Chapter 13 

	Woodring's feeling that Lincoln Daniels and the other members of the NFIB were 
already controlling the investigation of Saleh's death was confirmed the moment 
Chalmers handed him the card with the address of the National Photographic 
Interpretation Center (NPIC) on it. To outsiders, its headquarters was an old windowless 
yellow box in the Washington Navy Yard, but the highly secret National Photographic 
Interpretation Center was the child of the CIA and the equally nonexistent NRO, the 
National Reconnaissance Office, itself a joint-venture between the Air Force and CIA.  
	Satellite intelligence generally came in two forms, signals intelligence, called 
SIGINT, and photographic, called imagery.  While the NSA at Ft. Meade concerned itself 
with the analysis of SIGINT, NPIC's major function was to process thousands of 
electronic photographs. And since the boys at Langley didn't like rubbing elbows with the 
DIA analysts at NPIC,  the CIA had its own private imagery analysis section in Virginia 
with some long name like Imagery Analysis Service, so Woodring immediately realized 
that by sending him to NPIC Daniels was already going outside his own organization. 
	Woodring showed his pass, and the bluejacket at the door let him in, gave him a 
cup of coffee and escorted him right away into a darkened office.  Its occupant, Dr. Glen 
Hockaday, was busy pinning what looked to Woodring like a dental x-ray onto an 
illuminated box.
	Having done a quick background check on Hockaday  before his trip to NPIC, 
Woodring found that Hockaday wasn't an imagery analyst at all, but a former Harvard 
classics professor and polyglot who knew ten languages.  Before being posted to NSA, 
Hockaday had been at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, a prestigious think 
tank which was filled to the brim with former Ivy League professors.  Which made 
Hockaday's presence at NPIC all the more suspicious, since NSA employees usually 
concerned themselves with signals intelligence at their own offices in Ft. George G. 
Meade.  Hockaday also read Homer in the original Greek, Virgil in the original Latin, 
Proust in the original French, followed the libretto to Tristan und Isolde in the German, 
mused over the sexual habits of Bedouin potentates in classical Arabic, and followed the 
dialogue of undubbed Visconti films in the original Italian. Within a six-week period 
during a sabbatical to Istanbul, with the aid of a cab driver, he had constructed enough 
vocabulary from his knowledge of the probable Indo-European roots of Turkish to be 
fluent in that language, also. 
	"So you must be Woodring, am I right?" asked Professor Glen Hockaday of 
Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. 
	"Yes." 
	Such an intellectual type, Woodring thought, looking at the academic's tweeds and 
penny loafers. But Professor Hockaday, always in a rush, cut further musings short. 
	"Just got these," Hockaday said, pointing at a set of gray transparencies hanging in 
the air like mounted butterflies. "That's heat. That's not." 
	Hot spots were white. Cold was black. Sometimes it was the reverse.
	"There's been a change, right," Woodring agreed, peering through the second set of 
transparencies mounted directly over the first.  Still, it all looked like dots and splotches 
to Woodring, who wasn't used to seeing reports from the Directorate of Intelligence. 
	"Don't worry, we've already colorized them. Just for you." 
	The white dots had turned pink, surrounded mostly by green and gray.  The pink 
blotches were more obvious.
	"Weapons crates?" Woodring guessed, but he could tell by the shocked look on Dr. 
Hockaday's face that he had guessed wrong. 
	"Nooo," the professor paused, "weapons crates are orange.  These are pink." 
	"Came over this week?" 
	"Look at this."  Hockaday handed a ship movement sheet to Woodring, who, at 
first, was confused by the lines of ETA's and ETD's and foreign names.  Someone had 
taken it off Lloyd's computer -- it wasn't from NRO's. 
	"I still don't get it," admitted Woodring in defeat. 
	"No major flag freighters this time -- just neutral and Japanese," hinted the roly-
poly analyst, forcing Woodring to guess again as if he were a schoolboy. 
	"I don't get it."  Woodring knew that several of the major arms-exporting nations 
often disguised their weapons shipments on neutral shipping, but that obviously wasn't 
the point.  As Hockaday frowned, he refocused first on the ship movements chart and 
then on the infrared transparencies.  "The volume is heavy . . . like if, if they're weapons 
crates," sputtered Woodring. He was at a total loss.  So many shipments on both Japanese 
and neutral shipping, so what was going on? 
	Hockaday smiled annoyingly, giving nothing away, "It's not just the color," his 
didactic impulses overwhelmed him, "there are many more than that.  More than even you 
could imagine." 
	"But you just told me they were pink." 
	"Anything with that density would be pink," Hockaday replied.  His smile had a bit 
of a sneer to it this time. 
	"If this is a joke -- " 
	"Joke?  The joke is on the Germans, I assure you.  These little crates are singing 
their heads off like a Southern gospel choir," Hockaday replied, peering down at 
Woodring's pass as if it were a dunce cap. 
	"I thought it was all based on light.  I mean, on the heat.  The relative heat waves -- 
" Woodring stopped, when he saw a Cheshire cat's smile spread across the professor's 
face. 
	"You do want to know what it is, don't you?" 
	For a short man, Dr. Hockaday moved quickly, toodling through the huge corridor 
past the beige doors. 
	"Wait!" Woodring shouted after him and bolted out of the cubicle and startled a 
couple of passersby, whose eyes were immediately drawn to the color of his pass.  He 
barely saw the door shut in time and grabbed the cheap metal knob. 
	"I'm not really NPIC, I guess Chalmers told you that already," uttered Hockaday, 
his voice lost in the cold wind racing across the yard. 
	"Why hasn't anyone given this stuff to NSC?"  
	"Oh, let's not discuss that here, too many little birdies in the air.   Here it is!" 
	Hockaday was pointing at an Oldsmobile so old that Woodring winced before he 
could catch himself.  The engine barely turned over and the White House messenger 
clapped his hands in the biting cold, while his breath began to fog the windshield. 
	"Where're we going?"
	"To my real office, of course," laughed the Ph.D.  It was Hockaday's idea of a 
joke.
	Woodring raised his eyebrows and stared at the man who looked like a character 
from Alice in Wonderland. At first, the car lurched forward, struggling against the 
weather, but within a few minutes they had arrived at the entrance to the somnolent 
Baltimore-Washington Parkway.  Each of them knew better than to make conversation on 
the way. 
	"No trucks," Woodring mused.  The beginnings of a snow flurry began to reduce 
their visibility.
	"No.  None at all.  Only  bureaucrats and spies I'm afraid," Hockaday supplied, 
then they both lapsed back into silence. 

	"The tower.  The jewels are in the tower," spoke Hockaday, nodding to their left. 
	Woodring almost missed it in the snow, the outline of a nine-story government 
building, stripped of personality and abandoned in the countryside.  As they drew closer, 
he saw the Federal Protective Service guard teams wearing winter uniforms behind the 
cyclone fences. 
	"They've picked up our scent."  
	Woodring winced as a pack of attack dogs surrounded the black sedan and pressed 
their snouts against its windows.  The car had just slammed to a stop outside a gatehouse 
with a single number on its front, 4.  
	"I don't have a -- " 
	"Now you do." 
	Hockaday slipped a pass out of his pocket, which had been properly labeled with 
Woodring's name and picture on it. The pass was attached to an elastic cord, so it could 
dangle under the wearer's neck,  and Woodring put it on.  
	"Professor!" a guard saluted Dr. Hockaday, while a second bluejacket tapped the 
window for Dr. Hockaday to roll it down.  A bayonet came into view as the beefy, FPS 
guard had a look at the doctor's special guest.  The guard took the pass, checked 
Woodring's face again, then waved to the men inside the house. 
	"This is Mister Holland.  He's quite all right," lied Hockaday in his patronizing 
way. 
	The bayonets dropped, and Woodring marveled how Hockaday acted as if he had 
handpicked the guards himself. 
	The moment both men crossed the threshold, a second group of bluejackets, who 
had been idly milling about several golf carts, snapped to attention and await the 
professor's order.  Hockaday motioned to Woodring to join him in the golf cart which had 
just wheeling up next to them and hopped on the vinyl seat.  Startled passersby flattened 
themselves to the walls as the cart raced through the vanilla-colored corridors towards 
DEFSMAC, the Defense Special Missile & Aeronautics Center, the NSA's 
electromagnetic nerve center.  "Death-smack" is an electronic stethoscope whose input 
depends on the fleet of satellites directed by the Air Force's National Reconnaissance 
Office (NRO).  Any sign or indication of a nuclear launch would be relayed immediately 
by DEFSMAC's analysts to the White House Situation Room, the National Military 
Command Center at the Pentagon, and finally, the underground headquarters of the North 
American Air Defense Command (NORAD). 
	A second squad of bluejackets stood outside DEFSMAC's unmarked doors, 
awaiting the arrival of the pair of visitors.  Woodring couldn't help but be intimidated, 
since, until his arrival, no FBI personnel had ever been allowed to enter them. 
	Inside, a moving tableau of two hundred fifty technicians monitored an array of 
oscilloscopes, trajectory maps, country maps, ocean maps, space debris charts -- all fed by 
a multibillion dollar system of satellites and listening stations which stretched across the 
world.  In the center of the room a ray of light raced across the wall map, leaving 
hundreds of illuminated specks in its wake, which subsequently disappeared, until the 
light ray reswept the map and the pattern was repeated once again.  Woodring noticed that 
country boundaries, indicating various states around the Persian Gulf, remained 
permanently lit in a soft, orange light. 
	Perhaps Hockaday was pulling it raw off the satellite, Woodring guessed, in direct 
contravention of the UKUSA treaty -- the secret sharing agreement between the USA, the 
UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
	Hockaday ushered Woodring outside and jumped back on the waiting golf cart, 
whose driver rushed them down the corridor to an elevator.  They exited on the fifth floor 
and walked one hundred feet to the right. 
	"This is my office," said Hockaday, pointing at the door. 
	Woodring nodded silently as Hockaday fiddled with the keys and opened the door 
to his cubicle.  He noticed a computer cursor blinking on and off like a lonely firefly at 
summer's end, before the professor flipped on the light.  The corridors were deserted, 
except for the gray-uniformed Federal Protective Service guards at each end.

	"It's not a G-war, is it?  So why all the equipment?" Hockaday, now the tutor, 
tested Woodring, his unwilling tutee. 
	"That was MILSTAR, wasn't it?" Woodring asked.  The SIGINT satellite had told 
quite a story, but meanwhile Daniels hadn't told the White House or the JCS a thing. 
	"No.  That was our own little star.  In an orbit all its own." 
	"But the disposition, it was electronic, wasn't it?"  Woodring didn't understand the 
discrepancy; the photographs at NPIC had told such a different story.  Clearly, the 
deliveries of whatever it was had been disguised from infrared photography, but were 
somehow broadcasting a signal just the same.  And the electronic map!  The one at 
DEFSMAC had so many more dots than the one he had just seen at NPIC -- they were all 
over Iraq!  Woodring unconsciously rubbed the hair on the back of his neck, which felt as 
if it had stood up on end. 
	"It's sad, isn't it?  None of the engineering students these days are ours -- but at 
least the parts still are." 
	At first Woodring didn't know whether to take it as a joke, then quickly realized he 
had missed it. "Who?" 
	"No one knows about it yet . . . only Director Daniels and us,"  Hockaday replied, 
the friendly tone now gone.  Saddam Hussein had just been sold a bill of goods, 
hardwired with special chips.
	"It's nuclear, isn't it?" Woodring prompted. 
	"They're centrifuges for a nuclear separations plant -- the parts are being 
warehoused all over the country." 
	"So why haven't the Iraqis ripped the bugs out?" 
	"Oh, they only sing upon command," Hockaday assured him.  "They only oscillate 
when our bird comes over." 
	"But, the Germans -- " 
	"Shouldn't reexport things they don't understand, should they?" Hockaday quipped, 
turning the lights back on.  The professor's bonhomie vanished once again like a passing 
breeze.  He leaned forward in his chair and stared straight into Woodring's eyes. 
	"Saleh's dead; the Mukhabarat's suddenly gone home; and Saddam's keeping a 
centrifuge plant in cold storage.  That strikes me as a bit more than coincidental. 
	"If we're lucky -- and I mean very lucky -- someone else is going to have to be sent 
over to activate Saleh's second Trojan Horse, if there is one.  Otherwise, we'll just have to 
wait it out." 
	Before Woodring could reply Hockaday turned in his swivel chair, quickly opened 
the Mosler wall safe, and pulled out a black notebook.  Each page was identical in its 
pristine state, exhibiting the standard single-column of words in the original language for 
each topic. 
	"RAINBOW GOLD," Hockaday tapped into the computer terminal.  He spent the 
next minute climbing the system's authorization ladder, then waited for it to double-check 
his clearance. 
	"You're cleared to the end of the RAINBOW," the message flashed across the 
screen for a split second and disappeared.  Another security measure he had devised, just 
in case anyone were to leave an open terminal cleared to RAINBOW status, NSA's 
highest clearance. 
	"LIST ALL KEY SELECTION FILES," he requested next.  His computer terminal 
asked Hockaday the proper medium for such a voluminous request. 
	"DISK, RAINBOW GOLD-GH," he told the system and logged off. 
	He had set it up, an electronic monster so powerful it could simultaneously 
monitor, analyze, and file into memory the thousands of telecommunications 
transmissions in over one hundred languages. The system's computers had been geared to 
detect keywords and their synonyms, automatically picking out the relevant conversations 
from thousands of transmissions for the auditors.  Who, if they heard anything interesting, 
would label it and send it to Transcription.  But that was the problem -- No one had been 
looking for a telltale message -- until now. 
	"LIST ALL KEYS," Hockaday punched in the terminal, which immediately 
complied with his request.  A list of various topics began to scroll across the screen from 
left to right. 
	"Here, take a look at this," urged Hockaday, handing the fresh printout over his 
desk to Woodring. 
	The titles of each Selection File struck Woodring with their brutal simplicity: 
PANIC, TERROR, ASSASSINATION, EXPLOSION, SURPRISE, CRASH . . . 
	Before Woodring could respond, someone knocked softly on the door. 
	"Come in!" ordered Hockaday. 
	A man larger than Woodring and almost twice the professor's size entered, 
stroking his mustache. 
	"Jackson, this is Assistant Director Woodring from the FBI.  David Woodring, F. 
Jackson Tice." 
	Woodring got up from his chair with a worried look on his face. 
	"Don't worry, David, Lincoln and Hubert know all about this -- it's their idea.  
You're just here to watch and learn." 
	Tice handed Hockaday a file which the professor unceremoniously folded open 
and read its contents. 
	"This is the complete list?" 
	"Why, yes, sir," Tice, his assistant, hesitated, knowing immediately Hockaday 
wasn't satisfied.  "It was all that -- " 
	"-- I know, don't tell me: it was all that the Romance Languages Department could 
bring itself to produce." 
	"This is charming," the professor mused, scanning the single sheet of paper, 
"absolutely charming." 
	"So it's -- " 
	"Worthless," Hockaday replied, neatly feeding the list of synonyms for the noun 
"hysteria" into what he called "his toaster." 
	"Now I'm going to lunch.  Care to join us?"  Dr. Hockaday commanded, in an 
accent, which if pressed, even he would have to admit was more than a bit affected for 
someone originally from Baltimore, Maryland.
	Tice, not considering for a moment that refusal was an option, immediately agreed. 

	Two hours later, after having listened to a luncheon discussion between Hockaday 
and his assistant about the existence of pagan shrines in late Byzantium, Woodring 
silently followed Hockaday, who was purposely ten minutes late, into the Transcription 
Department conference room. Each departmental head was seated before him, 
representing each language group in which the National Security Agency's monumental 
computerized eavesdropping project had an interest: Oriental, Slavic, Teutonic, Romance, 
Arabic, Scandinavian, Latin, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu-Hindic, and Malay-Indonesian. 
	"When I taught Latin to Harvard undergraduates," Hockaday began without any 
introduction, "it was common to make a distinction between the basic literary idioms -- 
classical Latin, for example, as represented by Virgil, varied considerably from silver 
Latin and also the idiom of the streets, latina vulgaris, exemplified by Petronius' 
Satyricon, which by the way was made into an excellent film by Fellini." 
	The head of Slavic languages department nodded slightly towards his associate 
from the Teutonic department and allowed his eyes to dart back and forth in derision. 
	"So, I was somewhat shocked this morning, when my assistant gave me the key-
list from a certain department for the noun 'hysteria.'" 
	Upon hearing Hockaday's last word, the head of Romance Languages felt an 
unwanted surge of adrenalin shoot through his body, making his head feel light. 
	"I'm afraid it's pretty third-rate stuff, which seems to have been culled from a 
college-level thesaurus," continued Hockaday, ignoring the looks of increasing shock on 
the face of each department head, but pausing a moment to focus on the chief of 
Romance Language's frozen grin.  "Not only can one synonymously suffer from delirium, 
or agitation, or feverishness, or convulsions, in our language, but as you all don't need to 
be told -- isn't it quite possible to go nuts, get crazy, or just to lose it, to boil over, if you 
will?  Or, panic in low English, just as in high English one can be harrowed or 
psychoneurotic?"   
	"Excuse me, Dr. Hockaday, but by just whose authority have you been empowered 
to chair this meeting?" demanded the chief of Teutonic languages in an Austrian accent. 
	"My status is RAINBOW GOLD, which, if I have been informed correctly, gives 
me more than adequate authority to run this meeting as I see fit," Hockaday replied 
tersely, raising quite a few sets of eyebrows in the process.  No one in Transcriptions had 
ever obtained  RAINBOW status . . . and no one at the table needed to be told that 
RAINBOW GOLD  was NSA-speak for "White House messenger."  
	"So vat do you vant?" the chief of the Hebrew Department kvetched.  "I don't half 
all day." 
	"Don't worry, Hyman, this meeting is about over," Hockaday informed them.  "By 
five o'clock I wish to see new key-lists with a minimum of fifty synonyms from each 
department." 
	"By five o'clock, this would be impossible!" the head of the Slavic Department 
protested.  "I'm responsible for ten language groups, dialects -- ."
	"Major languages only by today.  Secondary in two days.  Dialects within the 
week," Hockaday interrupted. 
	"Just what are we looking for, Dr. Hockaday?" the head of the Oriental Language 
Department questioned.
	"Une aiguille dans une botte de foin," Hockaday replied, repressing a grin of 
triumph as he saw the look of horror on Romance Language chief's face. 
	A needle in a haystack. 



Chapter 14 

	The morning after his second visit to the hacker,  HYDRA made himself breakfast 
in his flat, carefully reading the printouts on each subject as he sipped his morning coffee.  
Koester, the NIS technician, was a few years younger than he was, but he thought it 
wouldn't make too much of a difference, since Koester had never visited the Bangor 
Submarine base before.  Gereke, the reservist, on the other hand, was in his middle 
thirties, and therefore a few years older than HYDRA, which, again, HYDRA thought 
shouldn't be a problem because no one had ever seen Gereke at Pax River before, either.  
But Russell Matthews, in his middle forties, was considerably older, and HYDRA had to 
weigh the not unimportant matter of how closely he wished to resemble Matthews versus 
how much disguise he, himself, could afford to wear.  HYDRA also guessed that 
Matthews' hair, which was listed as "drk brn" in his file, had grayed somewhat after his 
stretch in Marion, and he should adjust his appearance accordingly. 
	After rereading each of the three files, HYDRA carried his dishes to the sink, 
walked down the four flights of stairs to the street and hailed a passing taxi on 62nd, 
giving the driver an address on the lower West Side near the theater district.  Carefully 
dividing his purchases amongst several different shops, HYDRA bought a salt-and-
pepper colored wig at one, a matching moustache at a second, and a strawberry blond wig 
at yet another, then caught a taxi, having it drop him off at the post office branch near his 
apartment. 
	At the counter the clerk notified him that a package had just arrived from 
Washington State. HYDRA showed him Matthews' ID, waiting patiently while the clerk 
fetched it from storage. Holding the package under his arm, HYDRA walked the few 
blocks to his apartment, deciding he looked no different than any other pedestrian who 
had been out shopping.
	After entering his room, he drew the curtains shut, tore the wrapping off the box, 
and unfolded a nylon-lined diving suit. Stripping off all his clothes, HYDRA donned the 
Farmer John-style pants and matching jacket, zipping up its banana collar. He took 
several paces back and forth, bent over and stretched, then paced around some more, 
checking the fit. Satisfied, he removed the diving suit and repacked it in its box, deciding 
he would send it later by messenger to David Blond. 
	Now wearing only his briefs, HYDRA went to his bedroom closet, shoved the 
suits aside, and extracted a Samsonite metal suitcase, a camera bag and a collapsible 
metal tripod.  He dropped the camera case and the tripod on the sofa in his living room, 
and took the suitcase to the bathroom, setting it on the counter.  He returned to the living 
room, counted out six paces, and set up the tripod in front of the sofa. Next, he opened the 
camera bag, removing a Polaroid Mini-Portrait Model passport camera.  The Mini-
Portrait model was constructed with four lenses instead of one, so that the user would 
receive a series of four identical photographs of the subject for each picture that was 
taken. 
	HYDRA returned to the bathroom, which he had redesigned with a large sink and 
matching mirror, and sat down on a padded vinyl stool of the variety found at makeup 
counters in department stores. He opened the metal case he'd left on the counter, 
unfolding it like a tackle box. A large, stamped manila envelope lay in the middle, which 
HYDRA extracted and slit open, taking out several color photographs. He propped the 
photographs in front of him against the mirror, and began to apply a dark makeup base on 
his face and neck and a layer of spirit gum on his neck. 
	One look at Matthews' face and he decided that the nose would be first.  He 
scooped some putty out of the can and warmed it by kneading it in his fingers, giving it 
shape, until its surface was smooth, and positioned it upon his nose.  He checked his 
handiwork from each angle, deciding to leave his face unshaven, since it would go better 
with the color.  Now he feathered in the edges with the skin, alternately using a brush 
handle and an orange stick. 
	He blended some base color in his left hand, mixing it for a long time until he felt 
he had it right, then applied a dab of it to his nose with his fingertip.  Now his hands 
moved quickly, spreading and applying it across his face before the colors changed.  
Shadow was next, which he applied to the nose by gently tapping it with his fingertips. 
	He opened the hatbox containing the salt and pepper wig and carefully positioned 
it over his head, glancing first at the row of Matthews' pictures, then at his own reflection 
in the mirror.  He pressed his forefinger firmly against his forehead, then eased the wig 
gently down in back.  Donning a blue denim workshirt he had purchased at Brooks 
Brothers, HYDRA returned to the living room, set the built-in delay timer on the Polaroid 
for ten seconds  and pressed the shutter button.  Returning to the stool, he sat down and 
faced the camera, which, after a short delay, automatically took his picture.  Counting out 
the seconds to himself, HYDRA yanked out the film strip and peeled off the negatives.  A 
quartet of Russell Matthews' stared impassively forward. 
	Satisfied with his work, HYDRA photographed himself as Matthews three more 
times, just in case he needed any extra photographs.  When he had finished, he went to his 
kitchenette, grabbed a dish, and picked up the vinyl chair on his way back to the 
bathroom. 
	He poured a moderate amount of acetone into a dish which he had set next to the 
sink and quickly screwed the cap back on the bottle.  Dipping the cloth into the solvent, 
HYDRA dabbed it carefully on the edge of his scalp where the spirit gum had come 
loose.  To free each adhesion point without harming his scalp was a laborious process, 
because the acetone was harsh on the skin and could cause burns, leaving dangerously 
visible marks on his head and limiting his ability to adopt another disguise.  
	After gently removing Russell Matthews' wig, HYDRA dabbed more solvent 
across his scalp, forehead, and temples, until all traces of spirit gum were gone.  In the 
medicine cabinet he found some cold cream, applied it to his scalp to reduce the risk of 
burning.  He picked the blond wig out of the sink, and put it back in its hatbox. 
	Now, because applying a second wig would irritate his scalp too much, he would 
be himself, and photograph himself without makeup as both Peter Koester and Jack 
Gereke.  With the cold cream on his scalp, HYDRA returned to his bedroom closet, 
where he pulled out a shirt on a hanger plus a large, blue hatbox and laid them carefully 
on the bed. He opened the hatbox and extracted a surplus naval cap. Stripping off his 
shirt, he donned the white tunic and returned to the living room and sat on the padded 
stool, repeating the same process with the Polaroid passport camera he had performed 
disguised as Matthews. He shot several sets of pictures, both with and without the dress 
cap, since he didn't know which pose was required for proper identification purposes. 
	After he had finished shooting, HYDRA carefully packed up the equipment and 
accessories, redressed, and went to lunch at the French restaurant next door.  Waiters 
were running back and forth carrying large plastic menus in their hands while the owner 
was busy taking reservations on the telephone.  HYDRA, a regular, was quickly shown to 
an empty table and given his standard glass of wine, while he put in his order. 
	After lunch HYDRA walked to Madison Avenue and hailed a taxi, giving the 
driver an uptown address. 


Chapter 15 

	Entering Manhattan's uptown traffic, his taxi exited East River Drive and in 
another minute came to a halt at the corner of 93rd Street and Third Avenue.  HYDRA 
paid the Korean driver and walked the rest of the distance to a quiet bookshop in the 
middle of the block.  A battered sign over the locked wire-mesh door read, The Military 
Bookworm.  HYDRA pressed the service buzzer, then a loud solenoid switch was 
activated, and he let himself inside. 
	Rows of twelve-foot-high shelves were crammed with vertical and horizontal 
stacks of remaindered books, which dealt with a wide range of military matters as far 
back as the Roman legions to recent works on Operation Just Cause in Panama.  A slim 
man with florid cheeks, sporting a blond moustache, stood behind the counter talking to a 
customer on the telephone, hanging up when he saw HYDRA.
	"How can I help you?" 
	"I'm a friend of Luiz's.  He told me he would give you a call about me," replied 
HYDRA. 
	At the mention of Luiz's name, the manner shifted and the eyes above the 
moustache narrowed.  Recommendations from the Cali Cartel were taken very seriously 
for obvious reasons. 
	"Just a minute," the bookstore owner muttered, left the counter, and flipped over 
the Open-Closed sign hanging on the door. 
	"Come on back." 
	HYDRA followed him through a corridor of metal shelves into a tiny, cramped 
office. 
	"What do you need?  A clean passport for Bogota?  I can have it for you in a week 
-- " 
	"It's a little more than that," HYDRA replied, flattening out a copy of the pattern 
he had just showed to Blond and slid it across the forger's desk.  "You recognize this 
uniform, of course?" 
	Even though the Military Bookworm was filled with pamphlets and illustrated 
works devoted to various uniforms and insignia, the forger's knowledge of certain 
costumes came from a different source: a training course at Camp Peary in the early 
sixties. 
	"I recognize it," replied the forger, now training his eyes on HYDRA's.  "It hasn't 
changed a bit."  The forger smoothed out the pattern with the palm of his right hand, 
waiting for his customer to speak. 
	"I need a clean set of orders to visit Bangor on this date," HYDRA said, carefully 
handing the forger a slip of paper with Lieutenant Gereke's name and rank on it. 
	"Bangor?" 
	"Washington.  Plus a full set of ID.  Driver's license, credit cards, everything on 
the list." 
	The forger said nothing.  Whoever had given his guest Gereke's legend obviously 
knew his way around the military. 
	"Next, I want a similar package on this man," HYDRA spoke, giving no hint to the 
forger that he was aware that this portion of his request was at all unusual.  HYDRA 
handed him a second 8 1/2-by 11-inch sheet of paper, containing the relevant information 
on Sergeant Peter Koester, NIS's technical consultant. 
	The forger took the list and began to read it.  Every piece of paper Koester could 
possibly possess was listed: MasterCard. Diners Club.  Amoco Motor Club.  Even 
Blockbuster Video Rental. 
	"Plus a visitor's pass for Gereke." 
	The forger carefully set down the sheet with Koester's specs on it. 
	"What for?"
	"Trident tour at Bangor." 
	"Base passes are on regular paper, so printing them's no problem," replied the 
forger, eyeing the remaining printout in HYDRA's hand.  "But if your guy's not expected, 
there's no way my codes are gonna match the Pentagon's." 
	HYDRA handed the proprietor a slip of paper from his shirt pocket.  "These will 
be in each base's TDY." 
	The forger quickly examined the three sixteen-digit-long alphanumeric sequences 
which had been separately and simply entitled Gereke-Bangor, Koester-Bangor, and 
Gereke-Pax River.
	"What's next?" 
	"Full ID package on this one too."  HYDRA laid Matthews' file down like a hand 
of cards, spreading it on the table. 
	"All these people gonna look just like you, or what?" demanded the forger, 
shoving the printouts aside.   
	"Relatively, yes."  
	The forger reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette and offered one to HYDRA.  
HYDRA held up his hand to decline, then reached into his jacket pocket and slipped out a 
letter-sized envelope, sealed with a piece of clear plastic tape.  He handed the envelope to 
the forger, who carefully slit the envelope open with his index finger and spread the 
photographs across his desk, comparing them with the man in front of him.  Except for 
the facial structure, HYDRA had managed through a change in hair color and other tricks 
to create a successfully misleading divergence from his normal appearance in each case. 
	"This is good work," the forger murmured, sifting through the documents.  "These 
will be fine."
	"Luiz told me you could do it," HYDRA smiled.  "Now why don't you tell me 
what your terms are." 
	"I'll be frank with you, just the way I am with anyone Luiz sends me.  You and I 
both know the work itself will be no problem -- it's the risk in this case that I'll want to be 
compensated for. 
	"I have no idea who these three men are, but it's obvious from their orders  where 
Gereke and Koester are visiting -- and whatever you're going to do there in their place 
may attract more than the normal amount of attention -- to put it mildly." 
	"Meaning what?" 
	"Meaning that I want twenty-five thousand for the lot.  In cash and up front." 
	HYDRA reached slowly into his opposite, inside jacket pocket, extracting a 
European-style wallet the size of a small checkbook and counted out twelve thousand five 
hundred dollars in fifty dollar bills. 
	"Compromise -- I won't quibble over price and I'll pay you the rest upon delivery." 
	The forger stroked his mustache and sighed.  The man in front of him scared him 
more than any other client he had ever had, and he thought better than to continue the 
discussion over terms with someone who had been referred to him by Luiz. 
	"Done." 



Chapter 16 

	Once he left the Military Bookworm, HYDRA walked up 93rd Street to Madison 
and hailed a northbound taxi, telling the driver to take him to Kennedy Airport.  For the 
second time HYDRA gave his name as Russell Matthews and paid in cash for a non-stop 
ticket to San Francisco on UAL Flight 4820, which departed in forty-five minutes.  
Arriving in San Francisco at approximately 3:00 p.m. local time, he rented a car in his 
own name for the drive to Bonny Dune.  Less than an hour later, he pulled to a stop 
outside Castor's rundown redwood-shingled ranch house. 
	As he neared the door, HYDRA heard strains of rock music wafting across 
Castor's lawn.  Pressing his finger on the doorbell, HYDRA hoped for his sake that Castor 
was relatively sober.  Waiting a full thirty seconds, he pressed the bell a second time, 
doubtful that Castor could hear it amidst the din.  Now worried that following Luiz's 
recommendation of one of the cartel's retreads had been a mistake, HYDRA tried the 
doorknob, finding to his surprise it was unlocked. 
	Inside, the music was even louder, and CNN was playing soundlessly on the big-
screen TV in the debris-filled living room just as it had before. When the music stopped 
abruptly, filling the house with an eerie silence, HYDRA reached inside his jacket pocket 
and slipped out a Heckler & Koch P-9 9mm pistol, carefully checking his surroundings, 
before he called out Castor's name. 
	"I'm down here, down in the basement!" 
	HYDRA sighed to himself, shoved the pistol back inside his jacket, and found  the 
open door leading to the shallow basement.  At the bottom of the stairs he found Castor 
sitting on a high metal stool, hunched over an illuminated magnifying glass on a swivel 
arm made of stainless steel. Various pieces of electronic test equipment were stacked 
across a long C-shaped worktable, whose surface was littered with small plastic bins 
filled with electronic parts, tools, bits of circuit boards, and various handheld remote 
controls.  Light green patterns danced up and down on a pair of spectrum analyzers. 
	"So, Mr. No-name, you finally decided to come back," Castor chuckled to himself 
as he peered through the glass without bothering to look up. 
	"Any problems?" HYDRA asked. 
	"I used to work on these babies, remember?" Castor sniffed, then wiped his nose 
with his shirt sleeve. 
	On the bench, the HP palmtop lay disassembled, its chassis covered with alligator 
clips, looking like an acupuncture patient. The laser gun he had given Castor was held 
vertically by a metal clamp, its point aimed directly at a tiny solar cell set in plastic.  
Behind the gun and computer were three television monitors whose screens glowed with 
a solid blue light. 
	"I wanted you to see this first," Castor spoke.  "I managed to download the gun 
you gave me into my own computer without zeroizing it. Just a second -- " Castor typed a 
brief command on the keyboard, and the screens of all three monitors were suddenly 
filled with text.  Endless rows of 1's and 0's were each preceded by a date, expressed as 
MONTH: JANUARY; DAY: 05; YEAR: 1993. 
	"Those are the old keys for last semester's tour of duty.  Each of 'em's 56 bits long, 
that's why there's so many 1's and 0's." 
	HYDRA nodded silently as Castor scrolled several pages of keys across the 
multiple monitors. 
	"Now, the day you want to transmit to whoever you're gonna transmit to, you're 
gonna have to use that day's key so you'll be sending an authenticated message, or else 
whoever you send it to's gonna decrypt a bunch of garbage. 
	"The second thing is this gun you gave me only's gonna work in one place -- an 
SSBN -- and somehow I don't think that's exactly where you plan on going -- right?" 
	HYDRA paused a moment, then murmured without emotion, "Go on." 
	"So you're gonna have to know how to input that day's code into whatever box is in 
front of you -- you may even have to print yourself out a physical key, depending where 
you're at -- the technology's all different -- or you may have to hand input it, and this 
adapter I just made you can't do all that for you.  You realize that, of course?" 
	HYDRA nodded affirmatively. 
	Castor displayed a grin filled with yellow teeth.  "I see." 
	"Let's get on with it," HYDRA pressed, not wanting to give Castor's imagination 
any more time to dwell on the operation. 
	"There's not much more to it," Castor continued, with more than a hint of worry 
now in his voice.  "To bring up the program, all you have to do once you've activated the 
machine is type in the password, T-E-S-T." 
	Castor entered the letters in himself and two seconds later the blank CRT in front 
of him came to life, filled with diagnostics. 
	"This is just boilerplate, in case anyone's looking over your shoulder -- it doesn't 
mean squat. 
	"Next, you ask them for the gun and insert it into the adapter -- " Castor 
disconnected the laser gun HYDRA had brought him and handed it to HYDRA.  "Here, 
you do it." 
	After HYDRA took the gun from Castor's hand and gently shoved it into the 
female receptacle, the CRT screen went blank, then was filled with a different set of 
diagnostics. 
	"Same deal here -- all this is just for show."  Castor pointed at the keyboard, "here, 
you type it in."
	HYDRA looked at him as Castor said the word "BULLSEYE," then entered it into 
the laptop.  Once again, the three large twenty-seven-inch monitors in front of them 
displayed a six-month's supply of authenticated codekeys. 
	"One thing," Castor said, turning on his swivel chair so that he was face-to-face 
with HYDRA, "don't forget to tell them once you've downloaded their gun that it's been 
zeroized.  If you forget, there's a small chance that one of them may wonder why, then 
mention it to someone else." 
	"Right," HYDRA murmured in assent. 
	"Now, when you want to pull up the codes again, I've wired the HP so that they're 
stored inside a chip, not on its disk, in the small chance that someone decides to dump 
your disk to see what's on it.  You'll need to protect it with your own seven-letter 
codeword which you can enter now."  Castor hit the return key and all three screens went 
blank with a single question mark appearing on the furthest one to the left. "I don't want 
to know what it is for obvious reasons."  
	HYDRA thought to himself for a moment, then entered a seven-letter-long word 
which had special significance to only him. 
	"All right," Castor sighed, swiveling back around in his chair.  "We're done and 
you owe me twenty-five thousand dollars." 
	"Right." 
	Without a hint of warning HYDRA slipped the P-9 out of his inside jacket pocket 
and shot Caster once in the sternum.  The P-9's 9mm slug slapped into the technician like 
a hammer blow, toppling him off his chair into a cardboard box full of equipment.  When 
HYDRA bent over the body, Castor's eyes were still open and his mouth was moving 
soundlessly and blood trickled across his chin.  This time HYDRA aimed the P-9 squarely 
at Castor's forehead, uttering the word "BULLSEYE" as he fired his second shot. Still 
holding the P-9 in his right hand, HYDRA slipped a plastic baggie out of his side pocket 
with his left and jerked it open, showering the worktable with a half-ounce of pure, high-
grade Colombian cocaine.  
	HYDRA stuffed the empty baggie back into his pockets, then extracted a clear pair 
of disposable surgical gloves, slipped them on and sat on the vinyl stool, its seat still 
warm from Castor's body.  One by one HYDRA removed the alligator clips from the HP-
100LX's chassis, then carefully reassembled the computer into one piece.  He released the 
laser gun from its metal clamp and clipped the leads to the solar cell under it with a pair 
of wire clippers, stuffing the gun and the cell into his pocket.  He next removed the two 
floppy disks stored on Castor's own computer and methodically searched the workroom 
for any others he could find, stuffing all of them into a discarded paper sack he found in 
Castor's wastebasket. 
	Now the screens of all three monitors were blank, save for a cursor and an 
automatic clock blinking at the bottom margin.  Local time was 5:08 p.m.  People were 
returning home from work, children were already home from school, and neighbors 
would be walking across their lawns.  HYDRA decided to spend the remaining time until 
nightfall searching Castor's house for stray computer storage disks, in addition to the ones 
he had already located in the workroom. 
	A little after half past seven HYDRA walked out Castor's front door, wiping the 
doorbell clean with a tissue before he left.  He drove past Felton, on local Highway 9, the 
cool mountain rushing through his open windows.  In seconds, he reached the Pacific 
Coast Highway and retraced his path back to the San Francisco International Airport.

K-13A

70


