“What do you know?”

“Very little. But Dewey’s photo is on the wire, so I knew something was up. They haven’t identified him yet, but there is a manhunt. He’s going to get rolled up, Hector. Do you want us to assist in the reconnaissance?”

“I’m not worried about Dewey.”

“Did he abduct the woman?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, why is the United States so interested in Russian ballerinas all of a sudden?”

“Her fiancé is a terrorist. He put a thirty-kiloton nuclear bomb in a boat and it’s on the way to the United States.”

A soft whistle came from Chalmers.

“What do you need from us?” he asked. “It goes without saying, we’re at your service.”

“Katya Basaeyev is being flown to Inverness,” said Calibrisi. “I need your best interrogator. At this point, she’s our only connection to him.”

“And he’s the only one who knows where it’s going?”

“Correct.”

“How far out is the vessel?”

“Two days.”

“July Fourth,” noted Chalmers. “Independence Day. You’re lucky we Brits don’t hold grudges.”

Calibrisi cleared his throat.

“Very lucky, Derek. Thank you, as always, for your help.”

“I’ll fly up right now,” said Chalmers.

“You don’t need to go. Just send up your top interrogator.”

“That happens to be me. If she knows something, I’ll find it out.”

“Dewey thinks she’s innocent. He said that she seemed genuinely surprised at the fact that her fiancé is a bad guy.”

“As you know, and despite his irascible countenance, I’m one of Dewey’s biggest fans,” said Chalmers. “But he’s an operator. I nearly lost my life due to a Russian honey trap. Never trust a Russian woman. What’s the fiancé’s name, by the way?”

“Pyotr Vargarin. He’s called Cloud.”

“Cloud?” said Chalmers. “What a pompous ass. Already I don’t like the fellow. Send some biographical information, will you?”

“Will do.”

Calibrisi hung up his phone, then nodded to Wendell, who pushed in the door and entered Calibrisi’s large glass-walled office.

“Where are we on this, Ted?” asked Calibrisi.

“It’s bad,” said Wendell. “It’s some sort of virus. It’s going to take awhile. Cloud has been inside for more than a year. He built a bunch of trapdoors. Looks like he can come and go as he pleases.”

“Can’t we remove them?”

“The problem is, we don’t know how many, or where they are. As long as the virus is still active, we could theoretically get rid of all the trapdoors but still not have gotten to the heart of the problem.”

“How long to clean it?”

Wendell shrugged his shoulders.

“A couple weeks, maybe a month.”

“Can we get some contractors on it? Cyber security specialists?”

“That’s like hiring the police to stop a bank robbery after it’s happened, Hector.”

“What’s your point?”

“He’s inside,” said Wendell. “He cracked the vault and now he’s inside. We don’t need a cop. We need a bank robber.”

Calibrisi nodded, deep in thought.

“Thanks, Ted,” he said, nodding to the door. “That’ll be all.”

Calibrisi waited until Wendell left, then put both hands on top of his desk, bracing himself against the wave of anxiety that flooded over him. It wasn’t just the lack of manpower on the ground in Russia. They were exposed here, in the United States, as well. Time was running out. The enemy was attacking on all fronts. Like cancer, he’d laid down his contagion silently, at a level that was invisible to the human eye. By the time Rublevka went south, the cancer had already taken hold. Now they were witnessing the rapid metastasis of the illness. It was spreading. Worst of all, there was no longer a vague premonition as to the day the cancer would take down its victim. Chalmers was right: the attack they nicknamed 9/12 would take place on Independence Day, the Fourth of July, a nation’s birthday that in two days’ time would be forever marked by genocide.

Calibrisi picked up an object from his desk. It was an old pistol, a Walther PPK, its black patina worn from use. It was a gun that, many years ago, in a Berlin apartment building, had been used by a Stasi agent to try to kill him. The slug had missed. Not by much, but it had missed, and Calibrisi had taken the gun after putting a bullet through his would-be killer’s head. He kept it because it reminded him of the thin line that separated victory from defeat, good luck from bad luck, life from death. An inch here, a moment there.

A sudden, violent lurch when your enemy doesn’t expect it.

Calibrisi understood then what he needed to do.

He crossed his office and opened the small closet at the opposite side of the room, quickly stuffing a few items in a beat-up leather weekend bag. He went back to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a bundle of disposable cell phones and put them in the bag.

A few minutes later, bag in hand, Calibrisi stepped off the elevator eight floors below and walked down the hallway. He put his hand on a scanner next to the door. A half second later, the door unlocked and he stepped inside Targa.

Polk was standing before one of the plasma screens, watching a live POV video of one of the agents now attempting to infiltrate Russia. The view showed a line of passengers at an airport.

Calibrisi got Polk’s attention. Polk crossed the room.

“What’s the status on the team?”

“It’s set up,” said Polk. “Brainard and Fairweather should be wheels-up within the hour.”

For the first time, Polk saw Calibrisi’s leather bag.

“Where you going?”

Calibrisi paused, then spoke: “I’m going off grid. I’ll call you.”

55

ABOARD THE LONELY FISHERMAN

INTERNATIONAL WATERS

When Poldark awoke the next morning, he leaned immediately to his left and started vomiting.

You’re running out of time.

The radiation sickness was already upon him. It would settle in quickly, ravage for a day or two, then kill them all. By the time they arrived at their destination, all of the men aboard the boat would wish they were dead. Poldark, mainly due to his age, would likely be dead.

Poldark, Faqir, and the other six men aboard the trawler had all agreed to what was to come. They all signed up to die on behalf of a cause.

For Faqir and the Chechens, that cause was jihad. For Poldark, the reason had nothing to do with jihad. It had to do with a man named Vargarin, though not Pyotr.

Anuslav Vargarin had been Poldark’s professor and mentor. He studied under Vargarin and it was Vargarin who convinced Poldark, at age twenty-one, to pursue a life devoted to scientific discovery and academic research. Professor Vargarin had been his undergraduate advisor, his doctoral thesis advisor, and, for twenty-two years, his colleague.

Poldark was part of the team that helped Anuslav Vargarin turn an idea into a theory and then, ultimately, into a formula, a formula that eventually got Vargarin killed. In a few days, it would kill Poldark as well, though in a very different way. It would kill Poldark because he would utilize the formula to divide the nuclear device into two nuclear devices, and, during that process, would be exposed to lethal amounts of gamma radiation. He would die either when the bomb was detonated in New York City or from radiation sickness before they got there.

What Vargarin created, with Poldark’s assistance, was a way to achieve supercritical mass with less uranium than a standard nuclear device. Though other scientists had also succeeded in achieving the same goal, all had done so with chemical accelerants that, while not as difficult to procure as uranium, still required the use of apparatus and/or chemicals that only a major enterprise possessed, such as a cyclotron or polonium. Vargarin’s theory achieved supercritical mass with a slight twist, using a chemical compound that could be made more easily than had ever been achieved before, without a cyclotron and without the need for a rare element such as polonium.