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  The computer hummed to life, the hard drive whirred, and the DOS screen flashed by as his customized Control Central program booted. It locked on the title screen as the synthesized voice of Mighty Mouse sang operatically from a speaker in the side of the machine.

  "Are any other programs currently running, Matty?"

  "No," Stoll said glumly as Hood swung into his office. "How long were you off fighting Mr. Trouble?"

  "Nineteen point eight-eight seconds."

  The computer finished accessing the program and the familiar blue screen appeared, ready to go. Stoll hit F5/ Enter to check the directory.

  Hood leaned on the back of Stall's chair and looked down at the screen. "It's back—"

  "Seems to be. Did you lose anything?"

  "I don't think so. Bugs was saving everything. Nice work getting it running again—"

  "I didn't do anything, boss. Not unless you count sitting here, shvitzing."

  "You mean the system came back by itself?"

  "No. It was instructed to do that—"

  "But not by you."

  "No." Stoll shook his head. "This can't happen."

  Lowell Coffey said from the doorway, "And Amelia Mary Earhart had a map."

  Stoll ignored the attorney as he finished checking his directory: all the files were there. He entered one; when he didn't get an Error prompt, he felt confident the files themselves hadn't been burned.

  "Everything looks okay. At least the data seems to be intact." His thick, piston-fast index fingers flew across the keys. Stoll had written a WCS program as a lark, never expecting to have to use it. Now he hurriedly dumped the worst-case-scenario diagnostics file into the system to give it a top-to bottom physical. A more detailed diagnostics examination would have to be made later, using classified software he kept under lock and key, but this should spot any big problems.

  Hood chewed on his lower lip. "What time did you get here, Matty?"

  "Logged in at five forty-one. I was down here two minutes later."

  "Ken Ogan report anything unusual?"

  "Nada. The night shift was smooth as glass."

  "As the sea when the Titanic sunk," Coffey noted.

  Hood seemed not to have heard. "But that doesn't mean something didn't happen in the building. A person at any station could have gotten into the system."

  "Yes. And not just today. This could have been a time bomb, entered at any time and set to go off now."

  "A bomb," Hood reflected. "Just like the one in Seoul."

  "Could it have been an accident?" Coffey asked.

  "Mightn't someone simply have pressed a wrong key somewhere?"

  "Nearly impossible," Stoll said as he watched the diagnostics checklist begin working its magic. Numbers and characters scrolled up at lightning speed as it looked for aberrations in any of the files, commands that didn't gel with existing programs or weren't entered "on the clock."

  Hood drummed the back of the chair. "What you're saying then is that we may have a mole."

  "Conceivably."

  "How long would it have taken for someone to write a program to bring down the whole system?"

  "Anywhere from hours to days, depending on how good they were. But that doesn't mean the program was written on-premises. It could have been created any-where and piggybacked in on the software."

  "But we check for that—"

  "We check for sore thumbs. That's basically what I'm doing now."

  "Sore thumbs? You mean something that sticks out?"

  Stoll nodded. "We tag our data with a code, stored at specific intervals— like a taxicab, either every twenty seconds or every thirty words. If the code doesn't show up, we take a closer look at the data to make sure it's ours."

  Hood clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Keep at it, Matty."

  Sweat trickled into his left ear. "Oh, I will. I don't like being coldcocked."

  "Meantime, Lowell, have the Duty Officer start running through the videos they took last night, all stations inside and out. I want to know who might have come and gone. Have them blow up the badges and check them against file photos— make sure they're authentic. Put Alikas on that. He's got a good eye. If they don't find anything unusual, have them go to the day before and then the day before that."

  Coffey toyed with his class ring. "That'll take time."

  "I know. But we've been blindsided, and we better find out by whom."

  The two men left just as Bob Herbert wheeled in. The thirty-eight-year-old Intelligence Officer was in a high dudgeon, as always. Part of him was angry at whatever had gone wrong, the other ninety percent was mad at the die toss that had dropped him in a wheelchair.

  "What gives, techboy? Are we pregnant?" There were traces of a Mississippi youth still in his voice, edged with urgency born of ten years in the CIA and lingering bitterness over the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that had left him crippled.

  "I'm checking on the degree and type of penetration," Stoll said, pressing his lips shut before he added, "Major Pain in the Ass." The dogged Herbert took that from Hood and Rodgers but not from anyone else. Especially someone who had never worn a uniform, pulled the Libertarian Party lever most Novembers, and still carried as much weight around Op-Center as he did.

  "Well maybe, techboy, it'll help if you know that we weren't the only ones who got slam-dunked."

  "Who else?"

  "Portions of Defense went down—"

  "For twenty seconds?"

  Herbert nodded. "So did parts of the CIA."

  "Which parts?"

  "The crisis management sectors. Every place we supply with data."

  "Shit—"

  "Horse apples is right, boy. We knocked up a whole lot of people, and they're gonna want someone's ass."

  "Shit," Matt said again, turning back to the screen as the first wave of figures stopped.

  "The first directory is clean," sang Mighty Mouse. "Proceeding to second."

  "I'm not saying it's your fault," Herbert said. "I'd be walking if good men didn't get blindsided now and again. But I need you to get me some intelligence from the NRO."

  "I can't do that while the system is in the diagnostics mode, and I can't exit while it's in a file."

  "I know that," he said, "junior technoboy Kent told me. That's why I rolled on in here, to keep you company till you get the damn system on-line again and can provide me with the information I need."

  "What information is that?"

  "I need to know what's happening in North Korea. We've got a pile of dead people wearing what seems to me Made in the DPRK death masks, there's a planeload of Striker boys en route, and the President wants to know what the troops up there are doing, the current status of missiles, if anything is happening at the nuclear power plants— that sort of thing. We can't do that without satellite surveillance, and—"

  "I know. You can't do that without the computers."

  "The second directory is clean," Mighty Mouse reported. "Proceeding to—"

  "Cancel," said Matt and the program shut down. Using the keyboard, he exited to DOS, entered the password to go on-line with the National Reconnaissance Office, then folded his arms, waited, and hoped to God that whatever had invaded the computers hadn't gotten through the phone link.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Tuesday, 7:45 A.M., the National Reconnaissance Office

  It was one of the most secret and heavily guarded sections in one of the world's most secretive buildings.

  The National Reconnaissance Office in the Pentagon was a small room with no overhead lighting. All of the room's illumination was provided by the computer stations, ten neat rows of them with ten stations in each row, laid out like a NASA control room; one hundred lenses in space watching the Earth in real-time, providing sixty-seven live, black-and-white images a minute at various levels of magnification, wherever the satellite eyes were pointed. Each picture was time-encoded to the hundredth of a second so that the speed of a missile or the power of a nuclear explosion
could be determined by comparing successive shots or by factoring in other data, such as seismic readings.

  Each station had a television monitor, with a keyboard and a telephone below each monitor, and two operators were responsible for each row, punching in different coordinates for the satellites to watch new areas or provide hard copy of images for the Pentagon, Op-Center, the CIA, or any of America's allies. The men and women who worked here went through training and psychological screening nearly as thorough as that of the people who worked in the control centers of the nation's nuclear missile bases: they couldn't become anesthetized by the steady flow of black-and-white images, they had to be able to tell in seconds whether a plane or tank or soldier's uniform belonged to Cyprus, Swaziland, or the Ukraine, and they had to resist the temptation to check in on their folks' farm in Colorado or brownstone in Baltimore. The space eyes could look at any square foot on the planet, were powerful enough to read a newspaper over someone's shoulder in a park, and the operators had to resist the temptation to play. After looking at the same mountain range, plain, or ocean day after day, the urge to do so was intense.

  Two supervisors watched the silent room from a glass control booth that occupied one full wall. They notified the operators of all requests from other departments, and double-checked any changes in satellite orientation.

  Supervisor Stephen Viens was an old college buddy of Matt Stoll. They'd graduated one and two in their MIT class, jointly held three patents on artificial neurons for silicon brains, and in a national mall-tour shootout were, respectively, the number two and number one highest scorers on Jaguar's Trevor McFur game. Atari executives had to agree to pay for overtime as Stoll's game continued four hours past mall closing time. The only thing they didn't share was Viens's passion for weight lifting, which gave their wives the idea for their nicknames: Hardware and Software.

  Stoll's E-mail arrived just as Viens was settling in with his coffee and chocolate-chip muffin before starting his eight o'clock shift.

  "I'll take it," he told night Supervisor Sam Calvin.

  Viens rolled his chair in front of the monitor; he stopped chewing as he read the message:

  Facehugger successful. Operating now.

  Send 39/126/400/Soft. Check own Alien?

  "Whoa Nellie," Viens muttered.

  "Que pasa, Quickdraw?" asked Calvin. The night and day Deputy Supervisors also came over.

  "Facehugger?" said day Deputy Supervisor Fred Landwehr. "What's that?"

  "From the movie Alien. The thing that put baby aliens into people to incubate. Matt Stoll says they've got a virus, which means we could have it too. He also wants to see Pyongyang." Viens snapped up the phone. "Monica, take a look at longitude 39, latitude 126, magnification 400 and send it over to Matt Stoll at Op-Center. No hard copy." He hung up. "Fred, run a diagnostics on our software. Make sure everything's okay."

  "Am I looking for anything in particular?"

  "Don't know. Just scan everything and see what beeps."

  Viens turned back to the computer and typed:

  Looking for Chestburster. Kick butt Ripley.

  39/126/400 Soft copy.

  Sending it, he looked out across the rows of monitors, still not quite believing what he'd read. Stoll had come up with what they'd both agreed was as virus-proof a system as someone could design. If it had been compromised, that would be something. He hurt for his pal but he also knew that, like him, Stoll had to be fascinated by the prospect that it had been done at all and determined to get to the bottom of it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tuesday, 9:55 P.M., Seoul

  Major Lee saluted as he walked into the General's office, and Norbom returned the salute.

  "Greg Donald," he said, "I believe you know Major Kim Lee."

  "Yes, we've met," Donald said, touching a napkin to his lips. He stood and offered the Major his hand. "Several years ago, at the parade in Taegu as I recall."

  "I'm impressed and flattered that you remember," said Lee. "You are here on official business?"

  "No. Private. My wife— was killed this afternoon in the explosion."

  "My condolences, sir."

  "What are your thoughts on that, Major?" Norbom asked.

  "It was ordered in Pyongyang, perhaps by the President himself."

  "You seem pretty certain," Donald said.

  "You are not?"

  "Not entirely, no. Neither is Kim Hwan of the KCIA. The evidence is very thin."

  "But not the motive," said Lee. "You are in mourning, Mr. Ambassador, and I mean no disrespect. Yet the enemy is like a snake: it has changed its skin, but not its heart. Whether through war or by sinking its fangs into our economic well-being, they will try to sap us. To destroy us."

  There was sadness in Donald's eyes and he looked away. Now as in the 1950s, the biggest impediment to lasting peace was not greed or territorial disagreements or indecision over how to unify two separate governments. They were formidable problems, but not insurmountable. The biggest impediment was the suspicion and deep-seated hatred that so many of the people of one nation had for the other. It distressed him to think that real unification could not occur until the generation touched directly by the war had died out.

  "This is Kim Hwan's bailiwick," said General Norbom, "so why don't we leave it to him, Major?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Now, what is it you wanted to see me about?"

  "This transfer order, sir. It requires your stamp."

  "What's it for?"

  Lee handed him the paper. "Four quarter-sized drums of tabun, sir. I'm to take it to the DMZ."

  The General put on his glasses. "What on earth does General Schneider want with gas?"

  "It's not for the General, sir. Military intelligence reports that chemical drums are being dug up at the border, and that more are on the way from Pyongyang. We are to bring these to Panmunjom in the event that they're needed."

  "Christ," sighed Donald. "I told you, Howard, this is going to get out of hand."

  Lee's face was impassive as he stood stiffly beside Donald, watching Norbom read.

  "You requisitioned the gas," the General said to Lee. "To whom is it being delivered?"

  "I will be staying with the shipment, sir. I have orders from General Sam." He removed the papers from his shirt pocket and held them out.

  Norbom gave them a cursory glance, then tapped his intercom. "Shooter."

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Authorize Major Lee's transfer and get me General Sam on the phone."

  "Yes, sir."

  Norbom handed the papers to the officer. "I have only two things to say, Major. One is drive carefully. The other is when you get to Panmunjom, err on the side of caution."

  "Of course, sir," said Lee, saluting, bowing curtly to Donald, his eye lingering on the diplomat's and chilling him inexplicably before he turned smartly and left.

  * * *

  Lee's face remained expressionless, but he was smiling inside. The months and money he had spent persuading Sgt. Kil to join them was paying off. General Sam's aide had signed his superior's name so many times it was indistinguishable from the real thing. And he'd be the first to get Norbom's call, finding ways to make the General unavailable until it slipped Norbom's aging mind or it was too late. In either case, Lee and his team would get what they wanted: the chance to put the second and deadliest phase of their operation into effect.

  He met his three men at the canvas-backed truck, an old Dodge T214. U.S. soldiers had nicknamed this vehicle the Beep-the Big Jeep. It was three quarters of a ton, with sturdy shocks and a low center of gravity that was perfect for some of the off-road traveling they'd be doing.

  The men saluted as Lee approached and he climbed into the passenger's seat. The other two men sat in the back, under the canvas.

  "When we leave the base," he said to the driver, "you will return to the city, to Chonggyechonno." He half turned toward the back. "Private, the Deputy Director of the KCIA does not believe that the enemy is be
hind this afternoon's attack. Please see to it that Mr. Kim Hwan does not perpetuate falsehoods. Make certain he does not report for work in the morning."

  "Yes, sir. An act of God?"

  "No, no accidents. Go to the hotel, put on civilian clothes, take one of the IDs, and steal a car from the garage. Find out what he looks like, follow him, and hack him, Jang. Brutally, the way the North Koreans hacked the American servicemen who were trimming trees. The way they mercilessly killed seventeen people in the bombing in Rangoon. The way they murdered my mother. Show them, Jang, what animals the North Koreans are and how they have no part in joining the civilized world."

  Jang nodded and Lee settled back in his seat to place a call to Captain Bock at the DMZ. At the gate, he presented the stamped document to the U.S. guard, who went to the back of the truck, checked the drums, returned the paper, and waved the truck on. When they reached the boulevard, Jang slipped from the back and hurried to the Savoy, the hotel where their long and eventful day had begun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tuesday, 7:57 A.M., Op-Center

  Paul Hood's telephone rang. That didn't happen very often. Most of his communications came through E-mail, or through the special phone lines in his terminal.

  It was especially odd because his intercom hadn't alerted him to the incoming call. Which meant it was someone with the clout to bypass Op-Center's main switchboard.

  He picked up. "Hello?"

  "Paul, it's Michael Lawrence."

  "Yes, sir. How are you, sir?"

  "Paul, I understand your boy went into the hospital this morning."

  "Yes, sir."

  "How's he doing?"

  Paul frowned. There were times to give the President good news, and times to give him the truth. This was one of the latter. "Not well, sir. They're not sure what's wrong, and he's not responding to treatments."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," the President said. "But, Paul, I need to know, how much of a distraction will this be?"

  "Sir?"

  "I need you, Paul. I need you on top of this Korean situation. I need you focused and in control of things. Or I need someone else in charge. It's your call, Paul. Do you want me to hand this off to someone else?"