"The sea is calm to-night" ... and deathly cold.

August 3rd, 10:47 p.m.

Their innocents-abroad cover story shredding fast, Knox and Marianna count themselves lucky to catch an unscheduled chopper flight from Rusalka back to the Azores -- until they see that Yuri's coming along for the ride.

Down in Rusalka's secret lab, chief scientist Galina Postrelnikova makes final preparations for the culmination of Grishin's mysterious Antipode Project -- tonight!

Cosmological reveries presage a wholly unanticipated return from the dead ...

A spur-of-the-moment indiscretion is instantly regretted. A post mortem is conducted in the cold, gray light of dawn. And a midnight dinner in Rusalka's sumptuous banquet hall features a curious bit of scientific legerdemain and an even more curious toast.

Marianna raids Rusalka's clandestine lab and discovers riddles wrapped in enigmas: a strange undersea base and an even stranger wall-safe. Meanwhile Knox, running interference for her up on bridge deck, inadvertently learns more from a casual conversation than he was supposed to -- if only he could figure out what it was.

It's back to business, as Marianna drags a reluctant Knox into a raid on Rusalka's secret lab, while back in DC her boss is planning an assault on a whole different order of magnitude.

A day aboard the megayacht Rusalka offers every manner of indulgence, from romance and frivolity, to remembrance and regret.

Seeking the secret harbored at Rusalka's heart -- with paper, pencil, and force majeur.

Knox and Marianna's tour of the megayacht Rusalka unexpectedly hands them the key they need to break the Grishin case wide open. As far as Knox can see it's mission accomplished, but Marianna's only getting started, and all the while Rusalka is setting sail ...

Knox attends the Kennedy Center gala intent upon winding up his involvement in the Grishin investigation as quickly and painlessly as possible, only to find that Marianna has something quite different in mind. Meanwhile, the target of that investigation, Arkady Grishin himself, retires to GEI's fabulous megayacht Rusalka, there to summon up a computer-generated chronogram of recent Russian history, and drink an ominous toast to its might-have-beens ...

Marianna manages to extricate Knox from the clutches of Russian State Security in the nick of time. But the rescue comes with strings attached ...

Jack Adler's academic adversaries seek to quash his research via bureaucratic maneuvering. GEI hitman Yuri, however, favors the direct approach.

Jonathan Knox wanders the halls of the museum and the corridors of his own memories, pondering whether to help CROM, so lost in thought that he fails to notice he's got company.

Plagued by insomnia, Jack Adler wrestles late into the night with balky equipment and his own doubts -- which means he is there to witness it when his primordial black hole goes flashing across his screens. Is it the greatest discovery of all time, or the greatest danger the world has ever faced?

When Marianna fails at sweettalking Knox into joining CROM's anti-Grishin taskforce, her boss Pete Aristos puts the pressure on, only to have that backfire too -- big time!

Guided by an aged shaman's chants, Jack Adler reconstructs the aftermath of the Tunguska Event, and the evidence for a tiny black hole as the culprit. And all the while, Grishin's hired killer Yuri is closing in on his next target -- Jack himself.

Knox learns more than he ever wanted to know about CROM's secret inner workings -- and about how his own checkered past fits into their undercover investigation of Grishin Enterprises.

As Jonathan Knox makes some unusual preparations for his morning meeting, on the far side of the planet Jack Adler toils to the top of a sacred mountain, to a meeting with an ancient holy man who can teach him the secret of the Tunguska Event and, just possibly, the meaning of his own life.

Marianna drags Jon Knox into her investigation against his will, and gets more than she bargained for.

Marianna pins her hopes of building a case against Grishin on a man with a past, an unconventional analyst for the Archon Consulting Group named Jonathan Knox. Meanwhile, half a world away, maverick cosmologist Jack Adler tries prove that the true cause of the Tunguska Event was - a submicroscopic black hole!

Arkady Grishin, billionaire chairman of Grishin Enterprises International, has a secret agenda of his own where the Tunguska Event is concerned - a secret his minions are only too willing to kill for.

New York City, present day. Marianna Bonaventure, rookie field agent for the supersecret agency known as CROM, tries to nail the shadowy Grishin Enterprises International conglomerate for trafficking in weapons of mass destruction research, and nearly pays for it with her life.

June 30th, 1908, a forty-megaton explosion obliterates a swath of ancient Siberian forest half the size of the state of Rhode Island, yet leaves behind not a trace of the object that caused it. What was it? A meteor? A comet? An alien spacecraft in reactor overload? — Or something stranger still? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices