Acts of War

cried at night.

Now here he was. Relatively affluent and the director of Op-Center. In less than a year, Hood and his core team had turned the agency, formally known as the National Crisis Management Center, from a liaison office between the CIA, the White House, and the other big boys to a crisis-management team in its own right. Hood had an often fractious relationship with some of his closest people, most notably Deputy Director Mike Rodgers, Intelligence Officer Bob Herbert, and Political and Economics Officer Martha Mackall. But he welcomed the differences of opinion. Besides, if he couldn't manage personality clashes in his office, he couldn't handle political and military clashes thousands of miles away. The desk-side skirmishes kept him alert and in shape for the bigger, more important battles.

Hood drank his coffee slowly. Virtually every morning he sat comfortably alone on this sofa. He surveyed his life and invited contentment to lap him like an island. But it rarely did. Not on all sides, anyway. There was a hole, much larger in the month since he'd returned from Germany. A void which had been filled unexpectedly with passion. Passion for his one-time love Nancy, whom he'd met in Hamburg after twenty years. Passion that burned on the beach of his little island and disturbed his rest at night and fought for attention during the day.

But it was passion that he had not and could not act upon. Not unless he wanted to destroy the people for whom this home and this life were contentment. The children to whom he was a constant and reliable source of strength and emotional security. The wife who respected and trusted him and said she loved him. Well, she probably did. She probably loved him in the same buddy-sisterly-shared-goals way that he loved her. Which wasn't bad, even though it wasn't what he felt for Nancy.

Hood drained his mug, regretting that the last mouthful never tasted as glorious as the first. Not in coffee, not in life. He rose, put the mug in the dishwasher, grabbed his trench coat from the closet, and walked into the balmy morning.

Hood drove southeast through Washington, D.C., to Op-Center's headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base. He negotiated traffic that was already thick with trucks, Mercedes, and fleets of overnight courier vans rushing to make morning deliveries. He wondered how many people were thinking like he was, how many were cursing the traffic, and how many were just enjoying the drive, the morning, and some upbeat music.

He plugged in a tape of Spanish gypsy music, a love he'd acquired from his Cuban-born grandfather. The car filled with Romany lyrics whose words he didn't understand but whose passion he did. And as the music washed over him, Hood tried once again to fill the gaps in his contentment.

FOUR

Monday, 7:18 a.m.,

Washington, D. C.

Matthew Stoll disdained the traditional labels for 'his kind.' He loathed them almost as much as he hated chronic optimists, unreasonably high prices for software, and curry. As he'd been telling all his friends and coworkers since his days as an MIT wunderkind — a term he didn't mind — he was not a computer nerd, a techno-weenie, or an egghead.

'I think of myself as a techsplorer,' he'd told Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers when he first interviewed for the job of Operations Support Officer.

'Excuse me?' Hood had said.

'I explore technology,' the cherubic Stoll had replied. 'I'm like Meriwether Lewis, except I'll need more than his twenty-five-hundred-dollar Congressional appropriation to open up vast new technological lands. I also hope to live past the age of thirty-five, though you never know.'

Hood had later confided to Stoll that he'd found the neologism corny, though the scientist hadn't been offended. He'd known from their first meeting that 'Saint Paul' had neither a vaulting imagination nor a sharp sense of humor. Hood was a deft, temperate, and remarkably intuitive manager. But General Rodgers was a big-time history buff, and he'd been won over by the Meriwether Lewis reference. And as Hood and Rodgers had both admitted, there was no ignoring Stoll's credentials. He'd not only finished at the top of his class at MIT, he'd finished at the top of MIT's classes for the previous two decades. Corporate America had wooed Stoll energetically and won him for a time, but he grew tired of developing new easy-to-program VCRs or sophisticated heart monitors for exercise machines. He yearned to work with state-of-the-art computers and satellites, and he wanted the kind of research and development budgets that private enterprise just couldn't provide.

He also had wanted to work with his best friend and former classmate, Stephen Viens, who headed the government's National Reconnaissance Office. Viens was the man who had arranged the Op-Center introduction for him. He also gave Stoll and his coworkers first-dibs access to NRO resources to the detriment and annoyance of his colleagues at the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense. But they could never prove that Op-Center was getting a lion's share of satellite time. If they could, bureaucratic backlash would be severe.

Viens was on-line with Stoll at Op-Center and Mary Rose Whalley in Turkey to make certain the data coming from the Regional Op-Center was accurate. The visual images being channeled from the spy satellites weren't as detailed as those at the NRO: The mobile equipment provided just under half of the more than one thousand lines of resolution of the NRO monitors. But they were coming in fast and accurate, and intercepts of cell-phone conversations and faxes were equal to those that were being received by both the NRO and Op-Center.

After running the last of the tests, Stoll thanked Mary Rose and told her she was free to solo. The young woman thanked him, thanked Viens, and got off the secure downlink. Viens remained on his line.

Stoll took a bite of sesame bagel and washed it down with a swallow of herbal tea. 'God, I love Monday mornings,' Stoll said. 'Back in the harness of discovery.'

'That was pretty,' Viens admitted.

Stoll said through cream cheese, 'We build five or six of these things, pack 'em inside planes and boats, and there isn't a corner of the world we can't watch.'

'You do that and you'll put me out of business faster than the Senate Intelligence Committee,' Viens cracked.

Stoll looked at his friend's face on the monitor. The screen was the center one of three built into the wall beside Stoll's desk. 'That's just a frosh dingbat's witchhunt,' Stoll said. 'Nobody's going to put you out of business,'

'You don't know this Senator Landwehr,' Viens replied. 'He's like a little dog with a very large bone. He's made it his personal crusade to put an end to forward funding.'

Forward funding, Stoll thought. Of all the government sleights of hand, Stoll had to admit that that was the sneakiest. When money was earmarked for a specific purpose and those projects were back-burnered or altered, the funds were supposed to be given back. Three years before, two billion dollars had been given to the NRO to design, build, and launch a new series of spy satellites. Those projects were later canceled. But instead of being returned, all of the money was slipped into various other NRO accounts and disappeared. Op-Center, the CIA, and other government agencies also lied about their finances. They created small, so-called 'black budgets,' which were hidden in false line items of the budget and were thus concealed from public scrutiny. Those monies were used to finance relatively modest secret intelligence and military operations. They were also used to help finance Congressional campaigns, which was why Congress allowed them to exist. But the NRO had gone too far.

When the NRO's forward funding was discovered by Frederick Landwehr, a freshman senator who used to be an accountant, he immediately brought it to the attention of the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Congress acted swiftly to reclaim what was left of the money — with interest. And the interest included the heads of the responsible parties. Although Viens hadn't been involved in the parceling out of the money, he'd accepted budget increases for his satellite reconnaissance division knowing exactly where it came from.

'The press has to give space to a new face with a new cause,' Stoll said, 'I still think that when the headlines shrink, everything'll be sorted out quietly.'

'Deputy Secretary of Defense Hawkins doesn't share your atypical optimism,' Viens said.

'What are you talking about?' Stoll asked. 'I saw the Hawk on the news last night. Every coif with a mike who accused him of mismanagement got his or her nose bit off.'

'Meanwhile, the Deputy Secretary is already looking for a job in the private sector.'