was a former Legionnaire whose leg Smith had saved in the MASH unit during the Gulf War. Displaying his usual hospitality, he saw to it that no one bothered Smith while Smith read the file from first word to last. Then he sat back, ordered another demi, and mulled what he had learned:
The "small" evidence against the Black Flame was that the Deuxiegrave;me Bureau, acting on the tip of an informant, had picked up a former member of the terrorist group in Paris just an hour after the Pasteur's bombing. Less than a year ago, the man had been released from a Spanish prison for his part in long-ago crimes attributed to the Black Flame. After he and his associates were arrested, the Black Flame dropped from sight, apparently no longer active.
When the Bureau grabbed him in France, he was armed but swore he was completely out of polities, working as a machinist in Toledo, Spain. He claimed he was in Paris simply to visit an uncle, knew nothing about the Pasteur's bombing, and had been with his uncle all day. There was a Xerox of a photo of him. According to the date, the photo was shot when he was taken into custody. He had heavy black brows, thin cheeks, and a prominent chin.
The uncle confirmed the man's story, and the police's subsequent investigation failed to turn up evidence that directly connected him to the bombing. Still, there were a few holes, since the man had several hours unaccounted for that day. The Bureau was holding him incommunicado and interrogating him around the clock.
Historically, the Black Flame's center of operations was always mobile, never settling in a single spot for longer than a week. The organization favored the Basque provinces of the western Pyrenees: Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa, and Alava in Spain, and, only occasionally, Basse-Pyrenees, France. The most frequent choices were in and around Bilbao and Guernica, where the majority of the Black Flame's sympathizers had lived.
As a movement, the Spanish Basque nationalists had only one goal separation from Spain into a Basque Republic. Failing that, the more moderate groups had occasionally offered to settle for an autonomous region within Spain. The Basques' desire for independence was so strong that, despite their extremely devout Catholicism, they fought against the Church during the Spanish Civil War and supported the secular left-wing Republic, since it promised them at least autonomy, while the Catholic fascists would not.
Smith wondered how the bombing of the Pasteur Institute in Paris might figure into that long-standing goal. Perhaps it was to embarrass Spain. No, probably not. None of the Basque terrorist acts had yet shamed Spain.
It could be that the point was to incite friction between Spain and France, which might ultimately make possible convincing the French government to pressure Spain to accede to Basque demands. That made more sense, since it was a tactic that had been used by other revolutionaries, although with only varying degrees of success.
Or had the French Basques decided to unite with their brothers and sisters south of the border, spreading the terrorism into two countries, in the hope that by carving their new country from small areas of both, they would encourage the French, who would lose less, to force the Spanish to make a deal? Of course, there was the added incentive that the involvement of two nations could trigger the United Nations and maybe the European Union to lean on both Spain and France to find a solution.
Smith nodded to himself. Yes, that might work. And a DNA computer would be invaluable to terrorists, giving them a compelling weapon for many purposes, including convincing governments to capitulate to their goals.
But assuming the Black Flame had Chambord's molecular machine, why attack the United States? It made no sense unless the Basques wanted to force the United States to support their objective and increase the pressure on Spain. But if any of that was true, there should be contact and demands. There had been none.
As Smith continued to consider it all, he turned on his cell phone, hoping to hear a dial tone. There was one. He dialed Klein's secret, secure number in D.C.
"Klein here."
"Are all of the wireless systems back up?"
"Yes. What a mess. Discouraging."
"What exactly did he do?" Smith asked.
"After he took down the Western utilities grid, our phantom hacker got into the key code of one of our telecommunications satellites, and the next thing our people knew, he'd infiltrated the whole spectrum dozens of satellites. The FBI's forensics