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  Jack had known of the Bayview from passing it on the way to work every night — work being the airfield, which was owned by a group of local businessmen who had partnered up to keep their corporate jets there, and was just a hop-skip-and-jump from the bar — and also because a couple of his married buddies had been there with women they were seeing on the sly, and told him the owners went out of their way to keep things nice and discreet.

  He'd mentioned it to Cindi while they were practically climbing aboard each other's laps, and said he had a couple of hours before work, and would she like to go there with him and finish what they'd started? And that was when she had explained about the guy she was kind of dating, saying he was a long-haul trucker who would see her whenever he was in town, and was stopping by that night midway through a long run, and that even though she didn't expect him until much later, she figured he'd want a little something from her like he always did, which made her feel funny about, you know, being with Jack that same night.

  Jack hadn't known what to think of her story, except that it left him feeling like he needed a cold shower, and he'd asked her outright if she was having second thoughts about getting into something with him, and she'd said, no, no, you've got it all wrong, and had put her hand between his legs, and told him her boyfriend would be gone the next morning, and that it'd just be better if they could get together when she could be free to give everything she had to Jack… that was exactly how she'd worded it, keeping her hand on him the whole time, rubbing him where it counted right in front of everybody in the place. And that smile of hers, that smile, it was — how did the song go? — sweet as cherry pie and wild as Friday night, something like that.

  Everything I have.

  Ah, God, how could he resist?

  And so they'd wound up making their plans for tonight. His original idea had been to meet her at the bar around six o'clock, and then for them to drive over to the Bayview, where they could be together for a couple of hours before he had to take over for the day guard at the airfield. But she'd said she had some important errands to run that evening, how about they made it a little later, maybe seven, seven-thirty, just to be on the safe side. And he'd told her that was no good for him because he really had to be at his night job by eight, which would leave them with, what, half an hour tops, and that he didn't think either of them wanted the first time they were alone to be a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am kind of situation.

  It had gone back and forth a while, the two of them trying to get at a way to make it happen, neither wanting to delay it again, but Cindi insisting she couldn't put off whatever she had to do, until at last she'd asked if he couldn't maybe be a little late for work, or find somebody to cover for him, or even sneak away from his post for an hour or so, which she thought would make it that much more exciting for them, kind of dangerous in a fun way, didn't he!

  Crazy as it sounded when she brought it up, he'd immediately realized Cindi had hit on something. He could leave the gate unattended for a short time without anybody noticing; in fact, he'd done exactly that on occasions when he'd gone to buy a coffee or a pack of smokes for himself, and once or twice had even stopped for a brew before heading back to the airport. It wasn't as though he worked at Frisco International. There were rarely any comings and goings during his watch. He could clock in at his usual time, slip away for a couple of hours with Cindi, and be back without anybody being the wiser. And, yeah, she was right, it did somehow make things more interesting.

  They had finally arranged to meet in the parking area of the Bayview — he'd given her directions, and she'd told him that she sort of knew where it was, anyway — at eight-thirty, which had given him long enough to punch the time clock at the guard booth, make sure the day man was gone, and head on over.

  And here he was the very next night, looking at his watch yet again, waiting for her to arrive, wondering if she was going to let him down after all their planning… negotiations, you could even call them. Which, he thought again, might be for the best. Alice was a good woman and had gone through a lot with him, and he knew it would kill him to lose her. But it hadn't been happening in bed for them since Tricia was born, and he was a healthy guy who had his needs. What he was doing tonight was only sexual, and had nothing to do with how he felt about his wife. Still and all, though, once these things got rolling you could never be a hundred percent sure you wouldn't get caught with your pants down, and he guessed that was why there was a small part of him that would be glad if—

  The sound of an approaching car suddenly interrupted the flow of Jack's thoughts. He glanced into his side-view, saw a red Civic enter the parking lot behind a splash of headlights, watched it pull into a slot in the row of cars behind him… and then felt his pulse start to race as her long legs slid out the driver's side and she came walking toward him, sweet as cherry pie, wild as Friday night, wearing clothes that might have come right out of his hottest fantasies, clothes that made it impossible for him to think about anything besides what she would look like once he peeled them off

  He hit the button on his armrest to roll down his window, and waited.

  "Waiting for anyone special?" she said, smiling as she leaned into his car, her great big eyes and the scent of her perfume making his heart race.

  "Not anymore," he said, and reached for his door handle, knowing very well that he would not be heading back to the airport anytime soon, that he couldn't have claimed to care if he never showed up at work, and that, like goddamned Samson in the old Bible story, he was wonderfully, deliciously doomed.

  Its location chosen with privacy in mind, the airfield edged on a narrow inlet of the lower bay just northeast of the border between Almeda and Santa Clara Counties. Each of the four cinder-block maintenance hangars had a distinctive corporate logo painted large on its rooftop and at least one outer wall, making visual identification easy for approaching pilots. There were some small prefab outbuildings and two runways, one just over two thousand feet long, and a 3,400-foot high-speed stretch for the larger propeller and jet aircraft. Tonight only a handful of birds sat on the ramps beneath the calm and quiet sky: a single-prop Pilatus, a larger King Air C90B twin-turboprop, Cessna and Swearingen bizjets, and three or four kit-built sport planes. A fleet of passenger copters rested with their wheels on the numbers on a helipad at the north end of the airport.

  A small oval of blacktop with space for perhaps two dozen motor vehicles, the airport's parking area was vacant as the unmarked commercial van swung in from the tree-lined access road at half past eight, and then nosed against the fence running behind the hangars and apron.

  The pair of men inside had encountered no one at the guard booth, which had been their certain expectation. The guard had been lured to a motel by a woman whose expert distractions would make it impossible for him to remember his own name, let alone his responsibilities at the airport.

  Moments after its headlights and engine cut out, its driver and passenger exited the van and passed swiftly through the entrance to the hangar areas. Both wore green utility coveralls. The driver carried a wallet with forged identification, two small adjustable wrenches in a patch pocket on his chest, and an empty pint jar in one hand. The passenger was also holding counterfeit ID, but had nothing else on him except a silenced Beretta in a concealed holster.

  The service road ran in a loop around the airport, and had a concrete sidewalk leading past the hangars. Reaching the walk, they spotted the UpLink hangar about thirty yards to their right, and turned quickly and silently in that direction.

  If they came across someone who questioned their presence, they would explain that they'd been hired to perform last-minute preflight maintenance on Roger Gordian's Learjet and arrived late because of difficulty finding the airfield. They had brought the Beretta as a fallback should that answer fail to quell any suspicions.

  As it was, they reached the hangar without encountering anyone and found the hangar door open to the cool night air. They entered, located the overhead light switch, a
nd turned on the fluorescents. The hangar's interior smelled of fuel, lubricant, and metal.

  Stabalized by wheel chocks under the high, flat ceiling, Roger Gordian's Learjet 45 was a sleek eight-passenger plane with upturned wingtips and powerful turbofans. The driver stood admiring it for a moment. It was a beautiful work of engineering, but like all things had its Achilles heel.

  Now the driver of the van turned to the other man, gestured toward the front of the hangar with his chin, and waited as he went to stand lookout. Once in the doorway, the man with the gun stretched his head outside, glanced left, right, and then over his shoulder at his partner, nodding to indicate there was still nobody in sight.

  The driver returned his nod, and then went and slid down under the plane. Turning on his back, he produced the wrenches from his pockets and got to work. He unscrewed the lid of the pint jar and set the open jar on his stomach. Then he clamped one of the tools to the line running from the landing gear cylinder and, holding it steady by the handle, loosened the cylinder's hydraulic fitting with the other wrench. He held the jar underneath the fitting as the fluid bled out, and kept it there until it was full. Then he twisted the lid back onto the jar, put the tools back in his pocket, and wriggled out from beneath the aircraft.

  Less than fifteen minutes after they had entered the hangar, the two men were back in the van. The driver placed the jar of drained-off hydraulic fluid in the glove compartment, and then turned on the ignition and pulled out onto the access road.

  When they rode by the guard station it was dark and empty.

  The watchman was still out enjoying himself, and would no doubt remember his hours of stolen pleasure with a smile, never realizing they had all but guaranteed Roger Gordian's fiery death.

  Chapter Sixteen

  WASHINGTON, D. C./SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 25/26, 2000

  "I'm telling you, if those people in the Press Office don't start doing their jobs, I'm going to give every one of them the boot myself, and Terskoff is the first guy whose ass gets to meet my foot," said President Richard Ballard, referring in his momentary pique to White House Press Secretary Brian Terskoff.

  "Quite frankly, I don't think they're to blame," said Stu Encardi, whose official job title was Special Aide to the President, and who was now just waiting for the breeze to stir. "You know how it is with reporters. They cover what they want to cover."

  Ballard pulled a disgusted face. "Oh, come on. We're about to enter into a genuinely world-changing treaty with Japan and other Far Eastern countries, we've got three regional leaders and yours truly participating in a signing ceremony aboard a nuclear sub, and you're trying to say the crypto issue is sexier? That's absurd."

  "You think so?" Encardi said. "Granted, the numbers tell us people were hardly paying attention to crypto until this week, and they still don't get what the whole damn thing's about. But from my perspective, it's this escalating Gordian-Caine spat that's the hook for reporters. The treaty represents cooperation and harmony, and, well, conflict being the essence of drama—"

  "Spare me," Ballard said. "What the hell should we do as an attention grabber, get Diver Dan and Baron Barracuda down there underwater with us?"

  "Excuse me, sir?"

  "Never mind, you're twenty years too young," Ballard said, cocking an ear skyward. "By the way, doesn't the breeze sound pretty moving through those leaves?"

  "Yes, sir, it does."

  They were standing under a willow oak that a former First Lady had planted on the South Lawn as an everlasting reminder of her tenure at the White House, much as Encardi himself had been planted among the President's circle of confidants by his lovely missus, who had taken a shine to the thirty-year-old Yale man when he'd been one of the coordinators of Ballard's re-election campaign, sensing in him a kindred soul of similar outlook and attitude, and later finagling her husband into making him a member of his post-election advisory staff, feeling he would be the ideal surrogate to carry her approximate viewpoint to Ballard — be it on matters political or personal — whenever she wasn't physically present to do so herself.

  Generally speaking, Ballard considered Encardi an insightful, practical, and dedicated pup, and liked having him around as the personification of his wife's weltanshauung. Still, he was occasionally bothered by the fact that the aide boasted a profusion of hair to rival a Hungarian puli, while only a miracle of artful combing concealed his own advancing, Rogaine-resistant baldness.

  He also became annoyed when Encardi borrowed his wife's verbal tics, such as following every Presidential statement with a "You think so?" and beginning his replies with a pedagogic "Quite frankly," or "From my standpoint," both hearkening back to Mrs. Ballard's decades-long career as a college teacher. These were the sort of things that would make borderline days turn bad, and bad days a little worse, except when the gorgeous weather and the sound of the breeze rustling through Ballard's favorite tree made everything under God's blue sky appreciably better.

  "Stu, let me give you some instant perspective," Ballard said. "Two days from now I'll be signing the crypto legislation while Roger Gordian makes a fuss down the Hill. Two months from now everyone will have forgotten all about it, and think Morrison-Fiore is the name of some Vegas animal-training act. But in the interim I'll have closed a deal that establishes the guidelines for America's security role in Asia over the next twenty years, and probably much longer. There's my posterity, or a decent chunk of it. We just have to make sure people notice."

  Encardi regarded him in the light shade of the tree as the wind brushed through the drooping canopy overhead. There were gnats or something swirling around them. In fact, there were always bugs under this tree. For some reason he didn't quite get, they seemed particularly attracted to the vicinity of the goddamned willow.

  He swished a squadron of tiny winged harriers away from his face, convinced he would be a much happier man if just once the POTUS would elect to stroll under a dogwood, elm, or alder while seeking to restore his inner calm.

  "I'm thinking we need to make sure Nordstrum from the New York Times is given the red-carpet treatment," he said.

  "And / thought we were already doing that," the President said.

  "Well, we are, but we can always roll out more rug," Encardi said. "Nordstrum's the biggest proponent of our Asia-Pacific policy in the national media. Why not assist him in gaining interviews with the Japanese Prime Minister, as well as the Malaysian and Indonesian heads of state? Invite him to the dinner you'll be having aboard the Seawolf? Anything to give him a steady stream of material to write about."

  Ballard stretched broadly and inhaled the fragrant air of the White House grounds, sunlight striping his face as it filtered through the long bushy willow leaves.

  "Ahhhhh, I'm feeling almost relaxed," he said. "Isn't it a spectacular morning?"

  "Spectacular," Encardi said listlessly, swatting away an insect.

  Ballard looked at him.

  "Your idea about Nordstrum sounds fine to me, but only for starters," he said, his brow creasing in thought. "You know, now that you mention him, it's kind of odd Roger Gordian hasn't convinced Nordstrum to write more about the encryption issue in his columns. He's a paid consultant for UpLink International, did you know?"

  Encardi considered that a moment and shrugged.

  "Could be he disagrees with Gordian on that one," he said.

  "Or just finds the crypto stuff as dull and relatively inconsequential as anybody else," the President added.

  Swathed in virgin wilderness, the atoll was one of hundreds speckling the Celebes Sea west of the Sabah coast and bordering on the Philippines' territorial waters. A circular reef formed a breakwater around its shoreline, where a dense band of mangroves buttressed it against tropical storms and enclosed the rain forest that lay further inland, itself a protective horseshoe surrounding the lagoon at the island's center on three sides.

  The same terrain characteristics that sheltered the atoll from the ravages of sea and weath
er had made it an undetected — and virtually undetectable — site for the pirate enclave. Few outside their brotherhood had ever located it, fewer still had penetrated its natural lines of defense, and none who did so without invitation had left it alive.

  Zhiu Sheng had been there but once before, and then only for a quick pass around the island's rim at the request of General Kersik, who'd wanted him to have a firsthand acquaintance with the logistics of the planned Sandakan invasion. Today, however, he was headed for the interior. An hour ago, the Chinese fishing trawler that had brought him from the port city of Xiamen in Fujian province had steered slowly through the narrow inlet to the lagoon, and then dropped anchor near the sand belt. The timing of its arrival had been propitious; minutes afterward, the stacked, charcoal-gray clouds of an anvil thunderhead had burst open with a flash of lightning that illuminated the sky for several seconds, ushering in a fierce tropical downpour. Had the boat still been in open waters, the rough surf and buffeting winds might have capsized it.

  When the rain eased off, the vessel's crew, a dozen trusted, handpicked soldiers from commando units in the Guangzhou Military Region, had gotten to work offloading its cargo of unmarked crates into the dinghies that bore them ashore. Per their orders, they had on civilian khakis. For their part, Xiang and the handful of pirates who'd met them on the beach wore army camouflage fatigues, something that had not slipped past Zhiu's keen sense of irony. Far too often in the world, he thought, the roles of men became confused and indefinable.

  Now, the large crates balanced on their shoulders, their shirts soaked with perspiration, the soldiers were tramping through the knee-high water of a stream that bent and twisted between narrow lanes of cycads, their pirate guides leading them ever more deeply into the jungle. At first they had needed to hack their way through the epiphytic vines and creepers with machetes, but the undergrowth had thinned in the half-light below the treetops, allowing for better progress.