She twisted in Lubin's grip. But even mutilated, Lubin was immovable. His hand shackled her arm like a granite claw, oily with coagulating fluids. She could only slip in his grasp; she could not break free.

"I do have other options," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Contingency villas, you might say. I can go to one of those instead." He lifted a hand to the telemetry. "You've got a lot more riding on this than me."

He planned it for years, she realized. Even when we thought he was helping us. And ever since we've been cowering in the dark like good little rabbits while our lines went dark and our contacts dried up and it was him all along, cutting us off, fumigating the place so there wouldn't be any uncooperative tenants around when his luck ran out and he needed a place to hide...

"You asshole," she whispered, straining.

He didn't look at her. "So when are the cavalry coming, Ken? How did you call them in? How much do they know?"

"I tell you," Lubin said, "and you call off the attack."

"No, Ken, you call off your attack. Use whatever clever code words you set in place to shut down your sub's autopilot, or to convince Helsinki that you were mistaken, or whatever it takes."

"And you blow up Atlantis anyway."

"What for? I have other options, as I said. Why waste all those perfectly good hostages for no payoff? They're worth way more to me alive."

"For now."

"Now is all we've got, buddy."

Clarke glared: from the man who had tried to kill her, to the man who'd risked his life to stop him. Every hour you're in this place, you kill more people than ever lived in Atlantis, she thought.

Every hour I kill more people, by leaving you here.

And Ken Lubin was about to cut a deal.

She could see it in his stance, in that ruined blind face that had been at her side and behind her back all these years. He wasn't entirely inscrutable. Not to her. Not even now.

"I know you, Ken," Desjardins was saying. "We go way back, you and I. We're soul mates. We make our own rules, and by God we live by them. People don't matter. Populations don't matter. What matters is the rules, am I right, Ken? What matters is the mission.

"If you don't deal, the mission fails."

"Ken," she whispered.

"But you can save them," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Isn't that why you came back in the first place? Just give me your stats and the mission succeeds. You walk away, I abort the strike, and before I disappear I'll even send you a fix for that nasty new strain of ßehemoth your buddies have been wrestling with. I gather by now a fair number of them are seriously under the weather back there."