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Chapters (54)
  1. Title Page
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Prologue
  4. PART ONE
  5. Chapter One
  6. Chapter Two
  7. Chapter Three
  8. Chapter Four
  9. Chapter Five
  10. Chapter Six
  11. Chapter Seven
  12. Chapter Eight
  13. PART TWO
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Chapter Fifteen
  21. Chapter Sixteen
  22. Chapter Seventeen
  23. PART THREE
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-one
  28. Chapter Twenty-two
  29. Chapter Twenty-three
  30. Chapter Twenty-four
  31. Chapter Twenty-five
  32. Chapter Twenty-six
  33. Chapter Twenty-seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-one
  38. PART FOUR
  39. Chapter Thirty-two
  40. Chapter Thirty-three
  41. Chapter Thirty-four
  42. Chapter Thirty-five
  43. Chapter Thirty-six
  44. Chapter Thirty-seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-eight
  46. Chapter Thirty-nine
  47. Chapter Forty
  48. Chapter Forty-one
  49. Chapter Forty-two
  50. Chapter Forty-three
  51. Epilogue
  52. ALSO BY ROBERT LUDLUM
  53. Critical Praise for Robert Ludlum
  54. Copyright Page

And in some calculating part of his mind, a clockwork mechanism spooled with a hard, icy rage. He had taken arms against a compound of fanatics, only to succumb to something far more diabolical. Outrage infused his soul with a near cryogenic frost. Emotions like despondency and grief had to give way before a larger emotion, an absolute and unyielding thirst for justice, and it was that emotion that commanded him not to succumb to the other emotions. He was the one left alive—left to find out what had just happened.

And why.

PART TWO

PART TWO

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Washington, D.C.

“The prime directive here is secrecy,” the man from the Defense Intelligence Agency said to the others in the room. With his thick, dark eyebrows, broad shoulders, and brawny forearms, he had the look of someone who worked with his hands; in fact, Douglas Albright was an intensely cerebral man, given to brooding and deliberation. He held a Ph.D. in comparative politics and another graduate degree in the foundations of game theory. “Secrecy is priority number one, two, and three. There should be no confusion about that.”

Such confusion was unlikely, for the imperative even accounted for the unlikely venue for the hastily convened meeting. The Meridian International Center was located on Crescent Place, just off Sixteenth Street on Meridian Hill. A blandly handsome building in the neoclassical style that was the architectural lingua franca of official Washington, it was anything but eye-catching. Its charms were discreet and had much to do with its curious status as a building that was not owned by the federal government—the center billed itself a nonprofit educational and cultural institution—but was almost entirely devoted to very private government functions. The center had an elegant front entrance of carved oak; of greater importance was the side entrance, accessible from a private driveway, which enabled dignitaries to arrive and depart without attracting notice. Though it was just a mile from the White House, the center had significant advantages for certain meetings, especially interdepartmental conclaves that had no formal justification. Meetings here did not involve the paper trail that was necessitated by the security procedures at the White House, the Old Executive Office Building, the Pentagon, or any of the intelligence agencies. They could take place without leaving behind any telltale logs or records. They could take place without ever, officially, having taken place at all.

The five gray-faced men who sat around the small conference table were all in similar lines of work, and yet, given the structure of governmental agencies, they would never have had cause to meet in the ordinary course of things. Needless to say, the program that had brought them all together in the first place was far from ordinary, and the circumstances they now faced were quite possibly cataclysmic.