Lucchesi took in Fisher's tac-suit, Trident goggles, face half covered in his balaclava, and tilted his head to one side as though he'd just seen a dodo bird. "My, you must have been expensive."

Fisher sighed and lifted the SC, taking aim on Lucchesi's forehead. The Italian raised his hands and nodded apologetically. "Sorry, sorry . . ."

"What's going on here?" Fisher asked. "Why are you shut down? Where is everyone?"

"In order," Lucchesi replied, "absolutely nothingis going on, we are shut down because we are broke, and everyone has gone home."

"Explain."

"My funding has been revoked."

"The military?"

"My father."

"Say again?"

"My father decided--and I quote--'you've wasted enough time on your invisible robots and bugs.' That was just his excuse, though."

"Who's your father?"

"You have heard of Graziani Motors, yes?"

Fisher nodded. Since the early 1950s Graziani Motors had specialized in custom-made sports cars. Special-order Graziani coupes began at eight hundred thousand dollars. At the age of seventeen Calvino Graziani started the company in his garage in what was then the village of Sassari; now seventy-four, Graziani remained at the company's helm. Conservative estimates put his net worth at 14.2 billion.

Before Fisher could ask the next obvious question, Lucchesi said, "When my parents divorced, I was a teenager. I took my mother's maiden name in protest."

Fisher was running on instinct now, having decided against simply demanding the Ajax code from Lucchesi. Perhaps it was the vulnerability Fisher saw in the man, or genuine sympathy, or both, but his gut told him there might be a better way of skinning this cat.

"You said something about your father's excuse. . . ."

Lucchesi gave another shrug. "It doesn't matter."

"Tell me anyway."

He studied Fisher for a moment. "I think you Americans call this the 'bartender effect.' You know, you tell your secrets to a complete stranger who happens to be serving you drinks. Or holding a gun on you."

Fisher lowered the SC to a forty-five degree angle but kept it pointed in Lucchesi's general direction.

"I should have expected that my father wasn't helping me out of the goodness of his heart," Lucchesi said. "He has none of that. He gave me just enough money to build this place, hire the best people, and make some progress before springing his trap. I was to start making nanotech-based weapons for his new start-up company. Father wanted to become an arms dealer, you see. Evidently, fourteen billion dollars isn't enough."

"So you refused."

Lucchesi shrugged. "We argued. I tried to stall, I tried to compromise, and then a couple of days ago he pulled the plug, as you say. I came back from Milan and found this." He swept his hand across the expanse of the laboratory. "Everything shut down. My staff gone. Every scrap of data removed from the mainframe. They pulled every hard drive, took every CD and USB flash drive."

"Why didn't you just go along--give him something so you could keep working on your own projects?" Fisher thought he knew the answer to this question, but he wanted Lucchesi to verbalize it so the man's moral compass snapped back into focus.

"I got into the nanotech field to help people. To help the world. I inherited that weakness from my mother--if you listen to my father, that is. A soft bleeding heart with his head in the clouds."

There it is,Fisher thought. "What if I told you I might be able to help?"

"You? Hah! I'm a dreamer, not an idiot. Anyone who dresses like that and carries the weapons you carry is more like my father than me."

"You should know better than to make broad assumptions, Doctor. Sometimes you have to do a little bad to do a lot of good. Hear me out."

Lucchesi wagged his head from side to side, thinking, then said, "Why not?"

LEAVINGout names and places and the specifics of 738 Arsenal, Fisher outlined his goal: help stop a massive arms deal from taking place and round up some of the world's most dangerous terrorists. "It's probably not quite what you had in mind," Fisher said, "but as you're fond of Americanisms, what you've got here is lemons."

Lucchesi smiled. "So I should make lemonade."

Fisher nodded.

"How do I know you're not lying to me?"

Fisher made a snap decision. He holstered his SC, took off his Trident goggles, and removed his balaclava. He looked Lucchesi in the eye. "I'm not lying."

Lucchesi held his gaze for a long ten seconds. "No, you're not, are you?"

"The kind of people you're worried about would've stopped talking a long time ago."

"I will trust your word on that. So these weapons . . . They are bad?"

"Very. And the people who want them are worse."

Lucchesi considered this for a few moments, then stood up, ran his hands through his disheveled hair, and said, "What do you need?"

"AJAX?"Lucchesi said after Fisher explained what he needed. "I abandoned that months ago."

"We didn't."

"Too many bugs. We couldn't get it to work with enough chipset brands."

"Define 'work.' "

"There were too many variables in the maintenance protocols. The bots would find their way to the correct location, then get stuck in a feedback loop. Even the simplest maintenance tasks crashed them."

"What if they only had one task?"

"Wait a moment. . . . You said, 'We didn't.' What does that mean?"

"We built our own version of Ajax. But we ran into a problem."

Lucchesi smiled. "Ah, the fail-safe code. That's what you came here for. They refuse any execute commands you give them?"

"Right."

"What is this one task you want them to do?"

"Use whatever internal communication hardware and software they come across to send out a burst transmission."

"Like GPS coordinates, perhaps?" Lucchesi was smiling more often now, warming to his new task. At Fisher's nod, he rubbed his hands together. "Interesting . . . So you essentially want them to phone home. What kinds of hardware?"

"Laptops, desktops, cell phones, PDAs, GPS devices--anything that communicates electronically."

"Which is everything nowadays, yes? Oh, this is wonderful!" Lucchesi shook his finger at Fisher. "You see, this is the problem with scientists. We tend to overthink problems. Often, instead of reducing, we add. . . . You have schematics for me? Code?"

"I can get it. But that doesn't solve our problem--the line of code we need was confiscated along with everything else."

"Hah! One line of code--what was it, six or seven thousand characters long?"

"Four."

"Four!" Lucchesi waved his hand dismissively. "I can write that in a few hours. Come on, come on. Get me the data. I want to play!"

ITtook several exchanges on the OPSAT before Grimsdottir accepted the unusual course Fisher had chosen and acquiesced. When the schematics and code finally appeared in the OPSAT's download folder, attached was a note from Grim:You're mellowing in your old age.