Acts of war

Katzen scowled. "That's one point of view, I suppose."

"Damn right," Coffey replied. "And I'm not apologizing for it. But there is one thing you can tell me."

"What?" Katzen asked.

Coffey's mouth twisted. "What is the difference between a porpoise and a dolphin?"

Before he could answer, the door of the van opened and Mike Rodgers stepped out. Coffey savored the blast of air-conditioning before the ramrod-straight general shut the door. He was dressed in jeans and a tight gray Gettysburg Campaign souvenir T-shirt. His light brown eyes seemed almost golden in the bright sun.

Mike Rodgers rarely smiled, but Coffey noticed the hint of a grin tugging at the side of his mouth.

"So?" Coffey asked.

"It's running," Rodgers said. "We were able to uplink to all five of the selected National Reconnaissance Office satellites. We have video, audio, and thermal views of the target region as well as complete electronic surveillance. Mary Rose is talking to Matt Stoll right now, making sure all of the data is getting through." Rodgers's reluctant smile bloomed. "The battery-powered son of a gun works."

Katzen offered him his hand. "Congratulations, General. Matt must be ecstatic."

"Yeah, he's a pretty happy fella," Rodgers said. "After everything we went through to put the ROC together, I'm pretty happy myself."

Coffey toasted General Rodgers with a swig from the water bottle. "Forget everything I said, Phil. If Mike Rodgers is pleased, then we really must've batted one out of the park."

"Grand slam," Rodgers said, "That's the good news. The bad news is that the chopper which is supposed to take you and Phil to Lake Van's been delayed."

"For how long?" Katzen asked.

"Permanently," said Rodgers. "Seems someone in the Motherland Party objects to the excursion. They don't buy our ecology cover story, that we're out here to study the rising alkaline levels of Turkish waterways and its percolation effect on the soil."

"Aw, jeez," Katzen said. "What the hell do they think we want to do out there?"

"You ready for this?" Rodgers asked. "They believe we've found Noah's Ark and that we plan to take it to the U.S. They want the Council of Ministers to cancel our permits."

Katzen angrily jabbed the toe of his boot at the parched ground. "I really did want to have a look at that lake. It's got just one species of fish, the darek, which evolved to survive in the soda-rich water. We can learn a lot about adaptation from it."

"Sorry," Rodgers said. "We're going to have to do some adapting of our own." He looked over at Coffey. "What do you know about this Motherland Party, Lowell? Do they have enough power to screw up our shakedown session?"

Coffey dragged the kerchief along his strong jaw and then across the back of his neck. "Probably not," he said, "though you might want to check with Martha. They're pretty strong and considerably right-of-center. But any debate they start will go back and forth between the Prime Minister and the Motherlanders for two or three days before it's brought to the Grand National Assembly for a vote. I don't know about Phil's excursion, but I think that'll give us the time to do what we came here for."

Rodgers nodded. He turned to Sondra. "Private DeVonne, the Deputy Prime Minister also told me that leaflets are being passed out in the streets, informing citizens about our plan to rob Turkey of its heritage. The government is sending an intelligence agent, Colonel Nejat Seden, to help us deal with any incidents. Until then, please inform Private Pupshaw that some of the people who'll be heading to the watermelon festival in Diyarbakir may be carrying a grudge as well as fruit. Tell him to stay cool."

"Yes, sir."

Sondra saluted and jogged toward the burly Pupshaw, who was stationed on the other side of the tents. He was watching the road where it disappeared behind a row of hills.

Katzen frowned. "This is great. Not only could I miss out on the chance to study the darek, but we've got a hundred million dollars worth of sophisticated electronics in there. And until this Colonel Seden gets here, all we've got to protect it are two Strikers with radios on their hips and M21s, which, of they use 'em, we'll get clobbered for because we're supposed to be unarmed."

"I thought you admired my diplomatic finesse," Coffey said.

"I do."

"Well, that was the best deal we could get," Coffey said. "You worked with Greenpeace. When the French secret service sunk your flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor in 1985, you didn't go out and kill Parisians."

"I wanted to," Katzen admitted. "Boy, how I wanted to."

"But you didn't. We're employees of a foreign power conducting surveillance on behalf of a minority government so that their military can keep am eye on Islamic fanatics. We don't exactly have a moral imperative to gun down locals. If we're attacked, we lock the van door, get inside, and radio the local polisi. They rush out here in their swift Renaults and deal with the situation."

"Unless they're Motherland sympathizers," Katzen said.

"No," Coffey replied, "the police here are pretty fair. They may not like you, but they believe in the law and they'll uphold it."

"Anyway," Rodgers said, "the DPM doesn't expect us to have that kind of trouble. At worst there'll be tossed watermelon, eggs, manure, that sort of thing."

"Terrific," Katzen said. "At least in Washington they only sling mud."

"If it ever rained here," Coffey said, "we'd get that too.

Rodgers held out his hand and Coffey passed him the water. After taking a long swallow the general said, "Cheer up. As Tennessee Williams once said, 'Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.' "

THREE

Monday, 6:48 a.m., Chevy Chase, Maryland

Paul Hood sat sipping black coffee in the den of his comfortable suburban home. He'd opened the ivory-colored drapes, had cracked the sliding glass door an inch, and was looking across the backyard. Hood had traveled the world and was intimately familiar with many parts of it. But there was nothing that thrilled him as much as the dirty-white picket fence that marked his small part of it.

The grass was glistening-green, and a warm breeze carried the smell of roses from his wife's tiny garden. Eastern bluebirds and yellow warblers were lively with song, and squirrels were acting like furry little Strikers as they moved, stopped, reconnoitered, then moved again. The rustic tranquility was broken now and then by what the jazz-loving Hood called the morning door jam: the slap of a screen door, the groan of a garage door, or the slam of a car door.

To Hood's right was a dark oak bookcase filled with Sharon's well-used volumes on gardening and cooking. The shelves were also hacked with the encyclopedias, atlases, and dictionaries Harleigh and Alexander didn't consult anymore since all that material was on CDROM. Then there was a small corner section for Hood's own favorite novels. Ben-Hur. From Here to Eternity. The War of the Worlds. Tender Is the Night. Works by Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Old Lone Ranger novels by Fran Striker that Hood had read as a kid and went back to every now and then. To Hood's left were shelves filled with mementoes of his tenure as the mayor of Los Angeles. Plaques, mugs, keys to other cities, and photographs with domestic and foreign dignitaries.

The coffee and fresh air were equally invigorating. His lightly starched shirt was comfortable. And his new shoes felt rich, even though they weren't. He remembered when his father couldn't afford to buy him new shoes. It was thirty-five years ago, when Paul was nine and President Kennedy had been assassinated. His father, Frank "Battleship" Hood, a Navy man during the Second World War, had quit one accounting job to take another. The Hoods had sold their house and were about to move from Long Island to Los Angeles when the new firm put a sudden freeze on hiring. The firm was very, very sorry but they didn't know what was going to happen to the company, to the economy, to the country. His father didn't work for thirteen months after that, and they had to move into a small apartment. An apartment small enough so he could hear his mother consoling his father when he cried at night.

Now here he was. Relatively affluent and the director of Op-Center. In less than a year, Hood and his core team had turned the agency, formally known as the National Crisis Management Center, from a liaison office between the CIA, the White House, and the other big boys to a crisis-management team in its own right. Hood had an often fractious relationship with some of his closest people, most notably Deputy Director Mike Rodgers, Intelligence Officer Bob Herbert, and Political and Economics Officer Martha Mackall. But he welcomed the differences of opinion. Besides, if he couldn't manage personality clashes in his office, he couldn't handle political and military clashes thousands of miles away. The desk-side skirmishes kept him alert and in shape for the bigger, more important battles.

Hood drank his coffee slowly. Virtually every morning he sat comfortably alone on this sofa. He surveyed his life and invited contentment to lap him like an island. But it rarely did. Not on all sides, anyway. There was a hole, much larger in the month since he'd returned from Germany. A void which had been filled unexpectedly with passion. Passion for his one-time love Nancy, whom he'd met in Hamburg after twenty years. Passion that burned on the beach of his little island and disturbed his rest at night and fought for attention during the day.

But it was passion that he had not and could not act upon. Not unless he wanted to destroy the people for whom this home and this life were contentment. The children to whom he was a constant and reliable source of strength and emotional security. The wife who respected and trusted him and said she loved him. Well, she probably did. She probably loved him in the same buddy-sisterly-shared-goals way that he loved her. Which wasn't bad, even though it wasn't what he felt for Nancy.

Hood drained his mug, regretting that the last mouthful never tasted as glorious as the first. Not in coffee, not in life. He rose, put the mug in the dishwasher, grabbed his trench coat from the closet, and walked into the balmy morning.

Hood drove southeast through Washington, D.C., to Op-Center's headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base. He negotiated traffic that was already thick with trucks, Mercedes, and fleets of overnight courier vans rushing to make morning deliveries. He wondered how many people were thinking like he was, how many were cursing the traffic, and how many were just enjoying the drive, the morning, and some upbeat music.

He plugged in a tape of Spanish gypsy music, a love he'd acquired from his Cuban-born grandfather. The car filled with Romany lyrics whose words he didn't understand but whose passion he did. And as the music washed over him, Hood tried once again to fill the gaps in his contentment.

FOUR

Monday, 7:18 a.m., Washington, D. C.

Matthew Stoll disdained the traditional labels for "his kind." He loathed them almost as much as he hated chronic optimists, unreasonably high prices for software, and curry. As he'd been telling all his friends and coworkers since his days as an MIT wunderkind---a term he didn't mind---he was not a computer nerd, a techno-weenie, or an egghead.

"I think of myself as a techsplorer," he'd told Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers when he first interviewed for the job of Operations Support Officer.

"Excuse me?" Hood had said.

"I explore technology," the cherubic Stoll had replied. "I'm like Meriwether Lewis, except I'll need more than his twenty-five-hundred-dollar Congressional appropriation to open up vast new technological lands. I also hope to live past the age of thirty-five, though you never know."

Hood had later confided to Stoll that he'd found the neologism corny, though the scientist hadn't been offended. He'd known from their first meeting that "Saint Paul" had neither a vaulting imagination nor a sharp sense of humor. Hood was a deft, temperate, and remarkably intuitive manager. But General Rodgers was a big-time history buff, and he'd been won over by the Meriwether Lewis reference. And as Hood and Rodgers had both admitted, there was no ignoring Stoll's credentials. He'd not only finished at the top of his class at MIT, he'd finished at the top of MIT's classes for the previous two decades. Corporate America had wooed Stoll energetically and won him for a time, but he grew tired of developing new easy-to-program VCRs or sophisticated heart monitors for exercise machines. He yearned to work with state-of-the-art computers and satellites, and he wanted the kind of research and development budgets that private enterprise just couldn't provide.

He also had wanted to work with his best friend and former classmate, Stephen Viens, who headed the government's National Reconnaissance Office. Viens was the man who had arranged the Op-Center introduction for him. He also gave Stoll and his coworkers first-dibs access to NRO resources to the detriment and annoyance of his colleagues at the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense. But they could never prove that Op-Center was getting a lion's share of satellite time. If they could, bureaucratic backlash would be severe.

Viens was on-line with Stoll at Op-Center and Mary Rose Whalley in Turkey to make certain the data coming from the Regional Op-Center was accurate. The visual images being channeled from the spy satellites weren't as detailed as those at the NRO: The mobile equipment provided just under half of the more than one thousand lines of resolution of the NRO monitors. But they were coming in fast and accurate, and intercepts of cell-phone conversations and faxes were equal to those that were being received by both the NRO and Op-Center.

After running the last of the tests, Stoll thanked Mary Rose and told her she was free to solo. The young woman thanked him, thanked Viens, and got off the secure downlink. Viens remained on his line.

Stoll took a bite of sesame bagel and washed it down with a swallow of herbal tea. "God, I love Monday mornings," Stoll said. "Back in the harness of discovery."

"That was pretty," Viens admitted.

Stoll said through cream cheese, "We build five or six of these things, pack 'em inside planes and boats, and there isn't a corner of the world we can't watch."

"You do that and you'll put me out of business faster than the Senate Intelligence Committee," Viens cracked.

Stoll looked at his friend's face on the monitor. The screen was the center one of three built into the wall beside Stoll's desk. "That's just a frosh dingbat's witchhunt," Stoll said. "Nobody's going to put you out of business,"

"You don't know this Senator Landwehr," Viens replied. "He's like a little dog with a very large bone. He's made it his personal crusade to put an end to forward funding."

Forward funding, Stoll thought. Of all the government sleights of hand, Stoll had to admit that that was the sneakiest. When money was earmarked for a specific purpose and those projects were back-burnered or altered, the funds were supposed to be given back. Three years before, two billion dollars had been given to the NRO to design, build, and launch a new series of spy satellites. Those projects were later canceled. But instead of being returned, all of the money was slipped into various other NRO accounts and disappeared. Op-Center, the CIA, and other government agencies also lied about their finances. They created small, so-called "black budgets," which were hidden in false line items of the budget and were thus concealed from public scrutiny. Those monies were used to finance relatively modest secret intelligence and military operations. They were also used to help finance Congressional campaigns, which was why Congress allowed them to exist. But the NRO had gone too far.

When the NRO's forward funding was discovered by Frederick Landwehr, a freshman senator who used to be an accountant, he immediately brought it to the attention of the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Congress acted swiftly to reclaim what was left of the money---with interest. And the interest included the heads of the responsible parties. Although Viens hadn't been involved in the parceling out of the money, he'd accepted budget increases for his satellite reconnaissance division knowing exactly where it came from.

"The press has to give space to a new face with a new cause," Stoll said, "I still think that when the headlines shrink, everything'll be sorted out quietly."

"Deputy Secretary of Defense Hawkins doesn't share your atypical optimism," Viens said.

"What are you talking about?" Stoll asked. "I saw the Hawk on the news last night. Every coif with a mike who accused him of mismanagement got his or her nose bit off."

"Meanwhile, the Deputy Secretary is already looking for a job in the private sector."

"What?" Stoll said.

"And it's only been two weeks since the forward funding was uncovered. There are going to be a lot more defections." Viens raised his eyebrows forlornly. "It really sacks, Matt. I finally get my Conrad and I can't even enjoy it."

The Conrads were an unofficial award given at a private dinner every year by the foremost figures in American intelligence. The dagger-like trophy was named after Joseph Conrad, whose 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, was one of the first great espionage tales. Viens had coveted the award for years, and had finally won it.

Stoll said, "I think you're going to weather this thing. There won't be a real investigation. Too many secrets'll be made public. There'll be some wrist-slapping, the money will be found and returned to the treasury, and they'll watch your budget more closely for the next couple of years. Just like a personal audit."

"Matt," Viens said, "there's something else."

"There always is. Action followed by an equal and opposite reaction. What else are they planning?"

"I hear they're going to subpoena our diskettes."

That got Stoll's attention. His round, beefy shoulders rose slowly. The diskettes were time- and destination-coded. They would show that Op-Center was getting a disproportionate amount of satellite time.

"How solid's your info?" Stoll asked.

"Very," Viens said.

There was a sudden gurgling in Stoll's belly. "You, uh---didn't get that yourself, did you?"

Stoll was asking Viens whether he'd ordered surveillance on Landwehr. He prayed that his friend had not.

"Please, Matt," Viens said.

"Just making sure. Pressure can do funny things to sane people."

"Not me," Viens said. "Thing is, I won't be able to do much for you during the rest of the shakedown. I've got to give the other bureaus whatever time they need."

"I understand," Stoll said. "Don't sweat it."

Viens smiled halfheartedly. "My psych profile says I never sweat anything," he said. "Worst that happens is I follow the Hawk into the private sector."

"Bull-do. You'd be as miserable as I was. Look," Stoll said, "let's not go counting Mother Carey's chickens before the storm hits. If the Hawk flies the coop, maybe that'll take some of the pressure off."

"That's a slim maybe."

"But it's a possibility," Stoll said. He glanced at the clock in the lower right corner of the screen. "I'm supposed to see the boss at seven-thirty to let him know how the ROC is working. Why don't we have dinner tonight? On Op-Center."

"I promised the missus we'd go out."

"Fine," Stoll said. "I'll pick you both up. What time?

"How's seven?" Viens asked.

"Perfect," said Stoll.

"My wife was expecting candles and hand-holding. She'll kill me."

"It'll save Landwehr the trouble," Stoll pointed out. "See you at seven."

Stoll clicked off feeling miserable. Sure, Viens had given him access to the NRO, but Op-Center had had the crises to justify that access. And what did it matter whether Op-Center or the Secret Service or the NYPD needed assistance? They were all on the same team.

Stoll phoned Hood's executive assistant, "Bugs" Benet, who said the chief had just arrived. Finishing his tea and engulfing the second half of his bagel, the portly young chief technical officer strode from his office.

FIVE

Monday, 2:30 p.m., Qamishli, Syria

Ibrahim was asleep when the car eased to a stop. He awoke suddenly.

"Imshee... imshee---!" he cried as he looked around. Yousef and Ali were still playing cards in the backseat. Ibrahim's eyes settled on the round, dark face of his brother, which was sleek with sweat. Mahmoud was looking in the rearview mirror.