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The small lavatory had no porthole The rooht around the door fraht of the mirror in Saering spirit

The lavatory featured a spottedin its dark reflective surface

My usually fevered i with this rich

The door to ruthlessness that I had opened in my mind had not been closed More than darkness and mirrors, I feared what could co through the sea into the tugboat hull were proof that the transfer had been co under way onceyacht

I left the lavatory and went to the aft co counter to the deck to keep h which I had originally co-swept afterdeck, which was still brightened by the halogen work lamp

Two crates, neither of which had been there e had motored out of the harbor, lay toward the starboard quarter of the deck The size of coffins, wrapped in fog as they were, these twin containers suggested that we had not taken aboard anything as fantastic and grotesque as weapons that could destroy whole cities, but instead o of Count Dracula and his bride, ere sleeping now on beds of Transylvanian soil inside sunproof caskets where soon they would wake

Utgard Rolf--dressed in black nylon pants with elastic cuffs tight at the ankles and ajacket--and anear the small crane

Two othertools in a secured deck box

Pulling pistols as they , no doubt Buddy, crossed the deck behind the other two men and shot them in the back Both sprawled facedown, and their executioners bent to administer a final shot to each at the base of the skull

THIRTY-EIGHT

HESITATING BEHIND THE COMPANIONWAY DOOR, I thought that they would weight the deadthem overboard

Evidently, they were confident that fro the bodies to shore for days--if ever--and that by then they would have vanished into their new lives in far corners of the world They put away their guns, grabbed the cadavers by collars and belts, and began to drag them toward the portside deck wall

Their backs were to , Utgard did not long drag his victim, but soon lifted him clear of the deck and carried him

I dared not think about as required of me here, but had to focus my mind on why I must not fail to act: the possibility of children seared to the bone by blast heat, of women crushed and torn by the detonation wave, of s hammered to dust, museu like rivers of lava, and square miles of ashes soaked with the blood of h the stairhead door, I foundwas silver with halogen reflections, white overhead, and gray beyond the li been sed as completely as Jonah and his lantern

The chill wet air on my face was not as cold as the pit of my stomach, and the plume of my breath across ard reached the port wall He heaved the body overboard, but the dead unwale For a ave hi a fall, I nonetheless negotiated the wet and gently rolling deck as though born on a ship In a two-hand grip, I brought the gun to bear

The other ard grabbed one of the cadaver’s ar the difficulty of this disposal, I waited for them to finish the job

A hero does not shoot his adversaries in the back But hero is a title others have wrongly given to me, which I have never claiht and fog, I shot Utgard twice in the back froainst the gunwale, but did not tumble overboard

The other man recoiled in shock but in the same instant went for the weapon in the paddle holster at his hip

I squeezed off two rounds, trying for abdoh The first round took him in the face, and the second only parted his hair

The head shot was enough, and he went down dead

In bad shape, supporting hiard turned toward en reflections, his de unholy oil

His face was bruised, one eye swollen half shut, one ear crusted with blood--the consequence of events in the interrogation rooain

He slid down the gunwale and toppled onto his side His head knocked the deck hard enough to bounce

For a while I took great deep breaths and blew theun towatched theedof them would make no sense if I left Joey dead in the radio roo hiht present itself in which I could get the tugboat and the nukes into the hands of responsible authorities withoutthe delivery personally If I re face to face with the that I had done

I turned my back on the dead and crossed the deck toward the coffinlike crates that were stored on the starboard quarter

Movies condition us to expect that a villain shot repeatedly, appearing to be dead, will reliably rise onceviolins as background But reality has no symphonic soundtrack, and the dead stay dead Only the spirit rises

I was alone aboard the tugboat, and I doubted that the collector holding the contract on Utgard’s spirit would allow hi on my mind, I had crossed the deck in surefooted haste, but with the killing done, my balance seemed more precarious As I moved and as my feet tripped on obstacles that did not exist, I reached out to grab supports that were not at hand

A vastness of fog above and all around, an immensity of sea to every quarter of the compass, and a watery abyss below imposed upon me a loneliness almost unbearable because of its intensity and also because of what shared the boat with me I mean the dead men, yes, but not only the dead; I mean primarily the bombs, four cities’ worth of death condensed and packed into containers that were symbolic urns full of the ashes of all humanity

The crates transshipped from Junie’s Moonbeaed lids were held down by four evenly spaced bolt latches

I slid open the four bolts on the first crate After a brief hesitation, I lifted the lid

The halogen light reached far enough to show e device in each They appeared to be of cast and ht seductively, liquidly, at every curve, each n In its entirety, the thing was not merely a weapon, but the quintessence of evil

The crate had been welded together around an armature that kept the bomb immobile Special tools would have been needed to free it froht have been the core of each device, a four-inch-diameter hole appeared to have been crafted to receive a

I stared at the hole for a while before realizing that also bolted to the ared lid held shut by a single bolt

Inside I discovered a double-walled felt bag that filled the space I lifted out the bag and found within it the plug to hed four or five pounds

Frouessed that once inserted into the core, it would lock in place with a twist One end featured an LED readout currently blank and a keypad for data input

The trigger

Returning the plug to the soft bag, I put it on the deck I collected the other three

After closing the two crates, I carried all four detonators, in their sacks, up the open stairs to the foredeck, which consisted of a narroay around a central structure I went through a door into a coe

In a closet, I found rain slickers and other foul-weather gear, as well as a orn leather satchel, which was eed in the satchel without distorting it I was able to close the zipper

As I pulled the zipper shut, the hand holding the bag and the hand gripping the tab looked like the hands of a stranger, as if I had just awakened in a body that was not mine

Since the day on which Stors with these hands When she had been taken from me, a portion of my innocence had been stolen, as well But now it seemed to me that these hands had actively throhat innocence had not been robbed froht is not always clean, and does not always feel good In even a clear heart, sohteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sedi If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable ainst corruption

To dispel the apprehension that I had become someone different froht hand palm up My birthmark is a half-inch-wide crescent, an inch and a half froainst the pink flesh of my hand

This was one of the proofs that Storether forever, because she’d had a mark that matched it

Birth hope: They confirm that I remain Odd Thomas--perhaps different from what I once was, yet paradoxically the sa was as thick as ever and the night colder than I reht of narrow stairs led up to the top deck, where the bridge was located

Entering the bridge, I looked up as the wo on the wheel