Somebody once claimed to have spotted a cow, but that had never been confirmed. The top floor was so high that the board members rarely even saw birds, though every September, a couple of dozen turkey vultures, at the far northern limit of their range, would gather above Pye Plaza and circle through the thermals rising off the concrete and glass.

There were rumors that the vultures so pissed off Willard Pye that he would go up to the roof, hiding in a blind disguised as an air conditioner vent, and try to blast them out of the sky with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Angela (Jelly) Brown, Pye's executive assistant, didn't believe that rumor, though, she admitted to her husband, it sounded like something Pye would do. She knew he hated the buzzards, and the saucer-sized buzzard droppings that spotted the emerald-green glass of the Pinnacle.

But that was in the Autumn.

On a sunny Wednesday morning in the middle of May, Jelly Brown got to the boardroom early, pulled the drapes to let the light in, and opened four small vent windows for the fresh air. That done, she went around the board table, and at each chair put out three yellow #2 pencils, all finely sharpened and equipped with unused rubber erasers; a yellow legal pad; and a water glass on a PyeMart coaster. She checked the circuit breakers at the end of the table, to make sure that the laptop plug-ins were live.

As she did that, Sally Humboldt from food services brought in a tray covered with cookies, bagels and jelly doughnuts; two tanks of hot coffee, one each of regular and decaf; a pitcher of orange juice and one of cranberry juice.

Jelly Brown had checked the consumables before the board members arrived. She'd put an extra bottle of Reyka in the hospitality suite, because the heavy drinkers from Texas and California were scheduled to show up.

A few minutes after nine o'clock, she went back to the board room to close the windows and turn on the air conditioning. Sally Humboldt had come back with a tray of miniature pumpkin pies, each with a little pig-tailed squirt of whipped cream and a birthday candle. They always had pie at a Pye board meeting, but these were special: Willard Pye would be 70 in three days, and the board members, who'd all grown either rich or richer because of Pye's entrepreneurial magic, would sing a hardy "Happy Birthday."

Jelly Brown had closed the last window when she noticed that somebody had switched chairs. Pye was a man of less than average height, dealing with men and even a couple of women on the tall side, so he liked his chair six inches higher than standard, even if his feet dangled a bit.

She said, "Oh, shit," to herself. Almost a bad mistake. Pye would have been mightily pissed if he'd had to trade chairs with somebody — no graceful way to do that. She then made a much worse mistake: she pulled his chair out from the spot at the corner of the table and started dragging it around to the head of the table.

The blast did flatten her, and broken glass rained on her stunned, upturned face. She didn't actually hear the bomb go off — had no sense of that — and remembered Pye screaming orders, but she really wasn't herself until she woke up in the hospital in Grand Rapids, and found her face and upper body wrapped in bandages.

The bandages covered her eyes, so she couldn't see anything, and she couldn't hear anything except the drone of words, and a persistent, loud, high-pitched ringing. For a moment she thought she might be dead and buried, except that she found she could move her hands, and when she did, she felt the bandages.

And she blurted, "God help me, where am I? Am I blind?"

There were some word-like noises, but she couldn't make the individual words, and then, after a confusing few seconds, somebody took a bandage pad off her left eye. She could see okay, with that eye, anyway, and found herself looking at a nurse, and then what she assumed was a doctor.

The doctor spoke to her, and she said, "I can't hear," and he nodded, and held up a finger, meaning, "One moment," and then he came back with a yellow legal pad and a wide tipped marker and wrote in oversized block letters, "You were injured in an explosion. Do you understand?"

She said, "Yes, I do. "

He held up a finger again, and wrote, "You have temporarily lost your hearing because of the blast." Another page: "You have many little cuts from glass fragments." Turned the page: "Your other eyelid is badly cut, but not the eye itself." Another page: "Your vision should be fine." Another: "You also suffered a minor concussion and perhaps other impact injuries." Finally: "Your vital signs are excellent."

"What time is it?" she asked. The light in the room looked odd.

"Five o'clock. You've been coming and going for almost eight hours. That's the concussion."

There was some more back and forth, and finally she asked, "Was it a gas leak?"

The doctor wrote, "The police believe it was a bomb. They want to talk to you as soon as you are able."

"What about Jelly? She was in the room with me."

The doctor, his expression grim, wrote, "I'm sorry. She wasn't as lucky as you."

Kingsley, unfortunately for him, had the key, and walked up the metal steps to the trailer door, while Sullivan yawned into the back of his hand three steps below. Kingsley turned and said, "If we can get the grade..."

He was rudely interrupted by the bomb. Parts of the top half of Kingsley's body were blown right back over Sullivan's head, while the lower half, and what was left of the top, plastered itself to Sullivan and knocked him flat.

Sullivan sat up, then rolled onto his hands and knees, and then pushed up to his knees, and scraped blood and flesh from his eyes. He saw a man running toward him from the crew's parking area, and off to his left, a round thing that he realized had Kingsley's face on it, and he started retching, and turned and saw more people running...

He couldn't hear a thing, and never again could hear very well.

But like Sally Humboldt, he was alive to tell the tale.

The request got booted around, and at an afternoon meeting at BCA headquarters in St. Paul, Lucas Davenport, a senior agent, said, "Let's send that fuckin' Flowers up there. He hasn't done anything for us lately."

"He's off today," somebody said.

Davenport said, "So what?"