"Does she actually know what his former job was?"

"Manfred is very security-conscious, but we must assume that she does. What woman does not?"

"Go on," Qati said tiredly.

"Discovery of her body will force the police to search for her husband, and that is also a problem. She must disappear. Then it will seem that she has joined her husband."

"Instead of the other way around," Qati observed with a rare smile, "at the end of the project."

"Quite so."

"What sort of woman is she?"

"A shrew, a money-grabber, not a believer," Bock, an atheist, said, somewhat to Qati's amusement.

"How will you do it?"

Bock explained briefly. "It will also validate the reliability of our people for that part of the operation. I'll leave the details to my friends."

"Trickery? One cannot be overly careful in an enterprise like this one "

"If you wish, a videotape of the elimination? Something unequivocal?" Bock had done that before.

"It is barbaric," Qati said. "But regrettably necessary."

"I will take care of that when I go to Cyprus."

"You'll need security for that trip, my friend."

"Yes, thank you, I think I will." Bock knew what that meant. If his capture looked imminent - well, he was in a profession that entailed serious risks, and Qati had to be careful. Gunther's own operational proposal made that all the more imperative.

"The tools all have levelers for the air plates," Ghosn said in annoyance, fifteen meters away. "Very good ones - why all the trouble with the tables?"

"My young friend, this is something we can only do one time. Do you wish to take any chances at all?"

Ghosn nodded. The man was right, even if he was a patronizing son-of-a-bitch. "And the tritium?"

"In those batteries. I've kept them in a cool place. You release the tritium by heating them. The procedure for recovering the tritium is delicate, but straightforward."

"Ah, yes, I know how to do that." Ghosn remembered such lab experiments from university.

Fromm handed him a copy of the manual for the first tool. "Now, we both have new things to learn so that we can teach the operators."

Captain Dubinin sat in the office of the Master Shipwright of the yard. Known variously as Shipyard Number 199, Leninskogo Komsomola, or simply Komsomol'sk, it was the yard at which the Admiral Lunin had been built. Himself a former submarine commander, the man preferred the title Master Shipwright to Superintendent and had changed the title on his office door accordingly on taking the job two years earlier. He was a traditionalist, but also a brilliant engineer. Today he was a happy man.

"While you were gone, I got hold of something wonderful!"

"What might that be, Admiral?"

"The prototype for a new reactor feed pump. It's big, cumbersome, and a cast-iron bastard to install and maintain, but it's "

"Quiet?"

"As a thief," the Admiral said with a smile. "It reduces the radiated noise of your current pump by a factor of fifty."