"I see you got your personal invitation," I said as I sat down beside Monnie. "Welcome to the party."

"Oh, I wouldn't miss this. It's like sci-fi, or something. It's so weird, Alex."

"Yeah, it's all of that."

On the screen at the front of the room was the special agent in charge from the Las Vegas field office. The SAC was reporting in about the mobile crime lab that had been set up inside the town limits of what had been Sunrise Valley. She didn't have much new, though, and the meeting quickly moved on to threat assessment.

This was where everything got a lot more interesting.

First, there was a discussion of domestic terrorist groups such as the National Alliance and the Aryan Nations. But nobody really believed those simpletons could be responsible for something as well planned as this. Next up was the latest on al Qaeda and Hezbollah, the radical jihad movement. These groups received a solid couple of hours of heated discussion. They were definitely suspects. Then formal assignments were given out by Manning.

I didn't get an assignment, which made me wonder if I would be hearing from Director Burns soon. I didn't particularly want to hear from him on this one. I didn't want to travel out of Washington again, especially back to Nevada.

And then it got really wild.

Every pager in the conference room went off simultaneously!

Within seconds, everybody had checked his pager, myself included. For the past several months all terror threats got flashed to senior agents, whether it was a suspicious package on a New York subway or an anthrax threat in L.A.

The message on my pager read:

TWO SURFACE-TO-AIR MISSILES MISSING AT KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE IN ALBUQUERQUE.

CONNECTION TO SUNRISE VALLEY SITUATION BEING INVESTIGATED.

WILL KEEP INFORMED.