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that was sent up from the NSA and forwarded it a very short physical distance, to the center of this very building.
    Something was about to happen. The message was time-stamped 7:45 a.m. today. Whatever it was, Sword One would start at 11:45. He had done his job; let those down the hall in the Oval Office complex figure out what was next.

CHAPTER THREE

    11:10 a.m., near Portland, Maine  
    Shelly was down for her morning nap, thank God. Wendy had been such an easy child, Kathy thought as she carefully closed the door to the nursery, or was it that she was now thirty-seven and no longer a new wide-eyed mom of twenty-five and still fascinated by every single thing her darling did?
    The news was on in the kitchen. More about the shooting in Syracuse. A video surveillance tape had just been released; the police alerted this morning by a hotel manager, who, seeing the gunman's image from the school’s security camera had scrolled his own tape back and come up with a frightening match. The camera in the hotel was of the man leaving a back exit and it was time-stamped only twenty minutes before the killings at the school. But what was far more disturbing now was the fact that less than thirty minutes after the incident hit the news in Syracuse, five men, obviously Middle Eastern, had walked out the back door of the same hotel, gotten into a single car, and disappeared. One of them had shared the room with the gunman.  
    All schools in Syracuse were closed for the day and the city resembled Boston after the bombing of the marathon race, going into a full lockdown with every local and county officer in a manhunt along with a national guard military police unit being called in as well as federal officials. The hotel video provided at least a black and white image of the car that the other five had left in, but no license plate number. Syracuse was in a state of panic. An impromptu rally of angry parents was ramping up in front of one of the closed schools, denouncing the school system for inadequate security due to the failure to provide new security locks on classroom doors that would bolt the doors shut. A parent speaking for the group, demanding the new bullet proof steel security doors, was standing outside the glass window of the typical one story middle school building that stretched for a hundred yards.
    The fact that the lone shooter was stopped in the first minute of his attack by an off-duty police officer who had come to the school early to pick up his son who was ill, did draw some notice and comment and the officer was posthumously hailed as a hero. No one had noted nor emphasized the point that it was an armed parent, already in the school parking lot, who by lucky chance was there to stop the tragedy from becoming far worse.
    Kathy finally launched into loading up the dishwasher while the news shifted to the death of some reality show star. Disgusted, she clicked the volume down and logged onto her Facebook page to upload photos of Shelly’s first birthday party from the weekend. Why was it the kid just loved to smear food, especially anything with chocolate, all over her face and hair and then just sit there laughing as she and Bob groaned with disgust? Cute photos though.
    Some new posts were there: friends from college and her own teaching days were discussing the incident in Syracuse. When Bob had told her of his decision several years ago to ignore all the rules and carry a concealed weapon, they had agreed it was wise to avoid any comment whatsoever on the issue on any social media and in any conversation that stood the remotest chance of being overheard, especially by Wendy who had the typical loud mouth of a twelve-year-old. One never knew when the bounce back might hit. A post could be reposted in self-righteous angst about protecting “our children,” and then forwarded to Bob’s principal with the demand that he be “checked out.”  
    The usual argument was raging between her friends. Mary Browning,