The Orion Protocol Read Online Free PDF Page A

demands access to highly classified information, the undeniable knowledge of which might well cripple his presidency and by extension the republic you are sworn to defend? And is the answer different in time of war than in a time of peace?
    At the moment, though, these were not academic questions. Whatever action he took, if Winston was perceived as withholding crucial information from the President, the knives would certainly come out. The hypocrisy was galling, of course, but politics ain’t beanbag: divulging everything about an above-top-secret project like Orion to a new Occupant who barely had his legs yet would be almost a dereliction of duty.
    “Shit,” he said, in a laconic voice loud enough to echo off the underground concrete pillars.
    Then his sober black Lincoln LS was being brought up, the Marine driver leaping out and holding the door open in one smooth athletic move. Winston nodded, sliding in behind the leather-wrapped steering wheel as the driver’s-side door was shut with a vaultlike thud, the sound of Ford Motors closing some ground on the Bavarians.
    Using a handcuff key, he detached the hardened briefcase from his wrist and locked the doors. Weathering the political wind shear he was flying into would require pitch-perfect finesse and a Teflon vest.
    With the President’s directive to tell him everything relevant to the decision about Project Orion cycling through his mind, Winston strained to detect the smallest hint of linguistic wiggle room, but without success.
    “Shit, shit, and shit.”
    This was a problem. He slid the brushed-aluminum gear selector into drive and headed up to the guardhouse exit and Pennsylvania Avenue.
    This was a serious problem.

4
    January 28/PBS Studios/Washington, D.C.
    Ensconced in a video editing suite at the Public Broadcasting building just off K Street, Angela Browning and veteran producer Miriam Kresky were busy cutting promos, eleven hours into yet another deadline-driven fourteen-hour day.
    Angela, at thirty-five and very much at the top of her game, didn’t think of herself as laboring on someone else’s clock. As science reporter, on-camera host, and cocreator of PBS’s Emmy Award–winning series Science Horizon , her work had pretty much become her life.
    On a Trinitron monitor, a video sequence showing an iceberg the size of Rhode Island breaking off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica was being played back on an Avid digital editing system. Timing the assembled edits, Angela snicked a chrome mechanical stopwatch and showed it to Miriam.
    “Works for me.”
    “With bumpers and ten seconds for the affiliates . . .”
    “Let’s cut this puppy.”
    Miriam took over on the Avid keyboard. Angela stood up out of an off-black Herman Miller chair and shook out her tensed-up hands and fingers, cracking her neck vertebrae with chiropractic precision.
    “Coffee?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    Among the media-savvy in Washington D.C., or “Hollywood for UglyPeople,” as James Carville liked to call it, Angela Browning was a beauty, though probably only a “pretty brunette” by Left Coast standards.
    BOSTON DEB WEDS WALL STREET HEIR might have been her fate had it not been for an eclectic array of high school passions: writing, acting, filmmaking, and, curiously, astronomy and physics. Armed with stellar SATs and a vivid aversion to social clichés, Angela had eschewed Cornell and Columbia for a neobohemian Vassar education. And that road less traveled had made all the difference.

    As the Krups machine in the tiny studio kitchen hissed itself awake, she shuffled over to her office, where a slumping mountain of letters and packages lay dumped on her desk.
    “Oh, God.”
    All the mail in the Capitol was routinely sanitized by Titan electron beam machines, and at her mother’s insistence, Angela still kept a Cipro prescription in her bag at all times. But fear of terrorist biotoxins was not the issue. She eyed the avalanche of snail mail: a critical mass had been