A sliding sound. The same guard as before, one hand on the lever knob and the other at the keyhole, easing the heavy door open on its hinges. Andrea Bancroft stood at the far wall even before she was told to. But the guard was not alone this time. Another man—taller, lankier, older—stepped in after him. A few murmured words were exchanged, and the guard left, apparently stationing himself behind the door.

The tall man took a few steps toward Andrea and regarded her appraisingly. Despite his size, there was something catlike about his movements, she decided. He was elegant, somehow too elegant, and his gray-green eyes settled upon her with almost penetrative force.

“Two men were killed at a storage facility at Rosendale,” he barked. “You were there. What happened?”

“I think you know,” she said.

“What did you do to them?” His voice was loud yet toneless, and he was no longer looking at her. “We need answers.”

“Tell me where I am,” Andrea demanded. “Goddammit—”

The tall man’s eyes roved across the walls of the cell as if searching for something. “Why did you travel to Cyprus?” he demanded. Yet it somehow seemed that the question wasn’t even directed at her. “There’s no point in keeping secrets anymore.” Suddenly he turned over the nylon-and-canvas blanket on her bed, his fingers probing the heavy fringe of canvas along the outer seams.

“What the hell are you—”

The man turned to her with a worried look, placed his fingers to lips in a brief, frantic signal. “If you don’t cooperate with them,” he intoned, not meeting her eyes, “they’ll have no reason to keep you alive. They’re not big on second chances. I suggest you start talking if you know what’s good for you.”

He wasn’t speaking to her at all, then. He was speaking for the benefit of unseen listeners.

His long fingers suddenly yanked at a wire that had been cunningly concealed beneath the canvas. With a series of forceful jerks, he removed almost a yard of a thin, silver-colored wire. At its end was a small globular device that had been concealed in one corner of the suicide-blanket seam.

“Fine,” he blared, “sit down and start talking to me. I’ll know if you’re lying. You see, there’s very little about you I don’t know.”

Then he twisted the black plastic globule until a snapping sound could be heard.

The man turned toward Andrea and spoke quietly, urgently. “We don’t have much time. When the recording cuts out, they’ll assume a malfunction. But there’s a chance someone will notice the problem sooner rather than later.”

“Who are you?”

The man looked at her, his face taut with fear. “A prisoner, just like you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I told them I’d be able to get to you. That I’d know how to interrogate you, that I’d know your weakness. It’s the only reason they’ve put us together.”

“But why—”

“Probably because of who you are, and who I am. There’s something we have in common.” His expression was harrowed. “You see, I’m a friend of Todd’s.”

Andrea’s eyes widened. “My God. You’re Jared Rinehart.”

Washington, D.C.

In his office, Will Garrison glowered silently for a few moments. The alert had flashed on his desktop monitor, an interagency message that was instantaneously relayed by the Consular Operation Intranet. Confirmation was swiftly secured. The name provided by the informant in New York had been added to the FAA watch list, and now it had been triggered. One “Henry Giles” was on the move. Bet you didn’t think we’d be on to this one, Todd-o.

Yet Gareth Drucker was frustratingly hesitant when Garrison arrived with the news. Behind those rectangular rimless glasses, his eyes seemed veiled, shifty. He stood against the Venetian blinds, his slim form silhouetted against the afternoon light, and seemed reluctant to meet Garrison’s gaze.

“There’s a shitstorm coming, Will,” Drucker said, exhaling noisily, “and I don’t even know whose shit it is.”

“Goddammit, we can’t screw around at a time like this,” Garrison exploded. “We need to strike, and we need to strike now.”

“It’s this goddamn Kirk Commission,” Drucker said. “I’m already getting my balls fricasseed over the Hart Building debacle. There’s a time for stepping up and there’s a time to duck and cover. My political instincts tell me that if there’s one more operation goes awry, we could all be answering questions about it for the next twelve months.”

“You’re not going to dispatch another retrieval?”

“I have to think about it. Oakeshott tells me that Kirk’s guys have developed protective feelings toward our rogue. That’s the word he’s received, and Oakeshott’s pretty wired with the boys on the Hill. Go talk to him.”

“Fucking Oakeshott,” Garrison fumed. “So what’s the deal with Kirk? This because Castor’s got something on them? Or he’s masquerading as a goddamn whistleblower?”

“How’s it going to look? How’s it gonna look if you let a goddamn unhinged rogue go wreak havoc yet again? He’s a menace, and you know it as well as I do. You read the internal report from Larnaca. The bastard murdered a prominent businessman, a guy we used as a confidential informant more than once. Belknap is out of control; he’s deranged with rage and paranoia—a menace to everyone he encounters. I mean, Ruthie Robbins was killed just four goddamn days ago!”

“I got investigators telling me Castor wasn’t the doer. She was sniped, and he’s no sniper. Larnaca is looking more complicated than we thought. Meanwhile, I got people raising a lot of questions about Pollux. There may be some surprises there. There are some dark holes in that vita, and we don’t know what’s in ’em. But I’m guessing it’s more than a bunch of golf balls.”

“Shit. The ankle-biters are throwing up a bunch of distractions. Chasing after rocking-horse dung. I’m so sick and tired of the goddamn cult of Castor. Young shit-for-brains who refuse to see what’s in front of their faces, always trying to come up with some other explanation. Like that Gomez kid. Ought to be given walking papers, or posted to fucking Moldova.”

“Junior analyst Gomes, you mean? He’s raised questions, that’s true. But he’s not the only one. Trust me on this. Something isn’t trig, okay? Something isn’t right.”

“No argument there. Something isn’t right.” And it won’t be until I set it right.

Garrison had calmed down some by the time he made his way down the hall and poked his head in the office of a junior member of the operations directorate.

“What’s up, Will?”

“How are the kids, Danny?” He paused to remember their names. “Beth, Lane? They doing good?”

“They’re doing good, Will. What’s up?”

“Need to requisition a jet.”

“So do it.”

“Need you to do it. Got to keep things special-access.”

“You don’t want your signature on the authorization paperwork.”

“You got it.”

O’Brien swallowed hard. “This going to get me in trouble?”

“You worry too much.”

“As the lawyers say, that’s nonresponsive.”

“We really don’t have time to play pattycakes. Operational time has already commenced.”

“This part of the Castor recoup?”

O’Brien was slow but he wasn’t stupid. “You see, Danny,” Garrison said levelly, “we’ve tried teams before, haven’t we? This time we’re going to play it different. A single top-drawer operative, like a single well-aimed arrow.”

“Who?” O’Brien asked. “Who’s the passenger?”

Garrison’s quilted cheeks spread in a tight smile. “Me.”

He wasn’t just making a virtue of necessity. On reflection, Garrison had realized that he’d actually have a better chance of catching Belknap on his own. A multiperson team was too easy for a skilled operative to detect, and could be slowed by coordination problems. In fact, Garrison recalled a time when Belknap had apprehended a rogue single-handed because he knew that the arrival of a team would, as it said, “spook the hare.” Drucker’s reluctance would serve him well.

“You?” O’Brien’s eyes widened. “Can I ask you something, Will? You were a legendary field op in your day—everybody knows that. But you’re all grown up, at the top of the goddamn tree, just about. Whatever you need done, can’t you send someone to take care of it? I mean, what good is seniority if it doesn’t keep you safe in the office?”

Garrison made a harrumphing noise. “You know what they say. You want a job done right, you better do it yourself.”

“They sure don’t make ’em like you anymore,” O’Brien said, shaking his head. “Which, all told, might be a good thing. So, you going…equipped?”

Garrison nodded.

“Need a requisition there, too? Or are you taking care of that part?”

“A soldier always does his own packing, Danny.”

“You sound like you’re going off to war.”

“I’m going off to win, Danny.”

They had come close, so close, in Washington the other day, and if Garrison had been on the scene personally, it wouldn’t have merely been close. Castor was a wily son of a bitch, but he’d never been able to outplay Garrison. Garrison had been around long enough to learn every damn trick, dodge, and subterfuge that had ever been invented. You didn’t retrieve somebody like Belknap. That was just asking for trouble. With a customer like that, the only way to make sure he could do no more mischief was with a bullet in the brain. You wrote THE END, not TO BE CONTINUED. When the story was over, it was over. No sequels. No jaw-jaw. Just war-war.

“Where to?”

“Dominica. Fifty clicks south of Guadeloupe. You need to get my ass in the air within the hour. Chop-chop, baby.”

“What’s in Dominica?” O’Brien was already reaching for the telephone.

“I don’t know,” Garrison murmured, half to himself. “But I can guess.”

Jared Rinehart sat close to her. “There’s so much I wish I could explain.”

“Where are we?”

“My guess? Somewhere in upstate New York. Someplace rural, remote. But also in striking distance of Montreal and New York.”

“I keep thinking this is all a nightmare, and I’m going to wake up from it.”

“You’re half-right,” Rinehart said. “It’s a nightmare, all right. Listen, there’s no time. We need to talk about Genesis. Todd was on the trail, wasn’t he?”

Andrea nodded.

“I need to know exactly what he’s found out. Where does he think Genesis might be located?”

She swallowed hard, trying to think. “Last thing I know, he was meeting with Senator Kirk.”

“Yes, we know that. But he must have had ideas, suspicions, instincts. Please, Andrea, this is vital. He must have said something to you.”

“He was turning over rocks. Going through the possibilities. He even wondered whether you were Genesis.”

Rinehart looked startled, even wounded.

“Or Paul Bancroft, or—but I think he knew it wasn’t anybody we’d thought of. I think he’d decided it was someone else altogether.”

“This isn’t helpful. You’ve got to rack your brains. He trusted you, didn’t he?”

“We trusted each other.”

“Then he must have let something drop.”

“You mean like he knew and was trying to keep it a secret? That’s not how it was.” Andrea looked at the other man hard, feeling a tickling in the pit of her stomach. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have gone to see the senator.”

Yes, we know that.

Yet who was “we,” and how did they know? “Jared,” she said, “forgive my confusion. But there’s something I don’t understand.”

“They could come for us at any moment,” he reproved. “Please focus.”

“Have we been taken hostage by Genesis?”

“What are you asking?”

She knew. “It’s the others who want to know about Genesis, isn’t it? And you’re helping them.”

“You’re mad!”

Yes, we know that.

“Or are you trying to find out who’s on your heels? A threat assessment—isn’t that what you call it?”

Suddenly she lashed out at him, but Rinehart caught her wrist in a grip of steel and abruptly threw her onto the floor. She fell hard, returned to her feet slowly.

Now he was standing before her, regarding her with a baleful gaze. The pretended fear had abruptly vanished from his countenance. It was replaced by contempt.

“You’re a beautiful woman,” he said at last. “Apologies for the unflattering lighting.”

“I suspect that’s the least of my worries.”

The smile of a lynx. “You have a point.” He reminded her of a figure from a painting by Pontormo or some such sixteenth-century Florentine. A little stretched, but with a coiled strength. “Then again, we all have our roles to play. And yours is a crucial one.” She felt as if he were drawing her soul from her through the magnetism of his gaze.

“I have to admit, you really had me there for a while.”

“It was worth a shot. Clearly, Todd has taken you as his helpmate.” He smiled his feline smile, all teeth and no warmth. “He always did have a weakness for clever women. But it’s clear you have no actionable intelligence for us. No great surprise there.”

“Is Todd such a threat to you? Am I?”

“On the whole, I’d say we don’t respond to threats. We make them. And then we carry them out. More so now than ever. The Ansari network is among the world’s largest, and now it’s ours. Nikos Stavros himself has been a formidable presence in the transshipment of arms, and Stavros Maritime is in our control as well. As are a dozen other wholesalers in armaments and munitions. I’m aware that you know something about business. In the corporate world, it’s called a rollup.”

“A rollup. As in the strategy of acquiring many small firms in the same product category in order to create a market-dominant player. I know about rollups, all right. Coventry Equity backed a few.”

“Nobody imagined it could be done in the parallel economy, the so-called black market. I think we’ve proven otherwise. Which means, of course, that we’re poised to become even more powerful than ever before.”

“Who’s ‘we,’ kimosabe?”

“I think you know.”

“Theta.”

“You’ve named the seed crystal.” Another mirthless smile. “Do you understand what we’re on the verge of becoming?”

“I understand that you people have been manipulating elections around the world.”

Andrea looked in the tall man’s clear resolute eyes. “Why? What’s your goal?”

“Don’t affect ignorance, Andrea. I think you understand perfectly well.”

“I understand that you’re Genesis. That much I understand. That’s why you wanted to know whether Todd was going to be able to track you down.”

Jared Rinehart’s green-gray eyes widened. “You really think I’m Genesis? Hardly. Hardly, Andrea.” He spoke louder, becoming agitated. “Genesis is a purely negative force in the world. Genesis is an agent of destruction.”

Her mind reeled as she strove to absorb his response. Genesis. Enemy thine. After a long moment she spoke softly, almost intimately. “You fear him.”

“I fear the allure of chaos and destruction. What rational man doesn’t? Genesis has foot soldiers everywhere, has been constantly recruiting mercenaries and confederates—”

“You fear him.”

“I assure you that Genesis is the coward. That’s why nobody has been allowed to see Genesis.”

“Then how does he recruit? How can he operate?”

“Because Genesis wants to replace you?”

“Perhaps. We’ll know more soon. Because we’ve got the very best on the case.” He allowed himself a small smile. “When it’s all over, Genesis will be remembered as nothing more than a bump in the road.”

“What is it that you really want, anyway?”

“As if you don’t know. Your cousin said you were an apt pupil. He had even imagined that you might assume an important role in the organization.”

“Paul Bancroft.”

“But of course. It was he who devised the Theta Group in the first place.”

Andrea felt her stomach flip over. “And now you’re about to give it an army of its own. Do you know how monstrous that sounds?”

“Monstrous? It astonishes me that you could have learned so little from your own cousin. Everything we do is calculated exquisitely to serve the general welfare of humanity. In a corrupted world, the Theta Group is a force for the truest idealism.”

The line Paul Bancroft had quoted from Manilius returned to her with a shudder: To pass beyond your understanding and make yourself master of the universe.

“What I really don’t understand,” she said, “is why we’re even having this conversation. Why are you still here?”

“You’re right,” Andrea said. “I don’t believe you.”

“Like a brother. Which, I grant, is a complicated tribute in my case, given the awkward fact that I killed my own brother. My fraternal twin, no less. The really awkward fact is, I can’t even remember why. Of course, I was hardly more than a child at the time. But I digress.”

“You’re a sick man,” Andrea said in a trembling voice.

“In the pink of health, actually. But I know what you’re trying to say. I am…different from most.”

“If Todd had ever known who you really were…”

“He knew a version of me. People are complicated, Andrea. My friendship with Belknap was something I worked very, very hard to cultivate and sustain, and if that meant that distractions had to be eliminated, I saw to that.”

Distractions had to be eliminated.

“You kept him isolated,” Andrea said in a low voice. “Off-balance. And when anyone came too close, when he formed a real relationship with someone, you…made it go away. And when he was grieving, you were always there to comfort him, weren’t you?” Her voice grew louder, fiercer. “He thought you were his only true friend. And all the while you were the one manipulating him, murdering those he loved, keeping him off-balance. Those times when you rescued him—those were all staged, too, weren’t they? This man would have done anything for you. And all you ever did was to betray him.”

“And yet I did care for him, Andrea,” the tall man replied softly. “Certainly I admired him. He had—has—extraordinary skills. There’s really nobody he can’t track down when he has a mind to.”

“Which is why you latched on to him in the first place, isn’t it? He told me about East Berlin all those years ago. What was that—a twofer?”

“But you got something even better. The Hound’s loyalty and devotion. Strengths of character that you set out to turn into weaknesses.”

He nodded, with a hint of a smile. “I’m a sensible man. A rare talent like Todd’s is one you want to have on your side.”

“And you made sure of that when he was still a junior officer. You recognized right off the bat that he had skills you envied. Skills you wanted to exploit.”

“My dear, you read me like a book.”

“Yeah, Helter Skelter.” Repugnance filled her like a scalding fluid. “How can you even live with yourself?”

“Don’t judge me, Andrea.” Rinehart was silent for a long moment. “It’s odd—I’m having the conversation with you that I always wished I could one day have with Belknap. I don’t imagine he’d be able to understand me any better that you have. But try, Andrea Try. Not every difference is a disability. Years ago, I sought out the services of a shrink. A very well respected one. I essentially booked an afternoon with him.”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“I was a young man then. Still, as they say, finding myself. So there I was, in a cozy office on West End Avenue, Manhattan, spilling my guts out. Talked about absolutely everything. There was an aspect to my nature that troubled me—or, rather, what troubled me was precisely that it didn’t trouble me, and I knew it ought to. I guess the way to put it, Andrea, is this: I was born without a moral compass. Even as child I was aware of this. Not at first, of course. I found out about this deficit the way you find out that you’re color-blind. You find that others see a distinction that you can’t quite make out.”

“You’re a monster.”

Rinehart ignored her. “I remember when our pet Labrador had puppies, more than it could take care of, it seemed to me, and I borrowed one of those puppies to experiment on. I was fascinated by what was revealed when one slit open its abdomen with an X-Acto knife, and I remember fetching my brother to show him what I’d found, the way the small intestines looked like earthworms, the way the liver looked just like chicken livers did. I got no sadistic thrill from this—it was just a matter of disinterested curiosity. Yet when my brother saw what I’d done, he looked at me as if I were horribly disfigured, a monster. Such fear and disgust. I simply didn’t understand.” Rinehart’s voice was haunted. “I came to understand, as I grew older. But never to feel. Other people had a set of moral intuitions that guided them unthinkingly. I never had that. I had to learn the rules, as one learns the rules of etiquette, and to conceal those instances when I violated those rules. As with my brother’s death in a presumed hit-and-run accident. I suppose it was because I learned to conceal this aspect of myself that I ended up in the covert ops business: Concealment, subterfuge became second nature to me.”

Andrea was roiled with nausea. “And you told everything to a shrink?”

Rinehart nodded. “He was quite insightful. Finally he said, ‘Well, I’m afraid our time is up.’ Whereupon, simply as a precautionary measure, I strangled him at his desk with my necktie. Now, I ask myself, did I know that I was going to kill him when we started the session? I think that I did, on some level, because I was careful to leave no fingerprints in his office. Made the appointment under an alias, and so forth. And knowing this, even on an unconscious level, is surely what enabled me to speak so freely to him.”

“As with me.” Andrea breathed the words.

“I think we understand each other.” Rinehart’s tone was not unkind.

“Is it such a paradox?” Rinehart was leaning against the wall opposite her cot. His expression was both attentive and remote. “You see, this is how Dr. Bancroft changed my life. Because, intellectually, I very much wanted to devote my life to the good. I wanted to do the right thing. Yet I had a hard time seeing it, and ordinary people seemed to operate by such a complicated clutter of different considerations that I found it was sometimes impossible to anticipate these very strongly held judgments they had. I desperately needed some clear guide to right action. And that’s when I encountered the work of Dr. Paul Bancroft.”

Andrea just stared.

“Here was a man with a brilliantly simple algorithm—a clear, clean yardstick, an objective metric,” Rinehart went on. “He showed that morality wasn’t some subjective faculty of perception after all. That it was a straightforward matter of maximizing utility. And that people’s intuitions were quite likely to lead them astray.” Rinehart’s voice grew animated, his gaze intent. “I can’t tell you how captivated I was—even more so after I met the man himself. I’ll always remember something he said to me once. He said, ‘Compare yourself to the man who refrains from flaying alive random strangers because the very thought of doing so is repugnant to him. His is merely the morality of disgust. If you refrain from doing so, by contrast, it’s because you’ve reflected upon the axioms and principles involved. Ethically speaking, whose is the greater achievement?’ It was a gift, his saying that. But the greatest gift was the rigorous system of morality he set forth. The calculus of felicity.”

“You don’t say.”

“The runaway trolley car. You know this one, don’t you? Activate the switch, and it detours to kill a single person instead of five.”

“I remember,” Andrea replied testily.

“None that you can see, anyway.”

“The logic is crystal-clear. And once you take it to heart, it changes everything. The old prejudices fall by the wayside. Dr. Bancroft was the greatest, noblest savant I’d ever come across. His philosophy has meant that I really could devote my life to the greater good. It gave me an algorithm that could replace this missing thing—but it was better than what it replaced, like some kind of bionic eye. He showed that ethical choices were to be settled by intellect, not by emotion. Doing the right thing, he told me, isn’t always easy—for anybody. It takes work. And Todd should have told you that I’m a fiend for work.”

“Paul told me—” Andrea broke off. “He told me that every life matters. What about mine? What about mine, goddammit?”

“Oh, Andrea. Obviously, given all that you know about our operations, appropriate measures must be taken. But your life will matter in so many ways, as will your death.” Rinehart sounded almost tender.

“My death,” she echoed dully.

“Everyone on this green Earth is on death row,” Rinehart said. “You know this. People talk about killing as if it’s some mystical abomination rather than what it is—essentially a scheduling matter.”

“A scheduling matter.”

“Speaking of which, you’re blood type O, correct?”

She nodded numbly.

“Excellent,” said Rinehart. “The universal donor. Any exposure to hepatitis, HIV, syphilis, malaria, papilloma, or other blood-borne diseases?” His basilisk eyes drilled into her.

“No,” she whispered.

It was all Andrea could do to keep from doubling over and retching.

“Take care of yourself,” Rinehart said as he turned to leave.

“You take care yourself, you twisted bastard,” Andrea croaked. It was rage and rage alone that stopped her from falling apart. “Didn’t you say that Todd Belknap could find anyone if he had a mind to?”

“Well, exactly.” Rinehart smiled as he rapped on the steel-plated door. “That’s what I’m counting on.”