Rose Dunne. How do you think I'm doing? I'm a little sick to my stomach. I'm angry. I'm also petrified."

“I just meant hello. Hello, Jezzie? I know what the hell has happened here. ”

But Jezzie Flanagan had already walked away, at least partly to keep from saying anything else to Victor.

She did feel nervous. And ill. And mostly, wired as hell. She wasn't so much looking for familiar faces in the crowded school lobby, as the right faces. There were two of them now!

Charlie Chakely and Mike Devine. Her agents. The two men she had assigned to young Michael Goldberg, and also Maggie Rose Dunne, since they traveled back and forth to school together. “How could this happen?” Her voice was loud. She didn't care that the talk nearby had stopped and people were staring. A black hole was cut into the noise and chaos of the school lobby. Then she lowered her voice whisper as she questioned the agents about what happened so far. She listened quietly as she let them explain. Apparently, she didn't like what they had to say.

“Get the hell out of here,” she exploded a second time. “Get out right now. Out of my sight!”

“There was nothing we could have done,” Charlie Chakely tried to protest. “What could we have done? Jesus Christ!” Then he and Devine skulked away.

Those who knew Jezzie Flanagan might have understood her emotional reaction. Two children were missing. It had happened on her watch. She was an immediate supervisor of the Secret Service agents who guarded just about everyone other than the president: key cabinet members and their families, about a half-dozen senators, including Ted Kennedy. She reported to the secretary of the treasury himself.

She had worked unbelievably hard to get all that trust and responsibility, and she was responsible. Hundred hour weeks; no vacation year after year; no life to speak of.