Colleen Devlin tried her best to blend in with the commuting crowd, hoping that the long black coat and the stocking cap pulled tight around her ears wouldn’t provoke some cop or citizen do-gooder to intervene. After all the training and all the talking, it was finally time to pull the trigger. Literally.

The frigid wind off the Potomac River braced her for what lay ahead, as if by chilling her skin she could likewise chill her nerves. It wasn’t that she was afraid of dying-if it came to that, she’d do what she had to do-but rather that she was afraid of failure. Brother Michael had prepared them for the variables of battle, the thousand complications that render the most careful planning useless once the violence begins. If that happened- when that happened-she prayed that she would have the resolve and the resourcefulness to adapt. It was about keeping her head.

The Army of God was counting on her. They’d blessed her with their faith, their trust in her abilities. There could be no greater sin than to let them down.

She moved as she imagined a commuter would, her eyes ahead and her stride purposeful, a lone pedestrian on this cold November evening, strolling on the sidewalk, separated from the sea of oncoming headlights by a waist-high Jersey barrier. If it were two hours from now, or two hours ago, the traffic here on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, one of only two crossings on the Capital Beltway that linked Virginia and Maryland, would have been breezing along at sixty miles an hour, creating a windstorm of its own. Here at six-fifteen, however, the rush-hour traffic moved at barely a crawl, a walker’s pace, as the money worshippers left their resource-guzzling offices via their resource-guzzling automobiles to eat dinner with their families in their resource-guzzling homes. Colleen’s eyes watered from the cold, distorting the approaching train of headlights into as many shimmering stars, an endless serpent of greed. They were all Users. And they were in for one heck of a surprise.