The cart was done being loaded, and Tem hoped the day would start to improve from here on out. At least Jimmy was back to being his polite (mostly) and helpful self. One thing Tem really appreciated about the younger man, aside from his having whip-smart intelligence, Jimmy could be counted on to be grown-up and responsible in the clinch. Tem had always tried to be that way himself, though recalling his own teenage years sometimes made him cringe. What a young hot-head he had been! Good to know Jimmy wasn't that same way at all.

Tem frowned as he took another quick check on Amanda before telling her they were ready to head out. She was keeping her eyes closed whenever she thought she wasn't being observed, still sitting on the porch swing, still clearly feeling drowsy. He almost wished he hadn't mentioned anything about the Franconium hydrate, important as that shipment was. She could be staying home today, keeping cool on that porch swing then, but he knew she wouldn't now. She was a trouper, just like her parents. Tem hoped she wasn't coming down with a summer cold or fever. Those could be a real nuisance. Oh well, this too would pass. If the three of them could survive what they went through in Tennessee two short months ago, today would be a cakewalk.

"Ready?" he asked her, taking Amanda's hand to help her up from the bench.

"Of course," she said, giving him another one of those confident smiles that wasn't fooling him a bit.

Her hand didn't feel any warmer to the touch than usual, he noted with relief. She seemed the tiniest bit unsteady as they walked to the cart together hand in hand, but then, anyone who'd been sitting (or slumping) in the same position for half an hour without getting up would be stiff, so that was normal too. Good – he had probably been worrying for nothing and what the gentler workload began, electric fans, ice cream and a good dinner at Au Boeuf Bistro or someplace followed by an early bedtime would complete.

Jimmy had come around as thoroughly as Tem could desire too. He was full of care and solicitousness, offering his sister an additional hand up onto the cart's front seating while taking up a rear seat behind the baggage for himself without complaint. If anything, he was being a little bit too solicitous. Amanda, in spite of her earlier wan behavior, noticed it as well. Either Jimmy was up to something – unlikely, Tem thought, since Jimmy had never been the bad boy type on purpose – or, more likely, he was simply overdoing what Tem had asked. Must have felt as bad about yesterday as Tem had.

"Exactly how much ice cream did you offer to bribe him with?" Amanda whispered to her husband.

"An entire bucket, apparently," Tem sighed. If so, it would be worth it not to have to cope with a sulky teenager. Yep – assuming that neither one of the Gordon siblings attempted to murder or maim an obnoxious, narrow-minded State Department official, things should be smooth sailing from here on out.

The drive into Chicago was peaceful, quiet, and as usual scenic. Tem never tired from the steady clop-clop sound of a horse's hooves, even if cart dray wasn't Baccarat's favorite role to play and he'd be making Tem pay for it with peppermint candies later. Diamond also. This was so much nicer than trying to drive around in that smelly, noisy, potentially dangerous road machine that Amanda had taken a shine to though. This way she didn't have to drive the auto-mobile and could relax the entire way into the city. Tem didn't mind feeling her head resting on his shoulder. Not one bit. Poor 'manda. That thunderstorm must have kept her awake all night while he'd slept like a rock for at least part of it. And as for Jimmy, everyone knew he could've slept through the Wanderer II derailing and falling into a marble quarry during a dynamite blasting operation. Teenagers. Best to let her get a few winks now so they'd be able to benefit from her astute advice in setting up security for the F.h. at their destination.

When the destination did start coming into view, Tem nudged Amanda to make sure she was awake for that part. No matter how many times he arrived at it, Tem still marveled at the fantastic monument that was the Chicago Federal Building. He didn't know which part impressed him the most – the classical colonnaded front façade centerpiece that made him think of the Parthenon in Athens, or the mighty dome rising up even higher behind it like a Renaissance Cathedral in Italy. He'd never been to Greece or Florence, but this American masterpiece of architecture always took his breath away. Too bad the Secret Service and new Federal Investigation bureau business took place in a cramped wing at the very back of the mighty structure. The courts and the Post Office got the glamour parts of the building, and other agencies the choicest bits of what remained. The poor cousin law enforcement divisions had to settle for servants' quarters and entrance. Still, it made a man proud to go in there, even from the back.

Or a woman too. Amanda enjoyed drinking in the view of Chicago's mighty temple of Justice as much as he did. Today, he observed happily, was no exception. He always took a route into the neighborhood that gave them/him the best Adams and Dearborn street view, then drove or rode around to the back. She might not have been mesmerized by the lamp, but the Fed could work its own spell. He heard her enraptured intake of breath as she first caught sight of it. The glorious view didn't last long, as they made their way around to the area at the back of the mighty edifice where they could leave their horse cart parked under the watchful gaze of a security guard.

The smoothness of their arrival didn't last either. Tem jumped down as soon as he parked the cart and horses and hastened over to the other side to gallantly offer his wife a lift down. She usually didn't wait and jumped off under her own power with a bit of a suffragette smirk on her face, but today she waited. Jimmy practically tripped on the pavement scrambling his own way down to assist. Poor kid – his heart was in the right place, but the 125 lb, gawky, not-exactly-muscular youth wouldn't have been equal to the task if he had tried lifting her. A couple of inches shorter than Amanda herself, he'd have been easier for her to lift. Amanda was tall and heavier than she looked because, as Tem well knew, she was solid muscle under her feminine exterior. But Tem was even solid-er, his father's son. He had no trouble lifting her and setting her down gently upon the pavement. She wasn't the picture of grace this morning though, and stumbled almost immediately.

"Amanda . . . ."

"No, I'm fine," she said, though he was sure she wasn't. She shook her head, a gesture he'd already seen her make several times today. Headache? "Let's just get this over with," she whispered. She still wasn't any warmer to the touch than usual, or paler, but now he felt more concerned than he had been only a few minutes ago. Perhaps both siblings were coming down with something? Jimmy did look a bit pale. Amanda was very insistent about going into the building and attending to the security task nevertheless. With Tem taking her arm on one side, and Jimmy atypically offering her his support on the other side, the three of them went in through wide rear doors. Tem now wanted nothing more than to get Amanda seated in front of an electric fan with no more taxing a job to do than look through a few files. Maybe he and Jimmy could handle the security setup by themselves.

"Well, well! Mr. West," a familiar voice called out to him. The State Department official Tem had been speaking with the day before was in the back hallway, conferring with the instructor of the rookie Federal Investigation agents. Flemings, that's what the State guy's name was, Tem recalled, and the instructor – he was Wickersham, a good man, from what Tem had seen. The same could not be said for Flemings, who cleared his throat and frowned in a meaningful way as he caught sight of Amanda and Jimmy. "You've brought your family with you, I see."

"I know we're a bit unconventional," Tem said, putting his best face on it. "But these two were trained by my father and by Artemus Gordon themselves. They're far more expert at the, uh, subject you asked me to look into than anyone else I can think of. Unfortunately, I don't believe my wife is feeling very well today, so if we could perhaps find someplace to sit down and discuss the matter, I'd-"

"Hmmpphh!" Flemings coughed. "Exactly the reason I don't like to include the weaker sex in my dealings!"

Tem flinched, but Amanda made no move to insert herself into the conversation. She was either more ill than Tem had realized, or being unnaturally good at keeping herself under control. Tem heard Jimmy gasp, as shocked as Tem himself was at Amanda being this quiet when faced with a rude provocation.

"'manda?" Tem asked.

She blinked her eyes and looked up at him as if she had no idea what had just been said. Those eyes were unfocused, and now that he looked a bit closer, Tem could see that her pupils were dilated.

"Mmm?" she asked, confused.

Okay, that was it. Something was definitely wrong with Amanda, and Tem was very definitely going to do something about it.

"Excuse me," he turned to Wickersham as the friendlier party present. "Isn't there a nurse stationed in this section of the building?"

"Yes," Wickersham said, picking up on the fact that there might be a genuine medical emergency going on here, while the State Department official continued to look rude and officious. "It's right down this way – I can lead you to it."

Amanda, disoriented, tried to pull away from her husband and Jimmy's grip and stand up for herself. Jimmy didn't help matters any by trying to yank her even closer to him and suddenly starting to behave as if he was having hysterics.

"Oh, please, Mandy!" Jimmy cried. "Please don't be dying!"

That got a startled reaction out of her and Tem both.

"Jimmy, what?" Amanda asked. "Dying?"

"Who said anything about dying?" Tem demanded. "I think it might be-"

He didn't have time to complete the sentence as Amanda tugged free of her brother and stumbled a bit.

"Jimmy," she told him, "for heaven's sake, I am not . . . ." Her voice petered out and she shook her head again. ". . . . not . . . . not . . . . dy . . . ."

Tem gripped her firmly and scooped her up as she collapsed unconscious in his arms.

[WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW]

The ceiling was very white and had a slight crack beginning in the plaster of one corner, but why was she looking up at it? And ohhhh, could she feel a headache coming on! Had someone sapped her from behind? The last thing she could remember was entering the Fed with Tem and Jimmy, and she thought she'd heard someone say something about her dying. Was she dead?

No, no, couldn't be. Not just because she was breathing and could move her fingertips against the soft fabric underneath her, but because from a theological perspective she didn't want to believe that dead people felt as bad as she was feeling right now. She hadn't suffered a hangover this severe since her college days, and that hung-over sort of headache had only happened twice. If that wasn't Mother Nature's way of warning people off whiskey, she didn't know what was. Ouch.

"Mandy, you're awake!" she heard her little brother cry with relief. A bit too loudly. That's right. He had thought she was dying for some reason. She was pretty sure she wasn't. Might be wishing to do so just a smidge though.

"Softer, Jimmy," she whispered. "Have you got any aspirin?"

"I have some," an unfamiliar female voice said. Gentle woman's hands helped her to sit up and then went away, to return with a glass of water and the requisite medicine. Amanda didn't look up to see the face, but the hands were doing the work of a holy blessed saint, as Aunt Kate would have said. Amanda took the glass of water and swallowed the aspirin as quickly as possible, determined to keep it down in spite of a slight feeling of nausea.

"Where am I?" Amanda asked. "How did I get here?"

"We're in the nurse's station," Jimmy explained in more hushed tones. "Tem thinks you were under the influence of some sort of drug, because your eyes were dilated and then you passed out. He carried you here, but then Mr. Wickersham – he's the guy with Mr. Bonaparte's new bureau – said there was some kind of emergency alert from upstairs where the . . . you know . . . was being stashed. He told me to stay here and guard you with my life while he went with Mr. Wickersham and Mr. Flemings to see what it was."

Wickersham? Flemings? She had certainly missed something interesting while she was out. But her headache and nausea, bad as they were, had already begun to fade. She was convinced that she not only would live, she might even appreciate the fact in another ten minutes.

The nurse, Mrs. Prynn, helped Amanda into a full sitting position, but kept a sheet tucked over Amanda's legs and wasn't consenting to the young man in her office coming any closer to her patient.

"I'm afraid I loosened and removed some of your outer things, my dear," the nurse said with an apologetic tone. "It's the standard procedure in fainting cases. So often young women wear their corsets much too tight, you know."

Amanda took a quick inventory of her person. She still had her blouse on, and she hadn't been wearing a corset, just less restrictive undergarments above the waist. The nurse might not have approved, but then, Mrs. Prynn had probably never been in any knife fights where maximum mobility of the upper body was a survival consideration. What Amanda no longer had on, though, in addition to her shoes, was her skirt and petticoat. She still had one more layer of undergarment left to get through after those were set aside, but she could see where the nurse's modest mores might not be forgiving of her brother seeing her like this. Mrs. Prynn needn't have worried. Lord knows Jimmy was quite embarrassed enough the other day when the heat of the attic had forced Amanda to set her heavy skirt aside and work with only her petticoat and the last underlayer protecting her from view. He'd seen her in that level of undress before or the equivalent, which was her swimming costume. It safely mortified him.

"I would have you put your things back on now," the nurse continued. "But I'm afraid they have the most dreadful stain on them. We can send for some other garments if you like so these can be washed . . . ."

"Stain?" Surely she hadn't bled or – now she was mortified at the thought – been incontinent or, um, worse?

"It appears to be on the inside of your skirt, somehow, and it's soaked through to your petticoat," Mrs. Prynn explained. "It isn't blood. Quite thick and peculiar. I'm not sure what it is." The nurse frowned, showing Amanda the dark stain on the dark skirt fabric. To illustrate further, she began rubbing the stain between her fingers. "You . . . see . . . ."

Amanda might have seen, but the nurse didn't for much longer. Just as she got those last two words out, Mrs. Prynn's eyes glazed over and she collapsed in a faint.

Knickers be damned! Amanda cast the sheet aside and leapt up. Jimmy had moved quickly to keep Mrs. Prynn's head from clomping onto the floor hard, but he wasn't strong or fast enough to do much better than that. His own eyes were wide with bewilderment. But Amanda's head was starting to work again like it usually did, and now her mysterious illness was beginning to make sense.

"What? How?" Jimmy stammered.

"Don't touch the skirt!" Amanda cautioned him. "I don't think that's an ordinary stain!"

"I wasn't planning to," Jimmy said. "Do you think that's what knocked you out too?"

"I'm not sure yet, but it might be." Gingerly, Amanda wrapped a corner of the infirmary bedsheet around her hand and used it like a mitt to pick up one edge of her skirt not near the stain and move it away from Mrs. Prynn. She piled that and the petticoat in one corner of the floor while Jimmy looked for the smelling salts in this infirmary to use them on the nurse. "Jimmy, you worked with Dad in his lab all the time the last few years. When we were in the attic yesterday, did you see anything like the stuff he used to use to come up with his various knockout gas concoctions?"

Jimmy considered for a moment, then nodded slowly.

"There was some stuff like that, right next to a couple of broken test tubes . . . . Oh!" The idea occurred to him at the same time she was formulating it herself.

Yes. It all added up. She had taken off her outer skirt in the attic yesterday and dumped it on the floor to work in just her petticoat. The inside-out skirt must have come to rest in a dense puddle of whatever goo had escaped from those broken test tubes. In the dim attic light, Amanda hadn't noticed any stain before she put that skirt back on downstairs last night and donned it again this morning. Generally, her father's various sleep gas concoctions needed some sort of liquid to activate them. Amanda had provided the liquid herself. Even without the skirt on, her petticoat had become thoroughly damp with sweat up there. When she dressed herself, her sweat-soaked petticoat had drenched the stain, and the stain had started to drench back. If not for the petticoat forming a temporary protective layer between the chemical blotch and her bare legs, she'd probably be in a coma by now.

Another one to thank you for, Dad . . . . Amanda thought, then thought the better of it. It wasn't as if Artemus Gordon hadn't tried darned hard to keep his children out of the attic. He couldn't have anticipated their desperate need to clean it now. She allowed herself a dry chuckle.

"What's so funny?" Jimmy asked.

"I've heard women get compliments before by being told their dress was a real knockout," she said. "I think this one definitely takes the prize!"

Jimmy shrugged. He had found the smelling salts, and now with their roles reversed, Amanda tried to help the nurse into a sitting position while he attempted to revive her with the salts. Mrs. Prynn roused to semi-consciousness at best, then conked out again. By directly rubbing her fingers back and forth through the stain, she must have unwittingly given herself a concentrated dose of the very old Artemus Gordon Special Reserve.

"We'll have to take the skirt and petticoat to Wanderer II's lab, of course," Amanda considered. "I'll bet it is one of his old formulations. And this means the attic will need a thorough – and very careful – scrubbing top to bottom. Maybe a bit of reflooring. There's no telling how much spilled chemical might be up there."

Jimmy groaned.

"I know, I know," she told him. "But it's got to get done. Safely too. This may be a bigger job than we can handle on our own. But if you and Tem thought I was dying or anything like that . . . ." She shook her head, but not drowsily this time.

Jimmy sighed with relief at that, and went from groaning to grinning. Well, it was touching to know he cared, even if he had been jumping to conclusions a bit.

"And now I'd better . . . ." Amanda started to say something as the door to the infirmary opened. She was acutely aware that she was half-undressed and no longer covered by a bedsheet. That wasn't what concerned her. What concerned her was the gun being pointed in her direction by the very unfriendly looking man in the infirmary's doorway. One distinct advantage to having Nurse Prynn still sprawled on the floor and her own state of undress revealing most of her from the waist down, it caught the gunman as off-guard as he had caught her. By chance, Jimmy was standing behind the open door in the tiny little room in such a way that the gunman didn't see him yet either. Amanda, thinking on the fly, hand-signaled to Jimmy not to move, not to speak. He was temporarily concealed where he was, and he didn't know what he was concealed from, but he had been trained well enough to know how to act in this situation.

The gunman wolf-whistled and leered at Amanda's shapely bare legs.

"Well, well, well, doll face! Looks like I came to the right place!" he chuckled. "Too bad I got to bring you back to the boss. You 'n' me could have some fun in here with the nursy out!" He gestured with the gun barrel toward the patient bed behind her. Aha. An idiot. Amanda knew the type. She had little respect for men who used their guns as pointers instead of remembering to keep them on their target. But such idiots were useful that way.

"Oh!" she gasped, and crossed her arms over her body, pretending to be horrified at being caught by a man in such a half-naked state.

"C'mon, doll," he said, waggling and carelessly gesturing with the gun again, "I got to take you for a walk upstairs."

"But – but surely you'll allow me to get dressed first!" she protested, eyes wide and frightened. One of the handier skills Amanda had learned from her mother Lily was the ability to blush on command, and she was using that ability right now. "Please!" she begged. Don't see Jimmy! Don't see Jimmy! she was thinking at her assailant as hard as she could.

"Yeah, yeah, all right," the gunman (who she now thought she recognized) sneered. "Make it quick."

She intended to. Time for one hell of a dangerous field experiment.

Picking up her heavy outer skirt as carefully as she could by the edges not near the stain, she rolled her hands up into the clean parts of the fabric so that she was holding it almost like a very thick, awkward garrote with the stained portion pointing outward toward the gunman's face. The gunman, no gentleman, wasn't taking his eyes off her. He intended to enjoy the view. Amanda intended to send him to dreamland. He walked in closer toward her, keeping his other hand on the doorknob, with her batting her eyelashes and doing her very best to look like the scared little mouse she wasn't. She could see that Jimmy now knew something of the danger they were in, might be able to see the gunman's hand, or at least the tip of the muzzle. With the slightest nod of her head and movement of her eyes, she gestured to her brother to make a noise so she could make her move.

He did and she did.

Jimmy coughed – something he was very practiced at. The surprised gunman turned his head and stepped forward off balance to see what or who might be behind the door and let his gun hand swing carelessly away from the person he should have been watching. Amanda was on him in a split second, elbowing the gun hand back and forcing the stained section of skirt over his mouth and nostrils. The gunman's eyes widened, but they didn't stay that way. He passed out and dropped to the floor like a stone, thankfully without getting off a single shot.

"Mandy!" Jimmy gasped. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," she nodded grimly. "But I don't think anyone else in this wing of the Federal Building is." She cast her skirt aside once more and pulled the unconscious thug further into the room. "Close the door, Jimmy. We've got a really major problem on our hands, and a volunteer for giving me a new outfit."

Jimmy closed the door as instructed and gaped at the volunteer she was referring to.

"Who is he? He doesn't look like one of the Federal Investigators."

"He isn't one," Amanda told him. "The name is Joey Rock-fingers, and he's an enforcer for a mob boss Tem and I dealt with in San Francisco. Someone from that mob must have found out on the California end about the Franconium hydrate being transported to Sacramento and decided to arrange a little alternate transportation for it." With help from her brother she began stripping the outer clothing off of the criminal and then tearing the infirmary bedsheet into strips to tie him up with. A rolled bandage found in the infirmary's small cabinet made a suitable gag and Amanda put bandage tape over his eyes for good measure. She knew they had to work quickly. Someone had sent him to this room, and that someone would be wondering where he was. She dressed herself in Joey Rock-finger's outfit and holstered his gun at her shoulder. Not very ladylike, but then, neither was she. Fortunately, Jimmy was smart enough to realize the situation and the need for haste as much as she did.

"Upstairs, he said," she murmured. "And you said Tem and those two other men, Flemings and Wickersham went up there somewhere? Because of an emergency summons?"

Jimmy nodded. Here was an emergency all right.

"We have to assume they're all prisoners by now and that someone told this guy's boss where we were. Tem wouldn't have allowed that goon to come here after us if he could prevent it. That means they've got him." Because she wasn't going to allow herself to think of the alternative – that he was already . . . . No! She couldn't afford to think that. Her focus had to be on rescuing him and the Franconium hydrate and on alerting the authorities to the fact that something was very, very wrong in this place.

"But this is the Federal Building!" Jimmy whispered in shocked tones. "Who invades the Federal Building?"

"Someone who wants Franconium hydrate very badly would be my guess," she answered. "This is one small section of the bigger building, and it's a section that can easily be locked and shut off from the rest of the complex. No one going to the Post Office or the Law Courts is going to be looking for any trouble back here. No one would suspect anybody could make trouble back here, which is what helps make this a perfect target."

"So now what do we do now?"

"Now," she said, "we find and free Tem if we can. Keep ourselves out of the hands of any more gunsels if we can. And we alert folks on the outside so that criminals don't get away with stealing that dangerous chemical. But we have to find a way to do it so that whoever's behind this doesn't kill any hostages they have." Please!

"We don't know how many of them there are, or where they are," Jimmy pointed out gloomily. "And we've only got one weapon."

"No," she corrected him, looking over at where she'd cast her skirt. "We have at least two of them."

[WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW]

If he ever lived long enough to look back and write his memoirs, Jimmy Gordon thought, the time he fought a bunch of bad guys by using a woman's stained skirt and petticoat was NOT going to be a chapter in it! Talk about embarrassing! It was bad enough being treated like a toddler all the time. If his friend and fellow young scientist Oscar Montague ever heard about this, Jimmy would never live it down!

The rolled-up skirt wasn't the most reassuring weapon either. Held very carefully between hands covered by gloves that he and Mandy had scrounged in the infirmary, it was a weapon. And if Jimmy had to, he bet that tossing the skirt, with its thick blob of chemical residue, into a bucket of almost any kind of liquid – water, preferably – would cause it to produce one really huge cloud of sleep gas. But that was a one-shot deal to be used as a last resort. They'd both agreed that Mandy should keep the gun. She was by far the better marksman, uh, markswoman, and she was an experienced, competent Secret Service agent who'd already tackled more dangerous assignments than you could shake a stick at, while he, Jimmy Gordon, was just cutting his teeth. He hadn't aimed at living (or dying) the life of a field agent until his mother and Uncle Jim were both murdered only a few months ago. He'd wanted to be a great scientist. Now he had to figure out a way to survive so he could be both.

At his big sister's side, he snuck as quietly as he could down a corridor that led from the small federal law enforcement section of the Chicago Federal Building to another section that housed other government agencies. Just as he and Mandy feared, there were another couple of armed goons standing sentry duty in front of a locked set of double doors, effectively blocking their way. They'd already succeeded in knocking out at least two other bad guys in other hallways with Mandy doing an admirable job of walking like the mob tough whose clothes she was wearing, face tucked into a turned-up jacket collar, taking her turn distracting them while Jimmy anesthesia-ambushed them from behind. But those creeps had been stationed solo and armed only with knives. Mandy had taken one knife and Jimmy the other, but he felt even more useless with bladed weapons than he did with bullet-firing ones. Why, oh why hadn't he brought some of his dazzler balls or scientific gadgets with him today?

Because you thought you were going for ice cream . . . .

He and Mandy ducked back around the corner while they remained unseen. Two men, together, armed with rifles and probably other guns and weapons – not single guards so easily double-teamed. It didn't look like there'd be any skirting this issue.

"Drat," he swore quietly, under his breath.

Mandy didn't swear. The big sister was back to being her old self again, which in this case meant silent, focused, calm and professional. He wondered if he'd ever learn to be that way. Tem had tried explaining it to him once. When the chips were really down, Mandy somehow managed to put all her emotions away, like folding up a handkerchief and putting it in her purse. She didn't get panicked – she got dangerous. He'd told Jimmy that their fathers could be the same way when they'd had to be, and that was a part of how they'd managed to accomplish incredibly dangerous missions and stunts that no one else could, or had the courage to. It was like they didn't let their emotions get in the way at all. But how the heck did you do that? Tem admitted that he hadn't quite figured out the technique himself yet, but Jimmy thought his brother-in-law must be real close to it. Jimmy didn't want to let anyone down, but he didn't know how to be not scared. Not yet. He'd have been crazy with terror right now if not for his sister at his side.

Mandy signaled silently for the two of them to head back the way they came. They'd already located the stairs leading up, though presumably that way might be double guarded too near the upstairs portion, which was where the leader of the gang and his goons would be holding their hostages, and also be at their strongest. Two hallway sentries down, but access to the forward part of the building hopelessly blocked. No extra guns and not nearly enough special equipment between these two Secret Secret Service agents to stand a realistic chance of succeeding with a frontal attack. Not even a handy-dandy disguise kit on them.

"I hate to say it, Jimmy," Mandy whispered to him after they'd managed to duck into a broom closet unseen. "But we're going to have to get out to the back entrance where we parked the horse cart somehow and send you to get help."

There weren't any windows on this lower portion of the back building wing that they could escape through. The windows were all on the upper floors – not accessible from the sidewalk for, ironically, security reasons. Jimmy knew also it was the back entrance now or nothing. But . . . .

"Me?" he whispered. "Why are you sending me to get away?" He expected the reason to be something to do with Mandy's overprotectiveness or because she thought he was still a child. That wasn't the answer he got.

"It's because the authorities will trust the message if it comes from you. You're young, but not too young, and you're the right gender to get them to listen. The people whose help we'll need aren't going to just dismiss you or accuse you of having hysteria."

I'll be plenty hysterical if I think I'm leaving you and Tem behind and I might never see you again! he thought.

"But . . . what about you?"

"I have to stay here and do what I can," she sighed. "I'll be careful – I promise. Please, Jimmy. I know I can count on you. Tem's counting on you too."

At least, they both hoped he still was. She didn't have to say that. They could see it in each other's eyes.

Jimmy nodded. She was right. He'd do everything in his power not to let them down now.

As quickly and as quietly as possible, they left the broom closet and headed for the rear entrance. Jimmy swore he could feel his heart pounding in his chest and the blood-pounding sound in his ears. Hopefully that wasn't because of the skirt he was holding.

You can do this. You can do this . . . .

He half expected the rear exit from this section to be even more guarded than the front exit had been. That's how he would have done it if he was a criminal mastermind. But to their relief, he and Mandy saw that it was not. Maybe the two men they'd taken down back in the hallway were responsible for the rear-guard job. Maybe the bad guys were overconfident in their ability to stop anyone from getting away. They thought they were facing nothing worse down here than a fragile, sick woman, a nurse and a panicky, skinny adolescent after all.

Hardly daring to believe their good fortune, he and Mandy visual-checked the area and then made a dash for the unguarded back door. Mandy signaled that she was going out first to make sure the coast was clear on the other side, with Jimmy to follow. She went through the back door to exit the building with nothing and no one blocking her way. Jimmy only kept a few steps behind her. But there – ahead of them he could see the horse cart with their belongings, Baccarat and Diamond still in harness, still under the watch of one of the Federal Building's security guards. They were out! And they could enlist the guard's help too.

Without hesitation, Jimmy set for the cart, getting a few steps ahead of Mandy to reach it, ready to hail the security guard. He didn't have to hail him – the security guard was already turning their way. Jimmy heard Mandy do a sharp intake of breath at being startled by something. Then he noticed the guard was pointing his gun at them. He had gotten the drop on them both.

Oh, no . . . .

Still keeping one hand gripping the skirt, Jimmy raised his hands above his head in surrender.

"Let me guess," he murmured. "You're not really a security guard, are you?" More likely another mobster Mandy recognized, but too late to do anything about it now.

Another armed man dressed in security guard clothing stepped out from behind the Wests' horse cart, also leveling a gun at them. Then that man was joined by another. The rear exit hadn't been double guarded on the outside – it was triple guarded.

"We heard you was bright," the first fake 'security guard' said with a nasty grin on his face. "Time to go upstairs, kid."