Free State of Emergency by Sam Fisher Page B

moments of silence. Tom twirled a pen across
the fingers of his left hand.
    'Closest correlation is HYJJHHHKIO.'
    Tom dropped the pen onto the console attached to his
wheelchair.
    'Okay,' Josh sighed. 'Sybil, the third numeric cluster –
7876345256.'
    The silence was oppressive, then the computer voice rang
out. 'SELL ONE GAS.'
    'Oh, for Christ's sake!' Pete exclaimed.
    'It's alright. It's an anagram,' Josh said. 'LOS ANGELES.'
    Mark shot a glance at the cryptographer and nodded. 'So
the spooks must know something big is about to go down
in LA.'
    'Yeah, but they obviously have no idea what it is, or
clues to that information would have been imbedded in the
encoded traffic we've picked up between the agencies. You
haven't isolated any other keywords have you, Tom?'
    'No.'
    'Which means,' Josh continued, ' we have absolutely no
idea what's about to go down either.'

Part Two
ENTER THE DRAGON

20
Downtown Los Angeles
10.11 am, Pacific Standard Time (Incident time minus
9 hours, 6 minutes)
    Senator Kyle Foreman stretched his long legs as best he could
in the back of the Mercedes and watched the buildings flash
by along Pico Boulevard. The morning sun was bright in a
perfect blue sky. I could get used to this place , he thought to
himself. Flying out of JFK only four hours earlier, he had
left behind grey skies and rain. Sometimes he could barely
believe LA and New York were part of the same nation.
Whenever he flew into LAX, the City of Angels always felt
like a foreign land to him, every bit as exotic as its name.
    The car slipped into a short tunnel and he caught his
reflection in the window – high cheekbones and square
jaw, salt-and-pepper hair slicked back, large hazel eyes
that spoke of his Italian ancestry. He looked weary. He had
been working hard and it was showing. His skin was a little
saggy around the eyes and there were new wrinkles at the
corners of his mouth. He glanced down at the briefcase on
his knees and tried to focus on the job ahead, but his mind
kept wandering and it always returned to the same thing,
Sandy. He hated leaving her right now. The timing could
not have been worse. Only the night before, he had rushed
her to Mount Sinai Hospital. It was a false alarm, but her
due date was only two days away. The baby could arrive at
any time.
    He cursed his schedule. He had utter belief in his cause,
but sometimes . . . Then reason prevailed. This gig had been
booked more than eight months earlier. How could he have
known?
    Tonight's speech was to be the most important he had
made, the culmination of two years of campaigning and
dedication. He had been captivated by environmentalism
three years earlier. Looking for a new direction in his career,
he had found an immediate simpatico with what he quickly
realised was the cause of the era. Environmentalism, as he
often now said, was beyond politics.
    Kyle Foreman's critics – and there were many, from all
parts of the political spectrum – claimed that all he ever did
was preach to the converted. He knew this was untrue and
that in just two years his organisation, OneEarth, had grown
from being a group of likeminded enthusiasts to a global
campaign with over a million paid-up members. But even
he had to admit that tonight's event was partly a show for
the troops.
    He was not doing all this purely for political impact, nor
simply to enhance his profile. He sincerely believed in the
cause, and he was a man who threw himself heart and soul
into anything he felt passionate about. Now, at the age of
43, Foreman was at the top of his game, one of the most
popular and successful members of the Senate, a man tipped
to go all the way.
    His had been a remarkable ascendency. Born into a poor
family and brought up by his widowed mother in Ford
Heights, Chicago, he had been forced by necessity to fight
for absolutely everything he had achieved. Graduating from
Yale summa cum laude , he became obsessed with succeeding
as a politician because he believed politics was where