Nevertheless, Friday did as ordered and swung the Iron Man rig into a steep ascent, throttling back at one thousand feet. The city of Dublin twinkled below in a hazy network of summer lights, and a gentle wind made the suit’s plates hum.

  “Show me,” said Tony, still no-nonsense.

  Friday enlarged the screen until it filled the entire display. She scrolled back to the clip highlighted by the screening program Tony had devised to sync with most of the earth’s sat-cams and search for specific stolen armaments. The clip showed a small island less than eighty miles from their current position.

  “Little Saltee,” said Friday. “Two miles off the southeast coast of Ireland. Uninhabited for the past fifty years. Used to be a prison island in the Middle Ages. Nothing on it officially except the ruins of an old prison and a bird sanctuary. The island is a nature preserve for over forty types of gull. No humans allowed.”

  “No humans allowed officially. What about unofficially?”

  “Unofficially, I can see a boat docked in the old harbor. There’s a camouflage tarp draped over it, but the outline is clearly visible.” Friday zoomed in on the bulky shape in the small harbor and traced a line between several sharp protruding points in the tarpaulin. “I am fifty percent certain from the profile that the boat is a Stark Poseidon U.S. Special Ops gunboat.”

  “Fifty percent?”

  “Best I can do.”

  “Off the Irish coast? That’s a heck of a long way off course. What’s she packing?”

  “She’s rigged for machine guns, miniguns, grenade launchers, and fifty cals. That’s a minimum. You could mount whatever you want on those gunwales.”

  “Is the source reliable?”

  “It’s a weather satellite for a French station. I just picked up on the profile.”

  “Well done, you,” said Tony. “Or rather, well done, me. Is the army missing a gunboat?”

  “One was reported sunk during maneuvers in Guantanamo a few months ago, but the wreckage was never recovered.”

  “And now it turns up here, a hundred miles from an environmental summit in a riverside center.”

  “Maybe. Fifty percent, remember?”

  “Can you get anything more on infrared?”

  “Nope. Ran that already. Too cold.”

  “Anyone on the island?”

  “No hot bodies showing up, but I do see a craft moving down the coast on a rendezvous course. ETA thirty minutes.”

  Tony Stark did not deliberate for long. “Okay. Change of plan. I need to decommission that gunboat.”

  Friday disagreed. “No, boss, you don’t. Call it in. Let the coast guard handle it.”

  “The Irish Coast Guard is not armed,” said Tony. “And even if it was, how far away is the nearest boat?”

  Friday ran a quick scan of coast guard GPSs. “An hour at best.”

  “By which time whoever is heading for that gunboat will be locked and loaded.”

  “And what about you, boss? You’re locked and loaded with fireworks and disco music.”

  Tony didn’t need to listen to Friday’s arguments, but sometimes it was good to bounce his impetuous thoughts off the voice of reason.

  “Friday, let’s do a quick recon. If it is the gunboat, I will pull out the spark plugs and leave her dead in the water. Then I call it in. No firepower necessary. If it isn’t the boat, then we continue on to the party with no egg on our faceplate. Either way, it’s a twenty-minute diversion. Okay?”

  “Okay, boss,” said Friday, who knew that she wasn’t really being asked. Tony Stark rarely passed up an opportunity for do-good adventuring.

  In Tony Stark’s considerable experience, the best tactic to employ in this kind of situation was the direct approach. More often than not, the mere sight of a grim-faced Iron Man descending from the sky like the hammer of justice was enough to send terrorists and bad guys scurrying, especially if they had seen YouTube footage of him smashing various weapons dumps and arms markets, which most of the world had. Often Tony would disengage the suit’s mufflers and come in with every light blazing, whipping up more consternation than a troop carrier. But in this particular case, discretion was the wisest option, as there was a fifty-fifty chance that he would find nothing more sinister under the tarp than a trawler laid up for repairs.

  A trawler laid up for repairs in the summer on an uninhabited island?

  Okay, maybe that explanation didn’t fly, but there were still a dozen reasons a boat could be hidden on an island that didn’t include a raid on an environmental summit. In any case, there was no one on the island to stop him from taking a peek, so there was no need to wake the neighbors, even if they were only gulls.

  A thought occurred to him. “Friday, there are no ecological factors here, are there? I don’t want to knock over an egg and cause the extinction of some breed of seabird. I have enough on my conscience as it is.”

  “I think you’re good, boss. You can always feed the chicks caviar in an emergency.”

  “Hilarious. Remind me why I pay you, again?”

  “You don’t pay me, boss. Unless the currency is the sheer joy of your company.”

  “Sarcasm now? You are evolving.”

  Tony cupped his hands and brought his fingertips close together, powering down his magneto plasma thrusters so the suit descended smoothly to fifty feet above sea level.

  “Run the full spectrum,” he instructed Friday. “I want to know if there’s anything bigger than a small dog on that island.”

  On the helmet display he saw a laser grid draped over the island; thousands of red heartbeats popped up.

  “Nothing but birds, bats, and rodents, boss. No humans anywhere on the island.”

  “What about surveillance?”

  “Amazingly, we are in a dark zone. Not a single eye in the sky. Even that French satellite has moved on. It’s not often you find a place like this.”

  Tony frowned. “It all seems too safe.”

  “Imagine that. A safe reconnaissance with no one shooting at us. How frustrating!”

  Tony ignored this additional example of Friday’s evolution. “What kind of terrorist leaves a gunboat unguarded?”

  “One who’s on the way here right now. Boss, I hate to quote Hollywood, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this. If you absolutely must investigate, let’s get it done before that boat gets any closer.”

  “Can you see anything under the camouflage tarp?”

  “No heartbeats, boss. But beyond that, nada. There might be a coating on the underside, or it might just be really old.”

  Tony Stark did not like unknowns, but he knew that he had no choice but to investigate the craft. The boat was a mystery, and Tony’s entire career was built on solving mysteries. He could no more walk away from this one than Steve Rogers could pass a star-spangled banner without saluting.

  “Okay,” he said. “Down we go.”

  He reduced thrust by 15 percent, which took the suit out of hover mode and into a slow descent, with arms tight to the sides and hands and feet angled outward in a position that Friday referred to as “the penguin.”

  Tony supposed that it might look a little ungainly, but at least doing the penguin allowed him to observe on the way down.

  “Ten seconds to touchdown, Friday,” he said.

  To which the onboard AI said, “I don’t think so, boss.”

  There was something in the way she said boss, a new sneer in the tone that Tony didn’t care for. He was about to say something when things spiraled rapidly out of his control.

  First, a flashing skull appeared on his display, accompanied by a deafening foghorn blast that threatened to burst Tony’s eardrums.

  “Friday!” he called, though he could not hear his own voice. “Friday! Mute the speakers.”

  The speakers did not mute; if anything, the volume increased, disorienting Tony completely. Initially, he blamed this disorientation for the sudden lurch in his stomach, the feeling that he was falling without control.

  Then Tony thought, Oh, crap. I am falling without control. Thrusters are not operational. What else can go wrong?

  The answer to that question was apparently: Sensors. All of them.

  In addition to a crazy, deafening tumble, Tony Stark was suddenly completely blind.

  Blind, deaf, and tumbling.

  Surely top three on the Never Do This During an Operation list.

  He crashed into the tarpaulin and it wrapped about the armor like a net. Tony tried to thrash his way out, but the servomotors that allowed him to control the suit’s limbs and digits were frozen. Tony had no choice but to lie as still as a statue while persons unknown, who were not supposed to be on the island, pounced on the Party Pack.

  Inside the suit, Tony fought to regain some kind of control, but Friday was unresponsive and after a while he felt silly shouting “Reboot!” at the flashing skull on his screen.

  This is bad, he thought. Extremely bad.

  And it was. There was no way to spin whatever was happening as possibly a good thing.

  Whatever was happening was as follows: Iron Man crashed into the tarpaulin, which had been draped over what looked like a common-variety fishing craft and not the missing U.S. gunboat. Friday had predicted that the shape might very well not be a gunboat, but what she had not told Tony about were the two men who were exposed when the tarp was dragged into the boat’s hold. These men were armed with conventional sharp implements and automatic weapons but also with compact electromagnets, which they lobbed onto the swathed Iron Man before trussing him in more layers of tarpaulin. They were aware that Iron Man’s armor would not be affected by magnetic pull, but the electromagnetic fields would hamper any of his attempts to regain control of the suit.

  Once the electromagnets were clustered on the prone Tony Stark, the two men efficiently folded any loose flaps of tarp over Iron Man. One of them, a giant of an individual, actually hummed the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” as he worked. Cole Vanger, known as Pyro to his associates in the ecoterrorism world because of the twin shoulder-mounted flamethrowers he was rarely without, didn’t even realize he was doing it. Vanger also didn’t realize the incredible irony of someone claiming to love the environment using flamethrowers as his weapons of choice. In truth, Vanger was not a genuine ecoterrorist; he just pretended to be because he thought radical women would appreciate it.

  Once Stark was cocooned in tarpaulin, the next step was to wrap the package in duct tape, which is an incredibly strong material—not strong enough to restrain a functioning Iron Man but certainly of sufficient resilience to hold the package together for the brief but punishing journey on which it was about to embark. The second man was charged with the duct-taping, and he had been practicing on Vanger for days. The unfortunate Pyro had spent hours with his limbs encased in plastic piping, thrashing weakly while his comrade trussed him up in tarp and tape. But this was not rehearsal; this was the real thing. And the man did his employer proud, mummifying Stark in under thirty seconds. Truly, the wielder of the tape was the duct-tape equivalent of a one-man Formula One pit crew.

  “Allez!” cried the duct-tape boss, who was a Frenchman named Freddie Leveque. “Allez vite!”

  Leveque rapped three ringing knocks on an exposed inch of Iron Man’s visor to emphasize just how vite they should allez.

  The next step was to lasso Iron Man with a thick rope that snaked from the boat across the sloped slipway. The rope disappeared into the belly of a bush that was big enough to hide a truck. But it did not hide a truck; what it hid was a tractor with a thick rope tethered to its tow bar. The woman driving the tractor was known to Interpol by various names, including Valentina Zhuk, Valeria Zucchero, Vasha V8, the Zhukster, Zhuky, Tailspin, and simply Spin, and she was accustomed to being behind the wheel of automobiles a whole lot faster than a tractor. Spin Zhuk was famous in certain nefarious circles for being the wheelwoman who won a grueling international rally race in a corporately sponsored experimental vehicle and then stole the vehicle.

  At Leveque’s signal, Spin Zhuk cranked the diesel engine, which she had personally stripped and tuned until it ran smoother than a ten-thousand-dollar Swiss watch, and floored the accelerator, hammering the big tractor through the bush and up the old fishing lane toward the medieval prison ruins at the crest of the hill. The Iron Man tape-’n’-tarp package was dragged ignominiously behind, over a plank laid across the fishing boat’s gunwale, and bounced jerkily along the slipway, obeying Murphy’s Law by bashing into every possible obstacle on the short journey. Vanger and Leveque swarmed behind like urchin children, crying “Olé!” and punching the air after each impact. For the most part the impacts were cushioned by the wrapping, but often a crag or sharp corner of a brick penetrated the uneven cocoon, and the curve and purity of the metal made a bong ring across the small island.

  “Ding-dong,” called Cole Vanger. “Iron Man is dead!”

  This was not strictly true, but it won him a laugh from the other man, and heaven knew there would be precious few laughs in the days ahead.

  Spin Zhuk put the pedal to the metal as much as a person could in a Massey Ferguson tractor and swore in Ukrainian as the farm vehicle spluttered its way up the steep approach to the prison.

  “You are a stupid metal pig,” she told the tractor. “My grandfather runs faster than you, and he died fighting the Russians.”

  There were other words, too, more offensive even than stupid or pig, and if the tractor had been capable of taking offense, it might have considered stalling for a moment, before deciding that maybe it would try to squeeze out a little extra horsepower to avoid even more insults. In any event, sentient or no, the vehicle bucked and seemed to attack the incline with new vigor.

  The macabre parade snaked up the rocky trail to the medieval ruins, with Leveque easily outpacing the other man, using the almost incredible obstacle-course skills he had picked up in the French Foreign Legion. Leveque scaled the outer wall and winched open a camouflage net that hung across a granite arch. The arch had once supported a studded door and portcullis, but it had since crumbled and now sagged like the mouth of a mournful giant. If this operation were being run according to union rules, then health and safety would surely have vetoed access through the leaning arch, but these particular soldiers were not members of any union, and it was pretty much taken for granted that their health and safety would be at risk during every second of the operation. As if to highlight this point, the arch collapsed completely due to the vibration of the heavy vehicle’s passage, burying the Iron Man package in rubble. Spin Zhuk swore as the tractor jerked to a halt, then steered from left to right in a tight fan, wiggling Iron Man out from under the fallen stone. Freddie Leveque escaped injury by executing a neat sideways tumble, which drew another “Olé!” from Cole Vanger.

  Once the package was free, Spin proceeded along the planned route, driving the tractor through a doorway they had widened earlier and down a braced wooden ramp, directly into the heart of the old prison. The jail had once housed hundreds of pirates, murderers, swindlers, smugglers, and political prisoners, but it was now to be home to a single very special detainee. Down there the ceilings were low and oppressive, the air was dank and foul, and the huffing generator and banks of computer screens seemed thoroughly out of place.

  A portly Asian man with hair and beard clipped to a uniform tennis ball length spun on his office chair to face the tractor that had just thundered into the subterranean chamber, literally shaking the foundations. With an expression of mild surprise on his face, like Oh, is it that time already? he clapped three times.

  “Excellent, Miss Zhuk,” he said. “Wonderful, in fact. Let’s take a look, shall we, gentlemen?”

  Vanger and Leveque trotted down the ramp and set to work with diverse blades, quickly stripping back the layers of tarpaulin to reveal the world-famous red-and-gold Iron Man armor, semisubmerged in electromagnets like a toy at the bottom of a cereal box.

  The bearded man, who was known to his men simply as chef—in the boss sense of the word, not the cook sense—flexed his fingers like a concert pianist and turned back to his computer.

  “Now, time to say hello to Mr. Stark.”

  “No!” came a distant voice, accompanied by rapid footsteps down the spiral staircase that led into the chamber from the battlements. “Wait.”

  But the chef had not heard or would not wait. He tapped a line of code into his keyboard and the Iron Man armor peeled away from Tony Stark, leaving him as defenseless as a clam without its shell.

  Almost.

  Inside the suit, Tony had quickly realized that there was nothing for him to do but ride out the concussive trip. The suit’s assorted shock absorbers, gyros, and dampeners spared him a good portion of the impact, but he was still battered and bruised by the time the suit came to rest.

  The foghorn faded in his earpieces, which was a blessed relief, and gave Tony a moment to gather his thoughts as he heard the first telltale clink that signaled the impending removal of the Iron Man suit.

  Luckily, Tony Stark was a bona fide genius and could gather more thoughts in a moment than most people could assemble in one lifetime and several reincarnations.

  His lightning assessment of the situation was as follows:

  The suit has been somehow compromised, but no serious attempt has been made to damage it, which means that whoever is behind this wants it intact. Or perhaps they want me intact. Worst-case scenario: they want the suit alive but billionaire playboy dead. Unlikely. A rich genius is always more valuable alive than six feet under. So I have been lured here by someone who somehow stymied all my systems and therefore knows them intimately. Which narrows down the list of possible suspects considerably.

  Actually, I am the only suspect on the list.

  Was I manipulated somehow?

  Was I drugged? Hypnotized?

  Perhaps none of this is even happening, though it’s probably best to proceed under the assumption that it is, because this suit is about to open and when it does there will be people waiting to, at the very least, make me do things I don’t want to do.

  Conclusion: this is not going to be as much fun as Graywolf’s party.