“I think you want to get a look at something that’s going on in Borneo,” said Stoner when Jed reached him at the apartment he was renting outside the city. “I’ve been looking at this all day with some of our guys”

“Borneo? 1 think maybe Fred would be better,” Jed told him, referring to a staffer who handled Southeast Asian matters.

“It may complicate that airplane deal the White House is pushing with Brunei,” said Stoner. “And you have some Dreamland people over there.”

Jed sighed. “Should I meet you at Langley?”

“I’d rather do this at your office,” said Stoner. “And I’m supposed to leave town in the morning. Pretty early.”

“Well, I’m here,” said Jed, pulling off his coat.

Stoner showed up a half-hour later. He had a day and a half’s worth of stubble on his face. Deeply tanned, he’d lost considerable weight since Jed had last seen him. If not quite gaunt, he looked more like a bleached-out castaway than a hardened former SEAL and CIA agent.

“I got an off-the-record phone call the other night from someone in Brunei,” he told Jed, starting right off without even bothering to say hello. “It didn’t make a lot of sense. So I hooked the person up with somebody there I met. And did some checking myself.”

“Okay,” said Jed, not quite following along.

“You have some satellite images from Dreamland’s deployment at Brunei. The images may include the northern part of the island, around on the eastern shore in Malaysian territory, south of Darvel Bay”

Jed turned to his computer and tapped into one of the databases. During the operations in the South China Sea, the U.S. had moved its satellites to provide extensive coverage of the region. They had also conducted surveillance with a variety of systems, gathering electronic signals and other information to compile a profile of activity. But most of the effort had been focused on China and India. America did not yet have the capability of observing every square inch of the globe twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Doing so with satellites was not only absurdly expensive but technically unfeasible given present limits in technology. Improvements were steadily being made, but the day when someone could sit in a bunker in Omaha and read license plates around the clock in Beijing—let alone a less important place like Borneo—was still a good way off.

Jed paged through some images, which had been filed as part of a routine series covering the Whiplash deployment. Borneo was a large island shared by three different countries. Brunei territory formed a misshapen W on the northern coast. Sabah, the Malaysian province on the northern part of the island, wrapped itself around Brunei. Below it was the Indonesian territory, Kalimantan.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“Piece of road that could be used as an airstrip. About three thousand meters.”

Jed hunted through the images, which mostly showed desolate rock or impenetrable jungle. “This?” he said finally, pointing at what looked like a thickened pencil line near Rataugktan.

“Compare that to an image a year ago,” said Stoner.

The only picture Jed could find was from two years before. The road seemed narrower and ended in a T, which no longer seemed to be there.

“What I think they did was widen and flatten a road that was there, making it into more of a highway. The photo interpreter I talked to says the concrete is pretty new,” said Stoner. “And that what looks like a gully on the northern end there is actually painted on. It’s fairly clever, and if you weren’t looking for it, you might not catch it.”

“So what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “But if you can tap into the Russian network and look at their archives, there are two photos that show aircraft on the strip. I came across it by accident when your person called. They were looking for a way to get an image of the island, and I knew someone who would have access to the mirror site that the Greenpeace hackers set up when they broke in a few months ago.”

“Someone?” asked Jed.

“Just someone,” said Stoner. “Private guy. Thrives on information. He probably can get into the Russian system on his own, but I didn’t ask.”

Jed couldn’t get into either the Russian or Greenpeace systems from his computer, since doing so would potentially leave a trail and therefore represent a security breach. He could have any of a number of people do it for him, however.

“What sort of planes?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Stoner. “The interpreter thought they were Sukhois.”

“Breanna Stockard reported that the Brunei air force encountered Sukhois,” said Jed.

“Two plus two,” Stoner deadpanned.

“I could see having a base for counter insurgency there,” said Jed. “The guerillas are operating throughout that entire area. But why would you put interceptors there? Those are pretty useless against terrorists.”

“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “There was a ship that was blown up, right?”

“They’re still investigating. No one thinks it was sunk by a plane.”

“Maybe no one’s right, then,” said Stoner.

Jed turned back to his computer, tapping into SpyNet—the informal name for the intelligence community’s intranet featuring briefings and information from around the world. The CIA was tentatively agreeing with the unofficial Brunei assessment—a terrorist bomb had been planted in the ship.

“This your assessment?” Jed asked.

“No”

“You agree with it?”

Stoner said nothing. Obviously he didn’t, Jed realized—that was his whole point in coming over.

“What about a submarine?” asked Jed.

“Australians keep track of the Malaysian subs, as do the Chinese,” said Stoner. “Very unlikely.”

“Okay,” said Jed. “But why would the Malaysians want to attack a Brunei ship?”

“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “Maybe they’re trying to help the guerillas.”

“Are you still working on this?”

“I’m not working on anything at all,” said Stoner. “I’m being parked.”

“Parked where?”

Stoner made a face that was halfway between a grimace and a smile. “I’m going to be an adjunct history professor at a college up in Poughkeepsie.”

Jed listened as Stoner explained that his supervisors had decided, for his own good, to give him a kind of working vacation, arranging for him to go to the college as part of procedure to build a cover for a future mission. Or at least, that was the story they told him. The reality, as both Jed and Stoner knew without it being laid out, was that the CIA powers had lost confidence in Stoner for some reason, or more likely were preparing to lay the blame for certain agency failures on him. Stoner had been in charge of developing information about several Indian weapons, and had in fact been in the middle of doing that when he nearly got killed from the fallout. At the same time, his section had missed the development of two small tactical nuclear weapons and their delivery system by a private company in Taiwan. It looked to Stoner like the skids were being greased for him to tacitly take the fall. He’d never be accused of screwing up; people would just know he was “parked” and assume the worst.

“Maybe I’m just paranoid,” he said.

“You want to teach history?” asked Jed.

Stoner shrugged.

“Why don’t you come work for us?”

“Let me think about it,” said Stoner. He got up. “Sorry, but I got to work on a lesson plan. I missed the first couple of weeks of class.”

Brunei International Airport, military area, Megafortress hangar

9 October 1997, 1311

Breanna had just finished running through the last simulated flight session of the day when one of the air force liaison officers poked his head up onto the Jersey’s flightdeck.

“Madame Captain,” said the man, “a Mr. Jed Barclay wishes to speak to you without delay.”