Abyss

ONE

Brian DeCamp, forty-three, slender with thinning sand-colored hair, unremarkable in looks and stature, parked his rental Ford Taurus next to a tour bus in the visitors center of the Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Plant on Florida’s east coast eighty miles north of Miami. It was a few minutes before noon on a sunny day, but driving up along A1A, the highway that paralleled the ocean, he’d not really noticed the beaches or the occasional stretches of pretty scenery. Instead he’d mentally prepared himself for what was coming next.

Prepare first, shoot second, and you might just live to return to base. Never underestimate your enemy. Kill whenever, wherever the chance presents itself. Take no prisoners. Show no mercy. Wage total war, not police actions.

He’d learned those lessons from his days as a young lieutenant in the South African Defence Force’s Buffalo Battalion.

The Battalion’s primary mission had been to fight a brutal unconventional war behind enemy lines in Angola. And he’d been damned good, so that when he finally walked away seventeen years ago when the South African government had betrayed the unit by disbanding it and disavowing its tactics, he’d been one of the most decorated and youngest full bird colonels in any South African unit.

And he’d been a bitter man because he’d been forced to leave the intense camaraderie and esprit de corps of men who had shared the fighting and violent deaths with a sense of purpose; the holy zeal for the motherland, for the empire.

In the end the Battalion’s ideal had arisen from a letter a Roman centurion had written to a cousin back in Rome when the center began to fall apart: Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the Empire. If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on the desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions!

He got out of the car and headed across to the low building called Energy Encounter that served as the facility’s visitors center and he was still surprised at how easy it had been to get permission for a tour of the plant, though it had taken him the better part of the year to put everything together before he’d applied. It was silly, actually, after 9/11, for Homeland Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration to be so lax with such vulnerable targets that had the potential for destruction and loss of lives a hundred times worse than the World Trade Center.

He’d gotten the first call eight days ago from Achmed bin Helbawi, who’d reported that everything at the plant was in readiness. The Semtex and detonators were in place along with the weapons he’d smuggled in piece by piece over the past weeks. The Saudi- and French-educated New al-Quaeda operative had worked at the plant as an engineer in the control room for ten months under the name Thomas Forcier, and already he’d built up a reputation as an intelligent, cheerful, and reliable employee. Everyone liked Tom. He’d made no enemies.

DeCamp’s application for a tour had required a social security number, which he’d supplied under the name Robert Benson, a high school teacher from San Francisco. The name and the number were legitimate, but Benson was dead, his disappearance not yet reported because he was on vacation. In fact, that part of the op had been the most difficult to figure out. DeCamp had hacked into the databases of several San Francisco high schools before coming up with a dozen possibilities — teachers about the right size and build, who were single and lived alone. And it had taken even longer to find out who would be leaving town at the right time.

Benson, who was a homosexual, fit the bill, and two nights before he was scheduled to fly to Hawaii, DeCamp had followed him from a gay bar back to his apartment. Posing as an interested guy from the club, DeCamp got into the apartment without a fuss, had broken the man’s neck, and then telephoned Delta Airlines to cancel his flight.

That same night DeCamp had sealed the body in a plastic sheet with duct tape so that no odors of decomposition would escape to alert the neighbors and stuffed the body in the bedroom closet.

He took Benson’s identification and laptop to his hotel, where in the morning he went online to apply for a tour pass, which came three days later. After he’d altered his appearance with hair dye and glasses and then Benson’s driver’s license, substituting his own photograph, he’d left for Miami to wait for the final call from bin Helbawi giving the time and date that the next large tour group was scheduled.

The power plant’s twin pressurized water reactors, housed in a pair of heavily reinforced containment buildings like giant farm silos, dominated the facility that sprawled over an 1,100-acre site on Hutchinson Island, which looked more like some manufacturing operation than an electrical generating station. A maze of buildings were interconnected by large piping, umbilical cords that sent nonradioactive steam from inside the containment domes to the turbines and generators, returning the cooled steam back to the heat exchanger attached to the reactor. Two wide canals brought seawater for cooling from the ocean just across the highway.

Producing 1,700 megawatts, the plant supplied a significant portion of Florida’s power needs, and should there ever be an accidental release of nuclear materials, which would happen in about four hours, more than 140,000 people in a ten-mile radius would have to be evacuated or be in trouble.

That part of the operation was of no interest to DeCamp because by then he would be flying first class aboard a Delta jet back to Paris and from there by train to his home in the south of France where he could return to his flower gardens and pastoral existence.

It was just noon when he presented his visitor’s pass and driver’s license to one of the women behind the counter in the busy lobby of what looked like one of the attractions at Disney’s Epcot. An animated model of the facility took up an adjacent room, and everywhere on the walls and scattered around the center were interactive flat-screen televisions, models of atoms and other displays where people, either not taking the tour or who had already been, were wandering. A group of middle school children and their chaperones were doing something at several computer screens, and overall there was a muted buzz of conversation. No one was speaking much above a whisper. Just out the door and through the secured area fences were a pair of nuclear reactors, practically atomic bombs in some people’s minds, devices that were even holier and scarier than churches. This was a place of respect and awe.

The clerk compared the photograph to DeCamp’s face then laid it on a card reader, which was connected to a nationwide police database, something DeCamp had already done. Benson had come up clean.

When she was finished she looked up and smiled. “You have a choice, sir. You can join the Orlando tour, which starts in ten minutes, or wait for the next regular one, which begins at two. You might want to wait because the two o’clock has four people booked. The noon has eighteen. And the one o’clock is just for the schoolchildren.”

DeCamp nodded. “Actually I’m supposed to be in Jacksonville later this afternoon, so if it’s okay I’ll tag along with the Orlando group.”

“Yes, sir.”

She handed him a packet of materials containing cutaway diagrams of the plant’s reactors, turbines, and generators, as well as a map of the site, all the buildings and their functions, including the main control room in the South Service Building, labeled, which was incredible, and DeCamp had to suppress a smile. He was here to damage the facility, and they had given him a blueprint of the bloody place.

“You’ll need this as well,” she said, handing him a bright orange visitor’s pass on a lanyard. “Please keep it around your neck and in plain sight at all times. Our Barker security people get nervous otherwise.”

“Of course,” DeCamp said.

As well they should. It hadn’t been difficult to dredge up profiles on most of the two dozen or so security people and any number of so-called security lapses over the past eight or ten years, including the shortcuts that guards on patrol routinely took, apparently because they’d wanted to get back inside and watch television. Early in 2003 some new fuel containers had been delivered to the plant aboard a flatbed truck, which was parked just outside the radiologically controlled area (RCA) fence. But the containers were sealed at only one end, and no one had bothered to search them before they were admitted too close to the containment domes and the RCA backyard and one of the fuel-handling buildings. And this had been going on for some time before that incident. The year before, Barker’s people doing access control duty let an unauthorized visitor into the protected area of the plant where he somehow managed to get inside the South Service Building without an escort and without being challenged.

The only really good improvement was the closed-circuit television system, with cameras in a lot of the sensitive areas. That information had not been available online, of course, but bin Helbawi had sent him a detailed sketch map of the camera locations, which he memorized, and for a hefty price a Swiss engineer, with whom he’d done business before, had supplied him with a device that could freeze any camera for a few seconds at a time. Disguised as an ordinary cell phone, entering 000 then * would activate the clever circuit, yet the device actually worked as a cell phone.

The tour group people, most of them middle-aged men and women, not too different in appearance from DeCamp, were passing through an electronic security arch one by one, after first putting their wallets, keys, watches, and cell phones into little plastic containers that were sent through a scanner. It was the same sort of setup used in airports, and just as easy to foil.

Putting the visitor’s pass around his neck, DeCamp joined the queue, where he placed his wallet, watch, cell phone, and money clip with a few hundred dollars into a plastic tray, and when it was his turn he stepped through the arch under the watchful eye of an unarmed security guard in uniform.

Besides the man seated behind the scanner examining what was coming through in the plastic buckets, two other security guards stood to one side as the tour group gathered in front of an attractive young woman dressed in a khaki skirt and a blue blazer with the insignia of Sunshine State Power & Light on the left breast. She was smiling brightly and DeCamp noticed the two guards watching her rather than the people in the tour group, and he thought that it was a wonder that this place hadn’t been hit yet. No one here seemed to think that such a thing was possible, let alone feasible.

“Welcome to Sunshine State Power and Light’s Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Plant,” the young woman said when DeCamp and everyone else had recovered their belongings from the scanner. “My name is Debbie Winger — just like the movie actress.”

A few of the men in the group chuckled.

“I’ll be your guide for this afternoon’s ninety-minute tour. But before we get started I need to go over a few ground rules with you. This is a working electrical generating facility, and therefore some areas are strictly off limits — simply because they’re too dangerous. So, rule number one, everyone stick together and no wandering off on your own. Once we go out the door behind me, you’ll be given hard hats. So, rule number two is that you wear them at all times.” Her smile widened even further. “If you have a question, please don’t hesitate to ask. And the last rule is, enjoy the tour.”

TWO

Gail Newby looked down from the executive gallery at the tour group on the main floor of the South Service Building. The security people at the visitors center had presumably checked their credentials before the young tour guide had brought them over here, and when she was finished with her short spiel she would be bringing them upstairs and down the corridor past the conference room to the big plate-glass windows that looked down on the complex control room where the real work of the station was accomplished.

“Craziness,” Gail muttered, and she was reminded of her heated discussion last week with plant manager Bob Townsend about the recent spate of security lapses. As independent chief of security, which meant she did not work for Barker Security, Inc., but directly for the National Nuclear Security Administration, NNSA, it was her job to oversee the overall safety of the plant. In that she was second in command only to Townsend, a fact he had sharply reminded her of again yesterday.

At thirty-eight, she was a slightly built woman with short dark hair, coal-black eyes, and wide glasses framing her pretty, oval face. She’d graduated magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota with degrees in criminology and business, and then four years later graduated number three from Harvard’s law school. And as one of her classmates whom she’d dated during most of her freshman year said, she was definitely a case of beauty and brains if he’d ever seen one. But driven. He’d called her “the Ice Maiden,” which had stuck with her the entire four years.

Her assistant, Lawrence Wager, also an NNSA employee, came down the corridor from the conference room where he’d set up the security arrangements for the meeting of a bunch of SSP&L top brass and a NOAA egghead from Princeton, which had just started a couple of minutes ago.

“Looks like we’re running Grand Central Station,” he said, leaning on the rail next to her.

Wager, in his early forties, was an ex-New York City gold shield cop who’d been forced into retirement after he’d been shot during a domestic dispute on the Upper West Side. He and Gail got along very well because their ideas about security were practically the same. They both had the cop mentality, his from twenty years on the force, and hers because she’d been raised by her father, a Minneapolis cop who’d been killed in the line of duty, and because of her background with the FBI.

She glanced up. “You got Townsend and everybody settled in?”

He nodded. “Could be blood on the table before it’s done. She wants to close us down.”

“Never happen.”

“Why’s that?”

“First rule of business — never screw with a moneymaking concern.”

Wager, who was even shorter than Gail with a featherweight boxer’s build and the square-jawed, no-nonsense television docudrama profile of the quintessential cop that in fact had landed his face in police recruitment posters and literature all through his career, had to laugh. “Until somebody decides to build a better mousetrap. Anyway, this place gives me the willies.”

“Yeah, it affects a lot of people that way.”

“But not you.”

She shrugged. “The chances of getting hit by lightning are ten million times greater than this place turning into another Chernobyl. Our guys already know how to build the better mousetrap.”

“How about Three Mile Island?”

“Different type of reactor, along with what was probably sloppy management,” Gail said.

Because whatever disagreements she’d had, and in some ways still had, with Townsend they were never about operations, he had a first-class staff of engineers and safety experts here. But security had become a big enough concern in all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. that the NNSA had hired people like her and Wager for oversight. These tours were her one bone of contention with Townsend, who had bent under pressure from Homeland Security to allow public tours in order to prove that there was nothing to fear from a terrorist attack.

The New al-Quaeda had some sophisticated people out there looking for the right opportunity to strike the U.S. in a way that would be on par with 9/ll. The CIA had been warning the director of U.S. Intelligence that the terrorists had become almost frantic in their efforts to hit us, because since bin Laden had faded from sight al-Quaeda had lost its luster. The opportunity was ripe for something to happen, even though the Agency was expending a great deal of its resources to stop such an act, which in itself was worrisome to Gail. The CIA had blinders on, paying too much attention to the evolution of bin Laden’s followers instead of monitoring the bigger picture, looking for our weaknesses, watching for the unexpected attack to come from a completely unexpected direction.

It was the same mistake her father had made that had cost him his life. He’d been working street crimes, and he and his partner had been tracking the small-time drug dealers, trying to follow the links up to the big suppliers. The night he was killed in downtown Minneapolis near the old Greyhound bus depot, he had been dressed as a hustler in a flashy suit and gaudy gold jewelry, talking with one of the small-time street dealers, pressing the kid for a big score. So big it would have to go to one of the suppliers.

A bus had dropped off a load of passengers and as some of them began to straggle out of the depot, a street bum came up behind an old woman struggling with her suitcase, knocked her to her knees, and tried to grab her purse.

Gail had heard the story from her dad’s partner at the funeral, but it wasn’t until she’d become a cop herself that she’d been able to see the file. The woman had screamed for help, and her dad, figuring being a Good Samaritan was better than being supercop, turned away from the drug deal to help the woman.

But the street bum, who’d had a long record of petty thefts, public drunkenness, and urinating in front of a school bus loaded with kids, was armed with a .38 Midnight Special, which he pulled and fired, one shot hitting Officer Newby in the heart, dropping him on the spot.

Before the bum got three steps, Officer Newby’s partner shot and killed the man, but by then it was far too late.

It was a mistake that had cost him his life when Gail was nine years old, and every day of her life since she had been angry with him for leaving her so soon, leaving her to a mother who became a drunk and who’d slept with any man who would have her until sclerosis of the liver ended her life. And every day of her life she’d desperately wanted to prove that she was a better cop than he had been. Her near-manic drive had put off just about every man she’d ever met, except for one, and he’d been the exception. Perhaps he’d even been a father figure. But he had been in the middle of dealing with his own personal tragedy, so she’d known even though she’d thrown herself at him that they could never have a real relationship. And maybe she’d been punishing herself again.

Christ, there were days like this when all that past came roaring at her like a jumbo jet, so that she had trouble not despising who and what she had become.

The tour guide pointed toward the open stairway from the entry hall and she started her group that way.

“Want me to tag along with them?” Wager asked.

She had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, and now she was bitchy. It was nothing more than that. She shook her head. “We have to put up with this sort of thing, no getting around it.”

Wager knew her moods. “I’ll keep an eye on the monitors,” he said. “But from here they look harmless.”

“Yeah,” Gail said. “If you need me I’ll be outside, seeing how our guys are doing.” She often wandered around the facility, carrying her FM communications radio that not only kept her in touch with the Barker guards, but could also monitor any of the closed-circuit television cameras. Since she’d started her unannounced patrols the security force had definitely sharpened up, not that they were all that bad before.

Wager went back to the security suite at the far end of the corridor, and Gail waited for the tour group to come up to the second floor and walk past her. The tour guide nodded and smiled.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Newby,” she said brightly.

Gail nodded, but kept her eyes on the nineteen people in the group. Most of them were from the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, but four of them were add-ons, whose names and backgrounds Homeland Security had vetted. Ordinary-looking people. No Arab males with serious five o’clock shadows. No one wearing bulky clothing that could conceal explosives. No one who looked away, or looked frightened, or nervous or ill at ease. No one who looked the slightest bit suspicious.

But she couldn’t relax, couldn’t just go with the flow. It was one of the parts of who she was that she didn’t find appealing. A friend had once said that being around her for any length of time was like biting on tinfoil. It probably wasn’t an original line, but it had made Gail wonder that if her friends had that sort of an opinion of her, what sort of image was she projecting? When she thought she was smiling, maybe in fact she was frowning. A defense mechanism against hurt?

When the group had passed, she put on her hard hat and headed downstairs.

THREE

The group stopped at tall plate-glass windows that at this moment were closed by blinds on the inside, and DeCamp glanced back to where the woman had been standing by the rail, but she was gone. It was the expression in her eyes, the way she had scrutinized everyone, frowning a little, clearly disturbed about something that had attracted her attention.

He hadn’t risked looking at her for more than a split second, nor had he taken the chance to read her name tag, but he was fairly certain she was security, possibly NNSA. And had she remained at the rail, watching them, it would have made things difficult. It would have been risky to slip away at this point, he would have had to wait until they were outside before he could change badges and go around to the back of the building. Every mission contained the possibility of the unexpected. It couldn’t be helped.

The tour guide pushed a button on a small remote control device and the blinds opened on a room below on the main floor about fifty feet wide and twice that long that looked like something out of science fiction. Rack-mounted equipment with dozens of monitors and controls covered the front wall, faced by a pair of horseshoe-shaped desks, each manned by two men dressed in spotless white coveralls. The desks were equipped with several computer monitors and keyboards that were used to control the reactors.

A supervisor dressed in a dark blue blazer stood near his own desk directly below the window and between the two control positions. He was talking on the telephone.

“This is the heart of our facility,” the tour guide began.

DeCamp had remained at the back of the group throughout the tour so far, and no one had paid much attention to him. Directly overhead, one of the closed-circuit television cameras, its red light illuminated, was angled toward the people standing in front of the viewing window. He turned his head as the camera panned from left to right so that whoever was watching would not get a good frontal image of his face.

“Both of our nuclear reactors are controlled by the four operators and one supervising engineer you see on duty below. The room is manned twenty-four/seven as you can imagine, and the primary purpose of most of what you’re seeing is safety.”

The camera panned back to the center of the group and came to rest, the red light still on. Someone was looking for something or someone, and DeCamp thought it might be at the orders of the woman at the rail. But if she’d become suspicious, even had a hunch, she would have either stopped the group and asked to see their IDs, or she would have turned everyone back. To do otherwise, especially in this building, would have been more than foolish.

“The panels on the back wall look complicated,” the tour guide was saying. “And they are, but put simply they’re each divided into three parts. The first controls the reactor itself, along with the coolant, in this case seawater, and the steam generator, which you will see a little later. The second is used to operate the steam lines that feed the turbine, which generates the electricity we produce. We’ll be going to the turbine room, and believe me, you’ll be impressed. And the third set of gauges and monitors is in many ways the most important, because they control the reactors’ emergency coolant systems.”

She turned to look at her group. “You’ve probably heard the term scram, or scraming a reactor. Well, that’s something called a backronym, which comes from the first nuclear reactor in 1942 in Chicago. In case there was a runaway nuclear reaction, which would have caused a meltdown, one man with an axe was ordered to cut the ropes that held the control rods in place. That would have immediately shut down the reactor. His job title was Safety Control Rod Axe Man — SCRAM. And of course every one of those systems has its own alarm in case anything goes wrong.”

“Has anything ever gone wrong?” one of the women in the group asked. She seemed nervous.

“Sure,” the guide said, smiling. “All the time, but that’s what the panels on the back wall take care of. If one of the reactors gets a little too frisky, a few control rods automatically drop into place.”

Another in the group started to speak, but the guide held him off.

“Nothing serious has ever happened in the more than thirty years we’ve been in business,” the guide said. “Let me put it this way. Back in 2003 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees our operations, extended our license on reactor one until 2036, and until 2043 for number two.” Her smile broadened. “Even I will be an old lady by then.”

A few of the guys chuckled, and DeCamp had to wonder if every American male thought through his dick, or was it just the men in this group?

In France it was different, subtler, but with an ever-present sexual tension that seemed to hang in the air. It was his world now, with Martine in their hillside home above Nice. Different than when he was growing up alone on the streets of Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town, places of stiff formalities among the whites and an almost feckless abandon among a lot of the blacks.

He was eight years old when a man shot his father to death in a waterfront bar over an argument about money. He could see his mother’s face after the cops had come to the door of their Durban apartment to tell her what had happened. She’d become instantly angry, not hysterical that her husband was dead, but mad that she was being stuck with the bills and the responsibility for raising her only child. She’d railed at the cops, who’d finally turned and walked away.

And DeCamp remembered the look on their faces as well; they’d been surprised at first, but that had changed to something else, that even an eight-year-old could clearly understand. It was disgust written in their eyes, on their mouths, and pity, too. Later, when he’d become streetwise enough to pick just the right mark to rob so that he could eat, he realized that the cops weren’t feeling any pity for his mother or for him, they had been feeling pity for the poor bastard of a husband who’d lived with a woman like that.

In the morning she was gone. No note, no money, just the furniture and dishes and a little food in the fridge and the cupboards. It took two days before the landlord realized what was happening, that the husband was dead and that the wife was gone, leaving an eight-year-old to fend for himself, and he called the authorities.

When DeCamp had spotted the cop car pulling up outside, he’d grabbed a jacket and ran out the back door into the alley and disappeared. His father had never trusted the coppers, and they were the ones who’d brought the news that he was dead, so he wasn’t going to let them take him to jail. They probably did things to little kids in those places.

The following months were a blur to him, though he had been raped by a gang of boys on his second night on the street, and he remembered being hungry all the time, and cold and afraid. But gradually he learned to take care of himself, to run if possible or to fight back if need be.

He was a street-hardened kid of eleven when he’d come to the attention of Jon Frazer, a retired SADF lieutenant colonel, whom he tried to rob at knifepoint early one evening. That had been in Cape Town, and before he knew what happened he was on the ground, his right arm dislocated at the shoulder, and the knife skittering away down the alley.

“Lad, before you go up against a bloke, the wise tactic would be to study him first,” the colonel told him.

“Fuck you,” DeCamp said.

“An interesting proposition,” Frazer, who as it turned out had been in charge of the school that trained special forces units, replied. “I’m in need of a batman, and you can have the job if you want it.”

DeCamp said nothing. He hadn’t known what a batman was, and lying there in the alley with the deceptively harmless old man who had disarmed him standing over him, he realized that there were a lot of other things he hadn’t learned. Living in one of the shantytowns for whites, and working the streets for his existence, left no time to do anything except survive.

“Either that or we’ll just pop round to the police barracks and let them take care of you.”

“What’s a batman?”

“What’s a batman, sir, ” the colonel said. “An officer’s assistant, and you’ll fit the bill if you want. A place to live, three hots per day, and if you behave, a little money, and perhaps school.” The colonel shook his head. “On second thought you wouldn’t fit in. No, it’d be tutors.”

The next eight years had not been without trouble, but DeCamp had learned to keep his mouth shut, his inner thoughts to himself, and he’d learned languages, history, mathematics, physics, and chemistry from a series of tutors, as well as the basic principles of weapons, explosives, combat, and hand-to-hand techniques from the old man. But he’d never forgotten the lessons he’d learned on the streets, mostly self-reliance, nor did he ever learn why the colonel had taken him in like that, except the old man had never been married and never had children and he liked to have sex once a month with his batman.

The last two things the colonel had done before he’d died of a massive coronary were to enroll DeCamp in the South African Military Academy at the University of Stellenbosch in the West Coast town of Saldanha, and ask some of his friends still in the SADF to watch out for the kid. “He’ll make a hell of a fighter. Ruthless and smart.”

DeCamp had graduated at the top of his class with a bachelor’s in military science in the field of natural science, which was the most prestigious of studies.

The colonel’s friends made good on their promises, and he was sent to a series of specialist schools in various combat styles, weapons, explosives, field tactics, infiltration and exfiltration, and HALO parachute jumps in which the fully kitted-out soldier jumped from an airplane at a very high altitude, to escape detection from someone on the ground, and stayed in freefall almost all the way down until making a low opening.

It wasn’t long after that he was assigned to the Buffalo Battalion, and his real life had begun. For the first time he had a purpose, and he’d reveled in it.

The tour guide stood flat-footed with her silly grin. “Now if there are no other questions, we’ll head downstairs the back way and go over to the turbine building.”

No one said a thing.

“No questions? Good, then if you’ll follow me.”

DeCamp stepped aside as if he wanted to take a last look at the control room as the blinds closed, allowing the tour guide and her flock to pass him. He casually reached in his pocket and pressed 000* on his cell phone, which temporarily froze the closed-circuit camera just above the window, before he turned and fell in behind the last people in the group.

The corridor branched to the left past several offices, most of the doors closed, accessible only by key cards, to the stairwell and they headed back down to the ground floor, where DeCamp again used his cell phone to shut down the camera mounted high near the ceiling.

“You’ll be issued earmuffs before we go into the main turbine hall,” the tour guide was saying at the exit door. “It’s the loudest place anywhere in our facility. Even louder than the cafeteria on a Bucs game day.”

She went outside first, and before the last of the group was out, and before the closed-circuit camera came back to life, a door to the left opened and bin Helbawi was there.

“Everything set?” DeCamp asked, keeping his eye on the outside door as it swung closed.

“Yes.”

DeCamp slipped inside, the security door shutting behind him.

FOUR

The box lunches were tuna sandwiches on white bread or ham and cheese on rye, a small bag of potato chips, a pickle, and a bottle of Evian. The same sort of lunches Eve Larsen had been eating as she talked to scientists, energy people, and journalists around the country for the past fourteen months, trying to drum up acceptance if not support for her project. But it had become a tough sell once oil slid below the magic number of $70 per barrel, which is when interest in alternative energy sources began to fade.

It would be no different here today, she could see it in the bored faces of the eight men and one woman — all VIPs of one sort or another with Sunshine State Power & Light, which owned and operated this facility. But at least they’d been willing to listen, in a large measure because she’d promised to supply SSP&L with practically free electricity. An intriguing thought, even though most of them had heard of her and knew something about the experimental work she’d done just offshore last year. Work that had ended in one death and a near drowning, that Eve — though no one else — had claimed was sabotage. And in another measure SSP&L had agreed to let her speak here out of a certain amount of wishing to get to know a potential enemy sooner rather than later. Don had called her “The Queen of the High Seas.” The Fox crew had picked up on it that day aboard the Gordon Gunther , broadcast it as part of the mini-documentary, and it had stuck.

“Queen of the High Seas comes to the daring rescue of a crewman. Brains, beauty, and fearlessness. Who can say no?”

The nine people seated around the table in the spartan second-floor conference room in the Hutchinson Island South Service building that’s who, she thought, as Bob Townsend, the plant manager, got to his feet to introduce her to the eight others. He looked more like a roustabout than the guy in charge of a highly complex and potentially dangerous facility, but he’d been in the business in one way or another all his career, and had a solid reputation.

“Dr. Evelyn Larsen has come here today to tell us a little more about her intriguing project to not only help solve our energy problems, including the dangers of nuclear energy, as well as our continued dependence on foreign oil, but how she plans to modify the weather worldwide.” Townsend smiled. “For the better, we presume.”

Eve smiled faintly, not rising to the same bait that had been thrown at her from the beginning.

“By way of a very brief background, Dr. Larsen comes to us from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — funded Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton where she has been conducting her research into what she calls the World Energy Needs project.

“Her reputation and solid academic credentials of course have preceded her. I don’t think anyone missed the Time magazine article on her two years ago in which it was suggested that she was short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Physics. So it is a distinct honor to have her with us today.”

Everyone was looking at her as if she were a bug under a microscope. In some ways a dangerous, disagreeable bug, and it was the same look she’d gotten practically everywhere she’d given her presentation. She was getting tired of trying to explain herself, and of trying to raise awareness and therefore money.

“You’ve all received background information that Dr. Larsen was kind enough to send us in advance of her visit today, and if you’ve had a chance to look at the material you’ll have a better handle on what she has to say.”

Townsend was a nuclear engineer by training and Eve’s project, which threatened to make nuclear power plants obsolete, ran opposite of everything he’d worked for his entire career, and it showed in the tone of his voice, his demeanor, and his entire attitude, one of barely concealed contempt. And fear?

He continued. “From my left around the table are Sarah Mueller, Sunshine State Power and Light’s nuclear programs manager; Dan Seward, our vice president for environmental affairs; Thomas Differding, SSP and L’s top engineer and chief of operations; David Wren, the company’s assistant chief financial officer; Alan Rank, our vice president; Craig Frey, a member of SSP and L’s board of directors; Eric Utt, vice president in charge of new plant development, and our own Chris Strasser, whose job here at Hutchinson Island is chief engineer.”

Each of them nodded politely as they were introduced, but with no warmth, only a little curiosity that they were meeting the Queen of the High Seas.

“Dr. Larsen,” Townsend said, and he sat down at the opposite end of the mahogany table from her.

She kept a neutral expression on her face, and promised herself that she would not lecture, nor would she let her anger get out of hand like it had done before. “It’s counterproductive,” Don had warned her. “You’re the scientist — one of NOAA’s most respected, so that’s how you need to come across.”

“They don’t listen,” she’d responded, knowing Don was right.

“Hell, even Bob Krantz won’t listen and he’s seen the data, he understands the conclusions, and he knows that the science is sound.”

“It’s all politics,” Eve had said bitterly. Just as it was here in the Hutchinson Island boardroom.

“Damned right,” Don had said. “So you better start acting like a politician if you want funding.”

Eve got to her feet and managed to smile and actually mean it. These people weren’t her last hope, but without SSP&L’s cooperation she would have to move the first stage of her project elsewhere. But Hutchinson Island was ideal, and the experiment last year had proved it.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “And thank you for agreeing to hear me out. If you’ve read the material my lab e-mailed you two weeks ago, I won’t have to go over in any detail the science of my proposal, except to tell you some things that I’m sure you all know. By 2050 the world will need twice the energy we’re producing now. Which is why more than thirty permits will be granted for the construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. alone.”

“We’ve applied for several of those permits,” Sarah Mueller said. “And our funding is already coming together.”

“That’s good to know, because the need for new power is acute, and of course it will take two decades before any power from those new stations will hit the Eastern Interconnect. And that’s only one of the problems; there is a larger issue with using nuclear energy to generate electricity.”

“Spare us the dangers of the ten-thousand-year half-life of spent fuel rods,” Townsend said, obviously holding his anger in check. Without doubt he’d been hearing that argument for years, and was sick of it.

But Eve had known it would come up. “Not that at all,” she said. “The problem is the huge amount of cooling water you have to bring in from the sea. Nuclear reactors generate a bunch of heat, and a lot of that energy is lost. It’s the same with coal-fired plants where energy is lost up the stacks and into the atmosphere. Combine that loss, which is as much as fifty to fifty-five percent, with the ten percent loss from transmission lines made of aluminum wire, and more than half the energy you produce here is wasted.”

“You’re quoting Jeff Sachs now,” Seward, the VP for environmental affairs, said. “But he was talking about fossil fuel emissions. His implication was for more nuclear stations, not less.”

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, who ran Columbia University’s Earth Institute, was an economist who had argued in Scientific American that government-mandated cutbacks in carbon dioxide emissions from burning oil, natural gas, and especially coal, would create an economic blow to an expanding global economy so severe that billions of people would be adversely affected.

“You’re right,” Eve agreed. “But he was also warning that cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions before we develop new, cleaner, renewable energy sources, and technologies is the real culprit that could send us into a worldwide depression and very possibly war.

“Tom Wigley, who’s a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote a paper for Nature a couple of years ago along with a political scientist at the University of Colorado and Chris Green, a McGill economist. Those guys argued that instead of mandating tougher emissions standards, we need to mandate the development of new technologies.”

“Clean technologies, which Fermi did with the first nuclear reactor in 1942 in Chicago,” Mueller, the company’s nuclear programs manager, said. “As a result we got the bomb, but we also got Hutchinson Island and the other hundred and three nuclear-powered generating stations in the country, which I might remind you supply twenty percent of this nation’s energy needs, do just that. Generate electricity cleanly.”

“But not efficiently,” Eve shot back. “And the new generating stations won’t come online until it’s too late. Even you admit that much.”

“We’ve looked over the material your lab sent us,” Utt, SSP&L’s new plant VP, said. “We understand what you’re trying to do, and your project is as intriguing as it is expensive, with no guarantees that it will work in the long run. Or, even if you do generate the power you say is possible from your water impellers without the wholesale killing of sea life or severe dangers to navigation, maybe the effects on the climate will be the opposite of what you expect.”

“I’ll be happy to send you all the data we’ve collected, along with the mathematics supporting my work,” Eve said. “It’s compelling. From just one impeller three feet in diameter — which did absolutely no harm to sea life — trailed behind my research ship last year, we were able to generate all the power our research vessel needed not only for navigation and communications equipment, but for the scientific gear, the galley, the air-conditioning and lighting and the electric bow and stern thrusters, which kept us in one place over the bottom against the nearly four knot northward current of the Gulf Stream. And we had energy to spare.”

“It didn’t work,” Seward pointed out. “You had an accident in the second week when your transmission line parted and there were casualties. And that was with a three-foot impeller. What you’re proposing is to place generators more than eight times that diameter, and hang them from oil platforms in the Gulf Stream. Am I correct?”

“Yes, to a point, but—”

Seward interrupted her. “If a cable large enough to support generators of that size should break, you’ll suffer more than a couple of deaths. And putting hundreds, or as you propose, even thousands of these rigs in the Gulf Stream, would pose more than a danger to navigation, they would be a blight on the horizon.”

A number of the others around the table obviously agreed.

Eve held her temper in check. “Only one oil rig out in the Gulf Stream, twenty-five miles from here, with four impeller-generator sets that would be built by GE. It would be merely the second stage of my experiment, and my calculations imply that the power generated would amount to a significant percentage of what one of your nuclear reactors produces. When the full project comes online the impellers would be anchored to the seabed, fifty feet below the surface, where they’d pose no hazards to navigation.”

“You’re still left with a hell of a safety issue,” Strasser, the plant’s chief engineer pointed out, not unkindly. Of all those around the table he’d seemed the most interested, and the most sympathetic.

Eve wanted to say that there were safety issues in any power-generating station, and that the mandatory wearing of hard hats here would not do much if one of their reactors had a meltdown. She nodded instead. “You’re absolutely correct, sir, but for two points. The first is that the safety issue would be ours, not SSP and L’s until the experiment succeeded. And, the incident aboard my research ship was not an accident. It was sabotage.”

“That’s not been proven,” Alan Rank, the company VP, said.

“You’re right, but if you’d like I’ll send you the lab findings, which show that a massive power spike melted the cable. But that would have been impossible with the safety features built into the design. The only explanation was that someone had sabotaged those features before the impeller-generator was sent overboard.”

“Someone from your staff, or the crew of your research ship?” Rank asked.

“It’s possible, but I suspect it happened before the set got to us.”

“Didn’t you check it?” Strasser asked.

“Of course,” Eve said, making sure that she was speaking in an even tone. “We think that one of the seals may have been tampered with. Everything worked within design specs for two weeks before the spike. Time for seawater to slowly breach the system until one or more of the safety checks were affected.”

“You think,” Townsend said.

“Yes, I think. In the meantime, the reason I’m here is to offer any power that we might generate to SSP and L essentially free of charge for the first year. We would be responsible not only for the generators, but for bringing the power ashore on undersea transmission lines. Your only expenditure would be building the connection point between our cable and your transformer yard, a cost that you would certainly recoup in the first month, selling free energy to your customers at the usual rate.”

Sarah Mueller turned to the company VP. “We’d have to put this before the NNSA, to get their take.”

“I’ve already approached them,” Eve said. “In principle they see no problem.”

“Who’d you speak to?” Rank asked.

“Deputy Secretary Caldwell.” The NNSA was a division of the U.S. Department of Energy that was headed by Joseph Caldwell. “In fact it was his people who suggested I come here to speak to you.”

Still she wasn’t sure she had their interest even now, mentioning Caldwell and the DOE’s tacit approval, though it was a powerful gun. It had been Don who’d suggested that end run, and her relationship with him over the past couple of years had in some ways given her the strength to cope. He helped her to be herself, to be strong without the nuisance of being possessive or any sense of ownership.

Their relationship was vastly different than the one she’d had, briefly, with her theoretical physicist husband, whom she’d married just after graduating with her second PhD.

“Let’s think about starting a family,” he’d said out of left field one morning on their way into their offices at Princeton.

She’d been surprised, though secretly pleased, but she’d turned him down. “Not yet, Sam. Maybe in a couple of years.”

“It’s the climate thing of yours.”

“I think I might be getting close.”

He glanced over at her. “Your math is spot-on so far, but I don’t know if it supports the kind of conclusions that you’re suggesting. A little far-fetched.”

Dr. Samuel Larsen’s doctoral thesis attempted to reconcile Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics using a modified form of string theory to bridge the gap. He had his sights on the holy grail of theoretical physics — the TOE or Theory of Everything — which would explain the workings of the entire universe, large and small.

He was the only man she’d ever met who was smarter than her. But just then he’d pissed her off. “Far-fetched?”

He’d shrugged. “I didn’t mean to make you mad. It’s just that I’d like to start a family.”

“Two years.”

“Two wasted years.”

Their marriage didn’t last that long, nor did his work pan out. Two many flaws in both, too many dead ends, and out of frustration he’d practically ordered her to drop what he called her “nonsensical” work, come back to dry land, and become the mother that a beautiful woman like her was destined to be.

But for her, being a scientist was like being a Catholic nun; she was the bride not of Jesus Christ, but of her data and her concepts, stuff from which she could not simply walk away.

She’d told him the same thing that was on the tip of her tongue at this moment in the Hutchinson Island boardroom: Go screw yourself. Thank the gods for Don, because with her husband gone, her parents and siblings all still back in Birmingham and lost to her, she had no one else to turn to.

“We’d need more information, technical specifications, reliability predictions with the appropriate data sets, assuming you plan on first doing a test run for ninety days,” Strasser, possibly sensing something of her angst, suggested.

“Six months, actually. We’ll have dummy loads, and we will have the capability of controlling the actual outputs of our generator sets.”

“We’re interested in where your funding will come from,” David Wren, the company’s assistant CFO, said. He looked like a chief financial officer, his eye forever on the money trail. His implication being that if sponsors for the project were in any way competitors with SSP&L no deal with her would be possible.

And she began to calm down. She had their interest after all. “It’s the second part of the project I wanted to discuss with you today.”

FIVE

By now DeCamp was dressed in white coveralls, an employee name tag around his neck, and he stood with bin Helbawi at the door from the engineers’ locker room to the corridor across from which was the door to the control room. At this time of the day, with lunch in full swing, those personnel not on duty were over at the cafeteria and wouldn’t be expected back here for another half hour. Plenty of time to get in, accomplish the mission, which was quite simple actually and would only take a couple of minutes, then get out.

They were armed with 9mm Austrian Glock 17 pistols equipped with suppressors that bin Helbawi had smuggled in and hidden at the back of his locker. Each of them carried a spare nineteen-round magazine of ammunition in their pockets along with satchels that contained three one-kilo bricks of Semtex plus a half-dozen electronic detonators that had been modified so that once they were in place they could not be disarmed and if moved would automatically fire.

DeCamp looked at him. “Are you clear?”

“ Jie haan. ” Bin Helbawi said yes in his native Urdu with an almost dreamy expression in his wide, deep black eyes. His narrow, bony shoulders drooped and he stood as if he were in the beginning stages of some kind of a religious trance.

DeCamp had seen the same look on a mission he’d carried out for a lieutenant general in the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence service, a few years ago in the Hindu Kush along the border with Afghanistan. His job had been to find a pair of CIA field officers quietly searching for bin Laden and kill them before they got to the ailing al-Quaeda leader and put a bullet in his brain. As long as bin Laden remained elusive, Pakistan’s government could maintain the illusion that it was a staunch U.S. ally and continue receiving American military aid.

DeCamp had staged his push into the mountains from the city of Peshawar, which was the first decent-sized city on the east side of the Khyber Pass, with a pair of deep cover ISI field officers who knew the rugged tribal areas and who were smart but in the end expendable.

The day before they were to leave, DeCamp had been coming out of the hotel when a young man — perhaps in his early twenties, only a couple of years younger than bin Helbawi — had come across the street, clutching at his padded jacket. He’d had the same look in his eyes as bin Helbawi did now; what amounted to the same religious fatalism in the set of his shoulders and his gait. At that moment DeCamp understood what was about to happen and he ran off in the opposite direction, managing to get fifty or sixty meters away where he ducked around the corner of a stone building when the massive explosion destroyed the entire front of the hotel.

The young man had been a suicide bomber, willing to give his life for the cause. But whether or not DeCamp had been the target had been impossible to know, and after his successful mission, after he’d killed the two CIA officers as well as the two ISI agents assigned to him, and he’d returned to Nice one million dollars richer, he’d remembered the look in the young man’s eyes, and swore he’d never forget it, because recognizing it had saved his life.

And now bin Helbawi, who’d been sent to him by the same ISI general, had the same look as if he were preparing his soul for paradise and not escape. It was a look that he’d carefully concealed during his training in Syria and evidently for the past ten months here, because in addition to being a dedicated missionary he was bright.

He’d gotten his initial education, and militant Islamic radicalization, as bin Laden had, in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, at the King Abdul Aziz University where he’d studied physics and mathematics. Al-Quaeda, needing bright new minds for another spectacular push after 9/11, had brought him from Pakistan and had footed the bill for his BS. After graduation they’d sent him to Paris for eighteen months to learn French, and then to the International School of Nuclear Engineering at Saclay, and finally the Kestner Division of GEA Process Engineering in Montigny, which provided engineering solutions for nuclear power stations where he learned more engineering and perfected his French.

By the time he reached New York, on a French passport under the name Forcier, with an impressive résumé, the first headhunter he’d approached got him the Hutchinson Island job in less than twenty-four hours. Nuclear engineers were in short supply.

Such a waste, DeCamp thought. All that education would end in a couple of hours because bin Helbawi knew damned well that he’d never get out of the control room alive. Or, if by some miracle he managed to hold out until just before the explosives destroyed the scram panels for both reactors, and if he could get to his car and make it through the gate and drive away, he wouldn’t have the time to get outside the radiological damage path. He would take a heavy hit of rems that would sicken and eventually kill him.

Either way, he would not survive this mission and he knew it; he’d probably known it from the beginning, as did his ISI general. His willingness to die for the cause — not such a rare trait among Islamic extremists — plus his intelligence were the very reasons he’d been selected.

Afterwards, his mother, three sisters, and one brother in the tiny town of Sadda on the Afghan border would get some serious financial help, enough so that his brother could be sent to a real school in Islamabad, or perhaps even Jidda. A way out for them.

All that had passed through DeCamp’s head in the blink of an eye, and he simply didn’t care about any of it. He was here to do a job and then go home. There were no other considerations.

DeCamp keyed his cell phone, temporarily freezing the camera in the hall and, making sure that no one was coming, let bin Helbawi cross the corridor first and use his key card to unlock the control room door.

DeCamp had spent thirty days with him at an al-Quaeda camp in the desert outside of Damascus where they’d gone over, in detail, every step of the mission. Bin Helbawi was a lot brighter than the average terrorist, even brighter than most of the upper-level planners who’d worked with bin Laden and knew what they were doing, so he’d caught on very quickly.

The door opened and bin Helbawi hesitated for a moment, then they both went inside. There were no cameras in the control room.

Before Stan Kubansky, the supervisor, leaning up against his desk, realized that someone had come through the door, bin Helbawi disabled the card reader so that no one could get in, and DeCamp pulled out his silenced pistol and marched all the way into the room.

One of the operators glanced up and started to say something, but DeCamp put one round into his head, the force shoving him against the man seated next to him at the first console.

Kubansky turned, his eyes wide, his mouth half opened, and reached for the telephone, but bin Helbawi fired three times, one round hitting the engineer in the neck just below his jaw, and he lurched sideways, his hand going to his destroyed neck, blood pumping out in long arterial spurts.

“The blinds,” DeCamp said, his blood singing again like it had in the old Angola days, and he shot the engineer in the head.

“Son of a bitch!” one of the operators shouted, and he reached for his keyboard, but DeCamp shot him in the head.

Still moving toward the two consoles, he shot the remaining two men, one round in each man’s head, and the control room was suddenly silent.

Bin Helbawi was standing behind one of the consoles, a lot of blood on the computer monitor and keyboard and splattered across the desk, not moving as if he were in a trance.

“The blinds?” DeCamp prompted.

Bin Helbawi glanced at him. “Locked.”

At the training camp in Syria, bin Helbawi showed DeCamp photographs and diagrams of how most nuclear power station control rooms were configured — the monitors, the safety devices, and their controls and most important the scram panels. Hutchinson Island was similar, but last week bin Helbawi had faxed several sketches, which showed the differences and exact layout, and DeCamp had committed them to memory while he waited in Miami.

The plan was simple. First they would destroy the panels that controlled the coolant systems, which would cause each reactor to overheat. Next they would destroy both scram panels, which would have sensed the overheat and automatically shut down the reactors. Once the Semtex was in place and fused, the only way to prevent a catastrophic meltdown would be to pull the panels apart and rewire them so the coolant and scram controls could be manipulated manually.

Bin Helbawi would remain behind until the last minute to make sure there would not be enough time for such a fix.

“I could do this thing myself,” he’d said the night before he’d left Damascus.

They’d been sitting at a sidewalk café just off Azmeh Square downtown, the evening soft, the streets busy and noisy. “It’s better if I come,” DeCamp said, sipping tea.

“But I’m the nuclear engineer, not you. It’s what I know. I can do this.”

DeCamp nodded. “It’s what you know. But my expertise is killing people. Are you an expert in this as well?”

“I can shoot a gun and mold plastic explosive,” bin Helbawi had argued stubbornly.

“By the time this happens some of those people may be your friends.”

“Never,” bin Helbawi had replied angrily. He had gotten himself worked up, and DeCamp had reached across the table and laid his right hand over the boy’s.

“No one doubts your dedication, Achmed, least of all me. I know what you’re capable of doing. It’s why you were sent to me. But you’ll need patience, too. And trust. We’ll work as a team. You’ll see.”

Bin Helbawi had looked away and remained staring at the passersby for a long time, as if he were trying to memorize the scene, knowing that he would probably never see it again, and DeCamp had allowed him his peace for the moment.

When he’d turned back, he nodded. “I was told that you were an expert, and that I should listen to you and obey your orders.”

“Instructions,” DeCamp had corrected. “You taught me about nuclear power stations and I taught you about weapons and explosives. We will do this together.”

Careful not to step in any of the blood, DeCamp stuck his pistol in his belt and went around the computer desks to the panels and consoles on the back wall that controlled reactor one. He set his satchel on the floor, took out one of the Semtex bricks, removed the olive drab plastic wrap, and plastered it against the reactor coolant panel, his movements precise.

Bin Helbawi remained standing in front of the supervisor’s desk, looking down at the dead man. He glanced over at DeCamp. “Stan interviewed me for this job,” he said, his voice strained.

“Forget him, you have work to do. Get on with it.”

“Bastard,” bin Helbawi said, and DeCamp thought the remark was meant for him and he reached for his pistol, but bin Helbawi fired one round into Kubansky’s body. “ Salopard .”

“Enough,” DeCamp said.

Still bin Helbawi hesitated for a few seconds, until finally he came out of his angry trance, laid his pistol on one of the computer desks, and came around to the panels and consoles for reactor two, and began setting the Semtex bricks on the controls for the reactor coolant pumps and the scram unit, finishing just behind DeCamp.

“How long would it take to rewire just the two scram panels to bypass what we’ve done here?” DeCamp asked.

“At least an hour, maybe a little longer,” bin Helbawi said. He seemed to have steadied down. “They’d have to be careful not to disturb the plastique.”

“The detonators are set for two hours, so once they’re cracked you’ll have to hold out here for seventy-five minutes. Can you do that?”

“Of course. Insha’ Allah. ”

It took less than two minutes to place the detonators and activate them.

“Seventy-five minutes,” DeCamp said. He took off his coveralls and employee badge, and tossed them aside, then laid his pistol and spare magazine on one of the consoles.

“I know.”

“Jam the door lock after I leave.”

Bin Helbawi was staring at Kubansky’s body, and he nodded but didn’t turn around as DeCamp went to the door and opened it a crack to make sure no one was in the corridor. He keyed his cell phone, shutting down the camera, and without looking back stepped out of the control room, went down the hall, and out the back door where he headed over to the visitor’s center, a bland expression on his face. The reactors would melt down in two hours and no one would be able to do a thing about it.

SIX

Gail was in the driveway between condenser building two and its turbine building when Karl Reider, one of the Barker security people at the visitors center, called her FM radio.

“One of the people on the noon tour just showed up here. He’s leaving. Says he’s sick.”

“Are you holding him?” Gail asked, worried for reasons she couldn’t define at that moment. But then Wager maintained that worried was her normal state of mind, while she thought it was nothing more than a matter of being a stickler for detail. A precision freak.

Reider hesitated for a moment. “There was no reason for it,” he said. “He just walked out the door so he’s probably still in the parking lot, do you want me to bring him back?”

Ever since she’d come aboard, discipline at the plant had definitely tightened up. She’d fired a couple of security people in her first ninety days, which had sent a definite message to everyone else: Don’t cross the bitch. They were on their toes, no one wanted to get on her bad side.

Just now no one was around, and except for the heavy industrial whine of the turbines and generators, the day was bright, warm, and at peace, yet she had to force herself to keep on track, because she’d never believed in intuition — feminine or not. “No reason for it,” she radioed. “What’d you say his name was?”

“Robert Benson,” Reider said. “I pulled up his tour app, he’s a schoolteacher from San Francisco. Short guy, slight build, light hair.”

The security team had definitely sharpened up in Gail’s estimation, and she remembered the man in the second-floor corridor as the tour group had passed. He’d been at the rear and had glanced at her briefly before looking away. Guilty secrets? Or just so nervous at being so close to a pair of live nuclear reactors that he had already been getting sick?

“Good job, Karl,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Yes, ma’am. EE out.”

She switched channels and pulled up a page showing the closed-circuit cameras around the plant, scrolled down to the single camera under the eaves of the visitor’s center that was pointed at the parking lot and hit Enter. A black-and-white image of the half-filled lot came up on her FM radio’s small screen. One car was just turning into the driveway from the beach road, A1A, and as it went left she spotted a lone figure just getting into a dark blue Ford Taurus parked next to the Orlando tour bus, his back to the camera. Moments later the car backed out of its spot, turned and went out to the highway and headed south.

He hadn’t been in a hurry, and he definitely hadn’t acted like a man who was nervous either because of his surroundings or because he had done something wrong and was making a getaway, and yet something about him bothered Gail. She couldn’t put her finger on it, except that he had seemed almost too self-assured for a man who’d gotten sick and had to cut the tour short. On the way to his car he hadn’t looked around nervously or over his shoulder to see if anything was happening behind him.

The screen on her FM radio was too small for her to make out the license number, but that would show up on the recordings in security, and there’d been something about the incident that made her want to follow up.

She switched back to the main calling channel as she turned and headed around the corner to where she had left her golf cart. “Post one, this is Newby,” she radioed.

“Post one, Reider.”

“Did you talk to this guy?” Gail asked.

“No, that would have been Deb Winger, the tour guide.”

“I meant there at the center. Who checked him in and out? Who talked to him?”

“Monica checked his ID and gave him his package, but no one checked him out. He just came in, laid his badge and hard hat on the counter, said he was sorry, but he had to leave, he was sick, and he walked out the door.”

Gail got in the golf cart, made a sharp U-turn, and headed over to the visitor’s center. Something wasn’t right, damn it, she could practically taste it, smell it in the air. She really didn’t believe in intuition, but sometimes she had hunches. “Is she still there?”

“She’s on her lunch break.”

“I’m on my way over, I want to talk to her,” Gail said. “Newby out.”

Some schoolkids and their teachers from Vero Beach were still in the visitors center, working with the interactive displays. They were scheduled for the one o’clock tour and had probably eaten their lunches on the bus on the way down. Reider came over when Gail walked in the back door. He was a big man, a high school football standout who’d never made it in college, so that now at thirty-one he could only hope for a supervisory position with the security company one day. But he’d sharpened up over the past year or so, and he never seemed to resent his job.

“Monica’s waiting in the break room for you. Is there something I should know about?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Gail told him. “But you did the right thing to call me. I don’t like anything unusual to happen around here, if you know what I mean.”

“I hear you.”

Gail nodded at the other security officer and woman standing behind the counter and went back to the break room where the greeter who’d checked Benson in was seated at one of the tables. She was a middle-aged woman, slightly round, with a pleasant face but frizzy hair, and just now she looked nervous, most likely because Reider had filled her in about the Ice Maiden who ran security. She started to rise, but Gail waved her back down.

“Monica?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gail shook her hand. “Look, this is probably nothing, but I just wanted to check out something with you, if that’s okay.”

The woman nodded and wet her lips. She looked as if she were about ready to jump up and run out the door.

“You’ve done nothing wrong, I just need to ask you about the guy you checked in. The one who came back a couple of minutes ago, said he was sick, and left.”

“Mr. Benson. He didn’t look sick when I processed him. He was sort of calm, and pleasant. Nice manners, soft-spoken.”

“Did he say why he was taking the tour? He was a schoolteacher, maybe he was doing this so that he could bring something back to his classroom. Did he mention anything?”

“No. He just told me that he had an appointment later this afternoon so he’d join the Orlando tour. I offered the two o’clock because it was a much smaller group, but he turned that down.”

Gail had another thought. “How often does something like this happen? Someone getting sick and leaving in mid-tour?”

“I’ve been here three years and it’s never happened while I was on front counter duty.”

“Has the tour guide been notified?” Gail asked.

“I don’t know.”

Gail went to the door and beckoned for Reider, who came over. “Has anyone told the tour guide that she’s missing one of her flock?”

Reider looked sheepish. “No, ma’am. You’re the only one I told.”

“You’d better let her know.”

“Shall I call her back in?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Gail said sternly. “But I want to see her in my office as soon as she’s done. Damn sloppy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gail turned back to the desk clerk in the break room. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Mr. Benson? Anything, any little detail that might have caught your attention? You said that he was soft-spoken, nice manners. Southern?”

“No, he was English, maybe Australian, or something like that. I don’t think I’ve heard the exact accent. But it was nice.”

“A foreigner?”

The woman shrugged. “He had a California driver’s license.”

Even easier to forge than a passport, Gail thought. “You said he told you something about needing to take the noon tour because he had an appointment? Did he mention where?”

Monica brightened. “As a matter of fact he did. He said he had to be in Jacksonville.”

For a split second it just didn’t sink in, but when it did Gail’s heart tightened. The car had turned to the right on A1A. To the south, toward Miami. Jacksonville was to the north.

“Christ,” she muttered, and she went back through the visitors center in a rush, ignoring Reider who’d looked up in alarm, and out the back door to her golf cart and headed back to the South Service Building as fast as the cart would carry her.

Steering with one hand she keyed her FM radio. “Security Center, this is Newby.” They had a copy of Benson’s driver’s license, but before she called the Florida Highway Patrol, she needed the license number on the blue Taurus. She had an incredibly bad feeling about this situation.

“I was just going to call you,” Wager came back. He sounded excited. “We have what might be a developing situation in the main control room.”

“Shit, shit,” Gail swore. She keyed the FM. “What?”

“No one’s answering the phones, and the observation blinds have apparently been locked from the inside.”

“I’m on my way.”

SEVEN

DeCamp got off the island highway at Jensen Beach a few miles south of the plant, and once on the mainland headed for I-95, keeping a few miles per hour over the speed limit, while at the same time clamping a lid on his feelings of triumph.

It wasn’t the money, exactly, though two million euros was significant, it was the almost rapturous feeling of accomplishment he felt when an operation of his design worked. It was almost like a drug to his system, really, and it was something he’d never shared with anyone before, not even with his comrades in the Buffalo Battalion, not even after a battle from which they’d emerged victorious, everyone pumped with adrenaline.

No deaths had been necessary this time, except, of course, for the four engineers and their supervisor plus bin Helbawi in the control room, and for the other people in the power plant when the reactors melted down, releasing a lot of radiation into the atmosphere, and for possibly tens of thousands directly downwind, but he’d not had to go in with a squad strength force of specialists like in the old Battalion days and risk casualties.

He had no ill will toward the local authorities who would have been involved in just such a firefight, but the operation this afternoon had been clean; it had been even elegant in its simplicity. And that was something he’d admired ever since the colonel had taught him the concept, simple moves in hand-to-hand, simple moves in the field, no wasted efforts, no unnecessary casualties to reach an objective. And it all had made perfect sense to him then as it did now.

Merging with traffic heading south on I-95, he took an encrypted sat phone from his bag on the passenger side floor and speed-dialed a number that connected him with an automatic rerouter in Amsterdam that would use a different satellite to connect with a number in Dubai. The two-second delay in transmissions was nothing more than a minor irritation.

Gunther Wolfhardt answered in English on the first ring. He’d been expecting the call. “Yes.”

“One hour, forty-five minutes.”

“Troubles?”

“None.”

“The operation has taken longer than we originally expected.”

This type of questioning was something new, bothersome. “It is what it is.”

“And what of your team?” Wolfhardt asked. Although DeCamp never discussed his methods, or the names and qualifications of any team members he used — if any — the German had to believe that the operation was more than a one-man job.

“Untraceable.”

Wolfhardt hesitated for a few seconds beyond the delay, and DeCamp, who’d met him only twice before this assignment, still knew him well enough to see the man’s wrinkled brow because he’d not gotten the answer he wanted. “Dead?” he asked, his tone mild.

“Untraceable,” DeCamp replied.

Again Wolfhardt hesitated. “You are aware of the consequences of failure,” he warned.

“Certainly. Are you?”

“When I see the news on CNN your account will be credited. And there will be further assignments.”

“For which I’ll need more time.”

“These will be of a simpler nature,” Wolfhardt said. “But perhaps equally as important.”

“We’ll see,” DeCamp said, and he broke the connection and laid the phone on the passenger seat. Wolfhardt’s attitude was completely different this time. He’d never pressed for details until now, nor had he ever issued any sort of a warning. He’d come to DeCamp because of a recommendation from General Jan Van Der Stadt who’d been a close personal friend of DeCamp’s mentor Jon Frazer, and who had been the Buffalo Battalion’s commandant at the end, so there’d been no need to present bona fides or make silly promises or answer stupid questions.

But then it came to him that Wolfhardt, or perhaps the man or men he represented, was frightened. Because of the fourteen months it had taken to pull off this bit of business. But a man of the German’s obvious background — there was no doubt in DeCamp’s mind that Wolfhardt had been East German Stasi, the stamp was practically a scarlet letter on his broad Teutonic forehead — would know what planning and training had been necessary. He would understand the delicacy of such an operation. It was one thing to go into a situation — a bombing, an assassination, an act of sabotage — with no expectation of coming out alive but something completely different otherwise. And such operations took time.

Wolfhardt had evidently been under pressure to produce results. In a timely fashion because … of what? DeCamp asked himself. Money was a possibility, though where the profit would be in destroying a nuclear power plant was a puzzle. Certainly the German was not allied with an Islamic radical organization, there was no fit there that made any sense. Nor had Wolfhardt ever made even an oblique mention of his employer.

They had met the first time by arrangement in Paris at the touristy sidewalk café Deux Magots, on Boulevard Saint-Germain across from the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church. The place had been crowded and in fact DeCamp, who’d arrived a half hour early to look over the situation, had waited twenty minutes before getting a table. When Wolfhardt had walked across the street from the church, and not from a cab or the metro, it had struck DeCamp that the man had also arrived early as a precaution.

“It’s a good thing to be cautious,” DeCamp said as the German sat down.

The waiter came and he ordered a café au lait and waited until it was set before him before he got down to business. “You’ve come highly recommended.”

Nothing was required for DeCamp to say.

“I have a job for a man of your skills. An assassination.”

DeCamp relaxed and he nodded. No doubt the German had made his preparations, careful to make absolutely certain that no one could hear their conversation. The area had been swept for bugs and listening devices, and the man’s operatives were certainly nearby, otherwise he would not have spoken so openly

“I make no kills on French soil.”

“This would be in Berlin,” Wolfhardt said. “A German businessman who is a principal in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. He has a lake house outside the city.”

“Would there be family, staff, security?”

“Yes, all of that.”

“And they would have to be eliminated as well?”

Wolfhardt shrugged, the gesture suggesting a near-total indifference. “That would be up to your discretion. For your own protection. But I will offer five hundred thousand euros for the man. Nothing for the others.”

“Two fifty now, and the rest on completion.”

“Agreed,” Wolfhardt said, and he took a CD in a jewel case out of his jacket pocket and handed it across the table. The disk was labeled Beethoven Sinfonien 2 & 8, the London Classical Players, Roger Norrington. “You may need time to study the material before you accept the primary payment.”

“That’s not necessary,” DeCamp said. He took a plain business card, no name, address, or phone number, only two sets of numbers — the first with nine digits, the second with ten — and slid it across to the German. “I’ll begin immediately after the initial deposit.”

Wolfhardt nodded curtly. “You’ll have the funds within twenty-four hours,” he said, and he rose to leave.

Driving toward Miami, DeCamp remembered that first meeting clearly. Up until the end, the German had been coolly professional, but just before he’d walked away, he’d said one more thing, his tone at that point almost congenial, almost friendly, one comrade in arms to another. “Good hunting,” he’d said.

The businessman’s name was Rolph Wittgen, and as it turned out the house staff had been dismissed early, and the security cameras and devices switched off. The only other person there that night was Wittgen’s mistress. Killing both of them in the act of lovemaking and getting away had been simple, and two days later the second payment had shown up in his Channel Islands account. The entire affair from the meeting in Paris until the final payment had taken less than one week.

They’d met once again for a similar assassination, and then again fourteen months ago at a different café in Paris, and that time Wolfhardt had presented the same coolly professional demeanor as before, not questioning DeCamp’s abilities to carry out the assignment — that of sabotaging the Hutchinson Island reactor — despite the size and complexity of the operations.

No questions, ever, neither before nor after an assignment, not until just now over the sat phone. It was puzzling, and DeCamp disliked puzzles unless they were of his own making. But as long as the money arrived as promised he decided not to take Wolfhardt’s changed attitude as a sign of anything other than the unexpected length of time the assignment had taken.

Yet DeCamp had the disquieting feeling that the men he had worked for seventeen years ago had displayed the same change of attitude just before the Buffalo Battalion had been disbanded. They had been cutting their losses, disassociating themselves with the very men they had directed into battle. The war in Angola had been terminated, to no one’s satisfaction, and the Battalion had been dismantled and swept under the rug, its continued existence a potential embarrassment to the South African government.

“If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on the desert sands in vain, beware the anger of the legions!”

Anger indeed, he thought. They had no idea what he was capable of. Always had been. Setting the LED counters ten minutes back, for instance. No mercy. No prisoners. No quarter.

And now there was the possibility of more assignments. More money.

EIGHT

Kirk McGarvey, dressed in jeans, deck shoes, a white long-sleeved shirt, and a khaki sports coat, got out of his rented Chevy and walked inside the National Air Guard’s main hangar at Homestead Air Force Base a few miles south of Miami, pretty much in the same bad mood he’d been in for the past eighteen months. He was a tall man, in very good physical condition because he’d worked out just about every day of his life, and more than once that regimen had save his life. In his early fifties, still not too slowed down or mellowed even after a twenty-plus-year career with the CIA — mostly as a black ops field officer, which meant killings, but for short stints as deputy director of operations and director of the entire Company — he was alone as he’d never thought he would be at this stage of his life.

His partner, Alan Lundgren, slightly built with wire-rimmed reading glasses and a buzz cut, was formerly an FBI counterterrorism special agent. He had arrived on base a half hour earlier and was explaining the facts of life to a group of seven National Nuclear Security Administration Rapid Response team recruits gathered around him just to the left of the open service doors, about the distinct possibility of facing a terrorist one-on-one, which could develop into a hand-to-hand, life-or-death situation. All of them were nuclear scientists or engineers, not combat specialists, who’d signed on with the NNSA to help stop terrorist nuclear attacks on the U.S. Their eyes were wide; this was something completely new for them, and they were paying attention to what they were being told, and no one noticed that someone without credentials around his neck had come in.

It was an opening act that McGarvey and Lundgren had used at all the other training sessions like this one, their special ops assignment to bring all twenty of NNSA’S Rapid Response teams up to real-world speed.

A couple of mechanics were working on an F-15D Eagle jet fighter on the far side of the hangar, and parked in the middle of the big space was a MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter, its rotors drooping, nobody around it just now.

McGarvey hung back to give someone a chance to spot him, and in that brief few moments of inaction his thoughts were drawn back eighteen months and a horribly black haze dropped over him like a dense smoke cloud from an oil fire. His last assignment as a freelance field officer for the CIA before he’d quit for good — he hoped — when the organization he’d gone up against had murdered his son-in-law, Todd Van Buren, who’d been codirector along with McGarvey’s daughter, Elizabeth, of the CIA’s training facility outside Williamsburg. Todd been on his way back there after meeting with an old friend in Washington when a pair of gunmen forced him off I-95 in broad daylight and shot him to death, putting a final insurance round into the back of his head even though he had already been dead.

But that wasn’t the end of it. McGarvey had struck back, and in retaliation the same group had buried an IED in the road at Arlington Cemetery’s south gate where McGarvey’s wife, Kathleen, and their daughter, Elizabeth, were leaving after Todd’s funeral, killing them both. And just like that he’d been alone; everything he’d worked for all of his life wiped out; the real reason, if he was being honest with himself, that he had made a career in service to his country was that he’d wanted to make America safe not simply for Americans, but specifically for his family, for the people he loved. And he knew a lot of people over at the CIA and National Security Agency and every other U.S. intelligence agency who felt the same, because it sure as hell wasn’t about the money, or for most of them not even the thrill of operations, of being in the know.

Nothing was the same for him after that day. Todd’s death had hardened his soul, but killing Katy and Liz had eliminated it. His enemies, America’s enemies, any enemy had become fair game. Any method reasonable. No trials, no plea bargains, no deals, just destruction. He’d been an assassin for the CIA, his operations sanctioned, or at least most of them after the fact, but now everything was different. Simply put, he’d become a killing machine, and the job he’d been hired to do by the NNSA was to train its rapid response scientists how to recognize and deal with such a person, which had been a good thing for him, because at least for now he was in the role of a teacher and not of a killer.

Just lately, however, he had begun to chafe at the bit. Tough times and rough beasts were gathering for a strike. He could feel it in his bones, sense it in what for him had become like a strong electrical charge in the air, and his heart had begun to harden further.

Still no one in the group Lundgren was talking to had looked up, and this is how it was every other time, even though word must have spread from the other teams. It was a sloppiness that could get them killed one of these days, and stop them from preventing an act of nuclear terrorism, and it pissed him off.

He pulled his Wilson Tactical Supergrade Compact .45 ADCAP pistol out of the holster at the small of his back under his jacket and strode the last thirty feet to where the nearest man in the group stood listening to Lundgren tell them to make sure to maintain a peripheral awareness at all times and jammed the barrel of the pistol into the man’s temple.

Before the man or anyone else could react, McGarvey cocked the hammer. “You’re dead,” he said, and he pulled the trigger, the firing pin slapping on an empty chamber.

“Jesus H. Christ.” The man reared back, almost going to his knees.

McGarvey withdrew his pistol, ejected the empty magazine which he pocketed, slapped another into the handle, and charged the weapon before he reholstered it. “You weren’t listening.”

“We’re not some fucking cowboys here!” the group’s team leader, Dr. Stephan Ainsle, shouted. He was a youngish, curly-headed man with a prominent Adam’s apple and intensely dark eyes, and he was shaken, too. They all were. But Lundgren had warned them from the get-go to keep on their toes, to expect the unexpected; it was a vital part of the job they would be expected to do once they were fully trained.

“Then you’d better learn to get on the horse, Doctor, or else you’ll be worthless to the program.”

“We’ll see about that,” Ainsle said, and he started to turn away, more frightened than he wanted to admit than angry.

“You’re not in the program until we sign you off,” McGarvey said, holding his temper in check. He’d seen guys like this coming out of the Farm, with attitudes that got them killed or at least burned within their first ninety days in the field. It wasn’t the training, it was the certainty that they were superior to the trigger-pullers. They were the intellects who would solve every problem with their minds, with superior reasoning. And such a line of thinking was common among these types.

Ainsle looked at the others on his team, still not convinced to open his mind. “I don’t need this shit.”

“But we need you, Doctor,” McGarvey said. “You signed on to the program because you obviously thought so, too. If you’ll listen up maybe we can teach you how to survive long enough to find and disarm a nuclear weapon before it detonates, maybe in downtown Washington or New York.”

It had become a matter of face now, Ainsle’s education versus a pair of men he took to be nothing more than well-connected thugs, even though he might know something of McGarvey’s background. But unless he was convinced that he and his entire team would be scrubbed, which, in McGarvey’s estimation would be too bad, he would walk away now. They’d left the safety of academia, for whatever reasons, to volunteer for some tough training, and at least a two-year commitment to serve their country in a potentially hot zone. They were definitely needed.

“I know why you guys are here, and it sure as hell isn’t for the glamour or big bucks; you won’t have a new theory named after you, at least not while you’re with us. Nor will your names ever get in the media. No awards, no Nobel Prizes, no advancement at your labs.” McGarvey managed to grin. “Hell, you probably won’t even get women out of this.”

One of the younger scientists smiled and shook his head. “I knew it,” he said. He glanced at Ainsle and lifted a shoulder.

Still Ainsle, who was currently working on a government-funded fusion research project at Cal Tech, hesitated, and McGarvey wanted to go over to him and wipe the smug, superior expression off the man’s face. But he loosened up, so that they could all see it.

“Come on, Doc, make my day,” McGarvey said.

“Dirty Harry,” Ainsle said, and the others laughed. “All right, so I’m an asshole. But I’m a goddamned smart asshole and I want to help stop the bad guys.”

“Good enough,” McGarvey said. “Because from this point on I want you to keep two things at the front of your minds. It’s not a matter of if an attempt will be made to conduct an act of nuclear terrorism on American soil, but when it will happen.”

“And the second is to expect the unexpected,” Lundgren said from behind them. He’d slipped away while the team had given McGarvey its full attention. It was a part of what he called his and McGarvey’s dog and pony show.

They turned around.

Lundgren stood over a medium-sized aluminum suitcase that contained a Russian-made compact nuclear demolition device. The cover was open and a single red light flashed beneath a LED display that was counting down, and had just passed sixty seconds.

Ainsle was the first to recover. “That’s a realistic-looking mock-up.”

“You willing to bet your life that it’s a fake?” McGarvey asked. In fact it wasn’t a mock-up, though its physics package had been removed. The Russian-made gadgets leaked a lot more rems than ours did.

“We have equipment that can neutralize the firing circuits,” Ainsle said. “We’ve gotten this close, the rest is easy.”

“Fair enough,” McGarvey said. “Do it.”

Ainsle glanced toward the Rapid Response team van parked just outside. “Our stuff is in the van.”

“Get it.”

“Fifty seconds,” Lundgren said.

“You’re running out of time,” McGarvey prompted.

“I’ll get it,” one of the team members said, but before he could move, McGarvey pulled out his pistol and pointed at him.

“Holy shit, that’s loaded!”

“Yes, it is,” McGarvey replied reasonably.

“Forty-five seconds!” Lundgren suddenly screamed.

The mechanics working on the jet fighter glanced over, but then went back to what they were doing. They had been briefed.

“ Allahu akbar! ” Lundgren screamed. He picked up a short stock version of the AK-47 and fired a short burst of blanks into the air, the noise impressive. “Infidels! Die!”

Ainsle made to move toward the suitcase nuke but stopped short when Lundgren aimed the AK at his chest.

“Are you willing to die for your country, Dr. Ainsle?” Lundgren asked. “Thirty seconds.”

“Are any of you?” McGarvey demanded.

No one moved. No one said a thing. And it struck McGarvey that they were like sheep being led to the slaughter, or more like rabbits who froze rather than ran when they knew they were about to be spotted by the hunter and killed.

“Fifteen seconds,” Lundgren announced.

“Anyone?” McGarvey prompted.

“Ten seconds,” Lundgren said. “Nine … eight…”

At 00 the red light stopped flashing and the LED went blank.

“What happened?” McGarvey asked, but it was a rhetorical question and Ainsle and the others knew it. “You didn’t expect the unexpected and none of you were willing to give your life to try to stop the bomb from detonating.”

“We would have given our lives for nothing,” Ainsle said.

“In this case you would have been right. But you didn’t come here prepared to win.”

“All well and good for you to say with blanks in the rifle, and with a device that was a dud,” Ainsle said. “In the field, facing an actual nuclear threat, it’d be a little different.”

“He knows from firsthand experience,” Lundgren said. “Believe me the man knows.”

A look of recognition came into one of the team member’s face. “Holy shit, you were the guy in San Francisco. I was in grad school and my dad who’s FBI told me about it. Not the whole thing, but some of it.”

“What’s he talking about?” Ainsle demanded, though he was clearly impressed.

“Later,” McGarvey said. “Right now we’re going to take this scenario step-by-step so that you can save your own lives long enough to save everyone else’s. Are you on board?”

“Yes, sir,” Ainsle replied sincerely and without hesitation.

NINE

Gail took the stairs up to the second floor of the South Service Building two at a time, her heart racing as fast as the thoughts in her head. On the way across from the visitors center her imagination had jumped all over the place, out of control for the most part, but now that she was here, at the scene of the possible trouble, she was calming down. It was almost liberating. Now she could get on with doing the job she’d been hired to do. Accidents and terrorism were on the minds of everyone who worked in or near nuclear power stations. Since 9/11 those kinds of fears had become deeply embedded in everyone’s subconscious, hers included.

She’d said nothing to the pair of security officers at the front entrance. Wager hadn’t spread the word yet, but they knew something had to be going on; the Ice Maiden never ran around like this unless something was in the wind. And she could feel their eyes on her back.

At the top she glanced toward the windows that looked down on the control room, the blinds closed now, as they usually were, then turned left and hurried down the corridor to the security offices at the opposite end of the corridor.

Alex Freidland, chief of South Service security, was just coming out of the monitoring center where all the images from the closed-circuit television cameras around the power plant were fed, watched, and recorded by a pair of operators 24/7.

He was a local from Port St. Lucie, and one of the few black men Gail had ever supervised. Except for his attitude of expect no evil, see no evil, which was sometimes frustrating, he was a damn fine officer, dedicated and bright, and a real pleasure to work with. He was one of the very few men Gail had ever met who could make her laugh, and that was saying something.

“Still no word from the control room?” Gail demanded.

“They’ve probably got their hands full with something,” Freidland said. “Happened before.”

“Bullshit,” Wager said, coming out of the monitoring center. “At least three of the cameras in this building were on what looks like a sixty-second loop. Frozen. I didn’t have time to check the others, but the first is up here in front of the observation window and the other two lead right to the control room door.”

“The guy who got sick in the middle of the tour,” Gail said. This wasn’t about a control room crew too busy to answer the damn phones; this was the big one. “Has anyone tried to override the control for the blinds?”

“Dave Bennet’s on his way over,” Wager said. Bennet was the plant’s chief electrical and electronics facilities manager.

“What did you tell him?”

“That the blinds don’t work and we need them up and running before the next tour group.”

Gail suddenly remembered the school group over at the visitors center. “There are a bunch of kids waiting to take the one o’clock tour. Get them out of here,” she told Freidland. “And there’s another group in mid-tour wandering around somewhere, get them back on the bus right now, and then close the visitors center, and send all those people home.”

Freidland hesitated for just a moment, but then headed down the corridor as he got on his walkie-talkie to start issuing orders.

“Get someone on the front gate,” Gail called after him. “No one gets in without my clearance.”

Freidland stopped and turned back to her, his eyes wide. “Are you going to evacuate the plant?”

“I’ll know in the next five minutes.”

“I’m on it,” Freidland said and he hurried away.

Gail turned back to Wager. “Where’s Chris?” Chris Strasser was the facility’s chief engineer.

“He’s at the meeting in the boardroom.”

“Get him, but let’s do this low-key for the time being,” Gail said. “In the meantime has anyone tried to get inside the control room from downstairs?”

“The card reader has been locked from inside.”

“Shit,” Gail said. “I’m calling the hotline, see if they can send us a team. Soon as you get Chris back here, dig out the remote camera, and call Bennet and have him bring a drill with a diamond bit. We’re going through the observation window, I want to see what the hell is going on down there.”

Like Freidland, Wager hesitated for just a beat, apparently unwilling to take the situation to the next step, admit that they were probably in the middle of a terrorist attack on the plant. “Do you think this is it?”

“We’ll see as soon as we get through the window,” Gail said, and she went into her office where she speed-dialed the NNSA’s hotline in Washington. The one man she wanted with her at this moment was somewhere out in the field, and even if she knew how to reach him, she didn’t know if she wanted to admit she needed help. It was that stubborn streak that her father had once warned would get her into a peck of trouble.

“It’s okay to hold out your hand for a lift now and then,” he told her, Minnesota thick in his voice. She could hear him at this moment, and her stomach knotted. The two most important men in her life; one got himself killed in the line of duty, and the other had always been, at least by reputation, a dangerous man. And eighteen months ago he’d become a damaged man, volatile in the extreme, yet thoughtful, kind, sometimes patient, and above every other trait, he was steady. He was a man who could be counted on in an emergency, like now.

“Hotline.”

Gail turned back to the phone. “This is Gail Newby, Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station. We have trouble of an unknown nature developing. We haven’t been able to raise our control room crew for the past twenty minutes, nor has an attempt to override the security lock on the access door been successful.”

The rapid response team concept had been developed to counter the threat of a nuclear attack by terrorists, by detecting the arrival of nuclear materials and/or complete weapon assemblies primarily by ship, but also by airplane, by car or truck, or even by foot or horseback across the Mexican border, or by snowmobile across the nearly three thousand mile, mostly unguarded border with Canada. It had not been designed to counter an attack on a civilian nuclear facility. After 9/11 the thinking had always been that such threats would come from the air.

“Are you under attack at this moment?”

“All I know is that our control room crew does not respond.”

“Can you shut down the reactors from elsewhere?”

Gail could see the man sitting at a desk in Washington, the Situation Book open in front of him. But so far as she knew this scenario wasn’t there. “I think so. But if the reactors go critical a lot of people will get hurt. A lot of civilians downwind.”

“Stand by,” the hotline supervisor said, and the line went dead.

“Come on,” Gail muttered impatiently. Two security technicians monitoring the closed-circuit television monitors were looking at her. They hadn’t been told exactly what was going on yet, but they had eyes and they could see that the Ice Maiden was agitated about something.

The hotline super was back. “I’m dispatching our team from Miami. They should be with you shortly. In the meantime contact your local authorities, and prepare to evacuate the facility.”

“What about the FBI?” Gail asked, allowing herself a small bit of relief. Something was being done.

“I’m on it.”

Gail broke the connection and speed-dialed Larry Haggerty, who headed up the small unit within the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department that was tasked to protect the plant in case of an emergency, but mostly to coordinate the evacuation. Like the NNSA, everyone had expected an attack to come by air.

“We have a possible situation developing here.”

“Okay,” Haggerty said, and she could see him suddenly sit up. They’d worked together since Gail had been assigned to plant security, and although his persona and drawl were of the southern cop, he was sharp. “You have my attention.”

“We’ve been locked out of our control room, and there’s been no response so far. One of our rapid response teams is coming up from Miami, but I’d like you to stand by in case we have to bug out of here.”

“I’m on it. What else?”

“If there’s an actual problem, I might have a suspect for you.”

Wager came back with Strasser.

“On site now?”

“No, but I’ll get back to you with a license number as soon as I can. But first we’re going to try to take a look at what’s happening down there.”

“Talk to me, darlin’,” Haggerty said. “What’s your gut telling you?”

“I’m worried, Larry.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Will do,” Gail said and she broke the connection.

“What’s going on?” Strasser asked.

TEN

McGarvey said the same words he’d been saying for the past eighteen months. It was as if he were in a tightly scripted play that was so well rehearsed he wasn’t listening to himself, not even gauging the reaction of the seven rapid response team recruits standing around the suitcase nuke.

The picture of his wife’s tearful face as she said goodbye to him at Arlington National Cemetery after their son-in-law’s funeral was permanently etched in his brain. She had been just perfect to him at that moment, her eyes red and moist but still expressive and beautiful, clear windows into her sweet heart.

Less than five minutes later she and their daughter, Elizabeth, were dead, and the following weeks in which he went berserk, in which he’d become a killing machine — something he still was — had passed in a blur. But he’d extracted his revenge, and it was enough; it had to be enough because he was alone more completely, at a much deeper level than he’d ever been alone. And now this work with the NNSA was something like a balm to his spirit, so that at times like this he could switch to autopilot and simply cruise.

“But what you’re talking about is racial profiling,” Ainsle protested and he glanced at the others to back him up.

“You’re damned right he is,” Lundgren said. “Little old ladies with white hair usually aren’t the ones who go around blowing up airplanes or smuggling nuclear materials into the country. It’s why we take a closer look at men in their early twenties to mid-forties, heavy five o’clock shadows, maybe Muslims, maybe not, because chances are if you’re looking for a terrorist he’ll be in that group.”

“Okay, how do we stop a nuclear attack?” McGarvey asked.

“By disarming nuclear devices. We have some pretty neat gadgets that can interfere with firing mechanisms. Shut the weapon down even if it’s gone into countdown mode.”

“But first you have to find it.”

“We work with customs and with air marshals and the Coast Guard,” Ainsle said, a little more sure now that his argument was the correct one. “It’s not perfect, but we can put detectors aboard airplanes that will pick up radiation signatures from a couple thousand feet up.”

“You have to have to have a reasonably good suspicion that there might be a nuclear device let’s say in Boston’s south side, or maybe somewhere in the Mall in Washington. You can’t simply fly over every part of every city twenty-four/seven,” McGarvey said, trying to keep a reasonable tone. But it had been the same with just about every group he and Lundgren had trained. Scientists were bright, a lot of them so bright they were starry-eyed idealists.

“That’s the job of the CIA overseas, and the FBI’s counterterrorism people here in country.”

“So you’re saying that your only job is to detect and disarm nuclear devices that someone else will tell you are here and point you in the right direction,” Lundgren said.

“What are we doing here today?” McGarvey asked. “What can we say that will make your jobs a little easier, make you a little more effective as a team?”

Ainsle shrugged. “I don’t have the faintest idea, none of us do, except that we were ordered to meet with you if we want to be on one of the teams.”

“Fair enough,” Lundgren said. “So listen to the man. We’ve already established that he’s faced this sort of a thing before in such a way that none of you read about it in the newspapers. If you open your minds you might learn something that’ll save a lot of lives, possibly your own.”

It was busywork, McGarvey had to keep reminding himself. The Company shrinks said that he needed to keep his mind occupied if there was to be hope he wouldn’t go around shooting people. But all the bad guys weren’t dead. There would always be a never-ending supply trying to knock down our gates.

“We’re here to sell you on a mind-set,” McGarvey said. “A way of looking at your environment — your entire environment, not just your electronic equipment — while you’re on assignment in the field where the opposition might not play by the book, or by any rules of engagement that make any sense to you at that moment.”

“You’re telling us to stay loose, stay flexible,” Ainsle said. “And you’re right, we saw that when you showed up out of nowhere and pointed a gun at us. Won’t happen again. We’ve learned that lesson.”

Christ, McGarvey thought. They all came from the same mold. “Four points not negotiable,” McGarvey said. “These are the new rules. One: in the field you most definitely will use profiling as one of your most important tools. Not only racial profiling, but profiling of the kind that will make you notice the one person in a crowd who seems nervous, the one wearing a bulky jacket on a mild day, the one who won’t look you in the eye, the van with heavily tinted windows coming around the block for a second time apparently looking for a parking spot when several are available, the one person who doesn’t seem to fit.”

“Paranoia,” one of the young scientists muttered.

“Right,” McGarvey replied. “Two: you’re bright people, and very often you have hunches, in the lab, at home in the middle of the night, driving to or from work. The eureka moments when you suddenly have an insight. Gut instincts. Trust them in the field. If something doesn’t seem right to you, it probably isn’t.”

“We’re scientists, not trained FBI agents,” Ainsle said. “We don’t think that way.”

“You will after we’re finished here,” Lundgren told them.

“Three: you will be issued weapons and will be given the training to use them,” McGarvey said. “In the field you will shoot first and ask questions later.”

“I won’t—” Ainsle started, but McGarvey cut him off.

“If you want to be on a team, you will be armed. Four: give no quarter. Which means if you draw your weapon, you will keep firing until the suspect is down and unable to shoot back or trigger any device he may have intended to detonate. Center mass.”

“I could kill him doing that,” Ainsle said.

“That’s his problem, not yours.”

“Or her problem,” Lundgren added.

All of them looked a little green around the gills, but some of them were beginning to see the light, McGarvey could read it in their faces. It was a tough world out there, and no one had asked permission if they could fly airliners into buildings, and no one apologized afterwards. The only way in which they could have been stopped would have been to profile them and shoot them dead before they got aboard the airplanes.

McGarvey’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. The NNSA’s hotline came up on the caller ID. Lundgren was getting the same call, and McGarvey felt the instant stirring that something was happening or about to do so.

“Excuse me,” he told the group and he answered the call. “McGarvey.”

“This is the hotline OD, we have a potential class one situation at the Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station.”

“What’s the nature of the problem?”

“A possible incursion, by a person or persons unknown. Security gets no response from the control room.”

“Has Gruen been notified?” McGarvey asked. Carlos Gruen was Team Miami’s leader, and one of the fair-haired boys with the program manager, Howard Haggerty, up in Washington. He did everything by the book — exactly by the book — which meant that he had his nose so far up Haggerty’s ass that it would probably take him all afternoon to extract it, gather his team, and actually make the decision to head up to Hutchinson Island.

“He’s in the process of getting his people and equipment together.”

“Stand by,” McGarvey told the OD, and he turned to Lundgren, and nodded toward the Pave Hawk helicopter. “Round up the pilot, we need a ride.”

“I’m on it,” Lundgren said, and he broke the connection with the hotline and headed over to the ready phone by the door.

“Have the local authorities been notified?”

“In the process.”

“The Bureau?”

“They’re sending teams from Orlando and Jacksonville, but you’ll probably be first on site.”

“We’ll take it,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection.

The scientists were watching him. “What sort of a problem?” Ainsle asked.

“Someone may have taken over the control room at the Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station.”

A minute later a pickup truck came through the doorway and screeched to a halt near the helicopter. A pair of ground crewmen jumped out and started prepping the bird; removing the rotor tie-downs, disengaging the safety locks on the tail rotor, racing through their engine checks and walk around.

Lundgren came over. “The flight crew’ll be here in three minutes. Have you called Gail?”

“Not yet,” McGarvey said. “She’ll have her hands full at the moment.”

A squat tow truck came into the hangar, hooked up to the chopper, and once the wheel chocks were removed towed the machine outside.

“This scenario isn’t in the book,” Ainsle said.

“It will be tomorrow,” McGarvey said, and he and Lundgren followed the helicopter out the door.

ELEVEN

“Break down the control room door, now,” Strasser demanded. He was primarily a nuclear engineer used to tidy, if sometimes complex, solutions.

“Not until we find out what’s going on,” Gail told him. At this moment the safety and security of the facility were in her hands, and she still didn’t know what was happening. Time had seemed to slip into slow motion. “I need you to tell me if the reactors can be scrammed from somewhere other than the control room.”

“Yes, but it would cause a very large disruption on the grid, and we wouldn’t be able to get back up into full operations for a considerable amount of time. Damage would be done.”

“I’ll take the responsibility,” Gail said sharply.

“The company could lose a serious amount of money.” Strasser was a large, shambling bear of a man with a heavy German accent. He was from Leipzig in the former East Germany, and had escaped over the wall with his parents when he was a teenager. He’d got his schooling in nuclear engineering at the Polytechnic in Berlin and then at the Julich Division of the Fachhochschule at Aachen, before coming to the U.S. to work at Los Alamos. He was a very bright man, but he had never outgrown his stiff-necked German precision.

They were standing in her office, the doors to the monitoring room and the corridor open. So far there was no panic because very few people inside the plant knew that anything was wrong, but that wasn’t going to last much longer. In the meantime she felt like a small child being admonished by her elder.

“Do it,” she told him.

Strasser glanced toward the corridor door. “Townsend should be informed.”

“Just how much damage could a terrorist do in the control room?”

Strassser’s eyes widened, and Gail saw that she had gotten to him. “More than you want to imagine.” He picked up the phone and called Bob Holiman, the day shift chief operating engineer who at the moment was working on something in turbine building two. “Strasser. I want you to initiate an emergency shutdown on number two.”

Gail could hear Holiman shouting something.

“On my authority,” Strasser said. “But it has to be done on site, there is a problem in the control room. Cut the power to the control rod HMs.”

Control rods suspended above a reactor’s core would drop down, once a signal that something was going wrong was transmitted to the HMs, or holding magnets, that kept the rods in place, immediately shutting down the nuclear reaction by absorbing massive amounts of neutrons. That was a function operated from the control room where computers monitored everything from the state of the reactor to the coolant systems and even the electrical power output. If anything went wrong in the system the signal would be sent and the reactor would be scrammed. In this case, where the control room was apparently out of the loop, power could be cut manually, shutting down the HMs, which would allow the weight of the control rods themselves, aided by powerful springs, to do the job. Shutting down the reactor would theoretically take four seconds or less.

Gail used her cell phone to find Wager who answered on the first ring. “I have the camera and I’m on the way up. Is Bennet there with the drill yet?”

“No. Call him again and tell him to get his ass over here right now!”

“I’m on it.”

“I’ll hold,” Strasser said, and he put a hand over the phone. “It’ll take a minute or two to start the procedure.”

“What about reactor one?”

“Let’s try this first, and see what damage is done.”

“Specifically what trouble can we get into from the control room?” Gail asked, even though she knew something of it, if not the exact extent.

Strasser glared at her, not in the least bit comfortable with even thinking about it; his lips tightened. “Much trouble.”

“Come on, Chris, I need to know what we’re facing.”

“It could be as bad, maybe even worse than Chernobyl.”

“An explosion?”

Strasser shook his head. “That’s not possible, but the reactors could go into a catastrophic meltdown if the cooling controls were disabled and the scram panels damaged. A great amount of nuclear material would be released into the atmosphere.”

“Everyone in the plant would be in serious trouble.”

“Yes,” Strasser said heavily, as if he regretted his own assessment.

Wager came down the corridor on the run, with the remote camera bag slung over his shoulder while speaking on his cell phone, presumably to Bennet, and Gail stepped out of her office to meet him as he broke the connection.

“Where the hell is he?” she demanded.

“He’s on his way,” Wager said. “He didn’t know the situation so he wasn’t in any hurry. He knows now.”

“Ms. Newby,” Strasser called from her office and Gail went back inside to him and her stomach flopped when she saw the expression on his face. He looked frightened.

“What?”

“We cannot scram from outside the control room. The circuitry has been blocked.”

“Can’t the power be cut?” Gail asked.

“No. But he’s on his way over to reactor one to see if it’s the same.”

“It will be,” Gail said, no longer any doubt in her mind that the man who’d dropped out of the tour, claiming to be sick, was somehow involved in what was developing. “Has anything else been affected yet?”

“Everything appears to be operating within normal limits,” Strasser said.

“Can we monitor what’s happening to the reactors from outside the control room?”

“We can watch our power outputs, and watch that the flow of cooling water isn’t interrupted. But once that happens it will be only a matter of minutes before the situation would start to become unstable.”

Wager had come into the office. “Look, how about if we cut off electricity to the control room. The lights will go out and their computers will go down.”

Strasser started to object, but Gail held him off. “They could have rigged explosives to some of the panels that might react to a power failure. We just don’t know.”

“Wouldn’t work anyway,” Strasser said. “For obvious reasons all the key equipment in there is on a self-contained backup power system.”

Make a decision and stick with it, McGarvey had told her during her training last year. But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. If a situation arises, react to it immediately.

“Even before you have all the facts?” she’d asked.

“As you’re gathering the facts.” He’d smiled wistfully in that sad way of his, which she had found bittersweet and immensely appealing at the time. Still did. “Most of the time you won’t get all the details until later when everything is over and done with.”

“Until Bennet gets here, I want you to alert all the section heads to start moving out their nonessential personnel,” she told Wager. “No panic, no sirens.”

“What about Townsend at the rest of the brass in the boardroom?”

“Them, too. I want everybody to get as far away from here as possible.”

“What do I tell them?”

“Anything you want. It’s just a precautionary measure. But not a word about the actual situation to anyone other than Townsend. Clear?”

Wager nodded, handed her the camera bag, and went into his office to make the calls.

Gail turned to Strasser. “Stick with me, if you would, Chris. Once we get through the window and get a look at what’s happening inside, you’ll be a better judge than me what condition the computers and panels are in.”

Bennet showed up with his tool bag, all out of breath and red in the face. The stocky fifty-one-year-old electrical and electronics technician had retired from the Air Force after a thirty-year career dealing with and eventually supervising the same sort of work around nuclear weapons storage and maintenance depots, including a stint at Pantex in Texas where nukes were constructed. In the time Gail had worked here she’d never seen the man in a hurry, or flustered, and who could blame him for keeping calm? After working around nuclear weapons, some of them hydrogen bombs, a nuclear-powered electrical generating facility was tame. But right now he was agitated.

“Why not use the card reader?” he asked. “I can bypass the lockout.”

“Because we don’t know what’s going on down there,” Gail told him. “I want you to put a hole in the lower corner of the window, the farthest away from the control consoles, and with as little noise as possible. I want to thread the camera inside. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” Bennet said. “But it’ll have to be slow.”

“How slow?”

“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

“All right, get to it,” Gail told him and when he left she stepped around the corner to the monitoring room where the two on-duty security officers had been listening to what was going on. “You spot anything usual, and I mean anything , feed it to me,” she told them. “But I don’t think this situation is going to last much longer before I order the evacuation.” She started to turn away, but had another thought. “Look, guys, if you want to bug out I won’t blame you, or order you to stay. Okay?”

“We’re staying,” one of them said, and the other nodded.

They were both so young that Gail almost told them to get out, but she nodded. “Good show.”

Back out in the corridor Strasser had followed Bennet to the observation window, where the technician was setting up his drill. Satisfied that they were working that particular problem, she called Freidland on her FM radio. “Alex, copy?”

“Yes, ma’am.

“Where are you?”

“Just heading to the visitors center to make sure everybody got out. Has the situation changed?”

“I want you to round up as many security people as you can find and standby for a full evacuation. I don’t want any panic. But if it happens everyone’ll have to get as far away as quickly as possible. Haggerty will be sending his people as soon as I know exactly what we’re in the middle of. But I expect we’ll know within the next fifteen minutes. Stay loose.”

“Are you aware that people are already heading out?” Freidland asked.

“Right. Nonessential personnel.”

“Well, a lot of those nonessential folks don’t look too happy. Matter of fact they’re scared.”

“We’ll have to deal with whatever comes our way.”

“I hear you,” Freidland replied.

Wager came out of his office. “The word’s gone out.”

“Alex says the exodus has already started, and so has the panic,” Gail told him. “Bennet says it might take as long as fifteen minutes to get through the glass. Go let Townsend know what’s going on, and it’s his call but he might think about getting those people out of here. In the meantime I’ll get Haggerty in gear.”

Wager glanced down the corridor toward the observation window. “I never really thought it would happen this way, you know.”

“Nobody did, Larry,” she said, and went back into her office to call Haggerty again to get the local cops and emergency responders rolling. NNSA would have already alerted the FBI and as soon as she knew the exact situation she would be calling the governor in Tallahassee for help from the National Guard. It was a mess and for the first time in her life since her father’s death she was frightened to the core.

TWELVE

The conference was beginning to wind down, and Townsend had managed to get beyond his prejudices and really see that Eve Larsen’s project did have merit, even if it seemed far-fetched, especially the bit about modifying the weather. Yet that was the part that most intrigued him.

He’d worked the big coal-fired stations out in Nebraska and Montana and for a time in West Virginia and he’d seen firsthand the effects the emissions had on the air quality, even with the new electrostatic precipitators to take out the flue ash, and in some places stack gas scrubbers, which used a pulverized limestone wet slurry to clean up the exit gas pollutants. To this day, electrical generating stations were responsible for more than 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.

Just eliminating the coal-fired plants, which supplied half of all the electricity in the U.S. would have a massive impact on the weather, even on a global scale.

He wanted to believe in her science, and the impact it could have, and he could see that a few of the others around the table were beginning to get what she’d been driving at here.

The major stumbling block, of course, would be funding the next stage of her project, and David Wren, SSP&L’s tightfisted CFO had suggested going to the oil companies themselves and ask them to give or sell her an abandoned Gulf oil drilling platform. At first she’d been startled, but Townsend had seen the glint in her eyes and the glimmerings of a plan as that notion began to strike her. The fact that Wren was only half serious meant nothing to the woman, and Townsend was damned thankful that she wasn’t into nukes and working for him. She would definitely be a handful. Brilliant, yes, but almost certainly difficult.

Someone knocked at the conference room door and Townsend looked up, irritated as Wager came in. Eve Larsen was in mid-sentence and she stopped talking.

“Sorry to bother your meeting again, but could I have a word with you, Mr. Townsend?”

Townsend had been only mildly interested when Chris had been called out a few minutes earlier; they were generating electricity here and the chief engineer was always on call. But this interruption now, and the look on Wager’s face, was troublesome.

“Excuse me, Dr. Larsen,” he said, getting to his feet.

The others, especially Tom Differding, the company’s chief of operations, gave him questioning looks, but there was nothing he could say, because he didn’t know if there was any trouble, or what it might be, though he had a feeling whatever Wager wanted was serious.

“Please continue with your presentation, I’ll just be a minute,” he said, and he stepped out into the corridor with Wager, but waited until the door was closed before he asked what the hell was going on.

“Gail wanted me to call you out of your meeting,” Wager said. “We have a developing situation that might mean evacuating the facility.”

Townsend glanced down the corridor toward the security offices and beyond to where Chris Strasser and Gail were watching someone doing something to the observation window, and a little shiver of anticipation made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Tell me.”

“We’ve had no answer from the control room supervisor or crew in nearly a half hour, and Gail thinks that it’s a real possibility someone has taken over down there. The card reader on the door has been blocked, and when Chris had Bob Holiman try for a remote scram on two it couldn’t be done.”

“Scram?” Townsend said and he was suddenly more frightened than he’d ever been in his life.

“Gail wanted to give you the heads-up, and she suggested that you finish up the meeting and get those people out of here. We’re already evacuating nonessential personnel, and it’s beginning to get ugly outside.”

Townsend brushed past him and went down to the observation window. It was Dave Bennet on a knee drilling a hole through the glass, but slowly, making almost no noise, and just that fact was ominous.

Gail and Chris looked up, and he could see the concern and fear on their faces, even though Gail was trying to hide it.

“Okay, what’s the situation? Larry told me something about it, but fill me in. You tried to scram two remotely?”

“It was locked out from inside the control room,” Strasser said. “That’s not supposed to happen, but somehow they tampered with the HM circuitry.”

“I asked Chris to order it as a precaution,” Gail explained. “It would have caused damage and cost the company a lot of money. But the alternative could be much worse.”

“I understand that,” Townsend replied curtly, his anger in part because of his fear but also in part that he’d not been informed until now. His input had not been asked for something so massively important not only to the well-being of the facility, but to its employees. “But what brought you to make such a unilateral decision?”

“No one answers from inside,” Gail said, and he could see that she was getting angry as well.

“That’s happened before. They may have their hands full.”

“But they wouldn’t have blocked the door lock, nor would they have tampered with the remote scramming mechanism.”

“Has there been any changes on the status boards?” Townsend asked his chief engineer.

Strasser shook his head. “Everything’s within the proper parameters.”

“I didn’t want to bother you until we had more information,” Gail said. “Once Holiman told us that number two couldn’t be shut down, I had Larry call you out of the meeting. I’ve already notified the NNSA hotline, and they’re sending a team up from Miami. They’ve contacted the FBI by now and I gave the heads-up to St. Lucie County’s emergency response people.”

Townsend couldn’t believe this was happening, didn’t want to believe it. Troubles with coal-fired plants could and sometimes were bad, but nukes were the worst, because when they went bad a lot of civilians within the damage path could be hurt, the effects serious for the remainder of their lives; leukemia as well as a dozen other cancers could show up anytime, even as long as twenty years after an accident. The Russians knew all about that kind of a horror.

But he calmed down. “I assume you have a good reason for drilling a hole through the window.”

“We want to thread a remote camera head inside past the blinds and take a look at what’s happening down there.”

“And?”

“We’ll know when we get though,” Gail said. “Dave?”

“Ten minutes, maybe less,” Bennet said without looking up.

Townsend had developed a grudging respect for his chief of security in the year or so she’d been here. Although technically she was employed by the NNSA, and not Barker Security and therefore not for him, this was his facility, and in her first few months here he had come close to sending her packing. Generally she had been a pain in the ass — just the same as he imagined Eve Larsen would be, and for about the same reasons; they were both highly intelligent and independent women, nothing at all like his wife of twenty-seven years who was strong when strength was called for, and compliant when that was needed. His life was neat, private, and above all orderly.

The shades covering the observation window were closed, and he was about to ask why she just didn’t open them, when he realized that function had probably been blocked from inside. The conclusion he was coming to was the same as Gail’s, and he had to admit to himself that were he in her shoes he would have taken the same steps.

“We can’t reverse engineer this thing?” he asked Strasser.

“The circuitry has been blocked from inside.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nevertheless that’s the situation. Someone has managed somehow either to rewire the scram override panels, or rewrite some of the computer code.”

“I understand,” Townsend said. “But that couldn’t have been accomplished in a half hour, could it?”

“No, sir,” Bennet said, still not looking away from what he was doing. “Whoever did it knew what he was doing, and probably did the thing right in front of one of the shift supervisors.”

“We’re talking about someone on the inside. One of our employees.”

“Yes, sir, a real pro.”

A sudden strangely bleak expression came into Gail’s face as if she’d just thought of something completely disagreeable, even horrible, and she looked at Townsend and Wager behind him.

“What?” Townsend asked.

“I think we need to start the evacuation right now,” Gail said. “Immediately. Get everybody the hell away.”

“I thought you wanted to wait to see what’s going on down there first,” Wager said.

“They’re all dead, that’s why they haven’t responded.”

Townsend had the feeling that someone or something was walking over his grave, but he also had the hollow feeling that she might be right, and he hated her with everything in his being for just that instant, until he came to his senses and knew that it wasn’t her who had stabbed him in the heart, it was she who was trying to stop what was happening.

“I’ll start it,” Wager said, and he turned and rushed back to security where the code red would be broadcast everywhere throughout the facility, as well as to every law enforcement and emergency response agency within twenty-five miles.

“Get your people out of here, Bob,” Gail said. “And make it quick, because once the sirens blow there will probably be a fair amount of panic.”

“What about you?”

“We’ll know the situation in a few minutes. Just get the hell away.”

“I’ll be back,” Townsend promised, and he went to the conference room.

Everyone looked up when he came in, and most of them could see that something was wrong, and it showed in their faces.

“Ladies and gentlemen, a situation with one of our reactors is developing and merely as a precaution we’re evacuating all nonessential personnel,” he told them

“My God,” Sarah Mueller, SSP&L’s nuclear programs manager, said, getting to her feet. “Are you scramming the reactor?”

“Not yet,” Townsend said. “But that may be next. For now I’d like everyone to get out of here.”

“Where are you sending your people?” Differding, the company’s chief of operations, asked.

“As far away from here as possible, Tom.”

Everyone except for Eve Larsen was on their feet, and heading for the door. She was calmly putting the material she’d been using for her presentation into her attaché case.

“You too, Doctor,” Townsend said.

“Are you in trouble here?” she asked.

He started to tell her no, that everything would be fine, but he couldn’t lie to her. She was too bright, and she didn’t seem the type to panic. He nodded. “Could be serious, we just don’t know yet. Get away from here.”

“Preferably upwind?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Good luck,” she said, and walked out.

Leaving Townsend listening to his own inner voices that ever since he’d gotten into nukes had been speaking to him about the inevitability of an accident. Three Mile Island had been bad, and Chernobyl much worse. This today could be catastrophic. And there would be others, because no matter how safe they engineered and built these things, they were nuclear engines after all. Not quite bombs, but damned close.

He picked up the conference room phone and called his wife. Their home was on Jupiter Island, just a few miles away.

THIRTEEN

Air National Guard left seat pilot, Captain Frank Henderson, flew the Pave Hawk helicopter low and at maximum throttle, generally following I-95 north along Florida’s coastline that bulged a little bit to the east, out into the Atlantic, before turning due north and then northwest. Lundgren had gotten on his laptop and pulled up a site map of the nuclear plant, and showed it to McGarvey.

“The control room is on the ground floor in the South Service Building,” Lundgren pointed it out.

“How about security?”

“Same building, second floor. I’m sure that Gail is right in the thick of it.”

“No doubt,” McGarvey said, and he glanced out the window at the interstate highway. Traffic was heavy, as it usually was on a weekday, but twenty miles from St. Lucie there still was no noticeable difference southbound than there was north. If a full-scale evacuation had been ordered the first ripples had not reached this far yet. But when it did, he figured it was going to get messy down there.

Since they’d gotten the call from the hotline he had gone over in his head the possible scenarios they would be walking into, none of which seemed the least bit attractive. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear reactors were not inherently unstable or even dangerous. Crashing airliners into the containment domes would probably cause a lot of damage, but not enough to guarantee a release of nuclear materials into the atmosphere. But the right team in the control room, willing to give their lives in exchange, could cause a great deal of harm, a catastrophic meltdown if the reactors were not allowed to be scrammed and the cooling pumps shut down or sabotaged. It would be many magnitudes worse than Chernobyl.

And Lundgren was correct, Gail would be right in the middle of it, chastising herself for allowing the incursion to get this far. It’s one of the first principles he’d drummed into her head last year: prevention came first. Stop the guys from getting in the four airliners in the first place before they killed the crews and took over the flight controls. By then very little could have been done in the very short time once it was realized what was about to happen.

She’d allowed someone into the control room of her nuclear plant and she would be raving mad, beside herself, seething with a rage that she would not allow to show up on her face, in her actions, in her voice. She was the Ice Maiden on the outside, but still a lonely woman from Minnesota who in many ways was still mad at her father for getting himself killed, and therefore angry with just about every man she’d ever met.

Save one.

And there was a time when he’d been even more vulnerable than her. His wife, daughter, and son-in-law were all killed, leaving him to take a horrible revenge, and in the end he was a damaged, haunted man who had been open to the loving kindness of a woman. But almost immediately he began beating himself up for his weakness, and he still did for that weakness and his sometimes barely controlled anger. He didn’t know how or where it would end for him. Or when, if ever.

The tops of the Hutchinson Island power station’s containment domes appeared on the horizon right on their nose. And traffic on the interstate was beginning to pick up, most of it heading south.

McGarvey was wearing a headset. “Find a place to set us down inside the fence,” he told the pilot.

“Their heliport is just off A1A north of the visitors’ center,” the pilot said.

“Inside the fence, Captain.”

“Someone might take exception, sir.”

“I don’t care.”

Lundgren showed the pilot the site layout on his laptop. “Get us as close to the South Service Building as you can,” he said, pointing out the building that sat in front of and between the containment domes. “Looks like a staff parking lot.”

“Whatever you say,” the pilot said and he banked the helicopter off toward the island.

Lundgren shut down his computer and set it aside, then pulled out his pistol, a fifteen-round 9mm SIG-Sauer P226, and checked the load, before reholstering it high on his waist on the right side.

He caught McGarvey watching him and shrugged. Early on he’d admitted that he didn’t like the idea of shooting someone, anyone, but if it came to a gun fight he wasn’t going to rely on his less than perfect aim using something like McGarvey’s seven-shot pistol. He wanted to pull off a lot of shots as quickly as possible without stopping to reload. And fifteen rounds beats seven, he’d argued.

McGarvey had never taken exception with Lundgren’s tradecraft. He’d never once faltered, no matter the job that was set before him, and in the time they had worked together they had not really become friends — that was still difficult for McGarvey — but they had become trusted allies. McGarvey could count on him, and he was pretty sure that Lundgren felt the same about him.

The two bridges from Hutchinson Island to the mainland just south of the power plant were starting to jam up, traffic nearly at a halt. Police units were converging on the problem, but it was going to take a fair amount of time to clear up the situation, and that, McGarvey figured, was exactly what a terrorist bent on causing the greatest loss of life would have wanted. They would have wanted to wait until after the plant was evacuated and people were stuck on the roads before blowing the place.

The problem was the geography. Hutchinson Island’s Nuclear Incident Evacuation Plan was the same as the county’s Hurricane Evacuation Plan; the only way off the island, other than by boat or helicopter, was A1A — the narrow highway, more like a neighborhood street actually — that ran north and south, with only three bridges to the mainland, two a few miles to the south, and one to the north. It was a two-headed bottleneck that was already clogging.

“It’s starting to get bad down there,” he told the pilot. “Can you transport people out, somewhere upwind?”

Henderson and his copilot, Lieutenant Jim Reilly, nodded. “If those are your orders, sir.”

“Good man, but I don’t know how long the situation is going to remain stable. This place could blow at any minute. So it’s your call if you come back for more.”

“We normally carry a crew, including gunners, of six, plus a dozen fully equipped troops and their gear,” Henderson said. “So we can probably manage twenty-five or thirty people each load.” He glanced at his pilot. “We’ll come back as many times as we’re needed, or until you wave us off.”

People were streaming out of the various buildings throughout the plant, including the visitors center and the South Service Building where there seemed to be some panic developing.

As the pilot flared over the middle of the big parking lot, several uniformed security people, realizing that the chopper was going to land, began herding people away as best they could. But it still took several long minutes before Henderson could set the Pave Hawk down.

As soon as they were grounded, McGarvey and Lundgren jumped down, and waved a pair of security people over, one of them a tall, black man who seemed completely unflustered despite all the chaos.

“Alex Freidland,” he said, shaking their hands. “I’m chief of South Service Security. You guys from the NNSA?”

McGarvey nodded. “The whole team should be here shortly. For now I want you to take charge here. We’re going to start moving people to high ground right now. Can you do that for me?”

They had to shout to be heard over the rising noise. People were still streaming out of the building and either racing to their cars and motorcycles or out the main gate to the highway where they hoped to catch one of the emergency buses that were supposed to be en route in this sort of situation.

“The bridges getting bad already?”

“It’s going to be a major mess shortly,” McGarvey said.

“Can do,” Freidland said. “And if you’re looking for Ms. Newby, she’s straight up the stairs.”

Some of the people were beginning to see the helicopter as a quicker way out and they started to storm it, but Freidland and several more of his officers held them back, picking out only those who had no transportation and were depending on the buses.

McGarvey and Lundgren fought their way through the crowd, roughly elbowing people out of the way, to South Service’s main entrance in time to see a slender, deeply tanned blond woman carrying an attaché case struggle out the door. Before she could get five feet a half dozen or more people, men and women, burst out of the door, knocking her to the pavement, and raced past, even more people streaming out the building as the evacuation sirens began to wail.

Panic was nearly full-blown now. This was a nuclear plant and sirens were the last straw, and people crawled over each other to get as far away as fast as possible before the entire place went up in a pair of mushroom clouds. Only a handful of employees at any nuclear power plant were actually nuclear engineers. The vast majority were hourly workers from electricians and plumbers, to janitors and security officers and tour guides; these were people who were happy to have well-paying jobs, while at the same time believing in their heart-of-hearts that they were working under the threat of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki, especially after 9/11.

And now they wanted to be gone from this place as quickly as was humanly possible.

Another woman and a man were knocked off their feet just as McGarvey and Lundgren reached the blond woman.

McGarvey helped her to her feet as Lundgren was helping the other two, shielding them as best he could from the last of the employees leaving the building. And suddenly it was just the five of them at the entry.

“Get them out of here,” he told Lundgren. “I’m going to try to find Gail.”

“I have my own car,” the blond woman said.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Dr. Larsen, if your car isn’t glowing in the dark by tonight, I’ll make sure that you get back to fetch it. Right now I want you gone. Deal?”

Her mouth opened for just a moment, but then she nodded. “Deal,” she said.

McGarvey spun on his heel and headed into the building.

“What’s your name?” Eve called after him, but then he was inside, racing up the stairs.

FOURTEEN

The main entrance security officers were gone, presumably outside helping with the evacuation, so there was no one to stop McGarvey from going up to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. The building definitely had the air of not only desertion and emptiness, but of a dark, dangerous cloud hanging just overhead; a crisis was in full bloom here, and he could practically smell it in the air.

Gail was halfway down the corridor to the right with four men, one of them on his knees in front of a large plate-glass window.

A large man who looked to McGarvey like a roustabout in a business suit glanced over his shoulder as McGarvey came out. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Kirk McGarvey, NNSA. Who are you?”

“Bob Townsend. I’m the manager.”

Everyone turned around, and Gail’s face lit up. “My God, Kirk, I thought you were in Washington,” she cried.

“Miami. Gruen is getting his team together. What’s the situation?”

“Someone’s locked us out of the control room,” Gail said. “We’re going through the window with a remote head video camera to see what’s happening down there.”

“Why the evacuation?” McGarvey asked. “A lot of people are panicking, and someone’s bound to get hurt.”

“We tried to remotely scram the reactors, but those circuits were locked out as well.” She shrugged, almost like she was back in training with him and was waiting for his approval. “It was my call. Just to be on the safe side.”

“How many people are inside?”

“Five, a shift supervisor and four operators. But someone else could have gotten in. I don’t know how, and I’m not even sure it happened, but my gut is singing.” She explained about the man in one of the tour groups, who’d claimed he was sick and had left. “He was up here on this level, and his group went down the back stairs and down the north corridor to the rear door over to the turbine buildings. The control room entry is off that corridor. He would have passed right by it. Ten minutes later one of my security people at the visitors center said the guy dropped off his pass and hard hat and left. When I brought up the camera in the parking lot he was just getting in his car, and when he got to A1A he turned right, to the south. But he told the people at the visitors center that he had an appointment in Jacksonville. To the north.”

“Good call,” McGarvey said. “How soon before you get through the glass?”

“Almost there,” Bennet said.

Wager had set up a laptop computer and plugged the remote camera into it. The sharply defined image, displayed in color on the monitor showed the corridor they were standing in. The camera head itself, about the size of a pencil eraser, was at the end of a five-foot flex cable that could be controlled, left to right and up and down from the laptop’s keyboard.

Bennet’s diamond-tipped glass-cutting drill bit made very little noise. “It’s not likely anyone inside will have heard anything,” Gail said, watching.

McGarvey studied her profile, everything about her at this moment intent and tightly focused. She was doing her job the way she’d been trained by the NNSA, in part by him, and so far as he could tell she’d made all the right moves and for all the right reasons. She wasn’t relying on happenstance. But he wondered if she still had a chip on her narrow shoulders for most men because of her father. When she’d turned around and saw him standing there, she’d seemed genuinely pleased, and not ashamed to let that emotion show for just second or two. And for just those seconds he was forced to reexamine his feelings about her, only he hadn’t come to any conclusions. The situation was developing too fast for that sort of thinking, and anyway he wasn’t ready. Later.

“Does anyone know who’s supposed to be on duty down there?” he asked.

“Stan Kubansky is the shift super,” Strasser said. “And if there really is a problem, it sure as hell wasn’t him that caused it. I know the man personally.”

“For how long?”

“Ever since I hired him five years ago.”

“What’s your position here?”

“Chief engineer.”

“Good,” McGarvey said. “You’re just the man we’ll need to evaluate the situation.”

“We’re in,” Bennet said. He withdrew the drill and moved aside to let Gail insert the camera head, which she did with great care so as not to ruffle the blinds.

McGarvey and the others watched the computer monitor as the camera lens slowly cleared the blinds, the first images of the ceiling and light fixtures, until Wager flexed the cable to slowly pan the camera down.

Blood was splashed on one of the control panels along the back wall, and Townsend glanced at the observation window as if he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing on the monitor was actually the control room.

“What is it?” Gail asked, sensing the reactions behind her.

“It’s blood on the secondary cycle systems board for number two,” Strasser said.

“I don’t see any damage,” Townsend said.

Leaving the camera cable in position, Gail came around to the monitor. “That’s a lot of blood.”

“Pan farther down,” McGarvey told Wager.

The image on the screen slid down the panel to the edge of one of the horseshoe-shaped desks.

“Left.”

Wager moved the camera head to the left until he stopped it on the image of the two technicians obviously shot to death, one of them slumped over his position, the other sprawled on the floor.

“Jesus,” Wager said softly.

McGarvey looked closer. Both men had been taken out by a professional, a single shot to the head, but the backs of their white coveralls were splattered with blood. Someone else’s.

“Any damage to the equipment at that position?” he asked.

“Not that I can see,” Strasser said, his voice shaky.

“Left.”

Wager panned left, and stopped a few feet away at the body of a man in a blue blazer. He’d been shot in the neck, the bullet probably severing a carotid artery that had pumped out a lot of blood. But he’d also been shot in the head. Two shooters, McGarvey figured. First the neck wound by an amateur then the head shot by the pro.

“Mother of God, it’s Stan,” Strasser said.

“Left,” McGarvey said.

Kubansky’s body crumpled on the tile floor in front of his desk, his right hand outstretched as if he were signaling for help or trying to reach for something, slid to the right of the screen, the image shifting now to the two technicians at the reactor one control position. Like the others, they’d been shot in the head and died before they could sound the alarm.

“They’re all dead,” Townsend said.

The shooter had to have been first class, McGarvey figured, but he also had to be well under Homeland Security’s radar, otherwise he would not have been able to get inside, even with a false ID. Most hit men that good were on a lot of international watch lists, usually with fairly accurate descriptions, and in many cases fingerprints and even DNA on file, so the kinds of jobs they took required stealth, not openly walking into a secured facility somewhere.

But there was more. He was sure of it. If it was the guy who’d gotten sick in the middle of a tour, the one Gail had spotted driving away, but in the wrong direction, he would have done more than just somehow get into the control room, gun down the supervisor and four technicians, and leave. He had a plan and help. Inside help.

“Any damage to that control position?” he asked Strasser.

But the engineer shook his head. “Move the camera up,” he said and Wager panned up, the image of the control panels along the back wall coming into view.

“Shit,” Gail said, and everyone saw it.

A lump of plastic explosives, probably one kilo, was molded to one of the panels. Wires coming from a detonator were connected to a small device, about the size of a cell phone, with a LED counter.

“Is that an explosive device?” Townsend asked.

“Plastic, probably Semtex,” McGarvey said.

“Well, if it explodes we can kiss all of this goodbye,” Strasser said. “That’s the primary control unit for all the reactor coolant systems. It monitors everything from the steam generator to the reactor coolant pumps and even the control rod indicators.”

“Tighten the focus,” McGarvey said, and Wager adjusted a control so the LED counter filled half the screen. It had just passed the sixty-minute mark, the numbers decreasing from 59:59.

“We have one hour to figure out how to get in and stop this from happening,” Townsend said, when a blurred image passed on the monitor, momentarily blocking the LED counter.

Everybody had seen it.

“Someone’s still alive down there,” Wager said.

“Pull back,” McGarvey told him.

The image broadened to include the entire control panel, but no one was in the frame.

“Left,” McGarvey said.

The image of the LED slid to the right to another panel with another LED device. Wager tightened the focus. This counter was at 59:42.

“That’s the scram panel for reactor two,” Strasser told them. “With the coolant controls gone, and our ability to scram destroyed we’ll go into a massive meltdown.”

“How soon?” McGarvey asked.

“It’ll start to happen within minutes once the coolant pumps stop functioning.”

“Pull back again and go left,” McGarvey said.

Almost immediately a man’s image in profile filled the screen, and Wager pulled back a little farther.

“That’s Thomas Forcier,” Strasser said in wonder. “He’s one of our engineers. Worked for Stan when he first got here.”

But his words were choked off when the man they knew as Forcier turned directly toward the camera, and they could see that he was just finishing strapping two blocks of Semtex to his chest. He inserted detonators into both blocks and calmly began to wire them together, an almost saintly expression on his face, in his eyes, in the set of his mouth. He was a young man bent on making preparations for doing something good, even heroic.

“For Christ’s sake, talk to him, Chris,” Gail said.

The kid was connecting the wires to a simple switch, like the handle and trigger of a pistol.

“Does St. Lucie County have an evacuation plan in place?” McGarvey asked, watching the screen. He’d seen the same sort of look on the faces of terrorists he’d dealt with in Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s acolytes, their religious zeal.

“Yes,” Gail said. “But an hour won’t do much for us. We’re talking a hundred and forty thousand people in a ten-mile radius. The plan was designed to get away from a slow-moving hurricane.”

“Nevertheless, get them started,” McGarvey said.

Gail nodded tightly. “Right,” she said, and she took out her cell phone and walked a few paces down the corridor.

“Gail,” McGarvey called after her.

She turned around.

“Call the local weather bureau and find out the wind direction.”

FIFTEEN

On the day the two pickup trucks filled with armed mujahideen warriors came into the ramshackle town of Sadda, one hundred kilometers southwest of Peshawar on the border with Afghanistan, Achmed bin Helbawi, known now as Thomas Forcier, was fourteen years old. Everyone was aware of Uncle Osama and the holy struggle against the West, but down here the war had passed them by. Mostly.

It was a school day and the children, all of them boys, ran out into the dusty street to see what the commotion was about, but when the teacher saw the guns he quickly herded the children inside. All except for Achmed, whose mother worried about him since he’d learned how to read at the age of six. “Your curiosity will be your undoing,” she harped at him.

He was curious now, but not afraid. He was just a boy: and what could mujahideen with guns want with a boy?

A battered Gazik, which was one of the jeeps that the Russians had left in Afghanistan when they’d crossed the bridge, followed close behind the pickup trucks that, to Achmed’s complete amazement, stopped in front of his parents’ house. And suddenly he was afraid.

His father was gone, tending the sheep, and when his mother came to the front door of their hovel to greet the mullah who’d gotten out of the Gazik, Achmed ran home as fast as he could. His young brother Sayid was up in the fields with their father, leaving only their mother and three sisters alone — to face a man and two truckloads of armed warriors.

But by the time he reached them, his mother had begun to cry with a very large smile on her face.

Closing his eyes for just a moment in the control room, his right hand on the switch, he recalled that morning in exact detail. He’d been truly frightened, perhaps his mother was going crazy, crying and laughing at the same time, but then after the mullah had explained why they had come to Sadda, he was confused, deeply saddened, and overjoyed all at the same time.

“Achmed, we have heard very good things about you,” the mullah, a very tall, stern-looking man with the traditional head covering said through his thick, gray beard, and the mujahideen followed his every word with rapt attention, as if they were listening to an important sermon. “Even in Peshawar.”

Sayid had been removed from school when he was ten, because he was needed to help tend the sheep. But Achmed had been given special attention, even been taught from special books on algebra, the premier invention of Islam, geometry, physics, chemistry and languages — mostly English and French. And he was very good at his studies. He wasn’t a genius, but he was bright, something unusual for a boy in this town, and after that day fearless.

The New al-Quaeda had gone searching for bright boys like Achmed, to take them from their homes and to educate them. He’d been sent first to Saudi Arabia where he lived with a devout family while he finished his secondary schooling, again with the emphasis on math and physics, then to the King Abdul Aziz University.

Once a year he was visited by someone from the Peshawar region who brought him news of his family. “They are well, Achmed. And if you continue to excel in your studies we will continue to provide for them.”

Achmed agreed, of course. Really he had no other choice, and by the time he’d finished his second year at the university he was as fully radicalized as any other student — including Uncle Osama himself — had ever become there.

“You are now the hero of Sadda. Your people expect great things of you, as do we.”

But very often there’d been long stretches of no laughter. He remembered that clearly now, holding the trigger. No fun, no games; there’d never seemed to be time even to play soccer in the street like he’d done as a boy at home. Nor did he much care for the limited television they were allowed to watch, though from time to time he did listen to music on the stereo tape player one of the other students had managed to smuggle into the dorm. It was Western and forbidden by the religious police, but not every student was there under al-Quaeda’s direction, and the rich kids whose fathers were Saudi royalty were the most irreverent. Nothing would happen to them.

He opened his eyes and turned to look at Stan Kubansky’s body lying in a pool of blood, his hatred and contempt rising so hard and fast that he could taste the bitterness of bile at back of his throat. The supervising engineer had been among the worst of the Americans Achmed had met, so profane and so proud of his atheism that sometimes he would talk and laugh at the stupidity of war — of religious war.

“And for what?” he would practically shout. “Ragheads killing Jews. Ragheads killing Hindis. Ragheads killing Brits, and French, and Germans, and Danes, and crashing airplanes here. Why?”

The first time Achmed had heard Kubansky’s tirade he’d been struck dumb, his jaw dropping, and he’d almost stepped back, afraid that Allah would strike the infidel and anyone near him dead on the spot. But he had maintained his composure as he’d been told he must — his life and the mission would depend on it — but the deepest hatred he’d ever imagined possible had begun to smolder inside of him.

Each training shift he’d pulled with Kubansky hardened his heart further and he’d begun to pray in the evenings for the chance to kill the heathen, even as he was making subtle changes to the computer programs that ran both reactors, locking out any possibility of remotely scramming them, and smuggling in the Semtex, detonators, controllers, and the weapons and ammunition.

It was different after Saudi Arabia, when he went to France — first Paris where he studied French literature to perfect his language, and then to Saclay and Montigny for his nuclear training. And by then he had become fully integrated into French society, and there were even times, especially in Paris, where he’d had fun. He’d learned to appreciate jazz and smoking and drinking alcohol and dancing with girls who wore no head scarves, all activities his handler from Peshawar, who continued to visit him once a year in the spring, insisted on.

“Outwardly you are no longer a son of Islam,” he was told. “In France you have your Saudi passport, but in the U.S. you will become a French nuclear engineer, and that is where your work for Allah will begin.”

Finally, before he was to assume his new identity and travel to New York, he was sent to the Syrian training camp in the desert, well away from Damascus. The nearest settlement was the town of Sab Abar twenty-five kilometers to the southwest, and the camp was remote and desolate, another planet from France, but one he understood from growing up in Sadda.

He turned again and looked at the LED counters running down. If he truly wanted to survive he could try to leave here now. There wasn’t enough time to disconnect the explosives or rewire the panels, or even to reprogram the computer. The main alarm indicator was flashing, indicating that the facility was being evacuated. It meant that the engineers, probably Strasser, had figured out something was going wrong, and when they couldn’t reach the control room they may have tried a remote scram. All of that was inevitable, and the reason why he’d stayed behind.

And when his mortal body was destroyed, his soul rising to Paradise, al-Quaeda would help his parents, brother, and sisters to a far better situation; enough money to move into Islamabad where Sayid could get a real education, and life would become easy.

It was a way out for them, a real future, and a way to his salvation for the sins he’d committed since leaving Jidda.

At the camp his eyes had been completely opened for the first time; he’d finally been told the reason he’d been nurtured since boyhood. He was to become an al-Quaeda operative, a tool in the jihad against the West. He had a purpose.

And it was at the camp one evening, when a helicopter bearing the Syrian army markings brought General Mohamed Asif Tur, the Pakistani ISI officer who’d been behind his training, and Brian DeCamp with whom he would go on a mission.

Where General Tur was a dark, completely intense man who seemed to be in constant motion even when he was seated at a table, DeCamp was fair-skinned and calm. Achmed remembered his first impression of the former South African as a man who might have known all the secrets of the world, and had accepted everything, including his place in it. DeCamp was timeless, and that impression had not changed for Achmed during the thirty days in the desert, or at their last meeting in Damascus before he’d flown to London under the Forcier identity and from there to New York.

General Tur had taken Achmed aside that first night at the sprawling training camp, which appeared from the air to look like a Syrian army basic training center, and assured him that although Brian DeCamp was not a believer, neither was he an infidel in the ordinary sense of the word.

“This man is our friend,” the general had said. “He is an expert at what he does, so pay special attention to him.”

“An expert at what, sir?” Achmed had asked, but the general had smiled, not offended by the question.

“He will explain that to you, along with everything you will do together. Trust him, as I trust you. And may you go with Allah.”

“And you,” Achmed had replied.

All through his days at the training base, learning about weapons and explosives from DeCamp, who in turn learned about nuclear power stations from him, Achmed had asked himself the same question each night before sleep: I’m not angry. Why?

A deep anger seemed to lie just under DeCamp’s calm exterior, General Tur was a man at war, and his handler from Peshawar was angry with the West, as were all of the al-Quaeda — financed kids at the university. Achmed thought it was the way he should feel. He’d accepted al-Quaeda’s message about the evils of the infidels, but that had simply been at an intellectual level.

But it wasn’t until he’d arrived here that he truly understood the nature of what Kubansky had branded as radical Islam. He was a soldier now, finally ready and willing to give his life for the cause. Not only that he thought that he understood the necessity, even the urgency of the jihad. The continued existence of Islam depended on winning a war in which the infidel West had vowed would stamp out all Muslims everywhere on the planet, would make the belief in a merciful and just Allah illegal, and would brand all of the Holy Land with the stigma of the Jews.

And ironically he’d learned almost all of that from Kubansky.

He closed his eyes again and he could see the hills and mountains behind his town; he could hear his mother’s gentle voice instructing his sisters on their duties and responsibilities; he could hear his father and brother talking as they came down the street from the fields where the hired boy would remain with the flock for the night, and they sounded happy; and he could see the schoolroom so well that he could count the cracks in the walls, in the ceiling, and the swirls of dirt on the floor, and hear his teacher’s voice calling his name.

But something was wrong, and Achmed’s heart missed a beat, and he opened his eyes.

“Tom, Mr. Strasser wants to talk to you.”

He didn’t know who was speaking, and the voice was loud but distorted and it came from above, behind the observation window.

“Will you listen?”

And then Achmed saw the tiny camera head poking out from behind the blinds and he knew immediately what it was because similar remote video cameras were used to inspect the inside of reactor chambers.

It was time.

He smiled and took a deep breath and leaned backward.

SIXTEEN

Gail had finished her telephone call and came back as Wager, holding a bullhorn against the glass, was trying to talk Forcier down. McGarvey, watching the image on the computer monitor saw the sudden look of religious ecstasy on the young engineer’s face and he knew what was about to happen.

“Down!” he shouted, and he turned and shoved Gail to the floor as a tremendous explosion blew out the observation window, cutting Wager to pieces and throwing Strasser back off his feet.

The tinkling of the falling glass raining down on them seemed to last forever, and McGarvey had been in this sort of a situation before so that he knew to keep his head down, his face shielded until it stopped.

“No one move!” he shouted.

Someone was swearing and McGarvey thought it was Townsend, the plant manager, and then it was over, and he looked up.

Strasser was sitting down against the opposite wall, a thin trickle of blood oozing from a cut on his chin. He seemed dazed, but his face and especially his eyes seemed to be okay.

“See to your engineer,” he told Gail, and he went to Wager, but it was no use. The man was lying on his back a few feet from Strasser, his left foot folded under his right leg, the entire front half of his face and skull missing, splattered against the wall behind him. The force of the blast had driven the bullhorn into his head, followed by glass shrapnel. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.

McGarvey turned to Bennet who was down on his knees, blood streaming from dozens of wounds on his face, neck, and chest, fragments of glass sticking out of his eyes. “Can you move?”

“Yes. How bad is it?”

“You’re not going to die,” McGarvey said. “No arteries were hit.”

“What about my eyes?”

“I don’t know.”

Townsend wasn’t hurt, but he was so angry he was clenching and unclenching his fists, and he was shaking, muttering something under his breath.

“Get out of here,” McGarvey told him, helping Bennet to his feet. “And take him with you.”

Townsend came out of his daze. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You’ll be needed to get this place put back together and organized. We’re expendable, you’re not. Now, get the fuck out of here. Out of the damage path as fast as you can.”

Gail had helped Strasser to his feet, and she was staring at Wager’s devastated body, her mouth tight, a hard look in her eyes.

“He’s right, Bob,” Strasser said. He was a little shaky on his feet.

McGarvey handed Bennet to Gail, and went to the blasted open window, not bothering to see if Townsend would really leave because he didn’t give a damn.

The control room was in better shape than he expected it would be. Most of the force of the blast had been directed outward and upward. The son of a bitch had aimed his chest at the observation window meaning to kill at least the one trying to talk to him. As a result, his body, parts of which were splattered across the control desk for reactor one, had partially shielded the control panels behind him. The Semtex and LED counters were still in place, counting past 54:30.

Strasser joined him.

“Do you see anything obviously unfixable?” McGarvey asked the engineer.

“Just the explosives on the coolant and scram panels.”

“I’ll get you inside so you can take a closer look. Maybe he forgot something.”

“How?” Strasser asked.

But McGarvey had already stepped up on the sill, and balancing for just a second leaped up catching one of the open aluminum trusses that held up the low ceiling. It bent slightly under his weight, but he hand-walked out to the middle of the control room, away from the pools of blood, and dropped the ten or twelve feet to the floor, rolling with the hit.

He had banged up his knees in the fall, and he had to hobble over to the door, but the electronic locking mechanism had been disabled so it wouldn’t open. No time.

He pulled out his pistol and fired two shots into the back of the card reader, which sparked and the door lock cycled.

Gail was there with Strasser, her pistol out, but when she saw it was McGarvey she lowered her weapon. “We heard the shots, and I didn’t know what the hell was happening.”

He turned and went back to the control panels on the back wall and took a closer look at the LED counters, which had counted down to 50:00.

“My God, we need to call an ambulance,” Strasser said.

“They’re dead,” McGarvey replied sharply. He understood the detonators that looked like pencil stubs stuck into the Semtex, but the LED counters were out of place. There was no need for them, or at least not something as big and as complicated as they seemed.

“Do you recognize the setup?” Gail asked at his shoulder.

“No,” McGarvey said. He knew a fair bit about explosive devices and the means with which to detonate them, but this was something he’d never seen before.

“Can you disconnect the damned things?”

“I don’t know. This is probably some sort of a fail-safe. Tamper with them and they’ll blow.” McGarvey looked up as Strasser eased one of the bodies away from the computer monitor for reactor two.

“Cutting out the ability for us to remotely scram the reactors was probably done here,” the engineer said. “Maybe he rewrote the code. I need to get into the system to see what he did.” He sat down, squeamish at first because of all the blood, but then he took out a handkerchief and wiped off the keyboard and pulled up the master program, which was a directory of all the control documents that were used to operate the reactors, the coolant and steam generators and condensers, the turbines and scram functions.

McGarvey glanced at the LED, which had passed 45:00. “You have about thirty minutes before we’ll need to think about getting out of here.”

“What can I do?” Gail demanded. “Goddamnit, I feel so fucking helpless, and guilty.”

McGarvey thought that in a large measure it was her fault for not running a tighter security setup, even though this scenario wasn’t in the playbook, but it wouldn’t help to say it. The exact details of 9/11 had faded from the collective consciousness and a lot of people were walking around with blinders on. “You remember Alan Lundgren, from Washington.”

“He’s working with you now. Former Bureau counterterrorism man.”

“An Air National Guard chopper brought us up from Miami, Alan’s outside helping organize the evacuation, so he’ll be nearby. But he’s the explosives expert, I need him in here. You can take his place.”

“At the heliport?”

“No, right outside in the parking lot.”

It was obvious that she wanted to stay, torn between following McGarvey’s orders, and wanting to help fix this problem. But she nodded grimly. “I might be able to retrieve an image of the guy who left the tour. The monitoring station is upstairs, just down the hall from the observation window.”

“Later,” McGarvey said.

Gail looked over at Strasser, whose fingers were flying over the keyboard. “Good luck,” she said, and she left.

“Are you coming up with anything?” McGarvey asked the engineer.

“Nothing so far,” Strasser said without looking away from the screen. “The remote scram control seems to be functional from here.”

“Keep digging,” McGarvey said, and he took a closer look at the explosives molded to the other three panels. Nothing complicated, in each case just a one kilo brick of Semtex molded between an in-the-wall-mounted unit about the size of a fifteen- or sixteen-inch flat-panel television set and a smaller panel of brightly lit push buttons beneath it. If the plastic went off, it would take out both panels and probably do a lot of damage to some of the other controls and indicators within a eight- or ten-foot radius, and then they would be in deep shit.

Like Gail, he was beginning to feel helpless. As the counters passed 40:00, he took out his cell phone and took several close-up photos of the LED devices then speed-dialed Otto Rencke’s number at Langley.

Rencke was the CIA’s oddest duck genius, on a campus filled with such people, and was in charge of Special Operations, which meant he thought about things that no one else had dreamed up. And whenever he came up with something, perhaps something new the Chinese were doing, or defeating a new computer supervirus, or predicting a likely military or terrorist operation aimed at us somewhere in the world — and he was never wrong — the director and everyone else on the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building sat up and took notice.

He and McGarvey had worked together for years, and over that time Otto and his wife, Louise, who worked at the National Security Agency, had become family to Mac and his wife. When their daughter and son-in-law were assassinated, leaving behind a three-year-old daughter, Otto and Louise took the child in as their own; no hesitation, no questions asked; it’s what family did for each other.

Rencke answered on the first ring. “Oh, wow, Mac, is it you?”

“I have a problem I need your help with.”

Rencke always wanted to talk about what was going on in McGarvey’s life, about Audie, about Company gossip, and McGarvey almost always went along. But this time was different. “What do you have, kemo sabe?”

“I’m sending you some photographs,” McGarvey said and he hit the Send button, as the LED timers passed 38:00.

“Okay, got ’em,” Rencke said. “Oh, wow, you’re in the control room of a nuclear power station, and you’re in trouble.”

“Hutchinson Island, Florida,” McGarvey said. “It’s Semtex and an electric fuse, but I’ve never seen timers like these.”

“Not just timers. Probably remote controls too, maybe even monitors listening in to what’s going on,” Rencke said. He sounded out of breath as he usually did when he was excited or worried. “Who’s with you?”

“For now, Chris Strasser, the chief engineer, and Alan Lundgren, who’s been working with me at the NNSA.”

“Okay, I’ll run these downstairs to Jared, get his take. In the meantime I wouldn’t screw around. That shit could blow at any minute and when it does it’ll take out more than a couple of control panels, it’ll take out whoever’s standing in the way.”

“One of those panels initiates a scram if something goes wrong.”

“I see that,” Rencke said. “And I think the other panel looks like coolant controls, and if these people were any good they would have screwed with the remote scram capabilities.”

“Probably from the computer at the monitoring positions. Can you hack into them?”

“Nada. It’s a closed system, they’re not online,” Rencke said. “I’ll get back to you in the next couple of minutes.”

“We don’t have a lot of time.”

“I see that,” Rencke said, and the connection was cut.

SEVENTEEN

The LED counters passed 33:00.

McGarvey went around the control console for reactor two and watched over Strasser’s shoulder as the engineer tried to figure out what had been done to his system. But he was a nuclear engineer, not a computer systems or programs expert.

“We’re running out of time,” McGarvey said, and Strasser looked up at him and shook his head.

“I’m getting nowhere with this,” he said, frustrated and just a little frightened. “Whoever did this was damned good.”

“What about the control panels themselves? Can we take them apart and rewire the circuits so that those functions can be accessed away from here?” McGarvey said. He wanted to light a fire under the engineer’s ass; the man knew his stuff, but he was ponderous

“It’s possible. But it’d take time.”

Lundgren showed up at the door and pulled up short. “Jesus Christ, what a mess,” he said, but then he spotted the Semtex and LED counters and went to the first panel.

“What are they?” McGarvey said, starting around the console.

“Stay the hell away,” Lundgren said, his nose an inch from the LED counter. “This is practically a cell phone,” he muttered. “Dual purpose. A timed trigger, but it looks like it’ll accept a signal input. The antenna is built-in. Definitely cell phone frequencies.”

“No time to get a bomb disposal squad here,” McGarvey said.

“I can see that, so we’ll have to do it ourselves,” Lundgren said. He looked over his shoulder at Strasser. “Are you the chief engineer?”

“Yes,” Strasser said, getting to his feet. He was in some pain and it showed on his face.

“What are we dealing with here? What’ll happen if these panels are destroyed?”

“The nuclear reactors will overheat and there will be a catastrophic meltdown that the containment vessel might not be able to completely handle.”

“Will there be a radiation release?”

“Potentially massive,” Strasser said.

“Carlos and his people just showed up,” Lundgren told McGarvey. “From what I saw he only brought two of his team along. But Marsha is one of them, and she has her tool kit. If they’ll just stop talking to the plant manager.”

It was a bit of good news. While Carlos Gruen and his Miami NNSA team were highly trained to disarm nuclear weapons, Marsha Littlejohn was their expert on all kinds of explosive devices and detonators, easily on par with Lundgren. And although her personality was irrelevant at this moment, McGarvey remembered her as a cheerful optimist, the exact opposite of Gruen who found fault with everything and everyone. In advanced training, which McGarvey and Lundgren conducted at a weeklong workshop at Quantico, the team had been faced with a series of increasingly difficult tasks — everything from finding and disarming a nuclear device, to dealing with as many as ten armed and highly motivated FBI instructors playing the role of al-Quaeda fanatics — during which Gruen grumped his way, giving up when it became obvious the team was meant to fail. But Marsha never quit trying, always with a smile on her petite round face.

Lundgren pulled out a Swiss Army penknife, unfolded the one-and-a-half-inch blade, and probed one corner of the Semtex, digging out a tiny piece of it, and smelled it. “Good stuff,” he said absently, turning his attention back to the LED timer, which was passing 27:00.

“I suggest trying to open the panels and rewire them,” McGarvey said.

“We don’t want to do that,” Lundgren said. “Not until we know what we’re dealing with. Could be motion sensitive, among other things. Might even react to body heat it someone touches it.” He was studying the three wires leading out of the counter and up to the fuses. “Two of them complete the circuit, but I don’t know about the third.” He looked up. “But we caught a break. We’re between the morning and evening land and sea breezes. Nothing’s moving out there right now. So if this thing pops any radiation leaks should stay fairly close to home.”

McGarvey’s sat phone vibrated. It was Rencke.

“The LED units are almost certainly comms devices. Most likely on cell phone frequencies.”

“We got that much, what else?”

“Is Lundgren there?”

“Yeah, and Marsha Littlejohn will be here soon.”

“You’ve got good people with you, but make damned sure they understand that the detonation signal could come at any time.”

“Stand by,” McGarvey said. “Otto’s on the line, and I sent him pictures of the detonators,” he told Lundgren. “The Company’s science and technology directorate is helping out. Anything you need to know?”

“What the hell’s the third wire for?”

McGarvey relayed the question.

“The best guess here is a seismic sensory circuit,” Rencke said. “Depending on what kind of a reading the unit receives from elsewhere that particular explosion will go off in a timed sequence with others. Jared thinks it’s the kind of setup sometimes used to hunt for dinosaur bones buried too deeply for other means, and for oil exploration. The detonator reads the seismic returns from other explosions in the chain and decides what to do next.”

“Why here?”

“Move anything in the wrong way, and the detonators will fire.”

“You mean like another panel?”

“Yeah, and probably the control units that could maybe reroute cooling water. Just take it easy, Mac. Janet says your best bet will be disabling the LED counters.”

“Alan thinks they could be heat sensitive,” McGarvey said.

“Hang on,” Rencke said. He was back almost immediately. “Probably not. But go tenderly.”

“Will do,” McGarvey said. He broke the connection and explained what Otto and the Company’s S&T directorate had come up with.

“That’s just fine,” Lundgren said, disgusted.

“We can’t touch anything in here?” Strasser demanded.

“No.”

They all looked at the counters, which were just passing 23:20.

“What can we do?” the engineer asked.

“You’ve done all you can, it’s up to us now. Get out,” Lundgren told him. He glanced up at McGarvey. “Go pull Gruen’s head out of his ass and get his team in here ASAP. Marsha’s got the equipment we need.”

“We’re here,” Gruen said from the doorway. “And I’m taking over this case as of now.”

EIGHTEEN

Carlos Gruen was a roly-poly man, with a round, perpetually red face and the defensive attitude that many men who stood barely five feet two seemed to wear like a suit of armor. He was considered the fair-haired boy up in Washington, and his goal was to one day take over the entire NNSA, which was not out of the question. He had the credentials for the job: a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from M.I.T., an MBA from Harvard, and a lot of friends in the Department of Energy.

He carried two aluminum cases, each about the size of a medium-sized overnight bag, his glasses on top of his head, the collar of his powder blue coveralls properly buttoned up. He stopped all of a sudden when he saw the bodies and the gore, and the blown-out observation window above.

This was exactly the sort of situation McGarvey had been trying to drum into the heads of all the Rapid Response team personnel, but he’d suspected all along that no one actually believed they’d ever encounter something like this. They were scientists and technicians, not combat troops, and he could see dawning realization of what had happened, was happening here, in the momentarily sick expression in Gruen’s pale eyes.

Marsha Littlejohn, tall, whip-thin, pale blond, a leather satchel slung over her narrow shoulders, stepped around Gruen, her expression tightening when she saw the bodies and the blood. But then she spotted Lundgren at the scram panel, and went directly over to him, ignoring McGarvey and Strasser for the moment.

“What’s the situation?” she asked, and Lundgren explained what they up against, including the CIA’s opinion.

Gruen’s second team member stopped just inside the doorway. He was young, probably in his twenties, with the physique of a college football player, and like his boss he carried two aluminum cases that contained the equipment for detecting nuclear weapons, and for electronically interfering with the weapons’ firing systems.

“This looks like your sort of work,” Gruen said to McGarvey. “But since the shooting seems to be done with, why don’t you get the fuck out of my incident scene.”

“Nice to see you too, Carlos,” McGarvey said. “Well equipped for the job at hand, and on time as usual.”

Marsha had set her satchel on the floor and was pulling out some tools, and other equipment including a stethoscope and several small electronic devices each about the size of a pack of cigarettes or cell phone.

She looked up. “Oh, hi, Mac,” she said pleasantly, a little smile on her full lips. If she was feeling any tension it wasn’t showing. “You guys might want to get out of here, because we could screw this up.”

“She’s right,” Lundgren said, and he too was calm. Behind him the LED counter was passing 22:00. “We’re going to attempt to take the detonator circuit apart and disable the power supply, and it’s going to get a little dicey. Somebody accidentally bumps into something and we could be in trouble.”

Strasser was looking helpless, confused, and angry. This was his facility; he was responsible for the operation of the reactors and everything else of a nonbusiness and nonadministrative nature, and a dagger had been stabbed into his heart. Men he knew and trusted were dead, one of them the killer, the saboteur, and it was all too much for him.

“Leave now,” McGarvey told him. “Find your plant manager and figure out what you’ll have to do if we disarm the explosives, but more important what you’ll need to do if we fail.”

Marsha looked over her shoulder. “Everybody out. Now,” she said.

Strasser left, but Gruen with his second team member remained at the door, just as frustrated as the chief engineer was. But this situation was out of his hands. Nothing he could say or do was going to help, and he knew it, and it made him angry. He needed to be in the center of things, he needed to be in control, and his attitude had always been the same: The road to the directorship was paved with good field decisions, good management of his resources, and innovative solutions, and he wasn’t afraid to tell anyone who would listen.

“Do you need anything for backup?” he asked.

But Marsha didn’t respond. She turned the LED counter on the coolant control panel over on its back, her movements slow, careful, precise, and she began to hum a tune from the back of her throat. She’d once explained that she was always frightened practically out her mind — spitless, as she put it — and humming distracted that automatic part of her fight-or-flight instinct so that she could do her work with a steady hand.

Lundgren was paying close attention to what she was doing, and copying each of her moves, his hands just as steady as hers, as he worked on the LED counter attached to the scram panel for number two.

The counters passed 20:00.

“I’ll be right back,” McGarvey said. He glanced at his wristwatch; it was a few minutes before 1:40 P.M. By 2:00 P.M. the situation would be resolved one way or the other, and for the moment it was just as much out of his hands as it was out of Gruen’s.

“Doug and I will be out in the corridor,” Gruen said. “If you need anything I’ll be within earshot.”

They went outside and McGarvey followed after them. Gruen badly wanted to say something, take a parting shot, but he just shook his head.

“They don’t have a lot of time,” McGarvey said. “So it’s just a suggestion, but you might want to stay out of their way. Cut them a little slack.”

“Get out of here,” Gruen said.

McGarvey hurried down the hall and took the stairs to the second floor, past the blown-out observation window and Wager’s body, and back to the security suite, deserted now, as he hoped the entire facility was.

A pair of offices — Gail’s and Wager’s — were down a short corridor from the reception area, and across from a small room with banks of closed-circuit television monitors built into a long horseshoe-shaped console with positions for two operators. Behind them, another door opened to a room filled with a dozen or more racks of digital recording units.

Mac took a few precious minutes figuring out the system so that he could access the camera watching the visitors center. He brought the image up on one of the monitors. The lot was deserted of civilian personnel, and only a single St. Lucie County sheriff’s unit was parked diagonally across A1A. The legend at the bottom of the screen showed a camera number and a date-time block.

Some of the other cameras showed various places within the facility, all of them deserted except for the parking lot directly outside, where the Air National Guard helicopter was just setting down. Strasser emerged from the building and headed over to a knot of a half dozen people, one of whom McGarvey recognized as Bob Townsend, the plant manager, getting ready to board the chopper.

McGarvey went into the recording room, where it took another minute or two to locate the unit that corresponded to the visitors center parking lot camera, pop the disk out, and pocket it.

Back out in the corridor across from Gail’s office, he hesitated for a brief moment, wondering what he would find inside, what new measure of her he might discover, and in the next moment he wondered why he cared.

The answer came to him reluctantly as he hurried out into the main corridor and headed toward the observation window, Wager’s blood splattered against the opposite wall, and pooled up under his body. He’d cared for someone all of his life, and those kinds of feelings were like unbreakable habits reinforced each time he entered a relationship. At this stage with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law dead, the habit was still alive and active inside of him, perhaps stronger than ever, and he couldn’t help from wondering about Gail; couldn’t help wondering about himself.

He glanced at his wristwatch, it was coming up on 1:50 P.M., as he reached the observation window. Still moving, he glanced down. Lundgren and Marsha had shifted over to the rigged panels for reactor one, and were hunched over their work. Both LED counters on reactor two lay on a tray beneath the panels, their batteries disconnected, as was one of the counters for reactor one, and for the first time since he’d arrived he had genuine hope that they’d come on time because there was still ten minutes left on the last LED counter.

He was just past the window when a bright flash caught the corner of his eye, and he turned his head as the explosion disintegrated Marsha’s and Alan’s upper torsos and heads in a single haze of blood, and metal parts, and dust from somewhere.

It was so fast that McGarvery had no time to react, no time to move a muscle, no time even to stop in his tracks, or to feel anything beyond surprise.

Gruen was shouting something that McGarvey couldn’t make out over the ringing in his ears, and in the next second or two with the sounds of metal and bits of glass falling around the control room, he ran for the stairs to the back corridor and control room door.

“Get out of there!” he shouted, taking the stairs down two at a time, nearly stumbling and pitching headfirst, the images of his wife’s and daughter’s bodies destroyed beyond all hope of salvation, beyond even recognition, rising up in his eyes like a bitter gorge choking his breath.

Gruen, standing at the open door with his other team member, Douglas Vigliaturo, looked around, his movements in slow motion, as McGarvey hit the first floor running. “There was still ten minutes on the counters!” he shouted. “You saw it, too.”

“It was a trap,” McGarvey said. “Whoever set this up meant to kill anyone trying to disarm the explosives. We have to leave now.”

“I need to recall our transportation,” Gruen said, still shouting, panic showing in his eyes. “It’ll take too much time.”

“You can ride with me, but we have to get out of here.”

Gruen looked inside the control room, uncertain what to do next. “What do I tell Marsha’s husband?”

“Christ,” McGarvey said. “Stay if you want, but I suggest you move your ass.” He headed the rest of the way down the corridor, out the back door, and around to the front of the building, sirens wailing everywhere throughout the nearly deserted facility.

NINETEEN

They were the last to head away from facility. As soon as McGarvey came around the corner, Gail didn’t need to be warned, she knew what had happened. She got on the radio and began notifying Haggerty, who was on site, along with all the other emergency responders what was about to happen, and to get away — and far away — as quickly as possible.

She, Townsend, Strasser, Bennet, and a number of other station personnel were already climbing aboard the Air National Guard chopper when McGarvey reached them.

“Both reactors?” Gail asked.

“Just number two,” McGarvey said, not too gently hustling her aboard.

Gruen and Vigliaturo came across the parking lot in a dead run, and Gail exchanged a glance with McGarvey.

“No one else?”

“That’s it.”

“You say they were unsuccessful to stop the explosions on one?” Strasser shouted over the roar of the chopper’s engines and the heavy thump of its main rotor.

“That’s right, but I think only one of the panels was destroyed,” McGarvey told him, and Townsend looked mad enough to kill someone.

Police and fire units started to pull away from the station, some heading south, but most heading north on A1A by the time Gruen and his team member reached the chopper and climbed aboard. They’d left their antinuclear device equipment behind.

A St. Lucie County EMS tech was in the back of the chopper with Bennet, cradling the electrician’s head, and he looked up. “I’ve called an ophthalmic specialist at Miami General. He’s standing by. We need to get this man down there as soon as possible.”

McGarvey waited a full minute to make sure that no one else was coming, and he turned to the pilot and pumped his fist, and motioned out to sea. The helicopter lifted off, made a sharp dipping turn to the left, and headed directly east away from the power plant.

“Have a Dade County medevac chopper head north up the coast. When we can set down we’ll radio our position,” McGarvey shouted.

Gruen started to object but McGarvey just glared at him, and he sat back. He was still deeply shaken by the death of one of his team members, which was obvious from his expression, and yet it was equally obvious that he was working out a way in which he could somehow either blame the situation on someone — almost certainly McGarvey — and/or turn it to his advantage.

“We need to go now—” the medic insisted, but Strasser overrode him.

“It’s starting,” he said. He was looking out the window on the opposite side from the still open hatch.

Townsend was crouched next to him. “Mother of God,” he said. But the angle was wrong. The helicopter had already crossed A1A and was out over the water, the facility almost directly behind them.

McGarvey had to shout twice to get the pilot’s attention and he motioned for him to turn the helicopter broadside to the coast, while still heading away. The helicopter banked a little to port, then slewed left, almost skidding, the coast sliding into view from the open hatch and then the facility dominated by the twin containment domes.

Gail was right there with McGarvey at the hatch, and Townsend, Strasser, and the others crowded around, looking over his shoulder. At first nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except for the traffic. The facility was deserted, and from their altitude of about five hundred feet they could see a long way up and down the coast and across the Intracoastal Waterway on the west side of the island to the mainland and down toward the town of Stuart, civilian cars and a lot of police and emergency responder vehicles streaming away.

Massive traffic jams blocked the bridges off the island, one to the north and two to the south, and it would be hours before they were cleared. Farther inland the turnpike and I-95, which ran parallel within sight of each other, were packed with wall-to-wall traffic both ways. The warning had gone out on radio and television and the public’s remembrance of 9/11 spiked and with it the mindless, absolute terror of nuclear power and they were running. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl — Hiroshima and Nagasaki in some people’s minds — conjured up visions of mushroom clouds hanging over Hutchinson Island.

Then McGarvey and the others saw what Strasser had already seen; a slight shimmer was causing the air over the containment dome for reactor one to waver and rise like summer heat from a black-topped road in the distance; like a halo of death hanging over the domed cap, it came to McGarvey. The bodies of Wager and Marsha and Alan were down there, and it was possible that the South Service Building would become their mausoleum for a very long time.

“There!” Strasser shouted over the noise, and the chopper slowed and stopped, hovering where it was a mile or so offshore.

A dark line seemed to crawl from about halfway up the side of the dome, widening as it accelerated, and steam, white by contrast, began to leak from the crack, a little at first but then more of it, rising up into the cloudless blue Florida sky.

“Is it radioactive?” McGarvey asked, without looking over his shoulder, his eyes glued to the dome, and the plume rising above it.

“Probably not,” Strasser said. “It’s coming from the steam generator, or the loop. As long as the reactor core container doesn’t breach, we’ll be okay.”

“What are the chances of that not happening?”

“Depends on which panel they saved.”

A geyser of water shot from near the bottom of the crack, slamming into the South Service Building like a stream from a fire hose.

“The primary coolant loop just opened,” Strasser said.

“Goddamnit, Chris, what about the emergency diesel?” Townsend demanded. “It should have been pumping water into the core by now.”

“I don’t know,” Strasser admitted. “More sabotage?” The remorse was thick in his voice. It was sabotage, and not only in the control room. His nuclear power generating station had been mortally tampered with, and it had taken months to do it, and it had happened on his watch, right under his nose. He should have seen it.

Gruen pushed forward so he was right on McGarvey’s shoulder. “Christ,” he muttered, but everyone heard him.

A second crack, this one wider and moving faster, branched off from the first, and headed at a wide angle from the top third of the dome, like a broad slice of pie, and the concrete began to take on a rosy glow, hard to see in the bright daylight, but growing.

“The core is overheating now,” Gruen said in awe.

“He’s right,” Strasser said.

“Any possibility of an explosion?” McGarvey asked. “Even remotely?”

“No—” Gruen said, but Strasser cut him off.

“Not a nuclear explosion.”

The massive piece of concrete pie began to glow brighter now, moving up the scale from a rose to a deep red and it began to slump toward the right, in slow motion, opening a big hole in the side of the dome. Suddenly another geyser of water and steam burst straight out of the breach, heaving pieces of concrete and other debris out into the open air, the heavier materials raining out as far as the shore and the lighter stuff roiling upwards.

“We’d better back off,” Gail said.

No one could take their eyes off the terrible sight, and McGarvey remembered the pictures of Chernobyl right after it happened in 1986, but something else began to dawn on him as he watched the steam plume rise over the dome — the wind had shifted from the west. The radioactive release was heading out to sea. They had caught a break.

“It’s coming this way,” Gruen said.

And Townsend and the others saw what was happening. “Thank God,” the plant manager said.

“Don’t you think we should get the hell out of here?” Gruen asked.

The side of the containment dome slumped even farther, but the damage seemed to be slowing down.

“The reactor is finally scramming,” Strasser said. “Your people saved that panel. Thank God.”

McGarvey motioned for the pilot to get them out of there, and the chopper began a wide, swinging arc off to the south, away from the plume, as Gail got on her cell phone to contact the authorities on the ground, and Gruen got on his own phone to the NNSA hotline.

“You guys are going to have to deal with that,” McGarvey told Townsend and Strasser. “Will it be impossible?”

“It’s no Chernobyl,” Strasser said. “But it’ll take the better part of a year or more to get back online.”

“If ever,” Townsend said bitterly. “We’re going to be faced with public opinion. Especially if any civilians get hurt.” He looked away, overwhelmed for just that moment by the enormity of what had just happened, what was happening. He’d worked with nukes for the better part of his career, and this was in lieu of his gold watch and twenty-five-year service pin. He and Strasser would not be remembered so much for leading the cleanup efforts, but for the fact such efforts had been needed in the first place.

Nuclear power was unsafe, the headlines would blare. Worldwide.

If not for Lundgren and Marsha it would have been much worse, but McGarvey had the unsettling feeling that this incident was just the beginning. Hutchinson Island had been sabotaged, and he knew in his gut that this incident was only one part of something much larger.

TWENTY

It was ten in the evening in Washington when President Howard Lord entered the main conference center in the complex of offices that was collectively called the Situation Room, on the ground floor of the West Wing. Already seated around the long cherrywood table were the director of the CIA, Walter Page, who had been a Fortune 500 company CEO; the National Security Agency Director, Air Force General Lawrence Piedermont, who was short and slender with thinning hair and a titanium stare, and who was said to be the most brilliant man in Washington; FBI Director Stewart Sargent, who was tall with a stern demeanor, who’d worked his way from a New York street cop to chief of the entire agency, while at the same time acquiring a Ph.D. in criminal science; the president’s adviser on national security affairs, Eduardo Estevez, who’d been deputy associate director of the FBI, specializing in counterterrorism; Director of Homeland Security Admiral Allen Newhouse, who’d been commandant of the Coast Guard; and Department of Energy Deputy Secretary Joseph Caldwell, who’d been in nearly continuous conferences all afternoon and early evening with Joseph S. French, who ran the NNSA’s Division of Emergency Operations. The only key player missing was Director of National Intelligence Avery Lockwood, currently on his way back from Islamabad.

The main flat-panel television screen on the back wall facing the president’s position was running scenes from the Hutchinson Island disaster, as the media had dubbed it, and it was immediately obvious that the meltdown could have been much, much worse.

Everyone got to their feet.

“Good evening,” Lord said. At six-six he was the tallest U.S. president ever, a full two inches taller than Abraham Lincoln, and he’d been a decent basketball player at Northwestern, though the team was lousy. He was also one of the brighter men ever to sit in the Oval Office, but with that intelligence came a fair amount of arrogance that sometimes got in the way of his accepting advice from members of his staff who he thought weren’t as smart.

The vice president, who sometimes sat in on emergency meetings such as this one, had been sent to Offut Air Force Base in Omaha along with several key members of Congress and two Supreme Court Chief Justices. After 9/11 no one was taking anything for granted; Hutchinson Island had been hit, and it was possible that more attacks would be forthcoming, maybe even here in Washington.

“Good evening, Mr. President,” Admiral Newhouse said. “I’ll be giving the briefing.” He was a short fireplug of a man with a dynamic personality, and he was one of the men in the room whom Lord genuinely respected and liked. During a particularly disastrous hurricane season a few years ago, the Coast Guard, under Newhouse’s direction, had been the only federal organization that actually knew what it was doing.

“What’s the word on casualties?” the president asked, taking his seat at the head of the table. The preliminary briefing book was on the table in front of him, but the information it contained was already two hours old, and he ignored it.

“We caught a couple of breaks,” Newhouse said, moving to the podium to the right of the main monitor. “Nine people were killed inside the plant, counting the suspected terrorist—”

“He blew himself up,” Stewart Sargent said. “I think that makes him more than just a suspect.”

“But he probably had help,” Newhouse said, obviously disliking the interruption, and Lord motioned for him to go on, thinking that although Sargent was a good fit at the Bureau, he never knew when to keep his mouth shut.

“Two of the casualties — Alan Lundgren and Marsha Littlejohn, both of them National Nuclear Security Administration Rapid Response team members — managed to disarm the explosives on one of the reactors, preventing its meltdown. But they were too late to completely disarm the second one. Apparently it had something to do with defective detonating units. The explosives were triggered as they were working on the detonators, killing both of them instantly.”

“They were true heroes,” Joseph Caldwell said. “I never personally knew them, of course, but the public should be made aware of their sacrifice.”

For which the DOE would take the credit, Lord had the nasty thought. “We’ll hold on that for the time being,” he said, and Caldwell wanted to protest. “We don’t want to announce our abilities to the enemy.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“What about civilian casualties?” the President asked.

“A few cuts and bruises during the evacuation of the facility, and a fairly high number of traffic accidents on the highways within a twenty-mile radius, but reasonable considering that more than one hundred thousand people tried to get away from the possible damage path.”

“Deaths?”

“Only three, Mr. President, which is remarkably low,” Newhouse replied. “The biggest problem authorities on the ground are trying to deal with is convincing people at least five miles out to return to their homes. The winds all day were mostly out of the west, which pushed the bulk of the relatively small radiation leak harmlessly to sea.”

“How soon before the cleanup operation can begin?” Lord asked. No one enjoyed briefing this president, because he hammered the presenter with an almost continuous barrage of questions.

“Actually some cleanup operations have already begun,” Newhouse said. “A fair amount of debris, mostly concrete in sizes ranging from eight to ten pounds all the way down to dust, along with some metal slag, and water fell in the immediate area around the containment dome and the South Service Building where the control room was located. We’re dealing right now with the outside areas, along with about one mile of A1A — that’s the only highway on the island.”

“How long before the plant is back up and producing electricity?”

“That’s up to the nuclear engineers and waste disposal people. Could be a year, could be a lot longer.”

“Could be never?” the president asked, already thinking ahead to the trouble the industry would face as the more than thirty permit applications for new nuclear-powered generating stations were ruled on. Granting any of them would be almost entirely dependent on public sentiment.

Newhouse nodded. “No one wants to admit the possibility, Mr. President, but I think we need to consider that Hutchinson Island may never reopen. It may have to be capped, and the immediate area evacuated and quarantined, much like Chernobyl.”

“How many families would be affected?”

“I don’t have that number yet.”

“Get it by morning,” the president said. “Include it with your overnight update.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about the radioactive material that fell into the sea? How much of it has or will drift ashore?”

“That was another break,” Newhouse said. “It looks as if the bulk of the material is migrating into the Gulf Stream, which will carry it north while at the same time vastly diluting its strength. Shipping interests have been notified to stay clear, which will cost them money, of course, since they won’t get the boost from the Stream, but the effects shouldn’t last long. Perhaps less than a week.”

“What about damage to marine life?”

“It’s too soon to tell, but it’s my understanding from Loring that NOAA is addressing the possibility.” Ron Loring was the secretary of commerce, of which NOAA was a department.

Lord glanced at the Hutchinson Island images on the big flat-panel monitor at the other end of the room. It hadn’t been another 9/11, but it could have been. It had been meant to do the U.S. even more harm.

“Is there any reason for us to consider this as anything other than a terrorist attack?” he asked. “An incident with a national backing?”

“The CIA has no direct information of such a possibility,” Walter Page began. He was well dressed as was his custom, and looked as if he had just stepped out of a Savile Row ad in The Times . “But a former director of the Agency was on site, and was apparently instrumental in saving some important people.”

“Kirk McGarvey,” the DOE’s Deputy Secretary Joseph Caldwell said with a smirk. “A loose cannon if ever there was one.”

“You hired him,” Page shot back. “And yes, he’s a loose cannon, but he’s done some spectacular things for this country.”

Lord knew of McGarvey, of course, everyone around this table did, and while he could see that Page had a great deal of respect for the man it was a view he didn’t share. McGarvey was of an old, dangerous cold war school; the sort of a figure who approved of places like Guántanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and renditions, even assassinations. He’d done good, even great things for the U.S., but he’d also caused a lot of serious frustration and embarrassment for previous administrations.

“What was he doing at Hutchinson Island?”

“He was in Miami training one of our new Rapid Response teams to deal with actual face-to-face encounters with a terrorist or terrorists,” Caldwell said. “But to this point he’s been more bother than benefit. It’s highly unlikely that our people would ever find themselves in such a situation.”

“This time they did,” Page said.

“Are there any current or developing threats against us or our interests that have recently come to light? Any possible connections to this attack?”

“Nothing that’s not already on the table,” Page said.

“We’ve picked up nothing recently,” the NSA’s Director General Piedermont said.

“For the time being the incident will be publicly treated as an accident,” the president said.

“We may be too late for that, Mr. President,” Newhouse disagreed. “Too many people were on site in the middle of it — several of them senior SSP&L officers. And those people definitely will not want to support any claim of an accident. It would give them a black eye.”

“Get me a list of names, and I’ll talk to each one of them personally.”

“Yes, sir,” Newhouse said, and he glanced over his shoulder at the monitor, and the president and everyone else in the room saw the CNN graphic comparing this event to 9/11.

The genie was already out of the bottle, and Lord’s anger spiked, but he contained himself. “So, we’ve passed that point already. Has anyone claimed responsibility?”

“No, sir,” the admiral said.

“In addition to the cleanup efforts, the next steps are clear. We find the bastards who did this to us, and take them out.” Lord said and he looked each of his people in the eye. “Priority one.”

“It could be helpful if we also found out why,” Page said. “This attack could be an isolated incident, but it could be the opening shot of something much larger.”

“I agree, Mr. President. Al-Quaeda and some of the other terrorist organizations have gotten a hell of lot more sophisticated since nine/eleven. We need to find out what’s going on.”

“I’ll coordinate that effort,” the president’s national security adviser Eduardo Estevez said.

“We’ll need to put someone in overall charge in the field,” Page suggested.

“Do it, but quietly,” Lord ordered. “This will not end up as another nine/eleven media circus.”

But everyone in the room, including the president himself knew that an incident of this magnitude could not be manipulated. The American public had become more savvy since 9/11 and things like this always seemed to take on a life of their own.

TWENTY-ONE

It had come to her in a dream three days ago that something awful was about to happen, and that because of it she would be in a great deal of personal danger. She’d awakened at three in the morning, drenched in sweat, alone as she had been for the past five years since her divorce, and she’d gotten up, walked to the window, and looked out over the city of Caracas, goose bumps on the back of her neck and on her arms.

But it wasn’t until late this afternoon when flash traffic from CIA Headquarters alerting all station chiefs worldwide about the attack on Hutchinson Island’s nuclear power facility, that chief of CIA Station Caracas, Lorraine Fritch, suddenly put together most of the bits and pieces of information her people had been gathering over the past four months into one big — and to her — terrifying picture.

She’d had an epiphany, and she’d convinced herself it was because of Hutchinson Island. The connections had become crystal clear in her head, but not so clear that she would be able to convince her boss, the deputy director of operations, and especially not the DCI, by e-mail, no matter how detailed, or even by encrypted phone. This she had to do in person.

She’d messaged her boss, Marty Baimbridge, that she was flying up to Washington with something even more important than flash traffic could convey. This was something, she’d told him, that would have to be face-to-face. The one word reply had been: “Come.”

It was late evening by the time she climbed into the backseat of an embassy Escalade, her driver and bodyguard in front, and they left through the front gate, and merged with steady traffic on the Avenida Miranda and headed out to the Aeropuerto Internacional de Maiquetia Simon Bolivar. Ordinarily embassy personnel, including CIA officers, were supposed to fly commercial, and coach at that. But Continental flights left first thing in the morning, and, stopping in Houston, didn’t get to Baltimore until nearly midnight, so she’d chartered a private Gulfstream that would fly directly to Miami where it would refuel and then onward to Reagan National Airport in Washington, getting there first thing in the morning.

She could sleep on the flight, if she could sleep at all, which considering her state of mind at the moment was highly doubtful. It was one of the many reasons her husband had cited for their divorce: When she was engaged in something, she was superengaged to the point of completely tuning out her family, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. Another of the reasons, of course, was the fact she couldn’t discuss her work with her husband, and she would often drop everything and fly off to somewhere in the world at a moment’s notice, again without telling him where she was going, what she would be doing when she got there, and how long it would be before she got back.

She was engaged now, and she was flying out, but the only one she’d had to inform was Ambassador Turner, who hadn’t cared to demand a detailed explanation before she spent the money for the flight. It was her station’s budget, not the embassy’s.

It had began for her four months ago when she’d accidentally overheard a chance remark during a lunch at the Tamanaco Inter-Continental Hotel with a pair of advisers to President Chávez, who knew who and what she was, and were pushing her to make a mistake. They’d met with her on orders to find out what the CIA was up to, and she to get a hint of just how much SEBIN, Venezuela’s intelligence service, knew or guessed about what was going on right under their noses.

It was a little before 12:30 P.M., and they’d just sat down and ordered drinks when a man, medium build with a mustache, his hair graying at his sideburns and temples, with lovely dark eyes, walked in with a pair of men just as expensively dressed as he was. Lorraine thought that he was extraordinarily handsome and vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t dredge up a name though she thought it would be in her best interest if she could.

One of the men at her table looked up, and did a double take, and said something in rapid-fire Spanish to the other adviser.

It was too fast for Lorraine but she did catch the name, Señor Octavio, and it came to her that he was Miguel Octavio, Venezuela’s richest man, and one of the most reclusive multibillionaires in the world — even more so than Howard Hughes had been. His was oil money, of course, but the fact he was here like this was nothing short of extraordinary, and she’d had the thought that only something very important could have brought him out in public.

“Do either of you recognize the two men with Señor Octavio?” she’d asked, and the two advisers looked at her with genuine fear in their eyes, and told her no, that they were strangers to them. Of course she hadn’t believed them.

And it might have ended there, nothing more than a curiosity except that the obsequious maître d’ led Octavio and his companions to a window table, passing within a couple of feet from where Lorraine was seated. They were talking, in accented English, their voices low but not so low that she couldn’t guess that at least one of the men was an Arab speaker, and hear the initials UAEIBC mentioned, and her stomach had done a flip flop.

Lunch had been made difficult for her because she wanted to get back to the embassy and start working out what connection Octavio had made or was making with the United Arab Emirates International Bank of Commerce, which had been long suspected of funding a number of terrorist groups, including al-Quaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, and the lesser known group Islamic Jihad and their front cells and ancillary organizations — or at least funneling money from various Islamic fund-raising organizations into the groups. The bank had no direct connection with the UAE government in Dubai, but its books and client list were more closely held than any offshore bank in the world.

None of that had been proven yet, but consensus among top-ranking people in U.S. and British intelligence services compared the UAE bank with the Luxembourg-registered Bank of Credit and Commerce that had been funded by the government of Pakistan, likely through its intelligence service the ISI. The BCCI, which had collapsed in the nineties, had engaged in money laundering, bribery, and tax evasion, plus supporting some of the same terrorist organizations that the commercial bank in the UAE was supporting now. The BCCI had even dealt in arms trafficking, as well as brokering the sale of nuclear technologies. In the end the BCCI had collapsed under its own weight, its officers walking away with $20 billion that had never been accounted for.

That afternoon she’d set her assistant chief of station Donald Morton to the task of finding out everything he could on Octavio’s financial connections outside of Venezuela. Don was a Harvard MBA, and had been sent to Caracas to keep his ear to the ground in the oil ministry. Because Venezuela was the fourth largest supplier to the U.S., keeping track down here was of vital importance.

“I want his background as well,” Lorraine had ordered. She was finally on the hunt of something worthwhile and she’d already begun to love it. That trait in her had been the reason the CIA had snapped her up from her small, but exclusive, law practice in Beverly Hills fourteen years ago.

“Family history, education, stuff like that?” Morton had asked. “Just Google him, no need to use up our resources.”

“I want his real background.”

“Ah, a skeptic among us,” he said. Although he was barely out of his twenties he was a portly man who in a business suit could pass for what most people pictured a banker or Fortune 500 looked like. But he was a lot smarter than most of that type. “I have a friend in the DI at Langley who owes me a favor, I’ll get her started.” The DI was the Company’s Directorate of Intelligence, where all sorts of research was conducted on, among other things, international economic activities and the people involved.

“But quietly,” Lorraine had cautioned him. “I want this as low-key as possible, because this guy carries a lot of weight around here, and it would be too bad if we tipped something nasty over and word got back to him, we could all be in some deep shit.”

The first surprise had been how open the facts of his background were. What Don’s friend in the DI had dug up on the oil billionaire exactly matched what was published on Wikipedia: his family was old money, able to trace their lineage back to the early Spanish sugarcane and tobacco fields, and, of course, oil. Octavio the younger had been educated at Oxford, specializing in international business and law, spending his vacations skiing in Switzerland and Austria, gambling in Monaco and Las Vegas, and romancing his way across Europe, his photographs on the front pages of tabloids everywhere. Until he turned twenty-five when he practically disappeared.

“Except in the business world,” Morton had reported. “Miguel Octavio set out to become the richest man in the world, but very quietly, because some of his business deals were too sweet to be one hundred percent legit.”

That had been two months ago when Don laid a thick file on her desk.

“Give me a couple of for instances,” Lorraine had prompted.

“He’s either the shrewdest or the luckiest man in the world, or — and this one’s my best guess — he has had a whole lot of insider info. He was in on the dot-com boom in the States in a big way, investing in everything from Microsoft to Google, and sticking with them, but he also spread a couple hundred million in a bunch of other IPOs that went ballistic, and then sold them at the peak, before they crashed. And he walked away with his first billion.”

“A few moves like those would have made him a smart investor,” Lorraine agreed. “Did he ever fail?”

“Not once, and it was more than a few calls. More like three dozen.”

“Any common thread?”

“Threads,” Morton said. “And it’s all in the file. Primarily three major U.S. banks where he has close personal friends on the boards of directors. They couldn’t directly profit from what they knew, and more important when they knew what they did, but Octavio sure as hell could and did.”

“Any of that money make it back to his pals?” Lorraine asked.

“Yeah, but that’s the slick part. The guy bet the entire billion — or at least most of it — in the U.S. housing boom, the bulk of it in Florida and California, through Anne Marie Marinaccio.”

“The FBI wants her.”

“That’s the even more interesting part,” Morton said. “Marinaccio bailed when the housing market started heading south, and she took a few billions of her investors’ money with her where she set up shop in Dubai under what’s called the Marinaccio Group. Lots of derivatives, most of which she managed to dump in time. But the curious part is that Octavio bailed at the same time Marinaccio did. Pulling out more than two billion which was legit on the surface.”

“What about these days? Either of them been hurt by the recession?”

“I don’t know yet about Marinaccio, although there’ve been rumors about her oil investments, especially in Iraq, getting shaky, but Octavio is apparently in great shape.”

“So why is he involved with the UAEIBC?” Lorraine had asked, and now heading out to the airport she remembered that question and Don’s answer with perfect clarity.

“I’m working on that part, but it’s almost certain that the Marinaccio Group is heavily involved in the bank, and of course Octavio and Marinaccio had a fabulously successful financial relationship. So there’s that, along with their shared interest in oil, and one other intriguing tidbit that I’m still trying to run down.”

“Intrigue me.”

“The Marinaccio Group has it’s own security division, headed by Gunther Wolfhardt, ex-East German Stasi. Rumors are that Wolfhardt might have been somehow involved with the heart attack of one of Marinaccio’s rivals, and the terrorist bombing of another’s office buildings. In each case Marinaccio came out on top financially. And there are other rumors.”

“If all that’s true, it means Marinaccio is a ruthless bitch who’ll stop at literally nothing to protect her investments.”

“That would be to Miguel Octavio’s best interests as well.”

“Keep digging,” she ordered.

Last week Don had connected the Marinaccio Group with at least one probable assassination and one likely bombing as well as a direct connection with several of the UAEIBC-supported terrorist organizations, and a rumor floating around that al-Quaeda was planning another spectacular strike somewhere in the U.S.

Marinaccio equaled oil interests, equaled terrorism and terrorists, equaled Octavio. And then Hutchinson Island happened. Make nuclear-generated electricity unpalatable, and oil and natural gas would be ready and able to step in because coal was coming up against the increasingly powerful global warming lobby, and wind and solar technologies weren’t ready yet to fill the gap.

She didn’t have all the proof, but it was enough in her mind to make a damned good case for the CIA to spend some of its resources to take a closer look.

Two motorcycle cops pulled up beside them and waved them over. They were on the highway now, the airport within sight a few miles across an open field.

Lorraine didn’t know if she should be alarmed yet. The plates on the SUV were diplomatic and even though she was CIA, her embassy title was Special Adviser to the Ambassador, which gave her diplomatic immunity. But Venezuela was Miguel Octavio’s country, and just now President Chavez was acting particularly unkindly toward the U.S. And things happened down here.

“Were we speeding?” she asked the driver as he slowed down and pulled over to the side of the busy road.

“About ten miles over the limit, ma’am, the same as everyone else.”

“Better get your passport out, Mrs. Fritch,” her bodyguard said. “This is probably just a routine hassle. Been happening a lot lately.”

When they were stopped the driver powered down his window as one of the cops came over, while the second came around to the passenger side as Lorraine’s bodyguard lowered his window.

“Is there some trouble, Officer?” the driver asked.

Lorraine opened her purse, looked at her 9mm Beretta for just a second, but then grabbed her passport. Normally she didn’t travel armed, but this time she was spooked.

The first gunshot was so loud in the confines of the car that she was so startled, so distracted she didn’t realize for the first instant that her bodyguard’s blood had splashed her face. She looked up as the second shot was fired, this one hitting the driver in the forehead, and then she was looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, a SIG-Sauer, she thought, before a billion stars burst inside her skull.

TWENTY-TWO

All the way back up to Washington the next morning McGarvey had the feeling that nothing in his life had ever been meant to last. Not his work in the Air Force, not his career in the CIA, not with his wife and daughter and certainly not his retirement from the field.

Getting out of the cab with Gail in front of the three-story brick-and-glass building that was home to the operational division of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Tysons Corner, just outside the Beltway, it struck him hard that his days as a teacher and Rapid Response team adviser were finished, and had come to an end the moment he and Lundgren had responded to the Hutchinson Island call.

The morning was bright and fresh, the countryside southern and lush, but McGarvey wasn’t noticing any of it, he was so tightly focused. And he had to ask himself if he was glad for the chance to get back into action, or regretful. He thought he knew but he didn’t want to admit it to himself, not yet, anyway, but the call from the Division of Emergency Operations Director Joseph S. French had been straight to the point: Drop everything and get up here as soon as possible, and he had responded without hesitation.

“I’m sorry about Alan,” Gail said. “He didn’t deserve it.” She’d come up here to make her report to her boss, Louis Curtley, the operations manager in charge of in-place security operatives, the position she’d held — still held — at Hutchinson Island.

“None of them did,” McGarvey said, and he really looked at her for the first time since yesterday afternoon.

She was ragged, her oval features pinched with stress and fatigue. No one had gotten much sleep in the aftermath, but right now she seemed to be more affected than she should have been, almost beside herself.

He stopped her halfway up the walk to the front entrance. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was exactly my fault,” she said angrily, her black eyes wide, haunted. And he knew what she was seeing. “I was in charge of security. I let the bastard get into my control room six months ago, and I let the other just waltz into my facility like any fucking tourist.”

“You’re not an engineer, so there’s no way you could have known about the sabotaged systems. That was Strasser’s job. And it wasn’t yours to vet every person who ever took the tour.”

She looked up into his face, her anger like a halo. “He walked right past me, Kirk. And I knew something was wrong, I could feel it, but I did nothing. Like you said, it wasn’t my job to vet those people. But it was most definitely my responsibility to follow my gut. And that’s something else you said. Remember?”

She was on the verge of tears now, and McGarvey wanted to reach out for her, but he knew that she would resent anything like that, figuring that he would take her for being a weakling.

“I remember,” he said. “That’s how we learn.”

“But at what terrible cost,” she said bitterly.

“We keep going. You keep going.”

“And do what? I’m practically out of a job until — or if — Hutchinson Island gets rebuilt. Or do you think Curtley’s going to give me a new assignment as a reward?”

“Prove your plant was sabotaged, find out who did it and why, and go after them.”

She said nothing.

McGarvey could see that he’d told her something she hadn’t expected. “You know that the engineer inside the control room was a part of it, and you have a suspect who you saw get in his car and drive away. It’s a start.”

“The monitoring system is probably fried. The South Building took a big hit of radioactive water and steam.”

“It may not have gotten inside the building,” McGarvey said, and he took out the disk he’d taken from the monitoring station. “The visitors center parking lot camera.” He’d planned on giving it to Otto to work on, but he suspected that Gail needed it.

“You went back,” she said, taking the disk from him.

“I figured I owed you that much.”

“You paid your debt, Kirk, and then some,” she said with emotion. “If it hadn’t been for you taking charge and keeping Carlos from screwing things up, a lot more people would’ve been hurt.”

“Well, it could be a lead, especially if you can lift the license number,” he said with more gentleness in his voice than he felt. The security lapses at Hutchinson Island were only a small part of the real problem, starting with Homeland Security that in some ways still believed the major threat to the U.S. was by air, just like 9/11.

“Eric can do it,” she said, a hint of her old sparkle and excitement back in her face. Eric Yablonski was the NNSA’s resident computer geek, and served in a similar function for the administration as Otto Rencke did for the CIA. And now she had something to do that had merit, worth, and it was enough for her. A lifeline.

Joseph French had one of the corner offices on the third floor, and although this division of the NNSA had been pulled out of the DOE’s headquarters in the city, technically banished from the seat of power, he didn’t seem to mind. Out here, he’d once explained to McGarvey, he had a free hand.

He was a short, tightly built man in his late fifties, with an athletic grace that came from playing racquetball twice a week, and the thousand-yard stare acquired from his naval career from which he had retired as a two-star rear admiral. He had been boss of a Sixth Fleet battle group, which should have qualified him for a more important position in the DOE, but he was an action man who was perfectly happy to spend his retirement years out of the bustle of Washington and especially away from the bureaucracy of the Pentagon.

“You were right and everyone else at the DOE was wrong,” he said when McGarvey walked in. “Coffee?”

“No thanks on the coffee,” McGarvey said. “And the other is no consolation. We lost some good people.”

“It could have been worse,” French said, his mood unreadable. He’d been black shoe navy, and had never been able to completely trust the sometimes maverick tactics of special ops forces, including the Navy SEALs, and definitely not the CIA’s black ops officers — such as McGarvey had been. Yet he freely admitted that he considered Mac an asset too valuable to dismiss. He motioned to a chair.

“There are one hundred and three other nuclear plants out there, just as vulnerable.”

“We’re putting things in place.”

“I’ll bet you are.”

“The White House wants this thing to be handled low-key for now,” French said.

“Why’s that, Admiral?” McGarvey wanted to know. “The president doesn’t want to start a panic by letting people know we haven’t a clue how this happened, why it happened, who made it happen, or if it’s likely to happen again?”

“The FBI is working the case, so is the CIA. Anyway, you signed on to help with just that, remember?”

This was a morning for remembering. “Nobody’s listening,” McGarvey said, wondering about the depth of his bitterness.

“You’re wrong,” French countered. “I’m sorry about what happened in Florida. We all are, and not for the reasons you think — not for the negative PR impact. You came to me with a chip on your shoulder, and I understand that, too. Losing your wife and daughter. And I even understand your background, your deep background before you became director of the CIA. But here we are, and we need your … particular set of skills. And that comes directly from the White House via Walt Page who thinks like I do that you’re a loose cannon, always have been. But it’s a loose cannon we need.”

“As you said, the FBI’s working the case,” McGarvey said. “And I’m sure Caldwell didn’t sign off on me.”

“He had no choice, and before you dismiss him as just another bureaucrat, take a hard look at the man’s record. In two short years he’s managed to jump-start the alternative energy field despite the low oil prices. He’s an ass, but he does get the job done. On top of that, Homeland Security is in high gear, as is every other intel and LE agency in the country — just like after nine-eleven.”

McGarvey knew what was coming next, and he had known it the moment French had called him up here. And nothing had changed in his mind about going back into the field versus simply turning his back and walking away, and yet he’d been intrigued since the call from the hotline OD. Even more intrigued now that Page had brought up his name.

French was watching him closely, but he was bright enough to hold his piece. He’d said what had to be said and now the ball was in McGarvey’s court.

“I’ll need a free hand.”

“I’d expect you to work outside the system, especially independently from this office, but you’d have our resources at your disposal.”

“But quietly.”

“Yes.”

“That part won’t last, and you have to know it and understand why.”

French nodded after a moment. “As I said, I saw your file before I hired you.”

“I want Gail Newby to help out, and maybe Eric Yablonski.”

“You can have them if they’ll go along with you. This is a strictly volunteer operation. The way it was explained to me, the Bureau and everyone else will be beating the bushes for evidence and making a lot of noise doing it. Reassure the public. In the meantime you’re to do what you’ve always done; go through the back door and the hell with the niceties.”

“People are bound to get hurt.”

“I imagine they will,” French said evenly. “Do you have any ideas yet?”

“This was done by professionals. The very best, which means the most expensive. Considering what they tried to do — kill a lot of people — narrows down the list of organizations with that kind of money.”

“Al-Quaeda?”

“It’s a start,” McGarvey said. “But this time we’re not going to war, because I think the answers, when we find them, aren’t going to be so simple. Something else is going on.”

“Find out what it is,” French said.

“I’ll try,” McGarvey promised, and he got up and walked out.

Back in the field, he thought, just that easy. And in some ways he was feeling something new, a new emotion, almost relief to finally be doing something worthwhile. He supposed he carried the same look now that he had seen on Gail’s face when he’d handed over the video disk, only with one added burden — people were going to die before this was over, and he was going to kill them.

TWENTY-THREE

Gail’s boss Louis Curtley, who was possibly the most disinterested and uninteresting man she’d ever known, had dismissed her out of hand when she’d reported to him on the Hutchinson Island situation, stopping her before she’d really gotten started. He’d told her that he had been sorry to hear about Larry’s death, insincerity dripping from just about every word, and about the other deaths, but whatever theories she might want to run past him would have to wait until she had all the facts. Not only Forcier’s true background, but the name of the man she’d seen leaving the facility and concrete proof that: A. he knew Forcier; B. that he had actually gotten inside the control room; and C. and D., who, if anyone, he was working for and some sort of motive that made sense as to why he’d wanted to sabotage the plant.

“When you have your facts come back and talk to me,” he’d told her.

He was tall, dark, and slender, handsome, almost beautiful, but she’d always thought he looked and acted like a toad.

“And since there’s nothing for you to do at Hutchinson Island — leastways until it’s back up and running — finding the facts is your new assignment. Your only assignment.”

And now she was downstairs in the data center adjacent to operations with Eric Yablonski, a man who, if complete opposites actually existed, was Curtley’s counterpoint. Short, dumpy, homely, only a whisper of fine gray hair on his pink head, he was the kindest, nicest, and brightest man she’d ever met, with an open, generous heart, an easy laugh, and a sarcasm that had never fooled anyone — not her, not his staff, and especially not his wife and eight doting children.

“Curtley didn’t want to hear what you had to say so he kicked you out and sent you down here,” he said. “What makes you think that I’m any different?”

His office was separated from the main floor of the data center by a plate-glass window to the right, which in turn was separated from operations, which was called the Watch — the same as at the CIA — to the left by another large window. Four computer experts in the data center compiled and analyzed the real-time information gathered by five specialists in the Watch 24/7. It was all about threat assessments, what was coming at the U.S. right now, or what was developing somewhere — perhaps an intercepted telephone call or calls shunted over from the National Security Agency, or satellite images from the National Reconnaissance Office showing increased activity at some camp on the Syrian desert, or perhaps a field report from a CIA agent somewhere in the Middle East, Russia, or just lately South America.

“ Veni, vidi, vici, ” Yablonski had once said, gazing out the windows at what he considered was his private domain, because everything flowing from the Watch to the data center was his to ponder, to rearrange, to fit into patterns that no one else was seeing, and translate the patterns into real-world events. His job was to penetrate the haze to find what was happening and why.

Only he and everyone else had missed Hutchinson Island, and he’d been beating himself up about it all night, so that now he looked like a train wreck in progress, his tie askew, his dress shirt rumpled, and his jacket dropped in a heap on top of one of the lockboxes.

“I never saw it coming, but I should have,” Gail said, sitting down across from his desk that was dominated by a pair of wide-screen monitors.

“If it’s any consolation, neither did I, sweetheart,” Yablonski said, and his face fell a little. “I’m sorry as hell about Larry. I didn’t know him, personally, but if he was a good enough man to work with you down there then he must have been first class.”

“Thanks, but the entire control room crew was killed and one of Gruen’s people was taken out too, along with Kirk McGarvey’s partner. It was a screwup from the moment it started, and I was the administration’s hotshot who was supposed to make sure shit like that never went down.”

Yablonski gave her a hard, critical stare then nodded. “Yup, you did screw up, but that particular scenario wasn’t in your playbook.”

“It should have been.”

“So you’re taking all the blame, is that it? Instead of analyzing what you let happen, how to guard against it ever happening again, and finding out who did this to us and why, so I can chase down some leads and find out how I screwed up, you’re going to wallow in self-pity?”

She looked away. “Shit,” she said. Mac had said almost the same thing to her, and just as bluntly. And he had handed her a lifeline, which she had temporarily blocked out of her head. She turned back and actually managed a slight smile. “But that was a nice speech.”

“I worked on it all morning, soon as I found out you guys were on the way up.”

Gail took the disk out of her jacket pocket and handed it to him. “This is what we recorded from one of our video cams at the visitors center’s parking lot.” She came around behind his desk so she could watch the video.

“Do we maybe have a suspect?” Yablonski asked, bringing the disk up on one of his monitors. It was nighttime and the parking lot was empty.

She explained about the man on the tour she’d seen at the control-room observation window. “A few minutes later one of my security people called and said a man showed up back at the visitors center, claimed he was sick and drove off. A little bit after twelve.”

“Same guy who caught your attention?” Yablonski asked, fast-forwarding the video.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but I had my suspicions, so I talked to the people at the visitors center who checked him in under the name Robert Benson, a schoolteacher from San Francisco. Same description. He’d told them earlier that after the tour he had an appointment up in Jacksonville. But when he left, he headed south. The wrong way.”

Yablonski had gotten to the section of the recording that showed a man walking across the parking lot to a blue Ford Taurus. “That him?”

“Yes. Can you get the tag number?”

Yablonski paused the disk and magnified the image, centering on the license plate. “Florida, Dade County, Z12 5LS.” They watched as the man got into the car, pulled out of the parking lot, and turned to the south on A1A.

“Didn’t look sick to me,” Gail said.

“Or guilty,” Yablonski said. He pulled up a search program, got into Florida’s Division of Motor Vehicles for Dade County and brought up the tag number. “Hertz, Miami International,” he said. Next, he hacked into the Hertz computer system. “Okay, rented yesterday morning to Robert Benson, San Francisco. Your guy.”

“Has the car been turned in yet?”

“Two thirty yesterday afternoon.”

“Shit,” Gail said. “It’s not likely he left any forensic evidence for us.”

“Probably not. Anyway the car went out this morning on a one-week rental,” Yablonski said. “But we’re not done yet.” He pulled up San Francisco’s Motor Vehicle Department, and brought up Robert Benson’s driver’s license, which included an address, a thumbprint, height, weight, and a photograph.

“That’s not him,” Gail said. “So what the hell happened to the real Benson?” But she knew damn well what had happened to the man, who in all likelihood was lying dead in a field somewhere, or maybe at the bottom of the bay. “Check the city police files.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, dear girl,” Yablonski said, already headed in that direction. But they came up blank. Next he hacked into the school district’s mainframe, bringing up Benson’s file. “He’s on vacation, not due back until the fifth.”

“He’s never coming back,” Gail said. “The son of a bitch killed him.”

Yablonski looked up at her. “I’ll go along with that assumption for the moment. But why him, why that particular man?”

“He had a timetable, so he went looking for someone about the same height and weight, and killed him for his identity.”

“That’s a stretch even for a cop. I mean how the hell does he pick out the one poor sap in the entire country who he’s going to pose as?” Yablonski shook his head. “Either your guy is brilliant or he knows something we don’t. And by now he’s long gone, certainly not back to California.”

“Australia or maybe South Africa,” Gail said. “The clerk at the visitors center said he spoke with an English accent — but she didn’t think it sounded like he was a Brit.”

Yablonski glanced toward the plate-glass window, and picked up his phone. “It’s okay, let him in.”

Gail turned as McGarvey said something to one of the clerks, then came across the data center, and walked in. He nodded to Gail.

“Mr. McGarvey, I presume,” Yablonski said. “Good job at Hutchinson Island.”

“Not good enough,” McGarvey said. “My friends call me Mac.”

“Mine call me Eric,” Yablonski said and he rose to shake McGarvey’s hand. “Let me guess, French assigned you to find the terrorists, you asked to have Gail help, and he tossed me in to the bargain.”

“Do you know Otto Rencke?”

Yablonski grinned. “Never met the man, but everybody in my business knows him or knows of him, and we’re all in a bit of awe.”

McGarvey nodded. “He can be a little scary sometimes. I’m going to ask him to give us a hand, and if you’ll agree, I’d like you to work with him.”

“Absolutely,” Yablonski said without hesitation.

Gail explained what they had come up with so far, tracing the man on the video as far as San Francisco, where they’d run into a dead end.

“Not quite,” McGarvey said. “At least you’ve established that he had taken someone else’s identity. Makes him our prime suspect, along with Forcier.”

“But why San Francisco?” Yablonski asked. “Why not Denver, or Chicago, or Indianapolis. According to Gail the people who talked to him said he had an English accent, maybe Australian. So why not Sydney or Melbourne?”

“When we find him, I’ll ask. Do we have any images of his face?”

“Not on this disk,” Yablonski said. “But he took a tour inside the plant, at least as far as the control room observation corridor. He’ll be on some of those disks.”

“If the radiation hasn’t fried them and if we can get in to retrieve them,” Gail said. “But I got a pretty good look at his face so I can give a description to a police artist. Maybe we’ll get lucky.

“What about Forcier? Was he scheduled to be on duty?”

“No, but he had the proper ID card to get inside. It’s likely he met our Aussie and let him in.”

“Could this guy have gotten a weapon or the Semtex past security in the visitors center?” McGarvey asked.

“Not a chance,” Gail said. “But Forcier could have brought the stuff in. Nobody checks the employees. We run a pretty vigorous background check on our people before we offer them a job. I don’t remember Forcier specifically, but he was fully vetted for work in the control room, which meant his background investigation had to have been rock solid.”

“Obviously somebody missed something, so keep trying with the Australian and Forcier. In the meantime I’ll get Otto started, and then take a run out to San Francisco, see what I can dig up.”

“Do you want me to tag along?” Gail asked.

“No. For now just stick it out here,” he told her. “I’ll have Otto call you and you can pool resources. But my guess is that this guy isn’t Australian; you might try South African ex-special forces or the SASS, their secret service.”

Yablonski’s phone rang and he picked it up, but the call was for McGarvey. “Dr. Larsen.”

“You’re a hard man to track down,” Eve said when McGarvey got on.

“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” McGarvey said. “You took a tumble yesterday, are you okay?”

“Just fine,” she said dismissively. “I’m here in Washington, and I’d like to buy you lunch if you’re free.”

“I’m busy.”

“This is important, at least to me it is. The Watergate at noon? Then I won’t bother you again.”

McGarvey glanced at his watch. It was just past 11:30 A.M. “I’ll meet you at the bar.”

“Good.”

“NOAA’s Doctor Larsen from Hutchinson Island?” Gail asked when McGarvey hung up.

“Yes. She wants to talk to me.”

“About what?”

“Haven’t a clue,” McGarvey said, and he missed the quick expression of anger on Gail’s face.

TWENTY-FOUR

McGarvey had no real idea why he had agreed to meet Eve Larsen for lunch except for the fact she’d been at Hutchinson Island yesterday, right in the middle of the attack, and he’d never trusted coincidences.

Last year she’d been short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Physics, her picture on the cover of Time : RADICAL DOC TOO RADICAL FOR STOCKHOLM? She hadn’t gotten the prize, which was probably a good thing. People who blew up nuclear energy plants might not hesitate to kill the high priestess of alternative energy.

Dressed in a charcoal gray pantsuit with flaring legs, and a plain white blouse that practically fluoresced against her deep tan, she was seated at the half-filled bar in the Watergate Hotel, sipping a martini.

She was absorbed with something on the television screen behind the bar and didn’t notice McGarvey until he sat down next to her, and when she looked at him she smiled warmly, though he could see that she was worried, or at the very least had something she considered to be very important on her mind.

“Hi,” McGarvey said.

“Have you seen that?” she motioned toward the television that was tuned to CSPN, a stern-faced woman announcer reporting on something apparently grave. The sound was off, but her words appeared as a crawl at the bottom of the screen. A high-ranking U.S. embassy employee and her driver and bodyguard had been assassinated on the airport highway in Caracas, Venezuela.

An incident like that was bound to happen down there sooner or later, but something about the photograph of the woman, which flashed on the screen, was familiar to McGarvey and when her name came up on the crawl he realized that he knew her.

Eve was looking at him. “Did you know her?”

“I’m not sure. It was several years ago.”

“You were with the CIA?” Eve asked. She glanced up at the television, but the announcer was back to reporting on the Hutchinson Island meltdown, which had dominated every newscast since yesterday.

“Yes, but you called me. What can I do for you?”

“Did she work for the CIA?”

McGarvey had to remind himself that he was dealing with a woman a lot smarter than the average scientist, and by her attitude now and her questions, a lot more aware of her surroundings outside the lab. “Even if I knew that, which I don’t, I couldn’t tell you. But if she was working for the Company the media will out her sooner or later.”

“Because if she was a CIA officer, don’t you see a coincidence with what happened at Hutchinson Island?”

“Where are you going with this?”

Eve shrugged, and glanced up at the aerial view of the power plant on the screen. “Anything else going on in the world? You were the director of the Agency, if anyone would know something like that it would be you, right?”

“Not much just now.”

“Well, nothing’s been on CNN in the past twenty-four hours except for the attack on Hutchinson Island, and now this assassination, which was supposedly carried out by something called the Earth Liberation Front. They want to topple the Chávez government so that they can use the oil revenues to fight for a clean environment. They want to put themselves out of business by squeezing the price of oil so sharply they’ll make it impossible to keep using it for gasoline.”

“Where’s the connection?”

“I know about these people, and a thousand other groups like theirs. They’re the ones who want people like me to succeed. They not only want to shut down our consumption of oil, for any purpose, they want to stop the use of coal, reduce our carbon emissions all the way back to preindustrial days.”

“Hutchinson Island isn’t clean enough for them?

“A nuclear plant emits more heat into the atmosphere than just about any other type of power plant. They might consider that just as big a threat to the environment as carbon dioxide.”

“That’s a stretch, isn’t it?” McGarvey asked, though he wasn’t so sure. And it depended on what Lorraine Fritch was doing in Caracas.

Eve was thoughtful. “Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t like coincidences and I’m especially suspicious of hidden connections. Hidden motives.”

McGarvey smiled. “You’d make a good detective.”

She returned his smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment, but being a scientist is just about the same thing.”

“I’ll look into it,” he promised her. “But you said you wanted to talk about something that was important to you. Was that it?”

“Related,” she said, even more thoughtful than a moment ago. Worried? McGarvey wondered. “What usually happens when someone or some group goes on the attack?”

“Someone fights back.”

“Right,” Eve said. “And who would have the most to lose by closing down, or at least restricting, Venezuelan oil production?”

She was leading him, but McGarvey didn’t care because he knew where she was going, and why she might be at least concerned for her own safety. “The other oil producers.”

“And who would have the most to gain by making the public believe nuclear energy was so unsafe we might as well shut them down.”

“Big oil.”

“And then there’s my little project. Tapping the sea for energy, so we can get rid of nukes, as well as coal, oil, and gas-fired plants.”

“Something every energy producer would want to fight,” McGarvey said. “They’re all against you.”

“Now that the evil genie is out of the bottle — now that they’ve struck in Venezuela and Florida — maybe the war has begun in earnest, and I might be next.”

“What can I do for you?”

“You must still have connections over at the CIA. Maybe you can find out if something is coming my way.”

“I’m working the Hutchinson Island attack, but I’ll see what I can find,” McGarvey said. “No promises.”

“None expected,” Eve told him. “But I have a hunch something’s just around the corner. And I always like to follow up on my hunches.”

“How long will you be here in Washington?”

“Just for today. I’m giving a speech over at the DOE in a couple of hours. If I can get them on board it’d be a good thing.”

“Not commerce?”

“No.”

“Fund-raising?”

Eve’s lip curled. “I hate it with a passion.”

“But it’s part of the game,” McGarvey said, and he realized that being with her was easy and pleasant. She was good-looking and very bright.

She smiled. “I don’t suppose you have a spare billion or two for the cause?”

The Department of Energy’s auditorium was large enough to seat two hundred, and the hall was packed this afternoon: people from the department, of course, and environmentalists and earth scientists, but people from Homeland Security too, which Eve supposed was because she’d been at Hutchinson Island yesterday; the Coast Guard, because of her work in the Gulf Stream, also coincidentally just offshore from the nuclear power plant; representatives from the White House and the State Department, because what she was proposing would cost in the trillions; a few executives from ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and others, and a couple of senior analysts from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Department of the Interior, which controlled oil drilling and mining and the Department of Commerce which ran NOAA.

And a rep from the International Energy Agency, who stood up and told the group that an investment of one trillion dollars per year would be needed through 2030 just to keep up with the demand for conventional energy.

That had opened the debate after Eve’s familiar forty-minute talk about not only the need for alternative energy sources and her solution, but the need to control greenhouse gas emissions, which would effect global weather patterns, and with her broader, thus more controversial, proposal to control the weather.

But looking out at her audience, all of them smart people, many of them the top minds in their governmental departments, think tanks, and universities, she was struck once again how much they were not hearing. As with just about every other group she’d talked to over the past fourteen months, these experts had only heard what their field demanded they hear.

“If you’re talking about dumping oil and especially coal to produce energy in favor of ethanol, we’ll run into a big problem right off the bat,” an alternative energy expert from the University of Manitoba argued. “Just to replace oil we would have to plant corn on seventy-five percent of all the farmland on the entire planet.”

To which one of the oil reps got up and reported that his company was cutting all of its investments in hydrogen, solar, and wind power in favor of biofuels.

While the vice president of another oil giant told the audience that his company was scaling back its alternative energy research and returning to its primary goals of finding more oil reserves and more efficient means to pump it out of the ground, and how to better refine and use it.

“The point is,” Eve broke in, keeping her anger in check as best she could, “we all have to agree that natural gas and especially oil are not renewable resources. We will run out sooner or later — probably sooner.”

“With present technologies, and what’s on the drawing boards, that won’t happen until well into the next century,” the same oil executive argued, and Eve could see a general agreement among a sizable portion of her audience.

“And greenhouse gases, and global warming?” she asked, though she suspected her question was rhetorical here. “Those issues will not go away. I don’t think there can be much argument about that basic premise, which is why my proposal for a World Energy Needs program is so important.”

She stood at the podium at one side of the small stage, while the diagrams and some calculations she’d brought with her had been projected on the big flat-panel monitor to her right. The DOE had been gracious enough to allow her to make her presentation, and had been in some ways even more cooperative than Commerce.

Her boss, Bob Krantz, had come over from Silver Spring, and was seated at the back of the auditorium. She’d gotten the proof she’d needed from her work last year in the Stream, and despite the accident — sabotage hadn’t been proved or disproved — he’d finally agreed to let her publish her findings.

“But you’ll need a lot more,” he’d warned her. “You’ll have to convince a lot of people to go along with your scheme — not only other scientists and environmentalists, but the politicians and administrators.”

“I know,” she’d agreed. “And the oil people.”

“They’re the ones with the big bucks, and the ones whose throats you want to slit.”

He hadn’t painted a very pretty picture, and this far away from him now, even though she couldn’t really tell the expression on his face, she knew damned well that he was thinking: I told you so.

Don Price had been seated next to Krantz, but he was gone, and for some reason his absence bothered her.

“Look at the science and the data and draw your own conclusions,” she told them. “For the next stage of my research I need money to purchase an out-of-commission oil drilling platform, refurbish it, and have it towed to a spot in the Gulf Stream just offshore from the Hutchinson Island power station. I need money to commission General Electric to build four Pax Scientific impellers, just like the ones aboard the Gordon Gunther , only these need to be eight meters in diameter, deliver them to the platform, and hook their generators by underwater cable to the Hutchinson Island power connection.”

“Hutchinson Island will probably be down for a long time,” someone in the audience said without standing up. “Could be years.”

“I spoke by phone earlier today with Sunshine State Power and Light’s chief engineer who says the power connection would most likely be feasible in one year or less, and it will take us that long to prepare the rig and the generators and run the cable ashore.”

“You have claimed that your original Gulf Stream experiment was sabotaged, which resulted in the death of one of your crew members, and the near drowning of another,” someone else from the audience spoke up. “And Hutchinson Island may have been sabotaged. So now aren’t you concerned that if you go ahead with your experiment that you’ll become a target again?”

“I’ve considered that possibility. Yes.”

“Yet you’re willing to gamble your life and perhaps the lives of your crew to test your hypothesis?”

“I think solving our energy needs and reducing the intensity of destructive storms around the planet is worth the risk,” Eve said.

“Who’s behind the attacks on you and on Hutchinson Island?” the same man asked. She thought he was one of the reps from the White House, but she wasn’t sure. “No group has come forward to claim responsibility.”

And it was the sixty-four-dollar question she’d hoped wouldn’t be asked, but had expected. Here and now, however, was not the time or place to give them the answer that was on the tip of her tongue, had been on the tip of her tongue since she’d evacuated from the power plant. Oil interests, she wanted to tell them, and their reactions would be as predictable to her as they would be inevitable. Preposterous. No evidence. Certainly no proof. And she would be cutting her own throat, as Krantz had warned. Blaming big oil, or the financial organizations that most profited from the manipulation of oil exploration, market development, and the futures and derivatives that resulted, would completely cut her off from funding by them. Even though it was for a project that would guarantee the future of their companies.

Think beyond oil production, she wanted to tell them. Think energy production instead. From her project, from wind farms, from solar mining.

But in the end what she most wanted to say to them was that once the impossible was eliminated, whatever was left — however improbable — would be the truth.

Don Price came in from the rear of the auditorium, said something to Krantz, and then headed up the aisle to the stage, with such an over-the-top look of excitement on his face that he practically ran the last few feet and leapt up the stairs to her side.

“Excuse me, Doctor Larsen,” he blurted.

And something in the way he said it — he never called her Doctor Larsen — was alarming. But it wasn’t bad news. She didn’t think.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said into the microphone on the podium. “But this is important.” He looked at Eve and smiled in the way she found devastating.

“What?” she asked.

But he turned back to the audience. “I got word just a few minutes ago that Dr. Larsen had received an e-mail at her lab from Oslo, Norway, informing her that she has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on energy and climate change.”

Eve was rocked back on her heels. The physics prize she had expected, though not for several more years, perhaps even a decade or more — because most Nobel laureates were a hell of a lot older than her. But the Peace Prize, and just now?

For just a few seconds no one moved, no one said a thing, until Krantz got to his feet and began to clap, which started everyone else applauding, some with more enthusiasm than others.

Whenever Don wore a tie, it was almost always loose; some sort of a rebel statement he was making, but for some reason she noticed that he had snugged it up.

The applause didn’t last long, and when it died down, Don continued.

“She’ll be presented with the gold medal and diploma at Oslo’s city hall, on December tenth,” he said, and he turned to her again, and held out his hand. “Let me be the first to congratulate you,” he said, loudly enough for those in the front row to hear.

And then they shook hands, hugged, and he kissed her on the cheek.

“You beat the bastards after all,” he said in her ear.

She didn’t know how she felt, except that she was on the verge of tears, which she would not allow to happen. Not here and now. So she grinned. “Not yet,” she told him. “But it’s a start.”

“Yeah, the damn thing works.”

Although Department of Energy’s Deputy Secretary Joseph Caldwell had not attended Eve’s presentation, someone from his staff who was there, had called him with the Nobel Prize news, and he showed up as Eve was making her way up the aisle accepting congratulations and handshakes from just about everyone within reach. He was at the back of the hall, smiling broadly.

“Congratulations, Doctor,” he said, shaking her hand. “This must be a wonderful vindication for your work.”

“And a surprise, Mr. Secretary,” she said gracefully. She hadn’t met him before, although of course she knew of him, because he had given his initial blessing to approach SSP&L with her project. He was one of the Washington insiders who was on his way up.

“You were mentioned a couple of years ago for the Prize,” he said.

“Physics,” she said. “But thank you, and thanks for the use of your auditorium.”

“Yours is an important project, and I suspect that the Peace Prize will stand you in greater stead than a scientific prize, especially with the people who you’ll want to help with funding.”

“You were one of the first people I was going to approach, after my boss at NOAA.”

His smile was neutral. “The department cannot fund you, but I certainly can direct you to some folks who might be able to help. Perhaps Exxon or BP would be willing to give you one of their retired or soon-to-be retired oil platforms I know people over at Interior.”

“I don’t believe I have many friends in the oil industry,” Eve had said.

“You don’t understand how things work in the business world; this has nothing whatsoever to do with friendship. It has to do about appearances. Most of the oil producers are backing away from alternative energy research.”

“Just what I mean.”

“But they’re taking heat in the media because of it, and because of the BP Gulf spill. Giving you a piece of hardware that they’re no longer using would cost them nothing — hell, it would even save them the money they’d have to spend at a breaker yard. And this way they’d get the benefits of some good PR for a change.” He shook her hand again. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Eve and Don followed Krantz up to his office in Silver Spring and for the first ten minutes neither of them said a word, especially not Eve who was so caught up with the Nobel Prize thing that she could not think of anything else. She realized at one point that what she was feeling was a legitimate sense of wonderment or rapture, perhaps even the Rapture, but instead of meeting Christ at the midway point down from heaven, she was seeing her project actually happening. As Krantz had told her before they left the DOE auditorium: “It’ll be hard to say no to a Nobel laureate.”

Don finally looked over at her. “You’ll have a lot of crap facing you in the next few days. I didn’t say anything back there, but the FBI wants to interview you about what you were doing at Hutchinson Island.”

“Begging for them not to laugh me out of there,” she said.

“Debbie said this guy sounded serious.”

Debbie Milner was the general office manager at NOAA, and it was she who’d also taken the e-mail from Oslo through Eve’s lab at Princeton. Nothing got by her.

“I’ll talk to them,” Eve said. “But we have a lot of work to do, and probably less than a year to get it done, because I want to be ready to plug into Hutchinson Island’s power connection once it’s up and running.”

Don laughed. “You’re not thinking straight, Eve.”

She looked at him, really looked at him this time. He was an arrogant, conceited, irritating man, a prick at times, but at thirty-one he was one of the most intelligent men, other than her ex, she’d ever known, and she’d known a lot of bright guys. His Ph.D. thesis at Princeton three years ago was on possible methods of controlling the planet’s climate, and its sheer brilliance and clarity were among the main reasons she had considered him for postdoc work, even though she hadn’t been his thesis adviser. The fact she’d found him attractive had almost, but not quite, made her drop him from consideration, but in the end she’d hired him, and was still very glad she had done so.

“The Nobel Prize thing?” she asked.

“Right from the get-go; they’re setting up a party for you in the boardroom, but that’s just the start. Debbie says the phones have been ringing off the hook, and our Web site is damn near in gridlock with people wanting to talk to you. Mostly the press, but M.I.T., Cal Tech, Harvard, and a bunch of other department heads, plus the environmental geeks want a piece of you, too. She didn’t have time to tell me everything, but on top of all that you’re going to have to come up with a statement for the media — a sound bite that won’t put everyone to sleep — and beyond that you’ll need to start work on your acceptance speech.”

She had to laugh with him, because of course he was right. And she’d never understood until just this moment why just about every writer or scientist complained that getting the Nobel Prize had kept them from their work. But Krantz was right too, when he assured her that it would be tough to say no to a Nobel laureate. Look what it had done for Al Gore; taken him from a failed presidential candidate to a respected, even renowned world figure who’d spoken at the U.N. And she relaxed a little, knowing that she would have to start learning how to go with the flow.

Sensing her new mood, Don reached over and patted her on the knee. “That’s better.”

“As long as they don’t try to put my face on Wheaties boxes,” she said.

Anne Marie Marinaccio had buried herself in her work over the past year plus, each month that passed with no news driving her ever deeper into a funk that seemed at times to be bottomless. Ominously she’d not been pressured by al-Naimi or anyone else from Riyadh or any of the royals who’d invested, and continued to invest with the MG. And in some ways their new investments, many of them quite heavy, in the range of several hundreds of millions U.S., were even more troublesome to her. It was as if they — collectively — knew something that she didn’t. And at times she’d been afraid that some sword of Damocles was about to drop down and chop her head off.

But except for the dismal state of the economy, worldwide, during which the MG had continued to invest not only on shorted oil issues, in secret as much as that was possible given the volume of money she was hedging, nothing seemed to be lurking around the corner. Al-Naimi had kept the wolves at bay as he had promised for fourteen long months.

And suddenly it was as if the dam had burst. Gunther had called her yesterday around ten in the evening. “It’s been done.”

And she remembered her feelings of relief mixed with a bit of awe at what she had set in motion, and the reasons for it as well as the consequences. Especially the unintended consequences, the even more important thought that came into her head as she watched the CNN news reports on the scene, and listened as the commentators explained that although the incident was bad, circumstances had made the meltdown and release of radiation far less disastrous than the Three Mile Island incident more than three decades ago, and especially less disastrous than the more recent Chernobyl accident.

A National Nuclear Security Administration official was the first to use the term sabotage, but that for two NNSA teams on the ground at Hutchinson Island the incident would have been nothing short of catastrophic. When pressed for details the official cited national security concerns, leaving the newscasters, and a few nuclear energy experts from industry as well as academia to their explanations of emergency shutdown procedures that included automatic scramming and coolant water dumping and why they did not work as designed.

Which, of course, led to even more intense speculation about the safety of the other 100-plus nuclear power stations in the U.S., and the call for more security, and it reminded Anne Marie of the hue and cry over airport security in the wake of the 9/11 disaster.

Then early this morning she received a telephone call at the same encrypted number Gunther regularly used, this one from her friend and longtime heavy investor from as far back as the dot-com boom, that a situation in Caracas had been successfully handled.

“I wasn’t aware that there was a situation,” she’d told him. And Octavio had chuckled, his voice low and in her estimation his accented English very sexy.

“I didn’t want to bother you with something you could do nothing about, or until things began to get out of control.”

She’d been alarmed, this call coming so soon after the Hutchinson Island business. “Tell me.”

So he had explained about the CIA’s chief of station who’d been snooping around him and his business dealings, presumably involving not only there in Venezuela but elsewhere, which would have included Anne Marie. “I was told that she had chartered a private jet to fly her to Washington.” And the timing on the heels of a certain event in Florida was enough for him to take action.

She’d been afraid at that moment, because Octavio was talking about the assassination of an important CIA officer, an act that U.S. authorities would investigate with extreme vigor, but also because he’d made some sort of a connection to her and Hutchinson Island.

“How could you have been sure that the CIA was investigating you?” she’d asked, almost using the pronoun us instead.

“I wasn’t one hundred percent certain, but after reading the documents that she meant to carry to Washington, I was glad that I followed my instincts,” Octavio said. “And you should be glad of it as well, because not only were you and I linked, but the woman was making a case for a connection between you and me and the Florida business.”

“Me, by name?” Anne Marie had asked.

“Yes,” Octavio said. “But my security people assure me that this connection may have only been speculation, un teoria, a theory, because there have been no attacks on any of my online accounts, looking for information. Have your security people detected anything?”

“No,” Anne Marie had assured him, and afterwards she had called Gunther to alert him of the possibility and he too had assured her he’d detected no increase in interest.

“Did you admit anything to Miguel?” Wolfhardt had asked sharply.

“No.”

“He didn’t press you about Hutchinson Island?”

“No.”

“Good.”

And finally her encrypted phone chimed again less than one hour ago, and Jeremiah Thaddeus Schlagel was practically shouting like he did in his sermons. “If I’m reading this right, it’s about time,” he’d bellowed. “I’m here, at the Raffles. Meet me in that whorehouse of a bar upstairs at eight.”

She’d gotten dressed in a simple black Versace pantsuit and a plain white silk blouse, and riding over now to Dubai’s newest and most famous hotel in the back of her Mercedes Maybach. Some of the fear she’d felt after Octavio’s call had begun to fade, because the next phase of her operation for al-Naimi and the Saudi royals was about to begin.

About time indeed. Fourteen months ago after she’d set Wolfhardt on the task of creating a nuclear power station meltdown, proving nuclear energy was far too vulnerable to attack and far too dangerous a method with which to generate electricity, she’d contacted one of her largest investors back in the States and invited him to come over to Dubai to talk.

“Money’s getting a bit tight, darlin’,” he’d told her in his fake rural Kansas drawl. “Unless you got something interesting. Something I could set my teeth into.”

“You’re an ambitious man, Jerry,” she’d told him.

“Yes, I am, I admit it.”

“And you would make a fine president.”

For the first time since she’d known the man he’d had nothing to say.

“But you would need a cause. Something you could get behind on your television and radio networks. Something the religious right, your flock, could become enthused about. Wildly enthused, enough to push you to the top.”

“I’m listening,” Schlagel had said that day, his Kansas drawl replaced by his flat Midwest accent. He’d been born and raised in Milwaukee, and whenever something unexpected overtook him, the Wisconsin in him came back.

“Not yet. But when it happens it’ll be deadly, with a promise of more to come unless the right man is there to lead the charge.”

“Something like al-Quaeda? Another nine/eleven?”

“Bigger,” she’d promised.

“When?”

“This’ll take a bit of work, so I want you to remain patient. But I also want you to get your organization geared up to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Tell them you had a revelation that something stupendous is in the wind. God spoke to you, and commanded you to get your flock ready, because they’d be needed.”

Schlagel had chucked. “Not bad, darlin’,” he’d drawled. “Not bad at all.”

Her chauffeur dropped her off in front of the hotel built in the style of an ancient Egyptian pyramid in glass and steel instead of limestone, with the apex completely sheathed in windows so patrons of the city’s most famous drinking establishment, the China Moon Champagne Bar, could see the entire city right out to the edge of the desert.

Inside the mammoth lobby one of the white-gloved attendants scurried over and escorted her to the elevators, a service the hotel provided for everyone who walked through the doors.

It was a weeknight, but Dubai was a business city, so the lobby was bustling, a half-dozen people riding up in the elevator with her, at least two of them speaking with German accents, and another speaking French with a Chinese woman and an Arab male dressed casually in jeans, an open-collar shirt, and a khaki jacket.

Schlagel was seated in a high-backed red upholstered chair at a low table in the far corner of the large room, and when he spotted Anne Marie coming over he got to his feet, a big grin on what she’d always considered was a broad peasant’s face, perpetually filled with cunning and deceit. And except for his crudeness, almost total lack of manners or social graces, he was an extremely bright man, a good judge of human nature, and a shrewd investor, who at her last financial reckoning was worth at least two billion dollars, much of that hidden in offshore banks, including the UAEIBC here in Dubai, against the inevitable day his empire collapsed and he had to run.

“No way I’m going to end up like Brother Jim Bakker,” he’d told her once. “Just hedging my bets like you and your old man before you.” He’d done his homework on her as she had on him before she took any of his money.

Finding out about him, the real man behind the public image, hadn’t been easy because he’d been very good at covering his tracks and inventing a new persona for himself, but Gunther had put the right people on the project about eight years ago and slowly most of the pieces came together.

His real name was Donald Deutsch, and he’d been born to a working-class family from the wrong side of Milwaukee’s tracks; the one bit of his public background that wasn’t far from the truth. He’d left home when he was seventeen or eighteen and joined the army where he learned how to take care of himself physically, and where he used his street smarts to run several illegal operations at each base he was assigned to; gambling and prostitution rings as well as trafficking tax-free booze and cigarettes from the PX, which he sold on the black market in Europe.

But he’d apparently run through the money he’d made, and after the army he’d ended up broke and busted in San Francisco at the age of twenty-one. Newly released from the county lockup he’d stumbled into a small storefront church that fed the homeless, and it was there, according to Gunther’s researchers, that Deutsch found his salvation — his financial salvation.

Changing his name, he took up the old-time religion, which initially included faith healing, to conceal the exact amount that his growing flock of believers invested in God through the Reverend Jeremiah. He opened storefront churches all up and down the California coast, raking in money by the tens of thousands at first and then into the hundreds of thousands.

And Schlagel was not only very good at his preaching, he was a charmer, Gunther wrote in his report. Parishioners gave him money, which he supposedly invested for them, giving them a good return and only keeping a tithe for the church. In actuality he’d been running a highly successful Ponzi scheme that depended on the continual growth of his ministry and investors, and the provision that if a member left the church, his or her investments would remain with the church — to do God’s will.

Eventually he sucked in beat cops, then police chiefs, local businessmen, and finally the mayors of some of the small towns where he preached, as well as state legislators.

He bought his first radio station in Fresno in the late eighties, then another in Port Angeles, Washington — by then he had branched out to a half-dozen western states, so that he was raking in enough money from ordinary contributions that he was able to pay off the last of his Ponzi scheme investors.

Then eleven years ago Schlagel moved his ministry to McPherson, a small town in western Kansas, built a huge church and television studio and started his own Soldiers of Salvation (SOS) Network that was initially based on Pat Robertson’s 707 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Within five years, his television and radio networks, as well as newspapers and magazines across the country, made him not only one of the most popular preachers on air, but brought him to the attention of presidents, and just three years ago Time magazine had named him Man of the Year, and called him, “America’s man of God, the spiritual adviser to the White House.”

Besides money and the good life he led in secret, Schlagel’s chief ambition had become the same as Pat Robertson’s; he wanted to be President of the United States, and he was willing to do whatever it took to get there.

They shook hands when she reached him, and she smiled. She was going to get him the White House, and Hutchinson Island would be his start as well as her salvation.

“You’re looking particularly chic this evening,” he told her. He was dressed in a smartly tailored charcoal gray suit, and the look on his face was that of a man who was supremely confident that he was about to be handed the universe.

“Thanks,” Anne Marie said, and they sat down.

Schlagel had already ordered a bottle of Krug champagne, and he poured her a glass. “It’s your favorite,” he said. “I remembered, though when I’m alone I prefer a cold Bud. Simple tastes for a simple man.”

Anne Marie had to laugh at his disingenuousness. “Bullshit, Donald,” she said softly, and he became suddenly wary, like an animal who figured he was being backed into a corner and wanting to get out rather than fight.

“Interesting name,” he said, his smile fading.

“Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea you coming here. We shouldn’t be seen together.”

“After tonight we won’t be,” he said. “But something like this cannot be trusted to some Internet connection, or satellite phone, even if it’s encrypted.”

“What do you want?” Anne Marie asked.

“Is Hutchinson Island the opening gun?”

“Yes,” Anne Marie said, and she watched as the ramifications of the disaster began to hit him, what it could mean for him, and how it could be manipulated to his advantage.

“What’s in it for you?” he asked.

“I want you to turn public sentiment against nuclear energy. It’s your new cause. You had your revelation that something like this was going to happen, and now it has. Nuclear energy is against the laws of God and nature, and should be damned. The devil’s business.”

“Never preach to a preacher,” Schlagel said. “All I want to know is what’s in it for you, because I don’t even want to hear how you pulled it off. Where’s the gain for you, ’cause sure as hell you can’t believe that simply shutting down the hundred or so nuclear power plants in the States will have any serious effect on the price of oil. Anyway you’ve been selling short, so you’ve made money on the way up and on the way back down.”

“Never talk financial dealings with a Harvard MBA and a hedge fund manager who has no risk of going broke anytime soon.”

Schlagel laughed. “But Hutchinson Island is just a start. I can make it something my people will believe in, but there’ll have to be more.”

“Even if it was possible to cause another meltdown, it’s too risky.”

“Haven’t you been watching the news?” Schlagel asked. “You ever heard of Eve Larsen, an environmental scientist working for NOAA?”

Anne Marie shook her head. “Should I have?” she asked, but something in Schlagel’s change of attitude all of a sudden was bothersome.

“Yes, because she’s just become my new cause. Hutchinson Island is good, the timing is perfect, but Dr. Larsen has become even better.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s been preaching alternative energy sources. She wants all the nukes to be shut down, but she also wants to shut down coal-fired electrical plants as well as natural gas facilities and she wants all cars to run on electricity.”

“Won’t happen anytime soon,” Anne Marie said. “People hammering away at that idea are a dime a dozen. Everyone listens, but just to be polite. Oil is here to stay at least through the end of the century.” But even as she said it, something in the way Schlagel was watching her made her afraid.

“She wants to buy an oil platform and put it in the Gulf Stream, and stick some sort of paddle wheels into the water to generate electricity. She says she can supply all the electricity we need without burning coal or gas or use nukes.”

“Wouldn’t work.”

“Wait, there’s more,” Schlagel said, his deep brown eyes flashing. He was into a sermon, but he was enough in control to keep his voice low. “And it keeps getting better. Where do you think she wants to put her rig? Right offshore from Hutchinson Island. She wants to send her power through underwater cables to the plant’s electrical distribution system, and shut down the reactors.”

Anne Marie had heard nothing about this, and she knew she should have. “Coincidence?”

“Doesn’t matter. She’s promising not only cheap electricity to power our trains, planes, trucks, and cars, but she’s preaching that she’ll change the weather. Get rid of all those nasty hurricanes and such.” Schlagel’s grin broadened. He was reaching his point. “Now that’s God’s work she’s setting herself to do. Her own private little God project.”

Anne Marie’s anxiety eased a little. “The woman is a crackpot.”

“Well, the crackpot has just gone and won herself the Nobel Peace Prize, what do you think about them apples?”

Anne Marie sat back, trying to see the advantages, because surely they were there, hidden somewhere in the clutter. “She’ll have to fail,” she mumbled half to herself, but Schlagel picked up on it.

“You’re damned right. Hutchinson Island will be my rallying point, but the woman’s God Project will be my battle cry, and I’ll need as much time as possible to get my people behind me — to get the entire country so up in arms against nuclear power, and against the kind of tinkering she wants to do on God’s playing field that our oil will be king. At least through my lifetime.”

“And afterwards?” Anne Marie asked, though for the life of her she had no idea why.

Schlagel laughed. “Haven’t you grown up enough, darlin’, to realize there ain’t no hereafter?” He leaned forward. “I want you to get one of your good old boys to give the little lady her platform, and maybe help with the money for her waterwheels. And you can leave the rest to me.”

It was never about anything else but timing, of course. In that Schlagel was right. Nuclear energy had to become unpalatable to the public, which he would help bring about, and Dr. Larsen had to fail, for which she would arrange for a little insurance just in case something happened to the good reverend.

She raised her glass of champagne. “The God Project,” she said.

“Leave it to me,” Schlagel said, clinking glasses.

That same evening back at her penthouse apartment, Anne Marie telephoned Wolfhardt, and explained everything to him.

“I’ll call on Mr. DeCamp, immediately,” he said.

“Yes, do that.”

“But I don’t think waiting for her to actually get her oil platform and perform her experiment is such a good idea. She needs to be assassinated.”

“It could come back to us,” Anne Marie said. She was thinking about al-Naimi, and she almost said the Saudis, but she held off.

“Nothing would reflect on your oil interests, I can practically guarantee as much.”

“Who then?” she asked, but she suddenly realized that Wolfhardt was only stating the obvious; when fingers were pointed they would be toward Schlagel and his people. She chuckled, the noise coming all the way from the back of her throat. The irony would be delicious, actually pitting her and the reverend — two allies — against each other. Actually in concert with each other. Asset multipliers, such operations were called.

“I think you know,” Wolfhardft said.

“Of course,” Anne Marie agreed. “And I trust you implicitly, but with care, Gunther, and with fail-safes and contingencies.”

It was two in the morning when she called Schlagel’s encrypted phone. He was still at the Raffles and after five rings when he finally answered she could hear at least two women giggling in the background. “This had best be very good, darlin’,” he said, and he sounded drunk.

“Can you talk?”

“I can always talk. What do you want?”

“I want you to start now.”

Suddenly Schlagel was sober, and he sounded guarded. “Something happen?”

“Let’s just say I had an epiphany,” Anne Marie told him.

“I’m all ears.”

“Go after Dr. Larsen right now, sharp and hard. Send a couple of your soldiers after her. Shoot up her car, burn down her apartment, attack one of her lab assistants, maybe smash some of her scientific equipment. I don’t care what.”

Schalgel was silent for several beats, and Anne Marie could almost see him figuring the angles, working out the percentages. “I want the bitch aboard the oil platform.”

“I agree. Don’t kill her, just shake her up.”

“Why?”

“I want to slow her down,” Anne Marie said. “She’ll get her platform, but I want your people to hound her all the way to Oslo. Make her know that she’s vulnerable.”

“Vulnerable people make mistakes.”

“And if she starts making mistakes — I don’t care what sort of mistakes — everything else that the woman says or does will become suspect.”

Again Schlagel was silent for a beat, but then he chuckled. “You are one gloriously devious woman, darlin’,” he said. “And I can’t tell you just how much I love you.”

“Because we’re cut of the same cloth,” she managed to tell him though her gorge was rising. “We’re winners.”

“Amen.”