The sharp bite of electricity.

“Silence,” Hanley snapped.

Talbot was afraid, the kind of deep-down fear of the unknown and unseen that creeps into a man’s soul and plays with his nerves and internal organs. Talbot began sweating from his forehead and the need to urinate was overpowering.

“I have to pee,” he said.

“When we say you can,” Hanley said. “First we are going to make a mold of your head. Then we will produce a three-dimensional image of it, which we will transmit over our computer network. From here on out, the Asian police organizations will be on the lookout for you. Then you are going to read a confession aloud. If you cooperate and perform these tasks, you will be taken to Hong Kong so that you can catch the first flight to the United States. Screw with us in any way and you will be washing up on the beaches of mainland China a few days from now. What’ll it be, lover boy?”

“Okay, okay,” Talbot blurted. “But I’m about to pee my pants.”

“Take him to the facilities,” Hanley said.

Blindfolded once again, Talbot was led to a restroom and his hands untied.

Four minutes later, he was back in his seat and strapped in place. Fifteen minutes after that, the mask was formed and the voice print recorded. A few minutes later, Michael Talbot was placed facedown on the rear seat of the sedan again and was driven toward the ferry dock.

WINSTON Spenser was trying to figure an angle. There was none. He had grabbed for the brass ring and come up short. His choice now was to live or to die, and the people that were controlling him had made a compelling argument. He’d walk out with a new identity and a million in funding. He decided this was a deal he would honor.

Spenser stared at his new passport and documents, then watched the lady in the group talking on the cellular telephone. She disconnected and turned to the leader.

“The president is on his way, Mr. Chairman,” she said. “He’s taken care of the problem.”

Spenser had no idea of the identities or affiliation of the people who had taken him hostage. He only knew from what he had witnessed so far that they had a power that went far beyond anything he had ever seen. They seemed to exist in a world of their own creation, a world of control and illusion, and whatever Spenser may have planned, they had always been one step ahead. And then it hit him.

“You were at the auction in Geneva,” he said to the leader.

Cabrillo stared at Spenser, as if trying to decide. “Yes, I was.”

“How did you know I’d switched the Buddhas?”

“You paid our company to fly the icon here to Macau, then take it by armored car to the temple,” Cabrillo said.

“So you staged the entire affair at the party as a ruse?”

“That, and we wanted to fulfill your deal with the man outside,” Cabrillo said.

“Unreal,” Spenser said. “And the one hundred million?”

“It will go to charity,” Cabrillo said. “We were hired to bring the real Buddha back to its rightful owner—this side deal is just frosting on the cake.”

Spenser thought for a moment. “What is your ideology, your group’s motivation?”

“We are a corporation,” Cabrillo said. “That is the only ideology we need.”

“So you exist to make a profit?”

“We exist,” Cabrillo said, “to make right from wrong. But along the way, we’ve learned how to make that a very lucrative enterprise.”

“Amazing,” Spenser said.

“Not as amazing as this,” Cabrillo said as the door to the hangar opened and the car carrying Hanley drove inside. Once the door closed, Hanley climbed from the passenger side of the SUV. “Meet Michael Talbot,” Cabrillo said to an astonished Winston Spenser.

THE software billionaire took a key from a chain around his neck and opened the leather portfolio on the table. Then he removed a folder and flipped through the papers. The stack of papers was nearly an inch thick and was composed of bearer bonds in various amounts. The largest denomination was for an even $1 million. The smallest, $50,000. The banks that had issued the bonds were from a hodgepodge of European countries, from Great Britain to Germany to the most prevalent, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The total was $100 million.

It was a king’s ransom to purchase a princely prize.

But to the software billionaire, it was just money. He lived for the fulfillment of his own desires. It was not the art of the Golden Buddha that intrigued him, nor the history that surrounded the icon like a cloud; it was the fact that it had once been stolen and now it had been stolen again. It was the crime that turned him on, the inflation of his ego he would feel when he knew that he was the only man in the world to possess the rare and priceless artifact. Truth be told, he already owned a collection of stolen art that rivaled any museum in Europe. Monet, Manet, Daumier, Delacroix. Da Vinci sketches, Donatello bronzes. Illuminated manuscripts, crown jewels, stolen historical documents.

Warehouses in California were filled with antique automobiles, historic motorcycles, and early airplanes. Stolen Civil War artifacts, Romanov icons heisted from a museum in St. Petersburg, scientist Nikola Tesla’s writings lifted from a museum in Romania after the fall of communism, secret presidential letters, even a toilet from the White House.

The first computer, the first personal computer, the first mass-produced consumer computer.

Those last were for nostalgia, since computers were where his fortune had come from. He still had a hard copy of the first program his company had sold—one he had stolen himself from an unsuspecting programmer who’d believed he was just helping another enthusiast. That had been his first and largest theft, and it had set the stage for all the others.

He stared at the bonds again, then reached for the satellite telephone.

EDDIE Seng watched as a pair of olive-green Zodiac boats were raised from a lower deck on a utility elevator that exited amidships on the Oregon. As soon as the elevator stopped, Sam Pryor hooked a cable to the center hoisting ring of the first boat and swung it over the side, then into the water. Down at water level, Murphy took the bowline of the boat and tied it to the dock. While Pryor was hooking up the second boat, Murphy climbed aboard and checked the fuel and oil for the high-output four-stroke outboard motor. The oil was fresh and full, the tanks topped to the rim. Murphy turned the key and watched the lights on the dash; once he was sure everything was fine, he twisted the key and the engine started and settled into an almost silent idle.

Once the second boat touched the water, Kasim duplicated Murphy’s efforts. The two boats sat idling in the night. Seng climbed aboard Murphy’s vessel and checked the supplies that had been loaded aboard down in the inner workings of the Oregon. Finding all in order, he spoke to Huxley in a low voice.

“You got everything?”

Huxley stared at her list, then found the last item. “We’re good.”

Next, Seng reached across between the boats and handed Kasim a CD. “These are the coordinates for the onboard GPS—we are running an exact copy on this boat. Let’s try to stay within ten feet or so of one another, that way the radar shielding should hide us both.”

Kasim nodded. “You got it, Eddie.”

“Okay, Mark,” Seng said quietly as he threw off the line, “you can take us out.”

Murphy slid the control lever down and the boat backed in reverse. A few minutes later, the two boats were skimming across the rain-splashed water at speeds of nearly thirty knots. For all intents and purposes, they were undetectable. Any radar that might try to paint them was being jammed; anyone listening for the engines would not be able to hear the noise over the storm. Help was coming.