“No calls.”

“No calls?” she said. “Why?”
“Never mind why. Just hang up the phone and … read a book.”
Peter made a small gesture with his hand, as if to tell her it was all right. But he knew now that it wasn’t.
Agent Hause took out his cell phone, placed a call, spoke softly.
Meanwhile, Luzier said to Peter Fallon, “Who else knows about this?”
“No one.”
“Not even your wife?”
“I’m not married.”
“Boyfriend?” Luzier raised an eyebrow and looked around again at the books.
“Girlfriend,” said Peter. “She’s traveling.”
Hause closed his phone and said, “Mr. Fallon, I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to come with us.”
“Come with you? Why?”
“You’ve stumbled into something. You may have alerted the target in Boston. We have to take him down today. And other teams need to be alerted in other cities. The best way to be sure that you don’t reveal anything else, even inadvertently, is for you to … ah … spend the day with us.”
BY EVENING, IT was over, and Peter Fallon was back in his condo on Marlborough Street, sitting slack-jawed before the television, just like everyone else in America.
On the local station, a tape rolled over and over: an FBI SWAT team attacking a house on Boston Street with tear gas, which was answered with semi-automatic weapons fire from every window. A rocket-propelled grenade hit a police car. Boom.
Click. Fox News. The anchorman was saying, “Federal and state agencies across the country have averted an Al Qaeda massacre planned for the Fourth of July. We now know that their targets were fireworks celebrations in the East, crowded airport ticket lines in the Midwest, and beaches in California.”
Click. CNN: Another anchor speaking over footage of agents entering a storefront. “Before the action in Boston began, the FBI was moving on this grocery in Brooklyn, believed to be the nerve center of the plan.”
Click. MSNBC: A reporter in front of the White House, saying that the FBI, “working on tips from within the American Muslim community, had been watching several locations across the country, preparing to interdict while observing Al Qaeda cells, hoping to learn as much as they could before the Fourth of July. However, an informant today made it plain to authorities in Boston that the cat was out of the bag.”
That informant, Peter knew, was himself. He hoped that was all the identification he would ever receive.
Click. ANN, the American News Network: the commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department holding up an AR-15. “These weapons were bought legally over the last three months across the United States, then moved surreptitiously to central locations by couriers posing as florists, delivery men, even postal workers.” A reporter asked why they would not have kept the weapons dispersed until the day of attack. An FBI representative leaned into the microphone: “As with most Al Qaeda strikes, their operatives are kept in the dark until the last moment to protect the mission. Spreading the guns around would have spread the plan.”
In a story this big, everyone had plenty of spectacular footage—the firefight in Boston; an attack on a Chicago warehouse; an explosion at a U-Haul storage facility in South Central Los Angeles; Middle Eastern men doing the perp walk in Brooklyn, in Boston, in half a dozen other cities.
And in a story this big, everyone had an opinion. So at eight o’clock, the heads started talking and the cable cacophony began to rise. What had happened? Who was to blame? What could be done now to protect Americans?
On Fox, analysts praised the actions of the FBI and called for more funding for police agencies. On MSNBC, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee defended the Patriot Act while a Democrat argued that the Patriot Act had nothing to do with good police work.
And on ANN, the American News Network, Congresswoman Harriet Holden appeared on Rapid Fire with host Harry Hawkins, looked straight at the camera, and said, “I think that, in light of the horror that has been averted, it’s time to reconsider our gun laws. The Founding Fathers never imagined the kind of killing power that anyone—honest American or murderous terrorist—can now hold in his hands. Tomorrow, I will begin the legislative process that I hope will lead to the repeal of the Second Amendment.”
“The Right to Keep and Bear Arms?” said Hawkins. “You can’t be serious.”
“You can’t be serious,” whispered Peter Fallon to himself.
“I am deadly serious,” said the congresswoman.