shoot Mary Terror, and his would be the bullet that made the madwoman fire her gun and blow David's head apart.
'NO!' Laura screamed. 'STOP IT!' She began running toward the building the sniper perched on, but the concrete mired her feet like fresh tar. She heard the click of his rifle, a bullet slipping into the chamber. She heard the insane raving of Mary Terror's voice, and the shrill, frantic crying of her son. A doorway was ahead of her. She started through it, fighting the earth, and that was when two muscular dogs with flaming eyes leapt from the darkness at her.
She heard two shots, a split second apart.
The scream started to come out. It swelled in her throat and burst from her mouth, and someone was over her saying, 'Laura? Laura, wake up! Wake up!'
She came up out of the hot darkness, sweat on her face. The lamp beside the bed was on. Doug was sitting on the bed beside her, his face furrowed with worry, and behind him stood Doug's mother, who'd arrived from her home in Orlando earlier in the evening.
'It's all right,' Doug said. 'You were having a nightmare. It's all right.'
Laura looked around the room, her eyes wide with fear. There were too many shadows. Too many.
'Doug, can I do anything?' Angela Clayborne asked. She was a tall, elegant woman with white hair, and she wore a dark blue Cardin suit with a diamond brooch on the lapel. Doug's father, divorced from Angela when Doug was in his early teens, was an investment banker in London.
'No. We're okay.'
Laura shook her head. 'We're not okay. We're not okay.' She kept repeating it as she pulled away from Doug and huddled up under the blanket again. She could feel sticky wetness between her thighs: the oozing stitches.
'Do you want to talk?' he asked.
She shook her head.
'Mom, would you leave us alone for a minute?' When Angela had gone, Doug stood up and walked to the window. He peered through the blinds, out into the rainy dark. 'I don't see any reporters,' he told her. 'Maybe they called it a night.'
'What time is it?'
He didn't have to look at his watch. 'Almost two.' He came back to her side. She smelled a stale aroma wafting from him; he hadn't taken a shower since David had been stolen, but then, neither had she. 'You can talk to me, you know. We still live in the same house.'
'No.'
'No what? No we don't live in the same house? Or no you can't talk to me?'
'Just… no,' she said, using the word like a wall.
He was silent for a moment. Then, in a somber voice: 'I screwed it up, didn't I?'
Laura didn't bother to answer. Her nerves were still jangled by the nightmare, and she clung to the blanket like a cat.
'You don't have to say anything. I know I screwed up. I just… I… well, I guess I've said everything I can say. Except… I'm sorry. I don't know how to make you believe that.'
She closed her eyes, blocking out his presence.
'I don't want… things to be like this. Between you and me, I mean.' He touched her arm under the blanket. She didn't pull away, nor did she respond; she just lay there without moving. 'We can work it out. I swear to God we can. I know I screwed up, and I'm sorry. What more can I say?'
'Nothing,' she answered without emotion.
'Will you give me a second chance?'
She felt like something that had been thrown off a ship in a heavy sea, thrashed from wave to wave and left stranded on jagged rocks. He had turned his back on her when she needed him. She had given up her son – her son – to the hands of a murderess, and all she wanted to do was turn off her mind before she went insane. Would God grant her a second chance, to hold her baby again? That and only that was what she steered toward, and everything else was wreckage in the storm.
'The FBI's going to find David. They'll take care of everything. It won't be long, now that they've got her name and picture on television.'
Laura wanted desperately to believe that. Kastle and another FBI agent had come to the house at seven o'clock, and Laura had listened as Kastle told her more about the woman she'd come to identify as Mary Terror. Born on April 9, 1948, to wealthy parents in Richmond, Virginia. Father in the railroad freight business. One brother who'd hanged himself when he was seventeen. Attended Abernathy Prep, honors student, active in student government and editor of the school newspaper. Went to Penn State for two years, political science major, again active in student government. Evidence of drug use and radical leanings. Left college and resurfaced in New York City, where she enrolled in drama at NYU. Evidence of radical student involvement at NYU and Brandeis University. Then across the country to Berkeley, where she became involved with the Weather Underground. At some point she met Jack Gardiner, a Berkeley radical who introduced her into a Weather Underground splinter group designated the 'Storm Front.' On August 14, 1969, Mary Terrell and three other members of the Storm Front broke into the home of a conservative Berkeley history professor and his wife and knifed them to death. On December 5, 1969, a bomb attributed to the Storm Front exploded in the car of a San Francisco IBM executive and tore both his legs away. On January 15, 1970, a second bomb exploded in the lobby of the Pacific Gas and Electric building and killed a security guard and a secretary. Two days later, a third bomb killed an Oakland attorney who was defending a winery owner in a civil liberties case involving migrant workers.
'There's more,' Kastle had said when Laura had lowered her face.
On June 22, 1970, two policemen in San Francisco were shot to death in their car. Witnesses put Mary Terrell and a Storm Front member named Gary Leister at the site. On October 27,1970, a documentary filmmaker who'd evidently been doing a film on the militant underground was found with his throat slashed in a trash dumpster in Oakland. Two of Mary Terrell's fingerprints were discovered on a roll of exposed film. On November 6, 1970, the chairman of a police task force on the Storm Front was ambushed and shotgunned to death while leaving his home in San Francisco.
'Then the Storm Front moved east,' Kastle had told her, the thick file folder on the coffee table between them. 'On June 18, 1971, a policeman was found with his throat cut and hanging by his hands from nails in an abandoned warehouse in Union City, New Jersey, a communique from the Storm Front in his shirt pocket.' He looked up at her. 'They were declaring total war on what they called – and excuse me for my language – 'pigs of the Mindfuck State.'' He continued on, along the trail of terror. 'On December 30, 1971, a pipe bomb exploded in the mailbox of a Union City district attorney and blinded his fifteen-year-old daughter. Three months and twelve days later, four police officers eating lunch in a Bayonne, New Jersey, diner were shot to death and a taped communique from the Storm Front – with Jack Gardiner's voice on it – was delivered to area radio stations. On May 11, 1972, a pipe bomb crippled the assistant chief of police in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and again a taped communique was delivered. Then we found them.'
'You found them?' Doug had asked. 'The Storm Front?'
'In Linden, New Jersey, on the night of July 1, 1972, there was a Shootout, an explosion, and fire, and in the smoke Mary Terrell, Jack Gardiner, and two others got away. The house they were living in was an armory. They'd stockpiled weapons, ammunition, and bomb apparatus, and it was apparent they were about to do something very big and probably very deadly.',
'Like what?' Doug was working a paper clip around and around, nearing its breaking point.
'We never found out. We think it was timed to happen on the Fourth of July. Anyway, since 1972 the Bureau's been looking for Mary Terrell, Gardiner, and the others. We had a few leads, but they went nowhere.' He closed the file, leaving the picture of Mary Terrell out on the table. 'We came close to finding her in Houston in 1983. She was working as a cleaning lady at a high school under the name Marianne Lakey, but she cleared out before we got an address. One of the teachers was an undergrad at Berkeley, and she recognized her but not soon enough.'
'So why haven't you been able to catch her in all this time?' Laura's father stood up from his chair and picked up the photograph. 'I thought you people were professionals!'
'We do our best, Mr. Beale.' Kastle offered a thin smile. 'We can't be in all places at all times, and people do
