“No,” said Otto. “Not a chance. She may torture you a bit; I think she’d be very happy to do that.”

“Let her try.”

“As you say. But ultimately I think Hecate would want you alive. She’s smart enough to know that you’re smarter. She and Paris have stolen more science then they’ve pioneered. You, Mr. Cyrus, are science. Hecate is too much your daughter to throw away such a valuable resource.”

“She’d want you dead, though,” Cyrus said.

“Without a doubt. And I would like to think that she’s too smart to risk torturing me. She learned the art from me, and she knows that turning it around is something I daresay I’ve pioneered. No… if Hecate gets the chance she’ll put a bullet in my brain.”

“If we let her,” said Cyrus.

“If we let her,” said Otto.

They smiled and clinked glasses.

They sat in lounge chairs that had been brought outside. All of the Deck’s exterior lights had been turned off, and they were miles from any town. There was nothing to mute the jeweled brilliance of the sky. They could even see the creamy flow of the Milky Way.

“Veder is on his way,” said Otto. “He’ll be here before the Twins’ jet arrives for you. Do you want him to accompany you? We can say that he’s your valet.”

“No. He can go in with the team. But once your Russians have breached the walls I want Veder to find me. I want him protecting me throughout.”

“Easy enough.”

They lapsed into a longer silence.

Several times Otto looked at Cyrus and opened his mouth to speak, but each time he left his thoughts unsaid. Finally Cyrus smiled and said, “Speak your mind before you drive me crazy. You want to know about the Hive. About how I feel?”

“Yes. We lost so much…”

“We lost nothing that matters, Otto.”

“The New Men. The breeding stock…”

“The Twins will have them somewhere. They’re smart enough to recognize what the New Men are. They would want to experiment with them. Once we take the Dragon Factory we’ll get them back. Or we’ll get enough of them back so that we can start again.”

“And Eighty-two?”

“I don’t think the Twins will have killed him. I think he’s alive. I feel it. If he’s at the Dragon Factory and unharmed, I might even show the Twins a degree of mercy.”

Otto did not need to ask what Cyrus would do-or to what extremes he would go-if Eighty-two was dead. No amount of pills would be able to control Cyrus if that happened.

But then Cyrus surprised him by saying, “But in the end it doesn’t matter.”

Otto gave him a sharp look.

“Somehow I feel like we’ve moved past that,” said Cyrus. “As we get closer to the Extinction Wave, so many of the other things are becoming less important.”

“The New Men fill a necessary role. A master race needs a slave race.”

“Maybe.”

“Those are your own words, Mr. Cyrus.”

“I know, and I believed them when I said them. But they don’t feel as valid now. We’re doing a great thing, Otto. We’re doing something that has never been done before. Within a year a billion mud people will have died. Within five years-once the second and third Waves have had a chance to reach even the remotest parts of Asia-there will only be a billion people on the planet. When we created the New Men we conceived them as a servant race during an orderly transfer of power. But… do you really think things will be orderly?”

Otto said nothing.

“I think we have lit a fuse to chaos itself. As the mud people die, the white races will not unify as a single people. You know that as well as I do. That was Hitler’s folly, because he believed that whites would naturally form alliances as the dirt races were extinguished. You and I, Otto… we’re guilty of being caught up in fervor.”

“Why this change of heart? Are you doubting our purpose?”

Cyrus laughed. “Good God, no. If anything, I have never felt my resolve and my focus-my mental focus, Otto-to be stronger. With the betrayal of the Twins I feel like blinders have been removed and a bigger, grander picture is spread out before me.”

“Are we having an incident, Mr. Cyrus? Should I get your pills?”

“No… no, nothing like that. I’m in earnest when I say that I have never been more focused.”

“Then what are you saying? I’m old, it’s late, and I’m tired, so please tell me in less grandiose terms.”

Cyrus nodded. “Fair enough.” He sipped his wine and set the glass on the cooling desert sand. “I have been reimagining the world as it will be after the Extinction Wave-Waves-have passed. There will be no reemergence of old powers. The Aryan nations will not rise. That was a propaganda that we both believed, and we’ve believed it for so long that we forgot to think it through; we forgot to allow the ancient dream to evolve even while we evolved our plans as we acquired new science. The deaths of five billion people will not bring a paradise on earth. It will not create an Aryan utopia.”

“Then what will it bring?”

“I told you. Chaos. Mass deaths will bring fear. Fear will inspire suspicion, and suspicion will become war. Our Extinction Wave is going to plunge our world into an age of total global warfare. Nations will fall; empires will collide; the entire planet will be awash in blood.”

Otto was staring at him now.

Cyrus looked up at the endless stars.

“We were born in conflict, Otto. Our species. Darwin was right about survival of the fittest. That’s what this will become. Evolution through attrition. We will light a furnace in which anything that is weak will be burned to ashes. True to our deepest dreams, Otto… only the strong shall survive. It is up to us to ensure that strength is measured by how skillfully the sword of technology is used. But make no mistake, we are about to destroy the world as we know it.” He closed his eyes. “And it will be glorious.”

Chapter Ninety-Seven

The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland

Monday, August 30, 9:14 A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 50 hours, 46 minutes

When I woke, Grace was gone. She left like a phantom early in the morning. I looked for her, but every time I found her she was busy. Too busy to talk, too busy to make eye contact that lasted longer than a microsecond. It hurt, but I understood it. Those three little words we had whispered to each other in the dark had been like fragmentation grenades tossed into our professional relationship. This morning was like the deck of the Titanic twenty minutes after the iceberg.

A pretty hefty dose of depression was settling over me as I made my way to the conference room for my seven o’clock meeting with Church and Dr. Hu.

They were both there. Church studied me for a long moment before greeting me with a wordless nod; Hu didn’t bother even looking up from his laptop. I poured a cup of coffee from a pot that smelled like it had been brewing since last month.

“Please tell me we’re ready to roll,” I said. “I feel a strong need for some recreational violence.”

“Switch to decaf,” Hu murmured distractedly.

“Have we checked out those New Men? I mean… does the Kid’s story hold water about them being Neanderthals?”

“Too soon to tell,” said Hu. “We’re running DNA tests now, but you forgot to bring me a blood sample or bring back a specimen.”

“By ‘specimen’ you better mean a urine sample,” I said, “because if you’re referring to those people as specimens I’m going to-”

“They aren’t people,” said Hu. “If they are Neanderthals, then they are not human. No, wait, before you leap over the table and kick my ass, think for a minute. You’re going to make the argument that Neanderthals evolved from Homo erectus just like we did and therefore common ancestry makes them human. Whereas I can applaud your hippie granola we’re-all-one-big-family sensibilities, the fact is that they were distinctly different from modern humans. They may not have even interbred with early humans, and our last common ancestor died out about six hundred and sixty thousand years ago. Besides, the Kid was wrong when he said that they were reclaimed from mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrion only has a little over sixteen thousand DNA letters that code for thirteen proteins. To reclaim and grow an extinct species you’d need DNA from the nucleus, which has three billion letters that produce more than twenty thousand proteins.”