"What went wrong? We've been copying the Hot Line messages. They were kinda tense but okay until about twenty minutes ago. What the hell went wrong?"

"Sir, the President is convinced that there has been a coup d'etat in the Soviet Union."

"What? Whose fault is that?"

"Mine, sir," Ryan admitted. "I'm the jerk who delivered the information. Please set that aside. The President isn't listening to me."

Jack was amazed to hear a brief, bitter laugh. "Yeah, Bob doesn't listen to me very much either."

"Sir, we have to get to him. We now have information that this may have been a terrorist incident."

"What information is that?" Jack ran it down in about a minute. "That's thin," Durling observed.

"It may be thin, sir, but it's all we got, and it's a goddamned sight better than anything else we've got in."

"Okay, stop for a minute. Right now I want your evaluation of the situation."

"Sir, my best read is that the President is wrong, it is Andrey Il'ych Narmonov over there. It's approaching dawn in Moscow. President Narmonov is suffering from sleep-deprivation, he's just as scared as we are - and from that last message he's wondering if President Fowler is crazy or not. That is a bad combination. We have reports of isolated contact between Soviet and American forces. Christ knows what really happened, but both sides are reading it as aggressive acts. What's really happening is simple chaos - forward-deployed forces bumping, but they're shooting because of alert levels on both sides. It's cascading on itself."

"Agreed, I agree with all of that. Go on."

"Somebody has to back down and do it very fast. Sir, you have to talk to the President. He won't even take my calls now. Talbot and Bunker are both dead, and there's nobody else he'll listen to."

"What about Arnie van Damm?"

"Fuck!" Ryan snarled. How had he forgotten Arnie? "Where is he?"

"I don't know. I can have the Secret Service find out real fast. What about Liz?"

"She's the one who came up with the brilliant idea that Narmonov isn't there."

"Bitch," Durling observed. He'd worked so hard and wasted so much political capital to get Charlie Alden into that job. "Okay, I'll try to get through to him. Stand by."

"Right."

"The Vice President is calling, sir. Line Six." Fowler punched the button. "Make it fast, Roger."

"Bob, you need to get this thing back under control."

"What do you think I've been trying to do?" Durling was sitting in a high-backed leather chair. He closed his eyes. The tone of the answer said it all. "Bob, you have made things worse instead of better. You have to step back from this for a moment. Take a deep breath, walk around the room - think! There is no reason to expect that the Russians did this. Now, I just talked to CIA, and they said -"

"Ryan, you mean?"

"Yes, he just filled me in and -"