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,
