Together they entered the hut. The radiation had elevated the temperature inside the room to the point that they could not remain more than two or three minutes.

Yakov had the man steady the barrel of the cannon, his bare fingers projecting through the holes burned into the right-hand glove. Nitikin retrieved the projectile with the tongs. In less than a minute, using the ramrod, Yakov seated the uranium bullet securely down the barrel of the gun.

It took another thirty seconds to insert the safety disk of uranium-238, the neutron deflector, into the slot between the end of the gun barrel and the target. Once in place, the disk of uranium-238 began doing its job. It bounced the wandering neutrons from the two elements of highly enriched uranium, the projectile and the target, back to their respective sources, instantly reducing the gain in radiation. Nitikin heard the rapid clicking from the Geiger counter on the table suddenly fall off sharply.

The safety disk of U-238 was attached to a rigid piece of steel wire. The wire protruded through a tiny hole in the side of the bomb case. A quarter-twist of the wire in a clockwise direction locked the safety disk in place. Anyone trying to remove the disk without first twisting the wire in a counterclockwise direction would snap the brittle connection between the safety disk and the wire, rendering the bomb useless. The gun would fire. The cordite explosion would destroy the barrel and bomb housing, but there would be no nuclear chain reaction. Even radioactive fallout would be minimal and generally contained to any structure the device was in.

Properly turned and pulled, the wire would slide the disk from its slot, leaving the pathway clear for the projectile to be fired into the uranium target.

The only procedure more delicate than removing the safety disk was replacing it if the need ever arose. With the bomb housing closed, it would be impossible to see the disk or the slot into which it should slide. With only the rigid wire to manipulate the disk, replacing it in the slot was a matter of trial and error. It required the deft fingers and touch of a surgeon. Even Nitikin was not sure if he could do this any longer, though in his youth, in training, he had accomplished it twice on dummy mock-ups of the warhead.

Having locked the safety disk in place, it took less than a minute to seal the lead-lined bomb case and render the device safe.

As the two men stepped from the building, Alim’s man lifted the hood from his head and smiled with a toothy grin as the expression of relief flooded his sweaty face.

Nitikin had no way of measuring the dose of radiation emitted by the ionizing blue flare. But he knew that Tomas and the smiling lad he was now looking at were both dead.

The old Russian hovered over Tomas’s bed for four days and five nights. During this entire period, neither Yakov nor the FARC physicians could do much to comfort the young Colombian.

An ocean of water could not satisfy his thirst, even if he could keep it down. He was wretched with nausea, vomited constantly, and passed bloody diarrhea as the radiation began to kill his body from within.

After three days, Tomas’s fingernails turned black. His thick, dark hair fell from his head in patches so that a nurse had to brush it from his pillow every few hours, into a box that was to be buried somewhere in a deep hole. Open sores developed around his mouth and eyes. When the doctor lifted the sheet, he realized that these bloody sores covered Tomas’s entire body.

Nitikin could not even touch him for fear of further infecting his wounds, though the Russian knew there was no hope. The end was near. A high fever set in on the fourth day as infection began to take its toll. Tomas struggled for every breath as his airway swelled and his lungs filled with fluid. Just after midnight on the fifth day, Tomas suddenly went into convulsions. He arched his back as if a steel spring had snapped in his body. He shook the entire bed for almost a minute and then went limp.

Yakov noticed that in his stillness, Tomas was no longer struggling for breath. He didn’t have to wait for the doctor to check his pulse or put the stethoscope to Tomas’s ulcerated chest to know he was dead. He stood and slowly covered Tomas’s face with the bedsheet.

Tomas may not have understood entirely what he was doing, but Nitikin knew that his quick reactions and nimble fingers had averted a nuclear disaster that could have lit up the jungle and killed them all.

“Excuse me, but Mr. Hinds is on the phone with a client. If you’ll wait a moment-”

“Officer, if she gets in the way again, arrest her.”

Harry was on the phone, but he recognized the voice outside his office door. A second later it opened.

“Listen, I’m going to have to get back to you,” said Harry.

Before Harry could hang up the phone, Templeton was standing on the other side of his desk, backed up by a hefty sheriff’s deputy, muscle in a uniform, and one of the homicide detectives in Katia’s case. The detective had his arm in the air, holding a sheaf of folded papers as if it was a cocked pistol and the Dwarf was about to level the muzzle on Harry.

“We’re going to have to continue this later. I’ll call you. Yeah, yeah…call you this afternoon.” Harry hung up the phone.

The detective slapped the papers on the desk in front of him. “Consider yourself served.”

“What’s this about?”

“Search warrant,” said Templeton. “Bring some of those boxes in here!” he hollered to whoever was outside the door. Harry’s secretary, standing in the doorway, nearly got run over by the hand truck being pushed by one of the deputies, followed by another cop. The dolly was loaded with flattened cardboard boxes. They began unfolding and assembling the boxes on the floor, using packing tape and a tape gun to bind the bottoms.

“Why don’t you tell me what this is about?” By now Harry was standing behind the desk fumbling with the papers.

“Read the warrant,” said Templeton. “Sergeant, anything with the name Solaz on it, box it and seal it for review. If you have questions about anything, ask me. You!” He pointed to one of the other deputies. “Get some of those boxes and follow me.” Templeton headed out of the office.

Harry, who was still trying to read the documents, followed him out of the office and joined the parade headed down the hall. There were three more deputies outside in the reception area already boxing up files from the filing cabinets.

“Wait, wait wait. What are they doing?” said Harry. “They can’t reach in and take the files out of the cabinets.”

“You want us to roll the cabinets out and put them on the truck, that’s fine by me,” said Templeton, still walking.

“I’m going to have to ask you to have your staff leave the office until we’re done collecting everything. Then they can come back,” said Templeton.

“Why don’t you stop for a second so we can talk about this?” said Harry.

“Time for talk is over.” Templeton breezed through the open door of Paul’s office, reached up on the wall, and flipped the light switch. “You can start with the desk,” he told one of the cops. “No. No. On second thought I think I’d rather have Detective Howser do that. Gil, get every drawer. Clean it out. You guys can work on the file cabinets, here and the ones outside by the secretaries. And don’t forget the bookshelves. Those binders all contain documents. Box ’em up,” said Templeton. “Take ’em all.”

By now, Harry had devoured the few pages accompanying the search warrant. It had been signed by another judge, not Quinn.

“Wait a minute.” Harry saw one of the cops starting to grab binders off the shelves. “Those files have nothing to do with the Solaz case. The warrant is limited to Solaz.”

“In that event you’ll get ’em back,” said Templeton. “Procedure’s been set up for a review by a non-taint team and it’s been approved by the judge.”