"This raggedy kid?" Morgan asked. "This is the incredibly dangerous threat to society you brought us here to see?"

The three figures lay at the roof's edge, across the street from the boy they watched. At the other end of their binoculars, a teenager with Mexican features was about to enter a crumbling building half a block away. He had stopped at the door, reached inside his white baggy pants, and produced a thick wad of bills.

"Just keep watching," Chuck Barton said. Four men trotted toward the door. The pair coming from the left wore gray suits and carried big revolvers. The other two had on blue jumpsuits. SWAT team uniforms. One carried an automatic, while his partner held a shotgun. Morgan didn't envy them. Whoever chose those SWAT uniforms had not considered Southern California summer temperatures.

"Your boys, Chuck?" Morgan asked over Felicity's head. "CIA?"

"No way," Felicity said, turning her green eyes on her partner. "The two suits are FBI. I could spot them a mile away."

"She's right," Barton said, stroking her waist length red hair. "The other two are DEA. You just might get to see the first joint raid on an ice house that doesn't ..."

The Spanish boy started into the door. One of the gray suits shoved him forward and dived in after him. An explosion of a shotgun blast, and the FBI agent flew out the door before he was completely in. Gun barrels smashed out windows on the second floor and a hail of automatic fire showered down.

One of the DEA agents dived and rolled behind a car to return fire. His partner was down, his body bouncing as bullets continued to punch into it. The second FBI agent sat leaning back against the front of the building, alternately holding his left arm and shooting into the door until he ran out of bullets. Rifle fire burst from the building facing the target house, but it sounded feeble compared with what the criminals sent out their three windows.

"What have they got?" Felicity asked.

"From left to right, I see an Ingram Mac 10, an AK-47, and that looks like a Skorpion machine pistol," Morgan Stark said.

"Still think it's kid stuff?" Barton asked. As they watched, five very young men darted out the front door, firing submachine guns as they moved. One stopped to coolly put a bullet in the seated FBI agent's head. Gun fire from the facing building slapped him onto the sidewalk a moment later.

"The building's too well covered," Barton said, running stubby fingers through his brown curly hair. "The back's sewn up. The boys on this side are expert snipers. If they'd put their guns down ..."

"They won't," Morgan said. "They'll all die. For the ice."

"We need one alive," Barton said. "If only ..." He stopped because the boy in baggy white pants was edging slowly up the street in their direction. He moved like a professional, from car to car, firing two machine pistols in a deadly spray. In front of the building directly opposite Morgan and Felicity he fired out his two guns, then dived backward, up the four outside steps and into the door.

"I can track him," Felicity said, leaping to her feet. She was racing for the stairs, her long graceful legs pumping.

"Red!" Morgan shouted in his rough baritone, jumping up. "Get back here!" He sprinted after her. Barton followed, but Morgan and Felicity easily outdistanced him. He had on a suit coat on this hot July afternoon, while his friends wore only jeans and tee shirts. He was working. They were supposedly only observers.

Felicity was down the stairs and