The Commonwealth of Dominica, a wrinkled oval of land located between Martinique and Guadeloupe, was a former British colony, and had a cuisine that suffered for it. There were, however, other compensations. A relative newcomer to the tax-haven industry—it passed the International Business Companies Act No. 10 only in 1996—it had swiftly earned a reputation for efficiency and discretion. As a sovereign nation, it was unaffected by American and European regulations, and the Act made it a criminal offense to reveal personal information, expressly including information about criminality. There were no exchange controls on fund movements, no statutory oversight of businesses operating in its bailiwick. Thirty miles long, half as wide, the island boasted dense forests, valleys, and waterfalls, along with a rugged shoreline. Though it had only seventy thousand inhabitants, many of whom lived in the capital city of Roseau, its electrical and communications infrastructure was of an unusually high standard. Ecologists regularly complained about the various antennae placed on top of mountains in the major forest preserves. Elsewhere, indicator lights annoyed scuba divers. For them, such signs of modernity violated a cherished illusion of Edenic isolation.

Belknap had no such illusions. Nor was he in any mood to admire the tropical luxuriance of the place. Immediately upon arriving, he and Walt Sachs made their way to a shacklike structure that was about three hundred yards from Melville Hall, the main airport. A bright yellow logo identified the outfit as Island Rent-a-Car.

“My name is Henry Giles,” said Belknap. “I reserved a four-wheel-drive.” He had removed the dental appliances, but his mouth still ached.

“The four-by-four got wrecked, mon,” the man behind the counter said in a melodious lilt. “Got wrecked in Carnaval last January. Never quite worked since then.”

“Do you often let people reserve cars that don’t work?” Sachs spoke up. The long trip had not put him in a good mood.

“Musta been a mix-up. Sometime my wife answer the phone, you know. And she ain’t been right herself since the 1976 hurricane.” Belknap gave the man a closer look and realized he was considerably older than he seemed at first glance. His head was smooth-shaven and gleamed in the tropical heat, his skin tarry black, almost viscous-looking.

“What can you give me, my friend?”

“I got a Mazda. Two-wheel-drive, I’d guess you’d say, though I’m not sure it’s always so many as two.”

“What do you drive?”

“Me, mon? I drive that old Jeep over there.” He pronounced “over there” as “ober der.”

“How much to rent?”

The man made a whistling sound of disapproval and deliberation, sucking air through his gapped front teeth. “But those are my wheels.”

“How much to make them mine?”

The rent-a-car man made him part with two hundred dollars, U.S., before handing over the keys to his Jeep.

“So where you going, mon?” the man asked as he pocketed the cash. “What you come to see in dis island paradise?”

Belknap shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to see the Boiling Lake.” The Boiling Lake—a geothermal oddity, the result of a flooded fumarole—was one of the island’s better-known attractions.

“You in luck, then. It don’t always boil, see. Most of last year, it just steamed, mon. But this year it’s mighty hot. You best watch yourself around it.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

Once they were on the road, headed south toward Roseau, Walt’s already sour mood grew worse. “You’re gonna get me killed with this goddamn G.I. Joe business,” he whined. “At least you can defend yourself.”

Belknap gave him a look but didn’t respond.

Fruited branches—limes, bananas, guava fruit peeping through thick waxy leaves—brushed by them as they drove, the suspensionless Jeep amplifying every bump in the road. The landscape was as verdant as any Belknap had ever seen.

“Know what?” Walt pouted. “I’m beginning to think your boot ROM has a bad checksum.”

“I’m guessing that, where you come from, them’s fightin’ words,” Belknap replied heavily.

“Where are we headed, exactly?”

“The Valley of Desolation,” replied Belknap.

“You’re kidding,” Walt said

“Look at a map.”

“You’re not kidding,” Sachs said, and sighed. The ten-hour trip—they had changed at San Juan to a small prop plane—left them both feeling soiled and weary.

“Privex is in Roseau,” Walt said primly.

“Wrong. That’s just a P.O. box. The actual facility is just above the village of Morne Prosper.”

“How do you even know that?”

“Walt, my friend. This is what I do. I’m a finder. Privex is on the lee side of that mountain, because it’s not just dependent on the island’s generous fiber-optic supply. It also has a cluster of satellite dishes sucking up Internet transmissions from the sky.”

“But how—”

“Because deliveries must be made. These routers and servers and hubs and switches—all the bits and pieces of the whole information architecture—need to be replaced on some schedule. They don’t last forever.”

“Got it. So when EMC delivers parts for the Connectrix, someone has to get those parts to the facility. What telecom folks call the last-mile problem.”

“Cisco, actually. They’re using something called the Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine.”

“But how—”

“Did I know they’d order one? I didn’t. So I ordered one for them. Phoned the top network hardware companies, said I was calling from Dominica, gave them the P.O. box, and tried to place an order for half a million dollars’ worth of application servers and such. Got a hit at Cisco. Long story short, I found out that they’d hired a helicopter company to do the delivery to Dominica. So I called the copter company.”

“And that’s how you got location.”

“Long story short,” Belknap repeated.

“Incredible.”

“Like I said, this is what I do.”

“So where’s this place again?”

“Perched up high above the Roseau Valley.”

“Hence the Jeep,” Walt said. “To drive up that mountain.”

“We’re hiking. It’s safer. A Jeep in the village is likely to attract scrutiny. Make it harder to arrive at the facility unnoticed.”

“I guess that means going by helicopter is out of the question. Jeepers creepers. This trip is not as advertised.”

“No cruise, either,” Belknap snapped. “Sorry. You can apply for a refund afterward.”

“Oh, crap. Look, I’ll be in a better mood after I’ve eaten and showered.”

“Not on,” Belknap said. “No time to stop.”

“You’re kidding,” Walt said, running a hand through his brown-and-gray hair. His eyes looked even more irritated than usual as he shot Belknap a look. “You’re…not kidding.”

Belknap glanced at his watch again. Time was indeed running short: Andrea’s life was in the balance. Genesis could have her killed at any moment.

If she hadn’t been killed already.

Belknap’s stomach clenched; he could not allow himself even to consider the possibility. He had to hold himself together.

Why had Genesis grabbed her? Perhaps there was something she knew, some detail that she didn’t even know was significant—but that he might. Or perhaps—possibly a more hopeful thought—it was evidence of desperation on the part of Belknap’s shadowy adversary. Yet where was she now? What had Genesis planned for her? He refused to think about the nightmarish scenarios for which Genesis was notorious. He had to force himself to remain in the present. Simply getting through the next few hours would be difficult enough.

One foot in front of the other.

The ground was boggy in places, slick and mucky in others, and the ascent grew only steeper the farther they traveled. A sulfurous smell seeped from volcanic fissures. Ropelike vines dangled across the paths. Hundred-foot-tall gommier trees towered overhead, their intertwined branches forming a canopy that filtered out most of the sunlight. The two hiked with their heads down. At one point, Walt yelped. Belknap whirled around to see a gigantic frog, perched on a stump with a pelt of fluorescent green moss.

“They call that ‘mountain chicken,’” Belknap explained. “It’s a delicacy.”

“If I ever see that in a bucket of Popeye’s, I’m suing.” They were only a third of the way up and Walt was already gasping for breath. “I still don’t see why we’re not driving up this way,” he grumbled.

Ten minutes later, Sachs begged for a rest. Belknap agreed to a three-minute break, but for a reason of his own. For the past several hundred yards, he had a nagging sense that they were being followed. In all likelihood it was simply the sound of forest fauna disturbed by their presence. Yet if there were human footfalls in the distance, he would be able to hear better if they kept still for a few minutes.

He heard nothing—yet that was not entirely reassuring. If someone were following them, a skilled pursuer would try to match footfalls with them and remain motionless while they were motionless. No, dammit, you’re imagining things.

“Keep an eye out for snakes,” Belknap warned Sachs as they resumed their hike.

“All I see are lizards and mayflies,” Sachs said, panting. “And not enough lizards to deal with the mayflies.”

“A good deal for both the lizards and the mayflies, when you think about it.”

“So it’s just people who get the short end of the stick,” the tech huffed. After a while, he said. “I’ve been thinking more about what you’ve told me about Genesis.”

“I should hope so.”

“Nah, I mean, just the way that nobody’s ever seen the fellow, the way he-she-it communicates only electronically. It’s like we’re dealing with an avatar.”

“An avatar? That’s something Indian, right?”

“Well, originally, yeah. Like, Krishnu is an avatar of Vishnu, an advanced soul who takes on a physical incarnation to teach less-advanced souls. But nowadays, people who play computer games use it to talk about their online alter egos.”

“Their what?”

“Like a screen name?”

“Well, that’s just the start. Because these characters can be very textured, very complicated, with a whole history and reputation that affects the strategies that other players are going to use with them. You’d be surprised how sophisticated online computer games can be these days.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Belknap said, “if I ever become a quadriplegic shut-in. Otherwise, I gotta say I find the real world pretty damn challenging enough.”

“Reality’s overrated,” Sachs said, still trying to catch his breath.

“Maybe. But it’ll burn you if you don’t watch out for it.”

“You trying to tell me that the Boiling Lake is on the way?”

“Not far, actually,” Belknap said. “But it’s no joke. People have gotten severely scalded there, even died. The temperature can really soar. It’s no goddamn hot tub.”

“And I was so looking forward to taking a cooling dip there,” Sachs replied sourly.

It was past midnight by the time they heard wind chimes and realized that they had reached the village. From a distance, they saw a chute of white water, a narrow, nearly three-hundred-foot-high waterfall. A breeze cooled them a little. Then they sat together on a flat mesa-like rise. Glinting in the moonlight, a cluster of large satellite dishes looked like a floral bouquet from another planet.

“So they’ve set up a satellite-based counter-net,” Sachs said, marvelingly. “A virtual private network. That’s top-of-the-line equipment from Hughes Network Systems.”

“What kind of security, do you know?” Sachs couldn’t quite keep a tremble from his voice.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea, from my researches,” said Belknap.

“An electric fence?”

“Not in a jungle like this. Too much wildlife. Everything from manicou to iguanas to feral dogs—you wouldn’t get a security barrier, you’d get a goddamn barbecue. Same reason a perimeter alarm’s no good. It would be triggered three times an hour.”

“So there’s, what, a gunman inside?”

“Nope. The guys who run this place believe in technology. They’re going to have a state-of-the-art motion detector, that sort of thing—which you can’t have if you’ve got some night watchman in the place. Trouble is, the night watchman might get drunk, or fall asleep, or take a bribe—all problems that don’t afflict the technological solution. That’s how they think.”

“That’s how I’d think,” Sachs said. “I’d wire up a detect-and-delete heuristic. How do we deal with that?”

“There’s a lot of heat in that place, a lot of sensitive equipment. Ergo, there’s got to be a powerful cooling system, too.” Belknap pointed toward some aluminum ductwork on the roof, a wide hood with a vertical grill. “The place is practically windowless. Take a look. There’s a condenser unit just outside the rear door, and a fan, so cool air is forced in.” He pointed. “That’s the other end of the ventilation system—it’s where the warm air is pushed out. Wide ductwork to minimize resistance. So we get on the roof, we unscrew the grill, and we wriggle down.”

“And then the alarm goes off.”

“You got it.”

“Which, if standard security protocols are followed,” warned Sachs, “will kick the machinery into autodelete mode in about fifteen seconds. All files totally erased. A place like Privex would rather risk losing data than leak it.”

“Which means we need to work fast. Unplug the brain before it can activate the erase procedure. That’s the key. The guys who run this place live in town. It’ll take them half an hour to get up here. It’s the machines we need to outsmart.”

“Now what? Because I’m not up for any derring-do, okay?”

“All you need to do is wait for me to open the back door, and then scoot right on in.”

“And how you’re going to do that?”

“Watch and learn,” Belknap grunted.

Belknap removed a rope ladder from his backpack and a two-foot piece of metal tubing. He extended the tubing—it telescoped to several times its original length—and twisted it several times until two hooks protruded from it. He scanned the facility’s roofline until he found a place where a white pipe extended along the top of the building’s nearly flat roof, and he flung the hooked tube toward it. It caught with a clank; the nylon ladder now dangled from it like a long black shawl. He tested its grip with a few tugs, then scaled it rapidly.

Now, on the roof, he knelt before the ventilation grate and, with a wide screwdriver from his kit, removed the flat heads from all four corners. Belknap laid the grate gently on the roof. A stale smell emanated from the wide aluminum duct. The flow rate was high enough to produce a very faint breeze.

Which narrowed unexpectedly. His hands reached forward, seeking purchase, but slid back on what had become a slippery, almost greasy surface. Too late, he realized that the jointed section had connected ducting of two different standards, two different widths. He breathed in, and found that the dimensions of the duct prevented his chest from expanding fully. Only shallow breaths were possible. A primal sense of claustrophobia began to creep up on him. He moved a few feet further, straight down now. He had thought he would have to strain to control his rate of descent. Instead, he found the walls of the duct pressing against his chest. He had to struggle simply to move. His cell phone, in a breast pocket of his tunic, now gouged painfully into his ribs. He worked it free, and then it slipped from his grip, falling and smashing on some hard unseen surface below him.

Would it trigger the motion detector? Evidently not; it was too small. His own problem was that he was too big. He was effectively trapped.

Trapped.

Panic was the one thing he could not afford. Yet now trivial thoughts were starting to loom large in his mind—such as the sense that he could not know whether his eyes were closed or not in the pitch darkness. He reminded himself that he couldn’t be any more than twelve feet from the end. Then his mind began to race. Sachs was a civilian, had no expertise relevant to the physical world. If Belknap were stuck here, Sachs would have no idea how to get him out. He would remain here all night. And who knew what fate would befall him if he was found by whatever security goons Privex employed?

His fear had triggered sweating, and the sweating, he dimly sensed, would help smooth his passage. A cheap irony. He exhaled fully, reducing the diameter of his chest, and wriggled further, like a snake or worm, propelled by small movements from all his limbs, even his fingers. He gulped for air—and once more felt the sheet metal pressing against his rib cage. If he got stuck, could he back up somehow? He felt entombed, buried alive.

A hundred alternate entrance routes filled his head amid clouds of regret. He was wheezing now, his breath reduced to a whistling stridor, his very alveoli constricted by stress hormones. When he was a young child he had experienced episodes of asthma, and he never forgot what it was like. It was as if you had been sprinting and then were forced to breathe through a straw. There was air, but not enough, and somehow the insufficiency seemed worse than none at all. He had not felt like that for decades, but it was how he felt now.

Goddammit!

He wriggled another yard, slick with perspiration, blood pounding in his ears, pressure mounting in his chest. Snug as a bug in a rug. And then his stretched-out hand touched something irregular. A grate. At the other end. He pressed at it and felt it yield slightly. Just slightly, yet enough to give him heart. Now he banged at it with the heel of his hand—and he heard it fall clanging onto the floor.

A second later, he heard a loud, piercing beeping noise.

Oh, Jesus—the motion detector had already been triggered while he was still trapped in this infernal metal tube, his hips bruised further with every snaking move. The alarm noise, rhythmic, mindless, ceaseless, grew subtly louder with each beep. Soon, no doubt, the beeping would give way to a steady whine, and the security system would be activated. A million or so e-mails erased. The journey here had been in vain. Their last lead was about to be destroyed.

He would have screamed if he had only been able to get enough air into his lungs.

Andrea Bancroft shuddered as she remembered Jared Rinehart’s lynxlike gaze, the abrupt way he slipped from persona to persona, multiple personalities that were each under his tight control. His gifts for deception were frightening. Yet the glimpse she’d had into his true self was even more frightening. To him, Belknap was an instrument, but something more as well; he had an unwholesome fixation on the man he had so cunningly manipulated. At the same time, it was clear, he feared Genesis as much as she and Todd did.

What was the real reason for that? Why was she here?

Andrea Bancroft found herself pacing, a caged animal, struggling to keep hope flickering in her breast. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—it was the mantra of a Spanish literature teacher she’d once had, an old campaigner who revered the prewar communists and Republicans. She recalled a bit of verse from the Spanish poet Rafael Garcia Adeva, whose works she had been required to translate:

A physical impossibility. Yet a prison was not made up of walls and doors alone. There were people, and where there were people, surely, there was the possibility of the unexpected. She recalled the pike-eyed stare of the guard: It’s only the sheerest professionalism that stops me from raping you within an inch of your life and maybe an inch or so beyond. Her eyes returned to the fluorescent light by the door, its hateful sterile glare calling to mind an interrogator’s lamp.

A prison that was not a prison. There was a slightly makeshift air about some of the facilities. Though the commode was prison standard, the ancient bathtub was not. The ceiling light fixture near the door was within reach; in a standard prison, it would have been behind a cage. She could probably kill herself if she wanted to—again, not standard prison outfitting. The guard who had brought her “chow”—a man with hairy forearms, a scrubbed bronzed forehead, a dense, close-cropped black beard tight on his jaw—had carried not the washable tray of a large institution but a foil tray from the kind of frozen dinner sold at supermarkets. She had washed it out simply to give herself something to do; they would retrieve it, no doubt, whenever the next scheduled visit was.

She decided to fill the tub; she inserted the rubber stopper and twisted both taps all the way. The water that poured from the faucet was flecked with rust, evidence of disuse. As the tub filled, she sat on the cot, her fingers starting to tear at the heavy-gauge foil of the dinner tray in idle agitation, and her eyes once more settled on the glaring fluorescent fixture by the door.

Then she looked down at the foil strip in her hand, and she had another.

Sixty-three goddamn years old, Will Garrison thought, and his field skills had never been sharper. He had parked the Toyota Land Cruiser in the village, behind a liquor store fronted with sun-clouded Plexiglas. He had stopped drinking ten years before—hell, he was probably in better shape now than then. Then he had started the climb.

On the trip over, he had studied the NSA satellite imagery of Dominica, magnified to the point where you could see the individual fronds of the palm trees, the indicator lights on the AT&T antennae. From this bird’s-eye view, it was easy to see the Privex facility. Thick black-clad cables converged on the small bunker-like structure; round silvery dishes clustered overhead.

Dammit if Castor didn’t have balls. Garrison had to give the bastard that much credit as he watched him clamber up to the facility’s roof. Castor was going to unlock a Fabergé egg with a goddamn crowbar. Amazing. Now, why didn’t we think of that?

Garrison concealed himself behind a profusion of Caribbean elephant ears, the giant leaves bejeweled with glimmering drops of evening dew. It was just a matter of waiting. He had taken some Motrin as insurance, but so far his knees weren’t even aching. Belknap was in the building. Before long, he would be leaving it. But he wouldn’t get far. Just when Todd Belknap thought that he had succeeded, he was safe, no one knew he was there, his defenses were relaxed…that was when the Hound would be put down.

Once Belknap was taken care of, Garrison might even take an extra day or so to enjoy the island. They said the Boiling Lake was something to see.

He glanced at his watch, peered through the scope, and settled into a zone of watchful waiting.

It would not be long now.

Fighting to suppress his panic response, Belknap expelled the last ounce of breath from his body, curled his fingers around the rim where the grate had been, and pulled himself through. His head and then his torso slid out at a painfully awkward angle, and he collapsed on a hard floor gasping for breath.

He was in.

As the infernal beep beep beep continued to grow louder and louder, he forced himself to his feet and looked around in the dim silvery light, the space brightened by hundreds of small illuminated LED displays. Fifteen seconds before autodelete. He raced over to a large metal structure that looked like a giant Sub-Zero refrigerator—the beeping was coming from it—and found a thick power cord behind it. It was as thick as a snake, and required a surprising amount of force to pull it out of the wall plug.

After a brief pause, the beeping resumed.

Oh, Christ—a battery backup, no doubt, with enough power to run the autodelete program.

How many seconds remained? Six? Five?

The beeping stopped.

Blessed silence. Belknap’s legs were wobbly for a moment as he made his way to the door. He retracted the four-point dead-bolt system that secured the steel-clad door to the cinderblock framing, opened it, and whistled softly.

Sachs darted inside the door. “Mother of God,” he said. “They’ve got enough power to run the entire U.S. defense network. God, I’d love to take this for a spin.”

“We’re not joyriding, Walt. We’re searching for a goddamn electronic pin in an electronic haystack. So get your magnifying glass out. I need a digital fingerprint. I’ll take a partial. But I’m not going home empty-handed.”

Walt wandered around, poking among tall racks of servers and routers, boxes that looked like DVD players but that sprouted hundreds of tiny, brightly colored wires.

Finally, he stood stock-still, contemplating what looked like a large black cooler. “Change of plans,” said the computer maven.

“Speak.” Belknap shot him a questioning glance.

“How much room you got in that duffel bag of yours?”

“Are you improvising, Walt?”

“Is that a problem?”

“No,” Belknap said. “It’s the one damn sign of hope so far.”

Sachs ran a hand along his close-cropped temple. “I’m staring at a five-terabyte storage system. Give me a minute and I’ll give you a backup tape of the whole goddamn thing.”

“Walt, you’re a genius,” Belknap said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Sachs replied.

If you want a job done right, he thought to himself again, you’ve got to do it yourself. Wasn’t it the truth.

Sweet dreams, “Henry Giles.” Farewell, Castor. Bye-bye, Belknap. From behind him he thought he heard the noise of a broken twig or branch, as if from a footfall. But that made no sense, did it?

It couldn’t be Belknap—he was still inside, and so was the amateur he’d dragged in with him. Who else knew he was here? Belknap had no backup, no team or support personnel.

He stole a quick glance behind him. Nothing. There was nothing at all.

He was moving his finger back behind the trigger guard when he heard another sound and craned his head again.

Suddenly he felt the most god-awful terrific pressure around his neck—a searing band biting into his flesh, and then a sense that his head was going to explode from too much blood.

Finally he caught a glimpse of his assailant. “You!” he gasped, but the word died in his mouth. And then the darkness of the night was replaced with a deeper, truer blackness, which was the extinction of consciousness itself.

“Silly rabbit,” Jared Rinehart murmured to himself as he rewrapped the catgut cord of his garrote around one of its wooden handles. An old-fashioned device, and one of the few that had not been improved upon by modern technology.

Rinehart dragged the body downhill, the sound inaudible above the noise of the million buzzing midges and stone flies and the piping of little tree frogs, until he reached a trail of reddish volcanic soil. He removed and folded Garrison’s clothes, placed them in a plastic trash bag, and stowed the bag in his rucksack. He could simply dispose of the corpse in the underbrush, but there were better options.

Soon a sulfurous miasma become pungently evident, and the vegetation thinned, gradually giving way to slippery mats of lichens, moss, and grasses. Scattered vents and mud pots released wisps of steam that shone silver in the filtered moonlight.

Ten minutes later, walking by the intermittent light of a half-moon in a partly cloudy sky, Rinehart looked past a boulder and saw a milky-looking circle of water mostly obscured by steam. It was the lake. He heaved the body—even in the available light it was obviously an unpleasant specimen, with its withered dugs, varicosities, and dorsal pelt of coarse graying hair—over a ridge of crumbling pumice. It bounced down the steep declivity and plunged into the churning, bubbling waters,

After a few hours of simmering amid the harsh sulfur fumes, its flesh would peel away from the skeleton. Teeth and bones would drift to the bottom of a two-hundred-foot-deep lake. One could not send divers into water of its temperature, even if the authorities had reason to do so, and Rinehart very much doubted that they would. He was pleased with himself. It was quite a creative way to keep the Cons Ops boys guessing.

He flipped open his cell phone and phoned a number in the continental United States. Reception was crystal-clear.

“Everything’s on schedule,” he said. He paused, listening, before he spoke again. “Will Garrison? No worries. Let’s just say he found himself in hot water.”