Prepared For Rage

14

HOUSTON, JUNE 2008

Lately, Kenai woke up, went straight to her computer, and logged on to the National Weather Service, set for local conditions at Cape Canaveral. It only forecast ten days out but she couldn't help obsessing. Weather delays were the bane of shuttle launches, and July was a month into hurricane season. There was nothing either she or Mission Control could do about the weather, of course, but checking the forecast gave her the illusion of control. Knowing is always better than not knowing.

She'd formed the habit of going in to work early, because the Arabian Knight (when the secretaries over at admin found out he was royalty he'd had a new nickname before lunch, although the astronauts had several, much less complimentary ones) had taken to appearing promptly at eight a.m. each morning, ready to tolerate, if not with good humor then at least with equanimity, whatever indignities his infidel babysitter would inflict on him that day. She had begun to feel a faint hope that he might not, after all, kill them all on orbit.

That morning he came to her with a request that, on the face of it, seemed innocuous. He would be doing daily television broadcasts from the shuttle, which would be launching on the day of the full moon. They'd be on orbit for eight days, which meant the moon would be visible toward the end of the mission. He wanted to observe the new moon during one of the broadcasts, which would naturally enough go out over

the family network and appear on virtually every television screen in the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia.

She took this first to Rick and then to Joel. Neither had a problem with it. "Anything that keeps him out of our hair," Rick said. So the request had been approved, and no one thought much more about it until two days later when they were going over the on-orbit schedule, revised now to accommodate the Arabian Knight's broadcasts, and Laurel said, "Wait a minute, isn't the moon a big deal in the Islamic religion?"

No one on the Carnivore Crew knew. Joel was summoned, and he scurried away in search of the nearest imam, who when found allowed as how, yes, the moon was a big deal in the Islamic religion. Joel came scurrying back and Rick Robertson sat his royal pain in the ass down and went over the script for his lunar broadcasts word by word.

The Arabian Knight was upset. "It's not even Ramadan!"

"I don't care," Rick said later. "Nobody's issuing a call to prayer from one of my missions."

He glared at Kenai, who thought of protesting that it wasn't her fault, and settled instead for a wooden "Yes, sir."

The sooner they launched, the better.

Cal laughed when she told him. "Who knew dating an astronaut would be this entertaining?"

"Always glad to provide the light relief," Kenai said, yawning, and reached up to turn out the light. She tucked the receiver between her ear and the pillow and snuggled in.

"Am I going to see you again before you light the candle?"

She smiled to herself. Cal was coming along in astronautspeak. "I don't know. Probably not."

"We still on for going away when you get back?"

Her mind was filled with nothing but the mission, but she was willing to play along with the notion of a future after orbit. "How's your schedule looking?"

"We'll be headed to dry dock in Alameda by the time you get back. Refit and repairs and then back to Kodiak."

"Are you going north with her?"

"Yeah, for another year."

"And then where?"

"Don't know yet."

"What's on your dream sheet?"

He smiled to himself. Kenai was coming along in Coastiespeak. "Not much, yet. I can't decide if I want another boat."

"You went to the Academy, right? So you've got your twenty in?"

"Yeah."

"Do you want a shore job?" She couldn't decide if she liked the idea of him more available to her or not. Assigned to a ship, he would be gone on patrol half the time. It seemed to be working well for them so far. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

"I don't know. I don't like doing the same thing over and over again, I know that much."

"So, not another 378."

"I don't think so. And no guarantee I'd get one anyway, in fact probably exactly the opposite. There are more people waiting for the captain's chair on a cutter than there are waiting for a seat on a shuttle."

"Mmm. Where are you that you could call me, anyway?"

"Can't say. BSE Brief stop for fuel."

"And you're low on fuel why?"

"Chasing go fasts."

"Catch any?"

"Not yet," he said grimly. "At this point we're all looking forward to the shuttle launch as the highlight of the patrol."

MIAMI

Six months. He had never stayed so long in one place before, not since he was a child in Pakistan. At first it made him uneasy. He'd kept his head down, reporting in to work every day without fail, keeping close to home in the evenings. His plan was already in place, his team was recruited and ready to move at a word from him, he had arranged their transportation. There was nothing now to do but wait. Waiting was good. His enemies might hope that he was dead, and the more time passed without word or deed from him, the more they would believe it.

He'd seen on Irhabi's blog that Ansar was still looking for him. Which meant that the old man was still looking for him, because Ansar would be happy never to see Akil again, happy to step into the power vacuum left by Zarqawi's death. Akil had given some thought to the possibility that Ansar had been the one who had betrayed Zarqawi's location to the Americans, before dismissing the notion. Ansar simply hadn't the courage it took to betray a friend. Neither had he the intelligence to plan it.

What he did have was the ambition to exploit the results.

Akil didn't trust any of them. He had trusted Zarqawi because Zarqawi had stood by him, in spite of his not being Jordanian, in spite of his pioneering of the Internet, in spite of his refusal to lip sync his way through prayers with the rest of them. He'd never lied to Zarqawi. He could barely tell the difference between Sunni and Shia, and he didn't care if the whole world bowed toward Mecca. He hated the West for reasons of his own, and he would do everything in his power to bring it down. He'd proved it over and over again to Zarqawi, with the result that Zarqawi had trusted him completely, going so far as to make him his second in command, a signal honor in al Qaeda for the not Saudi- or Jordanian-born.

He did not contact Ansar, or the old man, or anyone from the organization. He had let all previous email addresses lapse, so he could say with perfect truth that he had received no message recalling him to Afghanistan. When his mission succeeded, they would know where he was, or at least where he had been. Even the old man would be forced to judge his precious money well spent.

So far as he could tell, the American authorities remained ignorant of his activities. He had seen nothing, in the Miami Herald he read every morning or on the television in his room or on Internet news web sites, that led him to believe that they even knew he was in the country. So far his cell was holding together, maintaining an admirable silence. Yussuf and Yaqub had done a good job of recruiting.

There was a soft knock at the door. "Mr. Sadat? Dinner is ready."

"I'll be right there," he said, and shut down his computer. He'd bought it to satisfy the curiosity of his landlady's daughter. He only rarely used it to access anything more alarming than a Hotmail account registered to an Isaac Rabin, which he used to subscribe to online versions of The NewYork Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly. Isaac Rabin belonged to Slate.com and iTunes, too, through which he downloaded news programs from NPR to his iPod. He'd also found a Baywatch fan podcast he listened to while taking ever-longer walks that were beginning to infringe on the edges of the Everglades.

Somewhat to his own surprise, he liked Miami. It was a vibrant city, filled with color and light and just the right amount of civil corruption, or at least enough to make him feel right at home. Everything was available here, for a price, including anonymity.

He left his room and went down the hall to the dining room to find Zahirah and Mrs. Mansour already seated. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting," he said, pulling out what had become his chair and sitting down.

"You work too hard, Mr. Sadat," Mrs. Mansour said in scolding tones, and passed the pile of bread rounds, still hot to the touch. The tagine was spicy, and he tore the naan into shreds and mopped his plate clean.

He sat back and Mrs. Mansour beamed at him. "I like to see a young man enjoy his food."

"I would be very hard to please indeed if I did not enjoy the food set before me at this table," he said.

Zahirah smiled at him, and again he was struck at how much she reminded him of Adara. "Are you ready?"

He drove the three of them to a nearby theater complex where they each bought their own tickets to a Will Ferrell comedy and went inside sedately to find seats. Halfway through the film he whispered, "Will you excuse me?" and slipped out.

There was a coffee shop next door with an online computer free of charge to customers. He bought a latte with a shot of butterscotch syrup and waited tranquilly for the Goth gentleman with the black eye shadow and the multiple piercings to finish his purchase of a studded dog collar from an Internet store called Radiance Bound.

Online, he accessed a remote server, ran through a number of fairly simple algorithms, another much more complicated one, and sent out several emails.

He had mail waiting for him at a server in Canada. The cell was proceeding as ordered, slipping into Haiti one at a time, some through Mexico, some through Canada, a few even through Miami. They had no idea he was in Miami, of course.

He knew a real temptation to join them, to be in at the kill, for once to be an eyewitness to all his work and worry, to see a plan of his very own come to fruition with his own eyes.

It was impossible, of course it was. The chances of detection were high, the chances of survival very low. He had further work to do elsewhere. He could not waste the years of expertise he had accumulated for vanity's sake.

Still, he thought wistfully, it might almost be worth the risk.

Yussuf had reported in with his usual diffidence. Yaqub had written with his usual effusiveness, repeating that his life had had no meaning until Isa came into it. Akil distrusted such fulsomeness, but Yaqub had thus far proved trustworthy. If Yaqub survived the operation-extremely unlikely, in Akil's opinion-a more permanent place might be found for him. His would be a growing organization, after all.

A tentative hand touched his shoulder. "Mr. Sadat, what are you doing?"

He turned his head and saw Zahirah standing behind him, an expression of confusion on her pretty face.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

The familiar tapping of slender heels preceded the equally familiar tap at his door. "Mr. Chisum?" Melanie's artfully tousled blond head came into view. "Mr. Labi on line one. He says it's urgent."

After Omar Khalid was exiled to Tajikistan, Ahmed Labi was one of the few remaining agents fluent in Farsi and Arabic they had managed to keep in D.C, as opposed to the wholesale shipment of anyone with even a passing knowledge of any Middle Eastern language directly to Baghdad. Ahmed also had a working knowledge of Urdu, useful in Pakistan. "Ahmed, this is Patrick. What's up?"

Ahmed's voice was tense. "I've got something. I think you should come down here."

"On my way." Patrick hung up, put on his suit jacket, straightened his

tie, and shot out his cuffs. He marched out into the outer office. "Melanie, you really must start using the intercom to let me know when I have a call."

She said, perfectly calmly, "But I find out so much more when I can hear even a part of your conversations, sir."

His mouth opened, and closed again.

She held her serious expression for as long as she could, before it dissolved in a loud, joyous belly laugh. He stared, transfixed, as her creamy skin flushed; the line of her throat revealed when her head fell back, those lovely breasts outlined by the clinging blue of her sweater set. For a woman getting on forty, she had a lovely figure. He wondered how it would hold up divested of angora wool.

He pulled himself together. Company ink, he reminded himself firmly, and marched out into the corridor with the spine of a soldier on parade. He'd reprimand her later. Not anything permanent, heavens no, just a verbal warning, a hint toward the desirability of discretion in the workplace.

Oh, how he hoped she wasn't sleeping with Kallendorf.

Two floors down he was sitting across from Ahmed, examining a sheaf of papers, printouts of emails and web searches. "They just popped up two days ago," he said, sounding almost as dazed as he looked. "It was like magic. One of the geeks was trying out a new search algorithm, looking for names and pseudonyms of people on the list. We totally lucked out."

Patrick couldn't believe his eyes. "You're sure this is Yaqub Sadiq?"

In answer Ahmed tossed a photo across the desk. "We tracked his IP address to an apartment in Toronto. That's a photo we took of him on the street outside. And you're gonna love this."

He tossed another photograph to Patrick, and grinned. "That's his German passport photo."

Patrick still couldn't believe it. "He actually used his own name?"

Ahmed sobered. "If what you've learned is true, if Isa is operating independently of bin Laden, then he has to be recruiting from outside the organization. Al Qaeda has a pretty discriminatory recruitment process. Fanatics get in. Dummies don't. If it's like you said, Isa doesn't have that discretionary process to draw on anymore."

Patrick still couldn't believe it. "Which means he's hiring morons?" Ahmed grinned, white teeth gleaming beneath a flourishing black mustache. "Let us say rather that young Yaqub Sadiq is very probably not the sharpest tack in the box." He stood up, cramming a wad of paper into his jacket pocket. "Wanna go for a ride?"

15

TORONTO

Until now, his decision to join with Isa had seemed the single most romantic action of his life, a joyous response to a call to adventure. He cast off the shackles of home and family with a light heart-an added benefit was an escape from the increasing suspicions of Janan's husband-and followed where Isa led, first to England where he had thoroughly enjoyed seeking out and recruiting the young men who now looked to him and Yussuf like prophets, then to the camp in British Columbia where he had found the training much less amusing, and now to Toronto, where, using the identity papers their forger had prepared, he had found a job as a barrista in a Starbucks and rented a room in a boarding house.

After a month he had moved in with Brittany, the blond night baker who provided the coffee shop's pastries. She was starry-eyed in love with him, and he with her, too, of course, that went without saying. He was particularly in love with her working nights, as it left her side of the bed free for a rotating cast of young women picked up across the espresso bar, attracted to his dark and (he fancied) dangerous good looks. He played fair, he told them firmly that his heart belonged to Brittany, but he did not discourage them from trying to change his mind.

He'd never suffered from a lack of feminine attention, even in the more strict Muslim community of Düsseldorf in which he was raised. In England his eyes had been opened to the possibilities for casual sex in Western culture, but in Toronto he felt as if he'd discovered a gold mine.

No, he'd never been more content, and he was grateful from the bottom of his heart to Isa for plucking him out of a world where the consequences for sex absent marriage could place one's life in literal peril. He was mindful of the debt he owed; he checked his email religiously, following Isa's diversionary instructions to the letter. He'd written them down, strictly against orders, but they were so complicated he was afraid he would forget them, and he'd taped the scrap of paper to the bottom of a drawer in Brittany 's jewelry box where, amid a tumble of rhinestones and sterling silver, it would surely never be found.

Six months later he felt increasingly at home in the West, and it was a rude shock when he checked his email one evening and found the command to move on waiting for him. He went online and bought the ticket to Mexico City, and made reservations for the second flight, but the adventure seemed to have leeched out of his relationship with Isa. When Brittany came home the next morning, fragrant with yeast and sweat, and launched herself at him with her usual lusty joy, he made love to her with a single-minded ferocity that at first surprised her and then subsumed her. "Wow," she said after she caught her breath. "Where'd that come from?"

"I love you," he said, raising his head. "Let's get married."

She looked surprised and pleased. She was also a little puzzled. "Why now?"

He bent his head to kiss her. "I can't wait any longer."

"I didn't know we'd been waiting," she said.

He made love to her again without answering, and that afternoon they dressed and drove to Niagara and were married. It was a nondenominational service and therefore unrecognized in his religion, but he was nevertheless enchanted with the whole notion of Brittany forsaking all others but him so long as they both should live. They drove home and celebrated in bed, and she was late for work that night.

Naked, he got up and went to Brittany 's computer and logged on to the Internet from home, something else Isa had strictly forbidden. He checked his email. Nothing more from Isa, but a message from Yussuf, a discreet reminder to bring currency, as all of their transactions after they bought their airplane tickets would be in cash.

On impulse he emailed Yussuf back (also forbidden) to the same email address (again, forbidden). Suppose they didn't go?

He had a reply less than an hour later. Four words. He will kill you.

"He won't find me," he said out loud. Isa was brilliant, no question, but by his own orders Yaqub had assumed the alias on his forged papers, papers ordered and bought by himself and Yussuf. Isa had never seen them. He had deposited the modest (almost meager, he had thought at the time) stipend Isa had doled out before they parted into a credit union, and sank without a trace into Toronto 's millions. Again by Isa's orders, they communicated only by email, and that sporadically and from continually changing email addresses and computers. No phone numbers to trace to a physical location, no paper trail in a name Isa would know, a different IP address for each email. His identity appeared to be bulletproof. So long as he didn't draw attention to himself, he could live here indefinitely. As of today, he was even a married man. Children would undoubtedly follow. He smiled to himself. And as he was now married to a Canadian, Canadian citizenship would surely be that much easier to acquire.

A second email followed almost immediately, and his smile faded. He will kill us.

He felt a cold finger run down his spine.

Would Isa kill Yussuf for Yaqub's defection?

He thought of Isa then, a tall man with neat habits and a perpetually stern expression that made him appear much older than he was, livened only occasionally by a charming smile that Yaqub privately thought Isa should make a lot more use of.

Isa's sense of purpose was unmistakable and persuasive, almost hypnotically so. His loyalty to Islam was on the face of it without question, although Yaqub did wonder now and then if Isa wasn't a little less fanatical than your average Islamic freedom fighter.

He did not, however, doubt Isa's single-minded determination to accomplish his goals. He decided, regretfully, that Isa would kill Yussuf, thinking that where one was tainted by betrayal, both would be. Isa didn't like witnesses. Yaqub remembered very well how Isa had dealt with Basil back in Düsseldorf.

Yaqub and Yussuf had separated after they left Isa and Basil in the flight from the mob. In his panic he had taken a wrong turn and chance had found him on their heels. He would never forget the speed and strength the older man had shown in tripping Basil and throwing him in front of the mob. Yaqub himself had gone into an instinctive retreat, backpedaling around a corner and fleeing down a convenient alley. He had never told Yussuf what he had seen, but his awe at the display of murderous efficiency was what had tipped the balance in him following Yussuf into service with Isa.

It never occurred to him to wonder, then or after, why Basil had been disposed of in such ruthless fashion.

At present he was focused firmly on the matter at hand. If he had no doubt of Isa's reaction, the question then became, was Yussuf friend enough that Yaqub would sacrifice his newfound sense of contentment to save Yussuf's life?

He was still arguing with himself as he walked into the airport the following Monday morning. They always flew on Monday mornings, Isa's dictum holding that they were less likely to stand out in the crush of back-to-work business travelers. He had checked in online from his home computer-he gave a wistful thought to Brittany waking alone in their bed that afternoon, warm and sleepy and reaching for him-and checked his one bag. This also according to Isa, that people who checked bags were less an item of interest to the ponderous and so easily circumvented security roadblock the Far Enemy had thrown up against incoming travelers.

He smiled at the woman behind the counter and handed her his boarding pass. She was twice his age but that didn't stop him from running an admiring gaze over her. She scanned the bar code and returned a rather stiff smile before fastening a tag to his bag and putting it on the conveyor belt. She stapled the claim check to his boarding pass and handed it back. "Thank you," he said warmly, but she was unresponsive. Evidently not a morning person. He turned away, not seeing the man behind the counter who plucked his bag from the belt before it disappeared.

As he reached the line snaking out of the security checkpoint, someone tapped his shoulder. "Mr. Maysara?"

He turned to see a nondescript man in a tired three-piece suit smiling at him. "Yes?" he said, unalarmed. Perhaps he had left his passport behind.

"May I ask you please to follow me?"

Afterward he wondered why he had. The mild-mannered man in the unremarkable suit with the receding hairline and the belly going slightly to paunch had seemed so inoffensive, so little a threat. There was, too, something in the way he turned immediately after making his request, not once looking over his shoulder, as if he had never a doubt of Yaqub following him when he asked him to.

Whatever the reason, Yaqub followed him. It was done so quietly that barely a head in the crowd turned to watch them go through a gray door whose outline was almost indistinguishable from the gray wall that surrounded it. It led into a small gray room with another door. The man opened it and motioned Yaqub inside with a hand he then used to stifle a yawn.

"What's this about?" Yaqub said, finally asking the question, but he stepped obediently through the door.

A hand covered his mouth and he saw a confusing blur of motion from several unidentified people. There was a sharp sting in the side of his neck. He felt hands around his ankles, he was suddenly horizontal and in motion, and he plummeted down, down, down into a deep, dark well, absent sight and sound and sense.

HOUSTON

"Do you think it was deliberate?"

"What?" Kenai said. "Oh. Do you mean was the Arabian Knight planning to incite an international religious riot from the International Space Station?" She paused to consider. "I don't think so. But then I don't know him very well."

"None of us do," Rick said. "It's a problem."

They were still worried about the remarks the Arabian Knight might make when he broadcast from the shuttle. None of them spoke Arabic. "Then he speaks in English only," Kenai said. "One of us stands by the on-air switch and flips it if he shifts into Arabic."

Joel consulted the ever-present clipboard, a ruse because there was no way he could have anything on it pertaining to this discussion. Wisely, he said nothing.

Rick looked at Kenai. "You say you don't think he meant any harm. Why not?"

Kenai shrugged. "Like I said, I don't know him very well, but he just doesn't have the smell of fanatic to me. He's an arrogant, self-righteous little prick with delusions of grandeur, but I don't think he'd ever put himself in danger. He likes the high life way too much, and while he's really looking forward to being on orbit, he's looking forward even more to coming back and bragging about being a bona fide astronaut. What a shuttle ride means most to the Arabian Knight is an upgrade in arm candy, from Paris Hilton to, I don't know, Princess Stephanie."

"That's an upgrade?" Laurel said.

"Whatever." Kenai was impatient, wanting to get back to work, and not a little incredulous that this was still even a topic for conversation.

Rick frowned down at his feet. "All right," he said, ignoring Laurel 's muttered comment. "But, Kenai, I want you to demand to see in advance whatever remarks he is preparing to read. Make sure there's nothing even remotely incendiary in them."

"I thought you already looked at them."

"I did. Now I want you to look at them. Try to time it to be as close to just before we go up as possible."

Kenai nodded. She had no time for this nonsense, none of them did, but she knew better than to argue. "Wilco."

Rick nodded, a quick decisive gesture. "All right." He looked at Joel. "Anything else?" The set of his mouth indicated that there probably shouldn't be.

Joel shook his head.

"Good. Let's get back to work." Rick straightened up and walked out of the room.

Mike stood up. "Well," he said.

Kenai interrupted him with one hand held up, palm out.

The door opened and Rick stuck his head back in. "I'll take a look at the Arabian Knight's scripts again, too, Kenai."

"You bet," Kenai said. "Just in case," Rick said. "You bet," Kenai said again. Rick nodded and withdrew.

With a sigh, Bill said, "Why he's commander, I guess." Laurel looked at Joel. "Just how bad do we need to launch this frickin' satellite, anyway?"

Only she didn't say frickin'.

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA

"He woke up on the C-12," Patrick told Kallendorf on the phone. "He shouted a bunch of questions, in the worst English accent you've ever heard, and in German. We didn't answer him."

Kallendorf was impatient. "You didn't feed him, you didn't water him, you let him pee and shit where he sat. SOP, Patrick, I get it. What's he saying?"

"It's only been a day and a half, sir. We haven't even gotten him to admit to his own name yet. We have to be patient."

"Patient, my ass!" Kallendorf said.

The bellow was clearly audible all the way across the room. Bob and Mary pretended not to hear. Ahmed, clearly enjoying himself, made a fist and pretended to jerk off, rolling his eyes and letting his tongue loll out of his mouth.

"Isa's got a timetable, Patrick, which means our clock is ticking, too. You make that little son of a bitch squeal like Ned Beatty in Deliverance or you tell him I'll be down there myself to bite his nuts off with my teeth!"

Kallendorf slammed the phone down. His ears ringing slightly, Patrick replaced the receiver and heaved a relieved sigh. It could have been a lot worse.

Ahmed grinned at him. Bob, a short, hairless man with bulging biceps, looked at the ceiling. Mary, even shorter and thin almost to the point of emaciation, looked at the floor.

Robert Shadura was an ex-Ranger who had seen action under fire from Panama to Beruit to Afghanistan. When he had to retire, he'd settled in New York and done consulting work with an international security agency that specialized in the return of kidnapped American businessmen, which subsidized his basement flat on the Upper West Side. He entertained no leftover angst from any of the wars he had fought in, had no drinking habit, no family, and his only sin was a lust for Harley hogs, three of which were parked in a rented garage off Canal Street and one of which was an antique, a 1912 8XE V-Twin Legend, lovingly restored, that was worth over a hundred grand. He wouldn't have taken a million for it.

He was also a gifted actor. In the South Side Players, the amateur theatrical group to which he belonged, he was famous for his portrayal of Macbeth in the Scots play, and he doubled as choreographer for all the fight scenes in all the plays the South Side Players produced. He looked thirty-five, was actually fifty-two, and dated an unending series of beautiful actresses. All such relationships ended amicably, and one so blessed had been known to say in an awed, grateful voice, "I never met a man with such control!"

On occasion, at the behest of his country, Bob left the Harleys and the actresses behind for short periods of time when he allowed himself to be called back into service as an interrogator, a skill he had perfected in Iraq.

"Before we were so rudely interrupted," Patrick said. "You were saying?"

Bob, one of those admirable underlings with no interest, prurient or otherwise, in the doings of his superiors, resumed his narrative without so much as a blink. "He says he was going to Mexico on vacation. He says he never heard of Isa. He says he's a German national, he is innocent of any wrongdoing, and he demands to see his consul."

"How does he explain the forged Canadian passport in the name of Baghel Maysara?"

"He doesn't."

"He doesn't yet," Mary said, her voice as wispy as her appearance.

Mary Maria Santangelo weighed about a quarter of what Bob did, who was at least twice her age, and the closest she'd ever come to the armed services was an ROTC troop drilling on the Harvard quad when her date walked her home to her dorm on the Radcliffe campus. She looked like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Persephone stepped down from the frame, only rather less well-nourished. A massive quantity of black hair was bundled back in a ponytail so heavy it looked as if it should bend her slender neck backwards from the sheer weight of it all.

Mary was a history major, with a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies. She had an eidetic memory and to the distinct disapprobation of his superiors Ahmed had made Mary free of the CIA files on terrorism. With her training in history she was able to digest massive quantities of data to place people into a proper context and events into a proper chronology. The result was an eerie ability to pull the one tiny nugget of information necessary to nudge an interrogatee over the edge from intransigence to cooperation. There were times when it seemed she could read people's minds. She'd been called a witch, and more than one detainee had made the sign to warn off evil in her presence.

She and Bob had two things in common: an unparalleled ability to elicit information from unwilling witnesses, and a long list of lovers.

Make that three. They both liked women.

Mary was also an intuitive chameleon, with the ability to become whatever the detainee wanted at the moment of his greatest need.

They worked extremely well together, bringing in results where other gator teams threw up their hands and walked away. When Ahmed had asked Patrick who he wanted for gators, Patrick's answer had been instantaneous. "Bob and Mary."

Ahmed had looked and felt doubtful. "They can be a little volatile."

"They can be spontaneously combustible," Patrick had said. "But we want results fast, and we want lethal information, right?

Intel that produced the death of a known terrorist. "Yes," Ahmed said, "we want lethal information."

"Bob and Mary are the best interrogators in the business. They trained half the people in Task Force 145. They'll get it done."

"You want him to get the full treatment?"

"Everything," Patrick said. "I want this guy scared. I want him thinking Abu Ghraib's still in business, and that he's got a front-row cell reserved just for him. I want him thinking we're sending him to Egypt or Romania for questioning if he doesn't talk to us in Gitmo. I want him scared shitless, Ahmed."

Looking at them now, Patrick saw nothing inherently terrifying in either Bob or Mary. Well, between the biceps and the tattoos, he might have been afraid of Bob if he'd bumped into him outside a biker bar. Mary, an ethereal waif with large, dark, tip-tilted eyes that looked always on the verge of tears, not to mention bony hips that looked always on the verge of slipping out of her inevitable low-rider jeans, didn't look strong enough to swat a fly, let alone scare the shit out of a hardened terrorist.

But they were the best. "We don't have a lot of time, folks," he said.

Bob and Mary exchanged an expressionless look. "How did you pick him up?"

"Idiot used his own name on an email. One of our guys was running a new program on a random e-comm search. I'd just sent out the BOTLF on our friend here, and his pal Yussuf, and their boss Isa. The guy inputs the names and runs the search, which-okay, this is as much as I understand. This program has the ability to search for hot-button words on the Internet, words like 'bin Laden' and 'al Qaeda' and-"

"'Isa,"'Ahmed said.

"Yes, and 'Isa,' and this program can also trace them back to their originating server. Always supposing they aren't smart enough to route it through a couple of other servers to mess up the data trail."

"And he wasn't smart enough."

"He's been keeping his head down for six months. I think the serenity of his existence might have led him to believe that he was invisible."

"Ah," Bob said, "one of those." He smiled at Mary. "Ladies first?"

She looked at Patrick. "You want us to jack him up?"

Patrick shook his head. "There's nothing more worthless than information received through torture."

"Drugs, then?"

"I'm not crazy about drugs, either, you never know if you're going to get good intel or a regression to the time his father spanked him for picking on the girl next door."

"What, then?" Mary said.

"We've got people asking questions in Toronto, and we've got some intel from Germany. It all says Yaqub Sadiq likes women. No," he said, correcting himself. "Sadiq loves women. We think one of the reasons he may have joined up with Isa is that he'd been screwing somebody's wife and the husband found out. You can get killed for that if you're Islamic."

Mary's brow puckered, which was a pity, because it was a broad, alabaster brow. "What was his name? The husband's?"

Patrick called up the file on his Blackberry. "Rashid Nurzai."

Something that might have been a smile crossed her face and was gone. "Is Nurzai Afghani?"

"I don't know." Patrick hadn't seen any need to check. "The file doesn't say." Beneath her considering gaze, he felt the need to redeem himself. "Sadiq was born in Germany. Of Lebanese immigrants."

She nodded once, a crisp gesture that seemed somehow out of character. But, Patrick realized for the first time, she could have tailored her appearance deliberately to lull a detainee into a sense of false security. "Follow my lead," she told Bob.

She didn't wait for permission or agreement, she left the room. Patrick got up and walked to the pane of one-way glass set into the wall, and felt Bob and Ahmed come to stand behind him.

Sadiq was handcuffed to a metal chair in an otherwise bare room. A pool of urine under the chair gleamed wetly in the room's one bright ceiling light. "Those the same clothes he was wearing when we nabbed him?" Patrick said.

"When we took him into custody, you mean?" Ahmed said austerely, and spoiled the effect by grinning. "Yeah."

"He must smell pretty ripe by now."

"Yeah," Bob said laconically. "Probably time to let him clean up. After a while they stop smelling themselves, so it's less of an incentive to talk. Better to clean him up and let him shit and smell himself again; more motivation."

"What's taking her so long?" Patrick said, the urgency he felt gnawing at him like a sharp set of teeth. Even more so now, he had the awful feeling of a clock ticking down in the background. The longer Akil stayed out of sight, the more afraid Patrick was of what he would do when he eventually regained the spotlight. Maybe it was a condition of being a spy but more than any other single thing Patrick Chisum hated and feared not knowing what was going on. When you had no knowledge of the horrors in store there was no way to stop them or, worst case, prepare for them. Ignorance was not bliss. Innocent people, hundreds of them, thousands, could die if he remained ignorant of Isa's plans. "Oh," he said, relieved, "here she is."

The door opened a crack. Mary peeped inside. She waited until Sadiq's head came up to see who was there. "Oh," she said, her voice a nice blend of nerves and compassion. "Oh, you look just awful." She slipped inside, took a quick look into the hall, and shut the door with exaggerated stealth. "You poor thing. I brought you some water."

She carried a glass of water in both hands like a supplicant. "Is she tiptoeing?" Ahmed said in a faint voice.

Bob said proudly, "She is in fact tiptoeing."

Mary held the glass to Sadiq's mouth, one comforting hand on his shoulder. He drank greedily, some of the water spilling down his neck. Mary made a distressed sound and used the tail of her shirt to dry him off, not forgetting to give Sadiq a flash of midriff.

"Oh, please," Ahmed said with dismay. "A honey trap? You cannot believe for one moment that that's going to work."

The corner of Bob's mouth quirked up. Patrick said nothing. He'd chosen his people, the best at what they did. Now all he could do was step back and let them go to work. Still, he was taut and tense as a violin string, vibrating at the lightest touch, the balls of his feet digging into the floor. Come on, he said silently, come on.

Inside the interrogation room, in the middle of mopping up Sadiq, Mary pretended to hear something in the hallway. "Oh, no! I have to go!" She bent down to look earnestly into Sadiq's eyes. "I'm so sorry about all this, Mr. Sadiq. They're so mean to you men, and it seems to go on forever. I'll get back when I can, I promise." She gave his shoulder another consoling pat and tiptoed out.

"My cue," Bob said, and left the room.

Barely had the door to the interrogation room closed behind Mary when Bob kicked it open again, his head pushed forward aggressively, his eyes full of contempt. He walked over to Sadiq and without preamble balled one hand into a fist and hit Sadiq in the face, hard enough to knock his chair over. The chair with Sadiq still handcuffed to it slid across the floor until Sadiq's head hit the wall with a thump clearly audible to the two men on the other side of the glass.

Bob walked across the room and kicked him in the ribs. He looked down at Sadiq and smiled.

Sadiq groaned and coughed up blood and phlegm. There might also have been a tooth, but from behind the mirror Patrick couldn't tell for sure.

"Plenty more where that came from, friend," Bob said to Sadiq. "Where's Isa?"

Sadiq groaned again and tried to curl into a fetal position.

Bob shrugged. "Okay by me. I can keep this up all night." It was ten a.m. but part of the disorientation process was to divorce the detainee from real time. "No one will stop me. You're here until I say you can go." He leaned down and said into Sadiq's ear, "And I can do anything I want to." He straightened and reached for his belt buckle.

Sadiq's eyes went wide and his body bowed, heaving and struggling so violently the chair scraped a foot across the floor, his wrists straining against the handcuffs.

Bob laughed. His hand went to his fly.

"Jesus," Ahmed said.

Talk, you little fucker, Patrick thought.

The door to the room opened and Mary, looking frightened but determined, poked her head inside. "Mr. Crenshaw?"

Bob snarled. "What the fuck do you want?"

Her voice trembling, Mary said faintly, "I'm sorry, but Mr. Casawba wants a word."

Bob stormed past her into the hallway, refastening his belt and shoving her into the wall with a loud thud as he passed. The door slammed shut behind him.

"Oh," she said in a hurt voice. She pulled away from the wall, hand to her injured shoulder, and crept across the room. "Oh, what did he do to you?"

"Please," Sadiq said, coughing again. "Please help me."

Mary looked on the verge of tears. "I don't know what I can do." She blinked rapidly and said with brave determination, "Let's get you back up." With much heaving and struggling, she managed to right Sadiq and his chair. More ineffectual dabbing with her shirttail at the blood on his mouth, pretty concern over the lost tooth, and all the while Sadiq was saying in desperation, "Please, I don't know anything, I don't know why I'm here, please help me, please, get me out of here!"

Mary did cry then, actual tears, Patrick could see them distinctly, sliding down her cheeks. She was one of those women who looked good in tears, too, her nose didn't run and her eyes didn't redden. She knelt at Sadiq's side, the end of the heavy tail of black hair almost touching the floor, and held one of his hands below the handcuff, patting it ineffectually. "I can't do anything," she said, swallowing a sob. "I'm just a clerk. Bob-" She shuddered and cast a hunted look over her shoulder. "He's the lead interrogator here. He can do anything." She looked back at Sadiq. "Anything," she repeated, her lower lip trembling.

Sadiq swallowed hard, his horrified gaze fixed on Mary's haunted face. Even to Patrick, this seemed the essence of melodrama, overkill in a major key, any self-respecting detainee would laugh Mary out of the room. Surely Sadiq would see this, would catch on to what they were doing, would reject their attempts with the contempt they deserved.

But Yaqub Sadiq was a novice terrorist, barely a year out of his middle-class cradle. Ahmed was right, Isa was operating outside al Qaeda and thus had no access to the culling process of the organization's usual thorough and ruthless recruiting practices. He'd been reduced to finding his own people, which, Patrick suddenly realized, must mean that he was in a hurry. Why?

He looked through the glass at the handcuffed man, hovered over by the waif with the ponytail. This was not the usual experienced, hard-shelled detainee. Yaqub Sadiq had been abducted and drugged and had woken up handcuffed to a chair in an anonymous room with no idea of where he was or what day it was. His captors had not identified themselves but Sadiq had to know they were American and Isa's sworn enemies. If not American, then they were at the very least American allies and at the very worst contract interrogators in friendly states with no constitutional guarantees of due process and no qualms about torture. They'd withheld food and water until his stomach was one big growl and his tongue was swollen in his mouth, and they'd refused him access to a toilet so that he was forced to sit in his own piss and shit.

From the intel gleaned in Germany Patrick had seen photos of Rashid Nurzai, a very fierce-looking gentleman who looked ready to compete in the shot put in the next Olympics. He was surprised that Nurzai had only made an anonymous call, if he had. From that photograph Patrick would have expected Nurzai to take more direct action in a matter involving his wife. Patrick would have run from that himself.

The intel still coming in from ongoing interrogations in Toronto confirmed that initial impression. Sadiq's new wife, in a tearful accounting of their life together, stressed his loving nature. So did all the other women with whom he'd had significant encounters over the past six months. His boss spoke highly of him at work, his neighbors praised his friendliness and willingness to pitch in on communal chores. A few of them were a little snide about the parade of women in and out of the apartment and it would have been only a matter of time before his wife got to hear of it, but on the whole a good report was given by most of the people who knew him. They were certainly to a man and a woman shocked to hear that he was a terrorist-in-waiting.

But not a career terrorist. He'd never been arrested before, never been interrogated before. An amateur, in fact, with the barest veneer of trade-craft and no detectable inclination toward fanaticism. Patrick frowned through the glass at Sadiq, now sobbing with his face buried in Mary's breast, a Mary who winked at them over Sadiq's head. Next to him, Bob chuckled. "This isn't going to take much longer."

Patrick was inclined to agree with him. Sadiq was an amateur, a terrorist of opportunity even, joining Isa as a way out of personal difficulties at home, with a natural inclination toward women curbed by a Muslim upbringing, and then sprung on an unsuspecting Western world. He was just settling into his new lifestyle when they had kidnapped him.

On the other hand, he had been apprehended at Pearson International, waiting to board a flight to Mexico City. No one among his Toronto acquaintances, including his wife, had been aware of his travel plans. This argued either dedication to duty or fear of Isa. Probably the latter.

"Come on," he said, out loud this time, "come on, you little bastard, give it up."

"Relax, Patrick-"

"Don't tell me to relax," he snapped. "That little fucker's the only lead we've got to a man who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people all over the goddamn Asian continent! A terrorist who is now walking around the United States like it's his own backyard! How many Americans stirring half-and-half into their morning coffee or taking the bus to work or running their kids to school right now, right this minute somewhere in Dallas or Atlanta or San Francisco, how many is this little prick's boss planning on killing? Don't tell me to relax, Ahmed. I'll relax when that monster is dead on the ground in front of me and not before."

Surprised, Ahmed maintained a prudent silence. Patrick Chisum, the king of calm, was not known for outbursts of any kind. For a moment there, he had sounded a little bit like Harold Kallendorf.

Meanwhile, Mary was mopping the tears from Sadiq's face, and holding her scrap of lacy handkerchief-where on earth had she come up with that?-so he could blow his nose. "I wish I could help you," she said, her breath catching. "But I can't, I just can't."

She pushed him back in his chair and looked up earnestly into his face. "He'll hurt me," she said, her voice breaking. She squeezed out another tear. Her head drooped. "He's done it before. He can do anything. Anything." Her voice broke again on the word.

She looked up at Sadiq and shook his shoulder. "Tell him what he wants to know," she said urgently. "Tell him!"

"I don't know anything!" Sadiq said, his voice panicked.

She sat back on her heels. "Then I don't know what to say to you," she said sadly. "Unless…"

"Unless what?" When she didn't say anything, Sadiq said, bending forward as far as the cuffs would let him, "Tell me! Unless what?"

"There may be another way." She bit her lip. "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but…"

"What? Tell me what? Please, please help me!"

Mary looked over her shoulder at the closed door. "Is it true you're from Germany?"

"Yes, yes, I'm a German national! I want to contact my embassy!"

Mary looked uncertain. "I think they already have."

Sadiq looked confused. "What?"

"It's why Bob is so angry," she said, eyes huge wells of sympathy. "He might have to let you go before…" She made a vague, all-encompassing gesture, and they shuddered in unison. "You'd be sent back to… is it Düsseldorf? There's a man there, a Rashid Somebody?"

Sadiq froze, like a deer in the headlights. "Rashid Nurzai?"

"Yes!" Mary said excitedly. "That's him! He's vouched for you, says the government can release you into his custody to wait for the investigation. At least you'll be home. You'll be protected by the laws of your own nation." She sat back on her heels. "You can tell Bob you know that your embassy is looking for you. You can demand repatriation." She beamed at him. "He can't touch you once you're on your way home, and you're on your way home from the moment your embassy knows you're being detained."

He stared at her for a moment. Patrick held his breath. "Come on," he said, "come on, talk. Talk!"

Bob slammed back into the interrogation room-Patrick hadn't even noticed he had left the observation room-and snarled, yes, an actual baring of teeth, followed by the utterance of a loud, menacing growl that sounded like nothing so much as an infuriated and very hungry tiger. Sadiq actually cowered.

Mary leapt to her feet. "I-I was just-"

"Get out," Bob said.

Mary cast a scared glance at Sadiq and scurried out, giving Bob a wide berth.

Bob started toward Sadiq and Sadiq started to tremble. "Please-" he said, stammering. "Please, don't, I'll-"

"Shut the fuck up," Bob said, disgusted. "Jesus, if there's one thing I can't abide it's a sniveler. You're going home, asswipe." He unlocked the handcuffs and hauled Sadiq to his feet.

"Wait-" Sadiq said.

"What, you want to stay? You've had such a good time you want more? What are you, some kind of sicko?"

"No! I mean, wait! I mean-" Sadiq's feet scrabbled for purchase on the cement floor.

But Bob had him firmly in tow. "I can't see what a self-respecting freedom fighter like Isa saw in you anyway. What a waste of space. Still, there's someone back home who'll vouch for you, so you must be worth something to someone."

"Wait!"

"Oooh, nice little rent boy likes it rough, is that it?" Bob said, and gave Sadiq a shake, hard enough to rattle his teeth. He got him nose to nose and said, his voice a deep purr, "I'd love to have the schooling of you, pretty boy. Too bad."

He got Sadiq to the door and Sadiq, by a superhuman effort, managed to get his feet flat against the wall on either side of it. "Wait!" he said, almost screaming the words. "I'll talk! I'll tell you anything you want to know! Don't send me home! Please don't send me home! He'll kill me! He'll kill me!"

THE INTERROGATION HAD TAKEN LESS THAN TWO HOURS. SADIQ WAS even now babbling every detail, from his first meeting with Isa at the coffeehouse to packing his bag yesterday morning, into the interested microphones of three recording devices and two even more interested agents.

"How the hell did you know that would break him?" Patrick said. He and Ahmed were waiting for transportation to the Gitmo airfield.

Mary smiled. "Nurzai is an Afghan name. Afghans treat adultery as a capital crime, and the longer and more painful the death of those found guilty, the better. It was a calculated risk."

"But not that much of a risk," Bob said, looking very relaxed. "He's not what I'd call a pro."

"No kidding," Patrick said. "Well done."

"Wait until we see what we get," Ahmed said.

"You're very cautious."

"Sadiq's a weak vessel," Ahmed said. "If I were Isa, I wouldn't have told him anything worth knowing."

If it wasn't anything Patrick in all his urgency to find and stop Isa wanted to hear, he knew deep down that it was true.

HUGH RINCON ECHOED AHMEd's WORDS WHEN PATRICK, BACK IN HIS office the next morning, called to fill him in. "It's one of the reasons you haven't been able to catch the bastard," Hugh said. "He's one of the few terrorists capable of keeping his own counsel. He really understands need to know. He lives by it. He survives by it."

"Yeah, well, anything, any detail we get from Sadiq, is more than we have now. Did you get anything off the bag Isa left at the hotel?"

"Negative. It was all Bayzani's stuff. Got some hairs, so you'll have a decent DNA sample when you need to ID the body."

"I like your optimism."

"He's in a hurry and he's making mistakes," Hugh said. "He's made two big juicy ones in the past year. All we have to do is catch him making his third."

16

MIAMI

Zahirah wasn't especially pretty, but she had an air of dignity that sat quaintly on her young shoulders and she was by no means unintelligent. He liked to think that she was what Adara would have become, if Adara had lived.

She smiled at him across the dinner table. He smiled back. Mrs. Man-sour pretended not to notice, handing round the bread and olives in a businesslike fashion. They served themselves heaping spoons of rice and lamb stew and began to eat.

He was a little preoccupied this evening. Yussuf had emailed from Mexico City, and had reported all his cell members present and accounted for.

Yaqub had yet to make contact.

He was at present a day late. Yussuf had written to one of Akil's email drops, saying that he had not heard from him, either. In one way, Akil was pleased that the two young men had not broken protocol by contacting each other. They'd grown up together, were childhood friends. As a matter of natural human reaction he would have thought one of them would have broken the rules at least once, in spite of the strict injunctions against it he had laid on them. In the alien worlds to which they had been exiled, they could have been expected, even forgiven for having reached out for contact with the one familiar face left to them.

Irritatingly, this had not proved the case.

So Yussuf claimed.

Akil wasn't entirely certain he believed Yussuf, but absent a face-to-face confrontation he couldn't be sure. The Internet had certainly proved an excellent administrative tool, but like every other tool, it had its drawbacks.

He himself was leaving for Mexico City the next day.

"You are very quiet this evening, Mr. Sadat," Zahirah said.

He looked up to see her eyes twinkling in an otherwise solemn face. They had long since become Zahirah and Daoud in private. He doubted very much that they were putting anything over on her mother, but he went along with the subterfuge, refusing to admit to himself that he was enjoying it as much as she was.

They had grown inexplicably but undeniably closer over the past six months. Things had reached a head when she'd caught him checking his email when he should have been watching the movie with her and her mother. She'd accepted his explanation of finding the movie a bore but not wishing to spoil their enjoyment of the evening. They had agreed to tell her mother nothing, and this small deception had led to others. Before long, they were arranging expeditions of their own. They were all innocent enough, an art exhibit, a visit to a museum, a lecture at her university, but the fact that her mother knew nothing about them and did not accompany them as chaperone told its own tale.

At first he told himself it was only to distract her, but it wasn't long before he had to acknowledge the truth.

He'd never had a girlfriend before.

In spite of the judgment of his village council, in spite of the punishment inflicted on Adara for his supposed crime, he had never slept with Husn.

Husn kept house for the UNICEF representative in their small market town. As the only English speaker in the village, upon his return home he had been designated the local UNICEF contact. He and Husn had met for the first time at the Gilberts' home.

Looking back, it hadn't seemed that momentous an occasion, the event that would change all their lives so radically. Mrs. Gilbert had been teaching Husn English, and letting her spend an hour of each workday reading through the Englishwoman's collection of Mills & Boon romance novels, which increased her comprehension, if not her vocabulary. "Is love in the West really like this?" she had asked him shyly, holding out one of the books.

"I don't know," he had said, feathering the pages. "All I did was study. All I wanted was to complete my degree and get back home again."

"Were there female students at your college?"

"Yes, many, in some classes more than half."

"Do they wear the hijab?"

"No."

She was entranced by the thought of a country where she could walk down the street with the sun on her face. More questions followed. He started to bring in his textbooks, history and political science and even algebra. She devoured them all, and pelted him with questions that taxed his learning to the utmost.

He would have been lying if he had said he hadn't been attracted to her. Of course he was. She was beautiful, with dark-lashed eyes, luminous skin, and a skein of silken black hair with intriguing bronze highlights, the mere presence of which was in itself exciting because he was unaccustomed to seeing anyone other than his mother and his sister without the hijab. He had avoided contact with the women in his classes in Boston, shocked at their free ways and even more so by the display of skin. His four years had been spent buried in his books, and he had been in such a hurry to get home he hadn't even waited for the graduation exercises, arranging for his diploma to be mailed to him and flying out the evening of his last examination.

He never learned if Husn had been attracted to him. He had always been careful never to so much as touch her hand. When he gave her a book, he held it out by one corner, and she took it by the opposite corner, standing far enough apart so that their arms had to stretch to reach. Conversation took place always in the kitchen or the sitting room, with him on one side of it and her on the other. Mrs. Gilbert, who had not taken well to the Muslim life, and who had made no secret of her contempt for the way the women in it were treated, seemed to believe she was conniving at a romance and took advantage of every opportunity to leave them alone.

Of course they had been caught, if caught was the right word. The cook had walked in one day when Husn was reading something out loud in English. The cook must have gone straight to her husband, who had in turn gone to Husn's husband.

And a week later they had come for him, and for Adara.

He looked across at Zahirah. Her father had wanted her to be raised a good Muslim woman, but he had wanted her to be more than that. She was educated, independent, bare of head and face. She would wither and die in a place like his village. She would be stoned to death in a day in a place like Afghanistan.

She gave him a questioning look. He returned a slight, unrevealing smile and bent again over his plate.

Later that evening there was a soft knock at his door. He hesitated before getting up to answer it, fully intending to plead tiredness as an excuse not to admit her.

But it wasn't Zahirah, it was her mother.

"Mrs. Mansour," he said, startled.

"Mr. Sadat," she said. She looked grave. "May I speak with you?"

"Of course." He stood aside to let her in.

She came in and stood, her hands folded primly in front of her, and waited until he closed the door. "Forgive me for being so blunt, Mr. Sadat, but it has not escaped my notice that you and my daughter have become very close."

So much for subterfuge. He bent his head in wary acknowledgment, and perhaps a little in apology, too.

She took a deep breath. She looked nervous but determined. "I am very sorry, but I am afraid I must ask you to leave this house. You must never return, and you must promise me that you will never seek out my daughter again."

There was a moment of strained silence. "I see," he said at last.

"I'm glad," she said. "I'm sorry if it gives you pain to hear it, Mr. Sadat, but you will not do for my daughter."

He couldn't resist saying, "You're saving her for a rich man?"

Her eyes flashed. "Indeed, sir, I am not. If Allah wills it and a rich man captures her fancy, so be it. It is foolish beyond permission not to imagine that in this world enough money commands an easier life. But she will choose, and my Zahirah does not hanker after riches. She wants the companionship of a like mind, a partner in life. And that you will never be."

Again, he couldn't resist. "And why not?"

"For one thing, you are far too old for her. I will not have Zahirah living out her life caring for an elderly husband, as I did."

She stopped. He prodded her on. "And?"

"And." She gave him a narrow-eyed look. "I don't know why you are here in the United States, Mr. Sadat, or what your purpose is."

He stiffened in shock.

"I only know that you are not who you say you are."

"I-"

She raised a hand. "I don't care to know. You have resided under my roof for six months with a false name and a false identity. You are not Egyptian, Mr. Sadat, and may I say I find your taking of that good man's name in very poor taste. You appear to have had no friends in the area before you arrived, and you appear to have made none during your stay. Your supervisor-did you think when I saw you growing closer to my daughter that I would not inquire?-your supervisor says that while your work is satisfactory you seem merely to be waiting. Waiting for what, Mr. Sadat?"

He opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

She gave a grim nod. "Yes. Well. We Muslims here in the United States of America have had quite enough of that sort of thing. Your kind have generated a constant threat to any of our race and religion who reside here. We don't need you stirring up more trouble."

Again he was able to say nothing.

"I cannot prove anything against you beyond my suspicions, Mr. Sadat," she said, "and it is undoubtedly very unfair of me, but nevertheless I want you gone from my house and my daughter's company by tomorrow morning. Am I understood?"

His mouth a hard line, he said, his voice clipped, "You are."

"Good. Then I have no further need to be here."

She went to the door, waited for him to open it, and swept out. A small part of him was able to admire her style while the rest of him clanged the alarm, even as he moved to pull his case out of the closet and begin packing. What had given him away? How had he betrayed himself to Mrs. Mansour? How could she know he wasn't Egyptian?

He brought himself up short. Would she give him away? Was she even now calling the authorities?

He wasted nearly five minutes thinking about this. No, he decided. If she was going to betray him, she would not have confronted him. She had no proof to offer the authorities anyway, she had said so herself.

He was leaving tomorrow morning, on a ticket purchased with a credit card account that no longer existed. He had planned to come back after he saw the cell off on their mission. Now he would go somewhere else.

Sternly repressing the thought of Zahirah, he filled the small bag with a haphazard collection of clothes, the selection unimportant as it was only to lend him credibility with TSA and would be abandoned upon arrival at his destination.

He finished quickly and cast a glance about the room. His newly opened eyes saw how at home he had become here, that insidious feeling fostering the collection of various knickknacks. The stuffed bear Zahirah had won the day they attended the carnival. The small bookcase filled with books. The poster of the Everglades, bought at the shop the day they had taken the tour. He shook his head, tossed his computer on top of the clothes-there was nothing incriminating on it but it would look odd if he left it behind-and zipped the case closed.

He let himself out the side door and stepped softly down the sidewalk to where an elderly beige Ford four-door sedan was parked. He put the case in the trunk and slid behind the wheel. The engine started without fuss and he pulled away from the curb, willing himself not to look in the rearview mirror.

He parked in the garage at Miami International in the deepest, darkest corner he could find, and killed the engine.

From the backseat came a whisper of sound and he whirled instinctively, throwing his body over the gearshift and thudding into the passenger seat. He launched himself into the backseat in a continuation of the same movement and came down with all the force of a sledgehammer.

"Daoud!" she said, the barest breath of sound left to her after he slammed into her chest, his hands around her throat and squeezing.

"Zahirah!" he said, astonished.

She choked, pulling feebly at his hands, and he loosened them. He sat up and drew a shaky hand through his hair. He tried to collect his scattered thoughts, to regain some semblance of his customary equilibrium. "What are you doing here?" he said, and marveled to hear his voice shake over the words.

She bent over, wheezing as she tried to catch her breath. He couldn't help himself, he patted her back soothingly. "It's all right," he said, "it's all right now. I'm sorry, I didn't know it was you."

She looked up, her breath still coming fast, her eyes frightened. "Why did you attack me like that?"

"I didn't know it was you," he said again, very gently. "I'm sorry. Zahirah, what are you doing here?"

She blushed. He could barely see it in the dim light of the garage. She looked down, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "I-was coming to talk to you. My mother was there before me. I heard what she said to you. When she said you had to leave tomorrow, I knew somehow you would leave tonight. I went out and hid in the back of your car." She waited, head bent, for him to say something. When he didn't she looked up again. "Oh, Daoud, how could she have been so cruel?"

His mind had been racing while she spoke, the thoughts chasing each other like rats in a cage.

"Daoud?" she said timidly. "I want to be with you, and I know you feel the same way." When he didn't respond, only stared at her with a stone face, she said, "Please, Daoud, won't you say something?"

At last his expression broke. A smile of a sort spread across his face. She looked relieved. "That's better," she said with a trace of her old spirit. "For a minute I thought you weren't happy to see me."

"I am always happy to see you, Zahirah," he said.

She blushed again, her love making her deaf to the mournful note in his voice. "I am happy to hear it."

He felt his hands slide of their own accord around her waist. His head bent to hers, and she raised her face eagerly to meet his lips in their first kiss. Her lips were warm and wide and smooth, and he thought that in another life he might have been able to lose himself in them forever.

He deepened it, pulling her to him so that her breasts pressed into his chest. The soft curves were so warm and full against him, he'd never felt anything like it. He stretched out backwards so that she lay full length against him and her legs naturally fell to either side, so that the feminine heat of her was pressed full against the erection that had suddenly and inexplicably manifested itself.

"Oh!" she said, raising her head to stare down at him.

He pulled her back down into another kiss. He didn't want to talk.

She was as virgin as he was. There was a breathless bit of fumbling with unfamiliar fastenings and undergarments, a matter of deciding what went where, but they managed. He was trembling with the need to be inside her but he forced himself to wait, to play with her gently until she was slippery with desire. She stiffened at the sharp pain of his entry and he summoned up all his willpower to hold himself still, letting her become accustomed to him before he began moving again. When he did he moved very slowly, in and out, going as deeply as he could on the down-stroke, pulling out almost all the way, continuing so until he felt her hands on his back pulling him down. He began to move faster, and she pushed up to meet him, gasping, eyes staring blindly up. When her climax came she squeezed around him, milking him, sucking on him, and his own end came with a shout he muffled in the musty fabric of the seat next to her head.

"Oh," she said some moments later. "Oh, Daoud. I didn't know it could be like that."

He raised his head and slid his hands to her throat, his thumbs caressing the hollow beneath her chin. He was still inside her, his wetness and her own such a warm haven. She kissed him, with a tenderness that brought tears to his eyes. "I didn't, either," he said.

Her neck-such a slender, fragile stem-broke easily when he twisted it. The cracking vertebrae sounded like distant gunfire.

17

MIAMI

Back in port, Cal turned everyone loose, which since they were only temporarily homeported in Miami didn't mean much. They all knew working the shuttle launch was more of a PR mission than it was a real job, and crew was bailing right, left, and center. D7 was keeping Munro in bravo-24 status, available for recall and sailing within twenty-four hours in the event of urgent tasking, but when the "Liberty, liberty, liberty!" call went out over the pipe most of the crew scattered to cheap motels and holed up for three days, leaving a skeleton crew just large enough to respond to an emergency behind. Cal hoped they managed to stay out of trouble when they started checking out the bars. He remembered some pretty wild times as an ensign in Miami, assigned to a 110 off the Everglades. Lots of opportunity for a Coastie to get into trouble if he or she wasn't careful, but these were grown men and women and it was pretty much up to them. The XO cautioned them against sailing into stupidland and turned them loose.

It was a great honor to work security during a shuttle launch, no doubt, but the crew was homesick, discouraged that people had died during their last patrol and they had been unable to save them, and that they hadn't responded to any SARS or made any drug busts on this one. "I guess all the smugglers have up and moved ops to EPAC," the XO said, inspecting the map of the Caribbean Cal had duct-taped over the map of Alaska in the wardroom. He looked around and smiled. "Damn, we're good."

"Yeah," Cal said, without enthusiasm. "How many left on board as of liberty this morning?"

"Forty-four."

"Okay."

"You taking off?"

Cal thought about Kenai in Houston. "I don't know yet. Probably not."

"When do we leave?"

"Three days."

"The thirtieth? Why so early? Won't take us a day to get up there."

"Oh, uh, let me think. Because we're Munro, short for Douglas Munro? The only Coastie recipient of the Medal of Honor, in whose honor you will recall we are named? Related to Kenai Munro, a member of this particular shuttle crew?"

"Uh-huh," Taffy said, not without foreboding. "And this means, what, exactly? Sir?"

Cal gave a sour smile. "It means a tiger cruise, only instead of family riding along we get the press and a bunch of NASA honchos. Also Kenai Munro's parents. It means a couple of receptions on shore when we get there, and it means-"

"Dress uniforms," the XO said with a groan.

"There might also," Cal said painfully, "have been mention made of a band."

"Oh, Christ no," the XO said.

"I'm afraid so," Cal said.

"Allah be merciful," Taffy said.

"God could help out a little, too," Cal said.

"If we got the two of them working together, maybe they could scrub the launch," the XO said hopefully.

"Jesus wept, don't even say that," Cal said, blanching at the thought of Kenai's reaction to the suggestion.

He and Taffy adjourned to a great little Thai restaurant they knew from previous inports. Command had selfishly not shared that information with the rest of the crew, so they saw no one they knew. Cal had a beer, Taffy had tea, and they both ordered entrees with four peppers next to them on the menu. "What are we going to do about Riley?"

"Let him go," Taffy said. "OSC told him not to make any decisions based on his domestic affairs, but his wife won't go back to Alaska, and he won't leave her."

"She's not kicking him out?"

"He says not."

"What about Reese?"

"What about her? The investigators say there is no case. Her story lacks credibility, and to be fair, though an acknowledged weasel, no complaints have been made against Riley of a sexual harassment nature until Reese."

"How is she taking it?"

"Philosophically. I don't get the sense that there's a lot of repressed anger there."

"Does she want to come back to the ship?"

"She says yes."

"What does EMO say about her job performance?"

Taffy shrugged, spearing a shrimp. "It's better than what OSC says about Riley's. Says his work product never was that good, and lately it's fallen off in a major way. He's counseled him numerous times, he says, but it looks like the only thing that might get the kid's attention is a bad set of marks."

"So we're looking for another OS," Cal said, sighing. "Been a run on Combat positions this tour." He took a bite of panang gai and made an approving sound. Thai food didn't count unless it made his nose run. "They're probably bored."

"So am I, but it's the job, Captain," Taffy said, draining his tea and signaling for another. "It's what we're tasked with, it's what we're paid for. If you don't like it, you can always resign."

"That does seem to be the currently popular option," Cal said.

The waitress brought the XO more tea, lingering a little for him to try it, evidently to be the recipient of a grateful smile. Cal didn't think he even registered on her peripheral vision. "Taffy?"

"Captain?"

Cal nodded at the tea. "You ever take a drink?"

"Against my religion, sir," Taffy said.

"The Muslim religion," Cal said.

"That's right." The XO bent his head over his plate again. He was a southpaw, and the gold wedding ring gleamed on his hand.

Taffy didn't talk about his private life, and he didn't socialize a great deal. "Were you raised Muslim?"

The XO nodded. "Both parents."

Cal took a bite of spring roll. "I'm curious, and if I step in it let me apologize in advance."

The XO grinned. Across the room the waitress sighed. "Go for it."

"Does your mom wear a veil?"

The XO laughed out loud. "Not hardly. She's an EMT A veil might get in the way."

"So they're pretty modern."

The XO shrugged. "They're Americans. Their religion is important to them-it is to me, too-but they're acculturated. Just not secularized."

"Oh." Cal drank beer. "Wasn't time to ask in New Orleans, but…" He hesitated.

"What?"

Cal gestured at the XO's wedding band. "What happened to your wife? Wait, let me back up a little. For starters, what was her name?"

The XO's face softened. "Nur. Means light.'"

"How'd you meet?"

"At a college mixer for Muslim-American students. I was at the Academy, she was at Harvard."

"Harvard. No kidding. Got my first master's at Harvard."

"I know. She was probably about four years behind you, give or take. We got married the week after my graduation. She got her teacher's certificate and since I'd scored a 110 out of Chesapeake, she went to work for the Arlington School District, teaching civics and government at Patrick Henry High."

Cal winced. "Teenagers. Yikes. A brave woman."

The XO laughed a gain. "Yeah. You should have heard some of her stories. But she loved it, and from what I could see, shuttling back and forth between duty stations, they loved her." The XO paused, mashing rice with the tines of his fork.

Cal waited.

Taffy looked up, not bothering to hide the pain. "She'd never made a secret of her heritage. She used it in some of her classes, even. But then, 9/11 happened."

Cal was suddenly very sorry he'd asked.

"She was leading a small field trip to the Pentagon that day. She got the kids out, and then the building fell on her."

"Jesus," Cal said, putting down his beer. "I'm sorry, Taffy."

"Me, too," the XO said.

"No kids?"

The XO's smile was more a grimace. "We were waiting. Saving up, gonna buy a house, get more settled, a little more secure. You know."

They finished eating in silence.

"Seven years ago this September," Cal said.

"Yeah."

"Nobody else come along in that time?"

The XO shook his head. "She was one of a kind." He shrugged. "You never know, but I'm not looking for lightning to strike me twice."

Back on board that evening, Cal thought about the XO's tragic marriage. One of a kind, he'd called his wife.

Cal liked his life. He saw no reason to change how he lived it, in spite of his parents' infrequent pleas. If anything, his father's wishes in the matter moved Cal in the opposite direction. He supposed it was juvenile of him, but there it was. At least he knew what motivated him, and right at the top of the list was a disinclination to serve as a working trophy for his father.

One of a kind. Kenai was one of a kind.

They'd been seeing a lot of each other over the past eighteen months, or as much as either of their jobs would permit. So far they'd managed to keep it quiet, from their families as well as from the media. Cal harbored no illusions about his own intrinsic worth to what Harlan Ellison had so aptly named the glass teat, but the press was always on the lookout for a juicy astronaut story, and if and when his father found out about them he'd want to use Kenai on campaign tours.

His mother, on the other hand, would be terrified that marriage and- horrors!-grandchildren might be in the offing. So long as Cal didn't reproduce, Vera Beauchamp Schuyler could go on pretending she was on the right side of forty.

He wondered about Kenai's parents, what they were like. She had spoken warmly of both of them, although her father seemed to predominate over any such conversation. An ex-Alaskan Bush pilot, he sounded like a hell of a guy.

Now it was no longer a matter of when he would meet them, or if. They would be watching the launch from the Munro.

He'd shied away from meeting the families of any of his other girlfriends. It had been more than once the rock upon which the relationship had foundered, and frequently in such instances he was accused of being afraid of commitment. In vain did he protest that it was a simple matter of him liking his life as it was and that he saw no need to change it. He didn't convince any of them, but then he didn't try that hard.

The truth was he hadn't cared enough to put in the extra effort. That made him an asshole of the first water, no doubt, but it also made him a free asshole, and in the years following his escape from the mansion on Louisburg Square his freedom had been his most precious possession, the one thing he was determined never to yield, no matter how many broad hints his father gave about founding the greatest political dynasty in Massachusetts since the Kennedys.

So far, Kenai had not offered to introduce him to her parents, nor had she asked to meet his. It worried him sometimes, how easy their relationship had been so far. After a year and a half he remained interested in her, too, which also worried him. He had made an effort, met with varying degrees of success, not to think about what any of that might mean.

He called her that night in Houston. "How's the Arabian Knight?"

"Status quo," she said. "It's his friggin' satellite that's giving us fits now."

"What's wrong?"

"One of the gyroscopes keeps throwing off weird readings during testing."

"A vital piece of the package?"

"Not once it gets into the correct orbit, no. It's supposed to help get it into that orbit, though."

"I thought you just opened the payload bay doors and released it."

"Mostly, yeah, but this is, in fact, rocket science we're talking about here."

He grinned at her mock sarcasm. "I stand corrected."

"Anyway, we fixed it." She yawned. "Man, I'm beat."

"I'll let you go," he said, "but one question."

"What?"

"Do I get to see you before you depart this sphere?" The Munros were coming aboard early and sailing up the coast of Florida with them. When she got back from orbit, Kenai would make a flying trip to Miami to have a Munro family photo taken on the foredeck of Munro, the Medal of Honor banner on the lookout station in the background. Two genuine American heroes, one past, one present, one standing on the deck of a ship named for the one who died in duty above and beyond the call, and a Coastie, no less. It was hard to tell who was closer to orgasm over this PR opportunity, NASA or the U.S. Coast Guard. It was going to be hard to get around the ship without tripping over an admiral in any direction. He said, very casually, "How are we handling that, by the way?"

When she answered, she was no less casual. "We could pretend to be just acquaintances, I suppose."

"I suppose," he said without enthusiasm. "So, any chance for some alone time before this circus puts up its big top?"

"I might be able to sneak off for a couple of hours. Maybe. Possibly. If you can get up to the Cape before we go into crew quarters."

"What are crew quarters?"

"A bunch of trailers. We move in a week before launch date. It's essentially medical quarantine, so the crew doesn't catch anything from a family member or a friend and get sick during the flight. The only people we can see after that is someone checked out by the NASA flight surgeon."

"Oh." Getting checked out by the flight surgeon increased their chances of getting found out by the press.

She yawned again. "Anyway, I'm going to hit the rack." He heard the smile in her voice. "Exercise that paranormal Schuyler ability to find a really nice hotel as close as possible to KSC."

"Aye aye, ma'am," he said, and hung up with a reluctance that would have frightened the living hell out of him, if he'd noticed.

HOUSTON

Kenai had noticed, but she refused to be distracted by it. The Arabian Knight had, among many innate talents ready-made to annoy the astronaut corps, the ability to generate news coverage. A lot of this was driven by the administration, determined to make a show of hands across the sea in spite of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani dead and further in spite of the current saber rattle toward Iran. When asked, given the less than congenial state of affairs that existed between the United States and the world's Muslim nations, if he had any qualms about sending a Qatari national into space, director Milton "Alfred E." Neuman raised surprised eyebrows and said blandly, "Why, no. Should I have?"

The astronauts had some, not least of which was the Arabian Knight's propensity for the spotlight. He was a media magnet. According to the next morning's newspapers, while they were frantically working to recover the ARABSAT-8A's gyro, he was cruising Houston 's hot spots with one of the Disney blondes on his arm. "I can live with a jetsetting playboy," Rick told Kenai. "What I won't live with is someone who won't do their homework. I'm not taking anyone into orbit who doesn't know how to flush the fucking toilet."

Rick Robertson rarely swore, in public or in private. "Yes, sir," Kenai said, and departed at speed. She hunted down the Arabian Knight, who was chatting on his cell phone. She removed it from his hand, ended his call, and tossed it in a nearby trash can, where it landed with a promising thud.

The Arabian Knight erupted, in Arabic.

"Shut up," Kenai said.

He kept talking.

Kenai stepped up and got right into his face. "Shut up," she said, and this time he did. "I'm going to show you how to flush the toilet on the shuttle," she said, "and this time you're going to have the procedure down before you leave, I don't care if we're here all night."

She towed him behind her like a mother towing a recalcitrant child. His face was congested with fury and he spit what sounded like serious insults at her all the way there. They passed many NASA employees who had never seen quite that expression on Kenai's face before but were quick in clearing a path for it, especially when they saw who she had in tow. The Arabian Knight was no longer a shared joke, he was a potential hazard to the successful completion of the mission. In two years they would be retiring the shuttle, they'd already lost two, and no one wanted to lose a third between now and then, especially not due to some arrogant little prick of a part-timer who had been granted a ride-along because his daddy would sign the check to launch the satellite in the cargo bay.

There were over a thousand switches, buttons, and circuit breakers in the shuttle's cockpit, but Kenai often thought it was easier to put the shuttle on orbit than it was to flush its toilet. You had to strap yourself in with thigh clamps to what was essentially a vacuum cleaner and for number two use a sight with crosshairs to zero in on the appropriate orifice. She had planned for a male colleague waiting in the wings to handle this portion of the Arabian Knight's indoctrination into waste management training but she waited until her charge had run through his vocabulary of what she was sure was first-class Arabic invective before calling him in. She had to wear a diaper on orbit herself, so her sympathy was less than sincere, but she stepped out, and then waited for a while before going back in without knocking. More swearing, and the Arabian Knight zipped up with shaking hands and fought his way out of the thigh clamps before storming off.

Kenai raised an eyebrow. "So?"

"He got it. More or less."

"He'd better have, or the first time the Arabian Knight turns a turd loose on the flight deck in zero gee Robertson will put him and the turd into orbit without benefit of spacesuit."

"Any chance you can flush him out with the rest of the urine?"

"I wish."

There was a far more serious problem the next day, in the form of an anonymous threat from some skinhead hate group none of them had ever heard of before, claiming it was a crime against the Almighty to transport

a device owned and to be operated by the heathen, and that God's Army stood ready to attack.

"For Christ's sake," Rick said.

"Exactly," Mike said.

"Just tell me we're not letting this force us into a hold," Kenai said, her jaw very tight.

"No hold," Joel said. "The FBI doesn't regard the, uh, Smoky Mountain Whites as a credible threat."

" 'Smoky Mountain Whites'?"

"That's what they're calling themselves. Evidently they're from Kentucky."

"Whatever," Kenai said, and she and Laurel left to run yet another simulation of the Eratosthenes deployment. Eratosthenes, designed to take up where the Hubble Space Telescope left off, purred through it like a kitten. "If ever mankind built a perfect machine," Laurel said, "Eratosthenes is it."

"Shh," Kenai said, "it'll hear you."

Laura gave the shiny foil exterior of the telescope a fond pat. "She already knows."

WASHINGTON, D.C.

In spite of Yaqub's complete and total meltdown in the interrogation room at Gitmo and his subsequent fervent desire to omit no detail of his work with Isa, no matter how small, he could tell them very little that was useful. Back in his Washington office, Patrick found this frustrating in the extreme.

"He knows Isa only by the alias he used in Germany, Dandin Gandhi, and by another alias in England, Tabari Yabrud," Bob said. "The first names are common first names, and the second are names of Asian and Middle Eastern martyrs, major and minor."

"At this point," Patrick said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could type the names into his Isa database, "kinda not giving a shit what he called himself then. Kinda wanting to know what name he's using now and, oh yeah, where he is now, and what he's doing next."

"Isa told them that the plan was to take out Seatac, San Francisco International, and LAX." "How?"

"He would furnish them with credentials and they would get jobs as baggage handlers. Some of the cell are engineers, big surprise, and two are chemists. He had plans for homemade bombs made out of-" "Let me guess. Diesel fuel and fertilizer."

"Some of them, yeah," Bob said. He sounded tired. "Isa had plans for a lot of different devices, most of them to be assembled by the cell members when they arrived on scene." "What was the play-by-play?"

"For them to fly to Canada, which they did separately. Isa transferred enough funds into everyone's bank accounts to make this possible. We've got people checking on that, but Isa's some kind of Internet wizard, you know that. We'll never be able to trace any of those funds back."

"But we'll try," Patrick said, sitting back from the computer to page through an intelligence report. Three American Muslims had been arrested for praying on an airplane about to back away from a gate in Minneapolis. He couldn't find a great deal to get excited about there, every time he got on a plane anymore he prayed he'd be able to walk again after hours spent in what had to be the most uncomfortable seats ever designed for the human body. He turned the page.

"Yes, we'll try," Bob said. "When they arrived in Vancouver, they were instructed to proceed by public transportation to Lytton, a small town in the mountains north of Vancouver. There, they were to be picked up and taken to a camp even further in country, Sadiq says he doesn't know where." "Do you believe him?"

"I actually kinda do. He really is a sad sack of a terrorist, Patrick. Isa must really be desperate." The two of them contemplated the thought of a desperate Isa in silence for a moment, and then Bob added, "You might want to alert our friends north of the border."

Patrick had already sent off an email. "Will do. Did you tell Sadiq we found Isa's email instructions in Brittany 's jewelry box?"

"Yeah. He was astonished, he thought he'd hidden them so well. Now he thinks we're some kinda psychic."

"Good." There hadn't been much of use to them in the little slip of paper, but if it made Yaqub fear them, that worked for Patrick. "Why was he getting on a plane for Mexico City?"

"He says Isa emailed him that the LAX plan had been aborted due to some security breach and to get on a plane for Mexico City."

The next report in the intelligence folder was of a young woman found in the back of a Ford sedan with her neck broken, in the parking garage at Miami International Airport. Other than that the young woman was a Muslim American, it seemed unfortunate but unrelated to any of his concerns. "Last-minute orders and absolute obedience to same," he said to Bob. "That sounds a lot more like him than that whole planning session in York."

He could almost hear Bob shrug. Bob's job was to interrogate, not to interpret. "I don't think Yaqub's even close to a true believer. He thought about Isa's email for a while before he complied."

"What pushed him over?"

"He says that even if Isa couldn't find him he could probably find Yussuf, since Yussuf is apparently more of a true believer than Yaqub. He was Yussuf's friend, he said. He couldn't let him down."

"Honor among terrorists. Who'd a thunk it?" Patrick turned to the next report, and then he turned back to the one on the murder in the airport garage.

The body showed signs of recent and consensual sex. The ME thought she had been a virgin. She'd had no identification, but her mother had been making increasingly frantic calls to the hospitals and the police from the first morning of her disappearance, and had identified the body within hours of its discovery. Her mother had-

Patrick sat up, his attention caught. Her mother, a Mrs. Haddad Man-sour, had said that she suspected her lodger, a Mr. Daoud Sadat, of the crime. Mr. Sadat, she said, had been renting their spare room for six months, and she feared that he and her daughter had grown quite close.

Even more interesting, her description of him, precisely detailed, was very similar to the doctored photo on Adam Bayzani's passport.

A man, a Muslim terrorist who called himself Isa, or Jesus, a way of mocking the nations pursuing him.

He'd assumed the name Gandhi in Germany. After Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps? It seemed likely, even probable, especially if he then took as an alias the name of another good man, a man whose inspired leadership and vision for peace in the Middle East was a legend among all peoples, if anathema to some. "I will go to Jerusalem," Anwar Sadat had famously said. He had, and Muslim extremists had assassinated him for his vision.

"The fucker's giving us the finger again," he said, marveling, almost admiring.

"Which fucker?" Bob said.

Patrick got to his feet. "Bob, I'm sorry, I've got to go." He hung up the phone. "Melanie!"

18

HAITI

The anonymous little village was built on pilings perched on a narrow strip of tropical coastline at most a hundred feet in width between the almost vertical forest and the cerulean blue sea. It consisted in the main of a waterlogged marina with a dock ending in a ramp leading down to two wooden slips. The slips looked as if they were on the verge of going under for the third time. To the north and south of the marina were a few related businesses that looked even more tatterdemalion, and some one-room, thatched-roof homes clinging to the sides of the steep coastline that were almost tree houses. At the southern end of the village sat a shabby hotel, a one-story structure whose largest room was the bar, and a half-dozen bungalows with ancient thatched roofs teeming with insect life.

Up the coast from Port-au-Prince, it was so small it didn't even have a name, which might have explained why it was on no map. Although AMI thought that absence more probably had to do with the reason for its existence, its primary industry, which encouraged a wholesale discretion on the part of its residents, always providing they wanted to live to see tomorrow. It was probably the same reason that the encroaching vegetation had been encouraged to overhang the shoreline, all the buildings, and as much of the marina as possible. That much harder to spot, from the sea or the air.

There were a few open skiffs tied up to the marina, one painted a deep blue with a broad stern to accommodate the line of six large outboard motors bolted to it. Akil, inexperienced in the ways of boats, thought they looked very powerful.

He had been here for three days as the rest of the cell trickled in in ones and twos, some flying in on a seaplane held together quite literally with duct tape. Others came by ferry, a self-propelled scow whose arrivals and departures were as erratic as her drunken captain, a squat, scrofulous man with an almost incapacitating limp, very bad teeth, and one eye. Akil had arrived by car, although he'd had to hire a driver to find the road and then to get the car down the almost indecipherable switchback through the jungle, alive with bird calls. He imagined that he could hear the slither of snakes, too, and his driver, a gaunt, morose young man with the scarred knuckles of a fighter, enlivened the journey with a description of the various indigenous species. None of them were poisonous, the driver assured him, but Akil didn't like snakes, and this made the pit stops on the twelve-hour, twenty-two-mile journey interesting. If Akil had been in a less apathetic mood, he might have been more appreciative.

He didn't know quite what he was doing here. Yussuf, good soldier that he was, had arrived before him and had begun to gather in Yaqub's cell members as well as his own, settling them into the tiny cabana he had rented at the very edge of town. He brought them food-if all went according to plan they wouldn't be there that long but there was no point in giving away information about themselves to the investigators who would swarm about the place later-and he found women for those who wanted them. He led them in prayer, stiffening more than one spine, and when the Koran couldn't do the job, engaged the nervous in long discussions of what waited for them in paradise, with emphasis on the honey and the virgins.

During the last three days Yussuf couldn't be faulted. After the initial greeting, Yussuf had said only, "Yaqub?"

"He didn't make it," Akil said.

Yussuf muttered a prayer for his boyhood friend's soul and asked no more questions.

By comparison to Yussuf, Yaqub would have been at best only a decent aide de camp. Akil himself was superfluous.

He didn't need to be there. Moreover, he shouldn't be there. He'd known that before he'd arrived, before he'd left Miami, even. It was the first time he'd ever exposed himself to the risk of operations. For that matter the operation itself was at risk because of his actions. Sooner or later Zahirah's body would be found, and when they questioned Mrs. Mansour she would have too much of value to tell them. He cursed himself again for not returning to the house and disposing of her. He didn't make mistakes like that. It was why he was still alive, and still a threat.

He himself had flown on pre-existing reservations from Miami to Lima, from Lima to Mexico City, and from Mexico City to Port-au-Prince, a different passport for the last flight. The last two men had arrived this morning.

The transportation he had arranged for six months ago was due in late this evening. He would see off the faithful, entrust Yussuf with the completion of the operation, make the hazardous drive through the jungle back to Port-au-Prince, and fly to Paris, where he already had a reservation in a hotel where all the rooms had satellite television and he could watch the results of his plan play out on CNN and the BBC, and especially on Al Jazeera. It would be the glorious culmination of a long and inventive career, and a fitting coda to the life of his master, the man who had taught him everything. He knew Zarqawi would approve and rejoice at this astounding blow to the fabric and pride of the infidel.

The thought steadied him, and he returned to his room to sleep away the afternoon.

She was there the moment he closed his eyes. He knew it was a dream and he struggled to wake, but she wouldn't let him.

"Adara," he said.

"Akil," she said.

"Adara," he said.

"Stay with me," she whispered, her voice husky in his ears. "Daoud," she said. "Stay." Her hands ran shyly over his body.

"Zahirah," he said.

"Yes, my love, it's me. Stay with me, oh my best beloved."

He rolled her gently to her back and slid between her legs with a feeling like coming home, a feeling he had not known since he left his village for the last time. "Zahirah," he said, her name almost a prayer. "Zahirah."

"Daoud," she said, and he looked up to see dead eyes in a dead face, her neck bent in an unnatural angle, the dark marks of his fingers around the tender skin of her neck. Her body was cold, unmoving around him.

He woke violently, covered with sweat, and rolled off the bed to the floor. He scrabbled toward the bathroom on all fours, barely making it to the toilet in time. He vomited until his stomach heaved up nothing but a clear fluid, vomited until his esophagus and his sinuses burned like fire, vomited until he was too exhausted to do anything but lie on the bathroom floor in a puddle of his own sweat. He started to doze and jerked himself awake just in time. There would be no more sleep for him today.

He became aware of a persistent knocking. "Dandin?" Yussuf's anxious voice said. "Dandin, are you there?"

"A moment," he said. He rinsed out his mouth and sluiced off his face and reached for a towel. In the mirror he saw a reflection that shocked him, a gaunt and haggard face with haunted eyes.

When had he become so old? He was only thirty-seven.

THEIR TRANSPORT DRIFTED INTO THE MARINA LIKE A GHOST AT HALF past two the next morning. An eighty-foot sailboat with a hull painted black or a very dark blue and two dark red, lateen-rigged sails, or so Yussuf told him. He knew nothing of sailboats, or boats of any kind. The younger man could barely contain his excitement.

The master of the vessel knew what he was doing; he had the boat warped in to the slip and lines around the cleats in moments. There was a mutter of exhaust from the rudimentary main street of the village, and a large, enclosed truck backed down the dock, shaking the pilings beneath it. The passenger-side door banged and footsteps went to the back of the truck. They heard the click of a lock and the sound of a sliding door rolling up. There was a bewildered murmur of voices, cut short by a vicious, low-voiced curse. When the voices quieted the first voice snapped out an order, and many people began to come down the ramp.

"You have the money," the boat's master said.

Akil handed it over. The master tossed it through the open door of the boat's cabin. "Don't you want to count it?"

The master's teeth flashed white. "If it's short, your people are going to

have to walk to the U.S. from the middle of the Caribbean. And unless they're related to Jesus Christ…" He chuckled. "Quickly, now, before the rest get here."

He showed them to a stateroom in the bow. It had four sets of bunk beds and its own bathroom. It was very crowded with the ten of them, but except for the weapons they were traveling very light and had no belongings to find a place for.

Yussuf was left standing in the center of the room, looking very solemn. The boat continually dipped beneath their feet as more people boarded from the slip. Muted voices could be heard speaking in Haitian through the bulkheads. A small child whimpered, quickly hushed.

They looked at him expectantly. This was the moment where he gave (to paraphrase something he'd once seen an FBI agent say on television) the "come to Allah" speech, when he spoke the words that made them truly feel that they were on a mission graced and blessed by God himself, a God who held them in his hands and would welcome them to paradise when their task was done. This was the last time he had to make them feel that their task was worthy of their deaths, for surely they would all die. "You are about to embark on a sacred quest," he said. "You will strike a blow at the very heart of the Far Enemy, this godless infidel and friend to the Jews, whose abhorrent secularism has led to abominations like homosexuality, feminism, drinking, gambling."

They looked at him, waiting confidently. There was more. There had to be more.

There was. "I am coming with you," he told Yussuf, and beneath that young man's astonished gaze went to a corner and sat down with his back to the wall, crossing his legs and closing his eyes.

Outside, he heard light footsteps pad down the deck as the lines were loosed, and canvas flapped as the sails were pulled up. Under sail power alone, they slid slowly and silently away from the dock and out to sea.

MIAMI

Doreen and Nicholas Munro came aboard the day before Munro left the dock. Cal had intended to hand them over to the XO after the initial greeting and dinner in his cabin, but somehow it didn't turn out that way.

He liked them, for one thing. Mrs. Munro was a short, round figure with thick glasses that gave her the look of a blue-eyed owl. Her hair was completely white and had a tendency to stand on end, and she wore polyester plaid bagged out at the seat and knees with an air of insouciance. "I'm a housewife, wife and mother, plain and simple," she said breezily, "so don't ask me what I do for a living, thanks."

Mr. Munro was a tall man with amused brown eyes and hair even thicker and whiter than his wife's. He wore a gray sport coat over an open-collared shirt and jeans worn white at the seams. He was an aviator and as Cal had learned the main influence in his daughter's life. He was very affable-"It's Nick, Captain." "It's Cal, Nick."-and Cal offered him a ride in the helo when they got out to sea, warmly seconded by Lieutenant Noyes.

He gave them the dollar-and-a-quarter tour, after trying to fob them off on the nickel tour didn't work. They were insatiably and flatteringly curious about life and work on board Munro, and on instantly easy terms with every crew member they met, from FS2 Steele in the galley to MPA Molnar in Main Control to MK3 Fisher doing fuel soundings on the main deck. "We have two diesel engines and two gas turbine engines. The diesels are locomotive engines, the turbines are Pratt & Whitney's, essentially the same thing they built for the Boeing 707s."

"Really," Kenai's father said. "I'd like to hear a little more about them."

"When you get settled in, I'll have MPA come get you and give you a more detailed tour. He can print out some specs for you, too, if you'd like." Cal closed his mind to what MPA's probably profane reaction would be to that much time pulled away from his precious engine room and said, "If we're using only the bow prop we can still make five knots. We can go twenty-nine if we're up on both turbines."

Grinning, Mr. Munro said, "She throw up a rooster tail when you're going that fast?"

"No, sir," Cal said, grinning back, "but she'll put up a pretty impressive wake. Until Deepwater, which is the program building the new 410s, the Hamilton class 378s were the largest cutters built for the Coast Guard. When they were built, back in the sixties and seventies, they were all about speed and endurance, which meant they sacrificed a lot of utility and ease of access. We've got twenty-two different fuel tanks, and it is a genuine exercise in Newtonian physics to get her fueled properly."

"How far can you go on a full tank? Or tanks?"

"Fourteen thousand nautical miles," Cal said, and added, "at twelve knots, that is, on one diesel."

"More than halfway around the world without stopping for gas," Mr. Munro said.

"How many crew members on board?" Mrs. Munro said.

"A hundred and fifty-one." Normally. While many of the crew members were excited about watching the shuttle launch from offshore, many others had opted for leave during what they considered to be at best a public-relations exercise. Munro was running north with a crew of sixty-five, well under strength. Fortunately, all the chiefs except for GMC had elected to forgo liberty until their return. He could run the ship with the chiefs alone if need be, long enough to get her into port, if need be.

He wound up taking the Munros through virtually every compartment from the bow prop room to aft steering, and he was absurdly gratified when they understood the tac number system identifying each individual compartment the first time he explained it to them. "Excellent," he said. "If you understand this system you'll never be lost."

"Good luck," Mr. Munro said.

They all enjoyed a good laugh at that.

Kenai's father had a near miss with the Darwin sorter on the boat davit, and Cal got another big laugh when he described the little PA so blinded by love for Kenai that he'd run right into it. Mrs. Munro-"Call me Doreen."-demanded more news of Kenai's visit.

"What's involved in offshore security for a shuttle launch?" Nick said.

"Now, there's a question," Cal said. They were on the bridge. "Let's go down to the wardroom and get some coffee, and I'll walk you through it."

They disposed themselves around the wardroom table and Seaman Trimble was sent down to the mess deck for some of FS2's baked goodies while Cal made them both americanos. "You have an espresso machine on Munro⁷." Nick said.

"Well, of course," Cal said with a poker face. "It's probably one of the more important contributors to crew morale."

"It's the single most important contributor to your morale, sir," Seaman Trimble said.

The Munros laughed. "You're on report for insubordination, Trimble," Cal said. "Dismissed."

Trimble grinned and saluted. "Aye aye, sir," he said, and departed.

The baked goodies were found to be snickerdoodles, which Doreen pronounced divine.

"Okay," Cal said, "security on a shuttle mission. To begin with, there's an eight-mile security zone around the launch pad. Nobody unauthorized in or out for the duration."

"That's boats," Nick said. "What about aircraft?"

"There is a no-low-fly zone of twenty nautical miles. Believe it or not there are some private pilots out there who think they can do a flyby of a shuttle launch."

"Oh, I believe it," Nick said. "So, is the Munro the only sea-based security presence during the launch?"

"God, no," Cal said. "There are four small boats, two twenty-five-footers, and two shallow water boats. They're working from the shoreline to two nautical miles out. Then there are two forty-seven-foot MLBs- motor life boats-working two to six nautical miles out. A CPB-a coastal patrol boat, an eighty-seven-footer-usually acts as OSC, or on-scene commander, of all the Coast Guard assets working the mission. They're usually the offshore enforcement and response vessel."

"Usually?"

"Usually," Cal said. "Theoretically, an MEC or medium endurance cutter is the OSC, but in practice D7, the operational district responsible for this area, never has any available MECs. Not enough assets, and of course they never know how long those assets will be tied up."

"Because of launch delays," Nick said. "Kenai warned us. What's the forecast?"

"Weather's not looking like a problem," Cal said. "But it's July. Hurricane season. You never know. At any rate, Munro is OSC for this launch."

Nick smiled at his wife. "Because Kenai's on board the shuttle."

"Yes."

"And because she's related to Douglas Munro."

"Yes."

"Our tax dollars at work," Doreen said.

Cal laughed. "That's right."

"I like boat rides," Doreen said, twinkling at Cal.

"Me, too," Cal said, grinning at her.

"What else?" Nick said.

"We've also got a HU-25 Falcon patrolling a one-hundred-fifty-nautical-mile safety zone."

"Medium-range fan jet," Nick said. "Fast, too, got a cruising speed of over four hundred knots."

Cal shrugged. "If you say so, Nick. I don't do airplanes. The Falcon will make sure there are no vessels in the way of falling boosters."

Or shuttle parts, they all thought.

"Recently, we've added an MH-90 HITRON-an armed helicopter- as an air intercept asset. If necessary, it will enforce the no-low-fly zone."

"Impressive," Nick said.

"Reassuring," Doreen said tartly.

Nick grinned. "Do you report directly to Mission Control, or what?"

"Or what," Cal said. "We report to the Range Operations Center. The ROC reports to the Forty-fifth Space Wing of the U.S. Air Force."

"I didn't even know the Air Force had a space wing," Doreen said. She looked at her husband. "It sounds so, I don't know, what am I trying to say?"

"Thrilling?" Nick said.

"I was going to say Heinleinian," she said.

"Fictional?" Nick said.

"No. More like we've already got such a permanent presence in space that we've got a whole arm of the U.S. Air Force supporting our presence there."

"We do," Cal said.

"I guess so," she said. "I wonder if Kenai knows."

"I bet she does," Nick said, quirking an eyebrow at Cal, who smothered a grin. "What happens on Munro during the launch?"

^"Munro will run security from Combat," Cal said, "you remember, from the operations center three decks down?"

"Are there often a lot of offshore security problems during launches?" Nick said.

Cal smiled at his deceptively mild tone, and shook his head. "No," he said. "Not unless you count the charter skippers whose clients sign up for a shot at a game fish and, what the hell, since we're in the area, how about a front-row seat to the launch, too, or the drunk driving the Liberty Bay-liner who can't resist coming in for a closer look." He reflected. "I'm told there's the occasional poacher, hunting alligator. The place is virtually a game preserve, no hunting, trapping, and especially no shooting. But that's about it. Most people are sensible, they know enough to stay out of the area during a launch, or if they want to watch to go to one of the official viewing areas."

"Have you ever seen a launch, Cal?"

"No, I'm ashamed to say I haven't, Doreen, except on television," Cal said. "I'm looking forward to it."

"How close will we be?"

"How close? Well," Cal said, sitting back and steepling his fingers in an exaggeratedly pontifical gesture, "we are going to have media on board for this launch and, I'm told, at least one admiral. And then there's you. The Coast Guard is, shall we say, very excited about the public relations opportunity inherent in having you on board a Coast Guard cutter to watch your daughter go into space, all three of you descendants of the only Coastie to have been awarded the Medal of Honor."

"Relatives, not descendants," Nick said.

"Whatever," Cal said. He dropped the steeple and grinned. "All this together means we get to go in a lot closer than the OSC ordinarily does."

"Which means?" Doreen said.

"I aim to take us in as close as we can get without running aground. You'll have a front-row seat. Our BMC-bosun's mate chief, basically our chief navigator-is looking at the charts right now."

"When we said we'd do this, the man at NASA told us it wouldn't be as exciting as being on the grandstand."

"Distances over water are very deceiving," Cal said. "It will feel much closer than that. The sound of it will get to us a few moments after the fact, but that's true onshore as well."

"How many reporters will be on board?" Doreen said. "I do hate it when they shove microphones in my face and ask me how I feel about my only child being an astronaut."

"There were plenty of times when you wanted to launch her into orbit yourself," Nick said.

"Back when she was a teenager," Doreen said indignantly, over their laughter, "and every mother wants to launch her daughter into orbit at some point during adolescence." She reflected. "She was very stubborn."

"She still is," Nick said. "How else could she put up with the Arabian Knight?"

"The Arabian Knight?" the XO said, who had just joined them.

"The part-timer," Cal said without thinking. "The playboy sheik from Qatar who gets a ride-along on this shuttle courtesy of the satellite NASA is launching for his family business, otherwise known as Al Jazeera. The mission commander has landed Kenai with the job of babysitting him."

There was a startled silence, and he looked up from his mug to find them all staring at him. His words, he realized too late, had just ousted their relationship. "Or so I read in the newspaper," he said weakly.

"Are there any of those gorgeous snickerdoodles left?" Doreen said, leaning forward and smiling at the XO.

Into this awkward silence Lieutenant Noyes opened the door of the wardroom. He looked around until he found Nick. Target acquired, he smiled. He was a friendly soul, well-liked by the crew, something that could be said of only a very few aviators. The aviator-sailor relationship was competitive and all too often antagonistic, but Noyes was one of the good guys. "Mr. Munro," Noyes said now, "would you like a walk-around of the helo before you turn in? Give you an advance look at what you're letting yourself in for when you go flying with us." He grinned. "Might want to back out after. We're just a bunch of knuckle-draggers down in the AvDet."

"Love to, Lieutenant, but please, call me Nick."

The lieutenant smiled at Doreen. "It's a nice night, Mrs. Munro, beautiful view of the Miami skyline."

Not wholly impervious to his charm, Doreen shook her head. "Thank you, Lieutenant, but it was a long flight. I'm going to turn in."

Later, when the wardroom's other mess cook, one Seaman Crane, had been summoned to escort Doreen to the junior officers' stateroom that had been vacated for the Munros, the XO looked at Cal.

"Don't," Cal said.

"You're dating an astronaut?"

"Shut up," Cal said.

"You're dating an astronaut."

"I mean it, XO, put a lid on it, right now."

"I've always dreamed I could fly," the XO said, hand pressed to his heart.

"Good night, XO."

"Good night, Captain, and very sweet dreams."

Cal flipped him off over his shoulder, and heard Taffy laugh as he headed up to his stateroom.

19

MIAMI

Mrs. Mansour's face was drawn with grief, but her voice was steady and she spoke with clarity and determination. She identified Adam Bayzani's doctored passport photo as that of Daoud Sadat, the man who had rented her spare room for the last six months, although she didn't think much of the likeness, saying the individual features seemed exaggerated.

"Exaggerated how?" Patrick said. "It would help if you could be a bit more specific. Take your time."

She did, studying the likeness of a man who she believed had murdered her only child. After a bit she said, "His forehead might be a little too broad in the photograph. His was more narrow, I think. The ears and nose are too long, too, and the mouth a little too wide. It's almost-"

"What?" Patrick said when she hesitated. "Almost what?"

"It's as if someone smeared the photograph when it was still wet." She raised a hand in a helpless gesture. "That's all."

"It's a lot, Mrs. Mansour, believe me."

"Will it help you find him?"

"Yes, Mrs. Mansour," he said. "It will help us find him."

"And he will be punished?"

He held her fierce gaze, his own steady and unflinching, even though he knew he was making promises he might very well be unable to keep. "He will. I give you my word."

She detailed as much of Sadat's activities as she knew, sitting at the utilitarian metal table in one of two metal folding chairs, in the bare, grubby little room with the single overhead light, loaned to Patrick for the occasion by the Miami Dade Police Department. Sadat, she said, left the house for work every morning Monday through Friday, and returned each evening just after six. Work where? Lockheed, he had told her.

Patrick dispatched a team to Lockheed.

It was odd, she said, that all of Sadat's clothes had been new when he arrived at her house.

"How could you tell?" Patrick said.

She looked at him. "I work at a dry cleaner's," she said. "They were new."

"All right," he said.

"It seemed odd," she said again, "but it wasn't until later that I realized it might be because he was putting on a new identity with the new clothes."

Sadat, she said, appeared to have little or no social life. Outside of work hours, he spent little time out, at least at first-her lips tightened-and no friends had visited him at her home. He declared the intention of visiting various local sights: the Everglades, Miami Beach, a carnival, the zoo. He had invited the two of them to accompany him to some of these, as a way, he said, of repaying them for their kindness.

She couldn't be sure then, but now she was certain that Zahirah had begun meeting Sadat outside the home. Mrs. Mansour didn't drive so she hadn't been able to follow him anywhere even if she'd wanted to, although she had become increasingly uneasy when she saw how close her daughter and Mr. Sadat were getting.

"Was it," Patrick said delicately, not wanting to offend her, "a romantic relationship?"

For the first time her eyes teared up. "I believe my daughter thought it was."

"And Mr. Sadat?"

She had to think about that for a while, so long that Patrick had to give her a nudge. "Mrs. Mansour?"

She came back from wherever she'd gone and refocused on his face. "I think," she said very carefully indeed, "that Mr. Sadat cared more than he knew."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because he killed her," she said, her voice hard. "He could have just left her, walked away and never contacted her again. Instead, he killed her."

There was a brief, fraught silence. "I'm sorry," Patrick said in a gentle voice, "I don't quite-"

"He killed her so that there would be no temptation for him to return," she said, still in that hard voice, her eyes bright but not with tears. "I'm not a fool, Mr. Chisum. You are a federal agent. You would not be here if you did not have good cause to suspect Mr. Sadat of wrongdoing. And when you arrive with as much help as I saw in the lobby, I don't imagine you're looking for him because he's been forging checks or bilking widows out of their pensions."

She raised an eyebrow.

"No," he said.

"No," she said, agreeing with him. "You suspect him of being a terrorist. He must be very good at what he does or you would have apprehended him by now."

"Yes," Patrick said. At this point he saw no reason to lie to her.

"If he cared for my daughter, it would be a great temptation to him to return here for her after he accomplishes whatever horror he is planning. If he has succeeded in escaping your notice for this long, then he had to have known that returning here would have been a fatal mistake. Therefore, he removed that temptation."

He looked at her with respect. She'd have made a good profiler. "Tell me, Mrs. Mansour, how did you know he wasn't Egyptian?"

"His accent was Paki," she said. "He insisted on speaking English, he said the better for all of us to practice so we fit in to our new country. I think it was so he wouldn't give his true nationality away while speaking in Arabic. But he did slip on occasion. We all do. He was Pakistani, not Egyptian. I'm sure of it."

LATER, IN HIS HOTEL ROOM, PATRICK SHOWERED AND WRAPPED HIMSELF in the terry-cloth robe he found hanging in the closet. He turned on the television and flicked through the channels. More bombings and kidnappings in Iraq. Gaza had changed hands, again. Yet another helicopter had been shot down in Afghanistan, and in Islamabad there were demonstrations against Musharraf. Gutsy of them, although ever since Musharraf had taken to wearing business suits instead of an army uniform, and had had his photograph taken in one standing next to George Bush, he'd been a little less inclined to stomp on the opposition with tanks.

In Paris there had been a race riot involving Muslim expatriates; in Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar there were demonstrations for women's suffrage; and in Indonesia a plane had crashed into the Indian Ocean, killing all 102 people on board.

He clicked around a while longer, stopping at something called NTV. It took him a few moments to realize that this stood for NASA TV, replaying direct feeds from the space station and rerunning videos from shuttle launches going back a dozen years. Only in Florida. The channel came to rest on a long shot of the shuttle standing at the gantry, brave and white against the dark night sky. He muted the sound, pulled a chair up so he could prop his feet on the bed, and pulled his notes up on his laptop.

His phone rang. It was Melanie. "What are you doing still at work, Melanie?" he said, checking the clock. "You should have gone home hours ago."

"I thought I should wait until I heard from you," she said, her low contralto a pleasant sound. "In case you needed something."

"Thank you, Melanie," he said, a little touched. "No, there's nothing. Except-"

"Yes, Mr. Chisum?"

"What time is it in London?" He checked the clock again.

"It's five a.m. in London, Mr. Chisum."

"Okay," he said. "Do me a favor, call the Knightsbridge Institute and leave a message for Hugh Rincon when he comes in, will you? Ask him to call my cell phone number."

"As good as done. Anything else?"

"Has the director asked for me today?"

"No, sir. We haven't heard from the director since he went on vacation last Friday."

"Good," Patrick said with satisfaction. "Okay, thanks, Melanie. You can wrap it up now and head for home." He hesitated. "I wish I could tell you to take the morning off, but chances are I'm going to need you at your desk tomorrow. I'm sorry."

"It's quite all right, Mr. Chisum," she said, and he could have sworn he heard a smile in her voice. "This is important stuff. I'm happy to help out."

The warmth in her voice was unmistakable. He stammered some reply and fumbled the phone into its cradle, and sat staring at it for several minutes afterward. It had been so long since he'd experienced even a mild flirtation that he was uncertain as to what was going on here. Rumor had it she was sleeping with Kallendorf. If rumor was correct, she might be coming on to him at Kallendorf's suggestion.

If rumor was incorrect, she might be coming on to him for herself.

He shook himself like a dog coming out of the water. An improbable assumption. Just look at him, the budding potbelly, the dying hairline. It was written down somewhere that you never slept with anyone prettier than you. But he couldn't help feeling wistful. If only it were true.

His evil twin whispered, Even if it isn't true, how far would Melanie be prepared to go to get information out of you?

He immediately condemned his evil twin to silence and returned resolutely to his laptop, stubbornly determined to resolve the mystery that was Isa, and do it before Isa struck again, this time, Patrick was convinced, entirely too close to home.

Isa, who had apprenticed with Zarqawi.

Isa, who blew up a busload of people in Baghdad as a means of presenting a calling card to the Far Enemy.

Isa, who recruited acolytes in Germany and England and moved them across oceans like chess pieces.

Isa, who used the Internet as his front office while totally frustrating the best geeks, nerds, and techies the CIA had in house to trace him.

Isa, who it was reputed never bowed five times a day toward Mecca.

Isa, who seduced young men away from their families and their societies to become suicide bombers and mass murderers in the name of Allah.

Isa, who had almost certainly killed Adam Bayzani and Zahirah Man-sour.

Isa, who wasn't Jordanian or Egyptian, but who might be Afghani, or even Pakistani.

Isa. Where was he, and what was he up to?

20

CAPE CANAVERAL

"How's the weather look?"

They all waited tensely for the answer. The NASA meteorologist, aware that this was his moment in the sun, paged through a sheaf of papers and took his time answering, probably partly because his answer was so prosaic. It wasn't anything they couldn't all have looked up on www.weather .com five minutes before, anyway, and he knew it. "Forecast for midnight is for clear skies and calm winds, continuing through morning. Winds will pick up a little around eleven, but you'll be long gone by then, so no worries."

There was an audible exhalation around the room. "Excellent," Rick said. He looked around at the rest of the crew. "Any concerns? Anyone?" He carefully avoided looking at the Arabian Knight, who put his hand up anyway. "Mike?"

Mike shrugged, the epitome of the cool jet jockey. "Let's light this candle." He spoiled the effect with an enormous grin.

Bill shook his head.

" Laurel?"

Laurel 's brow was creased but then Laurel 's brow was always creased. "Eratosthenes and ARABSAT-8A good to go." No one saw her crossing her fingers behind her back but during launch crossed fingers were a given. "We should be good to go when we get on orbit."

"Kenai?"

"All systems go. Robot arm go." Kenai heard the words coming out of her mouth but they echoed strangely in her ears. This time tomorrow she'd be on orbit. This time tomorrow she'd look out of the flight deck windows and see the Big Blue Marble. This time tomorrow, she would have the right to change the silver shuttle on her collar for gold. "We're ready to rock and roll."

This time tomorrow she would be a bona fide astronaut.

The Arabian Knight still had his hand up. Rick sighed heavily. "Yes,

Jilal?"

"Yes, Commander." The Arabian Knight never addressed them by their names. He had not been invited to. "I had a few more questions about the food. I want be certain that everything is halal-"

Kenai tuned out of the conversation. That evening, she got a phone call from Cal. "I thought you were at sea."

"We're only five miles offshore. I figured I'd see if my cell phone was working. I dialed the number you gave me, and whiz bang, some guy answered and handed me off to you." There was a faint question at the end of his sentence.

"Yeah, that was Mike. Mike Smith. One of the other crew members. We're in crew quarters. You remember, in medical quarantine until we go out to the pad."

"Yeah."

After a moment she said, "So did you call just to hear me breathe?"

He surprised them both when he said, "Yeah. I think I did."

Neither one of them knew what to do with that, so she said, "You've met the parents?"

"They're great people, Kenai."

She smiled. "I know. They seem equally impressed with you. I talked to them before you left the dock." She yawned. "Dad wants to know if I'm sleeping with you."

"Oh," he said uncomfortably. "Yeah. I kinda blew it."

"He told me."

"Sorry," he said.

"I'm not," she said. "Are you?"

For the life of him, he couldn't come up with a respectable answer, probably because he didn't know what it was.

"Never mind," she said. "Let's not go there, at least not now. I've got other things to worry about."

"How's the Arabian Knight?"

"Right now, he's vetting the menu. Making sure everything's halal."

"What's halal?"

"It's Arabic for kosher, I think. Whatever. It keeps him out of our hair. Now if we could just gag him for the rest of the trip when we strap in."

"There have been protests about him."

"Yeah, they told us. Bunch of right-wing Muslims protesting a devout's close contact with secular infidels?"

"Pretty much."

"Do we got trouble in River City?"

"Nah. For one thing, the launch is miles away from anything that looks like access. I suppose they could barricade the gates or something, but what would be the point?"

"And that's not what they want, anyway," she said cynically. "What they want is film at eleven."

"Speaking of which-"

"Oh yeah," she said, and laughed. "I forgot. How many television cameras you got on board?"

"Only one, fortunately, and even that feels like one too many. They restricted it to three pool reporters, one from the Miami Herald, one from NPR, and one from CNN. And they all want to talk to Nick and Doreen."

"How they holding up?"

"Pretty well. That little prep course NASA runs the friends and relatives through must be pretty effective. They both smile right into the camera like it's their new best friend, and they'll talk the ear off of any reporter about how their little girl started reading Robert Heinlein by the time she was in the second grade. Oh, and I didn't know you did bead-work?"

"I do what?"

"Make bead jewelry."

"I do?"

"Yeah. Doreen seemed to feel it necessary to establish your feminine side."

Kenai snorted. "I cook. Isn't that enough?"

"You cook?"

"I make one hell of a spaghetti sauce, smartass."

"I'll let you try it out on me when you get back."

Another silence fell. "I'm not loving this," he said.

She didn't pretend to misunderstand him. "Don't worry. We'll all come back alive."

He thought of the virtual bomb she would be riding into orbit that evening, and said, "Bet your ass. Hey."

"Hey, what?"

"What if I love you?"

"What if I love you back?"

They considered this in startled silence for a moment. "Probably just the situation," she said finally. "You've never had a girlfriend before who rides rockets. I've never had a boyfriend who didn't come unglued at the thought."

"Yeah," he said, "you're probably right. Take care up there."

"I will."

"We've got a date the instant you're out of debrief and Munro's in dry dock."

"You going to kill me if I say I'm not anxious for my first time on orbit to be over?"

He laughed. "No. I think the right thing for me to say right now is, have fun."

"It'll do. See you in a week."

"See you," he said, but she had already hung up.

SOUTH OF ABACO, ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME

There was a hatch that led up to the bow of the sailboat, and before their first dawn Akil had it propped open so they could get some fresh air. They took turns sitting beneath it, letting the elusive breeze tease their faces. By afternoon the sun turned the cabin into an oven, and the combination of the heat and the oily swell passing beneath the hull that pushed the sailboat into a long, continuous roll put half of them on their knees in front of the toilet in the tiny bathroom. The smell of vomit spread the malady to all of them.

The moaning of the migrants was another constant irritant and through the walls they could hear others vomiting, sounds of protest ruthlessly subdued by crew members. Screams were quickly muffled during what sounded like an attempted rape, cut short by a meaty thud of wood on skull, a subsequent dip of the sailboat to port, and a heavy splash. After that, the moans and cries of the other passengers died to the occasional whimper.

"Why do they want to go to America so badly?" Yussuf said in wonder.

"Because they believe the lies," Akil said. " America, the promised land, where all your dreams come true." He looked around the room, meeting everyone's eyes in turn, willing them to believe. "They don't understand that America is a nation of unbelievers, crusaders who are determined to destroy Islam so they can remake the world in their own image. They will wipe us out, if we don't wipe them out first."

"What we are doing won't stop them."

"No," Akil said, surprising the engineer who had spoken words he thought wouldn't carry, "it won't. Not alone. But we are not alone. We are many, and our numbers are growing. They make the West fear us. Look how we have disrupted their lives. They fear to board an airplane. They fear what their own ships may be bringing into their own seaports. They can't defend themselves from us, and they know it. Each and every day, one of their newspapers has a story about how we could poison their water supply or explode a nuclear weapon in the center of one of their cities. They fear us, because they don't know where we will strike next." He paused for effect. "After tonight, they will fear us more."

"I still don't understand how we are to do this thing," the engineer said, apologetically but nevertheless insisting on an answer. "We have had training with the small arms, yes, but none of us knows how to fire the big gun."

Akil refrained from damning the engineer with a glare. This was how these things started, one man voicing doubts. It was good that he had come. He kept his tone instructive, almost pedantic. "Did I not say that Allah would provide? Trust in him, Hatim." He smiled. "And in me."

They needed more, though, he could tell from their bent heads and sidelong looks. He shrugged mentally. There were none coming back from this mission, and no opportunity for them to betray it, not with him at hand. "I have a confession to make, my brothers. I have been guilty of practicing a deception."

Their heads came up at that. "You knew you had become a part of al Qaeda."

There were nods all around. ~

"And you are all familiar with that martyr to our glorious cause, al-Zarqawi, most foully murdered by the infidel in a cowardly attack from the air."

More nods.

"Have you heard of Isa?" They exchanged wondering glances. "Isa sat at the right hand of Zarqawi. Trained by Zarqawi, he set up al Qaeda's online communications and banking systems so that the agents of the West would never be able to track them. He-"

"You are Isa," Yussuf said.

Akil, put off his stride, took a moment to regroup. "I am."

Most of them knew the name, and expressions varied from awe to fright to exhilaration, but Yussuf's face seemed lit from within. "Then we are truly members of the glorious al Qaeda."

Akil knew a momentary annoyance. Had he but known it, Akil's feelings exactly mirrored Ansar's when the old man told him to find Isa. "We always have been."

Yussuf was apologetic. "Forgive me, Ta-Isa. It is not that I doubted, and I understand that the utmost security is called for so that we may accomplish our mission in this great cause."

In a hushed voice Jabir said, "Are we under the hand of bin Laden himself?"

Akil gritted his teeth. "We are," he said. "He wishes me to tell you that Allah blesses our purpose."

The doubter who had spoken first said, still apologetically, "I still don't completely understand, Tabari-Isa. There are only ten of us. How are ten, against so many, able to accomplish our mission?"

"There is someone on board the ship who will help us," he said.

"A believer among the infidels?"

"Yes," Akil said. As well as someone who would be well paid. Or thought he would be. "I must speak to the captain," he said, and escaped the stateroom.

He stepped over and around numerous bodies down the passageway and up the stairs to the deck before he found the captain at the wheel in the tiny pilothouse. It was perched on top of the cabin, and was the one place on the whole of, to Akil's mind, this nauseatingly odiferous, dangerously overloaded craft where there was a semblance of order and solitude.

The captain raised an eyebrow at him and drew on his cigar. The smell hit Akil's nostrils and his sinuses ached in immediate response. He coughed, cupping his mouth and nose in his hand, trying in vain to block the smell. The captain took another drag and expelled another cloud of smoke. It drifted across the pilothouse, lit by the eerie green glow of various instrumentation screens. "I thought you didn't want anyone else to know you were on board."

"I didn't," Akil said.

"Then you shouldn't have come out of your cabin until I told you to." The captain blew a smoke ring, waited, and then blew a second inside the first.

Coughing again, Akil said, "Why is this trip taking so long?"

The captain raised his eyebrow again. "It took forty hours to get to Caicos Passage, and another fifty to get here."

"Where is here?" Akil said, mostly because the captain seemed to expect it.

The other man stepped back from the wheel, and smiled when he saw Akil's expression. "Don't worry, I've got her on the iron mike. The autopilot," he added, when he saw that Akil still didn't understand. He turned to a slanted table mounted against the rear wall and tapped the chart with the two fingers holding his cigar, now burned down to a squat, glowing stub. "Look here. We came through Caicos Passage fifty hours ago. There's no wind to speak of, and no seas, so I'm estimating that we'll be south of Abaco a couple of hours after dawn. Then we go up the inside, south of Grand Bahama -"

"I don't understand," Akil said, eyes watering from the cigar smoke as he tried to follow the captain's explanation. "Why don't we just stay outside the islands? Surely all this maneuvering will slow us down."

The captain regarded Akil with a quizzical expression. "For one thing," he said levelly, "we'll pick up the Gulf Stream if we go inside, which is good for another two or three knots of speed. For another, we can lose ourselves in the traffic."

"Traffic?"

"Yes, traffic, other ships, as in cruise liners, fishing boats, pleasure boats, sailboats, freighters, tankers. There is a great deal of traffic up and down the Straits of Florida, Mr. Mallah. We will hardly be noticed."

"How can you be sure of that?" Akil said, studying the map through streaming eyes. "Wouldn't it be safer to go up the outside of all these islands and then move in closer to the coast?"

"This ain't my first rodeo, Mr. Mallah," the captain said. His tone was placid but nonetheless conveyed a distinct warning.

Akil changed the subject. "Where do you plan to let us off?" He didn't ask because he wanted to know, he asked because the captain would think it odd if he didn't. Akil already knew where they were getting off.

The glowing tip of the cigar moved north. "I have a few favorite spots here, in the barrier islands off Georgia and North Carolina." He smiled, the gold-capped molar flashing. "Don't worry, Mr. Mallah. America will swallow you whole where I put you ashore. No one will be able to find you." Another draw, another exhalation of smoke. "Unless of course you wish to be found."

Akil's hand closed over the comforting shape of the little GPS unit in his pocket. "No," he said. "We only want to begin a new life in America."

He left the pilothouse, and the captain returned to the wheel.

He didn't know what the group of men in the forward cabin were up to, but the price of their passage doubled the total amount all the other migrants on board had paid. He was in the transportation business, his job was to get his paying passengers where they were going, nothing more, and nothing less. His curiosity extended to the color of their money, and stopped after they had counted it into his hand.

He took another long, satisfying draft of his cigar, and placidly blew another cloud of smoke.

MIAMI

"Patrick?"

"Hugh, thanks for calling. What if I told you that Isa was Pakistani?"

"How would you know?"

"Somebody ID'd his accent." Patrick wanted to cut to the chase. "Never mind that. What does that knowledge do for us?"

Hugh was silent for a moment. "I'm not sure," he said slowly.

"Can you backtrack, run the profile through your database and see if any matches pop up out of Pakistan?"

"Can't hurt," Hugh said. "But it's a long shot, Patrick. We've already been through the database a hundred times looking for Isa before he was Isa."

"Ever go looking for him in Pakistan?"

"When he got to be big news, we looked for him everywhere. Especially when he surfaced in al Qaeda, with Zarqawi. Back then, though, you'll remember that al Qaeda leadership was all Saudi and Egyptian."

"So?" Patrick was impatient. "Nowadays it's increasingly Libyan, or at least North African. He hated Zarqawi, that is well known, but bin Laden's never been shy about rewarding initiative, wherever it comes from."

"And bin Laden's looking for Isa, too."

"Yeah, I remember. Hugh, Isa's a Pakistani. I'm sure of it. I've already talked to the ops guys in Islamabad. Get the word out to your people. This guy just spent six months in Miami, living like a monk-well, mostly-in somebody's spare room. Then he left for Mexico City, where we lost his trail. He's up to something, and he's not a small player like-oh, like the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. He's the real deal. He'll be the guy to dream up another 9/11.1 want to get to him before he does."

"So do I, Patrick," Hugh said, although he sounded much more placid in talking about Isa than he did when he'd found out about Sara and Isa in the elevator in Istanbul. It helped when someone you thought might quite like to kill your wife removed himself to another hemisphere. "I just don't think going back to Pakistan gets the job done."

"Humor me. It's my dime."

"It's the American taxpayer's dime. How long do you think Kallendorf is going to let you get away with this?"

"As long as I continue to produce results."

Patrick hung up and stared at the television, still set to NTV, which was running an old interview of Sally Ride and her husband and fellow astronaut Steve Hawley by Jane Pauley. Jane wanted to know if they planned on having children, and Sally told Jane it was none of her business. A charm school dropout, Sally Ride. He thought of his own close encounters of the media kind and wished she worked for him.

The phone rang. It was Bob. "Yaqub says he thinks Isa is in America."

"Not news. Anything else?"

"Well… He told Mary that he thinks Isa is a virgin."

"Really."

"Really. He waited until I was out of the room to tell her, and he whispered it like he didn't want Isa to hear."

"Why? Isa taken a vow of celibacy to the cause?"

"He doesn't know why, but he says Isa-who he knew as Dandin Gandhi, by the way-never went anywhere near women while he knew him."

Patrick thought of Zahirah's body, skirt rearranged carefully over her recently deflowered body. "So he thinks Isa hated women?"

"You'd expect that from an avowed Islamist, wouldn't you? No, Yaqub says in fact the opposite. He was very critical of Yaqub's womanizing, thought it was demeaning to both Yaqub and the women. He used to quote at him from the Koran, something about if you be kind toward women and fear to wrong them, Allah smiles on you."

"Really," Patrick said again. "Interesting."

As soon as he hung up the phone rang again. It was the agent in Mexico City. They'd finally caught a break. Isa had been spotted boarding a flight for Haiti. Not without difficulty, Patrick managed to restrain himself until he hung up and then he leapt to his feet, pumped his fist once, and shouted, "Awright!"

He got immediately back on the phone to call his office. "Melanie? I need a seat on the next plane to Port-au-Prince."

There was a brief, startled silence. Miami was one thing. Haiti, especially given the current political climate there, was quite another. He was a bureau chief, not a field agent. "Are you quite sure about this, Mr. Chisum?" Melanie said.

"I'm sure, Melanie," Patrick said firmly. "And don't you think it's time you started calling me Patrick?"

OFF CAPE CANAVERAL, ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO

"We'll be hanging offshore about two miles out," Cal told the Munros. "But it'll feel like you've got a front-row seat. The best place to watch will be from the bridge. I'll put us port side to, and I'll have some chairs brought up for you if you'd like."

"Oh please," Doreen said, "you don't have to go to all that trouble."

"It's no trouble, Doreen."

Nick cocked an eyebrow. "You'll be providing seating for all your guests, Cal?"

Cal grinned. "The admirals and the press can stand."

They were in Cal 's stateroom, with the table set for dinner for six. There was a knock at the door and the two aforesaid admirals entered. One was of medium height with a barrel chest, the left half of which was covered clavicle to sternum with service ribbons. He had stern gray eyes and a thick, bristly flattop to match. "Admiral Matson," Cal said.

The second admiral was so tall he had to duck coming through the door, with a haircut so short he looked like he was wearing a silver skullcap. Admiral Barkley had an intelligent eye, a charming smile, and an easy manner, and he was a veteran of multiple patrols in the Caribbean, EPAC, and the Bering Sea, so he knew his way around operations and had an instant frame of reference with the skipper of a 378. He at once endeared himself to Nick by casting aspersions on aviators of every stripe. There followed a spirited debate on the relative merits of sea and air, which was accompanied by a lot of laughter and ended in an amicable draw.

In the meantime, Doreen tried to draw out Admiral Matson, who was determined not to be drawn, and other than asking Cal -twice-if the CNN reporter had made it on board, addressed himself exclusively to his prime rib. It was excellent, Cal was relieved to note, as the admiral was a noted trencherman. In Admiral Matson's defense, it had to be said that he spent all his time wrangling money out of Congress for the Coast Guard. If he regarded Munro working launch security with a Munro a member of the shuttle's crew solely as a heaven-sent opportunity to remind Congress of the Coast Guard's worthiness come appropriations time, there was some validity in that viewpoint. After a few minutes, Doreen, with an air of having done her best, handed Matson off to Taffy, who was seated at the foot of the table with his best attentive and respectful expression fastened firmly on his face.

The phone rang. "Excuse me," Cal said, and took the receiver from Seaman Roberts, who was doing her best not to hurry dinner along even though she wanted to take a nap when she got off duty so she'd be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the launch. Cal hoped fervently that no fires or other emergencies broke out at T minus ten, because most of his already skeleton crew would be on deck at that time, cameras at the ready, to watch the shuttle hurl itself skyward. "Captain," he said into the phone.

"Captain, this is the OOD. We've got a request to launch our helo to go pick up someone at the Cape."

"What?" Cal said. "Is there an emergency?" He sat up, napkin sliding from his lap. "Morgan, is this a SAR?"

The OOD, a sanguine and capable woman five years out of the Academy, said cheerfully, "No, Captain. Someone just wants a ride."

Cal laughed. "What did the XO promise you this time?"

"This isn't a joke, sir," Barbieri said reprovingly.

"I beg your pardon," Cal said meekly.

"Quite all right, sir."

"So what's going on?"

"Evidently there's a VIP at the Cape and he wants to come out and watch the launch from Munro''

Cal knew a sudden foreboding. "Who is this alleged VIP?"

"Senator Schuyler, sir."

THEY LAUNCHED THE HELO WITH MINIMUM FUSS, ALTHOUGH Lieutenant Noyes did make a joke about being demoted to a taxi service. They were back in forty-five minutes, entirely too soon, roaring down the length of Munro at 140 knots, fifty feet off the water, a flyby for which they had not asked nor been given permission to do.

His stateroom full of strangers, two of them his superior officers, Cal had no recourse but to greet his father in public. "Dad," he said.

Senator Schuyler swept Cal into a manly embrace, including several thumps on the back for good measure. "Your mother sends her love, as always, son."

Cal was certain as he stood there that if Vera had given any thought to her son and only offspring in the last month it was to wonder yet again if he'd finally decided to leave the disreputable life of a sailor behind for one more befitting his mother's station in life.

The honorable senator beamed impartially at the assembled company. "And who are all these good people?"

As if the senator didn't already have the 411 on every person in the room, Cal thought, and performed the introductions, if not with grace then with utility.

The senator shook hands with Matson, saying cordially, "Of course, Admiral. You've testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee on several occasions, haven't you?"

Admiral Matson, whose lugubrious countenance had brightened considerably at the news of Senator Schuyler's coming, was almost voluble in reply. The senator listened with an indulgent smile for a few moments, murmured an appropriate comment, and with a diplomatic adroitness Cal could only admire cut Matson loose to exchange greetings with Admiral Barkley, and moved on to the Munros. "I've been seeing your daughter in the news a lot lately," he said. "A beautiful girl-"

"A woman," Cal said under his breath. "She's a grown woman." He tried and failed to catch the XO's eye.

"-and smart, too. One of our best and brightest, as the phrase goes."

Nick and Doreen said something polite and avoided looking at Cal. His opinion of them, already high, rose higher.

The senator was late for dinner but not too late for dessert. Cal fiddled with his silverware, turning the dessert spoon at the top of the plate from bowl up to bowl down. Seaman Roberts set out another gold-rimmed china dessert plate with the Schuyler coat of arms on it in front of the senator (the full set of china had been a gift from his mother, commemorating his first command, and didn't he hear about that from his friends for years afterward), and quietly left the room.

A few minutes later the phone rang. Cal was on his feet, answering it well before it rang a second time. "Captain."

"Seaman Roberts, Captain."

"Yes, OOD, what is it?"

"There was a young man from Austin," Seaman Roberts said. 1 see.

"Who bought himself a new Austin."

"Yes, I can see where that might be a problem."

"There was room for his ass, and a gallon of gas."

"Certainly."

"But the rest hung out and he lost 'em."

Sternly repressing a grin, Cal said, "Tell MPA I'll be right down."

"Yes, sir." Seaman Roberts hung up.

Cal put the phone down. "I'm sorry," he said gravely. "A little problem in Main Control. No, no, nothing serious, but my presence is required."

Halfway out of his chair, Taffy said, "Is it something I can handle, Captain?"

"No, no," Cal said. "Please, sit, enjoy yourselves as long as you like. I believe dessert this evening is apple pie a la mode, and you haven't eaten apple pie until you've eaten FS2 Steele's apple pie. I'll be back as soon as I can. In the meantime"-he grinned cheerfully at Taffy-"XO has the con."

He snagged his cap and headed for the door.

On his way out, Admiral Barkley caught his eye and winked at him.

21

TEN MILES EAST OF MELBOURNE, FLORIDA,

ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME

Akil watched the tiny screen on the handheld GPS until the last digit on the coordinates changed. "All right, it's time," he said. "Everyone ready?"

It was a rhetorical question. They'd been ready for an hour and a half, since he'd brought the GPS out and left it out.

There had been very little discussion of their plan or its objective. "It really is quite simple," one of the engineers had said, sounding almost disappointed.

"Occam's razor," another said. "The simplest explanation is usually the correct one." He dared a shy smile. "Nine-eleven was a simple plan, too."

Akil smiled back. "Yes. It was. Inshallah."

"Inshallah."

At present several of them were on their knees praying toward Mecca. When they were done, they checked their weapons.

These were the smallest of small arms, the Ruger Mark II.22 semiautomatic pistol, with nine-round magazines. Each man had two pistols and a dozen magazines, all bought online through a variety of different Internet stores in different states with different identification papers and forwarded through several mail drops and a discreet, expensive customs clearinghouse to another mail drop in Port-au-Prince, where Yussuf had collected them upon arrival.

Akil's reasoning was that they were going to have to move fast and he didn't want the men to be burdened with a lot of heavy weaponry. Further, heavy weaponry would not be necessary if all went according to plan. He had ensured that his men would be trained on small arms. The Rugers were well made and reliable, and there was plenty of ammunition to accomplish the task at hand. Indeed, it was very probable they could take the ship without firing a shot. From Bayzani, he knew that at the time the ship in question was to be boarded, the crew would be unarmed, would be taken by surprise, and should be sufficiently cowed into obedience by a weapon of any size.

Lastly, and this was the most significant reason, in spite of the intensive training they had all received over some part of the past six months, these men were amateurs. They'd never seen combat. They'd never been under fire, if you didn't count the riot in Dusseldorf, and Akil didn't. Akil's plan depended on secrecy and stealth. The last thing they needed was for an inexperienced soldier of God to let loose with an AK-47 in the act of piracy on the high seas. Especially when Akil was absolutely certain none of them could hit what they were aiming at with a rifle of that size.

"Ready?" he said.

They nodded. They were wearing dark clothes and dark-colored, rubber-soled shoes. Their pistols were in doubled shoulder rigs, with the extra magazines in belt holsters. With jackets on, they looked a little bulky but that was all.

"Very well," Akil said. "Wait for my signal."

He slipped out of the door and down the passage, remembering the way from his earlier sortie even in the dark and even with all the bodies crammed into it. He tripped over some, he kicked others, but no one made a fuss. They were either too seasick to protest or too afraid of drawing attention to themselves to speak up, for fear they'd be put over the side before they reached the promised land. The first lesson had been ably demonstrated, and well learned.

When he got to the pilothouse, the captain was still there, perched on the high wooden chair in front of the wheel as if he hadn't left it in the five days they'd been at sea. "Ah," the captain said, "Mr. Mallah."

Akil had had so many different pseudonyms over the past year that for a surreal moment he wanted to look around to see who the captain was speaking to. Instead, he locked the door to the pilothouse behind him and pulled his pistol. "Captain, I'm afraid I'm taking command of your boat."

"Are you, now," the captain said, unsurprised. He took a leisurely puff on his cigar, and held it out to blow smoke on the lit end. Instead, he flicked the cigar straight at Akil, and rocketed out of his chair after it.

Akil instinctively dodged the cigar and twisted to one side to avoid being tackled. He hit the captain on the head with his pistol butt as he passed by, a glancing blow, not hard enough to knock him out but enough to get his attention. The captain hit the bulkhead hard and tumbled into a clumsy pile. He groaned.

"Shut up," Akil said, and hauled the captain to his feet and heaved him back into his chair. "Alter course to 240, due west."

Either still recovering from the blow to his head or faking it, the captain didn't immediately move. Akil took his left hand-the captain had been smoking with his right, and Akil needed him functional, at least up to a point-and flattened it against the bulkhead. He tossed his pistol up and caught it by the barrel and brought the butt down as hard as he could on the captain's little finger.

The captain screamed, a hoarse, shocked sound muffled by the engines. In Akil's experience, hands were very sensitive appendages for even the strongest of men. He'd met many a man who could barely tolerate a paper cut. "Don't hesitate when I give you an order. Alter course to due west."

"There is land due west," the captain said, cradling his wounded hand in his lap and rocking back and forth.

"I know that," Akil said. "Alter course, due west. If I have to ask you again I'll cut off your hand."

The captain believed him.

CAPE CANAVERAL, ON BOARD SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR

She had to pee.

She was lying on her back in her seat on the flight deck below the cockpit. The Arabian Knight was on her left. He looked pasty and scared, every drop of arrogance leeched out of him. It must finally have sunk in, what four million pounds of propellant could do if there was a problem during launch. He'd seen the fire trucks, and the ambulances, on their drive to the pad that evening.

It was T minus ninety, ninety minutes to launch, barring problems.

Her diaper rustled every time she moved. She could pee if she had to, but she didn't trust the diaper. What if it leaked? She thought she'd squeezed out every last drop of liquid in her body in the pad toilet, and at this point she was more furious at this betrayal of her body than she was terrified of blowing up.

Because she was terrified, of that there was no doubt. However stoic an appearance she presented to the world, the look on the Arabian Knight's face only mirrored what she felt inside.

In preparation for this day, she had worked and trained as hard as she ever had in her life. School, soloing, getting her commercial license, flying Otters full of tourists to go look at grizzly bears, these were as nothing by comparison. She'd flown formation in the T-38s in everything up to and including IFR approaches into the middle of storms that made her understand why the Greeks had made their head god one of thunder. She had rappelled down the side of the orbiter mock-up practicing emergency egress. She'd killed and eaten a rattlesnake during survival training. She practiced on the robot arm simulator until her own arms burned from sheer tension, and in the pool at Houston she'd practiced EVA maneuvers in the three-hundred-pound spacesuit until she thought she would grow gills. She had learned the function of every single one of the switches and knobs and levers and gauges and digital readouts in the cockpit. In a pinch, if Rick and Mike were both somehow incapacitated, she could land the orbiter at KSC or at Dakar International Airport or in Cold Bay, Alaska, or at any one of the designated shuttle emergency landing sites worldwide.

She was ready. She was ready for launch. She was ready for orbit. She was ready to carry out her mission. But she was also very aware of something the men who had flown the planes into the towers and the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania had intuited early on.

Aircraft were nothing more and nothing less than a thin, fragile skin barely containing thousands of pounds of extremely combustible fuel. She was on the inside with the fuel. If there was any kind of a problem, she was going to burn up with it.

And she would kill anyone, including Cal, her friends, her parents, and Joel Almighty God Minster, if they tried to take her off this flying bomb.

"T minus eighty-nine." Mission Control's voice was calm, almost laconic. The beat of her heart, loud and rapid in her ears, almost drowned it out.

No. She wasn't going to blow up. She wasn't going to screw up. At fifty miles high her silver astronaut pin would turn to gold and every dream she had ever had about space flight since she was nine years old and had read Michael Collins's Carrying the Fire for the first time would come true.

But she still had to pee.

"T minus eighty-eight."

A MILE OFFSHORE OF CAPE CANAVERAL,

ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO

The shuttle stood on its tail, mated to the solid rocket boosters and the massive external fuel tank, a valiant white spear against the night sky. A brilliant cacophony of stars glittered behind it, shouting the man-made lights onshore into a pale echo. A murmur of appreciation rolled down the deck of Munro and up over the bridge.

"My, isn't she pretty," Senator Schuyler said.

Cal agreed with him, but he agreed with him silently. It was a matter of personal policy never to agree out loud with anything his father said.

He was well aware of how childish that was. He didn't care. Agreeing with his father was always a slippery slope, at the bottom of which the senator lurked, waiting.

They were running darkened ship, so no one's night vision would be obstructed for the launch. The Munros were seated on canvas folding chairs on the port bridge wing, with the senator leaning against the railing, Admiral Matson at his side as if he'd been superglued in place, but nevertheless casting longing glances at the CNN crew on the foredeck.

"Great view," Admiral Barkley said from Cal 's other side. "Ever seen one of these before?"

"No, sir, I haven't."

"Me, either." Barkley's teeth showed in a smile. "I was in Admiral Mat-son's office when he invited himself along, and I figured it'd be my only chance, so I invited myself along with him."

The CNN reporter, her impeccably coiffed hair beginning to frizz under the influence of so much salt air, was on the main deck below, working her way toward the bow, doing man-on-the-deck interviews, all of it framed by the digital video camera perched on the shoulder of her cameraman. Cal had gone below to introduce himself and welcome them to the ship, introduced them to the XO, suffered through his own interview, and handed them off gladly to Ensign Schrader, the lowest-ranking officer on board and therefore the de facto last stop for all the jobs no one else on Munro wanted.

"It's great being the captain," the XO had said in a low voice as they watched Schrader herd his charges safely past the Darwin sorter. "Although you might have missed an opportunity there with Ms. Teeth."

Cal controlled a quivering lip. "Ms. Trenwith, I believe she said her name was, XO."

"Well, sir, I just wanted you to know you had an in there." The XO's teeth flashed in the dark. "You know, when the astronaut begins to pall."

"Stuff it, XO."

"Certainly, sir," Taffy said, and snapped off a salute.

Munro was idling directly abeam of the shuttle. In spite of it being July and no winds, it was night and cool on the water, and the crew was bundled into fleece jackets. He looked at them crowded up against the railing and the safety lines along the 378 feet of the ship and wondered who was driving.

"Captain?"

It was BMC Gilmartin, who had relieved Lieutenant Barbieri for the watch at 2000 hours. "The Falcon is reporting a freighter in the closed area."

"What?" Cal followed Gilmartin into the bridge. "Have we got it on the radar?"

They went to look at the surface radar, a monitor mounted in a freestanding console with a constant sweep revealing surface contacts in their area, radiating from Munro's position in the center. "What's the range?"

"Three miles, sir."

"So five miles from shore."

"Yes, sir."

"That's three miles inside the security zone."

"Yes, sir."

"Why the hell'd it take so long for the Falcon to notice them?"

"They didn't say, sir."

They both watched the tiny blip move slowly and unmistakably inshore.

Tramp freighters were as common as seagulls in this area, some full of legitimate cargo like bananas or coffee or molasses headed north to waiting wholesalers, some full of stolen bicycles or cars, headed south to a less legitimate market in the Caribbean or South America. Some, as he well knew, were full of migrants looking for a quick and dirty way into America.

This ship could be any one of those and probably was.

Still, they were in the middle of a countdown for the launch of a U.S. space shuttle. A shuttle, moreover, that Kenai was on. Something that might later be termed overreaction did not necessarily seem uncalled for at this moment. "BMC, what's her speed?" Cal said.

"About ten knots, Captain. I'm thinking two or three of that is the Gulf Stream."

"And our nearest assets?"

Gilmartin raised Combat, and OS2 Riley's thin voice blared out of the speaker. "We're spread out pretty thin on the coast, Captain. Because of the threatened protest, the four small boats are all working close in, making sure nobody gets ashore. One of the MLBs is responding to a SAR south of here-nothing to worry about, they lost their engine and they need someone to make sure they don't run aground while they're waiting for the tow boat to show-and the other MLB is too far north. It's us, I guess, Captain."

Cal nodded. "Here's hoping the crew doesn't mutiny when I tell them they have to interrupt their launch viewing opportunity to do some actual work. Set starboard side boat launch detail, BMC."

"Aye aye, Captain. Set starboard side boat launch detail, BM2."

"Combat, captain."

Riley's voice came back at him, the speaker distorting it to make it sound tinny and almost afraid. "Captain?"

"Why'd it take so long for the Falcon to spot the freighter?"

"Uh, I don't know, Captain. I passed on the message as soon as I got it."

"All right, Combat, captain out."

"Combat out."

Myers's voice echoed over the ship. "Set starboard side boat launch detail, set starboard side boat launch detail."

There was a wave of protest from the deck. "What?" "What'd they say?" "Are they kidding?" "Is this a joke?"

The XO had followed Cal inside. "I've got this, Captain."

"Nonsense, XO, I'll take it. You go keep our guests happy."

Good thing it was dark on the bridge so Cal couldn't see Taffy's expression.

Not that Boat Deck Captain Smith needed any help from Cal to get Mun 1 launched. He did not turn on the spotlight mounted on the edge of the starboard wing because it would have ruined everyone's night vision. Smith and Seaman Orozco had the davit engaged and the orange, rigid-hulled inflatable out of the cradle and snugged up against the boat deck a couple of minutes later. They were manned and ready to go in five minutes. Cal 's radio crackled into life. "Captain, boat deck."

"Boat deck, captain, go ahead."

"Permission to launch the starboard side boat, Captain?"

"Stand by one. Coxswain, captain."

"Captain, coxswain."

Two decks below the coxswain looked up but in the dark Cal couldn't see who it was. "Who's talking?"

"BM2 Hendricks, sir."

"Did you run a GAR?" This was an assessment by which crew readiness was calculated, run prior to an operation, especially one this unexpected.

"We're in the green, sir, total fourteen. High in crew fitness because we're all in tourist mode instead of being focused on the job, and another high in environment because we're fumbling around in the dark. The rest are all twos and threes. We know how to do this. We're ready."

"Who's on the crew?"

"Myself, Garon, Velasquez, Garza, and Clark."

Velasquez was one of their Spanish-speaking interpreters, breaking in Garza on the job. Good move, there was a strong chance that whatever this boat was, it would have no English speakers on board. "Thanks, Coxswain. Boat deck, Captain."

"Captain, boat deck."

"Permission to load, lower, and launch the starboard side boat, aye."

"Aye aye. Load, lower, and launch!" Smith's bellow was audible to everyone on the starboard bridge wing. "Boat moving!"

"Where are they going?"

Cal looked around to see the Munros leaning over the rail next to him to peer interestedly into the dark. "We have a contact on the radar where it shouldn't be, inside the area closed during launch."

"My goodness," Doreen said. They heard the smack of the small boat's hull on the water. "Who is it?"

"We don't know yet. Probably the usual idiot joyrider." He bent his head back. "Lookout?"

A head poked over the side of the deck over the bridge. "Yes, Captain?"

"Do you have a pair of those night-vision binoculars?"

"Sure thing, Captain." The head vanished and Cal went over the ladder up to the lookout. A moment later Seaman Critchfield handed the binoculars down to him.

"Thanks, Seaman."

"You're welcome, Captain. Uh, what's going on?"

"There's a contact bearing 090 relative, and heading west."

"That would be into the area closed during launch, sir?"

"It would. Keep an eye out."

"Keeping an eye out, aye sir."

22

TWO MILES OFFSHORE, ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME

"I can hear their engine," Yussuf said.

"Yes," AMI said. "Captain?"

The blood had flowed freely from the scalp wound where Akil had struck him, and it had dried to his face in a half-mask that made him look like the Phantom of the Opera. The little finger on his left hand stuck out at an unnatural angle, and he was careful to hold it out of the way. He sounded resigned. "I say nothing. I do not respond to calls. I do not slow down."

"Correct," Akil said. "Yussuf, get our men up on deck."

"Yes, Isa," Yussuf said, and left. Shortly they heard footsteps coming aft and climbing the stairs to the deck.

The migrants said and did nothing, watching them pass with fear or apathy on their faces. Most of them spoke little English, and they'd probably spent everything they had on passage to the United States. They would do nothing, take no action that might delay or deny that goal.

The engine of the small boat neared. Akil could barely discern the outline of the hull against the sea. It was so dark he couldn't see where the sea ended and the sky began, but for the stars, which were many and beautiful. He thought of Adara. He thought of Zahirah.

The small boat hailed them on the marine band. "Unknown freight, unknown freighter, this is the United States Coast Guard. You are inside a closed area, I say again you are inside a closed area. You must turn around, I say again you must turn around immediately. Please respond."

"Don't answer," Akil said.

He remembered very clearly the story Adam Bayzani had told him about what it was like on a small boat at night. They were in constant communication with their ship, both the bridge and the combat center, and they were equipped with their own surface radar unit. The ship had infrared radar that Bayzani had spoken of admiringly, but not on the small boat. The cutter had night-vision goggles, which the small boat might or might not have on board as well.

These last two items of information were why Akil's men had jackets on over their weapons. If the Coast Guard did manage to get a close look at who was on deck of the little Haitian freighter in the dark, he didn't want his people to stand out any more than absolutely necessary. Or not immediately. It was also why he had instructed Yussuf and Yaqub to select recruits who looked more African than Asian. They would appear like every other Haitian migrant on board, at least at first.

The small boat came nearer and nearer. When Akil judged it near enough, he said, "Cut off the engines."

"They'll know we-"

Akil shot the captain in the back of the head. He had a silencer fitted to the muzzle of his pistol and the shot made a muted burping sound. The captain's forehead burst and splattered blood and brains all over the steering wheel and the control console. Akil wiped away some of the mess to take the boat out of gear. He had watched the captain very carefully for the last part of the journey.

He left the engine idling and went to join his men on deck. "Did you immobilize the rest of the crew?"

"Yes," Yussuf said. "They're tied up in our stateroom. There are only six of them, and I think four of them were only guards. None of them protested when they saw the guns." A trace of self-satisfaction colored the words. Yussuf was discovering the power that came with a weapon.

Akil nodded. "Good work." He was watching the shadow that was the small boat. It made a wide circle around the Mokame and took up position off their port side. A powerful spotlight came on and flooded the stern of the freighter with light. Akil's men put on a good show, putting up their hands to shade their faces and blinking in the bright light. They were lost in the sea of migrants surrounding them, all doing the same thing as they muttered incomprehensibly among themselves.

The loud hail came a moment later. "Unknown freighter, unknown freighter, this is the United States Coast Guard. You are inside a security zone closed to all unauthorized vessel traffic, I say again, you are inside a security zone closed to all unauthorized vessel traffic. You must depart this area at once. Please reply."

"Remember," Akil said, "we need the uniforms."

HAITI

They had crawled slowly and painstakingly through every waterfront dive and backwoods bar in the greater Port-au-Prince area. In the past week Patrick had drunk more alcohol-most of it, he was certain, distilled in someone's backyard from whatever fruit they had hanging from the handiest trees-than during the rest of his life combined. His liver was protesting, he was experiencing shortness of breath, and he fancied that his heart had picked up an irregular beat somewhere between the harbor saloon where a massive black man had offered him his sister and he had been almost too terrified to refuse, and the one-room juke joint where a three-piece band was sawing away at some of the best blues he'd ever heard in his life.

A week. Seven days. If it came down to that, 168 hours. He looked down at his suit, spattered with the remnants of seven days' worth of meals featuring fresh conch, fried plantains, and sweet potato cake. No, he was no field agent, he thought sadly.

At seven days, even Patrick, who had pursued every lead Akil had left him with bulldog persistence, was ready to throw in the towel.

And then, a miracle occurred.

One of the men working with him found an informant, a man who ran a ferry out of Port-au-Prince. He had lately taken on board five men, passengers who didn't strike him as tourists, and let them off at a marina some miles down the coast. How many? He scratched his scrofulous chin and couldn't say. Patrick's man held up a twenty-dollar bill and asked if that would improve his memory. It would, and it did.

So Patrick and the dozen other agents who had flooded into Haiti clandestinely boarded the little ferry, after the unloveliest captain Patrick had ever seen held each of them up for the twenty-dollar fare, informed them it only paid one way, and cast off.

The little ferry couldn't have been forty feet long and her unprepossessing exterior did not lend Patrick any confidence that she wouldn't sink before she got off the dock. But she did chug determinedly out of the harbor and down the coast, which cast off civilization far too rapidly for Patrick's tastes, shedding houses for jungle as if someone had thrown a switch. He felt like Lord Jim going up into the heart of darkness.

He repeated this to one of the agents. "I think that was Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, sir," this young man said, an ardent Conrad fan. "Lord Jim is another novel entirely." "Whatever," Patrick said.

They arrived at the marina shortly thereafter. They went ashore and split up, half knocking on doors in one direction and half in the other. They met back at the marina two hours later. "If Isa was here, nobody's talking," one agent said. It was hot and they were to a man sweating profusely. Patrick actually had his suit jacket off and was fanning himself vigorously with a large leaf he hoped wasn't poisonous to the touch.

Discouraged, he said what they were all thinking. "Well, it was a long shot. We should probably pack it in and head for the barn."

Just then the young agent with the Conrad fetish showed up. He had a child in tow who looked about ten, with bright dark eyes, skin the color of a raven's wing, and a close-cropped cap of tight black curls. His blue-checked short-sleeved shirt and khaki shorts were shabby but clean and neat. He wasn't shy, looking them over with the eye of an expert who makes his living by judging a likely mark.

"He says he knows of the men we're looking for," the agent said. Patrick looked at the kid, who met his gaze fearlessly. "Does he speak

English?"

"Yes, he speaks English," the kid shot back. He had a thick accent but he was perfectly understandable.

"You got a name?"

"They call me Ti-Malice." Pleasantries concluded, Ti-Malice came right to the point. "You want to know about the strangers who were here."

"Yes. Ivar gave you a description."

"Yes."

"And they looked like that?"

"Yes, they looked like that," the kid said, aping his deliberate speech. "How much you gonna pay me to tell you where they went?"

"How much you gonna want for the information?" Patrick said.

They haggled back and forth for a few minutes before settling on twenty American dollars, which seemed to be the going rate for anything that could be bought. Patrick hoped the bean counters never questioned this particular informant fee on his expense sheet.

"Some they come by the ferry, which you know," Ti-Malice said. "Some they come by seaplane, which you don't. One, he come by car, through the jungle. He the leader."

"How do you know that?"

Ti-Malice looked at him with contempt. "They come to him with questions, he give them answers. When they leave, he get on the boat first. He the leader."

"How many of them were there?"

"Ten."

"When did they leave?"

Ti-Malice shrugged. "Six days ago, maybe?"

"What kind of a boat did they leave on?"

"Sailboat." But Ti-Malice's eyes slid away from Patrick's.

It was too blatant to be anything but intentional. Patrick sighed and got out another twenty-dollar bill. He held it out of the kid's reach. "Okay, Ti-Malice, what's the rest of it?"

"They not the only people on board this sailboat," Ti-Malice said.

"ISA'S ON A BOAT SMUGGLING MIGRANTS INTO THE U.S.?" THE AGENT with the Conrad fetish said over the roar of the seaplane's engine as they took off from the tiny harbor. "What's that about?"

Patrick frowned through the windshield. There was something he was

missing, some link in Isa's recent series of activities that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

Why would Isa go to all the trouble of infiltrating a boatload of Haitian migrants inbound for America? Look at how he had waltzed in and out of New York and Florida. He'd been in Florida for six months without anyone spotting him. Why go to all the trouble and expense and endure the discomfort of a smelly cruise on what sounded like a marginally seaworthy vessel?

He worried at the problem all the way back to Miami, in the throes of July Fourth celebrations that in Miami seemed to require much shooting off of guns into the sky. Traffic was slow coming in from the airport, and it was nine o'clock before the taxi dropped him off at his hotel.

He was still worrying when he unlocked the door to his hotel room.

Melanie was waiting for him.

His mouth dropped. "Melanie?"

"Hello, Patrick," she said. She walked toward him in the pencil skirt and slender heels she always wore, today topped by a thin, powder blue sweater with a scoop neck that hinted at cleavage. She was suddenly closer to him than she'd ever been before, and this time there was no desk between them. He backed up, only to hit the door. He dropped his bag. "What are you doing here?" he said weakly.

"I thought I could help," she said. "Here, let me get your coat."

Firm hands turned him around and lifted his coat from his shoulders. "My, you need a shower," she said. "Or do you prefer a bath?"

His tongue tied itself in knots for a moment. "Sh-sh-shower," he managed to say.

She gave him a sweet smile. "I showered when I got here-I hope you don't mind-but there are clean towels left."

"I, uh, okay," Patrick said, and fled.

When he came out, slightly pink from the scrubbing he had given himself, and the belt of the terry-cloth robe knotted very tightly around his waist, she was sitting next to a table set with Caesar salad, a crusty loaf of bread, and a bottle of chardonnay, which she'd already poured into two glasses.

He sat down in the chair opposite her with a thump, his legs oddly incapable of holding him up any longer. He stared at her. "Melanie, what are you doing here?"

She waved her hand at a briefcase sitting on the desk across the room. "There was some paperwork I thought I'd better deliver in person." She dimpled delightfully. "And I've never been to Miami."

He knew he was being seduced, probably at Kallendorf's instigation, and he couldn't do a thing to stop it. When they finished eating and she took his hand and led him to the bed, he did not resist.

"That was wonderful, Melanie," he said later, and kissed her in gratitude. "Thank you."

She smiled and held her hand to his cheek. "You're very sweet, Patrick. I've wanted this for a long time."

He couldn't tell if it was a lie or the truth, but he didn't really care. He sighed and reached for the robe discarded on the floor. "I'd better take a look at what you brought."

"It's a report from Mr. Rincon. He faxed it to the office this morning."

He forgot the robe and trotted over to the briefcase naked, riffling through the paperwork to find the report with the institute's deliberately vague logo, a quill pen crossed with a broadsword and the words littera scripta manet written beneath in a discreet little font. It was only when you looked more closely that you saw that the pen was larger than the broadsword and in a fair way to eclipsing it altogether.

"Mrs. Mansour was right, he is Pakistani," he said, reading rapidly. "Akil Vihari, brother of-holy shit."

"It's an awful story, isn't it," she said gravely. "Yes, I read it when it came in. I know I wasn't supposed to, Patrick, but I couldn't resist."

"I remember reading about this," Patrick said, unheeding. "It was something of a cause celebre, especially when her brother disappeared and Amnesty International and the rest of them figured he'd gone for revenge against the tribesmen and they'd killed him. It was in Time, it was on the Nightly News and BBC."

There was a picture of Adara, the one taken for her identity card. It was blurry but it looked familiar. It took him a minute before he made the connection.

"She looks like Zahirah Mansour." He thought of what they had found in the backseat of that car and felt a little sick.

She dozed off while he skimmed through the rest of the report. No wonder, he thought, looking at her slumbering form, lovingly outlined by the sheet. It was after eleven. She must be exhausted.

He'd be happy to crawl in beside her but he felt restless. The television was on. He skimmed the news channels. Nothing new; a bombing in Baghdad and another on the West Bank, a small plane crash in Alaska that everyone had walked away from, a mudslide in California and a tornado in Kansas. NASA was about to launch another space shuttle, and among the crew there was a relative of a World War II hero after whom someone had named a ship, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. There was a clip of her parents on the cutter, standing next to the captain, a fit, handsome man in his midforties who looked as if he wished he were anywhere else but there. Patrick wished he looked like him. Then maybe Melanie would have slept with him because she wanted to, not because Kallendorf did.

He clicked over to NTV for a little mindless entertainment, and watched as time-lapse photography darkened the sky over the agglomeration of ship and fuel tanks waiting next to the great steel Tinkertoy that held it upright until ignition. They were set to launch at midnight.

The scene switched to the standard NASA-issue press conference, the six astronauts dressed in the now-familiar blue flight suits with the mission patch on the breast sitting at a long table, facing a room full of reporters with notepads and microphones and cameras. It was the second mission for the commander and one of the mission specialists, the first for the pilot and the other two mission specialists. The sixth was a Qatari who worked hard at giving the impression that his job was to single-handedly launch the ARABSAT-8A, the communications satellite for the Al Jazeera news network.

The camera flashed on the mission commander, who for a moment looked like he'd been stuffed. One of the mission specialists, a woman from Alaska, diverted attention with a laughing complaint about the reporters' lack of interest in Eratosthenes, the orbiting observatory named for the ancient Greek scientist who had only been off three thousand miles when he estimated the circumference of the earth three hundred years before Christ.

That persistent little voice at the back of his mind telling him he was missing something became a full-fledged nag.

Zarqawi betrayed and killed.

Isa, Zarqawi's devotee, on his own after Zarqawi's death, breaking with bin Laden to form his own group.

Isa, recruiting Yussuf and Yaqub in Germany, and more in England.

Yaqub in Toronto, waiting for the go signal.

Mexico City, Haiti, a boatload of illegal immigrants.

Patrick paused with the glass of water halfway to his mouth.

Isa was Zarqawi's apprentice. Osama bin Laden hated and distrusted Zarqawi, and because of that Isa would never be regarded as a true member of al Qaeda.

But Isa was ambitious, and al Qaeda set the gold standard for terrorism with 9/11. Isa wanted to surpass it, and to do so he would use bin Laden's name.

One of the reasons Isa could be operating independently of al Qaeda was because he saw bin Laden's tactics change from attacking the Far Enemy on their own ground to engaging them in battle closer to home.

What was it that loser, Karim, had quoted Isa as saying? He said that Bush said that it was better to fight us on our ground than for the Americans to fight us on theirs. And then he said he thought Bush was right.

Instead of hitting the Far Enemy in Iraq, where the Far Enemy could hit them back, Isa was looking to bring the jihad back to the Far Enemy's backyard, where he believed it had belonged in the first place.

And the first thing he would look for was a target of opportunity, something universally recognized as a symbol of American might and power, something that symbolized everything the Far Enemy stood for that the true believers hated. Their technology. Their secularism. Their greed.

And their open, unabashed determination to corrupt the faithful.

He stared at the television, at the shuttle, white against the enormous fuel tank, flanked by the slender rocket boosters, steam curling up from the tail to make it look like the whole assembly was floating on air.

In the orbiter at this moment were five astronauts, two of them women, one of them black. One was a Protestant, one was Catholic, one was Bahai, and two were undeclared.

And then there was the sixth person on board.

One of the faithful.

One of the faithful, yes, Patrick thought, but from Isa's viewpoint also a Qatari, a citizen of a nation whose women would have the right to vote in the next election. A bona fide Muslim, scion of a powerful and influential Muslim family, a family that owned a controlling interest in a global media organization whose twenty-four-hour news feed could be found on every television in every coffeehouse in every souk in the near and far East.

An organization rich enough to launch its own satellite, which satellite was at this very moment tucked into the cargo bay of the shuttle he was staring at now.

Suddenly Patrick knew why Isa had boarded a boat in Haiti that was headed north.

"Fuck me," he said, and lunged for his cell phone.

23

ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME

"Now?" Yussuf's whisper was agonized.

"Wait," Akil said, his voice a mere thread of sound. "Wait."

The migrants' attention was fixed fearfully on the Coast Guard small boat. They barely registered Akil and his men's presence. With every part and fiber of their being they wanted to be safely ashore in America.

The small boat came closer in an ever-narrowing circle. Once again the hail, "Attention, unknown freighter, this is the U.S. Coast Guard. This area is closed to all traffic, I say again this area is closed to all traffic. You must turn your vessel around immediately and leave this area."

The small boat's orange hull was twenty-five feet away from the Mokames stern, then twenty, then fifteen. "Safeties off," Akil said softly, "and remember, head shots. We need the uniforms."

He waited until the small boat had closed to within five feet of the Mokame, when he could see beyond the brightness of the spotlight to the members of the small boat's crew. He raised his gun and shot the coxswain between the eyes.

"The coxswain sits in front on the left," Bayzani had said, illustrating with the salt and pepper shakers, so eager to instruct, so eager to please. "He's the captain of the small boat, so to speak. The man on his right maintains communications with the ship."

Without pausing Akil shot the man sitting next to the coxswain, and one of his men, Mahmoud he thought, reached over the side with a boat hook and snagged the bow of the inflatable.

"What the fuck?" the man in the bow said, staring open-mouthed. Yussuf shot him. The bullet hit his shoulder, high and to the left, and Akil was irritated. "We need the uniforms!" he repeated.

He had to raise his voice over the increasing cries of the migrants, who after the first shock were scrambling, clawing, fighting to get away from the guns. One man, braver than the rest and more stupid because of it, made a clumsy attempt to tackle Yussuf. Akil's bullet caught him in the stomach and he skidded backwards, to sit down hard on the deck. He looked with surprise at the rapidly growing stain on the front of his shirt.

Those migrants below had panicked at the sound of the gunshots, pouring out on deck, with screams and cries and pleas to their gods, only to fall back in fear when they saw the guns.

One of the two men left alive in the inflatable was trying to pull the coxswain's body free of his seat. Akil shot twice and missed twice when the man ducked, but by then his men had found their range and the next time his head popped up three bullets hit it more or less simultaneously. Miraculously, they had managed not to hit the boat.

The fifth man stood up in the back of the inflatable, hands raised in the air, his face a white blur in the night. The flap on his sidearm had been unfastened but his hands were empty.

At least five guns spoke at once, and the man tumbled backwards over the edge of the small boat and hit the water with a splash. There were other splashes as some of the migrants went in, some voluntarily, others falling. By now the Mokame was listing heavily to starboard because all the migrants were crowding the starboard side gunnel, trying to crouch as far away from the armed men as they could get.

Akil cursed with a fluency that momentarily stopped them all in their tracks. "Secure the boat!" he said.

Mahmoud knotted the end of the small boat's bow line around one of the cleats on the Mokame. Five of his men half jumped, half fell into the small boat and began stripping the bodies.

ON BOARD THE SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR

"T minus sixty."

The urge to urinate was by now all Kenai could think about. She still didn't trust the diaper, but her tonsils were floating. She ran a swift calculation. An hour to go till launch. From launch, it took ten minutes to get into orbit, when she could change into dry clothes. She would spend seventy minutes lying in her own pee if the diaper didn't work.

She decided to risk it. It took a few moments to convince her urethra that this was okay, prone on one's back not the most conducive environment for urination.

Her urethra got the message, and her bladder emptied out in a warm rush. The relief was immense, and she sighed. She sent out feelers for diaper failure, but her back was still dry, so far as she could tell.

All righty then. "Bring it on," she said.

"What's that, Kenai?" Rick said, his voice raspy over her headset.

"Nothing, sorry, Rick. Just hurrying up the count."

"Hear, hear," Laurel said.

"T minus fifty-five," said Mission Control.

ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO

"Less than an hour to go," Cal said to the Munros.

They smiled, their eyes glued to the binoculars. They didn't look or act apprehensive, but like any parent of any astronaut, they had to be thinking of Challenger, and Columbia.

He was.

When he wasn't monitoring boat ops on the bridge, that was. He went

back inside. "BMC?"

"Yes, Captain," Gilmartin said. "We haven't heard from Mun 1 since they sent their last ops normal call."

"When was that?"

"Five minutes ago."

They weren't overdue, and Garon's last communication had been to inform them that the contact appeared to be a sail-rigged coastal freighter

loaded with migrants. "The message sounded kind of garbled, like their radio was failing," BMC said apologetically. "OS2 Riley says the same."

"Oh, great," the XO said.

ET3 Lang, on watch during boat ops, said in a puzzled voice, "I don't know what can be wrong with the boat's radio, sir. I ran the morning check and it was fine."

They became aware of the presence of Admiral Matson standing in the doorway. "What's going on?"

Heads swiveled toward Cal. "We have a freighter that is refusing to identify itself inside the security zone, sir." He saw Barkley's head peering over Matson's shoulder. "We've launched the small boat to go over and take a look. The small boat's been out of touch for a little longer than we'd like, but that may be due to radio problems."

"Nothing interferes with Munro standing by this launch, Captain," Matson said, and returned to the port bridge wing.

There was a short, uncomfortable silence.

"One thing at a time," Cal said to his crew. "The BT will start the checklist, get the boat and crew information, if they're talking. In the meantime, we'll get this bird in the air. Then, if they haven't returned and we still haven't heard from them, we'll go over and take a look for ourselves."

"Works for me," the XO said more cheerfully.

ON BOARD USCG SMALL BOAT MUN 1

Akil, Yussuf, Mahmoud, and two of the others had donned the uniform shirts and life vests stripped from the dead boat crew. Mahmoud, the only experienced boatman among them, was in the coxswain's chair. He took a moment to familiarize himself with the controls before starting the engine.

Akil, sitting next to him, donned the headset and keyed the mike. He spoke tentatively, not entirely certain that the script he had put together from information received from Adam Bayzani and the traitor on board Munro was accurate enough to pass muster. "Munro, Mun 1."

The answer was prompt and sounded relieved. "Mun 1, Munro."

"The captain and crew are Haitian," Akil said. Unchallenged, he gained confidence. "The captain says his home port is Port-au-Prince." He dropped his voice as he said the last words.

"Mun 1, Munro, say again?"

Akil did so, again mumbling the words and keying the mike and throwing in the odd whistle and growl.

"Mun 1, Munro, you're breaking up."

"All right?" Akil said to Mahmoud.

"Yes, Isa," Mahmoud said.

"Then take us to the ship."

"Yes, Isa," Mahmoud said.

"Munro, Mun 1, the radio is breaking up. Mun 1 returning to base."

The tedious months of waiting, the interminable hours on the freighter, now it was all finally culminating in glorious action, action that would make them household names around the world, feared by their enemies and canonized by their friends. Mahmoud was a true believer, and if Akil could not easily make out his face in the darkness, he could plainly hear the joy in the other man's voice.

"Allahu Akbar!" Mahmoud said.

Eight of them responded, if not as joyously then with as much manufactured enthusiasm as they could bring to bear, knowing that they were going almost certainly to their deaths. Even the most fanatic among them suffered at least a pang of uncertainty when faced with the near future.

And then they looked to Akil sitting on the side of the small boat, at the calm certainty on his face, and were reassured. This was Isa, after all, Zarqawi's right-hand man, the author of too many successful actions taken against the infidel to count.

They could not fail.

Exalted they might be, careless they were not. They approached the cutter on the starboard side. A shout from the bridge.

"Radio's down!" Akil shouted back.

They waited a few moments, and then another shout from a man in a white hard hat two decks down. That would be the boat deck captain. "Captain says he'd like to leave the lights off until after the shuttle launch so we don't screw with everyone's night vision. You okay with that?"

In a passable American accent, Akil said, "No problem!" From Adam Bayzani and the traitor, he knew the boat crews practiced boat ops in the dark all the time. In this case the dark was a friend to him. Five of his men were lying flat on the bottom of the small boat, hidden by the men in the stolen uniforms.

The tension on the small boat was palpable as they heard the whine of the boat davit and the clink of the shackles as they were lowered. The man in the bow grappled for his shackle, missed, grabbed again, and this time caught it. In spite of the calm seas the small boat did move up and down and he fumbled with the clasp. When he got it on he threw himself backwards.

"Bow on?" The boat deck captain sounded testy.

"Bow on!" Akil said.

The stern shackle was even more recalcitrant, but it was finally fastened to the small boat and this time Akil's man bellowed, "Stern on!" without prompting.

There was a clank and a whine and a moment later the boat began to rise in the air.

"Cut the engine!" came the irate yell from the boat deck. Further comments were clearly audible, and probably meant to be. "Crissake, one shuttle launch and suddenly the boat crew doesn't remember how to run a boat."

Hastily Mahmoud cut the engine.

Akil wondered if the boat deck captain was annoyed at the possibility of his missing the shuttle launch himself. He didn't know it yet, but he was about to witness something far more spectacular and significant.

Something truly historic.

"Stand by, we're putting you in the cradle, we don't have any crew on the main deck," the white hat said. The whine of the davit increased. They ascended past the main deck and were swung aboard with neatness and dispatch, the hull settling into the cradle with a small jolt.

"You guys are supposed to report to the captain, as in pronto. Come on, Orozco." A door clanged open, and shut again.

"Quickly, now," Akil whispered, "and silently."

His men, galvanized, slid over the small boat's gunnel to the deck of the cutter. As Akil had hoped, the starboard side of the main deck was deserted. All of the cutter's crew was on the port side watching the shuttle.

"You have your radios?" Akil said in a low voice.

Yussuf held his up and clicked it twice. The click was repeated in the radios held by Akil and Mahmoud.

"You remember the plan?"

"I remember, Isa," Yussuf said, and surprised him with a fierce embrace. Five shadows went up the flight of stairs forward of the boat.

"Go," Akil said to Mahmoud. Mahmoud opened a door to the main deck and went inside. Akil and the rest followed.

Inside, the ship was dimly lit by red lights. Akil paused at the top of a flight of stairs and watched Mahmoud walk down the passageway toward the door leading into the engine room. He waited long enough to see Mahmoud open the door. Mahmoud and four men entered. The door closed firmly behind them, and Akil waited until he saw the levers lower and lock. He turned then and went down two flights of stairs, ending up in a tiny alcove between two heavy steel doors.

He straightened the life vest and the uniform shirt beneath it, and pulled on the bill of his cap. It was too large, and stiff with the coxswain's blood and brains.

He didn't look up at the closed-circuit television camera mounted above the door. It doesn't work, the traitor had told him. It's supposed to but we don't have the money for it.

He pressed the buzzer beside the door on the left.

They're not expecting someone with a gun.

He waited. A trickle of sweat snaked down his spine.

They'll open the door to anyone, especially if they're in uniform.

There was an answering buzz, and the sound of a bolt going back. The door cracked open and he stared at it in momentary disbelief.

The door didn't open any further. He realized that whoever had opened it had walked away, leaving him to enter on his own. He pulled the door open and walked in.

It was a large, cool, dark room, with many banks of screen displays, radios, and control consoles. There were four people looking up at a square screen. One of them looked over his shoulder. "Hey, Hendricks, come on-wait a minute, who are-"

Akil shot him. The woman next to him screamed, and he shot her, too. The third man put his hands out and backed up. "No," he said pleadingly, no-

He was the third to die in that room.

But not the last.

The fourth man sat where he was, a rictus of a smile on his face, his eyes wide behind round, silver-rimmed glasses. "You did it," he said.

Akil ejected the magazine and slapped in another.

"I didn't think you'd do it," the man said. He couldn't stop grinning.

"You were wrong."

"I intercepted the Falcon's transmissions about the freighter. I jammed the small boat's radio calls. I still didn't think you'd actually do it."

"We don't have much time," Akil said.

Riley quoted the words he had spoken in that hotel room in Istanbul. " 'Nothing will look out of the ordinary until the very last moment, and by then it will be too late.' I didn't think you could do it."

"We haven't done it yet, Riley." Akil holstered the pistol. "What about communications?"

Riley reached up to flip a switch. "I slaved all communications to a single switch," he said, as if he were expecting applause.

"Telephones? Internet access?"

"All," Riley said. "No one can call in or out."

"Cell phones?"

"I don't have any control over those."

"All right. Show me the controls for the 76mm."

Riley folded his arms across his chest. "Show me the money first."

Akil stared at him.

"I want my money before we go any further with this," Riley said. "I'm about to be a very wanted man. Maybe even one of the ten most. Maybe I'll even be on America's Most Wanted."

The idiot sounded proud of it.

"I'll never be able to show my face in America again," Riley said. "It'll be expensive, staying in hiding. Show me the money. Isa."

He gave a crow of laughter at Isa's look. "Did you think I didn't know? Did you think I couldn't figure it out? Of course you are Isa. Zarqawi's right-hand man. Why do you think my price was so high?"

"If you knew who I was, you could have turned me in for about the same price as what I'm paying you," Isa said. "Why didn't you?"

Riley, still with that rictus of a smile on his face, said, "I figured this would be more fun."

ON BOARD SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR

"T minus twenty-two. Endeavour," MCC said, "we're going on hold here." Curses echoed over everyone's headsets. "What's the matter?" the Arabian Knight said. "What's wrong?"

"Relax," Kenai said to him, "there's no problem, everything's fine." She switched channels. "Rick, what's the problem?"

"Ah, something's going on with the GLS. Sit tight, they'll fix it." Kenai mentally condemned the ground launch sequencer to the city dump.

At least her bladder was empty.

ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO

Cal wondered if he was imagining the list to port. Half his remaining crew was on the hangar deck, sitting around the helo in lawn chairs, cameras at the ready. The other half were lined up along the port side. "I sure hope somebody's minding the store," he said. As he said the words, he heard a noise.

"What the hell's that?" he said, in a low voice so as not to alarm the Munros, although he saw Admiral Barkley's head turn. The senator had gone down to the hangar deck to work the crowd, and Admiral Matson had gone with him.

The XO cocked his head. "It sounds like the 76mm."

"That's what I thought."

They looked at each other. "XO, I don't think even the gunnies would think shooting off the 76mm during a space shuttle launch was a good thing."

"No," the XO said decidedly.

"Not to mention which, GMC and almost all of the gunnies are on liberty."

"There's that, too," the XO said.

They both drifted back inside the bridge. "OOD, did you hear that?"

Gilmartin was on the phone. "Yes, Captain, I'm calling CIC to find out what's going on but I'm getting no answer."

"Call the armory."

"I did, sir. No answer there, either."

"Get the BMOW down on the gun deck right now and find out what the hell is going on."

"Yes, sir." Gilmartin jerked his chin at Myers, who reached for the IMC.

He didn't live to make the pipe. The silenced bullet took him in the back and he fell forward with barely a cry.

They all stared at the body on the deck, the red stain spreading beneath him, uncomprehending.

"If everyone will please remain calm until we are through, we will leave and no one else will have to be hurt."

A man in casual clothes stepped into the bridge. He was holding a small automatic pistol in each hand, and at first Cal thought stupidly of John Wayne. It was so dark on the bridge Cal couldn't make out the man's features. His voice was young, with an edge of excitement for all his apparent composure.

He stood aside and a second man shepherded the Munros into the bridge at gunpoint. In the dim light Cal could see that Doreen was white and shaking. Nick looked angry. He thought he caught a glimpse of a body sprawled on the bridge wing. Admiral Barkley. Christ.

On the bridge were Gilmartin, the XO, and himself, along with the Munros. He couldn't tell how many pirates there were, if indeed these were pirates. Somehow he didn't think so.

He himself was standing a little in back of the XO. It was dark on the bridge. He might be out of range of the glow from the radar screens. He put his hand in the small of the XO's back and pressed.

After a moment of hesitation, the XO took a step forward. "What the hell's going on here?"

"Who are you?"

"Captain Schuyler, I'm in command here," Taffy said. "And you are?"

Instead of answering the first pirate took a step forward to peer into Taffy's face. "You look like a Muslim, friend."

"And you look like a pirate, asshole. What's going on?" The XO took another step forward. "What do you want with my ship?"

"Yeah." Gilmartin had somehow intuited what Cal wanted, attention diverted from whatever it was he was going to do. He rose to his feet from where he'd been trying unsuccessfully to revive Myers. "Good question, sir. Just what the hell is going on?"

As BMC and the XO stepped forward Cal took a step back, until he could feel the air coming through the starboard side door.

"Stay back!" the pirate said. As small as the pistol was, he'd already killed Myers with it. They froze. "All of you, back behind navigation." He snapped a phrase in what Cal thought must be Arabic, and the second man herded the Munros, Gilmartin, and the XO behind the nav table. No one betrayed his presence by so much as a glance and Cal took advantage of it to duck down on all fours and peer out the door.

He couldn't hear anything, and he couldn't see anything. He slipped outside, duckwalked aft, and pulled himself hand over hand headfirst down the flight of stairs to the small deck that gave off his quarters. He got the door open and ran for the phone.

He cursed and slammed the receiver down. "Dead." He keyed his radio. Dead. He went for the computer. Access denied.

Hijacked two miles off the coast of goddamn Florida. What the hell did they want? What justified this big an operation?

He felt a sudden chill. The space shuttle.

The 76mm. They were going to use it to bring down the shuttle.

They must have been on board that freighter. They took the small boat when Mun 1 did the ROA. He spared an agonized thought for the boat crew, but he knew there was nothing he could do for them right now. The pirates, no, these weren't pirates, they were terrorists. Call the sons of bitches what they were. The terrorists had pretended the radio went bust and brought the small boat back to the cutter.

"Son of a bitch," he said out loud. "We actually brought them on board."

They had the bridge, CIC, and the 76mm for sure. Probably Main Control. They had to have Main Control if they wanted to maneuver the ship. They'd want control of the ship so he couldn't take it back and screw with their aim.

The gun locker. Forward of the hangar deck, just off the boat deck. One deck down from his cabin.

He cracked open his door and listened. The interior of the ship was as quiet as he'd ever heard it, the online diesel muted. He slipped into the passageway and moved quickly into Chief's Country. He opened every door he came to. No one was home, they were all out on deck watching the launch, on duty, or on liberty.

He kept moving.

CIC

"How far offshore are we?" Two miles.

"Range is what, six miles?"

"About."

"Good."

OS2 Riley's hands worked the controls nimbly, although they were shaking. "There. Target is acquired, and the automatic tracking is engaged."

When Akil didn't reply, Riley said more insistently, "We're done here. So long as your guys got the ammunition in the right holes, it's all up to the machines."

"Yes," Akil said, "it is. Stand away from the controls, please."

Riley rose to his feet, a sickly expression on his face. "I've done everything you want, everything you asked me to do."

"And you were well paid for your efforts," Akil said. "At least your family will suffer no needless privation from your death," and he shot him, once. A third eye appeared between Riley's eyebrows. He fell back without another sound, eyes wide open and staring at the bulkhead above.

"I'm sorry, but I never trust a traitor," Akil told him, and left CIC without haste, disabling the lock before he pulled the door shut behind him.

MIAMI

Patrick was almost weeping. "Sir, I am telling you. Isa is at this moment attempting to hijack a United States Coast Guard cutter off the coast of Florida."

It had taken an interminable half an hour to track down Kallendorf's location, and another ten minutes to pry the phone number out of directory assistance. For a spy agency, Patrick thought bitterly, we're just not very damn good, are we?

Melanie was a warm presence against his side, her hand cupping the back of his neck, her eyes loving and concerned. While he'd been waiting on Kallendorf, he'd used the hotel phone to call the local authorities. The problem was he didn't have a working relationship with anyone in Miami, except for a bored third-class detective down at Metro Dade who had long since packed it in for the night. He'd called the Pentagon. They'd promised to call him back right away. He was still waiting.

He'd woken Melanie in the mad scrabble for his cell phone. He couldn't use the hotel phone, not for something like this, it wasn't secure. He'd finally found his cell behind the nightstand when he called the number on the hotel phone and it went off. He must have kicked it there when he and Melanie-

"Patrick, what have you been smoking? I haven't heard of anything like this in the wind, and you just admitted, neither have you. Do you really think even your pet terrorist could pull something like this off without leaking a whisper of it to someone?"

"If anyone could, Isa could, sir."

"Patrick, look, I think maybe you've been working a little too hard. Why don't you take some time, catch some sun and sand and-"

"Goddammit!" Patrick said, surging to his feet.

Melanie flinched away from the bellow, crouched on the bed, staring up at him in alarm and not a little wonder.

"Why, Patrick," Kallendorf said, "I didn't know you had it in you."

"Sir, this is no time for your adolescent jokes. If you don't call the Coast Guard right now, I swear to God I'm calling the White House! I'll go over your head, sir, I sure as hell will! I'm telling you Isa is hijacking a Coast Guard cutter even as we speak, so he can use one of its weapons to take down the space shuttle! They're minutes away from launching, sir, minutes! Do you really want to go down in history as the CIA director who fiddled while the enemy blew up the most iconic symbol of American might and power ever? Do you?"

24

ON BOARD SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR

"T minus ten."

Ten minutes to launch. Still wearing dry pants. Still with her heart beating faster than any human heart ever had. In twenty minutes she could be in space. Correction. In twenty minutes she would be in space.

ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO

There couldn't be that many of them if they'd all fit into Mun 1 on the way over. He could raise a hue and cry and alert his crew.

But none of his crew were at present armed. He thought of Myers. The terrorists were.

He looked at his watch. Ten minutes to launch. Nine.

He swung around the foot of the stairs and diverted momentarily to put his head into the chief's mess. No one there, either. He wanted GMC and he wanted him now, but GMC was on liberty. He stepped back and turned to head for the door to the main deck and crashed into someone coming from the opposite direction.

There was a clang of metal dropped on metal followed by a curse not spoken in English. Going on instinct Cal hit out blindly, his right hand connecting with someone's belly. He shoved him out of the way and went scrabbling about the floor looking for what the man had dropped. A foot connected solidly with his side and he grunted. His hand touched the butt of a pistol and he snatched it up and brought it to bear. His finger was squeezing the trigger when the same foot came out of nowhere and kicked it out of his hand.

His hand went instantly numb. He dropped the weapon.

The pistol clanged off down the passageway. The other man went after it. Cal went for the door, got it open in record time, and tumbled out on the main deck. He hotfooted it to the forward stairs and pelted up to the boat deck. Behind him he heard running footsteps. They hit the stairs. He ran aft, making sure his own footsteps hit the deck loudly enough to be heard, ducking out of the way of the Darwin sorter.

As he had hoped, his pursuer was not so lucky. He hit the Darwin sorter at full throttle and from the sound of it laid himself flat out on the deck. Cal didn't stop to check, didn't try to find the pistol in the dark, he kept going until he got to the forward door of the hangar, worked the lever, and got inside, pulling it shut behind him.

"Captain?"

He jumped about a foot. "Jesus!" he said, peering through the dark. "Who's that?"

"Noyes."

The aviator. "What are you doing here?"

"I was in the av shack, getting another pair of binoculars. I heard some funny noises and I came to check. What's going on?"

"We got some bad guys on board, trying to shoot down the space shut-tie, I think."

There was a startled silence.

"No, I'm not kidding," Cal said fiercely, "and this is not a drill."

Recovering, Noyes said, "How the hell did they get on board?"

"There was a freighter-never mind that now. I don't know how many of them there are, ten or twelve, I think, but they've got the bridge and CIC and I'd guess Main Control, too. All our communications are out, I can't yell for help."

He spun around and felt for the door to the gun locker. "Is there anyone else in the av shack?"

"No. Captain, why don't we just stick our heads out the door and yell for the crew?"

"Because the crew can't shoot back. Yet." Cal 's fingers felt for the lock.

"Do you want me to turn on a light, Captain?"

"No! No." He found the lock and delved in his pocket for the massive ring of keys he always carried.

It wasn't there.

He felt the other pocket.

The key ring wasn't there, either. "Goddamn son of a bitch." They must have fallen out of his pocket during the fight.

"Captain, hold up a minute. We've got the radios in the helo."

Cal 's hands stilled. He hadn't even thought of the helo's radios.

AKIL GAINED THE BRIDGE TO FIND ALL QUIET UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYE of Yussuf, who greeted him with a triumphant smile. On the gun deck forward, the barrel of the 76mm had been trained on the sky over the shuttle.

They could have destroyed it on the ground, but Akil wanted to hit it in flight. According to Bayzani and to Riley, with the automated tracking gear installed during the ship's last refit, it shouldn't be a problem.

The shuttle's destruction would produce the maximum amount of shock and horror in the viewers. Millions would be watching; online, on television, later on the news channels over and over and over again.

When they were done they would know two things they hadn't known before.

One, that no one was safe from him and his forces. No one was beyond his reach.

And two, that henceforward Isa and Abdullah were names of respect, of awe and admiration, names to be taken seriously by every Western nation in the world.

NO ONE ON THE HANGAR DECK WAS AWARE ANYTHING UNTOWARD WAS happening elsewhere on the cutter because no one on the hangar deck could hear anything over the multiple boom boxes playing everything from Dave Matthews to the White Stripes. The 76mm was forward, that was where the attention of the terrorists would be concentrated. The hangar deck and his people were aft. For the moment, Cal wanted it kept that way. He didn't think his crew would panic but he didn't want to test the thesis, either.

He and Noyes walked to the helo at a casual pace, Cal unable to refrain from taking a look over the port side at the shuttle gleaming white and brave under the lights.

Noyes opened the door of the helo and slid inside. "Shit," he said a few minutes later. "The radios are dead. They've already been here. Somebody had some good intel, Captain."

"Yes, they did," Cal said. He scanned the crowd, a few of whom were giving them curious looks.

He looked at his watch.

"There can't be that many of them, Captain," Noyes said urgently. "We can rush them."

"They've got hostages," Cal said, "the Munros, BMC, the XO on the bridge. The watch standers in Main Control and CIC. They've killed Myers and I think everyone on the boat crew and they're not out of ammunition."

"They'd rush the bridge."

"I know they would. I don't want them to."

"How about rushing the 76mm?"

"They've got people on the doors leading to the gun deck."

"But we can't let them take out the shuttle."

"Did they just take out communications, or can you still get this bird in the air?" Cal scanned the crowd and didn't see the other aviator. "And can you do it alone?"

Noyes flicked a few switches. His frown cleared. "I think she'll fly, sir." He looked at Cal. "But sir, there isn't enough time to fly to shore and get help. The shuttle launches any second now."

"I know."

Noyes looked confused at first, and then he understood. His face changed in the reflected glow of the lights on land. "Oh. Shit. You want me to be a hero."

"If I knew how to fly it, I'd fly it," Cal said.

Noyes, amazingly, grinned. "Can you shoot the M-240?"

"Will it do enough damage to get the job done?"

"You said you think they're not going to start shooting until after the shuttle launches. Do you know what spiking a gun means?"

"Yes," Cal said, and realized what Noyes meant. "Yes!" There was another way, a better way, and maybe no one else would die.

They conferred hurriedly and came up with a plan.

"There's only-"

"What?"

"They could shoot us down."

"I haven't seen anything bigger than a.22 pistol. They're traveling light. If you can stay out of range until the last minute, and if you're willing to take the risk-"

"Let's do it," Noyes said.

Cal looked at the crowd, and then at his watch. Six minutes. "We have to clear the hangar deck. Oh, Jesus. And we have to get rid of them."

"Them" was the CNN crew, now snaking its way through the crowd on a dead reckoning for the helo. "Start the engine, that'll get all the bright ones moving," Cal said, and slammed the door shut. He grabbed the first crewman he saw, which turned out to be FS2 Mellot. "FS2."

Startled, she said, "Captain?"

He looked past her. "SKC? YNC? Come here a minute." He led the food service officer and the two chiefs away from the helo, along the way collecting MK3 Ochiai and DC2 Milton, all reliably levelheaded crew members. "We need to launch the helo. Never mind why, it's an emergency, just help me clear the hangar deck. And folks? We have armed hostiles on board. Let's not attract any attention. As quietly as possible, please, get everyone down on the fantail. Now!"

ON BOARD SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR

"T minus thirty-one seconds. Go for auto-sequence start."

Her mouth was dry and her heart was racing. Cal, Mom, Dad, she thought, watch me fly.

ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO

The rotors were beginning to turn and the noise of the engines increased. The hangar deck was deserted. Cal 's picked band of crew members had shoved, muscled, and strong-armed everyone down onto the fantail or into the hangar, the CNN crew protesting all the way.

He fought with an intransigent buckle on one of the tiedowns and swore out loud. The buckle came free and he threw the tiedown over the side to follow the first three. The last thing they needed was some piece of debris getting caught up in the rotors' backwash and he didn't have time to run anything back to the hangar.

Onshore, clouds of steam were beginning to boil up from beneath the shuttle's tail. Kenai, he thought, it'll be all right, I promise, go, go, go!

Camera lights went off like popcorn all along the main deck. He risked a look around the corner of the hangar. Was that a dark figure he saw slipping from shadow to shadow? They couldn't all hit the Darwin sorter, worse luck.

He duckwalked beneath the rotors and climbed in the back of the helo. Noyes was taking off as Cal 's foot left the deck.

Munro fell away beneath him.

ON BOARD SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR

"T minus ten seconds. Go for main engine start."

"Five… four… three… two… one…"

The hold-down bolts blew and they were hit with seven million pounds of thrust from two solid rocket boosters and three main engines.

The noise was deafening, the vibration threatened to shake her hair loose from her head, and the G-force flattened her against her chair like a steamroller.

Her teeth were rattling so loudly in her head that she almost couldn't understand Rick when he said, "What the hell was that?"

ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO

The boom of the 76mm firing was loud even over the noise of the engine. Cal yelled something, he didn't know what, and looked over his shoulder to see the shuttle was off its pad, rising slowly into the air, straining bravely for the stars. He knew a wave of relief so strong it was dizzying.

"Get ready!" Noyes yelled, and the sound of his voice steadied Cal. The aviator had already unlimbered and loaded the M-240. Its barrel pointed out of the left side of the helo and Cal 's hands were tight on the grip. Noyes maneuvered the aircraft until it faced Munro port side to port side.

Cal 's finger tightened on the trigger and the M-240 chattered, spraying the hatchway leading to the gun deck where he was certain one of the terrorists was on guard. It's where he'd have stationed a man if he'd been running this op, it was a chokepoint in case anyone decided to rush the 76mm. He couldn't get a direct shot but with all the metal the ricochet was bound to hit something. He prayed it wouldn't be a member of the crew.

"All right!" he yelled, and Noyes crabwalked the helo in closer, so close it seemed to Cal as if the rotors were going to slice into the bridge. "Jesus, Noyes, be careful!" he yelled. He wondered for a wild moment if Noyes could even hear him over the engines. They hadn't had time to don helmets. He crouched next to the M-240 in the door of the helo.

There was a muzzle flash from the bridge, and the helo jolted hard.

"Fuck that," Noyes roared, "jump, goddammit, jump!"

Cal jumped, pushing against the doorframe of the helo with his feet, launching himself in a shallow dive for the gun deck. Behind him he heard the helo roar off, and more gunfire, and more impacts.

It was the longest two seconds of his life.

He hit hard, just forward of the gun deck port hatch. He actually remembered to tuck and roll, and by a miracle came up on his feet.

Nobody shot him. That was a good thing because for just one moment he was frozen in disbelief that it had been that easy.

In the next he broke and ran for the side of the house. His right foot stepped in something slippery and he went down to one knee. He was up again almost immediately. The slippery something was blood. Yes, man

down, one of them, groaning, pistol on the deck just beyond his outstretched hand. Cal scooped it up and ran back out onto the gun deck, for the exterior of the 76mm. He paused for one moment to try the hatch in the deck aft of the gun, just on the off-chance the men inside had forgotten to lock it. No, locked, and then someone shot at him from the starboard side of the gun deck, the shot clanging into the deck two feet away and whining off to port.

He shot back with the terrorist's pistol and they ducked back out of sight. Someone shot at him from the bridge wing. He ran around to the front of the 76mm.

The casing of the big gun was a smooth, slippery white surface. He stuck the pistol in the back of his pants and climbed on the railing in front of it. He put both hands on the casing and jumped up, grabbing, clutching, clinging to the casing, pulling himself up, his muscles straining, his teeth bared in a snarl of determination.

He heard excited voices coming from the gun room below the deck, voices speaking what he supposed was Arabic. The big gun moved on its mounting, tracking the shuttle as it rose into the sky. "No," he said through his teeth, "no, goddammit, not on my watch you don't!"

He pulled himself from the casing to the barrel, a snout longer than he was and a mouth large enough for the job. Clinging to the barrel like a leech, by an act of will not sliding off, he freed one hand, reached around for the pistol, and dropped it into the open muzzle of the gun.

He let go and fell to the deck, falling awkwardly this time. He limped around to the back of the gun. A bullet whined off the deck next to his left foot, spurring him into a shambling run.

He'd just reached the hatch behind the wounded terrorist when the 76mm fired for the second time. The round hit the pistol, lodged halfway down the barrel.

The barrel of the 76mm exploded, shredding into threads of twisted metal, some of it severed into shrapnel. Most of it went overboard. Some of it hit the forward part of the bow and the front of the house.

A dark, hot force caught Cal in the small of the back in mid-stride and lifted him up. He literally flew down the deck and hit the bow of Mun 2, sitting in its cradle.

He hung there for a painful second, watching the shuttle climbing slowly, steadily, and most beautifully higher and higher into the sky. He slid to the deck and knew no more.

WHEN THE 76MM BLEW, THE NOISE AND THE SHRAPNEL BLINDED AND frightened everyone. All the window on the bridge shattered. A moment later, the man Akil thought was the captain went for Yussuf, slamming him into the bulkhead and sending his guns skittering across the floor. Two others went scrambling after them. The woman must have ducked down behind one of the consoles because she was suddenly nowhere to be seen, or acquired for use as a hostage.

For a frozen moment Akil, ears ringing, was aware only of the bent and broken fragments of his dream, buried beneath alarms and smoke and flying metal. There were screams of fear and bellowed orders. On his left the space shuttle climbed into the sky on a column of molten gold.

The wreckage of the big gun caught fire, first a flicker, then a glow. An instant later a siren went off, almost painfully loud, impossible to ignore. Crew members began pouring up into the bridge. The man he thought of as captain began shouting orders.

He walked to the door with no outward sense of haste. On the bridge wing, he tossed his gun into the water and climbed over the railing. He kicked away from the side of the ship, falling feetfirst into the water, and struck out for shore.

25

WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST 2008

"Isa got clean away?" Kallendorf was not pleased.

Neither was Patrick. "Unfortunately, sir, yes."

"Very unsatisfactory."

Patrick tidied his file together. "Not entirely, sir," he said mildly. "The attack was foiled. The shuttle and its crew made it safely into orbit, and they are now safely back. I understand the first round fired from the cutter's cannon got close enough for them to see. It gave them a few bad moments, but all in all, a happy ending, I would think.

"The helicopter, though damaged in the firefight, landed safely onshore at the Cape, although I understand the pilot was taken into custody by NASA security for a few hours until everything was sorted out. The cutter suffered severe damage when the gun exploded, but the hull remained intact and the cutter made it into port."

"How did they get control of the engine room?" Kallendorf asked idly. He wasn't all that interested.

Patrick allowed himself a prim smile. "Akil's people didn't know much about ships, sir. All the compartments are watertight, but there are many different entrances. The executive officer and the, what I believe is called the health services chief, or corpsman, colluded on a gas of some kind to introduce into the engine room. I believe the chief component was ammonia. When the terrorists became incapacitated, a welder cut through one of the doors and the terrorists were, uh, overpowered by the crew."

"Knacky people, those Coasties," Kallendorf said.

"Yes, sir. Always prepared is, I believe, their motto."

"Still. Isa escaped." Kallendorf sighed. "Not good, Patrick, not good."

"We now know who Isa is, sir, and where he comes from. This will, I believe, be a great help in predicting his future actions.

"And lastly, this attack underlined something the agency has been trying to get across to Congress for years."

"Oh? What's that?"

"That our nation is immensely vulnerable to attack by sea. This time it was a hijacked Haitian freighter. Next time? It might be a hijacked oil tanker, mined to explode as it runs aground…" Patrick shrugged. "Well. Pick a target, sir. Maybe, just maybe because of this action, Congress will listen the next time." He stood up. "Anything else, sir?"

Kallendorf looked at him broodingly. "You swore at me, Patrick."

"Yes, sir, I did." Patrick made a superhuman effort and didn't apologize.

Kallendorf grinned. "Get out of here."

"Certainly, sir."

Patrick went on his way rejoicing. When he reached his office, he paused with his hand on the door for a moment, and then went in. "Hello, Melanie."

"Hello, sir." There was a smile in her eyes.

"Any messages?"

"Just one." She handed him a slip of paper.

"Ah. Get Mr. Rincon on the phone for me, will you?"

THE CURRENT CARRIED AKIL SOME MILES NORTH OF CAPE CANAVERAL, where he managed to thrash his way to shore on a sandy beach that lined the edge of a swamp. He slogged through the swamp to a road, which he followed until he came to a town. On a clothesline in someone's backyard he found dry pants and a shirt. He walked to the next town where he caught a bus to Jacksonville. The woman across the aisle was reading the Miami Herald, which had a large, grainy picture of Adam Bayzani's doctored passport photo on the front page, but she never looked at him twice. Talk on the bus was all about the attempt to bring down the space shuttle. "We ought to just nuke the whole Middle East and be done with it," one old man said, and there were nods all around.

The story was running on all the televisions in the Jacksonville airport. He looked at the flight board, identified several possibilities, got cash from an ATM, and took a cab to a local mall, where he bought a new wardrobe and a carry-on suitcase to put it in. He found a small motel nearby and checked in. He used the motel's business center to buy his tickets.

That night he dreamt again of Zahirah, and woke in a sweat-soaked panic.

Once, all his dreams had been of Adara.

The next morning he showered, packed, and went to the airport. The passport he had with him was in the name of Suud Bathinda, an Indian national, a computer programmer from Mumbai.- He offered the TSA official grave apologies on behalf of all Asians for this latest attempt on America 's might and substance. He had no trouble getting through security.

In Atlanta he boarded a flight for Paris, in Paris another for Barcelona, not going to the Hotel Arc de Triomphe as he had planned.

He'd always liked Barcelona. The second day he even went back to the Maritime Museum, and stood in long contemplation of the Royal Galley that had fought at the Battle of Lepanto.

He never once thought of Adam Bayzani.

That evening he strolled down to the waterfront and dined well on fresh seafood at an open-air cafe. On the way back to his hotel, he became aware that he was being followed. He took no notice, continuing his placid pace.

When he opened the door to his room, Ansar was sitting in a chair, watching Baywatch on television. "Ah, Isa, I was wondering what was keeping you." He smiled. "The old man wants to talk to you."

Akil knew a sudden and a great weariness. "Certainly," he said. "I am at his disposal."

"YOU'RE SURE?" PATRICK SAID.

"He was seen, and identified. Besides, it's all over the net. Irhabi's blog has the story, almost the real one. I think someone in the al Qaeda organization doesn't like our Isa."

"Will bin Laden have him killed, do you think?"

"I don't know," Hugh said thoughtfully. "We've been talking that over ourselves. The whole attack on the space shuttle was pretty gutsy. A lot like 9/11, it was simple, and pretty cheap. His guys talking yet?"

"Some of them are. The ones who still can talk after the Coasties got done with them. They were pretty pissed."

"Really?" Patrick could hear the smile in Hugh's voice. "May I tell Sara?"

"Sure. Anyway, Isa's bunch don't know much."

"I suppose bin Laden could be upset that this was going on in his own backyard without him knowing it."

"If he didn't know it," Patrick said. "Ah, the hell with it. I'm going on vacation, Hugh. I'll be gone for two weeks."

"Alone?" Hugh said. "Or in company?"

Hugh really was very good at what he did. "None of your business," Patrick said primly. "Leave a message if anything else crops up, will you? And, hey, thanks. We did some good work here."

THEY WERE SITTING ON A STUMP OVERLOOKING KACHEMAK BAY IN Alaska. The view, both near and far, was breathtaking.

Kenai was more relaxed than he'd ever seen her, the tension that had kept her at peak performance expended now in a job well done. "Eratosthenes is in orbit and working, just a flawless deployment," she said. " Laurel is ecstatic, and so are all the astronomers. The Al Jazeera satellite deployment went without a hitch, too, so all the Arab nations could watch their guys take a shot at us. Sons of bitches."

"Did you see them shooting?"

"No, but Rick and Bill did. Like a big tracer across the nose. Way too close for comfort. Said it cleared up their sinuses."

"I'll bet," Cal said.

"Other than almost getting shot out of the sky, it was a great mission. Even the Arabian Knight managed to behave." She reflected. "Probably had something to do with the fact that his people had very nearly shot up his own sweet ass. Rick told him straight out that if he even so much as sneezed in the direction of anything even remotely resembling a control switch Rick would duct-tape him to a bulkhead and leave him there for the duration of the mission. The Arabian Knight believed him."

"Wise of him."

"Very. Rick was thinking of doing it anyway, just on general principles, and he didn't decide otherwise because any of us talked him out of it, believe me."

"What it's like?" Cal said. "The view from orbit?"

Kenai leaned back in the deck chair and contemplated the dark blue bay and the mountain peaks cutting white wedges into the darker blue sky. "I don't know what I can say that will do it justice, Cal," she said finally. "It's beautiful. It's terrible. It's glorious." She turned her head to meet his eyes and smiled, but her eyes were sober. "Earth is such a small place. So far, we're all there is. If we don't make it, if humanity doesn't make it, we've had it. We have got to figure out a way to get along with each other, or we have just flat had it."

They sat in silence for a few moments. "And you?" she said. "How are you?

He shifted in his chair, wincing a little. "Mostly I'm just sore from all the bruises I got falling all over my ship. Taffy says for a Coast Guard captain I sure am a honking big klutz."

"Your father okay?"

Cal 's grin was wry. "What, you haven't seen him on CNN, describing his escape from death by inches, all due to this heroic son?"

She sat up and reached for his hand. She opened it and kissed his palm, her lips warm against his skin. She cradled it against her cheek. "You saved my life. You saved all our lives."

Acutely uncomfortable, Cal shifted in his chair again. "Yeah, well, don't let it get around."

She held his hand between her own. "No, Cal. Tell me. Say the words."

He thought about it first. He wanted to say this right.

"I've never been the most dedicated soldier," Cal said. "I've never wanted to die for my country. Staying alive and living the best life you can has always made a hell of a lot more sense to me."

He smiled at her. "But guess what?" "What?"

"Turns out I'm willing to die for you."

Her eyes brightened with a sheen of tears. With some difficulty she said, "I'm glad you didn't." He laughed. "Me, too." They went inside, and closed the door of the cabin firmly behind them.

Kenai Munro flew once more on the space shuttle before it was retired in 2010. She is currently employed by NASA as a manager in the development of the next manned space flight program.

Captain Callan T. Schuyler, decorated for his actions during the attack on Munro, was later promoted to admiral. He retired from the USCG the next day to go to work for George Soros's Drug Policy Alliance as an expert advisor in support of the effort to end the war on drugs.

The bodies of Yussuf al-Dagma and three of the other terrorists who attempted to shoot down the space shuttle Endeavour were cremated. The other terrorists apprehended at the scene were tried and convicted of piracy on the high seas and sentenced to life without parole. They are currently serving out their sentences in a federal maximum-security prison.

Karim Talib and Yaqub Sadiq were imprisoned without trial, first in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and after that facility was closed down in a series of facilities in foreign nations friendly to the United States. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

The new administration in Washington, D.C, discovered to its great and well-publicized dismay that there had been a consistent culture of blackballing of whistle-blowers and dissident government employees by the previous administration. An internal review was conducted in the full light of the media. One of the results was that Sara Lange was promoted to captain, and offered command of a 210 in Kodiak, Alaska.

Lieutenant Commander Mustafa Azizi was promoted to full commander and in June 2009 took command of a 210 out of Alameda, California.

Hugh Rincon now works part time from Kodiak, Alaska, as a data analyst for the Knightsbridge Institute.

Mrs. Haddad Mansour buried her daughter, sold her house in Miami, and moved to Houston, Texas, where in an odd twist of fate she wound up cleaning house for the Robertsons, the family of Kenai's first mission commander.

Arlene Harte continues to travel and make friends wherever she goes.

Akil Vihari, alias Isa, remains at large.