"So, are you telling me these New Zionist fruit loops are in England, too?" It was Marino who asked, and he was about to boil over.

"Not that we are aware of, but unfortunately, there are plenty of others to take their place," Wesley said.

"Well, I got an opinion." Marino looked accusingly at me. "We got a possible nuclear disaster on our hands.

Don't you think you ought to stick around?"

"That would be my preference."

The general made the salient remark, "If you help, hopefully it won't be necessary for you to stick around because there won't be anything for you to do."

"I understand that, too," I said. "No one believes in prevention more than I do."

"Can you manage it?" Wesley asked.

"My offices are already mobilizing to handle whatever happens," I said. "The other doctors know what to do. You know I'll help in any way I possibly can."

But Marino was not to be soothed. "it ain't safe." He stared at Wesley now, "You can't just go sending the doc through airports and all the hell over the place when we don't know who's out there or what they want."

"You're right, Pete," Wesley thoughtfully said. "And we're not going to do that."

Chapter 12

THAT NIGHT I WENT HOME BECAUSE I NEEDED clothes, and my passport was in the safe. I packed with nervous hands as I waited for my pager to beep. Fielding had been calling me on the hour to hear updates and air his concerns. The bodies at Old Point remained where the gunmen had left them, as best we knew, and we had no idea how many of the plant's workers remained imprisoned inside.

I slept restlessly under the watch of a police car parked on my street, and I sat up when the alarm clock startled me awake at five A.m. An hour and a half later, a Learjet awaited me at the Millionaire Terminal in Henrico County, where the area's wealthiest businessmen parked their helicopters and corporate planes. Wesley and I were polite but guarded as we greeted each other, and I was having trouble believing we were about to fly overseas together. But it had been planned that he would visit the embassy before it was suggested that I should go to London, too, and General Sessions did not know about our history. Or at least this was how I chose to view a situation that was out of my hands.

"I'm not sure I trust your motives," I said to Wesley as the jet took off like a race car with wings. "And what about this?" I looked around. "Since when does the Bureau use Learjets, or did the Pentagon arrange this, too?"

"We use whatever we need," he said. "CP amp;L has made available any resource it has to help us resolve this crisis. The Learjet belongs to them."

The white jet was sleek, with burlwood and teal green leather seats, but it was loud, so we could not speak softly.

"You don't have to worry about using something of theirs?" I said.

"They're just as unhappy about all this as we are. As far as we know, with the exception of one or two bad apples, CP amp;L is blameless. In fact, it and its employees are clearly the most profoundly victimized."

He stared ahead at the cockpit and its two well-built pilots dressed in suits. "Besides, the pilots are HRT,- he added. "And we checked every nut and bolt of this thing before we took off. Don't worry. As for my going with you-he looked at me-"I'll say it again. What happens now is operational. The ball has been passed to FIRT. I will be needed when terrorists begin to communicate with us, when we can at least identify them. But I don't think that will be for several days."

"How can you possibly know that?" I poured coffee.

He took the cup from my hand and our fingers brushed.

"I know because they're busy. They want those assemblies, and there are only so many they can get per day."

"Have the reactors been shut down?"

"According to the power company, the terrorists shut down the reactors immediately after storming the plant. So they know what they want, and they are down to business."

"And there are twenty of them."

"That's approximately how many went in for their a] leged seminar in the mock control room. But we really can't be sure how many are there now."

"This tour," I said, "when was it scheduled?"

"The power company said it was originally scheduled in early December for the end of February."

"Then they moved it up." I wasn't surprised in light of what had happened lately.

"Yes," he said. "It was suddenly rescheduled a couple of days before Eddings was killed."

"it sounds like they're desperate, Benton."

"And probably more reckless and not as prepared," he said. "And that's better and worse for us."

"And what about hostages? Is it likely they will let all of them go, based on your experience?"

"I don't know about all of them," he said, staring out the window, his face grim in soft side lights.

"Lord," I said, "if they try to get the fuel out, we could have a national disaster on our hands. And I don't see how they think they can pull this off. Those assemblies probably weigh several tons each and are so radioactive they could cause instant death if you got close. And how will they get them away from Old Point?"

"The plant's surrounded by water for purposes of cooling the reactors. And nearby, on the James, we're watching a barge we believe belongs to them."

I remembered Marino telling me of barges delivering large crates to the New Zionist compound, and I said, "Can we take it?"

"No. We can't take barges, submarines, nothing right now. Not until we can get those hostages out." He sipped coffee, and the horizon was turning a pale gold.

"Then the best-case scenario is they will take what they want and leave without killing anybody else," I supposed, although I did not think this could happen.

"No. The best-case scenario is we stop them there." He looked at me. "We don't want a barge full of highly radioactive material on Virginia's rivers or out at sea. What are we going to do, threaten to sink it? Besides, my guess is they'll take hostages with them." He paused. "Eventually, they'll shoot them all."

I could not help but imagine those poor people now as fright shocked every nerve cell every moment they breathed. I knew about the physical and mental manifestations of fear, and the images were searing and I seethed inside. I felt a wave of hatred for these men who called themselves the New Zionists, and I clenched my fists.

Wesley looked down at my white knuckles on the armrests, and thought I was afraid of flying. "It's only a few more minutes," he said. "We're starting our descent."

We landed at Kennedy, and a shuttle waited for us on the tarmac. It was driven by two more fit men in suits, and I did not ask Wesley about them because I already knew.

One of them walked us inside the terminal to British Airways, which had been kind enough to cooperate with the Bureau, or maybe it was the Pentagon, by making two seats available on their next Concorde flight to London. At the counter, we discreetly showed our credentials and said we had not packed guns. The agent assigned to keep us safe walked with us to the lounge, and when I looked for him next, he was perusing stacks of foreign newspapers.

Wesley and I found seats before expansive windows looking out over the tarmac where the supersonic plane waited like a giant white heron being fed fuel through a thick hose attached to its side. The Concorde looked more like a rocket than any commercial craft I had seen, and it appeared that most of its passengers were no longer capable of being impressed by it or much of anything. They served themselves pastries and fruit, and some were already mixing Bloody Marys and mimosas.

Wesley and I talked little and constantly scanned the crowd as we held up newspapers like every other proverbial spy or fugitive on the run. I could tell that Middle Easterners, in particular, caught his eye, while I was more wary of people who looked like us, for I remembered Joel Hand that day I had faced him in court and had found him attractive and genteel. If he sat next to me right now and I did not know him, I would have thought he belonged in this lounge more than we.