She wasn't wrong. The computer had found the print in three minutes six seconds: Ralph brought up the file.

"Private Jang Tae-un," he read. "Soldier for four years, assigned to Major Kim Lee's explosives unit--"

"There you go," said Herbert, an edge of triumph.

"--and is a specialist in hand-to-hand combat."

"As long as the other guy didn't have a gun," Herbert muttered.

McCaskey asked Ralph for a printout of the data, then said to the chemist, "You're a miracle worker, Cindy."

"Tell that to Paul," said the attractive brunette. "We could really use a part-time mathematician to help write software to improve the algorithms we use to model biomolecules."

"I'll be sure to tell him." McCaskey winked as he took the paper from Ralph. "In exactly those words."

"Do," she said. "His son will explain it to him."

Hood was more concerned with Major Lee than with Cindy's request. With Liz Gordon and Bob Herbert at his side, both looking at the computer monitor, he reviewed the Major's ROK file that General Sam had sent electronically from Seoul.

The Director was finding it difficult to concentrate. More than at any time since the crisis began, he felt enormous pressure to find out who was behind the bombing: not only had the rising tension taken on a life of its own, but he felt that his diplomatic approach had caused the President to push Op-Center aside. Steve Burkow had phoned and informed him about the attack on the airstrip in North Korea just two minutes before it happened. The head of the Korean Task Force hadn't even been a part of the strategy team; the President wanted a fight, and was doing everything he could to provoke one. Which would have been fine if a fight was warranted.

If he was wrong about North Korea's innocence, he'd have more to worry about than losing the President's confidence. He would start to wonder if he'd been in politics so long that he'd actually become the fence straddler he'd once pretended to be. He forced himself to concentrate on what was on the monitor.

Lee was a twenty-year veteran with a justifiable dislike for the North. His father, General Kwon Lee, had been a field general who was killed at Inchon during the war. The Major's mother, Mei, was captured and hanged for spying on troop trains coming and going at the station in Pyongyang. He was raised in an orphanage in Seoul and joined the army when he was eighteen, and served under now-- Colonel Lee Sun, who had been a separatist in high school, handing out leaflets and once having been arrested. Though Lee belonged to none of the underground movements like the Fraternity of the Division and Children of the Dead-- the sons and daughters of soldiers who had died during the war-- Lee was in charge of an elite counterintelligence group, was unmarried, and did a good deal of reconnoitering in the North to help calibrate U.S. spy satellites, measuring objects on the ground to give the NRO a frame of reference.