He grabbed the phone and punched in Alan Smythe’s number. The ringing on the other side of the office suite went unanswered. That self-important Brit son of a bitch was never around when he was needed.

Andretti shook his head as he tried to will his furious pulse to slow. There wasn’t time to hunt down Smythe. Besides, Andretti doubted the man had the stomach for what needed to be done. He would puff his European cigarette, wave his hands about in that maddening, feminine way he had, and prevaricate until it was too late to do anything about it. Until after Catherine Goldman had shoved a giant wrench into the smooth-running gears of their perfectly meshing scheme.

The CTO felt the gorge rise in his stomach, the acid welling up into his throat. He opened the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk and took a big swig from the Maalox bottle he kept there. The stomach problems were getting worse, harder to control. He didn’t know if his nerves would hold out until they saw the plan to its finish.

The chalky taste of the stomach medicine gagged him now. He reached behind him and yanked open the little refrigerator, pulled out the bottle of Dewar’s, and filled the water glass on his desk. He took a healthy swallow of the amber liquid, felt its deep coldness on his tongue, then its warm, slow burn as it passed down his throat.

Funny. It did more to calm his churning gut than the Maalox had. It gave him a shot of courage, too.

It was time to make the call.

He punched in the phone number from memory. It was the kind of number one did not keep handy in one’s BlackBerry or address book. No, this was one number best not written down anywhere.

The phone rang twice, an oddly hollow and distant sound, and then clicked mysteriously several times. The call was being forwarded through a labyrinth of systems, bouncing around the world several times until it was untraceable.

It was a thick, growling voice that answered.

“Yeah. Who is it and what do you want?”

“It’s CA. I have a job for you. A certain difficulty requires your attention.”

Joe Glass stood on the platform at the bottom of the ladder that led up to the after escape trunk. The noise of the whirling turbines, just a few feet aft, drowned out most other sounds. He could hear the metallic clank as the Mystic landed for the third time on the back of Toledo. The smell of hot oil permeated everything back here in the engine room. Those who might assume that nuke boats were antiseptically clean had never been on one for any length of time.