“And sometimes pawns have to be sacrificed, right?”

“You’re a soldier. You know how it is.”

Dalton had no doubt about his status as a piece on the board. “So the Priory doesn’t have control of Bright Gate right now?”

“There isn’t much left there,” Eichen noted. “But I have no doubt that a new Psychic Warrior team will be reconstituted. And it’s very likely someone on that team will be working for the Priory.”

“Jesus,” Dalton muttered. “What a mess. We’re fighting ourselves.”

“Not just us,” Eichen said. “This is worldwide. We have members in Nexus from other countries. It turns out Eisenhower wasn’t the only world leader threatened by the Priory. Most go along, but some, men and women in positions of power who see the threat from the shadows, are putting everything they have on the line.”

“But you don’t even know exactly what the threat is or what the Priory’s goal is,” Dalton noted. “For all you know, the Priory might have a good reason for doing what it does.”

“I doubt that,” Eichen said.

“Why, sir?”

“Why hide if their motives are good?” Eichen asked in turn. “Trust me on this. The Priory is our enemy. I’ve looked at your service record, Jimmy,” Eichen said. “You appear to be a good soldier. You’ve served your country a long time, and now we’re asking you to serve once again.”

Dalton didn’t take the bait. “You know more than you just told me.”

“Not much more. And you’re going to be out there, exposed. What I have told you won’t compromise much of our organization. The Priory knows Nexus exists, as we know it exists. I’m your cutout.”

Dalton knew what the general was saying: If he was compromised, he could only give up the little he knew, which was basically his cutout, or intermediary-the general who was his only link to Nexus. The rest of the organization would be safe.

“What is Nexus’s agenda?”

“We fight the Priory, try to stop it from taking actions that harm our country.”

Dalton thought that overly defensive and reactive, but kept that opinion to himself. “What do you want me to do?”

Eichen stood. “Go back to Bright Gate. I want you to see if you can find out what Eileen Raisor discovered before she was cut off.”

“How will I do that?”

“Use the master computer there-Sybyl. There should be some sort of record of Ms. Raisor’s mission. There might be nothing. I don’t know. But I’d like to know as much as possible before I go to Alaska. Then try to find out who was running things there-who was behind Jenkins and Souris before him. Find their cutout if you can. Maybe we can work our way up their organization. Anything you find out, you report back to me.”

“What happened to Souris?” Dalton asked. “Is she still at HAARP?”

“That’s another strange thing,” Eichen said. “She disappeared two years ago. We haven’t been able to find her since.”

“Killed?”

“Perhaps. Or maybe she’s working on something else for the Priory now. We don’t know.”

Dalton had worked in the gray world of covert operations for most of his career, but this was the most bizarre thing he had ever heard.

“Are you with us, Sergeant Major?”

Dalton didn’t ask the question that popped into his mind-what would Nexus do to him if he said no? “Yes, sir.”

Eichen turned for the door, but paused, hand on the knob. “I am sorry about your wife. I know this is a difficult time to ask this of you.”

The door swung shut behind the general. Dalton saw the headlights go on and the car drove away, leaving Dalton once more alone in the dark in the house filled with memories.

Henry Kissinger had once stated that power was an aphrodisiac, but Linda McFairn thought that too narrow and foolish a definition. She cared little about bedding younger, good-looking men, unlike the majority of her male colleagues high in the echelons of government, who spent much of their free time pursuing young, nubile women. To McFairn, power was a lever that could be used to produce desired results. Sex, unless it served a specific purpose, was a waste of energy and, in a town where slander was thrown about with ease, a potentially damaging act, more so for a woman than a man, naturally.

She’d learned that over thirty-eight years ago when she started as a Russian linguist at the National Security Agency. She spent twenty years working her way around various slots in the Operations Directorate, then got her big break as Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director. It took another eighteen years of various assignments for her to make it from the outer office to the inner office.

As Deputy Director she was second only to the Director, a three-star Air Force general. In reality, her decades in the Agency, as opposed to his recent assignment, made her more experienced by far in the power workings of Washington and inside the Agency. The Director was always a military man, as the NSA fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, which meant she had gone as high as she could possibly go in the Agency. The fact that she had never married had produced more than a few subtle and not so subtle charges that she was a lesbian, something she found typical of male thinking. She’d discovered there were two basic reactions by most men to women in power-if they could screw her, they’d tolerate her but not respect her; if they couldn’t bed her, then she was a lesbian and they still wouldn’t give her respect. She had learned that while they might not respect her as a person, they would respect the power she wielded.

The NSA was in charge of all electronic intelligence activities for the United States, which meant its domain was information. And information, used properly, was power.

Her office was on the top floor of the “Puzzle Palace” at Fort Meade, a large glass building that dominated the landscape. It was directly at one end of the main corridor, the Director’s at the other end. She made the trip to his office once a day to sit in on the daily intelligence briefing, if both he and she were in town. He was currently overseas, leaving her in charge.

Her desk was teak and quite large, over eight feet wide by four across. A twenty-inch flat-screen monitor was perched to her left, the keyboard and mouse on a move-able shelf just under the desktop. The in-box was to the far right, the out-box to the far left. Her policy was never to leave anything in the in-box when she locked up to go home, which had caused her to spend many a late night in the office, once in a while causing her to catch a nap on a plain leather couch on the far side of the room and not go home. The fact that she was here at two in the morning was not an unusual occurrence.

On the wall next to the door, directly across from her desk, a quote in large letters was framed: ALL WARFARE IS BASED ON DECEPTION. It was from the The Art of War by Sun Tzu, a book that McFairn kept in the top drawer of her desk and read from every day.

Double doors led to the main corridor. Behind her, thick bulletproof glass windows overlooked acres of parking lots surrounding the building and the main post of Fort Meade. Two pieces of paper rested on the desk in front of her. One was a transcript of a SATCOM transmission that the NSA had intercepted-it intercepted and attempted to decode all satellite transmissions worldwide. The other was an internal classified Defense Intelligence Agency memo, hot off the wires.

She turned slightly as one of a row of phones inlaid to her right buzzed. She knew from the distinctive sound that it was her personal secure line. Only a handful of people had that number, but she knew even before she answered who would be on the other end.

She hit the intercom. “Yes?”

“This is Boreas. HAARP picked up an anomaly on the virtual plane. It lasted about fifteen minutes and then it disappeared.”