And through it all, the men and women in the nylon coats continued their search for evidence.

Half a mile away, the morning light slanted through the stained glass windows of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The air of the church, heavy with incense and smoke from thousands of candles lining the walls and altars, took on a rainbow hue. But the people who filled the pews were immune to its beauty. Many of them had been in Times Square when it happened. More had seen it on CNN or the local news. Some had lost friends and family. The deadly blast and the screams of the dying echoed in their memories. Nothing, not even the solace they’d sought here in an all-night mass for the victims, would ever silence them.

The meeting took place a little past noon in a sub-basement conference room at UpLink’s corporate headquarters on Rosita Avenue, in San Jose. With its clean lines, direct overhead lights, beige carpeting, and coffee machine, it looked very much like the upstairs conference rooms minus the windows. But being sealed away from a view of the Mount Hamilton foothills was only its most superficial difference.

Access was restricted to those in Gordian’s inner circle, all of whom were provided with digital key codes that unlocked the door. Two-foot-thick concrete walls and acoustical paneling soundproofed the room from the keenest human ears. Steel reinforcements within the walls had been implanted with noise generators and other state-of-the-art masking systems to thwart monitoring of electronic communications. Sweep teams went through the room on a regular basis, and telephones, computers, and videoconferencing equipment going in or out of it were checked for bugs using spectrum and X-ray analysis.

While Gordian felt the term “secure” was a relative one, and supposed that someone who was crafty enough, determined enough, and had enough sophisticated hardware at his disposal could still find a way to listen in on his top-level discussions, he was confident that this part of his operational center was as resistant to eavesdropping as caution and countersurveillance technology allowed. In the comint game, the most you could ever do was stay one step ahead of the droops—a word of Vince Scull’s creation meaning “dirty rotten snoops.”

Now Gordian looked at the faces around the conference table, considering how best to start a meeting that was light-years from business-as-usual. Present in the flesh were his Foreign Affairs Consultant Alex Nordstrum, Vice President of Special Projects Megan Breen, and Security Chief Peter Nimec. On a video docking station across the table, Vince’s puffy-eyed, basset-hound face was scowling at him over a high-band satellite link from Kaliningrad.

Gordian took a deep breath. He had observed that, to a person, their features reflected his own low, grim mood.