As mayor of Los Angeles and as head of Op-Center, Paul Hood had taken calls from heads of state. During times of crisis he had spoken calmly over the phone with his counterparts in other nations. Even when lives were at risk or lost, Hood had been able to speak without agitation to operatives in the field. He had talked with the wives and mothers of police officers and firefighters who had lost husbands and sons. He had called and visited the families of the Strikers who had perished in the Kashmir conflict.

But Hood was somewhat unnerved when he got around to accessing his personal cell phone messages. Daphne Connors had called at six-fifteen that morning. From the sound of her voice she had just woken up. Or perhaps she was just going to sleep. She often went to client parties that continued late into the night. She reported in a low, smoky voice that she had a dream about him. It had something to do with a stagecoach driver and a tavern owner in the old West. Only Hood was running the saloon and Daphne was running the stage.

Maybe that was true. Or maybe it was a pretext to phone. In either case, the call troubled him. Or rather, it was the tone of Daphne’s voice. He had not heard a bedroom voice in years. His former wife, Sharon, had never had one, really. And the one night he spent with Op-Center’s former press liaison, Ann Farris, was followed by awkward silence and forced felicity.

Daphne’s voice was very feminine, very seductive. It got into Hood’s ear, into his mind, into all his nerve endings in a way that made him very uncomfortable. It also made him wonder with dismay whether his discomfort was actually with Daphne. It might be with the idea of anyone getting close. Maybe his marriage had gone just the way he wanted it to. Built around a core of emotional and physical detachment for the sake of stability. It was as if he were running a city government or federal agency.

Hood did not like that thought at all. He chose not to think about it. He had arrived at the office a half hour before, and he was still going through the report from the evening unit. It appeared to have been an uneventful night everywhere except in the Celebes Sea. Hood listened to a call from Lowell Coffey to Hood’s evening counterpart, Curt Hardaway. The call had been recorded digitally on Hood’s computer.

Coffey reported that the Singaporean patrol ship had discovered an empty concrete block at a nuclear disposal site. The block should have contained radioactive waste. Radiation detectors on board Coffey’s ship, an Australian MIC corvette, supported the findings.