The woman’s aides were standing at the far end of the corridor. Unschooled and very young, they both knew virtue from criminal behavior better than these older, highly educated men beside her. Knowledge and liberality had crowded common sense from their brains.

“Gentlemen, I am returning to my patrol ship,” she said. “It is probably not a coincidence that this event occurred where it did.”

“What do you mean?” Ellsworth asked.

“You’re thinking about the 130-5 site, aren’t you Officer Loh?” Jelbart asked.

“I am,” Loh replied. “I would like to go there and look for evidence of a conflict or perhaps the target vessel itself.”

“Excuse me, but what’s the 130-5 site?” Coffey asked.

“It’s the point of intersection at one hundred and thirty degrees longitude, five degrees latitude,” Jelbart replied. “That’s where Japan and China are permitted to dump their nuclear waste.”

“But Officer Loh just said these pirates wouldn’t have attacked a vessel of that sort,” Ellsworth said.

“They would not have,” the Singaporean agreed. “What I’m afraid of is something else.”

“What?” Ellsworth asked.

“That they attacked a vessel that may have just done business with one of those vessels,” Loh replied.

SIXTEEN - Washington, D.C. Thursday, 11:55 P.M.

SIXTEEN

Washington, D.C. Thursday, 11:55 P.M.

Paul Hood was about to leave when the phone beeped. It had been nearly five hours since he turned over the running of Op-Center to the evening shift. That was the only time he got to catch up on E-mails, intelligence briefings, and personal matters.

He snatched it up and sat on the edge of the desk.

“Evening, Paul,” Coffey said.

“Good afternoon,” Hood replied. “So? Did your patient wake up?”

Coffey told him he had. Before the attorney briefed him, Hood conferenced in Mike Rodgers and Bob Herbert. Both men were at home. Rodgers was up watching old action movies, as usual. Usually John Wayne or Charlton Heston. Herbert was getting ready to turn in.

Nothing Coffey said surprised Hood.

“Do you have any information about the bullets they pulled from the pirate or the wreckage?” Rodgers asked.

“Yes, I wrote that down,” Coffey said. “Jelbart had one of his men come over and take a look at them. He just received word that they were from a .380 double-action semiautomatic. The initial forensics tests said that the bullets were remanufactured with a tungsten-polymer coating—”

“Which means that they’re doubly difficult to trace,” Rodgers said.

“How so?” Hood asked.

“Remanufactured, meaning that the shell and casing came from different places,” Rodgers said, “and designed so as not to retain evidence of the rifling from the barrel that shot them.”

“Bullets without fingerprints,” Herbert said.

“More or less,” Rodgers replied.

“Would it take considerable financial resources or a special laboratory to create ammunition like that?” Hood asked.