Chapter One

Five minutes to three in the afternoon. Exactly sixty-one hours before it happened. The lawyer drove in and parked in the empty lot. There was an inch of new snow on the ground, so he spent a minute fumbling in the foot well until his overshoes were secure. Then he got out and turned his collar up and walked to the visitors' entrance. There was a bitter wind out of the north. It was thick with fat lazy flakes. There was a storm sixty miles away. The radio had been full of it.

The lawyer got in through the door and stamped the snow off his feet. There was no line. It was not a regular visiting day. There was nothing ahead of him except an empty room and an empty X-ray belt and a metal detector hoop and three prison guards standing around doing nothing. He nodded to them, even though he didn't know them. But he considered himself on their side, and they on his. Prison was a binary world. Either you were locked up, or you weren't. They weren't. He wasn't.

Yet.

He took a gray plastic bin off the top of a teetering stack and folded his overcoat into it. He took off his suit coat and folded it and laid it on top of the overcoat. It was hot in the prison. Cheaper to burn a little extra oil than to give the inmates two sets of clothes, one for the summer and one for the winter. He could hear their noise ahead of him, the clatter of metal and concrete and the random crazy yells and the screams and the low grumble of other disaffected voices, all muted by doglegged corridors and many closed doors.

He emptied his pants pockets of keys, and wallet, and cell phone, and coins, and nested those clean warm personal items on top of his suit coat. He picked up the gray plastic bin. Didn't carry it to the X-ray belt. Instead he hefted it across the room to a small window in a wall. He waited there and a woman in uniform took it and gave him a numbered ticket in exchange for it.

He braced himself in front of the metal detector hoop. He patted his pockets and glanced ahead, expectantly, as if waiting for an invitation. Learned behavior, from air travel. The guards let him stand there for a minute, a small, nervous man in his shirt sleeves, empty-handed. No briefcase. No notebook. Not even a pen. He was not there to advise. He was there to be advised. Not to talk, but to listen, and he sure as hell wasn't going to put what he heard anywhere near a piece of paper.

The guards beckoned him through. A green light and no beep, but still the first guard wanded him and the second patted him down. The third escorted him deeper into the complex, through doors designed never to be open unless the last and the next were closed, and around tight corners designed to slow a running man's progress, and past thick green glass windows with watchful faces behind.

The lobby had been institutional, with linoleum on the floor and mint green paint on the walls and fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. And the lobby had been connected to the outside, with gusts of cold air blowing in when the door was opened, and salt stains and puddles of snowmelt on the floor. The prison proper was different. It had no connection to the outside. No sky, no weather. No attempt at décor. It was all raw concrete, already rubbed greasy where sleeves and shoulders had touched it, still pale and dusty where they hadn't. Underfoot was grippy gray paint, like the floor of an auto enthusiast's garage. The lawyer's overshoes squeaked on it.

There were four interview rooms. Each was a windowless concrete cube divided exactly in half by a wall-to-wall desk-height counter with safety glass...

Zabul Province, Afghanistan

Present day

They formed on the plain at dawn.

Man and beast and machine spread across the hard brown dirt in a line one hundred meters across. There were horses and jeeps and pickup trucks with heavy machine guns mounted on the flatbeds. They numbered only fifty men, and the villagers counted one hundred times that, but they were committed men. Warriors united under the banner of heaven. Sons of Tamerlane.

The commander stood in the rear of his Hilux pickup, binoculars to his eyes, surveying his target. He was tall and formidable, and he wore his black wool turban piled high on his head, the trailing folds wrapped tightly around his face to guard against the bitter cold. His name was Sultan Haq. He was thirty years old. He had been imprisoned for six years, twenty-three hours a day, in a small, clean cage in a hot place far, far away. In deference to his name, and to his habit of growing his fingernails long and keeping them as sharp as a bird of prey's talons, his jailers had called him "the Hawk."

The Hawk studied the cluster of low-slung mud buildings situated among the foothills two kilometers away. Through the mist, he could make out the town bazaar. Already shopkeepers were at work setting out their wares. Vendors cooked meat over brazier fires. Children and dogs ran up and down alleyways.

He lowered his binoculars and looked at his men. Arrayed on either side of him were six vehicles identical to his own, battered Toyota four-by-fours with mounted .30 caliber machine guns. His men crouched at the base of the armament, Kalashnikovs clutched and ready, spare clips tucked into the leather bandoliers strung across their chests. Several among them carried old Soviet-era RPGs. In between the trucks, twenty or more horses moved anxiously, steam issuing from their nostrils, hooves pawing the ground. Their riders held their mounts at bay, waiting for the signal.

The men wore no common uniform. Their clothes were ragged and dirty. But they were an army all the same. They had trained and drilled together. They had fought and been blooded. They were without mercy.

Sultan Haq raised a hand into the air. As one, the gunners cocked the machine guns. The sound of metal striking metal reverberated across the barren landscape. The horses whinnied madly. He closed his fist, andhis men rose to their feet and let out a fierce cry. Throwing back his head, Haq joined them, feeling the spirit of his ancestors rise within him. Closing his eyes, he envisioned the rampaging horde. He saw thundering hooves and flashing swords and smelled acrid smoke filling the air. He heard the screams of the vanquished and tasted death on his tongue.

He opened his eyes and returned to the present. Once more he was at home on the flat lands of eastern Afghanistan. He pounded his fist on the roof of the cab, and the pickup roared to life and accelerated across the fallow fields. In a few short months, these same fields would come to life as the poppy awoke, grew, and bloomed. Last year these fields had yielded three thousand kilos of raw opium, earning its farmers millions of U.S. dollars-more than enough to purchase stores and weapons to equip a thousand of his men.

The village must be brought under the Taliban's white flag. It was a question of economics, not religion.

A bullet cut the air above Haq's head, and a split second later the crack of the gunshot reached his ear. Dispassionately, he watched as the villagers armed themselves and formed a hasty skirmish line....

Chapter 1
It came by mail, regular postage, the old-fashioned way since the Judge was almost eighty and distrusted modern devices. Forget e-mail and even faxes. He didn't use an answering machine and had never been fond of the telephone. He pecked out his letters with both index fingers, one feeble key at a time, hunched over his old Underwood manual on a rolltop desk under the portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Judge's grandfather had fought with Forrest at Shiloh and throughout the Deep South, and to him no figure in history was more revered. For thirty-two years, the Judge had quietly refused to hold court on July 13, Forrest's birthday.

It came with another letter, a magazine, and two invoices, and was routinely placed in the law school mailbox of Professor Ray Atlee. He recognized it immediately since such envelopes had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember. It was from his father, a man he too called the Judge.

Professor Atlee studied the envelope, uncertain whether he should open it right there or wait a moment. Good news or bad, he never knew with the Judge, though the old man was dying and good news had been rare. It was thin and appeared to contain only one sheet of paper; nothing unusual about that. The Judge was frugal with the written word, though he'd once been known for his windy lectures from the bench.

It was a business letter, that much was certain. The Judge was not one for small talk, hated gossip and idle chitchat, whether written or spoken. Ice tea with him on the porch would be a refighting of the Civil War, probably at Shiloh, where he would once again lay all blame for the Confederate defeat at the shiny, untouched boots of General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, a man he would hate even in heaven, if by chance they met there.

He'd be dead soon. Seventy-nine years old with cancer in his stomach. He was overweight, a diabetic, a heavy pipe smoker, had a bad heart that had survived three attacks, and a host of lesser ailments that had tormented him for twenty years and were now finally closing in for the kill. The pain was constant. During their last phone call three weeks earlier, a call initiated by Ray because the Judge thought long distance was a rip-off, the old man sounded weak and strained. They had talked for less than two minutes.

The return address was gold-embossed: Chancellor Reuben V. Atlee, 25th Chancery District, Ford County Courthouse, Clanton, Mississippi. Ray slid the envelope into the magazine and began walking. Judge Atlee no longer held the office of chancellor. The voters had retired him nine years earlier, a bitter defeat from which he would never recover. Thirty-two years of diligent service to his people, and they tossed him out in favor of a younger man with radio and television ads. The Judge had refused to campaign. He claimed he had too much work to do, and, more important, the people knew him well and if they wanted to reelect him then they would do so. His strategy had seemed arrogant to many. He carried Ford County but got shellacked in the other five.

It took three years to get him out of the courthouse. His office on the second floor had survived a fire and had missed two renovations. The Judge had not allowed them to touch it with paint or hammers. When the county supervisors finally convinced him that he had to leave or be evicted, he boxed up three decades' worth of useless files and notes and dusty old books and took them home and stacked them in his study. When the study was full, he lined them down the hallways into the dining room and even the foyer.

Ray nodded to a student who...

From the book

SITTING IN THE control center of Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light's sprawling complex on the East River in Queens, New York, the morning supervisor frowned at the pulsing red words on his computer screen.

Below them was frozen the exact time: 11:20:20:003 a.m.

He lowered his cardboard coffee cup, blue and white with stiff depictions of Greek athletes on it, and sat up in his creaky swivel chair.

The power company control center employees sat in front of individual workstations, like air traffic controllers. The large room was brightly lit and dominated by a massive flat-screen monitor, reporting on the flow of electricity throughout the power grid known as the Northeastern Interconnection, which provided electrical service in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut. The architecture and decor of the control center were quite modern--if the year were 1960.

The supervisor squinted up at the board, which showed the juice arriving from generating plants around the country: steam turbines, reactors and the hydroelectric dam at Niagara Falls. In one tiny portion of the spaghetti depicting these electrical lines, something was wrong. A red circle was flashing.

"What's up?" the supervisor asked. A gray-haired man with a taut belly under his short-sleeved white shirt and thirty years' experience in the electricity business, he was mostly curious. While critical-incident indicator lights came on from time to time, actual critical incidents were very rare.

A young technician replied, "Says we have total breaker separation. MH-Twelve."

Dark, unmanned and grimy, Algonquin Consolidated Substation 12, located in Harlem--the "MH" for Manhattan--was a major area substation. It received 138,000 volts and fed the juice through transformers, which stepped it down to 10 percent of that level, divided it up and sent it on its way.

Additional words now popped onto the big screen, glowing red beneath the time and the stark report of the critical failure.

The supervisor typed on his computer, recalling the days when this work was done with radio and telephone and insulated switches, amid a smell of oil and brass and hot Bakelite. He read the dense, complicated scroll of text. He spoke softly, as if to himself, "The breakers opened? Why? The load's normal."

Another message appeared.

"We've got load rerouting," somebody called unnecessarily.

In the suburbs and countryside the grid is clearly visible--those bare overhead high-tension wires and power poles and service lines running into your house. When a line goes down, there's little difficulty finding and fixing the problem. In many cities, though, like New York, the electricity flows underground, in insulated cables. Because the insulation degrades after time and suffers groundwater damage, resulting in shorts and loss of service, power companies rely on double or even triple redundancy in the grid. When substation MH-12 went down, the computer automatically began filling customer demand by rerouting the juice from other locations.

"No dropouts, no brownouts," another tech called.

Electricity in the grid is like water coming into a house from a single main pipe and flowing out through many open faucets. When one is...

From the book

GUANGZHOU, CHINA

It hurt to blink.

The light stabbed at his eyes, shooting daggers of pain to the back of his skull. When he shut them an aurora of black and white spots lingered.

Albert Payne had never been one to partake liberally in alcohol; not that he was a complete teetotaler either. He'd been hungover a handful of times during his fifty-six years, but those few occasions had been the result of unintended excess, never a deliberate intent to get drunk. So although he had little experience with which to compare it, his pounding head seemed a clear indicator that he had indeed drunk to excess. He'd have to accept that as so, because he could remember little about the prior evening. Each factory owner, along with the local officials in China's Guangdong Province, had insisted on a reception for Payne and the delegation, no doubt believing their hospitality would ensure a favorable report. Payne recalled sipping white wine, but after three weeks the receptions had blurred together, and he could not separate one from the other.

Coffee.

The thought popped into his head and he seemed to recall that caffeine eased a hangover. Maybe so, but locating the magic elixir would require that he stand, dress, leave his hotel room, and ride the elevator to the lobby. At the moment, just lifting his head felt as if it would require a crane.

Forcing his eyelids open, he followed floating dust motes in a stream of light to an ornate ceiling of crisscrossing wooden beams and squares of decorative wallpaper. He blinked, pinched the bridge of his nose, then looked again, but the view had not changed. A cold sweat enveloped him. The ceiling in his room at the Shenzhen Hotel had no beams or wallpaper; he'd awakened the previous three mornings to a flat white ceiling.

He shifted his gaze. Cheap wood paneling and a dingy, burnt-orange carpet: this was not his hotel room and, by simple deduction, this could not be his bed.

He slid his hand along the sheet, fingertips brushing fabric until encountering something distinctly different, soft and warm. His heart thumped hard in his chest. He turned his head. Dark hair flowed over alabaster shoulders blemished by two small moles. The woman lay on her side, the sheet draped across the gentle slope of her rounded hip.

Starting to hyperventilate, Payne forced deep breaths from his diaphragm. Now was not the time to panic. Besides, rushing from the room was not an option, not in his present condition, and not without his clothes. Think! The woman had not yet stirred, and judging by her heavy breathing she remained deep asleep, perhaps as hungover as he, perhaps enough that if he didn't panic, Payne might be able to sneak out without waking her, if he could somehow manage to sit up.

He forced his head from the pillow and scanned along the wall to the foot of the bed, spotted a shoe, and felt a moment of great relief that just as quickly became greater alarm. The shoe was not his brown Oxford loafer but a square-toed boot.

Payne bolted upright, causing the room to spin and tilt off-kilter, bringing fleeting, blurred images like a ride on a merry-go-round. The images did not clear until the spinning slowed.

"Good morning, Mr. Payne." The man sat in an armless, slatted wood chair. "You appear to be having a difficult start to your day." Eyes as dark as a crow, the man wore his hair parted in the middle and pulled back off his forehead in a ponytail that extended beyond the collar of his black leather coat.

"Would you care for some water?"

Not...

I sit and stare through the tinted glass walls. On a clear day, I can see the top of the Washington Monument six miles away, but not today. Today is raw and cold, windy and overcast, not a bad day to die. The wind blows the last of the leaves from their branches and scatters them through the parking lot below.Why I am worried about the pain? What's wrong with a little suffering? I've caused more misery than any ten people.

I push a button and Snead appears. He bows and pushes my wheelchair through the door of my apartment, into the marble foyer, down the marble hall, through another door. We're getting closer, but I feel no anxiety.

I've kept the shrinks waiting for over two hours.

We pass my office and I nod at Nicolette, my latest secretary, a darling young thing I'm quite fond of. Given some time, she might become number four.

But there is no time. Only minutes.

A mob is waiting--packs of lawyers and some psychiatrists who'll determine if I'm in my right mind. They are crowded around a long table in my conference room, and when I enter, their conversation stops immediately and everybody stares. Snead situates me on one side of the table, next to my lawyer, Stafford.

There are cameras pointing in all directions, and the technicians scramble to get them focused. Every whisper, every move, every breath will be recorded because a fortune is at stake.

The last will I signed gave little to my children. Josh Stafford prepared it, as always. I shredded it this morning.

I'm sitting here to prove to the world that I am of sufficient mental capacity to make a new will. Once it is proved, the disposition of my assets cannot be questioned.

Directly across from me are three shrinks--one hired by each family. On folded index cards before them someone has printed their names--Dr. Zadel, Dr. Flowe, Dr. Theishen. I study their eyes and faces. Since I am supposed to appear sane, I must make eye contact.

They expect me to be somewhat loony, but I'm about to eat them for lunch.

Stafford will run the show. When everyone is settled and the cameras are ready, he says, "My name is Josh Stafford, and I'm the attorney for Mr. Troy Phelan, seated here to my right."

I take on the shrinks, one at a time, eye to eye, glare to glare, until each blinks or looks away. All three wear dark suits. Zadel and Flowe have scraggly beards. Theishen has a bow tie and looks no more than thirty. The families were given the right to hire anyone they wanted.

Stafford is talking. "The purpose of this meeting is to have Mr. Phelan examined by a panel of psychiatrists to determine his testamentary capacity. Assuming the panel finds him to be of sound mind, then he intends to sign a will which will dispose of his assets upon his death."

Stafford taps his pencil on a one-inch-thick will lying before us. I'm sure the cameras zoom in for a close-up, and I'm sure the very sight of the document sends shivers up and down the spines of my children and their mothers scattered throughout my building.

They haven't seen the will, nor do they have the right to. A will is a private document revealed only after death. The heirs can only speculate as to what it might contain. My heirs have received hints, little lies I've carefully planted.

They've been led to believe that the bulk of my estate will somehow be divided fairly among the children, with generous gifts to the ex-wives. They know this; they can feel it. They've been...

Chapter One
Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of tell-tale signs. Mostly because they're nervous. By definition they're all first-timers.

Israeli counterintelligence wrote the defensive playbook. They told us what to look for. They used pragmatic observation and psychological insight and came up with a list of behavioral indicators. I learned the list from an Israeli amy captain twenty years ago. He swore by it. Therefore I swore by it too, because at the time I was on three weeks' detached duty mostly about a yard from his shoulder, in Israel itself, in Jerusalem, on the West Bank, in Leb anon, sometimes in Syria, sometimes in Jordan, on buses, in stores, on crowded sidewalks. I kept my eyes moving and my mind running free down the bullet points.

Twenty years later I still know the list. And my eyes still move. Pure habit. From another bunch of guys I learned another mantra: Look, don't see, listen, don't hear. The more you engage, the longer you survive.

The list is twelve points long if you're looking at a male suspect. Eleven, if you're looking at a woman. The difference is a fresh shave. Male bombers take off their beards. It helps them blend in. Makes them less suspicious. The result is paler skin on the lower half of the face. No recent exposure to the sun.

But I wasn't interested in shaves.

I was working on the eleven-point list.

I was looking at a woman.

I was riding the subway, in New York City. The 6 train, the Lexington Avenue local, heading uptown, two o'clock in the morning. I had gotten on at Bleecker Street from the south end of the platform into a car that was empty except for five people. Subway cars feel small and intimate when they're full. When they're empty they feel vast and cavernous and lonely. At night their lights feel hotter and brighter, even though they're the same lights they use in the day. They're all the lights there are. I was sprawled on a two-person bench north of the end doors on the track side of the car. The other five passengers were all south of me on the long bench seats, in profile, side on, far from each other, staring blankly across the width of the car, three on the left and two on the right.

The car's number was 7622. I once rode eight stops on the 6 train next to a crazy person who talked about the car we were in with the same kind of enthusiasm that most men reserve for sports or women. Therefore I knew that car number 7622 was an R142A model, the newest on the New York system, built by Kawasaki in Kobe, Japan, shipped over, trucked to the 207th Street yards, craned onto the tracks, towed down to 180th Street and tested. I knew it could run two hundred thousand miles without major attention. I knew its automated announcement system gave instructions in a man's voice and information in a woman's, which was claimed to be a coincidence but was really because the transportation chiefs believed such a division of labor was psychologically compelling. I knew the voices came from Bloomberg TV, but years before Mike became mayor. I knew there were six hundred R142As on the tracks and that each one was a fraction over fifty-one feet long and a little more than eight feet wide. I knew that the no-cab unit like we had been in then and I was in now had been designed to carry a maximum of forty people seated and up to 148 standing. The crazy person had been clear on all that data. I could see for myself that the car's seats were blue plastic, the same shade as a late summer sky or a British Air Force uniform. I could see that its wall panels were molded from graffiti-resistant...

Jaywalker's sitting in Part 30 when it happens. Part 30 is one of the Supreme Court arraignment courtrooms they have down at 100 Centre Street. It's where you go before a judge for the first time after you've been formally charged with a felony. A felony being anything they can give you more than a year for. Like murder, say.

Jaywalker's there for a sentencing. A client of his, a wiseguy-wannabe named Johnny Cantalupo, pleaded guilty to possession six weeks ago, in order to avoid going to prison for sale. It was cocaine, and not that awfully much of it, and Joey's white and had no record to speak of, so the assistant D.A. and the judge had agreed to probation and time served, specifically the two days Joey had spent while he was in the system.

In the system.

Whenever he hears the expression, Jaywalker can't help picturing a huge beast, gobbling up the newly arrested, digesting them for a day or two, and then, well, the rest is a bit vague. Spitting them out? Undigesting them into a courtroom?

Although he was the first lawyer to show up this morning, and Johnny (under penalty of death by Jaywalker) the first defendant, they have to wait to get their case called. A written probation report first has to complete an arduous journey spanning three entire floors of the building, a feat that can take hours, sometimes days or even weeks. Never mind that the report will have no impact whatsoever on the sentence; its presence is mandated by law. In fact, the appearance before the judge this day promises to be a perfunctory one, the precise details of the sentence having been long ago worked out, recited on the record, and promised to the defendant on the sole condition that he show up today, which Johnny dutifully has. Consequently, Jaywalker will barely speak, having no need to convince the judge to do anything or refrain from doing anything. He's therefore allowed his attention to wander from the half-finished crossword puzzle in his lap to the defendants who one by one are brought out to face the judge, stand beside their lawyers, and hear the charges they've been indicted on by a grand jury.

The first thing that strikes Jaywalker as out of the ordinary is when the clerk calls a particular case and a lawyer, instead of simply rising from his seat in the audience and quietly making his way up to the defense table, shouts out, "Defendant!" Now thisThis immediately brands him as a civil lawyer, unfamiliar with how they do things over here on the criminal side.

The guy even looks like a civil lawyer, Jaywalker decides. Not just that he's short and bald; those descriptives apply to plenty of criminal lawyers. No, it's more than that. There's something decidedly shifty about him, something just a touch too practiced. Something that suggests ambulance chaser, or fixer. The old term shyster even comes to mind, but Jaywalker immediately banishes it, half forgiving himself only because he himself is half Jewish. Sort of like how African Americans are free to call each other nigger, but others need not apply.

They bring the guy's client out from the door to the pen, and Jaywalker's attention shifts to him. He's a kid, a kid who looks no more than sixteen or seventeen. Tall, though, with good posture for a teen, pale skin and closely-cropped blond hair. A couple of years older and he could be a marine recruit, thinks Jaywalker, or in his first year at West Point. But the thing that really stands out is how good-looking the kid is. Beautiful, almost. Though having grown up in the homophobic 70's, Jaywalker still has a bit of trouble...

Chapter One
Washington, D.C.

Three Weeks Later

Nervous?" asked Eddie Chase, nudging his fiancée as they approached the door.

Nina Wilde fingered the pendant around her neck, her good-luck charm. "Er, yeah. Aren't you?"

"Why? We've met the guy before."

"Yes, but he wasn't the frickin' president then, was he?"

An aide opened the door and ushered them into the Oval Office. They were greeted by applause. Waiting for them were former U.S. Navy admiral Hector Amoros, their current boss at the United Nations' International Heritage Agency; several White House officials and representatives of Congress; the First Lady . . . and Victor Dalton, the president of the United States of America.

"Dr. Wilde!" he said, stepping forward to shake her hand. "And Mr. Chase. Good to see you both again."

"Good to see you again too. Uh, Mr. President," Nina added quickly.

Chase shook hands next. "Thank you, sir."

The others took their seats while Nina, Chase and Dalton remained standing. Dalton waited for everyone to settle before speaking, half turning to face the White House photographer recording the event as much as his guests of honor. "Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "distinguished members of Congress, members of my cabinet. It is truly a great privilege to present this award to a woman whose unflinching bravery in the face of extreme danger has saved countless lives, both in America and elsewhere in the world. And at the same time, a woman whose dedication to science and discovery has changed our view of history forever, restoring to the world long-lost treasures that until now were thought only to be myth. In a way, she is responsible for protecting both our past and our future. I am honored today to introduce Dr. Nina Wilde, the discoverer of the lost city of Atlantis and the buried Tomb of Hercules, and also the savior of this nation from a monstrous terrorist act, and to present her with the highest accolade this office can bestow--the Presidential Medal of Freedom."

Nina blushed, simultaneously fighting the pedantic urge to correct Dalton--Atlantis was the name of the island, not the city--as he carefully took a medal attached to a blue ribbon from a velvet tray. "Dr. Wilde, this nation is in your debt. I would be honored if you would accept this symbol of our eternal gratitude."

"Thank you, Mr. President," she said, lowering her head. Dalton raised the medal and placed it around her neck. He then shook her hand once more before turning her to face the strobing flashes of the camera, leaving her momentarily dazzled. The speech she had worked out earlier melted away to nothing under the onslaught of light and renewed applause. "Thank you," she repeated, struggling to come up with something intelligent to say. "I'm . . . I'm very grateful for this award, this honor. And, um, I'd also like to thank my fiancé, Eddie--" She cringed mentally at that. I'd also like to thank? This isn't the goddamn Oscars!--"without whom I'd probably be, well, dead. Several times over. Thank you. Everyone." Cheeks now as red as her hair, she moved back.

"Dr. Wilde stepped on my toes a little there," said Dalton jovially, raising a polite laugh and making Nina wish the Oval Office had a secret trapdoor she could disappear down. "But yes, the second person we're here to honor today is Eddie Chase"--he gestured for Chase to step forward and take Nina's place--"who as a former member of the United Kingdom's elite Special Air Service has chosen to eschew public recognition for...

Chapter One

Three of them, hard men carrying nylon bags, wearing work jackets, Carhartts and Levis, all of them with facial hair. They walked across the parking structure to the steel security door, heads swiveling, checking the corners and the overheads, steam flowing from their mouths, into the icy air, one of the men on a cell phone.

As they got to the door, it popped open, and a fourth man, who'd been on the other end of the cell-phone call, let them through. The fourth man was tall and thin, dark-complected, with a black brush mustache. He wore a knee-length black raincoat that he'd bought at a Goodwill store two days earlier, and black pants. He scanned the parking structure, saw nothing moving, pulled the door shut, made sure of the lock.

"This way," he snapped. "Yalla."

Inside, they moved fast, reducing their exposure, should someone unexpectedly come along. No one should, at the ass-end of the hospital, at fifteen minutes after five o'clock on a bitterly cold winter morning. They threaded through a maze of service corridors until the tall man said, "Here."

Here was a storage closet. He opened it with a key. Inside, a pile of blue, double-extra-large orderly uniforms sat on a medical cart.

The hard men dumped their coats on the floor, and pulled the uniforms over their street clothes. Not a big disguise, but they weren't meant to be seen close-up — just enough to slip past a video camera. One of them, the biggest one, hopped up on the cart, lay down and said, "Look, I'm dead," and laughed at his joke. The tall man could smell the bourbon on the joker's breath.

"Shut the fuck up," said one of the others, but not in an unkindly way.

The tall man said, "Don't be stupid," and there was nothing kind in his voice. When they were ready, they looked at each other and the tall man pulled a white cotton blanket over the man on the cart, and one of the men said, "Let's do it."

"Check yourself..."

"We don't hurt anyone," the tall man said. The sentiment reflected not compassion, but calculation: robbery got X amount of attention, injuries got X-cubed.

"Yeah, yeah..." One of the men pulled a semi-automatic pistol from his belt, a heavy, blued, no-bullshit Beretta, stolen from the Army National Guard in Milwaukee, checked it, stuck it back in his belt. He said, "Okay? Everybody got his mask? Okay. Let's go."

They stuffed the ski masks into their belts and two hard men pushed the cart into the corridor. The tall man led them further through the narrow tiled hallways, then said, "Here's the camera."

The two men pushing the cart turned sideways, as the tall man told them to, and pushed the cart through a cross-corridor. A security camera peered down the hall at them. If a guard happened to be looking at the monitor at that moment, he would have seen only the backs of two orderlies, and a lump on the cart. The tall man in the raincoat scrambled along, on his hands and knees, on the far side of the cart.

The big man on the cart, looking at the ceiling tiles go by, giggled, "It's like ridin' the tilt-a-whirl."

When they were out of the camera's sight-line, the tall man stood up and led them deeper into the hospital — the three outsiders would never have found the way, by themselves. After two minutes, the tall man handed one of the outsiders a key, indicated a yellow steel door, with no identification.

"This is it?" The leader of the three was skeptical — the door looked like nothing.

"Yes," said the tall man. "This is the side door. When you go in, you'll be right among them. One or two. The front door and service window is closed until six. I'll be around the corner until you call, watching."

He'd be around the corner where he could slip out of sight, if something went wrong.

The other man nodded, asked, "Everybody ready?" The other two muttered, "Yeah," tense now, pulled on the masks, took their pistols out. The leader put the key in the lock and yanked open the door.

***

Weather Karkinnen had taken a half-pill at nine o'clock, knowing that she wouldn't sleep without it. Too much to do, too much to think about. The procedure had been researched, rehearsed, debated, and undoubtedly prayed over. Now the time had come.

Sleep came hard. She kept imagining that first moment, the first cut, the commitment, the parting of the flesh beneath the edge of her scalpel, on a nearly circular path between the skulls of the two babies — but sometime before nine-thirty, she slipped away.

She didn't feel her husband come to bed, at one o'clock in the morning. He took care not to disturb her, undressing in the dark, lying as unmoving as he could, listening to her breathing, until he, too, slipped away.

***

And then her eyes opened.

Pop.

Dark, not quite silent — the furnace running in the winter night. She lifted her head to the clock. Four-thirty. She'd been asleep for seven hours. Eight would have been the theoretical ideal, but she never slept eight. She closed her eyes again, organizing herself, stepping through the upcoming day. At twenty minutes to five, she got out of bed, stretched, and headed to the en-suite bathroom, checking herself: she felt sharp. Excellent. She brushed her teeth, showered, washed and dried her short-cut blond hair.

She'd laid out her clothes the night before. She walked across the bedroom barefoot, in the light of the two digital clocks, picked them up: a thick black-silk jersey and grey wool slacks, and dressy, black-leather square-toed shoes. She would have preferred to wear soft-soled cross-training shoes, like the nurses did, but surgeons didn't dress like nurses. She'd never even told anyone about the gel inner-soles.

She carried her clothes back to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light again, and dressed. When she was ready, she looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad.

Weather might have wished to have been a little taller, for the authority given by height; she might have wished for a chiseled nose. But her husband pointed out that she'd never had a problem giving orders, or having them followed; and that he thought her nose, which she saw as lumpy, was devastatingly attractive, and that any number of men had chased after her, nose and all...

So, not bad.

She grinned at herself, turned to make sure the slacks didn't make her ass look fat — they didn't — switched off the light, opened the bathroom door and tiptoed across the bedroom. Her husband said, in the dark, "Good luck, babe."

"I didn't know you were awake."

"I'm probably more nervous than you are," he said.

She went back to the bed and kissed him on the forehead. "Go back to sleep."

Downstairs in the kitchen, she had two pieces of toast, a cup of instant coffee and a yogurt, got her bag, went out to the car, backed out of the garage, and headed downtown, on the snowy streets, across the river to the Minnesota Medical Research Center. She might be first in, she thought, but maybe not: there were forty people on the surgical team. Somebody had to be more nervous than she was.

***

At the hospital, the yellow door popped open and the three big men swarmed through.

Two people were working in the pharmacy — a short, slender man older man, who might once in the 60s have been a dancer, but no longer had the muscle tone. He wore a skuzzy beard on his cheeks, a soul patch under his lower lip. First thing, when he came to work, he tied a paper surgeon's cap on his head, for the rush he got when people looked at him in the cafeteria. The other person was a busy, intent, heavy-set woman in a nurse's uniform, who did the end-of-shift inventory, making sure it was all there, the stacks and rows and lockers full of drugs.

Some of it, put on the street, was worthless. Nobody pays street prices to cure the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Most of it, put on the street — on more than one street, actually; there was the old-age street, the uninsured street, the junkie street — was worth a lot. Half-million dollars? A million? Maybe.

The three hard men burst through the door and were on top of the two pharmacy workers in a half-second. The woman had enough time to whimper, "Don't," before one of the men pushed her to the floor, gun in her face, so close she could smell the oil on it, and said, "Shutta fuck up. Shut up." Soul-patch huddled into a corner with his hands up, then sank to his butt.

The leader of the three waved a pistol at the two on the floor and said, "Flat on the floor. Roll over, put your hands behind your back. We don't want to hurt you."

The two did, and another of the men hurriedly taped their hands behind them with grey duct tape, and then bound their feet together. That done, he tore off short strips of tape and pasted them over the victims' eyes, and then their mouths.

He stood up: "Okay."

The leader pushed the door open again and signaled with a fingertip. The tall man stepped in from the hallway, said, "These," and pointed at a series of locked, glass-doored cupboards. And, "Over here..."

A row of metal-covered lockers. The leader of the big men went to the man on the floor, who looked more ineffectual than the woman, and ripped the tape from his mouth.

"Where are the keys?" For one second, the man on the floor seemed inclined to prevaricate, so the big man dropped to his knees and said, "If you don't tell me this minute, I will break your fuckin' skull as an example. Then you will be dead, and I will ask the fat chick."

"In the drawer under the telephone," soul-patch said.

"Good answer."

As the big man retaped soul-patch's mouth, the tall man got the keys and began popping open the lockers. All kinds of good stuff here, every opiate and man-made opiate except heroin; lots of hot-rock stimulants, worth a fortune with the big-name labels.

"Got enough Viagra to stock a whore-house," one of the men grunted.

Another one: "Take this Tamiflu shit?"

"Fifty bucks a box in California... Take it."

Five minutes of fast work, the tall man pointing them at the good stuff, sorting out the bad.

***

Then the old guy on the floor made a peculiar wiggle.

One of the hold-up men happened to see it, frowned, then went over, half-rolled him. The old guy's hands were loose — he'd pulled one out of the tape, had had a cell phone in a belt clip under his sweater, had worked it loose, and had been trying to make a call. The big man grunted and looked at the face of the phone. One number had been pressed successfully: a nine.

"Sonofabitch was trying to call 911," he said, holding up the phone to the others. The old man tried to roll away, but the man who'd taken the phone punted him in the back once, twice, three times, kicking hard with steel-toed work boots.

"Sonofabitch... sonofabitch." The boot hit with the sound of a meat hammer striking a steak.

"Let him be," the leader said after the third kick.

But the old man had rolled back toward his tormenter and grasped him by the ankle, and the guy tried to shake him loose and the old man moaned something against the tape and held on, his fingernails raking the big guy's calf.

"Let go of me, you old fuck." The guy shook him off his leg, and kicked him again, hard, in the chest.

The leader said, "Quit screwing around. Tape him up again and let's get this stuff out of here."

***

The old man, his hands taped again, was still groaning as they loaded the bags. That done, they went to the door, glanced down the hallway. All clear. The bags went under the blanket on the cart, and the three big men pushed the cart past the security-camera intersection, back through the rabbit-warren to the utility closet, replaced the orderly uniforms with their winter coats, picked up the bags.

The leader said, "Gotta move, now. Gotta move. Don't know how much time we got."

Another of the men said, "Shooter — dropped your glove."

"Ah, man, don't need that." He picked it up, and the tall man led them out, his heart thumping against his rib cage. Almost out. When they could see the security door, he stopped, and they went on and out. The tall man watched until the door re-latched, turned, and headed back into the complex.

***

There were no cameras looking at the security door, or between the door and their van. The hard men hustled through the cold, threw the nylon bags in the back, and one of them climbed in with them, behind tinted windows, while the leader took the wheel and the big man climbed in the passenger seat.

"God damn, we did it," said the passenger. He felt under his seat, found a paper bag with bottle of bourbon in it. He was unscrewing the top as they rolled down the ramp; an Audi A5 convertible, moving too fast, swept across the front of the van and caught the passenger, mouth open, who squinted against the light. For just a moment, he was face to face with a blond woman, who then swung past them into the garage.

"Goddamnit!"

The leader braked, and looked back, but the A5 had already turned up the next level on the ramp. He thought they might turn around and find the woman... but then what? Kill her?

"She see you guys?" asked the man in the back, who'd seen only the flash of the woman's face.

The guy with the bottle said, "She was looking right at me. Goddamnit."

"Nothing to do," the leader said. "Nothing to do. Get out of sight. Shit, it was only one second...."

And they went on.

***

Weather had seen the man with the bottle, but paid no attention. Too much going through her head. She went on to the physicians' parking, got a spot close to the door, parked, and hurried inside.

***

The tall man got back to the utility closet, pulled off the raincoat and pants, which he'd used to conceal his physician's scrubs: if they'd been seen in the hallway, the three big men with a doc, somebody would have remembered. He gathered up the scrubs abandoned by the big men, stuffed them in a gym bag, along with the raincoat and pants, took a moment to catch his breath, to neaten up.

Listened, heard nothing. Turned off the closet light, peeked into the empty hallway, then strode off, a circuitous route, avoiding cameras, to an elevator. Pushed the button, waited impatiently.

When the door opened, he found a short, attractive blond woman inside, who nodded at him. He nodded back, poked "1," and they started down, standing a polite distance apart, with just the trifle of awkwardness of a single man and a single woman, unacquainted, in an elevator.

The woman said, after a few seconds, "Still hard to come to work in the dark."

"Can't wait for summer," the tall man said. They got to "2," and she stepped off and said, "Summer always comes," and she was gone.

***

Weather thought, as she walked away from the elevator, No point looking at the kids. They'd be asleep in the temporary ICU they'd set up down the hall from the operating room. She went instead to the locker room, and traded her street clothes for surgical scrubs. Another woman came in, and Weather nodded to her and the other woman asked, "Couldn't sleep?"

"Got a few hours," Weather said. "Are we the only two here?"

The woman, a radiologist named Regan, laughed: "No. John's got the doll on the table and he's talking about making some changes to the table, for God's sakes. Rick's here, he's messing with his saws. Gabriel was down in the ICU, he just got here, he's complaining about the cold. A bunch of nurses..."

"Nerves," Weather said. "See you down there."

She was cool in her scrubs, but comfortably so: she'd been doing this for nearly fifteen years, and the smell of a hospital, the alcohol, the cleaners, even the odor of burning blood, smelled like fresh air to her...

No point at looking at the kids, but she'd do it anyway. There were two nurses outside the temporary ICU, and they nodded and asked quietly, "Are you going in?"

"Just a peek."

"They've been quiet," one of the nurses said. "Dr. Maret just left."

Moving as silently as she could, in the semi-dark, she moved next to the babies' special bed. When you didn't look closely, they looked like any other toddlers, who happened to be sleeping head-to-head; small hands across their chests, eyes softly closed, small chests rising up and down. The first irregularity that a visitor might notice was the ridges in their skulls: Weather had placed a series of skin expanders under their scalps, to increase the amount of skin available to cover the skull defects — the holes — when they were separated.

There was really no need for her to look at them: she simply wanted to. Two babies, innocent, silent, feeling no pain; their world was about to change. She watched them for a minute, and Ellen sighed, and one foot moved, and then she subsided again.

Weather tiptoed out.

***

The old man in the pharmacy was moaning, the woman trying to talk, and the old man heard the woman fall down against a chair, after trying to get up, and then somebody was rapping at the service window and they both tried to scream, and they were loud, but muffled. He was chewing at the duct tape on his mouth, and finally it came loose from one side and he spat it away from his face.

"Dorothy, can you hear me?"

A muffled "Yes."

"I think I'm hurt bad. If I don't make it, tell the police that I scratched one of the robbers. I should have blood on my hand."

She replied, but the reply was unintelligible. He'd been working on the tape on his wrists, and eventually pulled one free... he tried to get up, but was too weak. He couldn't orient himself; nothing seemed to be working. He fumbled at the tape over his eyes, failed to get it free, moaned, moaned...

More time went by and the old man felt himself going dark; didn't know what was happening, but his heart was pounding and he told himself, calm down, calm down. He'd had heart and circulatory problems, clots, and he didn't need a clot breaking free, but his heart was pounding and he was sweating and something was going more wrong than it should be, more wrong than rolling around on a tile floor gagged and blinded and beaten. Hurt bad.

Then the door rattled and he shouted and he heard an answering shout, and he shouted again and Dorothy tried to scream through her gag, and some time later the door rattled again, and he heard it open, and somebody cried out, and then more people were there.

He blacked out for a moment, then came back, realized he was on a gurney, that they'd put a board on him, they were moving down a hallway. Somebody said, a few inches from his face, "We're moving you down to the ER, we're moving you..."

He said, as loud as he could as the world faded, "I scratched him. I scratched him. Tell the police, I scratched him..."

***

The operating room had been reworked for the separation operation. Maret had stripped out all the general surgery stuff, put in more lights, brought in the custom table. The table had been made in Germany, and lined with a magic memory foam that would adapt to the kids as their bodies were moved this way and that.

Sara and Ellen Raynes were joined at the skull, vertically, but slightly turned from each other. If an observer was standing at Sara's feet, looking at her face, and Sara was looking straight up, then Ellen's face was upside down and rotated to the observer's left. Imaging studies, done by Regan and her associates, indicated that their brains were separate, but they shared a portion of the dura mater under the skull, a kind of fibrous lining that protected and facilitated the drainage of venous blood from the brain.

The in-coming blood, in the arterial system, was good in both babies; but if the blood couldn't be drained away, and recirculated, it would put increasing pressure on the brains, eventually killing them.

Sara and Ellen were eighteen months old. Their parents had known the babies were conjoined before birth. The option of abortion had been proposed, but rejected by the parents, Lucy and Larry Raynes, for religious and emotional reasons. The children had been delivered by caesarian section at seven-and-a-half months. Sara had been born with a congenital heart defect, which further complicated matters.

***

Weather pushed into the OR and found three surgeons working with the baby-doll — a life-sized, actual-weight dense-foam model of the Raynes twins. They had it on the table, and were rolling it against the foam.

"So... no change," Gabriel Maret said.

Maret was a short man, with a head slightly too large for his body, the size emphasized by a wild thatch of curly black hair, shot through with silver. He was dark-eyed, olive-complected, with a chipped front tooth. He favored cashmere in his carefully-tailored, French-cut winter suits, and the women around the hospital paid close attention to him: He was French, and the observing women agreed that his accent, in English, was perfect.

Maret had come to dinner with Lucas and Weather every week or so over the winter, enjoying the kids and the family life. He was divorced, with four children of his own. He and his wife still shared an apartment in Paris, and, sometimes, he said, a bed. "It's insane," he said. "She is more stubborn than one of your mules."

"More stubborn than you?" Weather had asked.

He considered the question: "Maybe not that stubborn," he said.

He and her husband, Lucas, who got along improbably well, once spent an hour talking about men's fashion, nearly driving Weather crazy with the inanity of it. She'd said, "Fifteen minutes on loafers? Loafers?"

"We were just getting started," Lucas said. She wasn't sure he was joking.

***

"So... no change," Maret said.

"Not as long as everything goes right," said John Dansk, a neurosurgeon. "If we run into trouble splicing the six vein, if we lose it, we may have to take out another piece and that means rolling Sara this way and Ellen will torque back to the right."

The six vein was a vein shared by the twins. They'd tie it off on Ellen's side, and attempt to splice it into the five vein on Sara's, the better to move blood out of Sara's brain. The vein numbers simply came from imaging charts prepared by the radiologists.

"So what are you suggesting?" Maret asked. He glanced at Weather: "You are gorgeous this morning."

"I know," she said, to make him laugh. As did the other women around him, she liked to make him laugh.

Dansk scowled at them and said, "I'm suggesting that we slice a few wedges out of the base of the mold, so that we can use them as shims if we have to brace one of the kids."

"Why not have a nurse hold her?" Maret asked.

"Because we might be talking a couple of hours, if worse comes to worse."

"You know how much that mold cost?" Maret asked.

"About one nine-thousandth of your annual salary," Dansk said.

Maret shrugged. "So, we cut a few wedges. Why not? If we need them, we have them, and if we don't, it won't matter."

"Should have thought of this before now," said Rick Hanson, an orthopedic surgeon who would make the bone cuts through the kids' shared skull. He seemed shaky; he'd invented a half-dozen little saws for this operation, and would be the focus of a lot of attention. Because of the way the children's skulls intersected, they formed a complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle — basically, an oval ring of bone — of which he'd be removing only a few pieces at a time. Normally the cutting would have been done by the neurosurgeon, with drills and flexible wire saws. Hanson, from Washington University in St. Louis, had developed his own set of electric saws matched to jigs — cutting templates — for complicated bone cuts. Maret had decided that Hanson's technique would be ideal, and would make it possible to prepare perfectly fitted composite plates to cover the holes in the babies' skulls.

"We're just nervous," Maret said now. "That's normal." Maret was the team leader, the one with all the experience. He'd done two other craniopagus separations, one in France, one in Miami. Of the four children involved, two had survived — one from each operation. When he talked about the work, he talked mostly about the children who'd died.

***

Another doc pushed into the room, followed by a second one. They had all kinds — anesthesiologists, radiologists, neurosurgeons, cardiologists, plastic and orthopedic surgeons, and a medical professor who specialized in anatomical structures of the skull, as it pertained to craniofacial reconstruction. They had twenty nurses and surgical assistants.

Weather said to Dansk, the neurosurgeon, "If you want to cut those wedges, you better get it done: they've got to start cleaning the place up."

Dansk said, "I'm on it," and, "I need a scalpel or something. Anybody got an X-Acto knife?"

***

Above the table, in an observation room behind a canted glass wall, people were beginning to filter into the stadium seating.

A nurse came into the OR — one of the sterile nurses — and said, "I wanted to see if we could make the move one more time."

She wanted to practice breaking the tables apart, so that when the final cut was made, and the twins were separated, they could be moved to separate operating areas for the fitting of the new composite skull shells.

"Why don't we visually check the linkage..." Maret began.

It was starting; Weather didn't think it, but she felt it, felt the excitement and the tension starting to build. She worked almost every day, cutting, sewing, cauterizing, diagnosing. This was different.

She thought, "Remember to pee."

***

The Raynes twins were a rare and complicated medical phenomenon. Craniopagus twins comprise only about one percent of conjoined twins. Because of the rarity of the condition, experience with separation surgery was limited. One of the twins, Sara, suffered from defects in the septum of the heart — the wall that divides the right side of the heart from the left side — and the defects were already causing congestion in the circulatory system.

The type of surgery usually favored for craniopagus separation might take place over several months. The most critical part of most operations was doing a staged separation of the brain's blood-drainage system. Each operation would isolate the drainage systems a bit more, and would allow the bodies to create new bypass channels.

In the Raynes' case, surgeons feared that a protracted series of operations would weaken and possibly kill Sara, which would also threaten the stronger Ellen, especially if Sara were to go into a rapid decline.

The additional factor in the Raynes' case was that the conjoined area was relatively small — the hole left behind in the babies' skulls after the separation would be no bigger than the diameter of an orange. That meant that a single operation was possible — even with some shared venous drainage, it was thought that one continuous operation would be the best chance for saving both twins.

The surgical team would do the separation, and once separated, the team would break in two, each working on an individual twin. The joint surgery was expected to last up to twenty hours.

The team was committed to saving both twins.

***

Weather did aesthetic, reconstructive and microsurgery. Her availability in Minnesota, and a paper she'd done on a thumb reconstruction, had caught Maret's eye when he began to consider the Raynes twins.

In Weather's case, a young boy had caught his thumb in a hydraulic log-splitter: the thumb had been pulped. After the wound healed, Weather had removed one of the boy's second toes, and used the toe to replace the thumb. Since a thumb represented a full fifty percent of the function of the hand, the reconstruction gave back the kid the use of his hand. As he used the new thumb, it would strengthen and grow, and eventually come to resemble a normal thumb, except for the extra knuckle.

As part of the eleven-hour operation, Weather had hooked up two nerves, two tiny arteries and two even smaller veins — veins the size of broom straws. The photomicrographs of the sutured veins had particularly attracted Maret's attention. The more veins that could be hooked up, the better off the twins would be — and Weather could do that work, even on the smallest vessels.

He'd also been attracted to her sheer stamina: eleven hours of microsurgery was a super-marathon. He sold her on the idea of joining the team, which also made her available to study the twins, to get to know the parents, and to place the skin expanders under their scalps.

***

Weather had turned away from Maret and the argument — "Remember to pee" — when they heard a commotion outside the operating room.

"What is that?" Maret asked. Dansk had just come back with a large scalpel, and he turned to look. A few seconds later, an anesthesiologist named Yamaguchi burst into the room. He looked, Weather thought, like someone who'd just come to the emergency room to see his child: panicked.

He said, urgently, to Maret, Weather, and the others, "It's off. The operation's off. We've got, we've got..."

Weather caught his sleeve and said, "Slow down, slow down."

"It's off," Yamaguchi said. "Some guys just raided the pharmacy and cleaned the place out. Everything is shut down. Everything."

Maret's face clicked through a series of expressions, from, "Is this a joke?" to astonishment: "What?"

"Some guys with guns," Yamaguchi said. He was flapping his arms, like a loon trying to take off. "Robbers. They robbed the pharmacy. The police are here. There's nothing left, they took everything... That old guy who works there, the one who wears the surgical hat..."

"Don," said Weather.

"Yeah, Don — he's hurt pretty bad. They're taking him into the ER."

"You must be shitting me," Maret said with a non-Gallic precision, looking around at his astonished crew.

***

Alain Barakat stood at the back of the emergency operating room, mask dangling around his neck, watching the work: the surgeon was cursing at the nurse, who was fumbling the gear, and they were all watching the blood pressure dropping and the surgeon was saying, "Get it in there, get it in there, get some pressure on it," and the nurse stood on a chair and lifted the bottle of saline and somebody else said, "Two minutes for the blood." The surgeon said, "I don't think we have the time, I don't think we've got it..." and the anesthesiologist said, "We're losing him man," and the doc said, "Fuck this, I'm going in," and he cut and cut again and again, going in through the beginning of a brutal black bruise on the old man's belly, and the anesthesiologist said, "Hurry it up, man," and the surgeon said, "Ah, Jesus, I've got no blood, I got no blood here," and he hurled the scalpel into a corner and it clanged around and he said, "It must've been his goddamn kidneys, let's see if we can roll him..." and the nurses moved up to help with the roll and the anesthesiologist said, "Man, he's arresting..."

Barakat, standing in the corner, said, "Shit shit shit shit shit shit..."

One minute later, the old man was gone. No point in trying to restart the heart — there was no blood going through it. They all stood around, shell-shocked, and then the surgeon said, "Let's clean up."

One of the nurses said, "We had no time. He was going too quick."

They all looked at the body on the table, worn Adidas sneakers pointed out at 45-degrees, chest flat and still, the bloody gash on the gut. The anesthesiologist turned to get something and saw Barakat, a tall man, standing in the corner, hands pressed to the side of his head, and the anesthesiologist said, "Wasn't you, man. You did good. Everybody did good. He was gone when we got him."

And Barakat thought: Now everybody will be here. Now the police will tear the place apart.

Because he really didn't care about the old man.

***

The separation team was standing around, repeating what Yamaguchi had said, when Thomas Carlson, the hospital administrator, came hurrying down the hall. Carlson was wearing his white physician's coat, which he often did on public occasions, to remind people that he had an MD in addition to the MBA; but for all that, not a bad guy, Weather thought.

He went straight to Maret: "Gabe, you've heard."

"I've heard there was a robbery."

"Unfortunately. The problem is, we've also got a man down. He's hurt pretty badly, and we won't have access to your drugs — any drugs, except in an absolute emergency, and then we'll be crawling around on the floor trying to find them. The place is completely wrecked. They threw everything out of the lockers, what they didn't take..."

"So: everybody is here," Maret said.

"But you're going to have to wait," Carlson said. "God, I'm sorry, man. But this is an incredible mess. As long as the kids are stable..."

Maret nodded: "Well. I guess we can wait."

***

Weather and Maret went together to tell the Rayneses. The parents were waiting in what the team called the "separation lounge," once a meditation room, which had been converted for family use and for team conferences.

The Rayneses were sitting on a couch, looking out over a table full of magazines: neither one was reading. They were in their early thirties, and except for their sex, as alike as new marbles: honey-blond, tall, slender, from the small town of New Ulm in southern Minnesota. Larry worked in a heating and air-conditioning business owned by his father; Lucy worked at the Post Office. Neither had lived outside of New Ulm. Both of them spoke fluent German, and went to Germany every summer, to hike. They had no other children.

They'd conferred with Maret on the separation process, but had worked more with Weather than any other physician, because of Weather's involvement in the preliminary surgery.

They were astonished by the news. "What does it mean? It's off? For how long?" Lucy Raynes blurted. "I mean...?"

"We'll go tomorrow," Weather said, patting her arm. "Same time. This whole thing is so bizarre... there are police everywhere, I guess. The girls are fine, no change for them."

"I can't believe it," Larry Raynes said. "After we got this far..."

His wife put an arm around his waist and squeezed him: "We'll be okay. It'll be all right."

***

Of the two Rayneses, Lucy was the most demanding of information, had studied the details of the separation, used terms like Ôsuperior sagittal sinus' and Ôcalvaria,' read medical papers on other separations. She'd spoken to the media on a number of occasions, both televised and print. Larry, on the other hand, mostly talked about timing, and the children's development; and often, to Weather, seemed to simply want to get it over with it. He wasn't stupid, but swept along in a current too strong for him, part medical science, part circus. He wanted to go home.

Maret had warned everybody about the circus. "Whenever this is done, we get the media, because of the drama and the sympathetic aspects. You have to be prepared. In Miami, we had reporters following the surgeons home, knocking on doors, waiting in the streets."

Now he said to the Rayneses, "I'll talk to the media in ten minutes or so. I'd like you to be with me."

Larry Raynes said to his wife, "You go. I'll go sit with the kids."

Weather left them talking, and went back to the locker room to change back into her street clothes.

***

By the time she got back, most of the team had drifted away. The OR nurses were shutting the place down. Weather stopped to talk with her surgical assistant, when one of the team's cardiologists, Alan Seitz, who'd been called to the ER, came ambling down the hall, looking distracted.

"What?" Weather asked.

"That Don guy died," Seitz said. "One of the robbers kicked him to death. Broke up his kidneys. He was soaked in Coumadin. He bled out before we could get anything going. We were dumping fluid into him fast as we could, nothing to do."

Weather stepped up and gave him a squeeze. Seitz was an old friend. "Nothing to do. You only do what you can."

"Yeah." Seitz looked around and said, "I mean, Jesus Christ: kicked to death. In the hospital."

Chapter One

The Sonoran Desert
An hour’s drive from Maricopa, Arizona
Early May

Rock and dust, scrub and cactus and the blinding white sun beating down. Nobody ever came out here.

The dust from two off-road vehicles drifted upwards into the still air as they bounced and lurched across the arid wilderness. The big silver Subaru 4x4 in front crunched to a halt on the stones, doors opened and three men got out.

One of them didn’t want to be there. He stood out from the other two, and not just because he was the only Japanese guy and they were white Europeans. He was also the only one with a .45 auto to the back of his head and his wrists bound behind his back. Tape, not cord. Cord would leave a mark, and his captors didn’t want that. A length of the same silver duct tape was pressed firmly to his face, muffling his protests. The T-shirt he was wearing was damp with sweat.

His captors knew his name – Michio Miyazaki – and that he was a scientist. Beyond that, it wasn’t their concern why this was happening to him.

The bright red Jeep Cherokee following the Subaru pulled up alongside. Its driver killed the engine, stepped down, ran her fingers through her blonde hair and wiped the sweat on her jeans. There was no sound except the ticking of hot metal and the feeble protests of the prisoner as the two men started marching him away from the vehicles.

The Jeep was Miyazaki’s, as was the technical equipment in the back. When this was over, it would look as though the scientist had been out here on a research trip, collecting samples. That fitted his profile. He was unmarried, single, no kids, tended to keep to himself, and he wasn’t a well man. Nobody would question what was about to take place.

The woman walked around to the passenger side of the Jeep, opened the door and lifted out the small container she’d been riding uncomfortably beside through the desert. This was one item that didn’t belong to Miyazaki. It was a pale blue plastic lunchbox, with tiny air holes pricked in the top. What was inside weighed almost nothing. The woman held it away from her at arm’s length. With her other hand she grabbed a shoulder bag from the footwell, then shut the Jeep door and trotted to catch up with the others. As she joined them she could hear the prisoner pleading with them through his gag.

They all ignored him.

‘This’ll be fine,’ the taller of the two white men said in their own language, glancing around him. The stocky guy with the muscles straining under his cotton shirt kept the .45 aimed at Miyazaki’s head.

The woman set the container down on the ground and stepped back, happy to get some distance from it. She reached into the shoulder bag and pulled out a pair of thick leather gauntlets. Tossed the right glove to her colleague, then the left.

‘You do it,’ she said. ‘I’m not touching that thing.’

The tall man pulled on the gloves. The one with the gun swept his foot out and Miyazaki crumpled on his back into the dirt. He was crying now, tears streaking the dust on his face.

The tall man walked over to the container and squatted down beside it. The others watched as, very carefully, he unsnapped the lid, lifted a corner, peered inside, dipped his gloved hand into the container and stood up with the thing in his fist.

Miyazaki started struggling and protesting with renewed energy when he saw the glistening brown scorpion trapped between the man’s fingers. He’d spent his life deeply involved in one small specialised corner of science, but he had enough knowledge of other disciplines to know that these people had done their research well. This was an Arizona bark scorpion, one of the most lethal arachnids on the planet.

Miyazaki couldn’t take his eyes from the creature as the tall man walked towards him with a smile. He struggled against his bonds as the scorpion came closer and closer. He could see it wriggling, the long tail lashing out, the stinger turgid with venom. Now it was right over him, six inches above his heaving chest. He could feel his heart pounding dangerously fast.

The man dropped it on him.

The scorpion landed on its feet and froze, as if cautiously assessing its new surroundings. Miyazaki began to gibber, every muscle in his body racked tight as he strained to see the thing that was perched on his torso.

But the scorpion was more interested in flight. It scuttled away, slithered down his ribs and dropped down onto the sand.

‘Shit.’ The tall man stepped quickly over to where the creature was trying to dig itself in, and scooped it back up. Sand ran out from between his fingers as he clenched the scorpion tightly in his palm.

‘Try again,’ the woman said.

The tall man nodded. He admired the creature. These things were tough. They’d been around for millions of years, unchanged, perfect. And they’d still be around long after humankind had obliterated itself. He didn’t want to harm it, just to stress it a little and activate its primal defence mechanisms. He squeezed hard and gave it a shake, feeling its hard carapace wriggle through the glove. Then he held it over Miyazaki’s exposed neck, where sweat was pooling in the hollow at the base of his throat, and let it drop a second time.

This time the creature landed on Miyazaki’s skin with its defences on full alert, poised to strike. The stinger lashed out, faster than a rattlesnake, and found its mark.

The scientist screamed behind the tape and thrashed on the sand as the creature scuttled away. His captors could see where the scorpion had stung him, a livid pin-prick already swelling on his neck three-quarters of an inch from the jugular artery.

‘That should do it,’ the woman said over the muffled cries of terror.

‘Gonna kill the fucking thing now,’ said the stocky guy, watching the scorpion as it ran towards the cover of the rocks. He pointed the pistol.

The woman slapped his arm down. ‘No shooting.’

‘Yeah, leave it be,’ the tall one said.

The stocky guy gave a shrug and put the pistol away. They looked down at the prisoner. His movements were already slowing, eyes rolling back in his head as the toxic shock started shutting down his weak heart. After another minute he wasn’t convulsing or kicking any more. His arched back sank down against the sand, his head lolled to one side and stayed there.

The tall man kneeled down next to the body and used a clasp knife to cut the tape from the dead man’s wrists. Once that was done, he ripped away the gag.

‘Now let’s dress this thing up to look how it’s meant to,’ the woman said.

 * * * *

The Picos de Europa mountain range
Northern coast of Spain
Two days later

The killers set out early. Seven in the morning, the low sun was glinting over the mountain peaks.

They’d driven up until they ran out of track. It was a long way down to the tree line. The cold breeze buffeted the van and made it hard to open the door. The woman stepped down from the vehicle and shivered. Reaching for the Minolta binoculars that hung from her neck, she scanned the mountainside, up, down, left and right. Nothing but rocks and shrubs.

Her two colleagues got out and walked around the van to join her. ‘OK?’ the tall man asked her without a smile.

‘Let’s get it done.’ She stepped over to the back of the van, opened up the back doors.

Julia Goodman blinked as the sunlight hit her eyes. Her heart was in her mouth and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She knew what was coming. She’d known it for days. Just not how they’d do it.

‘Let’s go,’ the woman said.

‘Please.’ Julia had repeated that word so often, it seemed to have lost all meaning. But all she could do was keep saying it and hope. Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Please.’

The woman looked at her impassively.

‘I’m so sorry.’ Julia had been saying that a lot, too. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t make it work. I—’

‘Save your breath.’

With a last glance around them, the two men dragged Julia from the van. She struggled and kicked, but they held her tight and her cries vanished in the wind.

The woman walked around to the side door, slid it open and yanked out the quilted jacket, the hiking boots, the rucksack. Everything inside it had been checked and double-checked, right down to the keys to the blue Renault Espace that had been leased in the university lecturer’s name two months earlier. The Renault had already been transported to a hidden storage facility nearby. By the time the accident was reported, the car would be up here waiting for the police to find it.

Again, they’d thought of everything. They always did, every detail. It was what they were paid for.

The woman carried the gear over to Julia and dumped it at her feet. ‘Put it on.’

Julia obeyed, weeping uncontrollably and shaking so badly she could barely tie the bootlaces.

‘Please,’ she kept saying. ‘Please.’

‘You want to die some other way?’

‘I don’t want to die,’ she sobbed. She collapsed to her knees and sank down to the stony ground. ‘I don’t.’

The men yanked her up by the arms and held her steady as the woman grabbed the rucksack and looped the straps around her arms, then walked round to her front and did up the fastenings. Julia was sagging at the knees, too weak to fight, making little whimpering sounds.

‘See?’ the woman told her. ‘If you don’t fight it, it’ll be much easier.’

 Twenty yards from where they were parked, the ground sloped sharply down to the edge of the precipice. The woman and the two men kept a tight hold of Julia as they walked her in that direction.

 ‘Please don’t do this,’ Julia pleaded desperately. ‘I’ll keep trying. I’ll work harder. I can make it work. I know I can. Give me another chance. Some more time. I—’

 ‘Shut it,’ the tall man commanded, and she did.

 Then, with a sudden surge of energy, she ripped free of their grip. The stocky guy made a grab for her hair. She lashed out with a hiking boot, and he yelled in pain as the steel toecap caught his shin. Then she was dashing away from them, scrambling over the rocks.

 She didn’t get far before they caught up with her and dragged her back. Ten yards to the edge. Five. Three. A sheer, vertiginous, thousand-foot drop below. The wind was whipping her hair across her face, sticking to her tears. She let out a cry when she looked down.

 ‘Nice view from up here,’ said the stocky guy, still grimacing with the pain in his shin. Then three strong pairs of hands shoved her hard down the slope towards the edge. She lost her footing and stumbled and rolled, grasping for stones and rocks, anything that would halt her momentum as she slithered towards the drop. Her fingertips found a crack in the rock, and suddenly she stopped sliding and was dangling with her legs in space. Her eyes were crazed, teeth bared, her breathing rapid.

‘Damn,’ the woman breathed. ‘Why do they always make things difficult?’

 ‘Don’t let me fall,’ Julia implored them. ‘Help me. Please. Don’t let me die.’

 ‘Could just leave her,’ the tall man said. ‘She won’t hang on forever.’

 The woman shook her head. ‘I want to see her go over.’

 She thought about the options. Too risky to scramble down the slope towards the edge and kick her hands loose. A long stick would work, but there wasn’t one around. She saw a jagged stone and picked it up. Hefted it in her hand. It was about the right size and weight.

 ‘No,’ Julia quavered.

 The woman lobbed the stone. It caught Julia on the cheekbone. She let go of the rock and went tumbling into empty space with a guttural shriek that died away as she spun and cartwheeled down to the rocks below.

 Four long, drawn-out seconds later, the scream was cut short along with Julia Goodman’s life.

 Then the killers returned calmly, quietly, to the van, thinking about what to do with the rest of the day.