Another blast! Just feet from the car, another cabin erupted in flames an instant after a missile streaked into it.

  Focus! Don’t be distracted, don’t look — focus!

  Need an escape, but what—where? Must get out of this clearing, out of the path of the missiles!

  Bryson’s thoughts were frantic. Nowhere to go, nowhere out of range, nowhere a missile can’t reach us!

  Jesus Christ! A missile streaked by so closely he could see it almost brush against the hood of the car, then hit a large oak tree, where it exploded. Fire was raging all around them now, the grassy meadow ablaze. The two destroyed cabins roared with pluming flames, pillars of fire.

  “My God!” he heard himself shouting. He was nearly crazed with terror, overwhelmed by the sense of futility, the madness of the situation!

  Then he spotted a bridge. Just across the burning field, a short path led down to a wide, muddy river, a rickety-looking, old wooden beam bridge across it. Flooring the accelerator, he drove straight ahead at top speed. Elena screamed, “What are you doing? You can’t—the bridge won’t hold us—it’s not for cars!”

  The trees just ahead exploded into orange flames, as another missile narrowly missed its mark. They plunged ahead straight into the inferno. For a second or two everything was orange-white as flames licked the glass, blackening it, and then they emerged on the other side of the conflagration, propelled forward onto the wooden bridge. It swayed perilously ten feet above the slow-moving river of mud.

  “No!” Elena screamed. “It won’t hold us!”

  “Quick, roll down your window,” Bryson shouted as he did the same. “And take a deep breath.”

  “What …?”

  The helicopter’s blades thundered ever closer, a sound Bryson could feel more than hear.

  He floored the accelerator once more, and the car lurched forward, crashing through the wooden parapets.

  “No! Nicholas!”

  The sensation was one of slow motion, as if time had almost come to a stop. The car teetered forward, then plunged into the river. Bryson roared, clutching the wheel and the dashboard; Elena clung to him, screaming as well.

  The splash was enormous. The El Dorado plunged bumper first into the water, hurtling down. In the seconds before they were submerged in the opaque waters, Bryson heard a blast just behind them; he turned to see the bridge collapse in a starburst of flame.

  Their world was dark, murky; the car sank; the brown water rushed into the windows, rapidly filling the interior. Bryson could see just a short distance ahead underwater. Holding his breath, he unbuckled the seat belt and helped Elena out of her seat belt, then out of the car, moving slowly, balletically, through the shadows, the billowy murk. Pulling her with all of his strength, they moved along just beneath the surface of the brackish water, carried along by the current, until he could no longer hold his breath and they came to the surface, surrounded by reeds and marsh grass.

  They each gasped for air, gulping it in. “Stay down,” he panted. They were surrounded by tall reeds, shielded from view. He could hear, but not see, the helicopter; he pointed toward the water, and Elena nodded, then they filled their lungs with air and went under again.

  The instinct for survival is a potent source of energy: it urged them along, allowed them to stay under for a longer time than they might otherwise have done, made them swim with greater endurance. When they came up for air again, still camouflaged by reeds and grass, the helicopter roar seemed to have diminished; it seemed to be farther away. Keeping his head down, Bryson looked skyward and saw that the chopper had gained altitude, likely to survey a broader area.

  Good; they’re not sure where we’ve gone, whether we were trapped in the car to drown slowly …

  “Again,” Bryson said. They took deep breaths, filling their lungs to the bottom, then plunged. There was a rhythm now, a pattern to their flight; they swam, let the current carry them downstream, and when they couldn’t hold their breath any longer they came up, sheltered by the wild aquatic vegetation.

  They went down again, and up, then down again, and soon half an hour had gone by, and Bryson looked at the sky and saw that the helicopter had left. There were no signs of life to be observed; the watchers had lost their targets, no doubt hoping that the targets were dead.

  Finally they reached a place where the river got shallow and they could stand and rest. Elena shook the muddy water from her hair, coughing a few times before she was able to catch her breath. Their faces were mud-covered; Bryson could not help laughing, though more from relief than from amusement.

  “So this is what your life was like,” she said, the analyst speaking to the field operative. She coughed again. “You’re welcome to it.”

  Half smiling, he said, “This is nothing. You haven’t lived until you’ve had to take a dive into the canals of Amsterdam. Three meters deep. A third of that’s muck and filth. Another third’s a layer of abandoned bicycles—they’re sharp and rusty, and when they scrape you it hurts like hell. Then you stink for about a week. As far as I’m concerned, this is a refreshing dip in a nature preserve.”

  They climbed up onto the riverbank, the water draining from their soaked clothing. A cold breeze was blowing, rippling the reeds and chilling them both. Elena had begun shivering, and Bryson held her close, warming her as best he could.

  About three-quarters of a mile from Camp Chippewah was a bar and restaurant. Sodden and cold, mud-encrusted, they sat at the bar, sipping hot coffee, talking quietly and ignoring the looks from the bartender and the other patrons.

  A television mounted on the wall was blaring a soap opera, which had just begun; the bartender pointed a remote at it, changing the channel to CNN.

  Richard Lanchester’s patrician face occupied the entire screen, file footage from one of his numerous appearances before Congress. An announcer’s voice came on in midsentence: “ … sources say will be named to head the new international security agency. The reaction in Washington has been overwhelmingly favorable. Lanchester, who is reportedly enjoying a rare working vacation in the Pacific Northwest, was unavailable for comment …”

  Elena went rigid. “It’s happening,” she breathed. “They’re not even bothering to hide anything any longer. Dear God, what is it, what are they doing—what is it really?”

  Two hours later they had chartered a private plane to Seattle.

  Neither one slept; they spoke quietly, urgently. They planned, strategized; they held each other, neither able to vocalize what they both feared, what the dying Harry Dunne had taunted Bryson with: they were too late.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Their suite at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle—the busy hotel, situated conveniently near the Interstate 5 Expressway, seemed their best bet for escaping notice—was converted into a command center: it was strewn with maps, computer equipment, cables, modems, and printouts.

  The tension was almost palpable. They had found the nerve center of a shadowy organization known as Prometheus, the site of a meeting this evening of enormous consequence. Harry Dunne’s ravings had been confirmed by a variety of means. The city’s limousine services all reported they had nothing available; there was a “function” tonight requiring quite a few cars. Most were discreet, though one owner could not resist dropping the name of the host: Gregson Manning. Flights were arriving throughout the day at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, pickups of VIPs arranged, many with security escorts. Yet not a single name of an arriving guest was revealed. The cordon of secrecy was extraordinarily tight.

  So too was the secrecy that seemed to surround the life and career of Gregson Manning. It was as if two or three sanitized accounts of his personal life had been doled out to fatuous journalists, published prominently, and then recycled endlessly. The result was that although much was written about Manning, little was known.

  They had more success in obtaining information about Manning’s famous mansion on the shores of a lake outside of Seattle. The building of this digital fortress, this so-called “smart house,” had taken years and was accompanied by much press coverage, a great deal of voyeuristic speculation. Apparently, after a period of trying to suppress reporting on his house, Manning had shifted to trying to control the reporting. That he had managed well. The mansion was described in tones of breathless astonishment, in “tours” published in such magazines as Architectural Digest and House & Garden, as well as in various wire-service reports and in The New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.

  Many of the articles were accompanied by photographs; a few even included rudimentary plans which, though no doubt incomplete, allowed Elena and Bryson to note the approximate layout and the purpose of many of the rooms. The futuristic, hundred-million-dollar estate was cut so deep into the steep hillside that much of it was underground. There was an indoor pool; a tennis court; an art deco, state-of-the-art theater. There were conference rooms, exercise facilities with a trampoline room, bowling alley, shooting range, basketball court, a putting green. The mansion’s front lawn, Bryson was careful to note, was directly on the shores of the lake, with two boat docks. Deep under the front lawn was a giant concrete-and-steel parking garage.

  But what Bryson found most intriguing about Manning’s house was that it was a fully digital house: all its electronic devices, all its appliances, were networked and controlled both locally and remotely, from the Seattle campus of Systematix. The house was programmed to serve the every want of its residents and guests. Every visitor was given an electronic badge programmed with their likes and dislikes, their tastes and preferences, from art to music, from lighting to temperature. Signals were relayed from the badge to hundreds of sensors. Wherever they moved throughout the house, the lights would dim or brighten according to their wishes, temperatures would adjust, their favorite music would come on the concealed sound system. Video screens were embedded in the walls, disguised as picture frames; they displayed a constantly changing selection of artwork from some twenty million images and pieces of art to which Manning had quietly acquired the rights. Visitors to the house would therefore see the walls hung with only the art they loved, whether it was great Russian icons or Van Gogh, Picasso or Monet, Kandinsky or Vermeer. Apparently the resolution of the video monitors was so fine that guests were astonished to realize they were not viewing actual canvases.

  But very little existed in the public record about the security of Gregson Manning’s high-tech Xanadu. All Bryson could turn up was that the security system was, of course, redundant; that there were hidden cameras everywhere, even secreted within the interior stone walls; and that the electronic badges that all visitors and staff wore did more than change the music and the lighting: they also kept track of every visitor’s whereabouts to within six inches. The system was said to be monitored at the Systematix campus. The place was said to be more heavily guarded than the White House. No surprise, thought Bryson grimly. Manning has more power than the president.

  “It would be a big help if we could get the building plans,” Bryson said after he and Elena had gone through the piles of articles photocopied from the public library and downloaded from the Internet.

  “But how?”

  “They’re supposedly on file at city hall, blueprints occupying seven drawers. Under lock and key. But I have a strong impression that they’ve been ‘lost.’ Men like Manning frequently arrange to have municipal copies of sensitive documents ‘misplaced.’ And the architect, unfortunately, lives and works in Scottsdale, Arizona. Presumably he has the stamped originals, but there’s no time to fly to Arizona. So we’ll just have to wing it.”

  “Nicholas,” she said, turning to him with anxiety in her face, “what do you intend to do?”

  “I need to get inside. It’s the seat of the conspiracy, and the only way to blow it, and them, out of the water is to confront and witness.”

  “Witness?”

  “Witness, observe the members. See who they are, the ones whose names we don’t know. Take photographs, record video evidence. Shine daylight into the darkness. It’s the only way.”

  “But Nicholas, it’s like trying to infiltrate Fort Knox, isn’t it?”

  “In some ways easier, in some ways harder.”

  “But even more dangerous.”

  “Yes. Even more dangerous. Especially without the Directorate as backup. We’re on our own.”

  “We need Ted Waller.”

  “I don’t know how to raise him, how to locate him.”

  “If he’s still alive, he’ll want to contact us.”

  “He knows how to. The telephone numbers are still answered by answering services, coded messages taken and given to the right caller. I keep checking, but he still hasn’t surfaced. He’s a man who’s skilled at disappearing without a trace if circumstances require it.”

  “But to try to enter the Manning estate on your own—”

  “Will be difficult. But with your help—your expertise at computer systems—we may have a chance. One of the articles mentioned that the security at Manning’s house is monitored both locally and at Systematix headquarters.”

  “That doesn’t really help us—Systematix is probably even more secure than Manning’s residence.”

  Bryson nodded. “No doubt. But the point of vulnerability may be the link. How would the house be connected to the company?”

  “I’m sure they’d use the most secure method possible.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Fiber-optic line. Buried in the ground and physically connecting the two locations.”

  “Can fiber-optic lines be tapped?”

  She looked up suddenly, startled, and then a slow smile started across her face. “Just about everyone believes it’s impossible.”

  “And you?”

  “I know it’s possible.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’ve done it. A few years ago the Directorate devised several clever techniques.”

  “You know how to do it?”

  “Of course. It takes some equipment, though nothing you can’t get at a decent computer store.”

  Bryson kissed her. “Terrific. I have a lot of equipment to buy, and I need to conduct some surveillance on Manning’s house and property. But first I need to make a phone call to California.”

  “Who’s in California?”

  “A company in Palo Alto I’ve dealt with before, in one of my Directorate aliases. Founded by a Russian émigré, Victor Shevchenko, an optics genius. He’s got a Pentagon contract and yet he used to sell a fair amount of obscure, classified equipment on the black market, which is how I got to know him, during an international sting operation. I left him in place, didn’t report his activities to Justice, because I figured he’d be more useful as a lead to much bigger fish. He was deeply grateful for my forbearance—and now it’s time to collect. Victor is one of the very few sources for the instrument I need, and if I get to him now he may just have the time to air-freight it to us by this evening.”

  Bryson spent the next hour conducting discreet surveillance of Manning’s estate, using small but high-powered binoculars, from the national forest land that adjoined it. The lakeside property occupied five acres. On the other side was a far more modest house on about an acre and a half.

  The security, or at least as much as Bryson could observe, was extremely sophisticated. The chain-link perimeter fence was eight feet high, with fiber-optic stress-sensor line enmeshed throughout it. This ruled out climbing over the fence or attempting to cut through it. The bottom of the fence was buried in concrete, which made digging underneath difficult. Buried under the topsoil in front of the fence was a distributed pressure-sensor system, also fiber-optic lines, which detected the footsteps of intruders above a certain preset weight: pressure on the sensors disturbed the light flow and set off an alarm. In addition, the entire area was watched by surveillance cameras mounted on poles along the fence. Getting in this way had to be ruled out.

  But every security system had its vulnerabilities.

  For one thing, there was the forest that adjoined the Manning property, where he now stood. Then there was the lake, which seemed to Bryson to present the best opportunity to infiltrate undetected. He returned to the rented Jeep, hidden among the trees and far from the nearest road. As he drove down the access road he passed a small white van that was turning into the gated Manning estate. It was painted with the words Fabulous Food. Caterers, no doubt preparing for the evening’s festivities. He caught a glance of the van’s passengers.

  Another possibility had just suggested itself.

  There were errands to run, purchases to make, and far too little time remaining. Bryson had no difficulty locating a sporting-goods store specializing in mountain climbing, not in this capital of the Pacific Northwest. It was a large and well-stocked shop that also catered to the diverse need of hunters, which eliminated the need to make two other stops. But scuba-diving equipment had to be obtained at a separate dive shop. The yellow pages identified for him the location of an industrial safety products supply house, which serviced construction companies, telephone linemen, window washers, and the like; there, he found precisely what he needed: a portable electric winch, battery operated and quiet, in lightweight aluminum housing with a self-retracting lifeline—two hundred and twenty-five feet of galvanized steel cable, a controlled descent device, and a centrifugal braking mechanism.

  An elevator parts supply company had exactly what he needed, as did a military surplus warehouse, where an employee recommended a decent shooting range close by. There he bought a .45 semiautomatic pistol for cash from a young, grubby-looking man practicing with it, who shared Bryson’s vocal disgust with the goddamned gun-control laws and the goddamned waiting period, especially when a guy just wanted to pick up a piece for recreational purposes on the way out of town for a camping trip.

  Batteries and bell wire were easily found at an ordinary hardware store, but he expected it to be far more difficult to find a decent theatrical supply house than it turned out to be. Hollywood Theatrical Supply, on North Fairview Avenue, sold and rented a complete range of equipment for stage and motion-picture industry use; Hollywood studios and production companies often went on location in the northwest and needed a local supplier.