Threat Level Black

Chapter 1

The last light went off in Manhattan three seconds after the bomb blast.

Brooklyn, farther from the epicenter, flickered for another half-second…

The D train had just entered the tunnel under the East River and slammed to a halt, sending its nearly one hundred passengers hurtling toward the front of the cars. The magnetic pulse that had exploded over the Con Ed power yard at the top of the island had wiped out more than just the power; all electrical devices within twenty-five miles stopped functioning — watches, radios, backup generators, old-fashioned fuses, computers, Walkmen, TV sets, electric toothbrushes, hair dryers, toasters, microwave ovens, fire alarms, security devices, video cameras, and children’s toys died, their microchips fried. Transformers, regulators, transistors, capacitors — they were all cooked by the blast.

With the lights out in Manhattan, two cars ran through Times Square, crashing into the lobby of the Loup Theater, where a crowd had just gathered for the revival of Cats. Flight 704 from London managed to land on the darkened runway at Kennedy but then slid off the apron, just in time to witness the midair collision of two flights trying to land at nearby LaGuardia. The nearly sixty thousand people crowding into Yankee Stadium for the start of the World Series against the Braves began to riot as they rushed for the exits. A fire truck speeding to a car fire on the access ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge skidded out of control at the jammed intersection. Striking an obstruction, it went airborne, flying up and over the bridge into the dark water below. On the George Washington Bridge, a distracted driver swerved his SUV into a liquid propane truck, sending the truck crashing into a rail. The tank hit the metal obstruction at just the right angle to compress the tank sufficiently to make it explode, turning the exit for the West Side into a yawning gate of flames.

Over on the east side of the island, the tram to Roosevelt Island stopped over the river, perched exactly 250 feet above the water. A woman aboard the car pressed her face to the glass, awed by the sight of New York completely dark. A dark shadow looped toward her; she stared at it for a moment, wondering if it was a cloud or some avenging angel sent by God. In the next moment the shadow materialized into the underside of a traffic helicopter whose gauges and controls had been devastated by the blast. The skid of the helicopter pierced the glass of the gondola, spearing the woman and her nearby companion before tearing the tram and its assembly down into the water in a huge fireball. The flames landed squarely on the deck of the Elflon Oil, a barge en route to a new floating power station about a quarter-mile upriver. The barge began to sink at the rear, leaking its fuel out into the water. Miraculously, the helicopter did not set the oil on fire; that happened a few minutes later when gasoline leaking from a tanker ignited, heating the thin layer of fuel sufficiently to turn the river into a layer of red and yellow fingers grasping desperately at anything in reach.

Then things got really ugly…

“Serves the bastards right for outlawing smoking,” said Andy Fisher, turning away from the computer where the simulation was running.

“That help you?” asked the programmer.

“Only psychologically. I can’t stand New York.”

“Of course, that’s only the first five minutes. It’ll take at least three months to get replacement parts for that electric yard that was fried in the blast, and God knows what else. It won’t be confined to New York, either. Remember the blackout in the summer of 2003? Spread from a few power lines in Ohio, right? Well, this thing will spread twenty times as far and at least as fast. And when the power goes out this time, it’ll stay out, at least in New York. Because the E-bomb fries everything. You don’t have a chance to pull the circuit breakers: They’re all fried. Everything’s fried. You know how long it’ll take to get replacement parts?”

“Months.”

“In some cases years. So you think: city without power for months? No lights, no elevators, no subways— ”

“Yeah, but I’m sure there’s plenty of downsides.” Fisher took a last swig of the coffee — Chase & Sanborn, 2003, north side of the mountain — then went outside to have a cigarette. He was joined there half a smoke later by Michael Macklin, who headed the CERN — Homeland Security joint task force that had called Fisher in.

“What do you think?” Macklin asked.

Fisher shrugged. “You couldn’t have worked Godzilla into the picture somehow?”

“He does Tokyo.”

Fisher took a long drag on the cigarette, working it down toward his fingertips. Something about the air in suburban Virginia made cigarettes burn quicker. Fisher had a theory that the burn rate increased in inverse proportion to the distance from Washington, D.C., with the Capitol building the epicenter of inflammability. Undoubtedly there was a flatulence factor involved.

“So is this something we worry about, or what?” asked Macklin.

“Oh, you can always worry,” said Fisher.

“Should we, though?”

Fisher took a last drag of his cigarette, then tossed it to the ground and took up another. Macklin had a kind of earnestness-grating, even under the best of circumstances, whatever those might be.

“Turning lights off in New York — not exactly the sort of thing that’s going to piss off Middle America,” said Fisher. “I know a bunch of ministers who might even get behind it.”

“The DIA thinks it’s a real threat,” Macklin said.

“Well, there you go, then,” said Fisher. “Obviously it’s nothing to worry about.”

“You’re joking, right?” Macklin eyed his cigarette, but Fisher wasn’t sharing, at least not with him: The head of Homeland Security had just suggested a five-cent tax on smokes to help pay for his department. “They say it’s good intelligence. There are intercepts between this Muslim cell in Syria talking about power going out. Problem is, they’re to a cell phone that no one’s been able to find. But the DIA thinks it’s good intelligence.”

“They ever tell you they had bad intelligence?” asked Fisher.

Macklin shifted around nervously. “Should we go to an orange alert?”

“What color are we at now?”

“Yellow.”

“You get a raise if the color changes?”

“No way.”

“Sucky job. You should never have left the FBI, Mack. You wouldn’t have had to worry about colors or the DIA. New York gets fried, it’s somebody else’s problem.”

“Hey, come on, Andy, give me a break here. I didn’t want to work for Homeland Security. Leah made me do it.”

Leah was Macklin’s wife. The pair had met while working together at the FBI several years before and, despite extensive counseling, had gotten married. From the moment he uttered the words “I do,” Macklin’s life had nose-dived: The poor slob had given up smoking, cut back on coffee, and according to the latest rumors even enlisted in a health club.

“I’m sorry for you, Mack. I really am,” said Fisher.

“So, can you help me out?” asked Macklin. “I need to make a recommendation to the big cheese in the morning.”

Fisher shook his head. It was pitiful, really. In the old days, Macklin never would have called the boss — anyone, really — the “big cheese.” Marriage really did screw people up.

“I asked Hunter to send you over because I figured you could help,” added Macklin. “Come on, Andy. Help us out here. Help me out. For old times’ sake.”

“I am helping you,” Fisher told Macklin.

“All you’re doing is busting my chops.”

“That’s not help?” asked the FBI agent. He looked at his cigarette thoughtfully. Jack Hunter was executive assistant director for National Security/Special Projects, a kingdom within a kingdom within a broom closet at the FBI. He was also allegedly Fisher’s boss. Hunter had in fact sent him over to talk to Macklin, but the executive assistant director — ex-ass-dic to people in the know — had specifically instructed Fisher to be not particularly useful.

Or, as Hunter put it, “If I wanted to help them, I’d send somebody else.”

“Turning off the lights seems too simple,” said Fisher. “All that’s going to do is make people mad at Con Ed, the power company. That’s not exactly a major accomplishment.”

“It’s not just turning off the lights,” said Macklin. “An E-bomb — whether they explode it over New York or Tokyo or Des Moines or wherever — every electrical device within twenty-something miles goes out. It takes months to get everything back online.”

“Yeah, I saw the show. Something else is up.”

“Mayhem’s not enough for you?”

“I like mayhem, personally. It’s just not enough as a motivating factor.”

“So, what’s going on, then?”

Fisher sighed. “Jeez, Mack, do your own detective work. You used to work for the FBI, right?”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t like you,” said Macklin. “Come on, Andy. You’re the hot-shot hound-dog snooping machine. You look at an airplane crash and you can figure out what the pilot had for lunch.”

“Well, sure, if it’s splattered on the windshield,” said Fisher.

“I heard what you did with that Cyclops case.”

Fisher shrugged. He’d just about single-handedly broken one of the most far-reaching, diabolical conspiracies ever to rack the American military and political establishments. The President had personally thanked him. Even better, Hunter had avoided him for forty-eight hours after the busts were made public.

That and five bucks would get him a pack of cigarettes. Two packs if he got it through his Indian friends online.

“You got to help us,” said Macklin. “We could be facing a major terrorist operation here.”

“No offense, but all you have to go on is a three-sentence report from the DIA and one intercepted e-mail that the NSA says could be either about an E-bomb plot or the opening of a new pizza restaurant. Not a hell of a lot to go on,” said Fisher. “I will say one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“The kid who wrote that simulation program’s got a real future. I like what he did with Yankee Stadium.”

“Jeez, Andy, if you don’t help me, I have to rely on the DIA.”

“That’s kind of an ugly threat, Mack.”

“What if I asked Hunter to permanently assign you to Homeland Security? You’d love it over here. Get your own expense account, nice car. We have our pick of impounds. I can probably hook you up with a drug dealer’s condo or something. You should see our office up in New York. Out in the suburbs, on the water. Tell you what: Come by around noon tomorrow and I’ll set up lunch with the big cheese himself.”

“I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“When you join Homeland Security, do they make you go through a behavior modification program to learn to call the boss ‘big cheese’? Or do they do it with drugs?”

“Shit, Andy.” Macklin sighed. “Can I have a cigarette?”

Fisher reached into his jacket for the pack and shook one out. “You owe me a nickel.”

Chapter 2

Dr. Park Syoun Ra-ha took a deep breath and rose from his workstation, trying to appear no more nervous than any other scientist might be when called to the director’s office. The two men who had come to fetch him waited stiffly a short distance away — not out of respect but because the work done at Nyen Factory was top secret, and anyone who looked at the wrong computer screen might be accused of a crime. Inadvertent or not, merely gaining top secret information was punishable by death in North Korea. Disseminating it was a crime beyond all imagining, and giving it to the Americans must surely be ten times worse.

Park felt his fingers trembling as he followed the men into the hallway. The complex’s name meant “kite,” but that was a convenient cover, for the items constructed here were not a child’s toys. The factory buildings nestled against a hillside north of Kujang hosted a weapons development facility that had few rivals in Asia. There were at least three different research areas, and most likely a full dozen; even Dr. Park wasn’t sure how many there were. He was personally responsible for the creation of a weapon that could send a modern city back to the Stone Age in a heartbeat.

Dr. Park did not want to see that weapon used. He also had decided he must leave North Korea. He had combined these two goals and, after considerable debate, taken steps to fulfill them. But now as he walked to the director’s office he worried that he had acted too rashly. He worried that he would forfeit his life in a most painful manner.

Worse, his attempt had been completely ignored by the Americans. He’d sent the e-mail nearly a week before. There had been no response.

Dr. Park could reconcile himself to that. But he had thought that if he were going to be caught, he would have been caught nearly right away. When no one sent for him by the end of the second day after he’d sent the message, he had concluded he was safe.

One of the guards stopped Dr. Park when they reached the director’s outer office. He knocked on the door and went inside. When he did not immediately reappear, Dr. Park wondered whether this was a good or bad sign. If they thought he was a traitor, wouldn’t they deal with him swiftly? But, on the other hand, where was the need to be swift? Letting him sweat out his guilt would be part of his punishment.

While death would naturally be the outcome, the end would not come swiftly. On the contrary, the process of punishment would be long and slow and painful. This went without saying. He had heard stories about cattle prods and special beatings, terrible things done to a man’s privates.

The muscles in Dr. Park’s thighs began to vibrate as he walked into the office. A pain began to grow at the back of his head on the right side, spreading quickly toward his eyes, pressing his skull the way a vise might.

“Dr. Park,” said the director. “Welcome. You know General Kuong Ou?”

Dr. Park felt a shock in his chest that forced the air from his lungs. Kuong was the head of the Military Research Institute, the bureaucracy that ran this plant. He commanded an army division and was related to the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, North Korea ’s father and commander in chief. He was one of the most important people in North Korea.

Kuong’s visit here had not been announced, and to find him in the corner of the director’s office — what else could this mean but great, great distress for Dr. Park?

Horrible distress.

As the director began speaking, Dr. Park could think only of torture. The one happy thought that occurred to him was the fact that he had no family: His parents both had died some years before, and he had never found a wife. At least his humiliation and pain would belong only to him.

The director’s words seemed more like stones than sounds, pelting the sides of his face, pummeling him without meaning.

Vacation.

Rest.

Moscow conference.

Reward.

What was he saying?

Kuong was smiling.

Smiling?

“Your unit has done brave work,” said Kuong. “In the current situation, it is most admirable — beyond admirable.”

Was this part of the torture: to tell him that he was being rewarded and then send him to prison?

But why so elaborate a ruse?

No, they were smiling. He was… free.

Free!

“Our Russian comrades are hosting a conference on power generation similar to the ones you’ve attended in China,” added the director. “There’s unlikely to be anything new there, but you will have to make a full report.”

Dr. Park looked at the director and then at the general. He struggled to return their smiles.

“Enjoy yourself,” said the director. He began telling him of the arrangement details: An aide would accompany him as a guide and translator. Though the director did not say so, the aide would actually be a minder from the security service, prepared to report him for any infraction and willing to kill him if necessary. But typically such men were corruptible; it was a question of finding their price.

Dr. Park had never been to Moscow.

There were trains, connections to other cities.

Or perhaps if he simply went to an embassy…

Yes.

Would the Americans take him? There had been no answer to his e-mail.

“You do want to go?” asked the director.

He made it sound as if Dr. Park had an option, which the scientist knew wasn’t the case. In North Korea, even recreation was mandatory.

“You do want to go, don’t you?” added the general when he did not respond immediately.

“Of course,” Dr. Park said, bowing. “Of course. I welcome the opportunity.”

“Good,” said the director. “Very good.”

Dr. Park smiled weakly, then left the office.

Chapter 3

William Howe stared at the shadows on the ceiling, turning over on the thin mattress of the Hotel Imperium in Parkland, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. He knew it wasn’t quite five A.M., but he also knew it made no sense to lie here any longer. If by some miracle he managed to actually fall asleep, he would be woken by the alarm in an hour anyway. Early in his Air Force career, Howe had adopted a rule about sleep: If he couldn’t get at least two hours, he wouldn’t bother.

He got out of bed and went into the bathroom to shower and shave. Now that he thought about it, he’d made up that rule in college, which predated the Air Force. But he’d been in the service so long, everything in his life seemed to originate there.

Howe wasn’t in the service any longer. Three months before, he’d turned down a promotion and a Pentagon posting, arranging instead to resign his commission. His decision had followed a wild sequence of events that had simultaneously made him a hero and left him disillusioned about everything from love to government.

Disillusioned. One of his commanders had used that word, trying to figure out why Howe — a full bird colonel — wanted to walk away from a career that could have led all the way to the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Disillusioned. It was an interesting word, but Howe decided it wasn’t exactly right. He wasn’t disillusioned. Being disillusioned implied that he had been naive. William Howe, former fighter pilot, former project liaison officer of one of the most revolutionary war-fighting systems ever, had not been naive.

Trusting, perhaps. Too ready to assume that others held to the standards of honesty and duty and responsibility that he himself held dear. But not naive.

Burned.

That was a better word. He had been burned.

Howe pulled on the gray suit pants over his white shirt.

So, if he’d been burned, why was he back in D.C.?

Because his mother had been excited by the fact that the national security advisor to the President of the United States had called her son not once but twice. And actually spent several minutes chatting with her.

Chatting was the word she had used.

The national security advisor to the President of the United States. We chatted for quite a while. A very, very nice man.

She had had the same tone in her voice nearly twenty years before, when he was a high school junior being courted by colleges offering athletic scholarships.

He looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and laughed at himself. At thirty-five, he might be a bit younger than some of the people he brushed shoulders with in Washington, but he wasn’t going to pass for a high school kid anymore — though in some ways he felt like one again.

National Security Advisor Dr. Michael Blitzand, to hear his mother tell it, the President himself — wanted Howe to take on a very important job. But what job that was hadn’t been made clear. Howe figured it was as some sort of advisor to the President, a glorified pencil sharpener more for window dressing than anything else. He wasn’t going to take it, but the truth was, he was getting bored hanging around his parents’ house in rural Pennsylvania; he could do with the change of scenery. And sooner or later he did really have to decide what the hell it was that he was going to do when he grew up.

Howe laughed again. Then, remembering it was still god-awful early, he clamped his mouth shut, grabbed his suit jacket, and went down to see if he might find a place for breakfast.

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

The knock on the door had a familiar rap to it, the sort of hollow sound Death might make if he had a hangover.

“Fisher. I know you’re in there,” said a voice not unlike Death’s own.

“He’s not here,” said the FBI agent.

“We need to talk.”

“So talk, Kowalski. You’re good at it.”

“Face-to-face.”

“This early in the morning? I don’t know if my stomach can take it.”

Fisher refilled his coffee and lit a fresh cigarette: no sense approaching a Defense Intelligence Agency agent unarmed, even one like Kowalski.

“Why the hell aren’t you working up some plans to take over a minor country, like France or Germany?” he asked as he opened the door.

Kowalski stood in the hallway of Fisher’s small apartment building, flanked by a pair of men Fisher didn’t recognize. Their suits were pressed and their ties didn’t clash: The DIA was recruiting a better class of people these days.

“You’re dressed,” said Kowalski.

“Sorry to spoil your thrills,” said Fisher. He took a sip of coffee. “What happened? You took a wrong turn at Gomorrah and got lost?”

“Can we talk inside?”

Fisher stood back and let the three men enter the small studio apartment. When Kowalski was inside he turned to the other two men. “This is what working for the government will get you.”

“If you’re lucky,” said Fisher.

“That coffee or motor oil you’re drinking?” asked Kowalski.

“Both.” Fisher turned to the two men Kowalski had brought with them. “You guys are DIA?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I could tell from your haircuts.”

“Don’t mind Fisher. He comes off like a real jerk, but once you get to know him you’ll see he’s worse than he looks,” said Kowalski. “Have some coffee, boys. Your widows will be well cared for, I promise.”

“Don’t want the full breakfast?” Fisher asked.

“We had breakfast on the way, sir,” said the taller of the two men.

“Kowalski made you pay, right?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Same old Kowalski. You see his tie? Some of those stains are five years old.”

“It’s a design, Fisher. This is an expensive silk tie that my wife gave me for my birthday. I don’t wear clip-ons like you.”

Fisher considered demonstrating the disadvantages of Kowalski’s sartorial preferences but decided the tactical advantage might come in handy if he had to choke him some day.

Kowalski put his head inside the small fridge at the side of the kitchenette. “You got stuff growing in here.”

“Penicillin. Saves on doctor bills.”

“God,” said Kowalski as he adjusted his coffee. “This is almost drinkable.”

“If I’d known you were coming I would’ve gone all the way.”

Fisher walked into the other half of the apartment, pausing over a pair of card tables that served as his combination dresser and entertainment center. He took his watch, wallet, and Bureau credentials off the ancient Philco TV, then examined his gun, a .44 Magnum nearly as old as the black-and-white TV set and arguably only half as deadly.

“So, how much do you know about the E-bomb?” asked Kowalski.

“I don’t know anything,” said Fisher.

“I heard Macklin called you in to consult.”

“He called me in to look at a computer video of New York City blowing up. He thought I’d be nostalgic,” said Fisher.

“Homeland Security is peeing in their pants,” said Kowalski. There was a note of triumph in his voice. “So you coming aboard or what?”

“I’m not doing anything unless they roll back the cigarette tax,” said Fisher. “Why are you here?”

“Because we’re the ones who came up with the intelligence on the E-bomb in the first place. Macklin didn’t tell you I was the guy who figured it out?”

“No. But probably he had trouble putting your name and the word intelligence together in the same conversation.”

“We’re putting together a joint task force. Homeland Security. DIA. And you.”

“Me?”

“We can use somebody for comic relief.”

“I’m too old to run away and join the circus.”

“Listen, Andy, this is going to develop into a big one. When we bust this, we’ll be on 60 Minutes.”

Fisher thought he detected a smirk from Kowalski’s taller sidekick. There was hope for the country yet.

“You really do want to join up,” added Kowalski. “I told Macklin it was a great idea. That’s why I’m here.”

Fisher took the cigarette butt down to the nub, then put it out in a glass of water in the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Under ordinary circumstances he would have left it there, but since he had company he thought it best to keep up appearances: He leaned over to the nearby window and tossed the butt down into the alley.

“So? You in or out?” asked Kowalski.

“Boss promised me a nice Internet porn case if I show up for work before noon today.”

“Internet porn? Come on. That’s not your style. You’re a high-tech guy. National security. Lives on the line. Not T & A.”

“Nothing wrong with a little T & A now and again,” observed Fisher.

“Seriously, Andy. Come on. Macklin wants you. I want you. We could use some help determining if this thing is real or not.”

“No, thanks.”

“Could be a career boost. Jump in pay — get you into some upscale digs.”

“This place isn’t upscale?” Fisher spread his hands around his domain. “Listen, I have to get going. Thanks for the wake-up call. But I got a question for you.”

“Yeah?”

“A serious question.”

“Shoot.”

“How come you used the salad dressing instead of milk in your coffee?”

Chapter 6

Howe handed his entire wallet to the Secret Service agent, letting him examine his license even though his ID had been checked twice before and he already knew his name was on the list of visitors. He’d been to the West Wing of the White House only once before, and that time he had been accompanied by a high-ranking assistant to Blitz, Howard McIntyre, who’d smoothed him past all the security hoops and barriers. It was somewhat different this time around. To the men checking his ID he was just another name on the list. Howe thought he liked it that way.

The agent pointed at him and gestured to the side of the hallway. Howe stepped over to the wall, unsure of what was going on, but he wasn’t being singled out for a search and there was nothing wrong with his credentials. A moment later a phalanx of dark-suited men appeared, leading the way for President Jack D’Amici and his entourage. Dr. Blitz was at President D’Amici’s side, and the two men were engaged in a deep discussion. The secretaries of defense and state walked immediately behind, frowning deeply, while a handful of aides scurried behind, trying to keep up.

Deep furrows lined the President’s forehead. The tips of his close-cropped hair were stained gray, and though his body was trim, even on the thin side, the flesh at the corners of his chin had begun to sag. He was perhaps two decades older than Howe, young for a president, though the office weighed on him as it weighed on every man.

Howe had met him after the recovery of Cyclops One, the airborne laser plane that had been hijacked and then recovered by a team Howe had led. The pilot had come away from the meeting disappointed; spending a few minutes alone with the President had punctured the larger-than-life fantasy he’d unknowingly had of the man. But now that he saw him in the hall, absorbed in thought, Howe felt a sensation of awe take hold. This was the President of the United States, the commander in chief, and if he wasn’t larger than life — if he wasn’t a god or even a demigod — he was nonetheless a man of uncommon ability and even greater responsibility.

President D’Amici shook his head at something Blitz said. As he did he turned toward Howe, catching a glimpse of him.

“Colonel Howe, how are you?” said the President, as matter-of-factly as if he saw Howe every day. Before Howe could actually say anything in response, D’Amici added, “Good, good,” and walked on, not even breaking his stride. Blitz himself took no notice of Howe, not even pausing in his conversation.

“Hey, Colonel,” said a tall black man peeling off from the back of the formation to pump Howe’s hand.

“ Tyler?”

“How the hell are you?” Major Kenal Tyler had been an Army Special Forces captain when he and Howe had met a few months before. Tyler had led a team that helped recover the Cyclops airborne laser weapon.

“You’re in D.C. now?” asked Howe.

Tyler laughed. “Everybody’s got to be somewhere. I’m on a special task force. Brain work. I’m attached to the Joint Chiefs staff, but I’ve been doing tons of work for the NSC. What are you doing these days?”

“Supposed to meet Dr. Blitz.”

“Great. You going to work for him?”

Howe shrugged.

Tyler looked at him as if he expected an explanation. When Howe didn’t offer one, the major suggested they have a drink sometime. “Where you staying?”

Howe told him the hotel. Tyler nodded — it wasn’t clear to Howe whether he was truly interested in getting together or not — then ran off down the hall to catch up with the others.

If the Secret Service agent was impressed by the fact that Howe knew the President, it didn’t show in his manner. He checked the ID again before letting Howe pass.

“Would you like some coffee, Colonel?” asked Mozelle Clarke, Blitz’s administrative assistant, when he arrived in Blitz’s office a few minutes later.

“Not really, thanks. I’m kind of coffeed out this morning.”

“Mention that to Dr. Blitz,” she said.

“Mention what?” said Blitz.

“That some people drink too much coffee.”

“I give up coffee every few months,” said Blitz, meeting him at the door. Blitz looked every bit the academic he had been before coming to work with the administration: His shirt was rumpled and his tie loose at the neck, while his glasses leaned so far off the edge of his nose it seemed impossible that they didn’t fall. Books were stacked high around the office, and the titles that were visible included tomes on biblical studies, English literature, and French philosophy as well as world politics and military analysis.

“Against my better judgment,” Blitz said, as if commenting on something he had said before.

“The coffee?” asked Howe, sitting down.

“Coffee? No. The arrangements. Keeping the contract agencies on. Privatization — between you and me — it’s bullshit. Total, complete, utter bullshit. The military ought to be in control of its own fate. I don’t buy all this outsourcing crap, even if it can be expedient.”

Howe still wasn’t sure what Blitz was talking about.

“But rearranging everything, between Congress, the budget fight — God help us if we had to raise taxes,” said Blitz.

“Yes, sir,” said Howe, falling back on the old military habit: When in doubt, salute.

“So we’re stuck with it. But if someone gives you a lemon, my stepfather always said, make lemonade. And that’s what I’d like to do.”

“Excuse me, but I’m not really following,” admitted Howe.

Blitz smiled and nodded, as if finally getting some inside joke. “National Aeronautics Development and Testing. We’ve gotten rid of Bonham — for a long time, I’d say. He’s going to plead guilty. There won’t be a trial.”

Howe nodded. A retired Air Force general, Clayton Bonham had headed the National Aeronautics Development and Testing agency. Commonly abbreviated as NADT, the private company was responsible for developing and testing cutting-edge weapons for the military. Bonham had been in the middle of the conspiracy to hijack Cyclops, using it to cheat on the tests for an augmented ABM system.

Howe realized that he should feel some relief that there would be no trial, since he would undoubtedly have been a witness in the case. But he felt as if justice had been cheated. In his opinion, no jail sentence would sufficiently punish Bonham for what he had done: betraying his trust for money.

“But the company itself — its function developing and testing new weapons systems — it has too much potential in the present political and economic climate to just walk away from,” continued Blitz. “Outsourcing and private industry sharing the risks — it’s the way we’ll be doing things for the next decade at least.”

Howe detected a note of regret in Blitz’s voice. Howe, though he had worked with NADT, agreed that outside contractors were gaining too much control over military projects. Originally conceived as a way to rein them in, NADT had helped encourage the trend. Set up as a government-sponsored company like Freddie Mac — the comparison had often been made — NADT had quickly set its own course. It now controlled or had a hand in nearly a hundred projects, including large ones like Cyclops and the Velociraptor, an improved version of the F/A-22 Raptor jet aircraft. While it wouldn’t be fair to say that the agency controlled the Pentagon, it also wouldn’t be accurate to say that the Pentagon controlled NADT. The company had far more say over individual projects than traditional contractors like Boeing ever dreamed of.

“If the structure has to remain, if outsourcing is still the order of the day,” added Blitz, “then we have to make the best of it. It does present certain opportunities — advantages in terms of expediting things, making things work. Of course, there will be reforms. That’s why it’s important to get the right people — the absolutely right people — in place.”

“Right,” said Howe absently.

“Richard Nelson is set to be elected as the new chairman, probably by the beginning of next week. But we need a new president of the company, someone to take Bonham’s place.”

“Of course.”

“Will you?”

“Will I give you recommendations?” asked Howe.

“No, I don’t want recommendations.” Blitz plucked at his goatee. It was blond, a shade lighter than the hair on the top of his head. “I want you to take the job. President of NADT. It’s going to play an important role developing weapons, not just for the Air Force, but for all the services. I want you in charge.”

“Me?”

“The President agrees. As a matter of fact, you could even say it was his idea.”

Howe leaned back in the seat.

“There will be changes. There have to be changes,” said Blitz. “You’d have the President’s confidence and free rein to get things done. A mandate to get things done.”

“I don’t know,” said Howe.

Blitz bent forward across the desk, his face intent.

“It would be an important opportunity for a man like you,” said the national security advisor. “A good career move.”

Howe started to say that he didn’t have a career: The only thing he was thinking of doing, seriously, was hooking up with a friend of his who was building spec houses up in rural New York about fifty miles from where he’d grown up. But Blitz didn’t wait for an answer.

“More than that, it will be a huge contribution to our country. Huge,” he said. “And financially it would be well worth your while.”

Howe said nothing.

“General Bonham’s base salary was roughly half a million dollars,” continued Blitz. “The entire compensation package would be somewhat complicated and would have to be negotiated.”

Half a million dollars, thought Howe. The sum seemed incredible.

Am I worth that much?

What do they expect for that much money?

“I’m sure an equitable arrangement would be worked out. I understand you’re not the sort of man who makes decisions based on money.” Blitz got up. “Don’t answer now. Think about it. Go out there — you’ve been there. Take a long tour. A few days. Think about it.”

“Of course.”

“Go over, talk to people, talk to Jack Myron on the Defense Committee, talk to everybody. Take a week to talk to different people. I’ll arrange it — whoever you want. Mozelle will set it all up. Go over to the Pentagon, get with Admiral Christopher at the CIA. Go into it with your eyes open,” said Blitz. “As a matter of fact, I gave Congressman Myron your phone number at the hotel and your home. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Take some time and think,” added Blitz. “But believe me, your country needs you.”

Chapter 7

“DIA has the intercepts and some details about how an E-bomb would work, probably from one of their Middle East sources, maybe because someone here wanted to get an understanding of it,” Fisher told Hunter in Hunter’s FBI headquarters office. “That’s the extent of it. They have Homeland Security so twisted in knots over it that they’re putting together a joint task force. Macklin and Kowalski are going to work together.”

“Where?”

“Not sure. Macklin mentioned New York, which seems to be where the terrorist cell was operating.”

“You’re sure they don’t know about our guy?”

“I’m sure.”

“How sure? Give me it on a scale of one to five.”

Fisher shrugged. “I’m not good with numbers.”

“They’re trying to muscle into our case,” said Hunter. “Those fucks. They want to take our deserter. Fuckheads.”

Fisher generally approved of cussing in a man; it implied an appreciation for the finer things in life, like spit and horses that finished just out of the running. But from Hunter’s mouth the words sounded as if they were being read from a dictionary.

“We have to bring this guy in,” said Hunter. “We have to get him out of Korea.”

“Okay,” said Fisher.

“I want you to do it.”

“Sure,” said Fisher.

“Bring him in, we debrief him, go the whole nine yards. We need our own task force,” added Hunter. “Yeah, that’s what we need: a task force. Yeah. We’ll get military people, CIA — the right CIA people. This is a big deal, Andrew. A very big deal.”

Fisher didn’t like the sound of that. Whenever Hunter used his first name — with or without expletives — trouble surely followed.

And as for working with the CIA…

“We really don’t need a task force,” he said. “Not yet. We have to make sure this guy is real. Then we can figure out how we’re going to get him. If the CIA is involved, there are going to be meetings and written estimates, budget lines…”

“You’re in the big time now, Fisher. You have to think big. Big.”

“Can I smoke in here?”

Hunter blinked. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Just checking to see if it was you I was standing in front of.”

“You fly out to — what was the name of that town in Arizona again?”

“Applegate.”

“Yeah, right. Fly out to Applegate, meet the scientist, make contact, find out what we need. I’ll get a task force going. What we’ll do is, we’ll get everyone who’s not on the DIA-Homeland Security task force on our task force. Then we’ll nail those bastards to the wall.”

“Assuming this guy is for real,” said Fisher. “Assuming he knows something about E-bombs. Assuming there’s some sort of connection between North Korea and Middle Eastern terrorists who are so dumb even the DIA can stumble across them.”

“Right,” said Hunter. “Go for it.”

“What?”

“The whole nine yards.”

“Why not ten?” asked Fisher.

He made his escape while Hunter tried to come up with the answer.

Chapter 8

North Korean army general Kuong Ou had not begun his life as a superstitious man, nor was he presently given to omens or fortune-telling, except for this: He played o-koan every morning.

The ancient arrangement of dominoes — the Korean words, taken from the Chinese, meant “five gateways,” a reference to famous battles fought by an ancient general — was a longtime habit. He had learned the skill as a babe, studying the meaning of the bone tablets. O-koan could be played as a game of solitaire, a mathematical puzzle to be worked out, but it was also an ancient way of predicting the future and seeing beyond the future to the world as it was, the cycle of endless rearrangement and sorrow. There were lessons in every piece and rule, most importantly this: The lowest tablets were the most powerful when combined. Even as general of an army division and the head of the North Korean Military Research Institute, Kuong Ou could not afford to forget that lesson.

Kuong held the pair — the two and four, the one and two, called chi tsün — in his hand, turning them over as he considered their relation to the event unfolding in the world around him. The regime was in collapse, army units openly rebelling. Even many of Kuong’s men had deserted him, including his cousin Sang. Kuong had not heard from Kim Jong Il, the Korean ruler and his half-brother, in two weeks. He had begun to believe even that he was dead.

There were many plans to assassinate the leader. There were even plans to assassinate Kuong Ou. He had already killed the conspirators he was sure of, but to eliminate every possible enemy he would have had to kill the entire division he commanded, and half the leadership of the rest of the army and air force besides. And that didn’t even include the silent traitors, those who told lies and claimed they could be counted on but who Kuong knew would vanish at the moment of need.

Kuong Ou had to publicly maintain his position and the regime. This was his duty, and to shirk it would bring dishonor much worse than death: Death was merely a stage in the cycle, whereas dishonor followed one through many cycles and could only be expunged with great exertion. On the other hand, he was not a fool: Given the choice, he preferred to live. He had made many plans to escape, holding them as contingencies against disaster.

One by one, they were disappearing. The easiest — escaping north to China or south to the so-called Republic — had been blocked long ago. The units on both borders had leaders who were his enemies, and even if he made it past them he would never be safe in either country, even for the short time he needed to get away from there.

But he would succeed. He would have revenge against the Americans who had placed his country, his leader, and himself in this predicament. The bones foretold it.

Kuong Ou scooped up the tablets and prepared to play another game.

Chapter 9

Ten years before, Applegate, Arizona, had been a pristine patch of sand and tumbleweed populated only by the wind. Now it was a pristine patch of high-tech factories punctuated by macadam and people who smiled a lot, undoubtedly because they had just cashed their latest stock options. The factories had been built by a collection of new-wave defense contractors; as far as Fisher could tell from the backgrounder he’d been given, the companies specialized in making things that didn’t actually work — and taking a very long time to prove it.

The airport terminal looked like a pair of trailers piled one on top of the other, with a few windows added for light and structural integrity. Fisher walked inside with the other dozen people from the airplane, noting the No Smoking signs and strategically placed ashtrays filled with pink-colored sand. This seemed to Fisher the work of a particularly perverse antismoking group: Not only did they want you not to smoke but they harassed you with Day-Glo colors.

Then again, it could be part of a guerrilla movement intent on undercutting the antis by mocking their weaponry. Or, worse, it occurred to Fisher that the sand might mask some nefarious incendiary device lurking just below the surface of ash. Deciding the matter needed more investigation, Fisher took out his cigarette pack and lit up, tossing a match into the tray to see if it was flammable.

“You can’t smoke inside,” whined someone behind him.

Fisher glanced left and right without finding the source of the voice.

“Fisher, right?”

Something bumped his elbow. Fisher looked down into the gnomelike face of a forty-year-old woman. The face was attached to a body that barely cleared his belt. Fisher was tall — a bit over six feet — but not that tall. This woman defined vertically challenged.

“I’m Fisher.”

“Special Agent Katherine Mathers,” said the woman, jabbing her hand toward his. “And you can’t smoke in here.”

“That’s good to know,” said Fisher. He took another drag. “Are we walking to where we’re going, or is there a car?”

“I’ve heard about you,” said Mathers. She frowned and headed across the reception area, all eight feet of it, toward the exit. Fisher caught up outside at the curb, where Mathers was waiting behind the wheel of a 1967 puke-green Ford Torino.

“Nice car,” he said, getting in.

“Oldest Bu-car in existence,” she said, using the accepted slang for a Bureau-issued vehicle. If she hadn’t, he might have thought of asking to see her ID.

“No smoking,” she told him.

“No?”

“No.”

He was almost at the butt anyway, so Fisher rolled down his window and tossed it.

“You do that again and I’ll have to bust you for littering,” said Mathers. “We’re very ecology-conscious here.”

“I could tell from the car you were driving.”

Mathers stomped on the gas pedal — or, rather, the three wooden blocks taped one atop another on the gas pedal. The Torino lurched away from the curb, smoke and grit flying.

“Can you see where you’re going?” Fisher asked the other agent.

“I heard you were a wiseass.”

“That’s me.”

“I can see fine,” said Mathers, whose head would not have been visible from outside the car. “They brief you or what?”

“You got some guy who met some other guy who knows someone who built an E-bomb for North Korea and wants asylum,” said Fisher.

Mathers shook her head. “First of all, the guy’s a gal.”

“Okay.”

“Second of all, the gal met the scientist himself, not someone else. There’s only two players.”

“That’s a relief. I was afraid we’d have to use zone coverage. Now we can just go man-to-man.”

“What are you going to do?” Mathers asked.

“After we stop for some coffee, I’m going to talk to the guy who’s a gal,” said Fisher. “And we’ll take it from there.”

“We don’t have no fancy bullshit coffee here,” said Mathers, in a tone that made Fisher forgive not only her driving but the business about smoking in the car. “Just stuff that’ll burn a hole in your crankcase.”

“The only kind I drink,” said Fisher.

The e-mail that had brought Fisher to Applegate consisted of exactly two words:

Attached was a technical diagram of an E-bomb — or, as the technical people preferred to call it, “an explosive device intended to render a disruptive magnetic pulse.”

The e-mail had been sent to Amanda Kung. While Kung worked at a defense-related company, neither she nor the company had anything directly to do with E-bombs — or any weapons, for that matter. The company built UHF radios that could fit on pinheads, undoubtedly seeking to exploit the burgeoning market of seamstresses who needed walkie-talkies.

According to Mathers, the connection between Amanda and the Korean who had sent the e-mail was personal: They had met in China during a conference two years before and occasionally corresponded electronically.

“Love thing?” Fisher asked as they drove toward the complex on a road that might be charitably described as a succession of bumps interrupted by gullies. Fortunately, Fisher had equipped his coffee cup with a safety shield; when you found java this bad, you didn’t want to spill a drop.

“Could be love. Probably just curiosity: how the other half lives, that kind of thing,” said Mathers. “Typical flighty-scientist kind of thing. Women. You know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“So, did you really commandeer a C-17 over the Pacific to make a bust?”

“Gross exaggeration,” said Fisher. “I won the C-17 in a game of darts.”

Mathers smiled. “You’re an inspiration.”

“Don’t get giggly on me, Mathers.”

She veered from the pothole-strewn highway onto what looked like a dust-swept field. The Torino growled as they took another turn, the engine chuttering while the air filter chewed on some pebbles.

And then, like a scene from a Charlton Heston movie, the dust cleared and a four-lane concrete road appeared. The Bu-car settled down as they approached the building where Amanda Kung worked, K-4 Electronics. A quartet of khaki-clad guards with German shepherds met their car. The two FBI agents were instructed to get out of the vehicle and the car was searched before being allowed to proceed. Inside the gate, they were met by a six-foot-five protosimian who pointed to a parking space and gave them coded tags to wear.

“Computer system figures out if you’re inside and don’t have a tag on,” warned Mathers.

“What’s it do, vaporize you?”

“Very possibly.”

Inside the building, the agents were met by a personal minder, another large athletic type Fisher thought he might recognize from WFW reruns. He led them to a private room where Amanda Kung was waiting.

As a member of the high-tech community, the company had a certain image to maintain and therefore did not call the room a room but rather a “cell.” It looked very much like a room, at least to Fisher, though the decoration was not in keeping with the ultra-high-tech style of the rest of the building. Twenty-feet-by-twenty-feet-square, it had thick red carpet, leather-upholstered furniture, wainscoted walls, and paintings of various dogs. Kung explained that this was because the firm had begun its existence by making special radio collars for an invisible K-9 fence before branching out into the more lucrative defense field.

There were a number of dog jokes attached to the explanation of the company’s history. Fisher made it through the first — We’re the only business that succeeded after going to the dogs — then decided to cut Kung off and ask if she could tell him about the Korean.

“I met Dr. Park two years ago at a conference in China,” said Kung. Short and thin, Kung had the female dweeb look down, with thick glasses beneath uneven bangs. Her purple blouse hurt Fisher’s eyes. “He is an engineer working on electrical generation projects.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s what he told me. I got the idea that he might know more, because of the sessions he was at. And then I got that e-mail.”

“Want to go to Korea?” asked Fisher.

“ Korea?”

“ North Korea. I have some frequent-flier miles to redeem. Supposed to be pretty nice in February. They put out fresh mud.”

“I don’t know.” Kung looked at Mathers.

“You want to help your friend, don’t you?” said Mathers, apparently ignoring the ESP signals Fisher had beamed into her brain.

“He’s not really my friend,” said Kung. “He’s just an engineer I met.”

“Well, he thinks of you as his friend,” said Mathers, stubbornly impervious to mental suggestion.

Kung pursed her lips.

“You’re not married, right?” asked Fisher.

Kung’s lips turned white. “He’s going to Moscow the day after tomorrow,” she said.

“ Moscow?” asked Fisher.

Kung unfolded a piece of paper and slid it across the table to Fisher. “This came this morning.”

Fisher took the e-mail and looked at the header that showed the path the message had taken:

There were various ways the actual route an e-mail took could be hidden, and the agent recognized one of the remailers as a kind of semianonymous clearinghouse in Asia that he’d seen in the course of another investigation.

“Can I keep this?” asked Fisher.

“Sure.”

Fisher got up. “Well, think about going,” he said.

“Where?”

“ Korea,” said Fisher.

“Why Korea if he’s going to be in Moscow?” asked Mathers.

Fisher decided the time was right for the ultimate weapon and unleashed the double-dog-drop-dead stare. Mathers’s breath caught in her chest and she swallowed whatever sentence had been lurking in her mouth.

“That’s all you want to know?” asked Kung.

“Pretty much,” said Fisher.

He stopped at the door. “I do have one other question,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “Do you have a smoking area?”

“That was your entire interview?” asked Mathers as they walked back to the car.

“Yeah.”

“I have to say, your interrogation style leaves a lot to be desired.”

Fisher went around to the passenger’s side, waiting while Mathers fiddled with the locks. The car was searched once again as they left. The search was thorough enough for Fisher to smoke two whole cigarettes and start on a third before having to get back in the car.

“I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t smoke in the car,” said Mathers. Her voice was so sincere that Fisher almost considered putting the cigarette out.

“Could you at least roll down the window?” asked Mathers.

Fisher could do that, and did.

“I shouldn’t have criticized you,” she said as they drove away. “I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem.”

“But if those were the only questions you were going to ask, why bother coming out here in the first place?” asked Mathers.

“Boss wanted me out of Washington,” Fisher told her.

“You figured the people at the company are listening in,” said Mathers a few miles later.

“I’m sure they were,” said Fisher.

“You don’t think you can trust them?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“So, what do we do? Go to Moscow? Talk to her at home?”

“We find a place with really bad chili dogs and have some lunch,” Fisher told her. “I haven’t had a good case of heartburn in more than a week.”

Chapter 10

Howe pushed himself down into the cockpit, listening as the NADT contract pilot gave him a few last-minute instructions on the Iron Hawk’s handling. Jeff Storey, the other pilot, was a former Navy man under contract as a test jock; Howe had met him a few times before. Storey was going to fly wing in a second plane while Howe took the Iron Hawk for a short familiarization hop, part of the campaign arranged by Dr. Blitz to convince him to take the NADT director’s job.

Howe had started early that morning with a tour of the headquarters building, where every single female employee appeared to have been instructed to wear the shortest dress imaginable. Following the flight, he would be taken to lunch at one of the area’s best restaurants. A briefing on more NADT programs was planned for late afternoon, and then he was supposed to join two senators for dinner.

Howe was actually looking forward to the flight. His aircraft combined a host of different technologies that, apart from its aeronautical abilities, demonstrated what NADT could mean to the military. But he was interested primarily in feeling the strain of gravity against his chest, and the giddy rush that the experienced pilot still felt when he goosed the throttle. He hadn’t been at the stick of a jet in months.

Howe’s aircraft had ostensibly started its life as a McDonnell Douglas T-45, an extremely airworthy and capable aircraft used by the U.S. Navy as a jet trainer but versatile enough to serve as a multirole fighter for foreign air forces. NADT had taken the basic airframe and reworked it for its own purposes. Among the many obvious changes were longer wings shaped in a modified delta, forward winglets near the fuselage that helped maneuverability, and a reworked cockpit area. While the new cockpit allowed only one pilot, not the two common in a normal trainer, it included a “bathtub” of titanium and a carbon-fiber compound designed as a kind of bulletproof armor to protect the pilot. The idea was that the Iron Hawk would be especially survivable on a close-air-support mission, where it might come under ground fire while swooping down to support troops.

Less noticeable improvements included the more powerful engine, the large-capacity fuel tanks, and an improved radar/synthetic sight system called AMV.

AMV stood for advanced military vision and was at least potentially a quantum leap over normal radar. In its most basic modes, it combined phased-array, millimeter-wave, and microwave devices and input from multispectral and hyperspectal image sensors-optical, infrared, and near infrared viewers to synthesize a radar “picture.” The combined sensors gave it a far wider detection span than what was possible with radars normally installed in tactical fighters; a B-2 bomber could be seen at about fifty miles. Seen was an appropriate word, because the technology that was used to integrate the sensors also allowed the computer to draw a three-dimensional picture of the detected object. In the Hawk, the image was presented on a flat, two-dimensional multicolor screen, but the system could be mated to a 3-D hologram display similar to that being developed for the F/A-22V.

AMV had several modes that would be familiar to any interceptor pilot since the advent of solid-state avionics. It could sweep a wide area, track particular planes while continuing to search for others, and target an aircraft at long and close range using all of its sensors. It included a system to “cue” a pilot in a dogfight, essentially telling him when to fire. But the radar capabilities also allowed synthetic close-up modes, useful for a number of applications. For example, an airplane suspected of smuggling large amounts of drugs or weapons could be “scanned” at about five miles. In layman’s terms, the system provided a detailed “X-ray” of the interior. The computer interpreter attached to the system could assess what it was looking at quickly and then present the information to the pilot transparently. It not only could tell an F-15C from an F-15E but detail the target aircraft’s fuel and ammunition states. AMV had potential for police uses as well: It could scan a smuggler’s aircraft and detect bales of marijuana, for example.

Perhaps the real breakthrough was the size of the unit: It was small enough to be carried by the Hawk, which had given over part of its fuselage and undercarriage to the antenna pods and sensors, but otherwise still looked like the compact airframe it had begun life as.

There were still a number of bugs to work out. One of the most annoying was the failure of the software routines that filtered out things like birds at long distances; a single bird would occasionally blink onto the screen as a red triangle “unknown,” staying there for a few seconds before the computer satisfied itself from the flight pattern that it was in fact a bird, rather than a cleverly disguised missile or aircraft. Nonetheless, AMV had major potential for the future.

The Iron Hawk itself was just a tester, but NADT was preparing to propose the plane as a lightweight attack aircraft, versatile enough to serve as a backup interceptor. In theory it could replace both the A-10A and F-16, with much of the toughness of the former and all of the adaptability of the latter. It could take off and land on short runways with a full load of bombs, withstand several direct hits by 23mm flak guns, pull 10 g’s without coming apart, and accelerate to just over the speed of sound in a hair-breadth. As a dogfighter, it couldn’t match the F/A-22 or even an F-15, but it cost considerably less. All of that made the aircraft exceptionally attractive.

But Howe wasn’t here to evaluate the plane, just to get a look at NADT’s toys.

Maybe his toys?

At a half-million dollars a year, he could afford his own plane. And a nice house, and nice vacations, and whatever the hell else he wanted.

“Bottom line, flies just like a T-45 with a full load of fuel,” Storey told Howe. Storey was flying an identical plane. “Takes off smooth — you’ll swear you were in a trainer. It’s that easygoing. Very forgiving, very friendly. But it still goes like a champ.”

Howe gave him a thumbs-up and began familiarizing himself with the cockpit. Despite the NADT upgrades, the basics were recognizable descendants of the Navy’s Cockpit 21 program — a McDonnell Douglas designed arrangement that featured multifunction displays and a layout perfected during in the late 1980s and 1990s. Aside from some updated GPS and radio gear, the main improvements concerned the radar and weapons systems the Hawk was meant to test. He soon had Hawk One snugged and tiptoeing toward the flight line.

NADT leased space at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland; the arrangement allowed it to make use of the finest facilities in the world. The Air Force also provided some of the security around its three hangars — though regular Air Force personnel were not admitted into the compound area, and in fact would have been subject to court-martial if they dared even approach the external fences. It was a sweetheart deal for NADT, demonstrating not only how important the private agency was but also showing the vast resources it could call on if necessary. The people maintaining the plane Howe sat in included veteran mechanics and other technical people who’d gained experience in the military, and the engineers who had actually designed the systems were available for consultation.

Besides the Hawks, two other NADT aircraft were housed here. Howe happened to be familiar with both. One was an F-15E that had been used to test some of the systems later installed in the F/A-22V Velociraptor. The other was a knockoff of the Russian Sukhoi S-37/B Berkut — a two-seat, next-generation version of the super plane built by NADT from specifications obtained by the CIA.

The S-37/B had been Howe’s introduction to NADT; he’d come to the D.C. area on a special temporary duty assignment specifically to fly the aircraft. The project had been so secret that only two men had been trained to fly the aircraft, Howe and Tim Robinson.

Timmy had lost his life in the Cyclops project.

The Sukhoi sat under a tarp in the far corner of the hangar, mostly forgotten now that its mission had been completed and it had yielded its data to the CIA and Air Force. Howe powered up and rolled away from the hangar.

“I’m not taking this job,” he reminded himself as he waited for the tower to give him clearance. “It’s not what I want to do. And besides, it’s a desk job.”

Although there were fringe benefits: He felt one of them as he accelerated into the sky.

“Hawk One, this is Two,” said Storey as they tracked out into the small rectangle they’d been given to fly in. “I’d say you’ve flown before.”

The two aircraft moved over the Atlantic, passing through a thick bank of clouds.

“Clear skies,” remarked Storey as they burst above and ahead of the weather. It was as if the sun had disintegrated the curtain of clouds; the sky seemed so clear you could look up through the canopy and spot the angels polishing the stars.

Howe pushed his wing down and began a gentle bank, riding the Hawk southward in a lazy orbit. The stick responded easily, the aircraft eminently predictable despite all its mods and miles. One thing he had to give NADT: They knew what they were doing.

If he took the NADT post, he could do this whenever he wanted.

If he really wanted to fly, why had he left the Air Force in the first place?

Hell, he could find a job as a contract pilot somewhere. Anywhere, just about. Work as a test pilot.

Maybe that was the slot he should take at NADT, not boss man.

Turn down the chance to be rich?

Maybe the money had corrupted Bonham. Wasn’t money the root of all evil? Or was it your own soul where the problem was?

Half a million bucks a year — more, potentially lots more, when you threw in bonuses and stock options and all the perks. Maybe it was a drug you couldn’t resist.

As they neared the end of the cleared range, Storey started talking up the plane, mentioning some of the improvements in engine technology. As a general theme, the engineers had substituted new materials for the traditional metals, seeking to make the power plants lighter and yet tougher at the same time. Howe knew the real question wasn’t whether the materials were usable but rather whether it would be practical — as in affordable — to use them in full-scale production. Even the military had financial constraints, and just because you could make something smaller, faster, and lighter didn’t mean it was cost-effective to do so.

Howe started a series of maneuvers, doing inverts and sharp cuts, rolling out and climbing, diving toward the ocean and whipping back upward, doing his best impression of a 1920s barnstormer. While admittedly the Hawk couldn’t match those old biplanes for sheer warp-ability, it could slash around the sky fairly well. He managed some tight angles and high g’s, felt the restraints press against his body and the blood rush from his head despite the best efforts of his flight suit.

The maneuvering forward airfoils and the variable-attack edges on the main wings gave the smallish Hawk some serious advantages in a close encounter with an enemy fighter. Howe found himself almost wistful for the days of cannon-punctuated furballs, close-in dogfights as much decided by the skill of the engineers who constructed the aircraft as the pilot himself. Today a dogfight would typically end without the planes even seeing each other; an American fighter pilot was equipped and trained to down his opponent before the enemy’s radar even picked him up.

Forget the romance. There was no arguing against the idea of beyond-visual-range combat. The goal was to shoot down the enemy and live to tell about it, and a great deal of work had gone into making that happen.

Reality and fantasy veered in different directions. Reality: The NADT job would be a pain in the ass. He’d be a paper pusher. And maybe worse: They’d expect something for their half-million big ones.

“All right, Hawk Two, let’s head back,” said Howe.

“Roger that. I’ll tell the folks back home to warm up the car.”

As Storey clicked off, Howe caught part of a transmission from a ground controller querying a light aircraft back near the coast. It was flying toward a restricted area north of Washington, D.C. Something in the controller’s tone caught Howe’s attention; he glanced at the radar screen and located the plane about twenty-five miles to the southeast.

The plane failed to respond to the queries. About sixty seconds later a ground controller vectored an Air National Guard flight toward the aircraft to check it out. Howe called in to ask what was going on.

“NADT Test Flight One, we have an aircraft refusing to answer hails or directions at this time,” snapped the controller.

“We’ll check it out for you. We’re closer than Guard Sixteen,” he said, referring to the F-16 that had been vectored to check out the plane.

The controller hesitated but then acknowledged. Howe and Storey selected max thrust — the Hawks had no after-burners — and changed course for the intercept.

The small low-winged monoplane was flying a straight-on path toward the Capitol building. A bomb-laden plane on a suicide flight? Or a lost civilian with his radio out?

Howe’s augmented radar system painted the light plane to his right as he approached. A new controller added data about the plane. The pilot was off his filed flight plan by several miles.

Howe and Storey tried hailing the pilot on the civilian frequencies and an emergency channel but got no response. In the meantime the Air National Guard F-16 was galloping toward them with orders authorizing the pilot to shoot down the plane.

As he cut the distance between them to under five miles, Howe flipped through the radar modes into Close Surveillance to scan the interior of the aircraft.

“NADT Hawk Flight One, advise your situation,” said the Air National Guard pilot.

Howe told him he thought he could get a look at the cockpit.

“You’re not going to make it in time,” said the other pilot, who naturally assumed that Howe would have to fly alongside the other plane at very close range, matching his speed and altitude, to see what was going on.

A blue bar at the top of Howe’s radar image screen alerted him that he was now close enough to get a good view of the plane. “Interior image,” he told the computer. The two planes were still about two and a half miles apart.

The pilot was slumped over the control yoke. But there was another person in the plane.

An injured pilot and a hijacker? Or an injured pilot and a scared, nonpilot passenger.

The person in the first officer’s seat was much smaller and moved around.

The rest of the plane appeared empty.

No bomb that the gear could see.

“Guard Sixteen, pilot of target plane appears unconscious. There’s a passenger. Looks like a kid,” added Howe. “He’s light on fuel as well.”

“How the hell do you know all that?” demanded the Guard pilot.

“NADT Flight to Guard Sixteen,” said Howe, hoping his call sign would provide a clue, “I’m afraid I can’t go into details. But I do know it.”

There was a spar and a compartment behind the cockpit area painted solid by the AMV: The gear couldn’t see inside. It was possible that it was a bomb.

“NADT Flight Hawk One, Hawk Two, Guard Sixteen, we have additional data on the intercepted flight,” said the ground controller before the F-16 jock could respond. “Pilot is a thirty-four-year-old male, one passenger, ten-year-old girl, his daughter.”

“Shit,” said Storey.

“All right, let’s think on this a second,” said Howe. “How many terrorists are going to take their daughters with them on their final flight?”

“How do we know that’s really who they are?” responded Guard Sixteen.

“The person in the first officer’s seat is pretty small,” said Howe. “Yeah, it’s definitely a girl. She’s got long hair.”

Howe slid closer, riding inside twenty yards, ten, worried that the turbulence off his aircraft might upset the plane. He didn’t need the high-tech AMV system any more: He could see the girl pretty clearly through the large window in the relatively new plane. He tried to signal for her to speak, but she didn’t seem to have a headset. He tried a few times to mime that she should take her father’s, but he knew that wasn’t likely to help much. Whatever happened in the movies, in real life the odds of talking a ten-year-old into a safe landing had to be a million to one.

“How much fuel does he have left?” Storey asked.

One of the ground controllers thought he was talking to him and replied that, if the flight plan was correct, he ought to be able to fly for another half hour or so. Howe thought the estimate fairly accurate based on the scan, though it was difficult to tell without more details about the airplane and its engine.

“That should take it out of the restricted area,” said Storey.

“Then what happens?” said the ANG pilot.

“I think it’s a Cirrus SR22,” said Storey.

“And?”

“If that’s a Cirrus SR22, it has a parachute,” explained Storey. “All we have to do is get the kid to pull it when she’s clear of the capital.”

The controller confirmed that the plane was designed to carry a parachute — but added that there was no way to know if it had one.

“Where is it located?” asked Howe.

“Behind the cabin area,” said Storey, describing the compartment.

“It’s there,” said Howe. “I say we give it a shot,” said Howe. “Better than shooting down a ten-year-old kid over the Potomac.”

“Stand by,” said the ground controller.

The Capitol building loomed ahead. Two more interceptors were flying up from the southeast, along with a police helicopter.

“We have a company representative on the line,” said the controller finally. “We think it might work. Can you hang with them?”

“Not a problem,” replied Howe, exhaling slowly into his oxygen mask.

“Good advertisement for the I-MAN system,” said Storey.

I-MAN was an emergency piloting system that would allow the controls for a private plane to be taken over in an emergency such as this. It was another NADT project. Until this moment he hadn’t thought that much about it — and certainly hadn’t seen it as important or even worthwhile.

But it might be. If he took the job, he could find out. He could help all sorts of people, not just the Air Force, not just the military. It was an important job.

Just not his.

“You have to get that passenger on the radio,” said the controller, explaining that they would need to instruct her to kill the engine and then deploy the chute. Howe acknowledged, then closed in.

“Radio,” he said, miming how she should take the headset from her father and put it on. It took several tries before she finally got it. But she still didn’t acknowledge the broadcasts.

“Wave your hand if you hear us,” said Howe.

She did.

“Okay, ground,” said Howe. “For some reason she’s not transmitting, but she can definitely hear. Do we have an easy place to land ahead somewhere?”

The controller mapped a spot in Virginia. They were a good ten minutes from it when the aircraft’s engine began to cough. That at least solved one problem: They didn’t have to tell her how to cut power.

Howe listened as the controller, speaking in what had to be the calmest voice he’d ever heard, told her to tug on the emergency handle. It took forty pounds of pressure to pull the lever; Howe watched anxiously as the girl pulled down with all her weight.

Nothing happened for a second. And then the panel at the rear of the cockpit seemed to mushroom upward. The parachute appeared as if it had come down from above, snagging the aircraft in a harness. The airplane slowed abruptly and Howe lost sight of it for a moment as he banked to the north. By the time he came around, the Cirrus was descending calmly toward the ground, more like a balloon than a skydiver. It landed against a patch of trees near a baseball field; a Coast Guard helicopter that had been scrambled as part of the rescue effort closed in.

“Time for lunch, Colonel,” said Storey.

His flight suit was soaked. He’d been sweating his brains out, worried about the kid and her father.

“Colonel, we going home?” asked Storey. “We’re, uh, getting low on fuel ourselves.”

Howe glanced at his instruments and realized with a shock that he was already far into his fuel reserves; he had something on the order of ten minutes of flying time left.

“Roger that,” Howe said, plotting the course to the airfield.

Chapter 11

Blitz dove into the e-mails on his desk, trying to clear away the most important business before his next round of meetings. But it was no use; he was about two messages deep when Mozelle buzzed with a call from the CIA deputy director of operations. The calls multiplied, and Blitz found his head swimming in a myriad of details and distractions.

Just a few months earlier the U.S. had forcibly prevented nuclear war from erupting between Pakistan and India. In the first wave of optimism after the trauma, commentators had hailed a new era of peace. Now things seemed as chaotic and volatile as ever. North Korea was Exhibit One: The supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, was reportedly sick and hadn’t been seen for several days. Some intelligence reports claimed he had been poisoned; others noted that revolt was a common topic in army circles. Satellite data showed several different units on the move.

Blitz wanted more than regime change in North Korea. American interests in Asia ultimately depended on reunification. Not only was this the only way to effectively prevent war, it was the best short-term solution to growing Japanese restlessness about its constitutionally limited military establishment. Unlike some of his predecessors, Blitz realized that a rapidly rearming Japan presented a grave danger in Asia. China would have to react, and inevitably this would lead to further confrontation.

Blitz knew his goal; the difficulty was that it looked impossible to achieve, short of war. War in Korea would inevitably kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, even if the nuclear warheads the country was believed to have were not used.

While many worried about the nuclear weapons, ironically they were relatively easy to neutralize or at least target. Central Intelligence had confirmed that North Korea had two warheads loaded on Taepo-Dong 1 missiles that could hit Japan but that the CIA had concluded were currently aimed at South Korean targets. For the past eighteen months the country had been reprocessing uranium, or at least claiming that it was, turning it into bomb material. There was considerable debate about how much weapons-grade material the North Koreans had made, but the consensus was that the country probably had enough for four or six more weapons. Among the many reports on Blitz’s desk was one updating the likelihood that these had been placed on the Taepo-Dong 2 two-stage missile, a long-range weapon theoretically capable of striking Alaska. The missile wasn’t very accurate, but as the head of the Air Force pointed out, you didn’t have to be very accurate with a nuclear warhead.

All of the missile sites, along with potential bomb storage areas and a number of “hot spots” where sensor readings indicated uranium was present in some form, were under constant surveillance and could be destroyed within roughly twenty minutes — less time than it would take the Koreans to prepare the missiles for launch. If the North Koreans tried to go nuclear, Blitz was fairly confident that the threat could be met.

More problematic, though, were the massive number of rocket and artillery weapons aimed at South Korea. Two hundred and fifty 240mm rocket launchers were deployed by one unit alone, all aimed at Seoul from just north of the demilitarized zone. The total number of guns and rockets capable of killing people in the heavily populated area near South Korea ’s capital literally could not be counted but numbered well in the thousands. Many of these weapons could be reloaded and used several times within just a few minutes.

Those weapons, too, were targeted. Most would be wiped out quickly if the order to attack was given, but presumably by then the damage would be done.

The Koreans may have seen the weapons as a deterrent to American attack. In some ways, however, they were exactly the opposite: It made more sense to launch a preemptive strike if things looked dicey than to stand around waiting until Seoul was on fire. Logically, Blitz realized that this meant America should attack before the North Koreans had a chance to. But successfully navigating the postwar environment required “moral authority,” which presumably would be lost if the U.S. struck first. Whether it made sense to or not.

“President’s looking for you,” said Mozelle, appearing over his desk between calls.

Blitz glanced at his watch. “I’m supposed to head up to NADT and have lunch with Bill Howe. What’s up?”

Mozelle gave her eyes a little half-roll, which meant she had no idea. “FBI director just came over, along with Jack Hunter.”

“Hunter? What the hell does he want?”

“President didn’t say.”

Blitz grunted. He left his assistant to deal with the phones and went down the hall to the President’s office, where he found President D’Amici lining up a putt on the carpet. Charles Weber, the head of the FBI, sat at the side of the President’s desk. Hunter, who was presently the third or fourth man in the agency, depending on how you interpreted the depth chart, sat beside him. Both men were dressed in identical brown suits; the cuffs of their pants were hiked just enough to reveal a line of skin above their argyle socks.

The President flicked his wrist and sent a ball shooting across the carpet into the plastic cup. A little flag shot up at the side and the ball spun back.

“Dr. Blitz — just the man I wanted to see,” said the President, as if Blitz had wandered into the office by accident. He pointed his golf club at Weber. “Charlie, give the professor the lowdown.”

“Actually, Jack’s got a better handle on it.”

“Three days ago,” began Hunter in a voice that sounded as if it came from a TV commercial, “one of our field agents received a call from a young woman in Arizona…”

Hunter continued, detailing a contact from a scientist in North Korea who wanted to defect. The situation would not have been particularly unique, except for the fact that the scientist had supplied a copy of plans for an E-bomb, a weapon North Korea was not known to possess. That, and the fact that the DIA had recently begun working on a case involving the potential threat of using such a device on a major East Coast city.

Blitz hunched down in his seat and scratched his goatee. “Are these two things related?” he asked.

“We’re not sure,” said Hunter. “We’re still trying to flesh things out. The Korean is going to Moscow in two days. We want to try to contact him there.”

Different experts had slightly different opinions on the potency of the weapon: One thought it would send a surge through all unprotected electrical devices within a five-mile radius, frying them for good. Another thought its potency would be limited to roughly a mile or so. The three other experts who’d been consulted were somewhere in between. All agreed that the explosion would almost certainly cause the Northeast’s power grid to go down for several days, probably more.

“Best-case scenario, this is a real catastrophe,” said Hunter. “Nothing like the August 2003 blackout. The surges in the system will wipe out at least some of the safeguards that have been put in place since then. Worst case I don’t even want to speculate about.”

Hunter had his own ax to grind here, Blitz realized; he was angling for the FBI director’s job, which was due to open at the end of the year with his boss’s planned retirement. Blitz didn’t mind ambition, though it could be a powerful set of blinders when information was being conveyed.

“What does CIA think?” Blitz asked.

“I spoke to Anthony late yesterday,” said Hunter, referring to the head of the CIA. “He thinks it’s valid. We’ve sent one of our best people out to nose around, back up the field agent, Andy Fisher.”

Blitz knew of Fisher from the NADT scandal. Though unorthodox, the agent was reliable.

“We’d like to grab this guy and bring him back,” said Hunter.

Blitz stroked his chin. A Korean plot against the United States: That would clearly justify intervention, maybe even a preemptive strike.

Have the President go on television — no, have the scientist go on television.

Wouldn’t work.

“We want to help this guy defect,” repeated Hunter.

“What do you think, Professor?” asked the President. “Is it worth it?”

“Information on their weapons would certainly be useful,” said Blitz. “But what about the DIA’s angle? How would they get it here?”

“We don’t know,” said Hunter. “To be candid, from what we’ve seen, it’s just pure speculation by the DIA and it’s unrelated to this. But of course we should take it seriously.”

“That’s why I thought it best to bring it to the President’s attention personally,” said Weber.

The President took his putt. It hit the corner of the cup and bounced off to the left. He shook his head as he corralled the ball, then lined up another shot. “Why are they sending this scientist to Moscow?”

“It’s about the only place in the world the Koreans are still welcome,” said Hunter.

They should grab him, Blitz decided. The potential risk of such a weapon — even if it was only used in Korea — was great.

“I think we should move ahead,” he told the others.

Hunter’s face blanched. The President took another putt. It rimmed the cup, then sank down.

“Yes,” said the President, shepherding the ball as it came back. “But this sounds more like the sort of thing the CIA ought to handle.”

Hunter’s face blanched.

“Of course, the FBI should remain involved. You’ve worked together before,” added the President.

“Of course,” said Weber. “We were going to suggest a joint operation.”

Hunter asked who would be lead agency. It was a political faux pas: Had he not asked, he could have claimed sovereignty in any discussion with his CIA counterparts.

“If it’s overseas, I’d prefer the CIA,” said the President.

“Of course,” said Weber quickly. Whatever he lacked in police abilities he made up for in political acumen. He rose from his chair, obviously intent on getting out before Hunter blundered further.

“Stay with me a second, Professor,” the President told Blitz. “I have a few minutes before my next appointment, if John’s timeline is right.”

When the others were gone, the President asked Blitz if he thought the North Korean government would collapse soon.

“Hard to say,” said Blitz. “It might fall apart tomorrow. Then again, no one thought Kim Jong Il would even last this long. We may be talking about this twenty years from now.”

“You and I won’t,” said the President.

“We’re ready for an attack if it comes,” said Blitz.

“You’re still in favor of a preemptive attack, aren’t you?” said the President.

“That’s not what I was in favor of,” said Blitz.

“No?” The President took a shot and missed.

“It would solve certain problems, and create many others,” said Blitz. “Ultimately it doesn’t make sense.”

“But if it did, it would save a lot of lives,” said the President.

Blitz wasn’t about to argue with that.

“Have you found a new head for NADT yet?” asked the President, picking up his golf ball and stowing his putter as he changed the subject.

“I’m still working on Colonel Howe. We’re supposed to have lunch, actually.” Blitz glanced at his watch, more for show than anything else: There was no way now that he’d make the appointment.

“Money not enough?”

“I think the money’s part of the problem,” said Blitz. “I think it may scare him.”

“Tell him he deserves it. More than most of the fat cats running corporations around here who think they’re God’s gift to America.”

“Nonetheless,” said Blitz.

“He can always arrange to take the equivalent of his government salary.”

Blitz frowned, even though he knew D’Amici was only joking. Right or wrong, financial compensation was one way defense contractors and Washington kept score; Howe had to have a salary commensurate with his responsibility or he wouldn’t be taken seriously.

“Who’s your backup?” asked the President.

“ Trieste, I guess,” said Blitz, mentioning a retired two-star Army general whose name had been floated around.

“Not my first choice,” said the President. His tone made it clear Trieste wasn’t even on the list of acceptable candidates.

“What about my former assistant, Howard McIntyre?”

“Way too young for that job,” said the President.

“So is Howe.”

“Howe has considerably more experience, and he’s a hero,” said the President. “And he’s older than Howe — who is a good man; don’t get me wrong.”

“I’ll keep working on Howe,” said Blitz. “I haven’t given up.”

“You think you can control him?” asked the President.

“No,” said Blitz. He didn’t want to control Howe, necessarily, just steer NADT a little more toward the administration’s agenda than in the past.

“Maybe you should take the job yourself,” suggested the President.

That snake pit? Blitz knew he wouldn’t last six months.

“I’m happy where I am,” he said. “We need someone qualified and independent but who won’t come with their own ax to grind — and won’t be in the pocket of people looking to get rich. Howe’s perfect.”

“Be careful, Professor, you may get what you wish for,” said the President.

Chapter 12

The fact that he was supposed to be Swedish rather than American didn’t particularly bother Fisher; he’d always had vaguely Nordic ambitions despite his dark hair and lack of a sauna fetish. Nor did he worry that the few phrases of Swedish they’d given him to memorize were unpronounceable tongue twisters; Fisher figured that anyone he was likely to meet in Moscow would understand even less Swedish than he did. Not even the ridiculous nonstop hopscotching across Europe as he made his way to Russia threw him off his game. On the contrary, it gave Fisher a chance to sample terrible coffee in a succession of small airports, confirming his opinion that the java brewed at airport terminals belonged in a class all its own.

No, the real problem with his cover were the European cigarettes he was forced to smoke for authenticity. He’d settled on some British smokes as being the closest thing to real tobacco he could find. But for all their storied contributions to civilization, the English had yet to come up with a smokable cigarette.

Worse, the damn things were filtered.

On the other hand, smoking was permitted and seemingly mandatory throughout much of Russia; he’d even been able to light up on the airplane into Vnukovo Airport outside of Moscow without anyone looking cross-eyed at him. It seemed particularly ironic that the country that had given the world gulags, mass murder, and fermented potato juice had such an enlightened attitude toward cigarettes. Fisher was sure this was a good omen for the country’s future and even thought about the possibility of buying a retirement home here. The fact that he couldn’t speak the language was surely a plus, since it would spare him from knowing what was going on around him — one of the prime benefits of living in a foreign country.

The CIA officer who had assumed control of the operation, Hans Madison, met him in the terminal. Vnukovo was southwest of Moscow and used mostly for regional flights. While it was watched by the FSB, one of the internal security agencies that had succeeded the KGB, the Russians felt that any spy forced to use it must be pretty low on the feeding chain and therefore of less interest than the big shots who flew directly into the main airport, Sheremetyevo-2. This meant that the FSB put its own second- and third-stringers here. Within a few minutes of arriving, Fisher and the CIA officer in charge of the operation — he introduced himself as Hans Madison, a name so goofy Fisher thought it might be real — were free of their shadow and riding in a bus toward the city. The bus was more like a six-wheel minivan with a trailer welded to the body; it was operated by a brand-new company capitalizing on the inefficiencies of the existing public transport system by inventing its own. Capitalizing on government inefficiency was a growth industry in Russia, but then again, the same might be said for just about anywhere in the world.

“Our man arrived last night. He’s staying at a youth hostel,” said Madison as they rode.

“Youth hostel?”

“Cleared it out for the conference. They’re putting up foreign scientists from North Korea and China there. Rest have to stay in real hotels.”

Amanda Kung’s flight was supposed to arrive at Sheremetyevo-2, within a few hours. Kung had agreed to come to Moscow and let the scientist contact her. For some inexplicable reason she’d insisted on having Mathers as her FBI bodyguard. Mathers had been equipped with a cover claiming she worked with Kung as a junior engineer and had come to take notes.

“We’ve already bugged the conference rooms,” said Madison, continuing to lay out the operation. “You’ll be inside with two other agents. A little tricky to wire everybody, so we’ll have to go silent com. We have some small radio units, but they’re very short-range. You’ll have to back up with sat phones. The phones are encrypted, but the Russkies will know you’re using them, so obviously that’s a last resort. What do you know about power companies and electrical generation?”

“They turn off the lights if you don’t pay the bill on time,” said Fisher.

“Guess that will have to do,” said Madison. “We have a portfolio for you as a Swedish electricity minister.”

“Cattle prod come with the job?”

“Not this time around,” said Madison.

Chapter 13

Dr. Park made his morning ablution to his ancestors, trusting himself today especially to the memory of his great-grandfather, who had told him stories about fighting against the Japanese. A more objective observer might have questioned whether his great-grandfather had personally been involved in the battles he spoke of, but Dr. Park accepted them uncritically. His great-grandfather was for him a warrior, and he needed that quality now.

The American had sent word that she would attend the conference. His salvation was at hand, if he was brave enough to seize the opportunity.

Dr. Park dressed quietly. Chin Yop, the minder sent to accompany him through Moscow, snored loudly in the bunk a few feet away. It occurred to Dr. Park that he might take this chance to simply run for freedom: go out on the street and find a cab, then take it to the American embassy. But he didn’t know Russian, and even his English was halting. Besides, there were undoubtedly others watching him besides the mild-mannered man who had accompanied him from P’yongyang, Russians as well as Koreans.

“Trust us,” the American had said in her message.

It was his only option. Dr. Park finished dressing, then woke his minder, telling him he was going to the day room for breakfast.

Chapter 14

There was black, and there was black. And then there was the blackness of Russian coffee, a shade beyond the naked oblivion beloved of philosophers from Plato to Sartre. Plato had his cave, Nietzsche had his superman; Fisher had his coffee.

It occurred to Fisher that the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant could not have been a true coffee drinker; he was too much of an idealist. Or, rather, given his syncretistic leanings, he would have been the sort who added milk and sugar, botching the whole operation and skewing his view of the universe in the process.

Coffee like this — strong, black, so full of caffeine that the surface buzzed — this sort of coffee was the reason Russia had produced musicians and writers rather than philosophers and poets; the liquid was as thick as sandpaper, scrubbing away the ethereal coatings of your esophagus, a region much given to philosophical thoughts. And the heartburn that would surely follow tended to wipe out lyrical expression.

Fisher, never much for poetry or philosophy, decided he would have to drink more of this on a regular basis. Maybe he could get his local Dunkin’ Donuts to import it.

The FBI agent achieved these insights while sitting at the back of Assembly Room Two in Meeting Hall Pavilion A, Government Facility Conference Buildings, Moscow, listening as an engineer sang the seemingly unlimited praises of microcurrents. Fisher was sitting two rows behind Kung and Mathers, who were themselves two rows behind the Korean subject, who had come with his minder and sat in what appeared to be rapt attention, though his dossier said he spoke little English, the language of the presentation.

There were another dozen people in the room, including one Russian agent and one of the CIA backup team members. Fisher had also spotted a Chinese conferee sipping coffee with cream; this was a dead giveaway that the man was either an intelligence agent or a German philosopher trying to reform.

The speaker droned on in an English that came from somewhere between London and Düsseldorf. Apparently there was a brave new world lurking in the circuits powering modern life; Fisher didn’t understand most of what the man said, but it did give him a new respect for his cordless shaver.

He remained in his seat as the session broke up, watching Dr. Park up close for the first time. Thirties, no family to speak of, the man was a mid-level drone in the Korean scientific community. As far as that went, he had a relatively sheltered life; in that society he would even be considered privileged.

So why did he want to defect? Beyond the obvious appeal of apple pie and Chevrolets?

Fisher got up as Kung and her gnomish bodyguard passed by his seat. Mathers wagged a finger at him as if they were in junior high; Fisher set his glare on stun and fended her off.

Outside, the hallway was crowded with scientists, engineers, and spooks assigned to make sure they didn’t make off with too many doughnuts. Fisher sifted to the far end of the snack table, making like he was checking the program listing.

Fisher had emphasized the importance to Kung — and to the gnome — of letting Dr. Park come to her. So far she was sticking to the program, nibbling on cookies with Mathers at one end of the long table while Dr. Park stood almost motionless on the other. A Finnish engineer came up to the two women and started talking about alternating current, obviously some sort of codeword for threesomes involving short people.

Fisher slid through the crowd and got closer to Dr. Park. He had a minder and a shadow: The shadow had registered as a scientist from China, but Madison ID’d him as a Korean agent. A pair of Koreans from the embassy were watching outside in a car.

A lot of company for a mid-level scientist, unless they suspected he wanted to defect. But if that were the case, wouldn’t they have stopped him from attending the conference in the first place?

Fisher watched as Kung and the gnome walked off toward the next session. Dr. Park moved in the opposite direction.

Where were the professional matchmakers when you needed them?

“From Swiss National Electric?” asked a cheery balding man, glancing at Fisher’s name tag. His accent was very British, and his name tag revealed that he worked for the London Power Company.

“ Sweden,” said Fisher. He mimicked the man’s accent and threw a lisp in as a bonus, though it was a lot to weigh on a single word.

“Spent time in the States?”

“Too much,” said Fisher.

“Many issues there, I suppose.”

“It all comes down to too many volts,” said Fisher, shambling after Dr. Park.

Miss Kung was plumper than he remembered, and a little older. Still, she had an exotic air about her. Her smile was not quite Korean, but it warmed the room nonetheless.

Dr. Park had not realized until he saw her at the conference that he was attracted to her in a romantic way. Perhaps he had not been until that moment.

He knew she was some sort of spy. The Americans routinely sent their agents across the world to enmesh unsuspecting males; he’d learned that as a child at school. They were devious, but that was one of the things that made dealing with them attractive.

As he walked toward the conference room, Dr. Park realized with great disappointment that Miss Kung was not attending this session. He could not change his own plans, however, without arousing the suspicion of Chin Yop.

A tall European with an absentminded, arrogant air bumped into him just outside the door. The man managed to knock the packet of handouts Dr. Park was carrying from his hand onto the floor.

“Pardon, pardon,” said the man, bending and helping pick them up.

Dr. Park stood motionless as the man handed him the folder.

Was there a message in the papers he handed back?

Chin Yop grabbed the folder.

“Sorry,” said the man who’d bumped into him.

Dr. Park wanted to run away: He thought of jumping on the man, grabbing his chest, demanding help.

But he wasn’t even an American. All that would accomplish would be to expose himself and his plans. He would be dragged away, taken back home to Korea, shot.

They wouldn’t bother taking him home. He would be shot in Russia, left in an alley for the dogs to eat.

“You — cigarettes? Have some?” asked the European in broken English.

Dr. Park couldn’t get his mouth to speak.

“Cigs?” repeated the man. He took a pack out and held it in Chin Yop’s face. He said something in a foreign language that Dr. Park didn’t understand, then repeated it in English. “Where I can get more?”

Confused, the minder shook his head.

The European turned to Dr. Park. “You?”

Dr. Park managed to shake his head.

“No smoke?” said the European. He turned back to Chin Yop, said something indecipherable, then switched to English. “I can tell you smoke. Where do you get your cigs?”

The minder glanced at Dr. Park. “Is he crazy or what?” he said in Korean.

Dr. Park shrugged. Chin Yop did, in fact, smoke: He had a box of Marlboros that he had picked up near the hostel in his pocket.

“Cigarettes? You smoke American?” asked the European, pointing at the box.

Chin Yop nodded hesitantly.

“Can I have one?” said the European, pointing at the minder’s pack. “Two of mine for one of yours.”

Chin Yop held up his hands, not understanding or at least pretending that he didn’t.

Dr. Park explained in Korean, then added that he ought to hold out for three at least.

“Three?” said the European when the trade was offered. But he made the deal, trading his entire pack for three Marlboros. He lit up immediately.

“Where?” he asked as he exhaled. “Buy them? Where did you find them? American, right? I didn’t know you could get them here.”

“Should I tell him where I got them?” Chin Yop asked Dr. Park as he deciphered the question.

Dr. Park shrugged. Cigarettes were available throughout the city, though they had bought theirs from a black-market vendor near the hostel at a considerable discount.

Was this man really a Russian policeman, checking on them?

“You tell him,” said Chin Yop.

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t know.”

“You’re the senior man. Go ahead, it will seem odd if you don’t reply.”

Dr. Park looked at the European and then at his minder. Probably the minder was simply worried about his English, but perhaps this was part of an elaborate trap: Dr. Park would be arrested for buying forbidden items, then thrown into a Russian jail.

“Is he a policeman?” asked Dr. Park in Korean.

“You think so?” answered Chin Yop. “No. Too confused. Look, he’s a geek like you.”

“Maybe it’s a trick.”

The minder looked at the European and laughed.

If it was a trick, Dr. Park decided, the minder wasn’t in on it.

“Go ahead and tell him,” said Chin Yop. “He’s harmless. A nicotine addict.”

Dr. Park had trouble smiling, still unsure if he would be arrested for answering.

“I have heard that you can get them near Kolomev Street,” said Dr. Park, naming the street where their hostel was located. He had to repeat it twice before the foreigner understood.

“Oh.” The man nodded. “I heard there are shops in Arbatskaya.”

Dr. Park felt the blood leave his head as he finally understood who the man was and what he was doing. The Americans were quite clever after all.

Chapter 15

After the excitement of the Hawk flight, Howe found the rest of his week rather mundane. The girl in the aircraft was okay — physically, at least: Her father had had a heart attack and died as she watched. Howe, who had lost his own father when he was young, knew she would never truly get over that.

He had missed lunch with Blitz and they kept missing each other as they tried to reschedule, but otherwise he got the full-court treatment, VIPs at every meal. He phoned home once and sometimes twice a day, talking to his mom and occasionally his younger sister, who lived nearby and stopped by the house every so often. They were terribly impressed.

So was his friend Jimmy Bozzone, who kept calling him a big-shot muckety-muck and asking if he’d be able to get him tickets to all the sporting events now.

“What would that do for you, Jimmy?” asked Howe as Jimmy ragged him that night after dinner.

“Well, like, you know, you talk to the powers that be and get an executive box and I come along as your aidede-campo.”

“Campo?”

“Whatever. As long as I get a free beer. Listen, they’re having the Final Four down in New York City this month. Get us some tickets.”

“Right.” Howe shook his head and lay back on the bed. He yawned.

“Sorry if I’m keeping you up,” said Jimmy.

“All this wining and dining is hard work.” Howe hadn’t told Jimmy how much money was involved. He knew if he did, Jimmy would yell at him, call him a fool for even hesitating.

Would he, though? Jimmy valued his independence, and that was something you couldn’t really put a price tag on. As head of the NADT, Howe would be answering to all sorts of people at the Pentagon, the White House, Congress. He’d have to deal with contractors, blue suits, Navy people, the GAO — everyone in the world.

That was why they would pay so much money.

“You watching Syracuse?” asked Jimmy. “They’re ahead.”

“I may turn on the TV just to see them get their asses kicked,” Howe told him.

“Screw yourself. And don’t forget, I want tickets to the finals at Madison Square Garden.”

They were having the Final Four championship games at the Garden this year, the first time ever. Jimmy had gone to Penn State but had inexplicably seized on Syracuse as a team to root for after moving to New York State a decade or so before. Howe had no doubt that he would try and scalp tickets at Madison Square Garden if the Orangemen somehow made it to the play-offs. Tickets would go for thousands, he thought; everybody was making a big deal out of the fact that they were at the Garden.

“Ain’t gonna happen,” said Howe.

“We’ll see,” said Jimmy.

After he hung up, he flipped on the basketball game, a first rounder in the NCAA finals. Syracuse was comfortably ahead, but they were only playing Marist, which had managed somehow to draw the last bid of the tourney. With Syracuse up by twenty after one period, the game was pretty boring. He was just about to click off the set when the phone rang; thinking it was Jimmy calling back to rub in the game details, he hesitated but then picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Colonel Howe,” said a female voice, “stand by, please, for Dr. Blitz.”

“Colonel,” said Blitz, coming on the line before Howe could even answer. “Sorry we’ve been missing each other. A lot of stuff going on over here. I know it’s getting late and I won’t keep you. How about we have dinner next Tuesday night?” suggested Blitz. “My wife loves to cook.”

“I wasn’t planning on staying in town quite that long,” said Howe. “I was hoping to leave Saturday.”

“I’m afraid I have to go to Camp David for the weekend with the President.” Blitz paused. “Why don’t you come along?”

“I don’t think so,” said Howe.

“No, no, you really should: A lot of the important people you’ll be working with will be there.”

Howe smiled at the way Blitz had made it sound as if he’d decided to take the job.

“I think I’ll pass on the weekend, if that’s okay. Thanks, though.”

“Well, let’s set up that dinner, then. And I think the President will want to talk to you as well.”

Howe sighed. They really did want him to take the goddamn job, didn’t they?

Maybe he wanted it as well. Because really, if he didn’t, wouldn’t he have gone home already?

“So I can mark you down for dinner Tuesday?” asked Blitz. “Come over to my office in the afternoon-four, say. This way the President can drop by and say hi.”

Howe barely got “Well…” out of his mouth when Blitz started talking again.

“I understand your hesitation,” said Blitz, in a voice that suggested the opposite. “At least let the board of directors make a formal offer,” insisted Blitz. “We’ll have lunch Monday. Come over to my office. In the meantime, use that limo. Go out. Have fun. Even if you don’t take the job.”

The national security advisor paused and said something to someone else in his office. “Maybe you should have your mom come down from Pennsylvania. Show her Washington,” he said when he came back on the line.

“My mother’s sixty-eight.”

“Colonel, you really ought to relax for the next few days, just give yourself some time to think. Enjoy it — like a little minivacation. You’ve dedicated your life to your country, and you’ve made huge contributions. This is just a little bit of payback.”

“I’ll see you for lunch. I have to be honest, though: I’m leaning against the job. Very much against.”

“We’ll talk Monday,” said Blitz. “Wait until Monday.”

Chapter 16

Fisher was now officially played and had to stay in the background as the operation proceeded. Unfortunately, he couldn’t just disappear; one more lecture on joules and he would stick his fingers into the nearest light socket. So he feigned gastric distress and made a show of heading quickly to the men’s room, where he hung out for a while, smoking the cigarettes he’d traded for and listening to the attendant harangue customers for greenbacks instead of rubles. A few strategic groans kept him from being bothered, and when he finally emerged, the attendant steered well clear of him. Fisher made his way back to his hotel three blocks away; Madison flagged him down in a small Toyota.

“Nobody followed you,” the CIA officer told him. “You must’ve put on some act.”

“Looking stupid just comes naturally to some of us.”

They headed toward Arbatskaya, an area west of the Kremlin that once had a vaguely bohemian flavor and lately had become something of a tourist trap. Kung and the gnome were already en route, driven by a CIA operative disguised as a taxi driver; Madison would “deploy” them once Dr. Park arrived in the area.

If he arrived in the area.

“Your partner’s bugged, so we’ll hear what happens.”

“Who’s my partner?” objected Fisher.

“What’s-her-name-the short one. Mathers.”

“The gnome is not my partner,” said Fisher.

“Will he show up?” asked Madison.

“Got me,” said Fisher. “His minder will, though. I just about cleaned him out of smokes.”

Dr. Park walked past the shop, his heart thumping. Moscow was supposedly undergoing a very warm winter, but he felt like ice, even inside his warm parka. It had not been difficult to persuade Chin Yop to come here; he mentioned that he had eaten in the area during his one previous trip to Moscow and that it was very inexpensive. Chin Yop was undoubtedly being paid an allowance, and thus any savings on meals would go into his pocket.

Were the Americans following? How would they approach him? When? What would they do to Chin Yop?

Dr. Park tried to clear the questions from his mind. If they were following him — and they must be following him, he decided — then they would make contact at a time and place of their choosing, a time they felt was safe for everyone. He had to trust that they would handle the business appropriately: They had done well so far.

Dr. Park let his companion choose the restaurant, a small basement café at the foot of a large brick building that held apartments. The man who greeted them at the door spoke English in such a heavy accent that Dr. Park could not make it out. They found a seat in toward the back and managed to pick out items that seemed benign from the menu. In truth, anything they ate here would be exotic; Dr. Park’s diet consisted mostly of rice and bits of vegetable or, on occasion, fish. From the looks of his thin wrists and neck, Chin Yop did not fare much better.

“Oh, hello!” said a woman in English from across the room.

Dr. Park looked up. Ms. Kung and another woman were making their way across the room. Chin Yop had a strained look on his face.

“Mr. Chin,” said the shorter woman, bowing her head toward Dr. Park’s minder. “And your friend?”

Dr. Park introduced himself. The short woman said that her name was Ms. Mathers and she remembered the pair from the conference. Chin Yop smiled faintly, then said to Dr. Park in Korean that the taller woman was quite beautiful.

Dr. Park seized the chance to look directly at Ms. Kung. She was, he agreed, most beautiful.

“Mine,” insisted Chin Yop.

Dr. Park turned to him in surprise.

“Don’t be a prude,” insisted the minder, pushing his chair back and insisting in his poor English that the two women join them.

Dr. Park did not know what to do. His minder’s instructions would undoubtedly have been explicit: Such contacts should be kept to a minimum; certainly dinner would violate that edict.

A test?

Dr. Park could smell her perfume. What if the minder wanted to defect as well?

Perhaps he had his own plan.

Or perhaps he knew that Ms. Kung was here to contact him.

“I think perhaps we might eat alone,” suggested Dr. Park in Korean. Chin ignored him, talking with the women, asking them about America.

America!

Surely this was a trap. Dr. Park sat silently as the others ordered. When the food arrived he tried to eat slowly, but he could not: He was too hungry. He quickly cleaned his plate, then sat while the others laughed and talked.

“What the hell is she trying to do, pick up the security agent?” Madison asked Fisher. “She’s all giggly.”

Fisher shrugged. “Probably she gets that way when she’s nervous.”

“Why would she be nervous?”

Not only could they hear the entire exchange via Mathers’s bug, but two of Madison ’s team members had slipped in with a small video spy cam and were sitting at the next table. The cam was embedded in a brooch on the female op’s blouse and provided a fish-eyed view of the room, fed onto a laptop in Madison ’s Toyota.

The Koreans’own trail team sat in a Russian car half a block away, just barely in view of the entrance. A scan had shown that they were not using any bugging devices — probably, said Madison, because they couldn’t afford them. There didn’t appear to be any other minders or Russian agents nearby.

Mathers suggested vodka. Fisher rued his decision not to object to her joining the operation.

The four of them drank and ate for more than an hour. Dr. Park was clearly uncomfortable at the start; he became more so as the time went on. He looked the part of a defector: nervous and antsy. But he also looked like a typical North Korean scientist anxious because his minder was clearly breaking the rules. Paranoia was the one behavior in Korea that didn’t attract attention.

Finally, Chin Yop got up to go to the restroom. Dr. Park said something to him as he pushed away the chair.

“Don’t leave me alone with these women,” whispered the CIA translator from the team van, two blocks away.

Chin Yop said something in return; Fisher assumed it was a lewd suggestion, because the translator, a woman, didn’t immediately supply the line.

“All right,” said Madison, pointing to the screen. “Let’s do it.”

“No. I think we ought to wait,” said Fisher.

“What?”

“I think we ought to wait.”

“Screw that,” said Madison. He brought his arm to his mouth and spoke into his mike. “Go,” he told his people.

Fisher shook his head.

The CIA officer with the brooch said “Good evening” in Russian — the words sounded a bit like “Duh breeze there” — giving the signal to exit. Mathers jumped to her feet and grabbed Dr. Park. He pushed her away but got up, starting to walk toward the back. The other CIA agent inside the restaurant loomed at the left, corralling him. One of the patrons yelled something.

Then both the audio and visual feeds died.

“Shit,” said Fisher, jumping from the car.

Dr. Park felt his head spin as the man pushed him toward the door.

The Americans were trying to help him escape — surely they were trying to help him escape. But the woman and the man who had approached him had spoken Russian. Where were they taking him?

Dr. Park took a step toward the back when the man from the other table grabbed him. He whispered something that Dr. Park didn’t understand.

He thought it was Russian, yet it seemed almost Korean.

Dr. Park was being pushed toward the front. He tried to grab Ms. Kung, but she was sliding away, running toward the exit.

What was going on?

The door flew open. Dr. Park tried to push against the large man but it was no use; he felt himself thrown out into the street.

“Nyet,” he said, the only Russian he knew. “No! Help!” he shouted in Korean.

Where were the Americans?

“Come with us,” said the short woman, Mathers.

She was speaking English.

Suddenly, Dr. Park understood: They were all Americans. He started to run.

A police car sped around the corner. Two men got out and began shouting, reaching for their weapons. Dr. Park threw himself to the ground.

Fisher got to the corner just as a pair of Russian police cars, one marked, one unmarked, arrived. Two policemen were in the street, guns drawn.

The American FBI agent pulled out the Beretta that Madison had supplied. As the Russian police grabbed at Kung, Fisher fired, making sure he hit the man square in the chest, where he was protected by his bulletproof vest.

The other policeman fired back, missing. The CIA backup team finally got its act together, firing a barrage of tear-gas canisters that sent the policemen retreating across the street. Fisher, choking, grabbed Kung and dragged her away, then went back for Dr. Park. His eyes blurred with the gas; he grabbed a figure in front of him and pulled backward, his whole body burning with the thick gas. His eyes clamped themselves shut.

“Go, let’s go!” Madison shouted.

Fisher managed to crack open one eye and saw that he’d taken Mathers, not the Korean scientist. Cursing, he let go of her and started back toward the restaurant.

Madison grabbed him. “No! The police are coming,” he shouted. “We have to leave. Now!”

Fisher hesitated just long enough to hear a fresh hail of bullets hitting the concrete a few yards away.

“All right,” he said, heading back around the corner where a van was waiting, eyes and nose raw with the gas.

“You okay?” asked Madison as they sped away.

“Yeah,” said Fisher. “But I really hate tearjerkers.”