He crouched and waited. Directly across the room from him, the tunnel through which he and the woman had escaped ran into the mountain. Tanya. Her name was Tanya, come back from the dead to speak to him about her God. She was as beautiful as he remembered. Possibly more. His heart pounded steadily.

And the priest? It was too late for the priest.

The air shattered with an explosion. Immediately all heads jerked to the far corner and Shannon bolted from his cover. Steams of ammonium hydroxide jetted from the ruptured tank to his far left. Yells of alarm filled the air as pipes hissed the potent gas. Before any of the men had fully registered the nature of the accident, Shannon was across the room and in the tunnel, sprinting down the earth floor toward the elevator shaft he and Tanya had used.

He tossed a single bundle of C-4 under the conveyor track as he ran. It would close the tunnel. Then he was at the gaping elevator shaft—clear to the bottom with the car resting above him. He looked back toward the processing lab from where the ruckus now carried. If he’d been spotted, they weren’t pursuing.

He reached into the shaft, grabbed the thick steel cable, and lowered himself to the basement level, ten feet above rock bottom. He withdrew the bowie knife, jammed it between the elevator doors, and wrenched hard. The steel doors gaped and he shoved his foot through the opening. Five seconds later Shannon tumbled into the hall that had sealed him in just two days ago.

ABDULLAH STOOD slightly hunched in the upper room, drenched in sweat, his facial muscles twitching spastically.

He considered calling the coast for confirmation of his blast but the fidgeting Hispanic before him was right. They couldn’t trust anyone now. In fact, they should leave, before a fighter jet dropped one of those bombs on them that drilled through mountains. Before Jamal arrived by helicopter.

“But they can’t attack us. They know the second device is already on a countdown. They will assume that only I can stop it. You see, that’s the power of true terror.” He couldn’t remember such a feeling of satisfaction.

The room suddenly shook under the rumble of an explosion and Ramón bolted from his chair, terrified.

Abdullah sprang to the window. A dozen men scrambled about below, fleeing what appeared to be the contents of a ruptured tank. An accident? It was too coincidental. The seconds slogged off in his mind with the surreal pace of a huge pendulum.

And then he saw the half-naked man disappear into the tunnel to his far left and he swallowed.

The agent. Casius!

He spun to Ramón. “It’s the agent!” For a moment he couldn’t think. He stared at Ramón, who’d already drawn his gun.

“Casius?” Ramón said.