He was up on the deck, his first taste of fresh air in a week. They’d called him an hour ago, as he knew they would. A quiet knock on the steel bulkhead to let him know they were approaching their destination.

Now they were approaching land. The coastline was dark, visible only because it was darker than the surrounding ocean reflecting the light of the crescent moon. This part of the coast was as deserted as Siberia. No one to see them come, no one to see them go.

Arkady breathed deeply. The air smelled of nothing but pine trees for a thousand miles, with no hint of industry. Man’s hand here was light. Just as it was in Siberia. The earth would be better off if mankind were to simply disappear.

Arkady believed that with all that remained of his soul.

The captain was good at his job. The ship had doused its lights, but he put into a narrow inlet as if driving into a parking lot. Arkady looked overboard and was surprised to see a long jetty. There were no other boats, nothing else at all, actually, just this lone, long jetty stretching out to sea.

Waiting on the shore was a truck. Anonymous, a little battered and mud spattered. The license plates were smeared with mud. Arkady had no doubt that the heart of the truck, its engine, was top of the line.

He climbed down the ladder and waited quietly as two crew members brought up the container and offloaded it to a four-wheel hand truck. They worked smoothly and quickly, maneuvering in the darkness as if it were noon.

Arkady watched as they placed the container in a special compartment in the back of the truck. Until they opened the partition, there had been no sign of the secret compartment. Suspicious border guards would have to actually measure the inside and outside dimensions to discover it. Arkady had never been to North America, but he understood that, however heightened security might be at airports, road border controls between the United States and Canada were light.

There was barely enough space for a comfortable chair and six liters of mineral water. Arkady wouldn’t be as comfortable as he’d been up until now, but it would only be for a little while. And he’d survived worse, much worse.

They would get through. The Vor had thought of everything.

For a second, in the freezing midnight Canadian cold, on a clear night, with the Milky Way a cloudy rope across the sky, Arkady felt at one with the universe.

Arkady had one last phone call to make. The truck driver told him that though there was light snow in Vermont, the roads were clear. They should be in Parker’s Ridge tomorrow in the late afternoon, in about eighteen hours. He hauled out his last untraceable cell phone, the red one.

As always, Arkady thrilled to hear the Vor’s voice when he answered.

“Our good luck with the weather is holding.” He looked up at the inky winter sky. “Brilliant sunshine, warm winds. Weather forecasts say that the weather will hold for about eighteen hours.”

“Excellent news, my friend. See you soon, then.”

The red cell phone met the same end as the others. The SIM card was buried underneath a juniper bush, the rest of the phone crushed beneath his boot heel and tossed into the Atlantic.

Arkady watched as the ripples the plastic made edged their way outward, then subsided gently.

The last stage of a chain of events that would change the world.

The captain and his crew had already boarded the ship, which was turning to head back out to sea. The captain and his crew had been efficient carriers. Arkady would report this back to the Vor. There would be many other trips. The captain would retire a very rich man.

Arkady was left with the truck driver. He awaited his orders.

“We depart now,” Arkady said quietly in English, and he nodded.

With one last look at the night sky, Arkady climbed into the secret compartment and waited to be sealed up with his lethal cargo.

November 29

Harlan’s Motel, thirty miles from Parker’s Ridge

Finally, morning came. The dull gray sunlight seeping through the cracked blinds of the motel room didn’t flatter the room any. It highlighted the stains and worn patches in the carpet, the cracks in the plasterboard walls, the thin film of dust everywhere.

It was a miserable little motel room, the most anonymous, cheap one he could find. Though Nicholas Ames’s photo had been briefly on the news all day four days ago, the man who checked into Harlan’s Motel looked nothing like the sleek businessman on the TV screens with his barbered face, styled hair, eight-hundred-dollar suits, and cashmere overcoats.

Nick Ireland hadn’t shaved or showered or combed his hair for days. So when a tall man in black jeans, black turtleneck sweater, and cheap black parka, tousle-haired and with black stubble on his face, checked into the motel, the pimply teenager manning the desk barely put down his skin magazine to look at him.

Nick registered as Barney Rubble.

That was a provocation, just as remaining within a thirty-mile radius of Parker’s Ridge was a provocation. He’d promised he’d drive back to D.C. yesterday. Today the boss was waiting to debrief him.

If his partners knew he was still here, they’d probably shoot him. If his boss back in Washington knew, he’d fire him.

Yesterday, he’d been ready to go back. Some stupid sentimental thing, some strange compulsion, had led him to stay on for the funeral, and Di Stefano had chewed his ass out for it.

He’d seen the funeral, seen Charity one last time, had climbed down from the mountainside and gotten into his SUV. Well, the hit man’s SUV, slated for forensics once Nick hit D.C.

And Nick had had every intention of heading out.

It was 4:00 p.m. by the time the funeral was over. He shouldn’t have gone at all, because he had over a ten-hour drive to get home. Or eight if he wanted to drive his frustration off.

Either way, he had a long night of driving in front of him.

And yet he got as far as the turnoff that would take him straight down into Burlington, and then pulled off the road and sat in the SUV, engine idling, for a quarter of an hour. The very few vehicles out on this gelid day, with its promise of more snow toward evening, hissed by. No one paid him any attention whatsoever, which was as it should be.

He was dead, after all.

He sat and sat, knowing that each minute spent here just made his long trip even longer. Knowing that he was forfeiting even a short nap before having to haul his sorry ass down to headquarters to be debriefed.

And though his foot was on the accelerator and his hand on the gearshift and all it would take was about four pounds of pressure from his foot to shoot on to the road to Burlington, he couldn’t do it. He spent a fucking hour at that fucking intersection until finally, angry and frustrated, he turned the SUV around and drove to the most anonymous motel he could find, where he could be miserable for only forty-five dollars a night.

In his Delta days, Nick had lived rough. He’d once spent seventy days in Afghanistan sleeping on the ground and crapping in a pit he’d dug himself. This room was somehow worse.

He’d tried to ignore the pubes in the shower stall and the faint smell of sewer coming from the drain. He’d started drying himself with the thin towel then stopped when he saw brown streaks.

Still damp, he’d padded back into the room and sat down, naked and damp, on the side of the bed.

Jesus only knew how many traveling salesmen had jerked off on the bedspread. He needed something to sterilize the germs. Luckily he’d stopped off at a 7-Eleven to buy it. A bottle of whiskey, five bucks, pure rotgut. Just what he needed tonight.

He uncapped the bottle and looked for a glass. The one he found was stained and chipped. With a shrug, he simply tipped the bottle up and took a big slug. It burned all the way down, so he took another.