Temple

The caseless bullet smacked into Ehrhardt's enormous chest, causing a gout of blood to explode out from it, the impact hurling the big man into the wall behind him.

Ehrhardt slammed into the wall and—bablam!—his Glock went off, firing into the ceiling, smashing a smoke alarm to pieces, and suddenly a series of fire sprinklers in the ceiling of the cabin burst forth with showers of water.

Ehrhardt sank to the floor in the teeming indoor rain—a dribbling, ugly mess—his mouth open, his eyes wide with shock.

Race just stood there in his doorway, frozen in the firing position, water hammering against his face, stunned.

He had never shot a man before. Not even during the river chase earlier. He felt ill. He swallowed back the bile welling in his throat.

And then he saw the Supernova's timer: 00:03:00 00:02:59 00:02:58

He snapped out of his trance, hurried over to examine the fallen Nazi leader.

Ehrhardt was still alive, but barely. Blood dribbled out from his mouth, bubbled out from his chest.

But his eyes still glimmered, glaring up at Race with a kind of mad delight, as if Ehrhardt were thrilled to have left him in this position—alone in a control booth in a foreign country, with nothing but a dying Nazi, a ticking Supernova, and eight drums of explosive hypergolic fuel that would kill him for certain even if he did manage to disarm the main bomb.

All right, Will, stay calm.

00:02:30 00:02:29 00:02:28

Two-and-a half minutes to the end of the world.

Stay calm, my ass!

Race scrambled across the floor to the Supernova, peered at the screen on its arming computer.

YOU NOW HAVE

00:02:27

MINUTES TO ENTER DISARM CODE.

ENTER DISARM CODE HERE

Race stared in dismay at the timer. Sprinkler rain pounded against his head.

What are you gonna do, Will ?

It wasn't like he had a choice now, was it?

He could die along with the rest of the world or he could try to figure out how to stop the Supernova—and die that way, too.

Damn it! he thought.

He wasn't a hero.

People like Renco and Van Lewen were heroes. He was just a nobody. A guy. A university professor who was always

late for work, who always missed his train. Jesus, he still

had outstanding parking fines to pay, for God's sake!

He wasn't a hero.

And he didn't want to die like one either.

Besides, he wouldn't know the first thing about cracking the code on the Supernova's arming computer. He wasn't a hacker. No, the simple fact of the matter was that Fritz Weber was dead, and he was the only one who knew the code that would disarm the Supernova.

0002:01 00i02:00 00i01:59

Race shut his eyes, sighed.

Might as well die like a hero.

And so he sat up straight in front of the Supernova, and stared at its display screen with a fresh mind.

All right, Will, deep breaths. Deep breaths.

He looked at the screen, at the line that read:

ENTER DISARM CODE HERE

Okay.

Eight spaces to fill. To fill with a code.

Okay, so who knows the code?

Weber knows the code.

He was the only one who knew the code.

just then a voice exploded in Race's ear and he almost jumped out of his skin.

“Professor. What's happening?'

it was Renee.

'jesus, Renee. You scared the shit out of me. What's hap- peg? Well, Ehrhardt shot Weber and then I shot Ehrhardt and now I'm sitting in front of the Supernova trying to figure out how to disarm it. Where are you?'

'I'm back in the office overlooking the crater. Ehrhardt cut my bridge...

'Got any ideas on how to disarm this thing?'

“No. Weber was the only one—”

'I know that already. Listen, I've got eight spaces to fill and I need to fill 'em fast.'

'Okay. Let me think…'

00:01:09 00:01:08 00:01:07

'One minute, Renee.'

'All right. All right. They said in that telephone transcript that their Supernova is based on the US model, right? That means the code must be numerical.'

'How do you know that?'

“Because I know that the American Supernova has a numerical code.' She must have heard his silence. “We have people inside your agencies.'

'Oh, okay. Numerical code it is then. Eight-digit code.

That leaves us with about a trillion possible combinations.'

00:01:00 00:00:59 00:00:58

'Weber was the only person who knew the code, right?' Renee said. 'So it has to be something to do with him.'

'Or it could be a number that's completely random,' Race said dryly.

'Unlikely,' Renee said. 'People who use numerical codes rarely use random numbers. They use numbers that have significance to them, numbers that they can recall by thinking of a memorable event or date or something like that. So what do we know about Weber?”

But Race wasn't listening anymore.

Something had twigged in the back of his mind as he'd been listening to Renee something about what she had just said.

'All right,' Renee was saying, thinking aloud. “He was a Nazi during the Second World War. He performed experiments on human subjects.'

But Race was thinking about something else entirely.

They use numbers that have significance to them, numbers that they can recall by thinking of a memorable event or date…

And then it hit him.