Breakpoint

5 Thursday, March 12

Chen Fei sat in the cockpit, listening to the briefing in his headset as his aircraft idled on the taxiway in the early-morning light. He would lead the three-ship mission today, a great honor. Today the targets would be aircraft, remotely piloted. This would be the first day that they would test the airborne laser gun system, one aircraft against another. If it worked, and he knew it would, it would give Taiwan the technological edge over China. One aircraft equipped with a laser could engage a dozen or more enemy fighters. The laser could fire at distances greater than the longest Chinese air-to-air missile. It could switch from one target to another in nanoseconds. The Chinese on the mainland had nothing like it in development. Once they knew Taiwan had it, the mainland air force would be deterred.

Chen Fei knew the state of the Mainland’s People’s Liberation Army’s air defense capabilities because he held the highest clearances of any of Taiwan’s test pilots. He alone among the pilots was also in the special security clearance compartment that allowed him to read the progress of the American laser program. Every day, the computer warfare unit at the Lung Tan Air Force Base summarized what had happened in the development and testing of the American system by the Boltheed corporation at the secret facility in the Nevada desert. It had been that way for five years. Everything the Americans had done, the Taiwan engineers had copied, every mistake and failure, every technological breakthrough and engineering design. Only three times in those five years had the Boltheed computer network changed in ways that kept the Taiwan warriors out, and then only for a matter of days. The firmware implants in the firewall and intrusion-detection system that the Taiwan intelligence agents had inserted in the network were never detected.

Now Boltheed was ready to test the Advanced Tactical Laser Cannon with a squadron of the new F-35 Block 20 fighters over the Nevada and California deserts, and unknown to Boltheed and the Americans, Taiwan would also be testing a squadron of its aircraft over the Taiwan Straits.

“Gentlemen, this is a very big day for Taiwan.” Chen Fei recognized the voice of the program commander, Colonel Zhang. “To review one final time, following takeoff to the north, you will proceed down the west coast over the Straits at altitudes between forty and forty-five thousand feet, depending on cloud formations. Somewhere after passing Penghu Islands on your left, you will detect two formations of drones made up to look like PLA fighters. They will be armed with air-to-air missiles and cannon. You will take out the lead fighter at maximum lethal range, before he can engage you with missiles. Then close and eliminate the remaining aircraft in dogfight maneuvers. Make sure you drop all the targets over water. If you see real PLA aircraft in the vicinity, abort the mission. We do not want them to know what we have yet. Not yet. Good flying.”

With that, Chen Fei called the tower for permission to take off, received it, powered back on the single jet engine, and the aircraft bolted forward down the runway. He saw the runway markers pass by quickly, 1,000 feet, 2,000 feet, 3,000, and soon the aircraft was in flight. After two minutes, he called to his wingmen. Their aircraft were right behind him. “Jin dui, this is Jin tou zi. Let’s get to altitude fast to save fuel.”

Fifteen minutes into the flight, the three ship went feet wet over the East China Sea and banked left to begin the run south, parallel to the coast. By choosing this route, Colonel Zhang, commander of the laser program, was simulating real-world conditions. He insisted on real missiles on the target aircraft. These were the skies where Taiwan’s air force might one day have to defend the island against the far more numerous PLA air force. When the laser cannon shot down the target drones, they would fall in the water, not on Taiwanese villages. The Chinese would see the exercise on their radar and be impressed with the state of the Taiwan Air Force’s training, but they would not know that the drones were downed with lasers. Not yet.

Following the success of the independence-minded Taiwan National Party in the December elections, Chen Fei knew that the prospects of a military confrontation were not just theoretical. Despite their mutual economic dependence, Beijing and Taipei had been hurling invective at each other for the last four months to a degree unseen in twenty years. Mainland officials talked publicly about invading the island if it formally declared its independence from China.

“Jin Two, drop to angles thirty-eight. Jin Three, go up to angles forty-five. When at altitude, flip on scanning radar at low power. Scan from two hundred eighty degrees to eighty degrees. Copy?” Chen Fei’s two wingmen moved their aircraft above and below his and then both turned on the smaller of the aircrafts’ two lasers. Together the two aircraft would scan over twenty five thousand cubic kilometers of airspace, using their lasers to look for the targets. These lasers acted as radar, but unlike radar they gave off no electronic signature, no radio frequency emission, that would allow other fighters to detect their presence. Some advanced American aircraft carried laser-detection systems, but the laser beam had to strike them at exactly the correct angle and stay there for two to three nanoseconds for the detector to register.

The Penghu Islands navy base was coming up on the left, the east, and the sun was high enough now to light the base against the coastal mountains behind it. There were scattered light clouds at about twenty thousand feet. They looked yellow in the morning light. Before his aircraft had even passed Penghu Islands, the lower wing man, Jin Two, called in: “Target identified. Two ship formation at angles thirty, sixty degrees off my nose, ninety klicks out. Tracking west to east-northeast.”

Chen Fei acknowledged, “Roger, Jin two. Continue track.” He quickly switched to his long range electro-optical system and visually acquired the target. They were made to look like PLA J-12s. Chen Fei called in to Control. “Jin touzi, acquired two target drones simulating J-12s at angles thirty, climbing and heading toward the coast at Penghu Islands. Moving in for long-range attack.”

In his headset, Chen Fei heard the familiar voice of the one of his fellow pilots who today was guiding the exercise. “Jin touzi, this is Control. Acknowledge target acquired. Do not, repeat not, drop target over land, and remember, when you go to engage in dogfight mode, there will be more drones.”

Chen Fei turned up the power on his idling laser and dove from forty thousand feet to thirty-five. The ocean below was moving by fast. He touched the toggle switch that locked the laser’s pointing mechanism onto the target that he was tracking with the electro-optical system. Then he powered the laser up to tracking mode. The green numbers flashing on the bottom right of his screen indicated how close the target was: 65, 60, 55 kilometers out. Chen Fei hit the power level again, moving the laser into combat mode and setting the range. He had chosen the drone on the right from his perspective. At fifty kilometers, he flipped up the protective cover on his joystick and hit the attack button with his thumb. He paused and hit it again. Then he called out into his headset: “Fox Four, two bursts.”

The laser gun on the underbelly of the aircraft, where the cannon had been originally, had emitted a 300 kW burst for almost a second. The beam had traveled at the speed of light and then, four seconds later, another had leaped from the aircraft. The heat from the beam had caused the target aircraft’s missiles to heat to the point of exploding on the aircraft’s own launch rail. Now the solid-state laser had to cool for up to thirty seconds before it was ready to fire again.

“Roger that. Jin Two here. I can see the target. It split in half. Splash one.”

“Jin Three: I count four more targets at angles three eight. Eighty klicks out. Heading one seven five degrees and coming fast.”

Chen Fei had felt the adrenaline building, but now it was a rush. Even though it was only an exercise, this would be the first dogfight in which one side used lasers instead of missiles. How quickly could they drop the remaining five drones as they maneuvered against them? He barked into his headset, “Jin Two engage the wingman. Jin Three, with me, let’s get the four ship. Tally-ho!” He pulled back on the joystick to return to forty thousand feet, keeping Jin Three above him and to his right. “Let’s swing around to heading two seven zero so we can come at them out of the sun. Then we fire our own little suns.” He checked the laser control. It had returned quickly to full power after the two long-distance bursts. Now he dialed it down to close in combat mode.

He could hear Jin Two describing how he was engaging one-on-one with his target, but it was distracting. He dropped the volume on that frequency, and as he did he heard a loud pulsing in his ears. He knew what the noise meant before he heard the words from his radar warning receiver: “Alert. Alert. Radar lock on.” Despite being blinded by the rising sun, the oncoming fighters had seen him on their radar. Chen Fei switched the laser to automatic antimissile fire and flipped his own radar from standby to scan. Almost as soon as he had, the laser control panel went from green READY to red FIRING.

Chen Fei noted four short bursts recorded on the panel as the laser shot out to where it thought an incoming missile would be. Immediately, he saw two small flashes in front of and below his aircraft. His laser had blown up the incoming missiles. With the laser now slaved to his target-acquisition radar, he fired back, hitting two bursts. The explosion below him was instant and much brighter than the destruction of the air-to-air missiles. He had destroyed another drone.

Jin Three had fired at almost the same time, causing another explosion, another aircraft destroyed. “Splash number three,” his wingman called out. Chen Fei checked his radar to find the other two aircraft in front of him. They were climbing fast, probably on afterburners, trying to get above him for a look-down, shoot-down kill. He caught a yellow glow in his peripheral vision and quickly looked down at his laser control panel. The blinking yellow light showed the word CHARGING. He could not fire. The eight bursts he had fired had dropped the power level below the minimum. As Chen Fei thought for the first time how much trouble he would be in if his expensive laser-carrying aircraft were destroyed, he pulled back hard on the joystick and went to afterburners on the engine, standing his aircraft straight up for a 10G climb.

The dark of the cockpit was suddenly flooded with light as the door in the back of the room was thrown open. Colonel Zhang burst into the pilots’ cockpit room. “Break off the attack and get those birds out of there now!” No one was supposed to enter when pilots were remotely flying their aircraft; they could lose control and crash their vehicles.

Chen Fei stood to attention, pulling off his headset. “Colonel Zhang, we are in the middle of the test.”

“No, you are not! The target drones are still aloft, about fifty kilometers further south. You are shooting down real PLA fighter aircraft! And they have real pilots in their aircraft!”

An alarm sounded and Chen Fei looked back down at his cockpit. While he had been standing at attention, a PLA fighter had shot a radar-guided missile at his RPV. Chen Fei had not noticed or responded. The automatic antimissile laser had not enganged because it was still recharging. On the front screen of the wraparound cockpit windshield, words appeared in red on a black background: “Your aircraft has been destroyed.” For the first time, Chen Fei was glad that he was not actually in his aircraft.

Jimmy Foley had risen early at the visiting officer’s quarters, donned his running gear, and set out to do five miles in the cold morning desert. He needed the exercise, but he also wanted a chance to think. As he stretched outside the VOQ, he realized that it was now four years since he had run the New York Marathon. He had finished in three hours and nine minutes. Not bad; it had qualified him for the Boston Marathon, which he had never gotten around to running. Now, four years on, he wondered if he could do it in under three-thirty. He headed out, thinking again about the idea that the rich would soon be able to buy spin-off technology from the Pentagon, exoskeleton suits, giving them great strength and tying their bodies into cyberspace for diagnostics. He laughed out loud as he ran, thinking about what his new friend Soxster could do with that.

He had woken up twice during the night, anxious about the meet with TTeeLer this morning. The FBI’s L.A. field office had taken charge of the planning after Jimmy had reported in to the Intelligence Analysis Center and they had passed word to FBI headquarters. Already FBI personnel were working behind the counter at the 7-Eleven, the dry cleaners next door, the used-car lot across the street. He wondered whether the Feebs would get anything more out of TTeeLer than he had. Chances were he would just clam up until a U.S. Attorney gave him immunity in writing. The running was coming easier; he was moving smoothly down the road. The anxieties of the night were giving way to the rising endorphins from the run, but he realized that he was going to have to find his own way to geo-locate the ranch where TTeeLer had worked. Or maybe Soxster could do it.

As he turned a corner by a barracks, Jimmy saw a company of Marines jogging toward him, returning from their morning five-mile run. Despite the cold, they were in tan shorts and T-shirts, not spacesuits. As he approached them, he yelled out, “Hoo-rah!” Some gave a weaker “Hoo-rah” in return. He missed the camaraderie, the certainty of being a Marine. He did not miss Iraq. If he had had an exoskeleton suit in Iraq, he thought, he might never have been injured, might never have lost that year in hospitals in Haditha, in Ramstein, in Bethesda. He might still be in the Marines, be a major by now.

But he had found a good place in the NYPD. And he had found Janice. Never thought he’d marry an investment banker, but he had and it was working. She wasn’t clingy or possessive. She gave him his space. They had their separate careers; some people thought they had their separate lives, but they were wrong. How many married couples could still have videophone sex like they had had last night? When they were actually together in the same place, it was even better, perfect. The two weeks on Mustique at Christmas had been heaven. As he thought about diving with Janice in that turquoise Caribbean undersea world, he realized he was approaching the giant baseball field where he had seen the game last night. As he ran up the sandy slope, he heard yelling from the other side.

Below him, as he hit the crest of the dune, he saw dozens, maybe scores of the black-spacesuited Marines spread out across the field. Regular Marines and civilians were scattered around, attending to the suited supermen. He spotted Dr. Rathstein talking to six men at a table at the bottom of the dune. They seemed agitated. He jogged up to them.

“Jimmy!” Rathstein seemed startled to see him. “You already heard what happened?”

Foley caught his breath, filling his lungs. “No, Doc, hadn’t heard. What did happen?”

Dr. Rathstein signaled for the men with him to step away, to go about the mission he had given them. “It’s awful, Jimmy,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “On this morning’s exercise, we lost touch with Echo Company. All the telemetry from their suits shut down. We came out here looking for them and found them like that….”

Jimmy looked at the troops in the spacesuits. Some were standing in the parade rest position, legs spread apart, left hand in the small of their backs. Some had both hands behind their necks. Others had their arms spread out behind them, as though they were about to take flight. A few had their arms up, as if surrendering. None were moving.

“We’re trying to get them out of the suits now, but they’re all asleep. Looks like the suits gave them a big dose of painkillers and sleeping agent, then the suits froze up, turned off. I think some kids have OD’d.” Rathstein turned and looked out at the statue-like men of Echo Company. “It will be the end of the program,” Rathstein continued. “The Marines will shut it down. I can hear the generals now: ‘Can’t have our boys attacked by your suits, Doctor. What if it had been war?’”

Foley thought that the man was actually about to cry. “How did it happen?”

Rathstein shook his head and said, “I have no fucking idea.” A gust of wind blew sand onto his face.

“Soxster, this shit is not funny,” Jimmy Foley said into his headset. “I got a hundred Marines in sick bay out here, drugged up like dopeheads.” Foley was standing in the middle of Navy investigators and Marines who had set up a command post to figure out what had happened and prevent it from happening again. They were also contacting the families of the hospitalized Marines from Echo Company.

“No, Jim, really I know — it’s just the dog bots, man. You gotta admit that was great. Thousands of silly-rich guys shitting their pants as their status symbols go nuts and attack them, after having posted their tax returns and medical records in chat rooms all over cyberspace.” Soxster could barely get the words out between laughs. “Every hacker at Infocon Alpha in Vegas will be claiming credit.”

“People got hurt, a couple died, dude,” Jimmy intoned in his deep voice. “So who the hell did it?” He could hear Soxster tapping away on a keyboard. He waited.

“Okay. So the hack on the Marines was an RF signal to get around the firewall on the base network. Short distance. They called the server they used ‘Mini-UAV3.’ So maybe they bounced the signal down onto the troops from a mini-UAV flying above the base. Those things are so small, nobody woulda seen it,” Soxster said, still clicking away on the other end of the call.

“Those things are like toy airplanes, they don’t fly very far,” Jimmy noted. Soxster didn’t reply. He was onto a lead, doing a route trace-back, his mind running down digital corridors in cyberspace. He had called up the record of his first chat room meet with TTeeLer, when he was still at the ranch. TTeeLer had used an anonymizer, a server meant to hide his tracks and obscure his real online identity. Soxster was now into the anonymizer’s billing record.

“This is all for national security, right?” Soxster asked as he sped ahead. “You got a Get Out of Jail Free card, Jim, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, whaddya got?” Foley asked, wondering whether he could get an ex post facto waiver of a few laws, or whether they would even get caught in the first place.

“Okay. So when TTeeLer was chatting with me, he was originating on PacWest’s network, in southern California, coming out of the telcoms hotel in downtown L.A., let’s see, shooting out east to the giga-router in the San Bernardino hosting center, on to the Desertnet Internet Service Provider….”

“Good, good, then what?” Jimmy urged him on.

“Hang on, hang on, dude, you think this shit is easy?” Soxster mumbled as his fingers flew across the keys. “Hold your pee.”

Jimmy said nothing, but his breathing sounded heavy on the line. He began counting ceiling tiles and trying not to think of how many laws they were breaking.

“Desertnet’s main router is on Ocotillo Ave. in Twentynine Palms. The packets came in from a smaller neighborhood router up Del Valle Drive and into them from a WiMax on Rainbow Canyon Road. It gets a relay from a WiMax transmitter that’s named ‘Bagdad Road.’ You got a Bagdad out there? Isn’t there a letter h in Baghdad?”

“You gotta be kidding me. A town called Bagdad?” Jimmy shook his head. “I had a bad enough time in the real Baghdad. What’s with one here?”

On the other side of the country, in the Dugout, Soxster ran one more check. “Well, unless I am badly mistaken, the ranch that TTeeLer was operating out of with the other hackers is within about two miles of that town. And they have a really wideband satellite dish. Look for the dish.”

“You’re the man!” Jimmy yelled in the Marine base’s operations center. “Sox, I love you, buddy.” He realized that a Naval Investigative Services agent was looking at him oddly. “Not you, this guy in Cambridge. Never mind. Look, we need some helicopters.”

“I am perfectly fine. They released me,” Susan insisted into her mouthpiece as she accelerated to pass an eighteen-wheeler. “Sam, I don’t care. You can call the attending yourself. Her name is Isabel Moreno and she actually saw me. You are doing long-distance diagnosis, Dr. Benjamin.”

“I don’t need to call her. If you had a concussion, even a minor one, you should still be under observation and bed rest. Any first-year would know that,” Sam Benjamin insisted from his office at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. “Besides, it doesn’t sound from the press reports like anyone near that blast would have only a minor concussion.”

Sam was the grounded one in the relationship, the practical one who did the planning and the worrying for both of them. He admitted that Susan was “more creative,” but he thought it was the kind of creativity that most often emerged from chaos. As he stood by a nurses’ station on the sprawling medical campus, he pictured his girlfriend about to pass out behind the wheel on some crowded California freeway. And, as usual with Susan, there was nothing he could think to do about it.

Susan put the car on automatic freeway mode so that she could concentrate on the call. “Look, I’m going to take it easy. I’m driving up to wine country north of San Francisco. I’ve been invited by this famous computer scientist to visit him at his vineyard. It will be very restful, bubele, really. Besides, how many days has it been since you had eight hours’ sleep, so look who’s calling the kettle black.” Susan knew how to counterpunch, how to get his hot buttons: using his grandmother’s term of endearment for him, putting him on the defenses, playing on their racial difference.

She heard Sam exhale in exasperation at the other end of the call. “Okay, Suz, call me later today. And don’t push yourself too hard. If you start getting dizzy, go lay down.”

“Thank you, Dr. Benjamin. Would you recommend I pull over first?” she said, and chuckled. “Don’t answer that. But there is a professional question I have for you. What do you think about connecting human brains to machines, to computers?”

“You don’t need it,” he joked. “Seriously? We’ve been doing it for over a decade. It’s the only way to cure some forms of depression. You place a small battery behind the neckbone and run a wire deep into the central cortex. I do about one a month. There are lots of other applications, too — epilepsy, some forms of Alzheimer’s. The guys over at the Marvin Center for the Brain here are doing all sorts of other experiments. If you pass out and end up with brain injury from a car crash, you can find out for yourself. So don’t push yourself too hard today, for once.”

“Yes, Doctor. No, seriously, I will, promise. Listen, I have to get off the highway now. I will call you later. Love you. Bye.” She took control of the driving back from the autopilot program and put the car onto the exit ramp for River Road. It was her first time to Sonoma County and its Russian River region. As she drove down River Road to Westside Road, following the car’s navigation system, she thought how different it was from the nearby Napa Valley she’d visited several years before. Where Napa was filled with tourist traps, buses, and wine-tasting rooms, one right next to the other, this area seemed more about growing the grapes. Field after field of vines stretched out alongside the narrow road.

When she’d told Soxster that Will Gaudium had agreed to see her and had suggested she come to his vineyard, the Cambridge hacker had insisted that she stop at the Kistler winery. “Kistler is the best American chardonnay, period. Remember I told you? You gotta stop there if you’re in Russian River.” Now she sat in the nearly empty parking lot, looking at the small, neat, stone building. She was glad for a chance to catch her breath. After a moment, she strolled down the beautiful stone walkway, past the little meditation pool and miniature waterfall, past the door to the tasting room, to the observation deck above the vineyard valley below. Spring was just beginning to bring green back to the valley’s palette and to awaken the sleeping vines.

How would she explain to Sol Rubenstein why she was meeting with a retired corporate computer guru, when things were blowing up somewhere every day this week and the Pentagon was developing options to respond by doing something to China? Sol and Rusty had given her great flexibility. They had great confidence in her ability to think differently than the straitjacketed Washington bureaucracy. Indeed, Sol had stopped her from being part of the FBI-led investigation so that she would not be prejudiced by their assumptions. That had pissed her off initially, but now she was glad at what they had done.

Following her own instinct, with help from Margaret Myers, she had focused on what was being attacked, not who was attacking. That had brought her to SCAIF just in time. As disturbing as her partial memory was of the incident at SCAIF, it was what she had learned there before the attempted bombing that had really left her chilled. Sitting on the bench overlooking the valley, she called Professor Myers in Boston.

“Megs, before you say a word, let me just say I’m fine. Not even a scratch.”

“I know, dear. Soxster pulled up your chart from the hospital. Oops, I’m not supposed to say that.” Myers chuckled. “Where are you now?”

“In Russian River. I’ve got an appointment with the tech guy you told me about, Will Gaudium.” Susan felt a calm coming over her from the beauty of the place.

“Well, if you’re thinking you want to find out where some of the zero-publicity technology breakthroughs are, he’d be the man to know,” Myers replied, looking out on the scullers on the river. She had never seen them this early in the year before.

“We have to find out where the leading-edge technologies you talked about are, some of the hidden ones without U.S. government funding, before they’re set afire or blown up,” Susan said, standing up and walking to the edge of the balcony over the vineyard valley.

“Well, Susan, if you can get Gaudium to talk to a Fed, you are going to the right source. He’s so worked up about the risks of the new technologies that he’s made it his business to know about them.”

“I don’t think it will be too hard for me to seem worked up about it too, Megs. Some of what I’m learning is…well, I was going to say scary, but let’s be professional and just say that it raises many complex policy and ethical issues.”

“Remember: facts, gaps, theories, then analysis,” Myers chanted. “Problem is, we are short on everything but gaps. Off to class now. Call me if you need me. Be careful. Ciao.”

Susan stared out at the beautiful, manicured valley below, thinking about the questions the technology breakthrough raised. Then, realizing where she was, she snapped out of her trance and headed for the tasting room, trying to remember Soxster’s definition of malolactic. Twenty minutes later, frustrated by the tasting room’s refusal to pour any chardonnay and having decided that she did not really care for their semillon blanc, she drove up to Gaudium’s winery, Bacchanalia. She arrived twenty minutes early for her appointment and sat in the car in the tasting room parking lot. The tasting room seemed modeled on its famous neighbor, Kistler: small, with extensive fieldstone work, granite outcroppings, and small ponds. There seemed, however, to be a Japanese or Zen touch to the flora and garden architecture. It also offered an even more breathtaking view of the broad valley below.

Susan noticed that there were only two other vehicles in the parking lot, both Cadillacs, a DTS sedan and a hydrogen-cell Escalade SUV. Before she could get out of her rental car, a small gaggle bustled out of the Bacchanalia tasting room. Susan recognized the appearance of the group, the way the men and women looked, neat in their blue blazers and ties, the way they placed themselves relative to one another, the way they moved. It looked like a small Secret Service detachment doing an OTR, an Off the Record event, a private activity by a protectee. Now she saw who that protectee was, presidential candidate Senator Alexander George, the man in the center of the half dozen agents. He looked less coiffed than he had at the Kennedy School forum. He was wearing a windbreaker and jeans. So I’m not the only one who wants Gaudium’s advice, she thought as she waited for the three-vehicle convoy to pull out.

Once inside, she was politely ushered into a special tasting room. Wood-paneled and appointed with modern leather couches, the room was all about the view. Its two picture windows showed the vine-filled valley below with a crispness and clarity that almost made them seem unreal, like an image on the new Very-High-Definition screens. “May I offer you some of our 2010 pinot?” Gaudium said as he entered the room holding a bottle in one hand and offering the other to shake. He was taller than she had expected for some reason, with a thick crop of unruly brown hair and a weathered face. In an old checkered shirt and worn jeans, he might have been mistaken for the viniculturist just in from his fields. “Thank you for coming up here to see me. I almost never get down to Menlo Park anymore.”

“No, no. Thank you for seeing me, especially on such short notice,” Susan said, shaking his hand. His grip was strong and the skin felt callused, coarse. “I hope my coming didn’t drive the senator away. I know how little he cares for those of us in the federal bureaucracy, except perhaps his Secret Service detail.”

Gaudium motioned toward two chairs by the window. He waited until he was opening the bottle of pinot noir to respond. “Actually, Senator George is a very thoughtful man. We’ve been talking on and off for almost six years. I’m supporting him for President. I paid for some of the March on Washington last year.” He poured some of the dark ruby-colored wine into two wide, stemless crystal glasses. “But you’re right about him not wanting to have too many federal employees. Those guards were private. He doesn’t think the taxpayers should have to pay for the protection of candidates at this stage in the campaign.”

He spun the wine in the glass, sniffing its aromas. Susan copied his hand motion and breathed in a surprisingly strong but pleasant nose of fruit flavors. “Very nice,” she offered after tasting a sip. “Light and smooth, but with so much flavor, and in waves.”

“Rain came late that year. I’m so glad we delayed the crush. Everybody up here did. Best pinot since the 2004.” Gaudium beamed. “Westside Road is its own little microclimate, and its been producing the best pinot for almost forty years now.”

He closed his eyes as he sipped and held the wine in his mouth a moment, then swallowed and opened his eyes again to look at his guest. “But it’s not the wine you came to talk about, if I understood your message correctly.”

Susan put down her glass. “No. It’s information science, computer technology. We’re trying to understand why there’ve been these attacks on the internet beachheads and the Globegrid labs, on CAIN and SCAIF, and why now.” Gaudium spread some cheese and fig on a plain cracker as Susan spoke.

“And you have a theory and you want me to react to it, right?”

“I do. Very good,” she said, regretting her tone as she did. “I’m beginning to realize that computer science is about to make a major leap, at least in some countries.” Gaudium nodded and sipped again at his wine. Susan continued, “Living Software that is close to flawless, massively parallel processors linked together, direct brain-machine interfaces. Put it all together and it’s a big change, one that has somehow escaped Washington’s collective consciousness.”

Gaudium smiled knowingly. “Information technology is a tremendous addition to our planet. I know — I was there at the beginning of the internet explosion in the early nineties. That’s how I can afford to be a winemaker with some of the most expensive patches of grapes in the country. But like anything else, it can be taken to an illogical conclusion, if you’ll excuse the pun.” Susan hadn’t noticed a pun and Gaudium kept going.

“So, we are at an inflection point, a vector point with IT. And most people have not noticed. Living Software will never be flawless, but it will be close enough to make it difficult for us to regain control of it. And don’t doubt for a minute that we have lost control of it. Humans did not write that software and we really do not know what’s in it. All the operating systems and major applications have gotten so complex now.

“Then there came the 2009 Cyber Crash, and the government funded this Living Software monstrosity in response. It keeps changing, improving — and when it’s combined with Globegrid, it’ll be in most of the networks and systems in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.” Gaudium’s mood had changed as he spoke, growing more serious and agitated.

“Is it a threat to China, or to other nations not in the consortium?” Susan asked casually as she reached for a wafer.

“Of course. So, they say that the consortium will open up to the entire world at some point, but they don’t say when. Naturally, China, Russia, and the others feel left out. But they may eventually be glad they are. Who knows what LS will decide to do once it examines the major networks and systems in this country? It could shut some of them off or create new ones. What if its efficiency criteria eventually decide humans aren’t efficient? I know, I know, it sounds like some film you saw as a kid, but we really are moving in that direction. Machines are better at most things than people. Most people you see all day long are doing jobs that machines could do, and do better. How long will it take LS to figure that out and start acting on it by creating programs to do those jobs?

“And once people start buying BEPs, brain-enhancement packages, that connect them to cyberspace, LS will be inside human brains, too. So who wouldn’t want a BEP that prevents Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the brain, speeds up memory and thinking, provides direct linkage to all the public databases, makes it possible for all sensory experiences to be heightened? You’d pay the hundred thousand for that, wouldn’t you, if you had that kind of money?” Gaudium paused, looking at Susan’s expression. “No, I’m sensing that maybe you wouldn’t. But most people would.”

Susan looked out at the valley. “No, I wouldn’t. But I am not a purist, I do take memory-enhancement pills now. The Center pays for them. It’s just that I think that if you have a brain-computer connection, it runs a risk of blurring what it means to be human.”

“Precisely!” Gaudium almost screamed in the tasting room. “What people should be focused on first, the greatest threat, is what the genomics and biological sciences are doing to what it means to be human. Bio Fabs are creating life to do the work of machines. Human Machine implants are silicon doing the work of carbon-based life.” Gaudium jabbed his finger at the tabletop.

“I’m confused. I thought we were talking about the growing influence of computer science, not biology,” Susan responded, feigning naïveté.

“Both are problems, and they’re linked. But it is all about humans changing what it means to be human, creating a new species, splitting off a race that will soon enough look no more like we do today than we look like Neanderthals. That’s what has already started with genomics moving beyond fixing to enhancing. Fixing was all right, because it meant raising people up to the norm by repairing genetic mistakes, like Tay-Sachs syndrome, diabetes, the rest. But enhancement? What enhancements do we order? Who is to decide? And who gets them? We know the gene that gives superior IQ by thickening the prefrontal cerebral cortex. Let’s make it even bigger, see what that does.”

As Gaudium’s speed and volume rose, he did, too, leaving his chair and standing with his back to the picture window above the valley, focused on Susan. He had gone from mellow winemaker to furious evangelist. “Sure, replacing defective organs by having your own good stem cells grow a new bladder or liver is fine, but turning off the aging process in cells? Pretty soon the rich will never die, except by accident or violence. As if we didn’t already have a population problem.

“And now they want superchildren! Believe me, it’s further along than you think. They’ve gone underground because of the states that have passed laws against genomic engineering. But my investigators have found them. They’re creating superkids, with all the flaws taken out and all the genetic enhancements designed in. Tall, blond or red haired, brilliant, everlasting. Our own little gods and goddesses. That’s what people should be really worried about. That’s what this election will be about!” He turned his head toward the valley, then back at her. “I’m sorry if I get excited…”

Susan stood up to reduce the physical distance between them, but even when she was standing, Gaudium towered over her. “No, it’s okay. I think I understand, or at least I’m beginning to. I’m supposed to uncover secret activity by other governments, and I think what I’m uncovering is activity here in the U.S. that has been kept secret from most of us, maybe because we just don’t understand it.”

“No, Susan, it’s more than the fact that it’s just written up in technical journals that only scientists read. After the fights about abortion and then stem cells and evolution, the Transhumanist science community stopped revealing their research at conferences and in journals, as scientists normally would. They pretended it was to protect patents and intellectual property, but it was really because they feared the public’s reaction would nip their science in the bud before they had a chance to develop it into marketable products. Once they get treatments that prevent cellular degeneration, boost IQ, replace eyes and ears with enhanced sensors, tie humans directly into the grid…then they will market their inventions to the rich and famous. Then everything will change….” Gaudium took a deep breath to calm himself and then sipped the last of the wine in his glass.

She followed suit, then added: “That’s what Senator George was talking about at Harvard. The rich will actually be smarter, instead of just thinking they are.” Susan sat down on one of the tasting room’s oak-backed chairs. “And if they turn off cellular degeneration, combine that with organ regeneration…those motherfuckers will live forever.” She blushed. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“No, no, I love your passion. And you’re right. Death, for the Enhanced, will only result from violence and accidents.” Gaudium poured more pinot. “But they’d still be human. Except that when they add electronics into the body, nanobots roaming our bodies fixing things, when they allow the brain to connect to the grid to access data and to automatically report malfunctions, the way OnStar automatically tells the police when you have an accident in your car…Then they’d begin to become parts, just parts, of a larger network.”

“A larger network whose software will have been written by…by software?” she added.

“Right. You see it, too.” Gaudium opened another wooden panel on the wall, revealing a whiteboard. He began drawing. “So, here is a farm growing Frankenfood, some genetically enhanced fruit or vegetable. Humans act as the pickers, because in most cases we don’t yet have machines that can do that well. Then the machines take over. They wash, destem, package it into cartons with bar codes or RFID tags. The machines decide what trucks the packages go on, what rail cars, or planes. They decide what stores they go to, based on what other machines have told them about inventories and sales. They decide on the price based on a sales intelligence software. You buy the box of tomatoes and the RFID tag tells the checkout system, and deducts funds from your account when you wave your debit card near the reader. When you get home, if you have one of those new intelligent fridges, your refrigerator reads the RFID tag so that it can tell you when the tomatoes are about to go bad. Perhaps it also tells a marketing intelligence system that Susan buys tomatoes twice a week….”

“It’s a good thing I can’t afford one of those fridges then. Do most people know when they’re using something connected to the internet?” she asked.

“All new devices are connected to your home wireless system, which is connected to the internet,” he said in a dismissive tone, as if stating the obvious. “But don’t you see the important thing here? Look at the flow of this system,” he yelled, and moved the red marker across the whiteboard. “In that entire process with the tomatoes, the human is reduced to doing manual labor, the things requiring the least intelligence. I can show you hundreds of examples where the humans are reduced to being beasts of burden and the computer-controlled systems do the work requiring higher cognition. The Enhanced won’t be doing the beast of burden jobs, of course. No, they will be interacting with machines at higher levels. Gold men. Silver men. Bronze.”

Susan smiled. “I’ve heard that argument before. Plato’s Republic. The classes cannot mix and order is preserved by the Magnificent Myth that keeps the bronze men under control.”

“Absolutely right. End of democracy as we know it. End of humanity as we know it. Yes! That is the problem in a nutshell,” Gaudium said, shaking his head in quick little moves. “The Magnificent Myth or Noble Lie that Plato had in mind was telling the bronze men that the gods intended this three-tiered system and that the gold men were made better, even though they may not be. But with this neo-eugenics, these Enhanced humans will actually be better than any normal human. And so, eventually, the Enhanced humans will rule the lesser life-forms like us.”

He stood there, still shaking his head. “Look, I’m going to Infocon Alpha in Vegas tomorrow morning in my VLJ. I’m giving the keynote. Why don’t you come with me?”

Now she was going to have to explain to Sol and Rusty why she was flying off to Vegas with a man she had just met, in his personal Very Lite Jet, a man who seemed to be the prototype for the brilliant mad scientist. But she’d bet anything Gaudium knew where some of these underground labs were, and if she could find them, warn them about the attacks…. “I’d be glad to,” she told him.

“You can spend the night in the guesthouse, then. And will you join me for dinner at seven?”

“You’d better be right about this, Foley,” Major Mike Zerbrowski was saying into his mouthpiece as the helicopter lifted off from the Marine base. “It’s goin’ to be hard to explain why I used Marines to go after a civilian complex.”

Yes, I had better be right, Jimmy Foley thought. It had been a bad day so far. TTeeLer had missed the meet at the 7-Eleven and the FBI had eventually given up and most of them were lying around a pool at the Red Roof Inn.

Foley and the Marines watched the videotape from their Remotely Piloted Vehicle again. Flying out toward Bagdad, as Soxster had suggested, it had come across a fenced-off area with a security gate up a dirt road. It was a big ranch spread out on the way to the copper concentrate leach facility, at about forty-one hundred feet above sea level. It was at the seam of the Mohave and Sonoran Deserts. There were both Joshua trees and yucca, a private airstrip, three large satellite dishes, four large buildings, and maybe twenty cabins. Over two dozen vehicles were parked, but there were few people outside. It was listed on the county tax rolls as “American Energy & Mineral Research Corporation,” with a corporate headquarters in the nation of St. Kitts. Folks at the nearby Miner’s Diner said they never met anyone from the place.

Jimmy had spent the day convincing the colonel commanding the 7th Marines that he had discovered the location of the culprits who had attached Echo Company by drugging them and taking control of their exoskeleton suits. Foley was convinced this was the place where the Chinese were using American hackers to monitor and subvert the military’s work, maybe also the place from which they had sent the signals that sent the Pacific satellites off.

It had been harder to persuade the colonel to put Marines back in exoskeletons after what had happened to Echo Company, but Dr. Rathstein had been persuasive. “If we shut off the Netcentric functions, then there will be no data entering or leaving the suits. No one can hack in again. The guys will just have tactical radio links, voice, like in the old days.” He also produced over two dozen exoskeleton-experienced volunteers from Bravo Company. What got the colonel to say yes was Jimmy’s argument that the 7th had been attacked and the colonel had inherent authority to act in self-defense; if he waited for Washington to approve a plan, the bad guys would be gone.

With the sun starting to go down, Jimmy watched the two other UH-85 Arapahos lift up, one on either side of the bird he was in. Each of those two helicopters carried four Marines in exoskeleton suits with the new M-912 combined individual weapon. The M-912 was a double-stack multiple-grenade launcher, an electronically initiated, very-high-rate-of-fire 9mm Lugar parabellum automatic rifle and Taser-style stun gun in one weapon. It would have been too heavy for troops without the lifting strength provided by the exoskels. Jimmy and the major in the lead Arapaho wore standard body armor and carried only side arms. Three Marine criminal investigators and two counterintelligence officers were sitting in the back of Jimmy’s chopper. “Military forces can act in their own protection, even in the states. It’s in the rules of engagement. And you can act without warrants and higher-level approvals when you think there is an imminent national security threat. Trust me, I know this posse comitatus stuff,” Foley bluffed.

The three-bird formation of Arapahos was coming toward the ranch low out of the dark eastern sky. Suddenly, ahead of them, red streaks jumped up from the ground.

“Missiles, missiles!” the pilot yelled over the radio. “Break formation, dive!”

The Arapaho seemed almost to tip upside down as it banked and dove for the surface. The pilot righted the aircraft a few feet above the desert floor. Twisting his head to see through the window to the sky behind them, Jimmy saw four fireballs slowly descending. The pilot had had the presence of mind to release diversion flares as he maneuvered out of the path of the incoming Stinger-like missiles.

“Talon Two, Three, you still wi’ me?” the Arapaho pilot asked, calling on the other two helicopters.

“Roger that, Talon One, Talon Three is on your tail,” came the response. Then: “And Talon Two, who are these guys got Stingers out here?”

“Break formation. Talon Two, approach your target low from the east-northeast, heading zero eight zero. Talon Three, from the northwest at heading two eight zero. Do not break ceiling above three zero zero feet.” The lead pilot then began a long turn, giving the other aircraft time to get into position for a simultaneous assault on the site.

“I don’t see anybody down there where the Stingers came from,” Talon Two called in.

“Talon Three in position,” Foley heard over his headset. Then the other helicopter confirmed its readiness.

“All Talons, go, go, go.” The Arapaho lurched forward. “Remember, no touchdowns, drop, discharge, and pull out.”

The desert turned into dust devils as the choppers descended. The exoskeleton Marines leaping from the Arapahos reminded Foley of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, giants totally encased in their own individual ecosystems, impervious to attack. The exoskel Marines jumped into swirling sand and fanned out by bounding across the ground. Also dropping from the helicopters were several four foot long vehicles with miniature tank treads, Bombots. They carried multimode cameras and sensors designed to find booby traps and bombs. Another model carried a high-rate-of-fire electronic gun system.

Jimmy Foley and Major Zerbrowksi came up behind the squad moving in from the east. He heard a small thud up ahead and realized that the lead unit had made it to the large warehouse-like building. The thud was probably the sound of the Marines using a light explosive charge to blow the lock off the main door. Foley realized he had not yet switched his headset from the aircraft band to the ground frequency. As he switched over to the chatter of the Bravo Company ’skels, he heard, “Sending the Bombots into building one.”

Normally, the exoskeleton troops would have the visuals in their helmets of what the Bombots were seeing as they drove around inside the buildings. However, with the Netcentric connections turned off to prevent another hacker attack, only their voice radios connected the exoskels to the tactical communications system. Only Jimmy, the major, and two gunnies had the Bombot’s visuals on their portable monitors. The vehicles scanned the rooms with their electro-optical and infrared cameras, but they were also equipped with self-sensing microcantilevers that detected the smallest particles that could be explosive residue. They tested by creating faint popping noises, actually detonating particles in the air.

“Bombot reports building one secure,” he heard on the ground freq. “We’re going in.”

“Building two secure.” That meant both the warehouse and the residence had been taken and checked for booby traps.

He was getting close enough and the sand was settling, so he could make out the shape of the thirty-foot-high warehouse. “Building three secure.” That was the multibay garage building. Foley headed for the warehouse.

On the ground outside the building were what looked like two large toy aircraft, maybe the unmanned aerial vehicles that Soxster thought had been used to beam signals down directly to the exoskeleton-suited Marines? Zabrowski bent over one of the little planes. “Writing’s in English and Chinese.”

“Yeah, well, ever found a toy that’s not made in China?” Foley asked, and kept going.

Foley heard the chattering back and forth on the tactical channel. None of them had found anyone. There were lots of computers, but no people. Signs of recent occupancy, but no one home. “Got a video-monitoring studio here,” one of the Marines announced on the radionet. Foley joined him and found six flat screens, flipping among various video feeds. They had not shut the system off. But the feeds were not coming from the ranch. They seemed to be from industrial facilities, parking lots. Then the White House appeared on one screen. They had been hacking into surveillance cameras all over the country. Foley hit the computer console in front of him and a GUI appeared with a search box. On a hunch, he typed in “SCAIF.” A long list of dates came back. Jimmy typed again. “SCAIF, bombing.” It came back with three listings. He hit the third. On the center flat screen above him, a tape began to run. The image was grainy, maybe on telescopic. A cloud like a small explosion appeared in the distance, then a large truck came roaring down the road. A car crashed into the truck from the side and the screen was immediately filled with a flash. There was no sound. Then the camera panned back and to the right. There was someone on the ground. The image zoomed in. “Jesus, Susan!” Jimmy said. He reminded himself that he knew she was all right. That scene had taken place yesterday. He tapped his mike: “We got a bunch of evidence over here.”

As he reached down to the console again, he heard in his headset, “Major, we got a stiff in the warehouse. Big bullet hole in his forehead.”

Foley accompanied Major Zabrowski inside the large structure that he guessed was forty feet by a hundred. The front part was divided up into vehicle bays, some of which had dusty jeeps and trucks. The rest of the space was office cubicles, many with flat screens and headsets. Following the voice of a gunny sergeant directing them, they made their way back to a cubicle near the far side of the building. The body was still on a gurney. An IV drip stand was on its right and some sort of brain scanner on the left, with its wires still connected to pads on the skull. There was also a large, bloody hole in the middle of his forehead.

They had tried to learn what he knew through drug inducement and lie-detector brain scans, which Jimmy Foley knew from his own experience worked well, unlike the medieval hocus-pocus of polygraphs. Jimmy wondered what had happened to Naomi, the single mom, and her kid. He swallowed hard.

“You know this guy?” the major asked. “Who is he?”

“This is TTeeLer,” Jimmy said with an overwhelming sense of guilt.

“What kind of a fuckin’ name is that, Major?” the gunny asked. Zabrowski shook his head.

“It’s geek,” Foley volunteered.

“Greek? I heard of Stavos and Dimitri, no TeeTee,” the Gunny said, and laughed.

“Geek, computer talk,” Foley corrected, remembering what Soxster had told him. “TTL. It’s part of a computer packet, how long it’s good for, how long it lasts. It means Time To Live.”

“Well, in his case, I’d say it meant time to die,” the gunny said, bending down to examine the body.

Jimmy looked up and saw, on the other side of the room, the surveillance camera inside the glass globe. It was moving slowly. When it was pointed at Foley and the major standing over TTeeLer, the lens zoomed in. It could just be an intelligent video program that was directing it, Foley thought, but it had an erratic pattern that made it seem driven by hand. He turned his back on the camera, flipped his frequency to the All Mission Personnel channel, and said softly, “Do not run, but quickly withdraw from all buildings, withdraw now.”

The noise was from above, sharp and loud, THWACK, and with it came an instant rain of metal shards everywhere. They hadn’t checked the roof, Foley thought as he looked up. The ragged metal roof fragment hit his right eye and angled into and through his nose. Foley felt no pain, but through his left eye he could see his blood gushing out. Then he fell over onto the corpse.

“I wasn’t sure at first whether you were only pretending to agree with me,” Will Gaudium admitted as he poured the Late Harvest Laborscum, “but the expression in vino veritas hasn’t lasted two thousand years without reason.”

“Well, here is the truth: I hate dessert wines,” Susan protested, convinced that she had already had enough wine for two nights.

“At least try it,” Gaudium pleaded. “My wife loved it.” He tended to the dwindling fire, stirring the embers and adding a log.

Sipping the liqueur-like wine, Susan had to admit, “I can see why. Like honey, but not syrupy or oversweet.”

“Just like you,” Gaudium let slip. “I’m sorry, that was inappropriate, Susan.”

“No, Will, don’t be upset. It was fine. In vino veritas. I love getting compliments,” she said. “But, if you don’t mind, tell me about your wife.”

Gaudium inhaled. “Breast cancer. Three years ago. Happened fast. Tried everything, but it was aggressive and we caught it late.” He swallowed and, Susan thought, his eyes teared up. “You see I have no problem whatsoever with genetic alteration to fix mistakes in our cells. If I could have spent all my money to save her that way, I would not have hesitated. But instead of doing research into that our scientists were doing Viagra and Botox.”

“Will, I’m so sorry,” Susan offered. “And then, with her gone, you threw yourself into this work?”

“Yeah, basically. I was approached by some venture capitalists from Sand Hill Road. They were raising a new fund to invest exclusively in nanotech, human-machine interfaces, life extending pharma, all that. That’s when I really looked closely into these fields, and came away shocked that we were so close — so close to fundamentally and irrevocably altering humanity.”

For the first time, Susan saw the man sitting next to her by the fire not as a part of her investigation but as a warm, honorable, principled human being. Older than her, but still strong and fit and caring. He had built a big company on the basis of his technical brilliance, retired to be with his wife and make wine, and then lost her. Instead of any of the grief-driven things others would have done, he had put his money to use trying to educate the public and the government on a threat that only someone with his background and expertise could have seen holistically.

Susan reached out her hand and took his. She said, “I think I can help you.”

“Drop me off opposite the fire station,” Sol Rubenstein told the cabbie. The blue and white taxi pulled in at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Porter Street. The Director of National Intelligence had not been in a taxi for several years and fumbled about trying to determine how much of a tip was appropriate to program into his RFID credit card. Wearing a Washington Nationals baseball hat and a windbreaker, he assumed that the likelihood of his being identified was small. His picture had seldom been in the media and he made no television appearances.

The light changed to stop the end-of-rush-hour traffic still moving north on Connecticut Avenue toward Maryland. In a small group of pedestrians, Rubenstein crossed the street toward the firehouse. His fellow travelers looked to be mainly twentysomethings on their way to the new laser holograph movie at the Uptown Cinema.

Rubenstein broke off from the group shortly after crossing Connecticut and moved quickly into the Yin Ching Palace restaurant. Personally, he preferred dim sum from one of the more authentic Chinese establishments in Washington’s miniature Chinatown near the convention center. The chief of the Chinese intelligence service’s Washington station had been fairly insistent that they meet at the old Woodley Park restaurant. Perhaps there were too many Taiwan sympathizers in the Cantonese establishments downtown. Maybe the Chinese intelligence service, the Guoanbu, owned the Yin Ching, though that seemed unlikely.

As requested, Rubenstein moved quickly to the last of the bright orange booths, on the right-hand side in the corner. There, pouring a Sam Adams beer, was a young Chinese professional who could have been in his late thirties or perhaps early forties, Shen Ruikai. He wore a gray polo shirt that bore the red letters MIT. On the seat next to him was a faded blue Red Sox hat. “Sol, thanks for putting up with all the cloak and dagger. Not my idea. How you been?”

“I thought you ran everything for the Guoanbu in D.C. — hell, throughout the U.S. — Shen. What’s the matter, you been demoted?” Rubenstein joked. He had known Shen Ruikai for three years. They had exchanged lunches and dinners. Both Rubenstein and Ruikai were loyal to their governments, but they also both knew the value of informal channels and officially off-the-record discussions. It was Rubenstein who had initiated the discussions, but Ruikai had warmed to them once he understood that he was not the target of a heavy-handed recruitment. Rubenstein also knew that Ruikai told the Guoanbu about the meetings, lest anyone think he had become a U.S. double agent.

“Sol, you know I don’t bullshit. I got this instruction from Director of Second Bureau in a personal message,” Ruikai explained with some chagrin.

“How is Wu Zhan?” Rubenstein asked. Wu had been the Washington station chief before Ruikai and now ran the Foreign Intelligence Division of the Ministry of State Security, the Guoanbu’s formal name. Rubenstein had gotten to know him during the interagency effort Sol had run to uncover the scope of Chinese intelligence activity on American companies. Although his team had found massive economic espionage, including widespread electronic spying through computer-network penetration and implants in products assembled in China, the American government had kept the results of the investigation quiet, plugged some of the holes, deported several Chinese graduate students, and demarched the Chinese government. Rubenstein had also put a 24×7 tail, rather overtly, on the Chinese station chief. As a result, Wu Zhan had been withdrawn back to Beijing. Rubenstein later learned that his friendly adversary had been promoted to run all of Chinese intelligence’s foreign operations.

“He misses Washington,” Ruikai joked. “Misses you.”

“Doesn’t trust his successor is doing as good a job of stealing from us?” Sol shot back, only half in jest.

Shen Ruikai hesitated and Sol sensed that his joking remark had hit home. “Apparently, he does not trust me for something, Sol. I was directed to give you this message in writing. As you will see, I am not instructed to give you a substantive message. Instead, he invites you to visit him as soon as possible.”

Rubenstein took the text, which had been translated into English. Ruikai continued, “The backstory, Sol, which I got on the secure phone, is that Taiwan shooting down our fighter aircraft has really embarrassed the big generals of the People’s Liberation Army. They want to do something. And this comes at a time when some in the Pentagon think that maybe China is responsible for the terrorist attacks in the U.S. The Guoanbu in Beijing thinks the tensions between us are too high. Dangerously high.”

“That must be because that is what Guoanbu’s Washington station is reporting to Beijing,” Sol observed. “Is that what you are telling them?”

The Peking duck arrived and both men halted the conversation until the waiter distributed the pancakes, spring onions, skin, sauce, and duck meat. Even when the waiter departed, Ruikai did not answer. He carefully stuffed a pancake and then looked up at Rubenstein. “Without revealing my sources and methods, Sol, I might have reported that many senior officials of your government have the belief that China is somehow involved in the bombings this week. They are, of course, wrong. Perhaps I have told Beijing that the Pentagon has been tasked to develop retaliation options. And that POTUS will ask the television networks for time on Monday night.”

Now it was Rubenstein who took his time carefully assembling his duck package. Then he smiled across the table. “Without commenting on the accuracy of what you might have reported, tell me why Wu thinks that in the middle of all of this, I should spend a week dragging my raggedy ass to Beijing?”

Ruikai sat back in the booth and took a large gulp of the Sam Adams. “Here is where I can only speculate. You know that Wu is very close personally to our President. He may or may not be speaking for him. There may be a deal, which Wu cannot put in writing yet. Our President may not want to seek approval for a plan only to have your side reject it. But, Sol, I am guessing. All I do know is that my instructions were, first, to tell you that you could leave tomorrow and be back on Sunday on the nonstop to Hong Kong. Wu will meet you there. You will be the only one in the first-class cabin on the flight out of Dulles. Second, I was to meet you here, at the Yin Ching Palace. I don’t know why this place — it’s not very trendy.”

Sol Rubenstein did not reply. Ruikai saw Sol’s eyes focus in the middle distance. Then he said slowly, “I don’t think Wu has a flair for the melodramatic, Shen, do you?” Shen Ruikai shook his head.

Rubenstein signaled for a waiter. “Menu, please.” Ruikai looked puzzled. Sol accepted the menu, turned it over, and handed it to Ruikai, his finger pointing to a box on the back cover. It read:

Rubenstein stood up to leave and placed his Nationals cap back on. “Tell Wu I will see him in Hong Kong on Saturday. Call my assistant with the travel details, but I must be back Sunday.”