Fujima continued to smoke his second cigarette. He wondered whether he should go back to his office at Gaimusho, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He felt he should do some research into the 130-5 site. Perhaps get a schedule of the drop-offs, collect background data of the ships and their crews. But Op-Center was probably doing that already. It would be better if he rested tonight. That way he would be fresh for whatever happened the following week.

The slender thirty-five-year-old intelligence officer turned as his wife came from the kitchen. She told him that dinner would be ready in five minutes. He thanked her, winked, and said he would be in shortly. She smiled back. Then Fujima leaned on the railing and looked down at the street.

“What a world it is,” he said.

Fujima’s father would never have believed it. The nation that had dropped a pair of nuclear bombs on Japan was asking him for help to find missing nuclear material. And Fujima had given that aid. In the space of one generation, loyalties had shifted that dramatically. Yet that was not the most astonishing part. What was remarkable was that warlords and rogue groups could work in the shadows to create Hiroshima-level destruction. And not to end a war but to start one.

“What a world,” Fujima said again.

For the moment, however, Fujima was going to leave the responsibility for it to someone else. Dinner and his wife were waiting. His daughters would join them.

He intended to enjoy them.

That, after all, was what he was fighting for.

TWENTY-SIX - Washington, D.C. Friday, 8:57 A.M.

TWENTY-SIX

Washington, D.C. Friday, 8:57 A.M.

It was time for Bob Herbert’s wake-up call.

After Paul Hood hung up with Shigeo Fujima, he brought up the dossier on Colonel Hwan. While he read the file, Hood had his assistant Bugs Benet put in a call to the cockpit of the TR-1. Hood was patched through to his groggy intelligence chief. As Bob Herbert answered, it occurred to Hood that in all the years they had been working together he had never had to wake Herbert. It seemed like the man was always on the job or socializing. The first-time experience was disturbing. Clearly, the Mississippi native was not at his most alert or Pride-of-the-Deep-South charming when yanked from a dead sleep.

“Sorry to get you up,” Hood said after Herbert had grumbled something into the headset.

“The world better be ending,” Herbert said. Those were his first coherent words.

“It isn’t, though it might be roughed up pretty bad if we don’t do something,” Hood informed him.

“Now that I think of it, I don’t give a damn about the world,” Herbert said. “Just us. The U.S.”

The intelligence chief sounded as if his mouth were full of sand. Hood waited a moment.

“Are you sure you’re with me?” Hood asked.