Project Daedalus

"The hypersonic test flight must proceed as scheduled," Tanzan Mino said quietly. "Now that all the financial arrangements have been completed, the Coordinating Committee of the...

As Vance stepped off the motorized cart, the hangar around him was shrouded in white vapor. The swirling cloud on the ground, the eerie chiaroscuro of the lights, the amplified...

The rental car desk was across the lobby, past the tour group now pouring through the revolving doors. They clearly were just off a Paris flight, chattering in French, brandishi...

"It's the one place I thought I could persuade you to meet me." The bearded man sighed, his dark eyes grim. The accent was Russian, the English flawless. "I have a problem, a ve...

Vance felt his lungs curve around his backbone, his face melt into his skull. He didn't know how many G's of acceleration they were experiencing, but it felt like a shuttle laun...

"Michael, you look marvelous. It's so good to see you again. I really mean that. The years have treated you well." Eva Borodin leaned back against the gray fabric of the Saab's...

The room was cold. Just cold. That was the first thing he'd noticed when they shoved him in. It still was. For nine hours he'd been sitting on a hard, canvas-covered Soviet cot,...

Physically, he was almost mythic, a giant from Grimms' fairy tales. He had a heavy face nature should wish on no man, tousled gray hair, bushy eyebrows eternally cocked in skept...

"Michael! And Eva! Again, after so long. _Pos iste!_ What a surprise!" The old Greek's sunburned face widened into a smile, his gray mustache opening above his last good teeth....

The limousine had already left the Savoy and was headed down the Strand when Alex Novosty broke the silence. He leaned forward, pushed the button on the two-way microphone linki...

The massive hulk of _Daedalus I _was being towed slowly through the hangar doors, now open to their full 250-foot span. As it rolled out, the titanium-composite skin glistened i...

When Michael Vance walked into the third-floor trading room of Kenji Nogami's Westminster Union Bank, it had just opened for morning business. Computer screens were scrolling gr...

"_Hai, so deshoo_," Taro Ikeda, project director, bowed into the red telephone receiver, using that breathy, clipped speech all Japanese reserve for their superiors. _"Kore wa h...

A very wet, very annoyed Michael Vance rapped on the door of Zeno Stantopoulos's darkened _kafeneion_. He'd walked the lonely back road into Iraklion in the dark, guiding himsel...

_Tanzan Mino was dressed in a black three-quarter sleeved kimono, staring straight ahead as he knelt before the sword resting in front of him. His hands were settled lightly on...

She checked her watch, then took a last look around the spacious room. It was time. Her bag lay on the bed, packed and waiting to be sent later. The part of her luggage that mat...

"Who knows." He looked up from stoking the fireplace, where nothing but embers remained. "Tanzan Mino may be a genius, but the rest of his Yakuza hoods are not exactly rocket sc...

Tanzan Mino closed his eyes and sighed. The financial portions of the protocol would still stand on their own; the arrangement could be salvaged somehow; it would merely require...

"When did you receive this?" Tanzan Mino glanced over the cable message once again, then looked up. Although the time was near midnight, the aide had found him still behind his...

"So that's how the situation stands now," the banker continued. "Tanzan Mino has agreed to your terms. He even seemed to like the idea of laundering the hundred million one last...

The morning air was sharp and she wished she'd grabbed one of Adriana's black knit shawls before going out. Could she pass for one of those stooped Greek peasant women? she wond...

"Vance?" The portly, balding desk clerk studied his computer screen at the Athenaeum Inter-Continental. Here in this teeming marble lobby the new world met the old. "Dr. M. Vanc...