"State and Defense are out-they're both dead," Ryan pointed out.

"Vice President-Kneecap."

"Very good, Ben ... do we have a b.u.t.ton for that ... yes!" Ryan pushed it.

"Kneecap."

"This is CIA, DDCI Ryan speaking. I need to talk to the Vice President."

"Wait one, sir." It turned out to be a short "one."

"This is Roger Durling. h.e.l.lo, Ryan."

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Vice President. We have a problem here," Jack announced.

"What went wrong? We've been copying the Hot Line messages. They were kinda tense but okay until about twenty minutes ago. What the h.e.l.l went wrong?"

"Sir, the President is convinced that there has been a coup d'etat coup d'etat in the Soviet Union." in the Soviet Union."

"What? Whose fault is that?"

"Mine, sir," Ryan admitted. "I'm the jerk who delivered the information. Please set that aside. The President isn't listening to me."

Jack was amazed to hear a brief, bitter laugh. "Yeah, Bob doesn't listen to me very much either."

"Sir, we have to get to him. We now have information that this may have been a terrorist incident."

"What information is that?" Jack ran it down in about a minute. "That's thin," Durling observed.

"It may be thin, sir, but it's all we got, and it's a G.o.dd.a.m.ned sight better than anything else we've got in."

"Okay, stop for a minute. Right now I want your evaluation of the situation."

"Sir, my best read is that the President is wrong, it is Andrey Il'ych Narmonov over there. It's approaching dawn in Moscow. President Narmonov is suffering from sleep deprivation, he's just as scared as we are-and from that last message he's wondering if President Fowler is crazy or not. That is a bad combination. We have reports of isolated contact between Soviet and American forces. Christ knows what really happened, but both sides are reading it as aggressive acts. What's really happening is simple chaos-forward-deployed forces b.u.mping, but they're shooting because of alert levels on both sides. It's cascading on itself."

"Agreed, I agree with all of that. Go on."

"Somebody has to back down and do it very fast. Sir, you have to talk to the President. He won't even take my calls now. Talbot and Bunker are both dead, and there's n.o.body else he'll listen to."

"What about Arnie van Damm?"

"f.u.c.k!" Ryan snarled. How had he forgotten Arnie? "Where is he?"

"I don't know. I can have the Secret Service find out real fast. What about Liz?"

"She's the one who came up with the brilliant idea that Narmonov isn't there."

"b.i.t.c.h," Durling observed. He'd worked so hard and wasted so much political capital to get Charlie Alden into that job. "Okay, I'll try to get through to him. Stand by."

"Right."

"The Vice President is calling, sir. Line Six."

Fowler punched the b.u.t.ton. "Make it fast, Roger."

"Bob, you need to get this thing back under control."

"What do you think I've been trying to do!"

Durling was sitting in a high-backed leather chair. He closed his eyes. The tone of the answer said it all. "Bob, you have made things worse instead of better. You have to step back from this for a moment. Take a deep breath, walk around the room-think! There is no reason to expect that the Russians did this. Now, I just talked to CIA, and they said-"

"Ryan, you mean?"

"Yes, he just filled me in and-"

"Ryan's been lying to me."

"Bulls.h.i.t, Bob." Durling kept his voice level and reasonable. He called it his country-doctor voice. "He's too much of a pro for that."

"Roger, I know you mean well, but I don't have time for psychoa.n.a.lysis. We have what may be a nuclear strike about to be launched on us. The good news, I suppose, is that you'll survive. I wish you luck, Roger. Wait-there's a Hot Line message coming in."

PRESIDENT FOWLER:.

THIS IS ANDREY IL'YCH NARMONOV COMMUNICATING TO YOU.

THE SOVIET UNION HAS TAKEN NO AGGRESSIVE ACTS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES. NONE AT ALL. WE HAVE NO INTEREST IN HARMING YOUR COUNTRY. WE WISH TO BE LEFT ALONE AND TO LIVE IN PEACE.

I HAVE AUTHORIZED NO ACTION WHATEVER AGAINST ANY AMERICAN FORCES OR CITIZENS, YET YOU THREATEN US. IF YOU ATTACK US, WE MUST THEN ATTACK YOU ALSO, AND MILLIONS WILL DIE. WILL IT ALL BE AN ACCIDENT?.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS. I CANNOT STOP YOU FROM ACTING IRRATIONALLY. I HOPE THAT YOU WILL REGAIN CONTROL OF YOURSELF. TOO MANY LIVES ARE AT RISK FOR EITHER OF US TO ACT IRRATIONALLY.

"At least we're still getting these," Goodley noted.

"Yeah, it just makes things so much better. It's going to set him off," Ryan announced. "This one's really going to do it. You can't tell an irrational person that he's losing it...."

"Ryan, this is Durling." Ryan fairly leaped at the b.u.t.ton.

"Yes, Mr. Vice President."

"He didn't-he didn't listen, and then this new one came in, and he reacted rather badly to it."

"Sir, can you open a channel to SAC?"

"No, I'm afraid not. They're on a conference call with NORAD and Camp David. Part of the problem, Jack, the President knows he's vulnerable there and he's afraid-well..."

"Yeah, everyone's afraid, aren't we?"

There was silence for a moment, and Ryan wondered if Durling felt guilty for being in a place of relative safety.

At Rocky Flats, the residue samples were loaded into a gamma-ray spectrometer. It had taken longer than expected, due to a minor equipment problem. The operators stood behind a shield and used lead-lined rubber gloves and yard-long tongs to move the samples out of the lead bucket, then waited for the technician to activate the machine.

"Okay-this is a hot one, all right."

The machine had two displays, one on a cathode-ray tube, with a backup paper printout. It measured the energy of the photoelectrons generated by the gamma radiation within the instrument. The precise energy state of these electrons identified both the element and the isotope of the source. These showed as lines or spikes on the graphic display. The relative intensity of the various energy lines-shown as the height of the spike-determined the proportions. A more precise measurement would require insertion of the sample in a small reactor for reactivation, but this system was good enough for the moment.

The technician flipped to the beta channel. "Whoa, look at that tritium line! What did you say the yield on this thing was?"

"Under fifteen."

"Well, it had a s.h.i.tload of tritium, doc-look at that!" The technician-he was a master's candidate-made a notation on his pad and switched back to the gamma channel. "Okay ... plutonium, we've got some 239, 240; neptunium, americium, gadolinium, curium, promethium, uranium-some U-235, some 238 ... I-this was a sophisticated beast, guys."

"Fizzle," one of the NESTers said, reading the numbers. "We're looking at the remains of fizzle. This was not an IND. All that tritium.... Christ, this was supposed to be a two-stager, that's too much for a boosted fission weapon-it's a f.u.c.king H-Bomb!"

The technician adjusted his dials to fine-tune the display. "Look at the 239/240 mix...."

"Get the book!"

Sitting on the shelf opposite the spectrometer was a three-inch binder of red vinyl.

"Savannah River," the technician said. "They've always had that gadolinium problem.... Hanford does it another way ... they always seem to generate too much promethium."

"Are you crazy?"

"Trust me," the technician said. "My thesis is on contamination problems at the plutonium plants. Here's the numbers!" He read them off.

A NESTer flipped to the index, then back to a page. "It's close! Close! Say the gadolinium again!"

"Zero point zero five eight times ten to the minus 7, plus or minus point zero zero two."

"Holy Mary Mother of G.o.d!" The man turned the book around.

"Savannah River.... That's not possible."

"Nineteen sixty-eight. It was a vintage year. It's our stuff. It's our f.u.c.king plutonium."

The senior NESTer blinked his disbelief away. "Okay, let me call D.C."

"Can't," the technician said as he refined his readings. "The long-distance lines are all down."

"Where's Larry?"

"Aurora Presbyterian, working with the FBI guys. I put the number on a Post-it over the phone in the corner. I think he's working D.C. through them."

"Murray."

"Hoskins-I just heard from Rocky Flats. Dan, this sounds nuts: the NEST team says the weapon used American plutonium. I asked him to confirm it, and he did-said he asked the same thing. The plutonium came from the DOE plant at Savannah River, turned out in February 1968, K Reactor. They have chapter and verse, he says they can even tell you what part of K Reactor-sounds like bulls.h.i.t to me, too, but he's the friggin' expert."

"Walt, how the h.e.l.l am I going to get anybody to believe that?"

"Dan, that's what the man told me."

"I need to talk to him."

"The phone lines are down, remember? I can get him in here in a few minutes."

"Do that, and do it fast."

"Yeah, Dan?"

"Jack, the NEST team just reported into our Denver office. The material in the bomb was American."

"What?"

"Listen, Jack, we've all said that, okay? The NEST team got fallout samples and a.n.a.lyzed them, and they say the uranium-no, plutonium-came from Savannah River, 1968. I have the NEST team leader coming in to the Denver Field Division now. The long-distance lines are down, but I can patch through our system and you can talk to him directly."

Ryan looked at the Science and Technology officer. "Tell me what you think."

"Savannah River, they've had problems there, like a thousand-pound MUF."

"m.u.f.f?"

"M-U-F, acronym: material unaccounted for. Lost material."

"Terrorists," Ryan said positively.