The doctor, the nurse, and the six sailors who’d helped the rescued men down here lay sprawled inside. Each of them had small black dots on their foreheads or in the centers of their chests. Sometimes more than one.

Hanzo felt his heart judder to a stop in his chest, and his whole body went as cold as the icy seas that slapped against the hull. His mind, sharp as it was, slipped a gear as he tried to navigate through the seas of impossibility. All eight of the people in that room were dead.

They had all been shot.

There hadn’t been any noise of gunfire, but there was brass on the floor.

There was so little blood, but Hanzo knew that dead people do not bleed. He also realized that the head shots had not exited. There was no blood spatter.

Only death.

The three survivors were gone. Their heavy coats and gloves were on the floor, but they were gone.

What had been beneath those bulky coats?

He stood where he had stopped, one foot inside the sick bay, one in the hall. Hanzo looked down at the little camera transmitter in his hand.

“God help us,” he said.

He did not hear the footfall of the man who stepped up behind him. He barely felt the feather-light pressure of the sound suppressor of the pistol touching the hair over his ear. The shot was a soft thup, which he did hear, though only as a fading afterthought as the .22 slug punched through the bone and began ricocheting around inside his skull, expending its foot pound of force by destroying his brain utterly. Lacking the force to exit the skull.

He fell into the sick bay.

Captain Hanzo did not hear the screams and yells as the rest of his crew died.

There were fifty-three scientists and forty-four crew aboard the Shirase. There were weapons aboard, but the lockers were never opened, the guns and rifles never handed out. There was no time for that. The three Fixers swept like a storm through the ship, from stem to stern, deck to deck, killing silently, killing efficiently. They disabled the radio room.

Hanzo, who appreciated tough men working at peak efficiency, might had been impressed. He might also have been terrified, because these men moved much too quickly than was reasonable. In instances where a crewman was able to mount some kind of defense, they swept the counterattacks aside. For all the toughness of the sailors aboard, they might as well have been toddlers.

It was a massacre.

A quick, quiet massacre.

In under nine minutes, all ninety-seven people aboard the Shirase were dead.

INTERLUDE 10

SALES PRESENTATION VIA SHOWROOM

FOUR MONTHS AGO

Mr. Sunday froze the image on the face of Captain Hanzo. The officer had twisted as he fell so that his face was visible, and there was a look of profound surprise stamped on his features.

“Now that,” crowed Mr. Sunday, “is entertainment!”