Six Seconds

So why was this flaring up again?

Tripoli advised to stand by for an update.

More information would be good. This was going tobe another long day.

Mintz worked in the old naval intelligence base known as the Nebraska Avenue Complex. Her office was among some three-dozen buildings on the thirty-eight-acre site, near the operations center of the Department of Homeland Security, about fourteen miles from where terrorists had slammed a jetliner into the Pentagon.

The DHS’s mission was to prevent further strikes.

Mintz’s job was to track cases and assess the threat with her counterparts at the CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA, Secret Service and various other agencies.

Her team was responsible for distilling intelligence on incoming ships and planes.

Mintz bit her lip as she glanced at her copy of the morning’s New York Times. A front page headline indicated foreign intelligence agencies were detecting increased levels of terrorist activity—activity that was aimed at heads of state.

Ain’t that the truth.

Earlier in the week they’d helped process a threat through Australian and British security services indicating that two men, suspected to be terrorist operatives, had boarded a 747 on a Hong Kong-to-Sydney flight connecting to San Francisco. U.S. fighters were scrambled.

Fingerprints obtained covertly from their drinking cups in-flight by two American agents aboard and scanned in-flight to Washington, had confirmed the subjects’ identities and ruled out a threat.

Everyone stood down on that one.

Passengers had never known of the events that had unfolded around them.

Mintz reached for a carrot stick just as her computer flashed with a new report.

The embassy in Amsterdam had issued a classified threat. A jailed passport forger in Istanbul had told Turkish police interrogators that a ship was carrying several concealed containers of explosives that would be detonated when it reached Boston Harbor. Registered to a numbered company in Aruba, the vessel had left Rotterdam and was now approaching U.S. waters.

Mintz grabbed her phone when her computer flashed with an update from the Central Intelligence Agency.

The illicit Rotterdam cargo was a dozen mail-order brides smuggled out of Moscow. No explosives were located. No threat. It was common for criminal sources to inflate their claims to better bargain with prosecutors.

Thank you, Langley, for sharing.

Mintz massaged the knot of tension in the back of her neck as she looked at the National Threat Advisory displayed on the wall behind her.

Today we are yellow—an elevated risk of terroristattacks.

Her computer flashed with an update on the African freighter.

It was still headed across the Pacific to the U.S. The hostile substance was still suspected to be illicit drugs, possibly hashish or qat, a narcotic leafy substance, from Ethiopia.

Fine, Mintz thought, the data seemed to be going full circle.

Still, she directed it to her other agencies.

Sharing information to connect the dots. Once more,over to you fine people at the Coast Guard, Customs,the DEA and the gang at CT watch, who’ve probablyalready handled this one.

Then Mintz noticed that she’d just received a security look-ahead from the Secret Service’s Dignitary Protective Division—the guys who were protecting the pope during his U.S. visit in a few weeks’ time. Mintz scanned the updates on the papal travel agenda. Future destinations and considerations of interest to all security agencies.

Tapping her finger on her desk, Mintz contemplated some of her recent files.

She decided to share them with Secret Service Intelligence Division.

Mintz appreciated that they were going full tilt over there, given they had the lead to protect the Holy Father.

She was sorry to pile up their workload, but her orders were to share everything.

Even an unconfirmed shipload of drugs from Ethiopia.

And let’s hope that’s all it is.

9

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Searchers in Sector 17 found Anita Tarver’s corpse entangled in a logjam along a stream that flowed off the Faust River.

Less than twenty-four hours later, her naked body lay on a stainless steel tray in the autopsy room of the Calgary Medical Examiner’s Office, a few feet from the bodies of her son and daughter.

As Graham watched Dr. Bryce Collier, the pathologist, and his assistant conduct the procedures, he imagined moments in Anita’s life with her children. The birthdays. The Christmases. Getting them ready for school. Their excitement at the big plane trip for a vacation in the mountains. Anita kissing them good-night under the stars.

Had they known what was coming?

Like most detectives, Graham disliked autopsies. But it was part of the job. In his years as a Mountie he’d seen the aftermath of fires, electrocutions, drownings, stabbings, shootings, hackings, hangings, strangulations, beatings with hammers, bats, hockey sticks, pipes, car-wreck decapitations and lost hikers entombed in ice.

But no matter how many autopsies he’d viewed, he could never adapt to the room’s frigid air, the multicolored organs, the overpowering smells of formaldehyde and ammonia. Because they all signified the penultimate defeat.

And now, more than ever, it signified that he was toblame for his wife’s death.

When the autopsies on Anita Tarver and her children were completed Graham joined Collier in his office. He liked Collier’s tiny Bonsai tree and the calming gurgle of his small feng shui fountain. Objects of optimism. What always gave Graham pause each time he came here was the large print beside Collier’s framed degrees and awards: Van Gogh’s Twilight, before the Storm:Montmartre.

The worst is still to come, Graham thought.

Collier opened a can of diet cola, poured it into his ceramic coffee mug and began making notes in his file.

“I’m attributing cause as consistent with blunt trauma from the rocks and the manner as accidental. Noncriminal.”

“Not a doubt in your mind?”

“Unless you know something we don’t?”

“Emily tried to tell me something before she died.”

“Yes, Stotter mentioned that it was incoherent.”

Graham exhaled slowly.