Eagle Station

Originally built in the late nineteenth century to house the Departments of State, War, and the Navy, the seven-story Eisenhower Executive Office Building had long since outgrown its original tenants. Since it was located immediately adjacent to the White House, its offices were now occupied primarily by the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, and other aides working directly for the president and his senior staff. The building’s ornate French Second Empire — style façade and its green slate and copper roof stood in stark contrast to the rest of Washington, D.C.’s federal buildings, which were either elegant neoclassical structures or ugly concrete monstrosities.

Apart from the vice president’s ceremonial office and other elegantly appointed chambers used for formal occasions — like the Indian Treaty Room, where the United Nations charter had been signed in 1945—most of the building’s more than five hundred rooms were assigned as ordinary office space. There were, however, a handful of larger conference rooms reserved for occasional interagency meetings.

Inside one of those rooms, Brad McLanahan and Nadia Rozek-McLanahan now sat side by side at a large oval table. Around them were more than two dozen men and women — all of them middle-ranked executives from NASA, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and an alphabet soup of other federal agencies. Officially known as the Sino-Russian Space Alliance Analysis Working Group, these people had been meeting daily to coordinate the federal government’s assessment of recent events in lunar orbit. At President Farrell’s insistence, Brad and Nadia, as representatives of Sky Masters and Scion, had been allowed to participate in this afternoon’s session.

But two hours into the meeting, Brad was beginning to think this would be more accurately labeled a “nonworking group.” Most of the officials crowding this room seemed to have been picked for their ability to speak eruditely and at length, without actually committing their agencies to any firm position. And while none of them were openly impolite, it was obvious that they saw him and Nadia as unwelcome outsiders shoehorned in by a president who didn’t fully appreciate how the permanent government was supposed to function.

Noting Nadia’s tight-lipped mouth, Brad knew she’d already given up on these people. She was probably right. This group of bureaucrats seemed determined to remain undecided. Still, he decided to try again to shake some kind of action plan loose. He leaned forward, wishing for the hundredth time that he could get up and pace around the room to burn off some energy. Sitting on his ass while other people droned on and on for hours had never been on his list of “things Brad McLanahan is good at.”

He held up his hand, interrupting someone from the CIA who was assuring everyone that her agency would keep them in the loop if any new intelligence materialized. That was a promise Brad was pretty sure he’d already heard the same woman make at least twice in the past two hours. “Excuse me?”

“Yes, Mr. McLanahan?” the Working Group’s chairman said, raising a finely sculpted eyebrow. Adrian Yates was an executive in NASA’s Office of International and Interagency Relations.

“Between Sky Masters and Scion and all of your organizations, we’ve already checked and rechecked every piece of data gathered since the first two Chinese Yuanzheng boosters headed for the moon,” Brad pointed out. “Going over and over what’s already known isn’t going to get us any further. It might be smarter to focus on aspects of this supposedly unmanned lunar mission that don’t make any real sense.”

Yates frowned. “Such as?”

“Well, for starters, why did the Russians and Chinese keep that Federation 2 command module in Earth orbit for more than twenty-four hours after its return from the moon?” Brad suggested.

The NASA executive shrugged. “I fail to see that as some sort of deep dark mystery, Mr. McLanahan,” he said. “I assume Moscow and Beijing were conducting additional systems tests on a brand-new spacecraft that had just completed a prolonged circumlunar flight. That would be sensible policy, after all.”

“Maybe so,” Brad agreed, not hiding his own skepticism. “But that delay also meant we didn’t have any satellites in position to observe the command module’s reentry. Or its landing on Russian territory. What if that was deliberate?”

Yates sighed. “Are you still suggesting the Sino-Russian Pilgrim 1 mission might have been manned?”

Brad nodded. “It’s a possibility.”