Ness hopped out of the truck, yanked his. 38 from under his arm, and called back to his agents. They were pulling the ladders off the back of the flatbed, to cover the roof, where most distillery escapes were made. Several agents were already posted in back and around the building.

Hedges climbed down from the cab of the truck and his feet scuffed at the cinders on the floor.

"Let's find the basement," Ness said, and Hedges tagged along, an axe in his hands.

The axe carved open the basement door, and the two men headed downstairs, into another massive open area.

"Shit," Hedges said. "They've cleaned it out."

It was cold down there; their breath was smoking.

"Not quite," Ness said.

The stills had been dismantled and moved out, but their shadows remained in the cement; there had been six of them, each around four feet in diameter. A major setup. Doing some quick math, Ness figured that when they were up and rolling, they were turning out two thousand gallons daily, minimum.

A massive operation like this one could only have been pulled off with the collusion of Cleveland's celebratedly corrupt police force. Those sons of bitches made Chicago's bent cops look straight.

"Look at this," he said to Hedges. The smaller man came over as Ness pointed up to a galvanized iron pipe, a flume containing several electric blower fans. "We need to find out where this leads."

"There's a metal company next door," Hedges said. "Probably there."

"Makes sense," Ness said. "Smoke from the boilers and fumes from this distilling room could be passed off as coming from the metal works."

Ness prowled the basement further, discovered five workmen in the boiler room, all of them cowering near one of three massive boilers, several with tools in hand.