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there?”
    “If so, it’s really bad luck for him. He gets away from the bullets and still dies.”
    “Who’s on the scene?”
    “ATF and the FBI as we speak.”
    Stone could understand that. The ATF handled all investigations involving explosives until it was determined that the act was one of international terrorism. Then the FBI would take over. However, Stone assumed a bomb going off across from the White House would be classified de facto as a foreign terrorist act. That meant the Bureau would take the lead. It probably already had.
    Stone asked, “Okay, let’s pass over the explosion for now. Do we know the source of the shots? On the video they appeared to be coming from the northern end of the park. From the direction of H Street or perhaps past that.”
    “That’s the prelim conclusion at least, yeah.”
    “So running north-south. There were no muzzle flashes on the video,” Stone pointed out. “That must mean they were hidden from the camera’s eyes.”
    “Behind trees,” offered Weaver. “Lot of them at the northern end of the park. But the surveillance cameras are positioned mainly for ground-level observation. So in any event they might not have picked up the flashes if the shooters were really high up.”
    “Well, the shots had to come from elevated angles,” Stone opined.
    “How do you figure?” asked Riley in a way that made Stone believe the man already knew the answer but was simply testing him. Stone decided to play along, for now.
    “If they were fired from behind the trees at street level they mostlikely would have carried past the park and across Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.”
    “How do you know they didn’t?”
    “Because you would have already told me if they had or I would have heard about more casualties. There are a lot of people on the White House side. Vehicles lining Pennsylvania Avenue. Sentries doing perimeter patrols. It’s inconceivable that someone would not have been hit. So high ground to low. Fits with my observations. From what I could see, the slugs were all plowing into the dirt. And if they passed through tree canopies first, they had to be fired from at or above that line. And a lot of those trees are pretty tall with thick canopies.” Stone added, “Anyone on the northern end of the park see anything helpful?”
    “There was security. Park Police, couple of uniformed Secret Service agents, bomb-sniffing canine. They’re still being debriefed, but preliminarily they didn’t have much on the source.”
    Stone nodded. “And why wasn’t the park cleared last night?”
    Weaver’s expression showed his displeasure with this query. “I really just want your observations from watching that video.”
    “I like to have a fuller understanding of what’s going on before I extend myself.”
    Weaver’s gaze lowered to a file on his desk. “John Carr?”
    Stone remained silent, staring at the digital image of the man on the wall.
    “John Carr,” Weaver said again. “Your file is so classified even I still haven’t seen all of it.”
    “Sometimes even a government can be refreshingly discreet,” noted Stone. “But we were talking about the origins of the shots and the park security, or rather lack thereof.”
    “Origin of the shots is still being investigated. The park security is really Secret Service jurisdiction and I haven’t received a briefing from them.”
    “Of course you have,” countered Stone.
    Weaver looked intrigued. “What makes you say that?”
    “Security of the president trumps all other things, which gives the Secret Service interagency heft it might not otherwise have. What looked to be automatic gunfire and an explosion happenedright across from the White House over fifteen hours ago. You provide the president with his daily national security briefing at seven every morning. If you haven’t talked to the Secret Service yet, then you couldn’t have briefed the president on the matter this morning. And if you didn’t