Of course Hood had no intention of doing that. He was romantic enough to want to play the modern-day knight, but he wasn't reckless enough. And why bother going up to Old Saybrook if he couldn't promise to slow down? He liked his work. And shorter hours were something the job just wouldn't permit. Part of him felt that Sharon was being vindictive because she'd had to cut way back on her career activities in order to raise the kids. But even if he'd wanted to stop working and raise a family-which he didn't-they couldn't have lived on Sharon's salary. That was a fact.

He shut his eyes and dropped his arm across them. But facts don't always matter in situations like this, do they?

Hood's mind was too busy to allow him to sleep. He alternated between feeling angry, guilty, and utterly disgusted. He decided to give up trying to rest.

He made himself a pot of coffee, poured it black into his memorial Washington Senators baseball mug, and went back to his desk. He spent some time with the computer files of Manni's Italian secessionist movement. He was curious to see what, if any, intelligence work had been done to stopgap the collapse of Italy.

There was nothing on file. It was a nearly six-year-long process, which began in 1993 as an offshoot of voter unhappiness over increasing political corruption scandals. Smaller communities claimed that they weren't being adequately represented and so members of parliament were elected from individual districts rather than through proportional representation as before. That caused a fragmentation of power among the major parties which allowed smaller groups to flourish. Neo-Fascists came to power in 1994, business interests of the Forza Italia party wrested power from them a year later, and then the fall of Yugoslavia caused unrest all along the Istrian Peninsula in the north-unrest that the Rome-based Forza Italia was ill equipped to handle. For help the premier turned to parties that had a power base there. But those groups were interested in building their own strength and fanned the rebelliousness. Violence and secessionist talk flourished in Trieste and moved west to Venice and slingshot south as far as Livorno and Florence.

The Milan-bom Manni was recalled from Moscow to try to negotiate a fix to the deteriorating situation. His solution was to draft a pact that made northern Italy a largely autonomous political and economic region, with a congressional government in Milan to replace the bloc in the parliament in Rome. Both groups worked independently with the elected premier. While the Italians above the Northern Apennines paid taxes to their own capital, they used the same currency as the south; the two regions remained militarily intact; and the nation was still referred to as Italy.