantico, Chief Warrant Officer Jim Hart granted me an enlightening tour of the brig. Carl M. Majeskey shared with me his unparalleled ballistics expertise. My brother and medical consultant, Dr. Jonathan Finder, was as usual supremely generous with expert medical advice, as well as with an unfortunately timed computer catastrophe.

Claire would have had an even rougher time of it without my team of Boston attorneys: Ralph D. Gants of Palmer & Dodge; Morris M. Goldings of Mahoney, Hawkes & Goldings; Charles W. Rankin of Rankin & Sultan; Nick Poser; and especially Harry Mezer; and in Washington, Joseph E. diGenova and Victoria Toensing. At Harvard Law School, Alan Dershowitz and particulary Martha Minow were extremely helpful, as was M. Tracey Maclin at the Boston University Law School.