Daryl motioned for the two to come to the center of the ring.

“Three-minute rounds. Only rule is, when I say stop, you stop. Other than that, feel free to kick the shit out of each other.”

The Hispanic looked at Dewey from head to toe.

“Voy a matar a ti, viejo.”

I’m going to kill you, old man.

Dewey didn’t even look at his opponent. He said nothing.

Each fighter returned to his corner.

The crowd was getting hyped. A few catcalls to the other fighter got him to smile as he bounced on his bare feet.

“Chico! Kill the fucker!”

Daryl nodded to someone seated next to the ring. He slammed a hammer into the bell.

Dewey stepped slowly into the center of the ring as Chico danced left. Dewey glanced left; the man in the wheelchair was positioned next to the ring, watching. They made eye contact. Then Chico started his charge. He sprinted toward Dewey, swinging wildly, left right, almost too fast to see, his fists swinging for Dewey’s head as he lurched across the ring.

Dewey waited, guard down, calmly poised, his knees bent slightly. As the swings came closer, he heard the roar of the crowd anticipating the fight, wanting a rapid, brutal ending to the spectacle.

Chico charged into Dewey’s range. Dewey sensed a left hook slashing the air, and ducked. Chico lurched past him, whiffing completely, his momentum thrusting him forward. In one fluid motion, like a cocked spring, Dewey crouched, spun clockwise, and coiled his right foot skyward in a brutal roundhouse strike. His foot smashed into Chico’s face, hitting his jaw like a hammer, crushing it, breaking it in several places. Chico went flying sideways, tumbling awkwardly to the mat, unconscious. Blood gushed from his mouth and nose.

The kick silenced the crowd.

Dewey stepped to the center of the ring. His chest, torso, arms, and legs were red from adrenaline and the momentary exertion. He was ripped, his muscles hard and toned. He circled the ring, looking at the crowd. A few started clapping politely, then stopped.

Dewey stepped in front of the man in the wheelchair as a pair of gym workers carried the unconscious fighter out of the ring.

“You ready to stop fucking around?” asked Dewey.

9

DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (DIA)

JOINT BASE ANACOSTIA-BOLLING

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Will Parizeau sat in front of a pair of brightly lit plasma screens arrayed in a slight concave atop a long steel desk. Parizeau’s bespectacled eyes darted back and forth between the two screens. A look of concern adorned his youthful, ruddy face as his eyes raced between the screens. Then came a look of fear. His mouth opened slightly. His eyes bulged.

“Sweet Jesus,” he said aloud.

On the left screen was a grid displaying four satellite images. On the right was a wall of numbers plotted against a spreadsheet.

Parizeau was a senior-level analyst within the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Directorate for Science and Technology. Employing radar intelligence, acoustic intelligence, nuclear intelligence, and chemical and biological intelligence, the DIA detected and tracked fixed or dynamic target sources, such as nuclear weapons. If the National Security Agency was about scouring e-mails, phone calls, Internet traffic, and other signals intelligence, looking for bad people who might do harm to the United States, DIA was about scouring the earth for the objects those bad people might use in those efforts.

Parizeau’s desk sat in a cavernous, windowless, dimly lit room two floors belowground, in a respectable if unspectacular-looking brick building. It was one of several old, well-maintained buildings, built in the 1920s, on a 905-acre military base in southwest Washington, D.C., called Fort Bolling. Parizeau was one of more than a hundred analysts, all surrounded by visual media, and all of it related to nuclear weapons deemed vulnerable to theft or purchase by terrorists.

Parizeau’s job was to keep track of all suspected nuclear weapons inside the former Soviet republic and now sovereign nation Ukraine. DIA believed that four nuclear devices still were hidden in Ukraine, their existence denied by both the Ukrainian and Russian governments, and yet their telltale chemical signatures were like beacons to the highly purposed satellites that hovered in geostationary orbit looking down.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were at risk all over the newly independent breakaway republics. Due to geography, these small countries now owned nuclear weapons. Impoverished regional governments, often run by peasants and farmers, suddenly possessed a variety of valuable objects; nuclear weapons were at the top of the list. Indeed, they were the list.

Several years of negotiations between Russia and the West ensured that all Soviet nuclear weapons were accounted for and in safe storage. So concerned with the chaotic approach of the Russian government to its nuclear arsenal, America decided that it would be prudent to “invest” more than $300 billion in an effort to help Russia secure its own nukes. But even with the massive bribe, a few weapons went missing.

Behind the complex negotiations between the United States and Russia to safeguard the rogue bombs, there lurked a more alarming set of negotiations between Russia and its former republics. On the one hand, Russia wanted the United States to think they had the power to bring all of the weapons back into the fold. On the other hand, Russia had a smorgasbord of newly created republics, independent of Russia, that wanted a cut of the U.S. bribe. In the end, America bought—for Russia—its own weapons back from the republics. It was inevitable that some bad characters, in places like the Ukraine, would keep a few for themselves.

Ukraine had officially handed over all nineteen hundred of its nuclear weapons in 1994, giving them to the Russian Federation in exchange for its sovereignty and a variety of economic concessions, forgiveness of debts, and cash. A discrepancy of four out of the nineteen hundred had never been fully explained by either the Ukrainian government or Russia. It had taken technology and nearly two years to pinpoint the telltale tritium emissions and locate the four rogue weapons. Ever since then, it was Parizeau’s full-time job to monitor the supposedly nonexistent Ukrainian-domiciled nukes.

Parizeau relied on an advanced communications satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force, one of five that hovered in geostationary orbit above the earth. Parizeau spent his time tracking a variety of telltale chemical and biological symptoms, including plutonium depletion, keeping an eye on the nuclear devices.

It was a scan fewer than twenty-four hours old that Parizeau now stared at, transfixed. What the numbers showed was that one of the nuclear bombs in the Ukraine had been moved. In fact, it had disappeared.

Parizeau picked up his phone.

“Get me Mark Raditz over at the Pentagon.”

*   *   *

Mark Raditz, the deputy secretary of defense, sat behind his desk on the second floor of the Pentagon. His phone buzzed.

“Mark,” said Raditz’s assistant, Beth. “Will Parizeau is on one.”

“Who?”

“Will Parizeau. Ukraine desk at DIA.”

“Put him through.”

Raditz flipped on a tan plastic device that looked like a large radio. It was an air filtration machine. He opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a pack of Camel Lights. He stuffed a cigarette between his lips, then lit it. He sat down on his large red leather desk chair, leaned back, and put his cowboy boots up on the desk.

“What is it, Will?” asked Raditz, crossing his legs, yawning slightly. “How’s the Ukraine these days?”

“We have a rover,” said Parizeau.

Raditz was still for a brief instant, then lurched up and leaned over the phone console on his desk.