“It’s real simple. You remember that dumpy broad, Catherine Goldman? She called yesterday to say she had found something suspicious in the code. She wasn’t sure what it was yet, but it didn’t look good to her. She mentioned it to one of your guys there in New York. Well, last night, somebody tried to run her down on a street in Manhattan. It was no accident. Somebody wanted her guts spilled all over the place.”

The line was silent for a long time. Miller thought the connection might have been broken. He was about to check the phone’s readout when he heard Stern’s voice again. He was speaking very slowly and carefully.

“Miller, no way was it anybody from OptiMarx. You can trust me on that. Now listen very carefully.” Stern’s voice changed. There was an unmistakable hint of a threat. “I am paying you very good money to ensure that we get complete and speedy approval of the trading system from the SEC. I expect a return on my investment. That’s how I feed my family and my wife’s rather advanced shopping addiction. The approval better come on time and with no problems. Understand? If not, I know a certain congressional committee that would have considerable interest in a certain SEC deputy director’s rather sizeable Cayman Island bank account. Do you understand me?”

Miller gulped. His tongue felt as if it were coated with thick wool. There was now over four million dollars tucked away in that account. It was going to be his ticket out of this rat race and it was so tantalizingly close he could taste it. Sweat covered his brow despite the cold, icy wind that whipped down K Street.

“I…I understand, Mark,” he stammered, trying to conjure up some amount of confidence in his voice. “There won’t be any problem. Goldman is a bitch anyway. It was probably somebody else she’s pissed off sometime in the past. There’ve been plenty of them. Anyway, I suspect she needs some time off after such a traumatic experience. I’ll put someone else up there. Someone who understands how things work.”

Stern’s voice turned cordial. “Now, that’s the attitude.”

“Still, Stern, you better tell your guys up there to tread lightly. We’re almost there and we don’t want anything to raise any—”

The line had already gone dead.

*   *   *

Commander Bill Beaman’s plane rolled to a halt in front of the hangar at Oceania Naval Air Station. Beaman spotted Jon Ward waiting on the tarmac as he and his team poured out of the C-17.

After a quick handshake, Beaman hopped in the staff car at Ward’s invitation; then they sped off to the special intelligence cell at SUBLANT. During the short drive, they talked of the weather and what various mutual friends were doing. Both men avoided the subject most on their minds.