Two military police humvees with flashing blue lights awaited us on the tarmac when we set down. I regarded this as a good omen. I thanked Jimbo the pilot for not crashing, and informed him the in-flight movie sucked. He laughed.

Five minutes later we pulled up to the entrance of the headquarters of the United States Army's Criminal Investigation Division. A CID officer in mufti awaited us. He escorted us swiftly inside, and down a hallway, and up a stairwell, then down another hall to the door of Major General Daniel Tingle, fuhrer of the Army's equivalent of the Gestapo.

Understand that as a military lawyer, I worked with lots of criminal investigators, and when it comes to flatfoots, in my professional view, none are better. Most CID foot soldiers are former enlisted MPs promoted to the rank of warrant officer, a sort of halfway station between sergeants and commissioned officers, which affords them the best of both worlds. They are accorded the full privileges and respect of an officer, just none of the bullshit. They can go to the NCO club-where the liquor's cheaper-or the officers' club, where young lieutenants' wives are usually cuter, lonelier, and more gullible. In general, CID types tend to be highly intelligent, arrogant, sneaky, diligent, treacherous, and disrespectful. Essentially they are detectives, though, unlike their civilian counterparts, CID agents are highly trained in all arts and aspects of criminology and criminality, from interrogations through forensics, from rapes through murder, and with rare exceptions, they handle the A to Z of whatever case they're assigned.

Often their work takes them undercover. Arriving incognito, they report into a unit, they work hard to fit in, they create friendships and build strong bonds of trust, and then they bust everybody who farted outside the commode. It is this part of their duties, I think, that makes them beloved to the rest of the Army

Guys and gals like this need strong adult supervision, and that odious task falls upon a corps of commissioned military police officers. General Tingle was the current top sneak, a guy the rest of the Army's generals try hard to get along with because he has the dirt on everybody

So we entered the office where General Tingle was seated behind his desk, and he stayed seated behind his desk. On his left flank stood a large, heavyset black officer in battle dress uniform, the crossed pistols of an MP on one collar, the spread eagle of a full colonel on the other collar, and a nametag that read Johnson. On the general's right flank stood two middle-aged men in civilian clothes; from their sneaky faces, presumably both were senior agents. General Tingle, I noted, was attired in pale gray Army sweats, and although mostly bald, his few surviving strands were disheveled, nor had he shaved, nor was he smiling. Obviously he had been dragged out of bed, and from his expression he seemed to be pondering why, and by whom.

This might be a bad moment to mention my military rank, so I said, "Good morning, General. I'm Sean Drummond with the Central Intelligence Agency. This is Special Agent Jennifer Margold, the Senior Agent in Charge for National Security from the Washington office."

We stepped forward and shook his hand. He said, with remarkable prescience, "Well, I won't say it's nice to meet you. But would you care to sit?"

A pair of Rotarian chairs were in front of his desk, and we chose to sit. Without further ado, I informed him, "We're dealing with an emergency. I'll cut to the chase. I have bad news."

He smiled grimly "Oh… I'm counting on that."

I did not smile back. "Perhaps you heard on the evening news that Merrill Benedict was murdered on the beltway. And a few minutes later, a Supreme Court justice was slain on his own doorstep."

"I heard. And the White House Chief of Staff was massacred in his house yesterday morning. The city's going nuts-I got it." He pointed at me and said, "What I don't get is what this has to do with Army

CID."

"That would be the part you didn't hear on the news-Merrill Benedict was murdered with a LAW and Phillip Fineberg with a Bouncing Betty mine, modified into a command-detonated device."

Long silence. Eventually, the general said, "Shit."

"Enough to bury everybody. Don't worry about it."

But he obviously was worried about it. "You're positive these were U.S. military munitions? Russian and French hardware often find their way inside our borders. Both countries produce weapons analogous to the LAW and the Bouncing Betty."

"Traces of Composition A5 were on Fineberg's corpse-the distinctive propellant used with Bouncing Bettys." I allowed him a brief moment to mull that, then added, "As I hope your duty officer informed you, the killers vowed to assassinate the President. So you might say we're a little concerned about how they got these weapons, and about their access to other military munitions-types, quantities, and so forth."

General Tingle was a cool customer and took this understatement in stride. He stared at me. "All right. So this is… serious. Now, tell me why you-the CIA-are involved?"

"Because there's some chance this involves foreign terrorists."

He nodded. "Time line?"

"If they're true to their word, they'll try to kill the President within the next twenty-four hours."

"You believe this is credible?"

"They just filled two morgues. Don't you?"

He turned to Colonel Johnson. "Al, how long will it take you to scrub the files?"

But before Johnson could reply, I said, "Our FBI friends already did that. We have good reason to believe the weapons were acquired within the last six months, and our other assumptions are fairly obvious. There are three cases that meet our parameters."

I read the case file numbers and dates off my palm to Colonel Johnson, who left to gather the files. Apparently reading my mind, the general ordered coffee, and an aide left to scrounge a pot from the duty officer. The general looked at me and said, "Do you have military experience, Mr. Drummond?"

"I… yes, some."

"Then let me put this in perspective. Right now, we have two wars going on, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army is shipping equipment and munitions at rates not seen since Vietnam. Visit the port at Galveston

… it's like wandering through the aisles of some military Wal-Mart. Thousands of tons of artillery shells, main gun tank rounds, track pads, and spare parts pass out of that port every month."

"Meaning we… you have security problems?" I was having a little trouble with my pronouns.

"We have a security nightmare. Three-quarters of the Army's active, reserve, and National Guard MPs are in Iraq. Nearly all the Army's logistics specialists and security specialists are there, or Afghanistan. We're outsourcing security to civilian firms. They're hiring guys off the street, paying them $8.90 an hour, and begging them not to let their cousins walk through and filch a few Ml6s."

"But these are mines and LAWs," Jennie noted.

The general nodded. "Let me be frank. We don't really know how much is getting ripped off, or lost, or misplaced. And for obvious reasons we can't halt the train to find out. Sometimes, nobody discovers anything missing until the shipping container gets to Iraq or Afghanistan and it's opened and inventoried. Sometimes the guy doing the inventory arbitrarily decides it's just a bookkeeping error. Or he's lazy and doesn't feel like doing the paperwork to report the missing item. And when it's discovered missing overseas, there's always the questions of how, where it was stolen, and when-here, en route, or over there." He paused, and then added, "So what gets detected, and what gets reported to us, and what we choose to report to the FBI, could be a fraction of what's missing."