Dream Teams

experienced and unafraid to kick down a door or jump from a moving train-as he once did while chasing a fleeing suspect. A family man with four kids, he'd earned his stripes as an NYPD officer for over a decade.

 

Webster's counterpart, Detective Warne, on the other hand, was sly, charismatic, and twenty-eight years old. Where Webster was a decisive man of action, Warne was the agency's smooth talker and master of disguise-thin and chameleonlike, with a knack for getting people to cough up information.

 

The two had been chasing down Felton's railroad conspiracy at various Baltimore PD haunts for a month when they overheard a rumor that sent them racing back to base. In the course of that month, they had determined that a group of corrupt officials and politically disenfranchised socialites indeed had it out for Felton. But as far as they could tell, the group had done little but talk trash about him and other high-profile figures in Baltimore.

 

Webster, who knew how to relate to police officers, had been buddying up with off-duty drunks at local cop bars. Meanwhile, Warne was spending evenings in disguise at elite social hangouts, eavesdropping on the conversations of potential conspirators. In this manner, the two pieced together the troubling details of what was really afoot:

 

Basically, it was terrorism. The group, frustrated at the state of national politics that they felt was leaving Baltimore behind, wanted to send a message: the government had failed. "Look at our city," one conspirator confided, "and tell me if we are not going to ruin." They'd considered several ways to draw attention to this point, like ruining Felton's railroad line. But the group had recently cooked up plans to do something much less subtle: assassinate a high-profile congressman who would soon be passing through town.

 

The congressman-a popular but polarizing Republican-was the perfect target. He represented everything these extremists hated about the