Chapter One

Chapter One


Friday, 2:00 P.M.-Langley, Virginia

Alejandro Campos slowed the black Mercedes to a crawl, and carefully negotiated a serpentine series of heavy gray concrete pylons leading up to the security checkpoint at the entrance to CIA Headquarters. The positioning of the barricades looked haphazard.

It wasn't.

NASA's astrodynamics lab in Huntington had designed the maze. At four miles an hour or less, traffic flowed smoothly through the pattern. Anything over four mph guaranteed smashing a quarter panel against a pylon at an angle guaranteed to put a vehicle broadside to a guaranteed line of fire from the armored guard station at the end of the serpentine.

The CIA liked their guarantees.

They liked them double-downed hard.

Peeling a couple more antacids off the roll he'd been working since Dulles, Campos gave the mirrored third-story windows in the main building a quick visual once-over. Behind the windows was another NASA-designed product, an array of computer-directed weaponry with a broad range of capabilities, from putting a bullet neatly through a single driver's eyeball to turning an armored vehicle into a smoking tangle of twisted metal, or doing anything in between, depending on the perceived threat level. In terms of firepower, the imposing guard station at street level was mostly for show, but it was a damned convincing show.

When he reached the last of the pylons, he pulled the Mercedes to a stop, popped the antacids in his mouth, and shoved the rest of the half-eaten roll back in his pocket.

Yeah, it was good to see the old place.

Sure it was.

The security officer at the checkpoint was hard