transferred from his private office in his Taos ranch to this private office in the upstairs residence suite of the White House. He peered around at the massive bookcases, not really seeing them as he thought about what he needed to discuss. He desperately wanted to light his pipe. It was still in the breast pocket of his baggy wool suit jacket, the stem poking up. He crossed his legs, the top one almost instantly swinging like the arm of a metronome.
When the president entered, he saw the agitation of the chief of Covert-One. 'I'm sorry for your loss, Fred. I know how much you valued Dr. Smith.'
'The condolences may be premature, sir.' Klein cleared his throat. 'As well as the celebration of our so-called victory in Algeria.'
The president's back stiffened. He walked to the old roll-top desk, his favorite from Taos, and sat. 'Tell me.'
'The team of rangers we sent in right after the missile attack never found the bodies of Colonel Smith, Dr. Chambord, or Therese Chambord.'
'It's probably too soon. In any case, the bodies could've been either badly burned or blown into fragments.'
'Some were, that's true. But we sent in our own DNA experts as soon as I got Agent Russell's report, and the Algerian army and police sent in more people. So far, we have no matches to our three. None. Plus, there were no female parts. If Ms. Chambord survived, where is she? Where's her father? Where's Colonel Smith? If Jon were alive, he would've reported to me. If Chambord and his daughter had survived, they would certainly have been heard from by now.'
'Unless they were prisoners. That's what you're getting at, isn't it?' The president could not remain seated. He arose stiffly and paced across the Navajo rugs. 'You think there's a chance some of the terrorists escaped, and that they took our three with them?'
'That's what worries me. Otherwise'
'Otherwise, you'd be celebrating Smith's and the Chambords' survival. Yes, I see what you mean. But it's all circumstantial. Speculative.'
'I deal in circumstance and speculation, sir. All intelligence services do, if they're going about their jobs properly. It's up to us to see dangers before they occur. Possibly I'm wrong, and their bodies will be found.' He clasped his hands and leaned forward. 'But for all three to be unaccounted for is too much to be ignored, Sam.'
'What are you going to do?'
'Keep searching the ruins and testing, but'
The telephone rang, and the president snapped up the receiver. 'Yes?' He grimaced, the lines on his forehead knitting. He barked, 'Come up to my private office, Chuck. Yes, now.' He hung up and closed his eyes a moment as if trying to wipe away the contents of the call.
Klein waited, his general unease heightened.
Castilla said in a tired voice, 'Someone has just readjusted the computer processors aboard all of our military and private satellites so we can't retrieve data. All the satellites. No data. It's a catastrophic systems failure. What's even worse, no one on the ground can get them programmed back to the way they were.'
'We're blind from space?' Klein bit off a curse. 'It sounds like the DNA computer again, dammit. But how? That's the one thing Russell was sure of. The missile struck the villa, and the computer was inside. Smith told her he and Chambord were about to escape, all three of them, and to call in the strike. Even if Smith and Chambord hadn't destroyed it already, it should've gone up with the building.'
'I agree. It should've. It's the logical conclusion. Get into the other room now, Fred. Chuck's going to be here in a moment.'
Just as Klein slipped away, Charles Ouray, the president's chief of staff, hurried into the office. 'They're still trying, but NASA says whoever readjusted the computers has locked us out. Completely. We can't break through! It's causing problems everywhere.'
'I'd better hear what they are.'
'For a while, it looked as if the North Koreans were sending off a missile strike, but we had a contact on the ground that said it was just a heavy fog that was masking the heat from a truck that was near the missile silo in question. We lost an agent in South Beirut, Jeffrey Moussad. His 3-D directional finder failed. We believe he's been killed. Also, there was a near-miss in the Pacific with one of our carriers and a submarine. Even Echelon's ears are deaf.' In the Echelon program, the United States and Britain intercepted calls handled by satellites as well as tapping intercontinental undersea telephone cables.
The president forced himself to take a deep breath. 'Reconvene the Joint Chiefs. They're probably not out of the building yet. If they are, get Admiral Brose and tell him to instruct the others to assume the worst an immediate attack on the United States. Anything from biological warfare to a nuclear missile. Scramble every defense, and everything we don't have, officially.'
'The experimental antimissile system, sir? But our allies'
'I'll talk to them. They've got to know, so they can alert their own people. We feed a lot of them information off our satellites anyway. Hell, many buy time, too. Their systems have to be reflecting a loss of data, some of it dramatic. If I don't call them, they're going to call me. I'll put it up to some wild-haired hacker, the best we've ever seen. They'll believe it for a while. Meanwhile, we scramble everything. At least the secret experimental system should be totally secure because no one knows we have it, and it should be able to handle everything short of a massive missile attack, which terrorists won't be able to mount. No one but the Brits and Moscow can do that, and they're on our side this time, thank God. For any other kinds of strikes, we'll have to rely on our conventional military, the FBI, and the police every damn where. And Chuck, this doesn't get leaked to the press. Our allies won't want their media people to get wind of it either. This makes none of us look good. Get going, Chuck.'
Ouray ran out, and the president opened the other door. Klein's face was gray with worry as he returned to the room.
'You heard?' the president asked.
'Damn right.'
'Find out where the hellish thing is, Fred, and this time finish it!'
Chapter Twenty-nine
When Marty fell asleep again in his hospital room, Peter slipped away to contact local MI6. Randi waited ten minutes and left, too. But her journey was much shorter down to the phone booth she had spotted off the main lobby. She hovered at the top of the fire stairs, waiting as a few employees came and went, serving the rich patients who would soon emerge with new faces or new bodies or both. As soon as the lobby was clear, she padded down to it. Lilacs, peonies, and jonquils were arranged in showy springtime displays in tall cut-glass vases. The place was as fragrant as a florist's, but it was making a lot more money.
Enclosed in the glass booth, she dialed her Langley chief, Doug Kennedy, on a secure undersea fiber-optic cable line.
Doug's voice was grim. 'I've got bad news. In fact, rotten news. The surveillance and communications satellites are still offline. Worse, we've lost everything in orbit, both military and civilian. NASA and the Pentagon are working like demons with every tool they have, and they're making up the rest as they go along. So far, we're zilch, kaput, aloha, and good luck. Without those satellites, we're blind, deaf, and dumb.'
'I get your point. What do you think I'm working on? I told you the prototype had been destroyed, period. The only thing that makes sense is that Chambord survived, although I still can't figure out how. I also can't figure out how he could've built a new prototype so fast.'
'Because he's a genius, that's how.'
'Even geniuses have only two arms and ten fingers and need time and materials and a place to work. A stable place. Which brings me to my reason for calling your august self.'
'Hold the sarcasm, Russell. It gets you into trouble. What do you want?'
'Check with every asset we have on the ground within a two-hundred-mile radius of the villa and find out if they noticed, heard of, or even suspect any unusual traffic on the roads and in the ports, no matter how small, all
