Drabinsky said to his crew, “We got an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, boys. No avoiding it. Time to break out the demon.”

“You’re going in?” Max asked.

“No choice. Whoever was driving that car meant business.”

Jack’s heart kicked up another notch, but for an entirely different reason this time. It occurred to him that what had started out as a routine profile for a single night’s airing and then online archiving had blossomed into something much bigger. He was working freelance on this, paying Max out of his own pocket, and what he had here was a story that might be important enough to put him back on the national map. A potential terrorist attack in a major American city. And he and Max were the only news personnel who had been allowed inside the circle because Tom Drabinsky and he had hit it off, and that was the way the boss man wanted it.

But there was a downside. Because they’d hit it off, it was a friend who was walking into the hair-trigger kill zone, not some anonymous hero.

Jack watched as Drabinsky crossed to the Tahoe and threw the rear gate open. Two of his crew members joined him there and brought out a helmet and what Drabinsky had referred to as the “demon”-a personal armor suit made of thick padding, designed to withstand the force of an explosion. “In theory, at least,” Drabinsky had told him. They called it the demon because of the number of men who had died wearing one.

As Drabinsky suited up, Jack glanced to his right, toward a cluster of squad cars in the distance.

They had a person of interest in back of one of those cars. Not the bomber but someone who apparently knew the carjacker, had been trying to get to him immediately after the accident.