"Enough for both of us," Golovko observed. "Remember when we first met, negotiating to remove those fucking things?" He heard Ryan's snort over the phone. He didn't hear what his colleague was thinking. The first time I was close to those things, aboard your missile submarine, Red October, yeah, I remember that. I remember feeling my skin crawl like I was in the presence of Lucifer himself. He'd never had the least bit of affection for ballistic weapons. Oh, sure, maybe they'd kept the peace for forty years, maybe the thought of them had deterred their owners from the intemperate thoughts that had plagued chiefs of state for all of human history. Or just as likely, mankind had just been lucky, for once.

"Jack, this is getting rather serious," Golovko said. "By the way, our officer met with your officers. He reports favorably on them—and thank you, by the way, for the copy of their report. It included data we did not have. Not vitally important, but interesting even so. So tell me, do they know to seek out these rockets?"

"The order went out," Ryan assured him.

"To my people as well, Ivan Emmetovich. We will find them, never fear," Golovko felt the need to add. He had to be thinking the same thing: the only reason the missiles had not been used was that both sides had possessed them, because it was like threatening a mirror. That was no longer true, was it? And so came Ryan's question:

"And then what?" he asked darkly. "What do we do then?"

"Do you not say in your language, 'One thing at a time'?"

Isn't this just great? Now I have a friggin' Russian trying to cheer me up!

"Thank you, Sergey Nikolay'ch. Perhaps I deserved that as well."

"So why did we sell Citibank?" George Winston asked.

"Well, he said to look out for banks that were vulnerable to currency fluctuations," Gant replied. "He was right. We got out just in time I think, see for yourself." The trader typed another instruction into his terminal and was rewarded with a graphic depiction of what First National City Bank stock had done on Friday, and sure enough it had dropped off the table in one big hurry, largely because Columbus, which had purchased the issue in large quantities over the preceding five weeks, had held quite a bit, and in selling it had shaken faith in the stock badly. "Anyway, that set off an alarm in our program—"

"Mark, Citibank is one of the benchmark stocks in the model, isn't it?" Winston asked calmly. There was nothing to be gained by leaning on Mark too hard.

"Oh." His eyes opened a little wider. "Well, yes, it is, isn't it?"