What is most surprising, the phone systems are shut down.

Only the tourists are out in force, crawling over the Mall, throwing Frisbees and swarming around the Capitol, climbing the endless staircases and staring slack-jawed at the underside of the dome.

Some were peering through the iron fence around the White House around noontime when the President came out, quickstepped across the lawn and gave a jaunty wave before entering a helicopter. He was followed by a small entourage of aides and Secret Service agents. Few of the elite press corps were present. Most were home watching baseball on TV or roaming a golf course.

Fawcett and Lucas stood on the South Portico and watched until the ungainly craft lifted over E Street and dissolved to a speck as it beat its way toward Andrews Air Force Base.

"That was fast work," Fawcett said quietly. "You made the switch in less than five hours."

"My Los Angeles office tracked down Sutton and crammed him into the cockpit of a Navy F-20 fighter forty minutes after they were alerted."

"What about Margolin?"

"One of my agents is a reasonable facsimile. He'll be onboard an executive jet for New Mexico as soon as it's dusk."

"Can your people be trusted not to leak this charade?"

Lucas shot Fawcett a sharp look. "They're trained to keep quiet.

If there's a leak it will come from the presidential staff."

Fawcett smiled faintly. He knew he was on shaky footing. The looseness of the White House staff was open territory for the press corps. "They can't spill what they didn't know," he said. "Only now will they be waking up to the fact that the man in the helicopter with them isn't the President."

"They'll be well guarded at the farm," Lucas said. "Once they arrive no one gets off the property, and I've seen to it all communications are monitored."

"If a correspondent figures the game, Watergate will seem as tame as an Easter-egg hunt."

"How are the wives taking it?"

"Cooperating a hundred percent," Fawcett answered. "The First Lady and Mrs. Margolin have volunteered to stay shut up in their bedrooms claiming to have a virus."

"What now?" Lucas asked. "What else can we do?"

"We wait," Fawcett replied, his voice wooden. "We stick it out until we find the President."

"Looks to me like you're overloading the circuits," said Don Miller, Emmett's deputy director of the FBI.

Emmett didn't look up at Miller's negative remark. Within minutes after he had returned to the Bureau's headquarters at Pennsylvania Avenue and Tenth Street he set into motion an All Bureaus Alert, followed by a standby for Emergency Action of the Highest Priority to every office in the fifty states and all agents on assignments overseas. Next came orders to pull files, records and descriptions on every criminal or terrorist who specialized in abduction.

His-cover story to the Bureau's six thousand agents was that the Secret Service had come on evidence of a planned abduction attempt on Secretary of State Oates and other as yet unnamed officials of high government levels.