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off even one penny of what the Department of Defense wanted, because in the end they would be cutting off their own funding as well.
    This mission today was the last shot. It would be his last time in the Strategic Simulations Center. Détente and a weakened Russia wounded the brand of weapons research Parnes and his team worked on so diligently. The ratification of the SALT II Treaty delivered the coup de grâce. The Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty had limited his career and those of his team. Tomorrow he would awake and be without a job, without an office in the E-ring, without a parking spot, budget, and research team. He would have nothing but the severance from his contract. Not that this in itself mattered. He did not have to work another day in his life, or Archimedes’ nine.
    Later that day, exactly two-and-a-half years before the building exploded in Westchester County, at a small, melancholy celebration in the Parnes’s home, the twenty-two members of the Nuclear Research Team gathered for the last time.
    The TV was on in the den where the last few hangers-on and Parnes settled in for a cognac-and-cigar nightcap. It was the opening of the Democratic National Convention. The televised coverage eventually turned the chatter in the room briefly to the election. The general reaction was ambivalence; the opinion shared around the room was that there was no real choice for president being offered to America. Benyru Macordal, the team’s lead mathematician, pointed out that the two most exciting candidates, the ex-fighter pilot James Mitchell and the wiry freshman senator from Wyoming, were the ones who were gaining popularity. But they had their brief moment in the limelight summarily snuffed out by their respective parties’ political machines.
    “Do you think we will ever work on a project again, Professor?” the youngest of the team inquired. Parnes, already lost in thought, fixed his eyes on the flickering images of the convention. Maybe there was a way to leverage a little something he always thought about experimenting with. The interstitial rates would certainly be fast enough, and the architecture would be very simple.
    The television report switched to James Mitchell’s campaign manager. The type at the bottom of the screen identified him as former governor Ray Reynolds, but Parnes knew him on sight. Reynolds was the driving force behind Mitchell’s third-party attempt. Yes , Parnes thought, very doable.
    And the professor now knew exactly who would be interested in funding this new research.

CHAPTER THREE
    Spin
    IT HAD BEEN TWO YEARS since the election and nine hours since the horrific blast in Westchester as dawn broke over the nation’s capital. The buffeting rotor noise of the WJLA News Chopper 7 shattered the calm of the new day as it patrolled the beltway, its reporter scanning the roadway for early signs of the inevitable traffic tie-ups. To his right, the sun rose behind the Washington Monument. A quick look over his left shoulder revealed the first rays of early light washing over the front portico of the White House. This was as close as any aircraft had ever dared come since the attack on the Pentagon, the obvious exception being Marine One, the president’s private helicopter. The pilot pushed his steering collective control left, veering away from the White House and its Patriot surface-to-air battery missiles that kill you first and ask questions later.
    What the reporter/pilot could not see was the heavy traffic going on inside the mansion. Aides hurriedly passed the bronze busts of former presidents and antique Early American furniture that resided there since America was “early.”
    One of the aides, Cheryl Burston, waited at the door of a small office, fingering the edge of a manila folder, not wanting to disturb the conversation between the two men within. One of the individuals was her sixty-year-old boss, Chief of Staff Ray Reynolds. She learned from Ray that a president was