SIXTY EIGHT.

    It had taken almost exactly an hour to figure out what had happened.

    The White House was under lockdown. No one was being allowed in or out. The President and the other principles had all been moved downstairs to the Situation Room. Jack Warch, the special agent in charge of the Presidential Detail, had originally ordered that everyone be taken to the bunker deep under the White House, but President Hayes had countermanded the order. He'd been in the bunker once before and had no desire to go back unless he absolutely had to.

    When Warch saw how serious the President was, he relented. At a minimum he asked that they relocate to the Situation Room. Hayes agreed, and the National Security Team moved downstairs where they could monitor the crisis and stay in close contact with their various departments and agencies. The heavily armed and black-clad Secret Service Counter Assault Team had taken up defensive positions around the Executive Mansion and the West Wing. Stinger surface-to-air missiles had been unsheathed and readied on the rooftop and Stage Coach, the Presidential limousine, was running and waiting on the South Grounds ready to evacuate the commander in chief from the premises if necessary.

    The men and women under Warch's command had reacted with the precision and efficiency that he expected. They'd run the drills over and over until every agent and officer knew not only their own responsibilities, but those of the people who stood next to them. Now the one-hundred-plus-person force stood primed and poised, ready for whatever would happen next. As the minutes passed they began to realize that the White House was not a target. At least not today.

    The initial reports that came into the Situation Room were that the State Department had been hit by a car bomb. Those reports were quickly proven inaccurate when Secretary of State Berg contacted her office and was told the point of the explosion was actually several blocks away on Virginia Avenue. The first real clues to the carnage were provided by a Fox TV crew that had been at the State Department doing a live shot. After recovering from the initial shock of the explosion they packed up their gear and hoofed it to the sight of the detonation.

    They were lucky enough to get to the scene before the Metropolitan Police could set up a perimeter. Fox broadcast live footage of fire crews trying to douse the flames of several twisted wrecks. The FBI and ATF. arrived twenty minutes later and had the Fox TV crew moved to the other side of the barricades with the rest of the networks and cable outlets.

    The bomb experts from the ATF. and FBI quickly ascertained the exact point of detonation and found what little was left of the vehicle that had been used as the platform. After that everything was a little confusing. There were shattered windows on both sides of the street for at least a block in each direction. Injured people streamed out of office buildings, many of them with nothing more than paper towels to stem the blood that flowed from gashes caused by flying glass. The George Washington University Medical Center, just a few blocks to the north, was inundated with patients. Fortunately only a few of them had injuries that were life threatening.

    The actual target of the bombing was not immediately obvious.

    Several cars were flipped, twisted and charred almost beyond recognition.

    Many of the buildings had received superficial damage, but none had collapsed. The true target of the attack came to light when someone from the Saudi embassy called to see if the Ambassador was still at the White House. The answer was unfortunately no. It appeared the Ambassador's staff, after seeing the footage, had tried to reach both the Ambassador and his security detail. No one was answering their phones.

    An FBI agent at the scene verified that one of the charred vehicles did in fact appear to be a limousine. It had taken the brunt of the explosion. Torn in half and flung across the street, it was now resting upside down in two pieces on the opposite sidewalk. The bodies inside the limousine were burned beyond recognition. The make of the vehicle was verified as a Mercedes with diplomatic plates. Prince Abdul Bin Aziz, the Royal Saudi Ambassador to the United States of America, was dead.

    President Hayes's range of emotions went from disbelief, to confusion, to outright anger. When Rapp entered the Situation Room for the second time the President was absolutely furious. He had been in the midst of trying to figure out what to say to the Crown Prince when CBS broke the story. The speculation began almost instantly.

    In the new twenty-four-hour news cycle it wasn't enough to just report the facts.

    Talking heads were taking to the air on every station throwing the names of terrorist organizations around like they were corporations traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So-called experts were calling into question the effectiveness of the FBI and CIA and the new department of Homeland Security was being denounced by one particularly self-righteous pundit as a monumental failure.

    During that initial media scramble to try to get a hold of the story, one lone voice caught the President's ear. A spokesman for the Palestinians wondered aloud if Israel could have been behind the assassination in an effort to delay the vote before the UN and drive a wedge between America and her greatest Arab ally. The story had struck such a chord that even Rapp paused to give it serious consideration. Both he and Kennedy shot each other quick, worried glances upon hearing the hypothesis.

    If it wasn't for the fax that Rapp held in his hand he would have been more inclined to believe Israel was behind this entire operation.

    Prime Minister Goldberg was ruthless and daring enough to launch such a plan and Ben Freidman was the perfect person to carry it out.

    If this car bomb got pinned on any one of a dozen terrorist groups the Crown Prince and the rest of the House of Saud would put their wallets away and begin cracking down on fanatics like they had never done before. The Saudi Ambassador and the Crown Prince were very close, having been raised together and schooled as if they were brothers.

    He was the perfect target, and what better place to do it than on US.

    soil.

    Several things didn't fit, however. There was this mysterious John Doe seen meeting with Prince Omar twice in the last two weeks. There was the audio recording from the Brits that had them talking about war and money, and even more interesting was the sudden appearance of this John Doe in both New York City and Washington, DC.

    All of this could be explained away as some exotic operation by Mossad to put the Palestinians on the defensive, stick their finger in the eye of the UN and drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia. In a contorted complex way Rapp could see why Freidman might launch such an operation. The suicide bombs were not stopping and in the minds of men like Goldberg and Freidman action was always better than inaction. All of that fit with one exception.

    Rapp held up the fax one more time and read it. This one piece of evidence unearthed by Dumond cast everything else they had in a different light. Rapp was about to tell Kennedy what the young hacker had discovered when a Marine Captain came up and told him he had an important phone call.