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  "Honey," he said in a low, clipped voice. "Take Rebecca and get back in the car."

  "Where do you get off ordering me ar—" She saw him standing there with the TPH held before his chin with both hands, like a man at prayer, and stopped. "Frank, what is it?"

  "Just do it."

  Becky was starting to skip down the linoleum-tiled foyer to the living room. Elinor caught her up and ran out the front door.

  Marron ducked sideways into the kitchen. Bent low beneath the counter that communicated with the dining area, he duckwalked through the kitchen to the door. Straightening, he stepped out and sideways, arms extending—right arm locked, left elbow bent and slightly dropped—into the isosceles triangle of a perfect Weaver stance.

  The sliding glass door to the rear deck was open. A lanky black-haired man lay on one of the redwood chaise longues.

  "Yo, Frankie. Thought you'd never get back." He gestured with a bottle of Wild Turkey. "I brought some of the bad stuff. Come on out and set a spell."

  Marron let the three fat white dots of the sight drop away from his line of vision. "Dick? Dick Torrance!"

  "The Original Swinging Richard himself." Torrance got to his feet, a process that always reminded Marron of one of those Taiwanese wooden snake toys that folded in all different directions, first this way, then that. He came forward and caught the shorter Marron in a Latin-style abrazo, endangering the back of his head with the bottle.

  "How the hell have you been?" he demanded, tousling Marron's hair.

  "Fine. Hey, just fine." Marron drew back. Torrance knew playing with his hair like that made him nuts. That was the kind of guy Torrance was. ?

  Torrance stepped back and gestured at the small black pistol. "That how you greet an old comrade-in-arms? Or is that always how you come into your house these days?" He shook his head and laughed. "And people say us FedPols have too much power. You know what we always say—'You don't like the Federal Police, next time you're in trouble, call a hurt-pusher.'"

  He laughed again. From the front door came Elinor's voice: "Frank, are you all right? What's happening in there?"

  Marron grimaced. "Come on back, Ms. Thompson," Torrance called. "It's just old home week in here. Don't mind the bottle; I'm a FedPol, and you know we can do no wrong."

  Chapter FIVE

  National Security Adviser Sondra Mohn arranged her features in her trademark faint patrician smile and tried not to wonder if there was rain in her hair. Almost all the members of the National Security Council's Crisis Management Unit were on hand. Time to make sure her game face was in place.

  Rain still fell on 17th Street, outside the Executive Office Building. Traffic hissed sporadically past. Curfew was in effect. At this time of night only those on official business and commercial and service people with appropriate stamps on their internal passports—newspaper delivery trucks, nighttime janitorial staff, and the like—were permitted on the streets of the nation's capital.

  Despite the lack of traffic, it was an inconvenient time for most members of the National Security Council's Crisis Unit. On the other hand, the limousine ride through eerily deserted streets enhanced their sense of being special, their awareness of playing a vital role in the shaping and preserving of their country's destiny.

  In other words, it made them feel more important than they were. Just the way Sondra Mohn had planned it.

  The door opened. The representative from Enforcement Affairs flew in with a swirl of the London Fog thrown over his shoulders, inevitably late. With his racquetball build, longish slicked-back hair, and cover-boy looks—thrust of forehead hanging like a cliff over brooding blue eyes—he was widely considered to be on the fast track to power. Not least by himself.

  He had bolted a high-visibility prosecutorial job with Justice for the sexier enforcement end, though the move entailed a nominal demotion. It paid dividends: he was the Secretary's head hatchetman already. And a thoroughgoing young snake who bore close watching.

  Pentagon and DIA looked at each other. Defense Intelligence rolled her eyes. Pentagon let his lips peel slightly back from his teeth. Though both were serving military, they seldom agreed on anything. They did on this.

  "Excuse it," the latecomer said. "I was with the Secretary in Detroit when I got the call. Complications came up."

  Someone snickered. Secretary Doyle was filming a Public Service Announcement in the inner city for the kick-off of Operation Clean Sweep, dressed as McGruff the Crime Dog. There had been complications, some too overt to gloss over.

  At least the hard-pressed containment teams had managed to keep the mortar fire off the CBS Evening News.

  "Since Mr. Serafin has at last seen fit to honor us with his presence," Mohn said in her finest spoon-tapping-crystal voice, "perhaps we can begin consideration of the events of the last twenty-four hours in Central Asia. Mr. Chamorro, if you'd care to brief those of us who have not had a chance to familiarize ourselves..." She let the sentence die. She had little use for those who had trouble catching the drift—or, rather, she had little brief for them; they could be useful indeed.

  Henry Chamorro dithered briefly with his face with both hands, a process that ended with the hands' simultaneous discovery of his heavy-rimmed glasses. They grasped the glasses, briefly, as if he were peering through binoculars, and lit at last on the keyboard inset in the table in front of him.

  "What, ah, what has happened," he said, "is a series of revolts that seem to be spreading rapidly throughout Central Asia."

  "Civil disobedience, you mean," barked Major General der Hagen, the Pentagon man. His wattles shook and his gray crew cut bristled; he seemed to take slights against the League's military capabilities personally.

  "I mean revolt, General," Chamorro said, exasperated. "Rebellion. As nearly as we can ascertain, it seems to have originated in Tashkent, capital of the Uzbek Republic—"

  Mohn cut him off. "Before you continue, Henry, perhaps Francine can give us a concise background on the region in question."

  The representative from State looked at Mohn with a tentative blinking smile. Dr. Francine Wollstonecraft was an incredibly ingenue Yalie, young for her job and highly photogenic. She was beginning to entertain vague suspicions that the National Security Adviser didn't like her.

  "Well," she said, "Central Asia, also called Russian Turkestan—"

  The room was a power room, but an old-fashioned power room; Mohn liked her people to be reminded of their roots. Discreet, elegant sculpted molding and dark oak paneling, a smell of age and rain. It wasn't hopelessly out of date: Francine pressed buttons on the keypad before her own chair, and an apparent expanse of dark-stained hardwood paneling turned into a four-foot-square color LCD screen showing a map. The Adviser liked to think of it as appropriate technology.

  "—is generally considered to extend from the Caspian Sea to the vast mountain ranges, the Tien Shan and the Pamirs, which form the border with China. To the south the region is bounded by Iran and Afghanistan. Its northern boundary is less distinct, roughly a line running from the northern tip of the Aral Sea to Alma-Ata, capital of the Kazakh Republic. The people of Turkestan are predominantly Altaic, of Turkish or Mongol stock. There is a large Persian-speaking minority, the Tadzhiks, centered in Tadzikstan.

  "The Russians conquered most of the region in the last century, under the Tsars. The assimilation wasn't, however, completed until the 1920s. The population of the region has been expanding, while population levels are stable or even receding in the predominantly European areas of the League. As a result—"

  "Thank you ever so much, Francine," Mohn said. "Henry." Chamorro gouged his thumbs at the purplish bags beneath his eyes. "The League has simply lost communications with military and civil authorities in the major Uzbek cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, and the Kirghiz capital Khokand. Dushanbe, which is the capital of the Tadzhik Republic, reports severe street fighting, with air strikes on the city center. Strikes and massive demonstrations are reported in Alma-Ata, though the
participants seem to be ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans protesting against the revolt."

  He glanced at Mohn. She nodded, once. He touched a key. The map gave way to a view of street fighting between the crumbling facades of giant housing blocks, with an IndoNews/English logo in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

  It was a view forbidden to private citizens—unauthorized access—but still available to anyone who could afford a modern toaster-sized phased-array satellite antenna on the black market. Even with restrictions on the availability of technology, stiff penalties, and extensive informer programs sponsored by government and legitimate media alike, the Federal Police Agency—executive arm of Serafin's Department of Enforcement Affairs—estimated between twenty-five and thirty million homes had them.

  A failure of the will, Sondra Mohn thought. The state could offer all the technical training and access necessary through its own channels, and squeeze intrinsically anarchic private endeavor completely out of existence. Therefore the state had the responsibility to do so.

  The screen flared, fire splashing across the rear deck of a BMP-2 armored personnel carrier as a Molotov cocktail shattered. Francine gasped and covered her eyes. Mohn's lips curled.

  Here we see what happens when a state begins to lose its nerve, begins to fear to fulfill its responsibilities she thought. And here's where we shove it up their asses.

  Chamorro was rolling his eyes around at random in their dark sunken sockets. Mohn felt the overpowering urge to grab him and shake him, but squelched it. He was always that way.

  "Your 'civil disobedience,' General," Chamorro said at last. "It seems to bear a startling .resemblance to a violent— and very well orchestrated—uprising."

  "Crap," Pentagon said. "It's all fortuitous, copycat stuff. Nobody revolts against the League. System's too interdependent. Each of the republics is afraid of anything that might give its neighbors the jump on it, and most of 'em hate the ragheads more than the Great Russians do. If the Central Asians did try to break away, the rest of the League would dogpile 'em in a hurry."

  Seated in his usual position off to the side—his Gray Eminence chair, he called it—NSA's Ward Archer had been stoking his pipe and ignoring Mohn's occasional dagger gaze. A tall, donnish man in late middle age, he was a registered addict, entitled to receive prescriptions for his tobacco habit. Because he had acknowledged his problem, Mohn couldn't use it as a dodge to get the press to ratpack him; that would be insensitivity. She hated not having a handle on people this close to the throttles of power.

  "The other republics have condemned the uprising," he said through a cloud of reeking blue smoke. "But somebody over there takes it seriously. Namely League internal security— our old friends the KGB."

  Der Hagen turned a bulbous bulldog glare at him. "What do you mean?"

  "We have skim-offs from their Molniya satellite network indicating that State Security regards the uprisings as linked. Moreover, they don't think either the League or republican armies can contain them."

  Pentagon snorted disbelief. "That's the largest army on earth you're talking about, guy. They've squashed dissi-dence in the republics before. When are you people gonna realize that the threat we all grew up with hasn't just withered up and blown away?"

  "Oh, grow up, Ernie," Brigadier General Wofford of the Defense Intelligence Agency said. A black, bespectacled Marine with shoulders like a defensive lineman, she knew full well that she was a token. That she was also good at her job—analysis and evaluation—was incidental. Her status meant she was fireproof. She did not exactly bend over backward to be diplomatic.

  "I find it curious," Serafin said, half reclining in his seat in that languid panther way of his, "that No Such Agency manages to infiltrate possibly the most secure satellite network in the world, and can't get a handle on unauthorized access in our own country."

  Archer puffed furiously. "That's a different matter entirely. You're talking there about millions of Americans—your estimate—tapping into a network of several hundred private and government-owned communications satellites, many of them launched from countries which make not even a pretense of regulating the uses to which they're put. They log on and off at random, along a variety of pathways so numerous as to be functionally infinite. Opposed to that, we are monitoring throughput of a known and carefully restricted system. The League refuses to trust its secure traffic to the global commercial network, which they feel, quite correctly, to be anarchic." Puff. "But then, you couldn't be expected to know that. Intelligence stuff. Quite outside your realm of competence."

  Serafin colored to his hairline, which he hoped people would not notice was receding.

  Mohn contained a smile. "Thank you, gentlemen," she said. "Henry." Chamorro blinked and belatedly cut the feed.

  "What is State's assessment, Francine?"

  "Over the last few years Central Asia has become increasingly vital to the League economy. The Uzbek Republic, in particular, has become a major world source of cotton—an increasingly valuable commodity, as you know, because environmentally aware legislation has restricted both supply and demand for synthetic fabrics in the developed world. The area also supplies a disproportionate amount of other agricultural products, particularly fruits and vegetables. Petrochemical reserves beneath the Red Sands and Black Sands deserts are now estimated to be among the largest remaining in the world."

  "And it all gets piped straight into the Russian Republic," Wofford said. "The League still treats Central Asia like a colony. That's a big part of what turned your Russian in the street off to the idea of total devolution. All that old-style imperial tribute started drying up."

  "Well, we have to understand that most of the League's population lives outside the Central Asian republics—"

  "For now," Wofford said.

  "And the League is a very caring polity, very concerned to put the needs of the many before the selfish desire of the few."

  "Jesus," der Hagen said. Wofford made a jack-off gesture below the table's edge, out of Wollstonecraft's view but not Mohn's. Behind hands at State, they called Wollstone-craft "Francinestein."

  Wollstonecraft produced a frown. It made her look like a petulant flower. "Certain parties, who are apparently unable to let go of the Cold War even after ten years, appear to mistake the League as merely a successor to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Nothing could be further from the truth. The League is a commonwealth, a voluntary bonding together of the former constituent republics of the USSR, similar to the mode! of Unified Europe."

  "If it's voluntary, why are there APCs in the streets?" Wofford asked.

  "'Voluntary' as in our income tax system, General," Archer said.

  "The League does perform certain functions of a government; I'm sure no one here would prefer the same sort of anarchy that wrecked Yugoslavia and Canada to affect such a widespread area. The League's police department—the once-feared KGB, now playing a role analogous to our own Federal Police Agency—was instrumental in putting an end to systematic and violent persecution of minority groups in Moldava, the Ukraine, and Armenia, to mention a few. Additionally, the League administers those formerly Soviet assets fair ownership of which was impossible to apportion, such as power plants, the Baykonur Space Complex—"

  "—the nukes," der Hagen said.

  "Perhaps most important to understand is that the League is dominated neither by Russia nor by Russians," Francine said tartly. "It's in their charter."

  "Francine," Wofford said, "get real. Russia has three times the land mass of all the other republics combined. It's far and away the biggest country on Earth yet, twice as big as the U.S. It has half the League's people, and most of its trained professionals. All by its lonesome, it's a superpower.

  "Beyond all that, Great Russians form pluralities or even majorities in other republics—Kazakhstan, for instance, which is apparently what's kept it from flashing off with the rest of Central Asia. Just who do you think really runs that show?"

 
; Der Hagen barked a laugh. "The League is just the old Soviet empire on the cheap. They ditched communism because it didn't work for squat. They ditched the Soviet Union because the Russian people saw it as a means of sticking them for the operating expenses of a bunch of tributary republics they think are half-civilized anyway, stuff like welfare, infrastructure, administration. This way the money all comes in toward the center: everybody pays for League protection from big, bad neighbors like China and Germany and the raghead countries; everybody pays the League for being the life-support system that keeps the republics' one-lung economies going. They get the bennies of empire without the cost." He shook his head, grinning a lizard grin of reluctant admiration. "It's a Russian empire for the New World Order."

  "Ernest," Wollstonecraft said scathingly, "nobody uses that phrase anymore."

  Der Hagen slammed his palm on the table. "Dammit, doesn't anybody get the picture?"

  Mohn gave him a look. He licked his lips and said, "With all due respect, Madam Adviser, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and dammit, some people here are being pretty forgetful. Everybody counted the Sovs out after the phony coup in '91. I say they've risen from the grave."

  "Like Joan Crawford," Wofford muttered.

  "What?"

  "You wouldn't get it."

  "I wouldn't think a serving military person would find much to laugh about here, General. This wonderful League of Francine's took every cent of the hundred billion we sent them, everything the Japs and the EuroWeenies sent, and they rearmed. Bootstrapped themselves right back into a goddamn superpower at our expense. Sure, they tossed some bones to the republics, and you know what? They spent the loot on arms too. Henry has the figures for you, if anybody's goddamn interested. You can't deny it."

  "No," Mohn said, "we can't, Ernie, and thank you so much for pointing that out. But we are concerned with the present." She looked around. "Appreciations?"

  "It's not worth fiddle-futzing around with," der Hagen said. "The League Army will give these ragheads a whiff of the grape, and that'll be that."