Roger Gordian stood stock-still as Nimec came closer, pushing between the rows of men and women seated before him. His heart knocking in his chest, Gordian found himself no longer thinking about words that had to be spoken, but only caring about those he wanted more than anything to hear.

“We’ve got her!” Nimec shouted. “She’s safe, she’s okay, we’ve got her!”

Gordian took a breath.

Perhaps the longest, deepest breath he’d ever taken in his life.

And then he reached into his right pocket and carried on.

The Gulf of Guinea. One thousand feet below the ocean’s surface. The crewed submersible launched from the Chimera ’s hold eeling toward an escape platform off the Cameroonian shore.

In the small aft passenger cabin, Harlan DeVane stared past Casimir and his co-pilot into the watery gloom outside the forward dome. Behind him in abandoned waters, toasts to good fortune were being made on the Sedco platform, its beacon lights radiating far into the night. Broadcast to the world, Roger Gordian’s words of success had been statement enough of DeVane’s failure. Transmitted in secret, his own unanswered communiques to Kuhl had been mere redundant verification.

The robin was free. Father and daughter would be reunited.

Father and daughter.

DeVane stared into liquid emptiness, his bloodless face without expression, despising the thoughts that filled his mind like some baneful toxin. Was there relief from them knowing what was in store for Etienne Begela . . . that before the night was over his brains would pour from a bullet hole in his skull not quite as neatly made as the rondelle he had been given? Or would he find greater comfort in the past?

DeVane pictured his long-ago return to the high tower of his father, its doors unlocked for that second visit by the secret video he had taken of his couplings with the widow Melissa Phillips, and his genetic proof of paternity of the child she had birthed out of wedlock . . . the misbegotten product of their ardent clasps in the night.

His small teeth bared themselves in what might have been a smile of recovered satisfaction. DeVane had studied his father’s life thoroughly after their first meeting at the long table of glass. There were two legitimate sons, and a daughter . . .

Her surname at birth had been VanderMoere. After her marriage to the multimillionaire president of an inherited commodities empire, Arthur Phillips, she had adopted her husband’s surname, retaining it after his untimely death.

DeVane learned everything he could about the widow Melissa Phillips . . . everything he could well before the day he stepped up to his half-sister’s brownstone in New York City and allowed her to think she had begun her seduction of him.

In fact, it had been other way around.