Yet she had seen what she had seen ... and would later reflect that the thoughts you tried not to let into your head sometimes turned out to be the ones that took deepest hold, lingering with the tenacity of restless ghosts.

The next few minutes were sheer torment. Along with everyone around her, she had been unable to do anything but wait for the astronauts to resume communications from the bunker. Wait, and stare at the monitor, and try not to surrender to the madness of what she'd been witnessing.

There was silence. And more silence.

Annie gnawed at her bottom lip.

Finally she heard an excited voice in her headset.

"Launch Control, this is Everett. Second basket's down and I think we're all--"

He abruptly broke contact.

Annie sat without moving, her heart slamming in her chest. She didn't know what was going on, didn't even know what she was feeling. The relief she'd experienced upon hearing Lee's voice had gotten all tangled up with profound despair. Why had he ceased to respond?

Control was hailing him now. "Lee? Lee, we're reading you, what is it?"

Another unbearable measure of silence. Then Everett again, his tone distraught, almost frantic: "Oh, God, God ... where's Jim? Where's Jim? Where's ... ?"

Annie would remember little about the moments that followed besides a sense of foundering helplessness, of the world closing in around her, seeming to suck her into an airless, shrinking hole.

And there was one other thing that would stand out in her memory.

At some point, she had glanced over at Roger Gordian. His face pale, his posture somehow crumpled, he appeared to have been violently thrown back into his seat. And the empty, blown-away look in his eyes after hearing Lee's anguished question--

It was a look that told Annie he knew its answer as well as she did, knew it as well as anyone else in the room.

Colonel Jim Rowland ...

Jim...

Jim was gone.

TWO

VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 17, 2001

5:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

THEY HAD LEFT PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL JETPORT in a rented Chevy that had seen better days, taking the Maine Turnpike north for over a hundred miles to the Gardiner terminus, where it merged with the interstate leading by turns northwest and northeast past Bangor to the Canadian border. Now the traffic, sparse since the Bath-Brunswick exits, had entirely dissipated, leaving theirs the only car on a road flanked by a profusion of evergreens and a variety of hardwoods denuded by the long, sedentary New England winter.

The toll stop was unmanned, with no barricade or surveillance cameras, and an exact-change basket that took the requested fifty cents or whatever the driver's conscience decided was adequate.

Pete Nimec fished two coins out of his pocket and tossed them in.

"Quarters?" Megan Breen said from the passenger seat. They were the first words she'd spoken in almost an hour. "Never knew you were such a choirboy."

He regarded her through his dark sunglasses, his foot resting lightly on the brake.