Code to Zero Page 0,11

out the window. The man in the raincoat was walking away with his newspaper tucked under his arm. Luke frowned. The man should have been trying to hail a taxicab. Maybe he was not a shadow, after all. Luke felt disappointed.

The bus pulled away, and Luke took a seat

He wondered again how come he knew about all this stuff. He must have been trained in clandestine work. But what for? Was he a cop? Perhaps it was to do with the war. He knew there had been a war. America had fought against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. But he could not remember whether he had been in it.

At the third stop, he got off the bus with a handful of other passengers. He looked up and down the street There were no taxicabs in sight, and no sign of the man in the olive raincoat As he hesitated, he noticed that one of the passengers who had got off the bus with him had paused in a shop doorway and was fumbling in his pockets. As Luke watched, he lit a cigarette and took a long, satisfying drag.

He was a tall man, wearing a grey Homburg hat

Luke realized he had seen him before.

7 A.M.

The launch pad is a simple steel table with four legs and a hole in the middle through which the rocket jet passes. A conical deflector beneath spreads the jet horizontally.

Anthony Carroll drove along Constitution Avenue in a fiveyear-old Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to his mother. He had borrowed it a year ago, to drive to Washington from his parents' place in Virginia, and had never gotten around to returning it His mother had probably bought another car by now.

He pulled into the parking lot of Q Building in Alphabet Row, a strip of barracks-like structures hastily erected, during the war, on parkland near the Lincoln Memorial. It was an eyesore, no question, but he liked the place, for he had spent much of the war here, working for the Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. Those were the good old days, when a clandestine agency could do more or less anything, and did not have to check with anyone but the President.

The CIA was the fastest-growing bureaucracy in Washington, and a vast multimillion dollar headquarters was under construction across the Potomac River in Langley, Virginia. When it was completed, Alphabet Row would be demolished.

Anthony had fought hard against the Langley development, and not merely because Q Building held fond memories. Right now the CIA had offices in thirty-one buildings in the government-dominated downtown neighbourhood known as Foggy Bottom. That was the way it should be, Anthony had argued vociferously. It was very difficult for foreign agents to figure out the size and power of the Agency when its premises were scattered and mixed up with other government offices. But when Langley opened, anyone would be able to estimate its resources, manpower, and even budget simply by driving past.

He had lost that argument The people in charge were determined to manage the CIA more tightly. Anthony believed that secret work was for daredevils and buccaneers. That was how it had been in the war. But nowadays it was dominated by pen-pushers and accountants.

There was a parking slot reserved for him and marked: 'Head of Technical Services', but he ignored it and pulled up in front of the main door. Looking up at the ugly building, he wondered if its imminent demolition signified the end of an era. He was losing more of these bureaucratic battles nowadays. He was still a hugely powerful figure within the Agency. 'Technical Services' was the euphemistic name of the division responsible for burglary, phone tapping, drug testing and other illegal activities. Its nickname was Dirty Tricks. Anthony's position was founded on his record as a war hero and a series of Gold War coups. But some people wanted to turn the CIA into what the public imagined it to be, a simple information-gathering agency.

Over my dead body, he thought.

However, he had enemies: superiors he had offended with his brash manners, weak and incompetent agents whose promotion he had opposed, pen-pushers who disliked the whole notion of the government doing secret operations. They were ready to destroy him as soon as he made a slip.

And today his neck was stuck out farther than ever before.

As he strode into the building, he deliberately put aside his general worries and focused on the problem of the day: