Much later, after the interminable questioning at the precinct offices, the detectives drove her to the Millennium. Once safely inside her room and with the door double-locked behind her, Catherine Goldman collapsed like deadweight onto the settee. The tears she had been suppressing streamed down her face. She had trouble seeing the buttons on the phone as she dialed.

She had riled her share of people along the way—people who had tried to cross the SEC. A couple had threatened to punch her in the nose. No one had ever tried to kill her before. She couldn’t imagine anyone hating her enough for that. Now it was clear that someone did.

She had no one else to call. No one else to come to her aid. No one else but her boss at the Securities and Exchange Commission. She tried to regain control of herself before Stan Miller answered.

She didn’t want him to hear her sobbing like some hysterical woman.

Chapter 14

Admiral Tom Donnegan dropped the telephone back into its cradle, picked up the single-page message from his desk, and stared hard at its terse Naval-ese phrases. The unimpressive-looking communication did not seem capable of carrying so much bad news in such a few short paragraphs.

First Joe Glass had popped his head up long enough to send an OPREP-Three with the horrifying news, confirming that Miami had been sunk by some unknown enemy, its crew lost at the bottom of the Barents Sea. Then, on the heels of that showstopper, he followed up with this latest little tale of high intrigue that seemed to have been lifted from some bad movie script.

“That guy’s been reading too many techno-thrillers,” Donnegan mumbled to himself as he once again folded the message. He set it back down on his desk before it burst into flames in his fingers.

He knew Joe Glass better than that, though. It was just too wild to believe. The latest person with whom he had shared the news, the person on the end of the call he had just completed, had been just as stunned as he was.

That first message, the news of Miami’s loss, had already caused an uproar in the upper levels of the defense community unlike anything Donnegan had ever seen before. The old sailor had seen his share of scrambling, from the fall of Saigon all the way through the balance of the Cold War to the terrorist wars. This was different, out of the blue.