Op Center 12 – War Of Eagles – Clancy, Tom

Book Cover:

The Explosion Of A Chinese Freighter—Carrying Illegal Workers—in Charleston harbor is the first sign that some-one is capping Chinese interests abroad. After explosions in South Africa, and Taipei, Op-Center roots out the cause: warring factions in the Chinese government. But still reeling from budget cuts and an almost devastating attack by an electromagnetic pulse explosion, Op-Center itself sustains a third hit: the removal of Commander. Paul Hood, replaced by a three-star general from the Army. Op-Center is now under the control of the Pentagon. Hood’s own future exists at the whim of the new President.

Chapter One.

Charleston, South Carolina

Monday, 4:57 A. M.

When Jesse Wheedles was a young man stationed at the Charleston Naval Base, he had a very precise and accurate job description. The Athens, Georgia, native was chief mess management specialist. He was proud of that position. Wheedles was more than just a cook, more than just a bagger who put together MREs–meals ready to eat for consumption by sailors in transit. Wheedles was a craftsman. His job was to make certain that whatever their rating, whatever their taste, when someone sat down in his mess hall, he or she had the best soup, hottest entree, and finest cookies and coffee in the United States Navy.

He had a paper napkin signed, “Amazing food!” by Undersecretary Sabrina Brighton proving just how well he had succeeded.

Wheedles wondered what life would have been like had he stayed with the navy. After his hitch, he took over the family restaurant, a roadside diner that was struggling to survive in the face of fast food and coffee bars. They hung on ten years, after which his dad sold the property to a developer, divided the profit among his three sons, and called it a day.

Wheedles lost his share of the $90,000 in an Internet start-up.

Now both the former mess chief and the naval base were doing something else. The base had been there for nearly ninety-five years, ever since President Theodore Roosevelt visited Charleston for its bicentennial celebration and decided that it would be a more suitable location for a naval facility than Beaufort. His decision didn’t sit well with the citizens of that city, who sent a wreath and their condolences when the base finally closed.

Southerners forgave, but they did not forget.

The military presence here had a long and significant history. During the American Revolution it had been the site of a major British siege. The fall of Charleston resulted in the single greatest loss of troops for the American cause and had effectively left the Southern colonies in the hands of the Crown. The proud port had also been one of the lifelines of the Confederacy, dry dock for the submarine H. L. Hunley, and the home base for ironclad blockade runners.

Fort Sumter, the flash point of the Civil War, was located here. The martial history of Charleston, built and shaped by sinew and soul, was too important to end with the cold, blind judgment of a computer.

But so it had.

The facility had been shut down in 1996 as part of the Base Realignment and Closure Program. That was a day of great mourning for the city. There was concern at the time that the loss of the fleet and four thousand support jobs would kill the harbor and drag Charleston with it. But federal agencies and commercial enterprises sailed to the rescue, filling the base with tenants and barely causing a skipped beat in the economic pulse of the city.

The redevelopment project even ‘saved the struggling career of thirty-seven-year-old Jesse Wheedles. Thanks to his former navy CO who was on the harbor renewal advisory board, Wheedles got a job as the morning manager of Teddy R’s, a new waterfront restaurant that catered to freighter and tanker crews arriving or departing on the early morning tide. It was a great position, because he got to do something he enjoyed and was good at, and he loved arriving before sunup to turn on the grill and get the deep fryer bubbling. He loved the feeling of literally firing up his day almost as much as he enjoyed the taste of the night sea air. Unlike the navy, where everyone had been groomed and uniformed in a kind of hive look and personality, the men who came to his restaurant were multicultural. They looked, spoke, and even smelled different. He welcomed the opportunity to experience a little bit of Bulgaria or Hong Kong, of Venezuela or Great Britain right on his doorstep. Wheedles was also delighted by the fact that when he left work at two in the afternoon there was still warm daylight to enjoy with his wife and young twins.

There was just one thing Wheedles had never anticipated: that one day a freighter might explode in the predawn blackness, destroying a significant section of the dock, Teddy R’s, and ending his life.

Chapter Two.

Charleston, South Carolina

Monday, 3:01 A. M.

Charleston PD Harbor Patrol Sergeant Al Graff had the wheel of his small white patrol boat. His partner, Officer Randy Molina, was in the well. He was scanning the mouth of the Ashley River with night-vision goggles, watching for small vessels. Over the past few months drug dealers from the Caribbean had been making drops along the Southeastern seaboard, meeting local distributors who brought the narcotics to shore in rowboats. Graff and Molina had not had a piece of that action yet. They hoped they would. The snakes who piloted those boats were generally not good swimmers. Especially if one of the oars accidentally struck them on the head.

It was a warm morning with a soft westerly wind. The eight-year veteran was about to turn back toward the mainland when something exploded a half-mile behind them. Both men turned. The blast lit the historic waterfront rooftops and the ornate spire of Saint Phillips. The rolling cloud itself blew much higher, spawning a spray of yellow and magnesium-white tendrils. They tumbled to earth tracing hot, jagged paths in the sky as the smoke roamed outward, thinning and growing darker. Within moments the surface shock wave of the blast had reached the boat, causing ripples that heaved the small vessel violently from side to side.

While Molina simultaneously radioed the Coast Guard and the CPDHP dispatcher for assistance, Graff swung the patrol boat toward the rising crimson cloud. It was obvious that a freighter had exploded. Graff could see the outline of the hull against the flames. The vessel was spilling oil into the harbor, which fueled the fire. There wasn’t a lot of it, since the ship had just arrived and not yet been refueled for the return trip, but there was enough to keep the area around it flaming.

A pair of CPDHP helicopters arrived within minutes to drop fire-retardant foam around the outside perimeter of the blaze to form a floating barricade that would keep it from reaching other ships. Big canvas hoses were rushed over by the harbormaster’s dock crew to keep embers from igniting buildings or wooden structures on neighboring vessels.

It appeared that only two structures had been damaged on the waterfront: the Southern Bells music shop and Teddy R’s. It looked to Graff like the restaurant had taken the bulk of the hit.

Trucks from the Charleston Fire Department, North Battalion, arrived just a few minutes later to help hose down the remaining structures and to mount an immediate search and rescue for survivors in the freighter or in the two burning buildings. The joint CPD/CFD antiterrorist task force was next on the scene, arriving moments after the main firefighting unit. While specialists from Fire Station 3 used their mobile hazmat lab to test for signs of radiological, bacteriological, or chemical agents, their CPD counterparts rushed to secure and search other vessels. The highway patrol blocked roads around the sector to keep perpetrators from escaping, while spotters directed patrolmen to buildings that had a direct line of sight with the afflicted vessel. If this was a rocket-propelled grenade, they might be in time to stop the attacker from leaving.

It was a slick, tightly coordinated operation that had been rehearsed numerous times. There were no rivalries, no competition between the departments. Everyone knew exactly what to do, and they did it with unflinching courage.

Graff and Molina had two jobs: to watch the coast to make sure this wasn’t a distraction created by smugglers, and to search for anyone who may have survived the explosion.

A quick circuit of the blast perimeter did not produce any survivors. It did produce body parts, however, limbs with charred skin and remarkably clean, unblemished white bone bobbing on the choppy river. There were pieces of clothing that did not sink with the rest of the ship and tangled mats of hair and fresh blood. Graff was not equipped to retrieve the evidence, but he did photograph it, along with the target itself.

The pictures, taken with a sat-link digital camera, were automatically sent to the CHP and to the FBI field division in Columbia and to Bureau headquarters in Washington, D. C. There, the images would be compared to a database of shipyard attacks to look for similarities. The remains and clothing would be studied to try to isolate distinctive national, cultural, or obvious blast characteristics. If this were a deliberate event, laboratory examination would determine the nature of the explosive used. If they found a fragment of the container used to house the explosive, scientists might be able to locate and read skin cells shed by the individual who had placed it. That would not tell them his identity, but it would tell them his ethnicity.

Graff documented the scene unemotionally. He did not know who these people were or what they were doing on the vessel or dock. He did not know which of them had families. Since terrorism had become a daily possibility on every American calendar, Graff’s default setting was to protect the harbor, the city, and the nation. He was emotionless about his work but passionate about his responsibility. He was also thinking back as he took pictures, running through the first two hours of his shift to make sure there was nothing he might have seen that did not seem suspicious at the time: a light on the water, an unusual sound from the hull of the freighter, movement somewhere along the dark wharf.

Molina informed him that the “scoop sloop” would be there within a quarter hour. That was the patrol boat with the nets and freezers required for evidence recovery. Graff acknowledged the update as he stood on the prow and continued to take pictures. He took each one twice, one through a night-vision lens and another with a flash. Comparing the two would help forensics experts construct a true-color image of the remains, something that would help them to pinpoint skin tone.

As they neared the hole in the vessel, Graff saw something that punched through the professional detachment. Something that put the nature of the vessel, if not the explosion, in context.

He saw a little bead bracelet floating on the choppy waters.

With . A little girl’s hand still attached.

Chapter Three.

Washington, D. C. Monday, 7:33 A. M.

The call came as a surprise to Paul Hood. He was just sitting down with a cup of coffee and a power bar when his assistant put through Lorraine Sanders, chief of staff to President Dan Debenport. The forty-six-year-old director of Op-Center was being asked to breakfast in the Oval Office at the White House.

He ate the power bar anyway. The china at the White House was Jacksonian–old and delicate–and the less he used the happier he was.

This was obviously not a crisis. That was not something a new president discussed over bran muffins. Also, an official car usually arrived within moments of the call. It was also not a social visit, since those invitations typically came with more than ninety minutes’ advance notice. It was certainly not a get-to-know-you meeting, because Hood knew Debenport well. The senator had been chairman of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee, the group that controlled the budget of Op-Center. The fact that it was being held in the Oval Office indicated that it was to be a working breakfast. Moreover, the timing could hardly be coincidental. The White House knew what was happening this morning.

As an intelligence officer, Hood knew when he was in what analysts called “the twilight zone.” He had enough information to stay engaged but not enough to tell him why or with what. Op-Center’s FBI liaison once described it as working on a crossword puzzle where you have scattered answers but not enough connective tissue to help solve the damn thing.

Which is pretty much the state of American intelligence, Hood thought. Traditionally reactive, using the military fist to squash an enemy instead of surgical subterfuge to cut him out. Destroy the entire puzzle, and you don’t need to worry about this one across or that one down.

Maybe it was just as well Hood did not know what was going on. He would find out soon enough and, besides, he was too exhausted to think. Hood was not just sleepy but sapped of energy, of imagination. It had been a long and difficult nine months since an electromagnetic pulse explosion had all but destroyed the National Crisis Management Center. Hood and his staff had not only been working around the clock to repair the facility and protect national interests, they had been looking for ways to streamline and economize, to reinvent Op-Center in the wake of severe budget cuts.

Hood also had a personal mission. He needed to find a way to fall in love with his job again. Op-Center was not just a place but the beating heart of American crisis management. Hood had been present for its birth, when the mission was uncorrupted and clear, and opportunity was boundless. He was also there for death and loss in Korea, Russia, Spain. It was odd. Triumphs, of which there were many, were short-lived. That was what professionals were supposed to achieve. Failures, of which there were fewer, hit harder. These included the deaths in the disbanded military unit Striker and the assassination of political liaison Martha Mackall.

It also included the painful budget-induced firing of Hood’s number-two man, General Mike Rodgers, over a half year before.

Hood had done the best he could; he knew that. He had a shattered marriage to prove it. What he felt was that this place had somehow let him down. Like a child you love and raise and who falls short of what you expected or wanted or did not know you needed.

Hood had not seen the exhaustion coming. Rodgers had, though. Before he left, the general suggested Hood read about the British officers who had been hunting the German battleship Bismarck during the Second World War. Hood went on-line and found out why Rodgers had recommended it. In May 1941, when aerial reconnaissance informed the British commanders that the modern, fast, and very powerful vessel was in Grimstadfjord, Norway, they knew they could not afford to let it slip into the open sea. Despite the ultimate toll of hardware and manpower, the officers of the Royal Air Force Coastal Command and the Royal Navy threw every plane and ship they could muster at the Bismarck. They did not rest for the six days until it was sunk.

Those men knew the kinds of decisions, effort, loss, and attention that combined to flatten a man’s spirit. Rodgers had seen it coming better than Hood had, the work it would take to resuscitate Op-Center. The effort required to inspire the people doing two or three jobs instead of one, learning new equipment, being unable to turn to associates who were no longer there. But then, Mike Rodgers had been in bloody battlefield combat. He understood sudden, often debilitating loss. Hood had only been in politics, the kind of combat where injuries could be repaired or ignored.

Scholarship had been Rodgers’s way of putting the world in perspective, and it was valuable to Hood during the years they had been together. Op-Center’s intelligence chief Bob Herbert had a different way of seeing things. Herbert fired from the lip, which was hot-wired to the seat of his pants. Early in the rebuilding process, Herbert put Hood’s life and labors in sharp perspective as only the candid, politically insensitive Mississippian could.

“You know what a bombshell can do,” Herbert reminded him. “With just a look she can both fog your brain, clear your eyes, show you reality, and inspire a new one. But a bomb, Paul. That’s pure destruction. It will break your spirit and body and will resonate through your soul. You’ll hear the explosion and feel the shock wave every day for the rest of your life.”

Like Rodgers, Herbert knew what an explosion could do. The former CIA field operative had lost his wife and the use of his legs in the Beirut embassy blast of 1983. But Herbert was right about the damage the bombshell could cause as well, and there was a reason he made the comparison. Several years before, Hood happened to meet his former fiancee, Nancy Jo Bosworth, in Germany. The great love of his life had turned Hood’s head, literally, and when he looked back at his life, it was no longer the same, no longer comfortable or satisfying. It took a trauma–a United Nations hostage-taking involving his daughter Harleigh–and a few more years for his marriage to Sharon to end. Bitter though it was, at least there was time to adjust, to make the inevitable crash landing as gentle as possible.

The impact of the EMP was much different. It took everything from .0p-Center in a flash. And the explosion didn’t just necessitate the long and difficult rebuilding of Op-Center. The power of the electromagnetic disturbance showed Hood and his colleagues how vulnerable modern technology was to a lone gunman with the proper tools. They realized how important it was to get all of American security resources up to speed to protect the nation. That weakness made the rebuilding process seem even slower.

Now Op-Center’s reconstruction was done, and however tired Hood felt, the real work was just beginning. Though he was eager to undertake it, he was also struggling to motivate himself for what was coming next, the Monday morning senior staff meeting. There was a curious and surprising conflict taking place in Hood’s head. The NCMC had done some significant work over the years, but that was in reaction to events, not prevention. Running Op-Center was like bailing a rowboat. Success still left them deep in cold water with the sea pouring in.

Hood was unreasonably, inexplicably angry at Op-Center for that. Nothing like this had happened when he was mayor of Los Angeles. He got frustrated, yes, with the city bureaucracy but never enraged. But then, his staff in city hall were mostly career politicians more dedicated to themselves, to advancement and power, than to their responsibilities. The people of Op-Center were different. They had to be: they were ready to die for their work. It was as if their dedication, their sacrifice, had given this place sentience, a soul. A target for his frustration.

Op-Center was not supposed to get sick. The NCMC had been designed to be a constant in a world of changing dynamics and new challenges, with experts in every field and the technology to support their activities. Hood’s people were devoted, and they were the best, but they required a support structure. They rallied after the explosion, but they were not able to do their jobs effectively for over half a year.

Not that Hood had discussed this with them. It was all rah-rah as technical genius Matt Stoll supervised the electronic recovery and upgrades. There were heavy doses of can do as they borrowed intel and data from other agencies so they could watch national and international hot spots. But through it all Hood was crying inside. Staff psycholo-

gist Liz Gordon probably would have told Hood that he was having a serious bout of transference, laying what he felt about his failed marriage onto Op-Center. Sharon Hood had let him down, too, in his mind. She had failed to support his dedication to his career, his responsibility to the staff and the nation.

Maybe it was true that Hood was shifting his feelings from one situation to the other. It did not change the fact that Op-Center had taken on water, and the man in charge was angry and disappointed.

To make matters worse, the bailing pail was smaller now. Fewer hands, less money. All Hood had wanted to do this morning was get the place on its feet and running. Instead, he finished his coffee, told his assistant Bugs Benet where he was going, and headed toward the elevator.

Benet rose inside his cubicle. “Do you know when you’ll be returning?”

“I don’t,” Hood said. “Tell Ron to start the show without me.”

“Yes, sir. Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

Op-Center was housed in a two-story building at Andrews Air Force Base. During the Cold War, this nondescript, ivory-colored structure was a staging area for flight crews known as NuRRDs–nuclear rapid-response divisions. In the event of a nuclear attack on the nation’s capital, the job of the NuRRDs would have been to evacuate key officials to secret bunkers built deep in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of the Air Force’s NuRRDs, evacuation operations were consolidated at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The building at Andrews was given over to the newly chartered National Crisis Management Center.

The two floors of upstairs offices were for nonclassified operations such as finance, human resources, and monitoring the mainstream news services for possible hot buttons, seemingly innocent events that might trigger crises. These included the failure of Third World governments topay their troops, accidents such as a submarine ramming a foreign fishing vessel or yacht–which might not be just a fishing vessel or pleasure cruise, but a spy ship–the seizure of large caches of drugs that could harm the black economy of local provinces, and other potential domino-effect activities.

The basement of the former NuRRD building had been entirely refurbished. It no longer housed living quarters for flight crews. It was where the tactical decisions and intelligence crunching of Op-Center took place. This executive level was accessible by a single elevator that was guarded on top twenty-four/seven.

Hood acknowledged the guard with a nod. The redcheeked kids were rotated every week to keep any of them from being tempted by foreign agents looking for access. Ironically, it was an individual with seemingly perfectly legitimate credentials who had been able to deliver the EMP bomb. In an era when a smart teen with a computer could shut down power grids, phone systems, banks, and military installations, passwords and swipe cards seemed quaint relics of a very distant time.

Hood stepped into the parking lot. The day was warming quickly. It helped to invigorate him. Hood knew it was partly a radiant effect of all the asphalt on the base, but he let himself think it was the sun. And it was a glorious spring morning, one in which the scent of the flowers that lined the security fence was actually stronger than the smell of the jet fuel coming from the airstrips.

Hood hoped the day stayed warm and welcoming.

In Washington, the weather had a way of changing unexpectedly.

Chapter Four.

Alexandria, Virginia

Monday, 8:11 A. M.

Morgan Carrie always regarded her career as a classic good news-bad news situation.

One year before, at the age of fifty-three, Carrie was the first woman to earn the rank of three-star general in the United States military. It was a low-key promotion. The army wished to promote a woman without calling attention to it. As her husband, Georgetown University Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. T. H. Albert Carrie, put it, “They wanted to break the glass ceiling without the sound of shattering glass.” That was all right with the woman. Since she was a kid playing war games with her four older brothers she was usually the nurse, only occasionally the French Resistance fighter Mademoiselle Marie–she wanted to be the officer she had become. She outranked two of her brothers, both of whom were in the Navy.

At the same time, the career intelligence officer was passed over to head the National Security Agency in the new president’s administration. Carrie had spent most of her career in Army General Staff, familiarly G2, the last five years as its head. Her office was concerned with all aspects of intelligence gathering, counterintelligence, and se- curity operations. On paper she was more qualified than the man who got the job to oversee the organization that coordinates and executes the activities that protect American information systems and sources and generates foreign Intel. But General Ted Dreiser was Air Force, and the new vice president, Bruce Perry, was former Air Force.

End of story.

Or so General Carrie had thought.

At eight P. M. the night before, the woman had received a call in her home in Alexandria, Virginia. She was being summoned to the White House for a short meeting with the president, the vice president, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Raleigh Carew. All she was told was that the president had a question for her.

A student of the history of American intelligence, Carrie knew that presidents rarely asked idle questions. At the very least, every query they made caused a snap-to ripple down the appropriate chain of command, just in case he decided to follow through. Sometimes, seemingly simple questions caused more dramatic responses. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland summoned Adjutant General R. C. Drum to the Executive Mansion to ask him a question about a foreign military installation. The officer was mortified to admit that he did not possess the information the president required, though he promised to get it. Drum did so and immediately organized the Military Information Division, which quickly grew from a single officer and four clerks to fifty-two officers, twelve clerks, and sixteen attaches. The MID collected data on geography and foreign armies and gave spying instructions to the attaches. The material the MID collected on military assets in Cuba, Mexico, and Samoa saved countless American lives during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Carrie’s driver. took her to the West Wing, where she met with the three men for a total of ten minutes. There was, as promised, just one question. The president gave her until this morning to answer it. The question was a little larger than she had anticipated, but General Carrie took some comfort from the fact that she had five hours more to answer it than Adjutant General Drum had.

General Carrie was up before her husband, who was himself an early riser. That was when the doctor usually read his medical journals, from about five A. M. to six-thirty. The sixty-year-old Johns Hopkins graduate believed that a doctor was like a general: having a lot of degrees, like having a lot of soldiers, wasn’t what made you effective. The trick was having the right ones, the best ones. Dr. Carrie was always on the lookout for those.

As requested, the general had responded to the president, in writing, by seven A. M. The letter was faxed to the White House and to the Pentagon. Original copies would be hand-delivered later in the day. For now, President Debenport had the answer he wanted. And General Carrie had a little more history in her dossier.

At seven-fifteen, Carrie received a call from the vice president’s chief of staff. A new driver, a civilian driver, would be coming to get her at seven forty-five. He would be carrying instructions in a sealed envelope. She would have two days to get her footing before meeting again with the president.

It was all very quick and definitely very gratifying. And through it all, as ever, her husband of thirty-eight years held her sure and steady, as he held a scalpel.

A nondescript navy blue sedan pulled into the driveway at exactly seven forty-five. The tall, lean neurosurgeon had delayed going to the hospital to hug his wife before she left. The woman, five foot seven and jogging-slender, pressed her head to his chest. He put a big hand around her short-cropped white hair. Morgan Carrie had earned a bronze star for her work with the 312th Evac unit in Chu Lai, Vietnam–where she met her husband–and later ran special intelligence ops behind enemy lines in the Persian Gulf. Yet when her husband held Carrie like this, she felt like an alabaster doll, fragile and fair, and not a commander of fighting men and women. Which was fine. When her husband sat on the sofa with her and watched Italian operas on DVD, he was not a confident surgeon but a teary schoolboy with trembling hands. Forget sex: this comfort level was really what marital intimacy was about.

The doctor gave his general a parting kiss on the forehead and wished her well. She grabbed her leather briefcase from its spot beside the door. There was nothing in it but pens and a notepad and the originals of her letter. She knew it would not be so empty when she came home. The general stepped into the bright morning. The driver was standing beside the car and opened the door. He introduced himself as Angel Jimenez and told her there was an iced tea in the cup holder in the backseat.

“How did you know that is my drink, Angel?” the general asked.

“I sent the question up the ladder until someone knew the answer,” the young man replied.

“And that person was?” she asked.

“Actually, General, no one knew. They called your military driver.”

“I see.” She smiled. “Well done.”

“Thank you, General,” Angel replied.

General Carrie slid into the unfamiliar car.

“There is a folder on the seat for you,” the driver said. “I see it. Thank you.”

The general picked it up. She tore the red paper seal with an index finger. After years of riding in a Cutlass, the Saturn seemed small. Certainly the leather seat needed breaking in. But she did recognize the heavy-bottomed ride as the result of armor plating and the thick windows as bulletproof. She did not know if she were more or less a target than before, but she understood that the precaution was necessary.

General Carrie looked at the folder. The outside said Eyes Only. Inside were sealed manila envelopes. Each contained a concise dossier on the personnel of her new command. She flipped through them, looking for familiar names. As expected, there were only two: Bob Herbert and Stephen Viens. She knew Bob and his late wife Yvonne from the Middle East, and Viens from his years with the National Reconnaissance Office. Both were solid professionals, though she had heard that Herbert was more of a loose cannon than ever.

No matter. President Debenport wanted her to reconfigure Op-Center, to run a tighter command. Either Herbert would fall in, or he would be replaced.

Carrie started scanning the files to familiarize herself with the personnel she would be meeting today. Former political liaison, now deputy director Ron Plummer. FBI liaison Darrell McCaskey. Director of Tech Operations Matt Stoll. Psychologist Liz Gordon. The evaluations written by Paul Hood and his former number two Mike Rodgers suggested that they were all rather individualistic, what the army called rogues.

Hood seemed to like and encourage that. Rodgers did not. Carrie sided with Rodgers.

It would be a challenge to bring them around, but that was what Carrie had been waiting for her entire career. She did not intend to blow it. Besides, the general was representing more than just women in her new position. She was also a standard-bearer for the military. It was flattering, it was terrifying, and it was invigorating, all at once. And the only way she would get through this was to remember something her dad, a newspaper editor in Pittsburgh, had told her when she went off to enlist. He knew her better than anyone when he said, “The job is not about you or having something to prove, honeypot. It’s about serving your nation.”

She began reading the dossiers in greater detail as the car merged smoothly onto the Capital Beltway.

Chapter Five.

Washington, D. C.

Monday, 8:29 A. M.

There was an unusual calm in the West Wing as Hood arrived.

The offices and corridors were never as busy as they were fictionalized on TV, people dashing here and there with purpose bordering on panic. But there seemed to be a bubble around Hood as he made his way through the security checkpoint and was greeted by the president’s assistant executive secretary. Eyes would come near him and then slide away, like sand off a beach ball.

Maybe it was his imagination. Or paranoia. In D. C., those were not hindrances; they were tools.

Hood was taken directly to the Oval Office, where Chief of Staff Lorraine Sanders was leaning over the desk, talking with the president. Debenport waved Hood in, and Sanders disappeared into an adjoining office. When she returned, she was followed by a man in a white jacket. He was wheeling a two-tiered brass cart into the room. The wheels squeaked loudly.

The president rose and offered Hood his hand. Debenport was a slope-shouldered man of average build. He had thinning straw-colored hair and a quick smile. He looked like a country pastor. His centrist views and unflappable nature made him a dramatic contrast to his predecessor, who was tall and dynamic–and had come close to a psychological breakdown from which Op-Center had rescued him. Hood and the NCMC had also been instrumental in helping Debenport get elected, fighting off a threat from corrupt third-party candidate Donald Orr. That battle had earned Op-Center the deadly EMP attack.

“It belonged to FDR,” the president said, nodding his chin at the cart. “I’m told the president wouldn’t let his staff oil the wheels. They made his own wheelchair seem quieter, more presidential.”

Hood believed it. On such details were image and power built.

“Sit,” the president said, gesturing toward a red leather armchair.

Hood did so. The president waited until Sanders sat before he did. With any other president that would have been a power move. The equation was, “The taller the figure, the greater his authority.” With the former South Carolina senator, it was simply good manners.

The president asked Hood about his children as coffee was poured and the tray of pastries was uncovered. More politeness, Hood suspected. Until the server was gone, they could not discuss national security matters. Hood told him that Harleigh and her younger brother Alexander were doing well.

“I can’t believe it’s been over two years since the United Nations siege,” Sanders remarked. She was a lean five-footer with a frowning and intense look. “I was deputy director of the State Department’s New York office at the time. We were working with the FBI to put a SWAT scuba team into the East River when you and General Rodgers ended the siege.

“Mike was really the one who ended it,” Hood said. “I was just trying to get my daughter out.”

Hood’s voice choked as he spoke. He and Rodgers had been through a lot. He owed the general a lot. The men had not spoken for six months, ever since the general had become the head of the military-industrial firm Unexus, an international cooperative formed by Australian, British, Russian, and American interests.

The server left, and the door to the other room was shut. The president took a sip of tea and leaned forward.

“Paul, I asked you here because I need a favor,” Debenport said. “I need you to take on a project for me.”

The president had a talent for personalizing things. That made it difficult to refuse a task without insulting him.

“Mr. President, do you need Paul Hood or Op-Center?” Hood asked.

“I need you, Paul!” Debenport replied. His exuberant tone was the equivalent of a slap on the back. “I would like you to become special envoy to the president. The position, entails international intelligence troubleshooting, unaffiliated with any group but with access to the resources of all of them. Your office would be down the hall from this one, and you would report directly to me through Ms. Sanders, not through the executive secretary.”

Hood thought the last six months had been a lot to process. This was complete information overload. Hood found himself with a lemon pastry in his hand. He did not remember reaching for it.

“Mr. President, I’m flattered,” was all Hood could think to say.

“Then you’re on board?” the president pressed.

“I’d like to think a bit, sir. This would be a big change.” “I need someone now, Paul,” the president told him.

“Someone I can rely on. I want it to be you.”

“What about Op-Center, sir?”

“No longer your concern,” the president replied bluntly.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I have given the post to General Morgan Carrie, for- merly of G2,” the president said, leaning forward. “Her commission is effective immediately.” Debenport spoke now with some of the steel Hood remembered from his days as chairman of the CIOC. The pastor wasg one, re- placed by a higher authority.

“You’re saying, Mr. President, that either I accept reassignment, or I’m fired,” Hood said.

“Not at all, Paul,” the president told him. “You can resign, effective as of eight-thirty A. M. this morning. You can say it was always part of your plan to get Op-Center on its feet and move on.”

“At the risk of belaboring something you want to see over and done, sir, are you saying you need me here, or are you saying you need me out of Op-Center?” Hood asked.

“Both. Paul, the military is not happy with some of the budget initiatives this administration is taking. I have to equal the ledger.”

“By giving them Op-Center?”

“In a word, yes.” The president leaned back. “You’re not a neophyte, Paul. You know that this is how things work. As for the new position, that’s my way of maintaining balance. I need someone who will continue to interact with Op-Center on a personal level and who will form close relationships with personnel at other intelligence agencies here and abroad.”

“You are saying, sir, that you want a personal intelligence officer.”

“Cabinet level without the title,” the president said. “And don’t look so glum, Paul. That’s a promotion.”

“I understand, sir. Doesn’t that interfere with the NSA and their mission?” Hood asked.

“You’ve met General Carew,” the president said. He looked at Sanders. “How did the vice president describe him?”

“He said the general has brass ballistics,” she replied.

“That’s right,” the president said. “And Vice President Perry ought to know. They served together in Vietnam. The point is, whatever Carew knows, the DoD will know.”

“That doesn’t answer my question, sir,” Hood said. “How will General Carew take my being here?”

“He will like it about as much as General Rodgers liked serving under a civilian,” the president replied. “But he will have to live with that. Your only contact with the general will be when you require information from the NSA. You will not be at their disposal.”

“I see. What about staff, sir?”

“We have budgeted two assistants, both off premises,” Lorraine Sanders replied. “We felt it best to have your telephones and computers located in a less trafficked area. We have assigned them space in the renovated basement of the Winder Building at 600 Seventeenth Street.”

“The U. S. trade rep has offices there,” Hood said. “Correct.”

“But the basement,” Hood said. “Isn’t that also where they held prisoners during the Civil War?”

“As I said, it’s been renovated,” Sanders replied. “Right.” Hood had gone from one basement to another. “Have you already hired the staff?”

“No,” Sanders replied. She smiled. “We want you to be comfortable with your associates.”

“This office will not be looking over your shoulder,” President Debenport assured him. “What do you say? I need my own intelligence resource, my own confidant. I need Paul Hood.”

Damn him, Hood thought. Damn the president for making something expedient sound desirable. And damn him for leaving Hood unemployed if he declined the offer. He had alimony and child support. Hood would not let indignation over the process affect his responsibilities.

“I accept the post,” Hood told him.

“Thank you,” the president replied, rising.

Debenport sounded sincere, which was something. It made Hood feel marginally better about having been shanghaied. Besides, the president was right. This was Washington, and Hood would have been lucky to make a lateral move, let alone enjoy an upkick in a new administration.

It still had not really hit him that he would not be returning to Op-Center, that the responsibility of running it–and the privilege–had been taken from his shoulders. Unlike the ending of his marriage, there was no sense of relief to counterbalance the sudden, encroaching emptiness.

Hood forced himself not to dwell on that. He had just accepted a new job. That was where his attention must go.

Hood and the chief of staff rose. Sanders told the new special envoy that she would show him to his office and come back around three, after she had arranged for help to organize and equip the Winder Building space. He thanked her while the president was still within earshot. Hood may have come from Los Angeles, but he had good manners as well.

As they walked down the corridor, the sense of avoidance Hood had felt earlier was gone. It had been replaced by a sense of courteous attention. Maybe it was all in his imagination, or maybe it was something palpable in his walk or his carriage, a stalwart if unconscious evidence of his new access to power.

Whatever it was, Hood resolved to ignore it. Yesterday he was the director of Op-Center. Today he was a special envoy to the president.

Tomorrow he could be indicted over a cheese Danish.

As they neared the area where the vice president had his small office, Hood felt one of his two cell phones vibrate. It was the one on his right hip, the secure STU-III unit he carried for Op-Center business. He slipped it from the loop on his belt and checked the number.

Hood replaced the phone without taking the call. He felt guilty about that, but it was the right thing to do.

Whatever Bob Herbert had to say would probably be better spoken–and heard–when it had cooled.

Chapter Six.

Durban, South Africa

Monday, 3: 1O P. M.

The Gold Coast of Africa is no longer the gold coast of Africa.

The honor of being one of the richest, most profitable, and fastest-growing regions on the continent has passed from western Africa along the Gulf of Guinea to the eastern coast of South Africa, with the city of Durban as the anchor. Because of the subtropical climate, with high temperatures and significant amounts of rainfall, the area has always been a perfect environment for growing. Beginning in the middle 1850s, thirty years after the British first established a major port there, significant sections of arable land were earmarked for sugarcane. The crop was easy to cultivate and export, much in demand, and produced significant profits.

Over a century and a half later, sugar continues to play a prominent part in South Africa’s agriculture, with Durban as the biggest sugar port in the world. Tourism has grown as well, with miles of beachfront having been devel-

oped into one of the most popular and celebrated vacation spots in the world. Along the Golden Mile, where summer lasts all year, the beautiful beaches are protected by shark nets, there are swimming pools with water slides, and there is an array of markets and merry-go-rounds, shopping centers, and world-class restaurants, nightclubs, and five-star hotels, all a few steps from the ocean.

Ever since the late nineteenth century, when a railroad was built to give inland regions access to the port, workers from the rest of the continent and from as far as India have come to work in the fields. Investors from other nations have come as well, creating an international mix unparalleled in most of Africa. Some of those individuals used the port and its resources to smuggle goods and receive cash. Men like the infamous drug lord Yakuba Balwon moved heroin through Durban, then laundered the money through the London-based Windsor Global Securities Bank. Others sold Rophy tablets, which was short for Rohypnol, an addictive relaxant that was most popularly used as a date rape drug.

Because of Durban’s multinational nature, and because it has been an economic lifeline to blacks and whites alike, the city has been spared much of the violent racial tension that devastated other regions. None of the local workers, black or white, lived as comfortably as the plantation owners, investors, or tourists, but there is always money in everyone’s pocket, and the end of apartheid, when it came, was peaceable. The only noticeable difference is the number of British and Afrikaner businessmen who are selling their interests in the port and portside concerns to financiers from India, Germany, France, and China.

Something that has not changed over the years are the sugar silos. Stuffed with raw brown sugar, they stand side by side in clusters across the landscape. Once made of brick and stone, the fifty-meter-tall towers are now constructed of aluminum and steel with a ceramic veneer to help control the temperature. They are connected at the top by enclosed bridges, which allow workers to move from one to the other with stampers, jackhammer-like devices with round bottoms that are used to compress the contents. The silos are rated by tonnage, not volume. Even if they are full, there is usually room for more sugar.

The air smells sweet around the structures, like cotton candy. Despite the presence of inner and outer doors, large, rough granules spill from hatches and cover the ground and the raised walkways. Like ants, the sugar is nothing by itself. En masse, however, the power of these twenty-five-ton mountains is immense. The silos are akin to the revered seven pillars of wisdom of many local faiths. South Africans regard the towers as the sentries of prosperity. They ensure economic security for this area, its investors, and its workers.

The largest of the sugarcane repositories are located along the Maydon Wharf. The workers here, mostly from Kenya and Nigeria, have unusually strong legs, the result of having to forcibly lift their feet hard when they move along the sticky walkways. They work in ten-hour shifts, with a half hour for a brown-bag lunch and two other fifteen-minute breaks. Their job is to see that the raw sugar stems move from truck or train to processing plant to silo to freighter in a timely and efficient manner with as little spillage as possible.

Twenty-two-year-old native of Durban Moshood Azwe was not concerned about losing a little “sweet gold” here and there. The silos attracted flies, and the loose grains kept the insects low to the ground, away from his face. That made him a more efficient worker as he directed trucks to the elevators that carried the sugar to the tops of the silos. These dump trucks backed up to funnels, which had filters to catch cane or other debris the processing plant had missed.

There were few deliveries at this hour. Most were made in the morning, before the heat and dampness could affect the unsiloed sugar. Azwe was beginning to think about going to the Joao Tavern with his buddies when a dump truck arrived. It did not have a familiar logo from the de Gama Company or KwaZulu-Natal Shipping Associates, the firms that usually transported sugar to the silos. There was a loosely fitted tarpaulin stretched across the top of the truck to keep the sun off the cane. It would not be necessary to remove it. The flap in back would simply ride up on the sugar as it was dumped into the bin below.

Azwe was standing on the ramp that circled three-quarters of concrete bay three. It was located beside the centermost of the six silos in this section. As the truck backed in, Azwe held up his big hands so the driver could see. He was not supposed to allow anything to be offloaded without first checking the bill of lading. The young man jogged over to the driver and jumped from the ramp to the driveway. He did not put his hand on the ramp lest the oil in his skin pick up sugar. The glaze was like glue, extremely difficult to wash away.

Azwe was a tall man. He put a hand on the side view mirror and dipped his head into the open window.

“May I see your documents?” he said. His voice had a clucking quality that was native to the region centuries before the arrival of the Europeans.

The driver, a young man who looked Madagascan, turned to another man who was sitting in the passenger’s seat. The second man handed the driver a clipboard. He gave it to Azwe.

“Thank you,” Azwe said as he looked at the document. He frowned deeply as he flipped through sheet after sheet. They were pages tom from the South African edition of Time magazine. “What is this?” Azwe demanded as he looked back into the cab of the truck.

The young Durban did not have time to react before a silenced Beretta that had been concealed beneath the clip-

board put a raw, red hole in his forehead. Hegasped softly as he dropped to the ground between the front wheel of the truck and the side of the bay. He was twitching at the wrists and hips as blood spat from the wound in the front of his skull. Azwe’s eyes were open, blinking incongruously as red drops fell on them. After a few moments, they shut.

The man in the driver’s seat jumped out. He stepped over the oddly angled body of the bay foreman and hurried to the back of the truck. The passenger also got out. He went to the elevator control box, which hung from a thick cable at the rear of the bay. As he pressed the blue button that opened the elevator door, the driver went to the back of the dump truck. He reached under the flap and removed a cooler. . He popped the lid. The plastic container was packed with C-4. He pulled a detonator from his jacket pocket, set it for four minutes, and jabbed it into one of the explosive bricks. Then he took the open cooler and put it on the elevator as it rose from the floor.

He and the other man quickly removed four other coolers from the back and opened them. They contained a half-dozen bricks of C-4 each. He set the timers to blow five seconds after the initial blast.

When the explosives had been off-loaded, the elevator was sent back into the silo. It would travel under the ramp, then up an external chute before being dumped into the top of the silo.

The two men hurried back to the truck. They had watched the silos for several days from. a motorboat and from the nearby Victoria Street Indian Market. The entire process would take three minutes. That would give them enough time to get away. When the blast occurred, it would not just impact the silos, it would destroy the security cameras and the shack where the videotapes were recorded. Nothing would be left to attach them to this action. All investigators would find was the abandoned truck, the Beretta with its serial numbers filed off, and a torn copy of Time magazine.

One hundred seconds after the truck drove from the bay, the men were outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the silos. Moments after that, the C-4 exploded. The blast blew out the top of the silo as if it were a party favor. Steel and ceramic tile were flung outward, along with huge pieces of fused sugar. The jagged sheets caught the late afternoon sunlight and flung it in all directions–up, down, and around. The explosion sent the other coolers tumbling along the covered bridges on either side. They detonated as they reached the other silos, blasting out the sides and driving chunks of debris into the silos that were facing them along the northern side. Multiple booms echoed through the harbor. They were joined by sharp cracks as massive pieces of shrapnel ripped into the second row of towers, ripping off the tops and sending them into the water as powdery rain. Cracks appeared in the sides of all six silos, some hairline, some like vast geologic fissures. The three most heavily damaged silos on the south surrendered first, dumping sugar and pieces of themselves onto the ground and against the adjoining structures. The impact caused the smaller fractures in the northern towers to expand, bringing them down within seconds.

In less than a minute, the, familiar Maydon Wharf landmarks were six distinct mounds of rubble beneath a cloud of smoke that smelled like roasting marshmallows. Though there were only a few small fires in the wreckage, firefighters rushed to the site to search for survivors. The KwaZuluNatal Metro Police also arrived to search for clues. The silos were not heavily protected locations, because no one benefited from their destruction.

Until now.

Chapter Seven.

Washington, D. C.

Monday, 9: 1 1 A. M.

Nothing ticked off a career intelligence officer more than not having intelligence. And right now, Op-Center’s intelligence director was extremely ticked off.

The people who glided past Bob Herbert’s open office door would not have known anything was wrong with the forty-eight-year-old officer. Their quick, questioning glances and hushed conversation suggested they knew there was something amiss at Op-Center, though no one knew exactly what that was. They may have heard rumors from Bugs Benet or seen the new arrival when she strode through the hall. But no one knew what it meant.

Including Herbert.

The intelligence chief sat quietly behind his desk in his new, state-of-the-art wheelchair. His expression was neutral. He appeared to be a man very much in control. But physical peace was a hair-trigger condition that rested, like crustal plates, on a molten sea of emotion. And Herbert’s emotions were bubbling.

Herbert had come to work a half hour before, after spending a long night overseeing the software setup of Op-Center’s lean but crackerjack intelligence division. He had arrived expecting to experience an exciting start-up with his colleagues, the culmination of six months of team effort, Sunrise at Campobello. Instead, Herbert found something much different.

A few minutes after Herbert had passed the upstairs guard–who logged him as present, information that went to the computers of all the division directors–Bugs Benet called to inform him that there was someone in Paul Hood’s office, a three-star general. A woman. She obviously had the creds to get downstairs, she had an ID card that gave her access to Hood’s office when she swiped it through the lock, and she told Benet to call a meeting of the senior staff for ten A. M. in the Tank, the conference room at Op-Center. Then she shut the office door.

“That was the last I saw or heard of her:’ Benet told Herbert. “I’m calling you first.”

“Where is Paul?” Herbert asked.

“At the White House,” Benet said.

“Oh?” That did not sound good. Washington had a singular way of removing an individual from power and assuring a continuity of command. This was it. “Did you try calling him?”

“No. That will go on the phone log.” Benet lowered his voice. “If Paul has been dismissed, his security status may have changed. I don’t want to be accused of passing operational data to an outsider.”

It was a valid point. Paranoid, but valid. Herbert asked to be put through to the general.

The woman took the call. She introduced herself as General Morgan Carrie, the new director of Op-Center, and said she would brief Herbert and his colleagues at the staff meeting. When Herbert asked what that meant for Paul Hood, she told him she did not have that information and would see him in forty-five minutes.

And hung up.

Herbert tried to call Hood, but he. did not answer his cell phone. Ticked off quickly became pissed off as frustration and consternation grew. Darrell McCaskey called, and Herbert told him what he knew. Liz Gordon suggested that they track him down using the GPS and intercept him somewhere.

“If he’s been dismissed, we don’t know what he might do,” the staff psychologist said.

“I don’t think Paul is the kind of guy who would off himself,” Herbert said.

“Actually, those are exactly the people you have to worry about, the iiber-steady souls who guide you through a crisis, then don’t have a place to put their key,” Gordon countered. “Like soldiers who come back from war. The job is finished, the purpose is removed from life, it’s time to check out. Though that’s not what concerns me about Paul.”

“What does?” Herbert asked. The intelligence chief was half-convinced that this was displacement, that Liz Gordon was upset and disoriented and looking for a place to put her key.

“He might turn his anger outward, at the thing he perceived has hurt him,” Gordon said.

“The president?”

“Op-Center,” she replied. “He could go to the press and complain, visit an old friend and divulge secrets without thinking, just get himself into a lot of trouble.”

“I think Paul is a little steadier than that,” Herbert replied.

“Do you.” It was a statement, not a question. “Remember what a chance meeting with an old girlfriend did to him?”

“Liz, that was the love of his life.”

“And what is Op-Center? This place is his life.”

Liz had a point there. Herbert still thought the soul of her concern was psychobabble, and he was not ready to hunt Paul Hood down and put a tail on him. Still, Herbert agreed that they should revisit this question after the staff meeting. Hopefully, by that time, General Carrie would have more information about her predecessor or Hood himself would have gotten in touch by then.

Hood had to know they would be concerned.

The emotionally impervious Matt Stoll called to ask if the rumors of a new director were true and how Herbert thought this would impact his own staff and operations. Herbert said he did not know, but he was perversely relieved that someone, at least, was concerned about Op-Center and not about its people. It reminded him that, like it or not, they had a job to perform, a nation to serve.

And then it was two minutes to ten o’clock. Time to get intelligence.

Assuming, of course, that any of them still had jobs.

Chapter Eight.

Washington, D. C.

Monday, 10:40 A. M.

At first blush the Tank struck General Carrie as a relatively spartan and unwelcoming chamber. The wood paneling was dark, the drop-down fluorescent lights were cold, and the rectangular table that dominated the room was heavy and plain.

The Tank got its name from the protection it afforded all electronic activity that was conducted within its walls. The room was completely surrounded by a barrier of electromagnetic waves that generated static to anyone trying to listen in with bugs or external dishes. The phone and computer lines were similarly protected. It was the only section of Op-Center that had survived the EMP blast, and it served as the field headquarters for its reconstruction.

General Carrie had selected this room for the meeting because it was impersonal. Though the director’s office was large enough to accommodate everyone, there were photographs of Paul Hood’s children on his desk and pictures of Hood and various individuals on the wall. That would have been a distraction. She was having Benet box those and messenger them to Hood.

Anyway, she told herself, people make a room. If these people were as sharp and stimulating as their dossiers suggested, the austerity of the place would not matter. She set her folder and notepad on the table. Although there were computers in the highly secure conference room, she would not be needing one.

The general had arrived precisely on time and nodded once at the guarded, unfamiliar faces. She had chaired hearings and run briefings countless times. Frequently, there was a percentage of officers or politicians in attendance who felt uneasy or amused to have a woman in charge, the sense that what she had to do or say was somehow less important than if she had been a man. And a white man at that. Carrie had no doubt that African-American and Latino officers experienced unspoken reserve similar to what she had always felt.

All General Carrie saw right now was concern in the faces of the five men and one other woman sitting around the oblong table. Some of that was probably about their own futures, and some of it was certainly worry about Paul Hood.

The general recognized the key tactical department heads from their photographs. Technical Director Matt Stoll was to her left, Op-Center attorney Lowell Coffey III was beside him, and Darrell McCaskey was next to him. Bob Herbert sat at the foot of the table with Deputy Director Ron Plummer to his left and Liz Gordon beside him.

There was a pitcher of water beside her computer. The general poured some into a glass. She asked anyone else if they wanted any. Only a few people answered to say no thank you. As usual, Carrie did not sit. She preferred to stand, not because it made her taller than everyone else but because it allowed her voice to carry. She did not have a classic baritone bark, as they called it at the Army General Staff. She put her hands together in the small of her back and looked out at the room.

“I am General Morgan Carrie,” she said to thegroup. “At the request of the president I assumed the directorship of Op-Center commencing at eight-thirty this morning. Unfortunately, I have no information regarding the disposition of former-director Hood. Perhaps one of you has spoken with him?”

Most eyes looked down. A few heads shook slowly.

“I will be pleased to share whatever information I am provided about Mr. Hood,” Carrie said.

“We had our differences, General, but he is our friend,” Bob Herbert said.

Carrie looked at him. “I am happy to hear that, Mr. Herbert. It gives me something to shoot for.”

“That isn’t why I mentioned it,” Herbert replied. “When General Mike Rodgers was dismissed six months ago, Paul Hood was up front about it. He was unhappy. He was apologetic. And he was sensitive to the fact that none of us was going to like it. This team has never relied on information that was ‘provided’ to us. We dig it up. I want to make sure we know what happened to Paul, why, and how.”

“Or else?” General Carrie asked. There seemed to be a threat in Herbert’s tone. She did not like being challenged any more than she liked being patronized.

“Think of it as the intelligence equivalent of leaving one of your troops behind in battle,” Herbert told her. “Leave unanswered questions lying around, and you will have a command, but you won’t have trust or respect.”

“That would be my problem,” she replied sharply. “Your responsibility will be to do your job, not mine.”

“My job description includes advising the director:’ Herbert said, unfazed. “I believe I have just done that, General Carrie.”

Carrie unfolded her hands and leaned on the table. The annual evaluation Hood had written of Bob Herbert in-

cluded a notation that the intelligence chief tended to challenge everyone. Hood saw it as an “often productive if frequently exasperating exercise.” Hood had not understated the case.

“Do you have any other advice for me, Mr. Herbert?” she asked.

“None at present, General.”

“Good. Then I have some for you. There is a line between advice and criticism, and you just crossed it. Sometimes it’s a word or a phrase; sometimes it’s a tone. But cross it again in my presence, Mr. Herbert, and I will be able to tell this team exactly what happened to the former intelligence director of Op-Center.”

The general took a moment to study their reactions. She felt like the new Medusa: they were six faces cut in stone. Even Herbert. The irony was that she did not disagree with what Herbert had said. In the military, information was passed down through channels, not dug up. Op-Center was a civilian agency, more aggressive, more contraceptive than reactionary. She would have to get used to their way of doing things. But on her timetable, not his.

“I will be meeting with you all individually as time and responsibilities permit, starting with Bob.” She looked at him. “Perhaps we can scroll things back and start fresh.”

Herbert’s cheek twitched,. and he dipped his forehead quickly as though he were a base coach giving signals. She took that for a “Go.” Lowell Coffey and Liz Gordon both smiled slightly. The general’s attempt to reach out to Herbert apparently had scored points with them. Either that or they knew she was wasting her time.

She would find out soon enough.

“In the meantime, I need your help,” General Carrie went on. She made that sound as conciliatory as possible without sounding weak. She opened her folder and looked at a printout. “There was an alert on my computer from Hot Button Operations upstairs. They looked into a pair of explosions that occurred this morning, one in Charleston, South Carolina, at five A. M. and the other in Durban, South Africa, at around five P. M. local time. The HoBOs suggest the attacks may have something in common. According to the Charleston Police Department, the ship that was blown up in their harbor was carrying illegal Chinese workers. The attack overseas three hours later destroyed sugarcane silos owned by a Chinese firm. The HoBOs suggest the second explosion was too swift to be retaliation, but both may be first shots in a broad war of some kind.” She looked across the table. “Suggestions?”

“We had evidence that the Chinese were becoming increasingly involved in African affairs nearly a year ago,” Ron Plummer said. “They were involved in diamond operations in Botswana.”

“That was part of the attack on the Catholic church there?” Carrie asked.

“Yes. We believed at the time that some faction of the Chinese government would have benefited from destabilization in the region,” Plummer said.

“We filed a formal white paper through our embassy in Beijing,” Coffey told her. “Our ambassador received a response from the director of the International Security Committee of the National People’s Congress. She strongly denied that Beijing was engaged in official activities on the African continent outside their embassies, and also disavowed any private misdeeds that might be going on.”

“I should point out that the Chinese are usually pretty forthright about their involvements abroad,” Plummer added. “When they feel possessive about something, such as the oil deposits in the Spratly Islands, they go after them openly.”

“Which doesn’t mean much in this case,” Coffey said. “The letter from the DISC didn’t preclude the involvement ofprivate individuals inside and outside the government.”

“You’re talking about a black economy,” the general said.

“Not just that,” Plummer replied. “Many wealthy Chinese invest overseas because constraints on ownership of businesses and property are much less restrictive than in the PRC.”

“But the illegal workers would have been what you suggest, General, a black market,” Darrell McCaskey said. “They get smuggled in for an average price of two hundred grand each. They stay indentured, working as prostitutes or cheap labor, until that sum is repaid. Since half the money they earn is sent to relatives in China, they are effectively enslaved for life. The FBI has been playing catch-up with these undocumented Chinese workers for decades. The Bureau has actually been losing ground since resources have been shifted to Homeland Security and the tracking of illegals from Malaysia, the Philippines, and the Middle East.”

“Maybe we need to change the way the search is carried out,” the general said.

“What are your thoughts?” Herbert asked.

The intelligence chief sounded challenging rather than beaten. Carrie wondered if Bob Herbert knew the meaning of the word defeat. Or humility.

“HoBOs says that Chinese-Americans represent four percent of the national population,” Carrie said. “Most of those people are concentrated in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Those are not areas in which we want to see a potential conflict spread. I suggest we have a look to see if there’s a war brewing. Who takes point on that?”

“That depends where we want to run the operations,” Herbert said. “Two of our stringers, Dave Battat and Aideen Marley, are familiar with Africa. One of our local people can shoot down to Charleston.”

“That’s catch-up,” she said. “I want to get ahead of this. What kind of resources do we have in Beijing?”

“A few stringers,” Herbert told her. “Our contact with the Chinese has been in proxy settings.”

“Korea and Vietnam redux,” Plummer said.

“Well, we know how those turned out,” Carrie said wistfully. “Maybe it’s time to change the dynamics.”

“Excuse me, General, but did you see action in Vietnam?” Liz inquired.

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“It’s the first time you looked away from the table,” she said. “Like you were looking back.”

Carrie felt exposed but decided that was not necessarily a bad thing. It told the group a little about her past, something that might start to earn her the respect Herbert had spoken about. Liz Gordon was wearing a slightly satisfied look, one that suggested it was exactly why the psychologist had asked the question.

The general leaned forward again. “Bob, maybe you can canvass the team and your resources, and we can have our sit-down over lunch in my office. We can go through whatever thoughts you have then and pin down a course of action.”

Herbert nodded, this time more affirmatively.

The general closed the folder, then took a sip of water. “If there’s nothing else, I want to thank you all for sharing your time and thoughts. I also want to assure you that we will never forget or slight the contributions of those who came before us–Paul Hood, Mike Rodgers, and especially the men and women who gave more than just their time and industry–Martha Mackall, Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Squires, and the heroes of Striker.”

Darrell McCaskey pounded the table lightly with the side of his left fist, a gesture of tribute echoed by everyone else in the room.

Including Bob Herbert.

And for a moment, the Tank seemed almost like home to General Carrie.

Chapter Nine.

Beijing, China

Monday, 10:46 P. M.

The twentieth-century Chinese Communist leader Liu Shao-ch’i once said that there could be no such thing as a perfect leader in China. The nation was too large, its population too diverse.

“If there is such a leader,” the philosopher-politician posited in a collection of his writings, “he is only pretending, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose to look like an elephant.”

Balding, stocky Prime Minister Le Kwan Po was not sure he agreed that China was ungovernable. But it was true that leading this nation of provinces with vastly different histories and needs required an individual of uncommon wisdom and resourcefulness. There is a tale told about the last dowager empress of China, Tz’u-hsi, whose reign was marked by the rise and fall of the turbulent Boxer Rebellion. The insurrection was named for the men at the center of the revolt, the secret society of the Righteous Harmonious Fists, which was founded in 1898 and fought to keep China from falling under the undue influence of foreigners. The empress approved of the modern conveniences brought by British, Russians, Japanese, and Americans, devices such as telegraphs and trains. But she disapproved of missionaries and foreign influence over Chinese affairs. It was a difficult balance to support them both. –

One morning, a Boxer was captured after murdering a British businessman on his way to the embassy. The Boxer beat him to death in his carriage, the businessman’s Chinese driver having run off at the sight of the attacker. One of Tz’u-hsi’s advisers wanted the Boxer beheaded. Another counselor warned that to do so would only encourage the Boxers to hit harder. The empress allowed the execution to take place, though not for the attack on the foreigner. In her decree she stated that the man’s actions had set one of her ministers against the other and disturbed the tranquillity of the morning. For that crime, and that only, he was to die.

Le Kwan Po contemplated the complexities of gestures and appearances as his state car pulled away from the government building at No. 2, Chaoyangmen Nandajie, Chaoyang District, in Beijing. His own life was full of such careful maneuvers. For example, the prime minister had two cars. One was a Chinese-made Lingyang, the Antelope, and the other a more comfortable Volkswagen Polo manufactured at the German-run plant in Shanghai. He rode the Antelope in Beijing, the Polo in the less populated countryside.

Always a balance for appearances, he thought. Please the nationalists while holding something out for potential foreign investors.

Except for the driver, the prime minister was the only passenger in the chauffer-driven car. Typically, an aide and a secretary rode home with the sixty-six-year-old native of the remote Xizang Zizhiqu province near Nepal. But the prime minister felt like being alone tonight. He wanted to reflect on the disturbing events of the day.

He looked out the window as the car drove past the lighted monuments and palaces surrounding Tian’ anmen Square. It was a hot and rainy night. ‘Large drops ran down the window. They smeared the lights of the city–fittingly, on a day when nothing was clear. The driver guided the small sedan through narrow side streets. At this hour, in this weather, the lanes were sparsely populated with the carts and bicycles that filled them during the day. The vehicle moved quickly toward Le Kwan Po’s nearby Beijing residence on the top floor of the exclusive Cheng Yuan Towers apartment complex. The prime minister had another official home, a weekend retreat in the Beijing suburbs at the foot of Shou’an Mountain near Xiangshan Park. During the week the prime minister preferred to remain in the city. That allowed him to work as late as possible. It also permitted him to stay synchronized with the pulse of Beijing.

It enabled him to watch those who wanted his job or sought to remove him as a thoughtful, mediating influence.

The prime minister enjoyed the tranquillity of the countryside, yet that scenic, agrarian world was China’s past. The future was in the increasingly cosmopolitan capital and cities like Shanghai, with their proliferation of students and businessmen–many of them from rich Taiwan, the supposed enemy. That was another act for an acrobat greater than any the Beijing Opera had yet produced: solving the Taiwan question. Chinese businesses were growing enormously due to investments coming across the strait. The Chinese military was being held to the budgetary levels of previous years as the threat from both Taipei and Russia was diminished. That did not make high-ranking career officers happy. Fewer commands meant fewer promotions. It caused grumbling up and down the ranks.

Though Le Kwan Po knew what the empress experi-

enced a century ago, he did not have her wisdom. He had not fought wars and rivals, dealt with prejudice against his gender and heritage, nor had to guard against or formulate regicidal plots. He was simply a conservative career politician, the son of a schoolteacher mother. His father had been a village magistrate at twenty-one and had risen regularly to positions in town, county, municipality, province, and finally the central government. He was not the prime minister solely because of his experience in government. He was here because, unlike his colleagues, he had not made any serious missteps. His background was spotted and propped with careful alliances and cautious agendas.

Even more important than the ruthless will of the dowager empress, however, the prime minister did not have her unilateral authority to act. In addition to the president and vice president above him, there was a cabinet with very powerful and ambitious ministers and the National People’s Congress with its proliferation of special interests, both local and personal.

The current struggle between Chou Shin, head of the secretive 8341 Unit of the Central Security Regiment, and People’s Liberation Army hero General Tam Li was outside the prime minister’s experience. According to reports Le Kwan Po had received from the Ministry of State Security–the Guojia Anquan Bu, or Guoanbu–the two rivals had begun a long-simmering face down today in two foreign ports. And that was just part of the problem. Tam Li was one of those officers who was unhappy with the lack of growth in the military. If his two displeasures con- verged, and he wished to express them at home, he could be a formidable threat to the stability of the nation.

It was just like it was in feudal times, when every man of importance had centuries of hate behind him. Then, even if a man was willing to look past personal differences with another, the shadow of their ancestors would not al-low it.

It was quite a burden, the prime minister reflected.

It was also easier to defend clan honor centuries ago, when a man was surrounded by like-minded individuals, and vast distances made confrontation an occasional matter. Today, the few men who harbored different loyalties, who had different goals, were in very close proximity. For the most part they managed to work together in the name of nationalism.

But not always.

The rain tapped on the roof. The prime minister reached into the vest pocket of his white trench coat. He withdrew a case of cigarettes and lit one. He sat back. Whenever China finally managed to reverse the trend and spread its influence around the world, there were two things ht hoped. First, that his people would learn to make a car as good as a BMW or a Mercedes. And second, that they could produce a cigarette as soul-satisfying as a Camel.

The prime minister did not know how he wanted to pursue this conflict between proud, stubborn, influential members of the government. It was not a matter he wished to present to the president or vice president. Disputes between officials, even those with international ramifications, were the responsibility of the. prime minister. He was supposed to be able to settle them.

Le Kwan Po wished that securing peace was as easy as sacrificing a minor third party, the way the dowager empress did with the Boxers. Of course, that only delayed the inevitable, having to deal with the rebellion itself. The foreign powers sent their own armies to China to crush the nationalists. Not only did the empress decline to stop them, she embraced their Western ways.

China did not.

The dynasty fell shortly after Tz’u-hsi’s death. Nation-

alist forces were so upset with her legacy that they blasted open the royal tomb, stole the riches, and mutilated her remains. The anti-imperial backlash allowed Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek to come to power, each espousing a form of Western-style republic that opened wounds and created political and ideological chaos. It was not until Mao Tse-tung and the Communists came to power in 1949 that order was truly restored.

That had been a proud time, centuries in the making. Le Kwan Po remembered hearing his father read of the events from newspapers that were published in a tiny print shop in their small village of Gamba. The prime minister’s uncle set type there in the evening. During the day, he worked in a quarry that was literally in the shadow of Mount Everest. The young Le could still vividly remember the joy in his father’s voice as he read about the end to the civil war that had tortured a nation already bleeding from the long war with Japan. He was almost giddy about the victory of the Communists over the republicans–who had the temerity to call themselves nationalists–certain it would help those who had to work all day, every day, just to support a small family in an extremely modest lifestyle.

When the newspaper was closed by the new regime, Le Kwan Po’s uncle was asked to stay on to typeset a new weekly publication, Principles from the People’s Administrative Council. The young boy was as proud as he could be when he attended the new school that the Communists opened in Gamba, and he was selected to read the first is- sue to the class.

The senior members of the current government this prime minister included–remembered the taste and feel of disorder. They did not want to see it return, not as a result of student demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square or from dis- agreements among powerful members of the government.

Theprime minister exhaled smoke through his nose. He thought about the fake elephant of Liu Shao-ch’i. Some-

how, he would have to convince the warring forces that he was a dragon. That the only way to defeat him was to put their differences aside and join forces.

Le Kwan Po did not know how he was going to do that. All he knew was one thing.

That it had to be done, and done quickly.

Chapter Ten.

Beijing, China

Monday, 1 1:18 P. M.

Chou Shin, Director of the ultrasecret 8341 Unit of the Central Security Regiment, sat in his fifth-floor office of the old Communist Party Building. It was located in the shadow of the Forbidden City, site of the palaces of the deposed despots who had run China for centuries. The sixstory-tall brick structure had been built in the 1930s on the site of the Yuan Chung Silver Shop, one of the oldest banks in the city. The Communists had torn down the pavilion-style institution to prove that the old ways were gone and a new era had begun. It was in Chou’s very office that the war against Chiang Kai-shek was planned and executed.

The structure itself had brick walls, copper ceilings, and pipes that groaned with their inadequacy to cope with the demands placed on them. There were several small windows along one wall, but the shades were drawn, as always. The director had the heat turned on, not only to chase out the chill of the stormy night but to generate white noise. It helped to befuddle any listening devices that might be present.

The seventy-one-year-old Chou was waiting for an intelligence update from an operative in Taipei. What they were planning was dangerous. But as the day had proved, so was inactivity.

While he waited, Chou reviewed what he called his cobblestone data, intelligence that was pulled from the street. This collection was done by a combination of paid informants, operatives who habituated bars and restaurants, hotel lobbies, and train depots just watching and listening, and electronic eavesdropping. Vans from the CSR drove through the streets of Beijing listening to cell phone conversations and intercepting the increasing number of wireless computer communiques. Although the CSR had sifters on the staff who went through the raw data, what ended up crossing his desk had still managed to double in the course of a year. He could not imagine what it would be like two or three years hence. Perhaps, like the American CIA, they would be forced to listen for just key phrases like terror plot or bomb threat and let the rest go by.

Years ago, the CSR list would have been a short one. During the late 1950s when Chou was recruited for the organization, the primary task of the 8341 Unit was to see to the personal security of Mao Tse-tung and other Communist party leaders. But the elite division of the People’s Liberation Army was more than a bodyguard unit. It also ran a nationwide intelligence network to uncover plots against the chairman or senior leadership. Chou himself, a former telephone lineman in the PLA, was part of the team that had discovered electronic listening devices in Mao’s office, hidden in the doorknob. The young man’s first promotion was to the counterinsurgent unit, assigned with executing surveillance of Mao’s rivals. The 8341 Unit was a key participant in the 1976 arrest of the Gang of Four, the group that attempted to seize power after the death of Mao. After that, the unit was officially disbanded. Mao’s successor, Teng Hsiao-P’ing, wanted to make a point of “decommunizing” the nation and its institutions. However, hard-line Communists like Chou resisted the change. Un- like many leaders before him, Teng decided it was prudent to acknowledge the wishes of the Chinese people and not just the Chinese elite. The deputy premier quietly but quickly reinstated personnel and organizations he had removed. Most immediately, the one that was responsible for his personal protection.

Today, the 8341 Unit was responsible for uncovering plots against the regime. Their sphere of activity centered upon China and the breakaway republic. Since the Tian’ an-men Square uprising in 1989, few dissidents had undertaken public displays against the government. Private activity was still relatively abundant but unthreatening, limited to pockets of philosophers, failed entrepreneurs, foreign-born firebrands, and disenfranchised youths who wanted fashionable Western clothes. At present, none of them represented a serious threat against the government. The only potential source of danger was the PLA, where one reckless, ambitious man might control the loyalty of tens of thousands of troops.

A man like General Tam.

Unlike the prime minister with whom he had just been meeting, Chou had no patience or sympathy for those who would betray the nation or the philosophies set out by Chairman Mao. Le Kwan Po was a mediator. He was a man committed to equilibrium, to compromise. Chou liked the prime minister and believed he was a patriot. But Le wanted to rule a China that was unified at any cost, even if it was a heterogeneous one and not a Communist one. Chou did not agree with him on this very significant point. The director still seethed when he thought of the beloved chairman’s late wife, who was one of the treasonous Gang of Four. She and her three fellows had coerced members of the military to help cleanse the nation of ideologues. The Communist Revolution had been an uprising of ideas. They were good and necessary ideas. In the 1930s and 1940s, the military was called upon by Mao to defend the right of the people to hold those ideas. Jiang Qing corrupted that. She used the vicious Red Guard to enforce her ideas. Iron boot education never produces long-lasting results. It produces slaves, and eventually slaves turn on their masters.

That was something the Gang of Four learned during their long, televised trial in Beijing.

It was something General Tam Li would also learn.

The computer beeped. The short, bespectacled intelligence director closed the white folder and put it in a drawer. He looked at the monitor. The cursor prompted him to enter a password. He typed in the Chinese characters for eagle and talon and waited for the file to download. Chou had a collection of ivory dragons on a shelf in his office. He enjoyed them and had collected them since he was a boy. But they were also there to mislead his adversaries. Anyone who came into his office and tried to access his computer files would naturally search for dragon-related passwords. No one would ever think to look for another powerful predator.

It was a report from one of Chou’s field agents in Taiwan. The CSR director had been expecting the information.

General Tam Li had gone into this day with a plan he had hoped would undermine the resolve of the man who was watching him closely. The general seemed to have thought that violence and the threat of personal exposure would turn the eyes of Chou Shin elsewhere.

Tam was not just wrong, he was decisively wrong. As he would discover in less than an hour.

Chapter Eleven.

Taipei, Taiwan

Monday, 11:49 P. M.

Lo Tek had a wonderful life. Part of that was due to the freedom he enjoyed, and part of it was the respect he had. Part of it was also due to the quaint simplicity of his world.

Born Hui-ling Wong, Lo Tek was a name given to him by his associates because he refused to use any sophisticated electronic communications devices. He believed in being surreptitious, and one could not work in the darkness with all the electronic lights of the modem age. Most days and nights the thirty-two-year-old spent on his ninety-four-foot ketch with its artful crew of three, sailing the waters of the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. For the most part, his navigation was done the old-fashioned way, by wind and by starlight. His belief was that if it worked for his ancestors, it would work for him. Though he used a computer and DVD player for onboard entertainment, communication was conducted entirely with point-to-point radios.

Lo Tek rarely left the sea. That was where he found refugees–men, women, and youngsters attempting to go from wherever they were to anywhere else. Mostly they were trying to get out of Indonesia or the PRC and trying to get to Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan. More than half of the nearly fifteen thousand who set out each year perished on the water due to overloaded or inadequate boats, inclement weather, insufficient supplies, or pirates who robbed them of their few possessions, assaulted then killed the women, and sank the boats. Of the seven thousand or so souls who managed to survive on the seas, four thousand were turned away by coastal patrols, arrested, or sold by corrupt police to slavers who worked the docks. Typically, those were young women. Occasionally they were young boys. Invariably, they were never seen again.

Less than one thousand individuals managed to make it ashore. Of those, fewer than two hundred managed to find employment. The rest became thieves, prisoners, or corpses.

Lo Tek had a very special business. His agents ran shipping services that “helped” refugees achieve their goals. The boats brought the cargo to Lo Tek, who brought the finest of the women on board and sold them to high-priced brothels in Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, and Hong Kong. In exchange for their silence, Lo Tek made sure the rest of the passengers reached their destination.

In return for giving his boats safe passage from Chinese ports, Lo Tek made sure his contact in the PLA was well-paid. General Tam Li had been a valuable asset for many years and a frequent guest on his ketch.

The young man felt no guilt about what he did. As they had sailed the seas, the ancient Chinese also dealt in human cargo. It was an old and legitimate profession. Statistically, without him most of these girls would be dead within days or weeks. Lo Tek never abused them himself and left the training to the professionals ashore. He felt that he was doing the young ladies a favor, placing them in situations where they would be warm, fed, and given regular medical care. They would even earn money to send to their families, which was the reason most of them had left their homes.

When Lo Tek came ashore, he liked to visit the clubs with whom he did business. They always treated him like nobility. Excellent food and drink and a reunion with one or more of his women. For the orphaned son of peasants, who had sold his twin sister to soldiers and dockworkers in Shanghai for ten fen each, that was quite an accomplishment. He still sent her half the money he earned, which she used to run an orphanage back in Shanghai.

The Top of the World club at the new Barre Crowne Tower was actually a legitimate nightclub with dinner, entertainers, and dancing. Only select guests knew to ask for special treatment. There were elegantly appointed rooms on the floor below for men with the time and money for what the club called “exceptional treatment.” These rooms could only be reached by a private elevator.

After two weeks at sea, Lo Tek was in the mood for very exceptional treatment. During that time the Chinese native had gathered a total of thirty women for clients along the Pacific Rim, including one private collector living in the Philippines who liked his companions tall and very young. Lo Tek arrived at the tower, was announced by the street-level doorman, and was greeted with an embrace from the manager when he reached the fortieth floor.

“You should have called ahead!” the manager said. “We would have had a lounge ready for you.”

“You know how I work.”

“Well just once, you know?” the manager said. “Give me a half hour, and I will have things arranged for you.” “Thank you,” Lo Tek replied.

The men walked arm in arm as they went down a circular staircase into the main nightclub area. The manager, Chin Teng, was a thin man who wore heavy glasses and a film ofperspiration across his forehead. Lo Tek imagined that he had the metabolism of a mouse, which would be fitting, given all the running around he did, attending to clients.

It was dark in the club, with a semicircular bar in the center and high tables scattered throughout. There was a raised dance floor behind the bar. The windows were floorto-ceiling and covered 160 degrees of the circular room. They offered a commanding view of the city and the hazy lights of the harbor. Because it was still early, the club was relatively empty. Most of the customers arrived between midnight and one A. M. and stayed until dawn. A disc jockey was playing Asian pop standards from a booth overlooking the floor. Lo Tek knew that there were also security guards up there, watching through the smoked glass to make sure everyone behaved. There were two couples on the dance floor, three men and a woman in a group at the bar, and two young men bent over tall beers at one of the booths in the back of the room, away from the window. It looked like they had had a long day.

“What would you like to eat and drink?” the manager asked.

“I would like orange juice, freshly squeezed, no ice,” Lo Tek replied.

“I’ll get it at once,” the manager said as he showed him to a booth in the corner, near the window.

Lo Tek slid into the deep leather cushion. The swaying of the sea had become natural to him. It felt odd being on solid ground.

A stunning young waitress in a short black skirt brought him water, macadamia nuts, and a brilliant smile. He smiled back. That was something else that happened onshore: he did not look at a woman and wonder what kind of price she would bring. He saw her simply as a person.

The manager brought Lo Tek his drink, then left to check on “the rest of your order,” as he put it with a wicked wink. Lo Tek took an appreciative sip of the juice. His mouth felt alive. He took another as he looked out at the club. He absently folded the cocktail napkin into a little sailboat. Origami was a hobby of his, something he had mastered to amuse and distract the younger girls who were briefly guests on his ketch.

He watched as the two men at the booth tossed several bills on the table and left. Neither of them carried a briefcase or backpack, which seemed unusual. He noticed, too, that both beer bottles had napkins around them. They were wrapped entirely around the glass, as though both men did not want to leave fingerprints.

Lo Tek wondered if that meant anything, or if his naturally suspicious nature were getting the best of him.

That was the last thought the slave trader had before his eardrums exploded, followed by the rest of the room.

A bomb had been left in a briefcase under the table and was triggered remotely. It consisted of six sticks of TNT bound with electrical tape and capped with a detonator. The sticks were packed in a bed of sugar.

From Durban.

The explosion fused the sugar into tiny shards, blowing them around the room like fireflies. The small table was shredded as the explosion slammed through the room. The force of the blast did not just pulverize objects and people, it knocked them about like a force five hurricane. Blood and alcohol were dashed against the walls, first by the TNT and moments after that by the exploding CO2 canisters behind the bar. There were a few screams from below as the dance floor of the nightclub was shoved down into the exclusive rooms on the thirty-ninth floor. Moments later there were cries from the streets as the big picture windows flew outward. Particles of glass rained down thickly, like hail, clattering off rooftops, cars,. and the street. Twisted barstools, along with broken bottles and glasses, were hurled toward the exterior wall. Most of the window frames were bent and dislocated, hanging at odd angles over the street. Some were still dropping larger pieces of glass to the pavement as dark gray smoke churned through them. The winds carried it over the harbor, an added pall on the already steamy night. People who were caught in the lethal rain were knocked to the pavement, some writhing with minor wounds and others utterly still, impaled by the larger pieces of debris.

The maelstrom lasted for less than five seconds. Sirens broke the muffled silence that followed, wailing nearer from all directions as scraps of paper and clouds of powdered pasteboard and brick continued to drift earthward. Some of the debris ended up in the harbor.

Including, fittingly, the paper boat Lo Tek had made. It sank quickly.

Chapter Twelve.

Washington, D. C.

Monday, 1:01 P. M.

After Paul Hood was shown to his office, a young female intern who did not look much older than his daughter came in and cheerfully showed him how to work his computer. The lady–Mindy, from Texas money, he knew from her accent and her Armani suit–dutifully looked away after telling him how to program his personal password.

“A master program maintains a record of all your Web stops, Mr. Hood,” the slender young woman informed him. “The president has asked us all to be circumspect about where we go.”

Hood could actually hear the Southern-born president using a word like that, imbuing it with the proper balance of danger and piety. The young intern sounded very mature indeed, carrying forth that word from the commander in chief. At Op-Center, Hood used to tell people the same thing. It took him two words, though: “No porn.”

Mindy showed Hood how to work the telephone and gave him a swipe card for the men’s room. She was very professional about that, too. After the young woman left, Hood sat alone, with the door shut. Chief of Staff Sanders said she would come by at three. She wanted to review her thoughts with Hood on how the new office might work. She assured him, however, that the decision would be his, and he would have full autonomy on the final setup.

As long as you agree, Hood thought. Otherwise, the new special envoy would be removed, and someone else would get the job. That was how things worked in the nation’s capital.

It was difficult to process everything that had just happened. Hood looked around and smiled mirthlessly. About the only thing today had in common with yesterday was that Hood still did not have a window.

Just an exit, if he needed it.

Hood felt alone, despite the people he knew were just a few feet away. He was at the seat of power, yet he felt strangely powerless. It would be odd not to receive hourly intelligence reports from the research rooms upstairs. It was frustrating not to have anyone of a Bob Herbert or Darrell McCaskey caliber to consult.

That is not entirely true, he reminded himself. Hood owed Bob Herbert a phone call.

It took a moment for Hood to remember how to work the telephone. He had to press nine, enter his department code, then punch in the number he wanted. At Op-Center it was the other way around.

“Paul, what the hell is going on?” Herbert asked after Hood had said hello.

“More changes,” Hood replied.

“That’s obvious. The phone ID says you’re calling from the White House.”

“I’m the new special envoy to the president,” Hood replied.

“Special envoy to where?” Herbert asked. “Everywhere. I am still an international crisis manager,” Hood replied.

“Did you know that this was coming? Any of it, including the changing of the guard over here?”

“No,” Hood said.

“Neither did I. And we’re intelligence professionals.” “An attack always comes from somewhere you’re not expecting it,” Hood pointed out.

“Is that what this was?” Herbert asked.

“What do you mean?”

“An attack?” Herbert said. “Hell, I thought we were all on the same side.”

The remark caught Hood like a palm-heel strike to the side of the head. Herbert had a point. Hood was obviously not pleased with how this had gone down, and he was not sure why. Not everyone got “fired” to the White House. He should be flattered, not angry. Maybe it was the idea that he was now working for someone. He had never done that in his career, not as the mayor of Los Angeles, as a financial adviser, or as the head of Op-Center. Though the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee watched what the NCMC was doing and how the money was spent, Hood was the superior officer. He did not report to one. The question he had to answer, truthfully, was whether he considered the president an enemy.

No. Lorraine Sanders, maybe, he decided. She struck him as being extremely territorial.

“How is everyone taking the change?” Hood asked.

“I don’t know,” Herbert admitted. “Numb, I guess. We had a staff meeting this morning, and everyone was pretty quiet. But I haven’t really talked to anyone. I’ve been looking into this situation we have.”

“Can you talk about it?” Hood asked. He wanted to put on his professional hat as soon as possible. Dwelling on personal issues was not going to get him anything but deeper into them.

“Sure,” Herbert replied. “You’ve still got your security clearance, right?”

“Yeah,” Hood said. Herbert was not joking. That bothered Hood, but like everything else, he was not sure why. Herbert was just doing his job, following a protocol that Hood had helped to establish.

“Someone out there is capping Chinese interests abroad,” Herbert told him. “There have been three incidents in one day. General Carrie wanted to know if they are connected or if we need to be concerned about that.”

“Do you?” Hood asked.

“It’s too early to say,” Herbert replied. “Charleston police report finding the remains of Chinese stowaways in the harbor. An hour ago there was an explosion at a nightclub in Taipei. Special guests received special treatment there–“

“From mainland Chinese girls,” Hood said.

“You see where this is going,” Herbert replied. “We do not believe that someone is attacking men and women who leave China. We suspect the target is the enabler, whoever is helping them to get out and making money from their sale in Taipei or the United States. Darrell just got off the horn with a friend in the Taipei Municipal Police Department. The Section Four Bomb Squad, attached to the Xihu Police Substation, was at the site within minutes. They found a badly wounded fellow who has since been identified as Hui-ling Wong, a suspected slaver. He died on the way to the hospital, but they found his boat in the harbor?’

“Did they get any phone records, computers?”

“Nada,” Herbert said. “The guy never used any of those. He had a nickname, Lo Tek. All his deals were conducted in person or arranged via ship-to-ship or ship-toshore communications.”

“Sensible.”

“The harbor police did get his radio operator, though. They’re hoping he’ll be able to tell them something.”

“Do you think Hui-ling was the target?” Hood asked.

“No,” Herbert said. “It would have been just as easy to take out his ketch. He was probably just a bystander who happened to deserve what he got.”

“So the business was the target,” Hood said.

“Yes, but Ron and General Carrie both think there might be a proxy war being fought here. I’m inclined to agree.”

Those words were not a slap. They were worse. Hearing Herbert mention Ron Plummer and General Carrie in the same sentence was like hearing his former wife talk about her new boyfriend. It reminded Hood, painfully, that forces beyond his control had wrested him from people and events that had defined his life. It was an effort to speak, let alone to speak unemotionally.

“Why do you think that?” Hood asked flatly.

“The PRC has an enormously high rate of illegal emigration,” Herbert said. “In terms of sheer numbers, it’s higher than that of any other nation. Those refugees were the people Wong reportedly hunted. He would not have been able to pluck people from offshore vessels without the tacit approval of the People’s Liberation Navy. Not in a ketch that size, in those waters, in a perpetual state of silent running. That alone would have caught the attention of every radar station along the coast. Wong had to be paying people off.”

“Do you have any idea who?”

“Not yet,” Herbert said. “But we may have a back door to that information. The attacks in Charleston and Taipei bookended the bombing of sugar silos in South Africa. According to public records in Durban, one of the investors in that refinery is the Tonkin Investment Corporation, a group of Vietnamese shipping entrepreneurs who have close ties with members of the Chinese government. Specifically, they handle official government investments managed by Chou Shin, who is the vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Relief Fund. The Chicom UFRF manages funds for the survivors of soldiers who died in the struggle to put the Communists into power and keep them there. Chou is a hard-liner, an acolyte of Mao who also happens to be the director of the 8341 Unit of the Central Security Regiment.”

“I’ve heard of them,” Hood said. “They’re extremely low profile.”

“Very. Their job is to spy on political and philosophical enemies of Chicom at home and abroad. Chou has deep files on students, radicals, black marketeers, and plutocrats:’

“A kind of anti-J. Edgar Hoover,” Hood suggested.

“Exactly,” Herbert said. “Chou also has the resources to attack the trade in illegal emigres.”

“For what reason?” Hood asked.

“Defense. Spite. The profits could be used to finance rival factions in Beijing, or maybe he has a grudge against some minister or general. What’s interesting is the timing of the events. The first two, the blasts in Charleston and Durban, happened relatively close together?’

“You mean someone might have had the silo scenario primed in the event of an attack on the emigres.”

“Right. But the blast in Taipei came significantly later–possibly a response to the bombing in Durban:’

“That isn’t a proxy war,” Hood said. “It’s gods hurling thunderbolts at one another.”

“Not giving a damn about collateral damage, I know,” Herbert said. “In any case, Maria has Interpol connections who deal regularly with the National Security Bureau in Taipei. They’ve got people inside Beijing. We’re trying to find out who is on the top of Chou’s hit list, someone who might have the resources to have the counterstrike in Durban ready and waiting.”

Maria Corneja McCaskey was the Spanish-born wife of Op-Center’s FBI liaison Darrell McCaskey. She had retired from Interpol to come to the United States with her new husband. She had not settled comfortably into domesticity and was retained by Op-Center to interface with the global police agency and its affiliates.

“So who are we rooting for?” Hood asked. “The slaver-capitalist or the repressive spy who’s watching out for war widows?”

It was a rhetorical question, and Herbert took it as such. “The sad thing is, people end up suffering either way,” the intelligence chief remarked.

“I hope there’s something you can do to minimize that,” Hood said.

There was a short silence as Hood worked through another painful moment. In the past that would be the start of a discussion between Hood and one of his senior staff, not the end.

“Are there any resources you can bring to bear?” Herbert asked.

“I’ll find out,” Hood said. “Hell, Bob, I’m still learning how to work the telephones.”

“Didn’t they give you an assistant?”

“I get to hire two,” Hood said.

“Hey. That’s a step up from Op-Center.”

“Not really,” Hood said. “I have no idea where to find them.”

There was another short silence. It grew into a long one. Herbert was not one for small talk, and Hood felt as if the intelligence chief had been extending the conversation unnaturally.

“I guess I’d better let you go,” Hood said.

“Sorry,” Herbert said. “I was just checking my caller ID. There’s an incoming call I’d better take.”

“Sure,” Hood told him. “I’ll have a look into this Chinese situation and get back to you.”

“Thanks,” Herbert said. “Hey, Paul, have you heard from Mike lately?”

“I haven’t spoken to him since he left Op-Center,” Hood told him. “Why?”

“Because that’s who is calling me,” Herbert replied.

Chapter Thirteen.

Washington, D. C.

Monday, 1:13 P. M.

“Hello, Mike Rodgers,” Herbert declared as he took the call. “How are things deep in the heart of Unexus?”

“The company is doing well, and so am I,” Rodgers replied.

The firm for which Rodgers worked was located in Arlington, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon. The two men had last spoken a month before, when they met for dinner at the Watergate. The 600 Restaurant was one of Herbert’s favorites, as much for where it was located as for what they served. The hotel was a monument to presidential arrogance, to the notion that the nation was still a democracy. That thought gave Herbert a warm feeling. It reminded him of the values he himself had paid such a high price to uphold.

“Is there something quick and dirty I can help you with, or can I give you a shout in about an hour?”

“Both,” Rodgers said. “What are you hearing about China?”

Herbert had been playing with a loose thread on his cuff. He stopped. “Why do you ask?”

“We’ve got a very important project about to launch with Beijing,” Rodgers told him. “I was wondering if the explosion in Taipei is an isolated event.”

“Do you have any reason to think it wasn’t?” Herbert asked.

There was a brief silence.

Herbert smiled. Rodgers knew the drill. Herbert’s first obligation was to Op-Center. Their job was to put puzzles together, not provide the pieces for others. Not even for an old friend, a trusted friend. With Herbert that was not a territorial imperative. It was his definition of professionalism.

“All right. I’ll go first,” Rodgers said. “Unexus has designed a Chinese telecommunications satellite that is going to be launched on Thursday. The prime minister has asked the head of the Xichang space center to provide him with an overview of security operations. Director Lung says that has never happened before.”

“Is this the first job you’ve done with them?”

“Yes, but that does not seem to be what is driving the prime minister’s caution,” Rodgers told him.

“Will the telecommunications satellite be used for civilian purposes only?” Herbert asked.

“We don’t know,” Rodgers said.

“Plausible deniability,” Herbert replied.

Rodgers ignored the remark. “The prime minister has asked that the security information be sent by courier, directly to him. Ordinarily these matters are reviewed by the Guoanbu.”

“The Ministry of State Security,” Herbert said.

“Bypassing them in a review of this nature is very unusual,” Rodgers said. “Director Lung was also instructed to make sure that one of the guests be accompanied by a Xichang official at all times.”

“What guest?” Herbert asked.

“General Tam Li of the PLA,” Rodgers told him. “Is the army involved with the launch?”

“Only as observers,” Rodgers said. “We hope to be do- ing more business with them in the future, though I’m not at liberty to say more than that.”

“Is there any reason at all to think that this General Tam Li is a threat?” Herbert asked.

“That’s why I’m calling,” Rodgers said. “The prime minister must think so.”

“When did the prime minister request the security plans?” Herbert asked.

“Saturday morning, Beijing time,” Rodgers said. “Now tell me. Is there anything you can add?”

“Is this for your ears only, or will it get back to the prime minister of the People’s Republic of China?” The question tasted like ash. But Mike Rodgers had new employers now, and he had always been a good and loyal officer.

“Do you even have to ask, Bob?”

“Unfortunately I do, Mike. You’re a good friend. You’re also a private citizen working with the government of a foreign power, possibly with the military of a foreign power. My boss would scowl at swapping spit with the enemy.”

“Tell Paul I am the same man I was–“

“Paul Hood is not my boss,” Herbert said. “Not anymore.”

It took Rodgers a moment to process the information. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I wish I knew,” Herbert admitted. “I came to work this morning and found out that Op-Center had a new director, effective immediately. General Morgan Carrie. Do you know her?”

“I know of her,” Rodgers said. “First woman to earn three stars.”

“That’s the one,” Herbert said. “From what I gathered, Paul was ‘invited’ to work for the president in some new capacity.”

“Classic occupation ploy,” Rodgers said.

“Excuse me?”

“The German army used to roll into a village and appoint a puppet government from among the population,” Rodgers said. “The new leaders and their families would get preferential treatment as long as they did Nazi dirty work, like ordering searches and ratting out resistance fighters. When that leadership had been squeezed dry, they would be executed.”

“I’m not sure I, see the parallel, Mike.”

“The CIOC had Paul cut Op-Center back, then turned the knife on him,” Rodgers said.

“True, though I wouldn’t equate a West Wing job to being terminated,” Herbert said.

“Did Paul sound happy?”

“He sounded uncertain, dislocated–” Herbert said.

“That’s as good as it’s going to get for him,” Rodgers said. “If you’re not part of the inner circle to start, you aren’t likely to get in. That’s the same as a political execution?’

“I don’t know if I agree, and I don’t think Paul is concerned about that,” Herbert said. “He cares about the work.”

“Bob, that’s how the work gets done there,” Rodgers said. “Whether it’s at 10 Downing Street, in the Kremlin, in Beijing, or in Havana, it’s all about having the sympathetic ear of the core group. If I were to cold-call the CIA, do you think I’d get someone at your level willing to talk to me?”

“I hope not:’ Herbert said. “You’re a patriot, but you’re still a civilian.”

“Exactly. It’s about access, Bob.”

“And trust,” Herbert reminded him. “Access gets a Bob Herbert on the telephone. Trust is what gets you information. And whatever I–we–think about Paul Hood personally, he has never been dishonest or unreliable.”

“No,” Rodgers agreed. “And Robert E. Lee disliked war. That didn’t prevent four years of ferocious bloodshed:’

This conversation was taking them down a rutted path Herbert did not want to travel. The men had never really discussed it because they did not want to let loose the resentment they both felt. But here it was, sneaking out the back door. Herbert had not approved of the cutbacks Hood had made or the effective dismissal of Mike Rodgers as deputy director. But those issues, those emotions, did not need to be on the menu right now.

“We can talk about precedent over a cup of joe,” Herbert told Rodgers. “Meanwhile, here is what I can tell you about the Chinese. It isn’t much, but I’m working on it. General Carrie called a meeting first thing this morning. She introduced herself and asked us to look into two, now three, incidents involving targets with a Chinese connection. The freighter that blew up in Charleston harbor, a sugar silo that was attacked in Durban, South Africa, and an explosion at an upscale brothel in Taipei that sent body parts sailing into the harbor.”

“Do you think those are all related?”

“Slave labor was involved in the harbor and brothel attacks,” Herbert said. “A spymaster, Chou Shin, apparently ran holdings in the sugar processing facility that was destroyed.”

“I’ve heard of Chou,” Rodgers said. “He’s a real hard- liner.”

“That he is. Have you heard anything else about him?” “Not really. His name showed up a lot in a white paper on the Tian’anmen Square uprising.”

“You remembered it just from that?”

“Oh yeah,” Rodgers replied.

“why?”

“He was out there running plays for the police, pointing out individuals he wanted for interrogation,” Rodgers said. “They call him the ‘eagle’ because of the way he just looked down from a balcony and plucked people from the square.”

“I don’t understand,” Herbert said. “Why would a diehard Red invest in capitalist enterprises?”

“The Unexus think tank was all over that question when we got involved with the Chinese,” Rodgers told him. “There are parallels regarding Middle Eastern, Colombian, and Japanese investments. What we view as naked capitalism Beijing regards as a means of control. Think about it. How does a foreign country gain influence in the United States? Through real estate holdings, owning businesses, even laundering money through banks. They help to drive our economy. That helps elected officials stay elected. It gives you their very attentive ear. How does a foreign government make money for those often extravagant enterprises? They invest in something people will always need, like sugar or tobacco, diamonds or gold.”

“I guess that makes a kind of lopsided sense,” Herbert admitted. “As long as you don’t become what you seek to destroy.”

“You know as well as I do that a lot of sleeper agents and fifth columnists are seduced by a better life and a big bankroll,” Rodgers said. “That’s always been a problem when foreigners infiltrate the United States. They try to recruit sociopaths and ideologues, but those kinds of people tend to stand out.”

“Okay. I understand why Chou might have invested in a sugar refinery,” Herbert said. “What I don’t understand was whether this attack was against the silos, the investment, or Chou himself.”

“I have no idea,” Rodgers said. “I just don’t want to worry that our satellite is in jeopardy.”

“Do you expect China to be a big part of your business in the future?”

“We hope so,” Rodgers said. “But that’s not my biggest concern.”

“What is?”

“The satellite has an RTG,” Rodgers told him.

Herbert grunted. An RTG is a radioisotope thermoelec- tric generator, a lightweight, very compact system that pro- vides energy through the natural radioactive decay of Pu-238. Though the plutonium is encased in a lead-ceramic alloy that would survive a crash or explosion, there was always the chance of an accident. One that could spread lethal radioactivity across a wide swath of the countryside.

“Is it a DoE component?” Herbert asked. Before plutonium-powered spacecraft were banned, the Department of Energy had built all of the RTGs used on American missions.

“No,” Rodgers said. “We built it.”

“So nuclear power is going to be a part of what Unexus offers in the future.”

“I can’t really talk about that, Bob.”

“I understand. It’s too bad you’re not tighter with the prime minister,” Herbert said. “You could put the question to him.”

“Do you think Paul might want to take a swing at that?” Rodgers asked. “You said he’s looking for something to do, and the White House has ways of communicating with the prime minister that we don’t.”

“Good point. Call him,” Herbert suggested.

“I will,” Rodgers said.

The intelligence chief did not want to phone Hood and say, “I was talking to Mike, and we were wondering . . .” That would seem like charity. It would carry more weight if Rodgers broke six months of silence with the request.

“Meanwhile, I’ll see what else Darrell and our overseas allies have come up with,” Herbert said. “Hopefully, the prime minister is just being cautious.”

Rodgers thanked him, and they made a dinner appointment for the following week. Herbert hung up feeling very strange. Here he was, doing his duty at Op-Center, while the guys who left were in a much better position to set the world on fire–one of them literally.

Obviously, doing the right thing is not the way to get ahead in the world, he thought. You had to leave government service and shit-can your friends to do that. But then you abandon the principles for which your wife died and you gave up your legs.

To hell with that. Bob Herbert picked up the phone and called Darrell McCaskey.

He had a job to do.

Chapter Fourteen.

Beijing, China

Monday, 2:27 A. M.

Prime Minister Le Kwan Po went home to his wife and a late snack of tea and apricots. Ever since he was a child he had liked dipping fruit in tea. The apartment in Beijing was a_privilege of office. The very tart Mongolian apricots were his one indulgence.

They had also been an education.

The delicacy had taught him the joy of mixing elements to produce something new. It had showed him that different blends produced different results. It had proven to him that two of anything is superior to one. What he had still been puzzling over was how to convince Chou and Tam Li of that fact.

The prime minister sat across the table from his wife Li-Li. They were in a small dining alcove off the kitchen, Beijing spread below them. The rain had stopped and the streetlights shone like candles in the misty night.

Li-Li was a handsome woman with a round face framed by long, gray hair worn in a bun. She was dressed in a red silk robe and matching scarf. She was smoking a cigarette. When Le Kwan Po finished his apricots, he would join her in another smoke. Throughout Le Kwan Po’s adult life, Li-Li had been his most valuable and trusted friend and adviser. She possessed a calm wisdom that was characteristic of those who had been raised in a temple. In the case of Li-Li, it was the seventeenth-century Qingshui Yan Temple in the state of Fujian. Her widowed mother cooked meals for the priests, the acolytes, and the pilgrims. The women lived in a very small room behind the mountainside structure. Some might have described it as a boring life. To Li-Li it was a reflective life. She met her future husband when he came through the region with fellow soldiers. The mountain unit stayed at the temple for nearly three weeks while they pursued remnants of the Guomindang, the nationalists who were hiding in these remote regions. “The soldier and the lady,” as her mother called them, quickly discovered they shared a love of two things. One was the mountains. They enjoyed being where they could look up at the sun yet down upon the clouds. They enjoyed the grandeur of the sharp-edged peaks and the flora that dug its roots into the rock to thrive there. Li-Li marveled that such a small, delicate tendril could split stone.

Just as the revolutionary ideology of Mao did in 1919. He did not work and study in Europe as all the other Communist leaders did. He moved among the peasants to invent his own form of government. He put small roots in the rich soil of the Chinese working class where they grew into a powerful nation.

A hybrid, like apricots and tea.

The other thing Li-Li and Le Kwan Po enjoyed was a lively discussion. She was always confident, soft-spoken, but very, very sure of her point of view. Some would say smug. Perhaps that was because Li-Li was raised in an environment where rules were incontrovertible. Le Kwan Po was more balanced in his thinking, more willing to listen to all sides.

The prime minister and his wife had been discussing the radical differences between the two men. She believed her husband should work behind the scenes to undermine the men. –

“Remove their support structure, and they will fall,” she counseled. “What you must do is relocate their aides, their allies, their confidants.”

“This does not need to be so complicated:’ he replied dismissively.

“Not this,” she agreed. “But you are not doing it just to stop these men. This situation is about the future. By undermining their network of conspirators, you will discourage others:’

“Fear is not a deterrent,” Le replied. “Even overwhelming force can be resisted, if not at the moment, then over time. The only thing that causes a permanent change is reason.”

“We have had this discussion before,” the woman reminded him. “The stakes are higher now. Do you believe you can convince these men that compromise is better than whatever they are after?”

Le nodded once. “They want power. But apart from that, men want to survive.”

“You just said fear does not work.”

“Not the act,” Le replied. “But the threat. That is different.”

Li-Li took a long puff on her cigarette. “What can you do to threaten their security? You cannot dismiss them. You cannot demote them.”

That was when De Ming Wang, the minister of foreign affairs, called on the prime minister’s cell phone. De Ming informed him about the explosion in Taipei. Le was not happy to learn of the disaster nor to hear of it from De Ming. The foreign minister wanted very much to become prime minister. Typically, De Ming withheld information to make rivals look ineffective. If the foreign minister were providing information, it was to maneuver someone into a situation that could prove difficult or embarrassing.

“Three incidents in one day,” De Ming said in conclusion. “We need to contain this situation immediately.”

His motives did not change the fact that the foreign minister was right. Which is what made him a danger.

“Was this Chou’s doing?” Le asked. “Those clubs in Taiwan host disreputable sorts–“

“This was very elite, and it employed girls from Guangdong province. The freighter this morning carried workers from Guangdong.”

That was not proof. But it was not a good sign. “I will handle this,” the prime minister said.

“What can I do to assist?” De Ming asked solicitously.

Le lit a cigarette, blew smoke, and thought for a moment. This was a delicate situation. If De Ming were directly involved in any talks, he could sabotage the prime minister’s efforts at peacemaking. If De Ming were not involved, and those efforts failed, the foreign minister could go to the National People’s Congress and ask for a no-confidence vote on the prime minister. In a situation like this, Le felt it might be best to keep his enemy close.

“I will call Chou and Tam Li and arrange a meeting,” the prime minister replied. “I would like you to attend.”

“Certainly. When would you like to meet?”

“I will let you knoW,” Le replied cautiously. He folded away the phone and tapped it as he looked across the table at his wife. He told her what had happened. “War between these two men will force others to take sides,” he concluded. “I need to do something about it.”

“You are anxious. You should wait until morning before contacting them,” Li-Li suggested softly.

“I cannot afford to let the situation escalate?”

“You are also tired,” his wife insisted. “Mao said that a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”

“They are tired as well.”

“Not so tired that they won’t perceive this as what it is,” Li-Li said.

“Oh? And what is that?”

“Desperation, not strength. Wait. And let the foreign minister wait.”

Le Kwan Po shook his head. “There is a difference between someone who is desperate and someone who is decisive. I have to find out if either of these men were involved in the attack.”

“Why would they tell you?” Li-Li asked. “You were reluctant to pressure them earlier.”

“I have no choice now,” the prime minister said. “The foreign minister will use this against me.”

“Then you are desperate.”

Le took two quick puffs, then reached for his phone. “I am motivated,” he replied.

“What will you say to them when you meet?”

“I will reason with them,” he replied. “That is what I do.”

“Please. If you must, call them now but see them tomorrow,” Li-Li urged. “If you sit together tonight, they will say nothing or throw charges at one another. You will simply be a mediator.”

“What will I be tomorrow?”

“More in control of the situation,” she replied. “They will wonder why you waited to see them.”

“They will wonder with good reason. I myself don’t see the sense of it,” Le protested.

The prime minister was not comfortable playing these psychological games. His success in politics was due to evenhandedness. He possessed a tireless devotion to the party but a willingness to allow that what worked in the twentieth century could not be cleanly adapted to the twenty-first.

Still,. Li-Li was correct. These were very different circumstances. Chou and Tam Li had always fought for posi-

tion and influence, but they had never resorted to murder or attacks on one another’s holdings.

But silence? he thought. The prime minister regarded his wife. How does one turn silence into a perfect weapon? he asked himself. Silence is like clay. Others can read into it what they wish. The question Le had to ask himself was whether his wife was correct, and the men would perceive it as strength. Or whether he was right, and they would regard it as weakness. He continued to look across the table. Li-Li looked back. Her sweet face was visible through the snaking smoke of their cigarettes, through the fainter mist of their tea. Her eyes were impassive, the thin lips of her mouth pulled in a firm yet delicate line. Le did not know for certain what she was thinking. He assumed it was critical of haste.

You assume the worst based on her silence. That supported what his wife had been saying about the value of silence. But you know her he reminded himself. You already know how she feels.

Unfortunately, the men he was dealing with would regard his silence as indecision. He had to confront them.

Le crushed his cigarette in the ashtray and picked up his telephone. He scrolled through the stored listing of cell phone numbers.

“You are calling them,” his wife said.

“Yes.”

“To meet when?”

“Now,” he replied.

“To reason with them?”

“At first.”

Li-Li stubbed out her own cigarette. “They will not listen. And what will you do if it fails?”

Le Kwan Po regarded her before accessing the first number. “Three nations suffered covert attacks today. As the prime minister of China, I have ways of passing infor-

mation to those nations. Information such as the names of the people who organized the bombings. I need never soil my hands.”

Li-Li smiled as she rose. “I like that reasoning,” she said as she left the small kitchen area to give her husband privacy.

Chapter Fifteen.

Arlington, Virginia

Monday, 2:44 P. M.

Since his days as a military commander in Vietnam, Mike Rodgers maintained that there were two phases to any operation. This belief was borne out during his tour of duty at Op-Center, where the general was both deputy director under Paul Hood and commander of the elite rapid deployment military unit Striker. It was also proving to be true at Unexus.

The first stage of a project was the booster phase. Whether it was a military incursion, a research program, or even a business deal, it always started with heavy lifting. Someone had to have and then sell an idea. Once it was successfully off the ground, it entered the pitch-and-yaw phase. That was a time of fine-tuning. The project had a life of its own. All the creator could do at that point was make sure it did not crash or self-destruct.

In science, the pitch-and-yaw rockets were on different sides. That was how the projectile kept its balance. In every other venture, opposing forces were not always beneficial.

The Chinese operation, as Rodgers called it, was in the pitch-and-yaw stage. The scientists had specific requirements, the investors in Europe and the United States had needs, and now the Chinese had concerns. Some of them conflicted, such as the propulsion engineers needing access to the booster and the Chinese not wanting them entering the gantry area without Chinese scientists, who had their own ideas about how things should be done.

Rodgers was kept from addressing the launch security matter as he worked to settle these problems. He was aided by fifty-one-year-old Yoo-Jin Yun, his translator, who had the most singular background of anyone he had ever met. She was the daughter of a suspected North Korean spy who was repeatedly raped by her South Korean interrogators. Her mother was fifteen years old at the time. Yoo-Jin was born nine months later. She was raised to believe that communication was the key to world peace–and to survival. Mandarin and Cantonese were two of the twenty-seven Pacific languages and dialects she spoke. The short, trim woman sat in the office next to Rodgers’s on the top floor of the six-story Unexus tower. Just being around her gave Rodgers a sense of world access he had never before experienced. And meeting her mother, Ji-Woo, had also enriched him. The older woman lived with her daughter and often drove her to work. She had relocated to Seoul in 1955 and raised her daughter on her own, cleaning office buildings at night and the Sangbong bus terminal by day to put her through school. Ji-Woo had nursed the beauty that had come Of tragedy. Bob Herbert could take lessons from her about living with adversity.

So could I, Rodgers had to admit. Testosterone had a way of overpowering intellectual equanimity and good intentions.

Rodgers rose from behind his opaque glass-topped desk. He went to a small stainless steel refrigerator hidden in a dark corner of the office and got himself a ginger ale.

He was dressed in shirtsleeves, a tightly knotted black silk tie, and Bill Blass slacks. His sharply pressed suit jacket hung on a wooden hanger behind the door. Rodgers always wore it when the door was open or whenever he was videoconferencing. He felt strangely powerless without a uniform of some kind. The retired general had come to this job after serving on the abortive presidential campaign of Senator Donald On of Texas. It was the murder of a British computer magnate, William Wilson, that precipitated the senator’s downfall. The founder of Unexus, industrialist Brent Appleby, knew Wilson well. Appleby attended the trial and was impressed with Rodgers’s frankness and composure. He asked the retiring general to become president of the new operation. Rodgers accepted with a handshake on the steps of the District of Columbia Federal Circuit Courthouse on Madison Place NW.

Rodgers returned to his desk with the can of soda and a cork coaster. In addition to the usual distractions, Mike Rodgers was not sure how he felt about calling Paul Hood. Rodgers had been allowed to resign from Op-Center after it was downsized. Though the cutbacks were not Hood’s fault, Rodgers felt the director had not fought hard to keep him. He understood why. Paul Hood had the larger picture in mind, the continuation of Op-Center in the wake of severe budget cuts. Striker had been decommissioned after a successful but costly intervention in Kashmir. At that time there was not a great deal for an army general to do.

But understanding and forgiving were not the same.

Now Paul Hood had been replaced. Maybe the White House position was better for Hood in some ways. But it was still a very sudden take-it-or-leave-it offer, not the kind of move that fattened a man’s ego. Rodgers did not need to gloat. That was in Bob Herbert’s nature, not his own. However, he also did not want to be a friend to Hood. That was a status Hood had never earned.

As soon as there were no other emergencies to handle, Rodgers was finally able to call the White House switchboard. They put him right through. That was how Rodgers knew that Hood was reporting to the Oval Office. He had been given cabinet-level treatment. Someone had literally walked his extension information to the switchboard rather than E-mailed it, where it might go unattended for hours. The name Paul Hood had been placed before the bank of operators so they knew who he was, where he was, and what his title was.

It also puts the president’s fingerprints all over Hood, Rodgers reflected. Unlike Op-Center, where a man was measured by his abilities, Hood’s fate was tied to that of the new chief executive. Whatever Hood himself did, he could be elevated or scapegoated at the whim of Dan Debenport.

“This is Paul Hood.”

“Christ, Paul. Didn’t they even give you an assistant?” It took a moment for Hood to place the voice. “Mike?” “It is,” Rodgers replied. “Bob told me where to find you.”

“Jeez, I’m glad he did! How the hell are you?”

“I’m doing terrific,” Rodgers assured him. “The change has been good for me.”

“I can imagine,” Hood said. “Unexus ain’t small potatoes.”

“No. Lots of starch here,” Rodgers joked, glancing at his jacket.

“How does it feel being in the private sector for the first time?”

“I’m happy, and my bank account is happy,” Rodgers admitted. “Speaking of changes–“

“Yeah. This is a big one. A sudden one,” Hood said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m tucked in the corridors of power without an assistant,” Hood said. “I’m told there will be a couple of them waiting in my other office down the road. An office that has a window, I hope.”

“That would be nice,” Rodgers said. He had a fleeting screw you moment as he looked out his own large floor-toceiling window. The Washington Monument rose in the distance, stone white against a cloudless blue sky.

“Bob tells me you’re enjoying what you’re doing,” Hood went on.

“I’m still fighting with powers from across the sea but usually with less bloodshed,” Rodgers said. The banality of this conversation was painful. Still, after six months of silence the quasi-hail-fellow-well-met dialogue was necessary. “So what can you tell me about this new position of yours?”

“Not a hell of a lot, yet,” Hood said. “New is the operative word. The job is just some five or six hours old.”

“Has it got a title?”

“A lofty-sounding one. I’m special envoy to the president.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Rodgers asked.

“Well, I’m still a bit unclear about that,” Hood admitted. “The position was described as ‘an international intelligence troubleshooter, unaffiliated with any group but with access to the resources of all of them.”

“What about political access through the president?” “You mean working heads of state?” Hood asked. “Exactly. In particular, I wonder if that includes getting the ear of the Chinese prime minister?”

“I don’t know. Does it pertain to intelligence troubleshooting?”

“It does,” Rodgers said.

“Impacting the private or public sector?”

“Public there, private here.”

” ‘Here’ meaning Unexus.”

“Right,” Rodgers said.

“Maybe you had better give this to me from the top,” Hood suggested.

Paul Hood had never been an evasive, cover-your-ass bureaucrat, and that was not what was happening here. He sounded like a man who really did not know the mechanics, let alone the parameters of his job. Since it had only been in existence for one morning, that was understandable.

Rodgers told him what had happened with Le Kwan Po and the Xichang space center and the exclusion of the Guoanbu from the equation. Hood seemed surprised to hear that. Unlike Washington, Chinese intelligence agencies shared information with each other and with the impacted ministries.

“What you really need to know is whether the prime minister has specific information or concerns that your satellite may be a target,” Hood said.

“Their satellite, our subcontract,” Rodgers said. “Right. Sorry. I thought we could shorthand it.” “I’m a little sensitive about that,” Rodgers said. “When I was a general, they were the enemy.”

“Aren’t they still?” Hood asked. “Or is North Korea funding its own nuclear program?”

“I’ve got a new office, Paul, one with a window,” Rodgers replied. “Things look different. They have to.”

The comment came out more explosive than illuminating. Rodgers might still be looking at things from a general’s perspective if Hood had not forced him to change offices. He decided to ignore his own minioutburst.

“It’s three days until launch,” Rodgers continued. “I’m hoping the prime minister is just being cautious. But I would like to know.”

“What does Bob say about all this?” Hood asked. “He’s going to sniff around from downwind,” Rodgers said. “But you know what our HUMINT resources are like.”

Like most intelligence agencies, Op-Center had cut back on expensive human intelligence and relied primarily on ELINT, electronic intelligence. That was fine, as long as adversaries used cell phones and E-mails, or spoke in public places where the agencies had VARDs–videographic or acoustic reconnaissance devices. If not, the analog fish slipped through the digital net.

“Lorraine Sanders will be here in a few minutes,” Hood said. “Let me talk to her about this, see what she thinks.”

“She’s a smart lady,” Rodgers said. “I assume she’s helping you to integrate into the system.”

“That, plus I’ll be reporting to the president through her,” Hood said.

Rodgers was surprised. “Does she have veto power over your operations?”

“No. Only the president, to whom I report.”

“But if the chief of staff controls the flow of information–“

“Conveying information in a timely fashion is part of her job description,” Hood replied sharply. “Mike, is there something we need to talk about? Apart from this, I mean?”

“No,” Rodgers said. “Why?”

“Because that’s the second kick in the ass you’ve given me in as many minutes,” Hood replied.

“That was not my intenti6n,” Rodgers assured him. “I’m sorry if it came out that way.”

“This isn’t easy, Mike. Being here, talking to you, none of it. The six months of silence that wasn’t something I wanted.”

“Okay,” Rodgers said. “But out of curiosity, Paul, if you didn’t want the silence, why the hell didn’t you pick up the phone?”

“Embarrassment? Discomfort? Maybe a little envy because I left the high road and you still had it?”

“You could have talked to me about that,” Rodgers said.

“We talked when you left. It didn’t change anything,”

Hood said. “I wasn’t happy about the way things went down. Who could. be? Then it became awkward because so much time did pass.”

“And now?” Rodgers asked.

“Has this been easy for you?”

“No,” Rodgers admitted.

“There’s your answer,” Hood said. “Look, I’ve got Sanders coming, and I want to get into this situation of yours. I’ll be in touch after the meeting.”

Rodgers thanked him and hung up.

Conflicted did not begin to describe how Rodgers felt at the moment. It began to look as if Hood had been demoted upward. Part of Rodgers felt bad for him. A smaller, more insistent part of him did not. Yet what had been the oddest part of the conversation had nothing to do with that. It happened when they were talking about Herbert and his limited HUMINT capabilities.

Rodgers had called them “our” resources.

Even six months later, it was difficult not to think of them all as a team. Hood, Herbert, and Rodgers had gone through a lot together, more than most men got to experience in a lifetime. The deaths of coworkers, family crises, fighting the clock to prevent civil wars and nuclear attacks. Maybe Op-Center was an idea as well as a place. Maybe it was hardwired, like Rodgers’s need to wear a uniform of some kind even if it was a suit. Perhaps they always would be a team, despite working from different places toward different ends.

And perhaps what the sage once said of divorce was also true of Mike Rodgers and Paul Hood. That going separate ways wasn’t a sign two people didn’t understand one another but just the opposite.

An indication that they had begun to.

Chapter Sixteen.

Washington, D. C. Monday, 3:18 P. M.

Of all the people General Carrie had met at Op-Center, the one she had enjoyed the most was Liz Gordon. The two women sat in facing armchairs in front of the desk. Carrie felt it might make these talks less intimidating than if she were behind the desk. Liz was the only one who moved her chair, turning it so that she was facing the new director rather than sitting at an angle. The staff psychologist also offered her viewpoints without having to be asked. She was the only one who did not say exactly what she thought the new director wanted to hear. They talked about Paul Hood and his impact on the organization before moving on to the existing personnel.

“The senior staff is going to want to please you,” Gordon told Carrie a few minutes into their informal chat. “But they will also resent you.”

“Because I replaced Paul Hood or because I replaced a man?” Carrie asked.

“Both,” Liz said. “And also because you were given the job most of them would have wanted.”

“I earned this position,” Carrie replied. She jabbed the desk with an index finger. “I also earned the three stars I’m wearing, something no other woman ever accomplished.”

“You see, General, that is part of the problem,” Liz replied. “You are a woman with three stars. I know Bob, Darrell, Lowell, Ron, and Matt. I know them very well. To the first two, at least, your promotion represents a bone to our gender and not a real accomplishment.”

“That would be their problem, not mine,” Carrie said. “Do you think they will work less for me than they did for Hood?”

“As I said, they still need the director’s approval if they want to keep their jobs. I’m sure they feel as if they are all on probation.”

“They are,” Carrie replied.

They were interrupted by a call from Bob Herbert. He brought Carrie up to date on the conversation with Mike Rodgers. Rodgers had also spoken with Paul Hood and had phoned to tell Herbert about that. Hood was going to see what he could do about getting intel from the Chinese prime minister.

Carrie thanked Herbert and hung up. There was a very strange mix of resentment and suck-up in Herbert’s brusque but meticulously complete briefing.

“None of them is in danger of being dismissed, and I don’t care whether they like me or not,” the general went on. “But I want to be sure I can count on them to give the job everything they’ve got.”

“You can,” Liz said confidently. “Bob and Darrell are competitive with each other and themselves, so they will always overreach–“

The conversation was interrupted by a beep on the inter-

com.

“Yes?” Carrie said.

“General, Darrell McCaskey and Matt Stoll are here to see you,” Bugs Benet informed her.

“Thank you. Send them in,” Carrie said.

“I’ll leave,” Liz said, rising.

“I appreciate your input, Liz. We’ll finish this later.”

“I look forward to it,” the psychologist replied.

Liz stepped out as McCaskey walked in. Carrie noticed McCaskey fire the psychologist a short, narrow look. It was the kind of look soldiers going into interrogation gave to soldiers leaving interrogation: Did you crack? Did you tell them something I should know about?

The moment passed quickly. As McCaskey entered, he was back on the job. Matt Stoll came in behind him. Carrie had not yet met the scientist alone. The MIT graduate was a lumpy man with eyes that saw elsewhere. Stoll struck her as a man who used his senses to guide him through this world while his mind lived in another, far more interesting place. He was carrying a compact disk on his index finger.

Carrie stood and went behind her desk. She did not want to be an armchair general when she received an official update.

“We may have caught a break,” McCaskey said. He stopped in front of the desk and remained standing. “There was a man at the club who Interpol and the Taipei police were watching. He was a reputed slave trader by the name of Hui-ling Wong, aka Lo Tek. He died in the blast. The coastal patrol had seen his boat arrive, and officers were dispatched to all the clubs he usually frequents.”

“Why didn’t they arrest him en route?” Carrie asked.

“Because they have no evidence,” McCaskey said. “The agents were at the nightclub with acoustic devices, hoping he would say something that would give them a reason to arrest him.”

“Did he?” Carrie asked, looking at the CD.

“No,” McCaskey replied. “But the agents were wearing wide wires, digital, wide-frequency recorders that collect every sound in a room and send it to a central location where the extraneous noises are removed.”

“That’s the only way to collect specific conversations without using a parabolic dish,” Stoll said.

“The agents were killed in the blast, but everything they recorded was sent to a mobile unit not far from the club,” McCaskey said. “Through my Interpol connections we got a copy.”

Stoll held up the CD on his finger.

“The explosion destroyed everything within one hundred yards of the epicenter,” McCaskey went on. “The bombers would have known the blast radius and made sure they were beyond that. But they would have had to be within three hundred fifty yards to detonate a radio-controlled device. Matt executed a thorough acoustic search in that window and managed to pick up the very faint trigger ping, the signal sent to activate the bomb.”

“We got the guys talking on the stairwell, Madam General,” Stoll said, “They were breathing hard, moving real fast, and speaking Cantonese.”

“So they were probably from the mainland:’ the general remarked. “What did you get?”

“Until the blast killed the wide wires, we managed to pick up their names,” Stoll told the general. He smiled a little for the first time. “More important, we got remarkably clear voiceprints.”

“There was no one else in the stairwell at that point:’ McCaskey noted.

Like fingerprints, voiceprints were unique to every individual. Stoll placed the CD on the general’s desk.

“Wepassed those charts back to Interpol and the Taipei police,” McCaskey said. “They’ve mobilized all of their ELINT units, including those of the military. They’ve sectored the city and are scanning every cell phone call being made. Which, at this hour, is not a lot.”

“They don’t actually have to listen to the calls,” Stoll explained. “All they need is to find a frequency that matches either voice.”

“Yes. I’ve worked with voiceprinting before,” the general said.

“Sorry,” Stoll said.

“So we have PRC bombers working in Taiwan,” Carrie said. “Hired hands?”

“We believe so. The working theory is that it’s the Tong Wars redux, right down to fighting of brothels and the trafficking of slave girls,” McCaskey said. “Foot soldiers working for gang leaders. In this case, though–and it’s the worst-case scenario–the leaders could be Beijing heavyweights. It will be tough to get to them.”

“Maybe,” General Carrie said. “Do you remember how Jack Manion dealt with the tongs?”

“Not actually, General.”

“His background was required reading when I went over to G2,” the general said. “In 1920, a gentleman named Dan O’Brien took over as San Francisco’s chief of police. He put his childhood friend Manion in charge of the Chinatown Squad. Inspector Manion recruited Chinese to infiltrate and inform on the warring factions, on shipments of heroin, on contracted hits. He made sure his men were there to intercept and interdict. He even came up with early electronic surveillance devices, such as electrified doormats to let him know how many people were inside a room. Manion also made protecting his sources a high priority. He always had his own men on the street where spies could go with information or for protection. Not only did Manion end the violence, but after ten years in the precinct, the grateful Chinese refused to let him leave. He stayed there until his retirement in 1946.” She leaned forward. “We need that here.”

“In China or in general?” McCaskey asked.

“Both. Our immediate concern will be making sure that we’ve got a blast shield for whatever is blowing up in China,” Carrie said. “I don’t care if they kill each other. But like Manion, I don’t want that spilling into the streets. Not the streets of Charleston or the streets of Taipei.”

“I still don’t see how we’re going to get close to the Chinese leaders,” McCaskey said. “We don’t have a deep well of HUMINT personnel and none over there. Are there resources you can call on?”

“There may be,” she said. “Let’s wait and see what the CA patrol turns up over there.”

CA was a chase and apprehend mission. In Carrie’s experience it was more often than not a full-fledged CAT operation: chase, apprehend, and terminate. Most spies and enemy infiltrators did not like to be apprehended.

McCaskey and Stoll left. Carrie slipped the CD into the computer and listened to the exchange between the bombers. The back-of-the-throat sound of the Chinese language was strikingly unfamiliar, but it was clear that both men were talking. They were definitely equals. They had been hired by someone else.

The prospect of facing a crisis this big on her first day in the director’s seat both scared and invigorated the general. She could not help but wonder if someone at the Pentagon or the White House had anticipated this.

“Toss it to the chick with three stars. See how she handles the long ball. . . .”

She would handle it just fine. Not only because her career depended upon it but because of something more important. Lives did.

Chapter Seventeen.

Taipei, Taiwan

Thesday, 4:22 A. M.

Senior Inspector Loke Chichang and Lieutenant Hanyu Yilan were partners at the Taipei Municipal Police Force CID–Criminal Investigation Division. Chichang was a twelve-year veteran, Yilan a five-year man. Chichang came from a family of soldiers and had extensive training in judo and marksmanship. Yilan was a graduate of the Central Police University with a doctorate in criminology. Chichang was a wide, burly man with muscle stacked on muscle. Yilan was barely 115 pounds of bone. Chichang had a wife and three children. Yilan did not.

But both men had at least one thing in common. A passion to protect their homeland.

They had been at home when they heard the explosion in the harbor. They immediately went to the stationhouse, fearing that Taiwan might be under attack. That had been ruled out by the time they arrived–not through detective work but because nothing else blew up. A report from Interpol provided additional information: the bombing was the work of two men. Listening squads in vans were being positioned about the city, scanning cell phone conversa-

tions to find a match for their voice patterns. Chichang and lan joined one of the units, sitting in patrol car seventeen behind a van. The precinct commander wanted a police presence around the city. That was not just to reassure the population but to force the perpetrators to hide.

To compel them to use a wireless phone.

Voiceprints, radio triangulation, and similar technologies both impressed and frightened Chichang. The fortyyear-old reasoned that if the police could watch lawbreakers, criminals could also watch police. That was one reason he did not use a cell phone. When he needed to call home, he pulled over to one of the increasingly rare pay phones and put his coins in the slot. The other reason was that he already had enough gear hanging from his. belt, from his gun to his radio to pepper spray and a baton. Moreover, he did not want to carry something that might beep or vibrate as he moved into a hazardous situation. His point-to-point radio was easy to turn off with just the press of a button. After that, it stayed silent and still.

“We’ve had a hit in the Daan District,” the CID dispatcher said over the phone. “One hundred percent match over a cell phone.”

Yilan was at the wheel. He pulled the patrol car from the curb and quickly headed west.

“The target is in the Cho-Chiun Hotel,” the dispatcher went on. “Cars three, seventeen, twenty, and twenty-one are closest. There is an underground parking structure. That is the rendezvous location. A bomb squad and backup are on the way, coming in silent, headlights only. Everyone else is to be turned away.”

That was not just for safety, of course. One of the incoming cars could be the bombers’ ride.

Chichang removed his snub-nosed .38 from its shoulder holster. He checked his weapon. Taiwan was not a society accustomed to guns and shoot-outs. Even among the police, pistol craft was a low priority and infrequently needed. Most crime was committed by thugs with clubs or knives. Homicide was relatively rare because it was difficult to get away from the crime scene and from the island nation. Chichang was a rarity, a true marksman. He had recently scored a 98 percent, the department’s highest ever, in the yearly handgun test. The examination involved eight points of ability: decision shooting against pop-up targets, reduced-light shooting, hitting moving targets, the use of cover when under fire, shooting to disable, alternate position shooting, reloading drills, and malfunction drills. The inspector would have earned a perfect score if a pigeon had not flown onto the range. Chichang did not think the bird was part of the test, but he could not be sure. He chose to shoot it. It was the wrong choice.

The gun was loaded, the safety was off, and the hammer mechanism was functioning free and clear, as his father used to describe it. The former army officer was the one who first taught his son how to shoot. Chichang slipped the weapon back into the holster as his heart began to speed up. The inspector had discharged his gun only once in all his years on the police force. That was during a raid on a drug factory in a harbor warehouse. He had wounded a pusher in the shin when the individual swung an AK-47 toward him. The victim was fifteen. He was sentenced to the same number of years in prison. Chichang was commended for his restraint.

The patrol car tore through the misty morning. They reached the hotel in under five minutes. Two of the other cars had already arrived. They parked in the small underground garage. As the ranking officer, Chichang was in charge of the operation. He told the two hotel security men to make sure all the exits were locked, including roof and cellar doors. Then he went to the front desk. According to the concierge, 418 was the only room in which two men were registered. Chichang asked the bellman to describe the layout of the floor. The room was relatively near the elevators. The two men might hear the bell if he went up that way.

The hotel was one of the older structures in the district, and there was only one stairwell. There were two windows, which overlooked the rooftop of a small grocery store. It was a two-story drop. Chichang instructed one of the police officers to go to that roof. He had one of the housekeepers go with him to point out the window of 418. If either of the men tried to escape, the officer was to open fire. His goal was to keep them inside, not to kill them.

The inspector took a master key from the desk and ordered Yilan and two other men to come with him. He sent one of the men to the fifth floor so the bombers could not go up. He left the other man on the third floor to block their descent. He and Yilan exited on the fourth floor. Yilan’s job was to make sure that if the two men got past him, they did not try to get into another room and take hostages. The bombers had taken a corner room ‘beside a linen closet. The room on the other side was occupied by a couple from England.

“I’m wondering if we should wait for the bomb squad and body armor,” Yilan said. “They may have more explosives.” “If we’re quick, they won’t have time to prime them.” “They may already have done so,” Yilan observed.

“If we wait too long, they may hear the quiet, start to wonder if something is wrong. We need to move quickly if we want to surprise them.”

“What about a chain on the door? Surely they would have used one.”

“That’s why I need you here,” the inspector said. They reached the door, and Chichang removed his handgun. He handed the brass key to Yilan. “You open it,” he whis- pered, pointing toward the room. Then he hunkered his right shoulder toward the door and put his weight on his right leg.

Yilan nodded in understanding.

He put the key in the lock as carefully as he could to make as little noise as possible. He turned to the right. The deadbolt slid back, and the door popped open. The chain was not on. But there was a very thin wire between the door and the jamb. It moved when the door swung inward. It pulled a plug from a detonator cap. The cap was stuck in a wad of plastique. It blew the top half of the door and the frame outward, slashing the two police officers with pieces of wood ranging from splinters to large fragments. They screamed and were tossed backward by the blast. Yilan took the brunt of the explosion, which tore a large, lethal hole through his rib cage. Chichang lost most of his face in the initial explosion. He also lost his right hand when the gunpowder in the shells detonated. He lay on the floor, his legs stretched across the carpet as his own blood mingled with that of Yilan.

The two bombers tossed aside the bedspread they had been holding over their heads. They pushed open the shattered door, stepped over the two bodies, and ran down the hall. They had been alerted by a call from the front desk. The Guoanbu maintained a covert sleeper presence in several Taiwanese businesses. This hotel was one of them. The concierge had no idea how the bombers were pinpointed. The only thing they could think of was that the cell phone had been compromised in some way. They had placed a short call to a relay boat in the East China Sea, letting their employer know that they had escaped the site. If they had been injured or captured, it could have led investigators to Director Chou.

The linen closet was unlocked, and the two men ducked inside. The officers who had been stationed on the staircase came running when they heard the blast. The bombers waited until they heard the men talking beside the blown- out door. Then they pushed open the closet door and ran to the stairwell. The door afforded them the moment of cover they needed to get away.

The two men hurried down the concrete steps. They got off on the second floor, which had a ballroom and a small kitchen. The doors were unlocked. They went inside, swung around a butcher-block island, and went to an emergency exit. It was there in case of fire in the kitchen. The steps were inside and led to a nondescript door near the Dumpster in an alley. Unless someone knew it was there, they would not think to look for it. The men listened, heard nothing, then opened the door a crack. There was no one in the alley. The CID had done a classic off-premises entry. The patrol cars were probably parked in a place where they would not have been heard or seen.

The two men walked into the damp, chill, early morning mist. They had arrived that same day and had no luggage. The explosives had been provided by a mainland loyalist in the Taiwanese military. They had planned to leave Taiwan the same way they came in, by a China Airlines flight through Tokyo. They would still do so, only now they would spend the next few hours at the White Wind all-night bar on Kunming Street instead of in their hotel room.

They had no way of notifying Director Chou that they had escaped. The cell phone had been attached to the plastique they applied to the door. The concierge had said he would call the boat with news of the getaway.

The men walked to the bar and went directly to the lavatory to wash the distinctive tart smell of the plastique from their hands. The bedspread, at least, had prevented their clothes from being covered with dust. They had walked off any traces that might have stuck to their soles.

Dawn came quickly, burning off the mist and allowing the two bombers to slip away, like human vapor.

Chapter Eighteen.

Washington, D. C.

Monday, 5:00 P. M.

Paul Hood felt mortified after talking with Mike Rodgers, though he was not sure why.

Horseshit, he scolded himself in a flash of candor. You know damn well what the reason is. He was humiliated because Mike Rodgers had come out on top. The guy who had been dismissed had not only landed upright but next to a ladder that let him scurry right back to the top. And beyond. Hood had landed on his ass and had to be picked up by the president and dusted off by the chief of staff. As Hood discovered, and as Rodgers had intimated, that was not a pleasant experience.

Lorraine Sanders came to Hood’s office as scheduled. She entered after knocking but before he told her to come in. He did not have time to put on his blazer, which was hanging from the back of his chair. Sanders’s mind was obviously somewhere else as she informed Hood that two temporary assistants were getting an on-site briefing at the new office. They would be prepared to take Hood around in the morning. She said that he was free to spend as much time in either office as he wished. A car would be at his disposal, though Hood told Sanders he preferred to drive himself.

“Are you trying to make the rest of us look bad?” the woman asked with a critical grin.

“Just a preference:’ he replied.

“You’d be the only senior staff member without a driver,” she pointed out. “There are also security issues. We’d feel better if you used him.”

” ‘We’ as in the president? Are you speaking for him?” “I know that is what he would want,” she replied.

“I’ll think about it,” Hood replied with a smile only slightly less insincere than her own.

What she had said to him was close to the truth. If he did not use a driver, someone in the press or the General Accounting Office might notice. They might wonder why anyone but the president and vice president needed a chauffeur. Perks might have to be sacrificed to keep the peace. Hood had always used that drive time to think. When he was mayor of L. A., he took public transportation to encourage its use. And Hood did not like the fact that Sanders was speaking for the president without even having discussed this with him.

Sanders’s smile evaporated as she gave Hood a CD containing intelligence matters that concerned the president. Hood promised to review them.

“I would also like to talk to him about a matter involving the PRC,” Hood told Sanders.

“Talk to me:’ she said.

“Prime Minister Le Kwan Po has requested information about an upcoming satellite launch at the Xichang space center. The satellite was built by Unexus, the firm run by my former deputy Mike Rodgers. He’s concerned that there may be an attempt to sabotage the booster.”

“Unexus is a firm with a minor American component, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know the exact proportion–“

“Why should this administration, be concerned about what is basically foreign-built hardware for a potentially hostile government?”

“The trajectory will carry the rocket over the Pacific,” Hood said. “If it blows up after launch, radiation from the plutonium power source is going to hit the atmosphere like Mardi Gras confetti. Some of that could come down in Hawaii or along the West Coast.”

“I see,” Sanders said. “And do you really think the prime minister will tell us what he knows?”

“The Chinese obviously have some kind of spitting contest going on,” Hood said. “He may be ready for a hand.”

Sanders nodded and looked at her watch. “The president will be finishing his meeting with the Joint Chiefs in about five minutes. I’ll pass this along.”

“Fine. But before you go, tell me why I had to stand here and justify my request,” Hood said. “It was my understanding that ‘I’d like a minute with the president’ was all I needed to tell you.”

She smiled more sincerely now. “You think too much,” she said. “I’ll let you know what the president says.”

The phone beeped as Sanders was leaving the office. The room was small enough so that Hood could grab the call and tap the door shut with his foot at the same time. He was aware of a sharpness in the little kick, a little Stuff it gesture to the retreating chief of staff.

“Paul Hood,” he said. He began rolling up his shirtsleeves like he used to do when he got to work at Op-Center or on a construction site in Los Angeles. Only now there was nothing to do.

“Paul, it’s Bob. The Taiwanese screwed up.”

“How?”

“The bombers got away,” Herbert said. “They killed two cops and blew up the cell phone when they did. We aren’t going to be hearing from them again.”

“Aren’t the police still looking?”

“No one saw them:’ Herbert said. “No one who survived. And the descriptions from the hotel workers are not giving them enough to go on.”

“What are the implications?” Hood asked, adding, “I don’t just mean for Mike’s launch.”

“That’s tough to say, Chief,” Herbert said. Was the use of the title a lapse or a sign of respect? Hood did not know, but it was nice to hear. “It’s not likely that these were the same people working in Charleston or Durban. They’d be two very tired men, and you don’t want tired men handling explosives. If there’s a network of bombers, and they were already positioned only in soft targets–for whatever reason–I would say the rocket launch is safe. But these three blasts could be the warm-ups for one or more big at-ticks. Perhaps the prime minister has insight we lack. We need to find out.”

“I agree,” Hood said.

“Did you make progress on your end?”

“I’m about to,” Hood replied. He was still standing beside his desk. He glanced at the closed door as if it were an enemy.

“I don’t follow.”

“I’ll call you when I get back from Olympus,” Hood promised.

The new special envoy to the president hung up the phone and left his office. He did not bother rolling his shirtsleeves back down. He had something to do, and it was in the Oval Office.

The Joint Chiefs were making their way down the corridor like a green glacier. They were talking quietly among themselves, ignoring the nonmilitary staff that moved past them. If thep resident were Zeus, then these were the tans, anchored by Army General Raleigh Carew. The Minnesotan stood six foot five and carried himself even taller. Hood sidled by. At the end of the hallway he entered the office of the president’s executive secretary, Julie Kubert. They had not been introduced earlier, but she knew who he was and greeted him by name. The door to the Oval Office was open to her left. Debenport was on the phone.

“I’d like to see the president,” Hood said.

The white-haired woman looked at her computer. “How is tomorrow morning at ten fifteen–“

“Today,” Hood said. “Now would be good.”

The former executive secretary to the publisher of the Chicago Tribune–which supported Debenport–looked over. “The president of Laos is waiting in the Red Room, Mr. Hood.”

“Appropriate,” Hood remarked. He cocked his head toward the Oval Office. “Is he speaking with Ms. Sanders?” “Mr. Hood–“

“Has she been to see him?”

“Mr. Hood, they are scheduled to review the day at six-fifteen, as always. Now, do you want an appointment for tomorrow or not?”

“Ms. Kubert, there’s something going on that I must discuss with the president, and soon.”

“If it will shut you up, Paul, come in,” Debenport said.

“Thank you,” Hood said to Kubert. Then he turned and entered the Oval Office. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I need to speak with Prime Minister Le Kwan Po.”

“The Chinese fence-sitter,” the president said. “Why?”

“He may be sitting on intel we need,” Hood replied.

Lorraine Sanders rushed in. She obviously had been alerted by Ms. Kubert. The chief of staff said nothing as she took up a position beside the president’s desk. Arms folded, she glared at Hood.

Hood ignored her. When the president was still Senator Debenport, and head of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee, he would often pit factions one against the other, then step aside as they slugged it out. The survivor was someone he wanted on his side. Hood did not know if that was the case here. It would not be a bad tactic to put sinew into a new administration. If this were a gladiatorial showdown, Hood did not intend for it to end with Sanders’s foot on his neck. Either he would win or leave the arena.

Hood told the president what he had already explained to Sanders, adding the new information from Bob Herbert. He made the presentation as concise as possible. The president listened, then rose and walked from behind the desk. He came around the side opposite from where Sanders was standing.

“Ms. Sanders, have Ambassador Hasen look into a meeting,” the president said. “Paul, get yourself over to our embassy in Beijing.”

“Sir?”

The president stopped beside Hood. “If there’s infighting in Beijing, we need to know. It might help to have General Rodgers with you. He can go to observe the launch, I presume.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“As for Op-Center, I want you to talk to General Carrie before you leave. The Joint Chiefs were just in here. They mentioned something in passing that obviously dovetails with this.”

“What’s that, sir?” Sanders asked. It was an obvious effort to become part of a project she had not felt was terribly important. Until right now.

“General Carrie has requested that a small group of marines be seconded to Op-Center for a possible security mission in Beijing,” the president told Hood. “One that will be defined as information becomes available.”

“Did she say what kind of security mission it would be?” Hood asked.

“The president said it would be defined later,” Sanders said.

“What I mean, sir, would it be at the launch site, at the embassy, or a black ops action somewhere else?” Hood asked the president, ignoring Sanders.

“The Joint Chiefs did not tell me, and I did not ask. There was no point. As I told you before, Paul, General Carrie was pushed on me as the head of Op-Center. If the military is planning some kind of new and covert direction for Op-Center, I want to know what it is–not what they tell me it is.”

“Understood,” Hood said.

“It’s good you have someone you trust on the inside,” the president told him. “Tell Herbert to keep one eye on the NCMC . . . and one on his ass.” He winked, then did not look back as he headed toward the door.

Hood looked over at Lorraine Sanders. Her arms were still crossed, and her expression was still sour. Debenport’s inner circle had a reputation for resenting outsiders. If Hood let that bother him, he would never be able to do his job.

“I’ll have the travel office arrange for a ticket to Beijing,” she said to him.

“Thanks.”

She walked toward the door, stopping beside Hood. “If you do that again, I’ll feed you to General Carew. I swear it.”

“Are you working for him? Should the president be concerned?”

“No,” she replied thickly. “I just happen to know the general likes chewing up starchy little bureaucrats.”

She crossed the blue carpet with its gold symbol of the presidency, leaving Hood alone for a moment in the Oval Office. He had alwas understood why presidents became paranoid, why they installed recording devices in the West Wing. He just hated being a part of that intrigue. The people at Op-Center had always pulled together toward a sin-

gle goal: protecting the United States and its interests from chaos. Here, they helped to create it.