Trident Code

CHAPTER 14

Galina reached 160 kilometers per hour so quickly that the speed scared her, but not as much as the car tailing her, keeping pace like a panther after its prey. She picked up her pace to 180, about 110 miles per hour. The beast still clung to her trail three car lengths back, an extremely short distance at these speeds.

She had no faith that he would ever give up. He was too tenacious. Had to be a cop, but he hadn’t put on his flashers. She had PP’s money, a lot of it. Does he know that? If he searched the car, he’d find out fast enough — and steal it. Cash in an envelope? It would be her word against his, and she didn’t figure hers would be worth much with the powers-that-be these days. Namely, Oleg. And if it weren’t a police officer behind her? That could be even worse. A hired thug answerable to no one but Oleg.

But she had that small gun in her right hand. She glanced at it gleaming in the reflected light from the dashboard. Blue steel dark as midnight. Murky as murder. Bleak as the soul who would use it.

She couldn’t kill. She was for peace. She’d been a regional director for Greenpeace, for Christ’s sakes. Peace on earth. Peace with the earth. She couldn’t use a gun.

Galina rested it on the passenger seat.

“Mommy, why are we going so fast?”

She’s awake.

“We’re not going so fast, Alexandra. It’s a different car, that’s all. It’s newer so it seems faster. Go back to sleep.”

The car was inching closer, only one length back. He had his brights on. They filled up the rearview mirror, like the blazing eyes of a nightmare. Up ahead was a four-lane highway. She had no training for taking the long curving on-ramp at high speed, but she feared slowing down at all.

She glanced back, remembering that her daughter was lying down. Not strapped in.

“Alexandra, sit up and put your seatbelt on right now.”

“Mommy, I’m too tired.”

“Do it, Alexandra. It’s very important, please.” Her foot pressed down even harder: 255 kilometers per hour.

Alexandra fiddled with the belt. Galina heard Alexandra’s seatbelt click shut. “Good girl.”

They raced by the sign for the turnoff: “1km.” If she’d blinked, she would have missed it.

But then she hit the turn so soon — in such a flash of highway markers — that she felt the Porsche slipping, sliding. Little wonder: she’d slowed only to 130 in a 70-kilometer-per-hour zone.

The unknown vehicle hung on her bumper as g-forces jammed Galina’s shoulder against the door.

Jesus, don’t roll it.

And then she slowed just enough that the Macan seemed to take ownership of the curve. Galina realized PP had given her the right car, at least for this. The small SUV had a racer’s heart. Her tires squealed, but the radials held the road.

She peeled onto the four-lane highway and pressed harder on the gas, bolting right back up to 255 kilometers per hour. Like the Autobahn, but better. Not a car in sight, not at this hour. She no longer felt fearful of the car’s performance.

That was when the police lights came on, ending the mystery. Not a bubble top. She would have seen that in profile. The flashing lights were hidden in the grill. She thought it might be the Federal Security Service. But who knew anymore? And just that quickly the mystery deepened. It could even be private security.

Galina slowed, watching the speedometer needle recede to the left. She looked for a place to pull over. No challenge there — paved shoulder as far as she could see. No excuse for any further delay.

When the speedometer dipped to under sixty, she let the Macan roll to a stop. Still no other cars in sight. Her mama used to say the Russian night was “quiet and dark as the inside of an oyster, where the pearls come to life.”

Galina had lots of doubts about pearls right then.

Put away the gun. It was still on the seat next to her, but she thought it would look suspicious if she leaned over to slip it into the glove box, like she was actually pulling out a gun. Instead, she tucked the small pistol under her right thigh.

The papers. PP said they were in the glove box. She could get them out. That would be legitimate. Have them ready. She reached into the glove box and felt around. There was the envelope with the cash, a comb, pen, the owner’s manual, and the registration sealed neatly in a clear plastic pouch.

She sat back with it, ready to hand it over. But they would want more than papers. Whoever they were, they hadn’t been sitting in the shadows waiting to check the registration. Don’t kid yourself. Then she realized she could have put away the gun when she was digging around in there. She didn’t dare now. It would look supremely suspicious if she started going through the glove box again.

She glanced back at Alexandra. There was no fooling her daughter. She looked petrified; oddly, that made Alexandra seem more alert, more alive than she’d been in weeks.

In the rearview, she saw the man get out of his car. The vehicle looked American, like a wide-bodied Chrysler, but that seemed unlikely. The big sellers, at least in Moscow, were the German, Japanese, and Korean makes.

And then she gripped both sides of her seat. Not the Federal Security Service. Not unless they were hiring the worst breed of thugs, because the man approaching the Macan was Tattoo.

He tapped on her window, surprisingly gentle, then waved his hand in small circles for her to roll it down. She feared he’d grab her neck as soon as she did and choke the life right out of her.

Cooperate. Don’t piss him off.

She pressed the window control. It rolled down. A low hum. Cool air. The window disappeared. Tattoo bent over, resting his meaty arms on the door, his face no more than eight inches from hers. He hadn’t shaved in at least a couple of days. She tried to hand him the registration. He shook his head, as if to say, “Don’t bother.”

“Galina Bortnik. And Alexandra.” He smiled at her daughter. “See, I never forget a pretty girl’s name.”

It appalled Galina that he’d remembered. She studied Alexandra’s reaction in the rearview. No reaction at all. Flat affect with her eyes frozen on her mother.

“What are you doing driving like a maniac in the middle of the night, Galina? You must be high on drugs. Is your mommy using drugs, Alexandra?” He sucked on an imaginary pipe.

Apparently, he thought that was funny. He prodded Galina’s shoulder and said, “Laugh.”

She did not laugh.

“What kind of drugs did you take to make you drive so fast, Galina Bortnik? You should tell me. Whatever I find, it won’t go well for you. And I will conduct a very careful search of your car. And you. Or maybe you’re one of those drug users who has her little girl hide the drugs. I can search her, too. Did she do that to you?” he asked Alexandra. “Use you like a drug mule? Bad mommy.”

“I’ve never used drugs. Ever.”

“Yes,” he patted her shoulder. “You look like such a good mother.” He left his hand on her. The weight unnerved Galina. A shudder passed through her. “But we all know that even good mothers make mistakes. And I think you have made some very big mistakes lately. What do you think, Galina?”

He squeezed her shoulder. His hand felt big as an oven mitt. As hot, too. He started kneading her flesh. The tips of his long fat fingers reached the top of her breast.

“Please stop.”

“I don’t think you want me to stop, Galina, because if I stop I’m going to have to do other things. But since you asked, I guess it’s time to get started. Unlock your door.”

When she hesitated, afraid he’d grab her breast if she turned toward him, he reached in, unlocked the door, and swung it open.

She didn’t move, not even her eyes. They were still on him. His gaze was on her chest, the breast he’d been touching. Then his gaze drifted to her legs. She pulled her modest skirt over her knees, as though he might not notice if she did it casually. But almost all women know better. So did Galina. Men like Tattoo always noticed. He smiled and crouched down. She thought of the way his car had trailed her like a panther. He seemed like a huge predator now, ready to spring at her.

“I told you, didn’t I? One thing leads to another.”

With that he put his hand on her thigh. “I heard you have such soft skin. Yes, you do…”

“Please stop that.” She tried to push him away.

He seized her hand, his grip so hard it felt like he could crush her fingers if he chose to. In another quick movement, he reached across her and unsnapped her seatbelt. Then he swept her skirt up onto her legs, exposing her underpants. When she tried to push the hem back down, he grabbed her hand again and shook his head. “One thing does what, Galina Bortnik?” When she shook her head, he answered for her. “Leads to another. That’s right.”

He sniffed the air loudly, closing his eyes for just a second, as if he were savoring a scent he couldn’t possibly smell.

He tormented her with another whiskery smile. “I have to search the car for contraband. I’m going to have to search you, too. It’s standard police protocol when we have such a reckless driver. I’m also going to have to search Alexandra. You were endangering such a nice girl.”

The fine hairs rose on Galina’s neck. A paused followed in which he said nothing. Galina could hardly breathe.

Then he seized her leg like it was an axe handle and pulled it so hard he swung her halfway around in her seat. He held her leg out the door.

Instinctively, she drew the other one to it — and felt the pistol exposed by her side.

Her hand fell to it. She gripped it, but kept it down. It looked as though she were bolstering herself because of the awkward angle he’d put her in. And she was bolstering herself, but not because of that. She pointed the pistol in his face.

Now he froze.

“Get your hands off me and back away slowly.”

“Galina, you’re making this very bad. This won’t turn out good for you now.”

“It was never going to turn out good for me so quit saying that.”

His hand dropped away from her leg. She pulled her skirt down. “I said to back up.”

He did, but remained hunched over, as though he were still leaning on the door — or getting ready to attack her.

Shoot him. Just do it.

Still, she couldn’t pull the trigger — until he lunged for her gun hand. She fired into his broad belly and watched him sink to his knees. Fearing he would pitch forward, she pulled her legs back toward the car.

He did come forward — with unbridled fury. He grabbed the waistband of her skirt. She fired again, and that was when she learned the small gun was a single-shot derringer. Just enough ammo to make him a madman.

He dragged himself toward her, ripping off her skirt. She leaned back into the car but he had her by the legs.

She sat forward and bashed him in the face with the butt of the small pistol, drawing blood from his cheek. Alexandra screamed.

“She’s next,” Tattoo swore.

Galina hit him again. He grabbed her hand and started crawling up her body, using her limbs like a ladder.

She couldn’t pull away. He gripped her shoulders next. Galina threw herself back toward the passenger door, breaking his hold, but the weight of him still pressed against her legs. They felt like they’d been sunk in cement.

She stretched out her upper body, but his hands slid over her bra and clamped back on her shoulders. He dragged his bloody stomach over her underwear. Then he grabbed her neck, enveloping it with one hand, and began to crush it with his thick powerful fingers. Alexandra jumped out of her seat and hit him, screaming, “Go away! Leave Mommy alone.”

Galina tried to tell her to stop but couldn’t talk. Couldn’t breathe. He was strangling her.

He pushed himself up and backhanded Alexandra so hard the frail girl slammed into the backseat, shocked so deeply that her wail didn’t come for seconds. But she’d bought Galina a few quick breaths.

“You little bitch.” He grabbed for Alexandra. She ducked. Thank God. But then he lunged partway over the seat for the girl.

Though pinned by his other hand, Galina reached for the glove box, fingers scrabbling to get inside, then grabbed the pen. She jammed it into the bullet hole as far as she could, jerked it back and forth and thrust it deeper still.

Tattoo howled. His eyes widened, and he grabbed her hand, pushing it away. She let him — and left the pen in his gut.

He pressed her hand against the passenger door and held it there, panting and creating the macabre appearance of a man having sex in a car.

Blood spilled copiously from his wound now. She must have hit an artery.

His grip on her hand weakened.

Die! Die!

He let go of her. She tried to push him away. He groaned loudly. She realized he’d been groaning since she’d stabbed the bullet wound. And then he clamped his hand back on her neck. A final seizure of murderous violence, as if he were determined to take her with him.

She tried to turn away, but he outweighed her by at least two hundred pounds.

He pushed down, cutting off the last of her air. But he began to shake and she heard a croaky sound rise from his throat. Then he shook so hard he rolled over, jamming himself between the seat and dash. He stopped moving.

Galina opened the passenger door and pulled her legs out from under him, falling onto the paved shoulder in her haste to get out.

She hurried to his car and shut off the lights. She didn’t want anyone stopping. His radio wasn’t on. He might have been off the clock. Of course, freelancing. She looked for his gun. A quick search didn’t turn it up, but she found his Taser and took it. She wanted to make sure he was dead, and sure didn’t want to check his pulse.

Alexandra came up beside her. Galina was about to tell her girl to get back in the car, then thought better of it.

“Wait here, okay?”

Alexandra nodded.

Galina returned to the passenger side of the Porsche. One of Tattoo’s hands was draped limply over the edge of the seat. She thought it was the one he’d used to choke her.

She tased it. No reaction.

Galina dragged and pushed and finally hauled him onto the shoulder of the road, swearing at him silently.

The Macan’s black leather seats were smeared with his blood. So were her legs and belly.

She wiped it off herself with her torn skirt, and used the sullied fabric to clean up the seats as much as she could. She took a fresh skirt from her suitcase and slipped it on, moving feverishly, frightened almost senseless that a car could come along and stop. One had raced by on the other side of the highway when he was attacking her. Others might have as well. Someone could have called the police. Two cars by the side of the road in the middle of the night? Suspicious, especially to a citizenry trained to be wary.

“Let’s go,” she said to Alexandra, who wanted to sit next to her.

Of course, her daughter was terrified, shaking. She wanted to be near her mother.

Galina pulled a dress from her suitcase and draped it over the passenger seat. She didn’t want Alexandra to get a trace of that animal’s blood on her.

They drove away. Only then did Galina understand that she’d been wheezing and hadn’t taken a full breath in minutes. Her throat hurt, but as they gained speed — and distance from Tattoo’s body — she began to relax enough that she stopped sounding asthmatic.

Alexandra’s eyes were closed. She looked like she was sleeping. Galina put on the radio, keeping the volume low. She wanted to know about Antarctica. Was it still there? Who really knew what a nuclear missile would to do the ice continent?

The explosion had taken place, as threatened, on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The radio announcer’s voice was grave. For good reason: more than three thousand scientists and support staff from around the world had died, swept to their death by powerful blast waves. Now, nuclear snow was said to be falling on parts of the southern ocean.

“And the seas are rising,” the announcer reported.

Not over centuries, Galina thought, as so many of those men and women on Antarctica had predicted, but with the speed of terrorism itself. And that was very fast, indeed.

She shut off the radio and kept driving, grieving as first light creased the eastern sky. She wasn’t sure where they would go. Only that there was no turning back.

CHAPTER 15

The silence in Lana’s NSA office belied the tragedies on several split-screen monitors she kept tuned to government and commercial news feeds. she’d muted the sound, needing to hear nothing more of drowning victims, environmental devastation, and the open panic of the world’s population. The massacre of all the scientists and support personnel in Antarctica was so shocking that she still had difficulty comprehending the loss, made personal when she learned that her college roommate, a renowned paleoclimatologist, had been among the murdered.

The Trident II had hit the continent just north of the Thwaites Glacier at an altitude of about two miles to exert maximum damage from the air. Not a direct strike but close enough to immediately calve glacial chunks the size of Rhode Island into the southern ocean — and incinerate billions of tons of ice now forming massive blizzards that were sweeping across the seas.

Scientists had long considered Thwaites crucial for holding so much of the region’s ice in place, but the blast had widened the glacier’s mouth. And it most certainly had compromised its grounding line, the border of the land that supported the ice and the body of water that would receive it. Glaciologists were certain the explosion would speed up the glacier’s path to the sea, which had been expected to take hundreds of years. The potential for a death toll in the billions from the missile strike would turn into a fast-forward reality if all the ice backed up behind Thwaites were shaken loose, as so many experts now feared.

None of the experts working for, or consulted by, the Defense Department were predicting anything but the most dire ramifications from the explosion.

“Expect sea level rise for a period of weeks, maybe months,” had been the bulletin from DOD. “Expect severe radiation poisoning as polar easterlies carry toxic plutonium from the continent. Expect disturbances both domestic and foreign among threatened populations.”

The parched language of panic.

Already, scientific consensus held that the world was heading for an absolute minimum rise of a meter — if the planet were exceedingly lucky and all of the WAIS didn’t crash into the ocean, a catastrophe that would lift sea levels the full eleven feet. But a meter still constituted a century’s worth of warming in the geological equivalent of a blink.

Trampling had become the leading cause of death in low-lying countries, such as Bangladesh, as populations crowded along coastlines raced away from rising waters. The number of victims already numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, Nauru, and other nations throughout Oceania were losing territory — and lives — by the minute.

But the biggest numbers of victims might yet hail from the biggest names in cities: New Orleans, which looked as if Hurricane Katrina had returned on steroids; New York, where subway trains had been caught in flooded tunnels, killing more than one thousand passengers; Los Angeles, where famed beach communities had been obliterated; Tokyo, where trampling killed hundreds; and Amsterdam, where even centuries of living below sea level could scarcely prepare the populace for such a swift onslaught of the ocean. The compounding tragedies also included Mumbai, Shanghai, Singapore, Jakarta, and Dhaka. Water treatment plants were flooded; basic sanitation had washed away with the floods; diseases, such as dysentery, were predicted to become epidemic; and widespread starvation was expected within days.

In the U.S., Miami was a worst-case scenario all on its own — possibly in a literal sense: Southeast Florida was among the most imperiled places on the planet, and if the waters kept rising, Miami would be cut off from mainland America within two weeks. It was not hard to imagine that in the next century its famed high-rises would form coral reefs as dead as so many of nature’s had already become.

Traffic on I-95 and I-75, heading north out of Florida, was choked by vehicles that had run out of fuel. Truck stops had shut down, only to be looted by motorists, including armed families, desperate for food and water and nonexistent gasoline. Shopping centers throughout the Sunshine State were ablaze, a fast-moving phenomenon not confined to Florida cities. It was as if arsonists were trying to fight floods with fire.

The mayhem was almost incomprehensible, and yet it made perfect sense to Lana. The world as people had known it all their lives was ending.

Meetings of every conceivable government agency remotely related to climate change, emergency services, and the nation’s security were underway, but as Holmes had confided to his closest aides only hours ago, “It mostly comes down to what we can do to stop these madmen.” Tellingly, his eyes had landed on Lana.

What her eyes could not avoid taking in now was the video once more feeding from the Delphin. The ghostly interior of the submarine, strewn with dead bodies, now looked like a preview of what the hackers had planned for the rest of the world.

This is how we got started, she imagined one of them saying, but soon this will be everywhere.

She told herself to look, really look at that sub. Hacking it, hijacking a nuclear missile, had been almost inconceivable — until it happened. Just as it had been difficult to comprehend the atomic bomb before Hiroshima, or the most virulent hate before the Holocaust. Or any number of other mass deaths.

She also kept the sound muted for the sub. Just look, she told herself again. She didn’t want to be distracted by the white noise coming from a submarine that had become a submerged crypt.

The only person she saw alive was First Class Petty Officer Hector Gomez, who had moved back into frame.

What are the odds, she wondered, that the man in charge of the Missile Control Center had survived? The very officer who knew the intricacies of launching the missiles.

Yes, she was aware he’d been vetted thoroughly since the hijacking, but she called Jensen anyway and told her CyberFortress VP to join her at NSA. She’d always made sure he was available full-time to run the show at her security firm, but if they didn’t stop this madness quickly, there would be no CF or much else of value to save.

He arrived looking graver than she’d ever seen him, and that was saying quite a lot about her Mormon right-hand man with his rock solid beliefs in a family-filled afterlife.

She pointed to the screen.

“Poor guy,” the navy veteran said. “Can you imagine being down there, still alive?”

“That’s why I want you to check out Gomez every which way from Sunday. I know DOD did that, but I’d like you to do it one more time. Come in cold. Don’t take any of the routes DOD did. Treat Gomez like a blank slate in that regard, the tabula rasa of cyberspace.”

“You sure you want me to take time for that now?”

Jensen had been helping Lana with the link analysis and network profiling to figure out just what was going on in that apartment building in Moscow.

“Yes, this is your priority.”

He looked dubious, and she could hardly blame him. But she was in a “fire all guns” mode, and that included questioning even the putative heroics of a sailor like Gomez.

Besides, she’d begun to worry the hacker she’d been communicating with anonymously had detected Jeff’s fingerprints analyzing the metadata from the apartment building, light to invisible though she believed them to be.

She returned to that data bulge on her own, keeping a satellite feed of the Moscow building in the corner of one of her screens. She wasn’t sure why. She’d had the impulse so she’d put it there. A reminder of the hacker’s essential humanity, perhaps? His or her habitat? Sometimes her instincts paid off, so she left it there.

In the next hour she came across emails to an Oleg Dernov. Those provided the first concrete information beyond the large-scale communication patterns. It was so easily unearthed that Lana was suspicious. More so when she found Dernov was a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and the son of one of Russia’s wealthiest plutocrats.

“I’ve been handed this,” Lana said aloud to herself. Set up? she wondered. Disinformation had long been the coin of the realm for so much of the spy trade. Why would it be any different in cyberspace?

Or?

The hacker, for whatever reason, wanted to give Dernov to her.

Hmmm. Lana stared at the IRC page on her screen that she shared with the hacker in that building, glancing at the satellite feed once more. At least she hoped it was shared only by the two of them. She typed a message:

“I’ve found a man’s name. Prominent. Did you give that to me?”

She wondered how long she’d have to wait for an answer, imagining the seas rising a foot or two before the hacker deigned to respond.

Not much more than a second, as it turned out: “Yes.”

“Why?”

“You are too intelligent not to know.”

Or I’m too stupid not to see that I’m getting set up here. Worked, as it were, by a twenty-first-century barker in a cybersideshow who likely wanted to lure away her attention and keep her busy with worthless distractions.

She decided to hold off on a response, searching the metadata for more easily accessed emails. She found the hacker had all but put a welcome mat down for her, starting with several emails to a pediatric oncologist named Dr. Kublakov. That was when she learned that the hacker whom she’d been communicating with might be an individual named Galina Bortnik. Also—possibly—that she had a six-year-old daughter named Alexandra with leukemia.

Personal facts, now, served on a platter?

More to the point, what does she want from me?

Could this be the hacker’s version of the classic honey trap, but instead of seducing with sex the hacker preyed upon the vulnerable emotions of a mother with a daughter?

Lana’s skin suddenly went cold.

Could she know that as well?

Don’t be stupid, Lana chided herself at once. Of course she could. Or they could, if the hacker were part of a group, as she’d originally presumed. Lana’s cover had been revealed after last year’s attack and her counterattack. Her identity in the real world was clearly known. The question, though, was did “Galina” have the technological wherewithal to have determined that Lana Elkins was the person she was speaking to in cyberspace? If the answer was yes, Lana realized that she might have met her match. The very thought produced a deeply uncomfortable and wholly unfamiliar feeling.

“Let’s come clean with each other,” Lana now wrote back.

“How do I know it is you?”

This gets convoluted, Lana thought, because the answer to that question depended on who the hacker thought “you” was. Lana could hardly answer without knowing that.

“We need to talk.”

“On a phone.”

“Yes,” Lana replied, excited, wary, heart pounding, yet bone weary from so little sleep for so many nights.

“Good.”

Here we go, Lana thought, sensing a riptide of events about to sweep her far from familiar shores. “Do you want me to call you?”

“No. Give me a secure line to call. If it is not secure, I will know and you will never hear from me again. That would be a great loss to the world.”

Now the hacker was trying too hard to lure her. Or perhaps too earnest for her own good?

Already accepting the female pronoun.

Lana thought about giving her the number for her secure NSA office landline phone, then shook her head. If she’s really good, I’ll never hear from her. So instead she gave up her cell number, which was as secure as the President’s. The hacker left the message board an instant later.

Given the pace of their back-and-forth messaging, Lana thought it likely that her phone would ring posthaste. The world had come to expect everything now. She was no exception, especially at this moment.

It didn’t ring. She looked at her phone. “Come on, damn it.”

“What was that?” Jensen asked, hurrying into her office.

Almost two and a half hours had passed since she’d redeployed him.

“Nothing,” she replied. “What do you have?”

“Almost eighteen months ago Gomez — whose real name is Grisha Lisko, and is no more Mexican American than I am — became a member in good standing of the U.S. Navy, with goodness knows how-much help from his friends just across the Russian border. I say that because he’s Ukrainian by birth.”

“So he’s a sleeper agent.”

“That’s right, and he’s finally awake.”

“Lucky us.” Lana shook her head. “What do we get out of letting him know that we’re onto him? Or taking it straight to the Russians? He’s got to be working for them. I agree with you. No Ukrainian on his own, I don’t care how bright, gets the high-level training to be some hacker’s weapons expert on a nuclear sub.”

“It certainly gives us a better idea of how these terrorists could have overcome all the safeguards on that sub. I know DOD has been studying those scenarios but they couldn’t figure out how it could possibly be done without Gomez, I mean Lisko, being part of the attack. Somebody trained him well.”

“Somebody Russian,” Lana said, wishing she could vaporize the Kremlin.

“This would certainly appear to confirm that.”

“Let’s go see Holmes.”

The deputy director was in his office with two Chinese officials, according to Donna Warnes, who raised her thin eyebrows the slightest bit when she imparted that information. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

Holmes’s assistant nodded toward the couch. Though sleep deprived, Lana couldn’t bring herself to sit. They had two substantial leads: a woman with a sick cancer-ridden child and the wherewithal to make herself known to one person only — Lana. And Jensen’s identification of Grisha Lisko, a.k.a. Hector Gomez, whose swarthy looks and penchant for ethnic typecasting had let him flourish on a nuclear sub that he now, in effect, commanded.

Holmes ducked out of his inner sanctum to confer with them. Jensen nodded as Lana revealed the news about Lisko. She then briefed the deputy director about the individual going by the name Galina Bortnik.

“This woman, if that’s what she is, hasn’t called you yet?”

“No,” Lana answered. “She has not.”

“If she does, record it.”

“I plan to.”

“We’ll want to run it through voice analysis.”

“What if she wants to meet me?” Lana always tried to anticipate the next step.

Holmes shook his head slowly. She had known him long enough to recognize the gesture not as a negative response but a stalling pattern.

“What have we got to lose?” she asked him. “They’re launching nuclear warheads.”

“You,” he said simply. “We could lose you. You could be the prize in their response to this whole Internet forum gambit.”

His last word resonated for Lana, for it made her realize she hadn’t thought once about gambling since the real world stakes had escalated, much as last year she’d escaped any desire for poker by trying to stop the assault on the grid. Even the worst news, she realized, had a flip side.

Lana returned to her office, telling Jensen to get everything he could on Lisko and Dernov. She briefed him about the latter, adding, “I know it’s not much.”

“It’s a start.”

“Or a dead end. That’s what worries me more than them going after me — that they’re burning up our time so they can burn down Antarctica.”

But in the next thirty minutes she found emails between a clinic and Dr. Kublakov about six-year old Alexandra, with all of the girl’s medical records attached to the last message. If this were a sting — and Lana still couldn’t rule that out — it was certainly growing more elaborate all the time. But that’s how stings work, she cautioned herself.

She also found passport photos of the mother and daughter, smiling when she saw that they really looked like two peas from a very cute pod. But what heightened Lana’s interest was learning that Galina had been a regional director for Greenpeace. She confirmed it was the same woman with the organization’s staff photos from two years ago. The confirmation didn’t rule out a sting, but it made the likelihood at least marginally smaller.

Lana’s phone rang. She took a steadying breath, then saw it was Emma. “Mom, how could they do that to the world? Why?” She was crying. “All those scientists are dead. People are freaking out. They’ve got another bomb all ready to go. Are you going to stop them? This is crazy.”

“Everybody is trying very hard,” Lana answered obliquely, as always.

“Mom, you have to stop them.” Emma, as always, ignored her mother’s attempt to distance herself from any intelligence work. “Did you hear about Miami? And that subway in New York? That was so horrible. Can you imagine being in one of those cars when that happened?” Emma was crying so hard that she had trouble talking.

“Do you have your keys, and are you with Esme?” Lana knew that Emma was staying with Tanesa. She wanted to get her and Tanesa’s family out of Anacostia before it succumbed to flooding.

“Yes on both counts,” Emma said.

“Please let me speak to her.”

“Sure, but I need to talk to you about—”

“I’m so sorry to interrupt, Emma, but this is urgent.”

Tanesa’s mom got on the phone. “Emma said you needed to speak to me.”

“Yes, thank you. Anacostia is going to flood. I’d like your family and Emma to relocate to our house. I know that’s asking a lot, but I have access to projected flooding in the District, and you’ll be in the middle of it.”

“Wow, that’s a lot to take in. I was worried about that. You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“I have my sister and her family two blocks over.”

“Our house is big, too big. Have her come, too.”

“She has four kids.”

“Good, we’ll have plenty of company,” Lana said without pause. “We’re all in this together.”

“We’ll bring all the food we’ve got.”

“Good idea. But traffic is going to be horrible. Is your gas tank full?”

“Topped off two days ago, and I haven’t done anything but food shop since.”

“Great, but you must hurry, Esme.” Lana glanced at her watch. “May I say good-bye to Emma?”

“She’s right here. And I want to thank you, Lana.”

“Are you kidding, the thanks are all mine.” Lana couldn’t begin to express the gratitude she felt toward Tanesa and her mom. Emma had grown up so wonderfully in their presence, which only made Lana feel, once again, inept as a parent.

“Mom, it was better last year when the grid went down.” Emma was no longer crying. “At least I was doing something.”

“And you did it with incredible courage.”

“Now I can’t stop anything. I feel like an idiot crying.”

“Emma Elkins, you are not an idiot. Is your dad there?” Speaking of… Lana let that thought trail off unfinished.

“Him?” Emma said indignantly. “He’s all upset because his new rental is flooded and he’s not sure he’ll get his deposit back. I just want him to go home.”

“Emma, all of you — and that’s going to have to include him — are going to head to our house. Right—”

Lana had another call coming in. The call, she thought. “Em, I have to go.”

“Mom! I have to talk to you.”

“If you want me to try to stop this, I have to take another call. I love you.”

“Bye.” Her daughter hung up.

Lana brought up the call. “Hello?”

No voice greeted her. Thirty seconds passed. Lana watched them go by on her watch. It felt like the longest silence she’d ever experienced on a phone. It was as if the caller were still debating whether to speak to her. Finally, Lana said, “I have a daughter, too.”

She heard a breath and then a woman said, “I know. That is why I am talking to you.”

CHAPTER 16

Oleg knew he should have been celebrating. Numero Uno hacker had scored a hit on Antarctica. The whole world was in chaos. And Russia was doing very well. He could tell the Russian President was doing all he could not to gloat. Like he was winking at Oleg right through the TV when he said the greatest country in the world had long been prepared for the worst. “The weaker nations,” the President didn’t specify, “did not take proper precautions.” The President had shaken his head wearily and added, “Very sad.”

Uno, of all people, was complaining, saying he’d wanted to knock out the biggest glacier and send all of it sliding into the sea. But then it would have been game over. You needed to leave something on the table in any negotiation. If the Arctic nations didn’t capitulate now, Oleg could use a second Trident II. “It can’t always be instant gratification,” he’d told Uno.

Definitely not instant gratification for Oleg. Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov was dead. Not possible, had been his first thought. Sergey was a police thug, covered in tattoos of snakes and barbed wire and guns. Sergey was a killer. He definitely wasn’t supposed to die. Oleg dispatched him to “dispose” of Galina and whatever else he found in her car — whiny kid, toys, everything. Get rid of it all. Like used tissue — or nasty feminine product. But she had disappeared and left Sergey dumped by the side of the road like refuse. Bullet in his belly. And Oleg was left at his workstation in his penthouse, staring at his monitor and phone and wondering where Galina was. She was number one, too. Number one suspect, he thought.

What kind of person does that to man of the law, Galina?

Oleg would have bet a casino full of cash that PP, his despicable money-grubbing father, had given her millions of rubles because why else would she have gone to him and then—poof—vanished?

Why?

Oleg knew. Because she needed that money. She’d been badgering him for it, whining all the time: Give me money, Oleg. Give me money. But she’d never said it was so she could leave.

She and PP and his lame-brained brother — never had that term held greater meaning — had been up to murder.

Galina girl—No, Galina bitch—hadn’t even had the basic human decency to answer his texts. Calls? Didn’t even pick up.

I give her pretty dresses, fancy underpants, special videos to make her moist, and crazy guy sex, and she can’t even stay in touch? What are friends for?

Worse — yes, worse—she had shut off an app he’d secreted onto her device that had recorded her geolocation, which had then uploaded to an Internet server that sent him the data.

Where’s the trust? Not even for the people closest to you?

Very sad, like the President said.

He could not abide this kind of betrayal because surely she must be in cahoots — how he loved that uniquely American word — with some coldhearted people to kill with a gut shot and a ballpoint pen?

A police officer — nobody Oleg knew — had found Sergey’s body on the shoulder of a highway. Minutes later, Oleg had a medical examiner on the case. Body not even cool. The ME reported the bullet missed the splenic artery, but a Bic pen tore it up like a wood router.

“How do you know it was a Bic?” Oleg had demanded. Very good forensics, he figured.

“It said so right on the side,” the ME replied, “where you click it. The pen was still stuck up in there.”

So absurd. So Russian.

And so very bad of Galina to bring some guy along to do her dirty work.

Oleg stewed in front of his screens. He wanted to kill Dr. Kublakov. If the oncologist had agreed to care for Alexandra, no way would Galina have left. She would have been in her apartment, not going to PP’s for help. And Volkov would have been able to visit her in the comfort of her own home. In fact, if Kublakov weren’t caring for the spawn of high-ranking government officials, Oleg would have had him dropped into the Baltic from thirty thousand feet this very day.

Instead, Oleg had to go see PP to try to find out what was really going on with Galina.

He took the elevator to the lobby, brushing past the wheel beast and his crippled girlfriend. Stalkers!

The girlfriend called him a gandon—condom — and said, “We’re getting you evicted.”

He stopped and stared at the two of them, lined up like they were ready for a race. “You think so. How about I really do buy the building and throw you out? You think I’m kidding? I’ll make sure you live in a box on the street.”

He used the stairs to rush down to the garage. He definitely felt better, glad to have gotten that off his chest. Honesty is the best policy. Good for his health, too. Blood pressure got too high if he didn’t express his innermost feelings. Hadn’t Galina always said, “Oleg, you have to let me know how you feel. It’s a better way to live.”

Look what that touchy-feely shit got him. She left without a word. No good-bye kiss. No good-bye sex.

What had happened at PP’s? That was the mystery.

He called the old bastard as he scurried to his Maserati. “I’m coming over,” he announced when the ex-husband of six women picked up. “We need to have a talk.” Oleg thought he sounded impressively sinister.

“We do,” PP replied simply, which unnerved Oleg slightly.

Not much, really, he assured himself.

What a terrible father PP was. Oleg vowed to be a much better dad. He would sire only sons and bring them up strong. And no dumb beasts like Dmitri.

Can you imagine raising one of them? He shuddered at the thought.

Oleg motored out of Moscow, keeping to the speed limits until he made it past the city’s outer ring of suburbs. Then he raced past the poor peasants in the countryside. He could almost smell them. Not like Galina’s lavender scent, that was for sure. Stink bombs.

The gate to PP’s mansion opened and Oleg gunned his engine, racing down the long driveway, narrowly missing a calico cat that always gave him the evil eye. One day he’d squash that creature, crush him right under his wheels. He’d been trying for at least a year. Quick little devil feet.

No parking elevator for him today. He pulled up by the front door. Would have left the Maserati running, too, if PP hadn’t freaked out last month and threatened to slash the tires if Oleg ever did that again. “It’s patriotic,” Oleg had tried to reason with the old man. “Burn gas, oil, and don’t worry. The planet will be fine for your grandchildren.”

PP was always saying that we had to think about the rug rats. Not those words exactly, but the thrust of his thinking ran in that direction. No wonder Galina liked him.

Actually, it was Oleg taking care of the future, quietly contracting with Russia’s biggest construction firms on secret projects to build AAC plants near nuclear generating stations and hydropower plants. Everything hush-hush, from commissioning designs to wiring money. Scores of AAC plants would rise soon, the pride of Russia, the country that would save the world — what was left of it, anyway.

PP opened the door himself.

“What happened?” Oleg demanded. “She was here. She left. I know that. Now I can’t reach her.”

“Come in, my son. I have long wondered about that question, too. What happened?” PP shook his head. In sorrow? That was what Oleg thought. Well, get over it old man.

But it wasn’t sorrow at all.

Galina headed to Sochi. So many tourists went there, even now, thanks to the Olympics, that she believed she could get lost in all the fresh faces. But she would have to spend the night in Voronezh. She found photos on Airbnb of a seventeenth-century monastery that provided a few rooms for “sincere guests.”

She was plenty sincere in wanting to stay there, thinking that nobody would ever look for her in a monastery.

Galina and Alexandra arrived just before dawn. The monastery appeared to have been carved out of solid rock.

She led her daughter, bleary from sleep and sickness, to the entrance, and knocked on a thick wooden door. No one answered.

“It’s early,” she explained to Alexandra.

She leaned her shoulder against the heavy door and pushed it open. They started down a wide walkway. Statues of religious figures, saints, Galina presumed, perched on stone shelves built into the walls. A reliquary with bones and scraps of clothing appeared behind a small square window.

They heard the murmur of chants as a woman in a nun’s habit walked toward them. She asked if they needed help.

“I wonder if we could take a room for the morning. We are weary travelers,” Galina said, falling into a strange speech pattern for reasons she could not explain, except for the stone walls and floor and ceiling. They seemed to demand obeisance to another era. She was too tired to resist.

The nun studied her, then looked at Alexandra. “You are both troubled in your own ways, aren’t you?” she said. Galina had to choke down tears. Again, she didn’t know why. She nodded.

“Will two small beds suffice?” the nun asked.

“Yes, thank you.”

The nun asked for a modest sum, slipping the rubles into a compact leather pouch that hung next to a rosary with a large silver cross. The transaction completed, she led them to the cloister.

Their room was at the end of a narrow hallway. The nun lit a candle on a corner table. It was the only light but for the sun slowly graying the sky.

The sister bid them adieu, backing out of the room with a genial smile.

“Mommy, are we going to eat?” Alexandra asked. “I’m hungry.”

Galina thought her daughter would want to sleep, but it had been a long night with no stops.

“I’ll go ask them for food,” Galina said.

Alexandra tugged her sleeve and pointed to a Bakelite phone, black as the blankets that covered the two small beds.

The woman who answered said she would bring them bread and cheese and butter.

In fewer than five minutes the humble provisions arrived, along with hard-boiled eggs and cold water in a gray ceramic pitcher that might have been as old as the monastery.

Galina thanked the initiate who had brought them the platter.

“How much do we owe you?” she asked the young woman, who shook her head and left quickly.

The chanting increased in volume. Galina realized they must be close to the chapel.

Alexandra picked up a crust of bread. She dropped it on the table. It was so stale it bounced. But she snatched it up at once and broke off the end, chewing it with difficulty. She had lost most of her baby teeth and had the whitest niblets coming in. But perhaps they weren’t quite up to the task of tackling stale chunks of bread.

“The cheese might be easier,” Galina advised. “Or you could dip the bread in water.”

“That’s okay, Mom. It’s really good bread.”

It was good. They ate slowly, deliberately, with no distractions, only the mesmerizing chanting. Amid such peace, Galina found it difficult to comprehend that the world had been plunged into such extreme turmoil. It was even harder for her to believe that Oleg had masterminded the devastation.

When she’d met him at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology seven years ago, she’d taken him for just another handsome, bright young man. And when he’d recruited her to track down the AAC technology—“For the betterment of all humankind,” he’d claimed — she’d been thrilled to take such a daring step to help clean up the atmosphere. She’d hacked scores of emails and articles by scientists before she’d found the startling revelations in a math professor’s computer files at MIT.

Now, she felt her own soul needed saving for the role she’d played. Turning over the math professor’s data to Oleg had led him to Professor Ahearn, and that had resulted in his murder, along with the shooting death of his tortured wife. Their children were now orphans. She looked at Alexandra and could have wept. The notion of penance came to her at almost the same moment she thought of the brief conversation she’d had with a woman who also said she had a daughter. They’d both been circumspect on the phone.

And look at where you’ve ended up, Galina said to herself. She had a strong suspicion the woman was an operative, and almost certainly American. They had great pediatric hospitals there. But that step could get Galina killed or imprisoned for life.

Still, she had the woman’s number. And they had agreed to talk again.

When they finished eating, Alexandra took her mother’s hand. “Come with me. We should go and see them.”

They walked down a stone corridor toward the sound of the chanting. It grew louder, but never harsh.

Entering the rear of the chapel, they saw two dozen nuns seated in hand-carved pews that probably hadn’t been moved in centuries. The women’s voices affected Galina. She filled with emotion as she and Alexandra sat in the last pew, kneeling moments later when the nuns shifted forward.

Galina prayed for her daughter. A new chant insinuated itself into her consciousness, and she joined in. So did Alexandra.

Morning light began to filter through stained glass windows above a rudimentary altar.

Galina saw that Alexandra’s eyes were fixed on a crude wooden cross that was catching the reds and blues and yellows from the windows. The crossbeams were bound with thick rope.

The girl’s eyes soon pooled but she didn’t sob. Tears spilled down her cheeks soundlessly. Galina wiped them away. Alexandra still had her gaze fixed on the cross.

Galina bent close to her. “What is it, my dearest?”

“Mommy, I’m going to die and go to heaven.”

“No, you’re not going to die. I promise.”

“And you are, too,” Alexandra said. “That’s what’s so sad. You’re not even sick.”

PP turned from the video of Dmitri and Galina in the museum. “What do you make of that, Oleg? Second-born son crumples up your picture like it was your head and puts it in the skull crusher. Tell me, what does that mean?”

Oleg looked around. He hadn’t seen Dmitri tonight. The scaredy-cat kid the size of an NHL enforcer was hiding somewhere. Dmitri could make the cruelest charges — with Galina’s help, of course. She probably encouraged him to put the photo in the crusher — and Oleg couldn’t even face his accuser. It was like American Gitmo justice. Disgraceful.

“I think she put him up to it, PP. She has taken off. She’s running away. She’s guilty. The guilty always run like rats.”

“You say that about Galina?”

PP looked ready to shoot Oleg, firstborn son, maybe. Oleg was outraged that he had to fear his own father. Oleg had a gun, but it was in the Maserati. What was I thinking? He’d been in too much of a rush arriving. Special people in Russia got to carry concealed weapons. Oleg was special. But so was PP.

“Tell me where she went,” he shouted at PP, unwilling to back down from the plutocrat. A man had to maintain his dignity, his self-possession.

“She didn’t tell me. She just left.”

“Did you help her? Did you give her—”

“What if I did?”

“That would be a mistake, giving money to someone like her. She needs my help, not your money.”

“She doesn’t think so. She’s afraid of you.”

“Of me? That’s ridiculous.” Though, in truth, Oleg was flattered to hear that. To instill fear was to instill respect. “She must have said something,” he insisted.

“She said she was very sorry.”

“See, what did I tell you?”

“Sorry that poor Dmitri had to go through that horrible experience in the museum.”

That again? “Can’t you leave that alone? That’s garbage. He’s brain damaged. Stupid beyond repair. But not because of me. Because of those stupid stairs. I’m leaving.”

Oleg thought he’d better. PP had a certain look about him, and the only time Oleg had seen it before was when he was moving carnivorously against a doomed business competitor.

His father grabbed his arm. Old but strong. It felt like a metal band around his bicep. “No, I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay. I’m enjoying our little talk. Let’s bring Dmitri into the discussion.”

“Mr. Mumbles? Into the discussion? You’re crazy. You’re both crazy. I’m the only sane one here.”

He jerked his arm free and backed away, scarcely believing he had to worry about his father shooting him in the back.

What has happened to this family?

Oleg made it to the door and stepped outside. Never had the air of the Russian countryside smelled so good.

He hurried to the Maserati and roared toward the gate, worried PP would lock it, then hunt him down.

What has happened to this family? he asked himself again. A firstborn son, maybe, should never have such sorrow. There’s a sickness here. Sick, sick, sick.

The gate opened, thank Christ, and Oleg raced out to the road. He opened the window, sucking in the untainted air, definitely in pursuit of Galina. Already calling Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov’s superior to put out an alert for Galina Bortnik. He gave him the make, model, and year of her shitty car. How far did she really think he’d let her run after taking so many secrets? Secrets about Antarctica and AAC. Secrets about a dead professor and his wife.

Secrets like little tiles that Galina could turn into a very dangerous mosaic.

CHAPTER 17

CNN kept replaying video of the mushroom cloud taken by a satellite over the South Pole. The repetition was stomach churning, like the coverage given to the attacks on the Twin Towers. Yet Lana could hardly bear to look away, and she was not alone. Tanesa and her family, including her Aunt Eve and her four children, were all sitting around Lana’s living room paying rapt attention to the screen. Doper Don was there, too. Thankfully, he’d kept whatever conspiracy theories he still harbored to himself. Perhaps Esme’s reaction to his rants last night kept his lip buttoned.

Walking in and seeing him in the house with the others had given Lana a start, even though she knew he’d be there. It was the seeming normalcy of his presence, after so many years of absence, that she found most unnerving. It was as if somehow he’d never been away. That puzzled her almost as much as the fact that he looked none the worse for wear. She thought prison was supposed to age people — fast. Of course, he’d done his time in a federal facility with tennis courts and a kidney-shaped swimming pool.

Don wasn’t the only one keeping his peace. None of the others had piped up, either. Under normal circumstances — if they were even imaginable tonight — Lana would have suggested the younger children go to the den and watch a movie, but that felt wrong this evening. Aunt Eve’s youngest two — a three-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy — clung to her fearfully. Children, Lana reminded herself, absorbed much by osmosis, but perhaps nothing so quickly as fear.

News reports said the hackers had detonated the Trident II with its single missile as close as possible to Thwaites Glacier, without actually striking it directly, because that caused what a navy spokesperson called “maximum break impact” on the ice.

That also provided the powerful visual impact of the towering mushroom cloud, which an explosion under the ice, easily delivered by a submarine, would not have accomplished. But an undersea attack might have delivered even more damage. Scientists were openly discussing whether the hackers had favored powerful optics over a possibly more crippling explosion, even as a second missile was ready for blastoff. As it was, the Trident II was plenty terrifying — one thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, which had killed upwards of 135,000 people.

The direct death count on Antarctica, at about thirty-three hundred, was a fraction of Hiroshima’s — and a fraction of those who were likely to die in the coming days and weeks as sea levels swallowed entire islands, along with cities and towns built during less apocalyptic times. More would die from radiation poisoning as nuclear winds carried the plutonium to the far corners of the globe.

Emma had been shaking her head slowly for minutes, as though in disbelief. Now tears spilled down her cheeks. Lana gently massaged her daughter’s neck. The girl didn’t look at her mom. She appeared completely unnerved.

When CNN returned to its newsroom for a series of predictable reports about domestic turmoil — flooding, rioting, looting — Lana asked if everyone had eaten.

“We kept it simple,” Tanesa’s mom, Esme, said. “There’s potato salad in the fridge and cold cuts. Even had a nice green salad that Eve made, and we saved some of that for you, too. I just hope we don’t have a blackout because we could lose a lot of food. I don’t think you could fit a pickle in there at this point.”

“We’ll be okay,” Lana replied, “even if there’s a—”

“We’ve had plenty of blackouts in Anacostia,” Esme said.

Lana nodded. “I have a generator built in to my electrical system.”

“Ah,” Esme nodded. “Well, that’s one less thing to worry about.”

Lana was starving and battle weary. Her break from combat, as it were, would be brief. Holmes had asked her to call the “Internet forum woman” as soon as it was six a.m. Moscow time.

“It’s our only play right now,” he told Lana. “But don’t let that cloud your judgment because I still think it may be a means of sucking you into action just to waste your time or, worse, get you in a position for a grab.” Abduction.

“Nobody’s going to grab me,” Lana had told him, “because I won’t be moving anywhere without your approval.” And without the backup support he would undoubtedly insist upon.

Actually, nobody was without government approval. The only commercial flights permitted were those essential to evacuating people from low-lying areas. Otherwise, any airborne planes belonged to DOD, and those fighter jets and troop transport planes were very active, indeed, on both domestic and foreign fronts, from what Lana had learned.

She headed quietly into the kitchen and filled a plate with cold dinner. Every cubic inch of the fridge was packed, just as Esme had indicated, and at least a dozen bags of groceries were sitting on the kitchen counters, nonperishables, she saw with a quick survey. Esme hadn’t exaggerated when she’d said they‘d been stocking up. Still, Lana wondered whether she should ask Tanesa’s mom to come up with a ration plan. With coastal cities flooding and in widespread disarray — violent chaos, in many cases — the vast number of tankers and container ships couldn’t off-load. Many had fled harbors for open ocean where they wouldn’t be subject to the havoc of unusually powerful tidal surges set off by the sudden rise in sea level.

Even the interior of the country was slowing down as fuel supplies dwindled rapidly. The President had mandated gas and diesel rationing, with special consideration granted only to shipments of food, medicines, emergency medical supplies, and military hardware.

But as bad as that was — and the death toll already had surpassed more than fifty thousand — the U.S. was infinitely better suited to deal with the crises than its neighbors to the south, while Canada, like Russia, was weathering the unprecedented challenges in relatively good shape. The Canadians, with the world’s largest supply of fresh water, were diverting substantial reserves to hard-hit California, which had been enduring drought-induced shortages long before its frightened citizenry had started hoarding water in all forms — bottles, huge plastic containers, bathtubs, and backyard swimming pools. The irony of water shortages on that scale, amid such widespread flooding, was so obvious that all but the dimmest TV commentators — and there were more than a few — even bothered to comment on it.

The West Coast’s biggest ports — Seattle-Tacoma, Oakland, and Los Angeles-Long Beach — were turning away ships packed with vital supplies — along with countless tons of plastic crap from China — so dock workers and engineers could make desperate attempts to shore up the wharves that were indispensable to the rest of the U.S.

The crisis — and the word seemed wholly inadequate to Lana — had sent the stock market into free fall, while banks across the country were taking an emergency “holiday” mandated by the federal government.

As Lana forked up the last of her potato salad and sliced turkey, Emma sidled up to her.

“You don’t look so great, Mom.”

“And you are an honest child,” Lana said, cupping Emma’s cheek for the first time in ages. “You’re right, though. I’m tired.”

“Are you going to get some sleep now?”

“Not just yet.” She finished her last bite and put aside her plate. “I’m going to duck into my office for a while, and I’ll probably be gone before you wake up in the morning. Everybody getting along okay?”

“Oh, sure. Even Dad’s keeping his mouth shut. I think he knows it’s real—finally. Besides, Esme wouldn’t take any more of his BS, even if he still thought it was all one big lying conspiracy. But he doesn’t. He even said that if he ever got his hands on the people who did this, he’d break them into pieces.”

At last, something Don and I can agree on, Lana thought. “Where’s he sleeping?” she asked Emma.

“A cot in the upstairs hallway. He’s the only guy. Well, the only big guy, so he doesn’t get a room. You want to know the other arrangements?”

“Not if you guys have it covered.”

“You’re still in your room, but Tanesa and I will be using the sofa bed in there.”

“Fair enough.”

“Mom?”

“Yes, Em.” She watched her daughter swallow, expecting more tears. Emma surprised her:

“I’m really worried about you. The last time it got really bad you took off and almost got yourself killed. Promise me you’re not going to do anything like that this time, that you’ll just sit at your computer and that’s it.”

“I promise,” Lana said. Perhaps too blithely.

“I mean it, Mom.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Right now.

Emma returned to the living room. Lana headed to her office, locking the door and pulling out her phone. She wondered how long service would continue. Could last for a while, she realized. It was hard to flood communication towers on mountains and hilltops, and satellites were safely removed from earthly insanity.

Before calling Galina Bortnik, she checked with her colleagues to see if there were any leads on the Delphin’s location. At this point, knowing what they did about Hector Gomez, a.k.a. Grisha Lisko, the navy was gunning for its own vessel. But finding it was the challenge. DOD announced that the service had pinpointed the launch in the Southern Ocean near the fortieth latitude, a region known as the “Roaring Forties” for its fierce westerlies, but it could easily take days to get ships there, giving the rogue sub ample time to leave quietly. And at ten knots or less, the Delphin would be all but impossible to find. Its stealth capacities were phenomenal, and the only real limit to how long it could stay out there to launch all two dozen of its missiles was food. And Grisha Lisko and whatever help he had could not eat all the provisions in two years of bombing and feasting.

Nobody believed the sub would actually go undiscovered for a year or two. It could actually fire off those missiles with no more than fifteen minutes of preparation, a sobering reality that appeared to elude the House Speaker and Majority Leader, both of whom had said the U.S. should never retreat from the Arctic because of terrorist threats. Threats? They’d just nuked Antarctica. Lana still could not believe those two cretins would make such an ignorant statement. But the President, according to Holmes, felt hemmed in by the demagoguery on Capitol Hill.

“Who cares?” Lana had replied, sitting across from Holmes in his office just hours ago.

“Everyone running in the midterm elections,” he’d replied.

“What midterm elections? There won’t be any if this keeps up. Can’t they just put that crap aside for this?” she exclaimed. If they can’t, how can the country ever survive? she wondered, but only to herself.

“No, they can’t put it aside,” the deputy director said.

It would appear the House and Senate leadership, like the sub, could outlast any stalling strategy by the White House. According to Holmes, Admiral Wourzy had advised the President’s chief of staff that the sub could also go very deep.

“How deep?” Lana had asked Holmes, who had shaken his head. That was his muted manner of saying the information was classified.

Wourzy had also said the sub could make the most of the ocean’s salinity gradients to enhance its cover. All of which would make locating the Delphin harder than trying to find the missing Malaysian passenger jet a few years back, and that aircraft had been equipped with a pinger to make location and recovery possible. Plus, the crash itself had undoubtedly left an oil spill on the ocean surface. Wourzy had also noted that in stealth mode the Delphin would slow down all its fans and shut off any major equipment that wasn’t absolutely essential to the sub’s operation. “With its speed reduced, it’ll cover fifty miles in five hours. I know that doesn’t sound like much but that that’ll vastly increase the search radius compared to it holding steady,” the admiral had added in his briefing to the chief of staff, to which Holmes had been privy.

Which was why Holmes had begun to place special emphasis on Lana’s Russian contact. He’d wanted at least five of their colleagues to listen in, even prompt Lana if necessary, but she’d scotched the idea, pointing out that Bortnik had already demonstrated superb hacking skills. They could not risk any discovery that would undermine whatever trust Lana had developed with her so far.

She checked her watch. Almost 6:05 a.m. Moscow time. It felt much later than nine-plus Eastern.

Lana heard the children getting ready for bed. None of the exuberance that she recalled from when Emma had had sleepovers. The kids really were absorbing the fear on the faces of their parents.

She dialed Bortnik, who answered on the third ring. This time the woman didn’t wait to speak.

“I know your name,” she said to Lana.

“And I believe I know yours.”

Neither actually used the names; Lana considered that savvy on Bortnik’s part. “But there’s a problem,” Lana said.

“Go ahead.”

“How do I know that you are who you say you are?”

“You have video capability, of course. You can—”

“Yes, but that isn’t foolproof. I’ve already accessed photographs of you and your daughter. I need much more,” Lana said.

“Fingerprint and iris recognition? Would that help?”

“Yes,” Lana answered. “That would certainly be much better, but I want to see you, too. When you talk, videoconference with me.”

“Okay, but I will also send you instructions on how to access secret files about me so you’ll have all of that at your disposal.” Though Bortnik hadn’t specified, she had to be referring to FSB records, which Lana was glad she was volunteering. “But I want something in return,” Bortnik said.

Lana had a good idea what that would be, but asked anyway.

“I want the same from you,” the Russian replied.

“That will make my bosses uneasy.”

“And what I’m doing could get me killed. My daughter, too.”

“But you want to come here, don’t you?”

“Possibly.”

“Don’t play games with me. Do you or don’t you?”

“Yes, I want to come.”

“You know what we could guarantee you and your little girl, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“And, I repeat, you came to us.”

“Not ‘us,’” Bortnik corrected. “To you. I will give you what you want.”

Lana thought she sounded nervous. Who could blame her? Who knows who’s listening? “And your daughter. I want to see you both in our videoconference. Have her on your lap.”

A pause now greeted Lana, even longer than the one that came during their first call.

Bortnik broke the silence: “Yes, my daughter, too. But there are critical time restraints. You have to get us out of here. I have traveled close to a coastline. That is all I will say for now, except that I can’t cross a border checkpoint. People are looking for me. You must come for us very fast. Not just for us. It’s in your interest, too.”

“And what will you do for us, if we get you out?”’

“I can give you many pieces of the puzzle,” Galina said, speaking rapidly, as if she feared she’d be silenced — by her own timidity or the harshness of others — if she didn’t say everything at once. “But I am dead, and so is my daughter, if you don’t come right away. I mean you, Lana.”

Using her name for the first time. Not her surname, but still a gamble. “Why me?” Lana asked.

“Because I want to know the person I’m betting my little girl’s life on is betting hers as well. Simple quid pro quo. But there’s something else you must bring — all your expertise and computers. We will have to go to work immediately to stop this madness. These men are crazy. They think they are playing games. They won’t stop with one missile.”

“Why are they waiting now?”

“To make everyone cower. They think they’re in total control.”

They are, thought Lana reluctantly.

“Every minute is precious, Lana. Do you understand?”

“All too well. Let me see what I can do. I’ll look for that information you mentioned. We must start with that, and the means of verification must be foolproof.”

“Then let’s begin.” Bortnik hung up.

Lana imagined the woman’s fear, fleeing Moscow with her only child. Near a coastline, either in the north or south of her country. Which wasn’t giving away much, either to her or those searching for Bortnik.

But Lana also imagined a setup. How could she not? Bortnik, or whoever was posing as her, had put tremendous pressure on Lana to take personal action to exfiltrate her and her daughter from Russia. No mean gamble, especially at a time like this.

Plus, Emma had been right: Lana had almost been killed the last time she got involved in kinetic action against hackers. Physical derring-do wasn’t her strong suit. And she’d promised her daughter that she wasn’t going anywhere.

But at each stage of Emma’s development, Lana had tried to protect her from the bleakest, most age-inappropriate truths. She’d edited fairy tales, for instance, when she’d felt her daughter wasn’t ready for the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm. Now Lana felt that Emma, even at fifteen, hadn’t grown beyond the simple comforts of her mother’s deceptions. So she wouldn’t tell her if she were deployed overseas. Lana would just go, if it came to that, and trust that she’d return in one piece — and quickly.

There were always myths a famous mother couldn’t control, though. After last year’s violent cybersiege, Lana wished Emma had not accepted that her mother could overcome the grimmest possibilities and most excruciating penalties.

Lana had tried to tell Emma that what actually had happened in Yemen was much more complicated than the torrent of news stories would have had the world — and her own daughter — believe. Truth be told, Lana felt she’d been more lucky than brave during that climactic struggle — and that whatever had passed for her courage then was about to be cruelly tested again.

Fearing that she’d fail herself, her daughter, and her country, she glanced at the phone and shut off the light.

Sleep did not come easily.

CHAPTER 18

Galina awoke just before noon, her sense of displacement so great that she did not recognize the monastery room for several seconds. It looked so small it could have been a prison cell — but for the sleeping beauty in the bed across from her.

Alexandra lay with her eyes closed and mouth slack, looking blissfully happy, but five hours was all the sleep Galina would get. Even so, it represented the longest uninterrupted rest since she’d first spoken to the woman whom she now knew was Lana Elkins, owner of a cybersecurity firm and a former NSA star. Elkins, Galina had learned, was a troubleshooter for that agency and had survived a brutal firefight that ended the cyberattack on the U.S. grid. All of which told Galina that Lana Elkins had the clout to provide her with what she most wanted: safety for her daughter and herself from men who would kill them on sight. That had certainly been Tattoo’s goal, and she doubted Oleg would stop simply because the first thug he’d sent after her had failed.

She hoped Alexandra’s slumber would continue a while longer. With a belly stuffed with bread and cheese — and a body fully exhausted from all the stress they’d endured since thug number one had shown up — Galina thought it likely her daughter would sleep right through her mother’s next contact with Elkins, this time directly via satellite; the monastery did not have Wi-Fi but a satellite dish nested on a nearby building, so she would poach its digital video broadcast signals to get to the Internet posthaste.

She started hacking her way back into FSB’s cybercenter, following the invisible trails she had blazed long before to Russia’s darkest secrets. Next, she created a file to provide virtual paths for Lana Elkins that would lead the U.S. spy to everything FSB had on her and on Galina herself. She had read the Elkins files as soon as she’d managed to identify her. That was why she had been so comfortable moving forward with her: Elkins was formidable enough to have warranted lots of FSB interest. A credit to her, in Galina’s book.

But before executing the final keystroke to her own files, she froze at the sight of a surprise video greeting from Oleg. It was as if he were standing in the room staring at her, his eyes boring holes into her own.

It can’t be in real time, Galina thought. He must have placed it here, setting it up to be triggered by me. And she might have been right, but his message was much more menacing than even his shocking appearance could herald:

“Galina girl, you have come back to nest in the FSB files. I wonder why you are doing that. I wonder if you are betraying your own country now. But of course you are. Do you know that by betraying Mother Russia you are betting your own blood, and your daughter’s, on an act so terrible it can only fail? I wonder, most of all, if you know the price of betraying me? I will have you again. That is the price. Yes, in the midst of so many responsibilities, of so many great historic achievements — of literally changing the face of the earth — I am also on your trail. Why? Because you must and will be stopped. I could be outside your door right now. That would not even be a small achievement for a man who has accomplished what I have in the past few days. Why don’t you take a look? I really might be there.”

Galina paused the video and looked up. She couldn’t help herself. It was as if she suddenly believed in ghosts, or the idea that a bloodthirsty killer could be hiding under her bed. Or outside your door, she thought. After all, the rational side of her knew what Oleg was suggesting — that he was actually doing all this in real time only feet away — was supremely unlikely, but not impossible. That was what made her so uneasy.

She stared at the door, genuinely frightened that it would swing open and he’d storm in. No, she told herself. If he wanted you, he’d have grabbed you by now. So that made no sense. But neither did this:

“That’s right, Galina. I know you so well. You are wondering where I am, and if I can get you. The answer is yes, but how am I going to do it?” He smiled, so genuinely that it raised the hairs on the back of her neck. “That’s a secret you can’t hack. You’ll know that’s true when I put my hands on you and Alexandra. There can be only one reason you have disappeared: you betrayed me.”

He raised a big knife. It looked like a blade a hunter would use to slay a boar. He ran the shiny tip across his cheek to just below his eye, pressing the flat side against the very bottom of the socket. So close to his eyeball that she flinched.

“You are blind to what you are doing, Galina. You’ll never get across a border. A short, twenty-six-year-old woman with a sick, six-year-old daughter? Good luck. I’d like to see you hack your way through that.” He turned the blade till it reflected the light.

“And when you are caught, guess who you’ll be delivered to? Me, because you are my responsibility, just like Alexandra is yours. You will see that you have betrayed your little girl’s trust. Everyone who means anything to you in the coming days will also suffer. Good friends. Your former colleagues at Greenpeace. We’ll get them all. That has been made clear to me, so it is only fair that I make that clear to you.”

He waved good-bye with the knife, letting it catch the light again. She wondered how long ago he’d posted the video. She worked for several minutes trying to determine the answer before deciding she had bigger priorities.

She also wondered what the posted video would mean to Lana Elkins. Would she believe her now, if she actually saw it? Or would she consider it an elaborate orchestration?

Galina still wanted to hack her files for Elkins, but when she finally worked her way past Oleg’s video, she found they were missing. Completely removed. After all that, she had nothing to offer Elkins. Why would the NSA star ever believe her now?

Oleg was not outside her door, but he was nearby — on a hilltop overlooking Voronezh. He wasn’t certain Galina was in the city that spread out before him, but Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov had been murdered on the main highway heading south — and so ruthlessly that Oleg was appalled, even offended, that a man working for him had been treated with such cruelty. A bullet and a Bic pen? He still could hardly believe it.

He thought Galina might have braced herself to backtrack through Moscow, when she most wanted to leave that city—and for good reason, he chuckled to himself — but he doubted she’d have the stomach for that. Which would mean that if she were heading south she would have to pass through the city before him.

Pass through? Maybe not.

She might have been so tired, so stressed-out by the time she arrived with her cancer kid that she would have been eager to rest. Made sense. That was when an almost feral presentiment told him that if he were to just look, really look around Voronezh, he’d find her.

He gazed, once again, at the city. His eyes roved left to right.

Then again, he thought: intuition was one thing, Google was another.

“Places of interest.” He found a literary museum built in the eighteenth century. How quaint. Named after a poet Oleg had never heard of. A house bearing the name of an agronomist. A city square. A monastery.

None of it aroused his instincts, so he googled “Places to stay.”

An art hotel. He groaned. Holiday Inn. He gave his phone the finger. A hostel. Possibly, even likely before Galina became a mom, but not with a sick child. And the monastery again.

It had come up twice, like a slot machine with two cherries. Galina could be the third. The thought first amused, then intrigued him.

From where he stood on the hill, he should be able to see the monastery; according to what he read online, it had been carved from a mountain so it would always be prominent to the faithful. He certainly considered himself faithful to the mission of finding — and killing—Galina.

He was trying like hell to pick out the monastery when Numero Uno texted him.

Until now, he had always welcomed hearing from Uno. But the Ukrainian hacker had been badgering him for the go-ahead for the second Trident II, reminding Oleg that the missile was ready for launch.

“I am going to bury it in the ice sheet this time before it explodes,” he added. “That will melt even more ice and send a tsunami all the way to Asia.”

“Not yet. No means no,” he texted Uno back. It was like dealing with a two-year-old.

Oleg had his own people to answer to, and they thought there was plenty of flooding in the world right now, with terrific results: Canada, Norway, Denmark, and, of course, Russia, were pulling their ships out of the Arctic region. The only stubborn nation was the U.S., which was ruled by idiots. They were like bad poker players trying to raise the ante with the worst possible cards. The Russian President was known to be laughing at his pathetic rival in Washington.

So there was no need to launch the twenty-three missiles that were left. How much radiation do we really want, Uno?

But he could see that Uno was intoxicated with the power of being the man with his finger on the button. And Oleg understood that: with the coordinates fixed on the Smith Glacier, just south of Thwaites, Oleg felt twitches of envy over Uno’s chance to play nuclear plenipotentiary.

“Not now,” Oleg insisted in a postscript. “Wait as I have instructed you.”

“I don’t want to wait. Waiting is a mistake,” Uno replied with unmitigated gall. “Waiting makes us look weak and fearful.”

What was Uno really saying? Oleg wished he’d actually met the Ukrainian in person at some point. You can be in nearly constant contact with someone for three years, as he and Uno had been, but that was still not knowing him.

While Uno had done exemplary work with Grisha Lisko, the only reason the pair had actually been able to pull off the hijacking of the Delphin was the tomes of research by Russia’s own cadre of hard-core FSB hackers who had made countless incursions into the U.S. Navy’s command center for the Atlantic fleet in Norfolk, Virginia.

So Uno’s success was built on a platform designed and built by many others, although Uno knew only what he needed to know.

“Do not lecture me,” Oleg warned him. “And do not launch the second missile.”

“I will wait,” Uno replied.

Of course you will.

Oleg wished he could be as sure of Galina’s moves. The monastery intrigued him because she’d been brought up in the faith. Like so many others, though, she’d abandoned it. But Oleg had heard that people often found it again when they had a child with a terminal disease. They might not ever think of praying for themselves, but for a sunken-cheeked cancer kid? And Alexandra was Galina’s whole life.

There it is. He’d finally picked out a cross and building that had been carved out of a mountain a couple miles away. They’d been revealed in stone the way a sculptor will uncover a face with his chisel and hammer.

Why not take a closer look? There wasn’t much else between Voronezh and Sochi. Just small burgs. And Sochi itself had turned into a $50 billion ghost town since the Olympics.

He walked back down a short trail to his Maserati.

After watching Oleg on-screen, and finding her own files missing, Galina couldn’t rouse Alexandra and leave the monastery fast enough.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” she told her daughter. She couldn’t be as terse with the nun who had checked them in and wanted to know why a mother with an obviously ill child would be hurrying out the door in the middle of the day.

“I need to get home. My mother is not feeling well. Maybe dying.”

“What about your daughter? She looks like she needs rest. And you look like you need to pray.”

“She will sleep in the car,” Galina responded.

“And will you pray when you drive?”

“I’ll try.”

The nun appeared unimpressed with Galina’s sincerity. Galina felt the woman’s eyes on her back all the way out to the Macan.

Galina drove down the narrow streets of old Voronezh, eyes on the rearview mirror as much as the road ahead.

The bright sun, high in the sky, filled the narrow streets with harsh light that felt brutal and made her fear they had no place to hide.

But he doesn’t know you have PP’s new car.

No, she corrected herself immediately. You don’t know what he knows — or where he is.

But he felt as present as the sun, and as threatening as the shadows that darkened with every passing minute.

Oleg pulled up to the monastery and strode to the door. He knocked as if he owned the place, reminding himself that he probably could if he wanted to.

A nun greeted him with a curious glance, but no words. Beside her, head bowed, stood a younger woman not in a habit. A novitiate, Oleg presumed. An apprentice in the discipline of denial — of self, sex, and all the keen excesses that made life worth living.

The information center for Voronezh had noted that the nuns were “self-sufficient.” This one looked at him as if she not only owned the monastery, but his soul, too. Oleg loathed that kind of arrogance. Who does she think she is?

“How may I help you?” the nun asked in the manner of one who wishes to provide no help at all.

“I understand you have rooms for ‘sincere visitors.’ Is that true?”

She nodded. He thought he might have detected the slightest softening in her demeanor. Once again, he prided himself on knowing how to instinctively strike the right note with these bitches.

“And you are ‘sincere’?” she asked.

“Very much so.” Oleg managed not to smirk or offer even a hint of a smile. “May I stay here?” The monastery had three rooms for visitors, according to the city’s website.

The nun appeared obliging, but showed him only two of the rooms. The novitiate trailed silently behind them.

“Isn’t there a third room?” he asked.

“It is not clean. It was just used.”

He shrugged as though it didn’t matter to him, but then said, “I’d like to see it anyway. If I like it, I’ll be patient while you clean it for me.”

The nun peered at him. He thought about what he’d just said. What could possibly be off-putting about saying you’d be patient?

She shook her head. “It’s not ready.”

“Is that it?” He nodded at a door across the hall, the only one in the small cloister that he had not entered.

She did not respond, at least not quickly enough to suit Oleg. He walked across and opened it, finding Galina. Not her person, but her scent. The lavender he loved so much on her skin, which rose so seductively to his nose when she began to sweat. Unmistakable amid the old wood and stone and tiles.

“Dark hair. This tall.” He held out his hand. “With a little girl, right?” He spoke with none of the patience he had just professed to have.

The nun glanced at him, saying nothing. But the novitiate raised her face to Oleg for the first time. Such a sweet-looking creature, perhaps seventeen, eighteen, just coming into bloom, which even her shapeless black frock couldn’t hide. Neither could her face, frozen with alarm, deny the truth of what he’d just stated.

Oleg knew, and the novitiate knew he knew. He thought to calm her. “Do not worry. She is a dear friend. Which way did she go?”

The novitiate looked at the nun, who replied for her: “We don’t know who you are talking about.”

“You are lying,” he said as he approached the old woman. “Have you had a bad experience with a man?” She was ugly, with big pores on her nose. How he loathed them. But the novitiate looked sweet, pure, unadorned and untouched. But not for long. Any guy worth his manhood could see that immediately. Oleg made a point of letting his eyes settle on the nun’s charge, who averted her beautiful green gaze.

“You must leave. Call the police,” the nun said to the younger woman.

“No need,” Oleg replied, smiling and grabbing the novitiate’s wrist. “I am the police. So, I ask you again: Which way?”

“I don’t know,” the nun said. She had the audacity to even offer a shrug. And she, a religious woman. What kind of example was she setting for the novitiate?

Liar.

“It’s too bad that you don’t know.” Oleg still held the young woman’s wrist. “What car was she driving?”

“Car? I didn’t look,” the nun said. “Now let go of her.”

Oleg shook his head. Then he pushed them both into the room with the lavender scent that he’d always found so arousing, and closed the door behind him. It had an old lock that he snapped into place. He turned back to them, smiling.

Where is everybody? It’s empty. What was I thinking?

There had been so few cars on the road to Sochi. Galina had seen five to be exact; two were police SUVs. How was that possible? Billions had watched the Olympics, and now nothing? Millions had visited Sochi, and now nothing?

Worse than nothing. There were potholes; curbs breaking away from traffic circles; and apartment buildings that looked empty, eerie with the same two chairs and table on every balcony.

How could they ever get lost among the faces of tourists if no one was even there?

Galina realized she’d been living in her own world, such an insular life in Moscow, so focused on Alexandra and AAC and fighting global warming that she’d become oblivious to other events in her own country.

They found a restaurant in the southernmost part of the city. Galina donned a scarf and told Alexandra to stay in the car. With dark glasses, despite the setting sun, she walked inside and ordered potato latkes.

When she came out, her daughter said she had to go to the bathroom. Galina drove her to a park they’d passed; it had been built for the Olympics. Now the grass was overgrown and the concrete paths cracked. But they found a bathroom. When Galina flushed the commode for Alexandra, it roared and raised a brown geyser that made them run like refugees under fire.

Still breathing heavily, they hurled themselves into the Macan. The night was darkening. It was the only cover Galina could find for them.

Gratefully, she started driving, but after twenty minutes realized she was lost. She didn’t dare go online to check maps, haunted, as always, by Oleg’s desire to track her down.

She found a car park and shut off her engine, thankful for the anonymity of darkness, but haunted by every pair of passing headlights.

CHAPTER 19

Lana was ready to leave for Fort Meade after less than five hours of sleep, yet she wasn’t tired. Fatigue had been overwhelmed by urgency. Just one more thing to do, but she was certain it would be the hardest task of the day: She had to say good-bye to Emma, even if the girl was asleep, because Lana was all but certain she would soon be deployed to a coastline somewhere in Russia. Regardless of the reservations that she and Holmes and the White House itself had about letting an “asset” as valuable as she enter Russian territory at a time like this, she expected to be airborne in a matter of hours. Holmes as much as said so in a message only minutes ago: “You’re our best bet.”

Our only bet, Lana had almost volleyed, which she considered less an egotistical comment on her skills than the dearth of leads available to the intelligence services.

She left her travel mug of coffee on the kitchen island and hurried upstairs to where Emma lay next to Tanesa on the foldout futon in Lana’s large bedroom. Her daughter’s eyes were closed, her breath scarcely a whisper. She had her arm draped over Tanesa’s side. They looked like they’d known each other all their lives.

In a way, they have, Lana thought, if the most important measure of a full life with someone came only after surviving a near-death experience with them. Those two had certainly endured that — and more — together.

At least Emma and Tanesa weren’t in direct peril this time. But another mother and daughter were: Galina and Alexandra Bortnik. Six thousand miles away, or thereabouts, Lana guessed. Who knew where they really were? Near a coastline. That was all Galina had revealed to her.

While it was true that Russia did not have the world’s most significant coastal cities threatened by rising seas, Galina’s hint could mean that she and her daughter were in any one of hundreds of small towns, cities, and ports from Russia’s northern seas to the Baltic and Black Seas in the west and the Caspian Sea in the south. Just thinking of the thousands of miles of shoreline — and all those radiating possibilities — made Lana realize she could be gone for a while.

No, Lana corrected herself: You could be gone for good. If she’d learned one truth since the attack on the grid, it was that there were no guarantees you’d return. God knows, so many hadn’t back then.

She kissed Emma’s forehead, thinking she’d slip away without waking her. Daylight was only now easing past the blinds. But Emma gripped her mother’s hand even before her eyes blinked open.

“You’re leaving?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m going to Meade.”

“No, I mean you’re leaving the country. I know you are. You’re going somewhere.”

Lana felt caught in the crosshairs of her own conscience. Had she been too blithe last night in assuring Emma that she wasn’t leaving? Too quick to reassure her one more time? Had Emma detected the same cosseting tone that she’d heard her whole life whenever her mother had sought to soften the toughest stories for her?

“Mom?” Emma said, demanding an answer.

“I’ll let you know if I have to go.”

Lana expected a volley of furious complaints, a temper tantrum even, though Emma hadn’t thrown one of those in a long time. Instead, her daughter shocked her: “Be safe, Mom. I want you back. And don’t lie to me anymore. I know what you do, and I know why. Someday I’m going to do it, too.”

Lana kissed her again, choking down a flood of emotion, some of it pride. Most of it, though, was barely repressed grief at the fear of dying and never seeing her daughter again, just when her deadbeat dad came back into her life. The irony would be almost piercing.

“How will I know if you’re gone?” Emma asked.

If I don’t come back, Lana thought. But she promised to let her daughter know, “no matter what.”

“For real this time?” Emma asked.

“For real.”

Lana made excellent time driving out of Bethesda. Commuter traffic had thinned considerably as social chaos affected work schedules as much as shipments of goods and the delivery of vital services.

As she drove, she received a message from Galina explaining that Oleg Dernov had left a threatening video — and pillaged Galina’s FSB files. Then, just as Lana wondered who the devil Dernov was — and whether she’d missed a message from Galina — the woman dropped a bombshell: Dernov was the superhacker who’d been “running” Galina and the entire operation.

Galina added that Dernov was not officially FSB — a contention Lana would have Jeff Jensen chase down — and attached a copy of Dernov’s threatening video.

Lana turned it on as she merged easily onto the Beltway, glancing at her laptop on the passenger seat just long enough to catch Dernov’s smirk. She knew that she, along with many others in the nation’s intelligence services, would need to study the video closely, but she wanted to hear the gist of his message as soon as possible.

In a word, it was creepy. Dernov’s standard-issue charge that Galina had betrayed her country was one thing, but what snagged Lana’s attention much more was when he said, “I wonder, most of all, if you know the price of betraying me?” Making it personal in a way that was the very antithesis of cyberwar with its calculating, almost clinically cold cunning. His threats then went further: “I could be outside your door right now… Why don’t you take a look? I really might be there.”

Megalomaniacal, too, by claiming that tracking her down would be a “small achievement for a man who has accomplished what I have… literally changing the face of the earth.” Lana had met many men and women with ample egos in the cyberfield, but Dernov appeared to be in a class of his own, which she guessed he’d relish hearing.

His efforts to intimidate Galina included a hint at real violence when he unveiled a large, gleaming knife. Even though all Lana could do was glance at the screen while she drove, she still squirmed when he pressed the shiny tip of that blade just below his eye and told Galina that she was “blind” to what she was doing.

But what Lana took personally was Dernov’s vow that Galina and her daughter would never get out of Russia.

We’ll see about that.

Lana hurried directly to Holmes’s office. He looked up as she entered and, before he could ask, she lifted her laptop, as though in victory. “I’ve got it right here.”

He watched the video in silence. When it ended with Dernov’s threats to Galina’s erstwhile Greenpeace colleagues, Holmes shook his head: “Amazing that he’s the face of the enemy.”

“Almost too bizarre, but cyberspace has always had a disproportionate share of brilliant crazies.”

“When are you going to video link with her? Soon, I hope.”

Lana checked her watch. “In less than thirty minutes.”

“We want you to do it in your office. Keep it as normal as possible, plus there’s no telling whether she’s already seen your office.”

An allusion to remote activation of computer cameras, though Lana had as much security protecting her system as anyone up to and including the President.

“I doubt she’s seen my office, but I’d prefer to do it there for the reason you first stated, keeping it nice and normal. With your flowers in the background,” she added. Delivery of the deputy director’s weekly bouquet had not been stopped by the crisis.

“We’ll have our voice analysts and psychiatrist present. I want to keep the group small, though. Everybody will have a chance to go over the recordings of both Bortnik and Dernov later.”

“I don’t see how the Russians can play innocent after this,” Lana said. “The video was embedded in FSB files, for God’s sakes.”

“They’ll say he’s a great hacker and messed with their files, and then they’ll make a big deal of saying they’ll arrest him as soon as possible. But that won’t happen until they finish whatever business they have planned with those missiles. That’s what they want,” Holmes added matter-of-factly, “to sit on top of the world, no matter how damaged, as long as they’re number one.”

Lana agreed. It was as if many powerful Russians shared dreams of empire and would sooner take possession of the planet, no matter how damaged, than squat further down the food chain in a healthier world.

She reminded herself that past performance was often the best predictor of future behavior. And past performance with the Russians now included a nuclear missile strike and dangerously rising seas.

“The Chinese ambassador contacted me this morning to say he’s received approval to send over more than a hundred of their top cyberspies.”

“Does anyone outside this office know we’re going to be working with them?”

“The President, of course, his chief of staff, the secretary of state, the joint chiefs, and the heads of the various intelligence agencies along with their chief deputies. Only people with the highest security clearances. Absolutely nobody on the Hill. Not even the chairs of the intelligence committees. They’ll be screaming.”

“Let them,” Lana said, unable to hide her contempt.

“Even so, there’s always a risk it’ll leak.”

“The Chinese might even find a leak in their interest,” Lana noted.

“McGivern says they’re much more intent on stopping the damage to their principal ports and cities.” McGivern was NSA’s chief China expert. Holmes went on: “We may not know the meaning of bipartisanship in Congress, but we do with one of our chief economic and military rivals. Go figure.”

“That would take much more time than we have,” Lana replied.

Holmes nodded. “You should probably get ready.”

Lana checked her watch. Indeed.

As she headed to her office, she wished she’d had the time to actually study Dernov’s video before linking to Galina. Lana’s takeaway, based mostly on hearing him — and a few glances at his imperious facial expressions while she was driving — was that he was a control freak, perhaps to his own detriment. Going after Galina right now, with all that he had in motion, did not appear to make sense, unless Galina was truly in a position to torpedo — perhaps in the most literal sense — his whole operation. In any event, Lana was anxious to catch the psychiatrist’s take on Dernov.

She’d already performed cursory research on the Russian mastermind. He was a son of a plutocrat: Dernov père was an oil, gas, and minerals magnate. She’d found nothing in a quick search on Dernov senior to indicate that he was anything more than a moneymaking machine who had achieved prominence, along with so many Russian plutocrats, by plundering state-owned companies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Still, that was more than she was able to unearth about Galina in FSB files, just as the woman had warned. She’d done no better trying to dig any deeper about the younger Dernov.

She messaged Jeff Jensen and added Galina and Dernov’s father to his research tasks.

After studying the Dernov video, she saw that she had about sixty seconds before she was scheduled to link to Galina and her six-year-old. She was beginning to wonder whether Holmes and his team were going to show up on time, when they strode into her office.

At precisely the scheduled moment, an exhausted-looking woman with a hollow-cheeked child appeared on a large monitor mounted on Lana’s wall. It was almost shocking to see the girl, who appeared so genuinely ill that Lana regretted asking Galina to put her through this. The child also had a dark bruise on her face.

Emma had been a lean girl by that point in her life, but strong. Alexandra was curled up on her mother’s lap like a three-year-old.

Galina herself had stylishly cut black hair that came to her chin. Clearly, a woman who had taken care with her appearance — until she’d gone on the run. Now her hair hung limply. Some of it stuck to her round cheeks, as though she hadn’t had time for a shower and shampoo in days. And her eyes, large and round, had dark circles under them that were only accentuated by the lousy lighting of video sessions.

Lana would have bet her career then and there that mother and daughter were not poseurs.

“Did you see his video?” Galina asked.

“I did,” Lana replied.

“He’s not as crazy as he seems in that. Don’t underestimate him and think he’s just nuts. He’s not.”

“Were you intimately involved with him?”

“Yes,” Galina answered without pause. “Until recently. He is not Alexandra’s father. Her father died recently.” She said it in such a way that Lana knew Alexandra’s father had not died of natural causes — and that Galina wanted to shield her daughter from that news. “I was asked a lot of questions about his passing,” Galina added.

“I understand that you and your daughter might have been accosted as you drove south from Moscow.”

For a blink, Galina looked worried that Lana had mentioned the direction; she hadn’t reacted to “accosted.” Then Galina recovered and nodded: “It was terrible. She witnessed it.”

More than witnessed it, Lana thought with another glance at Alexandra’s face.

“Was this, in your view, an assassination attempt?” No way to dance around that question. Lana simply hoped the English word meant nothing to the Russian child, who gave no indication that it did.

Galina nodded again. “It failed because Oleg’s father gave me a small but powerful gift.”

“And you were able to use it?”

“I had no choice. A man was going to—” Galina stopped herself from adding any details, though surely the child had sensed the threat to her own life as well as her mother’s when Galina had used the “powerful gift.” But the child also looked fragile as an ancient ceramic doll.

“You must see that there is very little time for me. They have reason to arrest me now. They will give reasons for doing more than that.” She looked purposely at the back of Alexandra’s head, as much as to say, “and to her, too.”

“You know the means we’ve used in the past to communicate?” Lana asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“We will return to that now,” Lana said. Holmes was nodding. Nobody in the room seemed to need to go longer — and they all knew there was a risk of interception. The signal could even be traced. Better to keep it to minutes.

“I will contact you soon.”

“Immediately,” Galina said, raw panic in her voice for the first time. “The second missile, us. Everything is on the line.”

“We know,” Lana said.

The link ended. No one said a word for a full beat. Holmes spoke first: “We must get her out of there. I believe her. What about you?” He looked at the two voice analysts.

“She’s either the very best liar we’ve ever encountered, or she’s for real,” the senior of the two said. The woman next to him nodded.

So did the psychiatrist. “Very difficult to assess much at this remove and with such brief exposure to the subject.”

All the caveats Lana had come to expect from the psych corps, but she still wanted to hear his thoughts, which made his preamble all the more frustrating.

“But I would say she’s genuinely frightened. Did you see the way she held her daughter? Both arms around her, like the camera itself were a weapon.”

“Which it could be if we fail her trust,” Lana said. “There’s no telling for sure if she’s just been exposed.”

“But you have no doubts about Bortnik herself?” Holmes asked her.

“I always have doubts,” Lana replied, “but very few about her.”

“Find out which coastline she’s near,” Holmes said. “We may be able to pin it down with the signal, but then again, that’s not always bankable. It’s going to be difficult to exfiltrate them. We are stretched beyond the limit here.”

“But we will, right?” Lana said.

“Yes, we will,” Holmes agreed assertively. “Somehow. But a big military operation, like the way we got you out of Saudi Arabia last year, is going to be terribly hard to pull off. We’re all dealing with sea-level rise, while Russian security services are on full alert from the New Siberian Islands to Tartus.” The latter was on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. It contained a small Russian naval base, the country’s southernmost, and the only one outside Russia proper.

Before her colleagues even filed out of her office, Lana was back on the IRC: “We’re committed to getting you and your daughter. You must tell me where you are.”

In seconds, as promised, Galina fired back. “I’m hiding in Sochi. I want to get out of here. I’ve been seeing water getting higher and boats leaving. Should I find a place to charter one?”

“We’ll need to coordinate that. Please don’t make any arrangements yet. Just find a safe place for the night, but a place where we can be in touch. Okay?”

“Yes. I’ll try.”

She sounded nervous, Lana thought. Who can blame her?

Lana ran the chartering business by Holmes right away.

“I was thinking of something like that,” the deputy director said. “A very low-key effort that would take advantage of the challenges that every seaport is having. Boats are heading out to sea everywhere to try to avoid the destruction that will come with being moored on a coastline. But we’ll have one of our people handle the charter. For security reasons, Bortnik can’t be risking that kind of move.”

“So send in the navy? I could talk to Jensen.” Reminding Holmes that her number two at CyberFortress had been a navy cryptographer.

Holmes was shaking his head. “If we send a military unit in there and they get caught taking them out, the Russians might claim it was an invasion. I don’t want to even think about what that could mean. And let’s not forget, the way this is playing out the Russians are likely to be the world’s preeminent power.” He looked out his window. “If they aren’t already.”

“But I have to go.”

“That’s right, and you will go precisely because you’re not military. Let’s face it, Lana, if you get caught, they’ll love you to death just like they loved Snowden, in hope that you’ll eventually turn the world over to them. But your expertise is not in exfiltrating operatives and smuggling them into our arms on the high seas. We’ve got to find a private citizen, preferably a shady character, who knows how to operate below the radar screen, in every sense, in the middle of chaos and vast surveillance.”

“A drug smuggler?” Oh, my God, she thought. He’s been leading me there all along. “Donald Fedder?”

“What do you think?” Holmes asked her.

“My ex?” She was so flabbergasted she had to confirm that she and Holmes were talking about the same person.

“Yes, that Donald Fedder.”

“He’s a flake.”

“Not as much as you might think. I’ll get to that in a minute. Just tell me what you think of him, other than he’s a flake. Then I’ll tell you what we think of him.”

“Well, he’s a great sailor. There’s no questioning his seamanship. He could sail without electronics. Hell, he could sail without a rudder. But I think there’s plenty to question about his character. He just got out of prison, you know.”

“I do, but he spent a great deal less time behind bars than you think.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s been working with the DEA since his arrest. But he had to go through the courts and get sentenced and do some time to establish his bona fides. All the time you thought he was incommunicado in prison, though, we had him back down in Colombia moving drugs with FARC. The drugs ended up in the ocean but the intelligence he gave us on FARC was remarkable. It’s a key reason some of FARC’s top guerilla leaders have died in targeted strikes.”

“You are—” Lana almost blurted “shitting me.” But what Holmes had just said would explain why Doper Don looked like he’d spent his four years in a country club: he’d been cruising the Caribbean.

She had to sit down. “That guy never breathed a word of this to me.”

“There’s a reason he was recently paroled, Lana.”

“Does he have any training with guns, that sort of thing?”

“Quantico. The full course.”

“To be honest, Bob, till this moment I just considered him a ne’er-do-well.”

“All the better. Has he said anything notable about what’s going on?”

“Yes, at first he told our daughter that it was nothing but a conspiracy theory of the military-industrial complex.”

Holmes laughed. “Oh, boy, was he ever jerking your chain. Anything else?”

“Yes, last night he sang a different tune to Emma. He said that if he ever got his hands on the people who did this, he’d break them into pieces.”

“He’s playing it all to script, except now you need to know.”

“So you’re planning to have Donald Fedder, with me aboard, smuggle Galina and her kid out of Russia?” It sounded so improbable to Lana that she could hardly form those words into a sentence.

“It’s not ideal, but given exigencies here and our resources, we don’t have a lot of options. Fedder has been thoroughly tested. He’s pulled off tougher coups than this.”

“Will there be any backup?”

“Yes, but they can’t sail away with Galina and her daughter. You can. So can Doper Don.”

“That’s my nickname for him.”

“I know. He told us. Lana, it’s everybody’s nickname for him now, except we use it ironically. I suspect you will, too. Right now, you two need to talk privately. Your daughter cannot know any of this until you and Don bring the Bortniks back here safely.”

“I’ll go home and talk to him now.”

“No, I’d suggest you go down the hall to the SCIF. That’s where he’s waiting. We’ll leave you two alone to sort things out.”

“He’s here, in a SCIF?”

“Correct.”

“Who’s in charge?” Lana asked.

“You’re in charge of the operation,” Holmes said. “But he’ll be the captain of the ship.”

“That leaves room for conflict.”

Holmes shook his head. “There’s no room for conflict, only success. You know the stakes.”

“Does he?”

“Yes. He’s not the man who left you, Lana. He’s the man who wants, more than anything, to come back.”

“To me?” That was news to her.

“To you, his daughter, and his country.”

Lana stood, feeling numbed by the news, and started down the hall. Each step made her feel like she was boarding a pirate clipper, about to ship out with Blackbeard himself.

She went through security and found Don sitting alone at an empty conference table in the windowless room. Despite her every instinct, she smiled when he looked up.

CHAPTER 20

From the rest area in Sochi, Galina found an apartment building’s satellite dish and intercepted its signals, which had made it possible to comply with Lana Elkins’s request for a video link. But it was dangerous to spend so much time in one place and she desperately needed to head north to get out of the city.

Before leaving the rest area, though, she dug through an overnight bag, searching for Tylenol. Poor Alexandra’s joints and bones were hurting so bad. Six tablets so far today, and it was still only late afternoon. Galina shook her head because what Alexandra really needed was a doctor who could prescribe serious painkillers for her leukemia.

She found the Tylenol and a bottle of pineapple juice. Alexandra took two more tablets.

Galina hoped her daughter could hold them down. Her stomach was souring on acetaminophen; she’d vomited within minutes of her last dose two hours ago.

Looking left and right, Galina pulled onto a highway, feeling as obvious in the Macan as a goldfish in a bowl. She hoped to find a fishing village where boats were coming and going and chaos reigned because of sea-level rise, a crowded frenetic place where she and Alexandra could get lost among the panicky faces. That way if Lana Elkins failed her — and Galina would give her twenty-four hours, period, to exfiltrate them — she could use PP’s money to charter a boat and get Alexandra help in a country where the child was not the subject of a police search.

That was what outraged Galina the most: the authorities had announced — on television, radio, and the Internet, including social media — that both mother and daughter were wanted for the “brutal murder of Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov,” who was described as a “decorated war hero.”

Hero? Not how Galina thought of him. Beast was more like it. Probably had been a beast in Chechnya, too. So many were.

But it wasn’t about Sergey the Beast, anyway. It was about Oleg and his operation.

The late-model cars breezing by — cabriolets and six-figure coupes — worried Galina. She needed peasants, poor people who were not wired into the news of the day. She wondered if even among the impoverished there were people who fit that description anymore. And what did she know of the peasantry? She knew plenty about the sophisticated airs of Moscow’s nouveau riche who patronized the city’s finest restaurants and clubs — and also gobbled up whatever absurdities the Kremlin dished out. But she’d sooner trust her fate to a man riding a donkey than a celebrant of the capital’s splashy soirees.

She whizzed past Dendrariy, a picturesque part of greater Sochi, which stretched up and down the coast. The region’s renowned funicular caught Alexandra’s attention, as it undoubtedly had captured the eyes of millions of children before her.

“What is that, Mama?”

She told her, explaining, “It’s like a car on a cable. It goes all the way up the mountain. There’s a beautiful arboretum up there.”

“What’s that?”

Galina was encouraged that her daughter was energetic enough to ask questions. “It’s a pretty yellow-and-white building surrounded by the most colorful flowers and plants.”

“Can we go on the funicular and see the flowers… someday?”

Galina could have cried when Alexandra added “someday” so tentatively, as though she already knew how hopeless it would be to ask to stop now for anything resembling fun or beauty. They were on the run, that was clear even to a leukemia-stricken six-year-old.

Still, Galina said, “Yes, someday we’ll go. I promise,” knowing full well that if they ever escaped Russia, they would never come back.

But America had funiculars, too. She thought they called them trams, and America would welcome them and give them a home if Lana Elkins, to whom Galina had entrusted their lives, could actually find them safe passage out of the country.

In searching for a rural seaport, Galina was forging a backup plan, a redundancy, like you’d find in any sound computer software. Nobody with a conscience would bet the life of their child entirely on a stranger.

She soon spotted moorages, but they catered to cabin cruisers and large sailboats, whose hulls had risen with the sea and now shadowed the docks from heights she’d never seen before. Despite that, most of the slips were still occupied; the affluent boat owners were less concerned, perhaps, about their weekend pleasures than a fisherman who depended on his vessel for his livelihood.

She was surprised to see bearded men — Muslims, if she were not mistaken — walking alongside the road. More of them as she drove farther north, one with prayer beads in his hand. Headscarves on some women, too.

Galina checked her odometer — about fifty kilometers away from the heart of Sochi. She felt like a rube. How could she not know that Muslims lived in this region? She would have checked online right then but she planned to keep her phone power off unless she absolutely needed it.

Dimly, from a source she could not readily place, she recalled that there was, indeed, a sizable Muslim population up there.

Yes, that’s right, she thought. During the Olympics it was a reason given — not in the most overt terms — for heightened security.

That could be good, she realized. There might be people among them who despaired of the official Russian propaganda line, who might not even avail themselves of it. People who could sympathize with a woman who had killed a “hero” of the Chechnya war in which so many Muslims were ruthlessly tortured and murdered, including scores of children.

Galina took stock of her other resources. She had a bundle of cash and a gun. No bullets, but a gun. As a last resort, brandishing an unloaded derringer might be better than having no weapon at all, especially in the hands of such a notorious hero-slayer. Her reputation might not only precede her, but clear a path for them as well.

She glanced in the rearview mirror to see what such a murderer looked like.

Tired, she decided at once. Very tired.

The sun was going down across the sea. She didn’t dare look for an established hotel or inn. She passed billboards for a number of them with their locations and distances noted, but ignored them.

She had not seen the frantic small seaport she’d been hoping for, but the more Muslims she spotted, the more she considered a much different plan.

Farther north of Sochi she spotted a village from the road. She had to make a decision soon or she might find herself driving aimlessly through the night, when she would be able to see little.

Galina exited onto a freshly paved but extremely narrow road. Not hard to imagine that it had been resurfaced with macadam to accommodate vehicles other than carts pulled by beasts of burden — not all of them animals in the annals of Russia’s often brutal past.

When she found herself driving too directly toward the town, she turned onto a winding forest two-track through lush deciduous trees, still leafy in the subtropical climes of the coast.

She came to a place where the trees to her left thinned enough to provide a vantage point for the village. Alexandra, after her brief burst of energy, had slumped in her seat and gone to sleep.

Easing her door open and closed, Galina walked past the branches until she could see the small harbor in all its simple splendor. She counted twelve fishing trawlers, their nets off-loaded, apparently replaced by boxes and bikes and suitcases glowing golden in the day’s dying light.

Three sailboats sat moored a few hundred feet away in what appeared to be a protected inlet. Beautiful vessels. The two sloops and ketch ranged in size from about ten to twenty meters. Peering closely, she saw a small gathering on the ketch, the largest of the three. She thought fishermen, desperate to flee with their families, might be more likely to help her than yacht owners who appeared to be riding out the crisis in party mode.

The water here also had risen almost to the docks, making them look unusually low next to the boats.

As she looked at the sun setting across the dark waters of the Black Sea, she realized that not too many years ago she could have sailed straight out from the Russian coastline to escape the country’s territorial waters. Not now, not since Russia had annexed Crimea, laying even greater claim to the Sevastopol naval base. Now Russian territorial waters had many zigs and zags, which complicated navigation to international waters.

After checking on Alexandra, she hurried back to surveil the town and port, pleased with her viewpoint. Ten minutes passed before there was any sign of life below. Then four men walked out of a small building, not much bigger than a shed. She caught only a glimpse of small rugs inside, but enough to realize they’d been offering their sunset prayer. The sight elated her and gave her hope.

She watched them keenly as they checked their boats, each studying the height of their hulls. A man raised two fingers. She thought he was flashing the peace sign until he called to the others: “Two days. And then we have to leave.” He shrugged and shook his head.

Two days, that’s a long time to sit and wait with a sick girl. Too long, Galina decided at once. But she might persuade one of them to leave sooner. In the morning, when the men had their morning coffee and rolls in their bellies, she would find out just what PP’s money could buy. She would don her big dark glasses and a headscarf, but if she were recognized, she might also find out if it were true that the enemy of your enemy could be your friend.

Oleg had enjoyed his respite in Voronezh. Once he closed and locked the door to the room in the monastery and pushed the young woman onto the bed, the women’s tongues started wagging, if not the way he would have preferred with the novitiate, certainly in a manner that made him comfortable with the progress of their tête-à-tête.

He determined very quickly, for instance, that Galina and cancer kid had stayed at the monastery, now occupied by nuns. He thought the monks of old would turn over in their dusty graves if they knew all those menstrual cycles were churning within their once-sacred stone walls. Who could blame them? It made Oleg shudder, and he knew he was a man of the world, not of cloistered celibate living.

But he hadn’t been able to confirm the car Galina had been driving until he’d taken special measures. They’d balked, naturally, when he asked, even when he cupped his hand around the novitiate’s soft neck and shook her like the proverbial rag doll. And when she still wouldn’t say, he’d squeezed harder and lifted her hem to the horror of that dried-up old nun, who started saying, “Peugeot, Mercedes, Toyota” in such a frightened voice that he knew she would have said anything that might have stopped him from throttling the young woman. But why would he want to stop? How silly. Her flesh was so soft, so yielding, and he could feel her neck cords tightening — just like his pants.

“You really don’t know, do you?” he asked the nun.

“No, no. I’m so sorry.”

“So you lied to me. ‘Peugeot, Mercedes, Toyota.’” He pushed the novitiate’s face into a pillow, as though to smother her, but then released her, saying, “Don’t move or I’ll kill you.”

“You,” he turned to the nun, “I have a special treat for.”

He pulled out his knife and used it like an index finger across his own lips to indicate his sincere desire for silence. He even said “please” without making a sound, mouthing the request, modeling the behavior he was demanding of them in his most persuasive manner.

Then he pressed the blade against the nun’s lips, surprisingly succulent up close, puffy enough to part deliciously with just a tiny bit of pressure. The thinnest line of blood swelled appreciatively, exciting him immensely. The line became drips and dribbles that spilled down her chin, leaving a nice fat track.

He spoke, keeping the blade in place. But he wasn’t a cruel man; he refrained from slicing through to her gum. Instead, he just wiggled it slightly when she tried to back away. But there’s always a wall. “Don’t you know that?” he said to her. Of course, she had no idea what he was thinking. She just shook her head. But that stopped very quickly with the red blade back in place.

“Are you absolutely sure you could not see her car, even though you still have eyes?”

He knew she’d seen it, felt it in his very fiber. She might not know the make of the car but she’d seen it. He saw the truth in her eyes. He’d cut them out if he had to.

“Silver,” she gulped. “Like those cars for camping.”

Remembering all that fear now as he drove to Sochi made him laugh because only a nun wouldn’t have known enough to call it an SUV.

But that still made no sense. What would Galina be doing with—

Oleg shook his head in wonder. What was it, a month or two ago when he’d heard PP talking to Dmitri as if moron boy were actually intelligent enough to make sense of anything more complicated than his shoelaces? PP had been telling Oleg’s hulking younger brother about a new car Porsche was making.

As Oleg drove swiftly away from the monastery, he called a Moscow-area Porsche dealership. Yes, the Macan was available in silver.

He speed-dialed PP, who did not deign to pick up, so Oleg spoke slowly into the answering machine: “You bought that Porsche SUV, didn’t you, PP? And then you loaned it to Galina, didn’t you, PP? Silver. Isn’t it, PP? And that means you are aiding and abetting a known terrorist, aren’t you—”

PP picked up as Oleg presumed he would.

“What are you talking about?” PP demanded.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. You loaned Galina a new car and told no one, even though you knew she and her kid are wanted for murder. You didn’t even tell me, and I was there.”

“You would have found nothing here.”

“I would not have found your new Porsche, that’s for sure. I will turn you in, PP. I’m much more important now. I have influence. You don’t.” It felt immensely satisfying to state the obvious, force it right into the old bastard’s face.

PP didn’t respond. Oleg relished the silence, the power of a father cowed by the strength of his son.

“Tongue-tied, PP?”

“I know nothing of what you think she’s done. Nothing. I doubt she’s even done it, whatever you think it is.”

“She murdered a war hero and police sergeant. It’s on the news. You know what she did. The medical examiner says he was murdered. The police say by her. Don’t try to pretend that you don’t know what she did. And do not try to protect her. You have many enemies, PP, none so powerful or important as I. So simply tell me yes or no about the car and give me the plate number.”

Another long pause followed, but this time PP spoke up: “Yes.” Then he hung up.

Oleg figured PP was trying to preserve his dignity by not providing the number. Old men don’t have dignity; he also knew that to be true. They have only memory, and memory is a slippery whore like Galina. He had ample proof of that. He drove into Sochi at sunset, the town that had been cursed by the Olympics. It used to be packed with tourists enjoying the sunshine in a country mostly cloaked by clouds. But since the Olympics, even the Russians had stopped coming. Right now, that was good, though: so few people would make it easier for him to flush Galina and cancer kid from whatever hive they’d found.

He drove to the local police headquarters and met with the superintendent. Oleg dropped names and made promises of promotion. Then he provided photographs of Galina, all of them taken secretly as she enjoyed the pleasures of his body.

“You can see she’s not just a killer, she’s a dangerous whore,” he said.

“The most devious traitors are like that. Killers, too,” the superintendent said.

After raising a smile on the man’s face — and likely another part of his anatomy as well — Oleg knew he had the complete cooperation of the department.

“I should also tell you that she is not above trying to trade her body for freedom when she’s caught. You might want to know that. She’s very, very good.”

The superintendent assured him the search for Galina Bortnik would be thorough, indeed.

In less than a half hour, a motorcycle officer learned that a woman in a fancy silver SUV had bought takeout latkes.

“But she is not staying in Sochi,” the superintendent told him twenty minutes later. “Every hotel and inn has been checked. I took the liberty of providing the most identifying photos — of her, of course.”

He and Oleg shared a smile.

“Where would you go, if you were her?” Oleg asked.

“To bed,” the superintendent said, “with me.”

They laughed. Oleg considered him a fool, but listened closely when the man turned serious and said, “Not south. She’d run right into passport control in Abkhazia.”

Both men shook their heads at the brutal prospect of spending any time in a country so ruined by strife.

“But up north, you know what the criminals say?” the superintendent asked him.

“No, what do they say?” Oleg dutifully played the straight man.

“That both the trees and boats are thick but only the boats can save you. And I can see,” the superintendent stared at a particularly graphic photo of Galina, “that losing her would be a crime.”

“Thank you. You are a smart man. I will commend you to the Minister for Internal Affairs.”

Oleg left him smiling. But the hours of the day were not so kind to him: he would accomplish very little at night in the municipalities that lay before him. So he took a room in Sochi and checked the financial news online.

The ruble was reigning supreme among the world’s currencies. He had bought many millions of them weeks ago. In the United States they would have called that insider trading, and they might have prosecuted you for it — depending on your station in life. In Russia they would have called it the same thing, but if you were Oleg or others like him, they would only congratulate you for your sharp business acumen.

With that profitable business aside, he contacted Numero Uno, who started whining again.

“Just tell me,” Oleg interrupted, “how is Grisha Lisko?”

“Grisha is very good. Grisha is busy. Grisha is ready. The question is, are you?”

“Not yet, but you must be ready at any moment.”

To die, Oleg thought, for having the audacity to question him.

Under the cover of darkest night, Galina received an urgent message from Lana Elkins. They met on the IRC in seconds.

“I’ve been tracking Dernov’s data. He’s in Sochi. Is that close to you?”

Galina’s groin tightened. “You tell me,” she replied, wanting to shut off all her electronic devices immediately. Though surrounded by trees, she’d found another satellite dish in the small fishing village. But if she could do that, Oleg might be able to track her.

“I will tell you that we’re coming to get you,” Lana said.

“I think,” Galina typed slowly, feeling the night air close in around her, “that you are not the only one.”

CHAPTER 21

Lana had barely gotten over the shock of seeing Don’s persuasive smile — and settling across from him knowing they’d been impressed into service together on the high seas under high stress — when she’d been yanked from the secure conference room by an urgent message from Jeff Jensen.

In the seclusion of her office, he’d shown her Dernov’s metadata stream, which placed him in Sochi. She’d contacted Galina in the next few seconds. The woman’s reaction had left little doubt that she was not far from the Olympic city, either — and the monster who stalked her.

Lana now rushed back to the SCIF, knowing it was time to compartmentalize — and quickly — by putting Oleg aside to deal with Doper Don.

On her second go-round with Doper Don she refused to be taken in by his grin. Instead, she bored right into his recent past: “You worked for the DEA?”

“Do we have time for this?” he replied.

“Yes, you do,” Holmes asserted as he entered the conference room on Lana’s heels. “I want you two sorting out whatever needs sorting out right here, right now. If you need a couples counselor—”

“We’re not a couple,” they both exclaimed in unison, Lana furious at what Holmes — or Don, for that matter — might perceive as the cute synchrony of their response.

“Be that as it may,” Holmes went on, “we have a mediator on hand to make sure whatever issues plague you two get put aside.”

“I don’t think we’ll need anyone,” Lana said.

“As long as you both leave here knowing there’s no room for personal animosity. And you’ll do it in the next fifteen minutes because there’s a flight waiting for you. Have I made myself clear?” Holmes stared at Don, which Lana took as a pledge of good faith in her own professionalism.

“What else is up?” she asked Holmes. She didn’t believe for a moment he’d come into a highly secure room to urge them to get along. She was right:

“We’re having difficulty communicating with our contact on the Black Sea coast.” His gaze was back on Don. “Do you have a charter you could pull out of a hat there?”

“Maybe,” Don replied.

“Come with me,” Holmes said.

When Don returned ten minutes later with Holmes, the deputy director said their flight could be delayed “a bit.” Then with a smile, he added, “Go to it.”

As he left the SCIF, Lana had only to raise her eyebrows to finally get Don’s answer about the DEA.

“Yes, I worked for them. I didn’t have much choice. Do you know how much they caught me with?”

She did, but wasn’t about to let on to him that she’d been interested enough in his criminal proceedings to read the court record, so she gave him her most censorious look and asked, “Are you going to brag?”

“No, of course not. But it was more than four thousand pounds. A lot of bud. I had to make a deal.”

“Four thousand pounds? Wasn’t that a bit much for a forty-two-foot sloop?” recognizing, as she referred to the B. Marley, that she might just have given away her close examination of his case.

“A little,” he admitted, “but my plan was never to try to outrun anyone in a freaking sailboat. I was trying to blend in. Look, Lana, when they offered me a deal, I had to take it. And now they’re offering to expunge my record if I get that woman and her kid out of Russia. They need people like me, obviously.”

“Drug smugglers?”

“No! People who know high-end sailing and navigation. I’m talking about when all your electronics go down and all you have left are the stars, and you have to sail in the black of night through hostile territorial waters with channel markers and buoys disappearing, and crowded with all kinds of boats trying to stay clear of land with the oceans rising. Not to mention the Russian Navy.”

She could buy the need for criminals like him, but not the more startling Doper Don news of late: “Did you actually tell the deputy director of the National Security Agency that you’re looking to get back together with Emma and me? I can accept that they gave you a great deal. I can even accept that there’s an ounce of patriotism in you that might just possibly outweigh the tons of drugs that have passed through your greedy hands, but I can’t accept that a man who abandoned his two-year-old daughter and wife to play a stoned version of Pirates of the Caribbean really gives a damn about his family.”

“Quite a speech.” He stared at her. “Do I get to respond?”

“Sure. Be my guest.”

“I made a huge mistake. I’m looking to make amends. I’ve risked my life to take down some real savages in Colombia who would have delighted in torturing me slowly to death. I was a shitty husband and father. I was irresponsible. I’m the opposite of all that now. And, believe it or not, I’m the right person for the job.”

“Give me a break, Don. It’s a big country. There are thousands of qualified sailors. Not all of them with a nickname that pays homage to illicit drugs.”

“By the way, I would appreciate it if you’d stop referring to me that way in front of my daughter.”

“I’ve never called you that in front of her.”

He seemed delighted. “Well, thank you.”

“I fight fair.”

“As for those thousands of sailors you just mentioned, they’re really busy right now. I could clear a couple grand a day, if I were a free man.”’

Undeniably true. In the past few days, the nautical world had been turned upside down. Yacht owners were desperate for their captains — any captains — to save their floating palaces, but the captains generally worked for several boat owners at once; few ocean gentry had them on the clock twenty-four seven. Plus, the feds, under emergency provisions, had forced the recruitment of thousands of seamen who had served in various government capacities — merchant marine, Coast Guard, and so forth — just as they had impressed them in past centuries. They needed them to keep harbors from getting obstructed by boats breaking loose from their moorings — or by their wealthy owners scuttling them to make a quick insurance claim in a time of crisis, which had happened with such abandon after the 2008 financial collapse.

In short, skilled sailors were in unprecedented demand by the public and private sector — and making more money than ever. Except for Don:

“Instead,” he went on, “I’m still earning twenty-three cents an hour. That’s my prison wage and will be for the foreseeable future.”

“You’re saying you’re a bargain?”

“A great one.”

“Just answer one question for me. Answer it honestly, and we can tell Holmes we’re good to go and get moving: Why are you doing this? For real now, Don.”

“Because somebody set off a nuclear missile. Because in addition to the flooding, radiation is sweeping all over the earth. Because I have a daughter I love. And, goddamn it, I have an ex-wife who does incredibly important work for a country I want to serve. And nobody will take better care of you, Lana, than I will. I will get you in there, and I will get you out.”

He was so fierce, so impassioned, he almost convinced her. She suspected a residue of doubt would always remain.

“You realize, Don, that if we get caught, we’ll be leaving Emma an orphan.”

“You’re that sure they’ll kill us?”

“I’m that sure they’ll kill you and never let me go.”

He nodded somberly.

“So did you really find a charter over there for us?” she asked.

“Better than the Passport 44 the DEA was talking about,” he said with dedicated disregard. “Too beamy,” he explained, or thought he had: now Lana looked puzzled. “Too wide,” he explained. “Great for cargo—”

“You would certainly know about that.”

“But slow. I contacted an old boat broker of mine with, let’s say, a demanding clientele. He’s got a Dehler 38 waiting for us.”

“Tell me we’re picking it up somewhere close to the subject.”

“We are, in Pitsunda, Abkhazia.”

“What? We might as well be going to Moscow.” Abkhazia had broken away from Georgia, with Moscow’s wholehearted approval. Predictably, Russia was among the few countries that did recognize the teensy country, which was sandwiched between the two antagonists.

“Not really. Pitsunda’s a little bit beaten and a little bit lawless. But from what I’ve been told it’s really close to where we’re supposed to get that woman and her kid.”

“The Russian shadow falls all over Abkhazia.”

“It wasn’t my call. I just got the boat.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s not a race boat but it’s very quick and nimble. Cruising World’s best cruiser in its class. It’ll also have the right look for us. Affluent, but not so pricey that it would be out of line for a sport sailor trying to save his prize from the clutter of rising harbors. It won’t attract too much attention.”

One of Holmes’s runners rushed in: “The deputy director says it’s time to move. He wants you both in his office.”

Holmes stood as they entered. “We double-checked your boat broker,” he said to Don. “He’s solid.”

“I know.”

“We didn’t,” Holmes retorted. “You better be solid, too. I know you’ve done some fine work for the DEA but what you’re getting into now is more important than all the dope deals and FARC intelligence put together. Do not lose Lana, and get that woman and her child out of Russia. Then point that boat west and move out as fast as you can. We can’t help you for the first two hundred miles, and those territorial waters are a bit of a maze. You wouldn’t be the first captain to find himself towed into Russian territory because they found it convenient to do so.”

“Pitsunda, right?” Lana asked. “That’s where we’re getting the boat?”

Holmes nodded, as though he could appreciate her skeptical tone. “I know, it’s dicey, but the Abkhazians are intent on keeping up the façade of being independent of Moscow. It’s a little scary there, but let’s face it, so are some of the people we’ll have in place to keep an eye on you two. They can’t do anything for you once you enter Russian waters, but in Pitsunda and its surrounds, it shouldn’t be too bad.”

Famous last words, Lana couldn’t help but think.

“We’ve got a Sikorsky to fly you out to Andrews. You’ll board a Gulfstream 650. That’s for the first leg. The second will get more interesting. Get some sleep while you can. Once you’re on that boat, you’ll be all eyes all the time.”

“What do you mean, about the second leg getting ‘more interesting?’” she asked.

“It’s all ‘know as you go.’ Sorry,” Holmes said.

Packs of sailing clothing and supplies were waiting onboard the bird. They lifted up over Fort Meade, air space reserved for very few. It was all clear for the two of them and their young pilot.

Don looked green. Only then did Lana remember his uneasiness in the air.

“You going to lose it?” He had on American Airlines on their honeymoon flight to Saint Martin. Repeatedly. Ah, romance.

He shook his head. “I’m okay.”

She handed him an airsickness bag — just in case.

He buried his head in it — then most of his stomach — seconds later.

Lana turned from the revolting display, remembering — with a wrenching roll of her own stomach — how contagious regurgitation could get.

The flight to Andrews at dusk took them over the flooding Potomac. Water had reached the National Mall, and the reflecting pool at the Washington Memorial had disappeared into the larger vat of the rising ocean. Anacostia looked particularly hard-hit. She was glad Tanesa’s family had found refuge with them — for so many reasons.

Andrews, thankfully, was dry. They boarded the Gulfstream, an especially swift jet that should deliver them to their destination in less than eight hours. The pilot and his second would not tell them where they were going, though.

“More ‘know as you go’?” she asked the woman.

A quick nod and the pair disappeared into the cockpit.

Two hours later, unable to sleep, Lana peered into the darkest night knowing the sea was shifting radically thousands of feet below. In the complete blackness that now enveloped them, the watery world could have been reaching to swallow them and the stars.

They landed at a remote airstrip, but not in Abkhazia, or anywhere near Pitsunda. In Turkey, the pilot informed them, saying no more.

She and Don were taken to a hangar where a pair of F-15 fighter jets were waiting: his and hers, as it turned out.

“Why?” Don asked uneasily.

“We’re taking you to the U.S.S. William Jefferson Clinton.”

“An aircraft carrier? We’re landing on an aircraft carrier at night in rising seas?”

“That about nails it,” the new flight commander said.

Don hurled again, sans sickness bag. But at least he wasn’t in the fighter jet… yet.

Now he was. Lana waved good-bye. He was off. She was belted in by experienced hands.

At least Emma won’t be orphaned on this leg of the journey, she thought, because what were the odds of both pilots missing the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier and crashing?

Actually, higher than she realized, given the wildly unsettled sea.

The lights on the carrier appeared in the distance as a pinprick on a vast black screen.

That’s it? Lana thought. That’s all?

As they raced nearer, she saw raging whitecaps smashing into the side of the Clinton, sending spray across the deck, storm conditions that had to be on the very margin of safety. Or death, she thought at once.

She squeezed her hands into fists, sweating heavily.

Lana wondered if Don had made it safely aboard. Right then she saw his fighter jet approaching the carrier for a landing.

The wings of the F-15 tilted back and forth, as though the pilot were trying to mirror the wobble of the landing platform itself. Then, at the last moment, the jet’s engines flared brightly and the F-15 aborted the landing, blasting back up to the black sky, presumably for a second chance.

Her pilot said nothing. She imagined his eyes glued to the deck. She squeezed hers shut. The seconds hung with the weight of eternity.

Think about them, she told herself sternly: Galina and Alexandra Bortnik. They’re the ones in real danger.

But she had a hard time believing that because when she peeked out of the cockpit, all she saw was the carrier rolling like a barroom brawler on the waves below.

CHAPTER 22

Lana knew very little about landing an F-15 on an aircraft carrier, but she was certain each fighter jet had a hook on its tail that needed to catch on a steel wire stretched across the deck. More than one wire, if she recalled correctly.

She had no time left to worry: the F-15 hit the heaving platform, nose slightly elevated—That’s good, right? So it can catch? — and raced like a dragster down the tilting surface.

Catch, damn it.

The pilot gave his engines full throttle.

She swore, thinking they’d also missed the wires and needed to blast off to avoid ending up in the sea.

But no: turned out it was standard operating procedure in case the pilot missed one of the steel wires. He caught the hook and they came to a stop — incredibly — in less than two seconds.

If Don doesn’t lose the rest of his lunch, I’ll be amazed.

In what seemed like a blink, she was helped out of the cockpit and rushed off the deck.

She heard the jet with Don approaching, and realized how terribly torn she was between watching his landing and contacting Galina ASAP.

Then she saw seamen unfurling a huge net barricade across the deck.

“What’s that for?” she asked the taciturn pilot who had flown her to the carrier, which was pitching noticeably beneath her feet.

“He lost the nose wheel on his first attempt so he’s got to crash-land it.”

Crash-land it? With Don?

She swore again, but softly this time. Not enough, however, to escape the captain’s attention: “You can say that again,” he muttered.

Lana looked at the netting. She looked at the jets parked, wings up, along the side of the carrier. Tough to imagine the netting stopping a sailboat, much less a fighter jet traveling in excess of two hundred miles per hour.

Before she realized it, she was whisked off the deck to an observation window safely removed from the looming accident, because any way she looked at it, an accident was about to take place.

When Don’s jet hit the deck seconds later, the nose cone scraped across the surface, as if to plow it up. Then it hit the net and stopped almost as quickly as hers had.

A team of sailors carrying ladders and fire-suppression gear descended on the F-15, pulling Don and the pilot out of the cockpit.

“Always a chance of a fuel fire or explosion,” an officer who had just appeared by her side explained nonchalantly.

Don was stumbling, helped by two sailors, one on each arm.

He made it. We’re okay.

“I need the communications room,” she said to the officer.

“We can give you that for ten minutes,” he said, leading her through a doorway to a room filled with communication cubicles. She realized at once that it was no accident that he was standing next to her. “But you’ll be getting onto a boat a lot smaller and faster to get you to your destination.”

“In these seas?” she asked. He nodded. “How far?”

“A little more than fifty nautical miles.”

Nautical miles? It took her a second to remember that they were almost a thousand feet longer than a regular mile. And they had “a little more than fifty” of them to cross? In these seas? she repeated to herself.

“You’ve got to go under the radar,” the officer went on. “There’s no guarantee that will happen, but there’s less of a chance you’ll be noticed in a much smaller boat, especially with all the traffic on coastal waters these days.”

“What about this thing?” She looked about the Clinton.

“We’re in a narrow sliver of international waters to get you this close. Plus, the Abkhazians don’t exactly have much of a navy.”

Lana rushed a message to Galina: “Where are you?” Cutting to the chase.

Galina must have been on edge waiting to hear from her because she fired right back: “I need to get out of here before daybreak.”

“Stay put. We’re coming to get you.”

“How soon? Oleg is very close.”

“Do you think he’s close or know that he is?” Lana asked, worried that he would get his hands on her. Just hours ago, Jensen had tracked Dernov’s data to Sochi, where he presumably had spent the night.

“You and I both know he’s close,” Galina replied. “I need to leave before daylight. Where are you?”

“I can’t say.” She looked at the officer. “How long till daylight?”

He checked his watch. “An hour fifty.”

“We won’t be there by daylight,” she texted Galina, seeing no point in mincing words.

“How long?” Galina asked. Lana could almost hear her impatience. “You must have an idea of how far away I am.”

She pulled up Jensen, who had been the second person she’d planned to contact once aboard the Clinton, and asked him if he had any notion of where Galina was.

“She’s been very quiet,” he reported. “No data streams, but if I had to guess, I’d say she’s north of Sochi, but not too far.”

I could have guessed that.

“What’s the problem?” the officer asked.

She told him.

A young woman’s head popped up from behind a partition. “Whoever you’re communicating with is 110 kilometers north of Sochi in what appears to be a small seaport town. I can’t get a name for it. It might not have one, at least on any map we have.”

“Thank you.” Though it concerned Lana that Galina’s position had been sniffed out so quickly; at least it was by friendly forces.

She turned to Don: “From Pitsunda, how long will it take us to get up there?”

“We’ll be moving fast in these conditions. A half-day’s sail at worst. What’s the latest weather?” he asked the room at large, perhaps hoping for another head to pop up. One did:

“Strong winds, near gale force, till tonight,” a male sailor said, looking up from his computer.

“She won’t wait a half day,” Lana told Don. “She sounds like she expects us to be there in the next ninety minutes.”

“What choice does she have?” he asked.

Lana, more diplomatically, asked Galina that question.

“Can’t say, but I can’t wait,” she replied.

Lana relayed that reply to Don.

“It seems to me she’s got one good option, and that’s to go to sea and head south. She’s already said something about chartering, right?”

Lana nodded.

“I can give her captain coordinates for a rendezvous at sea,” said Don.

“That could look very suspicious,” said the officer who’d been by Lana’s side. “A busy Russian navy might miss that, but satellites are hardly going to.”

“I don’t see any option but to take the risk,” Lana replied. “You said yourself there are lots of boats out there.” She messaged Galina with Don’s suggestion of a rendezvous.

No response came from her.

“Galina? Did you get that message?”

Still nothing.

“Galina? I need to know if you’re okay.”

Good question, Galina thought, shutting down her connection with Lana Elkins. She was worried sick that Oleg might have located her, though the only activity she spied from her perch above the village was the house lights flicking on.

She considered rushing down to the dock just long enough to make contact with a boat captain, but could not bring herself to leave her daughter alone. Neither could she bear waking the sleeping child to another day of leukemia and pain.

Instead, she drove the expensive Porsche SUV into the village of perhaps a dozen run-down homes and a handful of cars and pickups older than she herself was.

Galina parked near the dock and stuffed PP’s cash into her shoulder bag, then shoved the derringer into her pocket so she could grab the gun easily if she had to.

Donning a headscarf out of respect — and dark glasses out of fear — she stepped from the car as a man jumped to the dock off a trawler. She wondered if he’d slept on it. But when she approached him in the dim light, his eyes looked bright, as if they were reflecting the last of the night’s starlight.

He didn’t appear at all surprised by her appearance, asking gruffly who she was, as he might have demanded of anyone else at any other time of day. He sounded like a man who did not suffer distractions easily.

“I need to charter a boat.”

“A fishing boat?” He shook his head, maybe in disbelief, then peered closely at her. “Take off your glasses.” When she hesitated, he removed them so swiftly she had no time to react. “I know you,” he said. “You are the ‘Porn Star Spy.’ I’ve seen naked pictures of you on TV.” He shook his head again, this time in obvious disapproval.

Porn Star Spy. That’s what they’re calling me? Oleg, that son of a bitch. He’d made a mockery of her. She knew it was easy to do: Russians loved their “news” tawdry and tabloid, just like the Brits and Americans.

“Please, listen to me,” she begged. “He was someone I loved. I didn’t know he took those pictures. I never would have done that. He’s horrible.”

She sounded desperate. She was. But even then she knew she’d rather deal with a Muslim man’s indignation — and from what she’d observed yesterday afternoon, this was a Muslim village — than Oleg’s murderous revenge. That the captain had taken offense only over the sex photos, not the spy allegations, had not escaped her notice, so she went on: “But it’s true, I’m a spy trying to stop this Russian criminal from bombing Antarctica. That’s what’s making the oceans rise.”

She glanced at the hull of his trawler; the bottom was now pressed against the top of the dock. The water had risen at least half a foot since last night. Soon there would be no dock.

“Who do you say is doing this to you?” he asked. His gruffness had not eased.

Now she saw that she would have to take the biggest risk of all: “A very rich Russian man. He’s bought influence with the Russian police. He’s doing this to me. He’s afraid of what I can do to him.”

The captain stared at her. He said nothing.

She played her last card — cash — pulling out a fistful of rubles. “If I don’t get out of here, they will kill me and my little girl. She’s in the car. You are a man of faith. I saw you coming from your prayer yesterday. You know what the Russians did to your brothers and sisters in Chechnya. They will do that to me, too. And then they will kill me. Help me, please.”

He eyed the money. “How far?” he asked.

“Out of Russian waters. A rendezvous at sea south of here. I can get the coordinates.”

“Your daughter, they say she’s sick. They say she needs help. That you’re a bad mother.”

“She is sick. She does need help. But not their help.” Galina stared into his eyes. “She needs yours.”

Oleg woke early in his luxurious suite in Sochi. He splashed water on his face and headed down to the kitchen, finding the lazy cooks sitting around a television and smoking.

“Not open till seven,” a swarthy man in chef’s whites said. He sounded surly as a hangover.

Oleg flashed his FSB identification, conveniently provided for this foray to the coast. “You’re open now. Eggs, potatoes, bread. Coffee. Spit in it and I’ll have you arrested and beaten senseless.”

He took no chances. Often threats weren’t enough. They could, in fact, instigate recklessness, so he watched them prepare his food to ensure they didn’t do to him what he would have done to them, if the circumstances had been reversed.

He glanced at the small screen and saw a magnificent video of water. “Water everywhere, and not a drop to drink…” A westerner’s words, but who cares. It was he, a Russian, who had made those words blaze with truth: Water flooding the capitals of the United States, Britain, the major ports of Europe and Asia. And all of it saltwater from the rising seas. Nothing good for drinking, but plenty good for drowning.

And, yes, some small problems in his homeland. But the Russian President was on TV right now, looking supremely confident. And who had made that possible? The right people knew the answer.

He ate quickly. In thirty minutes he was driving up the coast. He wished he could have called in a helicopter or two, but there were limits, given the small-scale crises facing the defenders of the Russian shoreline. But he had placed calls to every rural police agency up to Tuapse in the north, telling them he was tracking down the Porn Star Spy in their jurisdictions, news that had excited every one of them — until he informed them in his gravest voice that if she escaped from any of their areas of responsibility, they would answer to Russia’s top cop, the minister of Internal Affairs. Those interrogations were not known for their concessions to sentiment.

The officers were already calling him from hamlets all along the Russian Riviera, and from seaports used by the owners of magnificent pleasure craft, men mostly long accustomed to soaking up the sun in the company of whores and paramours.

Nobody had seen PP’s Macan. All had seen boats heading out to sea. Of course they were: rivers were reversing their flow, flooding and breaking up homes that had withstood hundred-year floods. But with docks disappearing and homes ripping apart and floating away, this was a force much greater. This was a once-in-a-millennium flood caused by a millennial man. No human in the annals of recorded history had ever accomplished what he had done. Jesus might have turned water into wine, but only Oleg Dernov had turned water into the world’s most powerful weapon.

Thanks to him, Russia had flipped the hegemony of the west on its head in a matter of days. So drown the river rats down there. Sink their shitty little homes. He imagined he could even hear them cracking apart from up on the highway. These people should be grateful to him. Most would live, unlike so many others. The great nation would have the resources to let them adapt to the new world forming all around them.

Would the Dutch be able to do that for their citizens? The Americans? The British? The French? The Chinese? He smiled at the very thought of those Asian pretenders. The “Beijing Miracle”? The great growth monster was turning into a joke. They were no longer a rival. Russia had no rivals left. All were drowning, first and foremost in their own regrets.

Water, water everywhere…

His phone started ringing. Police officers with nothing to report. No sightings. But the fourth call came from an officer looking down from the highway to a village so small it had no name. Not officially, but the officer, who sounded as if he’d been running, said the village had a nickname: “Raghead City.”

Oleg smiled.

“And there are boats getting ready to leave,” the officer added.

“Of course there are boats leaving.” What an idiot. “Have you gone down to look for her?”

“The Porn Star Spy?” He sounded even breathier using her nickname.

“Yes,” Oleg shouted. “The naked one on TV. In a silver SUV. Porsche. Go!”

He ended the call, furious over the timidity of these rural officers.

When the phone rang seconds later, though, he was furious over another man’s temerity: Numero Uno was demanding that Oleg approve the second missile launch now: “If you don’t make that decision, I will,” he threatened. “You can’t stop me.”

“Can you give me a little time?” Oleg asked, sounding so timid himself that he wanted to spit — in Uno’s eye. But he could do better than that, much better.

“How long?” Uno asked.

“Just give me till tomorrow, six p.m. I promise the answer will be worth the wait.”

“There is only one answer,” Uno replied.

“Six, tomorrow?” Oleg asked again, grinding his teeth.

“Yes, I will give you till then.”

Oleg hung up, relaxing his jaw. All the time in the world.

Galina had gone dark. Who can blame her? Lana thought.

She and Don were in a small, powerful boat skipping over the waves. It looked like a seagoing version of an AFV, armored fighting vehicle. She felt them go airborne at times, but always under control. To her surprise, Don didn’t appear to relish the experience, calling the swift vessel a “stinkpot,” which she understood to mean a fossil-fuel-powered watercraft.

The half dozen SEALs accompanying Don and her gave off the same vibe she’d felt last year when their cohorts had saved her life in Saudi Arabia. A little different now: they were putting Don and her in danger, while offering some short-term protection that would pass as soon as they sailed that boat into Russian waters.

The wind that had buffeted the Clinton still howled, as the sailor had predicted, which did brighten Don’s mood:

“Almost as good as it gets for what we’ve got to do,” he announced. “We’ll be on a broad reach heading into Russian waters. If the Dehler does the job as well as advertised, we’ll be carrying twelve to fifteen knots. That’s quick. You’ll love it.”

“Love it?” He sounded as though they were about to embark on a day of sport racing.

“Why not? Carpe diem,” he bellowed to the wind.

She saw light creasing the dark sky ahead. Despite the whump-whump-whump of the hull hitting swells and cutting through whitecaps, she tried reaching Galina. She had signals. She lacked only Galina.

Briefly, Lana wondered if she’d been set up by Russian intelligence. But she immediately worried that Galina and her seriously ill daughter were the ones fixed most firmly in those crosshairs.

These concerns were not far off the mark.

Galina’s persuasiveness, or cash — she wasn’t sure which — had convinced the captain that she was worthy of his assistance. He’d let her know that he himself had scarcely escaped death in fleeing Iran.

He had just started his big diesel engine, black puffs rising into the gray sky, when a Lada with a cherry top drove down to the dock. The officer behind the wheel parked next to the Macan. The contrast was remarkable, but Galina didn’t notice, so concerned was she that Alexandra keep her head down.

“You are under arrest,” the hefty officer said, squeezing out of the small car in such a rush that he didn’t have his handgun fully drawn.

Before she was consciously aware of it, Galina had her derringer aimed at his chest, rushing him as though fearless.

“Don’t try anything,” she warned him. “I’ve already killed Sergey the Beast. I will kill you, too, so keep your gun down.”

He complied.

She kept moving forward. “Back up.” As he obeyed, she had him drop his weapon, a Glock. The Lada might have been ancient but his pistol was impressive. She snapped the slide back, chambering a bullet, and slipped her empty derringer back inside her pocket.

“Take his handcuffs,” she ordered the captain, “and put them on him, hands behind his back.” As she spoke, she pointed the Glock at the ship captain just long enough to offer an unspoken threat to him. For her savior’s sake, she didn’t want him to appear to be collaborating with her. “So now I have two prisoners,” she told the officer.

The Muslim captain appeared to catch on, cuffing the officer, but apologizing for what he was being forced to do.

Galina saw more lights coming on in the houses. People were watching. She hoped there were no “Heroes of Russia” hiding behind those curtains. She doubted many Muslims had been so honored.

“Are you going to kill me, too?” the officer asked.

“We will see. Search him for other weapons,” she told the captain, who quickly found a knife sheathed inside his boot.

“Throw it in the water.”

The captain gave it a good toss, perhaps too enthusiastic, she thought.

“Now get him in the boat and get some rope ready. I want him tied down, and if any of your neighbors come out, tell them to go inside and close their eyes.”

The captain raised both hands and waved at the homes. Lights went out. It seemed they’d all had plenty of practice in not seeing.

Alexandra exited the Macan and walked toward her mother, dragging her blanket. She looked pale in the wan light. Galina was glad to see her. She hadn’t wanted to leave the captain and cop to retrieve Alexandra. The most convincing words can unlock the heaviest chains, though the feckless officer hardly appeared a likely mouthpiece for effective personal propaganda.

“We’re getting on the boat,” she told Alexandra. “You two first,” she ordered the captain and officer.

Once on board, she checked the cabin. A hard bench with a couple of stained cushions. Fish blood, she guessed. “Tie him to that.” She pointed to the bench.

She watched the captain carefully.

“Now take us to sea,” she ordered him. “We’ll see if he ever comes back.”

“Please don’t—”

“Shut up!” she yelled, cutting off the cop’s words.

She bundled Alexandra in her blanket and placed her on a bunk toward the bow.

The captain cast off. She stuck the Glock’s muzzle in the officer’s face.

“Where’s Oleg Dernov?” she demanded.

“He’s coming up the coast.” The officer shook as he spoke. “Maybe thirty kilometers away.”

Fifteen minutes at most.

“Move faster,” she told the captain. “Don’t worry about your wake,” she added, with a glance at the other docked trawlers.

He shoved the throttle forward. The big engine answered. They moved away from the disappearing dock at a rapidly increasing rate.

“Do you have a wife and children?” she asked the captain.

“Not yet.”

She was happy to hear that: no one to cry behind curtains for him — or cooperate with Oleg.

As they neared the opening to the harbor, Oleg’s Maserati barreled into the village. She watched with the captain’s binoculars. As soon as the vehicle rolled to the dock, all the lights in the homes went out.

“Nobody ever sees anything,” the captain whispered to her.

But he does, Galina thought, glassing the dock as Oleg raised his own binoculars. For a second they peered at each other. Then she waved.

She hoped good-bye.

CHAPTER 23

Oleg didn’t budge from the dock, and he held those binoculars on Galina as if he were aiming a weapon. She begged the captain to go faster. He toyed with the throttle. She might have sensed a bit more speed, but not enough to discourage Oleg, of that she was certain. Short of teleporting across the globe, she knew nothing was likely to stop his murderous pursuit of her.

Oleg simply had too much at stake not to kill her. Galina had worked with him long enough to have strong ideas about how to crush his assault on Antarctica and, by extension, the entire planet. But to do that she had to stop running long enough to work on her computer, preferably with the American, Lana Elkins, by her side. Elkins had already displayed daunting skills in tracking down Galina. Now the Russian hacker hoped her American counterpart would prove just as effective in exfiltrating her so the two of them could team up to bring Oleg down — before the deadly flooding and radiation got even worse.

Oleg bolted down the dock toward the nearest house. His sprint caught the captain’s eye, too. “I’m going faster here than I’ve ever gone,” he said before Galina could beg him again for more speed. “But I must be careful. There are old moorings in the water. You can see them at low tide. Maybe not now, when low tide is like high tide. I don’t want to hit them.”

“The last thing we need,” she had to agree.

“That’s him?” the captain asked. “The man who took those pictures of you?”

She nodded.

“Let me see him.”

She handed over the binoculars. He stared at Oleg, who was nearing the door of the house. Galina expected he’d be rooting out one of the captains in the next minute or two to chase them down.

“He’s ruthless, a killer,” she said.

“I understand,” the captain said to her. “I had to do ruthless things to get out of Iran. And those people,” he pointed to the house, “can be ruthless as well. They won’t open their doors.”

“I’m afraid they’ll have to,” Galina replied.

As if to prove her point, Oleg kicked it in. A woman in a headscarf shrank from him as a man marched out of the interior shadows. Oleg held up his ID — and his gun.

Galina refocused the binoculars as the man of the house slowed down and put up his hands. Oleg’s mouth moved and the man eased past the woman and edged out the door. He headed toward the dock, waving for Oleg to come with him. He reminded Galina of a mother bird faking a broken wing to try to lead a predator away from her nestlings.

Oleg followed the man, gun trained on him, to a trawler that looked similar to the captain’s.

“Is his faster than yours?” she asked him.

“About the same. These are not speedboats. But last winter he rebuilt his engine. I’m going to do that this December.”

“So what does that mean, rebuilt his engine?”

“Not much, I hope. Maybe more reliable. But mine’s a good boat,” the captain said, slapping the wheel.

Already black puffs of diesel smoke were belching from the other trawler’s stacks.

Oleg and his captive captain were underway.

Lana thought landing at Pitsunda was like hitting the beach at Normandy. A huge exaggeration, which she recognized, but the captain of the armored boat gunned the engine loudly as they raced down ten-foot waves, surfing them at times, until he ran the nimble vessel right up onto the sand.

Fortunately, they were not met by gunfire. Instead, she heard the staccato command of “Get out-get out-get out” from the SEAL leader, a red-haired man with the unlikely name of Johnny Walker; he’d already been the subject of obvious jibes in Lana’s presence.

But the SEALs took their commander’s words seriously; they moved rapidly onto the sand with their weapons drawn, scanning the beach with their night goggles. Lana, on the other hand, had her eyes on the rough shore break wondering where the Dehler 38 was moored.

The same thought must have occurred to Don because words to that effect passed his lips seconds later.

“The other side of this dune,” replied Johnny Walker Red, as he was known to his men. “That’s where the marina is, and where they’ll be waiting.”

The dune rose about two hundred feet on a steep slope that was crowned with short trees; Lana guessed scrub pine. It looked like a perfect place for a machine gunner to open up on them.

The slog up the dune proved exasperating: two steps up, one step down as the fine white grains gave away quickly under their weight.

Three SEALs were deployed in front of Lana and Don. Two moved on their flanks. One followed. She felt as protected as she could under the circumstances — until she received a text. She pulled out her phone thinking it was from Galina, worrying that Oleg had spotted his prey. It wasn’t from the Russian, though it was heartbreaking news: Tanesa’s mother, Esme, said Tanesa and Emma had been lost in a flood in Anacostia.

What? Lana looked up, as if an answer to her horror might be written in the night sky. She recalled seeing the rising waters in Anacostia as they flew in the chopper to Andrews, but she’d had no idea Tanesa and Emma were down there.

She returned immediately to the text, reading as she trudged up the dune that “Unknown to me,” Esme wrote, “the girls had volunteered to fill sandbags in Anacostia.” They’d been working on a headwall when the sea broke through. Tanesa’s mother wanted to know if Lana had any contacts who could help search for the girls.

Damn it! It was just like Emma—and Tanesa — to jump into the fray. Emma had been feeling so useless during the crisis, and had said as much, compared to the heroics that she and Tanesa had displayed last year. And what was fighting a flood, the two must have thought, compared to going up against men with a backpack nuclear bomb?

Lana did the only thing she could under the circumstances: she forwarded the entire text to Holmes. She didn’t need to add a single syllable. Her own desperation was so great it could have been etched in the sky — and would be immediately apparent to the deputy director. Then she sent a quick message to Esme saying that she’d alerted federal authorities who might be able to help.

What Lana did not do was tell Don, struggling up the dune to her right. She didn’t believe a dope dealer, of all people, could do anything to help Emma right now.

All the SEALs were looking side to side, which did little to protect them when floodlights poured down the dune and a man’s deep voice bellowed in accented English for them to stop.

“Halt,” Red ordered a split second later.

What choice do we have?

All Lana could spy behind the floodlights were shadows blending into one another. She wondered how those men had known they were hitting the beach. Or had they been using the bluff to watch both sides? “Is this how your guy does business?” she asked her ex.

“That’s not him. My guy has a squeaky voice. He got kicked in the throat by a horse.”

From Red’s cautious manner, he already knew they’d been met by the wrong party.

For a moment, Lana thought maybe they’d been intercepted by a routine patrol.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. It felt like a million maybes might flood through her mind in the next few seconds — along with a few well-placed bullets.

“We’re here to meet Nikita Mikov,” Red called out.

“Mikov? Mikov’s not feeling so good right now,” the commanding voice responded. “He said you should talk to us instead.”

“Maybe I will,” Red answered. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“On who I’m talking to. How much are my words going to cost me?” Red asked.

“So you are prepared to pay for the privilege of conversation?”

“I’m an agreeable man.”

“Then put down your guns. I find they reduce the desire for honest negotiation.”

“What are we negotiating for?” Red replied, still holding his weapon by his side, as were his men.

“What you were always negotiating for. A boat.”

“Dehler 38,” Don muttered.

Red nodded. “The Dehler 38,” he called out.

“Yes, a fine boat. One of our best.”

“And I think I know what’s going on here,” Don said softly to Red. “This guy must have taken control of the marina.”

“I hear you,” Red whispered back.

“It’s happening all over Europe,” Don added.

Not just in Europe. Lana recalled the gangbangers in Miami seizing boats and gleefully giving the owners the old heave-ho right into the harbor.

“We can’t drop our weapons,” Red yelled up the dune. “But we can promise you that we came to complete a deal.”

“American dollars?” the man asked.

“Good as gold.”

“Used to be. Rubles are better.”

“We’ve got them, too,” Red said.

We do?

“Whatever you want,” the SEAL went on.

“Then by all means point your weapons down and we’ll walk down there to you. But if one of your men makes a move, a grenade is going to land right on your heads. Let’s do it peaceably.”

And they did. A squat man walked out of the shadows with gunmen on either side of him who also kept their weapons low.

The leader pulled out his phone and showed them photos of the Dehler and quite a few other available boats.

“The Dehler,” Don insisted.

“Storm Season,” said the squat man, pointing to the name. “One million rubles for five days.”

“Hold on,” Red said. “That’s $22,000.”

“Yes, it is. That’s the price to charter,” said Squat, who looked even shorter up close.

“Mikov said $10,000.”

Squat looked around theatrically. “Do you see Mikov? I don’t see Mikov. He can’t protect your interests. To be honest, Mikov can’t even protect his own anymore.”

Red looked at Lana, who nodded quickly. Let’s just get the deal done.

“Five days, one million rubles,” the SEAL agreed.

Lana noticed Squat hadn’t demanded a deposit for the boat itself. Further proof, Lana thought, that he and his men had hijacked Mikov’s boat-chartering business and wouldn’t be sharing the profits with the boat owners themselves. Squat would be indifferent to the boat’s return if he and his hoods planned to be gone by the time she and Don got back.

And where would Emma and Tanesa be by then? She had a horrible image of them both drowned.

After strolling down a wide dock, the thugs lit up Storm Season, a handsome, sleek-looking sloop.

Don hurried to check the furled sails, nodding as he announced, “Carbon fiber, just like Mikov said.”

Squat nodded as if he knew why Don was elated.

“And fully battened,” Don added. “She should move.” He put out his hand to help Lana on board.

The cabin had a raked-back racy look with long, angled windows. The helm had electric winches for the halyard and sheets — the lines that raised and trimmed the sails. They made it possible for one person to sail the Dehler, which was good because Lana didn’t expect to be much help when it came to the actual voyage. And right now she needed to provide the rendezvous coordinates as soon as possible to Galina.

“We’ll wait till you’re under way,” Red said to her and Don.

The mood dockside turned amiable with the transfer of funds. Squat offered vodka to the SEALs. Lana was pleased to see that none accepted.

“Duty calls,” Red explained.

“Me, too,” Squat replied. “And my duty is to give praise where praise is due. To Stoli Gold.” He raised the distinctive bottle high.

“To Stoli Gold,” his men amen’ed.

Squat glugged down the clear alcohol for several rewarding seconds, to judge from his sigh when he stopped.

Don activated the depth finder and started the engine to motor out of the marina. The fuel tanks were full. He asked Lana to check the seventy-nine-gallon freshwater tank under the companionway. Topped off as well. Evidently, Mikov had been around long enough to attend to the details.

Lana also checked her messages, thinking she might have missed the telltale vibration. Nothing from Holmes, Esme, or Galina.

The vodka drinkers on the dock gave no indication of knowing anything more about sailboats than how to squeeze money out of a hijacked charter service.

But Lana thought the drinkers could have been more alert to the vagaries of their trade. With Storm Season under way and a couple hundred feet from the dock, Red and his men quickly disarmed the band and took back more than 500,000 rubles.

“Big mistake!” Squat bellowed.

“Don’t threaten us,” Red replied as loudly. “We’ve got your guns.” He looked at the weapons. “Not worth a damn,” he pronounced, ordering his men to throw them into the harbor. Lana watched them vanish into the dark water.

“Much harder to get than boats.” Squat was still shouting.

“Not where I come from,” Red replied evenly.

Don kept looking back from the helm. “He shouldn’t have done that. Bad blood over some rubles that aren’t even ours. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does,” Lana said. “It was all a lead-up to disarming them. Makes a lot of sense.”

But she worried that Don was right. Those trees on top of the sand dune still looked ominous to her, even after passing through them to get to the marina. Squat’s men had used only one floodlight to cast a narrow beam when they’d led them through the dense forest. Just looking up there made her imagine countless eyes peering down on the SEALs, who were already climbing back up the dune to get to the beach and their boat.

Lana opened the sail bag that had been packed for her at Meade.

“A gun in there?” Don asked.

“AR-15,” she answered, snapping the barrel and stock together and cramming in a clip. “A Sig Sauer, too.” She preferred it over larger pistols.

Don put Storm Season on autopilot as they motored out of the harbor, then plundered his own bag. “I’m outfitted the same way.”

The marina was dark, the sea ahead alive with a smattering of distant lights. Likely boats whose owners were hoping to ride out the storm of rising seas. She wasn’t worried about their lights. She was worried about huge gaps of darkness out there large enough to hide a navy. And she was even more frantic about Emma and Tanesa.

Don pointed the bow into the wind and took off the cover of the mainsail, raising it seconds later with the electronic winch. In the same manner, he unfurled the jib. Both luffed and filled as he turned the boat and cut the engine. Far from shore, he turned on the touch screen electronic charts at the helm.

Lana resisted contacting Holmes about her daughter’s plight. He was a man whose time was sacred in a crisis. And with nothing to tell Esme, she sent no update. But Lana did message Galina, succeeding in rapid fashion. Galina asked right away for the coordinates.

Don had the answer ready for Lana. “Technically, that puts us out of Russian waters for the rendezvous,” he added.

“Technically?” Lana asked.

“It’s so close they could claim anything but it’s about the halfway point. Ask how much speed they have.”

“Twelve knots,” Lana replied a moment later.

“We’ve got fourteen. That’s good. Ours will vary with the wind.”

A boat engine came to life from the point of the short peninsula that separated the beach from the marina. She and Don both looked back. Lana hoped it was the armored boat heading toward them.

As the engine noise grew louder, Galina messaged that Oleg was gaining on them.

“He’s chasing you?” Why hadn’t she said so? Not that she and Don — or the SEALs, for that matter — could do a damn thing to help her from this distance.

“Not close enough to shoot,” Galina replied.

“What do you have?”

“I’d rather not say,” Galina said.

Lana realized the Russian was worried Oleg was intercepting her communications. In any case, she doubted Galina had a combat rifle.

From Storm Season’s port side the boat drew closer. Red flashed a light to let them know who they were. Lana was glad; she’d been about to pick up her AR-15.

The SEALs moved up alongside them as Don started heading north, sailing away from land on a broad reach, as he’d foreseen.

Lana yelled to Red that Dernov was chasing Bortnik.

The commander nodded as a gunshot blew out Storm Season’s starboard cabin window.

Lana ducked and looked right. Just the big black gap until the next muzzle flash, which quickly turned into a fusillade that riddled the Dehler. The shooting stopped almost as quickly with her and Don huddled on the floor of the cockpit.

The SEALs raced ahead of them, speeding around the bow toward the source of the firepower. Lana kneeled, peering over the gunwale on the starboard side. She followed them by sound. She could see very little. The armored boat didn’t have powerful lights, or else Red had chosen not to use them.

But the gunmen who’d opened up on them had no such reservations. They turned on a beam that lit up the whitecaps and made the SEAL boat blindingly bright. She couldn’t make out the size of their assailant’s craft, but using the light allowed their position to be pinpointed. That seemed crazy to Lana. And at first it appeared she was right because the SEALs responded by shooting at the light. But just before their volley shattered it, Lana saw a rocket-propelled grenade launcher rise up in the other vessel. An instant later she followed the rocket’s red trail all the way to the armored boat.

The explosion ripped off the stern and sent SEALs — some immediately dismembered — into the air, eerily lit by flames flashing red on streams of blood.

We’re next.

But huddled on the floor of the Dehler, Lana received a text from Holmes that scared her far more: “Knew about girls. Have not found them. Bad here and getting worse. Stop them!”

So Emma and Tanesa had been missing long enough for a search to have failed. Lana’s whole body stiffened with fear. The desperation in the deputy director’s text didn’t help.

She scarcely looked up from the screen when a SEAL started screaming. His pain sounded unearthly.

And then Lana heard the horrifying whine of another rocket.

CHAPTER 24

Emma and Tanesa were in a van on their way to the Capitol Baptist Church in Anacostia to fill and stack sandbags. The flooding Potomac River was threatening the historic building. Emma was fierce with the simple desire to help out, and Tanesa had told her that the spirit of Jesus filled her every time she came to the aid of others. The church desperately needed volunteers, according to Shawn.

The lean young man was at the wheel, a very different position compared to last year when his leg was broken as he and other choir members tried to hold back traffic to save motorists fleeing horrific explosions in the first minutes of the cyberattack on DC. Lana was among those saved before a driver ran over Shawn.

After reading his text at Emma’s house, Tanesa had said, “We’ve got to go.”

“What’s your mother going to say?” Emma had asked, glancing at the door to her own mom’s bedroom, where, in Lana’s absence, she and Tanesa were sharing a king-size bed.

“Well, if it were some other kid going to pitch in, my mother would say, ‘That child’s so amazing, so selfless.’ But with me it would be, ‘What’s wrong with you, girl? You got curly gel for brains? That could kill you.’ So let’s just sneak out. I’ll tell Shawn to pick us up at the 7-Eleven down on River Road.” Which was more a point of reference than an actual convenience store, since it had been looted and burned to the ground by nicely groomed suburban kids.

“Could going there really kill us?” Emma had asked next. She knew her own mother would freak if she found out Emma was sneaking away in the midst of this crisis to go fight an unprecedented flood.

“Look, I’m going, and I don’t even know how to swim. And I’m guessing you’ve been swimming since you were a tadpole.”

True enough.

They’d snuck out the window and found their way into Shawn’s old Jeep Cherokee within twenty minutes, progress that slowed as they drove closer to DC. Shawn said he knew how to avoid the worst of the flooding, but that didn’t prove to be a state secret: so did every other driver, apparently.

Traffic wasn’t as bad once they finally approached Anacostia by late afternoon. Days were still long, so Emma figured they could pack sandbags for the church for at least a couple of hours. She figured if they got home by eight o’clock there was even a good chance they wouldn’t have been missed. And if they were, it was still early so Esme couldn’t be too pissed, right?

“Don’t bet on that,” Tanesa warned.

Emma tried not to feel uneasy as Shawn drove past groups of young black men who glared at the van. She felt it would be racist to make any judgments, and she knew that if white guys had been staring at them like that she’d be plenty paranoid about their intentions, too. She sure hadn’t gone anywhere near the burning of the convenience market. But a glare was a glare, no matter what the color of the skin.

“How close are we to the church?” she asked Shawn. Emma had been there many times for choir practice, but to avoid the flooding, Shawn had taken a circuitous route.

“Few more minutes.”

Emma could see how tight his jaw was. The tension in the van felt combustible.

They sure skirted a lot of flooding. The river now covered some of the new parks built in recent years along the waterfront, and had risen halfway up the stairs of some of the pedestrian bridges.

“Man, that’s high,” Tanesa said, sounding daunted.

Volunteers were sandbagging the lower banks of the river, which sloped every few hundred yards. But Emma couldn’t see how they could hold back the Potomac, if the sea kept rising. She could actually make out the river flowing backward. It looked bizarre. Emma pointed it out to Shawn and Tanesa up front.

“That’s never happened in all of human history,” she said.

“That is surreal,” Shawn replied.

As they neared the church they saw a wall of sandbags only partially completed near the back of the building. The choir and church members looked like they’d abandoned it to take the fight right to the river’s edge. They were all working feverishly down there, filling bags and raising them higher.

“Can those sandbags hold back that much water?”

“They’ve got to,” Tanesa replied. “Those bags go, there goes the church.”

“We’re looking for a miracle, I guess,” Shawn said.

But they spared little of themselves packing bags and lugging them to the wall.

Shawn, tall as he was, teamed with another guy to stack them as high as they could, sweating buckets in the hot September sun.

Nobody took a break. But what Emma had feared came true: the rising water pushed back a bag that Shawn had just helped heave into place.

In less than thirty seconds, water swept aside adjoining bags. Heavy as they were, the sandbags could not hold off the rising river.

The choir members and church volunteers tried frantically to push sandbags back into place. Emma and Tanesa did their best to help them, but even when they managed to wedge a bag into the wall, others broke loose.

Emma started backing up as sandbags tumbled away and the rush of water became a flood, washing over her feet, rising up her shins.

Tanesa was retreating as well. Both watched Shawn press his shoulder against the wall. Tanesa yelled for him to come. He either didn’t hear her or really believed a miracle would save him and the others and the church.

The sandbag wall collapsed around Shawn and consumed him in its dark gushing maw.

Volunteers were running up the slight slope to the church. It’s hopeless, Emma thought. She braced herself for the wall of water, spotting a group of young men — definitely not part of the choir — watching from a nearby riverfront trail. They were on higher ground about a hundred feet away.

Tanesa ran to Emma, panic frozen on her face. Emma grabbed her hand, no longer thinking about saving a church.

Only her friend and herself.

The rocket that Lana heard coming right at them ripped through Storm Season’s jib and kept on going, leaving a burning ring two feet wide in the gray carbon-fiber fabric.

Holy shit.

She looked starboard, expecting to see the attacker retargeting, but only darkness filled her gaze.

Don was already up, grabbing an extinguisher to put out the blazing sail. Lana couldn’t have been more grateful; the fire had put a bull’s-eye on the only target in the sea.

In less than sixty seconds, Don snuffed the fire. The man had serious cojones, Lana had to admit. The whole time he put out the flames in the bow, he was the only visible human target.

Lana raised her eyes above the gunwale again. She still saw nothing but darkness. No lights. No muzzle flashes. A strange silence had ensued. The SEAL who’d been screaming most likely had died, along with others, she guessed, based on what she had just seen of the explosion.

Then she heard the wind rushing through the hole in the jib, and Don yelling at her from twenty-five feet away: “We’ll use the genny. We’ll be okay.”

His words had barely registered when Red, balancing in the sinking bow of the armored boat, fired a rocket from a grenade launcher.

A heat seeker, she figured, when it ran a wickedly fast course across the rolling sea and blew apart the small vessel that had just fired on them.

When she looked back for Red, he and the bow of his boat had disappeared into the blackness.

Don jumped down into the Dehler’s cockpit, thrusting aside the extinguisher and grabbing the wheel.

He shoved a boxy lantern into her hands. “Up to the bow. We’ve got to rescue them if they’re still alive.”

She scrambled past the cables that helped hold up the mast, then grasped the railing all the way to the front of the boat. As she threw the switch on the lantern, she hoped like hell Red had taken out all the attackers because otherwise she was about to replace Don as the only target on the sea.

She immediately spotted three SEALs, including Red, trying to hold on to the other men, none of whom could possibly have been alive, their wounds gaping and deadly at a glance.

“Slow down, they’re to port,” she yelled to Don, pointing left.

He dropped the sails with the electric winches and started the engine to give them maneuverability.

Then he brought the stern in tight to Red and dropped Storm Season’s swimming platform, which fell to the water line. With the sea rising and falling, and the wind howling, Don did a superb job of holding the boat in position. Lana dragged the SEALs’ rocket-blasted bodies aboard, sickened by their wounds. Arms and legs were missing, faces blown away, and a chest had been ripped open. But she and the SEALs worked hard to claim what they could because those remains would mean much to their loved ones.

Only two of the dead still had intact life jackets. The other bodies were hauled to Storm Season by Red and Veal — another SEAL with a nickname, she presumed — and Kurt, who was bleeding from his shoulder. Struggling, he had to use that arm to push the dead onto the platform.

Finished loading, Red and his two compatriots climbed aboard. The SEAL commander told Don to head toward the wreckage of the enemy’s boat. He grabbed the lantern and joined Veal on the forward deck. Both had armed themselves with the boat’s AR-15s. Their own weapons were soaked and not firing.

Kurt settled on a cockpit bench and asked for a first aid kit. Lana brought it to him but he refused her offer to help.

She pulled out her semiautomatic handgun, as had Don, and joined the watch from the stern as he piloted them through the debris.

“No survivors. Seven dead,” Red announced after scanning the sea with the lantern.

“Was it them?” Lana asked, glancing back at the peninsula.

“No,” Red said, shaking his head.

Though Lana had no regrets over the deaths of these men, she averted her eyes, knowing how cruelly steadfast her memory could be. She’d already seen too much of the night’s carnage.

Red scrambled back to the helm and asked Don to slow the ship so he could check the bodies of his victims more closely. After relieving them of numerous weapons, including grenades, automatic rifles and pistols, and an RPG, he looked at various flag tattoos on three of the dead. “They’re Russians, and proud of it. Help me get them aboard.”

His compatriots pulled the bodies over the transom. Then Red said they’d also keep the wet armaments, “in case we have to argue about who violated international waters first.”

“What do you mean?” Lana asked.

“We can’t go back to Pitsunda,” Red said. “We can only go toward Russian waters, and this is far from over. They’re the ones who all but declared war. They fired two rockets at us and sank a U.S. navy vessel before we returned fire. So we’re going to take the battle to them. We don’t have any choice.”

Lana felt a chill deep in her core, like an icicle twisting in her gut. She knew it wasn’t from the mangled dead in the boat or the corpses floating limbless in the sea. It was from knowing that Red was right: none of them had any choice, and this really was just the beginning.

She also had no idea if the Russians the SEAL had just killed were on Squat’s payroll as enforcers, or coordinating their attack with Oleg and others farther north who might be targeting Galina at that very moment.

She checked for messages from Holmes or Esme, hoping for some good news about Emma and Tanesa.

Nothing.

Then she sent a message to Galina.

The wall of water hit Emma and Tanesa like a powerful wave, tumbling them and twisting them apart. Tanesa’s hand was torn from hers. Emma tried to swim to the surface, but for those first few moments she had no idea if she were upside down or right side up. As the fierce current swept her along she was terrified of smashing into the stone church or a concrete bench. She felt like a sock in the rinse cycle of a washing machine, lungs compressing for lack of air.

She broke through the surface gasping, only to see more water before it washed over her. The current was sending her rushing toward a sapling, which was good because when she hit it, the skinny tree bent and absorbed most of the impact. She held on, grateful it didn’t snap.

In the dusky light, she screamed for Tanesa, certain her closest friend was drowning. Then she spotted her about a hundred feet away getting hauled up onto a riverfront trail by one of those rough-looking guys who’d glared at them earlier.

Maybe they’re okay.

Tanesa was shaking badly, but Emma didn’t see any blood or obvious signs of broken bones. It took minutes for the swirling waters to settle before she even considered swimming to Tanesa. In the distance, she saw choir members dragging themselves from the water, but not Shawn. She yelled, asking if anyone had seen him. The only response came from a young girl who shook her head. The others looked shocked and battered by the flood.

Then she heard a guy say, “Hey, girl, lemme help you.”

A man about twenty with faux hawk hair pulled up alongside her in a kayak. It had an open deck, which would make it easy to board. She wasn’t sure she wanted to, though, because a closer look showed he was another one of the younger men who’d given them the stink eye. But now his eyes had softened — on her.

“Get on,” he said more firmly.

Her wet clothes clung to her as she boarded the kayak. She felt like an unwitting participant in a wet T-shirt contest.

She looked for Tanesa, but couldn’t see her now.

“Where’s my friend? I saw her getting pulled out of the water.”

“Yeah, that’s right, we saved her ass. Yours, too, now.”

He paddled like it was a Sunday afternoon lark in the park.

“There she is.” He pointed. “Now get off,” he added in a sharp voice, pushing her into hip-deep water.

Emma trudged across the grassy bottom as a huge guy, at least six foot six and two hundred fifty pounds, extended his great mitt of a hand.

She took it. That was when she saw the abject fright on Tanesa’s face and knew they had not found the comfort of strangers.

“How you doing?” the big man said. He looked like a boxer or kung fu fighter. Late twenties, shaved head, close-cropped beard, lots of muscle.

“Fine,” Emma muttered, back to eyeing Tanesa. “You okay?” she asked.

Tanesa shrugged.

“You’re not going to say ‘Thank you for saving my life’?” The big man glared and clapped his hands together so loudly they made Emma jump. “Show some gratitude. We look like the Coast Guard? We didn’t need to do that shit.”

Emma took Tanesa’s hand. “Come on, we’ve got to go find Shawn.”

“You aren’t looking for nobody,” the man said, dropping his hand on Emma’s shoulder. “Know why? ’Cause I’ve been looking at you two real close, and even with your hair all wet and funky, and looking like a couple of drowned rats, I know who you are. You’re those hero girls from last year. So do you know what that makes us?”

Emma was barely listening. What had mostly registered was that his grip on her shoulder was increasing its pressure.

“I asked you two a question, and I asked it nice. You better start learning some manners or we’re going to have to teach you some respect.”

“No, I don’t know what the hell that makes you,” Emma said, trying to shrug off his hand. It didn’t work.

“Your knights in shining armor. And I’d say you two give us some serious bargaining power.”

“Bargaining for what?” Emma demanded.

Before she got an answer she and Tanesa were surrounded and pushed toward a parking lot where a long black Hummer with darkened windows was parked.

“Get in the back with my friends,” the big man said.

Emma balked. “Bargaining for what?”

“Couple of hero girls like you haven’t figured that out?” he replied. “Your lives. What else? Now get the fuck in there.”

He pushed Emma so hard he sent her sprawling across the backseat.

Galina had barely slept after responding to Lana’s message. She’d worried that an attack on Lana’s boat could mean there would be an attack on hers. But so far the morning hours had passed peacefully under a brilliant sun whose heat had been lessened by a firm breeze.

She’d been keeping a keen eye on Oleg’s trawler, though, which rose and disappeared with the large swells. So did the boat she was on, captained by Abdul Majid Younes, as he had formally introduced himself yesterday.

“Does the other ship have any weapons on board?”

“A nine millimeter maybe, for shooting sharks. That’s all. Maybe a rifle.”

“What do you have?”

Captain Younes raised his eyebrows. “I have a few things lying around.”

The way he said that made Galina hope he had an arsenal aboard. He had fled Iran, after all. “If they take my daughter and me, they’ll kill us both,” she whispered; Alexandra was asleep on her lap.

“I protect women and children on my boat. It’s a matter of honor. You may not know it yet, but you picked the right man.”

Galina studied him openly. Could she really have been so fortunate as to have found a veritable prince in that tiny seaport? He’d betrayed no nerves thus far, sailing on course with hardly a glance back, casually drinking the powerful coffee he’d politely asked her to fix for him.

The cop he’d tied to the bench in the cabin was slumped over, evidently sleeping.

Captain Younes asked Galina to warm up cans of soup for all of them. She took on the duty of helping the officer, who brightened when he realized that she’d come to feed him, not fire a bullet into his brain.

“Just do what I say,” Galina told him as she spooned more broth and leeks into his mouth. “The cop I killed was a beast. He was trying to rape me. Don’t try to escape or hurt anyone and I won’t hurt you.”

When she returned to the helm, Oleg’s boat had neither gained nor lost distance on them.

“He doesn’t want to catch up,” Captain Younes said. “I’ve tested them, slowing down and speeding up. Always the same with them. I think he wants to know where you’re going and why.”

“I think he already knows all that. He’s a master hacker.”

It made sense that Oleg would stay back so he could try to capture both her and whoever she was meeting. Or simply kill them, for that matter. What he would fear most, she figured, was having them work together against him. Otherwise, Galina was certain he would have tried to grab her as soon as he could.

She sent Lana a message about Oleg’s careful stalking of her boat. Most of her morning had been spent trying to hack into the U.S.S. Delphin, fearful that at any second the crazy man Oleg had in that sub would launch another Trident II. But she hadn’t been able to penetrate the sub’s cybersecurity. What she had found was deeply curious, though: A tremendous amount of data was flowing from Moscow to the submarine, which was now deep in the South Atlantic. That location was also the best guess of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, which had released that information to the news media.

The data flow surprised her. It was as if her fellow Russians no longer saw any reason to hide their involvement in the hijacking of the sub or the bombing of Antarctica. Which was crazy. Any evidence linking them to either could be a casus belli for nuclear retaliation. It made no sense to her. But there was no denying the data.

Twice Oleg left her messages. In one he’d had the gall to say that if she came back to him now she could still be his “good bad girl again.” She shook her head in amazement. Didn’t he realize that she’d shoot him if she had the chance?

She stroked Alexandra’s head and prayed they’d both survive the rendezvous and whatever Lana had planned for it.

“Up ahead,” Captain Younes said, pointing. He was looking through his binoculars. “I see a sailboat. It looks the right size.”

She stood to take a look, glassing the sea, but catching only a glimpse of gray sail in the distance.

Galina turned around to look at Oleg’s boat. It had started to close the gap.

“He’s closer,” she said to Younes.

“I have been looking,” the captain said calmly. “I saw him speeding up before you did. But I’m afraid my friend is pushing his engine as hard as he can, and he’s a little faster than I thought.”

Galina told Alexandra to go back to her bunk and stay bundled up. The child must have sensed the urgency and danger because she scampered down the companionway, past the prisoner, and into the forward bunk.

Her mother raised the Glock and racked the slide to ensure a bullet was in the chamber.

Captain Younes nodded approvingly. “Take the wheel,” he told her.

He opened a locker in the cockpit and pulled out a shotgun and a hunting rifle. Pointing to the former, he said, “That’s for if they get close. The other one is to make sure they never do.”

“Are you good with those?” she asked.

“Good enough not to get caught in the middle,” he replied, “because that’s how you get crushed.”

Ten minutes later, with Storm Season in sight, a bullet ricocheted off a winch drum that operated the towing booms for the nets.

Calmly, Captain Younes put the trawler on autopilot, then picked up the hunting rifle, searching for Oleg with his scope.

The next shot struck Younes directly in the head. The captain dropped to the deck, dead, looking as if an axe had hacked open his skull.

Galina dropped below the level of the gunwales, shaking uncontrollably. Alexandra raced to the cabin doorway.

“No! Go back!” Galina screamed. “Now!”

The six-year-old darted to her bunk, but Galina knew that her little girl had seen Younes’s fatal wound and the copious blood washing across the deck.

She looked up at the wheel wondering how she could possibly steer the boat and try to keep Oleg at bay.

You don’t have to steer, she reminded herself: Younes had put it on autopilot.

“I can help,” the cop yelled from inside the cabin.

Galina ignored him, picking up the rifle. Staying as low as she could, she peered through the scope.

In an eerie replay of what she’d seen as they’d sailed from the inlet, she spotted Oleg staring back at her through an eyepiece of his own. Only this time it had a rifle attached.

He fired again.

CHAPTER 25

Oleg’s shot missed Galina’s head by less than six inches, but tore through the cabin walls with enough force to leave a bullet burn on the cop’s chin. An inch closer and the man would have lost his face.

Galina took no notice of this, worried far more that Oleg’s ammo would rip through the length of the trawler and kill Alexandra in the bunk at the front of the cabin. She wished she could hide her daughter behind one of the nets’ heavy winch drums, but she didn’t dare try to move her now.

She poked the hunting rifle over the gunwale and eyed Oleg again, firing as soon as she saw him.

The rifle kicked back into her shoulder with enough force to surprise her, but not enough to keep her from seeing that she’d made Oleg duck.

Still smiling?

Galina then shot out a window in the pilothouse of his ship. The glass shattered completely. She saw the captain duck away from the wheel.

As she scanned the trawler for Oleg, another bullet ripped into the stern a foot below her. A second shot followed quickly, nicking the railing inches from her head.

She ducked again, hoping they were getting closer to Lana’s boat. Galina needed help.

She crawled forward and peered over the port side, exposing herself as little as possible. She started to raise the binoculars when Lana’s sailboat rose easily into view on a swell. It was still more than a mile away, but in minutes their paths would cross if Younes’s trawler kept trudging along.

But a glance backward showed Oleg’s ship still catching up. It seemed to be gaining speed as it moved closer.

Oddly, though, he had stopped shooting, which made her uneasy. His boat was still disappearing when it moved down a swell, granting her only glimpses to shoot at him. She had little faith in her ability to do more than make him take cover.

But the swells also gave Galina breathing room when he couldn’t shoot her. She used that time to message Lana that Oleg had shot and killed the captain of her boat. She tried to communicate quickly, but her boat still rose and fell several times on the rolling sea before she turned her attention back to Oleg’s trawler, freezing when she saw the vessel only half a soccer field length away.

She stared through the riflescope for him, tense as one of the trawler’s steel cables.

The cop must have seen her burgeoning panic: “I can help,” he yelled from the cabin. “Cut me loose.”

Don’t be a fool, she warned herself. He works for them. Galina realized she must look scared and desperate. But I’m not stupid.

As Oleg’s ship rose back into view, she tried again to pick him out with the scope. Still no luck, but she fired anyway, hoping to give Oleg the impression that she’d sighted him. What else could she do with the ship sailing ever closer?

Captain Younes’s VHF radio crackled. Someone was trying to reach them, but the voice kept breaking up. She couldn’t tell if it was Oleg, or possibly Lana or someone else on her boat. Or maybe another boat entirely.

Each time her ship rose on a swell, Galina looked over the stern, then both sides, ready to shoot. Oleg, she realized, could be anywhere. The radio crackled again.

She crawled forward, still holding the hunting rifle, and reached up, grabbing the VHF mouthpiece from next to the wheel. Clicking it, she thought she heard Oleg’s voice, when she wanted more than anything to hear Lana’s again.

“Drop dead!” she shouted.

“I think that was the other captain trying to reach you,” the cop yelled from the bench in the cabin.

Galina froze. Was the cop trying to confuse her? But if that were the other captain on the VHF, where was Oleg? A haunting question.

The answer came, but not on radio waves.

As Younes’s trawler rode up another swell, Oleg appeared right beside her ship in a Zodiac with an electric outboard.

For the briefest moment, she thought he would fall away and she could rush the railing and shoot him at will. But in the same instant he hurled himself over the gunwale with his pistol in hand and lunged toward her.

She tried to raise the long hunting rifle, but it was cumbersome in such close quarters. He grabbed the barrel, pushing it down as she fired, and jerked the weapon from her hands.

He tossed it aside and pointed his nine millimeter at her face as he walked toward her. His smile returned. Cocky as ever, he shoved the pistol into the back of his pants, as though daring her to fight him with her hands.

She threw herself at him, knowing Alexandra’s life was at stake, too.

He swatted her arms away easily, seized her neck, and, still smiling, started choking her.

Lana hung up Storm Season’s VHF radio in frustration. There was a lot of co-channel interference, probably from the unknown numbers of unseen boats plying the waters in an attempt to escape the hazards of staying moored or docked in rising seas. Even so, Lana was pretty sure she’d heard Galina say, “Drop dead,” although it could have been from another boater frustrated by the radio interference.

“That crap happens,” Don said to Lana. “I’m guessing the troposphere is lit up with signals about now.”

“That’s not the kind of interference we should be worrying about,” Red shouted, studying Galina’s trawler with his binoculars. “Dernov’s going aboard. Oh, shit, he’s grabbing her. He’s strangling her!”

“What?” Lana asked, grabbing the binoculars when he set them aside and started tearing off his pants and shirt.

Veal quickly followed his commander’s lead. Kurt joined the rapid disrobing.

“No,” Red said to the wounded man, without slowing down his own efforts. “Not with your shoulder. It’d be like trolling for sharks.”

“You’re swimming over there?” Lana said as Red and Veal pulled on dark skullcaps and goggles that fit as snuggly as their shirts and briefs. Each hitched on what looked like tool belts with knives, lights, flares, and handguns.

“Why do you think they call us SEALs?” Red said, pulling on flippers. “I want you two to stay right on course until you risk a serious chance of getting shot, then just sail away.”

The pair climbed over the starboard side, out of view of Galina’s boat, and disappeared instantly into the sea.

Oleg and Galina were no longer in sight, either; Lana guessed they were struggling on the deck. If she’s still alive.

Don kept checking the water for the SEALs’ reappearance, but neither man had surfaced after two minutes. “They’ve got to be on a different set of swells by now.”

Lana nodded, still glassing the trawler with Galina. “I can’t see them.”

“Did you see the guns on their belts?” Don said. “German. Heckler & Koch. They shoot steel darts. They’re made for the water, but they can do a lot of damage in the air, too.”

Lana listened, but kept moving the binoculars over Galina’s trawler. Oleg and his prey still hadn’t reappeared. It was hard not to imagine her dead on the deck. At least the son of a bitch wouldn’t get away.

Before she looked back at Don, he spun the wheel, veering from the trawler they’d been heading toward since early morning. “I hope that doesn’t give away too much,” he said, “but we’re in gunshot range now.”

As Don jibed, she checked messages. Maybe Galina had overpowered Oleg somehow. Or there was news from Holmes or Esme.

Only Holmes had left a message: “We’re looking for the kids. Church members said they were driven away by the Fourth Street Kings gang.” But what perplexed Lana was Holmes’s order: “Tell Don.”

She followed Holmes’s directive.

Don listened, studying the sea with the binoculars Lana had set down. Still no sign of Red or Veal. He had her repeat the message before responding: “Tell your boss to set up communications directly between me and Michael Prince. He’s their leader.”

“Why, Don? I can’t just tell Holmes to do that.”

“Yes, you can because Prince and I have some history. That’s why he told you to tell me. Now do it, and then you can tell me why you never said a word about our daughter going missing.”

Lana messaged Holmes. Looking up, she remembered all too vividly the reason she’d never told Don about Emma: she’d figured a convicted drug dealer would be useless in this situation.

“You’re right,” she said to him. “I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

Don held the binoculars on Galina’s trawler. Without lowering them, he responded to Lana: “Goddamn right you should have told me. I know that crew. They run a lot of drugs in DC. They’re fully integrated vertically, from the Colombian producers down to street dealing. You do not fuck with them. But guess what?” He lowered the binoculars and stared at his ex-wife. “You do not fuck with our daughter.”

At any other time in their lives, Lana would have considered Don’s words mere bluster. But she didn’t now. Maybe it was nothing more than hope on her part, but she’d been seeing a different side of him since the shades had been lifted on his secret life. It was a scary side, to be sure, but she was deeply grateful to discover it. They needed someone who might spark fear in the men who’d taken Emma. Maybe he could do the same to Oleg Dernov — or just kill him.

There was still no sign of him or Galina.

Emma and Tanesa had been squashed into the Hummer’s backseat between two “soldiers.” That was what the big guy called the young men next to each of them. The pair called him Prince. Both had semiautomatic pistols pressed into Emma’s and Tanesa’s sides.

“They know to shoot if you try any shit. You hear?” Prince said from the front passenger seat. A guy almost as large was behind the wheel.

“Yes,” Emma said. Whatever defiance she’d felt at the edge of the flood had been overwhelmed as surely as the sandbag wall.

“They don’t need any permission,” Prince went on, “because they’ve got all they need.”

The big beast of an SUV plowed right through the flooded streets of southeast DC, one of the most violent neighborhoods in the U.S. They came to a warehouse district, where the flood had receded to less than six inches. Other than the water, the area was empty.

The driver gunned the engine, racing up a concrete ramp toward the loading dock behind a windowless brick building. There were five doors, each large enough to accommodate a Freightliner.

The driver clicked a remote on the sun visor. The door in the center rose so swiftly the Hummer never had to stop moving. As soon as they rolled into the darkness inside, the door closed behind them.

Then the driver hit another button on the remote, which switched on ceiling lights that illuminated rows of long wooden crates stacked three high.

“Now get out,” Prince said. “But if you try any hide-and-seek with us, we’ll make you wish you drowned back there.”

Emma believed him. She didn’t sense a single bit of bluff in his words or manner.

“On the other hand, do what you’re told and you might live,” he added with an unpleasant grin.

Emma and Tanesa piled out of the backseat.

“What’s all this stuff?” Tanesa asked, staring at the long narrow crates.

“You can’t tell by the shape? You’re too white for a black girl. Kids around here, they don’t need to look twice. Show them, Ship.”

The driver, his thick arms only a little tensed by the weight of the nearest crate, lowered it to the floor.

He unsnapped metal buckles that Emma hadn’t noticed till then and opened the top. A gleaming mahogany casket, corners padded with custom-fitted Styrofoam cushions, appeared.

“Someone I know well gave me the keys to this place,” Prince told them. “Maybe ’cause I’m so good for business, you hear? Open that up. Girl should see where she’s bedding down for the next day or two.”

“What!” Tanesa exclaimed. “Don’t do that to me. I’m scared to death of tight spaces. That’s my nightmare.”

Emma put her arm around Tanesa’s back. “Hold on,” she whispered.

“That’s cute,” Prince bellowed. “White girl getting close with her black girlfriend. Makes me all warm inside. Maybe we should squeeze them both inside that thing. Yeah, that’s what we should do.”

“No!” Tanesa screamed.

Prince strolled over to them. He pushed Emma aside and glared at Tanesa. “You look at me, girl. You’re going to get your black ass in that coffin or I’m going to cut your heart out and put you in there for good.”

Just that fast he pulled out a switchblade and clicked it open.

“Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, help me,” Tanesa said, as Prince shoved her into the casket.

While the others laughed, Emma looked around. She thought if it had been a movie she would have seen something to save them, but she saw nothing but stacks and stacks of crates. A lot of coffins. It sickened her to know that sooner or later they’d all be filled from the flooding. And other kinds of death.

She looked back at Tanesa, who had curled into a fetal position. Prince was leaning over her. “Get on your back and put your hands across your pretty chest,” he snapped at her. “And keep your big browns open.”

Tanesa, tears streaming down her cheeks, obeyed.

“Get another one over here for ivory,” Prince ordered. “Line it up, and get our cameraman,” he told one of the soldiers. “We need the video.”

Emma lay down in a matching coffin, wondering if they’d actually close them up and how long they’d keep them locked inside.

Prince ordered the cameraman, a short skinny man with big glasses, to take video of them lying side by side. He raised his camera and went to work.

Nobody spoke until Prince walked over and stared at Tanesa. “We’ll bury you alive,” he told her. “I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it to you. That’s why they call me ‘The Undertaker.’ You’ll be in there all by yourself, six feet under, and there’ll be no chance in hell anyone will ever hear you.”

Prince slowly lowered the lid on Tanesa’s unearthly screams and her hopeless attempt to keep him from closing the coffin. Locking it muffled her anguish so effectively it might not have been heard five feet away.

Then he closed Emma’s casket. She was terrified, too, but mostly that they’d load her onto a vehicle because that could mean burial. She couldn’t bear to let herself even think about that. Instead, she prayed as best she could, which she realized might never be good enough.

And she hoped — oh, God how she hoped — that she wouldn’t run out of air because they might not have thought of that.

Oleg and Galina were fighting furiously, rolling across the trawler’s deck. Early in their struggle, she had kicked him hard enough to break his stranglehold and back him into a bulkhead-mounted grappling hook. When he’d reached down, as if to grab the knife-wielding hand of an attacker, she’d twisted her head away, squirming and punching. Gasping for air, she’d fought madly to get away from him.

He swung wildly at her now, striking her mouth and drawing blood from her lips. She stumbled backward, looking for any help she could find on the deck. Her fear of dying at his hands was great, but nothing compared to her dread for Alexandra once she was gone.

As he moved toward her, she remembered he’d slipped his gun into the back of his pants, cocky enough — or so vengeful — that he wanted to make her murder as personal as possible. But when she tried to circle around him to reach for his weapon, he seized her hand.

“I know you want the gun, and you’ll get it.”

Galina tried to pull away, but his other hand latched on. Before she could fight back, he forced her onto her knees, his hands like steel clamps around her neck once more.

“Stupid girl. You could have had the whole world with me.”

Galina tried to speak, a futile effort with him draining the last of her air. But he must have wanted to hear her because he eased up just enough for her to cough and say, “I had nothing with you but lies. Better dead than with you.”

He pressed his thumbs back into her neck and snapped her head around. “I will strangle your cancer kid next. I promise.”

His eyes bulged with anger, and his hands squeezed harder. She couldn’t break his grip. She looked around frantically once more. Anything.

There.

The cop was frantically trying to work his hands free from the bench where he’d been tied up. All she had was hope, spurred by his offer of help only minutes ago.

Get his gun, she thought at the cop. The gun.

Galina fought for every extra second of life now, pounding Oleg’s hands, but to no avail. She began to black out. The cop had loosened the rope, but was still entangled in it.

Galina threw a desperate punch, trying to pound Oleg’s scrotum. She missed, but alarm filled his face, and she guessed she must have come close. She tried again. He caught her fist this time.

He was still choking her, but with only one hand. She was grabbing half breaths, telling herself she just needed a few seconds more.

His gun. Grab it. Staring at the cop again, hoping he really was on her side. Black splotches appeared before her eyes. The cop rose to his feet.

The gun, she pleaded silently one last time.

But the cop would never get it because Oleg reached back right then and grabbed his nine millimeter. He shoved the barrel into Galina’s mouth.

She choked.

He laughed. “What does this remind you of, bad girl?”

Then he froze: The cop had the muzzle of Galina’s hunting rifle pressed against the back of Oleg’s head. The only part of him moving now was his mouth:

“You will be tortured and killed unless you put that down now.”

“No. It’s not what I will do,” the cop replied. “It’s what you will do. Take the gun out of her mouth or you’re a dead man.”

“No, he’s not,” a voice called from the stern.

Galina could just make out a red-haired guy with swim goggles propped on his forehead. He was pointing a bulky handgun at Oleg, who was now targeted from two positions.

“I’m Lieutenant John Walker,” the man said. “U.S. Navy. We don’t want him dead. So, Oleg, if you put down your weapon, we can do business. Otherwise, we’ll have to let him shoot you.”

“Put it down,” the cop yelled, jamming the barrel into Oleg’s head hard enough to draw blood.

Oleg kept the gun in Galina’s mouth, but he’d eased the pressure until she was no longer choking.

“I want to go to Moscow,” Oleg yelled at Walker.

“We want you to go back there, too,” the lieutenant replied. “That’s the honest-to-God truth. We don’t want anything messy happening out here.”

The Russian cop smacked the side of Oleg’s head with the barrel. “I will shoot this son of a bitch, no matter what he says, if he doesn’t get that gun out of her mouth.”

Oleg slowly withdrew it.

“Put the gun on the deck,” Lieutenant Walker said. “In front of you.”

“Moscow?” Oleg said.

“Moscow,” Walker echoed.

What choice does he have? Galina wondered. They’ve got him both ways.

The SEAL walked up and grabbed the nine millimeter. “You’re a Russian policeman, right?” he said to the cop, who nodded. “I’d like you to stand down.”

“I want asylum in the U.S. I can’t go back. Did you hear what he said? They’ll torture and kill me.”

“You’ve got asylum,” Walker replied quickly.

“A guy in flippers,” the cop looked Walker over, “can do that.”

“This guy can,” Walker said, removing the cumbersome fins.

The cop lowered the rifle.

It disgusted Galina that Oleg was going to get away. He had his eyes on the navy guy, his hands off her, so she tried again with her uppercut, this time smashing his ballsack so hard Oleg doubled over and fell facedown on the deck.

She fell back herself, sitting heavily on her rear. The navy lieutenant gave her a thumbs-up. The cop was smiling.

“Are you a SEAL?” the cop asked Walker.

“I’ve been called worse,” Walker replied. He grabbed the back of Oleg’s shirt and pulled him into a sitting position. “Sit up so I can watch you.”

Oleg looked green. Galina edged away, almost tripping over Captain Younes’s body. She hurried to check on Alexandra. Another SEAL appeared near the bow.

“You two had it covered,” the cop said to Walker.

“We try. You made it a helluva lot easier than it would have been. Saved her, too. Nice job.”

“I was going to kill him.”

“We couldn’t let you do that.”

“You going to trade him for that NSA guy, something like that?” the cop asked.

“Something like that,” Walker answered.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Oleg gasped to Walker. “I’ll stop those missiles. Just give me my computer and you won’t even have to take me back to Moscow. My own people will come get me.”

“Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with here?” the lieutenant replied. “SpongeBob? You’ll never get your hands on another computer. And I never said we were taking you back there. Veal, get his wrists and ankles.”

The SEAL slapped plastic cuffs top and bottom on Oleg.

For a moment, Oleg looked worried. Then he lifted his head and his most imperious expression appeared.

With Oleg shackled, Galina carried Alexandra into the cabin. She watched Veal and the cop board the trawler’s own Zodiac.

“He’s going to take him over to the sailboat and get Lana Elkins,” Red told her.

Right then Galina pointed to the trawler Oleg had hijacked. It had stopped moving. “His computer,” she said. “It’s probably over there.” She spotted the captain through the window she’d shot out, relieved he was still alive.

“Friend or foe?” Red asked her.

“He was hijacked.”

Walker rushed to the stern. “Search the trawler for his electronics, computer, phone, anything he left there,” he called to Veal. “The captain should be okay.” Then the lieutenant used the ship’s radio to talk to Lana. “Tell NSA we’re set for Stage Two. Veal’s coming over to get you. Galina’s waiting.”

“What’s Stage Two?” Oleg demanded as soon as Walker put down the mouthpiece.

“Your flight out of here.”

Ten precious minutes passed, mostly in silence, then Lana Elkins climbed aboard with Veal. She carried a large computer case and Oleg’s laptop.

“So you’re Lana Elkins,” Oleg said.

“She’s a big reason you’re sitting on the deck of this boat all ready to be shipped back to Moscow,” Walker said.

Lana said nothing to Oleg. She walked up to Galina and introduced herself, then glanced into the cabin where Galina’s laptop sat on a table. “I see you have yours ready. I’ve got mine, too, and his, but first he has to be thoroughly searched.”

“Keep her away from me,” Oleg said, staring at Galina.

“Stand back,” Red said to her.

“What did you do to him?” Lana asked Galina.

The Russian motioned upward with her fist, then pointed to his crotch.

“What goes around comes around, right?”

Galina glared at Oleg. “Let’s hope so.”

Red and Veal found a pair of camera memory cards and three thumb drives in Oleg’s pockets.

“Awfully casual about your data,” Lana said to him. His pants were down around his bound ankles.

“Bend over,” Red told him.

When Oleg refused, the lieutenant grabbed Oleg’s privates. He bent over.

“It’s nothing,” Oleg said about the memory cards, and grimacing from Red’s rude intrusion. “Tourist shit.”

If so, it had been a grim detour, Lana saw after inserting one of the cards into her camera. It revealed photos of a dead nun and a terrified expression on the face of a naked young woman backed into a corner. The second card focused less on the murder and more on violent sex. Oleg had taken a ton of pictures.

“Did you kill her, too?” Lana asked Oleg, pointing to the younger woman.

“I have diplomatic immunity,” he replied.

“In your own country?” Lana shook her head, then used a virtual machine to reveal the contents of the first thumb drive; she would never have stuck a stick with unknown data into her own computer. Rows and rows of code appeared. She scrolled down.

“What is it?” she asked, expecting no answer. She didn’t get one, either, not from him.

“I might know,” Galina said.

The other two thumb drives contained the same kind of material. Lana handed them over to Galina, who hurried into the cabin and went to work. Lana turned her attention back to Oleg: “Give me the codes you used on the Delphin, and I’ll make sure you live.” More than anything, she feared a second Trident II launch — or a whole series of launches; the submarine, after all, still had twenty-three missiles in its arsenal.

“Don’t they tell you anything?” Oleg replied. “I’m going back to Moscow.”

“Look at me,” Lana said. “I’ve just been authorized to tell you that there are men in Moscow who are going to kill you as soon as you arrive. That’s all I can say, unless you cooperate. If you cooperate, we’ll take you back to the U.S. and tell the Russians and some others to go to hell. We’re willing to break some very critical deals we’ve been making lately if you’re willing to cooperate. But don’t fuck with us. If you come and don’t play ball, we’ll make every remaining second of your life a misery.”

“Yes, you Americans are good at torture now. I’ll never go with you. You say they’ll kill me in Moscow? No, you are the one who should worry about dying, you stupid bitch. I know who you are. Big hero last time. Not such a hero now.”

Red squatted in front of him. “Oleg, you’re in handcuffs. Think about that. She’s giving you the best offer you’ll ever get.”

“Come live in America,” Oleg singsonged. “You think you can always play that trump card: ‘Come live in America.’ I’d rather die on this stinking fishing boat than go live in your country. And I’m not giving you any codes.”

“I think we’ve got them,” Galina called from the cabin.

“You realize that right now Galina’s sharing everything she ever learned from you with the NSA via satellite,” Lana said. “Nothing’s going to end the way you wanted.”

“Yes, it is. There’s one more surprise you have coming, I assure you,” he told her.

Lana wanted to swear, but kept an impassive expression. “Listen to me, you’re going to die if you go back. We’ve been intercepting communications between your President and his staff, and they’re making one thing abundantly clear: you’re expendable. There’s a chopper coming for you. If you don’t cooperate, you’ll be getting on it and you’ll die.”

“What, are they going to fly way up into the sky and throw me out like you Americans do?”

Lana grabbed his face and made him look into her eyes. “It’ll be worse than that.”

“You can’t scare me. And I don’t believe you because if I were in your shoes, I’d be saying the same thing and it would all be lies.”

“But I’m not you, you’re not in my shoes, and I’m not lying.”

Oleg shook his head.

Disbelief is denial’s first ally, Lana thought.

A helicopter flew toward them. Oleg smiled at her. “Fuck you. I’ll be eating caviar at the Kremlin before the sun goes down.”

“You stupid son of a bitch,” she said.

“It’s his call at this point,” Walker said. “We’ll be keeping the deals we made.”

“I know all about deals,” Oleg said to them. “Russians take care of their own.”

“Yes, you do have a long history of that,” Walker said, smiling when a man was lowered from the helicopter on a steel cable with a double seat.

“Who’s that?” Oleg demanded when he saw that his rescuer was Chinese. “See, we take care of people who help us, too,” Red told him. “And since you’ve decided your future is short, I’ll let you in on something. Our Chinese friends call themselves Magic Dragon, and they were instrumental in blocking radio signals on the high seas, when others might have warned you that we were coming to take you. They also provided a terrific amount of cyberexpertise tracking down your tight network. Now they’re going to use you to pay their debt to someone you know very well.”

Veal and the Chinese man seized Oleg and strapped him into a seat.

“What is this shit?” Oleg said. He sounded unsettled for the first time. “What’s going on?”

“Come with us,” Lana said.

“It’s too late,” Red said softly, barely above the sound of the chopper.

“But I’m going to Moscow…” Oleg’s voice trailed off as he and his escort were lifted up into the helicopter’s cabin.

The first thing Oleg noticed was that the bird was being flown by a Russian crew. But the cabin itself held four other Chinese men.

“What are they doing here?” Oleg yelled at the pilot, who ignored him. With his headset on, the man might not have heard Oleg.

“Do any of you speak English or Russian?” he asked the Chinese men.

“I do,” replied the man who’d brought him aboard.

“Who do you work for?” Oleg asked.

The man smiled. “An oil and gas company.”

“That asshole. PP’s saving me?”

“PP? No, we call him Mr. Dernov. He is a partner of our country. Saving you?” The Chinese man shrugged and smiled even more broadly.

A horrible flood of anxiety swept through Oleg. He remembered the video PP had played for him of Dmitri and Galina down in that goddamned museum with its medieval… devices, and how fortunate he’d felt when he raced his Maserati away from his father’s estate.

This wasn’t a rescue. This was retribution.

CHAPTER 26

Lana sat in the trawler’s cabin holding Oleg’s computer on her lap with all the care she would have given to a Fabergé egg. Galina was perched by her side, working on her own device, but she nodded at Oleg’s.

“It’s all going to be in there,” she said. “And on these.” Galina held up the thumb drives. “He was a control freak. He wouldn’t have surrendered the freedom to launch to anyone else, no matter what he might have told them.”

Lana’s own laptop lay on a small navigation table feet away. Red was piloting the ship. With the boat pitching from stern to bow in the unsettled sea, Lana was finding it awkward to work her keyboard. She noticed that Galina was facing the same challenge.

Less than ideal work conditions, but with stubby black antennas protruding from all three computers, they did have vital satellite links to the NSA — and that meant stateside support from Jeff Jensen. Even so, Lana was running into one computer security defense after another: “I can’t even get into Oleg’s trash,” she growled.

Lana was frustrated, but still grateful the cyberbeast hadn’t tossed his laptop overboard. She figured he was too arrogant to have believed there would ever be any call for such an extreme action. But for all the progress Lana was making hacking the device, it might as well have been jettisoned.

She had just resorted to dumpster diving, a hacker term that held the same meaning for them as it did for the hungry homeless: plundering someone else’s trash. But again she’d failed to penetrate Oleg’s access controls.

“I put a keystroke logger on him two weeks ago,” Galina informed her, “when I first started to worry about what he was doing. If it worked, we should have a record of everything he’s done since then. But we need deciphering software to read out the results superfast.”

“I have that,” Lana said, leaning forward so her fingers could fly over her own keyboard on the navigation table. “But he could have used a virtual keyboard to prevent the capture of his keys, or even changed his character encoding.”

They hadn’t kept Oleg on board to try to coerce his cooperation because Lana knew he could have led them right into a cyber self-destruct payload, which, as the name suggested, could wipe out the data they wanted.

Complicating matters more was a message that had just come in from Jensen that he’d found data streams from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine that he thought might prove fruitful. The data had been submitted to the Black Sea — most likely to Oleg — and the southern Atlantic Ocean, most likely Lisko.

Did the data to Lisko contain an alert about Oleg’s capture? That was what worried Lana most.

The data streams all but confirmed that Oleg had been working with more than one far-flung conspirator. If one or both of those men didn’t already know he’d been taken into custody, she wondered how soon they’d find out their mastermind had been forcibly removed from their attack plan. What contingency had they planned in that case? Plus, Oleg might even have buried a heartbeat signal deep in his software to launch the missile — or all twenty-three of them — if he went incommunicado for a specified period of time.

“I’m in!” Galina announced. The deciphering software had worked and she’d penetrated a flash drive. “Here,” she copied lines of code onto Lana’s computer.

“Why do you think this will work?” Lana asked. It looked like thousands of letters and numbers.

“The sequencing. Pattern recognition. I have a good eye for it. It’s similar to data he gave me that helped me access Professor Ahearn’s computer before I found out about the murders. Just try it.”

Lana did, this time landing smack into Oleg’s trash bin — only to find he’d cyber-incinerated everything.

Wanting to tear out her hair, she realized he — or an accomplice aboard — might have installed a rootkit, an intrusion into the submarine’s computers that would remain almost undetectable. What a frickin’ nightmare. It was malware that allowed a hacker remote entry, but also hid its own tracks even as it provided openings for polymorphic malware — attack software that could not only spread quickly from one system to another, but also change its file hashes, persistence mechanisms, access codes, and locations in memory every time it duplicated itself.

If she could track down the rootkit, she could start roaming the submarine’s computers, too — or send in her own worms to disable the Delphin’s entire system. Shutting down power and lights would certainly hamper the manual efforts necessary to launch the missiles.

But any keystroke could also set off a virtual trip wire that would launch them. Lana watched Galina typing away frantically, breaking only to sweep her fingers across the screen to move data. As calmly as she could, she voiced her worry.

“I’m working strictly with his own code right now, and I’m not altering anything.” Then she stared at Lana. “What choice do we have?”

She’s right. They had no choice. That was when it also occurred to Lana that a conspirator — in the eastern Ukraine or on the Delphin? — might at that very moment also be trying to penetrate Oleg’s defenses, but with a different goal: to empty the sub’s arsenal so all of the WAIS would shatter into the sea and drive ocean levels up the full eleven feet.

She felt like they were in a race with a phantom that was already haunting Oleg’s systems. In the next few seconds she learned she was right: Oleg’s screen burst alive with Grisha Lisko smiling at Lana as he stood in the Missile Control Center. He exhibited no surprise at her presence. The dead bodies of sailors lay in the background. Lana figured he was sending his signal through the submerged submarine’s radio buoy.

“I know what you’re doing, but you’re too late.” Lisko held up the captain’s key. “We’re ready to fire. You can watch, but that’s all you can do.”

Galina gripped Lana’s arm, whispering, “That man is crazy.”

“You know him?” Lana asked.

“No, but look at him.”

Lisko was joined by two other sailors on the screen for the first time, though Lana knew the previously unseen collaborators had to have been present when Antarctica was bombed.

Lisko turned around and slipped the captain’s key into the console. He smiled as he grabbed a microphone. “Ready the Tactical Firing Trigger.” Then he cranked the key he’d just inserted. Lana knew the officer to whom he’d just spoken must be using a second key in another part of the sub so they could unleash the lethal madness once again. Two keys in separate locations — in combination with other security precautions — had once been thought sufficient to stop an unauthorized missile attack. But that had been in the era before cyberwar.

One more missile on Antarctica and even Noah’s mythical flood would look like a kitchen spill. Twenty-three more would mean death to billions.

“How much time?” Galina asked.

“Thirty seconds,” Lana replied. “Maybe.”

Emma lay in the blackness of the coffin trying to control her growing panic. Unlike Tanesa, Emma’s intense fear didn’t stem directly from a lack of space, but a distinct lack of air. Her worst fears of using up the oxygen in the tight confines were coming true, sending her anxiety levels rocketing upwards. She was terrified of an asthma attack, and knew that her fear alone could trigger one.

Don’t panic! But she was screaming that warning to herself.

She attempted every trick she’d ever used to try to calm down but they all involved breathing, so they didn’t work when breathing brought so little relief. A big gulp of air led only to the next big gulp… and the next.

In biology last year they’d studied expiration and learned that as carbon dioxide became more concentrated, it made you drowsy. And if you didn’t get oxygen at that point, it would put you in a coma and kill you.

With the last of her strength, Emma tried to beat on the lid, but even to her ears, just inches from the impact, the sound was muffled, weak, not enough to raise the nearly dead.

“He’s got to have used a Trojan to get in there,” Lana said, her mind racing wildly for a way to stop Lisko as he sat in the Missile Control Center. Trojans were malware that were supposed to look like regular programs, but were designed to take out specific targets, including cyberdefenses. In her less frenetic moments, Lana thought of them as a cyberwarrior’s smart bombs. But if she or Galina could possibly find a Trojan that Oleg had inserted into his computer as a defense mechanism — and Galina was still working at a furious pace — they could activate its destructive potential, perhaps on a key part of the sub’s system.

Galina was down to her last thumb drive. She must have read a thousand lines of code in the last minute because she’d been scrolling without stopping. “Maybe this,” Galina said, highlighting a line and shooting it over to Lana.

Lana used it, knowing at this point she was relying completely on code Galina had culled from countless lines under enormous pressure.

But she got you into his computer that way.

In moments, Lana entered the line onto Oleg’s screen and activated the code. It felt like a shot in the dark. Then they waited to see if they’d collaborated successfully. What else could they do if the code didn’t work?

The answer came to Lana in a flash: a kinetic attack. She messaged Holmes about the thick data stream the hacker had established with the submarine. If the NSA could detect it — and with extraordinary speed — they might stop the launch in time.

As Lisko began to speak into the microphone again, the lights on the submarine went out. Blackness filled Oleg’s screen where Lisko’s head had been visible a blink before.

“What does that mean?” Galina sounded as surprised as Lana felt. Had the sub’s missile launched? Or was the vessel dead in the water?

Prince’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He figured he finally had Lana Elkins on the line. Bitch better be ready to do some business, use her clout to get his soldiers out of the federal pen down in Middleburg, Virginia.

But it wasn’t Lana Elkins. It was freaking Don Fedder. What the fuck? Talk about prison… Prince hadn’t heard from him in years. “I can’t talk to you, man. I’m waiting for an important call, so adios amigo.” Last time he saw Fedder they’d shared a few cervezas down on a beach in Colombia as white as the coke Prince sold by the truckload. Fedder hadn’t been a competitor; he’d moved pot—tons of it.

“No,” Don shouted. “I am that call. That girl you’ve got, the one named Emma Elkins, she’s mine. My kid!”

Kid? Since when did Don ever have a kid? “You’re fuckin’ with me, right?” But hearing Fedder’s words worried Prince because Don was a lot of things, but never a bullshitter.

“Listen to me carefully, Prince. We all make a mistake once in a while. It’s part of the game.” The “game,” what he and Fedder had called the drug trade back then. They’d never been super close, more like colleagues from different companies in the same industry. They’d only come to know each other as fellow expatriates down in South America. But Prince had liked Don. The guy’d known how to survive — till he got busted on his boat.

That old familiar voice was growing more and more serious in his ear: “And you made a big mistake grabbing those two girls. That young black woman is Emma’s best friend.”

Oh, shit. Prince saw where this was going. He shook his head.

“You don’t believe me,” Don went on, “you ask Emma who her dad is.”

“Okay, I got it,” Prince replied, still shaking his head, already imagining the fury on the faces of his men down in Middleburg.

“Remember the deal I made with you six years ago? You got to keep your garden…” Prince’s coca plantation about a hundred miles from Cali. “And the road in and out of there…” His smuggling route. “And you gave me those addresses.” FARC jefes. “Remember?”

“I hear you,” Prince replied noncommittally, not knowing who the fuck was listening in, but appreciating Don’s discretion on the line.

“I’m glad you remember,” Fedder said, “because you’ve got to get Emma home. And I hope to hell you don’t have her in one of your coffins.”

Don knew about them because Prince once told him they served three purposes: the first was to smuggle coke in the hollow walls, bottoms, and lids; the second was to imprison informants and scare them to death; and the third was to bury them, when necessary.

Prince was already opening Emma’s lid and nodding at Ship to free her friend.

“They’re out, even as we speak, Don.”

“Let me talk to Emma.”

“Here she is.”

Prince stepped back while the girl, who sounded a little breathy to him, talked to her father. The sister looked shaky.

“Shit, girl,” he said to Tanesa. “I’m sorry. I had no idea you all were tight with big Don Fedder.”

Tanesa looked puzzled at Don’s name coming out of Prince’s mouth.

Emma handed Prince’s phone back to him. Prince studied her face.

She kind of looks like him. The shit you don’t know about people.

“Like I say, Don, I didn’t know. She doesn’t have your name.”

“Yeah, well, blame that one on her mom. One more thing, Prince.”

“Yeah, you got it.”

“You still have that bulletproof Hummer?”

“Newer model.”

“Armed guards.”

“More than ever.”

“Use all that to get those two back to my daughter’s house safely in Bethesda. You do that and I’ll help you with the feds, if you ever need it.”

“You’re saying I’ve got a chit I can cash.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Good, but I was going to do it anyway, Don. I’d never leave them hanging around this hood.”

“Thanks.”

“Back atcha.”

Prince put away his phone and looked at Emma and Tanesa. “Hey, you two, I’m sorry. Sometimes a man makes a mistake, so I’m going to take you home. Thing is, to seal the deal, you got to forget any of this happened. This place, all of it. You cool with that?”

“My dad already told me, and I told her. We’re cool.”

Tanesa was nodding beside Emma.

A minute later they were back in the Hummer, just them and Prince and the rising waters of the Potomac parting for his beastly SUV.

Lana waved Red into the cabin. He put the wheel on autopilot and hurried to the doorway. “It’s over,” she told him. “The Delphin was taken out by a P-8.” The navy jets had been airborne over the southern ocean since the news of the hijacking broke. “The sub-killer nailed it with a torpedo after locking onto the data stream.”

“Nice work,” Red said.

“The submarine? Sunk?” Galina asked.

“Yes,” Lana replied. “It’s gone,” she added, as she messaged the news to Don.

Red shook his head. “Man, the damage those sons of bitches did.”

Lana nodded. “The next thing we’re going to hear, you watch, is the Russians saying Dernov was just another one of their rogue hackers working all on his own for patriotic purposes. They’ll be covering their crimes by providing some data after the damage was done, and the net result is we lose 150 or more sailors, a nuclear-armed sub, and the whole world is flooded. But fuck if they’ll get away with it,” Lana cursed. “We’ve got his computer. We’ll do the forensics. We got into it, and now we’ll track down his links to whoever he was working with, wherever they are.”

But even as she spoke, Lana had her doubts. Shaking her head, she wondered how much cyberscrubbing was going on as she and Galina were working with tiny antennas and three laptops on the high seas.

Red looked up from a handheld device. “Here’s a report that Ukrainian separatists have abducted a hacker who goes by the handle Numero Uno across the border into Russia. I’m guessing he’s about to meet his new bosses.”

Lana felt even more dejected. She had hoped to follow those data streams to Oleg’s other conspirator.

She looked at Oleg’s black screen. There was nothing there, nothing for all the families of the men and women who’d died so miserably — and so publicly — on the Delphin. There would never be any body retrieval for any of them. She hoped Oleg was dying a death equal to all their pain. And then some.

A message from Holmes brightened her mood immeasurably: Emma and Tanesa had just arrived back home. Lana shared it immediately with her companions on the trawler, then with Don on Storm Season, adding, “Thanks for whatever you did.”

“You’re welcome,” Don texted back. “I’m just glad that nightmare is over. I know it’s been horrible for you. It’s been horrible for me.”

She wanted to hug him. It scared her to realize that. Really hold him and let the swell rock them together.

What are you thinking? she scolded herself.

Red checked the autopilot and ducked back into the cabin. “Your ex must have some kind of clout with one of the heaviest hands in the DC drug trade.”

Lana nodded. Mostly, she wondered if Don was starting to have that kind of clout with her heart. It was as if he’d slipped a rootkit into it. Information security specialists feared the damage rootkits could do once they were loose in a system. Lana worried Don’s own version was already breaking down the access controls surrounding her heart.

No, she barked at herself. Don’t go confusing gratitude with… With what? she asked herself earnestly. With love? Lust? With wanting to have your family back together again?

She sat in the cabin trembling, hoping neither Galina nor Red noticed.

Look, she finally told herself in exasperation, he saved their lives. You’re hugely relieved. That’s all it is. Get a grip.

That was her story, and for a few seconds — certainly no more — she stuck to it.

Then she slipped past Red and stood near the stern, waiting. In seconds, Storm Season rose with the sea. She saw Don and waved, knowing she’d be on that swell soon enough.