Finally, there was Finn Andressen, a Norwegian and a former officer in his country’s armed forces, who had degrees in geology and had a well-honed instinct for terrain assessment. He had designed security arrangements for mining companies around the world. He arrived within the hour, followed in short order by Sean Hennessy, the remarkably versatile and unflappable Irish airman. The team members greeted one another with hearty shoulder clasps or quiet handshakes, depending on their temperament.

Janson led them through the plan of attack, starting with the broad outlines and descending to details and alternative options. As the men absorbed the mission protocol, the sun grew red, large, and low in the horizon, as if it were getting heavier and its weight were forcing it down toward the sea. To the men, it was a giant hourglass, reminding them how little time remained.

Now they split up into pairs and set about finetuning the plan, bringing schematics in line with reality. Leaning over a folding wooden bench, Honwana and Andressen reviewed maps of wind-current and ocean-current patterns. Janson and Katsaris studied a plasticine mock-up of the Steenpaleis, the Stone Palace.

Sean Hennessy, meanwhile, was doing chin-ups from an exposed I beam as he listened to the others; it had been one of his few distractions in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Janson glanced at him; would he be all right? He had no reason to think otherwise. If the Irishman’s complexion was paler than usual, his physique was burlier. Janson had run him through a rough-andready field physical and was satisfied that his reflexes were as quick as ever.

“You do realize,” Andressen said to Janson, turning away from his charts, “that there will be at least a hundred people based in the Stone Palace alone. Are you sure we have enough manpower?”

“More than enough,” Janson said. “If five hundred Gurkhas were called for, I’d have requested them. I’ve asked for what I need. If I could do it with fewer, I would. The fewer men, the fewer the complications.”

Janson now turned from the plasticine model to the highly detailed blueprints. Those blueprints, he knew, represented an enormous effort. They had been prepared in the past forty hours by a task force of architects and engineers assembled by the Liberty Foundation. The experts had been provided with extensive verbal descriptions from visitors, a profusion of historical photographs, and even present-day overhead satellite imagery. Colonial archives in the Netherlands had been consulted as well. Despite the rapidity with which the work was done, Novak’s people told him they believed it was “quite accurate” in most of the particulars. They also warned that some of the particulars, the ones pertaining to seldom-used areas of the structure, were “less certain” and that some of the materials analysis was conjectural and “uncertain.”

Less certain. Uncertain. Words Janson was hearing too often for his taste.