Peter and Davila crouched in the dark, listening for any sound from above. They had heard the clatter of Thomas Markussen's sword against the workshop floor, then nothing.

Peter reached up, groping for the drawer Markussen had slammed shut above their heads, but Davila held him back, her breath warm against his neck. "If Gryphus is up there," she whispered, "then Markussen is already dead."

She was right. But they still had a duty to warn Markussen's uncle. Markussen had said there was a tunnel leading to a boat, which they could take to the island in the bay, where his uncle lived in a cottage.

The light on Davila's phone blazed. They stood in a cramped brick-lined space behind a sheetrock wall, insulated wires crisscrossing through the studs. A low archway led to a dubious tunnel, narrow and crooked. Little mounds of silt-covered rubble marked the spots where chunks of ceiling had broken loose. A little farther though, and the tunnel grew straight and sturdy. The walls, ceiling, and floor were lined with smooth, dark stones. To either side of the tunnel, rusty water trickled forward in shallow trenches. A hint of methane hung in the dank air.

After a hundred yards, the tunnel delivered them to the bottom of an abandoned well, or maybe a waste pit of some kind. They stepped down into the stinky knee-deep water and craned their necks at the faint outline of a trapdoor fifteen feet above. Iron rungs were set into the stone, the lowest several feet above Peter's head.

Davila faced Peter, put her hands on his shoulders, and stepped into the sling he had formed with his hands. She was surprisingly heavy, and Peter had to widen his stance to lift her. A lance of pain shot through his skull. Nimbly, she pulled herself up and perched on the bottom rung, her pants and shoes dripping muck. She clambered up the well and paused to listen at the trapdoor. Then she threw the door open to a flood of gray light and the coarse patter of rain.

Peter jumped as high as he could and managed to get his fingers around the bottom rung. He hung there, waiting for the pain in his head to subside. Then scrabbling his shoes over the slimy stones, he lunged for the second rung and got it. Several more attempts earned him the third rung, then the fourth, until at last he had his feet beneath him.

Climbing up the well, he joined Davila inside a little boathouse set back from the river's channel, hidden between two high wharves. A wooden dinghy equipped with a wimpy outboard motor bobbed expectantly in the water beneath them. Peter jumped down, primed the fuel line, and pulled the starter cord. To his surprise, the motor burbled cheerfully. Davila dropped in on all fours like a cat.

They pushed out into the rain-pocked river, thankful for their waterproof parkas. Motoring under several low bridges, they entered a wide shipping canal leading to the bay. To their left, the Gudrun's white wheelhouse towered over the drab buildings.

They rounded the breakwater and ran into heavy chop. With each wave, stinging salt-spray lashed at Peter's face. Davila curled up between the benches, refusing even to peep over the gunwales. Had she dared, she would have seen their destination less than a mile out, the little fortress island of Munkholmen standing like an outpost in the rain-swept sea. Atop its low, whitewashed seawalls, outbuildings and leafless trees clustered around a squat cylindrical tower capped by a gray conical roof. Two piers serviced the island. The southern pier was unoccupied, but at the eastern pier, someone had moored a sleek motorboat.

A sandy spit curled out from the island's northern fringe like the tail of a comma. Peter angled toward it and ran the dinghy ashore. They leaped out and jogged to a wooden staircase scaling the fortress's northern wall. Stepping over a heavy chain, they penetrated the island's raised park-like interior.

The tower and surrounding buildings appeared to be vacant and unattended, but over by the northwest wall, a low cottage glowed with warm window-light. Sweet-smelling wood smoke curled from the chimney, fluttering away in the wind and rain.

Crossing the soggy lawn to the cottage door, they stopped short. Wet footprints marked the dry flagstones beneath the eaves. The door was ajar. Davila drew her pistol and chambered a round. She pushed inside, Peter close behind her as she crept down the darkened hallway to a big room lit by faint daylight and the orange flicker of a fireplace. She crouched at the threshold, gun raised.

It was a great room of sorts, the vaulted ceiling ribbed with heavy wooden beams stained dark. To their left, across the scuffed wooden floor, a long rustic table with matching chairs stood close to the fireplace. An iron poker lay on the broad stone hearth, and next to it, a smooth granite stone the size of a cantaloupe. Its white surface was smeared with blood.

In the back-left corner, close to the window, a body lay across a heavy wool rug. They approached, pausing at the end of the table. The body belonged to a man, a very old man, emaciated and skeletal—Jonas Markussen, Tomas's uncle. The front of his bald and mottled head was caved in, a grisly imprint of the granite stone from the hearth. Fresh burns marked his face. The arm of his traditional knit sweater stretched toward the dusty corner, his lifeless hand clutching at something that was not there.

"Don't move!" said a man from somewhere behind them.

Peter whipped around before the words took hold. Davila stood frozen midstep, gun at her side, face locked in horror.

Just behind her stood a man wearing all black. He was slight of build, olive-skinned, his jet hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. And his eyes were the color of honey, just like Davila said. Gryphus. God, it had to be.

He raised a black pistol equipped with a silencer and aimed it at the back of Davila's head. "Set your weapon on the table," he commanded, his accent subtle, burnished, compelling. "Pass it to your left hand, behind your back, where I can see it."

Davila hesitated, knuckles white, the little gun trembling in her right hand. Her coal-black eyes sank into Peter's with a question: Should I?

He shook his head. No. God, no.

"I said lay your weapon on the table!"

Still, she hesitated.

"Now!"

Slowly she passed the gun behind her back, transferring it to her left hand. She laid it softly on the table, her fingers lingering on the steel before pulling away.

"Now, put your hands up, both of you!"

They obeyed.

Gryphus snatched up Davila's gun, uncocked it, and stuffed it into his waistband.

It was then Peter noticed the backpack. Gryphus slipped it off his shoulders and set it on the table with a heavy clunk. Then he frisked Davila head to toe. Fishing her phone from an inner breast pocket, he tossed it into the fire. He pulled a small double-edged knife from her ankle holster. That too went into the flames.

Peter swallowed down the bile in his throat. Davila was two steps away, Gryphus three.

As if reading Peter's mind, Gryphus leaned to his right, scoffing. "You'd get one step before you took a bullet." He ordered Peter to walk by the fireplace and sit in the chair at the end of the table.

When Peter had sat, Gryphus took Davila by the back of her collar and hauled her around the opposite end of the table. Grabbing a chair, he placed it on the hearth and forced Davila to sit facing the fire. With a set of white nylon zip ties from his pocket, he bound her wrists behind her and lashed them to the stout slats of the chair's back. Her ankles he bound to the chair's rear legs, above the stretchers so that she could not slip free. Satisfied, he went to Peter, frisked him, and similarly bound him to his chair.

Returning to Davila, he took her by the hair and wrenched back her head, studying her face.

She clenched her eyes and swallowed hard.

"So beautiful. So treacherous. I never thought I'd see you again," said Gryphus. He threw her head forward, and her chin bounced off her chest. Wet hair matted her face. "Tell me, who are you whoring yourself out to these days?"

When she did not respond, Gryphus smacked her with the barrel of his gun, splitting her lower lip wide open. "Tell me!"

Blood dribbled down her chin and dripped into her lap.

Peter stared, unable to look away, a ball of anguish twisting his gut.

Gryphus crouched behind her, and taking one of her fingers, he broke it with a sickening crunch.

She screamed and spat a salvo of blood over her shoulder.

Peter bucked against his restraints. "Leave her alone!"

Gryphus stood straight, frowning. "Are you friends? Lovers?" He wiped a fleck of Davila's blood from his forehead. "I wouldn't be so quick to defend this woman if I were you. Did she tell you who she works for? Did she even tell you her real name?"

Davila lifted her chin from her heaving chest.

"Once a Mossad whore, always a Mossad whore." Gryphus pointed his gun into the flames, at the bubbling puddle of plastic that was Davila's phone. "She was recording everything you said and did, uploading it along with your position to an IP address in Tel Aviv."

Davila shook her head faintly, like a shiver.

"Don't you dare deny it," he said, scowling down at the top of her head. "I found your phone beneath the sofa cushions in that poor girl's flat. I put it back so you could find it again, but not before programming it to send all its data to me as well. How else do you think I tracked you to London?"

Peter balled his fists, mind scarlet with the image of Anna's lifeless body lying on the carpet while Gryphus tinkered with Davila's phone. "You killed her, you fucking monster. You killed her!"

"Was she your friend too? I'm sorry. I didn't intend to kill her. And I had nothing personal against her, just like I have nothing personal against you, or your father, despite your repulsive genetic heritage. What is it with you Jews and your mutations? Inbreeding, I suppose."

Peter had no idea what he was talking about.

"I understand it's a rare mutation that runs in your family, something like one in a billion. And yet he insists I eradicate it from the human gene pool. Not that I pretend to understand his mind. Nobody does."

He spun Davila around in her chair so that her back was now to the fire. "But you I want to kill." He stepped back and aimed the silencer of his gun playfully at various parts of her anatomy, lingering over her left breast. "First, I want to make sure you know something." He slipped the gun back into its shoulder holster. "I can't imagine your father ever told you."

A strand of half-clotted blood stretched between her swollen lips.

"Does Munich ring a bell? 1972?"

Munich, 1972, a city and a year forever bound by violence and vengeance. Peter had seen a movie about it once. It all began at the Summer Olympics. Armed Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the athletes' village and took hostage eleven members of the Israeli team, eventually killing them all. In response, the Israeli government sent out its Mossad agents to exact revenge, sometimes killing innocent bystanders in the process. It went on for years.

"Wrath of God," said Gryphus. "That's what your people called it, as if you were angels of judgment. What were the lives of a few innocents compared to the will of the Almighty?" He looked past Davila into the glowing embers and dying fire. "We were innocent. We had nothing to do with it. We didn't support the Palestinians. We weren't even Muslims. And yet the Mossad firebombed our tenement. I watched my entire family burn—my father, my mother, my sister."

He looked down at Davila, his face red with firelight. "It took me years to find the man who did it."

Davila's bloody lips voiced a silent no.

"But I finally tracked him down. I caught him in the open like a desert rat. Oh, I never had any interest in that worthless box of bones you call the Ramallah Ossuary. I only wanted to kill the man who murdered my family. I thought I had killed you as well, in payment for my sister, but here you are still alive."

A log shifted in the fireplace.

"Maybe it's better this way. Now I can watch you suffer the way my sister did." From his pocket, he took one of his little metal gryphons and jangled it in her face. She turned away, but he grabbed her by the ear and hooked it through the cartilage.

Then he returned to the table, opened his backpack, and unloaded a half dozen olive-green canisters strapped together with duct tape. They were thermite bombs, the same devices they had seen beneath William Fitzimmin's bed. Taped to the outside of the canisters was a gray box roughly the dimensions of a deck of playing cards, a remote-control device, a timer perhaps. Six red wires connected it to each of the canisters. Setting the canisters under Peter's chair, Gryphus secured them to the legs with more duct tape then returned to his backpack on the table.

Davila lifted her head, rasping, "Why him?"

"It's the only way to completely destroy his DNA. He'll die instantly." He cinched the drawstring of his backpack. "But you won't."

Peter jerked his chair, the sharp nylon slicing into his wrists. "What the hell do you want from us?"

"Aside from your imminent deaths? Nothing." He began to shoulder his backpack.

"We can tell you where the Mustard Seeds are."

"Really?" he said, one strap over his shoulder. "Tell me then."

"Somewhere in North America."

"You'll have to do better than that." Gryphus nodded toward the body of Jonas Markussen lying on the rug in the corner. "He told me exactly where to find the Mustard Seeds, and look where that got him. No, you have nothing to add. You two have served your purpose."

"What purpose?"

"To help us find the Mustard Seeds, of course. You see, he knows what the Mustard Seeds are. He always has. What he didn't know was where they were hidden. You two helped us find them by leading us here. Ever since London, we've been following you, watching and listening. It's the only reason we let you live this long." He shouldered the other strap of his backpack. "And now you're done."

He loomed over Davila and stared down at her bowed head, whispering, "For Myriam." Then he turned and disappeared down the hallway.

No sooner had he passed out of sight than the odor of gasoline wafted into the room. Yellow firelight flickered from the hallway.

Davila nodded frantically at the thermite bombs strapped beneath Peter's chair. "The detonator box is flashing. It's active!"

Flames leaped from the hallway into the room, licking the walls, racing up the ceiling's wooden beams. Peter tried to rock forward and balance on his toes, but he went too far, falling over and crashing to the hearth, his face barely missing the bloody granite stone.

Davila peered over her shoulder and scooched around in her chair until her back was to the stone. "Get out of the way!"

Peter wriggled aside just as the back of Davila's chair came crashing down on the granite stone. The slats broke with loud crack. Groaning, she rolled off the stone and lay with her back to the fire, grimacing in pain.

The room grew dark as black smoked filled the vaulted ceiling, concealing the flames above. Yet Peter could still feel their heat against the back of his neck.

Semina sinapis. Was this how he died? Holy Mary.

Davila freed her wrists from the broken slats, but now she hesitated. She could not pass her bound wrists under her feet, because Gryphus had lashed her ankles to the chair's legs above the stretchers.

Her next move came as no surprise; Peter had seen her do it once before, back in the hotel room in London.

With a grunt, she threw herself up on splayed knees, cheek and shoulders pressed to the hearth, wrists still bound behind her. Then she folded her left elbow over so that it nestled in the crook of her right arm. There she paused, her now-dry hair fluttering with each ragged breath.

Flaming globs dropped through the smoke and splattered like napalm on the table and floor.

She brought her left elbow high, arms snapping into a letter Z across her back, blood oozing from her wrists. With a piercing scream, she slipped her left elbow over her head and gathered her hands beneath her chin. For a moment, she seemed to rest, cheek to the hearth, eyes closed. Then she passed out and fell sideways, her chair smacking against the wood floor.

"No!" said Peter, inching close. "Wake up!" With his forehead, he nudged the top of her head. Then he knocked it hard, pain ringing from ear to ear.

She stirred, her moaning barely audible above the roaring flames.

"Wake up!"

She snapped to attention, eyes darting. Grabbing the iron poker from the hearth, she scooched close to the fire and raked the coals. Out came her double-edged knife clattering on the stones. She laid her bound wrists across the searing blade, and the nylon straps popped loose. Then with the sleeves of her jacket, she took the hot knife and sliced through the straps at her ankles.

Peter thrashed against his chair. "Cut me loose!"

Once she had freed him, they belly-crawled together to the window, rolling the bloody granite stone with them. Behind them, a ceiling beam smashed the table, showering them with sparks and biting embers.

Mother of God.

They scuttled to the window and paused beneath the sill, filling their lungs from the layer of breathable air along the floor. Then Peter took the stone and hurled it through the glass, falling back amidst the flurry of shards, hands scorched, hair and eyebrows singed. "It's too hot!" he screamed.

A curtain of flames and smoke closed around them.

Holy Mary, pray for us sinners.

Davila slithered along the wall toward the back corner. Peter followed, groping through the smoke. His hand brushed against a shoe, a sweater, a bald head sticky with blood. Jonas Markussen. The old man lay on the heavy wool rug, his arm still reaching for something that was not there. Davila rolled the frail corpse aside, lifted the rug, and draped it over their heads and bodies.

Shielded from the radiant heat, they crawled back to the window and pulled themselves up to the sill. The rug's outer fibers hissed and popped. But in through the shattered window blew a cool, fresh wind. Beyond, a wet lawn beckoned.

But there stood Gryphus with his gun. He was not alone. Next to him stood a tall man in a black overcoat, his eyes hard-set, gray as flint. Jason Numec.

They lowered themselves to the floor.

Pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death.

Another beam crashed to the floor with a shower of brilliant embers. And in that sudden light Peter saw it: a perfect square cut into the floor where the rug had lain, a trapdoor—the escape Jonas Markussen had been reaching for.

Protected beneath the rug, they crawled together to the corner. Set in the trapdoor was an iron ring. Peter took it in his jacket sleeves and pulled with all his strength. Black salvation welled up from below.

The entire cottage seemed to draw a great breath. It howled through the window. It whistled up through the floorboards.

All at once a burst of lightning took the air.

The thermite bombs.

Peter's life flashed before his eyes, the joys and the sorrows, the pleasure and the pain, hope and regret—all welded in a single thought, a brilliant white light.