"You can't tell that to anyone," her husband went on. "Do you understand? You can't tell that to anybody, but since you are going to be with some Japanese people tomorrow, and because of who I am, the Secret Service wants to have somebody around you, just to make totally certain that things are okay." There would be more to it than that. The Secret Service was limited in manpower, and was not the least bit reticent about asking for assistance from local police forces. The Baltimore City Police, which maintained a high-profile presence at Johns Hopkins at all times—the hospital complex was not located in the best of areas—would probably assign a detective to back up Ms. Price.

"Jack, are we in any danger?" Cathy asked, remembering distant times and distant terrors, when she'd been pregnant with little Jack, when the Ulster Liberation Army had invaded their home. She remembered how pleased she'd been, and the shame she'd felt for it, when the last of them had been executed for multiple murder-ending, she'd thought, the worst and most fearful episode of her life.

For his part, Jack realized that it was just one more thing that they hadn't thought through. If America were at war, he was the National Security Advisor to the President, and, yes, that made him a high-value target. And his wife. And his three children. Irrational? What about war was not?

"I don't think so," he replied after a moment's consideration, "but, well, we might want to—we might have some additional houseguests. I don't know. I'll have to ask."

"You said they attacked our navy?"

"Yes, honey, but you can't—"

"That means war, doesn't it?"

"I don't know, honey." He was so exhausted that he was asleep thirty seconds after hitting the pillow, and his last conscious thought was a recognition that he knew very little of what he needed to know in order to answer his wife's questions, or, for that matter, his own.

Nobody was sleeping in lower Manhattan, at least nobody whom others might think important. It occurred to more than one tired trailing executive to observe that they were really earning their money now, but the truth of the matter was that they were accomplishing very little. Proud executives all, they looked around trading rooms filled with computers whose collective value was something only the accounting department knew, and whose current utility was approximately zero. The European markets would soon open. And do what? everyone wondered. There was ordinarily a nightwatch here whose job it was to trade European equities, to keep track of the Eurodollar market, the commodities and metals market, and all the economic activity that occurred on the eastern side of the Atlantic as well as the western. On most days it was like the prologue to a book, a precursor to the real action, interesting but not overly vital except, perhaps, for flavor, because the real substance was decided here in New York City.