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though the most they appeared able to produce were spasmodic, gasping breaths that seemed incapable of sustaining life.
    “Come on, damn it,” Alan Cline whispered. “Breathe! For God’s sake, breathe!”
    As if in response to his partner’s voice, Glen seemed to gain a little strength, and his chest heaved.
    The elevator banged to a stop and Jim Dover threw the door open. “Where’s the ambulance?” he demanded of the assistant foreman, who was waiting at the elevator’s base.
    The man’s eyes fixed on Dover for a moment, then shifted to Glen Jeffers, whose ragged breathing had abruptly stopped again. “Not here yet,” he said as Alan Cline went back to work on Glen. Then his gaze came back to the contractor and he shrugged helplessly. By the time the ambulance arrived, would it already be too late?



CHAPTER 5

    T he crowd of demonstrators had begun gathering the day before, and every hour since the first arrivals had set up their makeshift camps, more of them had poured into the field across from the prison, until now the entire space was filled with tents, trailers, cars, and people. All night long a bonfire had burned, the demonstrators clustering around it as they sang songs of protest and chanted their conviction that the condemned man must not die, that somewhere some nameless lawyer was feverishly working in an ill-lit office, finding new grounds upon which to challenge Richard Kraven’s sentence of death.
    Perhaps there would be an error discovered in the court records, or some piece of evidence could be newly challenged.
    Or perhaps the governor would have a change of heart and commute Kraven’s sentence at the last minute.
    But as night faded into morning and the bonfire burned lower, until all that was left of it were glowing coals smoldering angrily beneath a thick layer of ash, a watchful silence had descended on the crowd.
    Anne Jeffers gazed down upon the scene from the window of Wendell Rustin’s office on the top floor of the prison’s administration building. A few curling wisps of smoke still rose from the last embers of the night’s bonfires, and the demonstrators still stood facing the prison, waiting in bitter anticipation for the last moment of Richard Kraven’s life.
    How many were there—five hundred? A thousand?
    And who was to say that their feelings about what was going to happen here today were any less valid than her own? An image of her daughter came to mind, and she saw once more the earnest expression on Heather’s fifteen-year-old face a few nights before, when they had once more debated capital punishment over the dinner table. With the absolute certainty of her youth, Heather had insisted that there was not—could not—be any justification for a government executing anyone.
    “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” she’d insisted. “And besides, aren’t we always making a big deal about being a Christian nation? What about the ten commandments? The Bible says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Which means that capital punishment is just plain wrong!”
    Now, her daughter’s words ringing in her ears, Anne wondered just when it was that she’d lost her own innocence, had lost the ability to see the world in black and white. It had not, she reflected, been that many years since she’d agreed with Heather wholeheartedly.
    Except that somewhere along the line she’d begun to believe that in some cases—cases like Richard Kraven’s—there was no other real choice. To some extent, she supposed that her work had hardened her, that her many years of observing and reporting on man’s cruelty to his own species had changed her.
    As she gazed down at the demonstrators in front of the prison, scanning their faces, she saw among the crowd scores of people her own age, and just as many who were twenty years older. Even as she watched, an elderly woman sitting in a wheelchair, swathed in a long peasant skirt and a rainbow-colored shawl, proudly waved a sign that read CAPITAL