Calibrisi nodded, deep in thought.

"Thanks, Ted," he said, nodding to the door. "That'll be all."

Calibrisi waited until Wendell left, then put both hands on top of his desk, bracing himself against the wave of anxiety that flooded over him. It wasn't just the lack of manpower on the ground in Russia. They were exposed here, in the United States, as well. Time was running out. The enemy was attacking on all fronts. Like cancer, he'd laid down his contagion silently, at a level that was invisible to the human eye. By the time Rublevka went south, the cancer had already taken hold. Now they were witnessing the rapid metastasis of the illness. It was spreading. Worst of all, there was no longer a vague premonition as to the day the cancer would take down its victim. Chalmers was right: the attack they nicknamed 9/12 would take place on Independence Day, the Fourth of July, a nation's birthday that in two days' time would be forever marked by genocide.

Calibrisi picked up an object from his desk. It was an old pistol, a Walther PPK, its black patina worn from use. It was a gun that, many years ago, in a Berlin apartment building, had been used by a Stasi agent to try to kill him. The slug had missed. Not by much, but it had missed, and Calibrisi had taken the gun after putting a bullet through his would-be killer's head. He kept it because it reminded him of the thin line that separated victory from defeat, good luck from bad luck, life from death. An inch here, a moment there.

A sudden, violent lurch when your enemy doesn't expect it.

Calibrisi understood then what he needed to do.

He crossed his office and opened the small closet at the opposite side of the room, quickly stuffing a few items in a beat-up leather weekend bag. He went back to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a bundle of disposable cell phones and put them in the bag.

A few minutes later, bag in hand, Calibrisi stepped off the elevator eight floors below and walked down the hallway. He put his hand on a scanner next to the door. A half second later, the door unlocked and he stepped inside Targa.

Polk was standing before one of the plasma screens, watching a live POV video of one of the agents now attempting to infiltrate Russia. The view showed a line of passengers at an airport.

Calibrisi got Polk's attention. Polk crossed the room.

"What's the status on the team?"

"It's set up," said Polk. "Brainard and Fairweather should be wheels-up within the hour."

For the first time, Polk saw Calibrisi's leather bag.

"Where you going?"

Calibrisi paused, then spoke: "I'm going off grid. I'll call you."

55.

ABOARD THE LONELY FISHERMAN.

INTERNATIONAL WATERS.

When Poldark awoke the next morning, he leaned immediately to his left and started vomiting.

You're running out of time.

The radiation sickness was already upon him. It would settle in quickly, ravage for a day or two, then kill them all. By the time they arrived at their destination, all of the men aboard the boat would wish they were dead. Poldark, mainly due to his age, would likely be dead.

Poldark, Faqir, and the other six men aboard the trawler had all agreed to what was to come. They all signed up to die on behalf of a cause.

For Faqir and the Chechens, that cause was jihad. For Poldark, the reason had nothing to do with jihad. It had to do with a man named Vargarin, though not Pyotr.

Anuslav Vargarin had been Poldark's professor and mentor. He studied under Vargarin and it was Vargarin who convinced Poldark, at age twenty-one, to pursue a life devoted to scientific discovery and academic research. Professor Vargarin had been his undergraduate advisor, his doctoral thesis advisor, and, for twenty-two years, his colleague.

Poldark was part of the team that helped Anuslav Vargarin turn an idea into a theory and then, ultimately, into a formula, a formula that eventually got Vargarin killed. In a few days, it would kill Poldark as well, though in a very different way. It would kill Poldark because he would utilize the formula to divide the nuclear device into two nuclear devices, and, during that process, would be exposed to lethal amounts of gamma radiation. He would die either when the bomb was detonated in New York City or from radiation sickness before they got there.

What Vargarin created, with Poldark's assistance, was a way to achieve supercritical mass with less uranium than a standard nuclear device. Though other scientists had also succeeded in achieving the same goal, all had done so with chemical accelerants that, while not as difficult to procure as uranium, still required the use of apparatus and/or chemicals that only a major enterprise possessed, such as a cyclotron or polonium. Vargarin's theory achieved supercritical mass with a slight twist, using a chemical compound that could be made more easily than had ever been achieved before, without a cyclotron and without the need for a rare element such as polonium.

In essence, it meant two bombs could be created from one. At a time when the Soviet Union and the United States were at war, a Cold War, racing to amass nuclear weapons, Vargarin's idea was revolutionary. A country could double its existing stockpile of nukes without the need for more radioactive material. It was an idea big enough for America to kill for.

When the Americans killed Anuslav Vargarin and stole the formula, they also killed Poldark's hope of a scientific career as celebrated as Vargarin's. He would have been part of the team that designed it. In the Soviet Union, such accomplishments were handsomely rewarded, its scientists treated like rock stars. America had robbed him of his future.

Nearly thirty years later, Vargarin's Theorem was no longer innovative or, for that matter, used.

But all that was secondary to Poldark. All that mattered to him was that it worked.

After carefully removing the bomb's component parts, Poldark took two of the eight uranium rings and placed them in a steel case beneath the table. He reassembled the original physics package. He drilled a small hole through its cap and then welded the cap back on.

Next he went to the duffel and removed a shiny steel cylinder that was longer and wider than the original. Over the next several hours, he replicated the design of the original bomb. Once the gun assembly was done, he welded a similar end cap to it, though this one had a slight modification. At the center was a small threaded hole.

Poldark went to the duffel and removed what was the most important part of the process. It was a large thermos, filled with a liquid, radiogenic isotope of bismuth. It looked like water. Using a plastic funnel, he poured the contents of the thermos into the second device.

From the black tool case, he removed two specially designed copper bolts. At the head of each bolt, three small screws stuck out like small antennae. He screwed a bolt into each of the caps, threading them tightly into the holes at the end of each bomb.

Poldark removed two small, similar-looking devices from the duffel bag. They resembled cell phones except that both had wires dangling out. These were the triggers. He attached the wires from each trigger to the copper bolts atop the two bombs, wrapping them around the screws, then fastening them tight. He wrapped several strips of duct tape over the end of each bomb.

Finally, he removed two detonators from the tool case. These were thin, square boxes the size of television remotes, made of white plastic. On one side of each detonator was a square blue cap that stuck out. Poldark placed each detonator on the table, then lifted up the caps. Beneath were switches, like light switches. They glowed dull red. He closed the covers and wrapped duct tape around them, ensuring no one accidentally flipped either of them before they were in place and ready to be detonated. He marked each detonator with a number so that the right detonator went with the bomb it had been programmed to.

Poldark stepped back from the table. He placed his hands behind his back, leaned against the wall, and slowly slid down and sat on the floor. He pulled the SCBA, self contained breathing apparatus, from over his head. Beneath, he was wet with perspiration, his skin a pale, ashen gray. Poldark crossed his legs. He sat and stared at the two bombs for more than ten minutes.

He looked up at a clock on the wall. He'd been working for twelve hours. His eyes returned to the bombs.

Would Anuslav be proud of him now? he wondered. Would he be proud of him for implementing his vision? For helping his son exact vengeance on those who'd killed his mother and father as he watched, an innocent five-year-old, sentenced to life as an orphan, crippled by a memory that could not be erased? Would Anuslav share the sense of justice when the bombs tore through life and limb of countrymen who'd taken his very life? Who'd stolen his life's work, sacrificing one of the Soviet Union's greatest scientific minds, all for a few sheets of paper filled with letters and numbers? Would the great professor be proud of him now?

Poldark knew the answer.

56.

GRAMERCY PARK HOTEL.

NEW YORK CITY.

Igor heard his phone beeping through a fog of Patrn and extremely expensive marijuana, grown in a laboratory in Oregon and designed for a mild prep school high intermingled with a Viagra-like sexual potency. The beeping was accompanied by a nudge from the foot that was approximately half an inch from his face, a foot that was tan and smooth, with red toenail polish and a heel that looked as if it had never done a hard day's work in its life, despite the fact that it belonged to a runway model, at least, that's what Igor thought she'd said. His left eye opened. He was now staring at the foot. It was a beautiful foot, he thought.

What the hell is her name? Alice? Allison?

The phone beeped for a fifth time.

At the other end of the bed, he felt a girl kissing his ankle, then his knee, then his thigh, and then a little higher.

Whoever's calling, well, they're just going to have to wait.

Suddenly, he felt a hand wrap around his chest. His eyes darted down. It was a small hand, brown, with white fingernail polish. Then he remembered the black girl. She was Alice. Now it was coming back to him. La Piscine. Hotel Americano. A shared joint. A limo ride back to the Gramercy. The shower.

Igor was worth more than $100 million. It wasn't as much as Sergey Brin, one of his classmates at Stanford, but it was better than a sharp stick in the eye.

He was the best programmer in his class. If others had made more money, it didn't seem to bother him.

Igor had made his fortune working for an American energy company, KKB. With little help or fanfare, he had designed, built, and then managed a technology colossus that controlled, in real time, all aspects of exploration, production, storage, and distribution for the largest energy company in North America and the second largest in the world.

Igor not only built it all alone, he managed it with a staff of only twelve people. The company's executives and traders knew precisely what was occurring in all parts of the company's massive supply chain, at all times.

Most impressive was the complex algorithm Igor had written that enabled KKB to optimize how it priced its products-electricity, oil, coal-in real time, against location. It was a mathematical piece of software genius. It helped deliver the highest profit margins of any other energy company, large or small, in the world.

KKB, in turn, had rewarded Igor handsomely. The year before, he'd made $25 million. And on New Year's Day, Igor had walked out of KKB for the last time, retiring with enough money to live a life of pleasure and, occasionally, debauchery. Of course, all that was irrelevant at this particular moment. Money, KKB, computers, the world-none of that crossed his mind, as Alice said something in French that he didn't understand.

The beeping started again, and this time it didn't stop. Reluctantly, Igor pushed Alice off and reached for his cell phone.

"Who is it?" Igor asked.

"It's Hector Calibrisi."

Igor sat up. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to expel the hangover and dizziness from his head.

"What time is it?"

"Two o'clock," said Calibrisi.

"Day or night?"

Calibrisi ignored the question.

"We need your help, Igor."

"Call Geek Squad," said Igor.

"I'm not fucking around."

"I'm not either. I retired, Hector."

"This concerns your adopted homeland, the United States of America. I'm assuming you still like it here?"

"Oh, man. What do you need my help with?"

"Catching a hacker."

Igor swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. He walked toward the bathroom as the two girls curled up together and started kissing.

"What do you mean, 'a hacker'?"

"He's Russian. His name is Vargarin, but he goes by the name-"

"Cloud," said Igor, stepping into the bathroom and turning the shower on-cold.

"That's right."

"Okay, first thing, tell your IT people not to shut anything down," said Igor. "No sanitization, no removal of code. Nothing. Leave it alone."

"Why?"

"He's inside Langley, correct?"

"Yeah."

"Cloud came in through a path. We need to find the beginning of the path. If we can do that, we can find him."

57.

PARK TENISOWY OLIMPIA.

POZNA, POLAND.

The bleachers were filled with fans, there to watch a second-round doubles match in Poland's sole professional men's tennis tournament, the Pozna Open. Beneath a warm summer evening, the point was already under way.

The French team was leading, having taken the first set over the pair of Americans. Tom Fairweather suddenly found himself in no-man's-land, trying to get to a lob that was headed for the baseline.

Fairweather had gotten lured to the net by a drop shot, and now he had no choice. He leapt, striking the ball with the very edge of the racket. The ball sailed in a wobbly line back down the middle of the court, between the two Frenchmen.

"Watch your alley!" barked Fairweather.

The French player reached the ball and pivoted, ripping a forehand crosscourt, toward Fairweather's alley. At full sprint, he lurched forward, racket extended, diving. The ball hit the racket in the half second before Fairweather landed chest-first on the clay, thumping hard and sliding painfully forward as gasps came from the crowd. From the ground, he watched the ball hit the top of the net, perch for a pregnant moment, then dribble over and die on the clay on the other side of the court.

Slowly, Fairweather climbed to his feet. The front of his white shirt and shorts, as well as his arms and legs, were covered in red clay.

"Nice shot," said one of the French players, nodding at him.