The Doomsday Key

As she waited, the man's face digitized into a hundred reference points and uploaded. Moments later, the screen flashed in red with a single word, along with an operative code beneath it.

The word made her go cold.

Sigma.

The operative code she knew equally well.

Terminate upon sight.

Krista returned the camera feed to live. She leaned close to the monitor. The man was gone.

Antonio Gravel was having a bad day.

Standing out in the hallway, he had meant to waylay Ivar Karlsen after the luncheon, to try one last time to convince the bastard to let him join the trip to Svalbard. He was even willing to offer some concession, to ingratiate himself if necessary. Instead, Ivar had run into the U.S. senator. Antonio waited in the wings to be introduced, but as usual, the bastard deliberately ignored him. The two men departed, deep in conversation.

Antonio could barely breathe after the insult. Anger grew to a blinding white fury. He swung away savagely and smacked squarely into a woman hurrying out a side door. She was dressed in a long fur coat, her hair done up in a scarf. He struck her so hard that a large pair of Versace sunglasses slipped from her face. She deftly caught them and perched them back on her nose.

"Entschuldigen Sie bitte," Antonio apologized. He'd been so startled and mortified that he slipped into his native Swiss German-especially as a confounding flicker of recognition fluttered through him.

Who...?

Ignoring him, she shoved past, glanced into the banquet room-then rushed down the hallway with a flare of her ankle-length coat. She was plainly late for some engagement.

He watched her disappear down the closest stairwell. Irritated, he shook his head and started to leave the other way.

Then he suddenly remembered.

He jolted and swung back around.

Impossible.

He had to be mistaken. He had only met the geneticist once, at an organizational meeting regarding the Viatus research project in Africa. He didn't recall her name, but he was certain it was the same woman. He had spent most of that dull meeting staring at her and undressing her with his eyes, imagining what it would be like to force himself on her.

It had to be her.

But she was supposed to be dead, a victim of the Mali massacre. There had been no survivors.

Antonio continued to stare toward the stairwell. What was she doing here, alive and unharmed? And why was she keeping herself hidden, her features under wraps?

Antonio's eyes narrowed as a slow realization warmed through him. Something was up, something no one was supposed to know about, something tied to Viatus. For years, he'd been seeking some dirt on Ivar, a way to rein the bastard to his will.

At long last, here might be his chance.

But how to best turn it to his advantage?

Antonio swung away, already plotting his game. He knew which card to play first. A man who'd lost a son during that massacre. Senator Gorman. What would the U.S. senator think if he learned there had been a survivor of the attack, someone Ivar was keeping secret?

With a grim smile, he headed off.

The day had suddenly gotten much brighter.

3:15 P.M.

Painter headed under the brick archway that passed through the fortress wall of Akershus. Even though it was only a little after three in the afternoon, the sun was already low in the sky at this near-Arctic latitude. Beyond the archway, the fjord's harbor opened. Snow still frosted the verdigris-stained cannons that lined the walkway and pointed out to sea, ready to protect the town against warships. Though at the moment, there was only a Cunard cruise ship parked dockside.

As seagulls swooped and screamed through the diesel-fouled air, Painter continued along the cruise ship's towering bulk and aimed for the city proper. Over the past hour, he'd kept tabs on Ivar Karlsen, eavesdropping on his conversations. With the bug, he'd had a good chance to discover more details about the CEO, insights that might prove invaluable for tomorrow's interview.

The conversations had mostly been of mundane matters, but still, it was clear the man was deeply committed to facing issues of hunger and overpopulation. Karlsen was all about real-world solutions and practicality. It was plainly the man's mission in life.

Painter also caught an intriguing bit of conversation about the drought-resistant corn strains being developed by Viatus, a version of which had been tested at the Mali research farm. As of last week, mass seed shipments were already under way to places around the world, triggering a spike in stock prices for Viatus. And still Ivar was not satisfied. He promised that his company's Crop Biogenics division was continuing to craft new strains with desirable features: insect-resistant wheat, frost-tolerant citrus, weed-killing soybeans. The list went on and on, including a rapeseed strain that could produce oil essential to the manufacture of biodegradable plastic.

But the conversation had ended on a darker note. Karlsen had brought up a quote from Henry Kissinger. It had been in response to a question about his company's shift in focus from petrochemicals to engineered seeds. He had said, paraphrasing Kissinger, "Control oil and you control nations, but control food and you control all the people of the world."

Did Karlsen truly believe that?

A few minutes after that, the man had climbed into a corporate limo and left for his research complex outside of Oslo. The hidden micro-transceiver had a limited range, so Painter had to abandon his spying for now. And just as well. Karlsen's talk about the Crops Biogenics division had lit a fire under Painter. He barely felt the cold as he crossed into the shadow of the towering cruise ship and navigated through the passengers hovering at the gangplank.

He had to prepare for another facet of the investigation, one that would require a bit more stealth this evening.

As he moved through the passengers, a burly figure in a parka bumped against him. Spotting the impact a fraction of a second before, Painter instinctively moved to sidestep him. A fiery lance of pain stabbed into his side.

He spun away from it, catching a flash of silver off a knife held low in the man's grip. If he hadn't dodged at the last moment, the blade would've struck him square in the stomach. He couldn't count twice on such a lucky break. The man came at him again.

So far, no one else had noted the attack.

Painter snatched a camera from around one of the oblivious tourists' necks. Gripping the shoulder strap, he swung the heavy Nikon SLR and struck the attacker square in the ear. As the man fell to the side, Painter leaped in closer, snagged the leather strap around the man's wrist, and used the grip to wrench his struggling form over his hip and hard to the pavement.

The man's face struck the cement. A bone snapped in his trapped arm. The knife tumbled across the ground.

As yells erupted all around, Painter vaulted over the prone body, going after the loose weapon. Before he could reach it, the knife suddenly jolted, emitting a sharp hissing, and skittered like a loose rocket across the icy ground. Painter hesitated, recognizing the lethal weapon.

A WASP injector knife.

The dagger's handle held a bulb of compressed gas, making the blade doubly dangerous. Once stabbed into a victim, the press of a button blasted a basketball-sized volume of cold air through the impaled blade and into the victim's gut, snap-freezing and pulverizing all internal organs. It could kill a brown bear with one jab.