He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Consider this. If scientists discovered than an asteroid was hurtling toward the earth and was likely to strike in one year, would it not be possible that the best and the brightest from all countries would drop their hostilities and work together to prevent a shared disaster?”

The comment was so weird that it jerked my head into an entirely different place. At the same time my heart started doing another jazz riff. “Christ! Is that what this is about?”

“What? Oh, no … no,” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “I speak hypothetically about the nature of our response to a shared threat too large for any one country to handle alone.”

“Next time say so. You almost gave me a frigging heart attack.”

He smiled at that. Jackass.

“Okay,” I said, “Given the right kind of potential catastrophe, then that kind of cooperation is possible. Even so, red tape would be a bitch.”

“And yet the red tape could be cut if the threat was more imminent, yes? Say that this hypothetical asteroid was due to strike in a month? The need for immediate and uninhibited action would necessitate a quicker exchange of information so that the situation could be handled. After all, global extermination trumps individual ideologies.”

“In a rational world, yes,” I agreed. “Where are you going with this?”

“There is a matter that will require very great and very careful cooperation.”

He removed a cell phone from his jacket pocket and played with the touch screen to bring up a photo, then handed the phone to me. “Do you know what that is?”

I stared at the picture and my mouth went as dry as dust.

“Good God…”

“Indeed,” agreed Rasouli.

I knew all about them, of course. I had to. I knew the history, studied them for my job, read the field reports. I had seen them in museums and textbooks and on the Discovery Channel. Knowledge may be power but at that moment I felt as weak as a child. Even as a picture on a phone—small and frozen in a snapshot moment of time—it was terrifying to behold.

A nuclear bomb.

“It is a Teller-Ulam design hydrogen bomb,” said Rasouli quietly. “It has a yield of fifty megatons, which is equivalent to fourteen hundred times the combined power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or, if you look at it another way, it has ten times the combined power of all the explosives used in WWII.”

“Where is it?” I snarled, causing Rasouli to recoil from me.

“Please,” he said soothingly, “this device is not on U.S. soil.”

“Then why the hell are you showing me this?”

“Because I need you to know that this is something larger than the political struggles between our countries.”

“Your country has been trying to build this for years, asshole—” I began, but he cut me off, and again had to wave back his guard.