Softly, and barely moving his lips, he whispered to Biery, "Is that it?"

Biery responded, "Yes. It should work almost immediately."

"You are certain?"

Biery was not certain. But he was confident. "Yeah."

A line of Cryptogram text appeared. "What is this?"

Kovalenko did not respond.

"This is an application? This is not what was requested."

Kovalenko looked at the camera.

Slowly he lifted his hand in front of his face in a fist and extended his middle finger.

Clark, Kraft, and Biery all stood to the side, mouths agape.

It took only seconds for a new line of text to appear on Cryptogram.

"You are dead."

The connection terminated instantly.

"He's off," Kovalenko said.

Biery smiled. "Wait for it."

Clark, Kovalenko, and Kraft all looked at him.

"Wait for what?" asked Valentin.

"Wait for it," he repeated very slowly.

Melanie said, "He logged off. He can't send any-"

A file popped up in the Cryptogram window. Kovalenko, still sitting in front of the machine, looked up to Gavin Biery. "Should I . . ."

"Please do."

Kovalenko clicked on the file, and a single picture expanded on the monitor. All four people in the dark apartment leaned forward to get a better look at it.

A young woman, with Asian features, eyeglasses, and short black hair, sat in front of the camera, her fingers resting on a computer keyboard. Over her left shoulder, an older Asian man in a white shirt and loose necktie leaned close, peering to a point just below the camera.

Valentin was confused. "Who is . . ."

Gavin Biery touched the girl with his fingertip. "I don't know who that is, but that guy, ladies and gentlemen, is the MFIC."

Melanie and Valentin just looked at him.

Biery said, "Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan, code name Center."

John Clark smiled and said, "The Motherfucker in Charge."

SEVENTY-TWO.

Adam Yao had documents to get him into mainland China, so he could come and go on the train or through the automobile border crossing.

Jack Junior, on the other hand, was not nearly so fortunate. Adam had a way across the border for him, but it necessitated some risk and discomfort.

Adam went first, driving through the crossing at Lok Ma Chau at five p.m. local time. He wanted to be in place on the other side for when Ryan made it over so Jack wasn't wandering mainland China as a gweilo with no papers, a scenario that would not have ended well for the son of the president.

Ryan took a cab to San Tin and then walked a few blocks to a hardware store parking lot, where he met the men who would take him across.

They were "friends" of Adam's, meaning he had run across them working in his "white side" job with SinoShield. They were smugglers, which made Ryan nervous when he was told they would be his access to China, but when he met them, he relaxed.

The smugglers were three small young men who seemed a hell of a lot more harmless than Ryan had spent the last sixteen hours imagining them to be.

Adam told him to not offer the men any money because he had taken care of them already, and although Jack had no idea what that meant, he trusted Adam enough to comply.

He sized them up as they stood there in the rapidly waning light. They clearly had no firearms on them. Jack had been trained to spot hidden pistols, and these guys weren't packing-not on their hips, under their arms, or on their ankles. He could not say for sure they did not have knives secreted somewhere on their person, but even if all three of these little guys came at him at once, Jack figured, he could bang their heads together and head for the border on his own.

That would not be the preferred outcome, however.

None of the men spoke a word of English, and this made things confusing for Jack as they stood next to their motorbikes and gestured toward his legs and feet. He thought they were admiring his Cole Haan loafers, but he could not be sure. The matter passed soon enough with a few chuckles from the men.

They had Ryan climb on the back of one of the bikes, which was not a great plan, considering Jack was six-two and he found himself riding tandem with a chubby young man who might have been five-four. He had to concentrate on his balance to keep upright as the little Chinese man fishtailed and lurched his straining, poorly tuned bike on the bad back roads.

After twenty minutes on the road Jack saw why the Chinese men were concerned about his leather shoes. They were surrounded by rice paddies that went all the way to a river, across which was the mainland. They would have to slosh in knee-deep water for a half-mile before even getting to the levee by the river. There was no way in hell his loafers would stay on his feet.

They parked their bikes and got out, and then one of the young men miraculously discovered an ability to speak English. "You pay. You pay now."

Ryan had no problem reaching into his money belt and thumbing off a few hundred bucks for the service these men provided, but Yao had been adamant that he not pay them. Jack shook his head. "Adam Yao to pay," he said, hoping his nonconjugated verb might make comprehension easier.

Oddly, the men seemed not to understand this. "Adam pay you," Jack tried next.

The men just shook their heads like they did not understand, and said, "You pay now."

Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a mobile phone he'd purchased that afternoon at the airport, and he dialed a number.

"Yeah?"

"It's Jack. They want money."

Yao growled like an angry bear, which surprised Ryan. "Put the smartest-looking of those three dumb shits on the fucking phone."

Jack smiled. He liked Adam Yao's style. "It's for you." He handed the phone to one of the smugglers.

There was a quick conversation. Jack did not understand the words, but the facial expressions from the kid left no uncertainty as to who had the upper hand in the argument. The kid winced with Yao's words and fought to get his responses in.

After thirty seconds he passed the phone back to Ryan.

Jack held the phone up to his ear. Before he could speak, Yao said, "That ought to be the end of that. We're back on, but don't show those bastards a dime."

"Okay."

They sloshed through the rice paddies as the sun set and the moon rose. Jack lost his shoes almost immediately. There was a little conversation at first, but as they neared the water all the talking stopped. At eight p.m. they arrived on the levee, and one of the men pulled a raft made of milk cartons and particle board out of tall grasses. Ryan and the smuggler climbed aboard, and the other two pushed them off.

It was only five minutes across the cold water to China. They landed in a warehouse district of Shenzhen, and they hid the raft in rocks and river grasses. The smuggler went with Ryan up to the street in the dark, they sprinted across just after a bus passed, and then Jack was told to wait in a tin storage shed.

The smuggler disappeared, and Jack dialed Yao again.

Adam answered, quickly. "I'll be there in under a minute."

Yao picked Jack up and immediately headed north. He said, "We go through Shenzhen and then hit Guangzhou in about an hour. Center's building is in the northern part of the city, out in the suburbs near the airport."

"How did you find it?"

"I tracked him from the movements of their supercomputers in Hong Kong. The servers traveled by ship, and I found the ship, the port, then the trucking company that brought them to the China Telecom building. I wasn't sure at first, but then I chatted up a girl at the new China Telecom office who said she came into work one morning and found out her entire building had been vacated overnight because the PLA needed the space.

"At that point I was pretty sure, so I got an apartment in a high-rise across a drainage culvert from the CT building. I can see the Army guarding the place, and I can see the civilians coming and going. They installed a satellite barn in the parking lot and have huge dishes on the roof. They must be using a ton of electricity."

"What's the next step?"

Yao shrugged. "The next step is you tell me who you really work for. I didn't ask you over here because I needed a friend. I need someone on the inside in the U.S., away from CIA. Someone who can make something happen."

"Make what happen, exactly?"

Yao shook his head. "I want you to be able to contact someone in the government, high up in the government not at CIA, and tell them what's going on. We will be able to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. And then when you do that, I want someone to come over here and blow it up."

"You want me to call my dad."

Yao shrugged. "He could make it happen."

Ryan shook his head. He had to keep his dad insulated, to some degree, from his operations. He said, "There is someone else I can call. She'll get the message through."

SEVENTY-THREE.

President Jack Ryan decided he would travel to the Pentagon to hear their plan to attack China's computer networking infrastructure and computer network operations capability. Most of America's top war-fighting strategists had been working on nothing else there in the building, doing their best to ad-lib parts of the tactical plan because the cyberattack on America had hamstrung their capabilities to get information, advice, and a good picture of the battle space.

Napoleon is credited with saying an army marches on its stomach. But that was in Napoleon's time. Now it was clear to everyone affected by the attacks that the U.S. military marched on its bandwidth, and at the moment it seemed it could do little more than stand at parade rest.

And in the two days since his directive to draw up the plan, the situation had gotten worse. In addition to increased cyberattacks on the United States-attacks that had shut down two days of trading on Wall Street-the Chinese had exploited other attack vectors against the military. Many American military and spy satellites had been hacked and their signals corrupted, so critical data were not getting from the theater to the Pentagon. Those satellites still online were sending back data sluggishly or sporadically corrupted, meaning the picture of the situation over there was spotty at best.

The United States had lost visibility of the Chinese carrier in the South China Sea, and only received clues of its location again when an Indonesian Navy frigate, Yos Sudarso, was sunk eighty miles north of Bunguran Timur, reportedly by four missiles fired from a Chinese attack helicopter. Of the one hundred seventy sailors on board, only thirty-nine had been recovered alive as of twelve hours after the incident.

More air-to-air contests over the Taiwan Strait had resulted in the shooting down of five more ROC fighters and a Marine Hornet, compared with the loss of eight PLAAF aircraft.

Ryan sat quietly as colonels, generals, captains, and admirals briefed him on the options for a military strike or, more precisely, on the seeming lack of options for a military strike.

The most frightening aspect of building a target list, clearly, was the poor coverage of the area. The degradation of the satellite data, more than anything else, made much of their attack plan a crapshoot, and the men and women in the room admitted as much to the President.

Ryan asked, "But some of our satellites are still functional?"

Burgess fielded this one: "Yes, Mr. President. But what you have to realize is, other than the dogfights over the Strait of Taiwan, the shooting war between the U.S. and China has not begun. Everything they've done to us to muddle our ability to fight, they've done with computer code. If we do attack, or if we do move carriers closer to attack or in any way show our hand, you can bet they will use shooting-war measures to disrupt those satellite feeds."

Ryan said, "Shooting down our satellites?"

Burgess nodded. "They have shown their ability, in a test against their own equipment, to destroy a satellite with a kinetic missile."

Ryan remembered the event.

"Do they have the capability to do that on a large scale?"

An Air Force general spoke up: "Kinetic ASAT, or antisatellite weapons, are no one's first choice. They are bad for all parties with space platforms, because the debris from a strike can orbit for decades and fly into other equipment in space. It only takes a particle about one centimeter in length to mission-kill a satellite. The Chinese know that, so we don't think they will blow up our equipment in space unless they absolutely have to."

Ryan said, "They also can attack our satellites over China with an electromagnetic pulse weapon, an EMP."

Burgess shook his head. "The Chinese will not detonate an EMP in space."

Ryan cocked his head. "How can you be so sure, Bob?"

"Because it would damage their own equipment. They have GPS and communications satellites up above their own nation, of course, not far enough away from our platforms."

Jack nodded. That was the kind of analysis he appreciated. The kind that made sense. "Do they have other tricks up their sleeves?"

The Air Force general said, "Yes, absolutely they do. The PLA also has the ability to temporarily blind satellites with the use of high-powered lasers. The technique is called 'dazzling'; they have done it on the French and Indian satellites in the past two years with great success. In both cases they totally degraded the satellite's ability to see and communicate with the ground for three or four hours. We predict they will start with this, and if it does not give them the results they want, then they will start firing missiles into space to shoot down our communications and intelligence-collection platforms."

Ryan shook his head in frustration. "A couple months back I made a speech to the UN and said that any attack on a U.S. satellite was an attack on U.S. territory. The next morning half the news organizations in the country and three-fifths on the planet were running headlines saying I was claiming outer space for the United States. The L.A. Times had a caricature of me dressed like Darth Vader on their opinion page. America's chattering class does not get the stakes we're up against."

Burgess said, "You did the right thing. The future of warfare is going to be brand-new territory, Mr. President. Looks like we're the lucky ones who get to blaze a trail."

"Okay," Ryan said, "we're half blind in the sky; what does the picture look like at sea level?"

A Navy admiral stood and said, "Anti-access/area-denial. A-two A-D, sir. China does not possess a great Navy, but they have the largest and most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile programs in the world. The PLA's Second Artillery Corps has five operational short-range ballistic missile brigades targeting Taiwan. DIA estimates they have over one thousand missiles."