Malnikov fired. The slug ripped a jagged hole between Tolstoy's eyes, kicking his head back, raining blood, skull, and brains on the floor, killing him instantly.

"You always have a choice, Leo."

87.

ELEKTROSTAL.

Cloud had two screens on Moscow network news. One screen showed continuing coverage of the plane crash. The other had live coverage of the explosion near Pobedy Park.

He heard the door open behind him, and turned. It was Sascha. He trudged inside, his clothing and hair soaking wet. His face was red and sweaty.

"It's all over the news," said Cloud.

"He was there."

"Who?"

"Andreas."

Cloud stood, mouth agape.

"He was across the street, like he was watching the building. He chased me."

"What did you do?"

"I detonated the bomb. He was thrown in the air. I think I might have killed him."

Sascha stepped behind Cloud to look at the news. The screen was frozen.

Cloud hit the keyboard.

"We're iced," he said.

Cloud pounded the keyboard several times.

"It must be in our directories," said Cloud.

He walked to the next workstation and ran a series of diagnostic scans of their own servers, then rebooted the system.

The scan of the servers pinpointed a buffer overflow-a massive amount of traffic that clogged the system. In looking at the sequence of its arrival, he was quickly able to find the perpetrator. It was coming from someplace in North America. The perpetrator had no purpose other than to disrupt the streaming of the television station.

Cloud cleaned it out, then rebooted the servers. Within twenty seconds, the screen quickly froze again.

Cloud went back to the log and found the malicious code behind the buffer overflow. He cut out the piece of malicious code, saved it, then ran it through a program that contextualized the code against existing hacker code, looking for similarities, so that he could understand where the code had come from and if it represented a danger. He pasted the code, then watched as it was smashed against hundreds of millions of cataloged malicious code from hackers all over the world, including his own.

After less than a minute, a red flashing block of code appeared: hwpsraid:/7sxl:0.01 He stared at the screen for several seconds, in shock.

"My God," he whispered.

"What?"

Cloud shut his eyes, deep in thought.

"Cloud, what is it?"

"They found us."

Down the hall from the Situation Room, Brubaker led Calibrisi and Polk to a small, windowless office. The room had photos on the walls of past presidents presiding over meetings in the Situation Room. A desk was against one wall. On top of it sat two large unusual-looking rectangular black phones.

Brubaker stepped to one of the phones and hit the speaker.

A female voice came on: "White House Signal."

"This is Josh Brubaker. I need a dedicated preaction uplink via NSA channel two two."

"Hold, please."

The phone made two distinct beeps, then a male voice came on the line.

"NSC code link, you're live. Agent O'Brien here, go, sir."

"O'Brien, you have a live Emergency Priority action," said Brubaker. "I'm handing it over to Hector."

"Yes, sir. It's an honor, Mr. Calibrisi."

Brubaker patted Calibrisi on the shoulder, then left, shutting the door behind him.

"What kind of encryption is on the link?" asked Polk.

"KEY-5 TLS encryption," said O'Brien. "What's the first number?"

"212-772-1001," said Calibrisi.

"One minute, sir."

Malnikov pushed the red Ferrari F12 Berlinetta recklessly fast-tearing east along the M7 at 150 mph despite the heavy rain.

Dewey, strapped tight in the passenger seat, stared ahead with a hint of unease.

"Alexei?"

"Yeah?"

"You realize if we die on the way there it sort of makes it hard to capture him."

Malnikov glanced at Dewey. He slowed ever so slightly, shaking his head.

"I thought you were tough."

"I never said that," said Dewey. "Besides, I don't care how tough you are, hitting a hunk of concrete at two hundred miles an hour hurts."

"Victory requires speed," said Malnikov. "Americans want to go too slow. Speed limits and whatnot. You're too cautious. Perhaps this is why you lose all these wars? Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq..."

Dewey's eyes bulged as they came up behind a semitruck, then swerved right, barely missing it.

"The Cold War," added Dewey.

Malnikov braked sharply, then exited the highway. A few minutes later, they came to the edge of Elektrostal. He took a left on Mayakovskogo. The road was rutted with potholes. Trees and shrubs had taken over the sidewalks. Old warehouses stained with rust sat between decrepit structures that had once been office buildings but now appeared abandoned.

"I didn't realize Russia was so nice," said Dewey.

Malnikov laughed.

"We have better-looking women," he responded.

"That's a matter of opinion," said Dewey.

"No, it's a fact."

"Katya's pretty, I'll give you that. But I'll take an Iowa farm girl any day."

"'Farm girl'?" asked Malnikov, shaking his head in disgust as he steered past potholes. "Who the hell wants to fuck a farm girl? You come out with me sometime. I'll show you what a beautiful woman looks like."

Malnikov slashed right, then slowed and came to a stop.

"There it is," said Malnikov, shutting off the Ferrari's lights.

Two blocks away, an ugly office building sat midblock. Four stories tall, it looked like the countless other structures on the street, concrete, shaped like a rectangular block, with small windows. Lights were visible in the building's top floor.

Malnikov's cell suddenly started ringing. He looked at the caller ID, muted it.

He turned to Dewey.

"In the glove compartment. Get a weapon."

As Igor waited for Calibrisi to call him back, he set the phone down on the desk and began typing, pulling the noose even tighter around Cloud's neck.

First, he built redundant pathways into Cloud's network, in case Cloud somehow shut off the system or was able to contain him. Next, he looked for Cloud's alternative egress points, quickly cataloging the various digital pathways out from the network to the Internet. In all, he found sixteen different arteries out of the single building at 17 Vostochnyy. He infiltrated them all, inserting trapdoors.

Suddenly, his third computer screen lit up. Words appeared: X:UsersCX7-44> who is this Igor thought for a split second, then started typing: C:Users02> where is it As he waited for Cloud's response, the screen came alive again: X:UsersCX7-44> where is what Igor paused. He knew that right now, every second mattered. He needed to try to delay Cloud long enough for Calibrisi to get people there.

Igor's phone started to ring.

"Igor?" asked Calibrisi.

"Yes, I'm here."

"What do you have?" asked Calibrisi.

"He's in a city called Elektrostal," said Igor.

Polk opened his laptop, quickly bringing up a digital map of Russia. He narrowed in on Elektrostal.

Igor spoke: "Hector, you need to know something. He initiated conversation with me."

"How?"

"Text."

"What did he say?"

"'Who is this?'"

"How'd you respond?"

"I asked, 'Where is it?' He just responded, 'Where is what?'"

Calibrisi looked at Polk, who was deep in thought.

"We need time," said Polk. "We need to get Dewey there. Let's ask him where the money is. He might think Malnikov has found him."

"Got it," said Igor.

"Control," said Calibrisi. "I need you to add another number."

On one screen, Cloud studied the hack, trying to assess where it had come from.

A second screen showed his opponent's words in white text on black: C:Users02> the money Cloud found the point of intrusion. First, his opponent had discovered an error in one of the networks Cloud had used to send one of his attacks.

Once his opponent discovered the error, he went directly after the jugular, seeking to break the encryption algorithm that safeguarded all of Cloud's network. The attacker had employed a so-called brute-force attack. Armed with a vast amount of computing power, the person or institution had eventually broken his encryption key by systematically enumerating all possible variants of the encryption key until finding the right one.

Now that he was in, there was no way to get him out. His attacker had already commandeered the network and architected a new layer of encryption, which he, not Cloud, controlled.