I called Bug. He wasn’t good with computers—he was a freak. When 9/11 happened Bug was still in high school, amusing himself by hacking into the school board computer to give everyone he liked a 4.0 average and to put the school disciplinarian on a sex offenders watch list. A couple of years after the planes hit, Bug tried to hack Homeland, believing that if he had access to their data he could find Bin Laden. The next day Grace Courtland and Sergeant Gus Dietrich—Church’s personal bodyguard—showed up at his front door to offer him a choice: jail or a job with the DMS. Bug made the smart choice.

Since then he’d become the high priest in the church of MindReader. And back in 2011 he got his wish by helping track Bin Laden to his Pakistani compound.

He answered the call with: “Hey, whaddya know, Joe? Heard about the hikers gig. Echo Team kicks a-a-a-a-ass.”

“Thanks, Bug, but listen up. Something else is about to hit the fan. The Big Man will be calling you any minute about—”

“I know, the nukes. I’m looking at it right now. Frigging scary as shit, huh?” Bug said with the kind of excitement you hear from video gamers who have found a challenging new level. I sometimes wonder if Bug knew that he didn’t exist in a purely virtual world.

“So you’re already tied up?”

“Nah, this stuff is crap. Got to run it through a bunch of filters and a clean-up program before we can do much with it. That’s going to take a couple of—”

“Good. Then, before you get swamped with that I need you to start a database search for me. It’s part of the nuke thing; but it’s a different arm of the investigation and to tell you the truth I don’t have a clue how it relates. All I have are the names of two books. No authors, no other data.”

“Fire away.”

“The Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex.”

“Saladin, as in the sultan who—?”

“Presumably. Rasouli dropped his name during our little chitchat, so I figure that was some kind of hint.”

“Okay. Wait—there’s something about them on the drive. No … forget it. Stuff’s corrupted as all shit. Reads like some kind of gibberish. I’ll have to see if I can translate it. What do you need?”

“Anything you got. General and specific. I had to dump my tactical computer and PDA, so send it to me via e-mail so I can read it on my phone. You ring any serious bells, call me directly. If I don’t answer, hit scramble and leave it on my voice mail.”

“You got it, Joe.”

I disconnected, and again I could feel another layer of stress crack and fall away.