“Boss,” he said to Cabrillo, “we need a KH-30 shot. The clouds are too thick.”

The KH-30 was the Defense Department’s latest supersecret satellite. It could peer through clouds, even into the water itself. Stone had been unable to hack into the system despite repeated efforts.

“I’ll ask Overholt the next time we talk,” Cabrillo said. “Maybe he can railroad the National Reconnaissance Office into giving him time. Good try, Stone.”

Hanley was staring at the track map on another monitor. The Oregonwas flying through the water but the other vessel had a good head start. “We can overtake them before Scotland anyway, if they stay at the current speed.”

Cabrillo glanced at the monitor. “It looks to me like they’re on a course for the Faeroes.”

“If that’s the case,” Hanley said, “they’ll reach port before we can overtake them.”

Cabrillo nodded and considered this. “What’s the location of our jets?”

Hanley pulled a world map up on the screen. “Dulles, Dubai, Cape Town and Paris.”

“Which aircraft is in Paris?”

“Challenger 604,” Hanley answered.

“Direct it to Aberdeen, Scotland,” Cabrillo said. “The runway at the airport in the Faeroe Islands is not long enough to handle it, and Aberdeen is the next closest city. Have it fueled and ready if we need to use her.”

Hanley nodded and walked over to a computer to enter the instructions. The door to the control room opened and Michael Halpert entered. He was holding a manila folder in his hands. He walked to the coffee machine, poured a cup and then approached Cabrillo.

“Mr. Chairman,” he said wearily, “I’ve exhausted the database. There are no terrorists or other criminal elements that go by the nickname the Ghost.”

“Did you find anything?”

“One Hollywood actor who fashions himself a proponent of the dark side, an author who does vampire books, an industrialist, and 4,382 various e-mail identities.”

“The actor and the author are definitely out,” Cabrillo said. “All the ones I’ve met are too stupid to plan lunch, much less an assault on a terrorist ship. Who is the industrialist?”

“One Halifax Hickman,” Halpert said, reading from the file, “an ultrarich Howard Hughes type with a vast variety of business interests.”

“Find out everything you can about him,” Cabrillo ordered. “I want to know everything from the color of his underwear on through.”

“Will do,” Halpert said as he walked out of the control room again.

It would be twelve hours before Halpert exited his office.

And when he did, the Corporation would know a lot more than it did right now.

IF TD DWYER claimed he was not nervous he’d be lying.

The group that was assembled around the conference table were the blue-ribbon winners in the nation’s power struggle. More than a few of them appeared nightly on the news programs, and most were recognizable to anyone not living in a cave.

The people assembled were cabinet officials, the secretary of state, the president and his advisors, and a scattering of four-star generals and intelligence leaders. When it was Overholt’s turn to address the group, he gave a quick overview of the situation and then introduced Dwyer for questions.

The first question came from the heaviest of hitters.

“Has this possibility ever been verified in a laboratory?” the president asked.

“It is believed isotopes of helium were detected in buckyballs that were inside fragments recovered at the meteor crater in northern Arizona as well as at an underwater site near Cancun, Mexico. However, the studies were conducted by university laboratories and the results were not completely conclusive.”

“So this is all a theory,” the secretary of state said, “not hard science.”

“Mr. Secretary,” Dwyer said, “the entire field is a new one. It has only been around since 1996, when the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three men credited with discovering buckyballs. Since then, with funding cutbacks and such, the field has been mainly explored by corporations with an eye toward commercial applications.”

“Is there a way to test this theory?” the secretary of state followed up.

“We could recover some debris and puncture the atoms in a controlled setting,” Dwyer said, “but there is no guarantee that we would recover a sample with the virus intact. Some parts might contain it, some might not.”

The president spoke. “Mr. Overholt, why did you dispatch contractors to Greenland and not some of our own agents?”

“Firstly,” Overholt said, “at that time I believed we were dealing with a relatively harmless object and I had no way of knowing Echelon had been compromised. The information of the increased threat only came to me from Mr. Dwyer today. Secondly, we planned to confiscate the object, and I wanted to shield your administration from any negative blowback.”

“I understand,” the president said. “Who did we hire for the job?”

“The Corporation,” Overholt said.

“They were in charge of the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet, were they not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I figured they’d all be retired by now,” the president said. “They hit a financial home run with that operation. Anyway, I have no doubt as to their skill—if I had been you, I’d have done the same thing.”

“Thank you, sir,” Overholt said.

The air force chief of staff spoke next. “So the situation is that we have an iridium orb loose at the same time that there is a Ukrainian nuclear weapon missing. If one meets the other, we’ll have a hell of a problem.”

The president nodded. That was the situation in a nutshell. He paused.

“Here’s what I want done,” he said finally. “Mr. Dwyer should recover some of these extraterrestrial buckyballs and start experimenting. If there’s a chance that an extraterrestrial virus can be unleashed, we need to know about it. Secondly, I want the military and intelligence unified in an effort to locate this meteorite. Thirdly, I want Mr. Overholt to continue to work with the Corporation—they’ve been on this since the onset, so I don’t want them pulled. I’ll budget whatever funds we need for their fees. Fourthly, I want this kept quiet—if I read about this tomorrow in the New York Times,whoever leaked it will be fired. Last is the most obvious: We need both the Ukrainian nuke and the meteorite recovered as quickly as possible so we don’t start the New Year with a crisis.” He paused and looked around the table. “Okay, everyone, you know what you’re supposed to do. Just get the job done and let’s wrap this up.”

The room started to empty but the president motioned for Overholt and Dwyer to remain. Once the marine guard had everyone herded out, he shut the door behind him and stood guard outside.

“TD, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” Dwyer said.

“Give me the sour milk.”

Dwyer glanced at Overholt, who nodded.

“If there isa virus in the molecules that comprise the meteorite,” Dwyer said slowly, “a nuclear detonation might be the least of our problems.”

“Get me Cabrillo on the telephone,” the president said to Overholt.

23

ON BOARD THE Oregonthe conference room was full.

“At three hundred fifty miles out we can launch the Robinson,” Cabrillo said. “If we fly at a hundred miles an hour against the headwind, we should be able to arrive in the Faeroe Islands around the same time as our mystery ship.”

“The problem is,” Hanley said, “with only you and Adams on site, there’s no way you can storm the vessel. It would be suicide.”

“These guys,” Seng added, “are badasses.”

Just then the door to the conference room opened and Gunther Reinholt, the Oregon’s aging propulsion engineer, poked his head inside.

“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “there’s a call you need to take.”