Tallinn’s business district was scarcely featured in the tourist brochures, yet many considered it to be the authentic heart of the city. The heart of the business district, in turn, was where the building where Estotek had its offices, a twenty-story erection sheathed in mirrored glass, was. A full mile outside the Old Town, it was just a block away from such contemporary landmarks as the Reval Olümpia and the Stockmann Shopping Center, not to mention the Coca-Cola Plaza Cinema and the neon-lit Hollywood Nightclub. The district was, in short, a city that looked like every other city, which was precisely what made businessmen feel at home. WiFi Internet access was beamed from eateries, hotel lobbies, and bars. We are modern, just like you was the message that was being transmitted, though with an edge of desperation that lessened its credibility. At this hour of night, the Bonnie and Clyde Nightclub—another peculiarity of Tallinn, Belknap noticed, was that the nightclubs actually, and doggedly, called themselves “nightclubs”—was still well lighted. Immediately adjoining the tallest hotel was an Audi and Volkswagen dealership: The locals were no doubt proud to have assembled the equivalent of a strip mall in the middle of their financial district.

The building was blocky and dark, each facade set in a white enameled facet of steel. It could have been airlifted into any one of five hundred cities and looked equally at home. Belknap got out of the taxi and wandered around on foot. In case anyone was watching, he made his gait slightly unsteady; he would look like a drunken businessman trying to remember which building his hotel was.

The real nature of this entity is closely guarded indeed, Arvo Pärt had said, and he had not exaggerated. Estotek, it emerged, was an Estonian corporation with an offshore charter; its registration records listed only its domestic assets, which were negligible. It was a firm that had no active operations and no significant holdings; it rented space on the tenth floor of an office tower in the business district, paid its registration fees in a timely manner, and was otherwise a phantom. A shell corporation, in short, configured in such a way that it was not required to disclose its subsidiary offshore business entities.

Belknap had been puzzled. “Don’t they at least have to list officers, principals?” he had asked Gennady.

The Russian sounded amused by the question. “In the civilized world, certainly. But in Estonia, the securities regulations and the financial codes were drafted by the oligarchs. This will amuse you: The listed principal is the name not of a person but of another company. Who’s the listed principal of that company? You may well ask. It’s Estotek. It’s like something out of M. C. Escher, yes? And in Estonia, it’s perfectly within the law.” The retired KGB man chortled. The crooked timber of humanity was, for him, a source of solace.

Belknap crossed the street, withdrew a small flat pair of field glasses, and squinted, trying to make out the security guard on duty in the lobby. He saw nothing. He saw…a curling wisp of smoke drifted from an interior pillar. There was a guard in that lobby all right. He was smoking. And he looked tired.

Briskly, the American checked himself in a reflective window. His dark suit fitted the part he was playing; the black leather Gladstone bag—it and its contents came courtesy of Gennady—was somewhat bulkier than the usual corporate briefcase but otherwise nothing very noticeable. Now he took a deep breath, approached the entrance, flashed his ID, and prepared to sign himself in.

The guard gazed at him sleepily, pressed a buzzer that released the front door. He had the widening girth that most Estonian men had acquired by their early middle age, the product of a diet of pork, fat, pancakes, and potatoes. He took a last drag on his cigarette and resumed his place behind a granite counter.

“CeMines,” Belknap said. “CeMines Estonia. Floor eleven.”

The guard nodded stolidly, and Belknap could guess what he was thinking. A foreigner, but then Tallinn was overrun with them. It was doubtless unusual for CeMines, a medical-science company, to have visitors at this hour, but Gennady had placed a call to the guard bank, letting him know, in his Russian-inflected Estonian, that a visitor was en route. Some sort of system failure requiring the attentions of some sort of technician.

“You come to make fix?” asked the guard in halting English.

The guard had the perplexed look of someone whose English had been overtasked. But the import of his thoughts was plain enough: Making trouble for a rich foreigner might be more than his job was worth. After a long moment, he had the visitor sign in, jerked a thumb toward the elevator bank, and lighted up another cigarette.

Belknap, for his part, felt his apprehension level rise with the elevator. The hard part was ahead of him.

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

Gina Tracy fingered a curl of black hair next to her ear as she spoke to the others. “There’s been a screwup. Really regrettable. Apparently the guys we sent to South America removed the wrong Javier Solanas. Can you believe it?” South America seemed so far away from the lacquered slate floors and frosted glass of the Theta facility, and yet this was where the critical decisions originated. Sometimes Tracy felt as if she was at an aerospace mission-control center, guiding probes on other planets. “They were supposed to take out the Ecuadorian trade representative.” She glanced at the instant message that had flashed on her computer screen. “Instead they got some harmless rancher with the same name. I mean, shit.”

There was a moment of hushed silence; only the white-noise purr of the climate-control system was audible.

“Oy, gevalt,” said Herman Liebman, the loose folds of his neck quivering with frustration.

“And these are supposed to be our top guys,” Tracy went on. “Total A-listers. Maybe we should’ve used people in-country. Something to be said for local talent, you know?”

He tilted his head. “You think it’s funny?”

“In a dark and bitter and blackly comic sort of way,” Gina assured him.

John Burgess’s watery, pale eyes caught hers. “You have a recommendation?” Filtered daylight picked out comb tracks in his white-blond hair.

“We need to think hard about how to prevent this kind of thing from happening again,” she said. “I really hate when this happens.”

“We all do,” Collingwood said.

“I’ve got to learn to be philosophical about it,” Tracy said. Some might consider them bloodless technocrats, she knew, but the truth was, they really cared about their work, and it was a struggle not to take it personally when things went wrong. “George is right. We’re going to slip up from time to time. Get too caught up in it and you lose the bigger vision. That’s what Paul would say.” She turned to the savant. “Isn’t it?”

“I regret this,” Paul Bancroft said. “Very much. We’ve made errors in the past, and there will, inevitably, be errors in the future. Still, there’s solace in knowing that our error rate continues to be well within the parameters that we’ve established as acceptable—and our error rates have been improving over time. That’s a heartening trend-line.”

“Even so,” Liebman persisted grumpily.

“What’s important is to situate these lapses in the larger context of success,” Bancroft went on, “and to look forward, not backward. As you say, Gina, we need to learn from our mistakes and determine what additional safeguards can protect against such errors in the future. The calculus of risk produces an asymptotic curve. Which means that there’s always room for improvement.”

“Think we should send our boys back to get the right one?” Burgess asked.

“Forget about it,” Collingwood said. “That would be too much of a coincidence. I mean, in the unlikely event that someone were keeping track of the deaths of people named Javier Solanas. But still. A risk-assessment analysis will tell you it’s not worth pursuing. Any developments elsewhere?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard the news story about a woman in northern Nigeria who’s about to be stoned to death,” said Tracy. “Apparently a village court found her guilty of adultery. I mean, how medieval is that?”

Paul Bancroft furrowed his brow. “I hope you’re not forgetting the larger view here,” he said. “We can have the boffins confirm this, but I’d project that this intensely publicized event has a highly beneficial effect on HIV transmission rates. It’s the baby-in-the-well syndrome all over again. The world media focuses on one woman with mournful eyes and an infant in her arms. The plangent iconography of the madonna and child. Yet the medieval law of these unlettered mullahs is probably going to prevent thousands of AIDS cases. Which is to say, thousands of painful, lingering, ravaging, costly deaths.”

Collingwood blinked. “It’s a no-brainer,” he chimed in, turning to Tracy. “Why do you think HIV seropositivity rates are so low in Muslim countries? When you penalize and stigmatize sexual promiscuity, transmission rates plunge. Look at the map. Senegal has one of the lowest rates of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s ninety-two percent Muslim. Now look at its neighbor, Guinea-Bissau, which has half the percentage of Muslims that Senegal has—and an HIV rate that’s five times higher. Stone away, I say.”

“Anything else in that continental sector?” Bancroft asked.

Burgess scanned his console for an electronic list of items. “Well, what about the minister of mines and energy in Niger? Isn’t he blocking important aid projects?”

“That got nixed, remember?” Gina Tracy looked annoyed. “Too many knock-on effects. We already went over this.”

“Remind me of the play here,” said Collingwood. “I’ve been meeting with the systems people all morning.”

“Executive summary? I’ll break it down into broad strokes.” Burgess paused, collecting his thoughts. “First, Minister Okwendo is too high-profile. Second, he’s likely to be replaced by Mahamadou, the finance minister. Which is fine, but then the question is, Who’s in place to succeed Mahamadou? If he’s replaced by Sannu, that’s fine. But it’s even money that he’ll be replaced by Seyni. And ultimately that could make things even worse. Instead of removing the minister of mines and energy, it would be better to remove Diori, the assistant minister involved. Diori’s number two is a relatively benign character, all our intelligence suggests: His father was a kleptocrat, but the result is that the son has enough money that he’s not in government to make more.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Bancroft said pensively. “Diori would appear to be the strategically sound choice. But let’s be sure to take it to the second-team boffins to see whether their calculations accord. An independent assessment is always valuable, as we’ve learned the hard way.” The look he gave Liebman spoke of their shared history.

“Running a fresh set of models could take a few days,” Burgess warned.

“A country like Niger, with a relatively tiny ruling elite, is extremely susceptible to wide output variances given minuscule input variances. We’ll want to be safe, not sorry.”

“No argument here,” said Liebman, tenting his liver-spotted hands beneath his chin.

“All right, then.” Bancroft gave Burgess a grave look.

“Meanwhile, how’s the absorption of the Ansari network coming along?” Liebman asked. “After all the effort we spent in taking it over, I certainly hope it proves its worth.”

“The power to do good,” Bancroft put it. “Everything we learn goes to support the larger cause.”

“Absolutely,” Collingwood said, nodding vigorously. “The world is awash in munitions. Right now, they flow toward the highest bidder. Even worse is when the bidding is split, and you’ve got both sides of a civil war armed to the hilt. There were thirty years of that in Angola. Totally irrational. Now we’re going to be able to guide the firepower to the states and factions that ought to get it. We’ll be able to pacify provinces that had been making themselves miserable for decades, because they’ve been given just enough arms to wage war and not enough to win. That’s always the worst state of affairs.”

“Our geopolitical analysts are quite clear about this. In situations of non-eliminationist civil war,” Bancroft said, “a swift and decisive victory by one side is nearly always preferable, from a humanitarian point of view, to protracted conflict.”

“It hardly matters which side. Getting bogged down in the supposed grievances and aggressions—the you-started-it crap—is a huge mistake. Now we’ll be able to run the numbers, pick a winner, and guarantee the optimal outcome. Think how crazy it is that the Ansari network was able to prop up these mountain tribes in Burma. Small arms, second-rate artillery, paid for by drug money. For years, it kept them at war with the Myanmar government. Like they ever really had a chance. That’s wrong. Wrong for the tribe. Wrong for the country. Nobody likes a repressive authoritarian regime, but longstanding conflict is even worse. Then, once the military has stabilized the social order, we can get to work on engineering the regime so that it’s less repressive and takes better care of its citizenry.”

“You’re saying that the rebels’ Ansari contacts are going to switch sides?” Liebman asked.

“Unless it’s a rebellion we sanction,” Liebman prodded.

“Toppling a regime by open warfare is always going to be a last resort,” Collingwood said, nodding vigorously. “But if it comes to it, sure. It’s an option. And our roll-up of the major networks isn’t by any means finished. Of course, the Ansari acquisition gives Theta more direct benefits as well. At the end of the day, do-gooders also have to do what it takes to protect themselves.” He turned to Bancroft. “You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you?”

“The quills of the porcupine,” Bancroft said.

“When threats to our own security arise, abroad or at home, we deal with them.”

“As best we can,” the aging savant agreed.

Collingwood traded glances with Burgess and then Tracy. He took a deep breath. “Then, Paul, we need to talk about Andrea.”

“I see.”

“Paul, you’re too close to the situation. Forgive me for speaking bluntly. But there are decisions to be made here. You need to leave them to the professionals on the ground. She’s become a problem. When she went to Rosendale, she crossed a line. You thought she’d listen to reason. Now we know that you overestimated her.”

“Or, from another point of view, underestimated her.” There was something veiled in Bancroft’s tone.

“Your judgment was colored.”

“You always like to think the best of people,” Tracy said. “Which is a great starting assumption. But you’ve also taught us that we shouldn’t resist changing our beliefs in the face of new evidence.”

“Precisely because she is your own cousin,” Tracy said.

Bancroft stared into the middle distance. “I don’t know what to say.” Had she imagined it, or was there a tremble in the philosopher’s voice? When he turned back to face the others, he looked ashen.

“Then don’t say anything,” Burgess said, in a gingerly tone of both respect and solicitude. “You’ve trained us well. Allow us to shoulder some of the responsibility here. Leave this case in our hands.”

“Like you always say,” Collingwood put in, “doing the right thing isn’t always easy.”

“Weathering the goddamn Kirk Commission isn’t going to be a cakewalk, either,” Tracy put in.

“You’re too young to remember the Church Committee hearings,” an older man at the table, Herman Liebman, told her. “Paul and I do. These things run in cycles.”

“So do monsoons,” Collingwood said heavily. “A historical perspective’s not much use if you’re in the path of the storm.”

“A fair point,” Bancroft agreed. His eyes narrowed. “Knowledge is power. Goodness knows we’ve turned over enough rocks from the senator’s past. What squirmy things have we found?”

Collingwood turned to John Burgess and gave him a you-tell-him look.

“Can’t be brought, either,” Collingwood said in his fluting voice. “I mean, you already know about the medical condition. He’s kept it secret, but if it got out, it would only bring a wave of public sympathy. Meanwhile, he’s got his eyes on posterity. He knows he’s not going to be alive to run again, but he’ll be around and functioning long enough to make a heap of trouble for us.”

“It’s like the Samson effect,” Burgess added. “The illness doesn’t help us. He’s in good enough shape that he just might collapse the pillars and bring down the goddamn temple.”

“You say knowledge is power.” Collingwood gave Bancroft a meaningful look. “The trouble, of course, is what the Kirk Commission knows. Somehow the senator has gained information that he just shouldn’t have. That’s what makes him a real threat to our entire enterprise.”

“And we still have no clue how?” Bancroft’s gaze was attentive but not anxious.

Collingwood shrugged.

Gina Tracy looked impatient. “I still don’t get why we can’t just remove Senator Kirk. Accelerate the inevitable. Take the thorn out of our paw.”

Bancroft shook his head gravely. “You plainly haven’t thought it through.”

“Can you imagine the storm of controversy and attention?” Collingwood shot her a reproving look. “Might prove more dangerous than the committee itself.”

“But we’re the goddamn Theta Group,” the black-haired woman persisted. “Theta as in thanatos.” She glanced at Burgess. “Greek for death, right?”

“I’m aware of this, Gina,” said Burgess. “But the same risk-assessment procedures that apply elsewhere in the world apply here, too.”

Tracy gave Bancroft a petitioning look. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

“Rest assured that I shall not have the work of the Theta Group derailed by a cornhusking pol from Indiana,” Bancroft told her. “You can be certain of this. The Theta Group must continue to be the arrowhead of benevolence.”

“Extreme philanthropy,” Burgess half-chuckled. “Like extreme sports.”

“Please don’t make a joke of my life’s work.” Bancroft spoke softly, but with a chastening look.

A long moment of silence was broken by the sound of apprehensive voices from the communications center on the level below. Then a pasty-faced man mounted the spiral staircase and greeted the senior managers with a grim expression. “There’s been another message from Genesis.”

“Another one?” Tracy asked, crestfallen.

The man from the communications center handed a sheet to Paul Bancroft. To the others, he said, “The guys downstairs take this seriously.”

Bancroft looked at the sheet briefly, his eyes widening. Wordlessly, he passed the sheet to Collingwood.

“I don’t like this,” Collingwood said softly, his anxiety undisguised. “What do you think, Paul?”

The philosopher had a look of intense focus. A stranger would take him to be reflective rather than fearful; the others knew that was his way in the face of crisis.

“Well, my friends, it would appear that we have larger worries to contend with,” Bancroft said at last. “Genesis is escalating the threat level.”

“We’ll follow the relocation protocol,” said Collingwood, studying the communication. “Suspend the operation here for the moment, shift over to one of the other facilities. Maybe the one near Butler, Pennsylvania. We can do it seamlessly, overnight.”

“I hate the idea that we’re running scared, though,” said Liebman.

“We’re in this for the long haul, Herm,” said Bancroft. “Short-term inconveniences for the sake of long-term security are of no great moment.”

“Yet why is this happening now?” Liebman asked.

“With the Ansari network under our belts,” Burgess told the elderly analyst, “there will be absolutely no stopping us. We’re just at a time of transition. Which means a time of vulnerability. We ride this out, and we’ll be unconquerable.”

“The world will be our terrarium,” Collingwood put in.

Liebman still sounded fretful. “But to let Genesis…”

“Inver Brass perished the first time because of overreaching.” Bancroft’s voice was mesmerizing in its intensity. He had regained his air of mastery and command. “Genesis will do it again. We just need to make it through the next few days. Genesis will be destroyed.”

Liebman looked less sanguine. “Or we will be.”

“Have you become a doubter, like Thomas in the Garden of Gethsemane? Have I lost your confidence?” Bancroft’s face was unreadable.

“You’ve never been wrong about the big things,” said Liebman, stung.

“You’re kind to say so,” Bancroft replied icily.

Though Liebman hesitated to speak again, his decades of loyalty and friendship compelled him to address the great man with candor. He cleared his throat. “But, Paul,” he said, “there’s always a first time.”

When the elevator pinged at the eleventh floor, Belknap stepped out, maintaining the slightly blasé look of the overtired air traveler for whatever cameras might have been installed in the car. Estotek was on the floor below; the eleventh was given over to CeMine. As Gennady had explained, CeMine was a pharmaceutical startup specializing in “bio-marker” research; the aim was to develop bioassays—simple blood tests—that could replace surgical biopsies for certain kinds of cancers. The company boasted that it was based on “strategic cooperation among industry, academia, and government.” Many partners, many pockets.

It was one of three small offices on the floor; Belknap chose it because its work was least sensitive, from the point of view of confidentiality, and therefore would have the lowest level of security. All that stood between him and the CeMine offices was a steel-clad door with a narrow slate of steel-mesh reinforced glass.

After making sure that there was no security camera in the hallway, Belknap moved a narrow tension wrench into the keyway of the latch knob, pushing from the far end in order to maximize sensitivity. Then he thrust the rake pick into the keyway and worked back, dragging the pick so that it pushed against all the tumblers. No go. As he feared, it was a double-sided lock. After he raked the top tumblers, he reversed the pick and raked those on the bottom. Only after another several minutes of intense, agonizing concentration did the latch retract and the door swing open.

No alarms. As he anticipated, the offices, which housed the company’s finance and legal department, relied upon the building’s security. Break-ins were rare in such settings. Ordinary precautions would suffice.

Belknap closed the door behind him. The office suite was dimly lit from fluorescent strips inset along the inner walls, the emergency lighting that building codes around the world required. He let his eyes adjust and walked through the space carefully, flashing a penlight around. The workplaces were mainly open-plan, save for a few enclosed offices at the windows. The carpeting was gray with a large diamond pattern. After a few minutes of inspection, he chose an area where a computer and telephone console was plugged into the floor. As with most office buildings constructed in the past decade or so, the subflooring held a weave of optical and coaxial cables. What were called carpet tiles, usually about two feet by two, were now commonplace, and he was not surprised to find them here; the floor panels could be lifted up for easy access to the wiring below. He lay on the floor and lifted up the carpet tile adjacent to the plug cluster. Flanging the tiles from below was a steel grid, and beneath the steel grid was the wiring. But how many feet of space was there between floors? Removing a crowbar from his Gladstone bag, he began prying up tiles, swiftly, quietly.

Then he pushed down a small fiber-optic camera. On the other end, it plugged into a digital camera, and displayed a flickering image on the flat-screen viewfinder. The snake camera, which produced a standard RCA output, was a mere quarter-inch in diameter and had a sixty-degree field of vision. It was four yards of black-clad cable attached to a small black case of electronics, where a small endocoupler converted the light from thousands of tiny fibers into a unified image. A small xenon light in the terminal cuff provided illumination as the snake cam made its way beneath the “floating” floor. He pushed the wire further and further, snaking around obstacles, until it ran into a white irregular surface. The acoustic tiles of the ceiling below.

At first, an irritating moiré pattern obscured the image; Belknap adjusted the controls until the Estotek floor came into sharper focus. The image was of a generic-looking office: rectangular desks, black chairs with oval seats and backs, the usual collection of printers, desktop computers, telephone consoles, in/out boxes. He adjusted the snake cam again, moving the head one way and then another until he brought into focus what he was looking for.

Recessed contact switches, unobtrusive and visible only to a trained eye, mounted in the top of the main door frames. Infrared motion detectors: small plastic boxes placed in high-traffic areas—walkways between cubicle clusters, along a long row of windows. The motion detectors would have been activated once the office closed for the evening, and they presented his most immediate challenge.

Belknap recognized the model. They were passive devices, designed to detect changes in temperature. When an infrared-emitting body entered the protected space, the devices would sense it and a flow of electricity within the device would be interrupted, activating the alarm.

He peered again at them. Again, they looked almost like light switches; nothing that would detain a casual glance. A fresnel lens focused infrared radiation through a special filter. The sensor had had two reception elements, which enabled it to correct for signals caused by sunlight, vibration, or ambient temperature changes. Those conditions would affect the two pyroelectric elements simultaneously; a moving body would activate one sensor and then the other in rapid succession.

There was virtually no way that Belknap could descend without triggering the alarm. He would not attempt to.

With a few crude nips of a wirecutter, Belknap made a space, then lowered his Gladstone bag down it until it caught a few feet below the floor. Next, Belknap himself wriggled through the wiring, then scuttled around the airflow ductwork and the rigid piping that fed the sprinkler system. In the crawlspace beneath the subflooring he groped around, with just his small penlight to light the way, until he was inches above the ceiling tiles of the floor below, holding on to electrical cables to support his weight. Gently, he lowered himself onto the reverse side of the ceiling panels, spreading his body out on the thin metal frames—an array of T-beams, cross-tees, and suspension wires—in order to diffuse the downward pressure. The ceiling was designed to support a man’s weight, since repairmen occasionally had to do work here. By contrast, the drop-in panels were of mineral fiber designed to absorb sound, not force. If he tried to stand up, he would fall through.

Now he reached down and partially unseated a meter-square panel from its frame—one of Estotek’s ceiling panels—and opened his leather case. The next phase of the infiltration would be performed by rodents. He withdrew a squirming canvas bag from his leather case, high-pitched squeaks and grunts growing audible as he opened the drawstring top. Now he tipped the bag over. Its contents—four white rats—slipped through the opening left by the unseated drop panel and fell to the floor nine feet below. Then he reseated the panel and maintained a vigil through the tiny snake cam.

On the small camera screen, he watched the vermin racing around the floor, bewildered and disoriented. Then he directed the camera lens toward the nearest motion detector. The soft green light beneath the square fresnel lens had turned red.

The alarm had been triggered.

Belknap’s eyes darted between his watch dial and the small digital viewfinder. Forty-five seconds elapsed before anything happened. Then a man in a brown Estotek uniform appeared with a small pistol in one hand, a large flashlight in the other. He peered around, and a long moment passed before a squeak and a flash of fur caught his attention. Cause and effect. First, the motion detector goes off; then a rat appears—and now a second rat flashing into view. The guard issued what was obviously a curse, though not in a language Belknap could understand. He recalled having heard that Estonian was unusually well supplied with expletives. The rats had been fed nothing in the past few hours save chocolate-coated coffee beans: They were caffeinated, even more energetic than usual. As lab specimens, they lacked the skills and instinct at concealment that their feral cousins would have mastered.

Another rat skittered into view; fecklessly, the guard leaped toward it with his thick-soled boots, trying to stomp on it. Belknap was reminded of children who tried to kick the pigeons on a city sidewalk: so close and yet so elusive.

The next part would require exquisite timing. Withdrawing the remaining rat from the tightly cinched canvas sack, Belknap lifted a corner of a ceiling panel and stuck its head through. Obligingly, it squeaked madly. Snipping off a piece of fiber-optic filament, Belknap knotted a length of it to one of the rat’s hind legs. He then pushed a few inches of the squirming creature through the small crevice. It clawed the air wildly. Belknap pinched its tail hard to make it squeak.

Now the guard whirled around, saw the creature’s small darting head protruding from a loose ceiling tile. A false dawn of comprehension showed on the Estonian’s gray, fleshy face: Vermin—perhaps specimens being held by the medical science company on the floor above—had escaped through the ceiling.

Belknap also knew, now, that only one guard had been stationed there. Had there been a second, the man would assuredly have summoned him, if only to gawk at the spectacle, a reprieve from the tedium of the posting.

The guard was now directly beneath him. He looked like another victim of the Estonian national cuisine. Yet he moved with surprising agility. For a few seconds he stared at the wildly scrabbling rodent. He started leaping up at it, batting at it—inches away from Belknap, who now pushed up the ceiling panel and, clenching a heavy wrench in his right hand, prepared himself for a sudden strike. It happened as if in slow motion. There was a long second in which the guard, having propelled himself into the air, saw the entire panel above his head lift up, saw a man in the shadows. There was a split-second of eye contact between the two men: The guard’s face flashed dismay and astonishment and then a fearful sense of the inevitable as the heavy steel in Belknap’s hand struck his forehead, concussing him with a dull thunk. The guard, knocked senseless, fell limply to the carpeted floor.

Belknap threw down the Gladstone bag and clambered down from the ceiling, swinging from a cross-tee to a desk a couple of horizontal yards away, and then onto the floor. Now he scrutinized the model number of the nearest motion detector. If he remembered its default settings correctly, it would have phased into a five-minute suspension cycle. Two of those minutes had already elapsed.

With almost automatic movements, he pulled on the sensor’s white plastic casing, which popped off easily. If it were an old-style system, he would have been able simply to block the lens while it was off—perhaps with a piece of cardboard—and thereby prevent its activation when it was powered up. But the newer models came with blockage detectors and went into alarm mode if they sensed a visual obstruction of that sort. So Belknap set to work with a very small screwdriver. He removed the tiny corner screws that held in place the amplifier and comparator units. Just beneath them he saw four wires running into the device. Two were the alarm-circuit wires, the code 12VDC appearing in tiny print on the coated wire—voltage direct current. The two other wires were the ones he needed to manipulate. He stripped back the insulation and twisted them together. Then he reassembled the sensor. He proceeded to the other two sensors in the area and went through the same procedure. When the master control resumed, it would sense normal power, but the sensors would no longer be functional.

The files! Gennady had told him roughly what he should be looking for. But first he had to find them. Assuming they were here in the first place.

The small power diode pulsed on; the system would indicate that the office was alarmed once more. Nervously, he moved an arm in front of the wall-mounted sensor. The green light remained steady. Deactivation had been successful.

Trickier would be the recessed contact switch, similar to the one on the door leading to the outer corridor. A magnet in the top of the door held a switch in the adjacent frame in closed position. Once the magnet was moved away, the switch opened and the protection loop was broken. Belknap pulled up a chair and stood on it. He ran his fingertips along the smooth painted surface of the metal door frame until he felt a slight change in texture. Tapping with his nails, he confirmed that the hollow metal had given way to a thicker, more solid-sounding steel plate. He retrieved a bottle of acetone from his kit bag and wetted the area with the solvent, scraping away at the paint with a screwdriver until he uncovered the flat screw-heads that kept the door-frame unit in place. The unit had been masterfully concealed beneath putty, sealant, and paint. It was concealed no more.

Dammit! He cursed the gods and himself, grateful only for the reprieve granted by his second thought. How could he have been so careless? With movements that were more practiced and less tentative on the second go-round, he disabled the second contact switch, and then did a final inspection of the complete door frame before he set to work on the keyway with the tension wrench and rake pick.

Five minutes later the door swung open, revealing an airless space of about fifteen feet square, dominated by a bank of filing cabinets. There was another door frame on one of the inner walls, suggesting a room within a room. But perhaps it only led to a stairwell.

Belknap looked at his watch. So far, the after-hours infiltration had come off almost without a hitch, but the thought made him feel edgier, not more relaxed. Overconfidence could prove fatal; and no real operation ever went entirely smoothly. When things went smoothly, he wondered when the anvil was going to fall.

The cam locks on the steel cabinets connected to a hook-and-latch mechanism and succumbed to Belknap’s focused attentions before long. He pulled open the drawers, removed a thatch of papers, began reading through them. Before long, frustration welled up: He was no expert, didn’t know what to look for. He wished that Andrea were there to help him decipher the material. Yanking open one drawer after another, he finally found a file labeled R. S. LANHAM.

The file was empty. A meaningless name, an empty file—it seemed a parable of futility, mocking his very hopes. The hound was chasing its tail.

Softly, he pronounced the name out loud. It was a name he knew—that of a Greek Cypriot magnate. Nikos Stavros was a reclusive man whose list of holdings worldwide was legendary.

They included, Belknap saw, a 49 percent interest in Estotek.

Was Stavros in fact Genesis? Was “Lanham” his alias? But Andrus Pärt had said he was an American. For that matter, then who owned the other half of the company—and what, precisely, did Estotek control? Belknap peered at an onionskin page headed PARTNERSHIPS and struggled to make sense of it. He lurched to his feet and tried the knob to the interior door—which was, blessedly, unlocked. He switched on an overhead light and, as the fluorescents blinked on, he saw further banks of black filing cabinets. Ten minutes later, he was beginning to perceive the complexity of the enterprise, the largely submerged iceberg that was Estotek.

Eleven minutes later, he heard the arrival of guards in the hallway.

He bolted from the annex like a rabbit from its hutch and he noticed—heart-stoppingly—the familiar alarm tab inset in the flange of the interior door. The knob had turned; the annex door had swung open. But what he hadn’t realized was that it was armed, that there was a separate alarm system in place. A silent one. There were not enough expletives even in the Estonian language to express Belknap’s self-disgust.

And now he found himself face-to-face with four well-armed security guards. They did not look like the pudgy man in the lobby or the feckless night watchman in the brown uniform. These ones were professionals. Each carried a drawn gun.

Instructions were yelled at him in several languages. He understood “Freeze!” He understood the directive about stretching his arms over his head.

He understood that the game was over.

The guard who spoke English came closer to him. He had leathery skin and a hatchet face. His gaze took in the files that spilled from the cabinets.

A triumphant grin stretched across his face. “There was a report of rats,” he said in lightly accented English. “And now we have caught the rat even as he nibbles at our cheese.”

Then he turned and said something to the youngest of his three colleagues, a twentyish man with yellow hair in a buzz cut, and the ropy, veined arms of a weightlifting enthusiast. The words were in a Slavic tongue; Belknap only made out the common Serbian surname Drakulovic—obviously the man’s name.

“Corporate history—kind of a hobby of mine,” Belknap said in a hollow voice. He noticed that the English-speaking guard was holding a Gyurza Vector SR-1, a Russian-made pistol designed to punch through body armor. It could, in fact, penetrate sixty layers of Kevlar, and its chambered steel-core bullets would not ricochet, because they would penetrate. They would travel through his body like a pebble through the air.

“See, it’s not the way it looks,” Belknap added.

With a sudden movement, the guard belted him across the face with the hand that held his pistol.

The blow landed like a mule’s kick. Belknap decided to exaggerate its effect, which took little effort. He wheeled backward, windmilling his arms, and then he caught a glimpse of the guard’s contemptuous look. The man was not taken in for a moment. A second, punishing blow landed—on the same cheek, the way a professional would do it. Belknap forced himself to stand erect, although he wobbled on his legs. It was not the time to resist, his instincts told him. The guard was trying to demonstrate his mastery, not to knock him unconscious. They would have questions for him after all.

“No movements,” the man said in a voice like gravel. “Be still like a mannequin.”

Belknap nodded mutely.

One of the other guards spoke to the one with the yellow buzz cut in a snigger. Belknap understood little, save the name Pavel—the young man’s first name. The young man approached, patted Belknap down, ensuring that he was disarmed. He fished out a small metal tape measure from Belknap’s rear pocket and tossed it aside.

“Now, what are you doing here?” The rugged man, obviously their leader, spoke in the tone of a man hoping for a display of insubordination so as to have an excuse to deal out punishment.

Belknap remained silent. His mind raced.

The hatchet-faced guard stepped closer. Belknap could smell his sour, beefy breath. “Are you deaf?” he demanded. The taunting of a playground bully, prelude to the violence on which he thrived.

Suddenly, impulsive, Belknap whipped his head around and caught the youngest guard’s eyes. “Pavel!” he said, his voice imploring and yet berating as well. “Tell them!”

The senior guard narrowed his eyes. Confusion and suspicion played across his face. Pavel looked baffled, stunned. But Belknap did not avert his eyes.

“You promised me, Pavel! You promised me there would be none of this!”

The heavyset guard gave the yellow-haired bodybuilder a suspicious side glance. A facial tic twitched the young man’s left eye. Evidence of tension. It was inevitable—but, to those so minded, suspicious as well.

Pavel murmured something that, to Belknap, hardly needed translation: some version of “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Oh, please,” Belknap burst out, indignant. He recalled Jared Rinehart’s advice: Suspicion, dear Castor, is like a river; the only way to avoid its flow is to divert it elsewhere. The memory gave Belknap strength. He jutted his jaw, squared his shoulder, looked less guilty than aggrieved.

The senior guard’s voice was menacing—though it was difficult to say toward whom, exactly. “You know this man?” he asked Belknap.

“Drakulovic?” Belknap spat. “I thought I did. Evidently not.” Belknap directed a furious gaze at the young man. “You piece of shit!” he stormed. “What kind of game are you playing? Do you think my boss is going to take this lying down?” Belknap was madly extemporizing at this point, sketching out a scenario that would intrigue but remain mysterious to the guards. He simply needed to buy time.

Belknap rolled his eyes theatrically as Pavel Drakulovic burst into a flurry of denials, protests. The outrage was genuine, but it came off as defensive, possibly spurious. Belknap noticed that the two other guards had subtly positioned themselves a few steps away from him, closer to the leader. Drakulovic was now an uncertain quantity; nobody wanted to be closely associated with him, at least not until the matter was resolved and clarity restored.

He continued to protest until their leader directed some brief, harsh word of remonstration at him, and shut him up. Again, Belknap could guess at the message: “Not another word out of you. We’ll sort this out later.”

Now Belknap lifted his chin. Time to drop another name, to sow more confusion. “I’m just telling you that Lanham isn’t going to be happy with you guys. Last time I do him a favor.”

The black-eyed guard suddenly looked wary. “Who did you say?”

Belknap took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his mind working furiously.

R. S. Lanham. An American, according to Andrus Pärt. The “R” could stand for Ronald, Richard, Rory, Ralph. But Robert was the likeliest; it was among the most common first names in the United States. A Robert could go by Rob, or Bert, or eschew a diminutive altogether, but if one had to stake a wager on the outcome, Bob was safest.

“Trust me,” Belknap said, “If you knew Bob Lanham as well as I do, you’d know he’s the last person you want to piss off.”

The black-eyed guard gave him a curious look. Then he flicked on a small communicator, spoke into it briefly. Then he turned to Belknap. “The boss comes soon.”

The boss. Not Nikos Stavros. The other owner, then. The principal owner. The man who used the name Lanham.

Andrus Pärt: This isn’t someone I’ve ever met face-to-face. Nor do I care to.

The leader now spoke in a low, reassuring voice to his young companion. A quick side glance at Belknap. They did not trust him. But the black-eyed man took and pocketed Drakulovic’s sidearm all the same. He was on probation for the time being. It was the only prudent thing to do. Drakulovic sat down on a small stool in a corner of the room, winded, wanting to protest further but resigned to the sidelines.

Belknap looked around him, at the remaining guards, saw their pistols held steady, nothing in their gaze but indifferent professionalism. His mind raced, his eyes darted. You must get out of here. There must be something he could do.

The sounds of arrival. The boss. Rapid Estonian but spoken, unless Belknap were mistaken, with an American accent.

Then the outer door swung open again and, accompanied by two young blond gunmen, the man who ran Estotek walked in.

His hair was black, dyed, gleaming in the overhead lights. The face was deeply pockmarked, each facial indentation a dimple of shadow. Jet-black eyes sparkled like jewels of malevolence. The mouth was as thin and as cruel as a well-healed knife wound.

Belknap found himself fixated on the two-inch-long scar that curved across his forehead like a second left eyebrow, and the ground beneath him seemed to swell and buckle like a sudden wave. Vertigo swept through him. He had to be hallucinating.

Belknap squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. It couldn’t be.

Yet it was. The shadowy Estonia-based mogul, the man who had taken over the quondam Ansari network, was no stranger to him. They had met, years before, in an apartment on East Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee.

Richard Lugner.

The man had been killed that day. Belknap had seen him die with his own eyes. Yet here he was before him.

“It’s impossible!” Belknap blurted the words, his thoughts given speech.

The slight widening of the man’s vulpine stare only confirmed the identification. “Would you stake your life on that?” he asked in a horribly familiar nasal rasp. In his left hand he held a large pistol.

“But I saw you die!”