Rapp swore under his breath while they waited for the elevator to arrive, exposed in the middle of the hallway. When the doors finally opened, Adams silently shooed Rapp into the tiny compartment and pressed the proper button. The elevator was big enough to handle four people at the most.

As the elevator started to move, Rapp handed his gun to Adams, and with both hands, he took his headset from around his neck and secured it over his baseball cap. Static crackled loudly from his earpiece, but as they rose it lessened. The elevator ascended quickly and noiselessly. By the time they reached the second floor, the static was greatly decreased, and Rapp had his weapon back in his hands.

When the elevator stopped, Adams gave Rapp an uneasy look. Rapp nodded and said, "Don't worry." And with a grin to help ease the tension, he added, "I'll go first. "Then pulling his lip mike down, he whispered,

"Iron Man to command. Over."

Rapp waited several seconds for a reply and then repeated his words.

After the third check, he thought he heard something, but it was too broken up to discern. They would have to move to the stash room and set up a more powerful secure field radio.

Rapp looked up at the small light above his head. It would have to be extinguished before they opened the door. After popping the frosted glass cover off the fixture, he reached up and gave the hot bulb several quick turns with his bare hand.

The bulb flickered and then went dark. Rapp then pulled a circular red plastic filter from one of his pockets and attached it to the flashlight that was affixed to the barrel of his submachine gun When he turned on the flashlight, a faint red light illuminated the floor of the elevator.

Adams pressed a button, and the elevator doors opened to reveal a wall.

There was no crack to wedge the snake under, so they would have to chance it and go forward without looking.

Slowly, Adams ran his hand along the wall until he found what he was looking for. As Adams pressed the catch, the wall popped outward several inches, revealing the tile floor of the president's bathroom. The lights were off, and the room was dark, with the exception of the faint red light coming from under the barrel of Rapp's gun.

Rapp checked the way and slid through the narrow entrance, taking three cautious steps toward the bedroom. Milt followed close behind. The door was open. Rapp checked for trip wires and then looked into the actual bedroom. The door that led to the hallway was slightly open, and a sliver of light spilled into the dark room from the hallway. Before entering the bedroom, Rapp looked back over his shoulder and whispered,

"Close that."

Placing both hands on the wall, Adams pushed it back into place. The wall shut with a slight click, and all traces of the hidden elevator disappeared.

Rapp stepped cautiously into the room. He moved across the president's bedroom to the door that led to the Truman Balcony, the semicircular porch that overlooked the South Lawn When Rapp reached the door, he froze in his tracks. He had missed it on the first sweep, but caught the slightest glimpse of it on the second. A thin clear wire ran across the base of the door about twelve inches off the ground. Rapp's right hand snapped up next to his head in a tight closed fist.

Milt Adams, a combat veteran, knew the hand signal all too well and froze in his tracks.

At first, only Rapp's eyes moved, and then his head swiveled from side to side. Adams was good enough to not say anything. It was apparent from Rapp's body language that he had found something. What Rapp had found was a filament trip wire, and he knew it was attached to something that petrified him. Rapp hated bombs. One of the qualities that had made him so successful during his almost decade of service with the CIA was knowing his own limitations. He didn't have the patience or the skill to deal with explosives, so he tended to avoid them like the plague. The problem with bombs was there were a hundred different ways to set them off, and a dozen of them could happen before you ever got within a foot of the actual device. There could be a pressure pad under the carpet, a magnetic plate, infrared beams, microwave beams, motion sensors, tremble or mercury switches—the list went on and on. And with Rafique Aziz involved, Rapp had no doubt these devices would be really hairy. One thing was certain, however: the trip wire was attached to something, and Rapp had to find out exactly what it was.

The door leading to the balcony was bordered on both sides with drapes.

Rapp stepped carefully to his right and looked behind a chair situated between the door and a window to the right. Sticking the black silencer of his gun behind the curtain, he pointed it down and found nothing on this side of the door, but on the left side, he could discern the rectangular shape of a box. The trip wire was tied to a switch on the side of the bomb and a nail on the other side of the door. Rapp crossed over to the other side of the door and examined the box from a closer angle. It appeared that the trip wire was the only exterior trigger device.

Rapp wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, and then reluctantly, he drew back the curtain. The box was simple, about eight inches high and six wide. In the upper right corner was a small red digital readout and a green light that blinked every three seconds. Gingerly, he let the drape fall back into its natural hanging position and took a step back. If the box was loaded with Semtex, the Czechoslovakian version of C-4 plastique, there was probably enough to blow the entire wall halfway across the South Lawn.

Milt Adams leaned over and whispered, "What did you find?"

"A bomb. "Rapp wiped some more sweat from his face.

"If we set one of these things off, they'll be picking us up with a vacuum cleaner. Milt. Let's leave this alone and get ourselves set up."

Adams led the way across the bedroom to a large walk-in closet. Rapp followed him in and left the door open, as they had found it. On the left was a substantial closet organizer. The smaller compartments near the bottom were filled with pairs of shoes, but as the organizer rose, the cubicles grew larger and were occupied by shirts and sweaters. Near the far corner Adams stopped and reached up along the edge. After feeling around for a second, he found what he was looking for and pressed the obscured button. The organizer popped outward several inches at one end, and then Adams swung it open three more feet.

They entered the hidden room and pulled the organizer shut behind them.

Adams turned on the wall light and slid a heavy steel bolt across the doorway. The small room, referred to as the "stash room" by the Secret Service, was eight feet long by six feet wide, and the ceiling was almost ten feet high. The walls were lined with bulletproof Kevlar and a fire-retardant cloth on both the exterior and interior walls. The room also contained four biohazard suits complete with oxygen tanks and gas masks.

These were packed in storage lockers that were bolted to the walls above their heads, along with some weapons and a first aid kit. The room was built in response to a small plane crashing into the South Portico in the fall of 1994. THE TECHNICIANS IN the first row of the control room at Langley had faintly heard Rapp's original signal. They had been working diligently for five minutes to clear up the link as Irene Kennedy and General Campbell watched from one row back. The two knew enough to let their people work and stay out of their way.

With the help of Marcus Dumond, who was manning the control panel of the Cia's communications van parked outside the White House fence, they were making progress. The telescoping boom on the back of the van was helping penetrate the electronic interference the terrorists were using.