I was checking the door again when Thorne planted himself right in my line of sight. “What about you? What do you think?”

“That we should all take up arms and start our own militias. Maybe we can organize ourselves into tribes and aspire to be like Rwanda or Zimbabwe.”

“Do you know how many nuclear weapons North Korea has built?”

“Not a clue.”

“Nor has a single one of our crack intelligence agencies. They don’t know how far along the Iranians are with their program. They didn’t know that Dr. Khan was selling the secrets to designing and building a bomb to anyone who would pay him.” He pulled a cough drop from his pocket and offered it to me. When I declined, he unwrapped it and popped it into his own mouth. “Let’s bring it down to something more personal. Would the world be better off without Drazen Tishchenko in it?”

“That’s not my call.”

“Here is a man who shoots his own mother, who trades nuclear weapons like baseball cards.” Thorne knelt down and put his hand on Harvey’s knee. It was an odd and inappropriate gesture. Harvey was aghast at being touched, which was probably why Thorne had done it. It was undoubtedly some kind of interrogation technique. “He will kill Rachel, you know. After I show him the video, he will hunt her down, and he will murder her, and he will take his time doing it. Surely, if you had the chance, you would put a bullet through this man’s brain.”

Harvey looked as though he would put a bullet through Thorne’s brain if someone would give him a gun and he had strength in his arms to lift it. But then he sat back and looked across at me, and a calm seemed to come over him. All he said was, “No.”

“What if I told you he could be responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans if you didn’t? What if I told you he had access to several transportable nuclear devices from the old Soviet arsenal and that he had them out for bid?”

“I would ask you to prove it in a court of law, and even then, I am not sure the penalty would be a bullet to the brain.”

“Then you probably believe that old canard, ‘It is better for one hundred guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to go to prison.’ ”

“Or to have a bullet put through his brain.”

“But what if one of those one hundred guilty men develops a way to smuggle a nuclear bomb into Manhattan? Does that equation still work? Is it better for a million Americans to die than for a thousand innocent men to go to jail?”

“Perhaps it depends on whether you or your brother or your father or your son is one of those innocent men.”

“Or if you or your brother or your father or your child is incinerated in a nuclear blast. That is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? How do we balance the needs of the many against the needs of the few?”

“Due process,” Harvey said, “is what keeps us from being terrorists ourselves.”

“That’s a quaint idea, old man, but not very workable in these days of weaponized anthrax and transportable nuclear devices.”

“I suppose,” Harvey said, “one can justify any behavior using the mushroom-cloud defense.”

Thorne removed his hand from Harvey’s knee. “Where did you hear that term?”

“From your late partner.”

“How did you know Tony?”

He didn’t, but he had listened to him talking to Lyle on tape for four hours.

Harvey went on. “He was quite conflicted over the things you did and the person you became. Was he one of the difficult decisions you had to make?”

Thorne looked profoundly spooked. His skin had lost some of its ruddiness. He pushed his hand through his hair as he turned away. Kraft, ever the reporter, was keenly interested.

“Is that true, Thorne? Did you kill your own partner?”

Tatiana broke the tension when she came through the door. “I’m back,” she said, dumping a Staples bag on the couch. “I got exactly what we need.”

TATIANA GOT THE LAPTOP HUMMING. CYRUS HAD PUT the key back into its protective case. He removed it from its shell, and handed it to her. She carefully slotted it into the side of the unit. Then the two of them stared at the screen, mesmerized with anticipation. We all stared at them, waiting to see what would happen. They waited. They waited some more. For Cyrus, the anticipation turned to frustration and then anger.

“Goddammit, what now?”

Tatiana was calmer. She seemed more intrigued than angry. “I don’t know.” She worked the token in and out a few times. That didn’t seem to do the trick, so she pulled it out and checked the receptors, wiping them clean with the sleeve of her shirt. That didn’t work, either.

“Is it the right computer?”

She turned it over and checked the back of the laptop against the back of a business card Cyrus handed her. It took me a few seconds to realize where he’d gotten the serial number. I had read it to Kraft over my phone. There wasn’t much I knew that they didn’t.

“The computer is fine,” Kraft said. “If there’s something wrong, it has to be the key.”

Everyone turned, and now the spotlight was on me. “I dug the key out of Vladi’s grave. It can’t be the wrong key. It might be old or damaged, but it’s the right key.”

Kraft started to bat that one back, but Harvey interrupted. “It requires a password.” The room went quiet. Now everyone was focused on him.

Thorne walked over and gave Harvey his best commander’s stare. “What did you say?”

“My ex-wife knew how to get into it. She and Roger Fratello believed the password would be enough. They did not understand that it required both the key and the password. She told me the password.” He took a breath and set his shoulders. “Let my partner and Mr. Kraft go, and I will give you what you need.”

“Is he telling the truth?” Thorne looked at me, and so did Harvey, and I knew what was happening. Here was the chance he had spoken of. Here was the opportunity that I was supposed to take.

Tendrils of panic made their way up from my gut and started to wrap themselves around my heart and my lungs. I didn’t know if what Harvey was claiming was true. I knew this. If I contradicted Harvey, Cyrus had no reason to keep either Harvey or me breathing. If I supported his story, it at least bought us some time.

“Yes…he’s right. Rachel was supposed to call back with the password once she felt safe. She must have given it to him before she left. I didn’t know.”

Thorne looked to Tatiana. “Is that possible?”

She shrugged. “It could be configured that way.”

Thorne knelt again in front of Harvey so they were eye-to-eye. “Give me the password.”

“First, let them go.”

“You know, I’ve learned a few things in my time about how to make people talk, a few interesting techniques.”

“I am already a dying man, and I have learned to live with pain.”

Thorne rose slowly and wandered over behind my chair. I felt his hands on my shoulders. “I’m not talking about physical pain.”

“If you hurt her, you will never get the password. Never.”

Harvey sounded less afraid than I felt. He was playing his last hand, and he was all in. The moment was both thrilling and devastatingly sad, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel.

“You let them walk away, and I will give you the means to open the files. Whatever else is there, there is more than a billion dollars available to the one who gets there first.”

Thorne didn’t move. Harvey kept going, more anxious this time. “I know of no cause that would not benefit from the infusion of a billion dollars in cash that is free and clear. No one knows about this money.”

Again, the heavy silence. I didn’t think Thorne would let Kraft go, a situation that had its own implications, but it seemed he was considering some kind of deal.

Tatiana broke the silence. “He’s lying.”

Harvey looked stunned. He tried to stutter a response, but Tatiana rolled over him.