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Dick Stone’s blood bomb is a wee-wee compared to this.

I am busting back toward the getaway car, but here comes Stone, running hard, passing me in the opposite direction.

“What the hell?”

“Get in!”

I continue toward the car. Stone is in the driveway. He’s going to finish him off! But on cue, there are screams and people running. Now Stone is back, the car door slams, and we’re gone.

I’m shouting, “What the hell? What was that?”

He coolly steers around the corner. “A good shooter never leaves his brass. You can only make that mistake once.”

Stone opens the fingers of his right hand to reveal the five bullet casings that were ejected from the pistol.

An ambulance driven by FBI agents has pulled up and loaded the blood-soaked deputy state director onto a gurney. At the same time, agents are storming the back door, getting the family out. There will be TV news stories, an obituary, and a funeral, but by then the Laumann family will be safely relocated in the witness protection program, where they will live undercover for the rest of their lives.

Everything goes like clockwork.

PART FOUR

Thirty-five

Four pug puppies will always cause a hullabaloo, even in West Hollywood. When Rooney Berwick takes his babies walking, some tourist will always shout, “How cute are they? I have a pug, too!”

What are you supposed to say to that?

Across from the cobalt blue shell of the Pacific Design Center is a neighborhood park with a small open field that provides a clear patch of sky—not an easy spot to find in the heart of L.A. So if you saw a loner—late fifties, wearing a black T-shirt, pants with a lot of pockets, and thick-soled combat boots—camped out in the middle of the field, pouring water into a collapsible bowl for four panting pugs, that would be Rooney Berwick, getting ready for a call on the satellite phone to his old buddy Dick Stone.

Dead cases are kept in a room-size automated drum in the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard. For two days Mike Donnato moves files around a track, like the clothes at your dry cleaner’s, grabbing at whatever fragments might remain of a case in the seventies codenamed “Turquoise.”

It was a failed operation, in which the Bureau targeted a series of armored car robberies thought to be linked to radical students at the University of Arizona who were allegedly part of the Weather Underground. Dick Stone was the rookie uc—short hair and creases in his jeans—who infiltrated the campus coffeehouse. Strangely, none of the radicals, who nicknamed him “the Fed,” wished to share their plans for the revolution.

The Bureau went high-tech, bringing in another young buck from Los Angeles, a whiz-kid technician named Rooney Berwick (the photo ID shows him thin-faced and detached, a hundred pounds lighter), who installed listening devices on the armored cars. Three weeks later, arrests were made of two drivers with unchecked criminal records, who had conspired to stage “robberies” with the local bad guys.

The Weather Underground had nothing to do with it.

Intrigued, Donnato runs the full sweep on Rooney: personnel reports, bank accounts, phone records, traffic tickets, pharmacy prescriptions. A picture emerges of a highly intelligent, socially isolated individual, who lives with his mother in the same Hollywood apartment complex in which he grew up, apparently addicted to painkillers, which he has been getting from five different doctors.

Donnato looks at Rooney’s recent cases. His latest assignment was to turn sand into gold. (If I could do that, I wouldn’t be in this rat hole, I can hear Rooney say.) The target was a ring of thieves in Brazil, with ties to U.S. organized crime, that was selling counterfeit nuggets. The Bureau’s undercovers would pose as manufacturers of counterfeit gold. Rooney’s mandate was to make fake nuggets as good as the thieves’.

Under pressure, Rooney was working the graveyard shift. On a scarred desk in the faceless JR Trading Company, in the midst of the displaced Hispanic nation, he set