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but if you’ve nailed it, Spain will owe us.”
    The President put down his phone and asked for his Chief of Staff. “Get me Acedo on the line as well,” he ordered. Acedo was the prime minister of Spain, and currently in the midst of an election battle. Within five minutes the call was put through, and the President delivered to Acedo the names and addresses of his terrorists.
    It took Acedo and his government several hours to retract their Basque terrorist theory, but in due course they acted on the tip, and arrested the terrorists who hadn’t yet committed suicide. For the subsequent press release, the Spanish security service indicated that a telephone belonging to Zoughan had been found, and that a quick search of the recent phone calls had revealed the names of the other terrorists. That was easier and less embarrassing than saying that some kid with a foreign supercomputer had tweaked out the names in 20 minutes just to pass the time. Even though TTIC was never acknowledged, and Acedo never publicly thanked the US government, word of the coup spread rapidly through the normally tightlipped Intelligence Community.
    On that day, Turbee made his bones with the TTIC team. Despite his many eccentricities and blemishes, he was adopted and accepted. For the first time, he learned what it was to be at home in an organization and with other people.
    J OHNSON, turn up the sound on the CNN feed for a second,” barked Dan. Ted Johnson was the custodian of the master controls, in charge of deciding what image or feed went to which of the big 101 screens. He also managed the conference room’s phone lines. The TTIC staff had nicknamed him “the yellee,” due to the fact that he was almost always addressed by Dan in a somewhat elevated tone of voice.
    “OK,” Johnson answered.
    It took only seconds for everyone in the room to tune in to the events taking place in Libya. On the central 101, a CNN reporter was in the middle of an interview with a demolitions expert on the US mainland. “How big will the explosion be?” asked the announcer. “How big a crater?”
    “I can’t say for sure,” said the expert. “But I agree with the Army representative—this explosion could be the equivalent of firing a kiloton of TNT. It could level any block in New York City. It could create a crater, in my opinion, of more than 500 meters across, and deeper than 20 meters.”
    The reporter moved on to talk about the odds makers in Vegas, and the rapidly growing pool of cash to be paid to the participant who most accurately called the depth and diameter of the crater. A sly grin slid across Turbee’s usually serious face. He turned to his computer and went to work.
    I NSPECTOR INDERJIT SINGH, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was watching the same CNN feed on a small, 20-year-old television set. He sat alone in his cramped office at the RCMP provincial headquarters on Heather Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, shaking his head in disbelief. “Tons,” he muttered to himself. “Almost 660 tons of Semtex. And now they’re betting on the size of the crater. Nuts. Totally nuts.” Indy, as he was affectionately nicknamed by the other denizens of the cramped complex, went back to the problem at hand.
    British Columbian marijuana, known on the streets of California as “BC Bud,” was pouring across the border separating Canada and her southern neighbor in record quantities. There seemed to be no stopping it. The border was evidently full of holes. Millions of dollars were being spent by four different levels of government, namely British Columbia, the state of Washington, and the two Federal governments, to stop the flow. With no success on either side. A tidal wave of pot, thought Indy. A veritable tsunami.
    The source of the drugs was, to the dismay of Indy and many of his colleagues, transparently obvious. After four decades of lax marijuana laws, minor or nonexistent sentences, budget cuts, and a local government that did not