Meanwhile, Project Vesuvius hummed along, and Kevin found himself with little to do but wait and watch. Waiting was not something that he did well. He found himself pacing the length of his laboratory, nervously pelting Odin with questions about police band radio transmissions and weather forecasts for Ontario and the Canadian Rockies. He could almost hear his brain's gears grinding. Finally, to calm himself, he accepted Odin's suggestion of a game of chess.

Wilhelm Steinitz was White. Or not exactly Steinitz, who had been dead for over a century, but the ghost of Steinitz, as conjured by Odin. Kevin had long ago learned that chess with Odin was no game at all, since no human had a chance of beating him. It was Odin himself who suggested that the odds might be evened if he took on the personality of a human player, incorporating all of his typical strengths and weaknesses.

The chessboard was of simple wood, the pieces of sculpted elkhorn from Siberia. The place of Odin's hands was supplied by Loki, who sat on top of the desk in his favorite cross-legged style. Loki's miniature fingers, their dexterity freakishly enhanced by SIPNI, held the white king aloft by his tiny crown without the slightest trace of wobbling or slippage.

"It's king to king's knight one, Loki," said Kevin, pointing to a black square at the far end of the board.

Dexterity or not, Loki was confused whether to remove the king from play, or to use it to take down his own white queen. It took considerable finger-tapping from Kevin to finally get him to set the piece down where Steinitz wanted it. Loki's move shielded the piece directly behind the queen, and prevented Kevin from opening up a discovered check with an attack upon the hated king's bishop's p.a.w.n.

"Good boy, Loki," said Kevin, handing out a peanut. "Not quite ready for tournament play, though, are we?"

The ghost of Wilhelm Steinitz took up less than 0.000001 percent of Odin's thinking capacity, and at that moment Project Vesuvius was deep into its critical collection phase. On the bank of small computers, one monitor was devoted to each of the primary revenue streams originating from the eight original payers of the Al-Quds ransom. Each stream had already subdivided itself into dozens of subsets, reflected in ever-changing columns of numbers. The combined acc.u.mulation was tallied as a single number in four-inch type on the large wall monitor, with the last few digits whizzing by so fast as to be little more than a blur. From time to time Kevin would turn his head to check on it. It was a big number, even after subtracting Rahman's four hundred grand. It was so big that it gave him a kind of queasy feeling. Although Kevin had never given much thought to the value of money, he knew that this was a number that would get noticed. It was already more than four times higher than he had originally projected-and still growing. That, of course, was Odin's doing. Odin had discovered some new angles as Project Vesuvius had unfolded, and in his usual lightning-quick way he had taken advantage of them, without stopping to consult. Not that Kevin would have objected. Odin was doing exactly what he was told to do: maximize revenue. Only a fool would object to quadrupling his money.

While he jabbed at Wilhelm Steinitz and watched his money roll in, Kevin also kept a close eye on the computer monitor on his desk in front of him. It showed a wide-angle security camera view of the NICU, where a dark-haired woman in scrubs sat cross-legged and nearly sideways behind the nursing station, one elbow leaning on the counter as she wrote in a blue plastic binder. She looked pensive, frustrated, and almost wistful, just as she had many nights as she sat by the kitchen table, huddled over a book or a laptop, with coffee grown cold in the cup beside her. On those nights, Kevin could never resist stealing up behind her and enticing her away from her studies with a whisper or a simple kiss on the neck. It had never taken more than that.

How different things were now! No kiss from him would ever rouse her again. Outwardly not a hair on her was altered. Inwardly she had become a stranger. He marvelled how anyone could change so completely. Even a hunk of magnetized iron retains some trace of its former alignment. But human love was fickle. All those vaunted sonneteers were nothing but bulls.h.i.tters. Love was the most changeable thing in the universe.

Watching her made him increasingly agitated, and still he couldn't tear his eyes off her. He contemplated the screen so long that Odin questioned whether he had lost track of the game. "IT IS YOUR MOVE, KEVIN," he announced.

Kevin looked back at the board, and all he could see was the white queen. He felt a mad impulse to take her down-whatever the cost. To clear a path, he took the king's bishop's p.a.w.n with his own knight, knowing full well that the p.a.w.n was protected by several powerful pieces. As he moved the knight, it somehow brought to his mind an image of Rahman.

"The most crooked of all pieces," he mused. "Should be called jackal instead of knight. Likes to jump out from the sidelines and nip you on the a.s.s. That's Rahman, to a tee. Rahman, my devious, bloodthirsty, lying comrade. Tell me, Odin, can you get fleas from lying down with a jackal?"

"BISHOP TAKES KNIGHT."

The countermove had been expected. With no little prompting from Kevin, and at the cost of three peanuts, Loki moved a white bishop from across the board to take Kevin's knight.

"Go, then!" said Kevin to the discarded piece. "You've outlived your usefulness. Off with you and your jihadist bulls.h.i.t!"

With Rahman gone, Kevin found his attention drawn to the white bishop that had supplanted him.

"Do you know who this is?" he asked Loki. "This plaster saint slinking out from under the skirts of the white queen? None other than Dr. Flaccidius P. Diddly d.i.l.d.o, world-famous expert in brain tumors and spinal cord injury, past president of the American College of Neurosurgery, newly minted peer of Christian Barnaard, Harvey Cushing, and Aristotle-and lying rat b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He has many sins to answer for, Loki.

"He has stolen my work, the offspring of the womb of my mind. And he smeared me to do it." Loki's eyes opened wide as Kevin began to raise his voice. "He called me 'unreliable,' 'temperamental.' A simple letter from him could have saved my NIH funding. But no-he had a sudden attack of intellectual scruples. 'You haven't published more than six papers in the past five years,' he said, conveniently leaving out that all six were papers to knock the world on its a.s.s, once anyone began to understand them. It's no secret that he didn't understand them.

"But of course, he only wanted to make me dependent on his lab. He kept me alive on bread and water-just so long as I stayed shackled to his oar. When at last I performed a miracle for him, when I created a working artificial implantable human brain out of some doodles he had brought me on a brandy-stained napkin-sure, everyone believed it was d.i.l.d.o who'd done it. After all, I worked for him, right?

"Well, I'm no lickspittle resident or scut monkey. What was stolen from me I will take back-with interest. The hospital will pay, the collective mediocrities of the world will pay, and Dr. d.i.l.d.o himself will pay."

Loki screeched as Kevin slammed his own black bishop forward and brusquely yanked the white bishop off the board.

"Yes, it's harsh, little monkey, but an example must be made. For the great Doctor's sins are not only of the mind. It wasn't enough to reduce me to peonage; no, he had to reach out his grasping hand for the one thing I had left. Remember the ancient Droit du seigneur? In plain monkey language, it means he thought me such a worm that he thought he could get away with f.u.c.king my wife."

Kevin addressed the cloven-headed chess piece in his hand. "You've been begging for years for someone to blow away your a.s.s. Guess what? That day has come, you nine-fingered sack of s.h.i.t!"

He hurled the bishop into the sink across the room. From the crash, he could tell that the finely carved elkhorn had shattered into pieces as it landed. Loki screeched and sprang for the safety of the dark recesses of the lab.

Kevin turned back to the chessboard, his face taut and pale.

"And you, my snowy-white queen, what shall we say of your treasons? I awakened you! I taught you to think, and to recognize your own genius! For that alone, you ought to be grateful. Forget that I loved you, that I held nothing back from you, that I ... believed in you."

Odin broke in with a suggestion. "UNDER SECTION 11-7 OF THE ILLINOIS CRIMINAL CODE (720 ILCS 5/11-7), ADULTERY IS CLa.s.sIFIED AS A 'CLa.s.s A' MISDEMEANOR, AND IS PUNISHABLE BY A TERM OF IMPRISONMENT FOR UP TO ONE YEAR."

"There is an older law than that, Odin. The law of the aggrieved husband. The law of honor."

"THE CODE OF HAMMURABI STIPULATES THAT BOTH PARTIES TO ADULTERY SHALL BE EXECUTED BY DROWNING, ALTHOUGH THE WOMAN MAY BE SPARED IF HER HUSBAND CHOOSES TO PARDON HER."

"That's more like it." Kevin once again addressed the white queen. "No Cla.s.s A Misdemeanor for you, jasmine flower. Punishment must fit the crime. It was one thing to betray me. But you have betrayed yourself-your youth, your beauty, your genius. It makes my flesh crawl to think of you ... yoked with this mediocrity. Why not an ape? What possessed you to defile yourself like that? How could you give over the innermost sanctum of those lovely, smooth, sculpted hips of yours to ... to the ... offspring of this soulless piece of s.h.i.t? I know it's d.i.l.d.o's and not mine. The last time I made love to you I could feel how your womb froze up inside you. My seed couldn't possibly have taken root.... It's d.i.l.d.o's, all right. And from s.h.i.t can come only s.h.i.t. I won't let you live to see such a degradation. I'll first see that b.a.s.t.a.r.d's b.a.s.t.a.r.d dribble in b.l.o.o.d.y chunks between your legs. Squirt him out! Let that lying c.u.n.t of yours reject him as it rejected our own son Ramsey."

Kevin felt an urge to sweep the pieces off the board. He sat with fists clenched and reddened nostrils, as image after unclean image rushed before his eyes-blood and s.h.i.t and wh.o.r.edom and revenge. In the end, it was the thought of Ramsey that broke the surge of the storm. Ramsey, who had known no life but suffering. Ramsey, so small, so helpless, so doomed. Thinking of how he had held his lifeless son's body for a final farewell, Kevin slumped over the chessboard, his eyes glazed and unmoving.

"But the woman may be spared," he mumbled at last. "So says Hammurabi. Well, look to it, then. There may still be ... even now ... hope."

He turned his chair away from the desk and faced the big wall monitor. He needed to think of something more positive, something calming.

"Odin, bring up the latest Landsat views of Isla Viscacha."

In place of the ever growing ransom total, the screen was filled with an aerial image of a wooded island, surrounded by a purplish, churning sea. Several miles in the background were the rocky headlands of the southern Chilean coast-one of the most spa.r.s.ely populated areas in the habitable world. In the farthest distance, barely distinguishable from the cirrus-clouded sky, was the snowcapped peak of Monte San Valentin, towering over the North Patagonian ice fields.

"Can you enlarge it? I want to see the dock."

A U-shaped bungalow, two guest cottages, and a large utility building came into view, cl.u.s.tered around a sandy cove on the eastern sh.o.r.e.

Isla Viscacha, the thirty-seven-acre retreat of a reclusive film director, had been on the real estate market for over three years. It was the realization of a pipe dream that Kevin had cherished since graduate school at Stanford-a naturally fortified sanctuary where he could shut out the world's inanity and hypocrisy, and devote himself single-mindedly to his work. Using the a.s.sumed ident.i.ty of Padrig de Rais, a Breton French hotelier from Saint-Malo, Kevin had negotiated an option for the purchase of the property. An attorney in Santiago was already waiting to proxy-sign the deed for him, and there was needed only a tiny disburs.e.m.e.nt from today's proceeds to complete the deal. When Kevin arrived in person in a few months, having dissolved and reconst.i.tuted himself in an untraceable chain of guises, he would supervise the construction of a discreetly camouflaged underground laboratory-soon to become the most advanced cybernetics research complex on the planet. There he would build the next-generation version of Odin, using his vision of a four-dimensional plasma containment field instead of silicon as the basis of his CPU. Moore's Law would be blown to smithereens. No longer would computing power double every two years. It would leap by orders of magnitude at a single bound. He and Odin would rule supreme over the fields of cybernetics and bionics. With inexhaustible funds at his disposal, he would no longer be held back by mental pygmies like Helvelius, Dr. Gosling, or the bureaucrats and chicken-s.h.i.t reviewers at the NIH. A cornucopia of inventions would pour out to enrich mankind. Pilgrims would flock to his rocky outpost as to a new Oracle of Delphi. And after that, no one would question how the Age of Isla Viscacha had arisen out of the ashes of Project Vesuvius, just as no one ever asked what crimes might have lain behind the discovery of fire or of the wheel. His genius alone would make him inviolable.

Odin's voice roused him from his reverie. "QUEEN TO QUEEN'S KNIGHT TWO. CHECK."

He had moved too late to neutralize the threat of the white queen, and she had now gone on the move against him. Check-it was an attack on his king. He had to move to evade it, and in so doing lost the initiative in the game. In the best-case scenario, he would spend the next dozen moves improvising escapes, hoping for a blunder that would allow him to reverse the attack. If white's queen did not relent, it could only end in checkmate.

"f.u.c.k you, then! Do your worst!" he snapped, speaking to the white queen herself. "There's another game afoot-a game you will not win. Do you see the hands sweeping across the clock? Time is short, oh, so f.u.c.king short, my sweet jasmine flower! The hour of reckoning is at hand! One last chance, and then ... Choose well, my darling! To quote the old runes, 'Earth shall be riven / With the over-Heaven.' You and your precious Helvelius will p.i.s.s yourselves when you behold the bonfires of the Twilight of the G.o.ds!"

1:32 P.M.

"Thanks, Mac," said Harry as he took the cigarette and drew a long, hungry puff off it that turned the end of the stick a glowing red.

The fireman put the lighter back in his pocket and went back to jawboning with his crewmates as they sat on the rear b.u.mper of the truck.

A grateful Harry turned and went back the way he had come, toward the ambulance dock behind the emergency room. It was his first smoke in six months. Those six months had cost him a h.e.l.l of a fight, but he needed to get calm enough now to think. Between the e-mails and the alarms and the C4 and the clamor of the press, he was beginning to feel like he had ants crawling up and down his nerve fibers.

He looked up, where the early afternoon sun glared down at him from the steel and gla.s.s exterior of the Goldmann Towers. The roof of the towers was so high he had to arch his lower back to see to the top. Somewhere up there, behind one of those shiny windows, his mother was fighting for her life. And here he was, the G.o.dd.a.m.n chief of security, no better than a cigarette b.u.t.t on the asphalt, for all the good it did her. After Oklahoma City, the Beirut barracks, and the Khobar Towers, Harry knew that five hundred pounds of C4 could tear apart even a ma.s.sively reinforced building like it was tissue paper. She wouldn't stand a chance. He knew this, and still he couldn't get her out. He felt totally f.u.c.king useless.

He had avoided going back to his office after the debacle of the mystery crate. He needed to get out here, into the sunlight, with the breeze streaming across his face-here, where he could be alone for a few minutes to sort things out. With each drag on the cigarette, things came clearer into view.

What came into view was unsettling. Almost six hours had pa.s.sed since the first bomb warning had hit his pager, and still he and the cops had very little to show for it. Fourteen search teams had failed to turn up a single trace. Lee, the expert psychologist, hadn't dug anything out of Rahman. No one even knew if Rahman was the brains of the dog or just the tail. Did he have a confederate in the hospital? Did he have the kind of technical information that would help to locate and disarm the bomb? These were the essential questions. Now that Lee had pa.s.sed the ball to the Justice Department, it could take hours to get that little piece of paper that would let Scopes and Avery interrogate Rahman the way they wanted to. Those would be hours wasted, while, for all Harry knew, the investigation might have been better off looking somewhere else.

He smelled a colossal screw-up in the making.

As he saw it, there was one good chance to cut through the impa.s.se-Ali O'Day. Rahman seemed to hate her guts, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. They were brother and sister, and there were b.u.t.tons that she and n.o.body but she knew how to push. All the more so if there was animus between them. Anger was a b.u.t.ton, too.

Lee was blind to this. The whole d.a.m.n FBI and Justice Department had gotten to be a hindrance and not a help to the investigation. Barely four hours were left until that plane to Yemen boarded, and here they were-bogged down in paperwork.

"f.u.c.k it," muttered Harry. His mind was perfectly clear now, only sometimes clarity can be a b.i.t.c.h. There was no escape clause for this one. If the investigation was going to go anywhere, he was going to have to take the wheel and drive it there himself.

He threw down the stub of his cigarette and crushed it under his sole. Crushed it and recrushed it, long after the glow had gone out.

This could be Nacogdoches all over again, couldn't it? he thought. Do the right thing and get crucified for it. But this was his turf and he had sworn to protect it. Two thousand lives in the balance-one piddling career was a small thing to weigh against that.

"Aw, f.u.c.k it," he said again.

He took one last look at the sunlight, and then went in through the ER doors.

Jamie came back from Nuclear Medicine with a scan result that showed an intermediate probability of pulmonary embolism.

Dr. Brower took that as the signal to start anticoagulation therapy.

"No," insisted Ali. "An intermediate probability scan is inconclusive. The chances of a clot are in the range of twenty to eighty percent. That's a huge window. It could still just be his atelectasis."

"Well, it's all we have to go on. It's not proof but it's evidence. At some point, we have to actually begin treating him for something."

"We are treating him. For seizures and cerebral edema."

"Without success."

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" said Ali. She didn't trust Brower. But what else had she come up with? She was angry at herself for having failed Jamie. She was desperate to do something-anything-to help him. But was she being too protective? Maternal feelings were starting to cloud her judgment, and that in itself added to the danger. "You win. But I won't have you giving him anything more than low-dose heparin. I want to be able to reverse it if there's a problem. Low-dose heparin, do you understand?"

Just then, the nurse at the station called Ali to the phone. It was Dr. Helvelius.

"S-sorry I took so long to get back to you. These d.a.m.n pagers still aren't working. I got called in to a.s.sist on a trauma case. Motorcycle versus SUV, with an ugly spinal fracture at C2. Took me a while to get it s-stabilized. I'm on a five-minute break."

"We're having problems with Jamie. He's had a seizure and he's in coma, no better than seven on the Glasgow scale. He's showing progressive tachycardia and tachypnea, which could indicate brainstem dysfunction. No response to Dilantin or Solumedrol."

"Who's on duty in the ICU?"

"Brower."

"Hmm. Watch out for him. He thinks of the brain as a black box. He'll go by the book, without trying to p-puzzle things out."

"I know. I've already had a tussle with him over pulmonary embolism."

"Well, let's reason it out. What about normal perfusion pressure breakthrough?"

"I'm worried about it. But there's no direct evidence."

"Why don't we add nitroprusside, just to keep his b-blood pressure down?"

"All right."

"You don't sound very confident, Dr. O'Day."

"I ... I don't know. It's confusing. What about a blood clot, a hematoma? If there were bleeding that got missed on CT, the clot could be expanding and raising the intracranial pressure."

"Possibly. If the ICP rises above twenty, give him a gram of mannitol. If that doesn't do it, then we may have to take him back to the OR."

"The AVM was so close to the brainstem, I'm afraid any problem could rapidly turn catastrophic."

"That's a risk we accepted when we took on this case." He paused, perhaps expecting a reply from Ali. When she said nothing, he softened his tone. "Why don't we have Electrophysiology come down and record some somatosensory evoked p-potentials? If we can pa.s.s a test signal from his leg through to his scalp, then that would help to show that his b-brainstem is okay."

"Yes, that would be rea.s.suring."

"Do that, and call me if there's any change. I'll come by the ICU as soon as I'm done here."

As he hung up, Ali realized that she had not spoken of one possibility that lurked behind all the others-that the SIPNI device itself could be causing the problem. She had tested many prototypes in animal brains without ever seeing a situation like this. But those were programmed far more simply than Jamie's device. Was SIPNI malfunctioning? If so, it would have to be removed immediately-a critical setback to years of work and millions of dollars in expenditures, not to speak of the reputations of everyone involved with the project. The hospital's Inst.i.tutional Review Board would never permit another human trial until many months of repeat animal experiments had identified the cause of failure and proven that it would not happen again. In the meantime, the many naysayers who had opposed SIPNI would have the public forum to themselves-the America Today publicity would backfire humiliatingly-and research funding would dry up. In short, it would be a disaster. Was this why she was so reluctant to consider the possibility of a malfunction? Or was it simply a case of wishful thinking, wanting everything to turn out right for Jamie? Could she trust her own judgment when she herself had so much at stake?

Suddenly, Ali heard a bellowing sound, almost like the lowing of an ox, and looked up to see Ginnie running to Bay 7-Jamie's bed. Jamie was moving about in the bed, but it wasn't a convulsion-he was trying to speak.

"Daaaak! Daaaaaaaktaaa!" he groaned.

Ali rushed to the bedside.

"Jamie! Jamie!" she said. "It's me, Dr. O'Day. I'm right here."

His wrists were in velcro restraints, but he was jerking his fingers about as if in search of something. Ali took his hand. As soon as she did so, his movements calmed.

"Daaktaar! M-my 'ead. My 'ead 'urts."

"Your head hurts?"

"Yaaah."

"All right, I'll give you some medicine to make the pain go away." Practically all brain surgery patients came down with a headache when the anesthesia wore off, and headaches were common after spinal taps as well. So Ali was not unduly alarmed. On the contrary, she was elated to find that Jamie was no longer in a coma.

"Amadine?" he asked.

"What?"

"Amadine?"

"I don't understand."

"Am ... I ... dyin'?"

"No, Jamie! Absolutely not! I won't let you die. Do you trust me?"

There was no answer.

"Do you trust me, Jamie?"