Ben screeched in delight and ran off toward the bleachers.

"Why did you do that?" asked Thora, stepping in front of him with a betrayed look. "I thought we were going to spend some time together at home."

Chris choked back a half dozen replies. "He really wants to stay."

"But I'm leaving tomorrow."

"By your choice."

She looked at Chris as though he'd slapped her.

"You'll only be gone three days," he said. "Right?"

Thora nodded slowly but said nothing.

He walked past her toward the bleachers. He thought she might call after him, but she didn't. As he walked, he tried to get a handle on his emotions. After going back to his office, he had done as Morse suggested and checked the online billing records for Thora's cell phone. He'd found several numbers he didn't recognize, but none belonged to Shane Lansing. Chris knew this because he had called them all to check. Stranger still, there had been no call at 12:28 p.m. There wasn't even a call in the thirty-minute window surrounding 12:28. Either Agent Morse was mistaken, or Thora had a cell phone he knew nothing about.

Eldon Tarver stood alone beneath a flaming sky, staring at a mansion built by slaves 150 years before he was born. One of the most splendid homes in Vicksburg, the Greek Revival palace stood on a hogback bluff overlooking a once-strategic bend of the Mississippi River. Not far away lay the big cannons that had held Ulysses Grant at bay for fifty siege days while the citizens of the town ate rat flesh and clung to their long-cherished beliefs. How many had died in that lost cause? Dr. Tarver wondered. Fifty thousand casualties at Gettysburg alone, and for what? To free the slaves who built this house? To preserve the Union? Had Stonewall Jackson died to create a nation of couch potatoes ignorant of their own history and incapable of simple mathematics? If those brave soldiers in blue and gray had seen what lay in the future, they would have laid down their muskets and walked home to their farms.

Dr. Tarver moved deeper into the shadow of an oak tree and watched a Lincoln Continental sail slowly up the long, curving driveway to the house. After it parked, a heavyset man in a soiled business suit staggered out of the driver's door, straightened up, and made his way toward the mansion's front door.

William Braid.

Dr. Tarver removed his backpack and laid it at his feet. He breathed in sweet honeysuckle, the scent of spring. It reminded him of his childhood home in Tennessee-a mixed memory.

Braid struggled for nearly a minute to fit his key into his front door. He hadn't shaved for days, and his suit was a wreck. After another thirty seconds, he took out a cell phone and called someone. He seemed to be ranting, but Eldon couldn't make out his words. As Braid walked farther from the house, probably to improve his reception, Eldon glanced at his watch and returned to his thoughts.

Like William Braid, America seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. She was squandering her power in half-fought wars and exporting her manufacturing base to future enemies-in short, practically begging for Darwinian retribution. Of all the great modern thinkers, Dr. Tarver believed, Charles Darwin had proved the most prescient. His laws worked at every level, governing the life cycles of microbes, men, and nations. Dr. Tarver tracked the elegant operations of those laws like a watchmaker observing a flawless timepiece. Like all scientific laws, Darwin's could be used not only to describe the past but also to predict the future. Not by chance had Eldon Tarver been one of the few scientists to predict the emergence of HIV in Homo sapiens. Darwin's laws had also revealed to him that the new paradigm of war so ballyhooed in the news media-war against terrorist groups rather than nations-was merely an illusion.

There was nothing preternatural about his insight. The future was barreling toward America with such momentum that nothing could stop it, and any child of the Cold War should have seen it five years ago. That future was China, an ancient empire reborn as industrial superpower, a single-minded engine of economic expansion that cared nothing for ethics, the environment, loss of life, or the destinies of other nations. This insured that in a very short time, China would be locked in mortal combat with the only other monolithic power on the planet. And the United States, Tarver knew, was woefully unprepared for this Darwinian battle for survival.

William Braid had been walking aimlessly as he talked on the phone, but now he took a sudden turn toward Dr. Tarver's hiding place. The doctor tensed until the fat man veered left and stopped beside a well-tended bed of roses, still ranting at full volume. From this distance Dr. Tarver could tell that Braid was stone drunk.

The battle between the United States and China would begin as a cold war, with leaders on both sides denying that a conflict even existed. But in a world of scarce resources, industrial giants could dissimulate for only so long. The first skirmishes would occur in the area of international trade, then escalate into the realm of international banking. Long before armies ever faced each other on land or sea, the targeting coordinates of nuclear missiles on opposite sides of the globe would be changed to reflect the new reality. And for the second time in history, the world's smaller wars would recede into the background as children grew up in the shadow of a polarizing conflict that brought with it a unique and almost comforting order.

William Braid barked something in Dr. Tarver's direction, then threw down his cell phone and reeled up to his front door like a boxer about to drop to the canvas. Bending over his key again, Braid uttered a startled cry of triumph and disappeared inside the house.

Dr. Tarver removed a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket, put them on, and studied his watch. He would give Braid a minute or two. The only future he would ever know.

Unlike the last cold war, this one would not drift along for decades, punctuated by self-limiting crises. Because the Chinese weren't the Russians. The Russians, as Tarver often told his colleagues, were basically just like us: white Europeans with a strong Judeo-Christian heritage, despite whatever lip service they'd paid to communist denials of God. But the Chinese were most assuredly not like us. When push came to shove, the Chinese were capable of destroying half of their population to wipe us off the face of the earth. As Mao once said, "If nuclear war kills half a billion of our people, we will still have half a billion left." And then he'd laughed.

But Mao had not been joking. War with China was inevitable, and Eldon Tarver knew it. But unlike the professional ostriches now running the country, he wasn't content to sit back and watch it happen. In 1945, Eldon's adoptive father had fought his way across four blood-drenched islands in the Pacific, and he'd learned a thing or two about the Asian mind. He might have been a bitter old bastard with iron-hard hands, but he had inculcated the lessons of that war into all his children-even the one he'd adopted solely to obtain an extra worker on his farm. Thus, unlike the dilettantes who reveled in anti-Chinese repartee on the cocktail party circuit, Eldon Tarver had a plan. He had studied his enemy for decades, preparing to wage what the Pentagon called asymmetrical warfare. But Dr. Tarver had a simpler phrase for it: one-man war.

A light clicked on in the master bedroom of the Braid house, spilling low-voltage halogen light onto the perfectly manicured lawn. Dr. Tarver knew about the halogen bulbs because he'd spent time in that bedroom nearly two years before. He lifted his backpack and moved swiftly around the house to the patio doors. Braid would not have switched on his security system yet; like most people, he was a creature of habit. And like most people-at least in relatively safe Mississippi-Braid did not feel the least bit threatened while the sun was still shining. That was why Dr. Tarver had come early.