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  “We won’t need flyover rights if we send an F-117a on a single pass,” a man in a military uniform interjected. “Unless it crashes, a stealth could fly in and out and nobody would notice. We do it all the time.”

  “That’s true,” Covington agreed. “And we always have the Raptors as a backup plan.”

  The President spoke up. “It sounds plausible. David, what do you think?”

  Aldridge smiled at Dyson. “You know, Colonel Walraff told me you had a lot of unorthodox ideas, but that was even better than I expected. Fake snow instead of missiles. I like it. I like it a lot, Madam President.”

  “Then here’s what we’re going to do,” the President said.

  CHAPTER

  66

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  The tires on Jill’s car squealed in protest as she made an illegal u-turn at the intersection of Rittenhouse Street and Lincoln Drive. She floored the accelerator for the quarter mile jaunt to the pull off for Forbidden Drive.

  Just as she expected, Brian’s car was already there, parked in the usual spot across from the map hut.

  She pulled her car parallel to Lincoln Drive, intentionally blocking off the only exit. Then she hopped out and retrieved her Kevlar vest from the trunk. She strapped on the vest and clicked off the safety on her gun, then radioed for backup.

  She found Brian a few minutes later, sitting in a lawn chair on the bank of the Wissahickon Creek. The creek was frozen solid. He was alone.

  When she came within ten yards, he said, “I never sold the PRC any information about the wave generator. All I gave them were the specs for the liquid helium compressor. I figured it would be useless without a wave source. But I suppose I should’ve known those crafty bastards would just get it from someone else. I don’t know where I got the idea that I was their only asset at the Base. Probably just my guilty conscious, huh?”

  He never turned to look at her as he spoke.

  “You don’t have to do this, Brian. Save it for your lawyer.”

  He laughed. “A lawyer? What the hell is a lawyer going to do, cut a deal with Joyce to allow me to pick out the color of the syringe?”

  “Brian—”

  “I only did it because I needed money to pay for Alison’s treatment. The IMRT was still experimental back then and the tightfisted assholes at the insurance company wouldn’t cover it. Make sure you put that in the file. For old time’s sake.”

  Jill inched closer. “I won’t cuff you if you promise not to do anything stupid.”

  He ignored her. “Do you know what that cocksucker Koxinga told me the last time I saw him? He said that if I lived in China I would’ve had no need to betray my country because they have free healthcare. Can you believe that shit? Fuck him. That little self righteous prick.” He looked over his shoulder at Jill. “Don’t come any closer.”

  She halted. “Don’t do this the hard way, Brian.”

  He turned back to the frozen creek. “Leave it up to you to ruin a man’s reflection time. How’d you know where to find me? Wait, scratch that. I come here every fucking day, don’t I? Anybody could’ve found me.” He paused for a moment, clouds of condensation billowing from his nostrils in the chilly air. “Do you know why I come here everyday? To this exact spot?” He waved his left arm in a wide arch like an orchestra conductor. “This is the scene depicted in a watercolor Alison made for me when we first started dating. It’s called Bubbling Brook at Forbidden Drive. I was such an asswipe that I taped it to the wall of my dorm room without a frame. Ali never said a peep about that though, not even when my frat brother accidentally ripped a corner of it with his head. I still have it. I had one of the propeller heads at the Lab seal it in helium after she died. I told myself that I could stop the painting from fading away even though I couldn’t keep Ali from doing it.”

  By now they could hear sirens wailing in the distance.

  Brian kept going. “Two years ago when I found out that Forbidden Drive is a real place, I couldn’t believe it. The first time I came here it was like walking into the picture. You can’t tell now, but in the spring and summer this place is a dead ringer for the painting.”

  Emboldened by her approaching support, Jill ordered him to put his hands on his head.

  He didn’t move. “Do you believe in life after death, Jill? I do. I think Ali is waiting for me on the other side, healthy as an ox, with hair down to her butt. I’ve been envisioning what she’ll look like when I see her again and that’s what I’ve decided: she’ll have all her hair back.”

  Car doors slammed nearby and male voices called out to one another. The sirens were now so close that they drowned out Brian’s voice.

  Jill decided to bull rush Brian’s chair and tackle him, in the hope that it would keep the others from opening fire on him.

  But she was too slow.

  Before she reached him, he lifted a revolver from his lap and put it in his mouth.

  CHAPTER

  67

  Washington, D.C.

  The operation was codenamed Black Santa Claus.

  An F-117a Nighthawk was already in the air on the way to Taiwanese airspace. Instead of missiles, it carried a unique payload of foam snowflakes and carbon-14.

  Back at the CTOC, a different engineer was holding a miniature wave generator in his hand, explaining how the device would receive the satellite telemetry.

  When Dyson saw the generator’s strange looking antenna, he said, “Oh, no.”

  __________

  Twenty-two thousand miles above the Earth, a satellite lazily drifted into broadcast position over Taiwan.

  A few minutes later, Doris’ camera began to act up. No matter what she tried, she could not get the viewfinder to work again. The flip-out LCD had abruptly switched to a blue screen with a digital clock counting down from 30:00. She could barely concentrate with the children shouting in the background.

  __________

  At the CTOC, David Aldridge was working the phones. It had taken Dyson ten minutes to explain the situation. After he had, Aldridge coolly swung into action. He ordered a BW/CW containment team to Southeast Washington. Then he personally phoned in a bomb threat to the Shaw Community Center. Aldridge was explaining to Dyson how that was the fastest way to evacuate the Center when an aide burst into the room.

  “Telemetry is coming in, Sir!”

  “Showtime,” Aldridge remarked. They headed over to the Situation Room.

  As soon as Aldridge walked into the room, people began shouting requests at him. Covington wanted permission to launch the Raptors from Nellis so they would have time to reach firing altitude if they were needed. The Deputy Secretary of State wanted to patch him into a conference call with the Taiwanese Foreign Minister. An aide needed to speak to him about a problem with the software needed for the operation.

  Aldridge sat down at the main conference table and talked to the speakerphone. “Madam President, are you still with us?”

  “I’m still here, David. What’s going on?”

  “We need permission to get the Raptors in the air in case we need them.”

  “Permission Granted.”

  Aldridge turned to a liaison officer from the Department of Defense. “Scramble the Raptors.” The officer picked up a handset to a phone with no buttons.

  Next he got on the conference call with the Taiwanese Foreign Minister and made the arrangements to have part of Taiwan’s main power grid shut down on his word.

  The moment he got off that call, another aide came running up. “General Zhao is on the red line for you.” Aldridge disappeared into the Briefing Room for a few minutes. When he emerged, Covington said, “Well?”

  “That was General Zhao from the PRC. He said he hoped those two Raptors we just launched from Nellis aren’t planning to shoot any missiles at SinoSat-4. Because if they do, it will be considered an act of war.”

  “Christ,” Covington said. “We just scrambled them a few minutes ago. Can’t we do anything without the PRC knowing abo
ut it? They must have assets at Nellis.”

  “What else is new,” Aldridge said. “Put NORAD on high alert.”

  Aldridge had nearly forgotten about the problem with the software. It was a big problem. The NSA programmers had successfully coded the software to triangulate the signal source, but they were having trouble with the other one. They needed a physicist to walk them through the calculations.

  But there was no time for that. The Stealth had already dropped the snow pellets over Taiwan and the wave generators were counting down. In a matter of minutes, Soman would be released and people would start dying.

  Covington was squawking at the speakerphone, pressuring the President. “The Raptors are at launch altitude, Madam President. They’re requesting permission to fire.”

  “Give us a few more minutes,” Aldridge said.

  “They can’t stay at that altitude for long,” Covington warned. “They have to launch now.”

  “I’m counting in seconds, David,” the President said.

  Aldridge turned to Dyson. “Can you help with the energy calculations?”

  Dyson stood, letting go of Mahogany’s hand for the first time. “Give me a graphing calculator, a laptop with Microsoft Excel on it and a stack of floppy disks.”

  The items appeared in the Situation Room in less than two minutes.

  In less than seven minutes, Dyson made a spreadsheet to calculate the energy released by all the possible photon impact trajectories. He pulled the calculator close. “Start feeding me lidar readings,” he said to one of the engineers.

  The engineer started yelling out numbers. For each reading, Dyson manually solved the differential equations needed to get the new atomic weight. Then he plugged that figure into his spreadsheet. After that he saved the spreadsheet to a floppy disk and handed it off to one of Aldridge’s aides, who opened the file and read the data over the phone to the programmers at the NSA trying to locate the signal source.

  For ten minutes, Dyson became a button-pressing, keyboard-tapping, disk-swapping blur. Nearly everyone in the Situation Room stood watching him, their mouths agape in astonishment.

  No one knew what to make of Dyson Conwell.

  Finally, the disk courier put the phone down and said, “They’ve got the source! It’s emanating from 120 degrees, 30 minutes, 33 seconds east longitude, and 24 degrees, 40 minutes, 07 seconds north latitude.”

  Aldridge turned to the Deputy Secretary of State. “Cut the power.” The diplomat picked up a phone.

  Then he turned to the uniformed officer standing next to the red phone. “Tell the Raptors to stand down.”

  The whole episode lasted thirty-five minutes.

  CHAPTER

  68

  There was chaos at the Shaw Community Center. People ran over each other to get out of the building.

  Rachael Higgins was the only one running deeper into the building. When the Center Director called for an emergency evacuation over the P.A. system, she had started gathering her things just like everyone else. That’s when she noticed Doris’ purse hanging on the back of the door.

  The play rehearsal. The P.A. system hadn’t worked in the auditorium for years.

  Mustering all her courage, Rachael fought the crush of people running in the opposite direction so she could warn Doris and the children to get out.

  A bulky man knocked her to the ground because she was blocking his way to the exit. As she lay on the ground, the bulk of the crowd passed her by. She limped over to the auditorium’s double doors.

  She pulled the door open and screamed at what she found.

  __________

  Aldridge gathered everyone into the Situation Room. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we cut the uplink to the satellite. As far as we can tell, none of the other Soman canisters Lui brought into the country were triggered. The Taiwanese military is moving in on the transmission station as we speak.”

  A wave of relief spread around the room.

  “The bad news is that a thirteenth canister we didn’t know about until today was released into the air at a community center in Southeast D.C. Apparently that canister was set on a shorter timer than the generators Lui brought in. A BW/CW team is already on the scene setting up a quarantine zone, but unfortunately, nineteen people were exposed to the Soman, including eighteen children.” A collective gasp went up. “Five of them are already dead. The rest are in critical condition at U.S. AMRI.I.D. over at Fort Detrick.”

  Dyson put his head in his hands. He had failed twice in one day.

  CHAPTER

  69

  Somewhere in West Virginia

  “AAAHHH!”

  Carl Dunleavy screamed like a wild banshee. Dark red blood trickled from both of his ears. His entire body convulsed like it was being electrocuted. He heaved like a choking victim.

  The FBI agents in the room with him became disoriented, unsure what was happening or what to do. What appeared to be a severe seizure had started without warning ten minutes ago. Dunleavy was in the midst of a briefing when blood began squirting from both his ears like he had two water guns inside his head. The initial gush had splattered the face of his assistant, who had been leaning over his left shoulder. The woman had leapt backwards in disgust, screaming.

  Disorder ensued.

  The assistant’s screams brought Browning-wielding Secret Service agents into the room, who were greeted by Glock-wielding FBI agents. The Secret Service team feared they had disrupted an insider assassination attempt. The FBI agents thought a sniper outside the room might have shot Dunleavy. A rancorous shouting match broke out between the two groups while Dunleavy bounced around the floor like a vibrator gone berserk.

  Suddenly, Dunleavy’s blood-splattered assistant darted towards the door. A secret service agent shot her in the leg as he had been trained to do. The woman instantly fell to the floor. In retaliation, one of the FBI agents, still angry over the death of the agent Koxinga had killed at the airport, shot the Secret Service gunman in the shoulder. The remaining Secret Service agents showered the FBI shooter’s torso with machinegun fire. The serenade of bullets sent the victim sprawling backwards over his chair. On his way down, he shot out one of the overhead lights in the ceiling.

  Half the room went dark.

  Warning alarms clanged loudly all around them.

  “Drop your weapons!” the senior Secret Service agent shouted.

  Having witnessed the killing power of the Browning, the FBI agents immediately complied. One of the younger Secret Service men huddled them into a far corner, his weapon trained on them.

  The Secret Service team leader and another agent tended to Dunleavy. Or at least they tried to. Both men had nominal emergency medical training, both neither had any idea what was had befallen the FBI Director.

  “Get the medic!” the Supervisor commanded. His colleague scrambled out the room and up the hall, a cream colored earpiece dangling over his shoulder by a thin wire coil.

  Dunleavy thrashed at his shirt collar with blood soaked hands. Suspecting a chest wound, the agent tossed aside Dunleavy’s tie and ripped open his dress shirt, buttons popping in the air as he went. He found no blood spots on the T-shirt beneath.

  Then Dunleavy’s flesh started to crawl. Literally.

  As the agent watched in horror, a six-inch cylindrically shaped lump swelled out from Dunleavy’s throat. When the swell started moving, the agent instinctively sprang backwards. With wide-eyed amazement, he watched the swell snake its way down towards Dunleavy’s chest, stretching the fabric of his T-shirt as it went. It looked like the engine of a model train was using the inside of Dunleavy’s body as a track.

  Then the Pain Train dissolved into Dunleavy’s pectoral muscles. He screamed louder than ever, bubbly white spittle foaming at the corners of his mouth.

  The commotion of the medical team racing down the corridor with a gurney caused the agent to regain his composure. He crawled over and rolled Dunleavy’s T-shirt up, exposing the man’s bar
e chest.

  The agent gasped.

  The strange moving object had broken apart and carved a message into Dunleavy’s flesh. The message said:

  NOW THE TRUTH REALLY HURTS

  Parked behind a bar in Randolph County, Koxinga typed an exclamation point on his PDA’s keypad.

  An exclamation point appeared in Dunleavy’s chest.

  Of all the nifty technologies the PRC had stolen from American research labs over the years, Smart Dust may have been Koxinga’s favorite. Microelectromechanical devices with radio receivers built in, they were infinitely configurable.

  Koxinga chuckled. The Smart Dust had been his idea, but all the credit for the message belonged to Tsang. The old man definitely had a sense of humor, something he rarely experienced in his line of work.

  His mission accomplished, Koxinga sent an instant message to Taiwan.

  __________

  It was eight o’clock in the morning in Taipei. Tsang’s PDA beeped with an instant message. The message was brief:

  IT IS DONE.

  Tsang looked up from the screen and laughed. And laughed and laughed.

  CHAPTER

  70

  The Oval Office

  Two Days Later

  The four men had been explaining the details of the President’s options for more than three hours. It appeared that a tentative consensus had been reached.

  The official cover was that there had been a carbon monoxide leak at the Shaw Community Center, which helped to explain why the victims had been rushed to U.S. AMRI.I.D. instead of the closer Children’s National Medical Center. Three more of the children had died since the incident. The pralidoxime had not been effective against the new strain of Soman.