"Of course," Elliot agreed. "I can handle that through my office, I suppose. I found your paper impressive. I want a mind like yours working for the government if you can agree to the necessary restrictions."

"In that case I guess I can accept them."

"Fine." Elliot smiled. "You are now a White House Fellow. My secretary will take you across the street to the security office. You have a bunch of forms to fill out."

"I already have a 'secret' clearance."

"You'll need more than that. You'll have to get a SAP/SAR clearance-that means 'special-access programs/special access required.' It normally takes a few months for that-"

"Months?" Goodley asked.

"I said 'usually.' We can fast-track part of that. I suggest you start apartment-hunting. The stipend is sufficient?"

"Quite sufficient."

"Fine. I'll call Marcus over at Langley. You'll want to meet him." Goodley beamed at the National Security Advisor. "Glad to have you on the team."

The new White House Fellow took his cue and stood. "I will try not to disappoint you."

Elliot watched him leave. It was so easy to seduce people, she knew. s.e.x was a useful tool for the task, but power and ambition were so much better. She'd already proven that. Elliot smiled to herself.

"An atomic bomb?" Bock asked.

"So it would seem," Qati replied.

"Who else knows?"

"Ghosn is the one who discovered it. Only he."

"Can it be used?" the German asked. And why have you told me? And why have you told me?

"It was severely damaged and must be repaired. Ibrahim is now a.s.sembling the necessary information for evaluating the task. He thinks it possible."

Gunther leaned back. "This is not some elaborate ruse? An Israeli trick, perhaps an American one?"

"If so, it is a very clever one," Qati said, then explained the circ.u.mstances of the discovery.

"Nineteen seventy-three ... it does fit. I remember how close the Syrians came to destroying the Israelis...." Bock was silent for a moment. He shook his head briefly. "How to use such a thing...."

"That is the question, Gunther."

"Too early to ask such a question. First, you must determine if the weapon can be repaired. Second, you must determine its explosive yield-no, before that you must determine its size, weight, and portability. That is the most important consideration. After that comes the yield-I will a.s.sume that-" He fell silent. "a.s.sume? I know little of such weapons. They cannot be too heavy. They can be fired from artillery sh.e.l.ls of less than twenty-centimeter diameter. I know that much."

"This one is much larger than that, my friend."

"You should not have told me this, Ismael. In a matter like this one, security is everything. You cannot trust anyone with knowledge such as this. People talk, people boast. There could be penetration agents in your organization."

"It was necessary. Ghosn knows that he will need some help. What contacts do you have in the DDR?"

"What sort?" Qati told him. "I know a few engineers, people who worked in the DDR nuclear program ... it's a dead program, you know."

"How so?"

"Honecker was planning to build several reactors of the Russian sort. When Germany reunited, their environmental activists took one look at the design and-well, you can imagine. The Russian designs do not have a sterling reputation, do they?" Bock grunted. "As I keep telling you, the Russians are a backward people. Their reactor designs, one fellow told me, were mainly for production of nuclear material for weapons ..."

"And ..."

"And it is likely that there was a nuclear-weapons program within the DDR. Interesting, I never thought that through, did I?" Bock asked himself quietly. "What exactly do you want me to do?"

"I need you to travel to Germany and find some people-we would prefer merely one, for obvious reasons-to a.s.sist us."

Back to Germany? Bock asked himself. "I'll need-"

Qati tossed an envelope into his friend's lap. "Beirut has been a crossroads for centuries. Those travel doc.u.ments are better than the real ones."

"You will need to move your location immediately," Bock said. "If I am caught, you will have to a.s.sume that they will get every bit of information I have. They broke Petra. They can break me or anyone else they wish."

"I will pray for your safety. In that envelope is a telephone number. When you return, we will be elsewhere."

"When do I leave?"

"Tomorrow."

12.

TINSMITHS.

"And I'll raise you a dime," Ryan said after taking his draw.

"You're bluffing," Chavez said after a sip of beer.

"I never bluff," Jack replied.

"Out." Clark tossed in his cards.

"They all say that," the Air Force sergeant observed. "See your dime and b.u.mp you a quarter."

"Call," Chavez said.

"Three jacks."

"Beats my eights," the sergeant groused.

"But not a straight, doc." Ding finished off his beer. "Gee, that puts me five bucks ahead."

"Never count your winnings at the table, son," Clark advised soberly.

"I never did like that song." Chavez grinned. "But I like this game."

"I thought soldiers were lousy gamblers," the Air Force sergeant observed sourly. He was three bucks down, and he was a real poker player. He got to practice against politicians all the time on long flights when they needed a good dealer.

"One of the first things they teach you at CIA is how to mark cards," Clark announced as he went for the next round of drinks.

"Always knew I should have taken the course at the Farm," Ryan said. He was about even, but every time he'd had a good hand, Chavez had held a better one. "Next time I'll let you play with my wife."

"She good?" Chavez asked.

"She's a surgeon. She deals seconds so smooth she can fool a professional mechanic. She plays with cards as a kind of dexterity exercise," Ryan explained with a grin. "I never let her deal."

"Mrs. Ryan would never do anything like that," Clark said when he sat back down.

"Your turn to deal," Ding said.

Clark started shuffling, something he also did fairly well. "So what you think, doc?"

"Jerusalem? Better than I hoped. How about you?"

"Last time I was there-'84,1 I think-G.o.d, it was like Olongapo in the P.I. You could smell it-the trouble, I mean. You couldn't actually see it, but, man, it was there. You could feel people watching you. Now? It's sure chilled out some. How about some five-card stud?" Clark asked.

"Dealer's choice," the sergeant agreed.

Clark dealt the hole cards, then the first set of up cards. "Nine of spades to the Air Force. Five of diamonds to our Latino friend. Queen of clubs to the doc, and the dealer gets-how about that? Dealer gets an ace. Ace bets a quarter."

"Well, John?" Ryan asked after the first round of bets.

"You do put a lot of faith in my powers of observation, Jack. We'll know for sure in a couple of months, but I'd say it looks all right." He dealt four more cards. "Possible straight-possible straight flush to the Air Force. Your bet, sir."

"Another quarter." The Air Force sergeant felt lucky. "The Israeli security guys have mellowed out some, too."

"How so?"

"Dr. Ryan, the Israelis really know about security. Every time we fly over here, they put a wall up around the bird, y'know? This time the wall wasn't so high. I talked to a couple of 'em and they say they're more relaxed-not officially, but personal, y'know? Used to be they hardly talked at all. Looked like a big difference to me, anyway."

Ryan smiled as he decided to fold. His eight, queen, and deuce weren't going anywhere. It never failed. You always got better data from sergeants than generals.

"What we have here," Ghosn said, flipping his book to the right page, "is essentially an Israeli copy of an American Mark-12 fission bomb. It's a boosted-fission design."

"What does that mean?" Qati asked.

"It means that tritium is squirted into the core just as the act of firing begins. That generates more neutrons and greatly increases the efficiency of the reaction. As a result, you need only a small amount of fissionable material ..."

"But?" Qati heard the "but" coming.

Ghosn leaned back and stared at the core of the device. "But the mechanism to insert the boost material was destroyed by the impact. The kryton switches for the conventional explosives are no longer reliable and must be replaced. We have enough intact explosive blocks to determine their proper configuration, but manufacturing new ones will be very difficult. Unfortunately I cannot depend on simply reverse-engineering the entire weapon. I must duplicate the original design theoretically first, determine what it can and cannot do, then re-invent the processes for fabrication. Do you have any idea what the original cost for that was?"

"No," Qati admitted, sure that he was about to learn.

"More than what it cost to land people on the moon. The most brilliant minds in human history were part of this process: Einstein, Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Teller, Alvarez, von Neumann, Lawrence-a hundred others! The giants of physics in this century. Giants."

"You're telling me you cannot do it?"

Ghosn smiled. "No, Commander, I am telling you that I can. What is the work of genius the first time is the work of a tinsmith soon thereafter. It required genius the first time because it was was the first time, and also because technology was so primitive. All the calculations had to be done manually at first, on big mechanical calculators. All the work on the first hydrogen bomb was done on the first primitive computers-Eniac, I think it was called. But today?" Ghosn laughed. It really was absurd. "A videogame has more computing power than Eniac ever did. I can run the calculations on a high-end personal computer in seconds and duplicate what took Einstein months. But the most important thing is that they did not really know if it was possible. It is, and I know that! Next, they made records of how they proceeded. Finally, I have a template, and though I cannot reverse-engineer it entirely, I can use this as a theoretical model. the first time, and also because technology was so primitive. All the calculations had to be done manually at first, on big mechanical calculators. All the work on the first hydrogen bomb was done on the first primitive computers-Eniac, I think it was called. But today?" Ghosn laughed. It really was absurd. "A videogame has more computing power than Eniac ever did. I can run the calculations on a high-end personal computer in seconds and duplicate what took Einstein months. But the most important thing is that they did not really know if it was possible. It is, and I know that! Next, they made records of how they proceeded. Finally, I have a template, and though I cannot reverse-engineer it entirely, I can use this as a theoretical model.

"You know, given two or three years, I could do it all myself."

"Do you think we have two or three years?"

Ghosn shook his head. He'd already reported on what he saw in Jerusalem. "No, Commander. We surely do not."

Qati explained what he had ordered their German friend to do.

"That is good. Where do we move to?"

Berlin was once more the capital of Germany. It had been Bock's plan that this should be so, of course, but not that it should be this sort of Germany. He'd flown in from Italy-via Greece, and, before that, Syria-and cleared pa.s.sport control with scarcely a wave. From that point, he'd simply rented a car and driven out of Berlin on highway E-74 north toward Greifswald.

Gunther had rented a Mercedes-Benz. He rationalized this by telling himself that his cover was that of a businessman, and besides he hadn't rented the biggest one available. There were times when he thought he might as well have rented a bicycle. This road had been neglected by the DDR government, and now that the Federal Republic was fully in place, the highway was little more than a linear repair gang. It went without saying that the other side of the road was already fixed. His peripheral vision caught hundreds of big, powerful Benzes and BMWs streaking south toward Berlin as the capitalists from the West blazed about to reconquer economically what had collapsed under political betrayal.

Bock took his exit outside Greifswald, driving east through the town of Kemnitz. The attempts at road repair had not yet reached the secondary roads. After hitting half a dozen pot-holes Gunther had to pull over and consult his map. He proceeded three kilometers, then made a series of turns, ending up on what had once been an upscale neighborhood of professionals. In the driveway of the house he sought was a Trabant. The gra.s.s was still neatly trimmed, of course, and the house was neatly arranged, down to the even curtains in the windows-this was Germany, after all-but there was an air of disrepair and depression not so much seen as felt. Bock parked his car a block away and walked an indirect route back to the house.

"I am here to see Herr Doktor Fromm," he told the woman, Frau Fromm, probably, who answered the door.

"Who may I say is calling?" she asked formally. She was in her middle forties, her skin tight over severe cheeks, with too many lines radiating from her dull blue eyes and tight, colorless lips. She examined the man on her front step with interest, and perhaps a little hope. Though Bock had no idea why this should be so, he took the chance to make use of it.

"An old friend." Bock smiled to reinforce the image. "May I surprise him?"

She wavered for a moment, then her face changed and good manners took hold. "Please come in."

Bock waited in the sitting room, and he realized that his impression was right-but why it was right struck him hard. The interior of the house reminded him of his own apartment in Berlin. The same specially made furniture that had once looked so good in contrast to what was available for ordinary citizens in the German Democratic Republic did not impress as it once had. Perhaps it was the Mercedes he'd driven up, Bock told himself as he heard footsteps approaching. But no. It was dust. Frau Fromm was not cleaning the house as a good German Hausfrau Hausfrau did. A sure sign that something was badly wrong. did. A sure sign that something was badly wrong.

"Yes?" Dr. Manfred Fromm said as a question before his eyes widened in delayed recognition. "Ah, so good to see you!"