Now he wondered again if one of those apparently humble handguns could somehow be converted into a curve-clipped, silenced beauty like the one lying on Angel's kitchen counter. Hood would bet on it. If he was right, he knew for certain who had built the one thousand silenced machine pistols-a talented young gunmaker named Ron Pace. And if that was true, Hood also had very strong ideas about who had delivered them into the hands of Carlos Herredia's North Baja Cartel gunmen-a fellow LASD deputy named Bradley Jones. Hood was hot to get his hands on one of those guns. All of ATF was hot to get one. And Hood wanted to send Pace and Jones to the slammer where they belonged.

He ate and watched and opened another soda. Graveyard was hard on sleep and diet. He wondered if the assassins were up early because they had a job to do. Usually they slept until noon. His mind wandered back to Sean Ozburn again, and Hood wondered why Ozburn had gone silent. Almost fifteen months undercover, and once a day Sean would call one of the Blowdown team-usually Hood-even when he had nothing substantial to report. He called it touching his life raft. Fifteen months UC was a long run in anyone's book. Too long, according to many with experience. The calls had been Sean's established pattern and it had worked for him, and now he had broken it. Six days and no call.

So maybe Sean had been made, Hood thought. He wasn't sold on the whole idea of the bugged safe house, because of that possibility. One whiff of suspicion or one person who recognized Ozburn, and boom-he was dead, or worse. The Den was supposed to be an ATF jewel but they all knew its potential cost to their man undercover.