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cockpit partially covered with snow on the windward side, a gaping hole near the tail. The fuselage seemed mostly intact.
    Jessie stepped over a shoe containing a foot and a shinbone— nothing more. Trying not to slip on the snow-covered rocks and cluttered debris, she muttered thanks to Kier, who briefly steadied her by her arm. As they drew nearer, they found the body that went with the foot spilling out of the wreckage. Caucasian, maybe in his thirties, dead of multiple, massive injuries.
    Jessie whisked snow from his face... and sucked in a lungful of icy air. There, neat and round as a Concord grape, was a bullet hole in his forehead. Little blood stained the snow. He had been shot in the plane before it crashed.
    The man wore an empty shoulder holster, reddish-brown, and twisted bizarrely over his chest. Think. Draw your gun. Training took over. Jessie reached under her coat for her 9-mm. semiautomatic, which was housed in its own business-black shoulder holster. Standard issue now was 10-mm., but the recoil was excessive for her light body and she did, after all, spend her time in offices, so carrying a cannon seemed unnecessary. She had never drawn it except to practice.
    Breathe deep. Scan. Scan. It was Dunfee shouting in that gravelly, knock-down-a-wall voice she'd never forget. Special Agent Mike Dunfee might as well have been standing behind her. Assuming the stance he'd taught her, adrenaline fluttering her legs and pounding her heart, she pointed her gun directly in front of her and began a 360-degree pivot around Kier. She could see only desolation.
    Should she rush into the plane? Better to be careful, she decided as she felt Kier pulling her down into a crouch next to the plane's rear entry. Facing him, she saw calm in his eyes.
    "Give me the gun and let me go in there first," he said, nodding at the hulk that had been a jet.
    "This is my job."
    "Right." He took a deep breath, obviously trying to figure what he should say next.
    "Listen. I know you're an FBI agent, but you run computers, don't you?"
    "I run computers. You doctor sick animals."
    He stared off to the side with his jaw clenched.
    "Yeah, well, I hope it doesn't bury you."
    "Well, if it does, I died doing my job."
    Without saying more, he let his eyes gaze over the landscape, searching, trying, Jessie knew, to devour every inch, to know more than could be known. Kier motioned with his head and they moved just inside the fuselage through the rear hole.
    "This is my deal, Kier," she said again, trying to slow him down.
    She fought to find the confidence that had gotten her this far in life. She worked with computers because she was good at it, not because she was afraid of the field.
    Quickly she surveyed what she could see of the main cabin. In the darkened interior to the left, she could make out a scramble of bodies and debris. Nothing moved. There were papers and blood everywhere. To the right, she found that the tail section contained large plastic pods, most of them broken open and covered with ice. Some were full of documents; others had what looked to be the remains of lab vials. Thousands of small plastic containers were strewn around. Kier was like a shadow standing so close that she could feel his breath as he looked over her shoulder.
    "Anybody hear me?" she called.
    "Everybody I can see is dead," Kier said.
    Quickly she checked the bodies that she could easily reach. Most had visible bullet wounds in addition to crash injuries All dead.
    While Kier began looking through the papers strewn near the jet's rear door, Jessie returned to the corpse outside. Crouching by the body, she wished desperately for plastic gloves. She had studied bullet wounds in pictures, and in bodies at the morgue. This was different. Here there was the nauseating odor of a perforated bowel, the slaughterhouse reek of open entrails. And here she had to hurry. More bodies were inside. Who had done the shooting and why? Had this been a hit man or a bodyguard? Foreign