The President regarded Rodgers. "General, is this why you advised me to capitulate to the bomber? Because we were going to do what he wanted anyway?"

"No, sir," said Rodgers. "The truth is, we didn't capitulate to him. We distracted him."

Lawrence leaned back, his hands behind his head. "From what?"

"Our counterattack," Rodgers said.

"Against whom?" Burkow asked. "The prick told us who he was with and turned himself in."

"But follow the thread backward," Rodgers said.

"We're listening," said the President.

Rodgers leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Sir, Grozny takes its name from Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Terrible--"

"Why am I not surprised?" muttered Rachlin.

"As far back as the Revolution, they've worked for political gain, not money," Rodgers said. "They were fifth columnists in Germany during the War and caused some minor trouble here during the Cold War. We traced some of the early, unmanned Redstone rocket failures to them."

"Who finances them?" asked Parker.

"Until recently," said Rodgers, "they were underwritten by extreme nationalistic political forces that needed terrorist enforcers. Gorbachev disbanded them in the mid-1980s, at which point they hunkered down overseas, especially in the U.S. and South America, and joined with the increasingly powerful Russian mafia in an effort to overthrow their westernized leaders."

"So they must really hate Zhanin," said Lincoln.

"You've got it," said Rodgers.

"But if they're not tied to the government," the President said, "what can they be planning in Eastern Europe? A military operation of any size can't be run without the approval of the Kremlin. This isn't Chechnya, with a handful of generals in the field dictating military policy to President Yeltsin."

"Hell," Rachlin observed, "I never believed he wasn't calling the shots behind his hand the whole time."

"That's just it," Rodgers said. "Something big just might be run without the Kremlin. What we saw in Chechnya in 1994 was the beginning of a trend toward decentralization in Russia. It's a big country with eight time zones. Suppose someone finally woke up there and said, 'This is like a dinosaur. It needs a couple of brains to make the whole work'?"

The President regarded Rodgers. "Has someone, in fact, done this?"

Rodgers said, "Before the blast, Mr. President, we intercepted a bagel order sent from St. Petersburg to a shop in New York."

"A bagel order?" said Burkow. "Get real."

"That was my reaction," said Rodgers. "We noodled around with it, but it didn't make any sense until after the blast. Using the Midtown Tunnel as a point on a grid, one of our cryptologists figured out that it was a map of New York, with the tunnel as one of the highlights."

"Were the other points secondary targets?" asked Egenes. "After all, the World Trade Center bombers had alternate targets, including the Lincoln Tunnel."