The living-room windows were on sliding tracks and had been pulled back to open the room onto the sea. A light breeze carried the smell of the ocean mixed with the tiny island’s exotic flowers. Only the Brazilians could create a night so perfect, mused the Troll as he climbed up to the table he used as a desk and opened his rugged General Dynamics XR-1 GoBook laptop. Via a small, inflatable satellite dish positioned outside, he was soon connected with his rack of dedicated servers secretly housed in a bunker deep within the eastern Pyrenees Mountains.

A British entrepreneur had rolled the dice on an idea that the Swiss approach to banking could be replicated in the digital realm.

The Brit’s facility in the European principality of Andorra boasted redundant power supplies, redundant network feeds, FM200 fire suppression, redundant air-conditioning, and multistage security identification processes. His servers were connected to generous bandwidth allocations, fully burstable, with multiple aggregated providers, ensuring 100 percent availability for maximum uptime.

It had all been music to the Troll’s ears. Relying on the servers at his estate was out of the question. Eilenaigas House was beyond dangerous, at least for now. If he kept a low enough profile, the U. S. intelligence services would give up on him eventually, but until they did, he’d have to stay far away from his home in Scotland.

When it was all said and done, there were much worse places to pass one’s time than a private island in Brazil. And he would know. He’d been to them.

Listening to the music of the waves as they gently washed against the rocks outside, the Troll logged on to his primary server and began the authentication process to gain access to his data. He still had not sifted through the windfall of intelligence he had gleaned from raiding the NSA’s top-secret files in New York during the Al Qaeda attack. The amount of data he’d stolen from the Americans had been beyond his wildest dreams.

The NSA program had been named Athena, after the Greek goddess of wisdom. Apparently the Greeks didn’t have a goddess of blackmail.

It had been a deep black data-mining operation. Using both the Echelon and Carnivore systems, the NSA had been gathering intelligence that could be used as leverage against various foreign concerns-governments, heads of state, and influential foreign business people.

In short, the Athena Program had been created to collect and sort extremely dirty laundry. Once they had their teeth into something particularly juicy, such as the Princess Diana crash, TWA 800, or the true cause of Yassir Arafat’s death, they assigned teams of operatives to flesh out the big picture and uncover as much supporting data as possible. That way, when it came time to use it, they had the victim pinned against the wall so tightly, there was absolutely no room for him or her to wiggle free.

And when they uncovered a conspiracy involving several powerful foreign figures, it was like hitting the jackpot.

The Troll had to smile. It was devious, deceitful, and utterly unAmerican. And now, all of the NSA’s data belonged to him. The gift that will keep on giving. There was enough in there to keep him busy for three lifetimes. The biggest risk was jumping the gun and selling off the pieces of information too quickly. He would have to study all of it and understand how it interrelated before he began assigning values. Fortunately, the Athena analysts had already done a lot of his work for him.

The Troll clicked on the subgroup folder he’d been working in and waited for its contents sheet to appear. It didn’t.

He clicked on the icon again and waited, but still nothing happened. He checked his uplink status. Everything appeared to be okay. So why then wasn’t his data coming up?

He tried another file and then another. They were all the same-empty. The Troll’s heart caught in his throat. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t happening.

He quaffed the balance of the brandy in his snifter, wiped his bearded lips with the sleeve of his linen shirt, and went through every single file on every single server.

All empty.

As he neared the end, he saw an animated icon that didn’t belong there. It was a little bearded man with a horned helmet, a sword in one hand, and a shield in the other. The figure hopped from one foot to the other and on every fourth hop banged his sword against his shield.

It looked like a little Viking, but the Troll knew better. This was no Viking. It was a Norseman-the codename of American counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath.

Enraged, the Troll clicked on the icon and opened the folder. It took a maddeningly long time for the file to load. For a moment, he thought it might be a trick-a way to purposely keep him online so that American intelligence could pinpoint his location.

Finally, the file loaded. It was a series of screen captures for all of his bank accounts. Every single balance reflected the same amount-zero.

A scream welled up from deep inside his tiny body as he hurled his brandy snifter against the wall. The dogs leaped up and began barking.

His entire life’s work was gone. Everything. The only thing that was still his was the estate in the Scottish Highlands, but if the Americans had been this thorough, the Troll had little reason to doubt that they had found a way to tie that up and keep him from doing anything with it as well. British antiterrorism laws were quite severe. It wouldn’t take much for the Americans to convince the U. K. authorities to play ball.

The dogs were still barking. The Troll grabbed a pewter dish filled with pistachios and was about to launch it when he thought better of it. “Silence,” he ordered, and the barking dogs fell quiet.

He needed to think. There had to be some way out of this.

He spent the next two hours going through his servers, remotely connecting to his various bank accounts scattered around the globe. Then began a series of angry phone calls, during which he suffered through excuse after excuse from each of his bankers. They plied him with empty promises to get to the bottom of what had happened, but the Troll knew it was no use. The Americans had done it. They had gotten everything. He was ruined.

While the Troll had no idea what he was going to do next, he knew one thing for certain. Scot Harvath was responsible, and he was going to make him pay.

He went back to the lone computer file that had been left behind. The dancing Norseman mocked him as it hopped from one foot to the other. Slowly, the Troll scrolled through the data. On his third pass he found it.

Now the Troll understood why the file had taken so long to load. Embedded within that annoying, hopping Norseman icon was a message.

It was an invitation to a private chat room from none other than Scot Harvath. The Troll shut down his computer.

This was going to take some brainpower. He resisted the urge to pour another brandy. Instead, he brewed a small copper pot of potent Turkish coffee and returned to the living room.

As he watched the brightly colored fish below the glass floor, he considered his options. This would be a fight for his very survival, and though he guessed himself to be far beyond Harvath in the brains department, there was no telling what kind of resources the American had at his disposal. The gravest error he could make here would be to underestimate the man.

Since there was no clock ticking on the offer to enter the chat room, the Troll decided to take his time and research his adversary first.