Germ

He was convinced the face on the pipe changed ever so subtly, even if only in his mind's eye, to help guide him. When he was having doubts, God gave him a look of strength, of encouragement; when he was righteously angry, God scowled at the offender with him. Now God was saying, Take care of this, Kendrick. It's why I gave you so much strength, so many resources.

After a long moment he gestured, and a man in Air Force blues stepped over.

"Sir?"

"He was trying to find out if we had something on him. And he claims to have set something in motion. Send in another team. We need to locate whatever it is he's missing."

The captain walked away, his heels clicking on the hardwood floor and echoing slightly in the big, antebellum ballroom that Kendrick had converted into his command center. Leaving his home had come to require more energy than he could afford to expend. But he could not retire or die until he had tied up the one loose end that could wipe out everything he had worked for, his country, his name. He had to find Litt and eliminate him forever.

He considered calling the captain back to remind him that the last team had been sloppy, hardly the surgeon Karl had found. More like surgeons with chain saws. But he decided the method wasn't his business; he cared only about the outcome. Granted, last time the outcome stank, but he wasn't in the field. He had learned a long time ago to let the experts do their thing. Give them an objective and get out of their way.

Would innocent civilians die? Maybe. He hoped not, but he hoped even more for a way to stop Karl.

He avoided making eye contact with God.

seventeen

For a man of letters, Jeff Hunter found himself often thinking about numbers. On his mind at the moment: six. That was the average number of work-related questions or suggestions he fielded during his morning journey from the doors of the New York Times building to his desk on the third floor. More than the hellos or the great-story-yesterdays. No, what he could count on hearing was something like, "That drug dealer didn't really tell you that, did he?" or "I heard from a source that you got that detail wrong," or—the winner by a mile—"I've got a great story for you, Jeff!" Six times on average. Once, the day after his Pulitzer nomination, twenty-eight people suddenly had brilliant story ideas Jeff just had to pursue. Twenty-eight. Only a dozen had congratulated him.

Today the lobby security guard scored number one: "Hey, Mr. Hunter, that story you did on college hazings? I was wondering, my nephew—"

"Can I get back to you about that, Tom? Kinda in a hurry." He didn't slow down. To the elevators, push the button. Janet from HR evened things out: "Hi, Jeff. Are those new glasses?" Then she blew it: "If you have a minute, I thought of something you should write about. You know EQ—emotional intelligence quotient? I just heard of this test—"

As if he needed ideas.

He arrived at his cubicle, having fielded five opportunities for distraction. Not bad. But then he checked his e-mail—not part of the morning's count, but with a scoring system all its own. Forty-four new messages, even with a kick-butt spam blocker and his own kill filters that automatically deleted e-mails containing such obnoxious words as "idea," "lawyer," and George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." He tended to get a lot of messages with at least one of those nasty seven. At least he used to, prior to creating the kill filters.

One wife. Three kids. Two mortgages. A salary just over six figures.

Numbers. Maybe I should have been an accountant.

Except he loved being an investigative reporter. Corruption, greed, abuse of power—what could be better than uncovering these deeds and exposing the perpetrators? In Hunter's book, nothing.

He started sorting through the e-mails. Delete. Delete. Delete.

He came to one with the subject line, "The story of the century"— a slight twist on the usual "Story of the year!" He opened it and was surprised to find it blank. Some story. Then he noticed the attachment, something called "First_Strike.xls." A spreadsheet. Or, more likely, a virus.

"I don't think so," he said out loud and hit the delete key. He'd gone through a dozen more e-mails when he thought about the spreadsheet again. What if it really was a big story? The blank message was a deviation from the norm; most people didn't seem to know how to stop once they started typing a message to him.

He opened his trash folder, then double-clicked on "The story of the century." He checked the return address. It was an anonymous e-mail resender he recognized. He received at least a few nasty-grams a week with return addresses that were untraceable, thanks to web sites that believed in a person's right to anonymity. In his experience, anonymity over the Internet meant trouble. Then again, Deep Throat