Of course, Rodgers had never met Ron Friday or the Black Cat officer they were linking up with. Captain Nazir. He would do what he always did: size them up when he met them. He could usually tell right away whether he could or could not trust people.

Right now, though, the thing that troubled Rodgers most had nothing to do with Friday. It had to do with the explosion in Srinagar. In particular, with that last call from the home phone to the field phone.

Other nations routinely used cell phones as part of their intelligence-gathering and espionage efforts. Not just surveillance of the calls but the hardware itself. The electronics did not raise alarms at airport security; most government officials, military personnel, and business people had them; and they already had some of the wiring and microchips that were necessary for saboteurs. Cell phones were also extremely well positioned to kill. It did not take more than a wedge of C-4, packed inside the workings of a cell phone, to blow the side of a target's head off when he answered a call.

But Rodgers recalled one incident in particular, in the former Portuguese colony of Timor, that had parallels to this.

He had read about it in an Australian military white paper while he was on Melville Island observing naval maneuvers in the Timor Sea in 1999.

The invading Indonesian military had given cell phones to poor East Timorese civilians in what appeared to be a gesture of good will. The civilians were permitted to use the Indonesian military mobile communications service to make calls. The phones were not just phones but two-way radios. Civilians who had access to groups that were intensely loyal to imprisoned leader Xanana Gusmao were inadvertently used as spies to eavesdrop on nationalistic activities. Out of curiosity, Rodgers had asked a colleague in Australia's Department of Defense Strategy and Intelligence if the Indonesians had developed that themselves.

He said they had not. The technology had come from Moscow. The Russians were also big suppliers of Indian technology.

What was significant to Rodgers was that the radio function was activated by signals sent from the Indonesian military outpost in Baukau. The signals were sent after calls had indicated that one individual or another was going to be in a strategic location.

Rodgers could not help but wonder if the home phone had somehow signaled the field phone to detonate the secondary blasts. The timing was too uncomfortably close to be coincidence.

And the continuation of the signal at such regular intervals suggested that the terrorists were being tracked.

Hell, it did more than suggest that, Rodgers told himself.

And the more he thought about it, the more he began to realize that they might have a very nasty developing situation on their hands. The Pentagon's elite think tank, with the innocuous name of the Department of Theoretical Effects, called this process "computing with vaporware."