Friday's file was extremely skimpy. It contained very few field reports from Azerbaijan, where he had most recently been stationed at the United States embassy in Baku as an aide to Deputy Ambassador Dorothy Williamson. There were zero communications at all from him during the recent crisis in the former Soviet Republic. That was unusual. Herbert had a look at the files of the two CIA operatives who had been stationed at the embassy. They were full of daily reports.

Coincidentally, perhaps, both of those men were killed.

Friday's thin file and his apparent silence during the crisis was troubling. One of his superiors at the NSA, Jack Fenwick, was the man who had hired the terrorist known as the Harpooner to precipitate the Caspian Sea confrontation between Azerbaijan, Iran, and Russia. Herbert had not read all the postmortems about the situation. There had not been time. But Friday's silence before and during the showdown led Herbert to wonder: was he really inactive or were his reports made directly to someone who destroyed them?

Jack Fenwick, for example.

If that were true it could mean that Ron Friday had been working with Jack Penwick and the Harpooner to start a war.

Of course, there was always the possibility that Friday had been helping Fenwick without knowing what the NSA chief was up to. But that seemed unlikely. Ron Friday had been an attorney, a top-level oil rights negotiator, and a diplomatic advisor. He did not seem naive.

And that scared the hell out of Herbert.

The decrypted NSA e-file arrived and Herbert opened it.

The folder contained Friday's observations as well as relevant data about the previous antiterrorist functions of both the National Security Guard and the Special Frontier Force.

It did not seem strange to Herbert that SFF had replaced the Black Cats after this latest attack. Maybe the SFF had jurisdiction over strikes against religious sites. Or maybe the government had grown impatient with the ineffectiveness of the Black Cats. There was obviously a terrorist cell roaming Kashmir. Any security agency that failed to maintain security was not going to have that job for very long.

Either he or Paul Hood could call their partners in Indian intelligence and get an explanation for the change. Herbert's concerns about Ron Friday would not be so easy to dispel.

Herbert entered the numbers 008 on his wheelchair phone.

That was Paul Hood's extension. Shortly before Op-Center opened its doors Matt Stoll had hacked the computer system to make sure he got the 007 extension. Herbert had not been happy about Stoll's hacking but Hood had appreciated the man's initiative. As long as Stoll limited his internal sabotage to a one-time hack of the phone directory Hood had decided to overlook it.

The phone beeped once.

"Hood here."

"Chief, it's Bob. Gol a minute?"

"Sure," Hood said.

"I'll be right there," Herbert said. He typed an address in his computer and hit "enter."