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the room was the special agent in charge from the Las Vegas field office. The SAC was reporting in about the mobile crime lab that had been set up inside the town limits of what had been Sunrise Valley. She didn’t have much new, though, and the meeting quickly moved on to threat assessment.
    This was where everything got a lot more interesting.
    First, there was a discussion of domestic terrorist groups such as the National Alliance and the Aryan Nations. But nobody really believed those simpletons could be responsible for something as well planned as this. Next up was the latest on al Qaeda and Hezbollah, the radical jihad movement. These groups received a solid couple of hours of heated discussion. They were definitely suspects. Then formal assignments were given out by Manning.
    I
didn’t
get an assignment, which made me wonder if I would be hearing from Director Burns soon. I didn’t particularly want to hear from him on this one. I didn’t want to travel out of Washington again, especially back to Nevada.
    And then it got really wild.
    Every pager in the conference room went off simultaneously!
    Within seconds, everybody had checked his pager, myself included. For the past several months all terror threats got flashed to senior agents, whether it was a suspicious package on a New York subway or an anthrax threat in L.A.
    The message on my pager read: TWO SURFACE-TO-AIR MISSILES MISSING AT KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE IN ALBUQUERQUE.
    CONNECTION TO SUNRISE VALLEY SITUATION BEING INVESTIGATED.
    WILL KEEP INFORMED.

Chapter 19
    NO REST FOR THE RIGHTEOUS , read a placard on the wall near the canteen and soda machines. At 5:50 that night, we were called back to the conference room on the fifth floor. The same august group as before. Some of us were guessing that the Bureau had finally been contacted by whoever was responsible for the bombing of Sunrise Valley. Others thought this might have to do with the missile thefts from Kirtland.
    A few minutes later, half a dozen agents from the CIA arrived. All in suits with briefcases.
Uh-oh.
Then came half a dozen hitters from Homeland Security. Things were definitely getting more serious now.
    “This is getting hinky,” Monnie Donnelley whispered to me. “It’s one thing to talk the talk about interagency cooperation. But the CIA is
really
here.”
    I smiled over at Monnie. “You’re sure in a good mood.”
    She shrugged. “As General Patton used to say about the battlefield, ‘God help me, I do love it so!’”
    Director Burns entered the room precisely at six. He walked in with Thomas Weir, the head of the CIA, and Stephen Bowen from Homeland Security. The three heavies looked extremely uneasy. Maybe just being there together did it—which succeeded in making all of us nervous, too.
    Monnie and I exchanged another look. A few agents continued to talk, even as the directors took their places in front. It was the veterans’ way of showing that they’d been here before. Had they? Had anyone? I didn’t think so.
    “Can I have your attention,” Director Burns said, and the room immediately went quiet. All eyes were glued to the front.
    Burns let the quiet settle in, and then he continued.
    “I want to bring you up to speed. The first contact that we received on this situation was two days before the bombing in Sunrise Valley, Nevada. The initial message concluded with the words ‘it is our hope that no one will be injured during the violence.’ The nature of ‘the violence’ wasn’t revealed or even hinted at. We were also instructed not to mention the initial contact to anyone. We were warned that if we did, there would be serious consequences, though these consequences were never spelled out for us.”
    Burns paused and looked around the room. He made eye contact with me, nodded, then moved on. I wondered how much he knew that the rest of us didn’t. And who else was involved? The White House? I would think so.
    “We have been contacted every day since then. One