America

Zelda.

'Maybe the game is worth the risks,' he said lightly and headed for the elevator. 'I just don't want you to forget what the risks are.'

Vladimir Kolnikov stretched out in the captain's bunk aboard America. He glanced at his watch, made sure the cabin door was locked, then turned out the light. Lying in the darkness, he closed his eyes, tried to force his body to relax.

He had a hell of a headache, so he snapped the light back on, wet a washrag at the sink tap, and lay down again. After turning off the light a second time, he arranged the cool, wet cloth over his forehead and eyes.

He had first gone to sea thirty-five years ago, a diesel-electric sub that rattled underwater. The Soviets had not known then how good American sonar was. Or would become. If there had been a war with the United States, that old boat would have been quickly sunk.

Didn't happen, of course. After all the propaganda, all those lies about the superiority of the Soviet system and the moral and financial bankruptcy of the free nations of the West, the whole Soviet edifice shattered and collapsed. All the lies the Communists had told, the crimes they committed, the lives they shattered, the people they murdered — that was the foundation of the Soviet state, and the whole colossal sand castle fell of its own weight.

If that wasn't bad enough, then came the aftermath! The now anti-Communist nomenklatura soldiered on as before, spouting propaganda about freedom and democracy. Same people, different song. They stole the foreign aid donated by the West, looted the national treasury, sold military equipment, literally robbed their fellow citizens of everything they owned to line their own pockets. They wanted to continue to live the privileged life they had enjoyed in the workers' paradise of Stalin, Khrushchev, Andropov, Kosygin, Brezhnev, and all the others.

Civilization collapsed in Russia. That was the optimist's take on it. Cynics said it never existed there. Certainly the liberal civilization of the West never existed in Soviet Russia, which had gone directly from a totalitarian society ruled by czars to one ruled by absolute dictators. Now, with the dictators gone, no one ruled. That would change of course, Kolnikov knew. Another dictatorship would inevitably follow, he thought. The Russians liked dictatorship, were comfortable only in an authoritarian, autocratic society where everyone behaved and did as he was supposed to do. And the people at the top set the standard. The Russians did not know how to live any other way.

Except Kolnikov. He had refused to wait for the inevitable. So had Turchak. The two of them gave up on Mother Russia and sneaked out of the country. Now they were criminals. Traitors.

Captain First Rank Vladimir Kolnikov, criminal. Thief. Terrorist. Pirate!

He lay now in the silent darkness listening in vain for sounds of the ship.

God, she was quiet!

He turned to the computer screen mounted beside his pillow and touched it with a finger. A menu appeared. He studied the options, then selected one. The boat's depth, course, and speed appeared instantly. Another touch showed him a variety of reactor temperatures and pressures. All normal. He turned his head, closed his eyes, tried to relax.

Before this adventure was over he was probably going to wish he had stayed in that Paris hire car. It was a living. An honest one, even.

The hell with it. He had made his choice, cast the dice. However it came out… well, it didn't really matter how it all came out. He knew that. And in truth, didn't really care.

The National Security Agency is a collection of buildings behind a chain-link fence on the edge of the army's Fort Meade complex between Baltimore and Washington. It is bordered on two sides by major arterial highways. South of the complex across one of the highways sits a regional military jail surrounded by concertina wire. The ugly, gray NSA buildings are festooned with an odd assortment of antennas, although no more so than many other high-tech headquarters in the Washington area. What is not readily apparent from the highway, however, is the size of the complex, which employs sixteen thousand people and houses the largest collection of computers in the world. Most of the complex is underground.

It was three in the morning when Jake Grafton arrived by helicopter at the National Security Agency. A gentle rain was falling as he walked across the helo pad.

The woman who met him shook hands, led him through a security checkpoint, and took him into a nondescript government office where three other people waited, two men and another woman.

'As you know, we've lost a submarine,' Jake said to get them started. 'We need all the help we can get to find it. I was hoping you folks could do a study of telephone traffic for the last two or three weeks around Providence and New London.'

'It doesn't work quite that way, Admiral,' the senior NSA briefer said. She was in her fifties, looked like she had just gotten out of bed an hour ago, which she probably had. 'As you are probably aware, we use the Echelon system to monitor foreign telecommunications traffic — hardwired, wireless, satellite, all of it — but legally we can't monitor U.S. domestic communications: That is the FBI's job. And we don't have the storage capacity to record even a statistically significant part of the traffic we do study. We sample conversations and automatically record those that use certain keywords; for example, terrorists, bomb, assignation, etc. But we have to choose our keywords in advance.' She explained how they did it, discussed interception techniques, hardware and software.

'I guess the horse is gone,' Jake said finally, when she appeared to be through.

'Apparently.'

Jake Grafton slapped his knees. He too was running on empty. 'Let's do this: Can you monitor all the traffic in the New England area and the Washington area, and do a study on all conversations that talk about the stolen submarine? America.'

'Not legally. But we can ask the British to do it and give us their results.'

'That is legal?'

'Oh, yes. We do the British, they do us. Keeps the politicians happy.'

'When you get the study, what will you be able to tell us about those conversations?'

'Everything. We'll have the conversation, where it originated, where it went, voices that can be identified….'

'What if they use some sort of code?'

'Breaking codes is what we do. We examine all suspect conversations to see if they contain a code. It's almost impossible to talk in code without revealing the fact that a code is involved. If it's there, we'll find it. Given enough time and some idea what the coded conversation might be about, we can break it.'

On that note, Jake rose to go. He took a step, then turned and returned to his seat.

'You got my security clearance?' he said questioningly, looking at the senior woman, who nodded. 'Let's do this. Give me a summary of what's going on in the world that isn't in the newspapers. What are you people working on here?'

They looked at each other. Intelligence projects were discussed on a need-to-know basis, not in wholesale form.

'Pretend that you are writing a morning briefing for the president, who has been on vacation for a week. What would you tell him?'

They began. SuperAegis headed the list. Korea, Middle Eastern terrorists, Iraq, oil, an assassination attempt in Ireland… the list was extensive. Almost by the way, one of the men mentioned Antoine Jouany, the financier. 'He's making huge bets on the euro, shorting the dollar. We also think he's betting billions on the index futures market. How much, we don't know.'

'What does that mean?' Jake asked.

'He thinks the American stock market and the dollar are going to get hammered in the near future.'

'Don't people buy and sell futures every day?'

'Of course. But Jouany has a massive position, we believe. Just how big we don't know.'

'How big is massive?'

'Ten billion dollars. Maybe twice that. We hope to know more next week. We're working with the CIA, trying to discover just how big the position is, what Jouany thinks is going to happen. His main office is in London, but he operates worldwide.'