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registration.”
    “Me neither.”
    “You can disguise a ship in a lot of ways, but there’s one thing you can’t hide: the engine serial numbers. They’re stamped everywhere. Here’s the rub, though: The FBI will eventually find the numbers and eventually the info will trickle down to us—”
    Lambert grinned. “I hate the word eventually.”
    In this case, “eventually” could mean weeks of bureaucratic wrangling. Fisher returned Lambert’s smile. “Me too.”
    Fisher had known Lambert for nearly twenty years, having first worked with him in the Army’s Delta Force, then again as they were both tapped for an experimental program that took special ops soldiers from each branch of the military and transferred them to counterpart units. Rangers went to Delta; Delta went to Marine Force Recon; and in Fisher and Lambert’s case, Delta went to the U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare Sea-Air-Land unit—the SEALs. The idea was to create operators of the highest caliber, trained to be the elite of the military’s special forces community.
    Lambert said, “As luck would have it, I’ve already had this discussion with the President. The FBI’s taking the lead on the case, but we’ve been cleared to conduct our own parallel investigation—separate from the FBI.”
    Fisher understood the order. While he loathed politics in general and did his best to stay out of it, he knew what was driving the President’s caution: the war in Iraq. Someone had just launched an attack on the U.S. that could have killed thousands of people and rendered a section of the Virginia shoreline radioactive for decades, perhaps centuries. So far, the only suspect was a lone man of Middle Eastern descent aboard the Trego . If America was headed toward another war in the Middle East, the President didn’t want another intelligence fiasco. America had just started rebuilding the credibility it had lost over Iraq. It would be Third Echelon’s job to make doubly sure all t’s were crossed and i’s were dotted.
    “Restrictions?” Fisher asked.
    “None,” Lambert replied. “We do it our way; gloves off.”
    “The only way to fly.”
    “Amen. Now, go get some sleep. Tomorrow night, you’re breaking into a U.S. naval base.”
     
     
     
    FISHER lived outside Germantown, Maryland, about thirty minutes northwest of Washington, in a small farmhouse surrounded by two acres of red maple and pine. He’d tried living a normal bachelor life: a townhouse, socializing with neighbors, sitting around the pool. . . . But he’d quickly admitted what he already knew in the back of his mind: He wasn’t much of a people person. Not that he disliked people per se, but he had a limited tolerance for most of them.
    It was a hazard that came with the job. Dealing with the worst of men in the worst of situations tended to change you. Living in the condo, Fisher had found himself mentally dissecting both his neighbors and his surroundings: threat or no threat; likely ambush sites; clear lines of fire. . . . Living on the razor’s edge, while often exciting, was also all-consuming. You didn’t survive long in special operations without fully immersing yourself in that world. Not having a home where he could let down his guard and decompress had gotten very old, very quickly.
    At the farmhouse, his closest neighbor was half a mile away. He could sit on his porch at night and hear nothing but the hum of the cicadas and the croaking of frogs. Surprisingly, he’d found the land itself therapeutic. He’d bought the property at a deep discount from an owner who’d allowed it to fall into disrepair, so he spent much of his time working at taming the landscaping or restoring the farmhouse, which needed new everything, from windows to shingles to plumbing. Fisher took comfort in the work—in the ordinariness of it all. Even the briefest of layovers at the farmhouse between missions helped recharge his batteries.
    By the time he got home it was near dawn. He threw in