Right after texting Quaid, Durwood got the tickle.

It always started behind his ears. In Rome, talking to that fidgety cardinal who betrayed them. Rolling up in a dune buggy on that Saharan dig, first whiff of the Pestilence Project. That little tickle. Little instinctual discomfort.

Something was off.

Durwood pulled a headphone cup over the side of his head. The audio had a new, background intensity. He checked video. The feeds looked unremarkable at first glance.

At second and third, though, he noticed shadows—darkening, shifting.

He worked the cam-joystick with his index finger. He pulled up a wide shot of the engine factory, scanned to the corners, to the rafters.

Was that door leaning ajar?

Had that bulb been lit before?

Sue-Ann labored to her feet and shook.

Durwood cycled through the other eleven factories, eyes keen, watching for anomaly. Surveillance was a patient art. Quaid, on rare occasions when he sat in, had no taste for it. If Durwood pointed out a curtain pushed too far to one end of its rod, he'd say, "Curtain's gotta be someplace, right? It's just coincidence."

But Durwood knew coincidence explained nothing. Every last occurrence on God's green earth could be understood—if you had the time and wherewithal to study it.

A noise from the tubing factory pricked his ear. He switched to its video and saw the shapes.

Human-sized shapes.

He dialed out the zoom, tweaked the infrared settings. Two figures came into focus. They were skulking about the perimeter, placing small...what, boxes? Communicating by walkie-talkie.

He checked the engine factory again, the lumber plant, the sugar refinery—which he hadn't even covered with mics, distant as it was from Steed's office, where they expected all the action to occur. Every last factory showed similar operations in progress.

Saboteurs.

They were not boxes, but explosive charges. Twelve factories, and none of AmDye's security measures had been tripped.

Durwood stood from his bank of monitors to fetch the frequency scanner. He tuned slowly through the ranges known to be favored by military and paramilitary forces, and sure enough, found chatter in a lower frequency.

Voices urgent but calm. Not speaking English. Durwood heard French first and thought they'd stumbling upon a French outfit, but the second exchange the scanner found was German, and the third Scandinavian of some kind.

They were commandos, fixing to blow these factories sky-high.

American Dynamics was halfway bankrupt as it was; destroying the Pittsburgh facility—"Ninety-nine percent of our manufacturing, right here in the U.S. of A.," as Steed was fond of saying—would finish the job.

Only the steel factory differed. There, pipes were being playing like bongos and machine belts sliced. Loud, showy damage. But damage that didn't amount to much. Youngsters. He assumed they belonged to the Blind Mice, though he didn't see Molly or Josiah.

Switching to Jim Steed's office, he saw why. The lead group, the Algernons, had just burst in. Josiah stood nose-to-nose with the CEO.

Durwood pushed his hat up his forehead.

It was beyond his tactical capabilities to intercede everywhere. The two situations in the steel factory involved the Mice, and the third must be linked too.

But how?

What relation did these foreigners have to the Mice? Slaves or masters? Had Josiah contracted out for help decimating American Dynamics? Or was the connection ideological, the foreigners some Euro-analog to the Mice?

Durwood didn't think so. These foreigners showed the skill and precision of superior training. These weren't the type of hombres who stop and tweet in the middle of an operation.

Could the foreigners work for some larger entity? Could the Mice? Potentially, this explained how the Mice kept missing trouble.

Durwood thought about the Blackstone murder. His working assumption was Piper Jackson's "kernel" had been responsible for the Mice slipping the cops' dragnet at midnight. Her gizmo had somehow disrupted their signals.

Maybe not.

Sue-Ann, feeling his unease, loped to the van's sliding door.

Durwood could only guess the nature of the association, these foreigners to the Mice. If he eliminated the Mice and it turned out they weren't at the top of the scheme? The unrest would continue. Worse, their link to whoever was would be lost. They would fulfill the AmDye contract but lose the greater peace.

Reaching a decision, Durwood armed himself amply and strapped on his smart-watch. After ensuring the watch was synced with all the feeds available to him from the Vanagon, he took out.

Sue-Ann took a gimpy step after.

"Not tonight." He showed her a flat hand. Stay.

He called Quaid on his way to the first factory.

"Bombs," he said. "Don't know who, but they're wiring up the whole complex. I need to disarm them."

Quaid said, "But tonight's the night we nab the Mice."

"It was. Now the situation's complicated. You need to extract Steed yourself."

Quaid made a noise like pigs rooting in mud.

Durwood said, "We're the ones teed him up."

"He wants a showdown with Josiah, remember? 'Brown in front and yellow out the back.'"

Durwood had nearly reached the tubing factory. "Bluster's no mortal sin."

Over the line, Quaid sighed.

"We can trade. Want to tangle with a dozen or more high-end operatives? More'n welcome. C'mon down."

"Oh, stand down. I'll go fetch Steed."

Durwood hung up and, without breaking stride, entered the tubing factory. There being no time for perfect stealth, he moved straight for the first man. Fortunately AmDye ran its ventilation systems overnight to clear fumes, and the giant wheezing sssssuck deadened his footfalls.

He slipped from behind a rack of hardhats to a twenty-gauge riveter, to a freestanding cabinet, then struck.

The man—in full dark, hunched over a charge—did not see Durwood coming. Durwood drove the edge of his forearm below the man's jaw, catching his brachial plexus clean. The man toppled over sideways to the concrete.

Durwood looked across the factory, drawing his M9 semiautomatic. The second commando stood from his wiring, looking about like a hare at a tractor's ignition.

There was no time for non-lethal force. As it was, Durwood doubted he could save all twelve factories. He squared the man in the night-vision scope. Fired a killshot.

Durwood turned back to the first commando, who was still unconscious, and inspected the charge he'd been working on. Double-brick of C4. Military grade, attached by black duct tape to a detonator with hinged antenna.

He glanced quickly at the det wires. As expected, they showed no sign of fancy booby-trapping. These suckers weren't meant to sit around exposed. They were meant to get set and go boom.

He disabled the antenna and dropped it in a jacket pocket, then hurried to the next charge. The commandos had targeted load-bearing points for maximum damage, precisely as Durwood would have. This made finding them easier.

He disabled six, then moved to the engine factory.

A single man was wiring this building, Durwood confirmed viewing the feeds on his smart-watch. He entered by a delivery port. The man was moving away from him, planting charges in a counterclockwise circuit. Durwood closed rapidly, hoping to stun the man with another brachial strike, but the man flinched with Durwood ten yards away.

So Durwood shot him. Neutered these bombs and moved to the lumber plant.

En route, he looked in on Jim Steed. The image on his watch confused him at first, looked like some tarp blowing off and back on a pile of brush sticks.

He brought the watch up, level with his eyes. In fact, it was a fight. Josiah and Jim Steed rolling around, pounding the other's back, punching, clawing.

Durwood looked in occasionally over the next minutes, dispatching commandos in a half-dozen factories in similar fashion to the first two. His boots became caked with mud, and various airs mixed in his nostrils like some toxic industrial stew.

He stopped bothering to collect antennae, started just tossing them a fair distance away. The risk of them being reattached and made operable again was negligible. These fellas were on a tight time window, and most were dead anyhow.

As Durwood took care of business, a vague impression of the enemy formed. The equipment was Black-Ops grade. Clothes and minor personal details—brands, style of mustache—suggested multiple nationalities at play.

Such a mixed force could mean many things. Mercenaries. Interpol. Some kind of all-star team. Without question, the chessboard had grown bigger.

The man at the seventh factory must have been a sluggard—Durwood stopped him in the middle of removing his first charge from its packaging. The bullet blasted him forward, spilling a cardboard box full of C4.

Durwood gave no thought to accidental detonation. C4 was a stable substance. What worried him—intrigued him, more accurately—was what tumbled out around the explosives.

Pink Styrofoam peanuts.

He checked his smart-watch. The scuffle in Jim Steed's office had escalated. Big ole Hatch held Steed up by the collar, about like Durwood's fishing pal Crole showing a big channel cat around. Josiah was bloody and rearing for another go.

Jim Steed was running out of time.

So was Durwood. Three more factories needed disarming. He cycled through video feeds to see whether there might be another sluggard, a situation he could skip for now, do last.

The sugar refinery was farthest away. The man there was no sluggard. In fact, it looked like he'd finished his work. Slipping off gloves and activating a walkie-talkie. He wore a ski mask. Big guy but didn't move like one. Soft steps. Seemed to occupy less space than his body.

This man could be a challenge to subdue. A cut above the the others.

That wasn't all. Durwood was feeling another tickle...something recognizable in the figure...some thrum at the back of his mind, nicked those ears...

Was it the ski mask? The slope the figure's shoulder? Maybe it was the gait—meticulous, like he was painting trim with the soles of his shoes.

Durwood felt the beginnings of a headache.