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MICHAEL DELANEY sometimes had his doubts about people. But a gun? No doubts there. A gun would never lie to you, would never tell you it loved you and then leave you for somebody else, would never take your kids away, would never flatter you and then stab you in the back. You treated a gun right and it would be your friend forever.

Back in his drinking days, Delaney used to riff on this particular subject after he'd gotten eight or ten fingers of single malt in him. It had been kind of a joke, but kind of not.

But not now. Right now it was not funny at all.

Once you made friends with a gun, you knew that gun better than you knew your own brother. And the gun in his hand was a stranger.

JUST MINUTES EARLIER Secret Service Special Agent Michael Delaney had awakened to the irritating pulse of his alarm clock. Usually the clock was just a safety. Normally he woke up precisely ten minutes before he had to get up, a skill he'd developed back in the Special Forces, when snatching the maximum amount of sleep from a mission was nearly as important as knowing how to shoot your weapon.

Today, though, he woke with a fuzzy, aching head and a mild case of nausea. There had been a time when that happened a lot. But he hadn't touched a drink in eighteen months. So there had to be another explanation.

Michael Delaney had been sleeping in Walnut, a small cottage in the staff area of the Camp David compound. The room looked like 1950—lots of dark wood, a brass lamp, twin bed, an ancient space heater humming under the frost-rimed window. Camp David had been hit with an unseasonably early snow the day before, and through the window he could see that more snow had hit the ground overnight. The tall black pines were heavy with white.

Delaney took a quick shower, started pulling on his clothes, and tried to replay the previous night's events in his mind. He had a vague recollection that his team had been notified just before he went to bed that VPOTUS would be arriving for an AM meeting with POTUS. As a member of the presidential security detail, that meant a frenzied morning of work for Michael Delaney. Since 9/11 the already pressed Secret Service had found itself in a pressure cooker. Threats running the gamut from the usual kooks, to domestic terrorist organizations, all the way up to Al-Qaeda had increased alarmingly. The pace of the work seemed to grow more intense by the day.

Why was his memory so vague?

Someone was banging on the door. "Delaney!" It was Mark Greene, head of the presidential detail.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," he called.

"WHMO just called. They're pushing up the meeting to seven AM. Get a move on."

Delaney grabbed his Uncle Mike holster, swung it over his shoulder, snapped the quick release buckles, then drew his Beretta 9 mm and pulled back the slide three-quarters of an inch. It was a mechanical routine that he went through every day of his life, checking to make sure a round was chambered.

Which is when the cold sweat hit him.

There was a round chambered, yes, the brass cartridge gleaming dully in the dim light of the cabin. But something wasn't right. When you'd pulled back her slide, what, a thousand times, when you'd put ten or fifteen thousand rounds down her pipe, when you'd personally filed and sanded her sear and her trigger so she broke smooth and pure as the stem of a champagne flute, when you'd eased untold numbers of patches down her bore, spoiled her with several gallons of Hoppe's #9, when she'd led you unerringly to the X ring more times than you could count… well, you knew her. You just did.

And the sticky, nasty, crunchy, grabby action of this gun's slide? No. Absolutely not. It was not his weapon. The action of the Beretta in his hand was strictly factory.

More banging on the door. "Delaney! Now!"

When Delaney tried to pierce the fuzz in the back of his mind in order to come up with an explanation of how this fresh-out-of-the-box hunk of steel had ended up in his holster, he drew an absolute and complete blank.

"Now!"

There was no good reason why somebody else's weapon was in his holster. But there was no time to think. It would come to him in a minute—there had to be a rational explanation, didn't there?—and then when things slowed down later in the shift, he would get the matter squared away.

Copyright © 2005 by Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer