After a large dinner of prime steak and vegetables, Grigor was taking a long, hot shower before bed. Tomorrow he expected to be finished in New York. Though his plan had some flexibility and movable parts, it fell within the limits of a broader, overriding schedule. One with very hard, very inflexible borders.

So he had ordered from room service, wanting a solid meal before he moved on. Then he had sent an encrypted phone message to Jochi and gone into the shower.

Rinsing off now, he dried himself and wrapped the towel around his waist. What else was there to do? A final check of his weapons and gear, but that could wait. First, a good night’s sleep. He needed to be sharp when he awoke in the morning. He did not expect to return to the hotel after he left.

Grigor got into bed, turned off the light and closed his eyes. Then he lay still on his back with his arms folded across his chest, his physiology autoregulating, his heart rate slowing down to forty beats per minute, his breathing becoming so shallow as to be imperceptible. For him there was no transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep. No segue. His eyes did not move under his lids. He never dreamed and rarely moved or turned under the sheets. He simply shut down and detached from consciousness.

In a state of deep repose, Grigor slept soundly.

Six hours later, he would awake rested and ready for Musil.

Hawaii

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when the Lucky Gift lumbered into Mamala Bay southeast of Oahu.

Bearing west, going a steady three knots at dead slow, the container ship rounded Diamond Head and Waikiki’s white crescent beach on its starboard side. Sunlight gleamed and speared and starred off the residential towers and hotels at Kewalo Basin Harbor as it passed the waterfront marinas heading toward Honolulu Harbor. Armstrong Island sat in the middle of the harbor, where the sun was also bright and hot over its wharves, storage sheds, container terminals, skyscraping cargo derricks and acres of open freight yards.

The city’s busy downtown area was less than two miles to the north. Westward around the barrier reef was the lagoon known as Wai Momi, waters of pearl, so named by Indigenous islanders for the coveted oyster pearls that the tide swept into it. At the head of its narrow inlet, Pearl Harbor was homeport to the nine destroyers and cruisers of Naval Surface Group Middle Pacific (NAVSURFGRU MIDPAC), SUBPAC’s fifteen nuclear submarines, and HSM-37’s Easy Riders and their squadron of MH-60R Seahawk marine attack helicopters. On the leeward side of the lagoon was a landing field for a fleet of huge C-47A logistics and support aircraft called Windjammers.