At 6:57 a.m. the city shook.
McGee was already awake — she'd stopped sleeping through the night somewhere around day four — sitting on the edge of the hotel bed with her phone in her hand when the windows rattled in their frames and the water in the glass on the nightstand trembled in a perfect circle.
She was on her feet before the sound finished arriving. It came a second later, low and deep, the kind of sound you felt in your sternum. West. Toward the river.
Her phone buzzed. Are you okay? That was close to you.
Thomas. Of course it was Thomas.
*I'm fine,* she typed back with thumbs that weren't quite steady. It was big. I have to go.
*Be careful.*
She was dressed and out the door in four minutes.
---
The Federal Reserve block was gone.
Not damaged. Not burning. Gone — a crater where a temple had stood, the columns lying in the street like fallen trees, dust hanging in the air so thick the sun came through brown. The gold depository, two levels down, was a rumor now. Whatever had been in the vaults was under a million tons of concrete and fire.
McGee stood at the perimeter with her credentials out and watched men in respirators walk a grid over nothing. Anderson arrived ten minutes after she did, took one look, and said nothing for a long time.
"Casualty estimate?" he asked finally.
"Too early." It was 6:57 on a Monday morning. The block had been all Fed — offices, vaults, parking. The streets around it, empty. That was the only mercy anyone was going to get today, and everyone at the perimeter knew it.
In the mobile command post, they played the footage.
Corridor camera, 2:14 a.m.: a dark figure under the lens, head tilted. Then — McGee heard someone inhale — the figure did a little dance. A shuffle-step, a spin, arms out wide. Joyful. Then it kept walking.
Stairwell camera: the figure paused, looked straight up into the lens, and adjusted its tie. Deliberate. A signature.
Lobby. Plaza. The same unhurried walk, the same tilt. Gone by 2:31.
"It's him," Anderson said quietly. "No question."
It was the dancing that got to people. McGee watched a twenty-year veteran turn away from the screen. There was something about the joy of it — the casualness — that the bombing itself didn't have. Bombers were angry. This man had been happy.
She thought about the riddle. They'll lock it down with guns and steel. They had. Every badge in the capital had been pointed at an empty building while he waltzed into the gold vault's basement with a cleaning van.
"He told us," she said.
Anderson looked at her.
"The Capitol was never the target. He gave us the riddle so we'd lock down the wrong building. He wanted the lockdown — the riot, all of it." She gestured at the crater, at the dust. "And while we were watching the dome, he came here. For the money."
Anderson's jaw worked. He'd run the ninety-one percent. He'd made the call. "You said so," he allowed. "In the briefing."
It wasn't an apology. It was as close as she was going to get.
The economic people arrived around noon with faces like ash — men and women who understood what a hole in the Federal Reserve meant in a way McGee didn't, quite, but the words markets and confidence and gold reserves kept being said in tones usually reserved for funerals. This wasn't a killing anymore. It wasn't even terrorism, exactly. It was war on the system itself, fought with the system's own money as the battlefield.
McGee stood in the ashes and thought about his voice on the phone. Tick tock, my lady.
---
It was Hannah who found her, late in the afternoon, and turned her gently by the shoulder toward the command post TV.
"You need to see this."
The news was playing it. Their footage — the corridor, the dance — on every channel. And underneath the dancing, clear as a bell:
Audio. Him, singing.
*"Down on Skid Row..."*
Nobody knew where the press had gotten audio. The security feeds didn't record sound. But somehow — somehow — they had it, and now the whole country was watching a masked man dance and sing show tunes in the basement of the Federal Reserve, hours before the block ceased to exist.
The command post went quiet. On screen, the figure spun with its arms out wide, joyful, and then the broadcast cut to the crater, and the crater cut back to the dance, and McGee watched Anderson watch it, and Hannah watch it, and a room full of federal agents watch a man they'd never caught waltz through their cameras singing.
It haunted every face in the room. That was the point, McGee understood. Not the bomb. Not the gold. This — the image, the sound, the joy. He'd given them a ghost they'd see every time they closed their eyes.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn't look at it. She already knew who it was.
Chapter 30