“Yeah,” joked Cates, “so what’s the bad news?”

A wave of tense laughter rolled through the room.

Tracy Hastings raised her hand halfway and asked, “If we don’t know who these people are and what their objective is, how are we supposed to find them?”

“I just got off the phone with someone who’s working on it,” replied Harvath. “We might have something very soon, so we need to be ready to move. In the meantime, we’ve got a bigger problem. All I have is a pistol, and it’s in my truck back up in Midtown. We’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to do for weapons.”

Another wave of laughter rolled through the room, but this time it was anything but tense.

Twenty minutes later Paul Morgan removed a piece of false drywall from the back of a closet in his small Gramercy Park apartment and said, “Go ahead and take your pick.”

It was a veritable arsenal. In the pistol department Morgan had two Unertl MEU SOC 1911’s, a Glock 19, and a four-inch-barreled.357 Smith amp; Wesson 620. Hanging next to them were a Mossberg 590 12-gauge shotgun, a Remington 40-X.308 sniper rifle, and a fully automatic Troy Industries CQB-SPC A4 assault rifle that Morgan had chanced a big official ass-whupping for smuggling out of Iraq.

“So much for our weapons problem,” said Harvath as he gazed at the display. “I’m going to ask another stupid question, but how are you set for ammo?”

Once again, the group laughed. Morgan crossed into the kitchen, which was covered with travel posters for places he hoped some day to see-Paris, Rome, Hong Kong-and removed a set of keys from his pocket. The refrigerator was a mosaic of snapshots showing Morgan as a marine in a number of other exotic locations around the world that were normally much more humid or dusty than Paris, Rome, or Hong Kong.

He unlocked a small padlock on the side of the freezer door and swung it open. Inside, boxes of shrink-wrapped ammunition stood in a neat series of rows.

“Where do you keep your grenade launcher?” asked Herrington.

“Dr. Hardy told me that grenade launchers are for paranoids, so I sold it to a buddy of mine a while back.”

Morgan let them stand there wondering for a second longer and then smiled and said, “Kidding. Only kidding. I never had a grenade launcher. Besides, with what the surface-to-air missile battery I’ve got up on the roof cost me, who could afford a grenade launcher?”

Everyone laughed, but secretly none of them would have been surprised to find that Morgan did have a crate of SAMs stashed somewhere upstairs.

Clearing off the kitchen table, Morgan hoisted a KIVA technical backpack stuffed to the gills with gear and set it onto one of the chairs.

“Is that your bug-out bag?” asked Hastings.

The marine nodded his head and began unloading his pack. “A week’s worth of the very best survival equipment money can buy.”

As Morgan pulled out MREs, chemlights, water purification tablets, parachute cord, and other items, Cates said, “A week’s worth? Whatever happened to seventy-two hours?”

“Hurricane Katrina, that’s what.” The marine looked at Harvath. “Even DHS is now telling people they need to have at least a week’s worth of supplies on hand in case of trouble, right?”

Harvath nodded his head knowing that they were talking about having people raise it to a month or even two. Not only did he have a bug-out bag ready to go at a moment’s notice in case of a terrorist attack or some other sort of disaster, but so did most of the military, law enforcement, and intelligence people he worked worth. Even civilians had them. The way Harvath saw it, it was pretty stupid for anyone, government employee or otherwise, not to be ready in case of an emergency. That said, his bug-out bag was sitting in the back of his TraillBlazer in a garage uptown. It weighed at least fifty pounds, and it would have been quite uncomfortable to carry everywhere with him. Even so, there were several items in it he would have liked to have with him right now.

As Morgan continued to remove items from his seemingly bottomless bag, Hastings asked, “Where’d you get all the money for this stuff?”

“Let’s just say that in my old life I was a good saver.”

“A real good saver,” added Cates as he checked the labels in a couple of the sport coats hanging in Morgan’s closet.

The marine laid out an assortment of extremely high-quality knives from Chris Reeve as well as a brand-new Gerber LMF II-Infantry, which could be used to carve one’s way out of a helicopter fuselage, and respectfully offered Harvath first pick.

Though they were all exceptional, Harvath already had his never-leave-home-without-it Benchmade auto in his pocket, and if they made it back to his TrailBlazer he’d have access to a superb fixed-blade knife from LaRue Tactical.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got some flashbangs in there?” said Harvath as he watched Paul Morgan continue to pull gear out of his bag.

“No, but I do have this,” replied the marine as he withdrew a Blackhawk medical pack.

Harvath was about to say that he hoped they wouldn’t need that when his cell phone rang. It was Kevin McCauliff.

After chatting with him for only a few seconds, two things became apparent. Kevin had some pretty good news. He also had some pretty bad news.

Harvath listened as McCauliff gave him the good news first. The NGA analyst had been able to hack the server containing the tracking data for the terrorist’s cell phone that Harvath had “borrowed” from the NYPD’s evidence bag. It was one of over forty-seven different phones operating off the same account. It and one other had continued to broadcast a signal after the bridges and tunnels had been blown. That “other” phone was recognized by the server as the lead wireless reception device. McCauliff explained that all of the units had been programmed to text message positioning data to the lead phone at regular intervals. Now it was time for the bad news.

Wherever that lead phone was, it was now no longer transmitting a signal. McCauliff had no way to tell Harvath its current location, only where it had been-an address on the Upper West Side and another in the diamond district on West 47th Street.

Even though the lead phone appeared to have been disabled, McCauliff strongly suggested that Harvath make sure that the positioning software on the one he was now carrying was turned off. Harvath told him he’d already done so back at the police station and, as he grabbed a pen and paper, asked McCauliff to repeat the addresses the lead phone had been at one more time.

When Harvath asked if there was any satellite imagery available for those locations, McCauliff told him that was also part of the bad news and that Harvath would understand what he meant once he saw it. All Kevin needed was an e-mail address. Harvath saw the cable modem next to the PC on Paul Morgan’s desk, crossed his fingers he’d be able to get online, and gave McCauliff one of the Hotmail accounts he used when he didn’t want to run things through the DHS servers.

Five minutes later, Harvath downloaded the first in a series of e-mails and saw exactly what McCauliff meant about the satellite imagery also being part of the “bad” news. The smoke from all of the fires made it very difficult to make anything out. Three e-mails later, he waved Herrington over and said, “Do you see what I see here?”

Bob stared at the screen and slowly scrolled through the images from the building on West 84th Street. When he was finished, he backed up and did it again, then repeated the process several more times. He wanted to be as sure as possible before rendering any kind of opinion. Finally he said, “The image quality absolutely sucks, but if I had to make a guess, I’d say that those are pictures of two vehicles carrying two breaching teams of anywhere from four to seven men each.”