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  The stakes are high for Mr. Gordian amid reports of mounting and widespread stockholder discontent, and Monolith Technologies' recent bid for a large voting share of his corporation. Questioned by reporters soon after his self-piloted Learjet touched down at Dulles International Airport, the besieged defense and communications titan gave no comment on rumors that his press conference will include a surprise announcement of his resignation as CEO of UpLink.

  President Ballard and his media aides, meanwhile, have chosen to downplay the crypto bill's significance, wishing instead to emphasize the President's visit to Asia later this week for the signing of the SEAPAC maritime defense treaty, an event to be held aboard an advanced nuclear submarine in Singapore's coastal waters.

  FROM THE STRAITS TIMES:

  Body Found by Coastal Villagers

  Banda Aceh, Indonesia — Local police authorities have reported the discovery of human remains by fishermen operating off Lampu'uk, a remote village at the nation's northernmost point, near a frequently traveled sea lane where the Straits of Melaka open into the Indian Ocean.

  There has been no official word about the body's condition, nor any indication whether its identity has been established. However, eyewitnesses present when the corpse was found describe it as belonging to a male who had apparently been afloat at sea for some days.

  A forensic examination to determine the cause of death is said to be pending.

  While little else about the case is known, the International Maritime Bureau and other regional investigatory agencies are said to have been contacted. It is routine procedure for the 1MB and ASEAN law-enforcement groups, who maintain close cooperative links and shared databases of persons reported missing or lost at sea, to consult when handling incidents of this type.

  Gordian remained at the field after the others had gone ahead to their hotel rooms and, accompanied by a couple of Pete Nimec's security aces, met with the airframe and power-plant mechanic at UpLink's leased hangar.

  Minutes after being told what had happened to the gear, the shocked A&P man was under the Leaijet's wing on a wooden creeper.

  "No sign of exterior leakage, and the fittings seem to be intact," he said now. "Wait, hold it a second, I want to take a closer peek at something."

  The mechanic ran the tips of his index and middle fingers over a spot at the bottom of the fuselage, closely holding a flashlight on it with his other hand. Then he rubbed the fingers against his thumb and sniffed them.

  "Got a whiff of Skydol, and there's some on my finger from outside the actuating cylinder.'.' He pulled his head out from beneath the plane to look up at Gordian. "Can't tell anything from that alone, though, since you're always going to have some minor fluid loss. I'm going to need to get in and check the whole circuit. From the sequence valves to the main system line."

  Gordian squatted down beside him.

  "I want to know what went wrong, Mike," he said. Then, thinking about Max Blackburn, he decided to follow a hunch. "Do me a favor and check for any signs of tampering, will you? Four people almost lost their lives today because of me. Four of my dearest friends."

  Mike turned off the flash, rolled out from beneath the plane, and stood, wiping the fluid residue from his hand with a rag.

  "Maybe this is only a groundhog's way of seeing it," he said, "but from what you told me a couple minutes ago, I'd say it was you who saved their lives, sir."

  Gordian shook his head.

  "It isn't a matter of perspective," he said tersely. "Federal aviation regulations state the pilot in command has ultimate accountability for the aircraft. And for the safety of its passengers. Makes no difference whether they were jeopardized because of a sloppy preflight in San Jose, a mechanical failure in the air, my own judgment, or a combination of factors. I am responsible for everything that happens in the air."

  Mike looked at him without speaking.

  "I got lucky, Mike," Gordian said, his face tight. "You understand? I just got lucky."

  Mike swallowed and gave him a slow nod. "I won't leave this hangar till I've combed over the bird from top to bottom," he said.

  Gordian briefly patted his arm. "Thanks. It's appreciated."

  He turned to the pair of Sword ops.

  "I'd like you to stick around here with Mike. Give him any help he needs."

  The two security men exchanged glances.

  Gordian could see they were unhappy with his order, which was understandable. Lean and serious and zoned-in, they were professionals whose effectiveness hinged on rigorous discipline. Their assignment was to protect him, and it went against everything in their training and mental conditioning to ease up.

  "It's okay, I'll be fine," he assured them. "I'm heading straight to my hotel room and plan to stay there all evening."

  "Sir, we received direct orders from Mr. Nimec to stay with you," one of them said.

  Gordian nodded. "I know, Tom," he said. "But if you don't tell him you left my side for a few hours, I won't either."

  The bodyguard looked pensive.

  "It would be best, sir, if we could check in with you over the phone this evening," he said.

  "Certainly, but please try not to reach any premature conclusions if I don't answer," he said. "It's been a rough day, and I need a long shower and some sleep."

  The bodyguard hesitated a moment, and Gordian resisted a smile. He'd suddenly remembered his paternal angst when Julia was a teenager going out on dates, and found himself amused despite his tension and lowering fatigue.

  "Gentlemen, my car's waiting, and the driver must be getting impatient," he said. "I'll see you later."

  Tom was quiet another moment, and then nodded, his expression a mixture of chagrin, worry, and vague disapproval.

  "Have a good rest, sir," he said.

  "I'll try," Gordian said.

  And still wrestling back a smile, turned, flapped his arm up over his shoulder in a loose, weary wave, and strode out of the hangar.

  "So, Alex, what I'm saying is that it looks like I can get you to dine with the POTUS and the other heads of state in the officers' wardroom."

  "Is that what you're saying?" Nordstrum said.

  "That is exactly what I'm saying," Stu Encardi said. "Right there in the belly of the beast we call Seawolf."

  They were talking over a lunch of quesadillas, cactus salad, and chili at the Red Sage on Northwest Fourteenth, roughly midway between the Kennedy Center and the White House.

  "And who's setting this up?"

  "Terskoff."

  "The Press Secretary."

  "The Press Secretary himself," Encardi emphasized.

  Nordstrum ate some of his quesadilla. "What's the catch?" he said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "The catch, the snare, the hook," Nordstrum said. "Whatever it is that's going to sink into my flesh if I take the bait."

  Encardi combed back a wave of his lush black hair with his fingers.

  "Oh," he said. "You mean President Ballard's request."

  Nordstrum looked at him. "Stu, I think you're a decent fellow," he said. "But if you don't stop playing dumb, and get to the point, I'm going to leave this table, stroll into the kitchen, find one of the cactus plants they use for the salads before its spines have been removed, then come right back here and shove it up your ass."

  Encardi frowned. "Ouch," he said.

  "Yes," Nordstrum said, and speared another wedge of quesadilla with his fork. "Very definitely ouch"

  Encardi leaned forward confidentially. "Okay," he said. "All the President requests is that you absent yourself from Roger Gordian's press conference tomorrow. That is, assuming you've considered attending."

  "Ah-hah," Nordstrum said, chewing.

  "Now don't think the White House is trying to restrict your ability to express your opinions," Encardi went on. "Ballard merely feels SEAPAC is a far more vital part of his agenda — and his legacy — than approving the crypto legislation. And that it's slipped out of the spotlight because Gordian versus Caine m
akes snappier news copy."

  "Ah-hah," Nordstrum said.

  Encardi spread his hands.

  "Think about it," he said. "You're the one heavy hitter in the press who's reported on SEAPAC from its earliest stages of negotiation to the present. Who's consistently stressed its importance to our regional interests in Southeast Asia. Don't you think it'll further sidetrack the public if they see you with Gordian at the podium? There are already enough things distracting their attention."

  "Ah-hah," Nordstrum said, chewing placidly.

  Encardi frowned with exasperation. "God damn it, Alec, now who's being incommunicative? You asked me to be right-on with you and I'm doing it. So, please, let's have some feedback."

  "Sure," Nordstrum said.

  He carefully set his knife and fork down on his plate and straightened.

  "I had planned on standing beside Roger Gordian tomorrow and will do that come hell, high water, or sugar-coated coercion from the highest levels of government," he said.

  Encardi brushed back his dense swirl of hair again.

  "Alec, you could be interviewing Prime Minister Yamamoto over caviar and champagne instead of chowing down in the goat locker with the enlisted personnel. Don't pass up the opportunity of a lifetime."

  Nordstrum crossed his arms. "You're annoying me," he said.

  "Alec—"

  "Don't whine, it makes you look like a schoolboy."

  Encardi frowned, wiped his mouth furiously with his napkin, and tossed it down on the table.

  "Okay, I quit," he said.

  "Good," Nordstrum said. "Anything else you want to ask while I finish eating?"

  Encardi looked at him and sighed.

  "Yeah," he said after a brief interval. "You ever hear of Diver Dan and Baron Barracuda?"

  Nordstrum shook his head disinterestedly.

  "Some help you are," Encardi said.

  The transcontinental haul from San Francisco to Johor Bahru had been a grueling and seemingly endless affair for Nimec and Noriko Cousins, with a late-night changeover from their 747 to a prop-driven rattletrap in Kuala Lumpur, and, following their jump to JB, a treacherous forty-minute drive over dark, winding, poorly mapped roads in the rental car Nimec had reserved at the airport.

  Though Nimec had been at the Johor ground station on only one prior occasion, and though it had occurred to him before departing the States that it might be wise to have somebody from the local Sword contingent come out to the airfield and meet them, he had finally decided to drive to their end destination himself. He supposed that part of it was a natural predisposition toward seeking camouflage, a trait that made him lean toward maintaining a low profile until he was clearer about where Max's probe had been taking him.. and what might have gone wrong. But there was also a part of him that simply liked cowboying it, and while he would have admitted it to no one — including, to some extent, himself — the truth was that being lifted from his ordinary milieu had aroused that long-dormant facet of his personality.

  At any rate, it was just shy of five in the morning when Nimec found UpLink's corporate emblem on a sign marking a dirt service road and, looking off beyond the tree line to his right, glimpsed the concrete and aluminum buildings of the ground station in the near distance.

  He swung up over the hard-pack toward the station's perimeter gate and braked about twenty feet before reaching the guard booth. There was an ATM-sized biometric reader on a concrete island to his left — one of the recent improvements Max had made to the security net. Whereas most UpLink facilities used either iris or fingerprint scanning at various levels of access, Blackburn had wanted to tighten the identification requirements at restricted entry points by using multiple biometric passkeys, and had the scanner platforms designed to his specifications.

  Nimec lowered his window now and swept his thumb over the platform's thermal-imaging strip while simultaneously waiting for the iris scanner to digitally photograph his eyes — two cameras matching them to a computerized facial template, the third taking a high-res snapshot of his iris. All three images were then checked for a variety of characteristics and compared with information previously enrolled in the security mainframe's database.

  Seconds after he'd pulled up to the multiscanner, the "toll light" above the motorized gate in front of him shifted from red to green and a computer-synthesized female voice issued from a speaker in the platform.

  "Identification complete, Peter Nimec," it said in English. "Please proceed."

  Nimec drove on through the gate toward the complex, nodding to the uniformed man in the guard booth as he passed him.

  "This isn't quite the sort of place I expected," Nori said from the backseat, looking out the window in the dawnlight. "It's so… I don't know.. colorless."

  Nimec shrugged with his hands on the wheel.

  "Utilitarian's the word I'd use," he said. "Didn't realize you hadn't been to any of our ground stations. They all come out of the same cookie cutter. After a while you get used to the no-frills decor."

  "I suppose." She sat back and yawned.

  Nimec glanced into the rearview.

  "Tired from our journey to the East?" he asked.

  "And wired," she said.

  "Not a good mix if you plan to get any sleep." He lifted a folded newspaper from the passenger seat and held it out to her over his shoulder. "Here, take this copy of the Straits Times I grabbed at the KL airport. Maybe it'll help you relax."

  "I don't remember seeing you read it."

  "That's because I haven't yet," he said. "And I doubt I'll manage to keep my eyes open long enough to do so."

  Nori took the paper from his hand, set it down beside her, and yawned again.

  "Thanks," she said. 4Til be sure to fill you in on the local news over breakfast."

  He nodded.

  "Just don't forget my horoscope," he said in a tone that might or might not have been serious.

  Sian Po had no sooner gotten to bed after returning home from his night shift at the precinct than he closed his eyes and dreamed he was in a gambling parlor managed by Fat B. There were women and flashing lights and he had somehow won an astronomical sum of money, hillocks of which surrounded him on every side.

  The knock at his door awakened him just as, in his dream, he had begun to dance with a magnificent blonde who'd slid down off a pole and then told him she'd come all the way from Denmark to make his acquaintance.

  Sian Po opened his eyes, jolted from the sparkle and glitz of his fantasy to the bland, curtained dimness of his studio apartment. Where had the sexy dancer gone?

  He frowned with the realization that she didn't exist, and glanced at his alarm clock. It was five A. M. Had he thought he'd heard something?

  There was another rap on the door.

  Still a little disoriented, he got out of bed and went over to it in his pajamas.

  "Who is it?" he grunted, rubbing his eyes.

  "I've something for you from Gaffoor," a hushed male voice said from out in the corridor.

  Sian Po's Weariness instantly dissipated at the mention of his insider with CID. He unbolted his lock and pulled open the door.

  The man was about thirty and dressed in civilian clothes, a light cotton shirt and sport jacket. Another investigator, or so Sian Po believed.

  "You in Gaffoor's unit?" Sian Po asked.

  The man shrugged noncommittally, extracted a white legal envelope from his jacket's inner pocket, and held it out to Sian Po.

  "Take it, ke yi bu ke yi," he said.

  Sian Po snatched it from his hand.

  The man stood there giving him a blank look. "I'll tell Gaffoor you received his message," he said, and turned down the hall.

  The door shut behind him, Sian Po eagerly tore open the envelope. Inside was a folded sheet of paper. He slipped it out and read the note that had been written across its face.

  Excitement flooded his squashed features.

  Unbelievable, he thought. Just unbelievable.

  Heedless of th
e hour, Sian Po hurried over to his bedside stand, located Fat B's phone number in his datebook, and rang him up.

  As though the dream had been a true and marvelous premonition, his jackpot had arrived.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  WASHINGTON, D. C./JAPAN

  SEPTEMBER 27/28, 2000

  In the corridor outside the East Room of the White House, a room throbbing with reporters, prominent members of Congress, and other official guests invited to the Morrison-Fiore bill-signing ceremony, the President was both aggravated and anxious to put pen to paper.

  He was aggravated because he had wanted to sign the bill while sitting behind the staunch and sturdy solidity of the Resolute Desk in the sound and secure comfort of the Executive Office, wanted to sign it at midnight when the folks around him were home in bed, or elsewhere in bed, or in some cases skulking between beds, zipping up, unzipping, getting tangled up inside their zippers, whatever the hell they chose to do with themselves when the sun went down and the lights were out here in the golden city on the Hill.

  He was anxious because now that he'd been induced to make a huge ceremonial affair of the signing — C-SPAN cameras dollying about, kliegs in his face, the whole nine yards — he wanted it over and done with so that public attention could be turned to something of real significance to him, namely SEAPAC, a child he had guided from infancy, watching it take on polish, refinement, and sophistication under his savvy political eye. A treaty that he viewed as the most important policy effort of his tenure in the White House. That he believed was the blueprint for a new strategic and logistic collaboration in the Pacific Rim. That he was certain would reinforce America's ties with its Asian partners, and decide the future of its own security interests in the region. What was Morrison-Fiore in comparison, besides a piece of moot legislation, easing commercial restrictions that had already been bypassed with countless loopholes?