But McGarvey had already stepped up on the sill, and balancing for just a second leaped up catching one of the open aluminum trusses that held up the low ceiling. It bent slightly under his weight, but he hand-walked out to the middle of the control room, away from the pools of blood, and dropped the ten or twelve feet to the floor, rolling with the hit.

He had banged up his knees in the fall, and he had to hobble over to the door, but the electronic locking mechanism had been disabled so it wouldn’t open. No time.

He pulled out his pistol and fired two shots into the back of the card reader, which sparked and the door lock cycled.

Gail was there with Strasser, her pistol out, but when she saw it was McGarvey she lowered her weapon. “We heard the shots, and I didn’t know what the hell was happening.”

He turned and went back to the control panels on the back wall and took a closer look at the LED counters, which had counted down to 50:00.

“My God, we need to call an ambulance,” Strasser said.

“They’re dead,” McGarvey replied sharply. He understood the detonators that looked like pencil stubs stuck into the Semtex, but the LED counters were out of place. There was no need for them, or at least not something as big and as complicated as they seemed.

“Do you recognize the setup?” Gail asked at his shoulder.

“No,” McGarvey said. He knew a fair bit about explosive devices and the means with which to detonate them, but this was something he’d never seen before.

“Can you disconnect the damned things?”

“I don’t know. This is probably some sort of a fail-safe. Tamper with them and they’ll blow.” McGarvey looked up as Strasser eased one of the bodies away from the computer monitor for reactor two.

“Cutting out the ability for us to remotely scram the reactors was probably done here,” the engineer said. “Maybe he rewrote the code. I need to get into the system to see what he did.” He sat down, squeamish at first because of all the blood, but then he took out a handkerchief and wiped off the keyboard and pulled up the master program, which was a directory of all the control documents that were used to operate the reactors, the coolant and steam generators and condensers, the turbines and scram functions.

McGarvey glanced at the LED, which had passed 45:00. “You have about thirty minutes before we’ll need to think about getting out of here.”

“What can I do?” Gail demanded. “Goddamnit, I feel so fucking helpless, and guilty.”

McGarvey thought that in a large measure it was her fault for not running a tighter security setup, even though this scenario wasn’t in the playbook, but it wouldn’t help to say it. The exact details of 9/11 had faded from the collective consciousness and a lot of people were walking around with blinders on. “You remember Alan Lundgren, from Washington.”

“He’s working with you now. Former Bureau counterterrorism man.”

“An Air National Guard chopper brought us up from Miami, Alan’s outside helping organize the evacuation, so he’ll be nearby. But he’s the explosives expert, I need him in here. You can take his place.”

“At the heliport?”

“No, right outside in the parking lot.”

It was obvious that she wanted to stay, torn between following McGarvey’s orders, and wanting to help fix this problem. But she nodded grimly. “I might be able to retrieve an image of the guy who left the tour. The monitoring station is upstairs, just down the hall from the observation window.”

“Later,” McGarvey said.

Gail looked over at Strasser, whose fingers were flying over the keyboard. “Good luck,” she said, and she left.

“Are you coming up with anything?” McGarvey asked the engineer.

“Nothing so far,” Strasser said without looking away from the screen. “The remote scram control seems to be functional from here.”

“Keep digging,” McGarvey said, and he took a closer look at the explosives molded to the other three panels. Nothing complicated, in each case just a one kilo brick of Semtex molded between an in-the-wall-mounted unit about the size of a fifteen- or sixteen-inch flat-panel television set and a smaller panel of brightly lit push buttons beneath it. If the plastic went off, it would take out both panels and probably do a lot of damage to some of the other controls and indicators within a eight- or ten-foot radius, and then they would be in deep shit.

Like Gail, he was beginning to feel helpless. As the counters passed 40:00, he took out his cell phone and took several close-up photos of the LED devices then speed-dialed Otto Rencke’s number at Langley.

Rencke was the CIA’s oddest duck genius, on a campus filled with such people, and was in charge of Special Operations, which meant he thought about things that no one else had dreamed up. And whenever he came up with something, perhaps something new the Chinese were doing, or defeating a new computer supervirus, or predicting a likely military or terrorist operation aimed at us somewhere in the world — and he was never wrong — the director and everyone else on the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building sat up and took notice.

He and McGarvey had worked together for years, and over that time Otto and his wife, Louise, who worked at the National Security Agency, had become family to Mac and his wife. When their daughter and son-in-law were assassinated, leaving behind a three-year-old daughter, Otto and Louise took the child in as their own; no hesitation, no questions asked; it’s what family did for each other.

Rencke answered on the first ring. “Oh, wow, Mac, is it you?”

“I have a problem I need your help with.”

Rencke always wanted to talk about what was going on in McGarvey’s life, about Audie, about Company gossip, and McGarvey almost always went along. But this time was different. “What do you have, kemo sabe?”

“I’m sending you some photographs,” McGarvey said and he hit the Send button, as the LED timers passed 38:00.

“Okay, got ’em,” Rencke said. “Oh, wow, you’re in the control room of a nuclear power station, and you’re in trouble.”

“Hutchinson Island, Florida,” McGarvey said. “It’s Semtex and an electric fuse, but I’ve never seen timers like these.”

“Not just timers. Probably remote controls too, maybe even monitors listening in to what’s going on,” Rencke said. He sounded out of breath as he usually did when he was excited or worried. “Who’s with you?”

“For now, Chris Strasser, the chief engineer, and Alan Lundgren, who’s been working with me at the NNSA.”

“Okay, I’ll run these downstairs to Jared, get his take. In the meantime I wouldn’t screw around. That shit could blow at any minute and when it does it’ll take out more than a couple of control panels, it’ll take out whoever’s standing in the way.”

“One of those panels initiates a scram if something goes wrong.”

“I see that,” Rencke said. “And I think the other panel looks like coolant controls, and if these people were any good they would have screwed with the remote scram capabilities.”

“Probably from the computer at the monitoring positions. Can you hack into them?”

“Nada. It’s a closed system, they’re not online,” Rencke said. “I’ll get back to you in the next couple of minutes.”

“We don’t have a lot of time.”

“I see that,” Rencke said, and the connection was cut.

SEVENTEEN

The LED counters passed 33:00.

McGarvey went around the control console for reactor two and watched over Strasser’s shoulder as the engineer tried to figure out what had been done to his system. But he was a nuclear engineer, not a computer systems or programs expert.

“We’re running out of time,” McGarvey said, and Strasser looked up at him and shook his head.

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