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  * * *

  There were four cabins in the salon passage, two to port, one to starboard, and one at the end — the captain’s cabin. Facing the door, he found himself grateful he’d frisked Chon the guard. The door’s lock was card-key access. There was a downside, though. Like most card-key doors, this one would do two things when the card slid through the reader: flash a green light and give a solid thunk as the bolt was thrown back.

  Fisher did a check with the flexi-cam. Unlike the salon, the cabin showed no emergency nightlights. In the glow of the NV he could see a figure lying on the queen-sized bed. This was Lei, he guessed. The man’s eyes were closed, hands folded across his chest. The cabin was small, perhaps ten feet by twelve feet. If Fisher moved quickly enough, he could reach the bed in less than a second.

  Fisher drew his pistol, then took a few seconds to mentally rehearse his entry. He slid the key through the reader and pushed in.

  Lei was immediately awake, sitting up in bed, hand reaching toward the nightstand.

  Fisher fired once. Lei yelped and jerked his hand back, his hand shattered by the 7.62 slug.

  “Next one goes in your eye,” Fisher said, shutting the door behind him. “Lay back down. Hands back on your chest.”

  His face twisted in pain, Lei complied. “Who are you, what do you want?”

  “The boogeyman, here to kill you if you move again.”

  Fisher was impressed. Lei was the boss for good reason. Most men, shot in the hand, facing a ghostlike apparition, would have been cowed. Not this one.

  “You’ve made a mistake, friend,” Lei said. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

  “Funny you should say that. Tell me who I’m dealing with.”

  “No.”

  Fisher fired again. The bullet slammed into the pillow beside Lei’s head.

  Lei jerked to one side, but the scowl on his face never wavered.

  Very tough. Plan B, then. Fisher had brought an extra flotation vest for this very contingency. They already had one prisoner; two was better. The interrogators could work on Lei’s attitude.

  “Sit up,” he said. “You and I are going on a little trip. Move very slow—”

  Fisher heard the thunk of the door latch being thrown. In that instant, as his eyes instinctively flicked toward the door, Lei had moved. His good hand was coming up and around. Fisher saw a blade flashing toward his face. He jerked his head backward, felt the blade slice the space where his neck had just been. The door opened. In his peripheral vision Fisher saw a figure standing at the threshold.

  “Run!” Lei shouted. “Blow it! Blow it now!”

  Fisher fired. Lei’s head snapped back. As he fell backward, Fisher saw a black quarter-sized cavity where Lei’s right eye once was.

  “Warned you,” Fisher muttered, then turned and rushed out the door.

  14

  Back in the corridor, he turned and headed toward the ladder just in time to see the crewman’s foot disappear from the top step. Fisher raised the pistol and fired, hoping for a lucky leg shot, but it was a half second too late. He started running.

  Blow it, Fisher thought. Lei’s command could mean only two things: One, destroy something aboard the Duroc; or two, destroy the Duroc itself. The sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach had him betting on the latter.

  But why? And who commanded such respect and/or fear in these men that they would essentially commit suicide? Was it Lei, or someone bigger? Fisher shoved the questions aside.

  As he reached the top of the ladder, he heard the forward door bang against the bulkhead. He stopped, pressed himself to the wall. Pistol extended, he slid forward until he could see the doorway. Clear. He sprinted forward, peeked into the corridor. To his left, the engine room hatch was open, revealing a ladder. A flashlight beam was playing across bulkhead below.

  Fisher stepped to the hatch and peeked through. A figure was standing on the deck. The man raised his arm. Fisher jerked his head back. Two gunshots rang out. A pair of holes appeared in the corridor bulkhead.

  “Give it up,” Fisher called. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t do it.”

  No response.

  “We can work this out. Just drop your gun—”

  Footsteps pounded, then faded away.

  Fisher peeked around the corner again, saw nothing. He started down the ladder. At the bottom, to his right, around a stanchion, he saw the glow of the flashlight on the other side of the engine. He stepped to the stanchion, pressed himself to it.

  Something clanged. Like sheet metal clattering to the deck. Access cover, Fisher thought. Move, move now!

  Gun raised, he stepped out.

  The last crewman was crouched beside the engine, hands fumbling inside an access hatch.

  “Stop!” Fisher commanded.

  The man turned his head, stared at him for a few seconds, then turned back and kept working.

  Fisher fired twice. The man grunted and rolled onto his side. Fisher rushed forward. He kicked the man’s gun away. It skittered across the deck. The man, barely conscious, let out a wet, bloody cough and grinned at him. “Too late,” he croaked.

  Inside the engine’s access hatch, a blue LED readout blinked from 10 to 9, then to 8.

  Fisher turned and ran.

  * * *

  With a countdown running in his head he was up the ladder in two seconds. He turned, charged up the bridge ladder, turned again, and headed for the door.

  Five… four… three…

  He threw open the hatch, rushed through, sprinted toward the railing, vaulted over it. Behind him, somewhere deep within the Duroc, there came a muffled crump. Fisher absently thought, First charge; fuel tanks will follow…

  It took him a split second to orient himself in the air. He looked down. The ocean surface rushed toward him. He curled into a ball, hoping to protect himself from the heat and shrapnel that was coming. Then he was underwater. All went silent.

  Resisting the urge to kick to the surface, he flipped over and kicked hard, arms spread in a wide breaststroke. He heard a whoomp and felt himself shoved from behind as the shock wave hit him. The air was compressed from his lungs. He started rolling.

  When he stopped, he righted himself in the water. Above his head, the surface glowed orange for a few seconds, then faded. Lungs burning, his every instinct screaming for air, he forced himself to stay submerged. The danger now was pools of burning oil and fuel. If he surfaced into one of them, his lungs would be seared.

  His heartbeat pounded behind his eyes and he felt a fuzziness creep into his brain as his body consumed the last molecules of oxygen left in his system.

  Wait, he commanded himself. Wait…

  He counted to five, then ten, and then seeing nothing above him, he kicked to the surface. He gulped air until his vision cleared, then looked to where the Duroc had been.

  There was nothing. Chunks of fiberglass and tiny pockets of burning fuel dotted the surface, but the yacht was gone, sinking toward the seafloor.

  To his left he saw a twinkle of light. In the distance, still a few miles away, a searchlight played over the water’s surface. The Bahamian Navy and the FBI to the rescue, Fisher thought. It was time to leave.

  He punched up the IKS’s control menu on the OPSAT and pressed buttons until the screen read, IKS: MODE: HOME TO SIGNAL. He keyed his subdermal. “Lambert, get Bird to the extraction point.”

  “Status?”

  “Mission clean.” No footprints, no evidence, no nothing. “Very clean.”

  “Explain.”

  “Later. I’m on my way home.”

  He turned and started swimming.

  SHANGHAI

  Kuan-Yin Zhao heard a knock on his door, then feet softly padding toward his desk. He knew without looking who it was. Xun. His hesitant, mincing steps were unmistakable. Xun stopped before Zhao’s desk and stood quietly, waiting.

  Zhao’s desk was covered in an array of newspapers from London, New York, Moscow, and Beijing. So far, the coverage w
as remarkably similar. No significant variations. The board was intact, all the pieces and players being taken at face value.

  Zhao looked up. “Yes?”

  “Message from Lei, sir. They’ve weighed anchor and are under way. The job is done.”

  Zhao sighed. Even Xun’s voice was weak. The boy was smart enough, with degrees from Oxford and MIT, but he had no Lān-hút—no stones, as the Americans say. Xun was a distant nephew, one of the few with his family name left alive. This, he thought, is what I am left with. A boy who had a mind for this business, but no heart for the brutality it required to not only survive, but to rule. Given time, Xun might be a worthy successor to the empire; but time was a precious commodity. During war, time was a luxury you couldn’t afford to squander.

  “No complications?” Zhao asked.

  “No, sir.”

  Zhao nodded. Another pawn steps forward, joining the first two, shielding the king.

  “The emergency bands?”

  “We’re monitoring. The island is small; it shouldn’t take long. May I ask, sir… ”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What are we listening for?”

  “We’re listening for the faint scrape of our opponent’s piece moving across the board.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Watch and learn.”

  Zhao waved Xun out. Alone again, Zhao closed his eyes and visualized the board. He imagined his opponent reaching out, fingers hesitating over one piece, before lifting it from the board.

  Your move.

  15

  THIRD ECHELON

  Having only been gone for fifteen hours, Fisher was stunned at what had changed during that time.

  The town of Slipstone was lost.

  Within minutes of local environmental officials determining that the source of the water supply’s contamination was neither natural nor accidental, the small New Mexico town had became the focal point of a massive relief effort, starting with the President’s order to activate the Radiological Emergency Response Plan, or RERP.

  Assets from every branch of government, from the FBI to the Environmental Protection Agency, from the Department of Energy to Homeland Security, sprang into action, dispatching first-responder teams. Within six hours of the RERP’s initiation, Slipstone was quarantined. Every road, highway, and trail leading to and from the town was put under guard by state troopers. Those residents who had panicked upon hearing the news and hurried to leave the area were quickly rounded up and placed in the mobile quarantine and treatment camp that had been established by the Army’s Chemical Casualty Care Division. Unfortunately, this camp was one of the first scenes captured by news cameras: families being unceremoniously marched by biohazard-suited soldiers into a sterile white tent in the middle of the desert. The image sent shock waves across the country as Americans realized their worst nightmare had finally become reality: Terrorists had attacked the U.S. with a radiological weapon.

  Meanwhile, the first responders to enter the town, a NEST team, found a greater nightmare waiting for them. Slipstone was a ghost town. Investigation would later show the water supply had been poisoned sometime in the afternoon, shortly before residents finished work and started heading home. Consquently, the streets were mostly deserted, with only a handful of bodies found, most of them in their cars as they had tried to escape the town. The bulk of the corpses were found in their homes, asleep, in front of television sets, in their bathrooms, and, heartbreakingly, sprawled beside the beds of their children, dead where they had fallen trying to reach their children.

  Those few residents found alive shuffled through the streets like zombies: glassy-eyed, hair falling out in clumps, blood streaming from their eyes as the radiological poison slowly killed them. Those with any strength left headed toward the edge of town and the quarantine barriers, where they were stopped by state troopers and National Guard soldiers. This, too, was broadcast across the country: ghostly-white Slipstone residents, begging to be allowed to leave, while stone-faced soldiers and police officers forced them back into the hell they knew was killing them.

  * * *

  In the Situation Room, Fisher watched, stunned, as the images paraded across the monitors. Across the country every broadcast and cable television channel, from the Food Network to Home Shopping Central, had either switched to emergency programming or had surrendered their signals to cable and network news coverage.

  Sitting on either side of Fisher at the conference table, Grimsdottir and Lambert also watched in silence. Anna stifled a sob, then stood up and walked away.

  “Good God,” Lambert muttered.

  “How many?” Fisher asked. “Any idea?”

  “Official figures won’t be released for a couple days, but Grim’s been monitoring the RERP’s secure frequencies. So far they only found fourteen survivors.”

  “Out of how many?”

  “According to the last census, five thousand plus.”

  It took a moment for Fisher to absorb this number. He exhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose. Unless the response teams were wrong and somewhere, somehow, there was a large group of survivors yet to be found in Slipstone, the death toll would far surpass that of 9/11.

  “What’s happening in Washington?” Fisher asked.

  “Both the House and Senate are in emergency session. The vote will be unanimous, I’m sure.”

  “Declaration of war,” Sam murmured.

  Lambert nodded. “Against nations unknown. The President is scheduled to talk to the nation at noon, our time.”

  “What does this do to our mission?”

  “Nothing. I spoke with the President while you were in the Bahamas. War is coming; there’s no way around that. Against who is the only question. He wants no stone left unturned, and no doubt about who’s responsible. Things are starting to snowball at the FBI and CIA now. Conclusions will be reached; recommendations made; targets chosen. Our job is to make sure — damn sure — we’ve got the right targets.”

  The television screens went dark. Standing behind Fisher, Grimsdottir laid the remote on the table and said, “I can’t watch this anymore. I can’t, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Anna,” Lambert said. “Tell us about the Duroc.”

  “Right…” She went to the table and paged through a folder, then selected a file. “Here. I haven’t had any luck tracing an owner, but based on the data Sam downloaded from the helm console, I know where she came from: Port St. Lucie, Florida. Shouldn’t take too long to narrow down a list.”

  A phone on the table trilled. Lambert picked it up, listened for a few minutes, then replaced the receiver. “Good call on the Bahamian fire bands, Sam. Twenty minutes ago the local police found nine bodies inside a burned-out coffee warehouse outside Freeport City. We should have preliminary autopsy results in a few hours.”

  “That explains what happened to the Trego’s crew, but not how the Duroc got involved. The one prisoner we’ve got is Middle Eastern and I’m betting those nine bodies will be, too.”

  “The question is,” Grimsdottir asked, “why were they picked up, then executed by a yacht full of Chinese? What’s the connection?” Nearby, her computer workstation chimed. She walked to it, sat down, and studied the screen for a few moments. “Gotchya,” she muttered.

  “Got what?” Lambert asked.

  “Remember the virus from the Trego laptop? Well, I knew its code was unique — the work of a pro. It took a while, but our database found him: Marcus Greenhorn.”

  “Please tell me you know where he is,” Lambert said.

  “I’ll do even better than that, Colonel. I’ll give you his room number.”

  16

  While Sam had never heard of Marcus Greenhorn, both Grimsdottir and Lambert assured him Greenhorn was as dangerous as any terrorist — so much so he’d earned himself a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

  A mathematical prodigy who graduated from high school at age seven, from Princeton at ten, and MIT at fourteen, M
arcus Greenhorn, now twenty-two, had at the age of eighteen nearly handed a nuclear weapon over to Iranian-backed Hamas extremists, having used his cyber-wizardry to hack into the Air Force’s security grid and steal access codes to the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex in New Mexico, home to a plethora of nuclear warheads, including the W56 Minuteman II and the W84 GLCM, or Ground Launched Cruise Missile.

  Brilliant as he was, Greenhorn fell victim to a pedestrian flaw — greed. After collecting his half-million-dollar advance from Hamas, Greenhorn had turned around and tried to extort the U.S. government, promising to turn over details of Hamas’s planned raid on Kirtland for two million dollars. While Greenhorn’s skills were impressive, they weren’t a match for the full and focused effort of the National Security Agency, which tracked the extortion demand back to Greenhorn, extracted the details of the Hamas raid from his computer, then proceeded to wipe clean the Swiss account he’d set up for his early retirement.

  Broke, on the run, and hiding from his disgruntled Hamas customers, Greenhorn had gone underground and become a cyber-mercenary.

  Since that incident, the authorities had kept Greenhorn’s former friends and compatriots under electronic surveillance, but to no avail. Until now.

  “This virus he wrote for the Trego laptop is pure Greenhorn,” Grimsdottir said, “but with a twist — a bit of security code he’s used once too often. I took the code and turned the mainframe loose on all the e-mails we’ve intercepted from Greenhorn’s old friends. We got a hit.”

  “Explain,” said Lambert.

  “We ran the same encryption protocols in Greenhorn’s virus through all the e-mail intercepts. It seems one of Greenhorn’s ex-girlfriends has been getting love letters — all disguised as spam: mortgage offers, discount pharmacies… the usual stuff. Well, yesterday this woman got an e-mail from Greenhorn. Decrypted, it read, ‘Ticket waiting for you at airport. Meet me, Burj al Arab. Champaign and caviar.’ ”