Gunn climbed the staircase and entered the apartment. A small man with thinning hair and a Roman nose, Gunn gazed through thick hornrimmed glasses. A former commander in the Navy and first in his class at the Naval Academy, Gunn was highly intelligent and well respected among the staff at NUMA. His blue eyes were wide and magnified behind the lenses of his glasses, and he had a dazed expression on his face.

"Two guys with automatic rifles in camouflage gear scared the hell out of me until I proved I was a friend of yours from NUMA."

"Admiral Sandecker's idea."

"I knew he hired a security agency, but I had no idea they had magical powers and could appear out of nowhere. All that was missing was a puff of smoke."

"They're very efficient," said Pitt.

"I was briefed on your situation in Telluride," said Gunn, sinking into a chair. "The word circulating around town is that your life isn't worth two cents."

Pitt brought him a glass of iced tea from the kitchen. Gunn seldom drank anything with alcohol except an occasional beer. "Not to those jokers from the Fourth Empire. I suspect they'll spare no expense to inter me in a tomb."

"I took the liberty of looking under a few rocks." Gunn paused and downed half the glass of iced tea. "I met with some friends at the CIA-"

"What interest could the CIA possibly have in a domestic crime?"

"They suspect the killers you ran up against in the Pandora Mine might be part of an international crime syndicate."

"Terrorists?" asked Pitt.

Gunn shook his head. "They're not religious or cult-driven fanatics. But their agenda is still secret. CIA operatives, Interpol agents- nobody's been able to penetrate the organization yet. All the foreign intelligence agencies know is that it exists. Where it operates from or who controls it, they haven't a clue. Their killers show up, as they did in Telluride, murder their victims, and vanish."

"What crimes are they involved in, besides murder?"

"That seems to be a mystery, too."

Pitt's eyes narrowed. "Who ever heard of a crime syndicate with no motives?"

Gunn shrugged. "I know it sounds crazy, but they have yet to leave even a tiny thread."

"They've got two of the scum in Telluride to interrogate."

Gunn's eyebrows rose. "You haven't heard?"

"Heard what?"

"A Sheriff Eagan from Telluride, Colorado, called Admiral Sandecker only an hour ago. The prisoners were found dead."

"Damn!" Pitt snapped irritably. "I expressly told the sheriff to search them for cyanide pills."

"Nothing so mundane as poison. According to Eagan, a bomb was smuggled into their jail cell. They were blown to pieces, along with a deputy who was on guard nearby."

"Life is cheap to these people," Pitt said acidly.

"So I gathered."

"What's the next step?"

"The admiral is sending you on a deep-sea geological project in the middle of the Pacific, where you'll be reasonably safe from any more assassination attempts."

Pitt grinned slyly. "I won't go."

"He knew you'd say that." Gunn grinned back. "Besides, you're too important in the investigation to send off to the boondocks. As it stands, you've had more contact with this group than anyone else, and lived to tell about it. High-level investigators want to talk to you. Eight o'clock in the morning…" He paused to hand Pitt a slip of paper. "Here's the address. Be there. Drive your car into the open garage and wait for instructions."

"Are James Bond and Jack Ryan coming, too?"

Gunn made a wry face. "Funny" He finished off the iced tea and walked outside onto the balcony overlooking the fabulous collection below. "That's interesting."

"What?"

"You referred to the assassins as being from the Fourth Empire."

"Their words, not mine."

"The Nazis called their hideous dreamworld the Third Reich."

"Most all the old Nazis are dead, thankfully," said Pitt. "The Third Reich died with them."

"Did you ever take a course in German?" inquired Gunn.

Pitt shook his head. "The only words I know are ja, nein, and auf Wiedersehen."

"Then you don't know that the English for `Third Reich' is `Third Empire.' "

Pitt went taut. "You're not suggesting they're a bunch of neo-Nazis?"

Gunn was about to reply when a great whoosh sound came, like a jet fighter using its afterburner, and was followed immediately by an earsplitting screech of metal and a streak of orange flame that flashed across the interior of the hangar before disappearing through the far wall. Two seconds later, an explosion rattled the hangar and shook the wrought-iron balcony. Dust fell from the metal roof and settled on the shiny cars, dulling their bright paint. A weird silence trailed the fading rumble from the explosion.

Then came the rattle of prolonged gunfire, followed quickly by another, more muted explosion. Both men stood frozen, gripping the balcony railing.

Pitt found words first. "The bastards!" he hissed.

"What in God's name was that?" asked Gunn in shock.

"Damn them. They fired a missile into my hangar. The only thing that saved us from being blasted to shreds was that it didn't explode. The warhead smashed through one thin corrugated wall and out the other without the detonator in its nose striking a heavy structural beam."

The door burst open and the two security guards came running onto the floor of the hangar, pulling to a halt beneath the spiral staircase. "Are you injured?" asked one.

"I believe the word is shaken," said Pitt. "Where did it come from?"

"A handheld launcher fired from a helicopter," answered the guard. "Sorry we let it get so close. We were conned by the markings- it was supposed to be from a local television station. We did fire on it, however, and bring it down. It crashed in the river."

"Nice work," said Pitt sincerely.

"Your friends certainly don't spare any expense, do they?"

"They obviously have money to burn."

The guard turned to his partner. "We're going to have to increase our perimeter." Then he looked around the hangar. "Any damage?" he asked Pitt.

"Only a couple of holes in the walls big enough to fly kites through."

"We'll see that they're repaired immediately. Anything else?"

"Yes," Pitt said, becoming even more angered as he stared at the coating of dust on his expensive cars. "Please call in a cleaning crew."

"Maybe you should reconsider that project in the Pacific," said Gunn.

Pitt seemed not to have heard him. "Fourth Reich, Fourth Empire, whoever they are, they've made a very serious mistake."

"Oh?" said Gunn, looking curiously at his trembling hands as if they belonged to someone else. "What mistake is that?"

Pitt was staring up at the gaping, jagged holes in his hangar's walls. There was a cold malignity glaring out of his opaline green eyes, a malignity Gunn had seen on at least four other occasions, and he shivered involuntarily.

"So far, the bad guys have had all the fun," said Pitt, his mouth twisted in a crooked grin. "Now it's my turn."

Pitt watched his security-camera tapes before going t0 bed and saw that the guards had done their homework. Using maps of the airport's underground drainage system, they'd found a large concrete pipe eight feet in diameter that carried away the rain and melted snow runoff from the airport's runways, taxiways, and terminal areas. The drainage pipe ran within ninety feet of Pitt's hangar. At a maintenance access, unseen in the high weeds, the guards had set up a well camouflaged observation post.