Alex Hassan slowly dropped to one knee in the treeline of moon-made shadows well behind the big Georgian Colonial and placed a glass coffee pot of brake fluid and chlorine on a bed of pine needles alongside him. The silent mixture rocked and glistened inside its prison, eager for an explosive escape.

Dressed in a dark sweatsuit, his face and hands blackened, Hassan was on a knoll that put him at eye-level with the second floor. He raised the binoculars strapped around his neck and looked into a lighted bedroom, rolling the focus bar in his fingers until he could clearly see the shapely bare back of Betty Keller. She was seated at her dressing table in a nightgown, methodically brushing her dark hair. He put the binoculars down and clenched his teeth, knowing that before the night was over shed be lying in a blackened, smoldering bed, an ashen sculpture of death. So would her husband, Chip, whod soon come home after a night of puffing out his chest alongside the governor at a banquet of corporate pigs.

Getting into the Keller home was easier than Alex thought it would be, the glass cutter making a scraping but sharp, circular incision in the solarium door pane while the suction cup held it in place and kept it from falling. In minutes he was in the kitchen. The wall clock ticked to the next minute hand. Otherwise there was silence.

He rested the coffee pot on the cutting board next to the sink and looked around. A night light bulb was plugged into a socket next to the stove, a fan of illumination revealing a porcelain cookie jar and a napkin holder. He went into the hallway and searched the rooms. It was dark and quiet. He looked up the wooden stairway along its oak balusters painted white and listened to the silence. The mansion was so big, the Keller bedroom so far away, theyd hear nothing. The flames would run up the stairs like an Olympic sprinter, gulping and consuming oxygen as they ascended, rolling black smoke to the ceiling.

He picked up his own glass vessel containing the deadly mixture, put it on the counter, removed the elastic band holding the cord, put the plug into a wall socket, and turned the timer dial to forty minutes. Midnight. He picked up the empty coffeemaker, opened the door into the moonlight on the patio, and turned for one last look. The clock ticked forward, he closed the door, and the moccasins on his feet whispered him across the patio.

Alex cruised along Ridgedale Avenue out to Route Ten. He had to be careful. He could not be stopped by a cop for speeding. That would amount to a catastrophe. Everything hed used was on the seat alongside him. He would go into the Two Guys lot, clean his face and hands with the cold cream and towels hed brought, throw everything incriminating into the dumpster, and drive home to his apartment.

The clock in the Keller kitchen ticked forward as the brake fluid and the chlorine, finally heated, forced their chemical molecules to interact and exploded with a muffled whoosh! There was a flash of light, gases, and violence, the coffee pot shattering, glass flying. The hypergolic trail of deadly fluid leaped out of the glass vessel and ran along the butcher block in a grayish white path, then dripped onto the front of the cabinets like slime easing itself down a mountain while a chorus line of flames danced along the same path.

The luminous blaze got more belligerent, eagerly swallowing up more territory and spewing carbon monoxide toward the ceiling, bluish green smoke turning to blackness, sooty clouds rolling aloft above the kitchen table and condemning the white and yellow daisies below to a painless, wilting death.

Having been deprived of going through the concrete walls of the new garage below Shelleys bedroom, the flames had chosen another route to get to her and were crackling through the second floor hallway, engulfing the walls and three paintings. One of them, a heavily scalloped gold, antique frame, dropped to the floor, thud! and jolted Shelley awake, frightened. She looked around her, out her windows to the buttonwood trees, saw their branches swaying and felt reassured but smelled smoke and saw it seeping in under her door. She leaped to her feet, stumbled, wearing only one shoe, and yelled, Mom! She ran to the door and grabbed for the doorknob, but it was superheated and burned her hand. Again, a yell through the door, Mom! Mom! She listened, fell to her knees, and burst into tears of fear and frustration, remembering from school that an open door in a fire would create a draft and rush a blaze into a room.

Shelley grabbed the bedcovers and pushed them against the opening under the door just as it caught fire and singed her face and hair. She jumped backward, ran to the window, flames rushing after her, and rammed it open. Sitting on the sill, legs dangling, she looked down onto the white stones of a landscaped path that was lit by arrows of fire shooting out of the garage windows. Angry heat scorched her back, and her clothes ignited as she leaped.