And then—no! it couldn’t be, it had to be a trick of the light!—he saw the flash, the dazzling, fiery blast and plume of a midair explosion. A pulse of white bleached the early-morning sky, followed immediately by a vast secondary flare, the yellow-white of combusted fuel. Small pieces of fuselage began to drift toward the sea.

No! Oh, Christ, no!

For several long seconds, Janson felt perfectly numb. He closed his eyes and reopened them: Had he imagined it?

A detached propeller twirled lazily before it crashed into the sea.

Oh, dear God.

It was a catastrophe such as none he had ever witnessed. At once, his heart felt squeezed, hard, harder. Theo. Theo Katsaris, the closest thing he had to a son. A man who loved him, and whom he loved. “Let me stay behind,” Theo had begged him, and—out of vanity, out of pride—Janson had refused him.

Dead. Incinerated before his eyes.

In a kaleidoscope, he saw the faces of the others. Taciturn, even-tempered Manuel Honwana. Andressen: loyal, methodical, reliable, soft-spoken—easily underestimated precisely because he was so devoid of selfregard. Sean Hennessy, whom he had spirited out of an English prison cell, only to serve with a death sentence. Donna Hedderman, too—the luckless American do-gooder.

Gone. Dead because of him.

And Peter Novak. The greatest humanitarian of a new century. A giant among men. The peacemaker. A man who had once saved Janson’s life. And the object of the entire mission.

Dead.

Cremated, three thousand feet above the Indian Ocean.

An incredible triumph had turned, now that day broke, into a nightmare.

All he knew was that it was no accident, no engine malfunction. The double explosion—the blast that preceded, by a few crucial seconds, the burst of combusted fuel—was telltale. What had occurred was the result of craft and design. Such craft and design that four of the best men he knew had been murdered, along with one of the best men anybody had ever known.

What the hell had happened? Who could have planned such a thing? When had the plans been laid?

And why? For God’s sakes, why?

Janson sagged to the floor of the RIB, paralyzed by grief, futility, rage; for a moment, in the open sea, he felt as if he were in a crypt, with a heavy weight on his chest. Breathing was impossible. The very blood that sluiced through his veins seemed to congeal. The heaving sea beckoned, with its antidote of everlasting oblivion. He was harrowed, tormented, and deeply afraid, and he knew just how to put a stop to it.

But that was not an option.

He would have given his life for any of theirs. He knew that now.

But that was not an option.

Only he survived.