Still, he found Jana’s failure to contact him disturbing as he did the anomalies in the picture of the apparently dead daughter of Colonel Harold Middleton. And if Charlotte Middleton was still alive, then so was the female Volunteer Tesla, holding fast to Archer’s trail. It was a good thing he’d taken precautions, another legacy bequeathed him by Sikari himself.

As if on cue, Archer’s scrambled cell phone beeped and he raised it to check the incoming text message from the man he had dispatched to Kashmir.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Middleton stood in the cordoned-off security area, gazing up at the sky in expectation of the president’s arrival. The structure of the Baglihar dam beyond made for a magnificent spectacle. The only thing that even remotely approached it in size and scope was Nevada’s massive Hoover Dam. Then, as now, construction had gone forward in essentially a wilderness; desert for the Hoover, rural unpopulated land for the Baglihar. If the concrete used here was even half what it had been there, Middleton could see no way any explosives short of the nuclear variety, including thermobaric, could possibly destroy the facility. Nor could it result in the kind of collateral damage capable of reaching the place where the president would be speaking: essentially a sprawling, natural amphitheater built to offer stunning, tourist-friendly views of the Chenab River, its vast power now harnessed between a million tons of concrete and steel.

What exactly had Devras Sikari meant in his email to Balan?

You recall what I have planned for the ‘Village.’ It has to happen soon—before we can move on.

As he gazed at it, he thought: No wonder Pakistan had lodged such a vigorous protest with the U.N. Irrigation to a great bulk of the nation’s agriculture was now endangered, especially if the season turned any drier than normal. From one side of Pakistan to the other, people could find themselves going hungry, the perfect pretext on which to strike back. Middleton couldn’t help but wonder if that had been the plan from the beginning.

“I have something you need to see, comrade,” Chernayev said, suddenly at Middleton’s side, holding out his BlackBerry. “The man pictured is named Umer, a known associate of both Sikari and Archer who helped them obtain the explosives. General Zang’s intelligence indicates he will be the one to trigger the explosion.”

“It makes no sense.”

“What?”

“Why go through all this trouble to set off explosives inside a dam they can’t effectively destroy?”

Chernayev shrugged. “A show of force, perhaps, of power as a precursor to something much worse.”

“No, this was about assassinating the secretary of state from the beginning. Now it’s the president. That’s what we’re facing.”

“Once my men locate Archer’s men, it’ll be sometime before we’ll have to face him again. And if we’re lucky enough to find the boy himself . . . ”