Fires of War

1

“Dance?”

The blonde took a step backward, clutching at the collar of her blouse as if it had been wide open.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Come on. You look like you could use a dance.” Bob Ferguson gestured to the side of the open piazza, where a small jazz band was playing. “They’re playing our song.”

“This isn’t dance music,” said the woman stiffly, “and you’re very forward.”

“Usually I’m not,” Ferguson turned to the woman’s companion and pleaded his case, “but I’m here on holiday. Tell your friend she should dance with me.”

“I don’t know.”

Ferguson laughed and turned back to the blonde. “I’m not going to bite. You’re British, right?”

“I am from Sweden.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

“You’re Irish?”

“As sure as the sun rises.” He stuck out his hand. “Dance?”

The woman didn’t take his hand.

“How about you?” Ferguson asked, turning to the other woman.

“I’m Greek.”

“No, I meant, would you dance?”

Thera Majed hesitated but only for a moment. Then, shrugging to her companion, she stepped over to Ferguson, who immediately put his hand on her hip and waltzed her into the open space near the tables.

“Hello, Cinderella,” whispered Ferguson. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine. What’s going on?”

“I felt like dancing.”

“I’ll bet. What would you have done if Julie accepted your offer?”

“I would have enjoyed two dances.”

Ferguson whisked her out of the way of a hurrying waiter.

“There’s no one else dancing, you know,” said Thera.

“Really? ‘But I only have eyes, for you.’” Ferguson sang the last words, grabbing a snatch of a song.

“Why are you contacting me?”

“Itinerary’s changed,” he said, spinning her around.

“What’s up?” she asked as she came back to him.

“Everything’s being moved forward. Some sort of push by the UN. You’re leaving for Korea in the morning.”

Ferguson danced her around, improvising a stride slightly quicker than a standard foxtrot to swing with the jazz beat. He’d learned to dance as a teenager in prep school — the only useful subject he picked up there, according to his father.

“We’re not going to have time to get security people on your team,” he whispered, pulling her back.

He felt her arms stiffen and started another twirl.

“You all right, Cinderella?” he asked her, reeling her back in.

“Of course,” said Thera.

“We’ll have people standing by. Relief caches will go in while you’re down South, exactly where we’d said they’d be. Plan’s the same; you’re just not going to have anyone on the IAEA inspection team with you.” He stopped and looked at her. “You cool with that?”

The IAEA was the International Atomic Energy Agency. After two months of training, Thera had been planted on the agency as a technical secretary; her team had just finished an inspection in Libya.

“I’m OK, Ferg. We shouldn’t make this too obvious, do you think?”

“Hey, I’m having fun,” he said, leaning her over.

He glanced toward the Swedish scientist, who was watching them with an expression somewhere between bewilderment and outrage. Ferguson gave the blonde a smile and pulled Thera back up.

“If you want to bail, call home. We’ll grab you.”

“I’m OK, Ferg. I can do it.”

“Slap me.”

“Huh?”

“Slap me, because I just told you how desperately I want to take you to bed.”

“I—“

“’I only have eyes, for you…’”

“I won’t,” said Thera loudly. She took a step back and put her hands on her hips. “No.”

“Come on,” said Ferguson. “We’re obviously meant for each other.”

Thera told him in Greek that he was an animal and a pig. The first words sputtered. She imagined herself to be the technical secretary she was portraying, not the skilled CIA paramilitary looking for violations of the new Korean nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

And she imagined Ferguson not to be her boss and the man who had saved her neck just a few months before but a snake and a rogue and a thief, roles he was well accustomed to playing.

Though he was a handsome rogue, truth be told.

“Go away,” she said in English. Her cheeks were warm. “Go!”

“Should I take that as a no?” Ferguson asked.

Thera turned and stomped to her table.

She seemed to take that well,” said Stephen Rankin sarcastically when Ferguson got back to the table. “What’d you do, kick her in her shins?”

“I tried to, but she wouldn’t stand still.” Ferguson sipped from the drink, a Sicilian concoction made entirely from local liquor. It tasted like sweet but slightly turned orange juice and burned the throat going down, which summed up Sicily fairly well.

“You think she’s gonna bail?” Rankin asked.

“Nah. Why do you think that?”

“I don’t think that. I’m asking if you think that.”

Ferguson watched Thera talking with the Swedish female scientist. He could still smell the light scent of her perfume and feel the sway of her body against his.

She wasn’t going to quit, but she was afraid. He’d sensed it, dancing with her. But fear wasn’t the enemy most people thought. In some cases, for some people, fear made them sharper, smarter, and better.

Ferguson thought Thera was that kind of person; she’d certainly done well in Syria, and there was as much reason to be afraid then as there would be in North Korea.

He jumped to his feet to chase the thought away “Let’s get going, Skippy.”

“One of these days I’m going to sock you for calling me Skippy.”

“I wish you’d try. Let’s get out to the airport.”

2

“Ms. Alston? Ma’am?”

Corrine looked up from her computer to see Jess Northrup, poking his head in the doorway.

“President was wondering if you could wander into his office in about five minutes,” said Northrup, who as an assistant to the chief of staff was the president’s schedule keeper. “Senator Tewilliger’s in there.”

“Thanks, Jess.” Corrine hit the Save button and stood up. “How’s the car?”

Northrup’s face, which had been so serious his cheeks looked as if they were marble, brightened immediately. “Paint job over the weekend,” he said. “Assuming matters of state don’t interfere.”

“You promised me a ride with the top down.”

“Soon as it’s done.”

Northrup’s car was a 1966 Mustang convertible he’d started rebuilding soon after Jonathon McCarthy won reelection as senator nearly four years before. McCarthy was now president, but Northrup’s car still lacked key items, among them an engine.

“Do you have a fresh yellow pad?” she asked her secretary, Teri Gatins, in the outer office.

“Wandering into the Oval Office?” said Gatins.

Corrine returned the assistant’s smirk. Having an aide “spontaneously” interrupt him was a favorite McCarthy tactic for cutting short visits from people like Gordon Tewilliger, who were too important and dangerous to blow off but too dense to take all but the most obvious hint that it was time to leave.

“You have that appointment with Director Parnelles at Langley on Special Demands this afternoon,” said Gatins as Corrine took the notebook. “Should I get you a sandwich?”

“I’m not really hungry. It’s only eleven.”

“I’ll get corned beef,” said the secretary, picking up the phone.

The president’s office was only a few feet down the hall, but in that distance Corrine transformed herself, consciously changing her stride and stare. Senator Gordon Tewilliger was not, technically speaking, an enemy, but he was far from a friend.

Very far. Though he was a member of McCarthy’s own party, there were strong rumors that he was thinking about launching a primary fight against him. The election was a good three years away, and Tewilliger had steadfastly denied that he was interested in the job, but even the news-people thought he was testing the water.

Corrine winked at Northrup, knocked once on the door, and pushed inside.

“Well, now, if I didn’t know any better, Gordon,” said McCarthy, eyes fixed on Tewilliger, “I might think one or two of those projects there smelled of pork.”

“Pork?”

“Pork might not be the proper word in this context.” McCarthy came by his South Carolina accent honestly — his forebears, as he liked to call them, had been in the state since before the revolution — but sometimes it was more honest than others. At the moment it was honest in the extreme.

“I expect that many of those programs are important programs in their own right,” added McCarthy. “One or two of those highway patrol elements, I believe, should be funded through Transportation. And in a case or two of high priority relating to homeland defense, those items might be added by our budget director, working in close relation with your staff, of course.”

Senator Tewilliger, who for a moment had felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach, now felt like a man pulled from the ocean. He knew it was partly, perhaps mostly, a game — he’d seen McCarthy operating in the Senate and was well aware how smooth he could be — but still, in that instant he felt grateful, even flattered, that the president was going to help him.

Then he felt something else: the absolute conviction that he, Gordon Tewilliger, deserved to be the next president of the United States. McCarthy couldn’t be trusted with power like this.

Corrine cleared her throat. “I didn’t realize you were in the middle of something.”

“Well, now, Miss Alston, I am always in the middle of something,” said McCarthy. “Isn’t that right, Senator?”

“Yes. Corrine, how are you?” Tewilliger nodded in Corrine’s direction.

“Senator Tewilliger and I were just discussing how important the security of Indiana is. He has been doing quite a bit of work to ensure that we do not forget the state in the upcoming homeland defense bill.”

“Just keeping the home fires burning,” said the senator.

It occurred to Corrine that, had McCarthy lost his bid for president, she could well be working for Tewilliger right now, as counsel to the Senate Armed Services Committee; he had inherited the chairmanship when McCarthy left.

Then again, she and Tewilliger had clashed in the past, and it was much more likely that he would have fired her. He liked his aides and staffers to be people he could push around.

Tewilliger got up to leave; McCarthy got up as well, extending his hand. “It occurs to me, Gordon, that you haven’t declared which way you will vote on the Korean nonproliferation treaty.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Tewilliger.

“Well, now, I hope you will explain your views to me on any possible objection you have.”

“I’m not sure I have any objections.”

McCarthy continued to grip the senator’s hand. “You’re worried about verification of the treaty?”

“We all have concerns.”

“That is a difficult section of the entire document, I must give you that.” McCarthy glanced toward Corrine. “Have you had a chance to finish your review, Miss Alston?”

“I have looked at it, yes, sir,” said Corrine. The president made it sound offhand, but in fact Corrine had reviewed several drafts of the treaty and spent countless hours with State Department lawyers refining some of the language.

“And what do you think?” said McCarthy.

“At first blush, the language appears solid. The difficulty is making sure North Korea complies with it.”

“Now that is the first time I think in the history of the Union, perhaps in the history of mankind, that a lawyer has admitted there is something of importance beyond the letter and face of the law,” said McCarthy. He turned back to Senator Tewilliger. “I have some concerns about verification, but ultimately our question should be: Is the treaty better than nothing?”

“I’ve always taken a hard line with North Korea,” said Tewilliger. “We have to be tough with them. We need assurances.”

“What sort of assurance would be sufficient, Senator?” asked Corrine. “We have their six warheads under constant surveillance. Their launch vehicles have been dismantled. The International Atomic Energy Agency will inspect all military and nuclear facilities on the peninsula and Japan. Beyond that, we have the satellites and—”

“That’s another thing that bothers me,” said Tewilliger. “South Korea is being treated like a pariah here.”

“Well, now, Gordon, I have to say the South Koreans are the least part of the problem,” said McCarthy. “They have less to hide than the preacher’s wife.”

“I didn’t say they were a problem, just that they have to be treated fairly.”

“True, true,” said the president. “Perhaps you could give the verification matter additional thought. Maybe someone from State could go over and brief your committee.”

“Yes. Of course.” Tewilliger decided it was time to leave. “I better let you get back to work.”

“Always a pleasure talking to you, Gordon,” said McCarthy, walking with him to the door.

“South Korea’s being treated unfairly?” said Corrine after the senator was gone. “Where did that come from?”

The president pulled his chair out and sat down. He had known Corrine literally all of her life; her father was one of his best friends, and he had visited the family at the hospital the day after she was born. She’d worked for him since high school, first as a volunteer, then as a lawyer.

“Well, dear. What the senator just told us is very interesting,” explained McCarthy. His thick Southern drawl not only made “dear” sound like “deah”; it removed any hint of condescension. “I would wager a good part of the back forty that some of Senator Tewilliger’s Korean-American constituents are feeling that North Korea is getting all of the attention.”

“The South Koreans pushed for the deal.”

“South Korea did, yes. We are not talking about South Korea. We’re talking about the senator’s constituents. Very different.”

McCarthy leaned back in his seat. Against his wishes, the disarmament treaty had become an important centerpiece of his foreign-policy strategy, an important test not only of his plans to limit the growth of nuclear weapons — Iran was his next target — but of his influence with Congress. Lose the vote, and Congress would feel emboldened to block any number of initiatives.

“And how precisely are we doing on verification?” he asked Corrine.

“The mission is proceeding. The IAEA just changed its inspection plans, pushing things up. The First Team should get there in—”

McCarthy put up his hand. He didn’t want to know the specifics, just that Corrine had it under control.

“You know, Parnelles is not in favor of the treaty,” said Corrine, referring to CIA Director Thomas Parnelles.

“As I recall he said he is not opposed to the treaty,” said McCarthy.

“Same thing, if you read between the lines.”

“Not precisely. Mr. Parnelles is very careful with his words, very, very careful. There are no lines to read between.”

McCarthy folded his arms. He admired Parnelles a great deal, but having a strong man in charge of the CIA presented certain problems. Appointing Corrine as his “liaison” to Special Demands and its so-called First Team of CIA paramilitary officers and Special Forces soldiers was one of several steps he’d taken to keep some control over the agency without pulling the reins too tight.

“Like many of the people who work for him at the CIA,” continued the president, “Tom Parnelles does not trust the North Koreans to tell him whether the sun is shining on a cloudless day.”

“Do you?”

“Of course not.” McCarthy laughed. “That’s why your people are there.”

Corrine wasn’t particularly comfortable calling the First Team “her people,” but she let the remark pass.

“Anything else, Jon?”

“No. Thank you, dear. I believe I should release you back to your regular chores.”

“I’ll have that briefing paper on the requests from the Senate ready for you first thing in the morning, so you can read it on your way up to Pennsylvania.”

“Very good.” McCarthy was heading off on a nine-day, twelve-state swing across the country in the morning. “By the way, Miss Alston, I spoke to your daddy last evening. He asked me to send his regards.”

“Oh?”

“He was concerned that you are not getting enough time off. He saw a picture of you on the television the other day and said you looked rather ragged.”

“I hope you took full blame for that.”

“I did, I did. And I gave orders to the press secretary to keep you off camera from now on.”

“I’m in favor of that.”

“Call him a little more, would you, dear?” said McCarthy as she got up to leave.

“I call him once a week.”

“That’s not very much to a father. Trust me.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

3

Ferguson and Rankin caught a commercial flight from Sicily to Rome’s Da Vinci airport, where they were supposed to be met by a specially chartered Gulf Stream and flown to Korea. But the plane had been delayed leaving the States and wouldn’t arrive for several hours; it would need at least one on the ground to refuel.

Rather than hanging out in the terminal, Ferguson decided they should go into the city. He could check the latest intelligence at the embassy, then maybe find a decent dinner and an espresso. Ferguson had always liked Rome; when he was a kid, his father had come over every few weeks from Egypt and Ferguson had occasionally tagged along.

He realized now that his father had probably been running a spy here or sending back material he’d gathered in Cairo — most likely both — but at the time it seemed like a vacation.

“Rome’s cool when you’re a kid,” he told Rankin in the cab. “I used to play hide-and-seek in the Forum ruins and chase cats in the Coliseum.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing the Coliseum,” said Rankin. “And St. Peter’s.”

“St. Peter’s? The cathedral?”

“Why not?”

The taxi driver looked over his shoulder and told them that the cathedral would be closed for tours in an hour and, if he wanted to see it, he’d better go there first.

“All right, you go over to the church. I’ll meet you there when I’m done,” Ferguson told Rankin.

Rankin could never tell with Ferguson whether he had another agenda or not — usually he had three or four going at a time and would share only one and a half — but finally he decided Ferguson was just trying to be nice.

Uncharacteristically nice, as far as Rankin was concerned, but what the hell.

“Thanks,” he told Ferguson. “I appreciate it.”

“Any time, Skippy.”

Rankin felt his face burn red but kept his mouth shut.

Ferguson’s first order of business in the embassy’s secure communications center was to check in with the mission coordinator back home in what was affectionately known as “The Cube.” Nothing more than a high-tech communications center — albeit one located in a bugproof concrete bunker — The Cube was located beneath a nondescript building in a ho-hum industrial park in Virginia. Mission coordinators manned the Cube around the clock, providing Ferguson and other team members with whatever they needed. A small group of researchers and analysts were also housed at the facility, assigned to support current operations.

“Hey, Ferg,” said Jack Corrigan, the mission coordinator on duty. “Sorry about the plane.”

“Not a problem, Jack. Gave Rankin a chance to connect with his inner tourist.”

“Van wants you to check in with him.”

“He’s my next call.”

“How was Thera?”

“Crazy legs? She’s just fantastic.”

“Huh?”

“Long story, Jack. She’s fine. Looking forward to it. Promised to send postcards.”

“IAEA just told their staff.”

“Good for them. Can you get me Van?”

“On it.”

A few minutes later, Colonel Charles Van Buren’s voice snapped onto the line.

“Hey, Ferg,” said the colonel, speaking from Osan military base in South Korea. “Where are you?”

“On my way. What’s going on? You sound tired.”

“Playing basketball. Gettin’ my ass whooped.”

“We set?”

“Everything’s planned out. We have an unexpected bonus from the navy: amphibious warship we can use as an emergency base in the Yellow Sea.”

“Oh that’s discreet. No one will look for us there.”

“It’ll be two hundred and fifty miles offshore.”

“Long way to swim.”

“Only for an emergency, Ferg. Don’t worry.”

“All right. We’ll be out there soon. Keep your elbows to yourself.”

His phone calls done, Ferguson went over to one of the computers that could be used to access the Internet without being traced. He sat down at the machine, put his hands together, and then spread his fingers backward, cracking his knuckles on both hands the way his piano teacher had when he was six or seven. He smiled wryly, remembering the smells of stale cigarettes and staler sherry that had drifted from Mr. Cog when they sat down to practice. Ferg had had four years of lessons, on and off, and besides a mean “Chopsticks” and half a Beethoven sonata, the knuckle cracking was all he’d retained.

Ferguson called up Microsoft Internet Explorer and used it to find the main page of a small telephone company in Maine that offered highspeed Internet connections and e-mail boxes back in the States. From there he entered an account name and password and checked his personal e-mail. There was only one piece of correspondence in the file, and in fact he’d read it twice already, but it was what he had come to look at. The file popped open in the mail reader, narrow black letters on a ghost-white screen.

ferg: Well, you’ve always said play it straight, so here goes…

Ferguson scrolled through the numbers that followed, which had been taken from a medical test a week ago. The most important numbers measured the amount of radiation in his body following his ingestion of a rock-sized piece of iodine. They indicated that his thyroid cancer was spreading to areas well beyond the neck area, including his pancreas and liver.

This was the third time he’d looked at the e-mail, and he knew the numbers by heart now. It was the message in layman’s terms from the doctor that he wanted to read… or not.

As you can see, there are cells there that we don’t want. A lot of them. We’ve discussed the feasibility of further radiation treatments; obviously, that’s your decision. As I said, I can recommend some clinicians who are pursuing other avenues of inquiry. Let me know…

— Dr. Zeist

The conversation about radiation therapy — the only effective, tested treatment after removal of the thyroid — had taken place before the test. The doctor had repeated what Ferguson himself had already read in the medical papers regarding his thyroid cancer: In essence, further radiation treatments wouldn’t do any good.

“Other avenues of inquiry” were trial programs for untested therapies, aka wild shots in the dark, uncomfortable shots in the dark, most of them.

Ferguson folded his arms. His cancer had always seemed theoretical, even when they’d taken out his thyroid. His body was screwed up and out of whack, to be sure: He had to take synthetic thyroid hormones twice a day, or he turned into Mr. Hyde within twenty-four hours, the sharp corners of the world closing in around him and his head exploding. But he didn’t feel like he was going to die, to really die.

Thyroid cancer was supposed to be the easiest cancer to beat, like the flu, or measles. The little glowing dots on the doctors’ screens and the long reports of scan results didn’t match up with who he was. He wasn’t going to die, not from cancer for cryin’ out loud.

A part of him had always suspected that he was a prisoner of fate, that in the end he’d have no more power over his future than a housefly trapped in a spider’s web. But not this.

“Ah, screw this horseshit,” Ferguson said out loud.

He hit the button to delete the e-mail.

Rankin took another step to the side, admiring Michelangelo’s Pietà. The statue loomed over the space of the side altar, the folds in the marble so supple they seemed to be floating on the wind. Working the stone required not only artistry but physical strength and finesse, hitting it with enough force to shape the marble yet not quite enough to turn it into dust.

Rankin was so absorbed in the statue that he didn’t hear Ferguson sneaking up behind him.

“I didn’t know you were such an art lover.”

Rankin just barely kept himself from jumping.

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Ferg.” He turned to leave.

“Hey, take your time. Plane’s not even at the airport yet.”

“I’m done,” said Rankin, walking away. “Let’s get something to eat.”

Ferguson looked up at the face of Mary, her agony crowded into elongated, blank eyes. Her lips were parted, as if she were about to say something, and yet the marble rendered her forever mute.

Once, on a visit with his dad when he was seven or eight, Ferguson thought he heard the statue whisper something to him about saying his prayers. Convinced, he did so for the next two weeks without fail, easily his longest streak, not counting the lead-up to Christmas.

That was back in the days when religion was easier, when a person was a good Catholic simply if he or she went to mass. Now going to mass made him feel just the opposite.

Ferguson stared at the statue. He could hear some of the tourists whispering nearby; undoubtedly that was what he had heard when he was a kid, but he winked at her anyway, preferring to keep the fantasy alive.

4

Roughly forty-eight hours after Bob Ferguson took her into his arms in Sicily, Thera Majed stepped out of a white SUV at the Blessed Peak South Korean Nuclear Waste Disposal and Holding Station thirty miles northwest of Daejeon. A gust of wind caught her by surprise and sent a cold shiver through her body. It was unusually cold for early November, but as Thera zipped her heavy parka closed, she thought of how much colder it would be when she reached North Korea.

Cold and alone, though surrounded by people.

Most of whom would hate her.

Thera glanced at one of the security guards, then pushed herself forward, joining the others queuing to go into the administration building near the front gate. Their guides waited in front of the main door in their shirtsleeves, smiling stoically.

“Thera? Where are you?”

Though he had been born in Kenya, Dr. Jamari Norkelus spoke with a very proper English accent, direct from Cambridge, his alma mater. He also tended to be more than a little brusque and came off like everyone’s most annoying spinster aunt. Norkelus ran the inspection team as if it were a church group, with curfews and daily reminders to wear proper attire. He even checked on the junior staff people to make sure they were in their rooms at night. He claimed it was because the UN had issued a directive against bad publicity, but Thera suspected he was simply an uptight voyeur.

“You will need to record the director’s remarks,” Norkelus told her. “Please take notes.”

Thera reached into her bag for her pad as she made her way to Norkelus’s side.

“Just the gist,” added Norkelus in a stage whisper when she reached him. “To show we think he’s important.”

“OK.”

Thera had been surprised to see in Libya how much of the inspection visits were devoted to diplomacy and protocol. Much of this morning’s tour, for example, was completely unnecessary. Not only had the team members already studied the waste plant’s layout, but several had been consultants during its design. The scientists and engineers on the team knew the function of most of the machinery and instruments better than the people handling them, but simply rolling up their sleeves and going to work was considered rude. And besides, the inspections had to be carried out according to an elaborate and lengthy set of protocols hashed out over months by negotiators after the basic Korean nonproliferation treaty was signed.

The agreement called for reciprocal inspections of nuclear facilities on both sides of the Korean border and in Japan. For every North Korean facility inspected, a South Korean facility would be checked; inspections in Japan, which had considerably more sites, were to be conducted on a more complicated schedule, though roughly in proportion with those in Korea. Different teams of inspectors would look at everything from nuclear-energy plants to waste facilities; Thera’s team was concerned with the latter. The inspections in Japan and South Korea were formalities added to the treaty as a face-saving gesture for the North Koreans, but the team members would strictly observe all of the protocols nonetheless.

In this case, the inspection of the waste facilities was truly reciprocal: The Blessed Peak Waste Disposal and Holding Station happened to be an almost exact twin of the facility in North Korea’s P’yŏngan-puko, or northern P’yŏnpan Province, where the team would go next. Both had been designed and built by a French firm within the last two years; the funding for the North Korean plant had come from the earlier framework agreement that had set the stage for the final disarmament pact.

High-tech monitors and robot train cars played prominent roles at the facilities. All of the waste that arrived at the South Korean facility was sealed in an appropriate containment vessel; even so, no human came within fifty yards of it, at least not under normal circumstances.

Things in North Korea were not quite as automated nor as strict — the containment “vessels” in some cases amounted to simple metal barrels, moved from trucks by forklift to the train cars — but they were nonetheless a significant improvement over the procedures followed just a few years before, when waste was dumped into open pits by workers using shovels, rakes, and in some cases their bare hands.

Most of the waste that came to both plants was low-grade radioactive substances left from medical testing and industrial testing, or the byproducts of their production. But the plants also contained temporary storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel. These were the areas that the IAEA had come to look at. For only the fuel from nuclear reactors could be processed into weapons.

A typical nuclear reactor was fueled by uranium or plutonium pellets no larger than the average man’s thumb. The pellets were loaded and sealed into long metal tubes called rods, which were then inserted into the reactor. The controlled nuclear reaction that resulted generated electricity for a number of years, depending on the plant’s design.

As the reaction proceeded, the fuel became “spent,” changed by the reaction into material that could no longer fuel the reactor. But the spent fuel represented only about three percent of the pellet. Once removed through “reprocessing,” the unused material could be used in another reactor.

Reprocessing was not, however, an easy task. The rods were very hot and highly radioactive when first removed from the reactor. To prepare them for reprocessing, they had to be cooled, which in some circumstances could take as long as ten years. They were then encased in lead and steel-lined cement canisters that looked like large barbells. The containment vessels allowed the fuel to be safely transported without danger of leakage.

Like much else connected with the nuclear industry, the shipping and reprocessing of fuel was an expensive operation, performed only by special plants. It was also highly regulated, for it was relatively easy to extract weapons’-grade material during the process. This was especially true for rods from plutonium-fueled plants such as those built by North Korea.

At Blessed Peak, spent nuclear fuel was collected from two research reactors in the western part of the country and stored until it could be shipped with waste from other Korean and Japanese plants for reprocessing in Great Britain, something which generally happened every one or two years. In North Korea, the waste was collected from the country’s sole operating nuclear power plant for shipment to Russia for reprocessing every eighteen months.

Blessed Peak’s wonjon nim, or director, explained all this with the help of an elaborate PowerPoint presentation in the administration building’s small auditorium. At nearly six eight, he was the tallest Korean Thera had seen since she arrived. He was also the palest; his skin seemed almost translucent. But he was an energetic man, bouncing across the stage as his slides appeared, talking in both Korean and fluent English. His silver-and-black hair occasionally blended into the background of the slides, leaving his brown suit hurtling back and forth to the nuances of tracking shipments and protecting against catastrophe.

Thera took notes during the director’s presentation, but her mind was on her real job: planting miniature monitoring devices known as “tags” at the North Korean site. Because Blessed Peak was so similar, she would plant another set here to compare the North Korean results when the tags were collected again in three months.

Less than a half-inch square, the detectors were hidden inside fake radiation buttons, the warning indicators worn by the inspection team to detect accidental exposures to radiation. Thera had memorized a list of twenty-five possible spots to plant the devices; she was aiming to plant between six and eight at each site.

The tags were designed to detect radiation from plutonium-239. Exploiting recently developed nanotechnology, the tags were extremely sensitive gamma-ray spectrometers, or, in layman’s terms, they were “tuned” to detect radiation produced by the bomb material. Tests had shown they could reliably detect about.03 grams of the material at 10 meters, a vast improvement over the most commonly used sensors, which could detect perhaps a third of a gram at the same distance.

Besides providing a check on the IAEA’s tests, the First Team operation would show if materials from illegal reprocessing were being shunted into the secondary and low-level waste area, something the North was suspected of having done with its earlier extraction program.

The tags had gold-colored ends, which had to be upright. The gold turned red if the tag made a detection. While a full analysis of the tag would provide additional data about the exposure, the simple indicator would make it relatively easy to check on the site. Another IAEA inspection was tentatively scheduled in three months.

The director came to his last slide, and the scientists applauded politely before filing out of the room. They toured the monitoring station down the hall, where technicians controlled the machines that received and moved waste containers. The setup reminded Thera of an elaborate toy-train layout one of her cousins used to have in his basement that used a wireless remote to run the engines. The trains here were full sized, and they worked in conjunction with large cranes and automated lifting gear.

Radio devices permanently attached to the containment vessels showed where the recyclable power waste was at all times. No terrorist could steal the potentially dangerous waste, the director boasted, at least not without the entire world knowing.

Security around the perimeter of the plant and in the area where the recyclable fuel was kept was relatively strong; cameras with overlapping views covered a double fence, which was patrolled by guards at irregular intervals. But the security system left the rest of the facility relatively open, making Thera’s job simple, assuming she could drift away from the pack.

That part wasn’t going to be easy today, though. Norkelus kept prodding her to stay close to their host, reminding her in pantomime that she should be jotting things down.

The director led them into the reception building, a large shedlike structure whose ribbed walls were made of steel. Every truck or trainload of waste entering Blessed Peak came to the large building first, where it was recorded, classified, and then prepared for storage. A large overhead crane, similar to that used to load containers onto and off of ships, sat near the middle of the building. The crane could swivel 360 degrees, setting containment vessels and waste “casks” — essentially smaller vessels with less serious waste — onto the special railroad cars.

“No people,” said the director, waving his hand, “except the truck driver. All is controlled from the administration station, with the aid of the cameras.”

He pointed overhead, where a pair of video cameras in the ceiling observed everything in the building.

The cameras made it impractical to plant the tags inside, but Thera wouldn’t have to; the metal ribs that ran upward from the ground to the roof on the outside would make easy hiding places near the door.

As the group left the building, Thera pulled out a pack of Marlboros and broke off from the rest of the group. She lit up, then leaned against the side of the building.

It was a perfect cover: She could slide a sensor right into the metal seam while pretending to light a cigarette.

Why not do it now?

She slid her hand inside her pocket, flicking off the exterior casing of the tag and sliding the detector between her fingers.

One-two-three, easy as pie.

“Miss?”

Thera looked up in surprise. A man in a lab coat was staring at her a few feet away.

“Um, cigarette,” she said, holding the cigarette up guiltily.

“You will come with me,” said the man. “Come.”

“But I was just having a smoke.”

The man grabbed her arm. It took enormous willpower not to throw him down to the ground and even more not to flee.

5

Senator Gordon Tewilliger pulled himself into the limo and shut the door. The weather had turned nasty and his plane from Washington, D.C., had been delayed nearly an hour from landing at Delaware County Airport, just outside of Muncie, Indiana. That meant he was even further behind schedule than usual.

“State Elks dinner begins with cocktails at six.” Jack Long, his district coordinator, leaned back from the front seat. “Your speech is scheduled for about eight thirty. You can just blow in, do the speech, then skip out. Which will get you over to the hospital before ten.”

“That’s still not going to help us, Jack.”

“You cut the ribbon at the Senior Center at six. We go from there directly to the Delaware County reception. You spend fifteen minutes there, then we swing over to the Boy Scout assembly to give out the Eagle badges.”

The door to the limo opened, and Tewilliger’s deputy assistant, James Hannigan, slipped in. Though his title seemed to indicate that Hannigan was number three in the hierarchy of his aides, in actual fact he was the senator’s alter ego and had been with him since Gordon Tewilliger had first run for state assembly. Hannigan, a short, wiry man, put his head down and ran his fingers through his hair, trying to rub off some of the rain. Once the aide was inside, the driver locked the doors and put the car in gear. The windshield wipers slapped furiously, as if they were mad that the rain had the audacity to fall.

“Finish the Eagle badges no later than seven-ten,” continued Long, “then stop by the reception at the Iron Workers Union. If things run late, we can cut that. Then—”

“You don’t want to cut the Iron Workers,” said Hannigan.

“Gordon could stand on his head, and they won’t endorse him,” said Long.

“Sure, but Harry Mangjeol from Yongduro is going to be there, and he wants to say hello.”

“He wants more than that,” said the senator. “He’s going to harangue me about the nuclear disarmament treaty again. ‘South Korea get raw deal.’” Tewilliger mimicked Mangjeol’s heavily accented English.

“He and his friends are supplying the airplane to New Hampshire tomorrow,” said Hannigan. “It wouldn’t be politick to tell him to screw off.”

“No, I supposed it wouldn’t,” said Tewilliger.

Mangjeol was a first-generation Korean-American who owned an electronics factory halfway between Muncie and Daleville. Though a rich man in his own right, Mangjeol was more important politically as the representative of a number of Korean-American businessmen with deep ties to South Korea.

The Americans were always complaining that the North was getting away with something. Oddly, at least to Tewilliger, in the next breath they would say how much they hoped the peninsula would be reunified, as if getting the two Koreas back together wouldn’t require a great deal of compromise and understanding.

“McCarthy’s not budging on the disarmament agreement,” said Tewilliger. “He won’t change a word.”

“A powerful argument to Mangjeol in favor of backing you for president,” said Hannigan.

“Here we go, Senator,” said Long.

Tewilliger looked up, surprised to find that they were driving up to the senior center already.

“Mayor’s name is Sue Bayhern. Serious lightweight, but she gets eighty percent of the vote,” said Long, feeding the senator the information he’d need to navigate the reception. “The place cost six point seven million dollars; the federal grant covered all but two hundred thousand.”

“Our grant, Jack. They’re always our grants,” said Tewilliger, opening the car door.

6

Thera’s right knee threatened to buckle as she walked with the man in the lab coat toward the administration building near the gate. She wasn’t sure what the fuss was all about. She’d never gotten the tag out of her pocket.

Had they somehow figured out she was a spy?

“What’s going on?” she asked in Greek and English, but the man didn’t answer. Four guards ran from the building.

The man in the lab coat yelled at them in Korean, “She must be detained.” The men immediately began escorting them.

Thera had studied Korean for over two months, and had become proficient enough to hold uncomplicated conversations but couldn’t understand everything the man told the guards. When they reached the building, she stopped and demanded to know what was going on.

“Jal moreugesseoyo,” she said. “I don’t understand.”

The man in the lab coat told her to go inside.

“Why?”

He pointed at her fist, where her half-smoked cigarette continued to burn.

“This?” She held up the cigarette. “This is what you’re upset about?”

“Very important law for all. No exceptions.”

“I’ll put it out. God. It’s not a big deal.”

The man in lab coat responded by slapping her across the mouth. Stunned, Thera dropped the cigarette. Once again, it took all of her willpower to respond the way the mousy secretary would: Rather than decking him she let herself be led inside, then down a hallway to a part of the building she hadn’t seen on the tour. A door was opened, and Thera was shoved inside. The man in the lab coat ordered her to strip.

“Like hell I will,” said Thera. The mousy act had its limits.

“You will do as I say,” repeated the man. He approached her with his hand out, threatening to strike.

“I am not taking my clothes off. I want to see the director. I want Dr. Norkelus. I was only having a cigarette.”

The man swung his hand. Thera ducked quickly out of the way. Her body poised to strike back, she yelled for Dr. Norkelus.

Thera’s speed and poise surprised the Korean. He caught hold of himself, realizing he had gone too far.

“Empty your pockets,” he told her in English.

“I want Dr. Norkelus.”

“Empty your pockets.”

“Where? There’s no table or anything.”

He said something to her in Korean that she didn’t catch, then turned and left. The others remained in the room.

“It’s just cigarettes, see?” Thera reached into her pocket and took out the pack. She showed it to the soldiers. One of the men shrugged; the others were immobile. She couldn’t tell if they spoke English or not. “I was just grabbing a smoke. Nicotine fit.”

Thera shoved her hand back into her pocket, slipping her fingers around the sensor she’d opened and trying to return it to the case. It wouldn’t quite snap together. Finally she took the pieces from her pocket, grasping them in her palm so that only the top part was visible.

One of the soldiers was watching.

“It’s just a sensor. See? Like yours?” She pointed to the somewhat larger clip-on devices on their uniform shirts. “To make sure no one’s poisoned. I have the spares. And a lighter.” She put the tag into her other hand, pushing it closed in the process. Then she took out the lighter. “See? Cigarettes. I’m addicted.”

The man smiled nervously but said nothing. Thera pulled out the rest of the tags, showing them to the men. Then she took out her pocket change and some crumpled won notes.

“See? Nothing. You think I have a gun?” She turned to the guard who had smiled. “You smoke, too, yes? I can’t say it in Korean. Smoke?”

“Dambae,” said the man. “Cigarette.”

“That’s it. Dambae.”

“No, no, no,” said the man, wagging his finger as if she were a child.

The door opened. A short, squat woman in a lab coat entered, scolding the men in Korean and telling them to leave. Then, still speaking Korean, she told Thera she was going to be searched.

Thera feigned ignorance.

“You must be searched,” said the woman in English. “Take off your coat.”

“I have cigarettes, a lighter, not even lipstick.”

“You must be searched.”

“Because I had a cigarette?”

“Cigarette smoking is forbidden inside the compound. Very dangerous. Any violation… this is taken very seriously. We have strict procedures. It is the country’s law, not ours.”

“I guess.”

“Please take off your coat.”

An hour later, Dr. Norkelus appeared with the facility director. He was carrying Thera’s belongings in a clear plastic bag. The extra radiation sensors were at the bottom, along with her cigarettes.

“I have to apologize for the way you were treated,” said Dr. Norkelus, “but smoking is forbidden. Strictly forbidden.”

“Yeah,” said Thera. She snatched back the bag.

Norkelus stiffened. She wasn’t acting like the mousy secretary, and he didn’t like that. He needed to feel superior, in charge.

“I’m sorry,” said Thera, trying to get back into character. “I was just having a cigarette. They made me strip.”

“Outrageous,” said Norkelus, his protective instincts kicking in. “The Koreans… they are very careful about their rules; they do not have the best attitude toward people breaking them.”

Especially when they’re women, Thera realized. She decided she wouldn’t mention the slap; it would only complicate things further.

“I’m sorry about the cigarettes. It won’t happen again.”

“Yes. That would not be good.”

Thera left her things in the plastic bag until she got to the hotel. When her roommate Lada Rahn went to dinner, she poured everything out on the table. The fact that she wasn’t allowed to smoke inside the complex took away her easiest cover for planting the bugs. Hopefully they wouldn’t be as strict or as health conscious in North Korea.

The dummy cases were intact; it didn’t seem as if any had been opened. Thera decided she would examine them anyway. She slipped her fingernail beneath the tab of the first unit, pushing gently. The top popped off and shot across the table to the floor.

As she got up to get it, she heard her roommate putting her card key into the door. Thera scooped everything into her pocket just as the door hit against the sliding dead bolt Thera had secured to keep her out.

“Sorry, I locked it,” said Thera, going over. “I was just going to take a shower.”

The roommate was a chronic giggler and reacted with one now. Thera let her in, then retreated to the bathroom to sort things out. As she was replacing the device she’d opened, she noticed that the edge of the chip had turned red.

As had all of the others.

7

Ferguson had just taken a seat at the restaurant when his satellite phone rang. He smiled at the waitress, who was handing him a menu, then took out the phone, expecting it to be Jack Corrigan, the mission coordinator back at The Cube, whose timing was impeccable when it came to interruptions. But instead he heard Thera’s hushed voice tell him that she needed to talk to him.

“Cinderella, why are you calling?” Ferguson glanced up at the waitress who was approaching with a bottle of sake.

“I need to talk to you,” repeated Thera.

“You need out?”

“I need you to meet me.”

“Where and when?”

Two hours later, Ferguson walked into the lobby of the Daejeon Best Western carrying a suitcase. He went up to the reservation desk and checked in as a German businessman, carefully starting his conversation with a small amount of German — nearly all he knew — before switching to a pigeon English. When the clerk took his credit card, he turned and looked around the marble-encased lobby. The balcony above was empty. Aside from the doorman, the place seemed empty, which, Ferguson hoped, it wasn’t.

The clerk returned his card and gave him a key. The room was right down the hall.

“Actually, I’d like something on an upper floor. Above,” added Ferguson. He put his thumb up.

“Above?”

“As high as you get.”

Perplexed, the clerk started to explain that he had given the gentleman one of the best rooms in the hotel.

“It’s not the best if it’s not what I want,” said Ferguson.

The clerk conceded and found him a room on the twenty-third floor. Ferguson thanked him very much, assured him that he could carry his own bag, and headed for the elevator. The car arrived instantly and began to glide upward.

It stopped on the third floor. Ferguson took a step back as the door opened. Thera stepped inside, practically out of breath. Neither of them spoke until the door closed and the car began moving upward.

“What’s going on?”

“The sensors found plutonium at the waste site today. I don’t know where.”

“Is that all?”

“Ferg, this is serious. All of the tags were red. I was only there for a few hours. There is a lot of material there.”

She handed him a small manila envelope.

“All of them?”

“All of the ones I had with me. They’re all red.”

“Maybe there’s a leak in the recycling storage area,” said Ferguson.

“No.”

Thera explained what had happened.

“The tags were put in a plastic bag along with the rest of my stuff. They were taken out to Norkelus, who was over by the rail cars at the time. He came straight to the administrative building. They never got near the stored rods.”

The elevator stopped. Thera stepped back against the wall, eyeing the short American who came into the car. He gave her a goofy smile, then turned and poked the button for twelve.

Ferguson stared at the bald spot on the back of the man’s head, trying to will some sort of identity out of his brain. Finally as the car started upward, he asked if the man knew where the party was.

“Party?” The man turned around. “What sort?”

“I’m sorry. I thought you were Alsop, Yank friend of mine.” He shoved his hand out toward the man and introduced himself as Bob Jenkins, an Australian in the city on business. “Alsop’s around some place, sniffing out the party.”

The shorter man shrugged.

“Alsop, Mr. Party,” said Ferguson. “You one of the teachers?”

“Teacher?”

“The English-language teachers. Convention down the street.”

“No, I’m just a technician for a machinery company,” said the man. He started to explain that he’d come to Korea from the States to check on an instrument the company had sold the Koreans some months before.

“Software has to be tweaked every few weeks,” said the man as the door opened. “Gets old real fast, I’ll tell you.”

“If I find the party, I’ll let you know,” promised Ferguson.

The door closed.

“Seemed legit,” Thera said.

“Probably.” Ferguson leaned against the back of the elevator. This was the one contingency they hadn’t planned for: finding nuclear material in South Korea.

“What are we going to do?”

“Did you leave a set?”

“No.”

“Do it tomorrow,” said Ferguson.

“All right. I’ll leave them overnight, then pick them up on our last day. How will I get them to you?”

“Leave them under your mattress when you get back and go out for dinner. We’ll get them. If something goes wrong, send an e-mail to your mother back in Greece and tell her you’re having a lovely time.”

“OK.”

“Don’t call, Thera. And do not come looking for me.”

“This was important.”

“Yeah, I know. Listen, this could just be a screw-up in the gadgets. They all went red? Sounds like a mistake.”

“You really think that, Ferg?”

Ferguson shrugged.

The door opened. Ferguson picked up his bag. Thera put her hand out to stop him.

“What if I have to talk to you again?”

“Don’t.”

Thera took the elevator back to the fourth floor. As the doors opened she took a breath, then plunged out into the hallway, walking quickly to the stairs a few steps away. Five minutes later, she was back on the street, wending her way to the bar where she was to meet Julie Svenson and some of the others from the inspection team.

“There you are!” said Julie as she slipped into the booth near the back. “We called your room, and Lada said you had gone out. That was an hour ago.”

“I got a little confused on the street,” said Thera. “Then I asked for directions.”

“Your first mistake,” said one of the scientists.

“True,” said Thera. “Very true.”

8

“Where’ve you been?” Rankin asked when Ferguson slid in next to him at the bar.

“Visiting the temples. I’m thinking of becoming a Buddhist.”

“You’d have to give up meat. And booze.” Rankin took a sip of his Coke. “Corrigan was looking for you. You didn’t answer his call.”

“Oh, gee. Must’ve forgotten to turn the phone on again. Tsk, tsk.”

Rankin smirked. He liked Corrigan even less than Ferguson did.

“There’s a complication,” said Ferguson.

The bartender came over. Ferguson leaned on the bar, eyeing the bottles of Western liquor. “Scotch,” he said finally. “Let’s try the Dewar’s, on the rocks.”

“He doesn’t speak English, Ferg.”

“Dewar’s,” said Ferguson. “That’s Korean.”

“So what’s going on?” asked Rankin.

“The sensors say there’s plutonium somewhere in the waste site.”

“What, here?”

“Maybe it’s a screwup, maybe not.”

Ferguson glanced across the bar. There were about a dozen other people, all Japanese businessmen, gathered in different knots, all stooped over their drinks and conversations.

“So what do we do?” Rankin asked.

“Hang tight. Thera’s planting some more tags. She’ll pick them up day after tomorrow; we’ll get them from the hotel and fly them home.”

“You tell Corrigan?”

“No sense telling him yet.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t want to be wrong on this. Washington’ll freak.”

“That’s it?”

“Uh-huh.”

Thera had let the tags get out of her possession. Because of that, the results were automatically suspicious; she really had no way of knowing where they had gone. If he told The Cube, Ferguson would have to explain what had happened. It wasn’t a major screwup, given the circumstances, but he didn’t trust Corrine or the CIAs deputy director of operations, Dan Slott, to know that. Corrine especially.

The bartender brought over a glass and the bottle of Scotch. Ferguson took the glass and handed it to Rankin.

“What’s this for?”

“In Korea, you always fill the other guy’s glass.”

“I don’t like Scotch.”

“You should’ve thought of that before I ordered it.”

9

The Korean security guards accompanying the inspectors called Thera “Cigarette Queen,” snickering among themselves as she tagged along behind a group of technicians setting up monitoring equipment at the reception building. She acted like she didn’t understand the jokes, helping the techies lug the gear over and unpack it. It was gofer work, but it suited her just fine.

On her third trip back to the truck, she veered in the direction of the embedded rail line used to ferry material to the recycling holding area. Thera slipped her hand in her pocket and took one of the tags from the shielded envelope she’d hidden there. Then she got down on one knee and pretended to tie her shoe. As she did, she slid the thin tag into the narrow furrow next to the rail.

Thera took a breath, then started to rise. All of a sudden she had a premonition: The guards were about to arrest her.

She sensed — she knew — that they were right behind her and that in the next second would grab her. The sensation was as strong as anything she had ever felt in her life. Thera held her breath, but nothing happened.

She took a step. Nothing. Another step. Nearly trembling, she continued on her way to the truck.

It’ll get easier as it goes, she told herself, walking back with the bag she’d been sent to retrieve. She made a show of being cold, stamping her feet and rubbing her hands. One of the engineers took the hint.

“You ought to go over to the administration building and warm up in the lounge,” he suggested.

“Good idea.”

Thera had always despised the helpless-female routine, but the role came in handy now; her shivers were so convincing she almost fooled herself. She did the shoelace trick again, this time with the other foot, planting a tag in another truck, then presented herself at the door of the administration building, where the two young guards were happy to let her inside.

Yesterday she’d been a prisoner, now she was a princess; the male engineers in the monitoring station practically tripped over themselves as they rushed to show her to the lounge. They found tea and some cookies, telling her in halting English that it was unusual to have such beauty in a person so intelligent. They thought she was one of the scientists; Thera didn’t correct the mistake.

She was just getting up to go back outside when one of the guards from the day before appeared in the doorway to the lounge. With a stern face, he beckoned her out into the hallway, then smiled, opening his palm to reveal a pack of cigarettes. He gave them to her, then motioned with his head for her to follow him outside.

Thera sensed a trap.

“Gomapjiman sayanghalkkeyo,” she told him. “No thank you. I really can’t; we’ll get in trouble.”

“No trouble. Ssssh,” said the man, putting his finger to his lips.

Trust him or not?

Fear swept over her again. Thera forced herself to nod, forced herself to go with him.

The guard practically bounced his way outside, leading her around the corner of the building and out toward the yard, where some empty train cars were parked.

“Here,” he said, sliding a cigarette into her hand. He cupped one as well.

Thera waited until he lit up, then did so herself, puffing with her hands hiding her face.

The spot was perfect, out of range of any of the surveillance cameras but strategically located. She had no trouble planting a tag as they finished their cigarettes, partners in crime.

And so it went. By the time the inspection team broke for lunch — a catered affair in the administration building — Thera had planted all of the sensors. She spent the rest of the day doing odd jobs for different members of the team, trying to get a feel for the plant’s routine so that she would have no trouble picking up the tabs tomorrow.

The ride back to the hotel was unusually quiet, the scientists and engineers feeling the effects of jet lag. Thera stared out the window, going back over the site’s layout in her mind, comparing it to North Korea’s. There’d be more guards there, but the video coverage would undoubtedly be poorer.

The cigarette trick would work.

What if it didn’t?

She needed a new gimmick.

“You must be thinking of a statue,” said Neto Evora, leaning forward from the seat behind her. Evora headed the ground sampling team; he and his crew had spent the day in the recycling area shoveling random half-kilogram piles of dirt into boxes.

“Why a statue?” said Thera.

“Because your eyes seem to see beauty,” explained the Portuguese scientist.

“Thank you.”

“Maybe you’ll have dinner with us.”

“Sure.”

“We’re going into Daejeon and get real food,” Evora added. “We deserve a little reward for all our hard work.”

“I didn’t work very hard.”

“But you deserve a reward anyway,” said Evora, his eyes twinkling.

The reward Evora had in mind was himself. A half-dozen members of the inspection team went to a noraebang or Korean karaoke joint, a bar with small soundproof rooms and karaoke machines where groups could sing, party, and dance.

Thera was one of two women with the group, and she found herself the focus of most of the attention. Evora kept pouring her drinks and urging her to sing. Six foot two, he had curly black hair and eyes that seemed to tunnel into hers when he spoke. He had a handsome face and wonderful shoulders, and moved reasonably well on the dance floor. Not as good as Ferguson had but almost.

Thera found herself debating whether she should take him to bed. She decided not to, but later, back in her room listening to her roommate’s snores, she fantasized about the Portuguese scientist, wondering what his arms would have felt like around her, imagining his finger brushing her breast.

Sex was an accepted part of spycraft if you were a guy. Someone like Ferg probably had sex all the time when working undercover.

Not that she knew that for a fact.

Things were somewhat more ambiguous for women. Someone like Slott would certainly not approve… Then again he wouldn’t ask, as long as you provided the results.

Evora wasn’t interesting enough to keep her attention, and Thera started visualizing herself retrieving the tags from the site. She began seeing guards everywhere, watching her.

Her mind began to race, unable to stop the permutations of fear multiplying in her brain.

They’d seen her, filmed her already, were waiting to spring it on her tomorrow.

Norkelus knew she was lying about the cigarettes.

She’d be caught in North Korea. She’d be tortured and locked away forever.

Thera tossed and turned in her bed, the sheets and covers wrapped around her, squeezing sweat from her pores. And then the phone was ringing with their wakeup call, and it was time to get up.

10

With the president and some of his key advisors away, the West Wing of the White House where Corrine had her office was relatively quiet. This meant fewer interruptions for Corrine, and by four o’clock she was actually caught up on her work or at least as caught up as she ever was. She called over to The Cube to check on the First Team’s Korean operation.

“This is Lauren,” said Lauren DiCapri, the on-duty mission coordinator. “Who’s this?”

The phone system in The Cube would have already identified Corrine, but she told her anyway. “So what’s going on?”

“Nothing. We’re good.”

There was a strong note of resentment in Lauren’s voice; she belonged to the camp that resented Corrine as an outsider and impediment to their jobs.

It was a big camp, and included Ferguson and CIA Deputy Director of Operations Daniel Slott. The arrangement itself was part of the problem. The lines of authority were somewhat hazy and had been so even before Corrine’s arrival. The CIA people who worked with Special Demands answered to Slott for administrative purposes and had to work with him on mission details. The Special Operations people assigned to the First Team — like Rankin and Guns — had two masters, the military and Special Demands, while the Special Forces detachment and its assorted support units had their own colonel, Charles Van Buren.

Until Corrine’s appointment as the president’s conscience — McCarthy’s term for her job as his designated representative — Special Demands had basically been run by Ferguson, who, after getting a directive from Slott, worked things out on his own.

Or so it appeared. Corrine had had a devilish time figuring out exactly how the chain of command really did run, and her efforts to insert more oversight, while they had had some impact, probably hadn’t changed things all that much. Ferguson and his people still had incredible leeway once given a mission.

She didn’t want to second-guess them, much less hamstring them, but she did want them to stay within the bounds set by the president. Finding the right balance was incredibly difficult, especially when the people she was supposed to supervise resented her.

“Thera’s still in South Korea?” Corrine asked.

“Yes,” said Lauren tersely

“Well, let me know if anything comes up.”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m not the enemy,” snapped Corrine. But it was too late; Lauren had already hung up.

11

Thera got up and went into the shower, not wanting to have to wait for her roommate. She let the hot water pummel her face, then backed off the heat until the water sent shivers through her body, shaking away the fear and paranoia she’d stewed in all night. She saw the tags in her hand, saw herself slipping them under the mattress, moving on. It was going to be easy, easiest thing she’d ever done, a piece of cake.

She’d have to take her roommate to dinner, make sure she was out of the way.

Bring her to karaoke with Evora.

Ugh, if she could stand it. Thera’s head was OK, but her stomach felt as if it had been pushed up into her chest. Too much kimchi.

Done with her shower, Thera dressed and headed downstairs to the coffee shop, where the team gathered for breakfast before assembling in one of the hotel conference rooms and starting out. As she stuck her cup under the spout of the coffee urn, Dr. Norkelus tapped her on the shoulder.

“A word, please.”

Thera finished filling her cup, then took a teaspoon and a small amount of sugar, stirring meticulously before placing the cup on a saucer. Norkelus stared at her the whole time, his expression similar to the look a vice principal might give when calling a student out of study hall for cutting up. Finally he tilted his long nose downward, then swung around and walked toward the exit.

Thera followed, sure she was going to be scolded, though she wasn’t exactly sure why. Had someone seen her smoking with the guard? Or was last night the problem? Norkelus had a puritanical streak. He walked with a gait so stiff it reminded her of some of the Greek Orthodox priests who’d taught her religion when she was young, righteous, sanctimonious old bastards who once made a girl spit out her bubblegum and stick it on her head for chewing in class.

Norkelus went into an empty conference room. Thera nearly bumped into him just inside the door.

“Tony is sick. I’ll need you to compile the logs and e-mail them to New York and the Hague,” he told her.

“Tony’s sick?” Thera managed, caught off guard.

“The UN secretary general wants the briefings. Here are my notes.”

He handed her a small flash-memory card, used by the team’s voice recorders.

“OK, sure,” said Thera. “I’ll get to work on it as soon as I get back.”

“It has to go out by noon, our time.”

“Noon?”

Norkelus tilted his head slightly. He didn’t comprehend her question, or rather why she was asking it. The secretaries weren’t needed on the inspections for anything more than running errands; here was real work that needed to be done.

And besides, she was a secretary; he was the boss.

“It has to be out of here by noon, or they have to get it by noon their time?” asked Thera.

“Our time.”

“In New York, it’ll be, say ten at night.”

“You have an objection?”

“No, of course not.”

“When you’re done, you can help make sure everything is ready for the trip North. We should be back by three.”

“I can go out to the site to help break down the equipment.”

“Unnecessary,” said Norkelus. “Thank you, though.”

Thera tried to think of an excuse, any excuse, to get out to the site, but nothing would come.

“Is there a problem?” asked Norkelus in his coldest you-better-not voice.

“It’s only that it may not be enough time,” said Thera. “To have the report done by noon.”

“I’m afraid it will have to be.”

12

Ferguson spread the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal out on the table in the Korean Palace Hotel’s restaurant and opened to the editorial page. The editors had decided to denounce the nonproliferation treaty with North Korea, claiming that it was a “poorly worded document more dangerous than hopeful. The fact that inspections have already begun shows how utterly worthless it is; the North Koreans only agreed because they know it has no teeth.”

The editorial writer made a few valid points about the limits of the testing protocols, though it was clear from his overall tone that, in his opinion, nuking North Korea was the only viable way to deal with the country.

Ferg’s sat phone began to ring as he turned the page.

“Batman speaking,” he said, hitting the talk button.

“Ferg, something’s up,” said Jack Corrigan, the desk man on duty in The Cube. “Can you talk?”

“I can always talk, Robin. The question is whether anyone listens.”

“We got a problem, Ferg. Our friend just sent an e-mail to her grandmother telling her she has to stay inside today and work.”

“That’s it?”

“More or less.”

“Don’t tell me more or less,” snapped Ferguson. “Read me the message, Corrigan.”

“But—”

“Read me the message.”

“You want it in Greek or English?”

“Now you tell me, Jack, do I speak Greek?”

“I don’t know what you speak some days,” said Corrigan. “Gram: Hope you’re well. Having a challenging and exciting time in new job. Going to all sorts of places and getting plenty of exercise — I think I’ve lost all the weight your chicken soup put on. Yesterday I got to go out, but today it’s desk work. Even though the sun is shining, I’ll be in all day. Lots of unfinished business. Then there’s a frowny face.”

“Cute. What else?”

“That’s it. What do you think—”

“We’re on it.”

Ferguson slapped off the phone and got up, leaving the newspaper spread out on the table.

“Gotta go,” he told the approaching waiter. He unfolded a five-thousand-won note from his pocket and let it flutter to the table. “Tto bzvayo.”

Ferguson had just hailed a taxi when his sat phone rang again. It was Rankin.

“Something’s up. Thera didn’t get in the trucks with the rest of the team at the hotel,” said Rankin.

“Yeah, something’s goin’ on,” said Ferguson, stepping onto the curb as a cab veered across traffic to pick him up.

“You want me to go in?”

“No, hang back. She’s OK. Where’s Guns?”

“Sleepin’. He watched her hotel all night.”

“All right. I’m pickin’ you up. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

The typically thick city traffic made it more like fifty. Rankin, who’d been watching Thera’s hotel from a parking garage across the street, had been standing outside the whole time and felt like a penguin with frostbite. When he grabbed the taxi’s door his finger nearly froze to the metal.

“Cold, huh?” said Ferguson as he slid in.

“No, it’s fuckin’ July.”

“Get warm soon,” said the driver helpfully from the front. “This unusual weather.”

Rankin frowned at him. He hated nosey taxi drivers.

Ferguson leaned across him and bent over the front seat. “Driver, take us to Hard Rock Cafe. Yes?”

“Hard Rock, yes,” said the man. “Good place for party.”

“That’s what I like.”

Ferguson tucked a thick wad of won notes in the driver’s hand when they got to the restaurant. Both men walked silently to the right of the entrance, ducked down a set of stairs they had scoped out the day before, and crossed to the back of the building. Five minutes later they were standing at the counter of a rental car agency three blocks away, reserving a Hyundai.

“You gonna tell me what’s going on?” Rankin said as they walked to the car.

“I didn’t think you were interested.”

“Don’t be a prick, Ferg. I didn’t want to ask questions while people were around.”

“Thera can’t pick up the tags. Her work assignment must’ve changed. You and I are going to go take a closer look at the site and figure out what we’re going to do.”

“We’re going in? How?”

“See, that’s the problem with explaining things to you, Skip. Every time I do, you ask more questions. Sooner or later I’m going to run out of answers.”

Generally the best and easiest way to get into a highly secure facility was through the front gate. But Ferguson decided that wasn’t going to work in this case. The South Koreans had upped their security to impress the IAEA inspection team, and any work crew, especially one with an out-of-place Caucasian or two, would draw close scrutiny. Presenting themselves as members of the inspection team wouldn’t work, either; that was too easily checked, and, besides, they didn’t want to do anything to draw any suspicion to the inspectors.

The next best option was to come in from the extreme northern perimeter, which bordered a nature preserve and was guarded only by razor wire and infrared cameras. It was a long way around: Rankin estimated that simply getting to the perimeter fence from the entrance to the nature reserve would take two hours, and it would take another hour and a half to hike from the perimeter fence into the compound.

“There’s another problem,” said Ferguson as they scouted the fence line from the park. “The security cameras overlap pretty well. I don’t think we can get over without blinding them.”

Rankin took Ferguson’s binoculars, peering over the crest of the hill toward the fence. The cameras were well hidden; he only knew where to look because they had prepared a map of the security layout for the mission. An infrared image taken just after sunset had been used to pinpoint the cameras; their housings dissipated heat more quickly than the surrounding rocks and brush.

“Hit ‘em with a fog machine,” said Rankin finally.

“Too suspicious unless the weather warms up,” said Ferguson. “Besides, that’s a hell of a lot of fog.”

“Take them a long time to respond to a blackout,” suggested Rankin. “We just cut the power. We’re inside by the time they get up here. We throw a fader on another unit, so we don’t have to go out the same way.”

A “fader” was a device that interfered with the camera’s ability to scan by disrupting its power circuitry, in effect “fading” the image so that it appeared to be a random malfunction. While difficult to detect, the device had to be placed inside the camera to work.

Ferguson abruptly slid down the hill and started back in the direction of the car. Rankin scrambled to follow.

“You figured it out?” said Rankin.

“You did,” said Ferguson. “You just don’t know it yet.”

13

Since tomorrow was a travel day, Norkelus ordered the entire inspection team to have dinner at the hotel and refrain from “partying.” While his decree drew snickers from the senior scientists, junior technical members and staff were shuffled upstairs immediately after dinner to pack “and get a head start on sleep.”

Evora winked at Thera, signaling that she should sneak out and join him and the others, but she decided it was better to avoid temptation and went upstairs. After packing, she and her roommate flipped through the channels for a while without finding anything interesting in English. Thera started to read; within a half hour, her eyes were drooping. She put down the book and turned off the light, falling asleep within a few minutes.

Come on, Cinderella, your pumpkin’s waiting.”

Thera woke with a jerk, only to feel herself pushed back down into the bed. She tried to scream, but a hand was clamped firmly on her mouth.

“It’s me,” whispered Ferguson, standing over her. “Come on. Before Rankin climbs into bed with your roommate.”

Rankin was standing on the other side of the bed, holding a small mask over Thera’s roommate’s face. A squeeze bulb was connected to the mask; he’d just finished spraying a mild sedative to make sure she remained sleeping.

“What’s going on?” Thera whispered.

“Sshh,” replied Ferguson.

Thera slipped out of bed, grabbing for her clothes on the nearby chair.

“You don’t have to get dressed,” Ferguson told her. “We’re not going very far.”

Suddenly self-conscious, Thera pulled on her jeans over her pajamas and grabbed for her sweater.

“No feet?” Ferguson pointed at the pajama bottoms, which were covered with miniature ducks.

“Very funny.”

“I always figured you for teddy bears.”

“They didn’t have my size.” Thera sat at the edge of the bed. “We can’t go out in the hall. They may see us.”

“We’re not going in the hall.” Ferguson pointed to a sliding door at the other side of the room. “We’re in the room above. Come on. This won’t take long.”

A rope dangled at the side of the balcony. Thera leaned over, making sure no one was on the nearby terraces, then hoisted herself up to the next floor. Guns — Jack Young, the other member of the team in Korea — was waiting on the balcony. He helped her over the railing.

Ferguson came up next, followed by Rankin.

“Have a seat,” he told her, gesturing at the bed. Ferguson stared for a brief, brief moment at her black curls and green eyes, thinking she really was Cinderella, or the next best thing. Even with a baggy sweater and jeans, she was hard to resist.

“I need a map of the spots where you put the sensors,” he told her. He reached over the waste basket, where he’d stashed a notebook and pencil earlier.

“I have twenty minutes. Then I turn back into a mouse,” he added, “Rankin turns into a cockroach. You don’t want to see that.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No way. If you’re caught, the whole mission collapses. Besides, you’re leaving for North Korea first thing in the morning. It may take us a while to get back.”

“I can do it, Ferg.”

“Come on, Cinderella, the map. I’m already getting a hankering for cheese.”

Thera took the pad and began sketching the general outline of the base.

“They’re taking attendance downstairs,” said Guns, who was watching a feed from the wireless video cam they’d placed in one of the lighting fixtures. It showed Norkelus walking down the hall, knocking on the doors. He was two rooms away from Thera’s.

“Get Cinderella back to the ball,” Ferguson told the others, pulling off his black cap and sweater. “Bring her back up once the coast is clear.”

“Never going to make it.”

“She’ll make it,” Ferguson told him running to the door.

The tenor’s song, drunken but perfectly on key, exploded from the elevator as the door opened.

“’And it’s no, nay, never, no nay never no more, will I play the wild rover, no never, no more.’”

Ferguson kicked the volume up a notch as he stepped out into the eighth-floor hallway. The rogue’s lament captured Norkelus’s attention just as he knocked on Thera’s door. Ferguson stopped walking but not singing, belting out the chorus as he put both hands on his fake glasses and pulled them from his nose, as if trying to get the hallway into focus. Then he started walking again, holding them in front of his face as he approached the bewildered scientist. When he got to within three feet, Ferguson stopped singing and concentrated on angling the glasses to get a proper perspective of the scientist.

“Who are you looking for?” demanded the scientist.

“ ‘Tain’t but lookin’ for a soul,” said Ferguson, slurring his words into a drunken Irish brogue. “But I am lookin’ for me room. And if you could point it out to me, laddie, I’d be much obliged.”

“You’re on the wrong floor.”

“ ‘Tis nine,” said Ferguson.

“Eight.”

“Nine.”

“Eight.”

Ferguson staggered back a step. “This is nine,” he insisted.

“Please go to your room, or I will call security,” said Norkelus.

“You’re a man who knows his numbers. I can see that.”

Thera’s door opened and her face appeared in the crack. She was back in her pajamas. “What’s going on out here?”

“Nothing,” said Norkelus. “Go back inside.”

“Is this eight or nine?” said Ferguson, bending so that he was eye level with her.

“The is the eighth floor,” she said. And then she added something in Greek, which he didn’t understand, though he guessed the drift: Go back to bed, you dumb lout.

“Eight, not nine. A thousand pardons, miss. And sir.”

Ferguson bowed, then turned and went back to the elevator. While he waited, he decided the night needed a triumphant air and began singing “Finnegan’s Wake.”

Rankin, back pressed against the side of the building as he stood on the narrow balcony, listened as Thera told Norkelus that her roommate was “dead out.” The scientist grunted but apparently didn’t believe her; the light flicked on, and Rankin saw the curtains flutter. He grabbed hold of the rope and put his foot on the building, ready to climb if he had to.

“Yes, then, good. I will see you in the morning,” said Norkelus gruffly. The light flipped off; Thera appeared.

“Wait,” whispered Rankin.

“Why?”

“Case he comes back.”

“He won’t.”

“Wait.”

Thera scowled but then disappeared. Rankin squatted, waiting. He’d heard a bit of Ferguson’s act through the door. It was vintage Ferguson. The CIA officer had a gift for bullshit; he’d seen him talk his way into and out of dozens of tight places, blustering and cajoling and always ladling on the crap.

It was part of the game, a tool, but it left Rankin vaguely uneasy. One of the things about Special Forces was that the people you worked with didn’t bullshit.

Except for officers. Officers were always full of it.

Guns stuck his head over the railing above and whistled, signaling that the coast was clear.

“Come on, Thera,” whispered Rankin. “Let’s get this done.”

14

Three hours later, armed with Thera’s hand-drawn map, Ferguson and Rankin stepped toward the rear door of an Air Force C-130 Hercules.

“Ready, Rankin?” Ferguson said, yelling over the rush of the wind in the rear of the plane.

“If you are.”

“Hey, piece of cake,” said Ferguson, clamping the oxygen mask against his face.

A night jump into a black hole from thirty thousand feet was not exactly Rankin’s idea of a piece of cake, but he still felt a certain elation as he stepped out of the Herky Bird into the cold night air. Airborne training had been one of Rankin’s favorite “schools” in the army, an absolute blast from the let’s-get-acquainted-with-gravity first jump to the hairiest night dive into the raging ocean. Even now, after maybe five hundred jumps — most recreational and from a considerably lower altitude — he loved the smack of the wind against his body and the loud rush that filled his ears as he spread his arms and began to fly rather than fall.

He was still more brick than airplane, if truth be told, since he was in fact plummeting at a good rate, documented by the dial altimeter on his left wrist. A global positioning satellite (GPS) device was strapped to his right; there was very little starlight and no moon, and he’d need to rely on it rather than his sight to get down to the target area.

A few meters to the right, Ferguson tucked his right side slightly to keep himself on course as he fell. The cold, thin air pressed through his jumpsuit, icy hands squeezing his ribs. It felt as if someone — an angel, maybe — were flying above him, holding on, guiding him to earth.

When he was little, Ferguson’s mind had been filled with stories about angels. He’d had vivid dreams of them, including one in which an angel grabbed him in his or maybe her arms and whisked him from danger.

The danger happened to be a particularly nasty Catholic nun — one of his teachers that half year — but that hadn’t seemed to bother the angel.

The altimeter buzzed, telling him it was time to pull the rip cord. The harness yanked hard against his body as the chute deployed. Ferguson made sure it had deployed properly, then checked his position with the GPS device.

He was roughly two hundred meters north of the spot he’d set for his target, but he still had a long way to fall. Ferguson moved his right toggle downward, working against a slight breeze that wanted to push him east.

Finally he saw the dim outline of the clearing in front of the perimeter fence off to his left. A sudden surge in the wind threatened to take him into the wilderness area; Ferguson dipped the wing of his chute and corkscrewed in the direction he wanted to land. The maneuver got him onto the right side of the fence but nearly collapsed his chute. He came down hard on the side of a hill about fifty yards behind the cameras. Collapsing onto his left knee, he slid for a few yards until he managed to twist downward and stop.

“Auspicious,” he said aloud in a mocking tone. “That’s what happens when you start thinking about angels.”

Rankin landed nearly thirty yards away, a nice walking touchdown on level land. Both men quickly gathered their chutes, bundling them with the rest of their jump gear. They stowed them near some bushes at the base of the hill where Ferguson had landed, then went to take care of the video camera and sensors that covered the fence where they wanted to get out.

The camera could be pivoted by remote control to cover the fence area; it was also set to respond to a motion detector covering the area in front of it. Ferguson identified the wires from the motion detector, then, with a penknife, carefully stripped small bare spots through the insulation. He clamped alligator clips on them, testing the connection to a small black box and antenna. When a light on the box indicated current, he clipped the wire, eliminating the motion detector from the circuit. He took out what looked like a cell phone and began pressing the arrow keys; the camera responded as if it had detected a large animal in the brush.

With the camera pointed all the way to its stop, Ferguson unscrewed the rear housing. He’d just gotten the last screw off when it began moving; the security people were panning it by remote control.

Ferguson waited for the camera to finish moving, then gingerly lifted off the back. He identified the wires supplying power to the circuit board and clamped a fat clip over them. Then he plugged what looked like a thick cell-phone battery into the other end of the wire and tucked it onto the camera chassis. He picked up the ersatz cell phone and pressed the center key. The screen over the keypad turned white, then slowly began to fade to gray, indicating the operation had been a success.

“Fader works,” he told Rankin, putting the housing back on the camera.

Ferguson used his short-range radio to call Guns, who was watching the plant’s main entrance and the administration building from a rise about a hundred yards from the gate.

“Anything going on?” Ferguson asked, adjusting his night-vision goggles before setting out down the hill.

“Aniyo,” said Guns.

“Learning the lingo are we?”

“I got the MP3 player with me.”

“Great. Just don’t get so caught up in the pronunciation that you forget about us, right?”

“Ne, dwaetseoyo,” said Guns. “OK.”

Ferguson and Rankin picked their way through trees and rocks for about an hour before coming to an old stone wall. The vegetation had been cleared on the other side of the wall, and within fifteen minutes they could see the buildings at the center of the complex.

They continued down a ravine that ran behind the low-level waste storage area. The radioactive dump had been sited inside the side of the hill. The entrance to the area looked like a mine shaft, albeit one large enough for a pair of trains to drive through. The actual disposal areas were shafts dug deep within the hillside. There were no fences blocking off the entrance, nor were there security cameras. The nearby ground was flat and open, though obscured from the rest of the site by a parking area for the train cars.

“First tab is over near those trains,” said Ferguson, pointing. “We’ll get it, then split up.”

They hadn’t taken more than a few steps before Guns warned them that the security people were starting a round in their pickup truck. Seconds later, Ferguson saw the vehicle’s headlamps swinging in their direction.

“No place to hide around here,” said Rankin.

“Into the mine shaft.”

“There’s radioactive waste in there,” said Rankin.

“There’s radioactive waste all over the place here, Skippy. Better to glow than get shot.”

Actually, the waste was stored far below, in containers and compartments that prevented contamination. The entrance looked like a train tunnel or a very large mine shaft. The roof and walls were tiled with large cement blocks, reinforced at intervals by triangular-shaped steel pillars and crossbeams. The train tracks ran along the floor, bending to the right as the shaft turned and disappeared from sight.

Ferguson stopped at the first set of pillars, watching as a four-door pickup circled in front of the shaft opening, then darted away.

“Gone?” Rankin asked.

“Gone,” said Ferguson, stepping out. “The radiation is all contained, Rankin. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“You remember that from the briefing, right?”

Rankin shrugged.

“You don’t believe them?” Ferguson asked.

“Who the hell knows what to believe?”

They trotted across fifty yards of open ground to a pair of railroad flatcars and a small diesel shunting engine. They could see the truck in the distance as it returned to the administration building, the patrol over.

“You should have at least thirty minutes before the next security run,” said Guns. The irregular intervals was intentional, designed to make it difficult for anyone who might try to time them. “Maybe as much as an hour.”

“You get the three on that side,” Ferguson told Rankin, pointing to the left of the operations station. “One’s in the rail there, another is over by that little power transformer set, and then there’s the one in the siding of the building.”

“I remember, Ferg. Jeez.”

“You got one camera on the corner of that building there.” He pointed to it. “Go.”

Rankin nudged forward, moving in a half crawl to the shadows on the other side of the railroad track. He got down on his hands and knees and began groping for the tiny sensor.

Ferguson, meanwhile, trotted in the opposite direction, running through a dark shadow toward the fence guarding the recyclable reactor rods. It was the hardest tag to get, because it was within view of the recycling area’s guard post. Ferguson reached the fence and threw himself on the ground. As he did, he saw the pant leg and boot of a man in the round glow of light ahead. Fearing he’d been seen, he reached for his pepper spray; there would be enough trouble if they were caught without killing the guards.

But the sentry continued without noticing him, walking across the macadam toward the administration building. Ferguson watched his boots disappear into the shadows, then snuck to the corner. Thera had stuck the sensor into the metal loop connecting the fence to the pillar; he retrieved it and retreated back toward the reception area for the other tags.

“Truck comin’ down toward the plant,” warned Guns. “Going to the front gate.”

“What, are you kiddin’?” said Rankin. “It’s way after closing time.”

“No shit, man. Really.”

“Where are you, Rankin?” said Ferguson.

“Other side of the reception building, near the little power cabinet.”

“Truck is at the gate. Going in,” said Guns.

“Rankin, stay where you are until the truck goes through.”

Ferguson hunkered down as headlights swept in front of him. The truck was a six-wheeler, a bit stubby looking, the type used by small firms in the States for local deliveries. It headed in the direction of the low-level waste disposal area, bumping over the tracks close to the railcars where he was supposed to meet Rankin.

“Guns, they question these guys at the front gate?”

“Just let them through, Ferg. The patrol should be starting in another five minutes or so. Any time after that, I mean. It’s been twenty-five minutes.”

Ferguson retrieved the second tag from the side of the reception building and then began looking for the last, which Thera had planted on top of a barrel opposite the corner of the building.

The problem was, he didn’t see a barrel.

Thinking Thera had gotten the corner wrong when she drew her map, Ferguson got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the side of the building. He was about midway when he heard voices coming from the direction of the administration station. Cursing, he jumped up and got back to the reception building as the men crossed toward the recycling area.

“They’re going for the truck,” warned Guns.

Ferguson was now trapped. He couldn’t stay where he was because he’d be easily visible once the truck started in his direction. Two of the other sides of the building were visible from the administration station itself; the front, with its large doors, was covered by cameras.

He considered running across the open lot to his left but decided that was too risky. Instead he backed against the building, hoping to hide in the shadows. The metal ribs extended out nearly a foot, but he didn’t think they were quite big enough to hide him. As he examined them, he thought it might be possible to climb up between them, leaning against one rib with his feet and the other with his hands. He gave it a quick try, pulling upright a few feet off the ground.

The sound of the pickup approaching convinced him this was going to have to be the solution. Ferguson reached the metal overhang of the building and pulled himself on top as the patrol truck swung in his direction.

As soon as the truck passed, Ferguson took out his night-vision glasses and used them to scout the nearby yard. The barrel was about ten yards from the corner of the building; he’d gone by it earlier without realizing it was where Thera had put the bug. Obviously her map hadn’t been drawn to scale.

Meanwhile, the truck that had come through the gate had disappeared into the entrance to the low-level waste storage area. Ferguson could see the top of the opening but not inside.

“Ferg, where are you?” asked Rankin over the radio.

“On top of the situation.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“On the reception building. Where are you?”

“Over near the back of the administration building. I got one more to get.”

“Hang tight. Guards are coming back.”

The pickup swung around the reception building, slowed near the entrance to the recyclable waste area, and then returned to the administration building.

“Clear,” said Ferguson. He was about to jump down when he saw the headlights from the truck that had come in earlier heading in his direction. “Hold it,” he told Rankin, and he leaned down against the metal roof.

Blessed Peak was a state-run facility; the users weren’t charged. Why would they need to bypass the standard procedures by bringing a single truck in late at night, skipping around the classifying and tracking station?

Ferguson reached into his pocket and grabbed three small wireless bugs, then crawled to the edge of the roof. When the truck passed the building, he tossed the bugs onto the top of the truck body. One bounced onto the ground, but the others stayed.

“Guns, see if you can follow that truck,” Ferguson said. “I dumped a couple of bugs on top.”

“On it, Ferg.”

Though not as good as dedicated tracking devices, the bugs could be used as primitive range finders with roughly a three-mile range.

“Ferguson, where are you?” asked Rankin.

“About to break my legs getting off the reception building roof,” said Ferguson, looking over the side and realizing there was no easy way down.

15

Guns ran down the hill and jumped into the car. He fumbled with his backpack, finally locating the audio bug’s receiving unit in a case at the very bottom. He had to squint to see the directional arrow in the screen.

Then they were gone. The bugs worked with line of sight radio waves, which would limit their range in this terrain.

At least he had the advantage of knowing which way the truck had come from. He eased down the dirt road toward the highway and waited for it to go by.

Five minutes passed before he realized his assumption was wrong; the truck had to have left by now and must be going the other way. Sure enough, he got the signal back as soon as he passed the waste facility.

It was weak; the truck was more than a mile beyond him, possibly close to the outside limits of the bug’s range. He stepped on the gas.

“Going east,” he told Ferguson. “He came from the west.”

“Just follow him until he gets somewhere. Check in later. We’ll meet you at the park.”

Guns had to slow down to take a series of curves as the road descended, braking so sharply that the receiving unit fell off the car seat. He grabbed for it, then lost it again as the road jerked right in front of him. Cursing at himself, he waited until he came to a straightaway, then reached down and grabbed the unit, holding it in front of the Hyundai’s dash.

They were straight ahead, about a half mile away.

Guns decided to trying ramping the volume on the unit, but the only thing he heard was a whooshing noise. Only one bug seemed to be working, even though Ferguson had told him he’d thrown more than one.

Five minutes later, Guns came to a north-south intersection. As he started across, he saw that the directional indicator had swung to the right. He veered across the shoulder and opposite lane of the deserted highway, scraping the muffler on the median curb. The car’s exhaust rumbled a bit louder as he got into the right lane, but at least he was going in the right direction.

While the immediate area was deserted, the truck would soon reach a built-up area where there were lots of intersections and turnoffs. Guns decided to close the gap. Within a few minutes the meter showed he was steadily gaining on the truck, and he started looking ahead for taillights, expecting them to appear at any second. Every so often he glanced at the receiver; his target was dead ahead.

And then suddenly it wasn’t.

The strength needle began backing off, and he lost the directional compass. Guns realized he’d somehow passed the truck.

He spun into a quick a U-turn. The strength gauge climbed again, showing the bug was dead ahead.

And then behind him.

He cursed, realizing the bug had fallen off the truck onto the road.

16

It took Ferguson and Rankin nearly three hours to hike out of the waste plant property and down through the nearby park. Guns was leaning against the car near the fence, waiting for them, his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. Ferguson laughed, then slapped him on the back and told him not to take it so hard.

“I’m sorry I messed up, Ferg.”

“The bug fell off the truck. What are you going to do?”

“I shoulda been closer.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Rankin, tossing his gear in the trunk, couldn’t help thinking that Ferguson would have ridden his butt if it had been him rather than Guns who’d lost the truck.

“I checked the area out. Couldn’t find anything,” said Guns as they got in the car. “I took a picture of the truck coming into the plant. Maybe we can use that.”

“Maybe,” said Ferguson.

“Probably getting around some no-dumping law,” said Rankin.

Ferguson plopped into the front seat of the car. He’d hurt his right knee getting down off the roof, and he grimaced as he pulled it in.

“What’d ja do?” asked Guns.

“Roof was a little higher than I thought it was,” Ferguson told him. “I tried sliding down the ribs, but it didn’t work too well. Nothing a good belt of Irish whiskey wouldn’t cure,” he added.

Rankin snorted from the back.

“They have Irish whiskey in Korea?” asked Guns.

“Guns, they have Irish whiskey everywhere,” said Ferguson. He dug into his pocket and took out the sensors, examining them. Only one had gone red, the one that had been on the barrel. It had been positioned near the tracks to the permanent low-level waste area, right next to the route the truck had taken.

“Gonna be a nice day for a change,” said Rankin, looking out the window. The sun had just started to peek over the horizon.

Ferguson repacked the tags in an envelope, then sealed everything in a large carrying case. He snapped the lock closed, then reset the digital lock.

“Give this to Van and tell him to send it back ASAP,” he told Rankin, handing it back to him. “I’ll let Corrigan know it’s coming.”

“I thought we were all going to shadow Thera,” said Guns.

“This is more interesting,” said Ferguson. “Besides, Skippy likes to be alone with the Delta boys. They stay up late and talk all that blanket-hugger stuff while they roast MREs over the fire.”

“You’re a laugh a minute, Ferg,” said Rankin. “You oughta go on Jay Leno.”

“Keep working on it, Rankin. There’s a comeback in there somewhere,” said Ferguson.

17

Corrine Alston got out of the elevator and walked down the narrow hallway to a stairwell guarded by two CIA security officers. The men stared straight ahead as she approached, doing their best to pretend that they didn’t notice her. She descended one level — the stairwells and elevators were separated to prevent a smart bomb from flying all the way down — and walked through a well-lit hallway The walls had recently been painted a soft blue on the advice of an industrial psychologist to add an air of calm, but it was a futile gesture. So much went on here that it was difficult for anyone to be calm.

Corrine put her thumb on a small panel next to the first doorway on the right. After a second’s delay, the doors swung apart, and she entered a vestibule leading to a small, secure conference room. In contrast to the rest of the building, the room was bereft of high-tech gadgetry. There was a whiteboard at the front and an old-fashioned slide projector on the table. The table and chairs were at least thirty years old, having been salvaged from another building.

Daniel Slott, the CIA’s deputy director of operations and the head of the agency’s covert operations division, sat alone at the table, fiddling with a plastic Papermate mechanical pencil. He looked up when Corrine entered, nodded, then went back to staring at his pencil.

Corrine pulled out a seat opposite him and sat down.

“So?”

Slott cleared his throat. “I thought I’d wait for the DCI.”

DCI was Agency-talk for “director of Central Intelligence Agency” — the head of the CIA, Thomas Parnelles.

“When will he be here?”

“Hard to tell.” Slott twisted the lead from the pencil. “He said he was on his way an hour ago.”

When she had first become involved with Special Demands, Corrine had assumed that Parnelles and Slott — generally considered the number-two man at the CIA — were close allies, but over the course of several operations she had come to realize they weren’t close at all.

Parnelles didn’t consider that a problem. Slott, though, felt the director not only second-guessed him but also undercut his authority, giving many of his deputies too much leeway, in effect encouraging them to subvert the normal chain of command. Parnelles wanted results above all; Slott often found himself trying to rein in operations that were veering toward the sort of abuses that had laid the agency low in the past.

Not that Slott would discuss this with Corrine.

“Maybe you and I should get started,” said Corrine. “And when he comes in—”

The door opened before she had a chance to finish the sentence. Parnelles stalked in, a frown on his face. Slott put the pencil down.

“Ms. Alston. Daniel.” Parnelles pulled a chair out and sat. “What’s going on?”

“The First Team found evidence of bomb material in South Korea,” said Slott.

It took Corrine a second to process what he had said. “South Korea?”

“Yes, South Korea. At the Blessed Peak South Korean Nuclear Waste Disposal and Holding Station, thirty miles northwest of Daejeon. Thera brought tags in to get a baseline so the scientists could compare it to the North Korean waste site. All of the tags were somehow exposed. Ferguson thought it might be a mistake or a screwup in the instruments. The devices are new, and since the underlying nanotechnology—”

“We don’t really need the details, Dan,” said Parnelles. “We stipulate that they made the right decision to double-check.”

“They planted a full set again,” said Slott. “One showed a serious exposure. It’s on its way back to the States to be examined.”

“Is it a bomb or bomb material?” asked Parnelles.

“We can’t be sure,” said Slott, going on to explain that the sensors were “tuned” to discover the main ingredient of a bomb and one common contaminant. The ratio indicated that weapons-grade plutonium was present, but they could not definitively say how it had been used.

Parnelles rolled his arms in front of his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Has the president been told?”

“No. I only just found out about this through Lauren. I haven’t spoken to Ferguson myself.” Slott glanced at his watch. “It’s roughly six a.m. in Korea, and they’d been working on getting this all night. I figured I’d let him sleep.”

“But you’re sure of the results?” said Parnelles.

Slott bristled. “There’s always a possibility that the sensors malfunctioned,” he said. “But the technology people tell me it’s unlikely. They’ve been tested, I’m sure you recall.”

“I think we have to tell the president immediately,” said Corrine.

“That goes without saying.” Parnelles’s voice boomed in the small, sealed room. “Are you sure, Daniel, that this isn’t a mistake?”

“We have two scientists on their way out to a lab in Hawaii. We should know more definitely in eight or nine hours. But I don’t think it’s a mistake, not with two sets.”

“It makes sense that they have a weapon,” said Parnelles. “It makes a lot of sense.”

“Whether it makes sense or not, it’s going to be a problem,” said Corrine,

Parnelles held out his hands. The skin around his eyes was thick and rugged, as textured as a rubber Halloween mask, but his hands were remarkably smooth and unblemished.

“This could kill the nonproliferation treaty and God knows what else,” said Corrine.

“I think it’s still a little premature to jump to the conclusion that they have weapons,” said Slott. “It’s possible this is just part of an exploratory program.”

“You think they stole the material from the North Koreans?” asked Parnelles.

Slott hadn’t considered that. “Maybe,” he said.

“Why didn’t we know about it?” asked Parnelles.

All Slott could do was shake his head.

“Nothing anywhere in any of the analyses hints at it?” asked Parnelles.

Slott shook his head again. While he couldn’t be expected to know everything the CIA knew — no one did — Asia was an area of special interest. So was Korea, where he’d been station chief. There had been South Korean programs in the past but none aimed at plutonium-fueled weapons. At least as far as the Agency knew.

“Who’s going to tell the president?” said Parnelles, looking over at Corrine.

Corrine interpreted it as a challenge. “I will.”

“You’ll want to tell him in person,” suggested Parnelles, “and alone.”

Corrine nodded. The president was in Maine this evening, staying at a private home; he’d be in New Hampshire tomorrow. She’d catch an early flight and meet him there.

“We should have the report from the scientists within a few hours,” said Slott, screwing the lead all the way out his pencil. “I can get you a copy.”

“All right. Start reviewing what we already know,” Parnelles told Slott. “See what’s there.”

“Absolutely. But it’s a sensitive time. Thera’s on her way to Korea.”

“It’s always a sensitive time,” said Parnelles, rising. “Better talk to Ferguson and find out exactly what the hell he knows. The president is bound to ask some very uncomfortable questions.”

Slott waited until the others had left the room before getting up from the table. The discovery of the plutonium had shaken him, not merely because it implied that the South Koreans were doing something he’d never believed they would but also because it implied that the CIA’s operations in the country had failed miserably. No matter where the radioactive material had come from, the Agency surely should have known about it before now.

And for it to involve Korea, of all places, a country he knew intimately having spent the better part of his career there…

Granted, he hadn’t been back in a number of years. Still, he knew Ken Bo, the station chief in Seoul, reasonably well. Until now, Slott thought he was a very good officer.

Knew he was a good officer.

Careers were going to be ruined if the information panned out. Including his, maybe.

He should take steps…

All his life he’d derided officers who put their careers above the needs of the country and the Agency. He hated the cover-your-ass mentality. But as he walked down the hall toward the Special Needs communication center, he realized he was thinking along those very lines.

He wasn’t going to do that. He was going to take it step by step, do what should be done, no matter the personal consequences.

Jack Corrigan was just coming on duty as mission coordinator and was being briefed by Lauren. They stopped talking as he walked across the “bridge,” an open area of space between the communications consoles and the high-tech gear that lined the room.

“I’d like to talk to Ferguson as soon as possible,” Slott told them.

“He’s still sleeping I think,” said Lauren. “His phone isn’t on—”

“Why the hell isn’t his phone on?”

Lauren glanced toward Corrigan. Ordinarily Slott was the personification of cool; he showed so little emotion at times, she was tempted to take his pulse.

“Ferg’s afraid that the phone might, you know, that there would be a bad time or something,” said Corrigan. “And I don’t think he totally trusts the encryption either.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Slott. The encryption was an NSA standard, all but theoretically impossible to crack.

“He usually leaves it off unless something important’s going on,” said Lauren. “The transmissions can be detected and—”

“Something damn important is going on,” said Slott. “Who’s with him? Sergeant Young?”

“Um, Guns turns his phone off, too,” said Lauren. “I’m sure Ferg tells him to.”

Slott struggled to control his anger. It wasn’t Lauren or Corrigan’s fault that he couldn’t talk to Ferguson — they couldn’t control what the op did — and, to be honest, neither could he.

He liked Ferguson’s results — who didn’t? — but the op had always struck him as being arrogant, acting as if he didn’t have to follow the rules everyone else did.

“I called the hotel desk,” said Lauren. “He left orders not to be disturbed. Maybe—”

“I want to talk to him now,” Slott told them. “Get somebody to get him. Have him call me.”

“Colonel Van Buren’s operation has his men tied up,” said Corrigan.

“Tell Seoul to send someone down there,” snapped Slott, referring to the CIA’s South Korean office.

“How much should I tell them?” asked Lauren.

Slott hesitated. There were two separate problems he had to deal with: the plutonium itself and his people’s failure to discover it. If he had Seoul work on problem number one, he might not be able to discover the seriousness of problem number two. What he needed for now was to keep the two problems separate if at all possible.

On the other hand, he needed to talk to Ferguson ASAP, not when Ferguson felt like checking in.

“Dan?” said Corrigan.

“Don’t tell them anything. Ferguson is just an American who’s supposed to call home.”

Corrigan and Lauren glanced at each other.

“I’ll come up with something,” said Corrigan.

18

The knock on the hotel-room door was not quite loud enough to wake the dead, but it was sufficient to jostle someone with a mild hangover. Ferguson lifted his head and grunted, “Yeah?”

“Robert Christian?”

It was the cover name Ferguson had used to check in. The voice speaking was English with an American accent.

“Yeah?”

“Your uncle wants to talk to you.”

“What time is it?”

“Going on ten o’clock.”

Ferguson groaned and slipped out of bed. “My uncle, huh?” At least his knee felt better. “Where’s he live?”

“Washington.”

He grabbed his Glock and a flash-bang grenade and walked to the door, flipping on the TV as he went. Ferguson had chosen the hotel because it had eyepieces in each room’s door; Ferguson had replaced his with a wireless video camera whose wide-angle lens allowed it to view the entire hallway.

The image on the TV screen showed that there was a man and a woman outside, both dressed in suits, both Western, more than likely American. They didn’t have guns showing, and they didn’t have backup down the hallway, unless they were hiding in the stairway. No headsets, no radios.

The man leaned against the door, apparently in a misguided attempt to peer through the spyglass.

“My uncle hasn’t lived in Washington in twenty years,” said Ferguson. Silently, he slid back the dead bolt and unhooked the chain.

“We’re from the embassy,” said the man, still leaning against the door.

“Which embassy would that be?” asked Ferguson. As he did, he yanked the door open. The man fell inside, helped along by Ferguson, who grabbed his arm and threw him against the bureau. Ferguson kicked the door closed behind him, then knelt on the man’s chest, his pistol pointed at his forehead.

“I’m hoping you’re new,” Ferguson told the CIA officer, who clearly was. “Like maybe you just got off the plane.”

“I’ve been in Korea three months,” managed the man.

“That’s long enough to know better.”

Ferguson quickly searched him; he wasn’t carrying a weapon. His business cards indicated he was Sean Gillespie and a member of the U.S. Commerce Department’s Asian Trade Council, the cover du jour obviously.

“What’s going on in there?” yelled his teammate from the hall, pounding on the door.

“Let her in,” Ferguson said, getting up. “Before I shoot her.”

Gillespie opened the door, and his fellow CIA officer, a thin brunette with thick glasses, came inside, her face flushed. Like Gillespie, she looked about twenty-three going on twelve.

“What is this?” she sputtered, mesmerized by Ferguson’s gun.

“Lock the door and lower your voice,” Ferguson told her. “Then you have about ten seconds to tell me why you’re here blowing my cover.”

The brunette’s cheeks went from red to white.

“Why are you here?” said Ferguson.

“You’re supposed to come right away to the embassy and call home,” said Gillespie. “We were told to bring you.”

“Why?”

“They didn’t say.”

“You’re not on official cover?” asked the brunette.

“Do these boxers look official?” said Ferguson.

Official cover” meant that the officers held positions with the government and had diplomatic passports. It also meant that just about anyone who counted knew they were CIA.

Someone traveling on unofficial cover, like Ferguson, had no visible connection with the Agency or the government. Other officers were supposed to be extremely careful when approaching them, since anyone watching might easily put two and two together and realize the other person was a spy.

Unsure whether the two nuggets had been followed, Ferguson told them to leave without him. They refused; they had their orders after all and insisted on accompanying him to Seoul. After considerable wrangling, he convinced them to meet him on the train to Seoul. Ferguson gave them a head start, then he called The Cube and asked what the hell was going on.

“There you are,” said Corrigan.

“Two bozos from the embassy just woke me up. What’s the story?”

“Oh. Slott needed to talk to you and—”

“So you got Seoul to blow my cover?”

“No.”

“You need to talk to me?”

“Dan does. Listen—”

“I’ll call back.”

Ferguson hung up, looked at his watch. Guns wouldn’t be up for several hours. He decided he’d let him sleep; they weren’t supposed to meet until the afternoon anyway.

Ferguson turned off the phone, gathered his gear in an overnight bag, then left. Outside, he took a cab to a hotel near the science museum, checked in, then strolled downstairs to the coffee shop. When he was sure he wasn’t being followed, he went out on the street and caught another cab at random, waving the first one off, and took it a few blocks to a park they’d scoped out the other day where he had a good view of the surrounding area.

He dialed into Slott’s number but didn’t get an answer, so he called back over to The Cube.

“Where have you been, Ferg?” asked Corrigan.

“Hello to you, too, Jack. Where’s Slott?”

“Seoul called me—”

“Yeah?”

“They were supposed to meet you on the train, and you didn’t show up. They thought you were dead.”

“Tell them I jumped out the window.”

“Hang on. Slott’s standing right here.”

“Ferg, what’s going on?” said Slott when he came on the line.

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

“You found bomb material.”

“Lauren didn’t tell you?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“The tags were hot. All of them the first day, one the second. We didn’t find the material itself. I have an idea where it might be, though. I’ll go back tonight.”

“No. I don’t want you going anywhere until you hear from me.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I really don’t feel like discussing this with you right now.”

“Well maybe you better,” said Ferguson.

“At the moment, I don’t want to do anything that will jeopardize Thera.”

“How is this going to affect her?”

“I understand you contacted her—”

“No, she contacted me. Look, Dan, if you want to second-guess me, fine, but I’m a little cold right now, so why don’t we do it some other time?”

Ferguson glanced around, making sure no one was near.

“I’m not second-guessing you, Ferg,” snapped Slott.

Ferguson, realizing he was feeling a little cranky himself, remembered he’d forgotten to take his morning dose of thyroid-replacement medicine. He reached into his pocket for the small pillbox he carried, and slipped out the three small pills.

Amazing how such a small amount of chemical could have so much control over a person.

Ferguson recounted what had happened, essentially repeating everything he had told Lauren before going to sleep a few hours earlier.

“The tag that went red the second night was the one next to the entrance to the low-level waste area,” added Ferguson. “I want to get a look at it. I’ll bring a gamma meter in, look around, take some soil samples, plant some more tags.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet? How long do you want me to wait?”

“Until I decide what I want you to do.”

Ferguson put his head back on the bench and looked at the thick layer of clouds overhead. He exhaled slowly.

As supervisors went, Slott was generally reasonable; Ferguson couldn’t remember being second-guessed, let alone being jerked around like this.

“This is a bad decision, Dan,” said Ferguson finally. “You’re not thinking this through.”

“Why is this a bad decision?” snapped Slott.

“Because they could move the material.”

“I’m not debating this with you.”

“Does Seoul know about all this?”

“Not yet.”

“You telling them?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“I don’t think we should get them involved. They sent a couple of rookie bozos down to Daejeon and blew my cover. I don’t think they can be trusted.”

“That’s not really up to you, is it?” snapped Slott, instantly defensive.

“You sure they don’t know about this already?”

“Good-bye, Ferg.” Slott cut the line.

19

A gust of wind rushed into the plane as the steward folded the 737’s forward passenger door back. Thera, standing directly behind Dr. Norkelus, hunched her shoulders together under her parka to ward off the cold, watching as a boarding ladder was rolled across the concrete toward the airplane. The metal stairway, a throwback to the 1950s, groaned and shook ominously as Norkelus stepped onto it.

“Come along,” Norkelus said to Thera under his breath. “Let’s look professional.”

Two men in heavy military overcoats stood at the bottom of the steps, their right hands welded beneath the visors of their caps in salute.

Norkelus, who did not speak Korean, addressed them in English. The men apparently didn’t understand what he was saying, for they responded by gesturing in the direction of one of the two large buses that were parked nearby. A short woman in an oversized parka stepped from the bus and began walking slowly toward them, taking tiny steps, her head bowed as if she were a beaten dog.

By now a good portion of the inspection team had come out of the plane and formed a small knot behind Norkelus. Most stared at the nearby three-story terminal building, where a large photo of North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-Il, returned their gaze.

P’yŏngyang Airport was the country’s main international airport, but it typically saw no more than four flights in any given week. No other aircraft were parked on the expansive concrete pad in front of the terminal. A half-dozen old Russian airliners, turboprops mostly, and all showing signs of serious neglect, stood in a row by the taxiway closer to the runway, or the place might not have seemed like an airport at all.

“You will board bus, please,” said the translator, looking at her shoes as she spoke.

“I am Dr. Norkelus,” said the director. “Please tell our hosts we are happy to be here.”

“You will please now board bus,” said the woman.

Norkelus, slightly confused, began shepherding his people toward the bus. Two of the techies stayed behind to supervise the unloading of the equipment. This bothered the two military men, and it took quite a while for Norkelus to explain through the translator that the protocols called for the equipment to remain in the team’s custody and care. The words regulations and our orders seemed to impress them finally, and they stopped complaining. But then came a fresh problem: Some of the gear was too bulky to fit in the bottom luggage compartments of the bus. A pair of military vehicles were finally called to transport the boxes.

During this entire time, the bulk of the inspection team remained on the bus. Thera, whom Norkelus wanted to “chronicle the events of the trip,” was among the handful of exceptions. She stood a few feet from the inspection team leader, shivering in the cold. Finally, with the gear loaded and the military leaders satisfied, Norkelus boarded the bus, and the inspection team rolled out… to the terminal building, all of two hundred feet away.

The inspectors were led to a set of tables in one of the large downstairs rooms. Even though they were traveling under special UN-issued passports guaranteeing them diplomatic immunity, the North Koreans insisted on detailed checks of the baggage and personal items being brought into the country. Norkelus decided this wasn’t worth a fight, and the team members queued up with their bags.

Thera took her red suitcase and rolled it behind Julie Svenson, listening as the scientist complained. Submitting to a search set the wrong tone, Julie said. It would make the Koreans think they were in charge.

“Wrong, wrong message,” said the scientist as she hoisted her bag up and then banged it onto the table. “They’ll think they can boss us around.”

One of the engineers nearby had an American Tourister bag with its red, white, and blue logo on the ID tag. The North Koreans pointed at the logo and began questioning the man closely. In a country still officially at war with the U.S. — and with a museum dedicated to America’s “war crimes” — even such a seemingly innocuous commercial symbol aroused suspicion. The fact that the engineer was from South Africa hardly seemed to matter.

Thera’s stomach began churning as the customs official rifled through Julie’s bag. She saw herself being hauled away, dragged out the large glass doors behind them, and shot on the stained cement.

“OK, Miss,” said the young man, pushing Julie’s bag to the side and turning to Thera. His light tan shirt had ballooned up from his waistline, and he was sweating, despite the fact that the terminal was rather cool. “We check. OK?”

Thera snapped open the suitcase. Four cartons of cigarettes sat at the side of the bag.

The man looked up at her expectantly. Thera, guessing he wanted one of the cartons, nodded. The customs official took one, slit open the end, and poured the boxes of cigarettes onto the table. He chose one pack and opened it, again emptying its contents. Then he selected a cigarette.

I should light it for him, Thera thought to herself, but before she could, he had pushed the cigarette back into the box and began to repack the carton.

He put the boxes back and went through the rest of the things. Thera reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out an unopened pack of cigarettes.

“You could have one,” she said, holding it out to the man. “Sir?”

The custom official’s face turned beet red. He shook his head quickly, then, without even looking in her pocketbook, shoved her suitcase to the side and waved the next person toward him.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Thera.

“Go now,” said the man, without looking in her direction.

20

After talking to Slott, Ferguson spent a few hours lining up new backup hotel rooms and renting cars under a new set of pseudonyms, erasing any connection with the man the Seoul CIA officers had called on. If he’d been operating somewhere else — Cairo, for example — he might not have gone quite so far; it seemed unlikely that they had been followed. But he didn’t know Korea, and the last thing he wanted was to be blindsided here because he wasn’t careful enough.

Running a bit late, he found Guns in the National Science Museum, puzzling out a historical display of Korean weaponry. The captions were almost entirely in Korean, but the marine had a connoisseur’s appreciation of the tools of the trade.

“Better than rifles, huh?” said Ferguson as Guns bent over an ancient sword.

“Not better exactly, but I wouldn’t mind putting it to the test.”

“Maybe later. You have lunch?”

“Like two hours ago at the hotel.”

“Come on and have some again.”

They found a small, inexpensive restaurant about a mile away, took off their shoes, and sat at a low table. A laminated menu hung on the wall next to them. All of the words were in Korean, punctuated by idealized pictures of the dishes that both men had learned from experience had little to do with what they’d actually end up being served. A gas burner sat in the middle of the table; they ordered steak and grilled the raw strips themselves when the dish was brought over.

Ferguson, who hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours, wolfed the food down as soon as the meat reached medium rare. He also devoured most of the kimchi and rice. Guns, still adjusting to the spicy food, looked on with a mixture of wonder and shock as the meal disappeared into his companion’s mouth.

“So what’s the next move?” he asked when Ferguson came up for air. “We go in and look for the material?”

Ferguson shook his head.

“OK,” said the marine.

That was one thing about Guns, Ferg thought: He always went with the program. No muss, no fuss.

“So what do we do?”

“Talk to a man about a truck,” Ferguson told him, counting out his money to pay the bill.

This is all you got?” said Corrigan after Ferguson uploaded the photos to him.

“What, the driver isn’t smiling?”

“Jeez, Ferg, these are blurry as hell. I can’t even read the logo on the grill.”

“Get some truck expert to look at it. Once you get the make narrowed down, we can talk to the police, get a list of licenses.”

“Even if we could talk to the police, which we can’t,” said Corrigan, “you know how many trucks there are in Korea?”

“Corrigan, stop whining and see what you can find out.”

While they were waiting for Corrigan to come up with something, Ferguson and Guns drove back to the highway near the waste plant and found a spot to plant two video units, hoping they might spot the truck if it came back. The units were outfitted with miniature hard drives; time-lapse photography let them record for thirty-six hours before transmitting their images to The Cube and starting all over.

Ferguson guessed it would be a long shot that the truck would return. He also had no idea if it was important or not. But he couldn’t stand just hanging around with nothing to do.

They were on their way back to Daejeon when Corrigan called Ferguson on the sat phone, greeting him with a question about what truck model was the most popular in Korea.

“Ford?” guessed Ferguson.

“Hyundai,” said Corrigan. “This isn’t that. You know what number two is?”

“Daewoo.”

“Exactly. This isn’t one of those either. It’s pretty rare, Namhan Hoesa Teureoka, South Korean National Truck Company.”

“Very creative. Who owns the truck?”

“I don’t know. They were only made for about two years. This was about a decade back. See, there was this rich guy named Park tried to set up a company to compete with the Japanese and—”

“Whose truck is it, Jack?”

“I told you, Ferg. I don’t know.”

“Have you ran the registrations?”

“I can’t just call up the division of motor vehicles.”

“Why the hell not?”

“For one thing, they’d get suspicious. Slott says we’re not supposed to do anything that will tip anyone off, especially the government.”

“Lie to the Koreans. Tell them it’s a drug thing. Just get me a list.”

Ferguson snapped off the phone.

“Problem?” asked Guns.

“Corrigan still thinks he’s in the army.”

Guns laughed.

They passed a Hyundai sedan whose side had been caved in from an accident.

“Hey, back up,” Ferg told Guns.

“What?”

“I want to grab a picture of that banged-up car. Turn around.”

Guns checked his mirror, then jammed the brakes and made a U-turn.

“What are we doing now?” he asked after Ferguson came back with two digital photos of the car.

“Looking for a police station. We just had an accident.”

Ferguson reasoned that he was more likely to find a sympathetic policeman in a small town, and so he and Guns got off Route 19, wandering around the local roads. They finally found a likely looking place just outside of Baekbong, where buildings with curved-tile roofs clustered behind a row of two-story stores on the narrow main drag. After brushing up on his Korean with the help of his handheld translator and a phrase book, Ferguson left Guns up the block and went inside.

“I want to report an accident,” he said in Korean, addressing the squat woman behind the desk at the police station. “Sagoga nasseoyo.”

“Dachin saram isseoyo?” said the woman.

It took Ferguson a second to untangle the phrase, even though he was prepared for it.

“No, no one’s hurt,” he told her in English, “but my car was damaged.”

“Da-majj-ed

Ferguson pulled out the camera with the picture of the damaged car. “It was a little road near Songnisan National Park, about a mile from the highway.”

By now three other officers had appeared. One spoke excellent English and began acting as translator.

“I need to fill out this insurance paper,” Ferguson told him, waving a form from the rental agency. “I need to find the truck.”

“What was the registration?”

“I’m not sure, but I know the kind of truck: Namhan Hoesa Teureoka.”

“Namhan Hoesa?”

“Maybe I’m not saying it right. The words mean ‘South Korean National Truck Company.’”

The officer gave him a strange look, wondering how he would know what the words meant if he could not pronounce them properly

“I have never heard of the truck,” said the policeman. “Are you sure it was not a Hyundai?”

“No, I’m positive. That’s why I figured you could help me track it down. Probably it would have damage on it. Couldn’t we search on the computer?” Ferguson stepped around the desk, pointing to the workstation. “For trucks? It’s an odd model—”

Going behind the desk meant passing over the invisible line separating police from civilians and was a major faux pas. The Koreans reacted quickly and fervently, shouting at Ferguson that he must get behind the desk. Ferguson raised his hands and backed away, trying to cajole them into giving him the information, but it didn’t work, and in the end he retreated, probably fortunate that he wasn’t arrested as a public nuisance.

“Didn’t work?” asked Guns when he got back to the car.

“Fell flat on my face.” Ferguson smiled. Then he reached into his pocket for his synthetic thyroid hormones, which he was due to take.

“Pep pills?”

“Oh yeah.” Ferguson dumped two into his palm, then swallowed. They tasted bitter without water.

“Why do you have to take that stuff, Ferg?”

“I never told you, Guns?”

The marine shook his head.

“I don’t have a thyroid,” Ferguson told him.

“Wow. How’d that happen?”

“Birth defect. Let me see if Corrigan has anything new.”

Corrigan — or rather the analysts working for him back at The Cube — had managed to come up with a list of the South Korean National Truck Company vehicles registered in South Chungchong Province. As rare as the trucks supposedly were, there were nearly three hundred.

“We’re working on the rest of the country, but this is a start,” said Corrigan.

“I thought you said this was a rare truck?”

“It is. You know how many trucks there are in Korea?”

“We have to narrow it down.”

“There’s about fifty that look like they might have something to do with hospitals or different companies, that sort of thing,” Corrigan added. “They deal with radioactive waste. Why don’t you start with them?”

For once, Corrigan had a good idea. Ferguson hooked the sat phone to the team’s laptop and downloaded the information from an encrypted website. Then they headed to the nearest hospital.

Parked near a small laundry building on the hospital grounds was a trio of trucks. One was a National.

“Wait for me a second,” said Ferguson. He got out of the car and walked over, took a picture of the license plate, and then used a handheld gamma detector to scan for radiation. The needle didn’t move off the baseline.

The gamma meter was designed specifically to find trace material. As powerful as it was, it couldn’t definitively tell whether the truck had been used to transport material, since properly shielded plutonium could have been transported without leaving any trace material behind.

Ferguson, though, theorized that the shipment hadn’t been well shielded at all, which would explain why all of the tags had turned positive the first time Thera visited the site. He also thought it possible that the plutonium had been moved after that first day, one possible explanation for the weaker hit on day two. And what better place to hide millions of dollars worth of plutonium than in a laundry truck?

None, but not in this truck. Ferguson opened the rear door and climbed into a compartment filled with stacks of linens bundled between brown paper. The needle still didn’t move.

“Anything?” Guns asked when he got to the car.

“Nada.”

“You think this is worth the effort, Ferg?” asked Guns. “I mean, all that’s probably going on is that these guys are illegally dumping waste, you know?”

“Yeah.” Ferg reached down for the bottled water. “Here’s the thing, Guns. We want to get into the site, right?”

“Yeah.”

“We can parachute in, or we can go over the fence. Either way is doable, right? Because me and Rankin just did it, and anything me and Rankin can do, you and I can do better, right?”

“I don’t know about better, Ferg.”

“But let’s say there’s something in there that’s pretty heavy, and we want to take it out—”

“Oh.”

Ferguson made his hand into a gun and fired at his companion.

“How’d you get to be so smart, Ferg?” asked Guns as they left the parking lot.

Ferguson laughed. “I’m not that smart.”

“You are, Fergie.”

“My dad taught me,” said Ferguson, suddenly serious. “He was the smartest guy I know.”

“He’s a spook?”

“Was. He died about a year and a half ago.”

“Oh.” Ferguson smiled, realizing the unintended double entendre. “Yeah, he was definitely a spook. A good one. The best. So good he got screwed.”

“How’d that happen?”

“Long story, Guns.” Ferguson unfolded the map to find the next truck. “Basically he trusted somebody he shouldn’t have.”

“Double agent?”

“No. His boss.”

Ferguson and Guns found the next hospital but couldn’t locate the truck, nor did they find one at the next place they tried, a small machine shop. This area of the city — technically, it was one of the suburbs, though a visitor would find it difficult to find the border — was a curious mix of business and science, part Berkley and part Silicon Valley, with what looked like old-line factories thrown in every so often for variety.

Two trucks belonged to a company whose name indicated it was a medical testing lab. Confused by the Korean street signs, Ferguson and Guns had a hard time finding it, and when they finally did they were stopped by a security patrol outside the building. Ferguson grabbed the map, hopped out, and began pointing excitedly, saying in Russian that he was truly, truly lost. The officers did not speak Russian, but one of the men patiently began to explain in Korean and then halting English how to get back to the road.

After a few minutes of gestures and nodding, Ferguson thanked the man profusely and stuffed a business card into his hand. This was an honorable gesture in Korean culture that could not be ignored, and the security officer not only examined it carefully but reciprocated by giving him his own.

The card came in handy an hour and a half later, when they checked on a trio of trucks owned by Science Industries. Ferguson drove through the main entrance without spotting a guard, only to find a pair of security officers standing in front of a gate a short distance from an intersection a quarter mile from the entrance. Before Ferguson could decide whether they should go left or right, one of the officers approached the car with his hand out in the universal sign of “halt.”

His other was on his holster.

Ferguson rolled out his Russian again, then went to pidgin Korean, saying he had lost his way. When that didn’t work, he found the other guard’s card and handed it to the man. Mollified, the security guard called over his partner for advice on how to best send the foreigners on their way.

Ferguson got out of the car to better understand the directions and to get a better look around. There was a loading dock at the side of one of the buildings about a half mile away, down the road that was outside the gate. Three trucks were parked in front of it.

The security officers agreed that his best bet was to go back the way he had come, taking a right on the main road and then heading to the highway a short distance away. From there he would have an easy time finding downtown Daejeon, his supposed destination.

“This way?” said Ferguson, pointing in the direction of the warehouse.

“No, no, straight.”

“Straight, then this way,” said the other guard.

Ferguson thanked the men and got back into the car. He turned around and began heading down the road.

“Those the right kind of trucks?” he asked Guns.

“Hard to see from here, Ferg.”

“Yeah, hang on.”

Ferguson turned off the lights, then veered to the right down the narrow dirt road that ran inside the perimeter fence. After about fifty feet he spotted a fire lane that led down to the lot in front of the warehouse.

“Hop out and hold the meter by them,” he told Guns, reaching up to kill the interior light.

As Guns got out, Ferg spotted headlights coming up the road in his direction.

He pulled forward into a three-point turn, ready to go.

“How much longer, Guns?” he called out the window.

“It’s still, like, calibrating.”

The headlights were growing larger very quickly.

“Never mind,” Ferg yelled. “In the car. Let’s go.”

The security patrol was less than a hundred yards away by the time Guns jumped into the car. The man inside turned on the side spotlight and moved the car into the middle of the street, trying to block their way.

“That’s the kind of crap that really annoys me,” Ferguson said as Guns hopped in. He stomped on the gas, homing in on the spotlight.

“Aren’t you going the way we came?”

“He’ll just follow us and radio to his buddy to cut us off. This is faster.”

“Jesus!” yelled Guns, covering his eyes with his arm.

The security officer, either taken by surprise or simply stubborn, remained in the middle of the road. Ferguson kept the pedal floored and, at the last second, jerked the wheel to the right. The car flew over the curb, rising up on two wheels.

Ferguson had cut it too close; his left fender and door sideswiped the security vehicle with a loud screech. The rental rebounded across a cement sidewalk, flattened a sign, and then landed back on the access road.

Something was scraping under the car, but this wasn’t a good place to stop and investigate; the security officer had jumped out of his battered vehicle and was firing at them.

A tracer round flew past Ferguson’s window.

“They’re not screwin’ around,” said Guns.

As Ferguson reached the main entry road, a burst of red illuminated the rear of the car. Thinking at first this was just the reflection of a police light, Ferguson ignored it.

“We’re on fire,” said Guns. “One of the tracers must have hit us.”

“Shit. I hate that.”

Ferguson slammed on the brakes and threw the car into a skid.

“Out!” he told Guns as the vehicle stopped perpendicular to the road, blocking it. He yanked off his seat belt, grabbed his backpack, and threw himself to the pavement as the gas tank exploded.

21

Rankin studied the satellite photo as the AH-6 Little Bird helicopter veered toward the North Korean shore. According to the GPS coordinates, the site where they had to plant the first cache “dump” was exactly three miles dead ahead, a few hundred yards off the coastal highway heading north.

While the highway was deserted at night — and indeed for much of the day- an unmanned Global Hawk reconnaissance drone was flying overhead just to make sure. The feed from the unmanned aerial vehicle was being monitored by Colonel Van Buren in Command Transport Three, a specially equipped C-17 flying a hundred and fifty miles to the south.

“Bird One, you’re go for Cache One,” said Van Buren.

“Bird One acknowledges,” said the pilot.

Their job, though dangerous, was relatively straightforward. Bird One would land in a field near the highway, where Rankin and the two soldiers with him would hide two large packs with emergency rations, weapons, a special radio, and a pair of lightweight, collapsible bicycles. The gear would be used by Thera in an emergency or by team members sent to rescue her. There were three spots along the coast, stretching from this one, about thirty miles south of the waste plant Thera was inspecting, to a spot on dry land in the marshes five miles north of the muddy mouth of the Ch’ŏngch’ŏn or Chongchon River.

Rankin didn’t see much point in leaving the gear. It wasn’t a mistake, exactly, just a waste of time. A forward rescue force would be parked on an atoll about twenty miles offshore. This was about seventy miles from the plant where Thera would be inspecting. If anything went wrong, they’d scramble in, grab her, and get out. The caches were just CIA fussiness, “just-in case” BS that the Langley planners liked to dream up to pretend they had all the bases covered.

That was typical CIA, though. They went crazy planning certain elements of a mission, then ignored others.

Like the possibility that South Korea might have nuclear material, for example,

“Here we go,” said the helicopter’s pilot, dipping the aircraft downward.

The helicopter arced over the roadway, the pilot making sure everything was clear before settling down in the field nearby.

Rankin and the two men in the rear of the chopper hopped out as the Little Bird settled down. While the other soldiers hauled the gear to the brush, Rankin located the large rock near the road that was to serve as a signpost. When he found it, he took out a can of white, luminescent paint and put a big blot on the stone. Then he ran to a set of rocks near where the others were burying the gear and sprayed them.

By the time he finished, the others were already hopping into the Little Bird. Rankin kicked some of the dirt where his paint had gone awry, hiding it, then hustled back to the helicopter.

22

The heat from the explosion was so intense Ferguson rolled on the ground, thinking he was on fire. By the time he realized he wasn’t, he could hear sirens.

“Guns?”

“Here, Ferg,” yelled the marine from the other side of the car.

“We want the highway.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

Ferguson leapt to his feet and began running in the direction of the road, crossing toward the perimeter road and then climbing the fence; with his arm, he pinned down the barbed wire strands at the top, ripping his parka but getting over without tearing his body to shreds. As he hit the ground, he saw a car approaching from the direction of the highway. Ferguson ducked behind some trees. Once the car passed — it turned out to be just a car, not the police as he’d feared — he climbed one of the trees and looked back in the direction of the plant they’d just escaped from.

“What’s goin’ on?” asked Guns from below.

“They’re putting out the fire,” Ferg told him. He slid back down. “You got the gamma meter and the laptop?”

“Left it in the car, Ferg. I’m sorry. I got everything else.”

Almost on cue, a fireball rose from the vehicle. The laptop had self-destructed.

“Sorry,” said Guns.

“It’s all right. Wouldn’t have been a good idea to go back and get them anyway. Most of those guys were carrying submachine guns instead of fire extinguishers.”

23

Thirty minutes after leaving the emergency supplies, the pilot of Bird One homed in on a small blot of black in the center of his green night-vision goggles. The blot was an uninhabited atoll eight miles east of North Korea’s Taehaw Island, itself a dozen miles off the mainland. During the early spring and summer, North Korea’s small fishing fleet regularly plied these waters, but in late fall the fishing was terrible, and the potential for ferocious storms kept the area nearly empty.

“We’re sixty seconds from go/no go,” the pilot told Rankin.

Rankin switched his radio onto the command frequency, linking with Van Buren.

“Bird One ready,” Rankin told Van Buren.

“You’re good to go,” said Van Buren. “Be advised there are two fishing vessels approximately three miles southeast of your target.”

“What are they fishing for at one o’clock in the morning?”

“Thinking here is that they’re smugglers, bringing goods back from China,” said the colonel.

“Thirty seconds from go/no go,” said the pilot.

“Roger. Team is committed,” said Rankin. He switched into the shared frequency, talking to the other three helicopters that made up the emergency extraction force. They’d all rendezvoused en route after dropping off their caches. “We’re committed. Two minutes to target.”

An officer might have said something like, “Make it look good,” but Rankin left it at that. The bullshit pep talks always bugged him when he’d been a member of Special Forces.

Technically, he still was a member of Special Forces, and, in point of fact, several of the men on the mission with him outranked him. But joining the First Team had put him into his own special category, not only in terms of rank — there was no question Rankin was in charge of the extraction team — but also in terms of the government bureaucracy. Officially, he was assigned as a special aide to someone at the Pentagon whom he’d never met. Unofficially, he worked for Ferguson and the CIA. They took their orders, to the extent Ferguson took orders, from Corrine Alston and maybe — Rankin wasn’t entirely clear because he didn’t get involved in that end of things — from the head of the CIA.

The First Team gig was the sweetest assignment Rankin had ever had, a grab bag of action that never got dull. Working with Ferguson was the only downside. The CIA officer was extremely clever and could handle SpecOps as well as the fooling-people spy stuff, but Rankin didn’t appreciate his wisecracks and know-it-all attitude. Without the CIA agent around, though, things were good.

“Beach is clear, sir,” said the pilot.

“Let’s get in,” said Rankin.

The helicopter zoomed over the rock-strewn beach and turned toward a small knot of trees. Rankin leapt out as it touched down, racing through the copse to make sure no one had managed to hide themselves here. The two Special Forces soldiers who’d been in the back of the chopper fanned out, making absolutely sure the spies in the sky hadn’t missed anything.

The small island was barely two and a half acres, so it didn’t take that long to search.

“Landing area is clear. Chopper Two, come on in,” Rankin said over the radio when the reecee turned up nothing beyond a few pieces of driftwood. Then he went to help the pilot get the camo net on Bird One, just in case the smugglers decided to bury their loot here.

24

Corrine Alston tried to look nonchalant as she was ushered into the back of of the elementary school auditorium by one of the president’s traveling staffers. Three or four hundred kids sat at the edge of their seats, quizzing President Jonathon McCarthy about the presidency.

“What’s the best thing?” asked a gap-toothed third-grader in the fifth row.

“The best thing about being president is that no one can give me time-outs,” said McCarthy.

The kids thought that was pretty good and began to clap.

“Plus, I get to have ice cream at any time of day I want, and no one can tell me no.”

The applause deepened.

“And, if I want to stay up past my bedtime, I just go right ahead.”

There were loud cheers of approval. McCarthy segued into a story about a frog he had brought to school in his pocket when he was in second grade; the amphibian had gotten loose.

“Not that you should follow my example,” added McCarthy at regular intervals, relating the havoc the creature caused as it worked its way through gym class and into the principal’s office, where it cornered the principal for fifteen minutes before he rescued her.

“Now there’s an important moral to the story,” said the president, wrapping up, “which many people do not realize. And that is this…”

He paused for effect. The kids and their teachers were practically breathless, waiting for some pearl of unexpected wisdom.

“Never bring a frog to school,” mimed Corrine, edging toward the door as the auditorium erupted with laughter.

Fred Greenberg, the president’s chief of staff, was standing just inside, a cell phone pressed to his ear. One of the Secret Service people opened the door, and Corrine slipped into what turned out to be a cafeteria.

“He’s running late,” said Jess Northrup, McCarthy’s schedule keeper. “You’re going to have to talk to him in the car.”

“Here we go,” said someone else, and Corrine heard the auditorium erupt in one last thunderous round of applause. The small group of aides began filing toward the rear; McCarthy was suddenly alongside her, joking with one of the local congressmen about how he had to be careful not to give students too accurate a picture of his childhood, lest he be accused of leading them “down the crooked path.”

“Hello, Counselor, glad you could make it all the way up heah from Washington,” said McCarthy, tapping her arm. “You know Mark Caren, don’t you?”

“Congressman.”

“Josh Franklin is outside, and Senator Tewilliger,” said McCarthy. “Come ride with us to the hospital.”

Tewilliger? Corrine wanted to ask what he was doing here; New Hampshire was a good distance from Indiana.

Unless, of course, you were planning on running for the presidency in three years… against McCarthy.

Corrine put on her courtroom face as she walked to the limo and SUVs. Secret Service agents flanked the procession, aides scurried to the vehicles, and the national press corps sauntered toward their bus, trying to pretend they didn’t like looking important in front of their local brethren.

Corrine couldn’t talk in front of the others, so she simply followed along as they walked to the limo. Franklin and Tewilliger seemed to have just finished sharing a private joke and were smirking like schoolboys as they got in. Congressman Caren gave the president a pitch for more funding in a highway appropriations bill, mentioning that the road they were to take was one of those that would be improved.

“And there are plenty of potholes in it,” said Caren. “I have to warn you.”

The president winked at Corrine as he got into the limo.

Though in theory there were six passenger seats in the back, three facing front and three facing rear, the president generally sat without anyone next to him. Corrine found herself sandwiched between Tewilliger and Congressman Caren, her arms folded.

“Senator, I was surprised to see you in New Hampshire,” said Corrine.

“My Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing on the coast guard,” said Tewilliger smoothly. “This afternoon as a matter of fact. I made my plans before I knew the president was coming.”

“The Senator joined me at the state party dinner last night,” said McCarthy, grinning. “It was quite a night.”

“They put on a good party,” said Caren, oblivious to the president’s irony

Tewilliger, of course, had arranged to be in New Hampshire specifically to attend the dinner, where many of the state’s top politicos could be glad-handed at the same time. It was hardly an accident that he’d shown up when the president did, nor was it likely that he had made his plans before the president. Everyone in the car knew it, though general political etiquette kept them from contradicting him.

“Are we making progress on Korea?” asked Tewilliger as the sedan began moving toward the president’s next appointment.

“I think we are,” said McCarthy.

“The Undersecretary seems to think North Korea is holding out,” said Tewilliger, turning to Franklin, “if I’m reading him correctly.”

“I just think it’s a possibility, not necessarily a fact,” said Franklin.

“What do you mean?” asked Caren.

“I think it’s very possible that they have nukes we don’t know about.”

As a general rule, First Team missions were kept secret from the cabinet, and neither Franklin nor his boss had been informed of this one. The president gave nothing away now, his manner still pleasantly accommodating. Talking to children always charged him up; he had dozens of schoolboy stories and loved to tell each one. Chatting with the kids, even from an auditorium stage, made him feel as if he were breaking out of the bubble that surrounded the presidency.

“If the international organizations do their jobs, we won’t have to trust North Korea,” Caren said.

“Assuming the North Koreans cooperate,” said Tewilliger.

“A difficult thing to assume,” said Franklin.

Corrine had not realized that Franklin was so skeptical. Defense Secretary Larry Stich was a proponent of the agreement, partly because he believed the North Korean regime was on its last legs and the agreement would not only freeze developments but also avoid the possibility of the weapons disappearing if a successor took over. But Franklin clearly had a different opinion; he began speaking about increases in the size of the North Korean army recently, mentioning improvements in the forces around the capital and the pending purchase of new Russian equipment. Details rolled off his tongue. There was a program to replace the type 63 light tank and another to update the North Korean version of the Russian type 85 armored personnel carrier, equipping it with better armor and fire-and-forget missiles.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to monopolize the conversation,” said Franklin, suddenly cutting himself off midsentence. He turned to Corrine. “Ms. Alston, what do you think about the Koreans? Can we trust them?”

“I don’t really have much of an opinion on trust,” she said. “And in any event, my opinion would be the same as my client’s.”

McCarthy started to laugh.

“What brings you to New Hampshire, Ms. Alston?” asked Congressman Caren.

“I have a few things to go over with the president,” she said, “and since he couldn’t come to me, I came to him.”

Caren nodded. He suppressed a smile, as if he were afraid his oval egg of a face would crack.

“I haven’t been to your state in a long time,” added Corrine. “It’s beautiful in the fall.”

“You should have seen the trees a few weeks ago. It is pretty, though. But chilly, very chilly.”

He could have been describing the temperature in the limo for the ten minutes it took to reach the hospital where the president was scheduled to meet with staff and patients before meeting with a doctor who had won a humanitarian prize for helping wounded children in Iraq. McCarthy picked up the phone just as the limo arrived; the others, sensing not only that the president wanted to be alone but that they would have a chance at giving exclusive interviews to the media, got out quickly.

“Just a second, Corrine,” said McCarthy. He asked the person on the other end to connect him to Senator Freely, then looked at her. “Assistant Secretary Franklin is here to accept an award from his alma mater this evening. I thought it would be useful to have him nearby; hold your enemies closely, as the philosopher once said.”

“Josh Franklin is an enemy?”

“Only of late and only with respect to Korea,” said McCarthy. “A slight difference of opinion. We can tolerate that. Sometimes I even disagree with you.”

Senator Freely picked up on the other end. McCarthy asked him how he was, how his family was, how his grandchildren were, how his constituents were.

“Now by and by, Lawrence, are you coming back to Washington for the treaty vote? It will help us get a great many other things done, both in that region and elsewhere… Well I do appreciate that, I do. Yes, I share your concerns. They are serious concerns. Nonetheless…”

Corrine watched the president listen to the senator. Like all the great politicians, McCarthy had a remarkable ability to make the person he was speaking to believe that he or she was the only person in the world he wanted to be with at that moment.

“Senator Tewilliger and I have been discussing your very point this morning,” the president told Freely. “Your very point. We both have concerns, but we feel they can be dealt with. Yes, Senator Tewilliger, though I can’t pretend to say I know which way he’ll vote… Yes, he is a very accomplished senator in that regard.”

McCarthy bantered for a few more minutes, then hung up the phone.

“Still on the fence. They’re probing for weakness,” McCarthy told her. “Freely was in favor of the treaty six months ago.”

Corrine nodded.

“I would like to see what treaty they could obtain, that would not cost us any blood or gold, but they don’t see the big picture,” added McCarthy. “Now, to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

“We’ve found nuclear material in South Korea. The same isotopes that we were looking for up North. Plutonium weapons-grade material.”

The president stared at her for a few seconds, genuinely surprised.

“Do they have a bomb?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know, Jonathon. It’s a possibility. We’re trying to track it all down.”

McCarthy folded his arms and stared straight ahead. “Not the best timing, dear.”

Corrine couldn’t argue with that.

“Has the IAEA inspection team found it?” added the president.

“No. It was at the waste site, near or in an area where low-level waste is ordinarily stored. They didn’t take samples from that area, and we don’t believe that what they did take will detect it. But of course we won’t know that until they get back and run their tests in a week and a half,” said Corrine.

“Right before the Senate vote.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you think North Korea would do if they found out that their brothers on the other side of the border had their own nuclear weapon?”

“The State Department would be in a better position to answer that.”

“Oh, I don’t think we need the State Department to know that the hound dog will bark when the fox slithers into the barnyard. Do you, counselor?”

Corrine shook her head.

McCarthy frowned, then reached for the door to the limo.

“What do you want me to do, Mr. President?”

“I want you to find out what’s going on, dear. If South Korea has a weapon, I want you to find it. I want you to be very quiet about it, but I want you to proceed very quickly. Very, very quickly,” said McCarthy, getting out of the car.