"You had advantages you didn't know you had. I had them, too. Bakersfield is like Beverly Hills compared to these border towns."

Hood, a Bakersfield boy, nodded. Morris of the South Bronx sipped his coffee. By six thirty A.M. agents Janet Bly and Robert Velasquez had arrived. This was the transitional hour, when the graveyard watcher went off duty and the three-agent day team took over for another shift of interviewing firearms dealers, recruiting informants, shadowing suspected buyers and sellers, posing as straw men and illicit buyers, answering the phones and watching the young killers on live feed-all in a day's work for Blowdown.

"Well, look who's up bright and early today," said Bly. "Is that Angel with his carnitas?"

Hood nodded, looking at Angel's machine pistol again.

"Sean call in?" asked Janet.

Hood shook his head, saw the hardness in her face.

"Then maybe he called Mars or Soriana."

"He'd call us first if he was in trouble," said Hood, confident that his good friend Sean Ozburn would call Blowdown well before he'd call the ATF field station in San Diego. Ozburn was a soldier, loyal and focused.

But six days and no calls. So the ghost of Jimmy Holdstock-retired now with long-term disability from injuries suffered in the line of duty; in his case, torture-hovered there in the war room once again.

Then, as if that ghost had cast its long, dark shadow over the room, one of the monitors went white, then black, and the audio died.

Hood's attention had been drawn to it just a split second before it went blank.

"The hell," said Bly.

"Don't worry," said Velasquez, their techie. "It'll come back. I'm not sure what's…"

Thirty seconds later the other monitors suddenly all turned bright white, then black. And the audio feeds died with them.

Blowdown was on its feet now. Velasquez looked down at the main control panel, head cocked. The others stared at the dead screens. They had lost camera transmissions before but never all of them at once.