Kali had owned the tiny West Village walk-up for years, paying for it in cash during an extended stay in the city. She had not returned since, until agreeing to accompany Carmody from Romania. Home for her was very far away, but this was a place to stay in her travels, somewhere she could do her work, and she kept it clean and uncluttered and sparsely but comfortably furnished.

Back from the Terminal, she hung her coat on a peg near the door, took a bottle of cold water out of the refrigerator and went to the dining area.

Her laptop was on the table, and she sat down behind it, touching the fingerprint scanner to unlock its hard drive. After a moment she typed in a decryption key to enter Access Mundi, the cloud vault she shared with Lucien Navarro.

Navarro had been Kali’s dear friend and confidant since childhood. He, along with a handful of other internet activists, had cofounded a community of millions in cyberspace that was preparing to declare itself a nation free of geographic borders, with sovereignty equivalent to any physical country on earth. A cybernation. It was an increasingly dangerous business, as several of the world’s authoritarian powers had declared any affiliation with Cybernation a jailable offense, labeling Lucien and his collaborators radical threats and instigators of rebellion.

Kali stayed in close contact with him, touching base on a regular schedule. But now the Access Mundi interface showed no messages from Lucien. No deposited files or digital stamps to indicate his recent entry. He had dropped out of touch, and that was more than a little odd to her.

Where are you? she thought. He would not go silent. Not at any time. But of all possible times, certainly not now. Too much was at stake.

Kali sat at the computer feeling Navarro’s absence.

It worried her. Deeply.

Crimea

The pier jutted straight out into the water from the road rimming the mountainside. It was narrow and concrete and within eyeshot of where the submarine pen cut into the high stone face. They stood at its head as the clock struck midnight, facing each other in a tight group: Koschei, squat and bearish in a charcoal-gray trench coat, the pale Grigor, and a third man, tall and thin with long black hair and dark, piercing eyes.

“This won’t take long,” Koschei said. He turned to the black-haired man. “Face-to-face contact is still the most secure, no?”

“In contrast to what?”

Koschei chuckled, looking amused. He turned to Grigor. “You’ll be returning to the United States,” he said. “New York first.”

“And then?”

“Hawaii.”

Grigor seemed surprised. “Five months ago, when I wanted to stay in America, you insisted it was too hot.”

“Circumstances change. We need you back there in the short term. You’ll take care of something for us alone, then rendezvous with the same group you led aboard the cable ship. They’re already en route.”