Once it was a swamp. Now Foggy Bottom is swimming with real-estate sharks. When a man is found stabbed to death in this trendy D.C. neighborhood, it is major news. But within forty-eight hours the nation is gripped by a fear that leaves this comparatively small crime in the dark. Three passenger planes are shot out of the sky. Everywhere–in law enforcement, in the media, and in the most secret realms of government–men and women scramble to find out who shot hand-held missiles at the planes, and why. It is a search that reaches from Moscow to the Pacific Northwest, putting some people’s lives in jeopardy and turning others lives inside out. But no one can guess the truth: that the epicenter of the terrorist outbreak is Washington D.C. . . . and a dead man behind a park bench in a place called Foggy Bottom. “A FIRST-RATE MYSTERY WRITER.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review “THE ACTION MOVES AT BREAKNECK SPEED TOWARD A CHILLING FINALE.” –Publishers Weekly a swamp. Now Foggy Bottom is swimming with real-estate sharks. When a man is found stabbed to death in this trendy D.C. neighborhood, it is major news. But within forty-eight hours the nation is gripped by a fear that leaves this comparatively small crime in the dark. Three passenger planes are shot out of the sky. Everywhere in law enforcement, in the media, and in the most secret realms of government men and women scramble to find out who shot hand-held missiles at the planes, and why. It is a search that reaches from Moscow to the Pacific Northwest, putting some people s lives in jeopardy and turning others lives inside out. But no one can guess the truth: that the epicenter of the terrorist outbreak is Washington D.C. . . . and a dead man behind a park bench in a place called Foggy Bottom. “A FIRST-RATE MYSTERY WRITER.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review “THE ACTION MOVES AT BREAKNECK SPEED TOWARD A CHILLING FINALE.” –Publishers Weekly Margaret Truman has won faithful readers with her works of biography and fiction, particularly her ongoing series of Capital Crimes mysteries. Her novels let us into the corridors of power and privilege, poverty and pageantry, in the nation’s capital. She lives in Manhattan. Monday Night - Washington, DC The corpse was well dressed. Washington Post reporter Joe Potamos looked down at the body behind a bench in the pocket park in front of the hotel at E and K Streets, on the eastern edge of Foggy Bottom. The victim was a white male with neatly trimmed and combed salt-and-pepper hair. His suit was blue, shirt white, tie gray with small red-and-white flags. “Canadian,” Potamos said to a tall, boxlike man writing in a small notebook. “Huh?” Peter Languth muttered as he continued to write. “Canadian. Those little flags are Canadian,” Potamos said. “The red maple leaf in the middle and those red blocks on each side. You don’t know that?” Homicide detective Languth stopped writing and turned to look down at Potamos. Languth was six feet four; Potamos topped out at five-eleven. “You get off on flags, Joe?” Potamos shrugged and started writing in his own long, slender, spiral-bound notebook. Uniformed officers stretched yellow crime-scene tape around the scene. A late-arriving EMS team knelt next to the body. Pressing in for a closer look were a half-dozen homeless men for whom the park passed for home in summer. One of them had alerted a passing squad car to the dead man’s intrusion. “Get back,” Languth growled at them. In the humid atmosphere of the nation’s capital, the heavy air pressed down like a rubber blanket, capturing the men’s pungent body odor. “You guys ever hear of a shower?” Languth asked, wrinkling his bulbous nose. “The hot water stopped working in my mansion,” the youngest of the homeless men said. “Call a plumber,” Languth said. Potamos hoped he wasn’t contributing to the bouquet of the moment. He’d been wearing the same blue chambray shirt two days in a row, and hadn’t gotten around to getting last summer’s lighter-weight clothing back from the cleaners. He itched under the weight of his gray tweed jacket. “Sit over there till I want to talk to you,” Languth told the odd assortment of men, pointing to a bench a few feet away. To a uniformed cop, he said, “Make sure nobody leaves.” Potamos arched his back against stiffness and yawned. Eleven-twenty. He’d dozed off in front of the television set in his one-bedroom condo in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the Potomac from the District, when the call came from his editor telling him to get to the park. Such a call wouldn’t have been made a few years ago, when the State Department was his beat, and crime reporting was only a memory. But that was then. “Whadda you see?” Languth asked one of the EMS technicians who’d left the body to come to where the beefy, balding detective stood with Potamos. “Something in the ribs, right side.” “No weapon?” Potamos asked. Languth scowled. “You see any weapons, Joe? You see something nobody else does? Except flag