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By Root 1798 0

flight that had allowed him to sit alone and think through several options. His colleague-brother-in Baghdad had been a little too sacrificial in his attitude, a little too dramatic, and the detail around the Iraqi leader had been pretty large, actually larger than the one on which he himself served. How to do it? The trick was to create as much confusion as possible. Perhaps when Ryan walked into the crowd to press the flesh. Take the shot, kill one or two of the other agents, then race into the crowd. If he could make it past the first line or two of spectators, all he had to do was hold up his Secret Service ID, better than a gun for getting through things-everyone would think that he was chasing the subject. The key to escaping from an assassination-the USSS had taught him this-was in the first thirty seconds. Survive that, and you have a better-than-even chance of surviving it all. And he would be the one setting all the security arrangements for the Friday trip. How, then, could he get the President to a spot in which he would have that option? Take POTUS. Take Price. Take one other. Then melt into the crowd. Probably better to fire from the hip. Best if the citizens didn't see the gun in his hand until after the shots. Yes, that might work, he thought, taking off the lap belt and standing. There would be a local Treasury agent at the end of the jetway. They'd go right to the hotel whose large dining room would host President Ryan's speech. Raman would have all day and part of tomorrow to think it through, under the very eyes of fellow agents. How challenging.

MAJOR GENERAL JOHN Pickett, it turned out, was a graduate of Yale Medical School, added to which were a pair of doctorates-molecular biology from Harvard, and public health from UCLA. He was a pale, spare man who looked small in his uniform-he hadn't had time to change and was wearing camouflage BDUs-making his parachutist's wings look very out of place. Two colonels came with him, followed by Director Murray of the FBI, who'd raced over from the Hoover Building. The three officers came to attention as they walked in, but now the Oval Office was too small, and the President led them across the hall into the Roosevelt Room. On the way a Secret Service agent handed the general a fax that was still warm from the machine in the secretaries' room.

Case count is now one hundred thirty-seven, according to Atlanta, Pickett said. Fifteen cities, fifteen states, coast-to-coast.

Hi, John, Alexandre said, taking his hand. I've seen three of them myself.

Alex, glad to see you, buddy. He looked up. I guess Alex has briefed everybody in on the baseline stuff?

Correct, Ryan said.

Do you have any immediate questions, Mr. President?

You're certain that this is a deliberate act?

Bombs do not go off by accident. Pickett unfolded a map. A number of cities were marked with red dots. One of his attending colonels placed three more down: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.

Convention cities. Just how I would have done it, Alexandre breathed. Looks like Bio-War 95, John.

Close. That's a wargame we played with the Defense Nuclear Agency. We used anthrax for that one. Alex here was one of our best for planning offensive bio, Pickett told his audience. He was Red Team commander for this.

Isn't that against the law? Cathy said, her face outraged at the revelation.

Offense and defense are two sides of the same coin, Dr. Ryan, Pickett replied, defending his former subordinate. We have to think like the bad guys do if we're going to stop them.

Operational concept? the President asked. He understood that better than his wife did.

Biological warfare at the strategic level means starting a chain reaction within your target population. You try to infect as many people as possible-and that's not very many; we're not talking nuclear weapons here. The idea is for the people, the victims, to spread it for you. That's the elegance of bio-warfare. Your victims actually do most of the killing. Any epidemic starts low and ramps up, slowly at first, like a tangential curve, and then