“Where I grew up,” Djemma said, “the old women had a saying. A snake in the garden is a good thing. It eats the rats that devour the crops. But a snake in the house is a danger. It will kill the master and eat the baby, and the house will ring with sorrow.”

He paused and then clarified. “You will get your money, Andras, perhaps enough to buy a small country of your own. But if you ever set foot on the soil of Sierra Leone, I will have you killed and your bones scattered to the dogs in my courtyard.”

Silence rang across the phone line, followed by soft laughter.

“The UN is wrong about you,” Andras said. “You are ruthless. Africa could use more men like you, not less. But in the meantime, as long you keep paying, I’ll keep working. Don’t run out of money like the papers say you’re about to. I would hate to extract my fees in less pleasant ways.”

The two men understood each other. The Knife was not afraid of Djemma, even though he should be. He was not afraid of anything. This is why Djemma had chosen him.

“Get yourself to Santa Maria,” he said. “I will give you further instructions once you arrive.”

“What about the Kinjara Maru?” Andras asked. “What if someone goes to look at her?”

“I have plans to deal with that if it occurs,” Djemma said.

Andras laughed again. “Plans for everything,” he said sarcastically. “You make me laugh, Garand. Good luck with your mad plans, fearless leader. I will watch the papers and root for your side.”

The phone clicked, the line went dead, and Djemma placed his receiver down on its cradle. He sipped water from a glass of fine crystal and looked up as the doors to his office opened.

The aide he’d sent running out came back in. Two of Djemma’s personal guards followed, escorting a white man who looked less than happy to be present.

The guards and the aide left. The twelve-foot-tall doors closed with a thud. Djemma and the Caucasian man stood facing each other.

“Mr. Cochrane,” Djemma said officiously. “Your weapon has failed… once again.”

Alexander Cochrane stood like a scolded child might, staring with insolence at his would-be father. Djemma did not care. There would be success or there would be consequences.

ALEXANDER COCHRANE WALKED toward Djemma’s desk with a sense of foreboding far beyond anything he could recall. For seventeen months, Cochrane had been toiling to construct a directed-energy weapon of incredible power.

This weapon would use superconducting magnets, like those Cochrane had designed for the Large Hadron Collider what seemed like several lifetimes ago. It would accelerate and fire various charged particles at almost the speed of light in a tight beam that could be rapidly “painted” over a target, destroying electronics, computers, and other circuitry.

If tuned correctly, the weapon could act like a giant microwave beam, heating organic matter, cooking its targets from the inside out, setting them afire, even if they took cover behind steel-and-concrete walls.

Through the skies, Cochrane’s weapon could shoot down attacking aircraft at ranges of two hundred miles or more, or it could wipe out approaching armies by sweeping back and forth across the battlefield like a garden hose aimed at approaching ants.

At its ultimate level of development, Cochrane’s weapon could destroy a city, not like an atomic bomb, not with fiery heat or explosive force, but with precision, cutting here and there like a surgeon’s scalpel, turning one block after another into a wasteland.

It could kill the occupants or leave them alive, at Cochrane’s — or Djemma’s — choosing. But even if tuned to destroy electronics and systems only, it could render a city uninhabitable by destroying all modern technology within it in a matter of seconds. Without computers, phones, an electrical grid, or running water, today’s modern, integrated city would become a land of anarchy or a ghost town shortly after Cochrane — or Djemma — set his sights on it.

But to do all that, the weapon had to work, and so far the results were inconclusive.

“I told you it needs more testing,” Cochrane stammered.

“This was supposed to be the final test,” Djemma said.

“What happened to the boat?”

“You mean the ship,” Djemma corrected.

“Ship, boat,” Cochrane said, “same thing to me,”

“Your lack of precision bothers me,” Djemma replied, with an undertone to his words. “A ninety-thousand-ton vessel is not a boat.”

“What happened to the ship?” Cochrane asked, sick and tired of Djemma’s condescending attitude. The man acted as if he were asking Cochrane to build a television set or assemble a computer from prefabricated parts.

“The Kinjara Maru has gone down to… what do you Americans call it? Ah, yes, Mr. Davy Jones’s locker.”

“And the cargo?” he asked. Nothing would improve without this cargo.

“One hundred metric tons of titanium-doped YBCO,” Djemma said. “Removed as per your request.”

Cochrane breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s good news.”

“No!” Djemma snapped, slamming his riding crop on the desk. “Good news would have meant your promises to me were kept. Good news would have been to hear that your weapon worked as you said it would, completely disabling the ship and killing all the crew instantly. As it was, the ship continued under power, and there were survivors, who we had to deal with.”

Cochrane had grown used to Djemma’s moodiness but was stunned by the sudden anger. He jumped at the snap of the crop. Still, his self-confidence was not shaken.

“So what?” he said finally.

“So, our men were exposed,” Djemma said. “A group of Americans tried to interfere. We have now attracted the wrong kind of attention. All thanks to you and your lack of precision.”

Cochrane shifted in his chair. His sense of discomfort would have turned into outright fear were it not for one simple fact. Even though Djemma could have him killed with the snap of his fingers, he never would as long as he needed and wanted the weapon to work.

So far, Cochrane had covered his bases well, everything from insisting his disappearance be made to look like a kidnapping — so he could go back to the industrial world someday — to the way he’d gone about constructing Djemma’s weapon.

He’d done all the development work himself, drawn up the plans and supervised the efforts on-site. He’d made himself so integral to the project that Djemma could do little to threaten him, unless he wished to abandon the hope of finishing it and possessing the final version of the weapon.

Remembering this, Cochrane spoke with renewed confidence.

“All systems take time to fine-tune,” he insisted. “Do you think they build the supercolliders from scratch and then just flip the switch and watch them go? Of course not. There are months and months of tests and calibration before they run even the most basic experiment.”

“You’ve had months,” Djemma said pointedly. “And I don’t want any more experiments. The next test will be full-scale.”

“The weapon isn’t ready,” Cochrane insisted.

Djemma’s glare rose to a new level of intensity. “It had better be,” he warned. “Or you will burn alongside me when they come for us.”

Cochrane paused. Djemma’s words confused him. Why would they burn? All along, Djemma had insisted they would sell the weapon, not to one world power but to all of them. Let them point Cochrane’s gun at one another’s heads much as they’d pointed nuclear missiles at one another for fifty years. They would never use it, and both Cochrane and Djemma would be rich. There was no danger in that. And no need to rush.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I have something else in mind from what I told you,” Djemma said. “Forgive me for deceiving such an honorable man.”