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P. Ardell, a heavy-set agent Lukas worked with sometimes, squeezed his earphone and listened. Nodded his bald, pale head. He glanced at Lukas. “That was Charlie position. Nobody’s gone off the road in the woods.”
    Lukas grunted. So maybe she was wrong. She’d thought the unsub would come at the money from the west—through a row of trees a half mile away from the expressway. She believed that he’d be driving a Hummer or a Range Rover. Would snag one of the bags—sacrificing the other for the sake of expediency—and disappear back into the woods.
    “Bravo position?” she asked.
    “I’ll check,” said C. P., who worked undercover often because of his unfortunate resemblance to a Manassas drug cooker or a Hell’s Angel charter member. He seemed to be the most patient of all the agents on the stakeout; he hadn’t moved his 250-pound frame an inchsince they’d been here. He made the call to the southernmost surveillance post.
    “Nothing. Kids on a four-wheeler is all. Nobody older than twelve.”
    “Our people didn’t chase ’em away, did they?” Lukas asked. “The kids?”
    “Nup.”
    “Good. Make sure they don’t.”
    More time passed. Hardy jotted notes. Geller typed on his keyboard. Cage fidgeted and C. P. did not.
    “Your wife mad?” Lukas asked Cage. “You working the holiday?”
    Cage shrugged. It was his favorite gesture. He had a whole vocabulary of shrugs. Cage was a senior agent at FBI headquarters and though his assignments took him all over the country he was usually primary on cases involving the District; he and Lukas worked together often. Along with Lukas’s boss too, the special agent in charge of the Washington, D.C., field office. This week, though, SAC Ron Cohen happened to be in a Brazilian rainforest on his first vacation in six years and Lukas had stepped up to the case. Largely because of Cage’s recommendation.
    She felt bad for Cage and Geller and C. P., working a holiday. They had dates for tonight or wives. As for Len Hardy she was happy he was here; he had some pretty good reasons to keep himself busy on holidays and this was one of the reasons that she had welcomed him to the METSHOOT team.
    Lukas herself had a comfortable home in Georgetown, a place filled with antique furniture, needlepoints and embroideries and quilts of her own design, an erratic wine collection, nearly five hundred books, more than athousand CDs and her mixed-breed Labrador, Jean Luc. It was a very nice place to spend a holiday evening though in the three years she’d lived there Lukas had never once done so. Until her pager had signaled her ascension to the METSHOOT command she had planned to spend the night baby-sitting that Board of Education whistle-blower, Gary Moss, the one who’d broken the school construction kickback scandal. Moss had worn a wire and had picked up all sorts of good incriminating conversations. But his cover had been blown and the other day his house had been firebombed, his daughters nearly killed. Moss had sent his family to stay with relatives in North Carolina and he was spending the weekend in federal protection. Lukas had been in charge of his protection as well as handling the investigation into the firebombing. But then the Digger arrived and Moss was, at the moment, nothing more than a bored tenant in the very expensive apartment complex referred to among law enforcers as “Ninth Street”—FBI headquarters.
    She now scanned the field again. No sign of the extortionist.
    “He might be staking us out,” a tactical agent crouched behind a tree said. “You want a perimeter sweep?”
    “No.”
    “It’s standard procedure,” he persisted. “We could use five, six handoff cars. He’d never spot us.”
    “Too risky,” she said.
    “Uhm, you sure?”
    “I’m sure.”
    Abrupt responses like this had earned Lukas a reputation in the Bureau for being arrogant. But she believed that arrogance is not necessarily a bad thing. It instillsconfidence in those who