The Sum of All Fears

15 DEVELOPMENT

Ghosn could only shake his head. He knew objectively that it resulted from the sweeping political changes in Europe, the effective elimination of borders attendant to the economic unification, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and headlong rush to join in the new European family. Even so, the hardest part of getting these five machine tools out of Germany and into his valley had been finding a suitable truck at Latakia, and that had actually been rather difficult, since negotiating the road into where his shop lay had incomprehensibly been overlooked by everyone — including, he thought with some satisfaction, the German. Fromm was now observing closely as a gang of men labored to move the last of the five tools onto its table. Arrogant as he may have been, Fromm was an expert technologist. Even the tables had been built to exactly the right size, with ten centimeters of extra space around each tool so that one could rest a notebook. The backup generators and UPSs were in place and tested. It was just a matter of getting the tools set up and fully calibrated, which would take about a week.

Bock and Qati were observing the whole procedure from the far end of the building, careful to keep out of the way.

“I have the beginnings of an operational plan,” Günther said.

“You do not intend the bomb for Israel, then?” Qati asked. He was the one who would approve or disapprove the plan. He would, however, listen to his German friend. “Can you tell me of it yet?”

“Yes,” Bock did so.

“Interesting. What of security?”

“One problem is our friend, Manfred — more properly, his wife. She knows his skills, and she knows he is away somewhere.”

“I would have thought that killing her carries more risks than rewards.”

“Ordinarily it would appear so, but all of Fromm's fellow experts are also away — with their wives in most cases. Were she merely to disappear, it would be assumed by the neighbors that she'd joined her husband. His absence risks a comment by her, however casual it might be, that Manfred is off doing something. Someone might notice.”

“Does she actually know what his former job was?”

“Manfred is very security-conscious, but we must assume that she does. What woman does not?”

“Go on,” Qati said tiredly.

“Discovery of her body will force the police to search for her husband, and that is also a problem. She must disappear. Then it will seem that she has joined her husband.”

“Instead of the other way around,” Qati observed with a rare smile, “at the end of the project.”

“Quite so.”

“What sort of woman is she?”

“A shrew, a money-grabber, not a believer,” Bock, an atheist, said, somewhat to Qati’s amusement.

“How will you do it?”

Bock explained briefly. “It will also validate the reliability of our people for that part of the operation. I'll leave the details to my friends.”

“Trickery? One cannot be overly careful in an enterprise like this one.”

“If you wish, a videotape of the elimination? Something unequivocal?” Bock had done that before.

“It is barbaric,” Qati said. “But regrettably necessary.”

“I will take care of that when I go to Cyprus.”

“You'll need security for that trip, my friend.”

“Yes, thank you, I think I will.” Bock knew what that meant. If his capture looked imminent — well, he was in a profession that entailed serious risks, and Qati had to be careful. Günther's own operational proposal made that all the more imperative.

“The tools all have levelers for the air plates,” Ghosn said in annoyance, fifteen meters away. “Very good ones — why all the trouble with the tables?”

“My young friend, this is something we can only do one time. Do you wish to take any chances at all?”

Ghosn nodded. The man was right, even if he was a patronizing son-of-a-bitch. “And the tritium?”

“In those batteries. I've kept them in a cool place. You release the tritium by heating them. The procedure for recovering the tritium is delicate, but straightforward.”

“Ah, yes, I know how to do that.” Ghosn remembered such lab experiments from university.

Fromm handed him a copy of the manual for the first tool. “Now, we both have new things to learn so that we can teach the operators.”

Captain Dubinin sat in the office of the Master Shipwright of the yard. Known variously as Shipyard Number 199, Leninskaya Komsomola, or simply Komsomol'sk, it was the yard at which the Admiral Lunin had been built. Himself a former submarine commander, the man preferred the title Master Shipwright to Superintendent and had changed the title on his office door accordingly on taking the job two years earlier. He was a traditionalist, but also a brilliant engineer. Today he was a happy man.

“While you were gone, I got hold of something wonderful!”

“What might that be, Admiral?”

“The prototype for a new reactor feed pump. It's big, cumbersome, and a cast-iron bastard to install and maintain, but it's—”

“Quiet?”

“As a thief,” the Admiral said with a smile. “It reduces the radiated noise of your current pump by a factor of fifty.”

“Indeed? Who did we steal that from?”

The Master Shipwright laughed at that. “You don't need to know, Valentin Borissovich. Now, I have a question for you: I have heard that you did something very clever ten days ago.”

Dubinin smiled. “Admiral, that is something which I cannot —”

“Yes, you can. I spoke with your squadron commander. Tell me, how close did you get to USS Nevada?”

“I think it was actually Maine,” Dubinin said. The intelligence types disagreed, but he went with his instincts. “About eight thousand meters. We identified him from a mechanical transient made during an exercise, then I proceeded to stalk on the basis of a couple of wild guesses—”

“Rubbish! Humility can be overdone, Captain. Go on.”

“And after tracking what we thought was our target, he confirmed it with a hull transient. I think he came up to conduct a rocket-firing drill. At that point, given our operational schedule and the tactical situation, I elected to break contact while it was possible to do so without counterdetection.”

“That was your cleverest move of all,” the Master Shipwright said, pointing a finger at his guest. ”You could not have decided better, because the next time you go out, you will be the most quiet submarine we've ever put to sea."

“They still have the advantage over us," Dubinin pointed out honestly.

“That is true, but for once the advantage will be less than the difference between one commander and another, which is as it should be. We both studied under Marko Ramius. If only he were here to see this!”

Dubinin nodded agreement. “Yes, given current political circumstances, it is truly a game of skill, not one of malice anymore.”

“Would that I were young enough to play,” the Master Shipwright said.

“And the new sonar?”

“This is our design from the Severomorsk Laboratory, a large aperture array, roughly a forty-percent improvement in sensitivity. On the whole, you will be the equal of an American Los Angeles class in nearly all regimes.”

Except crew, Dubinin didn't say. It would be years before his country had the ability to train men as the Western navies did, and by that time Dubinin would no longer have command at sea — but! In three months time he'd have the best ship that his nation had ever given one of its captains. If he were able to cajole his squadron commander into giving him a larger officer complement, he could beach the more inept of his conscripts and begin a really effective training regimen for the rest. Training and leading the crew was his job. He was the commanding officer of Admiral Lunin. He took credit for what went well, and blame for what went badly. Ramius had taught him that from the first day aboard the first submarine. His fate was in his own hands, and what man could ask for more than that?

Next year, USS Maine, when the bitterly cold storms of winter sweep across the North Pacific, we will meet again.

“Not a single contact,” Captain Ricks said in the wardroom.

“Except for Omaha.” LCDR. Claggett looked over some paperwork. “And he was in too much of a hurry.”

“Ivan doesn't even try anymore. Like he's gone out of business.” It was almost a lament from the Navigator.

“Why even try to find us?” Ricks observed. “Hell, aside from that Akula that got lost…”

“We did track the guy a while back,” Nav pointed out.

“Maybe next time we'll get some hull shots,” a lieutenant observed lightly from behind a magazine. There was general laughter. Some of the more extreme fast-attack skippers had, on very rare occasions, maneuvered close enough to some Soviet submarines to take flash photographs of their hulls. But that was a thing of the past. The Russians were a lot better at the submarine game than they'd been only ten years earlier. Being number two did make one try harder.

“Now, the next engineering drill,” Ricks said.

The Executive Officer noted that the faces around the table didn't change The officers were learning not to groan or roll their eyes Ricks had a very limited sense of humor.

“Hello, Robby!” Joshua Painter got up from his swivel chair and walked over to shake hands with his visitor.

“Morning, sir”

“Grab a seat” A steward served coffee to both men “How’s the wing look?”

“I think we'll be ready on time, sir ”

Admiral Joshua Painter, USN, was Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Commander-in-Chief Atlantic, and Commander-in-Chief U.S. Atlantic Fleet — they paid him only one salary for the three jobs, though he did have three staffs to do his thinking for him A career aviator — mainly fighters — he had reached the summit of his career He would not be selected for Chief of Naval Operations. Someone with fewer politically rough edges would get that job, but Painter was content. Under the rather eccentric organization of the armed services, the CNO and other service chiefs merely advised the Secretary of Defense The SecDef was the one who gave the orders to the area CINCs — commanders-in-chief. SACL ANT — CINCLANT — CINCLANT F LT might have been an awkward, cumbersome, and generally bloated command, but it was a command. Painter owned real ships, real airplanes, and real marines, had the authority to tell them where to go and what to do Two complete fleets, 2nd and 6th, came under his authority: seven aircraft carriers, a battleship — though an aviator, Painter rather liked battleships, his grandfather had commanded one — over a hundred destroyers and cruisers, 60 submarines, a division and a half of marines, thousands of combat aircraft The fact of the matter was that only one country in the world had more combat power than Joshua Painter did, and that country was no longer a serious strategic threat in these days of international amity. He no longer had to look forward to the possibility of war. Painter was a happy man. A man who'd flown missions over Vietnam, he'd seen American power go from its post-World War II peak to its nadir in the 1970s, then bounce back again until America once more was the most powerful country on earth. He'd played his part in the best of times and the worst of times, and now the best of times were better still. Robby Jackson was one of the men to whom his Navy would be turned over.

“What's this I heard about Soviet pilots in Libya again?” Jackson asked.

“Well, they never really left, did they?” Painter asked rhetorically. “Our friend wants their newest weapons, and he's paying with hard cash. They need the cash. It's business. That's simple enough.”

“You'd think he'd learn,” Robby observed with a shake of the head.

“Well, maybe he will… soon. It must be real lonely being the last of the hotheads. Maybe that's why he's loading up while he still can. That's what the intel people say.”

“And the Russians?”

“Quite a lot of instructors and technical people there on contract, especially aviators and SAM types.”

“Nice to know. If our friend tries anything, he's got some good stuff to hide behind.”

“Not good enough to stop you, Robby.”

“Good enough to make me write some letters.” Jackson had written enough of those. As a CAG, he could look forward on this cruise — as with every other he'd ever taken — to deaths in his air wing. To the best of his knowledge, no carrier had ever sailed for a deployment, whether in peace or war, without some fatalities, and as the “owner” of the air wing, the deaths were his responsibility. Wouldn't it be nice to be the first, Jackson thought. Aside from the fact that it would look good on his record, not having to tell a wife or a set of parents that Johnny had lost his life in service of his country… possible, but not likely, Robby told himself. Naval aviation was too dangerous. Past forty now, knowing that immortality was something between a myth and a joke, he had already found himself staring at the pilots in the squadron ready rooms and wondering which of the handsome, proud young faces would not be around when TR again made landfall at the Virginia Capes, whose pretty, pregnant wife would find a chaplain and another aviator on her doorstep just before lunch, along with a squadron wife to hold her hand when the world ended in distant fire and blood. A possible clash with Libyans was just one more threat in a universe where death was a permanent resident. He'd gotten too old for this life, Jackson admitted quietly to himself. Still as fine a fighter pilot as any — he was too mature to call himself the world's best anymore, except over drinks — the sadder aspects of the life were catching up, and it would soon be time to move on, if he were lucky, to an admiral's flag, just flying occasionally to show he still knew how and trying to make the good decisions that would minimize the unwanted visits.

“Problems?” Painter asked.

“Spares,” Captain Jackson replied. “It's getting harder to keep all the birds up.”

“Doing the best we can.”

“Yes, sir, I know. Going to get worse, too, if I'm reading the papers right.” Like maybe three carriers would be retired, along with their air wings. Didn't people ever learn?

“Every time we've won a war we've been punished for it,” CINCLANT said. “At least winning this one didn't cost us a whole lot. Don't worry, there'll be a place for you when the time comes. You're my best wing commander, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir. I don't mind hearing things like that.”

Painter laughed. “Neither did I.”

“There is a saying in English,” Golovko observed. “’With friends like these, who has need of enemies?’ What else do we know?”

“It would appear that they turned over their entire supply of plutonium,” the man said. A representative of the weapons research and design institute at Sarova, south of Gorkiy, he was less a weapons engineer than a scientist who kept track of what people outside the Soviet Union were up to. “I ran the calculations myself. It is theoretically possible that they developed more of the material, but what they turned over to us slightly exceeds our own production of plutomum from plants of similar design here in the Soviet Union. I think we got it all from them.”

“I have read all that. Why are you here now?”

“The original study overlooked something.”

“And what might that be?” the First Deputy Chairman of the Committee for State Security asked.

“Tritium.”

“And that is?” Golovko didn't remember He was not an expert on nuclear materials, being more grounded in diplomatic and intelligence operations.

The man from Sarova hadn't taught basic physics in years. “Hydrogen is the simplest of materials. An atom of hydrogen contains a proton, which is positively charged, and an electron, which is negatively charged. If you add a neutron — that has no electrical charge — to the hydrogen atom, you get deuterium Add another, and you get tritium. It has three times the atomic weight of hydrogen, because of the additional neutrons. In simple terms, neutrons are the stuff of atomic weapons. When you liberate them from their host atoms, they radiate outward, bombarding other atomic nuclei, releasing more neutrons. That causes a chain reaction, releasing vast amounts of energy. Tritium is useful because the hydrogen atom is not supposed to contain any neutrons at all, much less two of them. It is unstable, and tends to break down at a fixed rate. The half-life of tritium is 12.3 years,” he explained. “Thus if you insert tritium in a fission device, the additional neutrons it adds to the initial fission reaction accelerate or ”boost“ the fission in the plutomum or uranium reaction mass by a factor of between five and forty, allowing a far more efficient use of the heavy fission materials, like plutomum or enriched uranium Secondly, additional amounts of tritium placed in the proper location nearby the fission device — called a ”primary“ in this case — begin a fusion reaction. There are other ways of doing this, of course. The chemicals of choice are lithium-deuteride and lithium-hydride, which is more stable, but tritium is still extremely useful for certain weapons applications.”

“And how does one make tritium?”

“Essentially by placing large quantities of lithium-aluminum in a nuclear reactor and allowing the thermal neutron flux — that's an engineering term for the back-and-forth traffic of the particles — to irradiate and transform lithium to tritium by capture of some of the neutrons. It turns up as small, faceted bubbles inside the metal. I believe that the Germans also manufactured tritium at their Greifswald plant”

“Why? What evidence do you have?”

“We analyzed the plutomum they sent us. Plutonium has two isotopes, Plutonium-239 and –240. From the relative proportions, you can determine the neutron flux in the reactor. The German sample has too little 240. Something was attenuating the neutron flux. That something was probably — almost certainly — tritium.”

“You are certain of that?”

“The physics involved here are complex but straightforward. In fact you can in many cases identify the plant that produced a plutomum sample by examining the ratio of various materials. My team and I are quite certain of our conclusions.”

“Those plants were under international inspection, yes? Are there no controls on the production of tritium?”

“The Germans managed to circumvent some of the plutomum inspections, and there are no international controls on tritium at all. Even if there were such controls, concealing tritium production would be child's play.”

Golovko swore under his breath. “How much?”

The scientist shrugged. “Impossible to say. The plant is being completely shut down. We no longer have access to it.”

“Doesn't tritium have other uses?”

“Oh, yes. It's commercially very valuable. It's phosphorescent — glows in the dark. People use it for watch dials, gunsights, instrument faces, all manner of applications. It is commercially very valuable, on the order of fifty thousand American dollars per gram.”

Golovko was surprised at himself for the digression. “Back up for a moment, please. You tell me that our Fraternal Socialist Comrades in the German Democratic Republic were working not only to make their own atomic bombs, but also hydrogen bombs?”

“Yes, that is likely.”

“And one element of this plan is unaccounted for?”

“Also correct — possibly correct,” the man corrected himself.

“Likely?” It was like extracting an admission from a child, the First Deputy Chairman thought.

“Da. In their place, given the directives they received from Erich Honecker, it is certainly something I would have done. It was, moreover, technically quite simple to do. After all, we gave them the reactor technology.”

“What in hell were we thinking about?” Golovko muttered to himself.

“Yes, we made the same mistake with the Chinese, didn't we?”

“Didn't anyone—” The engineer cut him off.

“Of course there were warnings voiced. From my institute and the one at Kyshtym. No one listened. It was judged politically expedient to make this technology available to our allies.” The last word was delivered evenly.

“And you think we should do something?”

“I suppose we could ask our colleagues in the Foreign Ministry, but it would be worthwhile to get something substantive done. So, I decided to come here.”

“You think, then, that the Germans — the new Germans, I mean — might have a supply of fissionable material and this tritium from which they might make their own nuclear arsenal?”

“That is a real possibility. There are, as you know, a sizable number of German nuclear scientists who are mainly working in South America at the moment. The best of all possible worlds for them. They are doing what may well be weapons-related research twelve thousand kilometers from home, learning that which they need to learn at a distant location, and on someone else's payroll. If that is indeed the case, are they doing so merely as a business venture? I suppose that is a possibility, but it would seem more likely that their government has some knowledge of the affair. Since their government has taken no action to stop them, one must assume that their government approves of that activity. The most likely reason for their government to approve is the possible application of the knowledge they are acquiring for German national interests.”

Golovko frowned. His visitor had just strung three possibilities into a threat. He was thinking like an intelligence officer, and an especially paranoid one at that. But those were often the best kind.

“What else do you have?”

“Thirty possible names.” He handed a file over. “We've spoken with our people — those who helped the Germans set up the Greifswald plant, I mean. Based on their recollections, these are the people most likely to be part of the project, if any. Half a dozen of them are remembered as being very clever indeed, good enough to work with us at Sarova.”

“Any of them make overt inquiries into—”

“No, and not necessary. Physics is physics. Fission is fission. Laws of science do not respect rules of classification. You cannot conceal nature, and that's exactly what we're dealing with here. If these people can operate a reactor, then the best of them can design nuclear weapons, given the necessary materials — and our reactor design gave them the ability to generate the proper materials. I think it is something you need to look into — to see what they did, and what they have. In any case, that is my advice.”

“I have some very good people in Directorate T of the First Chief Directorate,” Golovko said. “After we digest this information, some of them will come to speak with you.” Sarova was only a few hours away by train.

“Yes, I've met with some of your technology analysts. A few of them are very good indeed. I hope you still have good contacts in Germany.”

Golovko didn't answer that. He had many contacts still in Germany, but how many of them had been doubled? He'd recently done a reliability assessment of former penetration agents in the Stasi, and concluded that none could be trusted — more properly, that those who could be trusted were no longer in positions of any use, and even those… He decided on the spot to make this an all-Russian operation.

“If they have the materials, how soon might they fabricate weapons?”

“Given their level of technical expertise, and the fact that they've had access to American systems under NATO, there is no reason whatever why they could not have home-made weapons already in their inventory. They would not be crude weapons, either. In their position, and given the special nuclear materials, I could easily have produced two-stage weapons within months of unification. More sophisticated three-stage weapons… maybe another year.”

“Where would you do it?”

“In East Germany, of course. Better security. Exactly where?” The man thought for a minute. “Look for a place with extremely precise machine tools, the sort associated with high-precision optical instruments. The X-ray telescope we just orbited was a direct spin-off of H-Bomb research. Management of X-rays, you see, is very important in a multi-stage weapon. We learned much of American bomb technology from open-source papers on focusing X-rays for astrophysical observations. As I said, it's physics. It cannot be hidden, only discovered; once discovered, it is open for all who have the intelligence and the desire to make use of it.”

“That is so wonderfully reassuring,” Golovko observed crossly. But who could he be angry with — this man for speaking the truth, or nature for being so easy to discover? “Excuse me, Professor. Thank you very much indeed for taking the time to bring this to our attention.”

“My father is a mathematics teacher. He has lived his entire life in Kiev. He remembers the Germans.”

Golovko saw the man out the door, then walked back to stare out the window.

Why did we ever let them unify? he asked himself. Do they still want land! Lebensraum? Do they still want to be the dominant European power? Or are you being paranoid, Sergey? He was paid to be paranoid, of course. Golovko sat down and lifted his phone.

“It is a small thing, and if it is necessary nothing more needs to be said,” Keitel replied to the question.

“And the men?”

“I have what I need, and they are reliable. All have worked overseas, mainly in Africa. All are experienced. Three colonels, six lieutenant-colonels, two majors — all of them retired like me.”

“Reliability is all-important,” Bock reminded the man.

“I know that, Günther. Each of these men would have been a general someday. Each has impeccable Party credentials. Why do you think they were retired, eh? Our New Germany cannot trust them.”

“Agents provocateurs?”

“I am the intelligence officer here,” Keitel reminded his friend. “I do not tell you your job. Don't you tell me mine. Please, my friend, either you trust me or you do not. That choice is yours.”

“I know that, Erwin. Forgive me. This operation is most important.”

“And I know that, Günther.”

“How soon can you do it?”

“Five days — I'd prefer that we take longer, but I am prepared to move quickly. The problem, of course, is disposing of the body in a suitable manner.”

Bock nodded. That was something he'd never had to worry about. The Red Army Faction had rarely had to worry about that — except in the case of the turncoat Green woman who'd blown that one operation. But that one had been happenstance rather than design. Burying her in a national forest had been done — out of humor actually, not that he had thought of it, putting her back into the ecology she'd loved so much. It had been Petra's idea.

“How will I deliver the videotape to you?”

“Someone will meet you here. Not me, someone else. Stay at the same hotel two weeks from today. You will be met. Conceal the tape cassette in a book.”

“Very well.” Keitel thought Bock was overdoing things. Cloak-and-dagger was such a game that amateurs enjoyed playing it more than the professionals, for whom it was merely the job. Why not simply put the thing in a box and wrap it in plastic like a movie cassette? “I will soon need some funding.”

Bock handed over an envelope. “A hundred thousand marks.”

“That will do nicely. Two weeks from today.” Keitel left Bock to pay the bill and walked off.

Günther ordered another beer, staring off to the sea, cobalt blue under a clear sky. Ships were passing out on the horizon — one was a naval vessel, whose he couldn't tell at that distance, and the rest were simply merchantmen plying their trade from one unknown port to another.

On a day like this, a warm sun and a cool ocean breeze. Not far away was a beach of powdery white sand where children and lovers could enjoy the water. He thought of Petra and Erika and Ursel. No one passing by could tell from his face. The overt emotions of his loss were behind him. He'd wept and raged enough to exorcise them, but within him were the higher emotions of cold fury and revenge. So fine a day it was, and he had no one with whom to enjoy it. Whatever fine days might come later would find him just as alone. There would never be another Petra for him. He might find a girl here to use, just as some sort of biological exercise, but that wouldn't change things. He would be alone for the remainder of his life. It was not a pleasant thought. No love, no children, no personal future. Around him the terrace bar was about half-full of people, mainly Europeans, mainly on vacation with their families, smiling and laughing as they drank their beer or wine or other local concoctions, thinking ahead to the entertainments the night might hold, the intimate dinners, and the cool cotton sheets that would follow, the laughter and the affection — all the things that the world had denied Günther Bock.

He hated them all, sitting there alone, his eyes sweeping over the scene as he might have done a zoo, watching the animals. Bock detested them for their laughter and their smiles… and their futures. It wasn't fair. He'd had a purpose in life, a goal to strive for. They had jobs. Fifty or so weeks per year, they left their homes and drove to their workplaces and did whatever unimportant thing it was that they did, and came home, and like good Europeans saved their money for the annual fling in the Aegean, or Majorca, or America, or someplace where there was sun and clean air and a beach. Pointless though their lives might have been, they had the happiness that life had denied to the solitary man sitting in the shade of a white umbrella, staring out to sea again and sipping at his beer. It was not fair, not the least bit fair. He had devoted his life to their welfare — and they had the life that he'd hoped to give them, while he had less than nothing.

Except his mission.

Bock decided that he would not lie to himself on this issue any more than he did on others. He hated them. Hated them all. If he didn't have a future, why should they? If happiness was a stranger to him, why should it be their companion? He hated them because they had rejected him and Petra, and Qati, and all the rest who fought against injustice and oppression. In doing that, they had chosen the bad over the good — and for that one was damned. He was more than they were, Bock knew, he was better than they could ever hope to be. He could look down on all of them and their pointless little lives, and whatever he did to them — for them, he still tried to believe — was for him alone to decide. If some of them were hurt, that was too bad. They were not really people. They were empty shadows of what could have been people if they'd lived lives of purpose. They had not cast him out, they'd cast themselves out, seeking the happiness that came from… whatever lives they led. The lazy way. Like cattle. Bock imagined them, heads down in feeding troughs, making contented barnyard noises while he surveyed them. If some had to die — and some did have to die — should it trouble him? Not at all, Günther decided.

“Mister President…”

“Yes, Elizabeth?” Fowler replied with a chuckle.

“When's the last time someone told you how good a lover you are?”

“I sure don't hear that in the Cabinet Room.” Fowler was speaking to the top of her head, which nestled on his chest. Her left arm was wrapped around his chest, while his left hand stroked her blonde hair. The fact of the matter, the President thought, was that he was indeed pretty good at this. He had patience, which he judged the most important talent for the business. Liberation and equal-rights issues notwithstanding, it was a man's job to make a woman feel cherished and respected. “Not in the Press Room, either.”

“Well, you're hearing it from your National Security Advisor.”

“Thank you, Dr. Elliot.” Both had a good laugh. Elizabeth moved up to kiss him, dragging her breast along his chest to do so. “Bob, you don't know what you mean to me.”

“Oh, I think I might,” the President allowed.

Elliot shook her head. “All those dry years in academe. Never had time, always too busy. I was so tied up with being a professor. So much time wasted…” A sigh.

“Well, I hope I was worth waiting for, dear.”

“You were, and you are.” She rolled over, resting her head on his shoulder and drawing his hand across her chest until it rested on a convenient spot. His other hand found a similar place, and her hands held his in place.

What do I say next? Liz asked herself. She had spoken the truth Bob Fowler was a gentle, patient, and talented lover. It was also true that on hearing such a thing, any man, even a President, was under control. Nothing, for a while, she decided. There was time to enjoy him further, and time to examine her own feelings, her eyes open and staring at a dark rectangle on the wall that was a fine oil painting whose artist she'd never bothered to note, some sweeping Western landscape of where the plains ended at the Front Range of the Rockies. His hands moved gently, not quite arousing again, but giving her subtle waves of pleasure which she accepted passively, occasionally adjusting the position of her head to show that she was still awake.

She was starting to love the man. Wasn't that odd? She paused, wondering if it was or wasn't. There was much to like and admire in him. There was also much to confuse. He was an irreconcilable mixture of coldness and warmth, and his sense of humor defied understanding. He cared deeply about many things, but his depth of feeling seemed always motivated by a logical understanding of issues and principles rather than true passion. He was often befuddled — genuinely so — that others didn't share his feelings on issues, in the same way that teachers of mathematics were never angered, but saddened and puzzled that others failed to see the beauty and symmetry of their calculations. Fowler was also capable of remarkable cruelty and total ruthlessness, both delivered without a trace of rancor. People stood in his way, and if he could destroy them, he did. It was like the line in The Godfather. It was never personal, just business. Perhaps he'd learned that from the mafiosi he'd sent to prison, Liz wondered. The same man could treat his true followers with a matter-of-fact coldness that rewarded efficiency and loyalty with… how could she describe it? The gratitude of an accountant.

And yet he was also a wonderfully tender man in bed. Liz frowned at the wall. There was no understanding him, was there?

“Did you see that report from Japan?” the President asked, getting to business just as Elliot was on the verge of a conclusion.

“Ummm, glad you brought that up. Something disturbing came into the office the other day.”

“About what?” Fowler showed his interest by moving his hands in a more deliberate fashion, as though to coax information out of her that she'd been waiting to reveal for some time.

“Ryan,” Liz replied.

“Him again? What is it?”

“The reports we heard about improper financial dealings were true, but it looks like he weaseled out of them on a technicality. It would have been enough to keep him out of this Administration, but since he's grand-fathered in from before—”

“There are technicalities and technicalities. What other thing do you have?”

“Sexual impropriety, and possibly using Agency personnel to settle personal scores.”

“Sexual impropriety… disgraceful… ”

Elliot giggled. He liked that. “There might be a child involved.” Fowler did not like that. He was a very seriously committed man on the issue of children's rights. His hands stopped moving.

“What do we know?”

“Not enough. It should be looked at, though,” Liz said, coaxing his hands back into motion.

“Okay, have the FBI do a quiet investigation,” the President said, ending the issue, he thought.

“That won't work.”

“Why?”

“Ryan has a very close relationship with the Bureau. They might balk on those grounds, might smooth the thing over.”

“Bill Shaw isn't like that. He's as good a cop as I've ever met — even I can't make him do things, and that's the way it should be.” Logic and principle again. The man was impossible to predict.

“Shaw worked personally on the Ryan Case — the terrorist thing, I mean. Prior personal involvement by the head of the investigative agency…?”

“True,” Fowler admitted. It would look bad. Conflict of interest and all that.

“And Shaw's personal trouble-shooter is that Murray fellow. He and Ryan are pretty tight.”

A grunt. “So, what then?”

“Somebody from the Attorney General's office, I think.”

“Why not Secret Service?” Fowler asked, knowing the answer, but wondering if she did.

“Then it looks like it's a witch-hunt.”

“Good point. Okay, the A.G.'s office. Call Greg tomorrow.”

“Okay, Bob.” Time to change subjects. She brought one of his hands to her face, and kissed it. “You know, at times like this I really miss cigarettes.”

“Smoke after sex?” he asked with a harder embrace.

“When you make love to me, Bob, I smoke during sex… ” She turned to stare into his eyes.

“Maybe I should think about relighting the fire…?”

“They say,” the National Security Advisor purred, moving to kiss him again, “they say the President of the United States is the most powerful man in the world…”

“I do my best, Elizabeth.”

Half an hour later, Elliot decided that it was true. She was starting to love him. Then she wondered what he felt for her…