“We don’t have time,” said Sophia. She looked over at the technician. “Heinrich! Is it all right?”

“As far as I can tell, Lady Sophia,” he replied.

“Just out of interest,” said Chase, stalling for time, “how did you know I was in here?”

Sophia smiled. “This habitat has a very sophisticated life-support system that warns the control room of any unexpected buildup of carbon dioxide. The first time you exhaled, we knew we had an extra person aboard.”

“I’ll hold my breath next time.”

“As you said, there won’t be a next time. But I still need to know who you’ve told about the bomb.” Chase said nothing. Sophia sighed and reached behind her back, taking something from the waistband of her trousers. “You always were irritatingly stubborn, Eddie. Well, since you’ve forced me to advance my schedule, we’ll have to continue this discussion later.” She brought her hand out from behind her back, holding an oddly designed gun.

“Hey, wait a-” Chase began, before a dart thumped painfully into his stomach. “Oh, bollocks…”

Darkness consumed him.

“Something’s happening!” Nina said, sitting bolt upright as she saw movement through the binoculars. People had appeared on the landing platform, standing out clearly in the glare of the spotlights. “Oh, crap, it’s Sophia! She’s getting into the plane!”

She watched intently as more figures emerged from the habitat, two of them carrying something small but heavy between them. “Shit! I think that’s the bomb!”

The boat rocked as Trulli clambered forward. “Are you sure?”

“Eddie told me what it looks like. That must be it.”

Trulli looked nervously at the water around them. “Christ, I hope he got out okay…”

The blood froze in Nina’s heart. “He didn’t,” she gasped. Through the binoculars, Komosa’s giant form stood out clearly from the others-and she was intimately familiar with the man he was effortlessly carrying over one shoulder. “Oh my God, they’ve got him!”

She watched, helpless, as Komosa brought Chase to the tilt-rotor and dumped him inside its cabin before entering himself. Sophia, the bomb and the two men carrying it were already aboard. Less than a minute later, the hatch was closed, the landing platform was cleared and the oversized propellers were turning.

There was absolutely nothing Nina could do except watch as the tilt-rotor lifted off and rose into the night sky. Its engines pitched forward and it sped off to the north, rapidly becoming nothing more than one more star among thousands.

“Oh, Jesus…” Nina whispered. “I’ve lost him.”

Trulli raced his Discovery along the coast road from Marsh Harbour. “Are you sure you’ll be able to find where they’ve taken Eddie?” Nina asked.

“Pretty sure,” Trulli replied. “All of Corvus’s cargo ships have GPS trackers. Hopefully his planes do too.”

“And if they don’t?”

The Australian didn’t have an answer for that. Instead, he turned towards a cluster of industrial buildings along the waterline. A barrier and gatehouse blocked the road ahead. “Okay,” he said, “just try to look relaxed. Maybe a bit drunk too.”

“How can I possibly look relaxed?”

Trulli stopped at the barrier. A uniformed security guard stepped out of the gatehouse.

“Evening, Barney,” Trulli said with exaggerated casualness. “How’s things?”

“Fine, Mr. Trulli,” said the guard. He didn’t seem suspicious, just curious. “What brings you here at this time of night?”

“Well, I was gonna go for a midnight dip with my friend here,” he indicated Nina, “and then I realized I left the bloody key for my outboard in the office!”

The guard looked through the window at Nina. Heeding Trulli’s comment, she gave the man a languid wave. “Hi.”

He nodded in acknowledgment, then turned back to Trulli. “You’re not going to be long, are you?”

“No, mate! Just got to find the thing. Should only take a few minutes.”

Barney considered this. “She should really sign in, but… Okay, as long as you’re quick.”

“You’re a top fella,” Trulli told him. The guard smiled, then returned to the gatehouse. The barrier rose, and Trulli drove through.

They pulled up beside a large building at the end of a dock. Trulli jumped from the Discovery and hurried to a side door. Nina followed him inside.

Despite the urgency of the situation, she couldn’t help but stop in surprise as Trulli switched on the lights. The building was a covered dock, a huge roller shutter at the seaward end cutting into the water. Isolated from the waves outside, the pool within the building was as smooth as glass.

That wasn’t what had surprised her, though. It was a submarine, suspended above the water on cables, though its design resembled no sub Nina had ever seen before. If anything, she thought, it looked as if it ought to be piloted by Han Solo or Captain Kirk.

Trulli ignored it, considering it as everyday a workplace object as a chair. “Up here,” he told Nina, clattering up a flight of steps to an elevated room overlooking the dock. She followed him into an untidy office, where a large drafting table covered with annotated blueprints dominated the space. “Sorry about the mess,” he said somewhat sheepishly, sweeping empty cardboard coffee cups away from a computer on a smaller desk as he woke it up.

“What is that thing?” Nina asked of the submarine outside the office’s windows.

“Hmm? Oh, that’s my current project. The Wobblebug.”

Nina almost laughed. “The what?”

“Well, that’s not the official name. René wants to call it the Nautilus, but that’s kind of a clichéd name for a sub. Although if he’s dead, I guess it doesn’t matter any-more…Anyway, it’s a supercavitator.”

“A what now?”

“It goes really fast,” Trulli oversimplified, before returning his attention to the computer. “Okay, let me just log in… Great, I can get into the GPS network.” A few mouse clicks, and a list of Corvus’s ships and aircraft appeared on the screen. “You remember the tail number of that plane?”

She did; he entered it into a search field and hit return. “Okay, it’s got a tracker.”

The list was replaced by a map. Nina recognized the outlines of the Bahamas and the southern half of the eastern seaboard of the United States, from Florida up to Virginia. A line led north from Great Abaco to a point about 150 miles off the South Carolina coast, a yellow triangle marked with the tilt-rotor’s registration number at its northern tip.

“There,” said Trulli. “Heading zero-eight degrees, speed two hundred and seventy knots, altitude ten thousand feet.”

“Where are they going?” Nina asked. “Zoom out, show more of the map.”

Trulli complied. The screen now showed the whole of eastern America.

Nina felt a chill as she realized where the tilt-rotor’s course would take it. “Oh my God,” she whispered, rummaging through the scattered papers on Trulli’s desk to find a ruler. She held it against the screen, extending the course all the way to its final destination.

The chill intensified. She’d been right. “Oh my God!” she repeated, more loudly.

“Jesus,” Trulli said as he saw it too.

The ruler sliced through New York.

Her home.

“She’s going to New York,” Nina said, stunned. “She’s taking a goddamn nuke to New York!”

Trulli entered rapid commands on the keyboard, and a window popped up with more information about the tilt-rotor. “No, she can’t be. The Bell 609 doesn’t have enough range, even with extra fuel tanks. She must be going somewhere else.”

“Where, though?” Nina looked back at the map. “The only other place she comes close to on that course is Atlantic City, and why would she nuke New Jersey? Nobody would even notice!” Mind racing, she stared at the yellow triangle representing the current position of Sophia-and Chase. “Can you show the positions of Corvus’s ships on there as well?”