GLOUCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.

"Hey, Scooter. How do you like your hot dog?"

Saxby Ruggierio, in a blue-and-white apron, was standing on the back terrace, over the barbecue. The backyard of Ruggierio's home was crowded with friends, family, and most of his employees from the marina.

"Medium rare," said Ruggierio's neighbor.

Ruggierio laughed, took a swig of beer, then walked back inside to the kitchen. His son, Billy, was seated at the table with a girl from down the street, both eating cheeseburgers and watching the Red Sox game.

"Who's winning?" asked Ruggierio.

"I don't know," said Billy. "They cut into the game."

Ruggierio glanced at the TV. On the screen was a special report from Boston harbor.

"Turn it up," he said as he stepped closer to the TV. An aerial view of the harbor showed a swarm of law enforcement boats, their red and blue lights bright.

"... while it's difficult to see, the area they seem to be focusing in on is Revere, just across the water from the city of Boston. Again, a terror plot is apparently being investigated on this, the evening before the July Fourth weekend..."

"Holy shit," he muttered.

Ruggierio reached for the phone and dialed 911.

95.

EVOLUTION TOWER.

MOSCOW.

The elevator came suddenly into the open air, more than thirty floors in the sky. The wind ripped across the steel heights, stinging Malnikov with driving horizontal rain. The cage groaned loudly as it climbed.

Malnikov looked down through the yellow grate. Moscow was a different city, a darker city, dense with whole pockets of black, and lights diffused by rain.

Malnikov registered a puddle of crimson at the edge of the cage. Blood from Cloud, now washing away as rain hit it from above.

The sound of gunshot cut through the air, joined by the loud clang of the slug striking steel near his head. Malnikov ducked just as another bullet was fired, then felt his shoulder being kicked hard and back. He let himself fall to the floor as more bullets hit the rising cage.

A floor above, the elevator came to a loud stop.

Malnikov looked at his shoulder. Blood oozed through a hole in his jacket.

He crawled to the edge of the cage, trying to peer down to the floor below. But just as his head came to the edge, another shot rang out. It hit the steel of the elevator floor. A small dent appeared just beneath his chin.

"Did that hurt, Alexei?" yelled Cloud.

Malnikov lay on his back, staring up at the black and gray clouds. His breathing was becoming difficult, as if he'd just run sprints. He unzipped his coat and pulled it away from his shoulder. Blood was everywhere. His first impression-that the bullet was in his shoulder-was wrong. A black hole sat just a few inches above his nipple. With every labored breath, a fresh wave of blood gushed out.

"I need the elevator," said Cloud. "Do you mind bleeding to death somewhere else?"

Still on his back, Malnikov reached up and lowered the latch to the cage door. He kicked the door open. Slowly, with a painful moan, he turned over onto his side and climbed to his knees against the back wall of the cage. He got into a crouching position, then stuck the muzzle of the gun to the edge of the cage and aimed down at where the shots had come from. Malnikov fired as fast as his finger could flex, then charged through the open door of the cage.

Dewey moved back to the cabin, cutting to the weapons rack. He took out a pair of night optics and pulled them down over his eyes, then flipped them on. He put on a weapons vest, then grabbed a body harness and quickly put it on. He scanned the row of firearms, choosing a Desert Eagle .50AE and sticking it in the vest holster atop his left chest. Then he grabbed a KSVK 12.7 anti-materiel sniper rifle.

Another gust of wind slammed the chopper, kicking it left and down.

Stihl turned from the cockpit.

"We're coming in hot," he said. "Strap in."

Dewey hooked himself to the harness rail in the middle of the cabin.

He stepped to the cockpit, the cord automatically releasing line as he moved. He looked out the front window. In the distance, Evolution Tower looked like a pair of steel ribbons spiking into the sky. The unfinished floors made the top appear as if it were disintegrating.

"Give me a perimeter," said Dewey. "Let's see what we can see before we get in there. It'd be nice if we could surprise that little bastard."

Calmly, Stihl reached to the right side of his helmet, feeling blindly for a small button, then pressing it as, directly in front of him, through the rain-splattered helicopter windshield, the unfinished, wildly curving steel spires of Evolution Tower arose through the mist in sporadic halogen yellow.

After the button was pressed, a black, specially designed glass visor slid down from the top of his helmet and covered his eyes. The visual became like a video game; the building snapped into a three-dimensional digital grid. Isobars of green, red, and yellow against black, in geometric patterns, filled the screen.

Stihl reached to his left, grabbing what looked like a glove. He pulled it on, then repeated the gesture with his other hand. The gloves suddenly went from being black to white, completely lit up, as if his hands were covered in some sort of glow-in-the-dark material. Stihl then began what looked like he was gesturing to himself, as the controls of the chopper became part of an advanced exoskeletal driving and weapons computer controlled by his hand movements, and the chopper responded, cutting abruptly left into the chasm between the unfinished skyscraper and a neighboring seventy-three-story office tower.

Stihl saw glimmers of heat on a high floor. He made an almost imperceptible movement with his left pinkie. The digital camera zoomed close, enlarging the green holographs. Another image flashed in the upper right part of Stihl's visor. Two floors were visible, the separating concrete slashing horizontal. On the higher floor, a man was crouched inside the elevator cage. On the lower floor, another man was limping toward a set of stairs near the side of the building. He was clutching a weapon, trained at the floor above as he climbed the stairs.

Stihl then saw red flashes of gunfire coming from the elevator, aimed at the floor below.

He flicked his finger again, engaging the cabin speaker system.

"We have a firefight," he said. "Better get up here."

Stihl flicked his thumb, and the windshield of the chopper abruptly transformed into the same digital screen he was seeing inside his helmet, like a large television screen. The rain was gone. The two figures looked like ghosts against a black backdrop.

Dewey moved to Stihl's right, studying the scene.

"Can you get a closer shot?" asked Dewey.

They watched as the gunman in the elevator kicked open the side of the cabin, then charged into the blackness, just as, at the other side of the same floor, another man climbed slowly up the stairs.

"Who's who?" asked Dewey.

"I don't know."

The screen showed the man running across the empty floor, sprinting, his path leading directly toward the man now climbing the stairs.

"That's Alexei," said Stihl.

"Which one?"

"The one running," said Stihl. "He's running right into him. He's going to get killed."

"Take me in."

"I'm going to level the guy on the stairs," said Stihl, suddenly engaging the weapons command.

"No, you're not," said Dewey. "Take me in."

Dewey stepped back into the cabin.

"He's going to die if I don't-"

Stihl's words were abruptly cut off as, inside his visor-and across the front screen-a blinding white light hit the left side of the view. He knew, in his bones, what it was.

"Hold on!" he screamed.

A ferocious torrent of wind shear, funneled like a tornado up into the valley between the skyscrapers, slammed like a wall of steel into the helicopter. They were kicked back and to the right, so hard that Stihl's helmet went flying from his head, struck the ceiling, and tumbled to the floor.

The chopper was jacked instantly sideways, its rotors vertical, as Stihl fought-using the exoskeletal gloves-to right them before they smashed into the building.

96.

LONG ISLAND SOUND.

OFF THE COAST OF STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT.

Faqir steered a mile offshore, keeping the lights of the coastline in view, tiny yellow and white lights, from homes along the shore, a typical American evening.

It was pitch-black out on the water. He wore night optics. On the radio was news about a suspected terrorist plot in Boston. The American president had just announced that it had been stopped.

He knew that if the White House was announcing it, it meant they had no clue as to the existence of the other device, the bomb lying on the deck next to him.

Most of the crew were inside the cabin. Every hour or so, Faqir walked among them, feeling if they were still alive. Occasionally, a man would open his eyes. For the most part, they were all dead to the world. Vomit covered the ground.

Faqir stopped vomiting sometime during the night. Aswan, another crewman, had made a similar transition before dying an hour after they departed Boston. He'd tied a concrete block to Aswan's ankle, then dumped him overboard.

Though he didn't say anything, Faqir grew increasingly worried, wondering whether he would last long enough to get the boat to New York harbor.

One of the Chechens, a light-skinned teenager named Naji, was the only crew member still in relatively decent shape. He had enough energy to puke over the side of the boat. When there was work to be done, it was Naji whom Faqir turned to.

Faqir had taught Naji how to run the boat, as well as navigate, just in case he died unexpectedly.

The Talaria was now near the shore, as Long Island Sound narrowed the closer they came to New York. As he looked to the shore, he saw a busy marina. People were sitting out front, eating at a waterside restaurant. Hundreds of watercraft, from beat-up skiffs to gaudy million-dollar cigarette boats, were moored along piers that stretched hundred feet into the water, then ran along the busy coast, beneath office and apartment buildings, for a quarter mile.

A memory flashed in Faqir's mind.

Many months ago, Faqir imagined that the night before the bomb was detonated-his last night on earth-he would celebrate, like Mohammed Atta had done the evening before 9/11. He imagined docking the boat and taking the others out for dinner, perhaps ordering wine.

A small grin came to his emaciated face as he thought about how much fun it would have been. Then he looked around the cabin. His grin disappeared as he realized that, except for Naji, all the crewmen were dead.

97.

EVOLUTION TOWER.

MOSCOW.

The wall of wind shear pummeled the Eurocopter sideways. The chopper's rotors tilted into a vertical position, then the chopper dropped more than two hundred feet in just seconds, before starting a somersault. The three-and-a-half-ton helicopter was out of control, in the rain and dark, sixty stories above the street.

Dewey felt the onset of the first gust, and all he could do was stick his hand out to shield his head before he was thrown into the back wall. He slammed into it, then dropped to the floor.

Desperately, he grabbed along the wall, searching for something to hold on to. He found a utility bar and clutched it with every ounce of strength he had, holding on as the chopper whipped violently upside down.

Stihl was strapped tightly to the pilot's chair, focused on the digital screen inside his visor. He'd already flipped the Eurocopter's avionics to his control, and now the chopper's fate was fully vested in the pair of highly advanced exoskeletal gloves on Stihl's hands. He had to right the helicopter before it crashed.

The wind shear should've hit in a straight wall, like a wave. But the tall buildings altered the wind, each steel-and-concrete spire cutting into it, making the gust choppy and uneven.

Stihl, who'd flown in blizzards in the hills outside Grozny, who'd tangled with hurricanes in the Hindu Kush, now had a serious situation on his hands, certainly the worst he'd ever faced.

Stihl reached his hands out, trying find some level of stability within the maelstrom. He tried to focus on the graphical of the wind. Its white blur was now dead center, shaped like an upside-down U. It was moving. The air was clear on the other side.

Stihl's eyes shot to the top of the screen. In bold green, a square box of geometric isobar lines was approaching the center of the screen. This was a skyscraper. Three hundred feet and closing. They would slam into it in seconds.

He waited one extra moment, unsure if what he was about to do would work, then realized it didn't matter. It was all instinct now. A quarter century's worth of gut, all funneled into one move.

"Hold on!" he screamed.

Stihl dumped fuel from all but one tank, then slammed on both front and rear rotor brakes. A half second later, he released the rear rotor.

The chopper tilted down, its nose suddenly going from aiming at the sky to the ground, as, in the same instant, the craft dropped. Gasoline poured down around the chopper, mixing with the rain, displacing weight.

Then Stihl jacked both engines to the max. Front and rear rotors churned ferociously. The chopper kicked forward and down. Stihl was slammed back in the seat. Whatever fuel hadn't been emptied juiced the Eurocopter's turbos, which crushed the gas into a barely controlled, sudden explosion of power. Every ounce of thrust the Eurocopter was capable of providing was being used as, on the digital screen, the skyscraper and chopper appeared as if they were in the process of merging.