Dragon (Dirk Pitt 10)

Pitt leaned over the back of his chair and fixed Kern with a dry stare. "Why bother?"

"What do you mean?"

"I see no need to panic."

"The President must be alerted. We're not only looking at the threat of nuclear blackmail but political ransom for Diaz and Smith. Suma can drop the axe any moment.

"No he won't. Not yet anyway."

"How do you know?" Kern demanded.

"Something is holding Suma back. He's got a fleet of those bomb cars hidden away. All he needs is one driving the streets of Manhattan or Los Angeles to put the fear of God into the White House and the American public. He's literally got the government by the scrotum. But what does he do? He plays petty kidnapper. No, I'm sorry. Something's not going down the right chute. Suma isn't ready for prime time. I say he's stalling."

"I think Dirk has a case," said Mancuso. "It's possible Suma's agents smuggled the bomb cars into position before they could bring the detonation command on line."

"It fits," Sandecker concurred. "We might still have time to send in a new team to find and neutralize it."

"At the moment everything hinges on Hanamura." Kern hesitated apprehensively. "We can only hope he's unearthed the Dragon Center. But we also have to consider the very real possibility he's either dead or captured by Suma's security force."

They went quiet as the Virginia countryside rolled past the windows of the bus. The leaves on the trees gleamed gold under the fall sun. Few people walking beside the road paid any attention to the passing bus. If any had seen the charter sign above the driver's windshield, they'd have simply thought it was a group of vacationers touring Civil War battlefields.

At last Sandecker spoke the thought that was on all their minds "If only we knew what thread Jim Hanamura was unraveling."

At that moment, halfway across the world, Jim Hanamura would have given his new Corvette and his Redondo Beach bachelor pad's state-of-the-art sound system to trade places with any man on that bus in Virginia.

The cold night rain soaked his clothes and skin as he lay covered by mud and rotting leaves in a drainage ditch. The police and the uniformed security force that were hunting him had canvassed the area and moved on ten minutes earlier, but he lay there in the slime trying to rest and formulate a plan of action. He painfully rolled over on his good elbow and peered up and across the road. The only sign of movement was a man in the garage of a small house who was bent under the open hood of a small delivery truck.

He dropped back in the ditch and passed out for the third time since being shot during his escape from Edo City. When Hanamura regained consciousness, he wondered how long he had been out. He held up his right wrist, but the watch had stopped, broken when he wrecked his car. It couldn't have been very long, however, because the driver of the delivery truck was still tinkering with its engine.

The three slugs from the security guards' automatic rifles had caught him in the left arm and shoulder. It was one of those flukes, a thousand-to-one unforeseen incident that catches a professional operative from a blind side.

His plans had been precise and exactingly executed. He'd forged the security clearance pass of one of Suma's chief structural engineers by the name of Jiro Miyaza, who closely resembled Hanamura in face and body.

Entering Edo City and walking through the checkpoints leading to the design and construction department had been a piece of cake. None of the guards saw anything suspicious about a man who returned to his office after hours and worked on past midnight. All Japanese men put in long hours, seldom working a normal eight-hour day.

The inspection was loose, yet tighter than what it takes to walk into the Pentagon Building in Washington. The guards nodded to Hanamura and watched as he slipped his pass card into the electronic identity computer. The correct buzz sounded, a video camera's light flashed green, and the guards waved him through, satisfied that Hanamura was cleared to enter that section of the building. With so many people passing in and out all hours of the day and night, they failed to recall that the man Hanamura was impersonating had only left for home a few minutes previously.

Hanamura tossed three offices in an hour and a half before he struck pay dirt. In the rear of a drawer of a draftsman's table he found a rolled cylinder of rough sketches of a secret installation. The sketches should have been destroyed. He could only assume the draftsman had neglected to drop them in a nearby shredder. He took his time, ran the drawings through a copy machine, inserted them in an envelope, and put the originals back in the drawer exactly as he found them. The envelope he curled and taped to the calf of one leg.

Once he passed the guards on the way out, Hanamura thought he was home free. He walked out into the vast atrium and waited his turn to take an elevator that opened on a pedestrian tunnel leading to the parking level where he'd left his Murmoto four-wheel-drive pickup truck. There were twenty people packed in the enclosure, and Hanamura had the misfortune of having to stand in the front row. When the doors opened on his parking level, fate dealt him a bad hand.

Pushed ahead by the crowd behind him, Hanamura stepped right into Jiro Miyaza.

The engineer, whose identity Hanamura borrowed, had exited the adjacent elevator with his wife and two children. They were headed for the same parking level for an evening drive aboveground.

Inexplicably, Miyaza's eyes were drawn to the clearance pass clipped to Hanamura's pocket.

For a moment he simply stared, then his eyes widened and he looked into Hanamura's face with disbelieving eyes.

"What are you doing with my pass?" he demanded indignantly.

"Internal security," Hanamura answered calmly with an air of authority. "We're examining security areas to see if the guards are alert and pick us out. I happened to be issued your name and ID number."

"My brother is assistant head of security. He never mentioned such an inspection to me."

"We don't advertise," Hanamura said, glaring at Miyaza, who refused to back down.