He was making a difference.
Now I'm recruiting spies and analyzing data, he thought. It was honorable work, but there was a big difference between commanding and supervising. What was it the Chinese leader Liu Shao-chi had said? The true leader is an elephant. The rest are just pigs inserting scallions into their nose in an effort to look like one.
With a nod toward the bartender, Rodgers turned back to the room. There was nothing in here that appealed to him. Not the glad-handing, not the eavesdropping, not the neediness, and not the facades. But Rodgers was definitely beginning to smell onions in his own nose. It was time for a change.
Rodgers would talk to Senator Orr and Admiral Link, but first he wanted to talk to Paul Hood. For there was one concession Mike Rodgers would never make, however bored he became. It was a concept he did not think many people in this room would understand.
Mike Rodgers put loyalty above all else.
TWO
Washington, B.C. Sunday, 11:18 p.m.
There was a time when the Liverpool-born William Wilson could not have afforded to stay in a landmark hotel like the Hay-Adams, with its view of the White House, the Washington Monument, and Lafayette Park. Or been invited to a Georgetown party hosted by a United States senator.
Or been picked up by a woman who looked like this one did.
What a difference two billion dollars makes.
The lanky, six-foot-three-inch Wilson was the thirty-one-year-old inventor of the Master Lock computer technology. Launched five years before, it used a combination of keystrokes, visual cues, and audio frequencies to create hack-proof fire walls Not content with revolutionizing computer security, Wilson bought the failing London Merchant-Farmer Bank and made it a European powerhouse. Now he was about to go on-line with Master Bank an on-line service that invested in European businesses. Wilson had come to Washington to meet with members of the Panel of Economic Advisors of the Congressional Committee on Banking Financial Services. He intended to lobby for an easing of foreign direct-investment restrictions that were put in place during the War on Terror. That would remove hundreds of millions of dollars from American banks and stocks. In exchange, Wilson would guarantee an equal investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in American companies. That would keep cash flow circulating in the United States, though the bulk of the profits and tax benefits would still be his.
The stunning young woman had approached him early in the evening, just minutes after he arrived. She was a reporter. After assuring him that she was not angling for an interview her beat, she said, was the environment and meteorology the woman asked if she could stop by later in the evening.
"I'm drawn to men who create technological quantum leaps," she said.
Who could resist a come-on like that?
Two hours later Wilson left the party with his two bodyguards and driver. He had agreed to meet the woman at eleven p.m. There were paparazzi outside, and Wilson did not want to be photographed leaving with anyone. The world was a conservative place. He preferred to remain a champion of the financial and science sections, not a libertine of the gossip page.
Wilson had the top-floor Federal Suite, and his bodyguards had the adjoining Presidential Suite. Motion detectors had been installed outside Wilson's door and on the floor of the balcony. If anyone tried to enter without being announced, vibrating wristbands would silently wake the bodyguards.
Wilson had ordered a 1970 Dom Perignon from room service and a light gray beluga caviar. He had candles delivered, along with a dozen roses for the bedroom night-stands. He opened his bow tie but left it hanging around his neck and sprayed a hint of Jivago Millennium above the collar. He probably did not need any of that. After all, he had made a technological quantum leap. But growing up the son of a pub owner, it made him happy to smell something other than ale and cigarettes. It made him even happier to be with women who did not smell of them.
His guest arrived on time and was announced. One of the guards met her at the elevator and escorted her to the suite. Wilson met her at the door with a rose. It made her smile. The rose seemed to disappear.
They ate caviar on toast tips. They drank champagne. They stood close on the balcony and looked out at the White House. They did not say much. She seemed content just to be there, and he was delighted to have her. As a distant church bell sounded midnight, they went quickly from the balcony to the authentic Hepplewhite mahogany settee to the bedroom.
The woman blew out the candles on the dresser, set her purse on the night table, and pushed him back on the king-size bed. She was as assertive as she was beautiful. Wilson understood that, and he went along with it. To succeed in her business, at her age, took confidence. She was showing that now.
"What can I do for you?" he asked.
"Just lie there," she replied as she settled on top of him.
He looked up at her and smiled. She moved her fingers down his arms and pushed them to his side. She placed her knees in his open palms and dragged her long nails across his chest, along the side of his neck, his scalp. Her toned body moved in excited spasms, like a whip.
Shining through the window, the lights of Lafayette Park showed Wilson occasional flashes of cheekbone and shoulder.
Lady lightning, Wilson thought. With thunder rolling from deep inside her.
Champagne always brought out the Byron in him. Wilson was about to share his little metaphor aloud when his companion suddenly leaned across his chest and pulled a large, full pillow from behind him. She dragged it across his face and then leaned into it, hard.
"Hey!" Wilson shouted. He repeated the cry but lacked the breath to say more. He shut his eyes and closed his mouth and tried to push up with his head. His neck cramped painfully, and he stopped.
Wilson's hands were pinned by the woman's knees. He struggled unsuccessfully to raise them while he wriggled helplessly from side to side. He screamed into the pillow, hoping his bodyguards would hear him. If they did, he did not hear them. He heard nothing but bedsprings laughing beneath his head, his heart punching up against his throat, and his own thick wheezing as he fought to draw breath. His hands throbbed and the flesh of his belly and thighs burned where it rubbed hers. The pillow was wet with perspiration and saliva.
This is a game, Wilson thought hopefully as rusty circles filled the insides of his eyelids. This is what turns her on.
If it was, he did not approve. But he did not dwell on that. His thoughts were not his own. Wilson's head filled with visual doggerel, images that came from other times and places.
And then, suddenly, the slide show stopped. His face cooled, his mouth opened wide, and his lungs filled with sweet air. He opened his eyes and saw the woman. She was still perched above him, a slightly darker silhouette than the ceiling above. His eyes were misty with sweat.
They smeared the woman as she bent close. The park lights sparked off something else, something in her hands. He tried to raise his arms to push her back, but they were still pinned. He couldn't speak or scream, because he was still desperately sucking air through his wide-open mouth.
She moved closer and put the palm of her left hand against the bottom of his nose. She pushed up.
"What?" was all he could say as his head arched back. He cried out weakly, but he sounded like a pig calling for dinner.
Or a man having sex, he thought. Christ. The bodyguards would not come, even if they heard him.
A moment after that, Wilson felt a cool sting in his mouth. He felt the weight of the woman leave him. He saw her get up. But that did not help. Within moments a cold, tingling numbness moved down from his ears along the sides of his neck. It filled his shoulders and arms and poured across his chest like an overturned bucket of ice. It tickled his navel and rolled down his legs.
This time there were no mental images, no struggle. The lights, and his lungs, simply snapped off.
THREE
Washington, D.C. Monday, 8:02 a.m.
Op-Center was officially known as the National Crisis Management Center. That was what it said on the charter, on the small brass sign beside the front door, and on the badge Paul Hood had just swiped through the lock to enter the lobby. Which was why Hood felt a little schizophrenic when he arrived and there was no crisis. He felt paradoxically relaxed and anxious.
Roughly half of the seventy-eight employees at Op-Center were dedicated to intelligence gathering and analysis. The other half handled crises that were imminent or had already gone "active," as they euphemistically described rebellions, hostage situations, terrorism, and other crises. When half the team was idle, Hood worried that someone on the Hill would notice. The intelligence community could learn something from Congress. With nothing more than newspapers, gossip, and intuition, they profiled people and agencies with eerie accuracy. After that came the auto-da-fe. After that, people who once moved through the corridors of power became consultants. Hanging out the shingle saved face. What they really were was unemployed.
Hood did not know what he would do if the Inquisition came for him.
Ironically, he knew how to stop it. Prior to joining Op-Center, Paul Hood was a two-term mayor of Los Angeles. He got to know a lot of people in the movie industry, and he learned that many of them were extraneous. If they did not find fault with perfectly fine scripts, there would be no reason for them to be employed. The United States military had somewhat the same mentality. Military intelligence financed "cheerleaders," as they called them. These were both indigenous and undercover teams that fomented conflict around the globe. "Counterfeit mobilization," they called it. A world at peace did not need increased military spending. And a downsized military would not be prepared to handle a real war when it arose.
There was some sense to the Department of Defense policy. However, counterfeit mobilization only worked one way for intelligence agencies.
You had to pick a foreign national, frame him, and have your guys smoke him out. As much as he hated the sense of entitlement diplomatic plates gave diplomatic personnel, Hood had a problem with that. First, it tied up personnel from watching for real spies and saboteurs.
Second, it could begin a pattern of escalation abroad until you actually turned allies into enemies. Third, it was wrong. It was not fashionable in Washington, but Hood believed in the Ten Commandments.
He did not always keep them, but he tried. And bearing false witness was one of the You shall nots.
Hood greeted the guard, used his card to access the elevator, then descended one level to the heart of the National Crisis Management Center. There, Hood passed window-less offices that were set off a circular corridor of stainless steel. He reached his own wood-paneled office, near the back. He was greeted by his assistant, "Bugs" Benet, who sat in a small cubicle located to the right of the door. The young man was busy at the computer, logging the reports of the evening crew.
"Morning," Hood said. "Anything?"
"Quiet," Benet replied.
Hood already knew that, more or less. If there had been any kind of significant development, nighttime director Curt Hardaway or his deputy Bill Abram would have notified him.
"Did you hear about William Wilson?" Benet asked.
"Yes," Hood replied. "It was on the radio."
"Heart attack at thirty-one," Benet said.
"Sex is among the most strenuous physical activities, up there with full court basketball and rock climbing," Liz Gordon said as she walked by.
Hood smiled at the psychologist. "I'll bet you wouldn't have said that at the Brookings Institution."
"Probably not." Liz smiled as she continued toward her office. The thirty-five-year-old woman had given up a post at the independent research and policy institute to take this job with Op-Center.
Initially, Hood had not put much faith in profiling. But Liz had impressed him with her insights about leaders, about field operatives, about soldiers, and about Op-Center staff that were bending under personal and professional stress. She had been especially helpful with Hood's fourteen-year-old daughter, Harleigh. The eldest of his two children had been among the hostages taken by rogue peacekeepers at the United Nations. Liz had given him solid, effective advice about dealing with her post-traumatic stress disorder. The psychologist had also helped Hood reconnect with his twelve-year-old son Alexander after the stressful divorce from Sharon.
Hood shut the door, went to his desk, and input his personal computer code. It was not the name of his children, or his first pet, or the date he started working here. Those were things that a hacker might figure out. Instead, it was Dickdiver, the main character of his favorite novel, Tender Is the Night. It also made Hood smile to key it in. Hood and his long-ago fiancee Nancy Jo Bosworth had read it to each other when they first moved in together. When there was still magic in his world and romance in his heart. Before stolen software designs compelled Nancy to run off with out telling him why or where.
It took almost twenty years for Hood to find her. It happened by accident, during a trip to Germany on Op-Center business. Nancy told him she had wanted the money for them but grew ashamed. Since she could not return it, she kept it for herself.
Old feelings returned for them both. Though the passions were not acted upon, they helped to undermine what had been a colorless, rebound marriage to Sharon. While Hood was alone now, the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel was still the key to a sublime place, the last time Hood was truly happy. The password was his way of remembering that every day.