Liberty

CHAPTER EIGHT

At midnight Lee, the second mate of Olympic Voyager, came to the bridge and relieved Dutch Vandervelt.

“Where’s the old man?” Vandervelt asked.

“He was drunk when I saw him an hour before we sailed. He went to his stateroom, I think, and hasn’t been out since. Passed out in there, probably.”

Vandervelt discussed the ship’s location, speed, and course, pointed out other ships on the radar and plot, then lingered for a moment as Lee surveyed the horizon with his binoculars.

“This is my last voyage on this ship,” Lee said matter-of-factly. “You and I have stood port and starboard every minute when we’re at sea since the day you arrived. With Pappadopoulus drunk all the time, it’s not going to get any better. No one has suggested a pay raise. And I guarantee you, if there is a problem, we’ll lose our licenses.”

Vandervelt grunted. The statement was true. The owners should put Pappadopoulus on the beach and hire a new captain. “Maybe after this trip the captain will ask to go. We’re all going to make some serious money.”

“Yeah,” Lee said, unenthusiastically. He brushed the money away.

Vandervelt left the bridge in a thoughtful mood.

He stopped in front of the one-guest stateroom, the socalled owner’s cabin, and knocked once. The man who opened the door and admitted him was of medium height and dark, in his early forties, apparently. Vandervelt didn’t know his name. Didn’t want to know it. He was of Middle Eastern origin, Syrian or Palestinian or, perhaps, Iraqi — somewhere in there. Vandervelt didn’t want to know his nationality either.

When Vandervelt was inside the cabin with the door closed, the man said in English, “Are they aboard?” He spoke those words with very little accent — Vandervelt thought the man had spent a good many years in some English-speaking university, probably British, but it could have been American.

“Yes. No hitches.”

“Shall we examine the patients?”

The wind was over the port rail, a good stiff sea breeze that was putting up four- or five-foot swells. The brisk wind and motion of Olympic Voyager in the seaway meant that both men needed to hold on to something on the weather deck. No one was topside that the mate could see. Of course Lee was on the bridge watching, but he had been paid.

Vandervelt wondered if Lee had told anyone about this adventure.

Dutch Vandervelt opened the padlock on the first container and helped the passenger open the doors.

The bomb was strapped to a pallet. Under it was a sheet of lead. Bolts went through the pallet into the lead.

The passenger inspected it carefully and fully with a flashlight. As he bent over looking, the container door banged as the ship rolled.

“So what do you think?” Dutch asked. “Can you do it?”

The passenger flicked off the flashlight. From the darkness his voice came, “This weapon was not designed to withstand this salty environment. The contacts are already beginning to corrode. I’d say after five or six weeks it will become unreliable.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It may be a dud.”

“Not my problem,” Vandervelt said. “You need any help working on these things?”

“No.”

Dutch handed him the keys to all four containers. “Work during the night. You have four nights.”

“I can be done in two.”

“The crew has been told to leave you alone. Let me know if anyone keeps track of your activities or asks questions.”

After Vandervelt left, the man went to another container and opened it. He used a flashlight to select a toolbox and carried it back to the bomb. After two more trips carrying items he wanted, he put a temporary latch on the container door. The latch was cunningly made of pot metal. Satisfied it would hold the door closed against curious eyes, he turned on a battery-powered lantern and began unpacking his tools.

Dutch Vandervelt had been correct about the man’s education — he held a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT — but wrong about his nationality. Dr. Hamid Salami Mabruk was Egyptian, a colleague of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a medical doctor, the longtime leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. They had spent years trying to topple the secular regime that ruled Egypt by murdering government ministers and tourists with bombs and gunfire. They left the country only when the government fought back ruthlessly, making it impossible to operate there. Interrogated and tortured until they told everything they knew, the militants of Egyptian Jihad were then imprisoned or secretly hanged, every one that the authorities could lay hands on.

When Dr. Zawahiri fled to Afghanistan and joined Osama bin Laden, Mabruk returned to America and secured a teaching position. Just now he was on sick leave. He escaped Egypt just in time, for now the authorities there knew his name — not his real name, his name in the movement — and would hang him if they ever caught him. He had no intention of returning to Egypt until the movement was triumphant. As Zawahiri and bin Laden had argued so eloquently, Egypt’s ally America would have to fall before that day would come.

Hamid Salami Mabruk was going to help make it happen. He arranged the lantern just so and began cleaning corrosion from the warhead’s detonator contacts.

Jake Grafton had big plans for Tommy Carmellini. Although he hadn’t yet laid them out, Carmellini thought he knew what was coming when he sat in a staff meeting with the brain trust, Jake, Toad, Gil Pascal, and senior people from each of the federal agencies.

First the admiral wanted to know the status of each agency’s hunt for the missing bombs. The National Security Agency, NSA, was monitoring — eavesdropping upon — radio and telephone communications throughout the Middle East, trying to intercept conversations that might be referring to the bombs. So far they had come up dry.

The FBI was investigating the disappearance of Richard Doyle. The list of negatives that FBI Special Agent Harry Estep recited from his notes was impressive. Doyle had not returned home, or called his wife or his supervisor. He had not made an airline reservation or purchased a ticket, written a check, used a credit card, made a cash withdrawal from a bank machine, or used his passport since the evening of his disappearance. Every police agency in the Western world was looking for him; so far there had been four false sightings, but no credible ones.

“Could he have been kidnapped?” This possibility was not as bizarre as one might think. The KGB/SVR had a long history of kidnapping people, usually Russians, whom they didn’t want talking to Western governments.

“We’ve checked every airport up and down the East Coast, with negative results. Of course he could have been stuffed into a van or the trunk of a car and driven to Canada or Mexico. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how he could have been removed from the country by air.” Estep discussed what the bureau was doing to check out charter and corporate flights the evening of Doyle’s disappearance. “He’s dropped off the face of the earth,” Estep concluded.

“Or been buried under it,” Grafton shot back.

“It looks that way,” Estep admitted.

“A professional hit.”

“At this point, that appears to be a strong possibility.”

The CIA had also been busy. Coke Twilley was the officer who presented Jake with a dossier on General Petrov and the base he commanded. Jake flipped through it while Twilley talked. The file looked, he thought, as if it had been put together with newspaper clippings and photocopies of pages in reference books.

The dossier did contain, however, the intelligence summaries from the former Soviet republics and the countries on the Indian Ocean rim. “What about this shootout in Karachi the other day?” Jake asked as he perused the summaries. “What was that all about?”

“Rival gangs, we think,” Coke said. “Our contacts there are talking to Pakistani intelligence, but so far we know only that a shootout took place in which all the parties were armed with Soviet-bloc weapons. Four dead, as I recall, and no arrests.”

The national imagery system had seen nothing of consequence.

Finally, the admiral got around to it. “Zelda Hudson and Zipper Vance will arrive tomorrow,” Jake said. “Gil, are the arrangements made?”

“Coming together, sir. The new identity documents are coming over this afternoon from the Federal Witness Protection Program. Sarah Houston and Matt Cooper. Carmellini has rented them an apartment under those names. If they don’t want to live together, I figured they could sort out their own arrangements. I have informed security, and we’ll get them badges and stuff when they arrive.”

“Fine. Tommy, they will work directly for you. I will brief them tomorrow afternoon when they arrive. I want you to sit through the brief.”

He paused and automatically Carmellini said, “Yes, sir,” which surprised him after it slipped out. He tried to avoid sirring the brass on the theory that few of them deserved it. On the other hand, Jake Grafton was the kind of guy who rated a “sir.”

“Okay,” Jake said, “that’s it. Coke, stay for a moment, will you?”

Twilley remained in his seat as the other people filed out of the room. When the door closed, leaving him alone with Grafton, he said, “I think you’re running some damn dangerous risks, Grafton.”

“That’s true,” Jake Grafton acknowledged, eyeing Twilley without warmth.

“Are you sure you want me on your team?”

Grafton let that question hang for a moment before he answered. “I didn’t ask for this job.”

“I know that.”

“A few days ago I was working for you. Now the roles are reversed. Are you uncomfortable with that?”

Twilley shrugged. “A little, I guess.”

Grafton’s lips formed a straight line across his face, and his gray eyes showed no warmth as he examined Twilley’s face. “You’re a professional. I expect you to do a professional job. This is our country. If you can’t do that, say so now, and I’ll ask DeGarmo to replace you.”

This course of action would not look good on Twilley’s record, and both men knew that. Twilley backpedaled. “No need for that, unless you want someone else.”

Grafton began gathering his notes.

“But I want to say I find the request that Sonny Tran and I take polygraphs demeaning.”

Grafton glanced up again. “Everyone who knew about Doyle, including me, is taking polygraphs. Hell, I already had one.”

Twilley threw up his hands. “A waste of time.”

“Perhaps.” Grafton stood. “I want you to send Tran to Corrigan Engineering in Boston to look at these new radiation sensors. I want a report on what they will do, when we get them, how big they are, how much power they take, our deployment options, all of it. Get him on the road as soon as he gets through with the polygraph people. Toad Tarkington and one of the Coasties will go with him.”

“Why Tran?”

“Man, I only have so many people.”

“What about deploying some of these new Corrigan sensors overseas?” Twilley asked. “A terrorist might conclude that an attack against one of those cities would rock a major American ally and leave the U.S. isolated diplomatically.”

“The big kahunas will make those decisions.”

“London and Paris would be good places to start.”

“Indeed, they would,” Jake agreed. “But we’ll need sensors. Send Tran to Boston.”

“Sonny Tran, Boston,” Coke Twilley said, and rose from his chair.

After Twilley left, Jake found Tommy Carmellini waiting in the corridor. “I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time, Admiral.”

Jake glanced at his watch, then led the way back into the conference room. Carmellini sat one seat away from Jake.

“What’s on your mind?”

Carmellini scratched his face. “This is a little embarrassing. Truthfully, I’m going to put you in a bad position, but I think I owe you the truth.”

“Okay,” Jake said, scrutinizing Carmellini’s face. He had piercing gray eyes, Carmellini suddenly noticed.

“Last week someone bugged my apartment. The bugs are still there. I think it was two guys from the CIA, Archie Foster and Norv Lalouette. I couldn’t figure out why in the world anyone would bug my apartment, then Arch asked me to come down to his office. Norv was there. They showed me a videotape taken several years ago by a tourist at the University of Colorado in Boulder on the day that someone assassinated Professor Olaf Svenson.”

Jake’s brows knitted. “Svenson? The microbiologist that Justice thought developed a polio virus weapon for Castro?”

“That’s the guy. The FBI couldn’t get enough evidence to prosecute.”

“I remember.”

Carmellini shrugged. “I was on that videotape, walking across the campus.”

“I see.”

Suddenly Tommy Carmellini’s mouth was very dry. He swallowed several times, reached for the pitcher of water in the middle of the table, and poured himself a cup. He drank it.

“I told Arch and Norv they didn’t have a case. They knew that, of course. They want something from me.”

“Is there any more evidence for them to find?”

“I don’t think so. Of course, the existence of that tape was a big surprise too, so”—he shrugged again—“maybe the best answer is, I don’t know.”

“If they want something from you badly enough they might manufacture some evidence.”

“There is that possibility. That’s why I thought we should have this conversation.”

“What do you think they want?”

“Anything I said would be pure guesswork.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Carmellini poured another cup of water and sipped it. “I just want you to know where it stands, what’s happening. I don’t know what in hell these clowns are up to, but whatever it is, it’s bad. When the deal goes down, I want you on my side.”

A shadow of a smile crossed Grafton’s face. “I appreciate that.”

“That’s it,” Carmellini said, and stood. “That’s my little tale. If you don’t want me working for you, I understand.”

The admiral nodded slowly, looked at his hands. Then he raised his eyes again to Carmellini’s. “A bunch of people died in Cuba.”

“Yes.”

“One of them was a colleague of yours, as I recall. A fellow named Chance.”

“William Henry Chance,” Carmellini said. “A genuinely good man.”

“This day and age they’re hard to find,” Jake said. He stood and picked up his papers. As he and Tommy walked toward the door, he said, “Keep me informed.”

“Yes, sir,” Carmellini replied. The “sir” just slipped out.

Zelda Hudson and Zip Vance arrived on Thursday afternoon. The federal marshals had a paper they wanted signed, a receipt for two prisoners. Toad Tarkington scanned it and was about to put his John Hancock on the dotted line when Jake Grafton loomed beside him. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I’ll sign. They jackrabbit, it’ll be my ass, not yours.”

The marshal looked at Jake’s signature and his uniform — he was in whites today — then said, “They’re all yours.” His female colleague took the handcuffs off Hudson while he removed the cuffs from Zip Vance.

“Be seeing you,” the marshal told Vance, then disappeared through the door after the female officer.

Jake surveyed his prizes. They were wearing clothes that looked as if they had been slept in. “My office,” he said, and led the way. “Carmellini,” he called, and gestured for him to follow.

When the door was closed and his three guests were seated, Jake said, “It took an order from the president of the United States to spring you two, but with one telephone call I can pop you back in.”

“I can’t wait to thank him,” Zelda said. Her hair was a mess, but in civilian clothes she looked more like her old self, Carmellini thought. Zipper Vance looked slightly overwhelmed. He chewed pensively on his lip and gazed fixedly at the corner of Jake’s desk.

“Ms. Hudson,” Jake Grafton said, “over six hundred people died as a result of your crimes, which were apparently committed for money. About two hundred of those people were American servicemen and — women. I know you two didn’t personally murder anyone, but they would still be alive if you had obeyed the law.”

Carmellini noticed that the scar on Jake’s temple was an ugly red splotch.

The admiral’s voice developed a hard edge. “Out of necessity, I have pulled every string and jerked every lever to get you out of prison. The American people desperately need your skills. Don’t think for a minute that I have forgotten what you did or the debt you owe. I’ll never forget. The families of those who died will never forget. As it happens, the fortunes of war have given you a chance to redeem yourselves. You may not believe in redemption, but I do. If you wish to stay out of prison you will obey Mr. Carmellini and throw yourselves into our work, giving it your best efforts. This can be the first day of the rest of your lives — it’s up to you. I will not threaten you, but I will make you this promise: If you give less than your best, violate the security regulations, or cut and run, I will be delighted to hold the cell doors open while the federal marshals throw you through them.”

Grafton’s finger made a tiny circle on the desk as he continued in a voice Carmellini had never heard him use before. “If you betray the trust that I am placing in you and people die because of it, you won’t go back to prison — I’ll personally send you to hell. Do you understand?”

Zip Vance couldn’t meet Jake’s eyes. Zelda wet her lips, swallowed once, then nodded affirmatively.

The edge went out of Jake’s voice as he continued: “As of today you are on the federal payroll as probationary GS-5s. Your supervisor is Mr. Carmellini. Whatever he says goes. He’ll give you a detailed brief; give you the documents that prove your new identities, and show you your workstations in the SCIF. That’s all.”

Out in the hall Carmellini loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. He pursed his lips in a silent whistle.

“Do you think he really would?” Zip muttered. “Do what he said?”

Tommy Carmellini glanced at him, decided he didn’t deserve the courtesy of an answer, and led the way toward security. The paperwork, photographs, and fingerprints took an hour. When they were accoutered in their new security badges, he led the way to the ad hoc computer center in the SCIF.

Once there he watched as Hudson and Vance inspected the equipment. They didn’t have much to say to each other, he noticed. He had no idea of how long the marshals had had them together. Perhaps they were waiting until they were really alone.

“Here’s the deal,” Carmellini said after they sat down. He planted his bottom on the table and sat facing them. “The admiral wants you two to put together the world’s finest surveillance network. He wants into every computer database in the Western world and access to every video camera in every hotel, business, airport, and intersection in the country. We want to be able to research airline reservations, drivers’ licenses, passports, credit card balances, hotel reservations, rental car receipts, video game rentals — in short, every database in the nation, everything. Can you do it?”

“Jesus Christ!” Zip muttered. “We get out of prison on a pass and you got fifty new felonies lined up for us to commit. This is fucking unbelievable!”

-“The reason I ask, the D.C. police are trying to put together a setup like this — well, maybe not quite so ambitious — but they are going to spend beaucoup bucks and wait years to get the right software.”

“Thanks, Carmellini, you asshole,” Zelda hissed. “We needed this. Another fifty felonies and they’ll crucify us on the steps of the Capitol building.”

“By the time the prosecutors get to you,” Carmellini replied, “the newspapers will have run out of ink. The president and Jake Grafton are going to be first.”

“What’s the rush?” Zip Vance asked.

“I know you’ve been in prison, but didn’t you hear about nine-eleven?”

“So?”

“There are a lot of bad guys out there in those mud huts.”

Vance looked pensive. Even Zelda seemed subdued. She caressed one of the keyboards with her fingers. After a bit, she said, “We’re going to need to be hardwired into some of the databases that you want us to access, with or without permission. Others we can get into on-line. Can you or Grafton do anything about that?”

“Little problems like that are my specialty,” Carmellini admitted. “Breaking and entering is my life.”

“Another straight arrow.”

“Hey, lady, let’s forgo the personal remarks. I’m just a civil servant doing my job.”

“Serving the civils by breaking and entering — that’s a new twist on an old gig.”

“Well, yeah. I do what I’m told. I’m no knight in shining armor, but I guarantee you, Jake Grafton is one of the real good guys.”

She took a deep breath, scratched her head, then said, “We’re going to need bandwidth, and a lot of it. I’m talking fiber, not copper.”

“Got you covered. You are in the second-most-wired place on the planet. The first being NSA, the National Security Agency.” Tommy tossed Zelda a pad. “Write down what you want, hardware and software.”

“You’re not really going to do this, are you?” Vance asked her.

“You want to go back to the joint?” she asked him.

“No, goddamn it, I don’t. That’s precisely the point. I want to do something legal and respectable. I want to earn a commuted sentence. Grafton doesn’t want to give us an honest-to-God legal job, for all I care he can stick it up his ass. You and I got troubles enough to last a lifetime!”

Tommy Carmellini hopped off the table and hotfooted it toward the door.

He stood in the hallway listening for a moment. “You’re a computer junkie,” Vance shouted at Zelda. “You’re hooked on this cyber-crap. What about us? You and me? Have you forgotten those letters you wrote me?”

“It’s this or prison,” she replied coldly. “You think Grafton is going to make you his press spokesperson?”

Carmellini decided it was time to go to the men’s room. When he returned he heard only silence. He opened the door, saw Hudson and Vance sitting silently glowering at each other. He went in and closed the door behind him.

“So what’s the verdict?” he said brightly.

“We’ll do it,” Zelda said.

“What about software? We can’t wait years for this. We need this up and running like yesterday.”

“Multiple Oracle databases with some heavily modified off-the-shelf software for data mining should do the trick.”

Carmellini sat again on the desk. “I’m a techno-turkey, but I have to explain stuff to Admiral Grafton from time to time. How are you going to do it?”

Zelda eyed him. “What do you know about networks?”

“Very little.”

“Networks are ubiquitous in modern nations, private networks, the Internet, wireless — even Starbucks is using WiFi, which is wireless fidelity, to create a continuous on-line wireless network for store managers in an urban area. Universities have WiFi networks, businesses, law firms, banks, the Senate and House of Representatives. Most are not encrypted, easy to gain access to, and you get to look at anything on the network.”

“Okay,” Carmellini said, nodding.

“The commercial networks that you mentioned, like credit card databases, bank, telephone, medical records, what have you, can be exploited — in fact they’re exploited all the time; the companies just never tell the public because they don’t want the bad publicity. They lose business and their stock price sinks when people find out how stupid they are. They have enough security to keep out the ‘script kiddies’—the teenagers who use attack scripts they get off hacker Web sites — but every commercial network has holes. What we want to do is quietly gain access while coming in under their radar.”

“How do we do that?”

“All networks have security patches they forgot to install, or former users with dumb passwords that haven’t been deleted from the system, or have gear attached to the network that came with factory-set passwords they forgot to reset. We go after these because it’s so easy. Once we get into their networks, we’re an authorized user and we get whatever we want because we have library cards.”

Carmellini grinned warmly. “I knew you two were the right folks for this job.”

“Can it, creep,” Zelda said bitterly. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Let’s make that list,” Tommy said, and handed her a pen.

“Zip and I are hackers,” Zelda explained. “We are going to need a small team of specialists that can build a data center with huge amounts of horsepower to process data. And we’re going to need a team to write the software to mine the data as it comes in. Without a data mining team, we’ll be looking for needles in a three-thousand-acre hayfield.”

Carmellini was taking notes.

“And we’re going to need some serious hardware. NSA uses hundreds of RISC-based Sun and IBM machines to process data.”

“We’ll get you the people and equipment,” Carmellini promised, “but you are in charge. Grafton wants you to make it happen.”

Before Hudson and Vance left the building, Carmellini visited with Jake Grafton, who perused Zelda’s list. “I’ll bet various government agencies own darn near everything on this list. Tomorrow you jump on it. Get the White House involved. I want that equipment in here Monday. You have all weekend.”

“Yes, sir. Zelda also wants maps from the network companies so she can figure out where we will need to hardwire permanent access.”

“How are you going to get those?”

“Steal them.”

Jake merely nodded. “So what do you think? Will Zelda and Zip work out?”

“As the saying goes, they have issues.”

“Keep me advised. I want them on the job. They’re the sharpest computer geeks I ever met, and they know how to cut corners. We need them badly, but don’t let them know that.”

“If they haven’t figured that out, they soon will.”

“So are you going to take them to their new apartment?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pick them up in the morning and bring them to work. This weekend they need to get a set of wheels.”

So Tommy Carmellini took Zelda Hudson, now Sarah Houston, and Zip Vance, now Matt Cooper, home to a one-bedroom, one-bath walk-up in a massive complex. They rode silently, looking at everything, and said not a word.

He drove into the parking lot, stopped, and pointed to the entrance. “You’re in twelve forty-one. Elevator’s in there. A suitcase with new clothes in your sizes is upstairs, along with the usual toilet items. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at seven right here.” He handed each of them a key to the apartment. As he handed Zelda hers, he added, “You have a hair appointment in thirty minutes at the salon on the ground floor. Get a cut and dye. Blonde, to match your driver’s license photo.” The photo on the license had been altered on a computer before it was affixed to the license form.

Carmellini took out his wallet, extracted two twenties and a ten, and handed them to Zip. “Get something to eat.”

“This agency money or yours?”

“Mine.”

“Then thanks.”

Carmellini snorted and put the car in gear.

They were standing side by side looking up at the building as he drove away.

The apartment was small, a Pullman-sized kitchen, a living room, one small bedroom, and a bath. The furniture looked as if it had been purchased at a motel liquidation sale; the sheets, blankets, pillows, and kitchen utensils were from Wal-Mart. As Zelda walked through the place inspecting, Zip Vance dropped onto the sofa and kicked off his shoes.

“I wish we were back in Newark,” Zelda said as she stood at the living room window looking at the view, which was of a freeway.

Vance took a deep breath, stretched, then studied his toes. Finally he looked at her back. “This is our chance, Zelda. We can make it work.”

She crossed her arms and hugged her elbows.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison,” Vance said.

“This isn’t much better.”

“You measure human lives by the amount of money people have. Aren’t you ever going to learn?”

She turned to face him. “I grew up in a dump like this. My brains were my ticket out.” She waved a dismissive hand at the room. “It’s like I never left.”

“If you can’t see the light, kid, you’ll never get out.”

“You’re one to talk,” she shot back. “You’re right here with me.”

Vance reached for his shoes. “Yep. I fell in love with a woman without good sense, and I wasn’t smart enough to walk away. I bought the ticket and I took the ride. The actual number of people who died because we set up that submarine hijacking was six hundred thirty-two by my count.” He looked at his hands, then made a face.

He — tied his shoes and stood. “Redemption, Grafton said! Six-hundred thirty-two people is gonna take a shitpot full of the stuff. Maybe I’ll always feel like a total slime. But I’m not going back to the can, not for you, not for anybody alive. Frankly, I’d rather be dead.” He headed for the door. “I saw a pizza joint next door when we drove up. I’ll bring you half. Don’t forget your hair appointment.”

With that he walked out and closed the door behind him.

Zelda turned back to the window and stood watching the traffic on the freeway. All those cars, all those people, every one of them going somewhere … and she was stuck here.

Jake Grafton got home that evening at 9:30 P.M. Amy was at the library studying and Callie was reading a book. “Let’s take a walk,” he suggested after he kissed her.

She looked at her watch.

“I’ve been looking forward to it all day,” he added. She put down the book and put on her shoes.

When they were out on the street walking along, he said, “I’m going to retire when this is over.”

“Because the president said that the brass felt you wouldn’t be promoted? Certainly it isn’t that?”

“A few weeks ago terrorists belonging to an organization called the Sword of Islam bought four nuclear weapons — missile warheads — from a Russian general. I’m supposed to find the damn things.”

Callie gripped his hand fiercely. “Can you?”

“There’s a chance. But I’m going to break most of the privacy laws in the country. Regardless of whether or not I find the weapons before they detonate, when this gets out — and it will — I’m toast. If I’ve got weapons in hand, I probably won’t go to jail. But any way you cut it I’m done as a naval officer.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“It’s time. Nuclear weapons, terrorists, spies, traitors — Jesus, Callie, I’m just a farm kid from southwestern Virginia who wanted to fly airplanes for Uncle Sam. And I’ve done that. I’m way over my head in scalding-hot water, and I don’t like anything about it.”

They walked along in silence hand in hand. After a while she said, “This started with Ilin, didn’t it?”

“He’s the one who told me about the bombs. The report went all the way up. The president put me in charge of finding the damned things.”

“Why you?”

“That was my question. Apparently he has a sense that something’s rotten at the FBI and CIA. I keep getting those vibes, too. It’s hard to put a finger on … and yet, I get this feeling that the people in these outfits don’t trust each other. Then again, maybe I’m wrong, and it’s something else. But the prez is getting bad vibes, too, from somewhere.”

They found a neighborhood bar and went in. When they were each drinking Irish coffees at a corner table, Callie said, “Terrorisms, mass murder — how’d we get to this, Jake?”

“Populations have been exploding since World War Two in rigid societies that can’t change,” he said gloomily. “They must change to feed all these new people, and they can’t. Or won’t. So the pressures build until something pops. Roughly a billion people live in the Islamic societies on less than a dollar a day. Africa is a continent full of those folks. Modern medicine has caused the birth rate to explode, but the people are still ignorant and illiterate, without the trust in each other that holds developed nations together. All those European kings, all those fights with Parliament and wars and battles for king and country — they were building nations. Never happened in the Third World. We call them nations, but they aren’t.”

“The world has experienced exploding populations before,” Callie said, frowning.

“Yes, and war and pestilence have always ravaged mankind until populations were reduced to a sustainable level. Hordes of locusts, epidemics like the Black Plague and AIDS, the Napoleonic Wars, the centuries of strife that occurred in China when dynasties fell — all those reduced the populations to levels that could be sustained with the technology available.”

“Terrorism and mass murder? Are they the modern plagues?”

Jake Grafton rubbed his fingers through his hair, then looked his wife in the eye. “During the Middle Ages in Europe ignorant, illiterate people were manipulated by appeals to the strains of intolerance and fanaticism that are part and parcel of every religion. The Crusades, the popes’ wars on heresy, the Spanish Inquisition, the war between Catholicism and Protestantism … all these horrors were committed in God’s name. The result was the rise of the secular states, which grew into nations.

“The Muslim world didn’t move on — it’s still trapped in the Middle Ages. Islam teaches that man should live a life that earns him God’s mercy — it’s no better or worse than any other religion. Yet the Islamic fanatics are exporting the horrors of the Middle Ages to a developed world that moved on centuries ago. Perhaps this war between religion and secular society is a stage that every civilization has to go through. Maybe it’s the only way for a people to gradually learn tolerance, which is the foundation for complex societies that can entertain new possibilities, new visions.”

“The future isn’t inevitable, Jake. It hasn’t been written yet.”

“I know. I tell myself that once an hour.”

He was sitting on the little balcony of the apartment having a drink when Amy got home a few minutes after eleven that evening. She got a Coke from the fridge and joined him on the balcony. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking at the North Star,” he said, and pointed. “Most nights you can’t see it because of the light pollution, but the air is very clear tonight.”

“How do you know it’s the North Star?”

“Find the Big Dipper. See it? The two stars at the end of the dipper point to Polaris — the North Star. If you were standing on the earth’s North Pole, it would be directly overhead. The stars seem to wheel. around it during the night as the earth rotates.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s an old friend,” Grafton said. “I got to know it years ago when I was flying A-6s in Vietnam.”

Jake rarely talked about his combat experiences, so Amy led him on. “What was it like, flying up the Gulf of Tonkin looking at the North Star, knowing that in a few minutes the enemy was going to be trying to kill you?”

Jake thought about his answer. “Winston Churchill once said that one of life’s most sublime experiences was to be shot at and missed. He was right. We always went in low, trying to get under the radar coverage, so up north they shot like wild men when they heard the sound of our engines. Streaks of flak, muzzle flashes, volcanoes of shells …” He fell silent, remembering.

“One night we were supposed to hit a target southwest of Hanoi, pretty deep in-country. There was a low stratus deck, and our usual tactic was to get down under that stuff and go roaring in at five hundred knots, four or five hundred feet above the ground. That night I had a feeling …” He shrugged, thinking about how it was.

Amy was watching his face, which she could just make out in the glow from the city.

“Anyway, I decided to vary the routine. We went in at about ten thousand feet, about a mile above the stratus clouds. Lord, I never saw so much flak. The flashes from the guns and tracers and exploding shells pulsated the clouds under us, illuminated them like continuous sheet lightning. Then there would be a pause, they would listen for our engines, and everyone would shoot again. The only thing … all that stuff was under us. They thought we were down there, and we weren’t.”

“Did you attack your target?”

“Oh, yeah. The BN found it, locked it up, and I dived during the attack. The bombs came off just above the clouds, and I pulled the nose up and did a long climbing turn to go back to the coast, trying to keep my speed up. You didn’t want to get slow over the north; they had a bad habit of shooting SAMs at us. They didn’t shoot any missiles that night, though.”

“Did you hit the target?”

“No way of knowing. It was modern war, I guess … we dropped the bombs and often didn’t know what we hit, if anything. If anyone died. The photo recon guys probably took pictures a day or two later — I don’t remember. I do recall that when we got back to the ship that night several other pilots who had seen the show told me that that was the worst flak they had ever seen. They didn’t know that we weren’t down there in it, so they thought we were real studs. I didn’t have the moral courage to tell them different.”

“Who was your BN that evening?”

“Morgan McPherson.”

“Did you like combat?” Amy asked.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Getting shot at and missed — I loved it. But the thing was, you knew you weren’t invulnerable. You knew if you kept playing the game long enough, they would eventually hit you.”

“Which made the game exciting.”

“I suppose. They killed Morgan a few weeks later.” He sighed. “Strange, he hated it and I loved it and he was the one who died.”

He finished his drink, rattled the ice. “When I see the North Star on clear evenings I think of those nights, flying up the Gulf, see the flak again. And wonder if I would still be alive if we had gone in low that night they shot everything they had.”

“Playing the game …” Amy mused. “It sounds like an addiction.”

“Yep. People who play those kinds of games always play too long. I certainly did.” He stood. “Let’s call it a night.”

She hugged him.