him sprang ajar.
Dart stepped through the door. The president of the United States sat behind a vast, unadorned desk. Two miniature American flags stood at opposite ends of it. Between them was a row of phones in various bright colors, like something you might see in a playroom. On a side wall were half a dozen monitors, each tuned to a different station, their audio output muted. The president’s chief of staff stood silently to one side, hands folded in front. Dart exchanged nods with the chief, who was famously taciturn, and then turned his attention to the man behind the desk.
Beneath the renowned thatch of jet-black hair and the bushy eyebrows, the president’s eyes looked sunken, almost bruised. “Dr. Dart,” he said.
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Dart replied.
The president swept one hand toward a pair of sofas that faced his desk. “Please sit down. I’ll take your report now.”
The door to the room was quietly shut from the outside. Dart took a seat, cleared his throat. He had brought no folder, no set of notes. Everything was burned into his mind.
“We have only three more days until the anticipated attack,” he began. “Washington is as secure as is humanly possible. All resources, agencies, and personnel have been mobilized in this effort. Army checkpoints have been set up on all roads leading in or out of the city. The writ of habeas corpus has, as you know, been temporarily suspended, allowing us to take into custody anyone for almost any reason. A holding and processing facility for detained persons has been erected, on the Potomac just up from the Pentagon.”
“And the evacuation of the civilian population?” the president asked.
“Complete. Those who wouldn’t go have been taken into custody. We’ve had to keep the regional hospitals open, with skeleton staffs, for those patients who simply cannot be moved. But those are few.”
“And the status of the investigation?”
Dart hesitated a moment before replying. This was going to be rough. “Nothing new of importance since my last briefing. Very little progress has been made on identifying the group or where the nuclear device is located. We have not been able to narrow down the actual target—that is, beyond the several already noted.”
“What about the possible threat to other cities? Of the terrorists shifting their target?”
“Again, we have no useful information on other targets, sir.”
The president erupted to his feet, started pacing. “By God, this is unacceptable. What about this terrorist still on the loose? Crew?”
“Unfortunately, Crew continues to evade our men. He escaped into the mountains and my men now have him trapped in a vast wilderness area where at least he can do no harm, where there’s no cell coverage, no roads, no way for him to make contact with the outside world.”
“Yes, but we need him! He could name names, he could name targets! Damn it, man, you people have to find him!”
“We’re deploying massive assets into the search. We’ll find him, Mr. President.”
The president’s slender figure swept from one side of the room to the next, turning briskly as he paced. “Tell me about the nuke itself. What more do we know?”
“The Device Working Group continues to disagree about how to interpret the patterns of radiation, the isotope ratios, the fission products they’ve detected. There are anomalies, it seems.”
“Explain.”
“The terrorists had access to the highest level of engineering expertise—Crew and Chalker were two of Los Alamos’s most knowledgeable experts on nuclear weapons design. The question is how good their fabrication of the supposed weapon was. The actual machining of the bomb parts, the assembly, the electronics, is a very, very exacting business. Neither Chalker nor Crew had that kind of engineering expertise. Some in the Device Working Group feel the bomb they made might be so big, it could only be carried around in a car or a van.”
“And you? What do you think?”
“I personally believe it’s a suitcase bomb. I believe we have to assume they had engineering expertise beyond Chalker and Crew.”
The president shook his head. “What more can you tell me about it?”
“The two sections of the charge have been well separated and shielded since the accident, as we can’t find any trace of radiation anywhere. Washington is a sprawling city, spread out over a large area. We’re dealing with the proverbial needle in a haystack. The very best assets from local, state, federal, and military resources have been tapped, and we’ve drawn heavily from all the many military bases near Washington. The city, quite literally, is crawling