Ito started to panic. “There’s no time! The cameras are going to come back online in only a few minutes. You have to help me!”

“Calm down, Doctor. I will help you, but there’s going to have to be a minor change in plan. When you leave here, does the guard follow you or do you follow him?”

Ito’s bloodshot eyes darted back and forth as he tried to remember. “He follows me.”

“Okay. Fine,” Smith said, trying to keep his tone soothing. “Do the guards wear body armor?”

“I don’t think so. No. I’ve never seen it.”

“Good. Then you’re going to walk out of here like you always do. And when you get close”—Smith touched a place on his upper stomach—“put that screwdriver right here.”

“What?” Ito said, eyes widening. “You want—”

“Listen to me!” Smith said, raising his voice enough to silence the man. “You need to drive it upward and to your right. Toward his heart.”

“But—”

“He has no reason to expect this,” Smith said. “But when you do it, he’s going to try to get his gun out and he’ll probably try to grab you. Stay right up against him. Be calm and don’t give him room to maneuver. In two seconds it’ll be over.”

“No,” Ito said. “I…I cannot do this.”

“You’re either going to have the figurative blood of millions of innocent people on your hands or the literal blood of one trained killer. As moral dilemmas go, that one seems pretty straightforward.”

“But…but I’m a scientist. An old man. What if he kills me?”

“Then all your worries will be over, won’t they?”

The scientist wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his lab coat and then, surprisingly, turned and pressed his hand against the palm reader next to the door.

His gait was a little too fast and stiff, but it didn’t matter. The guard’s eyes were locked on his American prisoner as they had been every time before.

Smith just stood there watching, calculating the odds that Ito would just keep on walking at about 99 percent. Again, though, the scientist surprised him.

He struck just as the door started to slide shut, pressing himself up against the man and pinning him to the wall. Smith rushed the door and grabbed its edge, but the mechanism was too powerful. The last thing he saw was the guard wrapping a hand around Ito’s fragile neck.

His heart was pounding far harder than it would have been if he’d taken the man himself, nearly audible in the silence that had descended on the room. There had been no gunshot, but what did that mean? Had Ito managed to hold on? Were the two men lying dead on the floor, one with a screwdriver beneath his rib cage and the other with a broken spine?