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By Root 366 0

job to find out what that was. The bureaucrats are checking up on the bureaucrats, Hood thought bitterly. Of course, he probably should not be thinking at all right now. He was tired and frustrated about the situation with Battat. And he had not even called home to see how Harleigh was doing. Rodgers had stayed with Hood between the time he first phoned Orlov and Orlov returned the call. While they waited for Bob Herbert to come back, Rodgers left to grab a soda. Hood decided to call home. It did not improve his mood. He was doing just the thing that Sharon had always hated. Working late. Calling home as an afterthought. He could hear the anger in her throat, in the tightness of her mouth, in the brevity of her answers.

"I'm doing laundry," Sharon said.

"Harleigh is in the den playing solitaire on the computer. Alexander is in his room doing homework and studying for a history test."

"How does Harleigh seem today?" Hood asked.

"How do you think?" Sharon said.

"Your own psychologist said it's going to be a while before we see any kind of change. If we see any kind of change," Sharon added.

"But don't worry, Paul. I'll handle whatever comes up."

"I'm not going anywhere, Sharon," Hood said.

"I want to help."

"I'm glad. Do you want me to get Alexander?" she asked.

"Not if he's studying," Hood said.

"Just tell him I called."

"Sure."

"Good night," Hood said. He could feel Sharon hesitate. It was only a moment, but it felt much, much longer. "

"Night, Paul," she said, then hung up. Hood sat there holding the phone for several moments. Now he was a bastard and a bureaucrat. He lay the phone in its cradle, folded his hands, and waited for Rodgers. As he sat there, something began to tick inside him. It wasn't a clock or a bomb. It was like a cam and rocker arm. And with each click of the arm, a spring grew tighter inside him. A desire to do something-and not just debate or call the Russians for help. Hood wanted to act.

Something was not right, and he needed to know what it was. Rodgers and Herbert arrived together. They found Hood staring at the back wall of his office where plaques and framed photographs once hung, the mementos of his years in government. Pictures with world leaders, with constituents. Photographs of Hood laying cornerstones or working in a Thanksgiving soup kitchen. His life as a bloody goddamn bureaucrat. As part of the problem, not the solution.

"Are you all right?" Herbert asked.

"Fine," Hood said.

"Did you get news?" Herbert pressed.

"No," Hood said.

"But I want to make some."

"You know where I stand on that," Herbert said.

"What were you thinking of?"

"Battat," Hood said. That was not entirely true. He was thinking that he never should have withdrawn his resignation. He should have left Op-Center and never looked back. He wondered if resigning had actually been for him and not to spend more time with his family, as he had believed. But he was back, and he was not going to run away. Battat was the next stop in his thought process.

"This man was sent to the hospital with some kind of sickness where a pair of assassins were waiting," he said.

"That doesn't sound like a coincidence."

"No, it doesn't," Herbert agreed.

"My brain trust and I have been looking into that." Herbert's brain trust consisted of four deputy intelligence directors who had been brought to Op-Center from military intelligence, the NSA, and the CIA.

They were three men and one woman who ranged in age from twenty-nine to fifty-seven. With input from Darrell McCaskey, who liaised with the FBI and Interpol, Op Center had the best per capita intelligence team in Washington.

"Here's what we've been thinking," Herbert said.

"The CIA is ninety-nine percent certain the Harpooner passed through Moscow and went to Baku. A DOS agent thinks he saw him on a flight to Moscow, but that may have been intentional."

"Why?" Rodgers asked.

"It wouldn't be unprecedented for a terrorist to let himself be seen,"

Herbert said.

"Back in 1959, the Soviet spy Igor Slavosk allowed himself to be seen at Grand Central Station in New York