She screamed, once, a single, helpless cry of agony, despair, and betrayed innocence.

Hearing it, all the strength drained out of his legs and he sagged to his knees between his captors. His forehead touched the ground before Faraj and Nasser managed to pull him upright again.

All the men of the tribe were there, massed outside the hut, their attention fixed on the doorway, little more than a hole knocked in the dried mud wall. A small oil lamp threw almost no light on the interior, hiding what was happening inside in indifferent shadows.

No one looked at him. No one even glanced in his direction. Their shoulders were hunched, their backs taut, their feet splayed on the ground as if they were about to step forward.

To get into line.

To take their turn.

Only the stern eye of the council kept them where they were. The four men inside would inflict all the justice Allah required.

For not the first time during the last seven hellish days did he regret his return. Even more bitterly did he regret his departure. He should have rejected the scholarship bestowed by a benevolent corporation that had led to his five years in the West. Had he stayed safely at home, free of the corruption of infidels and their indecent ways with women, he would not have fallen so easily into conversation with the wife of another man.

But that first naive conversation had changed everything. He wondered again where she was, what had happened to her. He wondered if there was another hut somewhere, with another tribal council and another crowd of men standing around it, straining to hear the tear of clothing, the striking of flesh on flesh, the panting, the grunts, the groans. Or had she been killed, stoned to death by her own husband?

If Allah were merciful, she would have been beheaded.

As he should have been. Suddenly, without volition, he heard himself bellow, "Where is it written?"

The hands manacling his own loosened in surprise and he took advantage, tearing himself free, not to run, no, instead, just this once, to stand up strong in front of the men of his village and accuse them face to face of the evil that they did. "In what sura is it written that my sister should be punished for my crime? Why-"

Hashim Hassan, the youngest member of the council, took a step forward and backhanded Akil across the face. Hassan was a big man, broad across the shoulders, arms heavy with muscle from loading and unloading goods from the one ancient Ford pickup truck that was the sole asset of his freight business. Akil heard his cheekbone crack. Blood welled from his mouth and splattered down his shirtfront.

He and Hashim had been born into the same village not a month apart. They had gone to school together, studied the Koran together. They had flown hawks together from childhood, competing with others from as far away as Gujar Khan. He looked up at Hashim's hard and unyielding face. Where now was the blood brother, the companion of his childhood, the friend of his adolescence?

He spit out blood and cried, "Did not the Prophet himself say to the girl who had been raped, 'Go now, God has already pardoned you'?"

Hashim hit him again. This time he spit out a tooth. "I am guilty! I admitted it! I-"

The rest of the council looked annoyed and the eldest snapped out a command. The third time Hashim hit him Akil lost consciousness, his last thought a fleeting relief that at least now he would not have to bear further witness to the shame that his own criminal carelessness had wrought upon the most beloved member of his family.

"I feel like I'm in a third-world country," Parker said, breaking a silence that had endured the entire distance from the Iwo Jima, moored at the Riverwalk in downtown New Orleans.

" Haiti," Helms said. She looked around with the same expression of bewilderment she'd worn all day. "Where is everyone? There should be ambulances and helicopters and-and police cars." She looked back at the two officers, almost pleading. "It can't be only us. It can't be."

Everything in St. Bernard Parish was backwards, if not upside down. The cars were in the water. The boats were on the land. Enormous barges, stripped of their containers, were beached hundreds of feet from the nearest canal. Trailers had been forcibly separated from their tractors and were scattered haphazardly across drenched and flattened fields like so many giant Tonka toys. Electrical transmission towers lay on their sides, half-submerged in bayous much deeper and wider than they had been not twenty-four hours before. The houses, those that remained standing, were minus doors, windows, roofs.

The landscape was not improved by the almost total absence of life. Once they saw a woman peer out at them from behind a tree. It didn't make any of them feel better when she screamed, a high, thin, terrified sound, and went crashing headlong through the underbrush, getting as far away from them as fast as she could. Once they saw a dog, a pit bull, emaciated and hostile, who growled menacingly at them before it, too, ran off. Cal would have shot it if he'd thought to bring a gun.

He realized with a faint sense of shock that they might actually need one.

The dog had been savaging the body of a woman. In spite of the swelling and the decay after a week's worth of lying in the sun, it was obvious that she had not died in Katrina, but afterward, and that she might have found her death a merciful ending to what had come before. And like all the other bodies they had found that day, she was black.

Cal had never before been quite so conscious of the whiteness of his skin.

Parker got a poncho out of the back of their jeep-they had run out of body bags-and covered her, holding his breath so he wouldn't retch. He backed off and stood looking down at the olive green bundle for a moment. "Animals," he said.

"Americans," Helms said, in such disbelief it was almost a question.

Parker raised his head and looked at Cal. "I was stationed in D.C. in 2001.I thought I'd never see anything like that again." He shook his head. "I hoped I wouldn't. But this-this is-" Words failed him. Parker was in his forties, in the Coast Guard long enough to work his way up to chief warrant officer, a veteran of patrols in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific and the Bering, like Cal, a cutterman.

On 9/11 Cal had been in New York City, testifying at a UN hearing on international maritime regulations. He had been in a cab on the way to the United Nations building when the first plane had gone in. It had been a beautiful morning, he remembered, clear, cool, the streets of New York filled with parents taking their children to school, people headed to work. He'd reported to the scene as soon as news of what happened had penetrated his meeting, and worked three days and nights helping to dig people, mostly dead, out of the debris. He, too, had never wanted to see anything like that ever again.

"Where is everyone?" Helms said. A yeoman with much less time served, still in high school when the planes went into the towers and the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania, she had watched the response on television with the rest of her peers. There had been a massive response of fire and rescue personnel and equipment to that disaster. She looked around now, expecting a line of response vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks, heavy equipment to begin the process of recovery to roll up and disgorge the people who were supposed to be doing this kind of work, people who were trained in it. "I was just here to see New Orleans," she said numbly. "I wanted to hear some good music, eat some beignets, walk around the French Quarter." She looked at Cal again, imploringly. "Captain, where is everybody?"

He couldn't answer her.

They waited with the body. The bad news was that it was their twenty-first body that day. The good news was that the Disaster Mortuary Affairs team wouldn't be that far behind them, so they wouldn't have to wait long.

And they didn't, the pickup driven by the same two exhausted men whipsawing around the wreckage on what was left of the road and skidding to a halt a few feet from Cal 's knees. This time they didn't even say hello, just went for the stretcher, stained with unmentionable substances from previous retrievals, muscled the body onto it and into the pickup, the back of which was getting crowded.

No one asked for the poncho back. The men didn't say good-bye. The three of them stood watching as the pickup careened around an overturned midnight blue Buick LeSabre with three of four tires missing and rattled off.

The sun was setting behind a gathering bank of low-lying clouds, leeching the light from the destroyed landscape and rendering everything suddenly more sinister. It began to drizzle, and a moment later the drizzle increased to a steady rain. If anything the sense of menace increased.

"Let's get back," Cal said.

The yeoman looked up the road. "There have to be other bodies," she said.

Cal knew how she felt, but he could feel the presence of many eyes trained on them, and again felt the acute lack of any kind of protection. "Tomorrow," he said.

But the next day the FEMA representative mercifully asked, "Who here knows about ships?" Cal put up his hand and found himself deputy director in charge of three cruise ships brought into New Orleans to provide temporary shelter for those left homeless by Katrina. He brought Parker and Helms with him, and the three of them gladly left the collection of bodies to other authorities.

He found himself reporting directly to the Coast Guard vice admiral, who was acting as the principal federal officer for Katrina response, and for perhaps the first time in his life didn't rue the fact that the old man was a friend of his father's. Between the Port Authority, the stevedores' union, and the ship's agent, all of whose offices were a shambles, it was a challenge just to maintain the ships' water reserves, which entailed finding sixty tanker trucks to deliver eight hundred tons of water per day per ship.

Finding them was one thing, keeping them was something else again. Across the six most affected parishes potable water was in short supply and tanker trucks capable of delivering it were in high demand. When he found one, it was all he could do to hang on to it before it was lost or stolen. One was hijacked right off the dock before it had even managed to offload its cargo, and when eventually the truck was found again the hijacker was apprehended in the act of selling said cargo for a dollar a gallon. He could have gotten five, he explained to the arresting officer, but he didn't want to price himself out of the market.

Initially Cal had no staff except for CWO Parker and YN1 Helms, which didn't help, and cell phones didn't work inside the skins of the ships so he couldn't even yell for any. Then by a rare stroke of luck he fell heir to what he decided ought to be designated the only national treasure walking around on two legs.

"Lieutenant Commander Mustafa Awad Azizi reporting for duty, sir," the national treasure said, snapping off a very smart salute and proffering his orders.

Cal read through them. Born in New Jersey. Academy graduate four years behind Cal. BS in civil engineering. A good mix of duty stations, including two years on patrol in the Bering Sea as a JG and two years at the yards in Seattle. He looked up, and said irritably, "At ease, Commander."

Azizi relaxed his stance. He was of medium height, with dark skin and dark hair that even with a regulation cut managed to look like the mane of a lion.

" New Jersey, huh?" Cal said.

"Yes, sir," Azizi said, "in spite of the fact that I look like Ali Baba and all the forty thieves put together, Trenton, New Jersey. My folks are a generation removed from Trinidad, and six generations before that the Tigris-Euphrates river valley."

Cal gave him a sharp look. Azizi smiled, which transformed his face, dominated by a long, broad nose with a distinct curl at the end, large flashing eyes, and a lot of teeth that looked to have received the assiduous and unstinting care of an attentive dentist from early on. "Yes, sir, Iraq."

"I didn't ask," Cal said mildly.

"No, sir," Azizi said. "I can't help my name or the way I look, but post-9/11 I've found it a good tactic to address it at once. Makes everyone relax."

"A pre-emptive strike," Cal said.

"Exactly, sir," Azizi said cordially.

Cal handed Azizi's orders back to the junior officer. "I could give a shit about your heritage, Azizi. Especially now. I'm one lone Coast Guard officer in the middle of one of the biggest messes this nation has ever had to dig itself out of. There are supplies pouring in and no way to get them out again to the people who need them. We've got a ton of first response people, fire fighters, EMS, doctors and nurses, and more on the way from every state in the union, and no place to put them to work because there is no electricity, which means no refrigeration and no air-conditioning. Hell, even the local EMS guys are sleeping in their ambulances."

He thought of his first week on scene. "And we've got bodies stacked up from here to Shreveport, and more of them every day, too, and damn few resources to deal with them. We can't bury them because the graveyards are all flooded, and even if they weren't we don't have any way to get them there."

"Yes, sir," Azizi said. "How many of us are there?"

"Well. I've got a chief warrant officer and a yeoman, although I don't know how long I'm going to hang on to either. The yeoman was on vacation in New Orleans when Katrina hit, and the CWO was changing planes from Atlanta to Dallas-Fort Worth en route to his next duty station when they closed Louis Armstrong Airport. But for the moment anyway, there's four."

Azizi looked at him for a moment. "I see."

Cal smiled. "And that, Commander, was the good news."

Azizi digested this in silence for a moment. "What's the bad news, sir?"

"I'm the boss."

Azizi looked delighted. "Really, sir? Well, then, let's get started."

It turned out that Azizi had an almost preternatural ability to hotwire anything on wheels; fork lifts, pickup trucks, even a motorized shopping cart liberated from a nearby supermarket. After a day of watching him in action Cal said, "So, you can hotwire anything, can you?"

Azizi shrugged, grinning.

"Does that mean you can un-hotwire anything, too? Make them impossible to steal?"

Azizi considered. "Well, sir, like I told you. I'm from New Jersey."

Cal had no further trouble hanging on to the tanker trucks.

Azizi also proved to be a first-rate scrounger, which as anyone who has ever served on a battlefield will attest is a skill to be cherished. The food on the three cruise ships improved markedly almost from the day of Azizi's arrival, and CWO Parker, who liked his grub, was moved to say that Lieutenant Commander Azizi ought to be put up for a medal.

The four of them did not long remain the only Coasties on the scene but Cal was indisputably the one with the most stroke, including the direct line to the old man, which he tried not to over-exploit but which proved to be a significant asset. When the police parked their cruisers so that they blocked access to the docks where the ships were moored he had six of them towed so the water tankers could offload, and no one so much as blinked in his direction. Had to be a first in relations between an East Coast intellectual elitist in Coastie blue and a bunch of brawny down-home Louisiana cops, most of whom were living in their cruisers at the time and so had a right to be a little cranky.

They were probably hoping they'd get a room on one of the ships. Everyone wanted a room on the ships. Short of presidential visits, of which there were two, both unwelcome and both so far as he could see productive of nothing more than a massive logistical headache for the people on the ground (and after the first visit he wanted to fall to his knees and give thanks he didn't work for the Secret Service), Cal gave first priority to those Louisiana residents who had lost their homes. He held staterooms even for those who had been evacuated out of state and had to be repatriated. When he turned down his third flag request (this time a Navy admiral whose dog robbers threatened to write to Congress if he didn't let them overnight on board) he was summoned to Baton Rouge, from where the vice admiral was running relief operations for Katrina and Rita. A helo took Cal off the ship and set him down in the parking lot of the commandeered office building that was serving as HQ. He was escorted promptly to the vice admiral's office.

The vice admiral looked at him over the tops of half-glasses. "I hear you bounced Jim Levy off the Aurora Princess."

Cal braced himself. "Yes, sir." He offered no explanation and no apology.

The vice admiral's face relaxed into a grin. "Never did like that asshole. How about a drink?"

They spent a genial half hour with rather more conversation about Cal 's father and his slam-dunk re-election prospects than Cal would have liked. At one point the vice admiral gave him an overall assessing look and said, "You look older, Cal. And taller, somehow. You're not growing up on me now, are you?"

At the end of the audience the vice admiral shook his hand, escorted him personally to the door, and congratulated him in a loud, penetrating voice on a job very well done within conspicuous earshot of some thirty loiterers. "Amazing what the U.S. Coast Guard can do to get the job done with no resources and no experience in disaster relief on this scale, isn't it, Cal?"

"Gives a whole new meaning to search and rescue, sir," Cal said, returning the handshake with interest, and then got the hell out of there.

The helo took him straight back to the Aurora Princess, still moored at the Riverfront, where a delegation from Princess Cruises swarmed around him on touchdown. The chief complaint seemed to be his continual unavailability to discuss the use to which their ship was being put. They had what they obviously considered was a brilliant solution to this problem. They wanted him to take occupancy of the owner's suite, which had the latest in state-of-the-art communications, the inference being that with him in residence there they could reach out and touch him whenever they wanted.

They managed to muscle him into the glass elevator leading to the suite-he had to admit to a certain curiosity to see it-but when they got there he took one look at the Jacuzzi, which could have slept five, and the bed, which could have slept ten, not to mention the phone with six lines mounted at the head of the bed, and made a polite but very firm refusal.

He was ushering them kindly but firmly down the gangway when a motorcade only slightly smaller than the president's pulled up. The driver got out and opened the rear door, and a tall man in his early sixties climbed out. His hair was the white gold some blond men were gifted with as they age, he had a smile whose teeth could be seen to flash all the way from the deck of the ship, and he was dressed in a three-piece gray pin-striped suit that anyone but a blind man could see had been lovingly cut to display his broad shoulders, his still-slim waist, and his long, muscular legs.

The cruise ship people, momentarily dazzled by this vision, stopped short. One of them said, "Hey, isn't that Senator Schuyler?"

Another one looked from the senator to Cal and back again. "You're that Schuyler?"

Cal was spared an answer when the senator caught sight of him and waved. His long legs ate up the distance between the car and the bottom of the gangway. The cruise ship people forgot Cal and trotted down to meet him, hands out. The senator, never one to neglect an opportunity to gladhand a potential campaign contributor, shook hands, slapped backs, and all in all seemed to be delighted with his new best friends. There was a reason he kept getting re-elected. There were, in fact, many.

Cal was essaying a soft-footed retreat until his father looked up and raised his voice. " Cal! Come on down here!"

Cal, caught, reversed course and stumped grimly down the gangway.

His father embraced him, beaming. "I see you've all met my son, Cal. That's Captain Cal Schuyler to all of us peons, of course." There was a dutiful laugh. The senator, now looking suitably grave, said, "Cal and the Coast Guard are doing a heck of a job down here. I venture to say they're the only federal agency that is being of any help at all. I don't know where these poor folks would be without them." He shook his Head. "Tragic, just tragic some of the stories I've been hearing. Washington has really fallen down on the job. There will have to be an investigation, of course." The senator, not currently a member of the majority party in Congress, tried not to look overjoyed at the prospect. He wasn't entirely successful.

He turned to his son and only child. " Cal, these good folks tell me there's an empty room on board with my name on it. You mind showing me up there?"

There wasn't a whole hell of a lot he could do at that point, so he said baldly, "Sure, Dad," and led his father and his father's entourage to the owner's suite.

"What are you doing here, Dad?" he said when they had a moment alone.

His father raised an eyebrow. "Why, I'm serving my tax-paying constituents, son, by getting a firsthand look at what's going on down here. You should see the newspapers, they're saying Louisiana might as well be Bangladesh for all the federal help they're getting."

"That's true enough," Cal said.

"Billy tells me you're doing a hell of a job," the senator said. "How did you get here, anyway? I thought you were in Alameda, bossing cutters around."

"I was. The vice admiral asked me to fly in ahead of him, give him a good picture of what was going on, what was needed. Then he asked me to stay on for a bit. I've got a good second in Alameda, so…" Cal shrugged. "How long are you staying?"

"Just the night, I'm afraid, I've got a fund-raiser in Amherst day after tomorrow."

They ate in the owner's suite that night, the senator's aides staving off starvation with a deli spread they'd brought with them from D.C. Cal invited and then ordered Azizi to join them. "Azizi," the senator said meditatively, ladling out an assortment of pates. He handed Azizi a basket of crusty bread. "Where's your family from, Commander?"

Azizi trotted out his American by way of Trinidad and Iraq family history. If the senator noticed that the litany was a little rote, he didn't mention it. "I see you wear a wedding ring, Commander," he said instead. "Tell me about her."

A bleak look crossed Azizi's face. "She's dead, sir."

The senator looked concerned. "I'm sorry for your loss, son," he said, and with his usual effortless social charm led the table talk away from any dangerous personal topics to the latest Hollywood date movie, inevitably starring Cal's mother as a glamorous grandmother determined to see her estranged daughter and granddaughter reunited and wed, not necessarily in that order.

They were lucky Azizi came from New Jersey and not Massachusetts, Cal thought, or the talk would have been all about the senator's reelection campaign.

Later, when guests and staff had left them alone for a few minutes, it was. "Dad," Cal said, trying to stave it off, "you know I have no interest in politics."

"I'm not saying you have to run for office, Cal, but you've got your twenty in. Isn't it time you moved to shore for good? I could use you on my staff. It's no secret that my relationship with the armed services isn't the best. I could use a liaison who speaks the language." He paused. "And we haven't been able to spend a lot of time together, not since you graduated from the Academy. Not since you joined up, really."

Or ever, Cal thought, and braced himself. His father had first played the patriot card and then the father-son card. He waited for it. Here it came-

"And although she'll never say it, your mother misses you, Cal. She was saying to me only the other day she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen you for more than a flying visit."

There it was, the mom card. Although Cal 's mother had never allowed him to call her anything but "Mother," and the moment he'd entered high school she'd insisted on "Vera" henceforward.

"She sends you her love," the senator said. "She wanted me to remind you that we're going to the Cape Cod house for Christmas this year."

Maybe Vera was mellowing. If she was playing grandmothers nowadays, maybe she'd finally come to terms with having a grown son. "Maybe I can make it this year."

"And," the senator added fatally, "she told me to tell you she's inviting the Whitneys to join us." His father winked. "Including that cute little Bella. You could do a lot worse, Cal."

Every hair on the back of Cal 's nape stood to attention. "I can't promise for sure I'll be there, Dad," he said, and tried to turn it into a joke. "You know I don't have any graven-in-stone plans beyond my next ship."

His father blinked at him benignly. "Well now, Billy's not sure you've got anywhere to go in the service but ashore. After Alameda you're headed for a 378, the biggest cutter in the Coast Guard fleet. Your tour will be, what, two years? There really isn't any place left for you to go in the Coast Guard after that, not at sea, not if you want promotion."

"Then I'll get an icebreaker," Cal said.

"Now, Cal, there's only three of those, and you know only two of them work." The senator winked again.

Cal felt his chin push out. "Then I'll put my name in for one of the new Deepwater ships."

"Billy tells me those ships have captains four or five years out."

"The vice admiral tells you a hell of a lot, doesn't he?" It was his first sign of temper, and a warning sign for both of them. He gulped down the rest of his coffee and got to his feet. "I'm dragging, Dad, I've got to turn in.

"I'll see you tomorrow before I leave," the senator said, bloody but unbowed. The senator always knew when to back off.

"I'll try," Cal said from the door, "but I've got an early morning and a full day." It wasn't a lie. His days in New Orleans ran from 0600 to 2200.

He pretended deafness to any last comments he might or might not have heard, and retired to the four-bed stateroom he was sharing with Azizi and a couple of civil engineers from Boise who had shown up out of the blue one day looking for somewhere to volunteer their services. He was the first one in that evening, and he commandeered the only comfortable chair and got out his cross-stitch, which was admirable at soothing the savage breast. The current project was the Alki Point Lighthouse with the Seattle Space Needle in the background and a seagull on outspread wings against the blue water in the foreground. He'd just finished the browns and greens of the rocky point in the midground when Azizi came in, who examined Cal 's cross-stitch with a critical eye. Azizi had just gotten out his knitting when the two civil engineers staggered in from a day spent surveying the levees.

The civil engineers exchanged speaking glances. "If you were ever on a three-month EPAC patrol waiting on a go fast that never came, you'd learn how to cross-stitch, too," Cal told them. There was enough of an edge to his voice that the civil engineers decided that in this case discretion was the better part of valor and retired without comment.

The next morning, to avoid a prolonged farewell Cal timed his arrival at the head of the gangway to coincide with his father's departure. The senator waved from the limousine, and Cal threw him a bone by way of a snappy salute. The senator beamed, was tucked tenderly into the limo, and the long black car moved off in stately fashion. Cal heaved a sigh of relief and got back to work.

He was back at the head of the gangway that afternoon when another batch of what he had come to think of as his refugees left the ship to return to their lives ashore. They had boarded the ship with all they owned in a plastic garbage bag and a thousand-mile stare, and they were leaving with a look of life and returned hope. It was amazing what clean sheets, three squares, a night's sleep in a secure area, and above all air-conditioning could do for your outlook.

He turned from the gangway and found Azizi watching him. "Something up, Azizi?"

Azizi hesitated. "Permission to speak freely, Captain. And without prejudice."

Cal shrugged. "Go for it." He even managed a grin. "What happens on the Aurora Princess stays on the Aurora Princess"

Azizi squared up in a stance that wasn't quite belligerent. "I'd heard about you, sir."

It wasn't what Cal had been expecting, and it wasn't welcome, either. "Lieutenant Commander, I-"

Risking a slap down, Azizi ignored him. "You're quite the golden boy of the U.S. Coast Guard. Callan T Schuyler, child of privilege, old money from Boston, a three-hundred-year American pedigree that includes three signers of the Declaration of Independence, one Civil War general, a Roughrider, and a Navy nurse who was killed by a Japanese kamikaze off Okinawa in World War II. Got the Academy appointment and after graduation all the plum jobs because his dad's a U.S. senator. Got all the ladies because his mom was the most beautiful actress of her day and he got her looks." He stopped, waiting to see how his boss would take such plain speaking.

Cal, resigned, made a come-on motion with his hand. At some point in every duty.station this conversation or one like it had to be endured. He'd learned fast that getting mad only exacerbated any preconceptions people had, and to suffer through and move on.

Azizi took a deep breath. "Smart, nobody denies that, but the general consensus is too lazy to try very hard. And why should you? It's not like you had to work for anything, it was all dropped right into your lap."

He paused again. Cal was frowning a little, but he didn't say anything.

"Your crews love you, especially the women, although in spite of all the rumors you've never been accused of dipping your pen in the company ink. Word in the fleet is that your COs, even if they do wish you'd be a little more enthusiastic, rate your job performance as consistently good. One even called you brilliant after that incident on the Maritime Boundary Line in the Bering Sea-" Azizi stopped obediently when Cal raised a hand, and then resumed."-and you got an award for the volunteer work you put in at the World Trade Center after 9/11. Although you don't like to talk about either, and I hear tell you've had to be reminded to wear the ribbons."

There was a brief silence. "You know a lot about me," Cal said finally, "for a guy I met less than a week ago."

Azizi shrugged. "You're one of those people who get talked about, sir. Have I offended you?"

Cal gave a tired laugh and pulled his cap off to run his hand through his hair. "Like none of that's ever been said before, to my face or behind my back. Tell me something I don't know, Commander."

Azizi looked over Cal's shoulder at the stream of people heading down the gangway; men, women, children, all of them moving with a new sense of purpose in spite of the months and years of rebuilding their city, their community, their homes that lay in front of them. There were infants in arms, toddlers, kids from grade school to high school, parents, grandparents. Some of them had been through the nightmare in the convention center, some had lucked out and survived the deluge after the levees broke in their homes and later been evacuated. Most of them were black, and much had already been made in the national and international press of America 's neglect of its Southern minority population in the destructive wakes of Katrina and Rita.

Azizi was as dark-skinned as half of the people going down the gangway, which, Cal thought, might have been why they were having this conversation.

"They call me Taffy, sir," Azizi said. "Mustafa's a little too much for most Western tongues to get around, and I've never liked Ziz, which is what I get stuck with when I don't tell people I've already got a nickname I can live with."

"Taffy," Cal said, trying it out.

"That's right, sir. Taffy."

After a moment Cal held out his hand. "Hello, Taffy."

"Hello, sir." Their hands met in a firm grip, quickly released before either man could be accused of overt sentiment.

Taffy consulted his clipboard. "One of the water tankers threw a rod this morning. I've got a line on a mechanic but in the meantime I've got a rumor of a couple tankers over in Alabama. I'll need the helo to get the drivers there, and we'll need drivers we can trust-have you ever driven a tanker truck, sir? No? Well, it's fairly easy, once you master the gears and figure out just how high your ass is in the air, you shouldn't have any trouble…"

"So this is a new one, Patrick?"

"It's a new name, sir."

"But the same old faces?"

"Certainly some of them, sir. Lights, please?"

The lights dimmed in the anonymous conference room. Patrick Chisum, special agent newly in charge of the CIA's Joint Terrorism Task Force, tapped a button on his notebook and the PowerPoint program began, a series of head shots interspersed with graphic pictures of bomb scenes, maps, dates, and casualty figures.

"They are calling themselves Abdullah."

"Just Abdullah?" His boss, Harold Kallendorf, sounded a little disappointed. "No Lord High Everything Allah? No Holy Judges, Juries, and Executioners of the Great Satan and All Who Sail in Him? No Fuck You and the Horse You Rode In On Jihad?" He sighed in what everyone hoped was mock disapproval. "Just suck the romance right out of the world, why don't you, Patrick."

There were dutiful chuckles from around the table, as in this group of government officials from the security departments of the FBI, the NSA, Immigration, Customs, the Border Patrol, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard, none held a higher rank than the new director. A dutiful chuckle in response to the ranking man's sallies, no matter how lame, was de rigueur.

They met for the last time in a cramped, dark room in a tumbledown house at the edge of a dusty village well off the beaten track, miles outside of Baghdad and as secure from surveillance as one could reasonably be and still be in Iraq. He looked around at the men left to him. They looked back, fearful but trusting. They had been together a long time, and they believed in him.

And if they didn't believe in him, they had believed in Zarqawi, and Zarqawi had chosen him to be second in command. Zarqawi's legend lingered on.

How many times could the Americans have killed him? In Mosul, in Ramadi, time and again in Kurdistan? He knew now-everyone knew, that was the wonderful thing about the Western media-that the American military had forwarded plans for attacking the Khurmal camp at least three times, and that each time Bush the Unbeliever had been so busy plotting his invasion of Iraq that the attacks had been brushed aside.

Each time they had hesitated, and each time he had eluded them. But now, now Akil had seen the proof with his own eyes. He might have been able to ignore this report as just another rumor, but this time the news was not only on CNN and the BBC but on Al Jazeera as well.

On a summer evening in Iraq, Zarqawi, his wife, and his eighteen-month-old daughter were killed by two bombs dropped from American jets. Photographs of his body, including close-ups of the all-too-familiar features of his face, even distorted in the rictus of a horrible death, were too clear to be disbelieved.

"Today, Zarqawi has been terminated," Nouri al-Maliki, the thrice-cursed Iraqi puppet, said from his American-built stage. "Every time a Zarqawi appears we will kill him. We will continue confronting whoever follows his path. It is an open war between us."

An open war, and a holy war. In truth, jihad. "How did they find the safe house?"

Karim lowered his voice. "It is said that the Americans had been tracking him for some time."

"Yes, yes," Akil said impatiently, "but this we all knew. They almost had him half a dozen times this year alone. But the safe house, Karim, how did they know of the safe house?"

The rest of the men had squatted just far enough away so that they might be out of earshot. Or might not. Karim satisfied himself with an eloquent look.

And how else, Akil thought, surveying the room over Karim's shoulder, allowing his eyes to sort through their faces. How else but an informant? But which one? Saad, whose Saudi ties he had always suspected? Jumah, who alone among the Jordanians in the cell had been very angry over the planned chemical attack in Amman?

"Who will lead us now, Akil?"

Karim's voice brought Akil back from his speculations. He raised his palms with a shrug. "Allah will dispose."

Karim was not to be so diverted. "It should be you, Akil. You walked beside him for the last seven years. You were his first recruit after he was released from prison."

"I am not Jordanian, Karim."

"It should not matter. You were with him when he made bay'ah to bin Laden, both times you swore allegiance side by side."

"But they thought we were killing the wrong people, Karim. They said so, time and again."

"You were killing the enemy!"

Faces turned at Karim's raised voice. "Gently," Akil said, "gently, my friend. Allah shall dispose of me as he sees fit."

She'd been named to the astronaut program five years before. She'd lived, worked, hoped, prayed for the day when she would be named to a shuttle crew.

In another four years, the shuttle program would end. The space shuttle would be retired, and NASA would move on to the next new thing. The next new thing was sounding a lot like the old new thing that scientists had been advocating for years, the return of the big dumb rocket, reminiscent of the days of the Saturn V. Preferably a big dumb unmanned rocket.

Atlantis was already scheduled to be cannibalized for parts for Discovery and Endeavour. The astronaut corps could hear the clock ticking down on the time left. There was already covert talk of what they were going to do after.

After, Kenai might open a vein and climb into a nice warm tub.

Today, she'd been named to a shuttle crew.

It was, however, nothing like she had imagined it would be. She had imagined joy unconfined, trumpets sounding, bells pealing, the exploding of champagne corks. She had imagined calling her parents and hearing their pride, and their fear. She had imagined the envy of her peers in the astronaut corps.

She hadn't imagined the spare, dry voice of Joel Minster, director of flight operations, informing them that there would be a sixth member of their crew, not an astronaut. What, in their more charitable moments, the astronauts referred to as a part-timer. Joy unconfined was checked, to be replaced by a stunned silence when they found out who it was.

"Please tell me you're kidding, Joel," Kenai said at last, with as much control as she could muster up on the spot.

Joel, known to some as the Great Conciliator and to others as the Great Suck-up, spoke her thought out loud. "I don't know what you're complaining about, Kenai. You've got your first mission. Doesn't happen to everyone."

Won't happen to a lot of them, was the thought in everyone's mind. And picking public fights with the man who might one day be in charge of assigning her to a precious second wasn't the smartest thing she could do, so this time she bit her tongue and kept her mouth shut.

Joel tucked his clipboard beneath an arm, gave a general nod, and left.

The door had barely closed behind him when the trash talk ensued.

"I don't know about you but this is just what I want on orbit, some dipshit rich kid fucking around on board." Bill White, an ex-Navy test pilot flying his second mission as pilot, was furious.

"We're launching the replacement for the Hubble, we're launching a communications satellite and an orbital observatory, we're conducting- how many experiments is this mission up to now?-and on top of all that we've got to babysit some spoiled brat?" This not-quite-shouted comment from Mike Williams, a mission specialist with a postdoc in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California who divided time into par-sees and as a result was usually the most patient and laid-back of astronauts. Today he waved long, lanky arms in emphasis, accidentally knocking the back of one hand against a table edge. He swore, which shocked them all into momentary silence, and sucked his bloody knuckles.

Into that silence stepped Laurel Freeman, a physicist from Stanford. She was almost sputtering with rage, but then Eratosthenes was her baby and as payload commander she took as a personal insult anything that affected its timely and successful deployment. Her father had been a stevedore on the Long Beach docks and in times of stress it showed up in her vocabulary. She was short and burly with a square face beneath a mop of untidy brown curls and it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine her offloading containers herself.

When Laurel paused for breath the mission commander stood up. "All right," Rick Robertson said. His voice was low and even, which had the natural effect of making them all shut up so they could hear him. "This is what's been handed to us. It sucks. Are any of you ready to give up your seat in protest?"

None of them were. There wasn't one of them who wouldn't have volunteered to be ballast on this mission or any other. Rick knew it. They all knew it. Rick was a test pilot from Texas Tech by way of the Air Force. This was his third shuttle flight and his second as commander. At five feet seven inches, he held himself with such parade-ground erectness that he seemed six feet tall. He looked at Kenai and said in his slow drawl, "Anything to add, Kenai?"

He'd deliberately mispronounced her name again, and it worked to defuse the situation. "It's KEE-nigh, not Kenya." She paused long enough for the delay to be felt. "Sir."

There was a very small laugh, but Rick gave her a brief, approving smile.

"Who's this guy again?" Bill said, his flush subsiding.

Rick consulted the bio Joel had handed him. "Well, at least he isn't a prince."

"The shuttle program already has its quota of princes," Mike said with feeling.

"Also U.S. senators," Laurel said, still steaming. "And U.S. representatives."

Heavily, Rick said, "He is a sheik, however."

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Bill said. "And what lame-ass experiment is he bringing along?"

"Way-ull," Rick said, drawing out the word in the best Chuck Yeager imitation so dear to all aviators, "he ain't got no lame-ass experiment. We are deploying his satellite."

"The ARABSAT-8A?" Kenai said. "He's a Saudi?"

"No, Qatari," Rick said. "His family has a controlling interest in a media conglomerate." He paused, and then, with obvious reluctance and not a little apprehension, said, "A media conglomerate which owns, among many other things, Al Jazeera."

There was a moment of charged silence. Media coverage was a de facto part of any shuttle mission, but that didn't mean that any of them regarded the press as anything but the bane of their collective existence. They'd all been burned by the incautious remark in front of the wrong reporter, and they'd all learned to keep a discreet distance, especially lately, when astronaut adultery and boozing on the job, not to mention sabotage, were making more headlines than successful missions. The news that they would be spending seven days cooped up in the small confines of a shuttle on orbit with an owner of one of the largest and most influential international television networks in the world was news they did not welcome. In fact, "Oh, fuck me," Laurel said, and slammed out of the room. Mike wasn't far behind her and his language was even more colorful.

Bill looked at Rick. "Well, that went over well."

"They'll be all right," Kenai said loyally, and spoiled it by saying, almost pleadingly, "Is he going to be broadcasting on orbit?"

"Ya think?" Rick said.

They sat in gloomy silence for a moment. "The sun's about over the yardarm," Bill said.

Rick looked at the clock on the wall. "It's five o'clock somewhere," he said, and looked at Kenai. "Join us?"

"Building 99?"

Rick shook his head. "Too touristy. I know a place."

In spite of Patrick's best efforts, it hadn't taken long before Khalid's version of Kallendorf's all! new! and improved! plan for agency operations was setting off ring tones and melting down blogs all over Washington. Well, nothing Patrick could do about that, or about the fact that three months later Khalid was exiled to the U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan.

Patrick had spent the year since collating and culling information on terrorist activities foreign and domestic, real, planned, anticipated, and suspected, trying to match events to perpetrators, and failing signally. He wasn't dismayed, or even disappointed. Such was the nature of intel on prospective guerilla warfare actions that too much of it was gleaned after the fact. The forces arrayed against al Qaeda and all its offspring were oftentimes too slow to recognize a threat. When at last it was recognized, action was all too often stifled in a welter of interagency and international rivalries and protocols, not to mention the occasional ripe diplomatic snafu.

He spent as much time as he could justify collecting data on Isa. Something about the shadowy figure-the ballsy name, perhaps? the Baghdad bombing, which had been the very model of the modern urban terrorist attack?-had captured his imagination. He was determined to gain on this man, and he would spare no energy, no agency resource until he had his hand on Isa's shoulder.

His wife had divorced him two years before. They'd been unable to have children, and he'd signed over the house so he didn't even have a lawn to mow. It had been pretty bloodless, all things considered, a marriage contracted in the fumes of a college lust that faded soon after graduation, leaving behind a civility that over time chilled into indifference. He was grateful that she'd had the courage to make the break, and they were both relieved when it was over. She had already remarried, relieving him of any guilt or anxiety over how she was getting along. There was nothing to distract him from the job at hand. Truth to tell, he'd always been more interested in it than in his marriage.

One day, when he'd assimilated as much information as he could hold, he told his assistant that he wasn't in and closed the door on her disapproving but unsurprised face. With movements that had become ritual, he sat, carefully unbuttoning the jacket of his three-piece bespoke suit, swiveled his desk chair to face the window, propped his feet up on the windowsill, folded his hands over the incipient potbelly that didn't worry him as much as the hairline which appeared to be in full retreat from his forehead, both aging him beyond his forty-two years, and regarded the well-polished toes of his black wingtips with a contemplative frown.

Patrick Chisum was that complete anathema to incoming administrations everywhere, a bureaucrat, one of those bland, behind-the-scenes figures, the nameless, faceless legion of laborers that kept the wheels of governance creaking along in spite of all the posturing on Pennsylvania Avenue and the Hill. He had a very fair idea of his own value, and it didn't take long for every new administration that swept into Washington promising to reduce spending beginning with the federal payroll to learn that Patrick Chisum and his knowledgeable brethren were all that kept the nation one step ahead of chaos.

He wasn't worried about Kallendorf's legendary line-clearing abilities. Patrick had been recruited into the agency right out of Yale, the ink still wet on his advanced degree in Islamic studies, and over the last twenty years he'd worked his way steadily up the ranks until he achieved his goal, the Middle East desk, specializing in terrorist groups beginning with Osama bin Laden, whose chief characteristic so far as Patrick was concerned was that, like the Hydra, each time one group was destroyed and its members captured or killed, another two groups sprang up in its place. It took unending patience, a sharp appetite for detail, and a wealth of experience to disentangle the various Islamic terrorism groups and separate them out as targets for observation and either arrest or elimination. Without vanity, Patrick knew that he was essential to that effort. The posturing of appointed rentapols who served solely at the pleasure of the president was far less important than the job at hand.

But Kallendorf was right in one respect. American intelligence agencies had degenerated into an international joke. There were too many of them; CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA, the individual intel-gathering agencies of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the list went on and on, all getting in each other's way, stepping on each other's toes, fighting battles over turf instead of fighting the enemy, refusing to share intelligence or alert one another to ongoing operations. Collectively, they had failed utterly to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, which caught the first Bush administration totally unprepared to deal with the disintegration of the USSR and the sudden independence of Warsaw Pact states. They had ignored their own agents' warnings of terrorist activity within American borders prior to 9/11, the FBI being most grievously at fault here. But his own agency was far from guiltless, having signed off on the WMD in Iraq, and later on Saddam's links with al Qaeda.

Their wholesale failure to anticipate the rise of the sectarian insurgency in Iraq and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the consequences of which played out on every television in America at six p.m. and ten p.m. each night, had led to a disgust for the ruling party that the American electorate had made manifest in the last election. Everyone but the man in the White House seemed to know that it was only a matter of time before the United States suffered its own regime change.

If Patrick wanted to take it personally, those failures and others had led almost directly to the swearing in of Harold Kallendorf as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had been given an unusually united mandate from both Congress and White House to shake up the institution, fire the deadwood, and streamline and update the intelligence-gathering process, with the desired end result an improvement in product accuracy and an increase in the speed of its delivery. Hence, the review in the briefing room in January.

But that wasn't what had him frowning at his wingtips. Kallendorf's idea of reaching out to an agency not their own wasn't necessarily a bad one. Especially when an old friend was at the other end of the line.

He'd just returned from Guantanamo Bay, where he had observed the interrogation of a young Jordanian named Karim Talib. He'd been picked up in a sweep of Fallujah six months ago, and the gators at Gitmo had finally broken him the week before. One of them, an old friend of Patrick's well aware of his new obsession, had called Patrick and said that he might like to hear this in person. Bob's tip-offs were usually pretty solid, so Patrick had hopped a C-12 out of Andrews and been present on the other side of the glass when Bob, a not unintimidating figure, leaned over the young Muslim man whom he must have outweighed by a hundred pounds and purred, "Now. What was it you were telling us yesterday, Karim?" When Karim said nothing Bob let the purr drop to a menacing growl. "Now, Karim, you don't want me to have to jog your memory, do you?" He smiled at Karim, lips pulled back to reveal a set of canines that looked ready and able to rip into raw meat.

Karim didn't look as if he had any intention of resisting, but his teeth were chattering so loudly that he could hardly get the words out.

"You worked for Isa," Bob said.

Behind the glass, Patrick stiffened.

"Y-y-y-yes," Karim said.

"From when to when?" Bob said.

"F-f-f-from 2003 until you k-k-killed Zarqawi."

"Three years. You must know him pretty well."

A spark of defiance gleamed in the young man's eyes. "Y-y-you'll never catch him."

"I'm sure you're right," Bob said cordially, and pulled up a chair. He gave Karim's knee a comforting pat. "I want you to tell me all about your time with him, Karim. Everything, every tiny little detail you can remember." He smiled at Karim again and Karim flinched back. "Take your time. I've got all day."

"I-I-I already t-t-told you everything I know."

"I don't think so," Bob said cheerfully, and gave Karim's knee another encouraging pat. "Start talking."

"W-w-what do I get if I do?"

Patrick had to admire the little terrorist. Terrified as he was, he was still trying to bargain.

Bob shrugged and worked his head. His neck cracked with a loud pop and Karim jumped so hard it moved his chair a couple of inches across the floor. "What do you get?" He smiled again at Karim. "Maybe I let you live to see the dawn."

Karim, who evidently got most of his courage from putting together bombs to be detonated far from his person, started talking. A lot of it Patrick already knew, such as Isa's predilection for and proficiency at Internet banking and communications. The particulars of Isa's dispersal of Zarqawi's cell after Zarqawi's death were news. Isa dispensing with the services of a group of men he and Zarqawi had trained from terrorist infancy seemed wasteful. Why cut loose your experienced personnel, when you had so much time invested in them?

Answer, Patrick thought, because one of them betrayed your boss. You don't know which one, all you know is it wasn't you, so better to cut them all loose. Even wimpy little Karim.

Karim, now weeping over his own betrayal, knew more than he would say about the bombing in Baghdad and nothing at all about Isa's current whereabouts. He drew a heartrending picture of his and Isa's farewell in the Damascus airport. "I didn't know where to go," he said, sniveling. "I didn't know what to do. So I went back."

Patrick shook his head. Embarrassing.

The speaker was quiet for a moment, but for Karim's sniffling. "Almost the last thing he said to me," Karim said wearily, "was a quote from your president Bush."

"Oh?" Bob said, bored. "What was that?"

"He said that Bush said that it was better to fight us on our ground than for the Americans to fight us on theirs."

"Oh, yeah?" Bob said.

Irritated at Bob's apparent lack of interest, the little terrorist said with a snap, "And then he said that he thought Bush was right."

Shortly thereafter Bob joined Patrick over a cup of coffee before Patrick headed north again. What do you think?"

"Is he gay?" Patrick said. "He sounds like he's in love with Isa."

"Something we'd thought of, too, he talks like Isa jilted him in Damascus," Bob said. "He didn't write, he didn't call, it's all one long moan." He cocked an eye at Patrick. "Anything you can use?"

"It's all grist for the mill, Bob," Patrick said thoughtfully. "He was in on that bus bombing in Baghdad."

"Ya think?" Bob said. "I'm going to sweat the little weasel until he tells me exactly how he designed and built that bomb, every nut, every bolt, every wire. I want to know where he got the parts, what the original target was, who picked it, who changed the target and why, and who gave the order for execution. When I have a confession, signed, witnessed, notarized, recorded on tape and on video, then at least, even if they won't let us hang him, he won't be exercising that talent on the streets of anyone's town ever again."

Patrick's driver poked his head in the door. "Time to go, Mr. Chisum."

Patrick drained his mug. "I appreciate the call, Bob, thanks."

"Thanks for the newspapers and the magazines and the smokes," Bob said. "See you next time."

No, Patrick thought now, it didn't hurt to ask a friend for help. His mind made up, he dropped his feet and swiveled back to his desk. He dialed twice before remembering to get his secretary to turn the phone back on, and then he had to redial because he got the country code wrong and wound up talking to a Josie Ryan in Limerick. They had a delightful conversation about the menu for the family dinner she was serving to her husband, Gerry, two daughters, and three sons (a fourth had moved to Alaska, probably partially due to the amount of grandchildren now in evidence). She inquired after Patrick's plans for the holiday, clucked her tongue over his having none, and extended an invitation. He declined with sincere regret and redialed. There was a brief silence, the double rings of the European telephone, and a click. "Knightsbridge Institute."

"Patrick Chisum for Hugh Rincon."

"One moment, please."

It was more like five before he was rescued from Muzak hell. No one ever played Yo-Yo Ma on hold. "Patrick?"

"Hello, Hugh. How are you?"

"Fine. What's it been, two wars?"

"More like three," Patrick said, "but who's counting. How's London? How's Sara?"

"Both good."

"She still stuck at the IMO?"

Hugh sighed. "Yeah, for a second tour."

"The people who make those assignments could be changing."

"So we saw," Hugh said, and left it at that.

Patrick respected the reticence. Hugh Rincon was ex-agency, married to an XO in the U.S. Coast Guard. They'd been involved in a lively adventure involving North Korean terrorists in the North Pacific a few years back, and the fallout had included Hugh's resignation from the agency and Sara's exile to the International Maritime Organization. Rumor had it she'd lipped off to the president himself, in the Oval Office no less, but Patrick doubted a career officer would put her future in such jeopardy and took the rumor with a large grain of salt.

Hugh had followed her to London, where he had signed on with the Knightsbridge Institute, an extremely well-funded global think tank which produced ruthlessly researched papers on subjects ranging from China 's embrace of the free market to the military preparedness of Dakar to the economic impact on Central and South America of the legalization of drugs in America. The Institute was known for having the best resources available on every possible global topic whether it be speculation or reality. Patrick faced up to the fact that this was going to cost him. "I've got the Middle East desk, Hugh."

"What happened to Harvey Moskowitz?"

"Retired last year."

"His idea?"

"No."

If 9/11 had taught them anything it was that the simplest plan was the best plan. A small cell, independent, autonomous, well-funded. A clearly defined target. A strong leader to give the cell a focus, and to help them keep it. And most important, a clearly stated expectation of results, which Akil had found to be most motivational. Not a threat of what would happen if there were no results, no, no, nothing so crude, but the implication was there, and he made sure it was frequently reinforced.

Money was the least of his worries, a huge relief, but over the past twelve months since Zarqawi's death and his departure from Iraq, he had taken the precaution of emptying out the account in Bern in small increments and placing them into a series of other accounts in various banks in different Western nations. He had learned a great deal answering the phone for the bank in Hayatabad all those years ago, Zarqawi had filled in the blanks he hadn't been able to fill in for himself, and he put it all to good use now.

The result was a tidy sum of working capital resting anonymously in three different bank accounts, one in the Grand Caymans, one in Hong Kong, and the third in the original bank in Bern, naturally under a different name. Sooner or later, al Qaeda would come looking for that money, and he wanted to be certain it would be well out of their reach.

Sooner or later, they would come looking for him, too, and they wouldn't stop until they found him.

Or until he returned to them, trailing clouds of glory, his own man, master of his own wildly successful organization, and owing fealty to none. He smiled at the thought.

He opened two more accounts, one in New York and another in Miami, with the minimum balance necessary to avoid fees. One of the things he despised most about capitalism was the rapacious capacity of Western banking institutions to bleed their customers dry in fees. Did not the Koran say that which you give that it may increase your wealth has no increase in Allah, but that which you give in charity shall have manifold increase?

But then so much of Western culture was haraam. It amused him to use their own unclean practices to bring them down, and this was where his time in the West informed his actions. He'd chosen the American banks on the basis of the quality and efficiency of their web sites, and set up an automatic bill pay plan to deposit monthly amounts from one to another that approximated a credit card payment and a car payment, respectively. Nothing was more sure to draw unwanted attention than sums of money sitting idle, thereby accruing no income to their hosts.

All this took time, since haste in withdrawals and deposits was another flag for official attention, but he was in no hurry. He got a job drawing blueprints for the new Düsseldorf airport extension and worked himself seamlessly into the local expatriate Muslim community, forging friendships with young Muslim men of promise.

Identifying likely recruits was never difficult, especially since the West had seeded the ground so well for the introduction of Muslim extremism. Everything about their various societies, their creeping secularism, their capitalistic greed, their abominably unfettered women, and above all their support for the state of Israel and their acquiescence to the subsequent subjection of Palestine, affronted the very ideals of Islam, firing the imams to denunciations and calls for action that fell on ready ears. The resulting harvest of disaffected young men was thick on the ground in every Western nation and ripe for the picking.

Germany was no different. As in France, England, and Austria, Muslims, imported for cheap labor, had taken up residency and settled in to produce a second generation that by features, coloring, and dress alone were guaranteed to grow up isolated, alienated, and angry about it. In

Düsseldorf there was a small, provincial colony of them, and within this colony AMI looked to replenish the cell of Abdullah.

One man, Rashid Guhl, seemed at first very promising, bright, inarticulate, and a rapt follower of the local imam who preached a carefully obscure jihad against the Far Enemy every Friday from the local mosque. Isa cultivated Rashid's friendship over some months, and then Rashid repaid him by falling suddenly in love with the daughter of the owner of an appliance store. Isa knew better than to try to talk him out of it, instead attending the wedding to wish Rashid and his new bride the very best of luck, but afterward he allowed himself to withdraw gradually from Rashid's new life. There was nothing more debilitating to a sense of mission than family entanglements.

Instead he concentrated on Yussuf al-Dagma and Yaqub Sadiq, Yussuf another engineer in his own firm, and Yaqub Yussuf's best friend from childhood, now a traffic engineer in Düsseldorf. Both were of Lebanese descent, with parents who had immigrated in search of relief from the constant conflict with Israel. Both were single. Both spoke English, albeit with the hideous British accent of their primary schoolteacher, and both held dual citizenship in Germany and Lebanon. Neither was quite as religious as Rashid, who was now beating his Western-born wife into wearing the hijab, and Yaqub was something of a ladies' man and a little erratic. They both regarded themselves as strangers in a strange land, though, and Akil played on that sense of exile. It was not to be expected that these men, softened by a birth and an upbringing in a Western culture that at least pretended to tolerance, would be of that same burning, single-minded drive and that matchless experience and ability as his original men, veterans of the streets of Gaza and Beruit. He did not dare show his face in either place, however, not yet, and so had to make do with the clay at hand.

The three of them took to meeting over coffee after work and talking long into the night, the core of a group of young men with shared feelings of dislocation from their homelands, of not fitting into their new worlds whether they'd been born into them or not, and of revulsion of Western mores from the consumption of alcohol to the length of women's skirts to Western, particularly American, imperialism. To them, the invasion of

Iraq was a crusade, nothing less, the first wave of the attempt to subjugate and then obliterate Islam from the world.

Some of the hotheads in the group began speaking outwardly of taking direct action, of targeting local unbelievers for retribution. "The Jews," someone said, and someone else laughed and said, "Are there any Jews left in Germany?" Akil said nothing to encourage them, but neither did he say anything to discourage them, maintaining a silence in which the others read what they wished to read. Incidents of broken windows and assaults soon followed, with a great deal of boastful swaggering after the fact. When no repercussions were forthcoming, a Muslim woman who was seen talking to a German shopkeeper was beaten on the street, and a Protestant church with a woman priest was vandalized.

Akil used the resulting hubbub to suggest that he, Yussuf, and Yaqub begin to meet elsewhere. They agreed. Another man, Basil ben Hasn, overheard and volunteered to join them. Yussuf and Yaqub made him welcome and Akil concealed his displeasure. He didn't like Basil. The young man listened too much and spoke too little, making it difficult to see into his heart. And he was from Jordan, a nation notorious for collaborating with the United States. Bin Laden was not altogether wrong in his distrust of them, they had betrayed too many fighters to the West, some of whom Akil had known personally, and some of whom were now rotting in Guantanamo Bay.

And one of whom had very probably betrayed his master.

If he was wary of enemy action, he was far more alert to the possibility of action by his so-called friends. So, instead of moving their meeting to his living room and giving his fixed location away to anyone who might be interested enough to follow them, they moved to another coffeehouse at the edge of the neighborhood. It was far enough away from the first one to separate themselves from the first establishment's patrons, but close enough that when a week later the riot began they heard the noise from five streets away and ran to investigate.

It was a scene of chaos, drifts of tear gas making their eyes water, men shouting, women screaming, police with riot shields striking at everyone within reach of their clubs. With a faint shock Akil realized that their intent was to contain the inhabitants of the coffee shop where he had first begun to meet with his recruits. The line of officers tightened, one bloody Muslim head at a time. When someone fell, they were dragged away and tossed into the back of a police van. One of the victims was Rashid's new wife, her veil twisted in a tumble of long black hair, her face bruised and bloody. Akil wondered what she was doing out so late, and resolutely banished the memories of Adara the sight brought to mind.

The police line re-formed and stepped slowly but inexorably forward. "But why are they attacking the coffee shop?" Yussuf said.

There were other policemen there, too, Akil realized belatedly, not in uniform but unmistakable nonetheless. Americans, many Americans in cheap suits and bright ties, and Interpol, he thought, or at least representatives of some European security force.

It was time to call in reinforcements. Akil found a discarded bottle and threw it as hard as he could.

The bottle hit the back of one of the helmets, hard enough to cause the policeman wearing it to stumble to his knees. The line broke and turned to see where the new attack was coming from. By this time the gathering crowd behind Akil and his friends were screaming and shouting insults, and they took to his example with enthusiasm. A rain of objects, including rocks, cobblestones, bottles, and cans, hammered down on hastily raised riot shields. The rain increased to a hail, and by the time the hail became a storm the police line had regrouped and begun to advance at a well-disciplined trot.

"Come on!" Akil said, and led his three companions on an agile, serpentine dance through the crowd. At the corner he said, "Split up! Yussuf and Yaqub that way! Basil, with me!" He didn't wait to see if they obeyed; he grabbed Basil's arm and sprinted down an alley, around another corner, and up a street. Basil had shrugged free of his grip and was a pace ahead of Akil. He saw that the boy was laughing.

"This way!" Akil said.

"But that's back to the riot!"

"I know a different way! Follow me!"

At the top of the street the noise of the riot, which had been decreasing, began to increase again. There were the sounds of metal crunching as cars were overturned, the glass of storefronts shattering, the shouts of men, the screams of women and the cries of children, the orders of police commanders bellowed in the vain hope they would be heard above the cacophony.

Akil turned toward it and increased his pace so that he pulled ahead. This time there was no hesitation; Basil's feet thudded behind him. At the corner at the top of a little hill Akil stopped without warning, turned to his right, and stuck out a foot. Basil tripped over it and as he fell forward Akil grabbed the back of his jacket and the seat of his pants and assisted his headlong hurtle into the crowd running up the hill. It parted to let him sprawl on the pavement at the feet of advancing policemen with riot shields and clubs.

In one smooth movement Akil continued his turn and reversed course, gaining on the leading edge of the fleeing, screaming crowd until he was able to duck down an alley, another, a third, emerging finally blocks away. He smoothed his hair, steadied his breathing, and walked at a sedate pace back to his one-room flat.

He got out his small, shabby suitcase and began to fill it with slow and deliberate movements. There was time. Yussuf and Yaqub would take extra care in returning. If they returned at all, if they chose to follow him.

They would. After all, he had, and they were as he had been once, young, callow, untried, searching for something to give their lives purpose and meaning, a way to leave something behind, a path that would take them to glory. Any and all of the above. His mind filled with memories of another leave-taking, years ago and half a world away, the day he had followed Zarqawi into Afghanistan.

There had been no hesitation on his part, no second thoughts that October in 1999. He left his job and all his belongings, save a few things in a small pack, without so much as a backward glance.

They found a house in Kabul, and Zarqawi began immediately to recruit expatriate Jordanians living in Afghanistan to plan and execute a series of terrorist attacks in Jordan. He kept an attentive Akil at his elbow, watching, learning, in the beginning fitted for no task more arduous than fetching tea from the cafe down the street. Jordan had to be taught not to hold the United States so dear, Zarqawi explained, and the attacks would serve to get and keep their attention.

The following year Zarqawi was given the task of overseeing an al Qaeda camp near Herat. When they arrived, he handed Akil over to the training master with instructions that Akil be taught the full curriculum. "Play no favorites here," the training master was told, and the training master took to this instruction with a zealous and unrelenting enthusiasm.

At the end of that formative year, Akil could route an anonymous email, drive a D6 Caterpillar tractor, and field strip an AK-47, reassemble it, and shoot and hit a moving target. He could create a web site, outrun a platoon of recruits, and send a suicide bomber out on his mission with words stirring enough that the young man-and sometimes the young woman-believed absolutely that paradise was waiting on the other side of their trigger finger. He could hijack a bus, a train, an airplane. He could kidnap an uncooperative Pakistani city official right out of his Peshawar office in broad daylight. He could negotiate terms for his release, and he could kill him if such terms were not forthcoming, or even unsatisfactory.

Yes, he could kill. Of all the skills he learned that year in the camp near Herat, it was his most difficult and ultimately his proudest achievement.

His first was a Reuters journalist traveling in an area still controlled by the Taliban, with whom Zarqawi had very close ties. The journalist had been filing uncomfortably accurate stories about the Taliban's renascent activities that were appearing in newspapers all over the world. Alerted to his presence, Zarqawi declared that here was an obvious agent of the Central Intelligence Agency and sent Akil and six trained veterans after him with his blessing.

It was almost absurdly easy, a simple roadblock that stopped the jeep and extracted the driver and the translator. Both, aware of the reality of life in Afghanistan at that time, were white and shaking. Akil filmed the journalist bound and gagged in front of a two-day-old issue of the Independent News Pakistan and sent the driver off with it, trembling with relief.

The journalist, a middle-aged white man thick through the waist and addicted to Marlboro cigarettes, was Canadian, spoke English and French, and was at first philosophical at his capture. No ideologue, his view of the world and its leaders was sanguine and cynical and very amusing, and Akil quite enjoyed his company while they waited for the negotiations to play out. Ransom was demanded, and refused. A deadline passed. When AMI, properly masked, shot the translator on camera, in front of the journalist, the journalist was shocked and disbelieving. Conversation ceased. AMI regretted the necessity, not least because conversation ceased afterward.

When the second deadline passed and AMI had the journalist dragged before the camera, squat and malevolent on its tripod, under the impetus of sudden inspiration he borrowed a dagger from one of the other men, a sharp curve of silver, the hilt set with semiprecious stones. He turned the camera on, and walked toward the journalist, forced to his knees with his arms twisted behind his back. The journalist swore and began to struggle. One of the men holding him laughed.

AMI could sense their excitement. He went around behind the journalist, knotted a fist in his hair to pull his head back, and looked into the camera lens. "In praise of Allah!"

"Allah!" "Inshallah!" "Allah!" "Death to the infidel! Death to America! Free Palestine!"

"Motherfucker," the journalist said, his voice a growl of hatred, staring up at AMI through narrowed eyes, his teeth bared. "Do it if you're going to and stop preening for the fucking camera."

Akil brought the knife down and in one clean stroke cut the man's throat open from ear to ear. The gush of blood was immediate and immense, turning the hand that held the knife red, flooding the front of the journalist's body and splashing the men holding his arms. The weight of the body tore the wound open further and left Akil holding it up by the journalist's spine. He tossed the body from him and it thumped soddenly to the floor.

Again, he looked straight into the camera's lens. He raised the bloody blade in the bloody hand. "Alhamdulillah!"

The men's cries rose around him. "Alhamdulillah!" "Alhamdulillah!" "Alhamdulillah!"

It was the beginning.

There was a soft knock at the door, and the memory faded for the reality of the flat in Dusseldorf. When he opened the door, he found Yussuf and Yaqub standing there.

"Basil?" Yaqub said.

He shook his head gravely. "They caught up with us. Basil told me he would distract them, and for me to run."

He made mint tea and they toasted the bravery and self-sacrifice of their missing comrade. Yussuf was fervent in a prayer for those who had been hurt and arrested. Yaqub was quieter and a little hesitant, regarding Akil with wide, troubled eyes.

Akil took no outward notice. It was their first taste of action. There had to be reaction of some sort. He smiled to himself. It was a law of physics.

When their glasses were empty Akil began again to pack. They watched him in silence until Yussuf said tentatively, "You are leaving us?"

"It has become too dangerous for me to stay," Akil said. He sorted through a selection of shirts and tucked them neatly into his case.

"Where will you go?" Yussuf said.

"Somewhere else," Akil said.

"But where?" Yaqub said.

"And to do what?" Yussuf said, the one Akil had always thought the superior in intellect.

"To continue my work," Akil said. He sorted through the papers in his desk. None in a name anyone would recognize, so he left them. He pulled out the German passport in the name of Dandin Gandhi he had bought in Barcelona and deliberately ripped it apart, piling the resulting fragments in a large bowl. He lit a match and the three of them watched his photograph melt and reduce to charred ash.

"Your work against the infidel," Yussuf said. "For the greater glory of Islam."

"Yes," Akil said.

Yussuf nodded at Yaqub. "We wish it to be our work as well," Yussuf said. "We will go with you."

Yaqub looked at once thrilled and frightened, but he didn't contradict his friend.

Akil closed his suitcase and stood it next to the door. He shrugged into his jacket and stood for a moment, looking around the room, checking to see if he'd missed anything. No.

He looked at the young men. "You understand that if you set out on this path there is no turning back."

Yussuf met his eyes steadily, without flinching. Yaqub was breathing a little faster than normal, his color high. He shifted from one foot to the other, once starting at a sound from the street.

Akil always felt bound by honor to give them more than Zarqawi had given him. His face was serious, his voice grave. Their eyes widened and they glanced at each other before looking back at him. "You will leave behind family, friends, everything you have ever known. You will be hunted by policemen of every nation, always on the move, often hungry, always tired, never again knowing a night's peace, and at the end only death."

"But a glorious death," Yussuf said quickly.

"Glorious indeed," Akil said. The rest came by rote. He had said it so many times he was hard put to it to infuse the words with any conviction. "We will either convert the infidel to the true faith, make them our slaves, and have sole dominion over the earth, or we will put them all to death. If we ourselves die in this endeavor, Allah will take us as his own, and we will be most richly rewarded in the afterlife."

"Seventy-two virgins for each of us," Yaqub said, and nudged his friend.

Akil pretended not to hear this. As useful for recruiting suicide bombers as it might be, he himself doubted the seventy-two virgins. "But all this you have had from the imam, and you are men of faith, so I need not repeat it to you here. My concern is what happens between now and then. It is not an easy task, what you wish to do."

"We will follow you," Yussuf said immediately.

"Today? Now? Are you this moment prepared to walk behind me out this door and never look back?"

"We are," they said in chorus. Yussuf walked to the door and opened it for Akil.

He didn't look back, but their footsteps echoed in his ears.

Munro was ten weeks out of Miami, trolling for go fasts before they headed back to port, when they spotted their first northbound freighter of the patrol. "Has she seen us yet, XO?"

The XO had binoculars glued to his eyes, feet spread to keep his balance in the slow swell rocking the ship. "I don't think so, Captain. Oh. Yeah." A long sigh. "Now they have."

"Damn it." Cal looked over his shoulder. "Launch both boats."

The coxswains, Garon and Myers, had been standing at his heels, waiting for the word. Their boarding teams had long since dressed out and were standing by the two small boats. "Aye, sir," they said in unison, and vanished down the ladder, probably afraid he'd scrub the boarding. Any day they didn't get their hands on a small boat was a bad day for them.

Although none of the crew relished the thought of taking migrants aboard. Most of them had probably been seasick by now and it was more than likely that the sanitation facilities were nonexistent. The last time they'd had to take on migrants the ship had stunk for a week afterward. He stifled a sigh. "Try to raise her again, Ops."

"Aye, Captain." Behind him Cal heard Lieutenant Terrell, the operations officer, key the mike for the marine radio. "Unidentified motor vessel, this is the USCG cutter Munro. Heave to, heave to, I say again, heave to, heave to."

Silence on the radio. They weren't responding. Cal heard the whine of the winch on the davit and went out on the starboard bridge wing. The hull of the orange rigid inflatable had barely touched the water before Garon started the engine and the wake boiled up behind the stern. The crew released shackles fore and aft, the sea painter was away, and Garon gunned the engine and the small boat pulled away from the Munro's hull in a wide arc, wake a white froth in a blue sea.

Cal went back inside the bridge and met the eyes of the XO coming in from the port wing. A quick nod told him the portside boat was safely away.

He squinted at the sky, a calm blue with a few cumulus clouds on the horizon, reflected in the glassy surface of the sea. At least they wouldn't have weather to contend with.

He returned to the bridge. Taffy was looking through his binoculars. Cal picked up his own and went to stand next to him. "How many?"

"Can't tell yet. There's about half a dozen people on deck. They say they're fishing but they've got no gear in the water or showing on deck."

Cal adjusted his binoculars and zeroed in on the tattered flag fluttering off the freighter's stern. A crew member had bent it on just moments before. "Haitian."

"Yeah."

"So they say."

"Yeah."

Over his shoulder Cal said, "Where are we, BMC?"

"Forty-two miles south of Providenciales Island, Captain," Bosun's Mate Chief Guilmartin said promptly, without looking down at the radar. "About a hundred and fifty miles north of Haiti."

Cal exchanged a brief glance with the XO. They had yet to take a migrant on board and already the crew was figuring out how long it would take to get them back to their country of origin and, more important, off Munro. Cal didn't blame them. Freighters smuggling migrants were all about the transportation and not at all about the hygiene.

Taffy muffled a curse.

"What?" Cal raised his glasses again.

When first sighted, the eighty-foot freighter had had maybe half a dozen people on deck, but when the white-hulled cutter with the orange stripe angling back down the hull bore down on them people began pouring up on deck. Like all coastal freighters encountered during Caribbean patrols, it was hard to see how this one kept her gunnels above water. She was wooden, her hull flaking paint and riddled with worm, her exhaust so black and her wake so uncertain Cal couldn't see how she'd made it out of whatever harbor she'd sailed from, let alone managed to get twenty miles off Miami Beach.

And now her hold was emptying itself onto her deck, where the sudden weight topside created a dangerously unstable condition on a ship that was already a hazard to navigation.

Inevitably, she began to roll, a little roll at first and then, very quickly, a lot, so that she was shipping water over the sides. They could hear the screams of the frightened passengers on the cutter's bridge. Cal bypassed Ops for the marine radio. "Unknown freighter, unknown freighter, this is the cutter Munro. Stop your people from packing the deck, you're going to capsize."

There was no discernable result and Cal went on the pipe and repeated the message, his voice booming out across the water.

"She must be taking on water," the XO said.

"Boat in that bad of shape, probably got the pumps running all the time. Probably shut them down to go all ahead full when they spotted us." To Terrell he said, "Tell the boats to keep their distance until things quiet down over there, they can't do any good if they get swamped by a bunch of panicked migrants."

Terrell gave the order. The two small boats veered off to idle on either side of the freighter. Seeing this, the people on the freighter began to shout and wave with one arm, flailing for something to hold on to with the other as the freighter's wallows increased in angle and velocity. The crowd on deck continued to increase as more people clawed their way up from below.

They were close enough now that Cal could hear the shouts and screams. Again, inevitably, a man fell overboard, screaming, followed by a second, then a little girl. Three people jumped in after her, and then a rain of bodies overboard, too many to count.

The freighter rolled heavily to port and swamped the deck. The rushing water swept half the remaining people topside overboard. Relieved of their weight, the dilapidated little freighter swung even more rapidly to starboard, probably further impelled by water rolling back and forth belowdecks, as textbook a display of the free surface effect that Cal, watching helplessly half a mile off their starboard beam, had ever seen. She rolled again and this time she kept going, all the way over, water swamping the gunnel, lines, buckets, boat hooks sliding down to the gunnel and over the side, the house disappearing beneath the waves, until at last she was keel up, there to display a soft-looking hull playing host to an entire biosphere of seaweed.

And people everywhere in the water, screaming and splashing frantically and grabbing for each other. The few who could swim struck out away from the sinking ship and began to tread water. Some of them were already being picked up by the small boats, who had moved in and were tossing PFDs to the people in the water.

"Son of a bitch," Cal said. "Dead slow ahead. Pipe Doc and all EMTs and stretcher bearers on deck now."

"Dead slow ahead, aye."

"Doc's already on deck, sir."

"Every free hand on deck as well."

"Already there, sir."

"XO, get down there and direct traffic. Ops, call the beach and bring them up to speed. And call the mess deck and tell the senior chief that we've got what looks like about two hundred extra for lunch."

"Two hundred extra for lunch, aye, sir."

"Damn it!"

Chisum rarely swore, and then only mildly, but it was enough to make his personal assistant raise her eyebrows. "Bad news?"

He looked up from the report and said with feeling, "Sometimes probable cause really gets in the way."

"Yes, it does, and I thought that was why the previous administration did away with it in these cases. Also habeas corpus and-"

"Thank you, Melanie, that will be all."

"Certainly, sir." Melanie swept out, and he couldn't help it, he had to watch. Women nowadays had forgotten how to walk, or maybe they just didn't care, striding along like they were in a race, all trace of what had once been an inviting softness to a man's hand long since worked ruthlessly off at the gym and leaving something perilously close to the stringy haunch of a greyhound behind.

Melanie was a throwback. A pocket Venus of a blonde in her midthirties, she wore heels and pencil skirts topped by a variety of soft sweaters in even softer colors, and every day he sent up a prayer of thanks to whoever had assigned her to him when Birdy had left. A forty-year veteran with an institutional memory that went back to the agency's roots in the OSS, Birdy was irreplaceable, but even Birdy was subject to the march of time. When she retired in October, Melanie had replaced her, and Patrick had suffered so instant and overwhelming an attraction that he had hidden it behind a curt, distant manner.

Even if every fiber of his being urged him to throw her down on his desk each time she walked in his door. "Whoa there, down, boy," he said beneath his breath. She was too good at what she did to treat with anything less than respect, so he locked his fantasies into a steel vault with a fail-safe lock and doggedly returned to the report.

Isa or someone bearing a striking resemblance to him had been spotted in Auckland, of all places. The source reported he had it on good authority that Isa was recruiting from among the Maoris for the purposes of launching a terrorist attack from down under.

Which was about as reliable as any humint his agents were fielding nowadays, he thought glumly. Everyone was hedging their bets, scarred from too many years of being slapped down for intelligence the previous administration either disbelieved or suppressed in pursuit of their almighty crusade. Except they didn't call it a crusade. They'd learned that much.

There were times when he thought he ought to finally register to vote.

There were others when he looked at the people in office and the ones running to replace them, and was overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness and impending doom.

Still, he could not afford to overlook any lead, and while the hard intel was grinding to a temporary halt the rumor mill was hitting high gear. Along with the sighting in York, he had reports of additional sightings in London, Darfur (from a recently evacuated aid worker who did some freelance work for the agency on the side, and whose product had never been all that reliable), Baghdad (at the site of an IED resulting in three killed and which he knew was nonsense because Isa would never have been so careless as to flaunt himself at the scene of one of his own attacks), Toronto (which frightened him; he'd sent a rocket back to the agent who had submitted it, requesting an immediate re-interview and a more thorough canvas of other possible witnesses), Bern (which he almost believed, given how well funded the al Qaeda cells were and how scrupulously they looked after their money), Moscow, and the list went on and on. Isa had been sighted fifty-three times in the last six months, three times in three different cities on three different continents on the same day.

Boeing was good, but they weren't that good.

The phone rang. "The director on line one," Melanie said, sounding fiuttery Patrick had noticed most women did around Kallendorf. Guy looked like a bull elephant and had about as much finesse but he had to beat the women off with a stick. Chisum smoothed back his thinning hairline, sucked in his potbelly, and picked up the phone. "Chisum here."

"I have your report in front of me," Kallendorf said without preamble. "Anything to add?"

Chisum thought swiftly, and then decided there was no margin for defense. It was what it was. "No, sir."

"When did we last talk about this Isa?"

By now he knew that the director remembered exactly when Chisum had briefed him on the terrorist, the day, the hour, probably down to the color of Chisum's tie. "At the annual JTTF briefing, sir."

"That's almost a year ago, Patrick. What have you done for me lately?"

"It's not like he's posting his schedule on the Internet, sir."

"No, it's not," Kallendorf agreed, a little too easily. "Maybe he's retired."

Patrick found himself on his feet without knowing how he got there. He forced himself to speak calmly. "Fanatical terrorists don't retire, sir. Usually they are killed. Rarely they are captured. They don't retire."

"Then he's been killed or captured. I think it's time to reallocate some of our intelligence-gathering capabilities to more worthy targets. Convince me otherwise."

Chisum took a deep breath. "Sir, Isa was Zarqawi's right-hand man and his closest confidant. He is widely believed to have pioneered Zarqawi's use of the Internet for banking, communications, and recruiting. I can definitely place him in Diisseldorf in June."

"Sez who?"

"I-acquired the information through a third party," Chisum said carefully.

"You trust this source?"

"Absolutely, sir."

Kallendorf grunted. "Which means we paid for it. I don't like buying intelligence, Patrick."

"I don't think anyone's going to give it to us for love, sir," Chisum said before he could stop himself.

There was a moment of silence, followed by a booming laugh. "What was Isa doing in Dusseldorf?" Kallendorf said, still chuckling.

"Recruiting," Chisum said baldly.

"Identify anyone?"

"Two, before Isa made our informant."

"Made him, did he? What'd he do to him?"

"Started a riot, and then threw him into the advancing line of riot police."

"No shit. Guy's got style, gotta give him that."

Chisum said nothing.

"Our snitch must have survived," Kallendorf said.

"Must have," Chisum said dryly. He sat back down. "According to him, the two recruits were young Muslim men, both German-born of immigrant Lebanese parents, both with degrees in engineering."

"What the hell is it with al Qaeda and engineering degrees? You'd think they wouldn't let you into the gang without one."

Chisum shrugged. "It's probably a lot like anything else. It's not what you know, it's who."

"What did they say about Isa?"

"Everyone we spoke to described Isa as a quiet man who socialized primarily in the coffeehouses with men his own age or younger."

"He gay?"

"Hasn't been any rumor of that so far. His boss says he was a reliable and competent if undistinguished employee."

"No proselytizing in the workplace, eh?"

"No, sir."

"We got any idea of what he's planning?"

"We know he's been bouncing money from bank accounts in Switzerland to all over Europe, both the Americas, and the Caribbean. I think Hong Kong, too, although the Chinese are even cagier than the Swiss about giving up information."

"Okay, mostly Western banks, then probably a Western target."

"Considering that, and considering also that we know Isa went to school in the West, and that both of his German recruits are fluent in English, yes, sir."

"So either us or the Brits."

"Yes."

"You talked to them?"

"MI5? Frequentiy."

"Talk to 'em some more. Any line on these recruits?"

"Yussuf al-Dagma and Yaqub Sadiq. They vanished from Dusseldorf the same day Isa did. We talked to their families, their friends, their coworkers. Only Yussuf al-Dagma's family had met Isa, who was at that time using the name Dandin Gandhi."

"Gandhi," Kallendorf said. "First Jesus, and now Gandhi. This guy got a martyr complex or what?"

"Yes, sir. Their description matches the few eyewitness descriptions we have."

"They were cooperative?"

"I'm told they are very worried about their son. The family has become pretty acculturated, and reasonably secular. They said that al-Dagma has been obsessing over Israel and Iraq, and that two years ago he started going to the mosque. We talked to the local imam, who was very cagey, but our people on the ground say he's been doing a little inciting to riot on the side."

"What was this riot about?"

"Nothing to do with the imam, not this time. Someone tipped off the local cops that there was a terrorist cell meeting regularly at a coffee shop frequented by young Muslim men. The informant who was trying to get close to Isa, once he was up and moving around again, did a little investigating and found out that Yaqub Sadiq had been sleeping with a married woman, also Muslim. As I'm sure you know, that's a beheading offense under Islamic law. The agent thinks the husband made an anonymous call."

" 'Hello, 911? This guy is banging my wife, so come on down and arrest all these bin Ladenites hanging out at the local Starbucks where my wife's lover buys his cappuccino'?"

"Uh, essentially, yes, sir."

"And they bought that?"

"I don't believe he mentioned his wife's lover, sir," Patrick said in a wooden voice. "We are at present speculating as to the exact occurrence of events."

"Holy shit," the director said, unheeding. "The Germans must hire their cops from the lowest common denominator up."

"Yes, sir," Patrick said. He was determined to cling to his point, no matter how difficult Kallendorf made it. "This could be good news for us, however."

"What, that German cops are simpletons?"

"No, sir. If Sadiq joined Isa's group as a means of escaping the consequences of sleeping with someone else's wife, it means that he may not be a true believer, he may just have wanted to get out of Dodge. If that's so, and if I can find him, we may have a way in."

"Any luck with that?"

"We canvassed the airport and the train stations with photos of the two. Nothing yet. They must have driven out of town, flown out of somewhere else. We're working with Interpol on that, but…" Chisum shrugged. "It was six months ago, and most airport rentacops can't remember who they screened in the last five minutes. And Isa never leaves much of a trail. He's patient, and he's cunning. I've got head shots of the recruits and I've distributed them to the heads of security in every American, Canadian, and Mexican airport, FBI, Interpol, and of course agency-wide. We're looking. It's only a matter of time before we find them."

"And when we find them, we find Isa?"

Chisum battled with temptation, and won. "That's not a given, sir. He communicates almost exclusively by email, at least after the initial recruitment. If he continues operating the way he operated in Baghdad, he will recruit them, work out a plan for them, and then he'll cut them loose except for email contact." He diverted from a lifelong self-imposed tact and discretion for a moment to say bitterly, "Son of a bitch won't even use a cell phone."

"I don't blame him," Kallendorf said, "have you looked at the sigint center lately? You could lock yourself into a safe with four-foot-thick walls and drop the safe into a thousand feet of water and they could still hear you whisper sweet nothings into that cute little blond secretary's ears. What's her name? Melissa?"

"Melanie."

"Melanie, that's right. Always smells so good. Love that in a woman." Silence. "Will he stop at two recruits?"

"No, sir. The average al Qaeda cell isn't large, but it's usually around ten or twelve people."

"Looking for more of the same?"

"Yes, sir. Young disaffected Muslim men, middle or even upper middle class, well-educated, often unemployed but not always. The preference is for unmarried but it's not a requirement. Most of them are pretty homely, too, which I think is deliberate."

"Can't get a girl, so give them a bomb instead?"

"Freud would be proud of you, sir."

Fortunately for Patrick, Kallendorf didn't hear that last remark. "And this Isa is the only al Qaeda contact the others will meet."

"Yes, sir."

"Cut off the head, the snake dies."

"With al Qaeda it's more like a hydra than a snake, sir."

"Huh. Hydra. Good one. I'll have to remember that. Yeah. All right, Patrick, carry on. But I want some hard data on this asshole soonest, and I want his ass in the bag sooner than that." Click.

Chisum replaced the receiver carefully back in its cradle.

The door opened and he looked up. "Everything all right with the director?" Melanie said.

"Everything's just fine," Chisum said.

"Anything you need to run up to his office, you just ask."

"Thank you, Melanie," he said.

"I was just going down the hall for some coffee," she said. "Would you like some, Mr. Chisum?"

"I would, thank you, Melanie."

"Be right back, then." She smiled and closed the door gently behind her.

It might have been the first time he wished he'd gone for the director's job. It wouldn't be the last.

"Why me?" Kenai said. It was more of a demand than a question, but at least then no one could accuse her of whining. "Why not Bill, or Mike?"

"Thanks a bunch, there, Kenai," Mike said.

"He's a Muslim, Rick," Kenai said, keeping her eyes on their commander. He was the one who had to be convinced. "He's not going to like having a woman for a babysitter. Think of how it'll play back home, a woman, an inferior instructing him. They'll see it on television every night, and he'll know it. He's not going to like it."

Her voice ended on something perilously close to a plea. Rick, leaning against a desk, his arms folded, frowned at the floor and said nothing. The rest of the Carnivore Crew watched and waited. There was no effort, individually or together, to take her part. She couldn't find it in her heart to blame them. None of them wanted to be the babysitter, either.

"It's your first time on orbit, too," Joel said in a tone that brooked no argument. "You'll know what to keep him away from."

"How about we keep him away from the shuttle altogether?" Laurel said brightly.

Joel pretended he hadn't heard her. He consulted the omnipresent clipboard. "I think that's all for today. Press conference on Monday, don't forget, clean flight suits all around."

The door closed behind him. "Nice try, Nanook," Laurel said.

"But no cigar," Mike Williams said.

Kenai gave a half-hearted shrug. "Worth the effort. I thought maybe when he didn't show for the Vomit Comet training in March…" Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head.

Rick looked up. "Somebody's got to wet-nurse him, Kenai. Sorry you drew the short straw."

There was an almost imperceptible relaxation of tension around the room. That was that. "Okay," Kenai said, dismissing the sheik for more important matters, "you've all got the updates on the robot arm modifications? Good. It'll add about twenty minutes to each deployment, a small price to pay for the increase in sensitivity. She's handling like something out of Robert Heinlein now anyway."

"Unless you're the one EVA, holding on to five thousand pounds of satellite with your fingertips," Mike pointed out.

"Bitch, bitch, bitch," Bill said. "You'd kill anyone who tried to take the job away from you, Gator."

Bill had a predilection for nicknames, and he'd called Kenai Nanook from the first day he met her, since she was from Alaska and "nanook" was the local word for polar bear. Mike was from Florida and he had a long, wide, flat nose that naturally led to Bill calling him Alligator. When the secretaries over at admin got to hear of it, they were the Carnivore Crew from that day forward. After that, the deluge. Now Laurel from California was Condor, Rick from Washington State was Killer Whale, Killer for short, and Bill from Minnesota was Wolverine, partly because he was from Minnesota but mostly because he was a huge X-Men fan. It didn't hurt that he looked a little like Hugh Jackman, only black.

A week later, the sheik in question arrived for an introductory visit. He looked like Disney's Aladdin, only older and more arrogant, and from the first he proved to be labor intensive. Kenai was right, he wasn't happy with a woman as his partner, and he said so. Joel, to his credit, ignored his hints that someone of the sheik's stature in the Islamic community and his family connections and their immense wealth and political profile and blah blah blah really ought to be taken in tow by the mission's commander. The director of flight operations nipped that suggestion in the bud immediately.

Joel was probably afraid of what Rick would do to him if he did, for good reason. Rick did not suffer fools gladly, and people who inflicted fools upon him had been known to rue the day, if not resign on the spot.

The sheik had various other concerns, usually delivered to Kenai in an imperious voice as he looked down his very long nose. For one thing, he had seen photos of previous crews in space and he'd noticed that often the crew was wearing shorts. He trusted Kenai would not be orbiting the earth half-naked.

Kenai exchanged a glance with Laurel, who happened to be loitering within earshot. "I'm sorry, sir, I just assumed…"

"Assumed what?" the sheik said loftily.

"That you had been briefed." She did her best to look as if she were reluctant to be the one to bring him the bad news. "This mission…"

His brow puckered. "Yes?"

"Well, sir, this mission will be accomplished totally in the nude."

If Laurel hadn't burst out laughing he might have taken this horror straight to Joel, but as it was he didn't speak directly to Kenai for three days, which at least proved he wasn't entirely stupid.

But it was yet another unwanted distraction in the now only eleven months leading up to launch. Kenai gritted her teeth and tried to be more accessible to the royal pain in the ass. She grudged the valuable chunks of time he ate up, but it was better for her to intercept any further problems before they got to the commander.

And let's face it, Bill was right, she would have killed anyone who tried to take the job from her. There was nothing, no irritation she would not suffer to pass that magic mile marker of fifty miles up that would turn her silver astronaut pin to gold and make her a bona fide astronaut.

Flight was all she had ever wanted, from the moment she was four when her father had lifted her into his lap, put her hands on the stick of his Cessna 172, and performed a simple right bank. She'd agitated for a shot at the right seat from the time she was eight, but her father wouldn't let her try until her feet reached the pedals without assistance.

She had almost a hundred hours in dual before she had her license, which she got the day she turned sixteen, a full six months before she bothered to get her driver's license. She only got around to getting her driver's license because she got tired of waiting on rides to the airport.

She graduated from high school a year early and seven years later was out the other side of a BA in English-she'd always liked to read, and she'd noticed that the ability to write simple declarative sentences was a serious asset in the world of aviation, especially when dealing with the FAA-and an MS in electrical engineering. By the time she was a sophomore in college she was qualified to fly commercial and put herself through school flying Twin Otters and then Beechcraft 1900 for Era Aviation between Homer and Anchorage on weekends. Upon graduation she went to work for Boeing in systems design. Shortly thereafter she was test-flying jets right off the drafting table, in between times taking her doctorate, also in electrical engineering. Her doctoral thesis was an overview of the evolution of electrical systems during the design and operation of the space shuttle, and ended with the proposal of a radical new design for the next generation of manned space flight vehicles that was energy efficient without reducing power. It was well written and relatively easy even for a layman to understand. It was what got her the job offer from NASA.

The goal had always been to fly in space. With no apology and no regrets, she figured she'd read too much Heinlein at an impressionable age and never recovered. It wasn't that they didn't know better now, no Venusian dragons or three-legged Martians, but the knowledge did not quench her thirst to go see with her own eyes.

It was an all-consuming passion, one that had cost her two good men and many more friends. She didn't regret the loss. The lovers and the friends wanted too much of her time, time taken away from the left seat. Cal wasn't the only man she'd ever been with who understood that, but he was the only one who was, so far, willing to accept it as part of the price of her companionship.

It was also the Challenger. It wasn't something she talked about a lot because the few times she had she'd received some very odd looks. It wasn't that she wanted to ride a rocket and have it explode beneath her. She didn't suffer from a death wish, she had every intention of living to be as old as she possibly could and then tack on another twenty-five years to read all the books she'd missed when she'd been focused on technical manuals. It was that the Challenger had left shoes to fill, and her feet itched to step into them.

Her father had been all for her applying to the astronaut program. Her mother, a stay-at-home mom, had never quite forgiven her for embracing such a dangerous occupation, especially since she was an only child, but she loved Kenai and supported her nevertheless. She had no family distractions, and after her two abortive attempts at romance no relationship distractions, either.

Sometimes she worried a little that she was turning into a drone. But mostly she was excited and challenged by her profession, a siren song that lured her, enticed her, charmed her, enslaved her. Call it the call to adventure. The Power of Myth had been assigned reading in her modern lit class. She'd liked it well enough, but one thing she had never understood, either in the text or in any of the subsequent novels they read and applied it to, and that was the hero's refusal of the call. She could not conceive of a day when adventure called and she wasn't the first to step up to answer.

Although the month Sheik Jilal al-Hussein spent with the Carnivore Crew did test her resolve. He seemed to take space travel as his birthright, a privilege that required no reciprocal sweat equity. He was by turns dismissive, contemptuous, and downright rude, and always and ever arrogant. He questioned everything, from the shuttle emergency escape procedures to how to work the toilet, which, to be fair, was a procedure that tested them all. He demanded a list of the food items that went into their on-orbit menu, searching the ingredients for pork products, and he looked mutinous at the news that he would have to hang his sleep sack mere feet away from two female infidels, neither of whom were his wives.

The less said about his delayed ride on the Vomit Comet, the better. He refused to go on a second, for which the test director of the Reduced Gravity Program sent the Carnivore Crew his profound thanks.

"The Reduced Gravity Program?" Cal said, grinning.

"NASA-speak for riding simulated weightlessness maneuvers in the KC-135."

"At which the sheik did not perform well?"

"At which the sheik outpuked Barfin' Jake Garn. We v/ere all kinda hoping he'd make himself too sick to ride. If he's that seasick on orbit, it's going to be seriously uncomfortable for all of us, even Rick, who's been up twice and never been sick."

Cal understood. In rough weather on Munro, all it took was the smell of one seasick crewman to infect his entire berthing area. "Who picked this guy anyway?" Cal said.

"We're launching his company's satellite." Kenai's voice was muffled, speaking as she was from a prone position on the sand. Cal was anointing her back with sunscreen, paying deliberate attention to every square inch of exposed flesh. Every now and then she let out an appreciative groan.

Munro was at the dock in Miami under Taffy's watchful eye. They had both managed to wedge a free weekend into their schedules, and Cal 's father had a friend whose brother-in-law knew someone who owned a luxury condo on South Padre Island who was more than happy to loan it to the senator's son for a weekend. Probably there was a legislative trade-off involved but that was his father's business and the less Cal knew about it the better. At any rate it was the end of the month, almost the end of the season, and the beach was almost deserted.

Kenai had temporarily handed the sheik off to Wolverine, who accepted the assignment with suspicious enthusiasm. Bill was a superb pilot, probably the best one in their class of astronauts-even the other pilots said so-and Kenai had a feeling that the sheik was on for his training ride in the backseat of a T-38. She hoped for Bill's sake it didn't prove as stressful as the Vomit Comet. "When's your next patrol?"

"We're scheduled to leave November fourth. Probably be a week or two after that."

"Sounds like a shuttle launch."

He laughed. "It's a forty-year-old ship. Lots of moving parts that weren't necessarily designed to work together. I've got a good engineer officer this time around, and he's determined we're not leaving the dock until all systems are go."

"Good for him."

"And then of course the crew has to get their grocery shopping done."

"You don't feed them?"

"We feed them, and we feed them pretty well, but three months is a long time. Comfort food gets you through it."

She raised her head. "What's your comfort food?"

He ran a suggestive fingertip down her spine. "Hmm, well-"

This time she laughed, and tucked her face back into her arm. "Given my absence," she said, her voice muffled.

"Good tortillas. Corn, not flour. I don't know where he gets them, but Senior orders in these huge green flour tortillas and makes wraps out of them."

"You don't like wraps?"

"I don't like green tortillas."

"Eyew. I don't blame you."

"I make chips out of the ones I buy. As long as the tomatoes and the cilantro last I make salsa to go with them. Guac if we have avocadoes."

"You go down to the galley?"

"I've got my own. Didn't I show you?"

She'd only been on Munro once, the first time they'd met. By mutual agreement, after that they had met away from both of their worksites. They'd met at her house in Houston, where the astronaut corps had press avoidance down to a fine art, and at his rented penthouse suite in Miami, where the security was as expensive and thorough as his trust fund could make it. He had agreed to borrow his father's Lear for a trip to Alaska after his next patrol and her first deorbital burn, but she had yet to tell her parents she was dating someone again and Cal had yet to bring anyone home. From the outside this might have seemed a little paranoid, but they were both people who valued their privacy. They were also the both of them a little spooked to find someone who fit this well this late in the game, and there was an unspoken agreement not to hex it by inviting anyone else in. They were both grimly aware that the first paparazzi who scored a photo of Senator David Tecumseh Schuyler's fair-haired boy snuggling up to NASA payload specialist Kenai Munro would be set for life.

"What's the mission for this patrol?" she said.

Unseen by her, he made a face. "The usual. Intercepting drug smugglers."

"What happened to that boatload of migrants you picked up on your way in?"

"Repatriated. Immediately. We dropped them at the dock at Port-au-Prince."

"Harsh, after what they went through to get to America."

"At least they lived. They can try again."

She raised her head. "You sound like you're sorry you caught them."

He shrugged and capped the bottle of sunblock. "It's my job. It's what I get paid for. If I don't like it, I can get another."

Her brown eyes were steady on his face. "And if it weren't?"

He stretched out on the towel. "Then, hell yes, let 'em in. They spent their life savings on passage to America, looking for a better life. Nothing our ancestors didn't do, it's why we're here. Those folks on that freighter, they suffered for the chance, bled for it." He thought of the little girl falling overboard when the freighter started to roll. "Some of them died for it. Who the hell am I to bar the door? Who knows what that kind of single-minded drive and determination and willingness to sacrifice would bring to the United States?" He took a swig from his beer. "My father's successor could have been on that boat. We'll never know now."

She put her head back down. "You should run for office."

He swiveled his head to meet her mischievous look. "Hah hah, very funny. Okay, you got me."

She shrugged. "It's the only way to change things."

He pointed a finger at her. "Boats, remember? Why I got into the Coast Guard in the first place? Boats, not Capitol Hill. Suits and ties and three-martini lunches. Always looking for more money to run." He shuddered. "Don't ever say that again. Don't even think it. Never gonna happen. Not until after my first lobotomy, anyway."

"So," she said. "Drugs."

"Drugs," he said. "Immigrant mitigation and search and rescue, too, of course, but mostly we're on the drugs. It's not like we ever catch enough of them to make a difference, but I've got to hand it to us, we're right in there pitching."

"I'm whelmed by your enthusiasm."

Her tone was a nice balance of curiosity and criticism and generated no offense. He capped the bottle and lay down next to her. "It's such a waste of the nation's resources, Kenai. I've got a new support officer and we're running down the budget and Suppo tells me if I don't spend at least a million dollars on fuel every patrol, Munro's not working hard enough. And that's just fuel, and we aren't even paying for that."

"Who is?"

"JIATF. Joint Interagency Task Force. Made up of all the three-letter agencies and then some. They work out of Key West. They're the ones who put the C-130s and the P-2s in the air and find the go fasts-or don't find them-and send us the intel. And we go get 'em. Or sometimes we do. Most times we don't. It's a big ocean."

She was silent for a moment. "I would think it would be, I don't know, kinda soul-destroying to be constantly not finding what you're trained to go look for."

He gave a short, unamused laugh. "You could call it that." He sighed. "It's the job, though."

"It's not what I think of when I think of Coasties," she said. "I think of you going to get my father when he wrecked his Cessna. I think of you saving my high school buddy Ole Johanssen when his crab boat went down off Slime Banks. I think of Katrina. The Coasties were the only government agency who had it together after Katrina."

"True." He was aware that his voice had warmed. He had told her a little about his part in Katrina. "I mean, don't get me wrong, it was truly awful, but I felt like we were really making a difference down there. Felt good."

"And this doesn't?"

He shrugged. "The Coast Guard has always intercepted contraband off the nation's coasts, Kenai. We have since before the nation was barely a twinkle in Washington 's eye. Hell, up in your own state, Roaring Mike Healy's Bear was a revenue cutter."

"Why does this seem different to you, then?"

He took a long swallow of beer, thinking. "It's not my business, I know that. I don't make policy, I don't pass legislation, I'm just the cop on the beat, swinging my billy club. But it's such a waste of resources. If someone wants to stuff powder up their nose or shove a needle in their arm, it's stupid but it's their business."

"So you'd decriminalize drugs?"

He thought back to the patrol, to the only time they'd come close to accomplishing what it was that all the might and resources of the United States of America, the greatest nation ever to exist on planet Earth, had sent him to the Caribbean to do.

They had been making what Cal described to Kenai as a gentle and inoffensive course south-southwest when Ops picked up the binoculars and found what appeared to be a small skiff adrift off their port beam. Ops tried to raise them on the radio and got no response. He called Cal to the bridge. Cal, relieved to be taken away from the massive quantity of email in his in-box, responded promptly and examined the boat through the binoculars. It rocked in the swell, its cockpit deserted.

"Let's lower a boat and go take a look," Cal said, which was perfectly within their authority. The disappearance of the boat's crew, always assuming they weren't sacked out below sleeping off the previous day's consumption of alcohol, always a possibility this close to Miami, had to be investigated. The skiff, unmanned and adrift, was a hazard to navigation.

They'd been about to launch the helo. "Do we continue the launch, Captain?" Terrell said from flight ops.

Cal hesitated, but only for a moment. "Launch the small boat first."

"Aye, Captain."

A boarding team was assembled, BM2 Morelli's legendary dimples clearly visible from the bridge wing two decks up when he straddled the coxswain's seat. "Load, lower, and launch," Cal said into the radio. The boat deck captain shouted, "Boat moving!" The winch on the davit whined, the small boat settled into the water with barely a splash, fore and aft shackles and sea painter were released, Morelli goosed the engines, and they were off.

Cal watched them go, not without envy. He remembered those first halcyon days after he qualified in LE. He had always been first in line for any boarding party. The worst thing about moving up in rank was that you left all the fun jobs behind.

"We never get to play with the big toys anymore," a voice said at his elbow, echoing his thoughts, and he turned to see his XO staring after the small boat with an exaggeratedly mournful gaze. He laughed dutifully, and they both went back inside to monitor the radio traffic. "Anything yet?" he said to Ops.

Terrell shook his head. Next to him, Velasquez, the ET3 who doubled as one of their translators, spoke into the mike in Spanish, hailing the drifting boat. He waited. They all waited. No response.

Cal looked around and noticed that the bridge, already crowded with the flight ops crew, had become even more so in the few moments he'd been out on the wing. BMC Gilmartin was behind the nav table, pretending to instruct BM3 Stamm on the finer points of charting the next way-point. HCO Harris was there, pretending she hadn't signed off on Suppo qualifying as helo control officer the day before. Suppo, a chunky chief warrant officer with merry eyes, pushed his glasses up his nose and raised an eyebrow at Cal, who repressed an answering smile, mostly because Harris was watching. EMO Olson was on the port wing, watching the small boat approach the skiff through binoculars, ET1 Jones behind the nav eval station, so they were more than covered if any of the electronics pooped out.

Taffy looked at him. They didn't have to say it out loud. The gang's all here, and then some. It had been a long patrol with very little action, and nobody wanted to miss out.

They all wore looks of suppressed excitement. He himself hated this part. Each second seemed to tick by more slowly than the last, and he had to rigorously suppress an active imagination that pictured hostiles on the skiff erupting from belowdecks and opening fire on his boarding team.

He knew that due to rigorous and continuous training his crew was ready for almost anything they might encounter. He knew that in thirty-five years of intercepting narcotics shipments in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean only once, one time, had a uniformed member of the U.S. Coast Guard had a weapon pulled on him. He knew that in that instance the Coastie had been able to talk the asshole down without drawing his own weapon. He knew that the smugglers were very well aware of what would happen to them if they were caught with automatic weapons on the open sea. He knew that they also had a very lively appreciation of the penalty for injuring or killing an American citizen, and that they were well aware- none better-how effective the helo on Munro s flight deck was at stopping go fasts from, well, going fast. Or, for that matter, going. On occasion, when the smugglers saw one of them coming, they stopped their boat and literally put their hands in the air. Once one of Munro's small boats had reached the scene of a go fast disabled by the helo's.50-caliber to find the go fast's crew lined up on the deck, all of them with their bags packed and ready to transfer to the cutter.

None of this mattered. Cal still sweated out the time between the approach of the small boat and the boarding team leader's first report.

"Munro, Mark 1, ops normal."

"Mark 1, Munro, ops normal, aye," Ops said into the mike.

Cal raised his binoculars. The small boat had closed to within a mile of the skiff and was making a big, slow circle. They all jumped when the radio erupted into life. "Munro, Mark 1, we see four new Yamaha 200s on the stern of the vessel!"

Before Ops could reply, through the binoculars Cal could see three men appear suddenly in the well of the vessel. A wake boiled up from its stern.

"Holy shit," someone said.

"Set go fast red!"

"Go fast red, aye, Captain!" Behind him he heard BM3 Stamm pipe, "Now, set go fast red, set go fast red!"

"Set flight quarters!"

"Now, set flight condition one!" Stamm's voice echoed over the ship so immediately on the heels of the order that Cal knew Stamm had been anticipating it. "Close all doors and hatches! Remove all hats topside! The smoking lamp is out!"

"Munro, Mun 1, ops normal!"

"Mun 1, Munro, ops normal, aye." Cal watched long enough to see the small boat settle into pursuit of the go fast and then went out on the bridge wing in time to see the aviators head aft at a run toward the hangar deck. Back inside the bridge had become crowded with deck officers, phone talkers, ETs, and HCOs, and loud with radio chatter between the officer of the deck, the helo communications officer, the landing signals officer, and Combat. At one point the noise level got so high the XO raised his voice and said, "Okay, everyone, take it down a notch."

Cal couldn't blame them. Part of their mission was to act as sentry between the wholesale drug smugglers in Central and South America and their retail market in the United States. Insofar as Munro's very presence

was a deterrent, well and good, but going a whole patrol without even the smell of a bust was disheartening to even the most motivated, best-trained crew. Everyone was excited at the prospect of a chase.

The closed-circuit television screen showed the helo on the flight deck, its rotors accelerating into a blur. A voice sounded over the speaker. "Hangman, this is Tin Star, we're ready for the numbers."

Suppo's voice was quick and sure as he went down the list: wind speed and direction, altimeter, the pitch and roll of the ship. The aviator, a lieutenant commander who had driven ships for two years before going to flight school and who consequently had a better idea than most aviators of what was going on on the bridge at that moment, read the numbers back and requested a takeoff to port. Suppo looked at Cal. "Permission to conduct flight ops, Captain?"

Cal nodded.

Suppo keyed the mike. "LSO, HCO, helo is cleared for takeoff to port, take all signals from the LSO, green deck."

"Green deck, aye," the conn officer said.

"Green deck!" the phone talker said, and switched the hangar lights to green.

"HCO, LSO, green deck." Cal recognized Chief Colvin's voice on the speaker. On the screen he watched the chief make a counterclockwise circle with his right arm and point to port. The pitch of the rotor blades increased and the helo lifted off, put its nose on the small boat, and shot down the length of the ship with neatness and dispatch, fifty feet off the deck.

"Get us up on turbines," Cal said.

The OOD, a newly minted ensign named Schrader, relayed the order to the engine room, which order was repeated back at the usual full-volume engine room bawl. A moment later main gas turbine one kicked in with its distinctive whine and Munro began to move over the water like she had a purpose.

"All ahead flank," Schrader said.

"All ahead flank, aye," the helm answered, and then she said, "Wait a minute."

"What's the problem, Roberts?" Schrader said.

"The rudder, sir," she said, a little uncertainly. She looked up at the rudder indicator and with more decision said, "It's stuck."

"Stuck?"

"Yes, sir, stuck, at five degrees port." In sudden indignation she said, "We^: re in the middle of chasing a go fast and they're throwing a drill at us, too?" She looked at Cal accusingly.

"This isn't a drill," Cal said. He exchanged a look with the XO, and had to admire the way both of them refrained from screaming with frustration. "All stop, and pipe the EO to the bridge."

"All stop, aye."

"EO, lay to the bridge, Lieutenant Raybonn, lay to the bridge immediately."

Almost before the words had stopped echoing around the ship the EO stepped onto the bridge. The XO explained the situation tersely. The EO, a tall man with neat features and a calm expression, listened without comment and retired immediately to aft steering, where they heard later MK1 Bensley and EMI Ryals were already wrestling with the rudder.

For the next few minutes, Munro went around in a very big, very slow circle. Everyone on the bridge waited for word from the helo. They sent an ops normal message and weren't due for another for fifteen minutes, but the boats hadn't been that far away, they should have made contact by now. Cal imagined Mun 1 getting farther and farther away from home and the go fast getting farther and farther ahead of the small boat.

"OOD, MKl."

"MK1, OOD," Schrader said into his radio.

"OOD, we've manually brought the rudder amidships."

They all looked at the rudder indicator.

"MK1, OOD, rudder amidships, aye." Schrader lowered the radio and said, "Rudder amidships, Captain."

"All right," Cal said. At least now, with twin screws, they could steer the ship.

Ops was on the radio to Mun 1. "They still have the go fast in sight, Captain."

"Good to know." Cal 's phone rang. It was the EO. He listened and hung up. "It was a dust bunny," he announced.

There was a brief silence, unusual in the middle of launching the helo. "I beg your pardon, Captain?" the XO finally said.

"A dust bunny," Cal said. "That's what jammed the steering linkage at five degrees port."

No one believed him, but he was the captain so no one said so, until the EO reappeared on the bridge with the dust bunny in question, a tiny scrap of fabric, oil-soaked and well-chewed, on display in the palm of his hand. "We figure someone was mopping oil out of the steering linkage with a rag and left this behind."

"Of course at the most inopportune possible time," the XO said tartly.

From the expression on the EO's face, a normally very unflappable man, Cal rather thought the XO was right.

They spent the rest of the day chasing the go fast.

"He would not stop for anything," he said to Kenai.

"I thought you could shoot out the engines."

"We could," Cal said, "if, a, the.50-caliber on the helo hadn't jammed, and b, we didn't have a problem fueling the helo when she came back to gas up."

"Yeah, gas is kinda important," Kenai, the veteran pilot, said. "What happened?"

"We thought at first something was wrong with the fueling system, but it turned out during the last refit the helo manufacturer had installed a new fuel coupling without telling anyone and without updating the specs. You know at a gas station when your car is full the handle clicks off?"

"Yeah?"

"That was what was happening when we tried to fuel the helo. It took us a week to figure out what the hell was going on."

"So you didn't fly for a week?"

"Oh no, we flew, the engineers figured out a way around it."

"Must have been frustrating."

"Yeah, well. Been nice to have caught ourselves a live one." He sighed. "We aren't seeing a lot of action this side of the isthmus since we got the smugglers here pretty much bottled up."

"Bottled up where?"

"There are three natural chokepoints in the Caribbean. Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba, and the Yucatan Channel between Cuba and Mexico. If they're coming north, they are most likely coming through one of those. We know it, they know we know it, and they've gotten a lot cagier because of it."

"So what can you do?"

"Chase them," Cal said. "Chase them until they run out of gas. Chase them until they break down. Chase them until we catch up with them. Box them in with another cutter."

"What did you do this time?"

"Well, we caught up with him. We fired a stitch of warning shots from the machine gun across the bow to make them slow down. They never do, but we try. Then the goddamn.50-caliber jams, so they can't take out the engines."

"So they got away?"

"The aviators told me they flew so low over the go fast that the go-fast guys stood a pole up in the middle of the boat so they couldn't get close enough to drop a net, which they know we do sometimes so we can snarl their prop."

"Clever," Kenai said.

"Yeah, they've had a lot of experience running from us," Cal said. "Anyway, we chase him all day. Eventually, we've got two Coast Guard cutters, our helo, two Customs jets, and a Jamaican Navy patrol boat all engaged in pursuit of this yo-yo, and guess what?"

"What?"

"He got away."

"You're kidding."

"I wish."

"I didn't know Jamaica even had a navy," she said. "How much did that cost the nation?"

"It's better you should not know. The only upside is when last sighted he was headed south, which means he didn't get his drugs to market."

"They will eventually, though."

"They will," Cal said. "Or somebody else will. We're intercepting more drugs here and in EPAC every year, and you know what that means?"

"What?"

"It means we are responsible for driving up the price of drugs in the U.S. Supply and demand."

"You'd rather be in the Bering?" she said. "Twelve-foot swells, forty-knot winds, and ice forming on the bow?"

"In the Bering we'd be doing a boarding every other day, if not every day. Plus in the Bering there is always the possibility of a search and rescue. Out here…" His voice trailed off.

"You don't feel that the Coast Guard's efforts are being utilized to their fullest potential?" she said, a smile in her voice.

"I think we're pissing away any relevancy we had as a service," he said.

"Ah. I was trying to be diplomatic about it."

"I noticed."

"I like the dust bunny part of the story best," she said.

"You like a three-hundred-seventy-eight-foot cutter being put on hold in the middle of an operation?" he said a little dryly.

"Well," she said apologetically, "yeah. It has such a ring of…" She thought for a moment. "Inevitability, I guess. It's the little things that will screw you, every time. A tile falling off the shuttle. A morning temperature low enough to freeze an O-ring."

He so didn't want to go there. At least his cutter still floated when it got into trouble. Space shuttles exploded. "Munro's almost forty years old, with a bunch of systems some of which are older than that, none of which were necessarily designed to work together. And let's face it, it's not like the Coast Guard ever gets first pick of the tech. A lot of our systems fall off the backs of trucks headed for the Navy. Sometimes I think it's a miracle we get off the dock."

"There's a story," she said, "so far as I know actually true. Gus Grissom was being interviewed on the radio one night, and when the host asked him how he felt waiting for launch on top of a Mercury rocket, he said, 'How would you feel sitting on top of a million different parts, all of which were manufactured by the lowest bidder?' " Cal laughed. "Yikes."

"Yeah, and that was back when all astronauts were de facto heroes and NASA could do no wrong." She stretched.

"Grissom was one of the guys who died in the capsule fire, right?"

"Yeah. Grissom, White, and Chaffee."

"You ever wonder if…" He hesitated.

"Every day," she said. "Every time I strap myself in. I'd still kill anyone who tried to take the job away from me." She smiled. "Just like you."

He thought of the go fast getting away, in spite of the massive amount of American manpower and assets arrayed against it. "Yeah," he said, a little wearily. "Just like me."

"Part of your problem is you're tired."

"And you aren't?"

"Time for me to be tired when we're wheels down."

"So long as you aren't arrested for homicide before you lift off."

She laughed. After a moment, she said, "Not loving the drug war, are you, Cal?"

"Not so much, no. If I had my druthers, I'd treat all drugs like alcohol, legalize them and tax the hell out of them and earmark the proceeds to underwrite the cost of marching every sixth grader in the nation through a detox center. 'There, you little twit, right there, see that guy sweating and shaking and screaming that the big snake's gonna get him? That's what'll happen to you if you use drugs.' After that, it's up to them and their parents."

He closed his eyes against the bright sun. "And I could get to work on stuff that matters. Like making sure your sweet ass gets itself safely in the air.

She raised her head from her arms again to smile at him. "You think my ass is sweet, do you?"

"Roll over here and I'll show you how sweet. Oh, never mind." He drained his beer, picked her up, and carried her into the bungalow.

The target was the very symbol of America 's power and prestige. Its destruction would be a blow at the. heart of everything they held dear, their capitalistic egotism, their imperialistic arrogance, their technological superiority.

Nothing and nowhere is safe from me, from us, he thought. That was the message he wished to send. It was the only message that had a chance of bringing the West to its knees, and that was what he wanted, a supplicant knocking at his door and begging to know how to make him go away.

The deaths would be minimal by comparison to 9/11, to the bombings in London and Madrid and Iraq, but there were names among them that would give pause to both East and West. If his time with Zarqawi had taught him anything, it was that no matter how many bodies were given up for cannon fodder, there were always more bodies to take their place. No, it was time to try something different, something spectacular, something that would burn indelibly into the hearts and minds of the enemy, something that would strike at their pride, at the very heart of who and what they believed themselves to be.

Further, the destruction of the cargo would throw down his gauntlet before his former masters in Afghanistan, a defiant gesture of independence. He meant them to know that he would not be intimidated or brought to heel, and from that moment on they would know it. After this,

they would have to treat him as an equal member. After this, his counsel would be valued.

Better, he would be feared. And with that fear would come respect. Isa and Abdullah would rank equally with bin Laden and al Qaeda. He would no longer follow, he would lead.

Yussuf and Yaqub had done well, recruiting from the Muslim communities in York and Leeds. He looked them over again. Most in their late teens, three in their early twenties, only one of them married, most of them with ordinary looks, and two actively unattractive. Again according to instruction, Yussuf and Yaqub had also selected as much as possible for surface ethnicity, dark skin, features tending more toward the African than the Arabic. Two of them were doctors. Four of them were engineers, which meant they had been trained to have a healthy respect for the laws of physics, and were conversant with the properties of electricity and the principles of elementary chemical reaction. Unafraid of complicated machinery, they were sons of Martha, they could make things work. He smiled at his comparison of these warriors of Allah to the Christian progeny of the sister of Mary, but only to himself.

They had been told as he had told Yussuf and Yaqub that this attack would be a second 9/11, only this time a simultaneous series of attacks on multiple targets in the West Coast of the United States: the airports of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They were so inexperienced that they didn't even ask how they were intended to get past American security, notoriously tight since 9/11, but Akil told them anyway. Years had passed, the Americans had been lulled into a false sense of security by thinking that terrorist activity had been moved to the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was time again to test their homeland defenses, over which he was confident they would prevail, to the greater glory of Allah.

Very little of this was true, of course. It was not time yet for any of them, not even Yussuf and Yaqub, to know their true target. Security must rest only with him until the last possible moment. He had told Yussuf and Yaqub to select educated recruits wherever possible, because in his experience the more education, the more effective the recruit, and the more long-lived, which meant a better return on the training investment.

"I know," he said in closing. "It sounds a little nonspecific, and at the same time a little… grandiose." He smiled. "But 'a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?'"

"The Prophet is wise," Yaqub said, and Yussuf nodded.

AMI refrained from pointing out that the words were from Browning, not Mohammed. If Allah was going to hand him a convincing quotation straight out of English 111, he was ready to accept it as a gift to further his argument. For one thing, it meant his time in America had not been entirely wasted.

Not that they needed convincing. Yussuf and Yaqub, coming ahead of him to York, had done well. The recruits were eager to volunteer their help, and their ideas came thick and fast. Most of them were improbable at best and fantastical at worst, and entirely unnecessary. For this job, all he needed were warm bodies with guns and two or three with a working knowledge of ordnance, which he could teach them himself.

He didn't tell them that, either.

Still, he knew better than to quash their enthusiasm, restricting himself to murmured comments that guided and instructed, never exhorted or dictated. At one point he said, "It is very important that events be synchronized in any operation." They agreed to that. Later he said, "Reconnaissance of the target we select is essential." Still later he said, "And of course we will need people familiar with the necessary materials. There will be training. We will be told where and when, and of course our travel will be arranged."

He was always careful to speak in the first person plural, and they responded, including him in their deliberations, deferring to his experience, following his extremely discreet and diplomatic lead.

He had selected York to recruit for the newest cell because he appreciated history, and York had one of burning Jews alive. The north of England had a growing Muslim community as well as a high rate of unemployment, fertile ground for the creation of a disaffected minority ripe for insurrection.

He had also chosen York as a good place to hide from his masters in the East as well as from the powers in the West, at least temporarily. He had never operated in England before this. Further, he well knew the al Qaeda leadership would not approve of his real target. Al Qaeda was interested in body count, not in counting coup. The infidel set too much store by life and not enough on the hereafter. To deprive them of what they held most dear, and to take it from as many as possible at the same time, was the mantra of the Islamic insurrection. Only when the West tired of being constantly under attack, so the thinking of his erstwhile masters went, only when Isa and his like had taken enough of those most precious lives would the enemy be defeated and Palestine be free once more.

He monitored a few select chat rooms and blogs on the Internet, and he knew the word had gone out to find him and bring him back into the fold, whether he was willing to come or not. They would find him, sooner or later, he understood that. But not yet, please Allah, not yet, not until he completed what he had set out to do. When he went back, it would be on his own terms, not as a supplicant, or worse, a prisoner. The humiliation of the prospect drove him to work even harder to hide his efforts from their sight.

He still controlled a great deal of their money, and they would want results for an investment of that size. They had left him alone after Zarqawi's death, partly because he was an undeniably effective operator, as he had showed these with the Baghdad bombing. They had been waiting, though, watching, hoping that if they gave him enough rope he would hang himself with it.

The image again called Adara to his mind, the slack sway of her body from the branch of the neem tree, the white knot of his shirt beneath her jaw, her eyes wide and dull in the moonlight. He accepted the memory, held it closely to him, embracing, accepting, owning the pain.

So often lately in the doing he forgot why. It was good to remember.

That evening he attended the first of several meetings with the young men carefully selected in advance by Yussuf and Yaqub, who had been in York for five months vetting prospective members. For this one meeting they were in the back room of a neighborhood community center, the door closed against the sound of the teen dance being held concurrently in the gymnasium. It was an inspired move on Yaqub's part, as most of their recruits weren't much older than the teenagers at the dance. Also very probably an opportunistic one, as Akil had observed Yaqub's dalliance with some of the more attractive young women. He did wonder occasionally if Yaqub's dedication to the cause might be a bit challenged by his hormones, but it wasn't a problem that hadn't come up before. He smiled to himself. So to speak.

Yaqub had set up the room in advance of the meeting, and Akil could see how much the businesslike setting impressed them. The dry-erase boards on easels, the tables in a sober line facing the boards, the pulldown screen mounted on the wall, the computer with its PowerPoint presentation, and the slide show that went off without a hitch, giving a brief history of the birth and flowering of the jihad, its heroes, its villains, and its future goals. It was very professionally done, designed with just the right proportion of sentimentality to ideological fanaticism, and ending with a long close-up of a smiling Osama bin Laden looking strong and confident, his gaze fixed a little over their left shoulder, at a future which held the promise of an inexorable spreading of the word of Islam across the globe. Akil might be breaking away from al Qaeda to form an independent faction of his own, but he knew better than anyone how useful the image was in recruitment. The West's pursuit of bin Laden after 9/11 had elevated him to a holy figure, revered as none other by right thinkers of Islam. At this point it didn't matter if he were ever caught or if he died in one of his refuges in the Hindu Kush. The legend would live on.

When the lights came up Akil deleted the presentation and cleaned the dry-erase boards with solvent, after which he turned and with a grave look searched the ten faces, one at a time, for boredom or, worse, ridicule. He found neither. They sat erect in their plastic bucket chairs, eyes alert, hands folded almost in an attitude of prayer.

Normally, training ran in three stages: basic indoctrination into Islamic law and guerilla warfare; training in explosives, assassination, and heavy weapons; and then instruction in surveillance, counter-surveillance, forgery, and suicide attacks. This could take as long as a year and sometimes longer than that. Akil himself had trained for almost thirteen months.

There wasn't time enough for the full course with this group, however, the schedule was far too tight. It was the one thing he didn't like about this operation. He had never liked keeping to someone else's timetable. It caused haste, and haste caused carelessness. He hadn't lived this long by being careless.

In this case, though, he reminded himself, the end result would be well worth the inconvenience. It was another reason for the size of the cell, and for the group training. He was breaking his most stringent security protocols, and he knew it, risking all their lives and his own freedom. Still, it could not be helped, and if they were successful the reward would be great.

His two lieutenants answered questions, Akil dropping in an occasional low-voiced comment when Yussuf or Yaqub got off track. The recruits were too awed to speak to him. Most of them couldn't even look at him. Good. Awe inspired unquestioning obedience in the faithful.

They met over a month, never in the same place and never on the same day of the week, and once, again upon Akil's instruction, changing locations at the last moment, more as an exercise in tradecraft than because he thought they were being watched. At the end of their last meeting, he gave them the same speech he had given Yussuf and Yaqub before sending them ahead of him to England, almost word for word. "You understand, once you set out on this path, there will be no turning back. You must leave behind family, friends, everything you have ever known. You will be hunted by policemen of every nation, always on the move, often hungry, always tired, never again knowing a night's peace, and at the end only death."

"But a glorious death," Yussuf said immediately, as he had on that day in Diisseldorf.

Akil nodded his head once, gravely. "I cannot tell you what will happen in the end. We will either convert the infidel to the true faith, make them our slaves, and have sole dominion over the earth, or we will put them all to the sword."

They looked back at him, attentive, alert, perhaps breathing a little faster, but with no timidity or faint-heartedness or second thoughts on display. Yes, Yussuf and Yaqub had chosen well. "If we ourselves die in the execution of this sacred task, Allah will take us as his own, and we will be most richly rewarded in the afterlife."

"Seventy-two virgins for each of us," Yaqub said, exactly as he had said it in Diisseldorf.

"But you are men of faith, you know what will come to you, so I need not repeat it to you here. My concern is what happens between now and then. It is not an easy task, what you have chosen to do."

"We will follow you," Yussuf said, predictably.

"Today?" Akil said to the men sitting in front of him. "Now? Are you this moment prepared to walk behind me out this door and never look back?"

They were on their feet cheering with one voice when he was finished. That the cheer was led by Yussuf and Yaqub was not noticed.

He smiled, then, patting the air with his hands. "Your joy in being about good work is music to my ears, but quietly, please, brothers, quietly." They subsided, eyes brilliant with excitement.

"You leave tonight," he told them.

"Where are we going?"

It was a natural enough question, and he saw no reason not to answer it. "You will be traveling separately, some on different planes, and I urge you not to congregate in the air or at either airport, and certainly not as you are going through customs and immigration. Yussuf has your identity papers and your airline tickets. You were each of you told to bring a suitcase large enough to be checked. Did you?" Eager nods all around. "Your destination is Vancouver, British Columbia."

" Canada." " Canada!" " Canada?"

"You will be met." There were some old contacts Akil trusted because they worked exclusively for money. "Yaqub will give you the details. You will travel by various means from Vancouver to a small training camp. There, you will learn to use small arms. The four best with the small arms will train on larger weapons." He didn't specify, and by now they knew enough not to ask. "You will also learn how to hide in plain sight, either on the move or in place, in a community such as your own here in York."

"When will we see you again, master?" Yussuf said.

"Soon," Akil said soothingly. He was keeping the timetable as vague as possible. When he gave the call, they would move into immediate action. He would withhold the target and the means of taking it out until they were on the last leg of their journey. "After your training, which should take all of your time for the next two months, you will be instructed to either return to Vancouver or go on to Calgary, Edmonton, or Winnipeg, there to hide in plain sight until you hear from me."

They digested this in silence, their awe momentarily suspended in lieu of the practical considerations involved. There were a few more questions. One of the older men had his elbows on his knees, his hands folded in front of him, his head bent over them as if he were praying. "What is it, brother?"

"My wife is pregnant."

"You are to be congratulated," Akil said courteously. "May it be a son."

The engineer raised his head, his face troubled. "I have a family, friends, a good job."

"Are you having second thoughts, brother?" Akil said softly. "There is no shame in that. The movement is not for everyone. Allah needs as many of the faithful in this world as he does in the next." A statement bin Laden would have refuted with vigor, but Akil wanted only true believers in this cell. The right touch of ideological fanaticism required so much less hand-holding down the road.

"Oh no!" The engineer was clearly shocked at the suggestion. "I see no other way," he said, more moderately, after Yaqub frowned at him and gave the door a significant look. This evening they were in a room off the main hall of a railroad workers' union headquarters, the walls oak-beamed and plastered. "Our people are being dishonored, oppressed, tortured, slaughtered by the tens, the hundreds of thousands. These people voted in this government, they support it. That makes them directly responsible for its actions, and we must hold them accountable for those actions. And then there is Palestine. No," he said. "There is no going back."

It now sounded as if Akil were in need of being convinced, which was what he had intended. He contented himself with saying mildly, "Then what troubles you?"

"I worry that after I have gone to paradise my family will suffer, my friends, my community." The engineer raised a troubled face. "It doesn't seem fair."

"Never fear, my son." Akil placed his hands on the man's shoulders and looked earnestly into his eyes. "We will do our best by them. They shall not want. And they will live in the knowledge that their husband, their father, their friend died a hero. Died for them. Died for Allah."

The engineer's face cleared. "Then I am ready to do my duty, to serve my people and my faith."

"Inshallah," Akil said. They embraced, and the others stood in a circle around them, their faces lit with a glow of righteousness and camaraderie.

Really, he had become very good at this.

The phone rang. It was Hugh Rincon. "Isa's in the U.S. "

Patrick straightened in his chair so fast he propelled himself away from his desk and bounced off the windowsill. "How do you know?"

"He was spotted by an immigration agent in JFK."

"He was spotted by Immigration in JFK?" Chisum said, his voice rising. "And I'm hearing about this from you instead of our own people, why?"

"You came to me," Rincon said, and left it at that. To his credit he didn't sound one bit smug.

"Wait a minute, you said they spotted him. They didn't grab him up?"

"The agent told her supervisor she thought this guy was worth a look. The supervisor disagreed."

Patrick digested this. At last he said, without much hope, "Did they at least follow him? Find out where he was headed?"

Rincon's silence was answer enough.

Chisum rubbed a hand over a suddenly aching head. "Anything else?"

"He entered the country under the name of Adam Bayzani. He was wearing a U.S. Coast Guard officer's uniform. The agent asked him where he'd been and he said Istanbul for a conference." Rincon took a deep breath. "There is more. Patrick, Sara just got back from an IMO conference on marine safety in Istanbul. You're not going to believe this, but she thinks she rode down in the elevator with this guy."

"What?"

Rincon repeated himself.

Patrick's first instinct was to scoff. Outside of Dickens this much coincidence was highly suspect. On second thought, he knew enough about Sara Lange to know that she was nobody's fool. Neither was Hugh Rincon. "All right," he said cautiously. "How'd he feel to her?"

"Bent," Rincon said bluntly. "The first information Coasties exchange after names is duty stations. She said this Bayzani said he was posted to District Seventeen, and then when she said she was from Alaska he shut down completely. For the rest of the conference whenever she saw him he was going in the opposite direction at flank speed. Her words."

"She make contact again?"

"She tried. She left a message on his voice mail to join her for drinks the last day. She never heard back from him. The whole thing felt wrong to her, so she told me about it when she got back, and then she checked the Coast Guard personnel list."

"And?"

"And there was an Adam Bayzani, all right."

"Was?"

"Was. She emailed him, and when he didn't email back, she emailed his CO."

"And?"

"And Adam Bayzani was in fact a commander, and he was in fact assigned to District Seventeen. The problem is, he's dead."

Chisum sat up straight. "When?"

"His body was found the week before the IMO conference started in Istanbul."

"Murdered?" Chisum said, sure of it.

"No. Died in his sleep, according to the police report."

"When and where?"

"Lanzarote."

"Where's that?"

" Canary Islands."

"What the hell was he doing in the Canary Islands?"

"Working on his tan. Lanzarote's a vacation destination for Europeans."

"He was on leave?"

"Yes. His boss said he was stopping off for a week in advance of the IMO conference."

"He alone?"

"He rented his car alone and he checked into his hotel alone."

"But?"

"But his boss said that Bayzani acted like he would be meeting someone."

"He say who?"

"No. His boss said he seemed happy lately. Evidently a pretty morose guy at the best of times. No girlfriends, kept his private life private, nobody he worked with had ever been to his apartment. His boss thought he might be gay."

"Really." Patrick digested this in silence for a moment. "Was there an autopsy?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"When a tourist dies, the local authorities get the body out of there as fast as they can. Tourism is pretty much their living. Anyway, I'm not sure they even have an ME."

"Can we ask for an autopsy?"

"The body is on its way home to his family in Los Angeles."

"All right, I know people in L.A.," Chisum said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could access the directory on his computer to look up names of helpful colleagues in L.A. "Any footprints on Bayzani's service record?"

"None that I can find, outside of his heritage. His family is fourth-generation American. He does have a Jordanian great-grandfather. His grandfather served in the Eighty-second Airborne during World War II. His mother was a Navy nurse in Vietnam. He was a Coast Guard Academy grad himself. They're all as American as apple pie, no red flags anywhere." Crap.

"Now for the good news."

Patrick perked up. "There's good news? Did the son of a bitch finally get on a phone?"

"Not that good, but almost. He had to have a passport to get into the country, and passports have to have photos."

"We've finally got a photo?" Patrick said, disbelieving. "A current photo?"

"Okay, don't start hyperventilating, it's doctored, our resident geek tells me some kind of computer overlay program where they alter the original photo to resemble the current holder without looking like it's been got at by a kindergartner with a crayon. There is a general ethnic similarity between Isa and Bayzani, probably one of the reasons Isa picked him, and the photograph's a little blurry, but it's the best we've had so far."

"You're sure it's him? This isn't an 'all Islamic terrorists look alike to me' kind of thing?"

"As sure as I can be," Rincon said, not taking offense. "As I don't have to tell you, the photos we've got of him aren't good, but I was pretty sure from the get-go this was the same guy." He hesitated. "Patrick."

"What?"

Rincon spoke, sounding as if he were choosing his words very carefully. "There was an-incident involving maritime shipping two years ago."

"I know," Patrick said. He'd looked up the case file after he'd called Hugh for help on Isa.

"Yeah, I know you do, and I know you know that I'd like to stay out of jail for violating state secrets. Kind of a personal quirk. The only point I'm making is, I think attacks by air are pretty much over. I think the terrorism community is moving on to attacks on maritime targets, in particular busy ports."

"We've been talking about that ourselves."

"Not enough," Rincon said tersely. "Not nearly enough, Patrick."

"Forward me what you've got," Patrick said.

"Will do." Rincon hung up.

Melanie brought him the fax from Hugh just as Chisum was sitting back from issuing an all-agencies alert as to Isa's probable presence inside U.S. borders. The phone began ringing as he spread the pages across his desk. "Get that, will you, Melanie, thanks. And I'm not in for the rest of the afternoon."

"Yes, Mr. Chisum." She was curious but too well-trained to ask, and he watched her walk out the door with his usual attentive wistfulness. He shook his head and pulled out his Isa file to compare the photographs. The ones in Iraq were group shots, taken from a distance. Everyone was burnoosed and bearded. Isa's head was circled, and in another print blown up. The quality of the print was atrocious, and what resemblance there was between it and the clean-shaven, smiling face in the passport photo was minimal at best. The group photo was more about personality than likeness. He was standing a pace in the rear behind Zarqawi, looking solemn, even a little studious, his hands folded, his lean figure a study in stillness.

The two photos Rincon had been working from were only marginally better. One was a black-and-white head shot taken with a long lens, picking Isa's face out of a crowded Baghdad street. He was seated at an outdoor cafe, drinking something from a tiny cup, facing someone with his back to the camera. Isa's face was seen over the second man's shoulder, looking straight into the camera lens. The resolution was grainy and his expression couldn't be made out, but there Patrick nevertheless got a clear impression of vigilance, as if Isa were always alive to his surroundings, might even be somehow aware that his photograph was being taken at that very moment.

The third photograph was another group shot, this time a posed shot of a Zarqawi grip-and-grin with bin Laden. The accompanying caption read " Peshawar, Pakistan?" Neither man looked overcome by joy at the encounter, but by the date on the photo, this was right after the hotel bombings in Jordan, and at that time no one in Arab leadership, legitimate government or terrorist, was pleased with Zarqawi.

And once again, at Zarqawi's shoulder, stood Isa.

He compared the two faces first to Bayzani's service file photo, and then to the doctored passport photo. He'd have the photos looked at by their own geeks down in tech services, but he was sure in his own mind that Rincon was right. It was Isa.

And that meant Isa was indeed in the United States.

He read the account of the immigration agent who had cleared Isa for entry. No useful knowledge to be gained there, except that Isa appeared to be at least superficially well versed in Coast Guard lingo. He made a note to inquire into Bayzani's past movements with care and attention. If he'd been spending time spilling his guts to Isa about his job, Patrick wanted it all down, chapter and verse.

While he had been perusing the file he was aware of the phone ringing nonstop outside his door, Melanie's voice a soothing counterpoint. At precisely sixty minutes and one second her tap was at the door. At his response she came in, set down a large stack of pink telephone slips, and departed again.

He thumbed through the slips. Mostly panicky demands for more information. Since he didn't have any, he shoved them to one side and assumed the position, feet crossed on the windowsill, hands folded on his stomach, frown aimed at the horizon.

No way to catch up to Isa until he surfaced again. Isa was a very cautious man. So far as Patrick could tell he never spoke on the phone, he never emailed twice from the same address, and he never flew directly to a destination, always employing multiple segments on multiple airlines, never booking them all at once, spreading his purchases around on Orbitz, Travelocity, and the airline web sites. No, Isa didn't make mistakes often, and truly, in these two instances, Istanbul and New York, he had erred more on the side of bad luck than bad judgment. Better to be lucky than good, as the old saying went. American immigration agents by and large were trained to look more at documentation than they were at faces and behavior.

Political correctness was all very well, but at what cost to the nation's security? The men on the planes had been recruited from upper-middle-class Saudi families, well educated and for the most part well off. Therefore American security forces manning American borders ought to be looking hard at upper-middle-class, well-educated, well-off men of the Islamic faith of every nationality. Never mind that there were millions of Muslims who did not subscribe to the notion that killing was the way to revenge, redemption, and paradise. Nobody ever hijacked an El Al jet and that was because El Al knew all there was to know about profiling and then some.

We could take lessons, Chisum thought now, and we should. As he had told Khalid nearly two years before, Kallendorf wasn't all wrong.

But Isa's first real piece of bad luck had come in Istanbul. He had learned enough, probably from Bayzani, to know that he'd have to have a duty station on offer when asked. Alaska would have seemed sufficiently remote to be safe. What were the odds, he would think, that he'd find himself riding an elevator with a Coast Guard officer born in Alaska?

Turns out, pretty good odds if he'd had anything but a superficial knowledge of the U.S. Coast Guard, who maintained a very large presence in Alaska, a state with 36,000 miles of coastline if you included all the islands, peninsulas, and archipelagoes.

That was not the real question, however.

The real question was, what was Isa doing at an IMO conference on marine safety in the first place?

There were two possible answers to that question.

One, he was there to learn what measures the international maritime community was putting in place to ensure the safety of vessels and crews working the high seas, for the purpose of confounding those measures and launching an attack against pick a target.

Two, and the answer Chisum considered far more probable, Isa was there to meet someone. Someone already inside the maritime community. Someone with a solid working knowledge of the shipping industry.

Or, or perhaps including, a working knowledge of ports. Western ports. Busy ports. Vulnerable ports.

But then, they were all vulnerable. Less than three percent of containers coming into U.S. ports were examined for contraband. Anybody could tuck anything inside of a container, stick it on a Horizon Lines ship, and feel pretty secure that it would never be spotted.

On the other side of his door he could hear the phone still ringing, though less frequently than before, and Melanie's voice still desolate at her inability to oblige any of the callers. She was really very good. She came in with another sheaf of phone messages. He looked at the clock. "Hey, it's after five. Go on home, Melanie."

"I can stay, Mr. Chisum. You could use the help."

"You have to have something better to do than babysit me, Melanie."

She smiled. She had a dimple in her right cheek. Her skin was like ivory. He recognized the triteness of the observation at about the same time he realized he'd been staring. He could feel the color creep up over his face, and he said gruffly, "I appreciate it, Melanie, thank you."

And again he watched her walk out of his office. Rumor had it that she'd been seen outside the office in company with Kallendorf. He hoped it wasn't true, and not just because it would mean the director had a spy too close to Patrick for comfort. He liked Melanie. He liked her a lot. She had thus far proved not only decorative but capable and efficient as well. True, he also liked the thought of her naked and stretched out on a bed, but he tried not to dwell on that. It was always a mistake to dip your pen in the company ink. Particularly this company.

He swiveled back to his computer and got online. The IMO's web site displayed an impressively far-reaching organization, with at a rough count over 170 member nations, including ones like Bolivia, Switzerland, and Mongolia, which so far as he could recall without looking at an atlas were landlocked. The U.S. Coast Guard was the United States ' representative at the IMO. He wondered who other nations sent. Be worth finding out. He made a note.

Then there were the government and non-government organizations affiliated with the IMO, some of which might prove productive of investigation, like the Arab Federation of Shipping, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, the International Association of Ports and Harbors. This last looked interesting so he pulled it up, and found links to countries with links to various of their ports. He clicked on Ireland in memory of Josie Ryan and on the Shannon page somewhat to his dismay found all the information he could wish for about the port, including maximum vessel dimensions and a scale map showing seven separate ship-berthing facilities.

He sampled some of the other port pages, and while some web sites were better than others they were all very informative.

He swiveled back to the window and reassumed the position.

On ports at least there was all the information Isa could wish for on the Internet if he were planning an attack against one. He would have no need to attend a conference on maritime safety to learn more.

No, he would attend a conference on marine safety to meet someone there. Patrick was now certain of it. Someone who had either information he needed, or expertise. Or both.

But Patrick wasn't going to catch him to ask him, at least not today. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after that, but that was then. He'd put everyone on the alert. All he could do now, maddening as it was, was sit back and wait for Isa to be spotted.

Maybe, he thought, just maybe he was looking at this from the wrong direction. Isa was in the wind. Someone might stumble across his path again, but the odds weren't in their favor. They'd been incredibly lucky in the two contacts they'd had, both by conscientious, practicing professionals, but it was fatal to depend on lightning striking that way a third time.

And besides, Patrick was tired of being a step and a half behind this guy. It was time to do a little backtracking, find out what made the guy tick so they'd have some idea of what he might do next, and where.

Chisum turned back to his desk and picked up the phone. This time he got the nation code right and Hugh Rincon's voice mail came on. He realized that it was after ten o'clock in London. "This is Patrick Chisum again. Who else attended that conference in Istanbul? I want a breakdown by names, professional organizations, and nationalities."

He hung up and frowned at the clock on his desk. The minute hand swept inexorably around, counting down the seconds, the minutes, the hours.

Like he needed reminding.

It took him a pitifully short time to find what he was looking for in Haiti, which cost him in U.S. dollars the equivalent of a used car, which he found even more pitiful. While he was conducting his business he stayed in a modest room at a resort hotel, renting a girl for the weekend so as to maintain his cover as a car salesman on holiday. She was a straightforward businesswoman, with a refreshing lack of curiosity even that first night when he gently refused her sexual services and insisted she sleep in the second bed. "Arm candy only, then," she said, as if it wasn't an unusual request, and didn't offer a discount. Time paid for was time paid for. On a professional basis, he had to respect that. She insisted on half up front. He respected that, too.

After he concluded his business, he maintained his cover by spending the weekend at the hotel lounging poolside with his paid companion, taking an hour off to find a cybercafé and check in. Yussuf and Yaqub were in Canada, one in Toronto and the other in Vancouver. They reported all cell members accounted for and settling in to their various temporary lives.

On Monday morning he paid the girl the other half of her fee and checked out of the hotel. He took a cab to the airport, a flight to Mexico City, a second to Cartagena, and a third to Miami. It took two days for him to arrive at his destination, but he had never lacked for patience.

In Miami, he took an airport shuttle into town to one of the big box hotels on Miami Beach, took a bus back to the airport, and picked up a

nondescript sedan reserved in the name of Daoud Sadat. He drove south to an anonymous suburb bisected by a major arterial lined with big box stores, did a little shopping at Target, and then consulted a street map purchased at a gas station. He turned right out of the Target parking lot, turned left at the next light, drove down a series of quiet side streets, and parked in front of a shabby, ranch-style home on a large lot festooned with palm trees and a prowling bougainvillea barely restrained by a chain-link fence. The house two doors down had had its trim renewed, and across the street someone had just replanted their yard, brave in poinsettia plants and new grass, but the neighborhood had the air of fighting a hopeless battle, as if a wrecking ball and upscale condominium high-rises were just one developer with a vision and a city councilman in his pocket away.

His knock was answered by a young woman with a grave face. "Yes?"

"Daoud Sadat. I believe I am expected."

She nodded. "You are. Please come in, Mr. Sadat." She reached for his suitcase.

He waved her off. "Thank you. I'll carry it."

"It's no bother." Her eyes were anxious.

"For me, either." He gave her a reassuring smile, and was rewarded by one in return. The change it made in her face was extraordinary, lighting her eyes, lending color to her skin, dimples to her cheeks. Her teeth were white and even.

She looked, he thought with a faint sense of shock, like Adara.

"Please follow me," she said.

She led him through the house to the kitchen, a large room at the back with appliances of varying ages against the walls, the center of the room dominated by a large wooden trestle table with benches on both sides and a captain's chair at either end. "Mama, this is Mr. Sadat."

The kitchen may have been as shabby as the exterior of the house but it was scrupulously clean. The woman at the stove was her daughter again in face and form, with twenty years and twenty pounds added on. Her dark hair was knotted at the back of her head, her dress was buttoned firmly to her throat and wrists with a hem that brushed her ankles. She wiped her hands on the dish towel knotted around her waist and bowed her head in his direction. "Mr. Sadat. I am Mrs. Mansour. This is my daughter, Zahirah."

He nodded to both of them. "Daoud Sadat. I wrote about a room?"

"Of course. I will show you. Peel the eggplants, Zahirah."

"Yes, Mama."

Mrs. Mansour led him to a room past the kitchen. It was clean and pleasant enough, containing a full-sized bed with a firm mattress plentifully supplied with pillows, a small writing table with a straight chair in one corner, in another an easy chair facing a television, and its own bathroom. "There is no tub, only a shower," Mrs. Mansour said.

"It is no matter," AMI said.

"I'm sorry that there is no telephone, Mr. Sadat, but I have the number of the telephone company. The connection is here." She pointed at the box low on the wall. "All you have to do is call them and have it hooked up. It may take a few days." She straightened. "And as you can see, your room has its own entrance," she said, opening the door. It had a window curtained only in white nylon sheers, but the encroaching bougainvillea obscured the neighbor's house. He looked outside. A cement walkway led to the front of the house. "You can be as private as you wish here, Mr. Sadat."

He shut the door and smiled at her. "I can see that, Mrs. Mansour, thank you."

"The breakfast things will be on the table in the morning: cereal, rolls, fruit, coffee. I rise very early to go to work."

"Ah. Where do you work?"

"At a dry cleaner's. My daughter, also, will be gone very early, so you will have the house to yourself."

He smiled. "I will be at work early, too."

"You already have a job?"

"I do," he said gravely. "I am a software engineer."

She nodded. "For Lockheed, probably."

"Yes," he said, raising his eyebrows in well-simulated surprise.

She took it as an implied rebuke for curiosity into his affairs and apologized. "It's just that their headquarters are so near, I assumed-"

He patted the air. "It is no matter, Mrs. Mansour, I quite understand. Your daughter works as well?"

"My daughter goes to university," Mrs. Mansour said.

"You must be very proud."

"It is why we moved here. It has been… difficult, but it was her father's dearest wish."

He steered her off further confidences by inquiring as to how she would like the rent, suggesting cash since he had not had time to open an account in a local bank. He paid for a full month in advance, including the deposit, over her protests, and escorted her to the door.

He barely had time to unpack the meager belongings in his suitcase when a soft knock sounded. He opened it to find Zahirah standing behind it with an armful of fresh towels and two bars of Ivory soap still in their wrappers. "For your bathroom," she said.

She hung the towels and the washcloths and unwrapped the soaps, putting one in the dish next to the sink and one in the dish in the shower. "Dinner is at eight, Mr. Sadat," she said. "Is there anything else you need?"

"Nothing, I thank you."

Her eyes went past him to his open suitcase. "But-I thought my mother said you were a software engineer." I am.

"You have no computer?"

He did not. He would never be so imprudent. He carried a flash drive in his left-hand pocket at all times. It was an indulgence, to carry that much information around with him, but it was necessary, and it was small enough to be easily disposed of at need. The information on it, mostly names and contact information, was encrypted and he backed it up to an online server in a name he never used for anything else.

But she was still wondering about his lack of computer, so he said, "I left it at work."

"Oh." She was doubtful but accepting. "Most engineers bring their work home with them." She met his eyes and a delicate flush stained her cheeks. "I'm sorry, Mr. Sadat. It's none of my business."

He smiled to show no offense taken, and changed the subject. "You and your mother don't wear the hijab."

A wary expression crossed her face. "The hijab is traditional, not religious."

"You and your mother are reform, then?"

This time her answer had teeth in it. "There is nothing in the Koran that advocates the hijab."

He surprised them both by laughing.

"What's so funny?" she said, still hostile, and a little bewildered.

The laughter had felt good. It had been a long time since he had laughed out loud. He sighed. "You sounded like my sister," he said simply.

"Oh," she said. She sensed his sorrow, and her hostility drained away. "My father-"

"Yes, I know, your mother told me," he said.

Again she was surprised. "She did?"

"That he wished for you to go to school. It is easy from that to understand the rest. Thank you for the towels and the soap. I will see you at dinner."

"Oh," she repeated. "Of course. Until dinner, then."

The door closed softly behind her and he stood where he was, listening to her footsteps go down the hall.

The messages were waiting for her when she got back to the hotel. She called the instant she got to her room and was greeted with, "Where the hell have you been?"

"Touring the topless towers of Ilium for Smithsonian magazine," she said.

"What? Are you all right?" Hugh Rincon did not consider poetry necessary, and Elizabethan poetry even less so.

"Girl's gotta earn a living," Arlene Harte said.

"Whatever. Call me back from a pay phone?"

"All right."

She found a coffee shop whose owner was willing to accept an exorbitant amount of money for the privilege of loaning out his telephone, a massive black instrument that looked as if it had been used by George Raft to call in a hit on Humphrey Bogart. It even had a dial, and its cord was straight.

It was at least in the owner's office, and the owner's office had a door that closed. She negotiated her way through the intricacies of Turkish long-distance and a short time later had a surprisingly clear connection to London. "What's up?"

"I need you to go to the Renaissance Polat Hotel and find someone with a good memory who remembers an International Maritime Organization conference held there a couple of weeks ago."

The desk had a tattered phone book on it and she was already puzzling her way through the Turkish Yellow Pages. "Okay, got it. What do you need?"

"Someone masquerading as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard attended the conference, I think to contact someone else who was attending legitimately."

" 'Someone'?"

"The someone is what I want you to find out. The guy masquerading as the Coastie was Isa."

She drew in a breath and blew it out again. She knew who Isa was. She'd been doing a story on Petra in Jordan when the Baghdad bomb had gone off. "Are we sure he's gone? I've always enjoyed being in one piece."

"Oh yeah, we're sure," Hugh said grimly, "because we're pretty sure he's in the U.S. "

Arlene felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. "Holy crap."

"Yeah. Anyway, I FedExed a package with photos to your hotel this morning."

"What exactly do you want to know?"

"If anyone remembers Isa, who was traveling under the name of Adam Bayzani. Commander Adam Bayzani. Find out if he was seen with anyone else. If he was, find out if anyone overheard any part of that conversation."

"You know you're dreaming, of course," she said. "This is Isa we're talking about, the practically invisible terrorist."

"I know," Hugh said gloomily. "Realistically, best-case scenario is you find his maid, who says he was such a nice young man, every morning he left a generous tip on his pillow. This guy won't even pick up a phone, he does everything anonymously via email with multiple addresses he never uses more than once. After we took out his boss, I'm guessing he won't even use satellite phones anymore. But he was at that conference, I'm sure of it. It lasted three days. Someone has to have seen him doing something." In spite of himself his voice rose. "Somewhere!"

She said nothing and Hugh got himself back under control. "Anything, Arlene, any scrap of information you can dig up is more than we've got now."

"Who am I working for, Hugh?" she said slowly. "This is starting to sound personal."

"It is personal," he said. "Sara was at the conference. He rode down in the elevator with her the first morning."

"Jesus Christ."

"She was in uniform, Arlene, and they introduced themselves. And as I'm sure you recall, Isa doesn't suffer a witness to live."

"I remember," Arlene said soberly.

"But for the record, you're working for us, or at least it'll be our name on the check."

"But?"

"But our friends across the pond are footing the bill."

"So, you're saying I can pile on the expenses."

"Anything, any scrap of information, Arlene," he said again, not responding to the joke. "Solid gold."

Lately, Kenai woke up, went straight to her computer, and logged on to the National Weather Service, set for local conditions at Cape Canaveral. It only forecast ten days out but she couldn't help obsessing. Weather delays were the bane of shuttle launches, and July was a month into hurricane season. There was nothing either she or Mission Control could do about the weather, of course, but checking the forecast gave her the illusion of control. Knowing is always better than not knowing.

She'd formed the habit of going in to work early, because the Arabian Knight (when the secretaries over at admin found out he was royalty he'd had a new nickname before lunch, although the astronauts had several, much less complimentary ones) had taken to appearing promptly at eight a.m. each morning, ready to tolerate, if not with good humor then at least with equanimity, whatever indignities his infidel babysitter would inflict on him that day. She had begun to feel a faint hope that he might not, after all, kill them all on orbit.

That morning he came to her with a request that, on the face of it, seemed innocuous. He would be doing daily television broadcasts from the shuttle, which would be launching on the day of the full moon. They'd be on orbit for eight days, which meant the moon would be visible toward the end of the mission. He wanted to observe the new moon during one of the broadcasts, which would naturally enough go out over

the family network and appear on virtually every television screen in the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia.

She took this first to Rick and then to Joel. Neither had a problem with it. "Anything that keeps him out of our hair," Rick said. So the request had been approved, and no one thought much more about it until two days later when they were going over the on-orbit schedule, revised now to accommodate the Arabian Knight's broadcasts, and Laurel said, "Wait a minute, isn't the moon a big deal in the Islamic religion?"

No one on the Carnivore Crew knew. Joel was summoned, and he scurried away in search of the nearest imam, who when found allowed as how, yes, the moon was a big deal in the Islamic religion. Joel came scurrying back and Rick Robertson sat his royal pain in the ass down and went over the script for his lunar broadcasts word by word.

The Arabian Knight was upset. "It's not even Ramadan!"

"I don't care," Rick said later. "Nobody's issuing a call to prayer from one of my missions."

He glared at Kenai, who thought of protesting that it wasn't her fault, and settled instead for a wooden "Yes, sir."

The sooner they launched, the better.

Cal laughed when she told him. "Who knew dating an astronaut would be this entertaining?"

"Always glad to provide the light relief," Kenai said, yawning, and reached up to turn out the light. She tucked the receiver between her ear and the pillow and snuggled in.

"Am I going to see you again before you light the candle?"

She smiled to herself. Cal was coming along in astronautspeak. "I don't know. Probably not."

"We still on for going away when you get back?"

Her mind was filled with nothing but the mission, but she was willing to play along with the notion of a future after orbit. "How's your schedule looking?"

"We'll be headed to dry dock in Alameda by the time you get back. Refit and repairs and then back to Kodiak."

"Are you going north with her?"

"Yeah, for another year."

"And then where?"

"Don't know yet."

"What's on your dream sheet?"

He smiled to himself. Kenai was coming along in Coastiespeak. "Not much, yet. I can't decide if I want another boat."

"You went to the Academy, right? So you've got your twenty in?"

"Yeah."

"Do you want a shore job?" She couldn't decide if she liked the idea of him more available to her or not. Assigned to a ship, he would be gone on patrol half the time. It seemed to be working well for them so far. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

"I don't know. I don't like doing the same thing over and over again, I know that much."

"So, not another 378."

"I don't think so. And no guarantee I'd get one anyway, in fact probably exactly the opposite. There are more people waiting for the captain's chair on a cutter than there are waiting for a seat on a shuttle."

"Mmm. Where are you that you could call me, anyway?"

"Can't say. BSE Brief stop for fuel."

"And you're low on fuel why?"

"Chasing go fasts."

"Catch any?"

"Not yet," he said grimly. "At this point we're all looking forward to the shuttle launch as the highlight of the patrol."

Until now, his decision to join with Isa had seemed the single most romantic action of his life, a joyous response to a call to adventure. He cast off the shackles of home and family with a light heart-an added benefit was an escape from the increasing suspicions of Janan's husband-and followed where Isa led, first to England where he had thoroughly enjoyed seeking out and recruiting the young men who now looked to him and Yussuf like prophets, then to the camp in British Columbia where he had found the training much less amusing, and now to Toronto, where, using the identity papers their forger had prepared, he had found a job as a barrista in a Starbucks and rented a room in a boarding house.

After a month he had moved in with Brittany, the blond night baker who provided the coffee shop's pastries. She was starry-eyed in love with him, and he with her, too, of course, that went without saying. He was particularly in love with her working nights, as it left her side of the bed free for a rotating cast of young women picked up across the espresso bar, attracted to his dark and (he fancied) dangerous good looks. He played fair, he told them firmly that his heart belonged to Brittany, but he did not discourage them from trying to change his mind.

He'd never suffered from a lack of feminine attention, even in the more strict Muslim community of Düsseldorf in which he was raised. In England his eyes had been opened to the possibilities for casual sex in Western culture, but in Toronto he felt as if he'd discovered a gold mine.

No, he'd never been more content, and he was grateful from the bottom of his heart to Isa for plucking him out of a world where the consequences for sex absent marriage could place one's life in literal peril. He was mindful of the debt he owed; he checked his email religiously, following Isa's diversionary instructions to the letter. He'd written them down, strictly against orders, but they were so complicated he was afraid he would forget them, and he'd taped the scrap of paper to the bottom of a drawer in Brittany 's jewelry box where, amid a tumble of rhinestones and sterling silver, it would surely never be found.

Six months later he felt increasingly at home in the West, and it was a rude shock when he checked his email one evening and found the command to move on waiting for him. He went online and bought the ticket to Mexico City, and made reservations for the second flight, but the adventure seemed to have leeched out of his relationship with Isa. When Brittany came home the next morning, fragrant with yeast and sweat, and launched herself at him with her usual lusty joy, he made love to her with a single-minded ferocity that at first surprised her and then subsumed her. "Wow," she said after she caught her breath. "Where'd that come from?"

"I love you," he said, raising his head. "Let's get married."

She looked surprised and pleased. She was also a little puzzled. "Why now?"

He bent his head to kiss her. "I can't wait any longer."

"I didn't know we'd been waiting," she said.

He made love to her again without answering, and that afternoon they dressed and drove to Niagara and were married. It was a nondenominational service and therefore unrecognized in his religion, but he was nevertheless enchanted with the whole notion of Brittany forsaking all others but him so long as they both should live. They drove home and celebrated in bed, and she was late for work that night.

Naked, he got up and went to Brittany 's computer and logged on to the Internet from home, something else Isa had strictly forbidden. He checked his email. Nothing more from Isa, but a message from Yussuf, a discreet reminder to bring currency, as all of their transactions after they bought their airplane tickets would be in cash.

On impulse he emailed Yussuf back (also forbidden) to the same email address (again, forbidden). Suppose they didn't go?

He had a reply less than an hour later. Four words. He will kill you.

"He won't find me," he said out loud. Isa was brilliant, no question, but by his own orders Yaqub had assumed the alias on his forged papers, papers ordered and bought by himself and Yussuf. Isa had never seen them. He had deposited the modest (almost meager, he had thought at the time) stipend Isa had doled out before they parted into a credit union, and sank without a trace into Toronto 's millions. Again by Isa's orders, they communicated only by email, and that sporadically and from continually changing email addresses and computers. No phone numbers to trace to a physical location, no paper trail in a name Isa would know, a different IP address for each email. His identity appeared to be bulletproof. So long as he didn't draw attention to himself, he could live here indefinitely. As of today, he was even a married man. Children would undoubtedly follow. He smiled to himself. And as he was now married to a Canadian, Canadian citizenship would surely be that much easier to acquire.

A second email followed almost immediately, and his smile faded. He will kill us.

He felt a cold finger run down his spine.

Would Isa kill Yussuf for Yaqub's defection?

He thought of Isa then, a tall man with neat habits and a perpetually stern expression that made him appear much older than he was, livened only occasionally by a charming smile that Yaqub privately thought Isa should make a lot more use of.

Isa's sense of purpose was unmistakable and persuasive, almost hypnotically so. His loyalty to Islam was on the face of it without question, although Yaqub did wonder now and then if Isa wasn't a little less fanatical than your average Islamic freedom fighter.

He did not, however, doubt Isa's single-minded determination to accomplish his goals. He decided, regretfully, that Isa would kill Yussuf, thinking that where one was tainted by betrayal, both would be. Isa didn't like witnesses. Yaqub remembered very well how Isa had dealt with Basil back in Düsseldorf.

Yaqub and Yussuf had separated after they left Isa and Basil in the flight from the mob. In his panic he had taken a wrong turn and chance had found him on their heels. He would never forget the speed and strength the older man had shown in tripping Basil and throwing him in front of the mob. Yaqub himself had gone into an instinctive retreat, backpedaling around a corner and fleeing down a convenient alley. He had never told Yussuf what he had seen, but his awe at the display of murderous efficiency was what had tipped the balance in him following Yussuf into service with Isa.

It never occurred to him to wonder, then or after, why Basil had been disposed of in such ruthless fashion.

At present he was focused firmly on the matter at hand. If he had no doubt of Isa's reaction, the question then became, was Yussuf friend enough that Yaqub would sacrifice his newfound sense of contentment to save Yussuf's life?

He was still arguing with himself as he walked into the airport the following Monday morning. They always flew on Monday mornings, Isa's dictum holding that they were less likely to stand out in the crush of back-to-work business travelers. He had checked in online from his home computer-he gave a wistful thought to Brittany waking alone in their bed that afternoon, warm and sleepy and reaching for him-and checked his one bag. This also according to Isa, that people who checked bags were less an item of interest to the ponderous and so easily circumvented security roadblock the Far Enemy had thrown up against incoming travelers.

He smiled at the woman behind the counter and handed her his boarding pass. She was twice his age but that didn't stop him from running an admiring gaze over her. She scanned the bar code and returned a rather stiff smile before fastening a tag to his bag and putting it on the conveyor belt. She stapled the claim check to his boarding pass and handed it back. "Thank you," he said warmly, but she was unresponsive. Evidently not a morning person. He turned away, not seeing the man behind the counter who plucked his bag from the belt before it disappeared.

As he reached the line snaking out of the security checkpoint, someone tapped his shoulder. "Mr. Maysara?"

He turned to see a nondescript man in a tired three-piece suit smiling at him. "Yes?" he said, unalarmed. Perhaps he had left his passport behind.

"May I ask you please to follow me?"

Afterward he wondered why he had. The mild-mannered man in the unremarkable suit with the receding hairline and the belly going slightly to paunch had seemed so inoffensive, so little a threat. There was, too, something in the way he turned immediately after making his request, not once looking over his shoulder, as if he had never a doubt of Yaqub following him when he asked him to.

Whatever the reason, Yaqub followed him. It was done so quietly that barely a head in the crowd turned to watch them go through a gray door whose outline was almost indistinguishable from the gray wall that surrounded it. It led into a small gray room with another door. The man opened it and motioned Yaqub inside with a hand he then used to stifle a yawn.

"What's this about?" Yaqub said, finally asking the question, but he stepped obediently through the door.

A hand covered his mouth and he saw a confusing blur of motion from several unidentified people. There was a sharp sting in the side of his neck. He felt hands around his ankles, he was suddenly horizontal and in motion, and he plummeted down, down, down into a deep, dark well, absent sight and sound and sense.

Zahirah wasn't especially pretty, but she had an air of dignity that sat quaintly on her young shoulders and she was by no means unintelligent. He liked to think that she was what Adara would have become, if Adara had lived.

She smiled at him across the dinner table. He smiled back. Mrs. Man-sour pretended not to notice, handing round the bread and olives in a businesslike fashion. They served themselves heaping spoons of rice and lamb stew and began to eat.

He was a little preoccupied this evening. Yussuf had emailed from Mexico City, and had reported all his cell members present and accounted for.

Yaqub had yet to make contact.

He was at present a day late. Yussuf had written to one of Akil's email drops, saying that he had not heard from him, either. In one way, Akil was pleased that the two young men had not broken protocol by contacting each other. They'd grown up together, were childhood friends. As a matter of natural human reaction he would have thought one of them would have broken the rules at least once, in spite of the strict injunctions against it he had laid on them. In the alien worlds to which they had been exiled, they could have been expected, even forgiven for having reached out for contact with the one familiar face left to them.

Irritatingly, this had not proved the case.

So Yussuf claimed.

Akil wasn't entirely certain he believed Yussuf, but absent a face-to-face confrontation he couldn't be sure. The Internet had certainly proved an excellent administrative tool, but like every other tool, it had its drawbacks.

He himself was leaving for Mexico City the next day.

"You are very quiet this evening, Mr. Sadat," Zahirah said.

He looked up to see her eyes twinkling in an otherwise solemn face. They had long since become Zahirah and Daoud in private. He doubted very much that they were putting anything over on her mother, but he went along with the subterfuge, refusing to admit to himself that he was enjoying it as much as she was.

They had grown inexplicably but undeniably closer over the past six months. Things had reached a head when she'd caught him checking his email when he should have been watching the movie with her and her mother. She'd accepted his explanation of finding the movie a bore but not wishing to spoil their enjoyment of the evening. They had agreed to tell her mother nothing, and this small deception had led to others. Before long, they were arranging expeditions of their own. They were all innocent enough, an art exhibit, a visit to a museum, a lecture at her university, but the fact that her mother knew nothing about them and did not accompany them as chaperone told its own tale.

At first he told himself it was only to distract her, but it wasn't long before he had to acknowledge the truth.

He'd never had a girlfriend before.

In spite of the judgment of his village council, in spite of the punishment inflicted on Adara for his supposed crime, he had never slept with Husn.

Husn kept house for the UNICEF representative in their small market town. As the only English speaker in the village, upon his return home he had been designated the local UNICEF contact. He and Husn had met for the first time at the Gilberts' home.

Looking back, it hadn't seemed that momentous an occasion, the event that would change all their lives so radically. Mrs. Gilbert had been teaching Husn English, and letting her spend an hour of each workday reading through the Englishwoman's collection of Mills & Boon romance novels, which increased her comprehension, if not her vocabulary. "Is love in the West really like this?" she had asked him shyly, holding out one of the books.

"I don't know," he had said, feathering the pages. "All I did was study. All I wanted was to complete my degree and get back home again."

"Were there female students at your college?"

"Yes, many, in some classes more than half."

"Do they wear the hijab?"

"No."

She was entranced by the thought of a country where she could walk down the street with the sun on her face. More questions followed. He started to bring in his textbooks, history and political science and even algebra. She devoured them all, and pelted him with questions that taxed his learning to the utmost.

He would have been lying if he had said he hadn't been attracted to her. Of course he was. She was beautiful, with dark-lashed eyes, luminous skin, and a skein of silken black hair with intriguing bronze highlights, the mere presence of which was in itself exciting because he was unaccustomed to seeing anyone other than his mother and his sister without the hijab. He had avoided contact with the women in his classes in Boston, shocked at their free ways and even more so by the display of skin. His four years had been spent buried in his books, and he had been in such a hurry to get home he hadn't even waited for the graduation exercises, arranging for his diploma to be mailed to him and flying out the evening of his last examination.

He never learned if Husn had been attracted to him. He had always been careful never to so much as touch her hand. When he gave her a book, he held it out by one corner, and she took it by the opposite corner, standing far enough apart so that their arms had to stretch to reach. Conversation took place always in the kitchen or the sitting room, with him on one side of it and her on the other. Mrs. Gilbert, who had not taken well to the Muslim life, and who had made no secret of her contempt for the way the women in it were treated, seemed to believe she was conniving at a romance and took advantage of every opportunity to leave them alone.

Of course they had been caught, if caught was the right word. The cook had walked in one day when Husn was reading something out loud in English. The cook must have gone straight to her husband, who had in turn gone to Husn's husband.

And a week later they had come for him, and for Adara.

He looked across at Zahirah. Her father had wanted her to be raised a good Muslim woman, but he had wanted her to be more than that. She was educated, independent, bare of head and face. She would wither and die in a place like his village. She would be stoned to death in a day in a place like Afghanistan.

She gave him a questioning look. He returned a slight, unrevealing smile and bent again over his plate.

Later that evening there was a soft knock at his door. He hesitated before getting up to answer it, fully intending to plead tiredness as an excuse not to admit her.

But it wasn't Zahirah, it was her mother.

"Mrs. Mansour," he said, startled.

"Mr. Sadat," she said. She looked grave. "May I speak with you?"

"Of course." He stood aside to let her in.

She came in and stood, her hands folded primly in front of her, and waited until he closed the door. "Forgive me for being so blunt, Mr. Sadat, but it has not escaped my notice that you and my daughter have become very close."

So much for subterfuge. He bent his head in wary acknowledgment, and perhaps a little in apology, too.

She took a deep breath. She looked nervous but determined. "I am very sorry, but I am afraid I must ask you to leave this house. You must never return, and you must promise me that you will never seek out my daughter again."

There was a moment of strained silence. "I see," he said at last.

"I'm glad," she said. "I'm sorry if it gives you pain to hear it, Mr. Sadat, but you will not do for my daughter."

He couldn't resist saying, "You're saving her for a rich man?"

Her eyes flashed. "Indeed, sir, I am not. If Allah wills it and a rich man captures her fancy, so be it. It is foolish beyond permission not to imagine that in this world enough money commands an easier life. But she will choose, and my Zahirah does not hanker after riches. She wants the companionship of a like mind, a partner in life. And that you will never be."

Again, he couldn't resist. "And why not?"

"For one thing, you are far too old for her. I will not have Zahirah living out her life caring for an elderly husband, as I did."

She stopped. He prodded her on. "And?"

"And." She gave him a narrow-eyed look. "I don't know why you are here in the United States, Mr. Sadat, or what your purpose is."

He stiffened in shock.

"I only know that you are not who you say you are."

"I-"

She raised a hand. "I don't care to know. You have resided under my roof for six months with a false name and a false identity. You are not Egyptian, Mr. Sadat, and may I say I find your taking of that good man's name in very poor taste. You appear to have had no friends in the area before you arrived, and you appear to have made none during your stay. Your supervisor-did you think when I saw you growing closer to my daughter that I would not inquire?-your supervisor says that while your work is satisfactory you seem merely to be waiting. Waiting for what, Mr. Sadat?"

He opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

She gave a grim nod. "Yes. Well. We Muslims here in the United States of America have had quite enough of that sort of thing. Your kind have generated a constant threat to any of our race and religion who reside here. We don't need you stirring up more trouble."

Again he was able to say nothing.

"I cannot prove anything against you beyond my suspicions, Mr. Sadat," she said, "and it is undoubtedly very unfair of me, but nevertheless I want you gone from my house and my daughter's company by tomorrow morning. Am I understood?"

His mouth a hard line, he said, his voice clipped, "You are."

"Good. Then I have no further need to be here."

She went to the door, waited for him to open it, and swept out. A small part of him was able to admire her style while the rest of him clanged the alarm, even as he moved to pull his case out of the closet and begin packing. What had given him away? How had he betrayed himself to Mrs. Mansour? How could she know he wasn't Egyptian?

He brought himself up short. Would she give him away? Was she even now calling the authorities?

He wasted nearly five minutes thinking about this. No, he decided. If she was going to betray him, she would not have confronted him. She had no proof to offer the authorities anyway, she had said so herself.

He was leaving tomorrow morning, on a ticket purchased with a credit card account that no longer existed. He had planned to come back after he saw the cell off on their mission. Now he would go somewhere else.

Sternly repressing the thought of Zahirah, he filled the small bag with a haphazard collection of clothes, the selection unimportant as it was only to lend him credibility with TSA and would be abandoned upon arrival at his destination.

He finished quickly and cast a glance about the room. His newly opened eyes saw how at home he had become here, that insidious feeling fostering the collection of various knickknacks. The stuffed bear Zahirah had won the day they attended the carnival. The small bookcase filled with books. The poster of the Everglades, bought at the shop the day they had taken the tour. He shook his head, tossed his computer on top of the clothes-there was nothing incriminating on it but it would look odd if he left it behind-and zipped the case closed.

He let himself out the side door and stepped softly down the sidewalk to where an elderly beige Ford four-door sedan was parked. He put the case in the trunk and slid behind the wheel. The engine started without fuss and he pulled away from the curb, willing himself not to look in the rearview mirror.

He parked in the garage at Miami International in the deepest, darkest corner he could find, and killed the engine.

From the backseat came a whisper of sound and he whirled instinctively, throwing his body over the gearshift and thudding into the passenger seat. He launched himself into the backseat in a continuation of the same movement and came down with all the force of a sledgehammer.

"Daoud!" she said, the barest breath of sound left to her after he slammed into her chest, his hands around her throat and squeezing.

"Zahirah!" he said, astonished.

She choked, pulling feebly at his hands, and he loosened them. He sat up and drew a shaky hand through his hair. He tried to collect his scattered thoughts, to regain some semblance of his customary equilibrium. "What are you doing here?" he said, and marveled to hear his voice shake over the words.

She bent over, wheezing as she tried to catch her breath. He couldn't help himself, he patted her back soothingly. "It's all right," he said, "it's all right now. I'm sorry, I didn't know it was you."

She looked up, her breath still coming fast, her eyes frightened. "Why did you attack me like that?"

"I didn't know it was you," he said again, very gently. "I'm sorry. Zahirah, what are you doing here?"

She blushed. He could barely see it in the dim light of the garage. She looked down, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "I-was coming to talk to you. My mother was there before me. I heard what she said to you. When she said you had to leave tomorrow, I knew somehow you would leave tonight. I went out and hid in the back of your car." She waited, head bent, for him to say something. When he didn't she looked up again. "Oh, Daoud, how could she have been so cruel?"

His mind had been racing while she spoke, the thoughts chasing each other like rats in a cage.

"Daoud?" she said timidly. "I want to be with you, and I know you feel the same way." When he didn't respond, only stared at her with a stone face, she said, "Please, Daoud, won't you say something?"

At last his expression broke. A smile of a sort spread across his face. She looked relieved. "That's better," she said with a trace of her old spirit. "For a minute I thought you weren't happy to see me."

"I am always happy to see you, Zahirah," he said.

She blushed again, her love making her deaf to the mournful note in his voice. "I am happy to hear it."

He felt his hands slide of their own accord around her waist. His head bent to hers, and she raised her face eagerly to meet his lips in their first kiss. Her lips were warm and wide and smooth, and he thought that in another life he might have been able to lose himself in them forever.

He deepened it, pulling her to him so that her breasts pressed into his chest. The soft curves were so warm and full against him, he'd never felt anything like it. He stretched out backwards so that she lay full length against him and her legs naturally fell to either side, so that the feminine heat of her was pressed full against the erection that had suddenly and inexplicably manifested itself.

"Oh!" she said, raising her head to stare down at him.

He pulled her back down into another kiss. He didn't want to talk.

She was as virgin as he was. There was a breathless bit of fumbling with unfamiliar fastenings and undergarments, a matter of deciding what went where, but they managed. He was trembling with the need to be inside her but he forced himself to wait, to play with her gently until she was slippery with desire. She stiffened at the sharp pain of his entry and he summoned up all his willpower to hold himself still, letting her become accustomed to him before he began moving again. When he did he moved very slowly, in and out, going as deeply as he could on the down-stroke, pulling out almost all the way, continuing so until he felt her hands on his back pulling him down. He began to move faster, and she pushed up to meet him, gasping, eyes staring blindly up. When her climax came she squeezed around him, milking him, sucking on him, and his own end came with a shout he muffled in the musty fabric of the seat next to her head.

"Oh," she said some moments later. "Oh, Daoud. I didn't know it could be like that."

He raised his head and slid his hands to her throat, his thumbs caressing the hollow beneath her chin. He was still inside her, his wetness and her own such a warm haven. She kissed him, with a tenderness that brought tears to his eyes. "I didn't, either," he said.

Her neck-such a slender, fragile stem-broke easily when he twisted it. The cracking vertebrae sounded like distant gunfire.

Back in port, Cal turned everyone loose, which since they were only temporarily homeported in Miami didn't mean much. They all knew working the shuttle launch was more of a PR mission than it was a real job, and crew was bailing right, left, and center. D7 was keeping Munro in bravo-24 status, available for recall and sailing within twenty-four hours in the event of urgent tasking, but when the "Liberty, liberty, liberty!" call went out over the pipe most of the crew scattered to cheap motels and holed up for three days, leaving a skeleton crew just large enough to respond to an emergency behind. Cal hoped they managed to stay out of trouble when they started checking out the bars. He remembered some pretty wild times as an ensign in Miami, assigned to a 110 off the Everglades. Lots of opportunity for a Coastie to get into trouble if he or she wasn't careful, but these were grown men and women and it was pretty much up to them. The XO cautioned them against sailing into stupidland and turned them loose.

It was a great honor to work security during a shuttle launch, no doubt, but the crew was homesick, discouraged that people had died during their last patrol and they had been unable to save them, and that they hadn't responded to any SARS or made any drug busts on this one. "I guess all the smugglers have up and moved ops to EPAC," the XO said, inspecting the map of the Caribbean Cal had duct-taped over the map of Alaska in the wardroom. He looked around and smiled. "Damn, we're good."

"Yeah," Cal said, without enthusiasm. "How many left on board as of liberty this morning?"

"Forty-four."

"Okay."

"You taking off?"

Cal thought about Kenai in Houston. "I don't know yet. Probably not."

"When do we leave?"

"Three days."

"The thirtieth? Why so early? Won't take us a day to get up there."

"Oh, uh, let me think. Because we're Munro, short for Douglas Munro? The only Coastie recipient of the Medal of Honor, in whose honor you will recall we are named? Related to Kenai Munro, a member of this particular shuttle crew?"

"Uh-huh," Taffy said, not without foreboding. "And this means, what, exactly? Sir?"

Cal gave a sour smile. "It means a tiger cruise, only instead of family riding along we get the press and a bunch of NASA honchos. Also Kenai Munro's parents. It means a couple of receptions on shore when we get there, and it means-"

"Dress uniforms," the XO said with a groan.

"There might also," Cal said painfully, "have been mention made of a band."

"Oh, Christ no," the XO said.

"I'm afraid so," Cal said.

"Allah be merciful," Taffy said.

"God could help out a little, too," Cal said.

"If we got the two of them working together, maybe they could scrub the launch," the XO said hopefully.

"Jesus wept, don't even say that," Cal said, blanching at the thought of Kenai's reaction to the suggestion.

He and Taffy adjourned to a great little Thai restaurant they knew from previous inports. Command had selfishly not shared that information with the rest of the crew, so they saw no one they knew. Cal had a beer, Taffy had tea, and they both ordered entrees with four peppers next to them on the menu. "What are we going to do about Riley?"

"Let him go," Taffy said. "OSC told him not to make any decisions based on his domestic affairs, but his wife won't go back to Alaska, and he won't leave her."

"She's not kicking him out?"

"He says not."

"What about Reese?"

"What about her? The investigators say there is no case. Her story lacks credibility, and to be fair, though an acknowledged weasel, no complaints have been made against Riley of a sexual harassment nature until Reese."

"How is she taking it?"

"Philosophically. I don't get the sense that there's a lot of repressed anger there."

"Does she want to come back to the ship?"

"She says yes."

"What does EMO say about her job performance?"

Taffy shrugged, spearing a shrimp. "It's better than what OSC says about Riley's. Says his work product never was that good, and lately it's fallen off in a major way. He's counseled him numerous times, he says, but it looks like the only thing that might get the kid's attention is a bad set of marks."

"So we're looking for another OS," Cal said, sighing. "Been a run on Combat positions this tour." He took a bite of panang gai and made an approving sound. Thai food didn't count unless it made his nose run. "They're probably bored."

"So am I, but it's the job, Captain," Taffy said, draining his tea and signaling for another. "It's what we're tasked with, it's what we're paid for. If you don't like it, you can always resign."

"That does seem to be the currently popular option," Cal said.

The waitress brought the XO more tea, lingering a little for him to try it, evidently to be the recipient of a grateful smile. Cal didn't think he even registered on her peripheral vision. "Taffy?"

"Captain?"

Cal nodded at the tea. "You ever take a drink?"

"Against my religion, sir," Taffy said.

"The Muslim religion," Cal said.

"That's right." The XO bent his head over his plate again. He was a southpaw, and the gold wedding ring gleamed on his hand.

Taffy didn't talk about his private life, and he didn't socialize a great deal. "Were you raised Muslim?"

The XO nodded. "Both parents."

Cal took a bite of spring roll. "I'm curious, and if I step in it let me apologize in advance."

The XO grinned. Across the room the waitress sighed. "Go for it."

"Does your mom wear a veil?"

The XO laughed out loud. "Not hardly. She's an EMT A veil might get in the way."

"So they're pretty modern."

The XO shrugged. "They're Americans. Their religion is important to them-it is to me, too-but they're acculturated. Just not secularized."

"Oh." Cal drank beer. "Wasn't time to ask in New Orleans, but…" He hesitated.

"What?"

Cal gestured at the XO's wedding band. "What happened to your wife? Wait, let me back up a little. For starters, what was her name?"

The XO's face softened. "Nur. Means light.'"

"How'd you meet?"

"At a college mixer for Muslim-American students. I was at the Academy, she was at Harvard."

"Harvard. No kidding. Got my first master's at Harvard."

"I know. She was probably about four years behind you, give or take. We got married the week after my graduation. She got her teacher's certificate and since I'd scored a 110 out of Chesapeake, she went to work for the Arlington School District, teaching civics and government at Patrick Henry High."

Cal winced. "Teenagers. Yikes. A brave woman."

The XO laughed a gain. "Yeah. You should have heard some of her stories. But she loved it, and from what I could see, shuttling back and forth between duty stations, they loved her." The XO paused, mashing rice with the tines of his fork.

Cal waited.

Taffy looked up, not bothering to hide the pain. "She'd never made a secret of her heritage. She used it in some of her classes, even. But then, 9/11 happened."

Cal was suddenly very sorry he'd asked.

"She was leading a small field trip to the Pentagon that day. She got the kids out, and then the building fell on her."

"Jesus," Cal said, putting down his beer. "I'm sorry, Taffy."

"Me, too," the XO said.

"No kids?"

The XO's smile was more a grimace. "We were waiting. Saving up, gonna buy a house, get more settled, a little more secure. You know."

They finished eating in silence.

"Seven years ago this September," Cal said.

"Yeah."

"Nobody else come along in that time?"

The XO shook his head. "She was one of a kind." He shrugged. "You never know, but I'm not looking for lightning to strike me twice."

Back on board that evening, Cal thought about the XO's tragic marriage. One of a kind, he'd called his wife.

Cal liked his life. He saw no reason to change how he lived it, in spite of his parents' infrequent pleas. If anything, his father's wishes in the matter moved Cal in the opposite direction. He supposed it was juvenile of him, but there it was. At least he knew what motivated him, and right at the top of the list was a disinclination to serve as a working trophy for his father.

One of a kind. Kenai was one of a kind.

They'd been seeing a lot of each other over the past eighteen months, or as much as either of their jobs would permit. So far they'd managed to keep it quiet, from their families as well as from the media. Cal harbored no illusions about his own intrinsic worth to what Harlan Ellison had so aptly named the glass teat, but the press was always on the lookout for a juicy astronaut story, and if and when his father found out about them he'd want to use Kenai on campaign tours.

His mother, on the other hand, would be terrified that marriage and- horrors!-grandchildren might be in the offing. So long as Cal didn't reproduce, Vera Beauchamp Schuyler could go on pretending she was on the right side of forty.

He wondered about Kenai's parents, what they were like. She had spoken warmly of both of them, although her father seemed to predominate over any such conversation. An ex-Alaskan Bush pilot, he sounded like a hell of a guy.

Now it was no longer a matter of when he would meet them, or if. They would be watching the launch from the Munro.

He'd shied away from meeting the families of any of his other girlfriends. It had been more than once the rock upon which the relationship had foundered, and frequently in such instances he was accused of being afraid of commitment. In vain did he protest that it was a simple matter of him liking his life as it was and that he saw no need to change it. He didn't convince any of them, but then he didn't try that hard.

The truth was he hadn't cared enough to put in the extra effort. That made him an asshole of the first water, no doubt, but it also made him a free asshole, and in the years following his escape from the mansion on Louisburg Square his freedom had been his most precious possession, the one thing he was determined never to yield, no matter how many broad hints his father gave about founding the greatest political dynasty in Massachusetts since the Kennedys.

So far, Kenai had not offered to introduce him to her parents, nor had she asked to meet his. It worried him sometimes, how easy their relationship had been so far. After a year and a half he remained interested in her, too, which also worried him. He had made an effort, met with varying degrees of success, not to think about what any of that might mean.

He called her that night in Houston. "How's the Arabian Knight?"

"Status quo," she said. "It's his friggin' satellite that's giving us fits now."

"What's wrong?"

"One of the gyroscopes keeps throwing off weird readings during testing."

"A vital piece of the package?"

"Not once it gets into the correct orbit, no. It's supposed to help get it into that orbit, though."

"I thought you just opened the payload bay doors and released it."

"Mostly, yeah, but this is, in fact, rocket science we're talking about here."

He grinned at her mock sarcasm. "I stand corrected."

"Anyway, we fixed it." She yawned. "Man, I'm beat."

"I'll let you go," he said, "but one question."

"What?"

"Do I get to see you before you depart this sphere?" The Munros were coming aboard early and sailing up the coast of Florida with them. When she got back from orbit, Kenai would make a flying trip to Miami to have a Munro family photo taken on the foredeck of Munro, the Medal of Honor banner on the lookout station in the background. Two genuine American heroes, one past, one present, one standing on the deck of a ship named for the one who died in duty above and beyond the call, and a Coastie, no less. It was hard to tell who was closer to orgasm over this PR opportunity, NASA or the U.S. Coast Guard. It was going to be hard to get around the ship without tripping over an admiral in any direction. He said, very casually, "How are we handling that, by the way?"

When she answered, she was no less casual. "We could pretend to be just acquaintances, I suppose."

"I suppose," he said without enthusiasm. "So, any chance for some alone time before this circus puts up its big top?"

"I might be able to sneak off for a couple of hours. Maybe. Possibly. If you can get up to the Cape before we go into crew quarters."

"What are crew quarters?"

"A bunch of trailers. We move in a week before launch date. It's essentially medical quarantine, so the crew doesn't catch anything from a family member or a friend and get sick during the flight. The only people we can see after that is someone checked out by the NASA flight surgeon."

"Oh." Getting checked out by the flight surgeon increased their chances of getting found out by the press.

She yawned again. "Anyway, I'm going to hit the rack." He heard the smile in her voice. "Exercise that paranormal Schuyler ability to find a really nice hotel as close as possible to KSC."

"Aye aye, ma'am," he said, and hung up with a reluctance that would have frightened the living hell out of him, if he'd noticed.

The anonymous little village was built on pilings perched on a narrow strip of tropical coastline at most a hundred feet in width between the almost vertical forest and the cerulean blue sea. It consisted in the main of a waterlogged marina with a dock ending in a ramp leading down to two wooden slips. The slips looked as if they were on the verge of going under for the third time. To the north and south of the marina were a few related businesses that looked even more tatterdemalion, and some one-room, thatched-roof homes clinging to the sides of the steep coastline that were almost tree houses. At the southern end of the village sat a shabby hotel, a one-story structure whose largest room was the bar, and a half-dozen bungalows with ancient thatched roofs teeming with insect life.

Up the coast from Port-au-Prince, it was so small it didn't even have a name, which might have explained why it was on no map. Although AMI thought that absence more probably had to do with the reason for its existence, its primary industry, which encouraged a wholesale discretion on the part of its residents, always providing they wanted to live to see tomorrow. It was probably the same reason that the encroaching vegetation had been encouraged to overhang the shoreline, all the buildings, and as much of the marina as possible. That much harder to spot, from the sea or the air.

There were a few open skiffs tied up to the marina, one painted a deep blue with a broad stern to accommodate the line of six large outboard motors bolted to it. Akil, inexperienced in the ways of boats, thought they looked very powerful.

He had been here for three days as the rest of the cell trickled in in ones and twos, some flying in on a seaplane held together quite literally with duct tape. Others came by ferry, a self-propelled scow whose arrivals and departures were as erratic as her drunken captain, a squat, scrofulous man with an almost incapacitating limp, very bad teeth, and one eye. Akil had arrived by car, although he'd had to hire a driver to find the road and then to get the car down the almost indecipherable switchback through the jungle, alive with bird calls. He imagined that he could hear the slither of snakes, too, and his driver, a gaunt, morose young man with the scarred knuckles of a fighter, enlivened the journey with a description of the various indigenous species. None of them were poisonous, the driver assured him, but Akil didn't like snakes, and this made the pit stops on the twelve-hour, twenty-two-mile journey interesting. If Akil had been in a less apathetic mood, he might have been more appreciative.

He didn't know quite what he was doing here. Yussuf, good soldier that he was, had arrived before him and had begun to gather in Yaqub's cell members as well as his own, settling them into the tiny cabana he had rented at the very edge of town. He brought them food-if all went according to plan they wouldn't be there that long but there was no point in giving away information about themselves to the investigators who would swarm about the place later-and he found women for those who wanted them. He led them in prayer, stiffening more than one spine, and when the Koran couldn't do the job, engaged the nervous in long discussions of what waited for them in paradise, with emphasis on the honey and the virgins.

During the last three days Yussuf couldn't be faulted. After the initial greeting, Yussuf had said only, "Yaqub?"

"He didn't make it," Akil said.

Yussuf muttered a prayer for his boyhood friend's soul and asked no more questions.

By comparison to Yussuf, Yaqub would have been at best only a decent aide de camp. Akil himself was superfluous.

He didn't need to be there. Moreover, he shouldn't be there. He'd known that before he'd arrived, before he'd left Miami, even. It was the first time he'd ever exposed himself to the risk of operations. For that matter the operation itself was at risk because of his actions. Sooner or later Zahirah's body would be found, and when they questioned Mrs. Mansour she would have too much of value to tell them. He cursed himself again for not returning to the house and disposing of her. He didn't make mistakes like that. It was why he was still alive, and still a threat.

He himself had flown on pre-existing reservations from Miami to Lima, from Lima to Mexico City, and from Mexico City to Port-au-Prince, a different passport for the last flight. The last two men had arrived this morning.

The transportation he had arranged for six months ago was due in late this evening. He would see off the faithful, entrust Yussuf with the completion of the operation, make the hazardous drive through the jungle back to Port-au-Prince, and fly to Paris, where he already had a reservation in a hotel where all the rooms had satellite television and he could watch the results of his plan play out on CNN and the BBC, and especially on Al Jazeera. It would be the glorious culmination of a long and inventive career, and a fitting coda to the life of his master, the man who had taught him everything. He knew Zarqawi would approve and rejoice at this astounding blow to the fabric and pride of the infidel.

The thought steadied him, and he returned to his room to sleep away the afternoon.

She was there the moment he closed his eyes. He knew it was a dream and he struggled to wake, but she wouldn't let him.

"Adara," he said.

"Akil," she said.

"Adara," he said.

"Stay with me," she whispered, her voice husky in his ears. "Daoud," she said. "Stay." Her hands ran shyly over his body.

"Zahirah," he said.

"Yes, my love, it's me. Stay with me, oh my best beloved."

He rolled her gently to her back and slid between her legs with a feeling like coming home, a feeling he had not known since he left his village for the last time. "Zahirah," he said, her name almost a prayer. "Zahirah."

"Daoud," she said, and he looked up to see dead eyes in a dead face, her neck bent in an unnatural angle, the dark marks of his fingers around the tender skin of her neck. Her body was cold, unmoving around him.

He woke violently, covered with sweat, and rolled off the bed to the floor. He scrabbled toward the bathroom on all fours, barely making it to the toilet in time. He vomited until his stomach heaved up nothing but a clear fluid, vomited until his esophagus and his sinuses burned like fire, vomited until he was too exhausted to do anything but lie on the bathroom floor in a puddle of his own sweat. He started to doze and jerked himself awake just in time. There would be no more sleep for him today.

He became aware of a persistent knocking. "Dandin?" Yussuf's anxious voice said. "Dandin, are you there?"

"A moment," he said. He rinsed out his mouth and sluiced off his face and reached for a towel. In the mirror he saw a reflection that shocked him, a gaunt and haggard face with haunted eyes.

When had he become so old? He was only thirty-seven.

Mrs. Mansour's face was drawn with grief, but her voice was steady and she spoke with clarity and determination. She identified Adam Bayzani's doctored passport photo as that of Daoud Sadat, the man who had rented her spare room for the last six months, although she didn't think much of the likeness, saying the individual features seemed exaggerated.

"Exaggerated how?" Patrick said. "It would help if you could be a bit more specific. Take your time."

She did, studying the likeness of a man who she believed had murdered her only child. After a bit she said, "His forehead might be a little too broad in the photograph. His was more narrow, I think. The ears and nose are too long, too, and the mouth a little too wide. It's almost-"

"What?" Patrick said when she hesitated. "Almost what?"

"It's as if someone smeared the photograph when it was still wet." She raised a hand in a helpless gesture. "That's all."

"It's a lot, Mrs. Mansour, believe me."

"Will it help you find him?"

"Yes, Mrs. Mansour," he said. "It will help us find him."

"And he will be punished?"

He held her fierce gaze, his own steady and unflinching, even though he knew he was making promises he might very well be unable to keep. "He will. I give you my word."

She detailed as much of Sadat's activities as she knew, sitting at the utilitarian metal table in one of two metal folding chairs, in the bare, grubby little room with the single overhead light, loaned to Patrick for the occasion by the Miami Dade Police Department. Sadat, she said, left the house for work every morning Monday through Friday, and returned each evening just after six. Work where? Lockheed, he had told her.

Patrick dispatched a team to Lockheed.

It was odd, she said, that all of Sadat's clothes had been new when he arrived at her house.

"How could you tell?" Patrick said.

She looked at him. "I work at a dry cleaner's," she said. "They were new."

"All right," he said.

"It seemed odd," she said again, "but it wasn't until later that I realized it might be because he was putting on a new identity with the new clothes."

Sadat, she said, appeared to have little or no social life. Outside of work hours, he spent little time out, at least at first-her lips tightened-and no friends had visited him at her home. He declared the intention of visiting various local sights: the Everglades, Miami Beach, a carnival, the zoo. He had invited the two of them to accompany him to some of these, as a way, he said, of repaying them for their kindness.

She couldn't be sure then, but now she was certain that Zahirah had begun meeting Sadat outside the home. Mrs. Mansour didn't drive so she hadn't been able to follow him anywhere even if she'd wanted to, although she had become increasingly uneasy when she saw how close her daughter and Mr. Sadat were getting.

"Was it," Patrick said delicately, not wanting to offend her, "a romantic relationship?"

For the first time her eyes teared up. "I believe my daughter thought it was."

"And Mr. Sadat?"

She had to think about that for a while, so long that Patrick had to give her a nudge. "Mrs. Mansour?"

She came back from wherever she'd gone and refocused on his face. "I think," she said very carefully indeed, "that Mr. Sadat cared more than he knew."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because he killed her," she said, her voice hard. "He could have just left her, walked away and never contacted her again. Instead, he killed her."

There was a brief, fraught silence. "I'm sorry," Patrick said in a gentle voice, "I don't quite-"

"He killed her so that there would be no temptation for him to return," she said, still in that hard voice, her eyes bright but not with tears. "I'm not a fool, Mr. Chisum. You are a federal agent. You would not be here if you did not have good cause to suspect Mr. Sadat of wrongdoing. And when you arrive with as much help as I saw in the lobby, I don't imagine you're looking for him because he's been forging checks or bilking widows out of their pensions."

She raised an eyebrow.

"No," he said.

"No," she said, agreeing with him. "You suspect him of being a terrorist. He must be very good at what he does or you would have apprehended him by now."

"Yes," Patrick said. At this point he saw no reason to lie to her.

"If he cared for my daughter, it would be a great temptation to him to return here for her after he accomplishes whatever horror he is planning. If he has succeeded in escaping your notice for this long, then he had to have known that returning here would have been a fatal mistake. Therefore, he removed that temptation."

He looked at her with respect. She'd have made a good profiler. "Tell me, Mrs. Mansour, how did you know he wasn't Egyptian?"

"His accent was Paki," she said. "He insisted on speaking English, he said the better for all of us to practice so we fit in to our new country. I think it was so he wouldn't give his true nationality away while speaking in Arabic. But he did slip on occasion. We all do. He was Pakistani, not Egyptian. I'm sure of it."

"How's the weather look?"

They all waited tensely for the answer. The NASA meteorologist, aware that this was his moment in the sun, paged through a sheaf of papers and took his time answering, probably partly because his answer was so prosaic. It wasn't anything they couldn't all have looked up on www.weather .com five minutes before, anyway, and he knew it. "Forecast for midnight is for clear skies and calm winds, continuing through morning. Winds will pick up a little around eleven, but you'll be long gone by then, so no worries."

There was an audible exhalation around the room. "Excellent," Rick said. He looked around at the rest of the crew. "Any concerns? Anyone?" He carefully avoided looking at the Arabian Knight, who put his hand up anyway. "Mike?"

Mike shrugged, the epitome of the cool jet jockey. "Let's light this candle." He spoiled the effect with an enormous grin.

Bill shook his head.

" Laurel?"

Laurel 's brow was creased but then Laurel 's brow was always creased. "Eratosthenes and ARABSAT-8A good to go." No one saw her crossing her fingers behind her back but during launch crossed fingers were a given. "We should be good to go when we get on orbit."

"Kenai?"

"All systems go. Robot arm go." Kenai heard the words coming out of her mouth but they echoed strangely in her ears. This time tomorrow she'd be on orbit. This time tomorrow she'd look out of the flight deck windows and see the Big Blue Marble. This time tomorrow, she would have the right to change the silver shuttle on her collar for gold. "We're ready to rock and roll."

This time tomorrow she would be a bona fide astronaut.

The Arabian Knight still had his hand up. Rick sighed heavily. "Yes,

Jilal?"

"Yes, Commander." The Arabian Knight never addressed them by their names. He had not been invited to. "I had a few more questions about the food. I want be certain that everything is halal-"

Kenai tuned out of the conversation. That evening, she got a phone call from Cal. "I thought you were at sea."

"We're only five miles offshore. I figured I'd see if my cell phone was working. I dialed the number you gave me, and whiz bang, some guy answered and handed me off to you." There was a faint question at the end of his sentence.

"Yeah, that was Mike. Mike Smith. One of the other crew members. We're in crew quarters. You remember, in medical quarantine until we go out to the pad."

"Yeah."

After a moment she said, "So did you call just to hear me breathe?"

He surprised them both when he said, "Yeah. I think I did."

Neither one of them knew what to do with that, so she said, "You've met the parents?"

"They're great people, Kenai."

She smiled. "I know. They seem equally impressed with you. I talked to them before you left the dock." She yawned. "Dad wants to know if I'm sleeping with you."

"Oh," he said uncomfortably. "Yeah. I kinda blew it."

"He told me."

"Sorry," he said.

"I'm not," she said. "Are you?"

For the life of him, he couldn't come up with a respectable answer, probably because he didn't know what it was.

"Never mind," she said. "Let's not go there, at least not now. I've got other things to worry about."

"How's the Arabian Knight?"

"Right now, he's vetting the menu. Making sure everything's halal."

"What's halal?"

"It's Arabic for kosher, I think. Whatever. It keeps him out of our hair. Now if we could just gag him for the rest of the trip when we strap in."

"There have been protests about him."

"Yeah, they told us. Bunch of right-wing Muslims protesting a devout's close contact with secular infidels?"

"Pretty much."

"Do we got trouble in River City?"

"Nah. For one thing, the launch is miles away from anything that looks like access. I suppose they could barricade the gates or something, but what would be the point?"

"And that's not what they want, anyway," she said cynically. "What they want is film at eleven."

"Speaking of which-"

"Oh yeah," she said, and laughed. "I forgot. How many television cameras you got on board?"

"Only one, fortunately, and even that feels like one too many. They restricted it to three pool reporters, one from the Miami Herald, one from NPR, and one from CNN. And they all want to talk to Nick and Doreen."

"How they holding up?"

"Pretty well. That little prep course NASA runs the friends and relatives through must be pretty effective. They both smile right into the camera like it's their new best friend, and they'll talk the ear off of any reporter about how their little girl started reading Robert Heinlein by the time she was in the second grade. Oh, and I didn't know you did bead-work?"

"I do what?"

"Make bead jewelry."

"I do?"

"Yeah. Doreen seemed to feel it necessary to establish your feminine side."

Kenai snorted. "I cook. Isn't that enough?"

"You cook?"

"I make one hell of a spaghetti sauce, smartass."

"I'll let you try it out on me when you get back."

Another silence fell. "I'm not loving this," he said.

She didn't pretend to misunderstand him. "Don't worry. We'll all come back alive."

He thought of the virtual bomb she would be riding into orbit that evening, and said, "Bet your ass. Hey."

"Hey, what?"

"What if I love you?"

"What if I love you back?"

They considered this in startled silence for a moment. "Probably just the situation," she said finally. "You've never had a girlfriend before who rides rockets. I've never had a boyfriend who didn't come unglued at the thought."

"Yeah," he said, "you're probably right. Take care up there."

"I will."

"We've got a date the instant you're out of debrief and Munro's in dry dock."

"You going to kill me if I say I'm not anxious for my first time on orbit to be over?"

He laughed. "No. I think the right thing for me to say right now is, have fun."

"It'll do. See you in a week."

"See you," he said, but she had already hung up.

ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME

"I can hear their engine," Yussuf said.

"Yes," AMI said. "Captain?"

The blood had flowed freely from the scalp wound where Akil had struck him, and it had dried to his face in a half-mask that made him look like the Phantom of the Opera. The little finger on his left hand stuck out at an unnatural angle, and he was careful to hold it out of the way. He sounded resigned. "I say nothing. I do not respond to calls. I do not slow down."

"Correct," Akil said. "Yussuf, get our men up on deck."

"Yes, Isa," Yussuf said, and left. Shortly they heard footsteps coming aft and climbing the stairs to the deck.

The migrants said and did nothing, watching them pass with fear or apathy on their faces. Most of them spoke little English, and they'd probably spent everything they had on passage to the United States. They would do nothing, take no action that might delay or deny that goal.

The engine of the small boat neared. Akil could barely discern the outline of the hull against the sea. It was so dark he couldn't see where the sea ended and the sky began, but for the stars, which were many and beautiful. He thought of Adara. He thought of Zahirah.

The small boat hailed them on the marine band. "Unknown freight, unknown freighter, this is the United States Coast Guard. You are inside a closed area, I say again you are inside a closed area. You must turn around, I say again you must turn around immediately. Please respond."

"Don't answer," Akil said.

He remembered very clearly the story Adam Bayzani had told him about what it was like on a small boat at night. They were in constant communication with their ship, both the bridge and the combat center, and they were equipped with their own surface radar unit. The ship had infrared radar that Bayzani had spoken of admiringly, but not on the small boat. The cutter had night-vision goggles, which the small boat might or might not have on board as well.

These last two items of information were why Akil's men had jackets on over their weapons. If the Coast Guard did manage to get a close look at who was on deck of the little Haitian freighter in the dark, he didn't want his people to stand out any more than absolutely necessary. Or not immediately. It was also why he had instructed Yussuf and Yaqub to select recruits who looked more African than Asian. They would appear like every other Haitian migrant on board, at least at first.

The small boat came nearer and nearer. When Akil judged it near enough, he said, "Cut off the engines."

"They'll know we-"

Akil shot the captain in the back of the head. He had a silencer fitted to the muzzle of his pistol and the shot made a muted burping sound. The captain's forehead burst and splattered blood and brains all over the steering wheel and the control console. Akil wiped away some of the mess to take the boat out of gear. He had watched the captain very carefully for the last part of the journey.

He left the engine idling and went to join his men on deck. "Did you immobilize the rest of the crew?"

"Yes," Yussuf said. "They're tied up in our stateroom. There are only six of them, and I think four of them were only guards. None of them protested when they saw the guns." A trace of self-satisfaction colored the words. Yussuf was discovering the power that came with a weapon.

Akil nodded. "Good work." He was watching the shadow that was the small boat. It made a wide circle around the Mokame and took up position off their port side. A powerful spotlight came on and flooded the stern of the freighter with light. Akil's men put on a good show, putting up their hands to shade their faces and blinking in the bright light. They were lost in the sea of migrants surrounding them, all doing the same thing as they muttered incomprehensibly among themselves.

The loud hail came a moment later. "Unknown freighter, unknown freighter, this is the United States Coast Guard. You are inside a security zone closed to all unauthorized vessel traffic, I say again, you are inside a security zone closed to all unauthorized vessel traffic. You must depart this area at once. Please reply."

"Remember," Akil said, "we need the uniforms."

"Now?" Yussuf's whisper was agonized.

"Wait," Akil said, his voice a mere thread of sound. "Wait."

The migrants' attention was fixed fearfully on the Coast Guard small boat. They barely registered Akil and his men's presence. With every part and fiber of their being they wanted to be safely ashore in America.

The small boat came closer in an ever-narrowing circle. Once again the hail, "Attention, unknown freighter, this is the U.S. Coast Guard. This area is closed to all traffic, I say again this area is closed to all traffic. You must turn your vessel around immediately and leave this area."

The small boat's orange hull was twenty-five feet away from the Mokames stern, then twenty, then fifteen. "Safeties off," Akil said softly, "and remember, head shots. We need the uniforms."

He waited until the small boat had closed to within five feet of the Mokame, when he could see beyond the brightness of the spotlight to the members of the small boat's crew. He raised his gun and shot the coxswain between the eyes.

"The coxswain sits in front on the left," Bayzani had said, illustrating with the salt and pepper shakers, so eager to instruct, so eager to please. "He's the captain of the small boat, so to speak. The man on his right maintains communications with the ship."

Without pausing Akil shot the man sitting next to the coxswain, and one of his men, Mahmoud he thought, reached over the side with a boat hook and snagged the bow of the inflatable.

"What the fuck?" the man in the bow said, staring open-mouthed. Yussuf shot him. The bullet hit his shoulder, high and to the left, and Akil was irritated. "We need the uniforms!" he repeated.

He had to raise his voice over the increasing cries of the migrants, who after the first shock were scrambling, clawing, fighting to get away from the guns. One man, braver than the rest and more stupid because of it, made a clumsy attempt to tackle Yussuf. Akil's bullet caught him in the stomach and he skidded backwards, to sit down hard on the deck. He looked with surprise at the rapidly growing stain on the front of his shirt.

Those migrants below had panicked at the sound of the gunshots, pouring out on deck, with screams and cries and pleas to their gods, only to fall back in fear when they saw the guns.

One of the two men left alive in the inflatable was trying to pull the coxswain's body free of his seat. Akil shot twice and missed twice when the man ducked, but by then his men had found their range and the next time his head popped up three bullets hit it more or less simultaneously. Miraculously, they had managed not to hit the boat.

The fifth man stood up in the back of the inflatable, hands raised in the air, his face a white blur in the night. The flap on his sidearm had been unfastened but his hands were empty.

At least five guns spoke at once, and the man tumbled backwards over the edge of the small boat and hit the water with a splash. There were other splashes as some of the migrants went in, some voluntarily, others falling. By now the Mokame was listing heavily to starboard because all the migrants were crowding the starboard side gunnel, trying to crouch as far away from the armed men as they could get.

Akil cursed with a fluency that momentarily stopped them all in their tracks. "Secure the boat!" he said.

Mahmoud knotted the end of the small boat's bow line around one of the cleats on the Mokame. Five of his men half jumped, half fell into the small boat and began stripping the bodies.

"T minus ten."

Ten minutes to launch. Still wearing dry pants. Still with her heart beating faster than any human heart ever had. In twenty minutes she could be in space. Correction. In twenty minutes she would be in space.

"Isa got clean away?" Kallendorf was not pleased.

Neither was Patrick. "Unfortunately, sir, yes."

"Very unsatisfactory."

Patrick tidied his file together. "Not entirely, sir," he said mildly. "The attack was foiled. The shuttle and its crew made it safely into orbit, and they are now safely back. I understand the first round fired from the cutter's cannon got close enough for them to see. It gave them a few bad moments, but all in all, a happy ending, I would think.

"The helicopter, though damaged in the firefight, landed safely onshore at the Cape, although I understand the pilot was taken into custody by NASA security for a few hours until everything was sorted out. The cutter suffered severe damage when the gun exploded, but the hull remained intact and the cutter made it into port."

"How did they get control of the engine room?" Kallendorf asked idly. He wasn't all that interested.

Patrick allowed himself a prim smile. "Akil's people didn't know much about ships, sir. All the compartments are watertight, but there are many different entrances. The executive officer and the, what I believe is called the health services chief, or corpsman, colluded on a gas of some kind to introduce into the engine room. I believe the chief component was ammonia. When the terrorists became incapacitated, a welder cut through one of the doors and the terrorists were, uh, overpowered by the crew."

"Knacky people, those Coasties," Kallendorf said.

"Yes, sir. Always prepared is, I believe, their motto."

"Still. Isa escaped." Kallendorf sighed. "Not good, Patrick, not good."

"We now know who Isa is, sir, and where he comes from. This will, I believe, be a great help in predicting his future actions.

"And lastly, this attack underlined something the agency has been trying to get across to Congress for years."

"Oh? What's that?"

"That our nation is immensely vulnerable to attack by sea. This time it was a hijacked Haitian freighter. Next time? It might be a hijacked oil tanker, mined to explode as it runs aground…" Patrick shrugged. "Well. Pick a target, sir. Maybe, just maybe because of this action, Congress will listen the next time." He stood up. "Anything else, sir?"

Kallendorf looked at him broodingly. "You swore at me, Patrick."

"Yes, sir, I did." Patrick made a superhuman effort and didn't apologize.

Kallendorf grinned. "Get out of here."

"Certainly, sir."

Patrick went on his way rejoicing. When he reached his office, he paused with his hand on the door for a moment, and then went in. "Hello, Melanie."

"Hello, sir." There was a smile in her eyes.

"Any messages?"

"Just one." She handed him a slip of paper.

"Ah. Get Mr. Rincon on the phone for me, will you?"