Oddblood Gray said, "He convinced me he was not acting out of personal anger. That it was the most effective solution to the problem. It is dire, of course, but so are the times. We can't let the situation be drawn out. That could be catastrophic."

Senator Lambertino said, "This is the first time that I have ever known Francis Kennedy to act in so high-handed a fashion. He was always a courteous President to the legislative branch. He could at least have pretended that we were party to the decision process."

"He's under a great deal of stress," Oddblood Gray said. "It would be helpful if the Congress did not add to that stress." Fat chance, he thought as he said it.

Congressman Jintz said worriedly, "Stress may be the issue here."

Oddblood Gray thought, Oh shit, hastily said a cordial farewell and ran back to his office to make the hundreds of calls to members of the Congress. Though he was privately dismayed at Kennedy's rashness, he was determined to sell Kennedy's policy on the Hill.

The national security adviser, Arthur Wix, was trying to sound out the Secretary of Defense. And making sure that there would be an immediate meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the Secretary of Defense seemed to be stunned by events and mumbled his answers, agreeing but not volunteering anything.

Eugene Dazzy had noted Oddblood Gray's difficulties with the legislators.

There was going to be big trouble.

Dazzy turned to Helen Du Pray. "What do you think?" he asked her.

She looked at him coolly. She was a very beautiful woman, Dazzy thought. He must invite her to dinner. Then she said, "I think you and the rest of the President's staff have let him down. His response to this crisis is far too drastic. And where the hell is Christian Klee to deal with this right now?"

Klee had vanished, which surprised Du Pray, it was not like him to disappear at a crucial moment like this.

Dazzy was angry. "His position has logic, and even if we disagree we have to support him."

Helen Du Pray said, "It's how Francis presented it. Obviously, Congress will try to take the negotiations out of his hands. They will try to suspend him from office."

"Over the graves of his staff," Dazzy said.

Helen Du Pray said to him quietly, "Please be careful. Our country is in great danger."

ON THIS WEDNESDAY afternoon Peter Cloot was certainly the only official in Washington who paid almost no attention to the news that the

President's daughter had been murdered. His energies were focused on the nuclear bomb threat.

As deputy chief of the FBI, he had almost full responsibility for that agency. Christian Klee was the titular head but only to hold the reins of power, to bring it more firmly under the direction of the Attorney General's office, which Klee also held. That combination of offices had always bothered Peter Cloot. It also bothered him that the Secret Service had also been placed under Klee. That was too much concentration of power for Cloot's taste. He also knew that there was a separate elite branch ostensibly in the FBI table of organization that Klee administered directly, and that this special security branch was composed of Christian

Klee's former colleagues in the CIA. That affronted him.

But this nuclear threat was Peter Cloot's baby. He would run this show.

And luckily there were specific directives to guide him, and he had attended the think-tank seminars that directly addressed the problem of internal nuclear threats. If anyone was an expert on this particular situation, it was Cloot. And there was no shortage of manpower. During Klee's tenure the number of FBI personnel had increased threefold.

When be had first seen the threatening letter with its accompanying diagrams Cloot had taken the immediate action as outlined in the standing directives. He had also felt a thrill of fear. Up to this time there had been hundreds of such threats, only a few of them plausible, but none so convincing as this. All these threats had been kept secret, again according to directives.

Immediately, Cloot forwarded the letter to the Department of Energy command post in Maryland, using the special communications facilities for this purpose only. He also alerted the Department of Energy search teams based in Las Vegas called NEST. NEST was already flying their pod containing tools and detection equipment to New York. Other planes would be flying specially trained personnel into the city, where they would use disguised vans loaded with sophisticated equipment to explore the streets of New York. Helicopters would be used; men on foot carrying Geiger counter briefcases would cover the city. But all this was not Cloot's headache. All he would have to do was supply armed FBI guards to protect the NEST searchers. Cloot's job was to find the villains.

The Maryland Department of Energy people had studied the letter and sent him a psychological profile of the writer. Those guys were really amazing, Cloot thought-he didn't know how they did it. Of course, one of the obvious clues was that the letter did not ask for money. Also it did define a definite political position. As soon as he got the profile Cloot sent a thousand men checking.

The profile had said that the letter writer was probably very young and highly educated. That he was probably a student of physics in a highly rated university. And on this information alone Cloot in a matter of hours had two very good suspects and after that it was amazingly easy.

He had worked all through the night, directing his field office teams.

When he was informed of the murder of Theresa Kennedy, he had resolutely put it out of his mind except for the flash that all this stuff might be linked together in some way. But his job tonight was to find the author of the nuclear bomb threat. Thank God, the bastard was an idealist. It made him easier to track down. There were a million greedy sons of bitches who would do something like this for money and it would have been tough to find them.

While he waited for the information to come in, he put the files of all previous nuclear threats through his computer. There had never been a nuclear weapon found, and those blackmailers who had been caught while trying to collect their bribe money had confessed that there had never been one. Some of them had been men with a smattering of science. Others had picked up convincing information from a left-wing magazine that had printed an article describing how to make a nuclear weapon. The magazine had been leaned on not to publish that article, but it had gone to the Supreme Court, which had ruled that suppression would be a violation of free speech. Even thinking of that now made Peter Cloot tremble with rage. The fucking country was going to destroy itself. One thing he noted with interest: none of the over two hundred cases had involved a woman or a black or even a foreign terrorist. They were all fucking trueblue greedy American men.

When he finished with the computer files he thought a minute about his boss, Christian Klee. He really didn't like the way Klee was running things. Klee thought the whole job of the FBI was to guard the President of the United States. Klee used not only the Secret Service Division but had special squads in every FBI office in the country whose main job was to sniff out possible dangers to the office of the President. Klee diverted a great deal of manpower from other operations of the FBI to do this.

Cloot was leery of Klee's power, his special division of ex-CIA men. What the hell did they do? Peter Cloot didn't know and he had every right to know. That division reported directly to Klee, and that was a very bad thing in a government agency so sensitive to public opinion as the FBI. So far nothing had happened. Cloot spent a great deal of time covering his ass, making sure that he could not be caught in the fireworks when that special division pulled some shit that would bring the Congress down on their heads with their special investigation committees.