“The creatures he designed and built fulfilled every one of those criteria. The operation was called Project Hybrid.”

“Okay. I have absorbed this. So please tell me what we are doing about the damn storm. Now!”

Dick Lamson burst out, “Ritchie, his creation has escaped! There are apparently underground lairs up and down the West Coast, and the damn things are smarter and stronger and faster than we are, and we are in terrible, terrible trouble. Ritchie, will you fucking listen?”

Silence in the room, with everybody wondering the same thing: Could even Dick Lamson get away with an outburst like that?

The president looked from face to pale, staring face.

“Okay,” he said quietly, “it’s bad. Worse than the storm. So we had a bad night last night here in the good ole US of A. Please continue to brief me.”

General Hollis said, “We attempted a shoot-down—”

“What?”

“Sir, we attempted a shoot-down without success.”

“Whoa. Without orders from me?”

“Sir, it was an emergency,” the general yammered.

“You’d better show him,” the secretary of defense said quietly.

“It sounds like the last thing we want to do is piss the bastards off by shooting at their shit, am I right? So, yes, please show me. I want to see why you apparently fired on an unknown thing over an American city without informing me.”

“We are informing you,” Hollis snapped. “Right now.”

The president pointed at him. “Back off.” He was having no insubordination from any of these people, none of whom had, it seemed, done much of anything right, whatever in holy hell was going on. And he was going to call Dick on the carpet when they had a private moment.

Hollis used a remote to shift the imagery to another view, this one of a huge mass of brown water, like the surface of a sewage-treatment plant.

“Okay, what am I seeing here?”

“That’s the bay. San Francisco Bay.”

“But—” And then the president understood. That wasn’t sludge at all, that was an incredible mass of floating debris.

“We’re in terrible trouble,” Lamson repeated.

“But—what? What is this? What’s happened here? What are those white things in the water, and the—what?—what’s going on down there?”

“Sir, they are bodies.”

A ghastly, sick fear boiled up in Crawford. “But what are those silver things? What are they doing?”

“Sir,” Hollis said, “they’re some sort of robotic forms, and they’re harvesting material from the bodies, taking eyes and skin, in some cases removing other organs. The hybrids are brilliant, remember, and they are apparently prolific genetic designers. My guess is that you are looking at purpose-designed biorobots at work down in that water.”

The words struck the president with the effect of acid in the face. An ominous weight gripped his heart. What in hell was the man telling him? Biorobots? What?