Tom Cain - No survivors

"Okay, maybe I can help. But I need more information. These items, on this list, are they all in America?"

"Not all, no… I cannot be certain, but my impression is some are in America, others in Europe, maybe even Asia, too."

"Just NATO countries and allies?"

Novak raised his eyebrows, apparently amazed by Vermulen's naivete.

"Ach, please, my old friend, I do not need to see the list to know the answer to that question. The Russians despised and feared the rest of the Eastern Bloc even more than their enemies in the West. They knew how much we hated them. I can guarantee you, without any doubt, there will be weapons in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary… all the former Warsaw Pact nations. Yugoslavia, too."

Before Vermulen could take the conversation any further, there was another blast of music and a roar from the crowd. The two teams were reappearing for the second period. Novak's face lit up again. He leaned forward in his seat, all his attention on the ice, ready to follow every shift in the swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns etched by the skaters and the puck.

Kurt Vermulen, however, sat back, motionless and silent, ignoring the game. An idea had come to him, by no means fully formed, but rich in possibilities. It involved the list that Novak had mentioned and the bombs that it contained. But it had nothing whatever to do with anyone in Washington.

At the end of the game, the two men said their farewells and went their separate ways. Neither had noticed the man sitting a few seats away with a blue nylon knapsack on his lap. Once Vermulen and Novak had left the arena, the man checked the camera whose peephole lens was peering through the shiny blue fabric. The photographs still needed to be printed. But he had every confidence that they would come out just fine.

The one indulgence Alix still had left was the hot, scented bath she liked to sink into before she went to work. It was the cheapest way she knew of feeling good. But this evening she had to call Larsson first. She felt bad about depending on him. He'd already done so much for her.

"They've given me a final notice," she said when he answered the phone. "One week to pay. I don't know what to do anymore."

"There's no progress, then, no chance of him remembering where he's stuck his money?"

"In a single week, I don't think so… But why do we need the clinic at all? I can care for him myself."

"How?" asked Larsson. "The man's still sick. He needs constant supervision, drugs, therapy. How can you afford that? Look, if there's really no other way, I could get a loan on my apartment."

"No, that's not fair. You've been a good friend to us, Thor, but even a good friend must look after himself… Hell! I've got to go to work. We'll finish this some other time."

"I'm sorry, Alix. I wish I could have done more to help you."

"You have. You listened. You cared. That was what I needed right now."

She put down the phone. There would just be time to wash her hair before she left for the club. The bath would have to wait.

In an imposing Baroque office building on Lubyanka Square, in Moscow, the conversation between Alix and Larsson was recorded, transcribed, and passed on to a duty officer. He examined it, then leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at the ceiling, losing himself in thought as he considered his opinion and how best to present it. Finally he sat upright again and put a call through to his boss's assistant.

"I need to meet the deputy director," he said. "It is a matter of the utmost urgency."

Waylon McCabe owned five thousand acres of Kerr County, Texas, a private kingdom between Austin and San Antonio, shaded by ancient live oaks and watered by twisting creeks and landscaped ponds. Up in the hills, a few miles from the main compound, stood a private retreat that McCabe reserved for his special guests. That was where he took Kurt Vermulen when he wanted a private conversation.

"You said you had something for me. What you got?"

Vermulen looked him in the eye. "A nuclear bomb."

McCabe didn't know if he was being taken for a fool.

"Is this some kind of joke, General?"

"Absolutely not. There are more than one hundred of them, cached around the world. They've been hidden for at least ten years. But I can obtain the document that tells me where they are."

"You don't have it yet, though?"

"No, but I expect to take possession of that information, along with the codes needed to arm the devices, within a matter of weeks. At that point, it's just a matter of acquiring one functioning weapon."

"Then what do you plan on doing with it?"

"Put it in the hands of Islamic terrorists."

McCabe's eyes widened. "Are you crazy?"

"Don't worry… I'll be giving it to terrorists we've invented. A video will be sent to news agencies around the world by a radical offshoot of the Islamic jihadist movement-an offshoot that does not exist, one that has been created for this operation. The video will threaten the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major city. The bomb will be filmed in such a way that defense analysts will immediately recognize that it is genuine."

"Then what?"

"Then the world will see that Islamic terrorists have nuclear weapons and be forced to take the threat seriously."

"What if the President tells the American people not to worry? Says that ain't no bomb, folks, just some kinda fake. What then?"

"I don't envision that happening. The evidence would be too strong. But anyway, I plan to take steps to make sure the bomb is discovered. Before it detonates, of course."

McCabe looked skeptical.

"Same problem. Special Forces or the CIA find this thing, then they say it's a fake. General, if you want people to know what it is, you've got to make it go off."

"And hit a major city? Tens of thousands of people could die. We'd be no better than terrorists ourselves."

"Sure, if it went off in a city. But why do it there? These radicals'd have some kinda hideout, somewhere they can't easily be found. Maybe they'd be in the desert, or the mountains. Detonate your bomb out there in the boondocks, no one gets hurt, but you get yourself noticed, that's for damn sure… Shit!"

He'd started coughing again.

"You should see a doctor about that," said Vermulen.

McCabe spat phlegm onto the ground.

"I got a chest infection. It'll pass. You just answer one last question: How much is all this gonna cost me?"

"I haven't budgeted it yet. But you'd have to allow several million bucks."

McCabe laughed.

"Several million? That all? Hell, I thought you were gonna ask me for serious money."

McCabe was impressed. He'd set Vermulen a challenge and the general had met it. That list of nukes would bring the war against the Antichrist a whole heap closer. So now he just had to find a place where a bomb could be the fuse that would make the whole world go up in smoke. Once Vermulen had been sent on his way back to Washington, McCabe went back to the estate house, where he'd installed a library of religious books. Then he poured himself a couple of fingers of bourbon and started his research.

His first thought was the hill of Megiddo itself, but it was just an outcrop in the countryside northeast of Tel Aviv, nothing much else around it. For sure it was the site where the final battle concluded. But it wasn't the best place to start a war. For that, he needed a place that was already a flashpoint, somewhere sacred to both Christ and Antichrist alike.

He was sitting at his desk, wondering where to look next, when something caught his eye, a letter he'd recently received, asking for donations to assist the preservation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Recently, the evangelical movement had found common cause with the Jews because both of them hated the Arabs. Now the Arabs were being accused of disrespecting the Jewish relics on the Mount. A lot of folks had been upset by that.