Edwards wrinkled his forehead and shook his head. “Not much protection if ordnance starts raining down on our heads, Skipper.”

“Yeah, but if ordnance starts raining down, we haven’t done our jobs, now, have we?”

Edwards made another face. “Guess not, but those SS-N-15s are going to hurt just as bad either way.”

“That they will, XO. That they will,” Glass said, and went back to studying the chart as if there was really any more he could learn from it.

Nicholas Vujnovich and Josef Bogatinoff emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel. The traffic snarl inside the huge tube had seemed interminable. Vujnovich hit the steering wheel with his fist and shouted Russian curses in frustration. He flung the big Ford around the traffic loop and merged into still another mess of rush-hour traffic trying to make it to the West Side Highway.

“This is going to take damn near forever,” he raged. “That bitch will die of old age before we get there.”

Bogatinoff pulled his Glock from its belt holster and dropped the clip out. He worked the slide to remove the round from the chamber before checking the weapon over. He loaded the round back in the magazine, slapped it into the butt, and slid a round into the chamber again. He grinned viciously. “Not much chance of that, Nicholas.”

Traffic came to a complete halt. In front of them was a sea of red brake lights. Vujnovich smashed the horn in frustration. The blast blended with the cacophony of every other driver around them doing the same thing.

“Turn up Tenth,” Bogatinoff yelled to be heard over the din. “Maybe we will make better time. The address is way over on the East Side, so we have to get clear across town anyway.”

He waved to the right with the barrel of his pistol.

“Put that thing away before someone in this parade sees it,” Vujnovich snarled.

He punched the accelerator and twisted the wheel. The Ford lurched through a red light at Tenth Street and roared down the narrow block. The two men ignored the angry blare of horns from the cabbies they had just cut off. They were, at least, moving again as Vujnovich dove into the warren of streets of the West Village, weaving uptown and toward the East Side.

Boris Medikov accepted no excuses for failure. Certainly not a bit of heavy traffic.

Finally they pulled into a parking garage on Thirty-ninth Street, just a block from the address they had for Charles Gruver’s apartment. They locked the car, walked up to street level, and looked around to take their bearings. The neighborhood seemed to be all high-rise apartments with shops and restaurants on their ground floors. They could just catch a glimpse of the rectangular steel shape of the United Nations Building, framed by a gap between two cement monoliths. The East River was a couple of streets over.