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you.”
    “But I’m security—”
    “Sir, I want you to lie flat.…” One cop watched McClane while the other focused on the two figures on the floor down the hall.
    When they had him cuffed, McClane strained his head around to look at them and said, “They pointed a gun at me. I had to shoot …”
    Two more cops moved past him—one crying out in fear when a rat ran up his pant leg—until they got to the boy and the body. A bloody ski mask lay on the floor next to the fallen girl. The boy looked up, fear in his eyes, and said, “She’s hurt bad. Please help me, that asshole shot her …”
    The cops said, “Back away, lie flat, put your hands behind you—now!”
    He did, and one of the cops knelt by the fallen girl and said, “She’s hurt; we gotta get her going, we need paramedics right now.”
    “On the way …,” the second cop said.
    McClane called, “Is he dead?”
    One of the cops had a daughter of his own, a girl who sometimes snuck a little dope and misbehaved. He stood up and snarled, “It’s not a
he
, it’s a
she
. And no, she’s not dead yet. You shot a pretty little high school girl, you fuckin’ moron.”
    By the time the cops got to Aubrey Calder, the leadership van was a mile away and moving out of the city.
    “Nothing is worth that,” said a girl in the back. “Aubrey was my friend.”
    “Nothing like that’s ever happened before,” said the leader. He was in the passenger seat upfront, stuffing a garbage bag with the gloves and masks they’d worn in the raid. From between his feet,he picked up a bottle of bleach and emptied it into the bag, closed the bag, and squeezed it until the contents were soaked; bleach destroys DNA. “Nothing even close to that. There was no reason for that rent-a-cop to go and shoot. We weren’t threatening anybody.”
    The young woman with the wild brown hair, Rachel, was at the wheel and glanced back at her. “Ethan’s right—it wasn’t our fault and it’s awful. I’m sure she’ll be okay.” She held up a thumb drive. “When we find out what’s on these, what was really going on in there, you’ll see. This is the greatest thing we’ve ever done. Legendary.”
    The girl wasn’t buying it. “She was studying for her SATs,” she said bitterly, and she began crying, unable to control it. She choked out, “She was trying for Stanford, she was taking all the AP classes. Now what? She’s going to prison if she lives?”
    “Get a grip, would you?” the woman shot back. “We can’t all go losing it.”
    Ethan glanced up from his work. “About that—you’re absolutely sure the new guy got out? ’Cause if he’s still in there pocketing rats or whatever he was doing—”
    Rachel broke in, defensive. “I told you, he couldn’t handle the scene and took off. He’s in the other van. Might have one rat with him, but the thing was basically DOA.”
    “Just make sure he doesn’t take his microchipped lab pet to a veterinarian. That’s a one-way ticket to the state pen.”
    Rachel rolled her eyes and Ethan told her to pull over, next to the mouth of a storm sewer. He slid the panel door open, threw the garbage bag into the sewer, then looked back at her as he pulled the door shut. “We shouldn’t have taken him. From now on, he only does the computer-nerd stuff. You’ve got to keep him under control.”
    “He’s not all that easy to control,” Rachel said. “He’s a little nuts, remember?”
    “Well, use your feminine wiles, for God’s sake. You’re good at that,” Ethan said, sarcasm riding his voice.
    Rachel bared her teeth at the implication. She and Ethan had once been together. “I got him,” she said.
    “Good,” he said, “because we went through that gate like it wasn’t there. That kid is a weapon. We’ve needed somebody like him for a long time. Now that we’ve got him—”
    “I got him,”
Rachel said.
    Two miles away, Odin held the muzzled dog to his chest as the second van took a curve a little