HE HIGH-RISE ALONG the dulles High-Tech Corridor was mostly dark. One firm, Pender & Associates, owned the entire building, having paid eight figures in cash to buy an office tower smack in the middle of some of the priciest dirt in the country. And even though it was called Pender & Associates, the firm was run by one man, its founder, Richard “Dick” Pender.

He possessed a face that was as chiseled, a grin that was as toothy, and hair that was as perfectly primped as any gospel-spouting televangelist. He had the silky smooth delivery of a trial lawyer in his polished prime. And he would continue to smile while the knife he held repeatedly connected with your spine.

His motto was simple: Why waste time trying to discover the truth, when you can so easily create it?

Pender’s line of work was called perception management. PM firms, as they are known, were paid to establish what was true or not, all over the globe. Some traditional lobbying firms considered themselves to be PM firms but they really weren’t. There were only a very few pure PM players and Pender & Associates was one of the best in the world.

Dick Pender could bury any secret, despite the attempts of the press to ferret it out. He had also, on occasion, started or enhanced wars based on certain truths. And when people started poking around, he had hidden those reasons under such bewildering layers of facts, figures, and falsehoods that no one could ever reach them. Yet mostly he was retained to create the truth.

He was paid enormous amounts of money to do this, both from government and private sources all over the world. For his clients, creating the truth was critical because real truth was too unpredictable. Created truth was controllable. And thus the difference between the real and the created was the difference between a bomb and an A-bomb in its effectiveness.

Pender had a special visitor coming tonight. The private elevator took his guest up to the top floor. A door was opened, and Nicolas Creel, wearing a black-hooded coat, was ushered into a room that was dominated by a large one-way glass window allowing the defense contracting magnate to see into the high-tech, digitized war room of Pender & Associates.

Pender sat down next to him. “I trust the flight was good, Mr. Creel.”

“I have no idea. I slept the whole way.”

“Someone mentioned to me that you’d cracked the top fifteen on the Forbes List.”

“That’s right,” Creel acknowledged in a clearly disinterested tone.

“Eighteen billion dollars?” Pender estimated.

“Actually twenty-one.”

“Congratulations.”

“For what? When I passed my first billion, what did it really matter? It’s not as though another twenty billion has greatly altered my lifestyle. Let’s hear the report.”

Pender pointed to the one-way glass where dozens of people were working hard. “We’ve devoted our entire war room to the effort. Thirty people, hundreds of computers, enormous databases, and an Internet pipeline that rivals anything Google has.”

“And you’re absolutely certain there can be no trace back here?”

“We took the most extraordinary security measures, including stealing the electronic identity of hundreds of Web sites and Internet portals. So if someone tries to trace it back to its origin the electronic tunnel will lead them directly to, say, the official Vatican Web site, or the Red Cross site. We also included our own site in the mix along with several of our competitors.”

“So if someone does track it back to you, you can just claim identity theft?”

“Why try to hide the needle in the haystack, when you can just make lots of needles?” Pender replied smugly.

“Your people?”

“Extremely well paid and dedicated to me. They have no idea of your, um, interest in this matter. Not that they would care, actually. We do not employ conscience here. We do not worry about the consequences of our work. That’s for the client to do.”

“Refreshing attitude. And the initial impact has been all that we hoped it would be.”

“A bit more sophisticated than stories about brutal foreign invaders tearing desert babies from incubators in order to make certain countries enter a war,” Pender said quietly, but with a superior smile. “But then you picked well, Mr. Creel. All we had to do was get the ball rolling and everyone jumped on.”

“The Bear is an easy target. Where’d you get the thousands of Russian dead?”

“Basically Photoshop stuff cranked up several levels. But we worked in some real victims that we got from old KGB files we bought years ago. You have five authentic dead bodies everyone assumes the other thirty-two thousand are legit as well.”

“Prescient of you.”

“That’s my business. I can visualize the aneurysm slowly building in President Gorshkov’s brain. Let me see, we’ve had the ‘gripper’ strategy, then the ‘Vesuvius’ tactic.” He gestured at Creel. “You’re arranging for the leak. Correct?”

“Yes. But forward to me anything that comes across your desk that looks promising. I’ll follow it up from there.”

“Not that your motivation concerns me in the least, but I did read that Ares has missed its quarterly projections four times in a row now.”

“Tip of the iceberg. We’re positively hemorrhaging money. I was convinced Iraq was the beginning of Armageddon in the Middle East and we ramped up for it. But a few months of shock and awe was followed by a years-long pissing contest using basically popguns. I didn’t build a $150 billion company to have my people sling potato salad in Anbar for soldier boys. It was a monumental cock-up and the responsibility rests with me. But I’ll get us out of it. That’s why I hired you. I have my people to take care of.”

“Of course you do,” Pender agreed demurely. “And we have celebrity interest too. They’ll throw on a ‘Remember Konstantin’ T-shirt which we’ll provide, plug their new movie, raise a fist to ‘Free Russia.’ And maybe even go to Washington and get star-screwed by assorted politicians.”

“Any problem areas?”

“Three.” Pender checked his computer screen. “There will be 148 feature stories running on the Red Menace across the globe in the next week or so. All but two follow our take to the letter. One in Spain. One in New York. The fellow in Spain is particularly tenacious, but he’s also been working for two years on a scandal involving the royal family. Tomorrow he will receive documents that will rekindle his interest in that story.”

“And the fellow in New York?”

“His wife has suspected for some time now that her husband is being unfaithful to her. Tomorrow she will also get a present that will show her instincts were right. That will take her hubby out of the game completely. Divorces can be so messy and time-consuming. I speak from experience, unfortunately.”

“You just had these things lying around?”

“I have files on virtually every journalist worth a damn. We collect secrets, craft half-lies, and anonymously release those items when it best serves our clients.”

“You said there were three problem areas?”

“Senator here in the States who fancies himself an expert on Russian affairs. Word is he plans to call for hearings on the matter using a very skeptical prism.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Next time he steps into a public men’s room we’re going to Larry Craig him.”

“So Senator Craig was set up?”

“Who knows? Who cares? But it’ll take this senator right off our backs.”

“And what do you call that tactic?”

“The ‘I’m screwed’ maneuver,” Pender said smiling.

“An apt name.”

“I actually prefer a more subtle approach where the target doesn’t event realize what’s happened. You recall reporters were embedded with troops in Iraq?”

“So they could see the war firsthand?”

“No, so they could be told the story only from the point of view of the Pentagon. That was my idea, and every general and administration official involved has personally come here and kissed my ass for coming up with it.”

“You know your field well, Dick.”

“I learned from the best.”

“Where was that?”

“I started out in the White House Press Office.”

Creel pointed to a large worktable in the war room where two people were laboring over some written materials.

“Explain.”

“That’s the ‘Tablet of Tragedies.’ We recently discovered that one of our competitors was hired to put something like this together during Persian Gulf One to help convince the West to defend Kuwait. It worked brilliantly there. So we thought we’d use the same concept here. But instead of printing hundreds of thousands of glossy copies we opted for handmade rudimentary stuff. That’ll give it a realistic homegrown feel to balance the high-tech attack so far. We’ll only make a dozen but send them out to optimal targets for maximum effect.”

“Boots on the ground,” Creel muttered thoughtfully.

“That was to be on your end,” Pender pointed out. “I can make anyone believe a lie is true. However, there’s no substitute for real blood spilled.”

“I have the boots quite figured out. In fact you’ll see evidence of that very soon.”

“What about the other piece of the equation?”

“What about it?” Creel said sharply.

“Only that you said you would advise us of the timing of it.”

“Have I advised you yet?”

“No.”

“Then it must not be time!”

A moment later Creel was gone. Pender had helped make the man a fortune during the cold war, and when that dried up, they’d engineered numerous smaller global conflicts until the first Iraq War had literally fallen into their laps followed by the lucrative second Iraq War. But as he’d recently told Pender, “The Americans are completely tapped out. And the EU’s in a peace mode, pouring their money into education, infrastructure, and health care instead of defense. The idiots never stop to think that it would be damn hard for the kiddies to go to school and Grandma to the doctor if they can’t protect their countries from ending up pledging allegiance to Allah. But with all that going against me I’m going to win this war.”

And Dick Pender would never bet against the man.