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through the security station at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, he had received four more ominous calls.
    Task Force HYDRA was finished. The damage done to his investigation permanent and unrecoverable.All eight heads had been cut off at the same time, and he needed to quickly determine what had happened. He had solid evidence linking all of them to Al Qaeda's financing arm, and their sudden termination sounded an earth-shattering alarm. He didn't have long to come up with answers. He heard a knock and barked at the door. His immediate assistant, Supervisory Special Agent Frank Mendoza, stepped into the doorway of the office and nodded.
    "Everyone's ready. Need any coffee?" he said, walking all the way into the office.
    "I've already had three cups. I just got off the phone with Delgado," Sharpe said grimly.
    "Shit. How high has the news gone?" Mendoza said, wincing, waiting for the answer.
    "All the way to the president. Homeland raised the threat level to Orange until we can provide solid evidence that we're not on the brink of another 9/11. Obviously, the director is hot on this, so I wouldn't expect much breathing room today. We've been given top priority for resources."
    He decided against mentioning the director's immediate concern that Task Force HYDRA had been compromised by a traitor. Sandra Delgado, his immediate superior, had kindly informed him that the Internal Affairs Department would quietly pursue this possibility from the sidelines, for now.
    "I think we already commandeered half of the building," Mendoza said.
    "Stand by to grab the other half. We'll be in the frying pan until we figure out what happened last night. Let's go."
    He stood up from the desk and walked out of the office, pulling the door closed. Mendoza fell in behind him as they approached the door to his task force's operations center. He heard considerable chatter behind the door and paused for a second before opening it. The room fell silent when the door swung open, and Sharpe walked to a desk that had been reconfigured to serve as a makeshift podium. The air quality in the room had deteriorated significantly. Rank and humid, the room reeked of bad coffee and faint cologne. The building's air circulation system was unable to compete with a room stuffed to nearly four times its intended capacity.
    He glanced behind him and saw that one of three enormous, side-by-side-mounted plasma-screen monitors showed a map of the East Coast. The map stretched from South Carolina to Maine and contained markers that indicated the location of each murder. Charleston, South Carolina; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Annapolis, Maryland; Long Island, New York; Manhattan, New York; Rye, New York; Newport, Rhode Island; Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Sharpe turned to face nearly sixty agents, hastily assembled hours ago to start unscrambling the mess."All right, so what do we have?"
    A young special agent stepped forward with a few sheets of paper in his hands. "Sir, as you can see, we're dealing with what appears to be a coordinated strike on all eight of our key surveillance targets. Most of the murders appear—"
    "Rob, are you going to tell me anything I don't already know?" Sharpe interrupted.
    The young agent looked to his supervisory agent for support.
    "I'm not trying to be an ass here, agent," Sharpe explained.
    "I just don't have time for a recap of events. We need to move this investigation forward at a record pace, and I don't need to remind everyone here of the implications surrounding these murders.
    "These guys," he continued, pointing behind him at the screen, "were conduits of financing for dangerous people. We need to figure out exactly why this coordinated attack occurred. The director is under increasing pressure from the White House, so you can imagine what it's going to be like for the task force as the day progresses. The primary concern is that we have another 9/11 imminent, and that Al Qaeda is cleaning house and cutting ties. This is our focus.