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his wife in our land.
    Now a madman has attempted to smuggle a nuclear device into our borders. By all appearances the criminal is the personal emissary of President Paul Green; certainly it is beyond doubt that they are close friends of long standing — and it is equally apparent that no one else in the United States government was remotely involved in this attempted crime against all humanity.
    Our grief over the death of Ada Green is still boundless, but we cannot allow ourselves to be cowed. The demands that Paul Green has made upon us are preposterous. We will not free the man who would have murdered so many millions of people. The nuclear criminal will be prosecuted. And in due course — after a fair, open, and public trial — he will be executed.
    ³ ³ ³
    Chapter Two
    MOUNTAINVILLE, TENNESSEE
    Ron prided himself on the fact that he was still in school.
    He hadn’t come from the sort of family where anyone expected to graduate from high school, let alone college; he’d dropped out a month and a half after he turned sixteen. Then he’d got himself into trouble a few times, but the law didn’t get very serious with you when you weren’t yet eighteen, and he’d only got himself into more trouble.
    Then, the year he’d turned nineteen, Ron and two friends had got drunk out of their minds and gone shoplifting for beer in a convenience store at three a.m., and they’d been so drunk and so blatant that the clerk had seen them at it. And if that’d been all that had happened — if the clerk had been sensible and just shaken his head and called the law as soon as Ron and his friends were done — if that were all that had come of it he would have come out of it okay. Even if the cops had somehow traced them down and arrested them. Shoplifting could get you put in jail, but not in prison.
    It didn’t happen that way at all.
    The clerk got tough with them, tough like he’d been ripped off a thousand times and finally had his chance to do something about it. He got a baseball bat out from somewhere, and stood in front of the door and locked it.
    “You boys ain’t going anyplace,” the clerk said.
    And Billy Wallace was too drunk to see exactly how mad the clerk was, and he’d gone at the clerk ready to grab the bat and good-naturedly whop him upside the head. But the clerk wasn’t drunk, and he was serious, and he’d bashed Billy so hard and so fast that before Ron and Joey Harris even knew what they were doing they were jumping on the guy to keep him from pounding Billy into a bright-red pulp.
    The clerk, of course, hadn’t been any match for two guys, not even with him having a baseball bat. Especially since he was all caught up in pounding and pounding on Billy. But he hadn’t given up without a fight, either, and before Ron and Joey got themselves and Billy out of that place the clerk was almost as bad a mess as Billy was.
    Still, they did manage to get Billy out of there. They had to break down the door, and Ron didn’t like to think about what they had to do to the clerk before he finally stopped coming at them. Breaking down the door set off half a million alarms, ones you could hear and ones that you couldn’t, and they only got a mile in the pickup before every cop in that part of the city tried to pull them over at the same time.
    Ron wasn’t a minor any more, and the mess they’d made of the clerk had turned a little drunk-stupid shoplifting into a major felony. Ron had gone to jail, hard and fast and for a long time. Not just to jail, but to the state penitentiary.
    Even that Ron could have learned to live with. Five years would have marked him, but it wouldn’t have broken him.
    What broke him was the six-foot-six-inch bodybuilder who spotted Ron on his third day in the prison. The man told him that he wanted Ron, wanted to know him the way the Bible uses the word. Ron hadn’t wanted any part of that, and he’d said so. He hadn’t taken any pains to be polite about the way he said