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in a two-story building at Andrews Air Force Base. During the Cold War, this nondescript, ivory-colored structure was a staging area for flight crews known as NuRRDs—nuclear rapid-response divisions. In the event of a nuclear attack on the nation’s capital, the job of the NuRRDs would have been to evacuate key officials to secret bunkers built deep in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of the Air Force’s NuRRDs, evacuation operations were consolidated at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The building at Andrews was given over to the newly chartered National Crisis Management Center.
    The two floors of upstairs offices were for nonclassified operations such as finance, human resources, and monitoring the mainstream news services for possible hot buttons, seemingly innocent events that might trigger crises. These included the failure of Third World governments to pay their troops, accidents such as a submarine ramming a foreign fishing vessel or yacht—which might not be just a fishing vessel or pleasure cruise, but a spy ship—the seizure of large caches of drugs that could harm the black economy of local provinces, and other potential domino-effect activities.
    The basement of the former NuRRD building had been entirely refurbished. It no longer housed living quarters for flight crews. It was where the tactical decisions and intelligence crunching of Op-Center took place. This executive level was accessible by a single elevator that was guarded on top twenty-four/seven.
    Hood acknowledged the guard with a nod. The red-cheeked kids were rotated every week to keep any of them from being tempted by foreign agents looking for access. Ironically, it was an individual with seemingly perfectly legitimate credentials who had been able to deliver the EMP bomb. In an era when a smart teen with a computer could shut down power grids, phone systems, banks, and military installations, passwords and swipe cards seemed quaint relics of a very distant time.
    Hood stepped into the parking lot. The day was warming quickly. It helped to invigorate him. Hood knew it was partly a radiant effect of all the asphalt on the base, but he let himself think it was the sun. And it was a glorious spring morning, one in which the scent of the flowers that lined the security fence was actually stronger than the smell of the jet fuel coming from the airstrips.
    Hood hoped the day stayed warm and welcoming.
    In Washington, the weather had a way of changing unexpectedly.

FOUR
    Alexandria, Virginia Monday, 8:11 A.M.
    Morgan Carrie always regarded her career as a classic good news–bad news situation.
    One year before, at the age of fifty-three, Carrie was the first woman to earn the rank of three-star general in the United States military. It was a low-key promotion. The army wished to promote a woman without calling attention to it. As her husband, Georgetown University Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. T. H. Albert Carrie, put it, “They wanted to break the glass ceiling without the sound of shattering glass.” That was all right with the woman. Since she was a kid playing war games with her four older brothers—she was usually the nurse, only occasionally the French Resistance fighter Mademoiselle Marie—she wanted to be the officer she had become. She outranked two of her brothers, both of whom were in the Navy.
    At the same time, the career intelligence officer was passed over to head the National Security Agency in the new president’s administration. Carrie had spent most of her career in Army General Staff, familiarly G2, the last five years as its head. Her office was concerned with all aspects of intelligence gathering, counterintelligence, and security operations. On paper she was more qualified than the man who got the job to oversee the organization that coordinates and executes the activities that protect American information systems and sources and generates foreign intel. But General