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  The clock finished counting down and the plastique ignited. There was a boom, like a popping paper bag. As the brass knob blew out, the door swung in.

  DiMonda went in first, followed by Park, Johns, and Arden. Smoke rolled in from the explosion and the men ran ahead of it, fanning out in a line. As they did, each man shouted "Don't move!" The cry came from the gut, loud and raw, designed to intimidate as much as possible.

  Two of the white supremacists, a man and a woman, rose at the blast but stood still. Gurney did not. He rose, threw the laptop at Park, and reached his right hand under the table.

  Park lowered his gun and'caught the computer. "Take him!" he shouted to Arden.

  Arden was ahead of him. He swung his 9mm over as Gurney drew a Sokolovsky.45 automatic from a holster attached to the underside of the computer table. The.45 spat first, the first bullet catching the edge of Arden's Kevlar bulletproof vest. His left shoulder was shattered, but the impact threw him away from the fan of bullets. As they struck the wall behind him, Arden squeezed off rounds of his own. So did Park, who had crouched, set the computer down, and fired.

  One of Arden's bullets caught the neo-Nazi in the left hip, the other in the right foot. Park put a hole in Gurney's right forearm.

  Snarling viciously from the pain, Gurney dropped the.45 and fell to his left. Park hurried over and put his gun to the man's temple. During the four-second exchange, neither the woman nor the other man had moved.

  There was no gunfire from the floors below, though the brief exchange on the third floor had brought the backup team racing into the building. They ran upstairs as Park was cuffing the bleeding gunman. DiMonda and Johns had put their own prisoners against the wall, face in, hands behind their backs. As they were handcuffed, the woman screamed that diMonda was a traitor to his race, and the man threatened retribution against his family. Both of them ignored Johns.

  Three members of the backup team arrived and entered in two-one formation— two agents rushed in, fanning left and right, while the third dropped to her belly in the doorway, covering them. When they saw Arden and the white supremacist lying on the hardwood floor, and the other two neo-Nazis cuffed, they called for the ambulance.

  As the backup team took charge of the prisoners, diMonda hurried to Arden's side.

  "I can't believe this," Arden gasped.

  "Don't talk," diMonda said. He knelt by his head. "If something's broken, you don't want to displace it even more." "Of course something's broken," Arden wheezed. "My goddamn shoulder. Twenty years on the force and not one injury. Man, I had a no-hitter going till that prick tagged me.

  And it was a sucker punch. The old gun-under-the-table." Despite his wounds, the gunman said, "You're going to die. You're all going to die." DiMonda looked over as he was loaded onto a stretcher. "Eventually, yeah," he said. "Till then, we're gonna keep beating the bush and flushing out snakes like you." Gurney laughed. "You won't have to flush." He coughed, and said through his teeth, "We're coming to bite you."

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Thursday, 2:45 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  Hood and Martin Lang had both been startled when Hausen returned and announced that he had to leave.

  "I'll see you later, in my office," he said as he shook Hood's hand. Then bowing slightly to Stoll and Lang, he left.

  Neither Hood nor Lang bothered to ask what was wrong.

  They simply watched in silence as Hausen walked briskly to the parking lot, where he'd parked his car earlier.

  When he pulled away, Stoll said, "Is he Superman or something? 'This looks like a job for šbermensch'?" "I've never seen him like that," Lang said. "He seemed very unsettled. And did you notice his eyes?" "What do you mean?" Hood asked.

  "They were bloodshot," Lang said. "He looked as if he'd been crying." "Maybe there's been a death," Hood suggested.

  "Perhaps. But he would have told us. He would have postponed our meeting." Lang shook his head slowly. "It's very strange." Hood was concerned without knowing why. Though he barely knew Hausen, he had the impression that the Deputy Foreign Minister was a man of unusual strength and compassion. He was a politician who stood by what he believed because he felt it was best for his country. From the briefing paper Liz Gordon had prepared, Hood knew that Hausen had shouted down neo-Nazis at the first Chaos Days years before, and had written a series of unpopular newspaper editorials demanding the publication of the "Death Books from Auschwitz," the list the Gestapo kept of people who had died in the concentration camp. For Hausen to run from anything seemed out of character.

  But the men still had work to do, and Lang tried to put a business-as-usual face on things as he led them to his office.

  "What do you need for your presentation?" the industrialist asked Stoll.

  "Just a flat surface," Stoll said. "A desk or floor'll do.

  The windowless office was surprisingly small. It was lit by recessed fluorescent lights, and the only furniture was two white-leather sofas on opposite sides. Lang's desk was a long slab of glass resting on a pair of white marble columns.

  The walls were white and the floor was white tile.

  "I take it you like white," Stoll said.

  "It is said to have therapeutic psychological value," Lang said.

  Stoll held up the backpack. "Where can I set this up?" "On the desk is fine," Lang said. "It's quite sturdy and scratch resistant." Stoll set the bag beside the white phone. "Therapeutic psychological value," he said. "You mean like, it's not as depressing as black or as sad as blue— that kind of thing?" "Exactly," said Lang.

  "I can just see me asking Senator Fox for the money to redo Op-Center entirely in white," Hood said.

  "She'd see red," Stoll said, "and you'd never get the green." Hood made a face and Lang watched intently as Stoll unpacked the bag.

  The first object he removed was a silver box roughly the size of a shoebox. It had an iris-like shutter in the front, and an eyepiece in the back. "Solid-state laser with viewfinder," he said helpfully. The second object resembled a compact fax machine. "Imaging system with optical and electrical probes," he said. Then he removed a third object, which was a white plastic box with cables. It was slightly smaller than the first. "Power pack," Stoll said. "Never know when you're going to have to rev up in the wilderness." He grinned. "Or on a laboratory table." "Rev up… what?" Lang asked as he watched attentively.

  "In a peanut shell," Stoll said, "what we call our T-Bird.

  It directs a fast laser pulse at a solid-state device, generating laser pulses. These pulses only last— oh, about one hundred femtoseconds, which is a tenth of a trillionth of a second." He pressed a square, red button on the back of the power pack. "What you get are terahertz oscillations that wriggle around between the infrared and radio wave area of the spectrum. What that gives you is the ability to tell what's inside or behind something thin— paper, wood, plastic, almost anything. All you have to do is interpret the change in the waveforms to tell what's on the other side. And coupled with this baby" — he patted the imaging device— "you actually get to see what's inside." "Like an X-ray," Lang said.

  "Only without the X's," said Stoll. "You can also use it to determine the chemical composition of objects— for example, the fat in a slice of ham. And it's much more portable." Stoll walked over to Lang and held out his hand.

  "Could I borrow your wallet?" he asked.

  Lang reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and handed his wallet to the scientist. Stoll placed it on the opposite side of the desk. Then he went over and pressed a green button beside the white button.

  The silver box hummed for a moment, and then the fax-like device began to scroll out a piece of paper.

  "Pretty quiet," Stoll said. "I was able to do this in your lab without the technician next to me hearing it." When the paper stopped moving, Stoll retrieved it and took a quick look at it. He handed it to Lang.

  "Is that your wife and kids?" Stoll asked.

  Lang looked down at the slightly fuzzy black-and-white
image of his family. "Remarkable," he said. "This is quite amazing." "Imagine what you'd get if you ran the picture through a computer," Stoll said. "Cleaned up the rough edges and brought out the details." "When our lab first developed this technology," Hood said, "we were trying to find out how to tell what kinds of gases and liquids were inside bombs. That way, we could neutralize them without getting near them. The problem was, we had to have a receiver on the other side of the object to analyze the T-rays as they came out. Then our R&D team figured out how to analyze them at the source.

  That's what made the T-Bird work as a surveillance tool." Lang said, "What's the effective range?" "The moon," he said. "At least, that's as far as we've tested it. Looked inside the Apollo 11 lander. Armstrong and Aldrin were pretty tidy guys. Theoretically, it should work as far as the laser can travel." "My God," Lang said. "This is beautiful." Hood had been standing off to a corner, and came closer now. "The T-Bird is going to be a vital component of the Regional Op-Center," said Hood. "But we need to make it more compact and also refine it to work with greater resolution so operatives can carry it in the field. We also need to be able to filter out extraneous images— for example, girders inside walls." "That's where your smaller chips come in," said Stoll.

  "We want it so that a guy can stand outside an embassy and read the mail inside." "It amounts to a technology swap," Hood continued.

  "You get what we have in that box… we get your chip." Lang said, "It's amazing. Is there anything the T-Bird cannot see through?" "Metal's the big thing," said Stoll, "but we're working on the problem." "Amazing," Lang repeated as he continued to stare at the photograph.

  "And the best thing?" Stoll said. "Until we iron out our problems, think of the money we can make selling foil-lined wallets."

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Thursday, 8:47 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  "You're a seriously flawed piece of work." Martha Mackall's bitter pronouncement hung in the air for several seconds before Mike Rodgers responded. He stopped a few steps from the doorway. When he spoke, he was temperate. Much as he hated the fact, people couldn't respond to each other simply as people. Martha was more than his equal in an in-your-face confrontation. But a white male who went toe-to-toe with a black woman was begging for legal woes. That pendulum swing was the inevitable, even necessary, but infuriating legacy of creatures like WHOA.

  "I'm very sorry you feel that way," Rodgers said. "And for what it's worth, I'm also sorry I upset the Senator." "Frankly," Martha said, "it's not worth a whole hell of a lot. You used the death of her daughter to mess her up, and then you called her an enemy. Now you've got the chutzpah to say you're very sorry?" "That's right," he said. "Only it's not chutzpah, Martha, it's regret. I'm sorry this had to be." "Are you really?" she asked.

  Rodgers started to go, but Martha jumped up. She stepped between him and the door, drew herself up, and came toward him until her face was less than a foot from his.

  "Tell me, Mike," she said, "would you have pulled the same kind of stunt with Jack Chan or Jed Lee or any of the male senators we deal with? Would you have been that cold with them?" The woman's tone made Rodgers feel as if he were on trial. He wanted to tell her where to go, but he settled for, "Probably not." "You're damn right 'probably not,' " Martha said. "The old boys' club looks after its members." "It isn't that," Rodgers said. "I would have treated Senators Chan and Lee differently because they wouldn't have tried to cut me off at the knees." "Oh, then you think this was against you? The Senator's after our fat because she has it in for Mike Rodgers?" "Partly," said Rodgers. "Not because of my gender or me personally, but because I believe that as the only remaining superpower the U.S. has a responsibility to intervene where and whenever necessary. And Op-Center is a crucial, quick-strike part of that. Martha, do you really think I was standing here promoting me?" "Yeah," she said, "I do. That's sure what it sounded like." "I wasn't," he said. "I was promoting us. You, me, Paul, Ann, Liz, the spirit of Charlie Squires. I was defending Op- Center and Striker. How much money, how many lives, would a new Korean war have cost? Or an arms race with a new Soviet Union? What we've done here has saved the nation billions of dollars." While he spoke, he noticed Martha ease off slightly.

  Very slightly.

  "So why didn't you talk to her like you're talking to me?" she asked.

  "Because I was presented with a fait accompli," Rodgers said. "She'd've used my arguments for batting practice." "I've seen you take worse from Paul," she said.

  "I'm his subordinate." "And isn't Op-Center subordinate to Senators Fox, Chan, Lee, and the other members of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee?" "To a degree," Rodgers admitted. "But the operative word there is comminee. Senators Chan and Lee aren't uncompromising isolationists. They would've talked to Paul or me about the cuts, given us a chance to discuss them." Martha raised a fist cheek-high and shook it. "Let's hear it for the smoke-filled rooms." "Things got done in there." "By men," Martha said: "God forbid a woman should make a decision and ask a man to implement it. If she does, you turn around and slug her." "As hard as she slugged me," Rodgers said. "You think I'm a piece of work? Who's the one asking for equality some of the time?" Martha said nothing.

  Rodgers looked down. "I think this has gotten way out of hand. We have other problems. Some jerks are about to go on-line with video games about whites lynching blacks.

  I'm meeting with Darrell and Liz later to see if we can derail them. I'd like your input." Martha nodded.

  Rodgers looked at her. He felt like hell. "Listen," he said, "I don't like when anyone gets a bunker mentality.

  Especially me. I guess it comes with the territory. Army looks after Army, Marines after Marines—" "Women after women," Martha said softly.

  Rodgers smiled. "Touch‚. I guess, at heart, we're all still territorial carnivores." "That's one way to spin-doctor it," she replied.

  "Then here's another," Rodgers said, " 'I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his.' A woman said that. Catherine the Great.

  Well, Martha, sometimes I can be an autocrat. And when I am, I can only hope that you'll forgive me." Martha's eyes narrowed. She looked as if she wanted to stay angry, but couldn't.

  "Touch‚ right back." She grinned.

  Rodgers smiled again, then looked at his watch. "I've got to make a call. Why don't you check with Liz and Darrell to get up to speed, and I'll see you later." Martha relaxed at the shoulders and stepped aside.

  "Mike?" she said as he passed.

  He stopped. "Yes?" "That was still a pretty hard blow you gave the Senator," she said. "Do me a favor and call her later, just to make sure she's okay." "I plan to," Rodgers said as he opened the door. "I too, can be forgiving."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Thursday, 2:55 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  Bob Herbert spent a frustrating hour-plus on the phone.

  Sitting in his wheelchair and using his private line, Herbert spent part of the time talking with his assistant at Op-Center, Alberto Grimotes. Alberto was fresh out of Johns Hopkins, a clever Ph.D. psychologist with good ideas. He was still very young and without a great deal of life experience, but he was a hard worker whom Herbert regarded as a kid brother.

  Question one, Herbert said, was trying to figure out which of their intelligence allies they could tap for up-to-theminute information about German terrorists. The men suspected that the Israelis, the British, and the Poles would be the only ones who followed those groups closely. No other nations had quite the same visceral, enduring fear of the Germans.

  Herbert held on while Alberto checked their HUMINT, Human Intelligence, database. This information from agents in the field was contained in what Herbert referred to as Op- Center's "pelt," the FUR file— Foreign Undercover Resources.

  Herbert was always ashamed to go begging for intelligence scraps, but his own resources in Germany were slim. Before West and East Germany reunited, the U.S. was heavily involved with helping West Germany ferret out terroris
t groups coming from the East. Since reunification, U.S. intelligence had virtually withdrawn from the country.

  The German groups were Europe's problem, not America's.

  With bone-deep budget cuts, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other information-gatherers had their hands full trying to stay on top of China, Russia, and the Western Hemisphere.

  So much for our crystal balls about the next big trouble spot, Herbert thought bitterly.

  Of course, assuming that other governments did have German HUMINT, there was no guarantee that they would even be willing to share their information. Since the wellpublicized U.S. intelligence security leaks in the 1980s, other nations were reluctant to tell too much of what they knew.

  They didn't want their own resources compromised.

  "Hub and Shlomo have four and ten people in the field, respectively," Alberto said. He was referring to Commander Hubbard of British intelligence and Uri Shlomo Zohar of the Mossad.

  Since this was an unsecured line, Herbert didn't ask for specifics. But he knew that most of Hubbard's agents in Germany were involved with stopping the flow of contraband arms from Russia, while the Israelis were watching the flow of arms to the Arabs.

  "It looks like Bog's boys are still cleaning up the Russian mess," Alberto said. That was a reference to General Bogdan Lothe of Polish intelligence and the nearwar with Russia. "You want a laugh?" Alberto asked.

  "I could use one," Herbert said.

  "Looking over this list, the only help I see us getting is from Bernard." If the situation weren't so serious, Herbert would indeed have laughed. "Help from them?" he said. "It'll never happen. Never." "It might," Alberto said. "Let me just read this report from Darrell." Herbert tapped out "Alabamy Bound" on the armrest as he waited.

  Bernard was Colonel Bernard Benjamin Ballon of France's Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale.