was restricted to code-breaking and to SIGINT — signals intelligence. Satellites are vitally important to our mission, and we devoutly wish we had more of them. But some things simply can
Rubens glanced at his watch. “About seven hours ago, one of our teams positively identified a contaminated area on the back of a truck that had been abandoned at a military airfield just outside of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. This suggests that the shipment had gotten at least that far, a little more than half of the distance from Stepnogorsk to Karachi. Unfortunately, our options for continuing the search are somewhat limited at this point. We’ve hit a wall.”
“What wall?” James demanded.
“We seem to be engaged in a small turf war for limited assets with … another agency.”
“Damn you, Bill,” Collins said, sitting up sharply in her seat.
Rubens held up a hand. “I’m not
General James looked at Collins. “Is the CIA sitting on data the NSA needs?” he asked.
“We … have imagery acquired early this morning from CF-1,” she admitted, “but it’s still undergoing analysis. Raw data must be … processed before it can be disseminated to other agencies.”
“Very true,” Rubens said, “and I would point out that the NSA possesses absolutely the best technology for carrying out that type of analysis. At the very least, we could be processing the data in parallel with our friends at Langley.”
“Which would entail a massive duplication of effort,” Collins countered. “It means a colossal waste of available resources.”
“With the sheer scale of 8X imagery,” Rubens pointed out, “we need to double up on resources just to sift through the data. Remember, we’re dealing with a whole new level of satellite imagery here.”
He didn’t specify that scale, of course, since those parameters carried a classification of above Top Secret. In fact, the data stream from Crystal Fire included real-time streaming video at a one-centimeter-minus resolution across an area of something like half a million square kilometers — a scale and a resolution that
“
“Yes, sir,” Rubens said. “However, given the critical importance of this search, I submit that we do need to cut through some of the red tape and compartmentalization. It’s crippling us. I agree that we need to avoid duplication of effort — but right now we have reliable evidence that twelve tactical nuclear weapons are on their way from Dushanbe to the port of Karachi. To get there, they have to travel through Afghanistan — not all of which is under friendly control, I’ll remind you—
His briefing completed, he stepped back from the lectern. “Questions?”
There were a lot of them.
She called herself Thea, a name she’d once heard meant “goddess.” Cynthia Jane Cramer thought of it as her
He grinned at her, reached down, and squeezed her left breast affectionately. She managed to smile, to not wince.
“Sorry, babe,” he told her. “I need to shave and shower. Got a big meeting with my publisher this afternoon.”
“But you make me so
“I’d love to see you again tonight,” he told her. “I’ll have something to celebrate by then — a fat new book contract!”
As soon as he walked into the hotel room’s bathroom and closed the door, she was out of bed. She pulled on her dress and heels and tucked her discarded panties into her handbag. Pender’s clothes were lying on the dresser. She began rooting through them, searching. She was
There it was. She extracted the magnetic room key from his wallet. She eyed the wallet’s other contents for a moment. She’d been warned, but …
He had a bit over a hundred dollars in cash and a couple of credit cards. Cards and cash both went into her pocketbook, along with the two hundred those guys had already paid her a couple of hours earlier. Not a bad take for half an afternoon’s work, and it was going to get better. She could spend the afternoon maxing out those cards, then drop them on some drunk down in Edgewater, and if they ever tracked the missing cards they’d find the drunk and not her.
A paperback book lay faceup on the dresser, next to Pender’s briefcase. The title was
“Hey, honey?” she called out. “I’m gonna step out and get me some cigarettes. But I’ll be right back, okay? I wanna wish you good luck for your meeting in a really
“Okay, babe!” he called back from inside the bathroom. “Just bang loud on the door, and I’ll let you in!”
They were waiting for her in the hotel lobby. As promised. Two men stood up as she clicked into the atrium on her heels.
“You have it?” one asked.
She held up the white keycard for the room. “Right here. Room 225. You have the rest of the money?”
One of the men reached into a jacket pocket and extracted a roll of bills. He peeled off three hundred and handed it to her.
“Whatever,” she said. “Nice doin’ business with ya.”
The two turned and walked toward the elevators. They looked foreign — Arab, maybe, but they
She shrugged. Too bad for him. The goddess walked out into the bright New Jersey afternoon.
She didn’t see the third man waiting for her in the parking lot.
“Mr. Rubens,” Catharine Tognetti said slowly, “just how powerful
“We don’t know the exact designs, of course,” Rubens replied. “In particular, we don’t know if the warheads have been fusion-boosted. But our best technical evaluation suggests that each device would have a yield of between one and ten kilotons — that’s one to ten thousand tons of TNT.
“The nuclear device exploded over Hiroshima in 1945, by way of comparison, was between fifteen and twenty kilotons. We’re not talking about city-busters here. A one-kiloton blast would wreck downtown Washington, D.C.,
