Tom Cain - No survivors

Larsson patted him on the shoulder. "Wait here, okay? I'm just going to get some cold-weather gear and my laptop."

"Why? Where are we going?"

Larsson grinned. "The end of the world, Carver. My world. I'm going to make your life hell. And you just paid me a lot of money for the privilege."

Barely a mile away, Piotr Korsakov was sitting in an FSB safe house, while a doctor tended to his nose. His cell phone rang. He checked the number-Moscow, calling on a secure line-and motioned to the doctor to leave the room.

"You had a bad night, Korsakov." The voice was cool, female, authoritative.

"Yes, Madam Deputy Director."

"You lost a partner and a target."

"Yes."

"Matov paid the price for his incompetence. What happened to you?"

"I was taken unawares. I did not believe that the target, Carver, had spotted me as a potential threat. I was wrong. He assaulted me. I could have retaliated, of course. Doubtless I would have killed him. But there were several witnesses. I felt it more prudent to play the innocent victim."

"That may have been the correct judgment. We will have a hard enough time covering up the deaths of Matov and the couple you terminated. We do not need any further complications. Did you see where Carver went?"

"No, ma'am. He left the building while I was still inside and I was unable to follow him. But he was not alone. There was another man, very distinctive, almost six and a half feet tall, with long hair. He would be easy to identify again."

"That will not be necessary. I am already aware of his identity."

"So what would you like me to do now?"

"Return to Moscow. I will decide what we shall do about Mr. Carver… and his hairy friend."

She hung up the phone.

And in the meantime, we must get a message to Alix, she thought. The assassination has failed, for now, but there is no reason she should know that. Let's see how well she does her job when she's not distracted by thoughts of another man…

Thirteen hundred miles away, alone in her hotel room, Alix was looking across the waters of the Canale della Giudecca toward the lights of Venice. Here she stood, in one of the most romantic cities in the world, and right there in the next-door room was a man who yearned to be her lover. For weeks she had been keeping him at bay, but all her training and professional expertise told her these stalling tactics were rapidly outliving their usefulness. Denying a man what he most desired was an excellent way of keeping him on tenterhooks, but beyond a certain point even the most lovesick male would eventually decide that the effort wasn't worth it.

If Olga Zhukovskaya could see what was happening now, her orders would be simple: "Sleep with Vermulen, immediately."

So what was stopping her?

Loyalty to Carver, and a refusal any longer to whore in the service of the state: Those were the obvious answers, but she knew they were just phony self-justifications. The real reason Alix was not in Vermulen's room right now was precisely the fact that part of her wanted to be there just as much as he did.

She did not love Vermulen the way she loved Carver, or had loved the man he once was. But the general was present in her life, and Carver was now just a memory that seemed to fade a little more into the distance with every passing day. Vermulen was a good, kind man, whose feelings for her were unmistakably real. Just as important, he had money, influence, and a degree of power. He offered her the possibility of protection, some refuge at least if she should ever defy Zhukovskaya, and walk away from the FSB.

Sooner or later, that promise of security would be impossible to resist.

There were eight men sitting at the mahogany table in one of the meeting rooms that form part of the five-thousand-square-foot complex known to its users as the Woodshed, but to the rest of the world as the White House Situation Room. One of them was the President's national security adviser, Leo Horabin. The other seven were senior representatives of federal agencies, including the FBI and CIA. These were men who had made it to the commanding heights of the establishment. They exuded a common aura of power. But they had all come to listen to Dr. Kady Jones.

She began the meeting by describing the discovery and analysis of the device found in Minnesota. A photograph of the inside of the case filled a screen on one of the Situation Room walls.

"The best way to describe this bomb is to say that it's a classic piece of Russian military design: basic, but effective. What they did was essentially the same concept as Little Boy, the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima more than forty years ago. It's what's known as a gun-type design. This here"-she pointed at the metal pipe filling most of the case-"is the gun barrel. It's fired by a signal sent from the control box, here, in the form of an electric charge. It passes down this wire into one end of the barrel and ignites a conventional explosive charge. Right next to the charge is a fifteen-kilogram mass of weapons-grade uranium."

She brought up another slide. One side of the barrel had been cut away, revealing the contents.

"Exactly like a charge of gunpowder propelling a cannonball, the explosive fires the uranium down the barrel, where it hits a second fifteen-kilo slug of uranium, at the far end. Now, a total of sixty pounds would not normally be enough to create a critical mass of uranium-two thirty-five-that's the amount needed to create a nuclear chain reaction. But the Russians were smart. They put a ring of beryllium around the end of the barrel-see how it thickens there, at the end? That beryllium acts as a reflector, concentrating the forces released by the impact, so that the reaction takes place at a lower mass. That creates a nuclear explosion, which we'd estimate in the range of one to five kilotons. That's nothing compared to a strategic nuclear-missile warhead, but it's still enough to devastate the heart of a major city, take out a military base, or flatten an oil refinery."

"Dear God…" Horabin's sagging, downcast face-all drooping jowls, double chins, and baggy eyes-was ashen. "And you're sure this thing is Russian?"

"Well, it was certainly manufactured from Russian components, using their uranium. And we believe it's at least a decade old, dating back to Soviet days, when the state still had total control of all its stocks of weapons-grade nuclear materials. So it was made either by a Soviet government agency or by someone with very, very high-level access."

"And it's still in working order?"

"Well, thankfully it didn't detonate when… ah"-she hesitated for a moment, hoping that no one could see the blood she felt flushing her cheeks-"when struck by a heavy falling object. But we couldn't find anything wrong with the basic bomb. Anyone with the correct arming code could have set it off."

"Excuse me, Dr. Jones…" The speaker was Ted Jaworski, the CIA representative. "When we investigated the Lebed claims at Langley, our analysts told us that if the bombs really did exist, they would most likely be inactive by now. But you're saying that's not the case. How come?"

Kady felt the atmosphere in the room crackle with anticipation. Jaworski was making a play, pitching his agency against hers. The people around the table were Washington veterans. They seemed to lean forward a fraction, anxious to see if the newcomer could defend herself.

"That's simple," she said, letting the room know that the question hadn't fazed her. "Your people would have made the same assumption we did at Los Alamos before we'd actually seen this thing. We all figured the Soviets would use plutonium for any small-scale weapon, because that's what we would have done. Plutonium is far more efficient than uranium. You get a much bigger bang per kilo. But it also decays a lot faster. Much beyond a decade, it's lost its explosive power, so the whole unit needs servicing and updating. But uranium lasts for hundreds of thousands of years. It's crude. It's inefficient. But it keeps right on working."