It didn't matter. Alex didn't owe anybody. He'd gotten this far by himself. His parents were gone, his sister was gone, his sole remaining family was his prick of an older brother, Ben, who had caused everything and then run away to the army after their father had… after he had died. Alex hadn't talked to Ben since their mother's funeral, eight years earlier. Even then, with nothing left but the two of them, Ben wouldn't say where he was or what he was doing. He just showed up for the ceremony and left, leaving all the details to Alex, just as he'd left Alex alone to care for their mother during the last year and a half of her life. After he'd finished the probate-again, all by himself-Alex had sent Ben an e-mail explaining his share of the estate, which was pretty big, as their father had done well and there were only the two beneficiaries. Ben hadn't even thanked him, just told him to send the paperwork to an address at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, saying he'd sign it when he could. For all Alex knew, right now Ben was in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sometimes Alex wondered whether he was even still alive. He didn't care. Either way he was never going to talk to him again.

Goddamn Hilzoy. Alex hated that he needed him, but he did. Because if Obsidian was even half as successful as Alex expected it to be, the seed money was going to be followed by a second, third, maybe a fourth round of financing. After the acquisition or the IPO, the firm's share would be worth a fortune. And Hilzoy would never forget who got him there. All the legal work afterward, and all the billing for it, would be Alex's and his alone. His name would be indelibly linked with Obsidian, he would be the lawyer who represented the hottest company of the year, maybe the decade, and then the David Osbornes of the world would be begging for the crumbs from his table.

Assuming Hilzoy hadn't already blown it for them. Did he understand just how busy these VCs were, how many proposals were pitched at them every single day, how few they actually followed up on? You get one shot for these people's attention, Alex had told him, just one shot.

If Hilzoy screwed this up, Alex was going to kill him.

Ben Treven sat motionless at the edge of a wooden chair at the Hotel Park Istanbul, watching the rainy afternoon street two stories below through tattered gauze curtains. The room was small and spartan, but its size and furnishings couldn't have mattered less to him. The window was open a few inches, and from time to time the interior quiet was broken by the sounds of the city without: car tires thumping over the antique cobblestone streets and splashing through potholes; the practiced touts of rug merchants calling out to passing tourists from in front of their small shops; the haunting notes of the muezzin, entreating the faithful to prayer five times daily between dawn and dusk.

In addition to letting in the sounds of the street, the open window kept the room cold. When the moment arrived, he would need to move quickly, and he was already wearing deerskin gloves, a wool cap, and a fleece-lined, waterproof jacket. His hair was naturally blond, but the false beard he wore was black. With the hat on, no one would notice the discrepancy.

The warm clothing would be useful in the rain and against the December chill, of course, but that was only part of it. The gloves prevented prints. The hat obscured his features. The jacket concealed a suppressed Glock 17 in a cross-draw holster on his left side.

On the coffee table next to him was a backpack containing clothes, two sandwiches, a bottle of water, a first-aid kit, ammunition, false travel papers, and a few other essentials. Other than the backpack, there was no trace of the room's occupant, nor would there be when he was gone.

He was there to kill two Iranian nuclear scientists, Omid Jafari and Ali Kazemi. Ben knew a lot about the men: their real names, the names they were traveling under, the details of their itineraries. He knew they were in Istanbul for a meeting with a Russian counterpart. He knew they were staying at the Sultanahmet Four Seasons, which is why he had taken this room at the Park, directly across the street. He had copies of their passport photos and had recognized them immediately when they arrived from the airport in one of the hotel's BMW limousines three days earlier. He knew the two men who accompanied them at all times were with VAVAK, Iran 's feared secret service, and that the VAVAK people, in addition to being well trained, would be motivated. If one of the scientists were kidnapped or assassinated, or if one of them defected, as Ali Reza Asgari, the Iranian general and former deputy defense minister, had done not so long before, the man who let it happen could expect to be executed.

He knew considerably less about the Russian: not much more than a real name, Rolan Vasilyev-which he probably wasn't traveling under anyway-and that he was coming to Istanbul to meet the Iranians. Washington had been pressuring Moscow about Russian nuclear assistance to Tehran, and presumably the Kremlin had decided it was too risky to bring the Iranians to Russia, even under false names. Istanbul was a good neutral corner: about midway geographically, with good air links, and security services focused more on ethnic Kurds than on Russians or Iranians.

Each morning since they had arrived, the Iranians and their VAVAK minders had gotten into one of the hotel limousines and returned after dark. Ben figured these trips were for meetings with Vasilyev and would have liked to follow them to learn more, but the likely costs outweighed the benefits. Alone in a car or on a motor scooter, he would be relatively easy to spot. Even if he weren't spotted, catching them in a venue that enabled him to do the job and depart without trouble would require an unrealistic amount of luck. He might have tried taking them as they arrived at or departed from the hotel, but the front and interior of the Four Seasons were quietly replete with cameras, doormen, and security personnel. It just wasn't a good place for a hit, which was part of the reason they had chosen it in the first place.

It didn't matter, though. His gut told him something would open up. After all, the Iranians were in town for seven days, and what did that mean? Probably that they expected to be done with their work in four, or maybe five. Country and culture were irrelevant: when the government or the corporation or anyone else was footing the bill, bureaucrats and other worker bees could always be expected to overestimate the time they would need for meetings. Especially when the meetings required their presence in a city as enticing as Istanbul, and at a hotel as fine as the Four Seasons.

In fact, the choice of hotel increased Ben's confidence about what was coming next. Because if the Iranians could persuade the bean counters to spring for the Four Seasons, cost was obviously not a consideration. If cost wasn't a consideration, they could have stayed at any hotel in the city-the Pera Palas, the Ritz-Carlton, even the second Four Seasons, recently opened on the Bosporus. Ben had checked with all of them, and they all had rooms available. They all offered more or less the same level of luxury and security. The question, then, was, why this hotel?

The answer, Ben thought, was location. All the other luxury properties were in Beyoglu, the newer part of the city, north of the Golden Horn. Only the Sultanahmet Four Seasons was a five-minute walk from the city's most storied attractions: the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, the Grand Bazaar. And if Ben was right about location being the deciding factor, he was confident the Iranians would take at least a day, and probably more, to see those walking-distance sights. When they set out from the hotel on foot, Ben could get behind them. From there, an opportunity would present itself. All he had to do was wait.