“Bah. My Misha is a good boy, but he is a lousy negotiator. You love me like a brother for what I did to that oversized scow of yours. We had good times, you and me, while the men at my shipyard turned your tabby cat into a lion. To honor those memories alone you should rescue me for free.”

Juan countered, “I could have charged double, and Mikhail would have paid because even he doesn’t know all your Swiss bank account numbers.” With that, he twisted the picks and sprang the lock.

The first thing Yuri Borodin did was grasp Cabrillo in a big bear hug and kiss him on both cheeks. “You are a saint amongst men.”

“Get off me, you crazy Russian,” Juan said lightly as he extricated himself from Yuri’s grip. “We’re not out of this yet.”

Borodin turned serious. “There is a great deal we need to talk about. The timing of my arrest was not coincidental.”

“Not now. Let’s go.”

They crawled back into Cabrillo’s cell. Juan took up the microburst transmitter, set a mental timer in his head, and activated both. He then keyed the plastic explosives he’d earlier molded to the prison’s exterior wall a good distance from his rabbit hole. The blast was muted by the intervening cinder blocks but could still be felt in every corner of the large facility. The guards would be swinging into action almost immediately.

Juan ducked down to enter the claustrophobic space between the prison’s inner and outer walls. He turned back to Borodin. “No matter what happens, just stay with me.”

Yuri nodded grimly, his normal bonhomie replaced with real concern for his fate.

They moved laterally along the cramped space and had to squeeze by pipes that rose through the floor. These were part of the passive ammonia cooling system that kept what little heat maintained by the prison from melting the permafrost on which it was built. The air thickened with the burned chemical stench of the explosives as they neared the breach through the outer foundation.

The C-4 had blown a ragged hole through the concrete slab about the size of a manhole cover. Chunks of smashed cement shifted under his feet as Cabrillo boosted himself through the opening. On the far side he found himself standing in a moat that encircled the prison’s basement level. This dead space acted as a thermal buffer to again prevent the building’s latent heat from melting the frozen ground.

Twelve feet overhead were panels that hid the moat from the surface. The panels had dozens of holes punched through them so that air could circulate freely and were supported by metal scaffolding. Clots of snow jammed some of the holes, and some drifted down on the men as a result of the blast.