John Kent has lost count of how many nighttime approaches he’s made to the KSC runway in one of NASA’s T-38s, but this one is unannounced. He rolls the sleek twin jet onto a stable final approach, working the throttles forward and back to keep the supersonic trainer on speed across the threshold. Touchdown and aerobraking are followed by a rapid taxi to the ramp where an unmarked NASA car is waiting, the driver bringing the ladder over as John cuts the engines, opens the canopy, and finishes the shutdown checklist. The man is on the top of the ladder now and John reaches over to shake his hand before unstrapping.

“Griggs! Great to see you.”

“Glad you’re here, old sport. I’m beginning to feel like the French underground versus Vichy.”

“World War II-speak again, Griggs?”

“Can’t keep an amateur historian down. Need help outta that tin can?”

“Nope. Stand back please, and don’t try this at home.” He pins the ejection seat, unstraps, and stands before swinging a leg carefully over the side and climbing down.

He joins Hopewell in the front seat of the car.

“Why am I here, Griggs?”

“I need your help, John. We’ve got a presidential directive to launch and a soft sabotage operation being run by our dear administrator to prevent us from launching,” he says, gesturing toward the Pad 39 launch complex visible in the distance bathed in lights. “I don’t know why Shear is silly enough to believe he can send an operative into my space center and not be found out.”

“The woman you told me about?”

“Miss Dorothy Sheehan. I’ve had one of my guys watching her, and where Sheehan shows, nothing goes. She’s not red tagging anything herself, but throwing her HQ weight around so that anything she points to someone gets excited about. All day today it’s been one crisis after another, not a one of them legitimate. I’ve warned Curtis, because I think he’s in cahoots, but I don’t have enough evidence to go over Geoff’s head to the White House.”

“And the bottom line is?”

“We’re not going to make this window, John, if this crap continues.”

“Of course he’s been against this from the start. Anything involving DiFazio…”

“Is he wrong, John?”

“Yes, dammit!

“But we don’t want another Challenger,John. And, Bubba, since you is my bona fide partner in crime, I want to review everything they’ve fingered so far and have you take a long look at the overall plan.”

“Look over your shoulder?”

“Exactly. I’m afraid of pushing too hard, even against this rotten interference.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to my office. And before you ask, yes, I’ve got Kip Dawson’s monologue punched up on my computer. You were busy boring T-38-sized holes in the sky, but just before I came out to pick you up, he was talking about a huge scandal involving his drug company employer, and if someone doesn’t end up in the hoosegow over it, I’ll be shocked.”

“Good Lord. He writes it there and things happen here, and he doesn’t even know it. Talk about the power of the pen.”

It doesn’t take an FBI agent to know that a moving light in an empty house is seldom a good thing. But Tucson police officer Jimmy Gonzalez can see nothing amiss as he slides up to the curb. He reads the call details again on his dash-mounted computer screen. “Next-door neighbor reports seeing flashlight beam moving around inside. Knows resident is out of town. Window involved on east side by shrubs.”

There’s a phone number listed for the house and he punches up the number on his cell phone, waiting until it flips over to a voice-mail message.

He closes the phone and types in that he’s leaving his car and investigating. Walking carefully, he moves along the eastern side of the rambler and positions himself to peer into the window where the flashlight beam was reported to have been.

Nothing.

He shines his powerful SureFire through the pane, lighting up a den that seems intact and untouched, then continues around the back and other side of the house, checking the doors before returning to his car.

“House secure, nothing appears amiss,” he types, closing the call and deciding there’s no point to interviewing the complainant.

Special Agent Kat Bronsky of the FBI has never loved the desert, but Tucson has been an exception, especially the pristine resorts on the northern flank of the town. This time, however, a two-week Homeland Security assignment meant a forgettable Tucson motel from where she’s spent most of the afternoon watching Kip Dawson’s amazing story unfold—including the fact that his home is less than a mile away from where she’s sitting. But reading that somewhere in the Dawson home is a file with evidence of criminal activity electrified her. For the past year she’s been part of a special strike force investigating Vectra Pharmaceuticals.

A quick after-hours phone call to her superior in D.C. is unavoidable, if unanswered. She waits a fitful twenty minutes for a callback from the urgent beeper message she leaves, relieved when her cell phone finally rings with his number on the screen.

“If Ijust read about it, Glen, and youread about it, at least someone at risk from Vectra saw it. We should get a warrant and get out there now.”

“Already in motion, Kat. A big alert triggered by the White House came down moments before you called. We’re trying to roust the Tucson office right now.”

“They’re not answering beepers or phones?”

“The whole team is away in Phoenix, I think. We’re working on it.”

“Okay, there’s no time. Let me take it.”

“You don’t know the local judges.”

“I don’t need to. There’s no one covering that house while we’re talking, so let me go out and at least watch the place. When you get the local team, have them get the warrant and hook up with me there.”

“Kat, use the local police for that.”

“Glen, that’ll go out on the radio channels, and anyone interested enough to be racing in to snatch that file will be on the police scanner.”

“Okay, dammit, you’re making sense, as usual. But, Kat, this one is the highest priority for doing things right. We can’t screw up an evidentiary grab started by a presidential order without all our heads rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. Got it? No heroics. Do notgo in or touch that file without a warrant.”

“No problem. Message understood and acknowledged.”

Finding the address and driving to 4550 East Fernhill takes less than ten minutes, and Kat parks down the street before walking back slowly, looking over the darkened residence as she approaches. Why is a local police cruiser in front of the house?She hesitates, pretending to search for an address, as the officer pulls away and passes her, accelerating around the corner as she makes a quick note of his plate number.

She sees mature trees in the front yard casting deep shadows against an overhead streetlight and takes advantage of the black hole to disappear alongside the Dawson house, moving carefully past shrubbery until she’s at the northeast rear corner. She waits a minute to watch and listen. The house is dark and quiet, and she decides to move to the nearest window and peer in before checking the doors and finding the best vantage point from which to be sure no one enters.

The ground beneath the window is a flower bed of soft topsoil anything but native to Tucson, and she steps in it carefully and lifts her eyes above the sill, letting her vision adjust to the darkness inside.

At the same moment a startlingly bright beam of light stabs through the interior, illuminating a desk in the corner of what appears to be a den.