CHAPTER TWENTY

Tuesday, 6:25 A.M., Op-Center

Paul Hood and Liz Gordon arrived at the Tank at the same time. Hood ushered her in with a sweep of his hand and then entered behind her. The heavy door was operated by a button in the side of the large oval conference table, and he pushed it when he was inside.

The small room was lit by fluorescent lights hung in banks over the conference table; on the wall across from Hood's chair, the countdown clock flashed its ever-changing array of digital numbers.

The walls, floor, door, and ceiling of the Tank were all covered with sound-absorbing Acoustix; behind the mottled gray-and-black strips were several layers of cork, a foot of concrete, and more Acoustix. In the midst of the concrete, on all six sides of the room, was a pair of wire grids that generated vacillating audio waves; electronically, nothing could enter or leave the room without being utterly distorted. If any listening device did somehow manage to pick up a conversation from inside, the randomness of the changing modulation made reassembling the conversations impossible.

Hood sat down at the head of the table and Liz sat to his left. He turned down the brightness on the monitor that sat beside a computer keyboard at his end of the table; a tiny fiber-optic camera was attached to the top of the monitor, and a similar setup was located at Mike Rodgers's position, across the table.

Liz slapped her yellow pad on the table. "Listen, Paul. I know what you're going to say, but I'm not wrong. This wasn't his doing."

Hood looked into the hazel eyes of his Staff Psychologist. Her medium-length brown hair was pulled back by a black headband; a white streak on a lapel of her smart red pantsuit was the residue of a carelessly brushed ash from one of the Marlboros she chainsmoked in her office.

"I wasn't going to say you were wrong," Hood replied evenly. "But what I have to know is precisely how sure you are. The President put me in charge of the Korean Task Force, and I don't want to tell him his North Korean counterpart is talking peace in our time while he's trying to egg us into crossing the DMZ."

"Eighty-nine percent," she said in her raspy voice, "that's how sure I am. If Bob Herbert's intelligence is accurate and we factor that in, our confidence level is ninety-two percent." She pulled a stick of Wrigley's from her pocket and unwrapped it. "The President of North Korea does not want a war. The short of it is, he's thrilled with the way the lower class is growing and he knows that the way to remain in power is to keep that class happy. The best way to do that is end their self-imposed isolation. And you know what Herbert thinks."

He did indeed. His Intelligence Officer believed that if the DPRK generals were opposed to the President's policies, they'd have thrown him out. The sudden death of long-time leader Kim II Sung in 1994 left enough of a power void that they could have moved in if they didn't like what was happening.