Castilla would let the Russians provide their own explanation, although both he and his intelligence advisors had their suspicions.

The Russian kept his eyes fixed on the photographs covering the table. “Before I answer that, Mr. President, I must first ask you a question.”

Castilla took up his own filigreed glass. “Please feel free.”

Baranov tapped one of the photo prints. “What has the United States government learned about this airplane?”

“We have learned, rather remarkably, that this was not an American Superfortress,” Castilla replied, taking a drink of his tea. “The archives of both the U.S. Army Air Force and U.S. Air Force have been carefully examined. While we did lose a small number of B-29 aircraft and their B-50 derivative over the Arctic, all of those downed bombers have been located. In fact, all Boeing B-29s known to have served in the U.S. inventory have been accounted for.”

Castilla set his tea glass down. “Some eighty-seven Superfortresses were also provided to Great Britain in 1950. The Royal Air Force called them the Washington. The British Air Ministry has been consulted, and none of their Washingtons were ever lost or even flown over the Canadian Arctic, and all of the aircraft were eventually returned to the United States.”

Castilla looked levelly across the table. “Does that answer your question, General?”

Baranov didn’t look up for a long moment. “I regret that it does, Mr. President. I must also now, regretfully, inform you that this aircraft may very well belong to us. It could be Russian. And if this is so, it could possibly represent a definite threat to both of our nations and to the world as a whole.”

“How so, General?”

“This aircraft may be a Tupolev Tu-4 heavy bomber, code-named by NATO ‘the Bull.’ It is an aircraft very…similar to your B-29. They were used by our Long Range Aviation Forces, or rather by the Long Range Aviation Forces of the Soviet Union, during the early years of the Cold War. On March fifth of 1953, one such aircraft, radio call sign Misha 124, disappeared on a training exercise over the North Pole. The fate of this aircraft was unknown to us. All radio and radar contact with the bomber was lost, and the wreck was never located.”

Baranov took a deep, deliberate breath. “We fear this mystery plane may be the Misha 124.”

Castilla frowned. “And why should a Soviet bomber lost on a training exercise over fifty years ago be considered anything more than a relic of the Cold War?”

“Because the Misha 124 was not a simple bombing plane; it was a strategic biological weapons platform, and at the time of its disappearance, it was fully armed.”

In spite of the warmth of the afternoon and the hot tea he had consumed, Castilla felt a chill ripple down his spine. “What was the agent?” he demanded.

“Anthrax, Mr. President. Weaponized anthrax. Given your nation’s recent concerns in these matters, I’m sure you recognize the disastrous potential.”

“All too well, General.” Castilla scowled. The megalomaniac with an elementary biological laboratory and delusions of godhood; the whiff of powder sifting from an opened envelope-those were images to haunt a President’s mind.

“The Misha 124 was equipped with a dry aerosol dispersal system,” Baranov continued. “The bioagent was carried in a sealed stainless steel reservoir mounted in the aircraft’s forward bomb bay. Should an in-flight emergency take place, the standard operating procedure would have been for this reservoir to be jettisoned over the open sea or, in this instance, the polar ice pack. But, from the photographs available to us, it is impossible to tell if this procedure was successfully carried out. The reservoir and the agent it contained could still be in the wreck.”

“And still dangerous?”

Baranov lifted his hands in frustration. “Very possibly, Mr. President. Given the subfreezing polar environment, the spores could conceivably be as deadly today as they were when first loaded aboard the aircraft.”

“Good God.”

“We urgently desire the assistance of the United States in this matter, Mr. President. Firstly, to ascertain if this…problem actually exists, and then to deal with it if it does.”

The Russian’s hands wandered amid the photographs on the table. “I trust, Mr. President, you can understand why my government feels secrecy in this matter is imperative. The revelation that an active and dangerous biological-weapons system of the former Soviet Union has been found on the North American continent could further strain relations between the current Russian Federation and the United States at this critical hour.”

“To say the least,” Castilla mused grimly. “The Joint Russian-American Counterterrorism Act would go right out the door. Beyond that, any terrorist group or rogue nation on the planet who learned of the Misha crash would leap at the chance to acquire a biological-warfare arsenal simply by picking it up off the ground. And by the way, General, how much active agent are we talking about here? How many pounds, or rather, kilograms?”

“Tons, Mr. President.” The Russian’s expression was stony. “The Misha 124 was carrying two metric tons of weaponized anthrax.”

The Marine Merlin growled away over the treetops, returning General Baranov to Washington, DC, and the Russian embassy while Samuel Adams Castilla walked slowly back to Aspen Lodge. His Secret Service guard held distant cover. It was obvious to the team leader that the POTUS desired only the company of his own thoughts.

A new figure was seated at the table on the lodge porch: a smallish, graying, slope-shouldered man in his sixties. An anonymous kind of individual who worked hard at his anonymity, Nathaniel Frederic Klein did not at all resemble the classic image of a spymaster. At best, he could manage retired businessman or schoolteacher. Yet he was both a service-hardened veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and the director of the single most secret intelligence-gathering and covert-action force in the western hemisphere.

Early in his first term, President Castilla had been confronted by what had become known as the Hades Program, a ruthless bioterrorism campaign that had caused the deaths of thousands around the world and that had come within a hairsbreadth of killing millions. In his postcrisis assessment of the incident, Castilla had come to certain ominous conclusions about America’s capacity to deal with such threats.

The American intelligence and counterintelligence communities, by their sheer size and breadth of responsibility, were becoming clumsy and bureaucratically overburdened. Critical information was being “stovepiped” and was failing to reach its needed destinations. Petty interdepartmental jealousies created unnecessary friction, and a growing number of professional political ass-coverers strangled operational initiative, crippling America’s capacity to react to a rapidly changing global situation.

Castilla’s had always been an unconventional administration, and his response to the Hades incident had been unconventional as well. He had chosen Fred Klein, an old and trusted family friend, to create an entirely new agency built around a small, handpicked cadre of specialists, military and civilian, from outside the regular national intelligence community.

These “mobile cipher” agents were carefully chosen both for their exceptional and unusual skills and capabilities and for their lack of personal commitments and attachments. They answered only to Klein and Castilla. Financed from national “black” assets outside the conventional congressional budgetary loop, Covert One was the personal action arm of the President of the United States.

That was why Castilla had Klein standing by during his conference with the Russian general.

A beverage cart had been wheeled out beside the table, and a pair of shot glasses, one filled with an amber fluid and the other with water, sat at each place.