The Good Liar
Laura Caldwell

www.mirabooks.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest appreciation to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Maureen Walters and Amy Moore-Benson. Thank you to everyone at MIRA Books, including Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Craig Swinwood, Laura Morris, Stacy Widdrington, Pamela Laycock, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Don Lucey, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Andi Richman, Kathy Lodge and Carolyn Flear.

Thanks also to everyone who read the book or offered counsel on it, especially Jason Billups, Dustin O’Regan, Clare Toohey, Trisha Woodson, Pam Carroll, Mary Jennings Dean, Morgan Hogerty, Ted McNabola, Joan Posch, Elizabeth Kaveny, Margaret Caldwell, William Caldwell, Kelly Harden, Karen Uhlman, Rob Kovell and Les Klinger.

Lastly, thanks to my panel of experts—Dr. Stuart Rice and Dr. Richard Feely for their medical counsel, Maria Fernanda Mazzuco for her Rio de Janeiro expertise, Dr. Roman Voytsekhovskiy and Peter Zavialoff for their insight into Russia, Gary LaVerne Crowell for his knowledge about the Phoenix Program and Vietnam and Rob Seibert for his special ops and weapons guidance.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

“O nly you can save your own life.”

Everyone told me this in one version or another, during the very bleak days after Scott and I fell apart. I took the advice to heart. I did everything I could to rescue myself.

I prayed to a divinity I couldn’t see or feel. I logged hours on the couch. I cleansed. I twisted my body into awkward positions intended to purify. I scribbled and scrawled in journals. I read Goethe. I slept and wept. I watched comedies and dramas. I swore off TV. I ate organically. I drank toxically. I took up gardening. I ran until my legs could hardly hold me.

Nothing helped. The problem was I no longer really wanted to save my own life. Someone had to do it for me. That someone was Liza.

But even Liza had no idea what it would take to save me.

1

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

R oger Leiland both hated and loved Brazil. On one hand, he’d grown up there professionally. The Trust, the organization he worked for, the one he was now in charge of, had planted him in Rio many years ago. He’d lived there under his alias, Paul Costa, posing as an American businessman selling vaccinations to the Brazilian government. Paul Costa had fallen in love with a woman named Marta and consequently had fallen in love with Brazil itself. But then Marta was gone, dead after a drive-by shooting on the Rodovia dos Lagos Highway. The shooting had left Paul Costa all but dead, too. The Trust had realized he was slipping and pulled him out. Sent him to Chicago, where he was like a walking corpse slowly coming back to life, strangely paralleling his research there—the Juliet Project. Eventually, he’d moved to New York where he took solace in the resilience of power instead of the tenuous comforts of love. He climbed the ladder at the Trust until he’d forged an entirely new existence at the top, all the while keeping his thumb squarely on the Juliet Project.

Now, his expertise was needed in Rio again. Technically, he could have sent someone else, but he wanted to prove to himself that he was at the apex of his game, that Rio no longer touched him. He had been back in Brazil for a few weeks, and while he had felt a flicker of longing for his old life, it was only that—a flicker. He was a different person now.

He had done his job while here. He’d gotten all the intel he required, and now he was meeting with Elena Mistow. Usually members of the Trust knew each other only by their aliases, and they’d been strictly trained to look no further. But even before he was a board member of the Trust, he knew Elena Mistow’s real name. Everyone did. Because Elena Mistow was royalty. Her father had founded the entire organization.

Now, he and the woman called Elena sat at an outdoor café in Santa Terese, a charming area set on a hillside in Old Rio. He tried not to be impressed by Elena. She was younger than he, after all, and his subordinate. But there was her lineage. And her beauty.

Elena was all business. “What do we know about Luiz Gustavo de Jardim? Will he show himself anytime soon?”

“Gustavo will appear in public in the next six months. He has to. He’s talking about running for office again, and he needs to thwart rumors that he’s already dead.”

“Wouldn’t that be convenient?”

They both laughed. Nothing was ever easy or convenient with the Trust. They were silent for a minute, sipping coffee that tasted nutty and somewhat ashy. To the many on the street, they probably looked like a couple enjoying a break from the day.

“He’ll pull the same stunt he always does,” Roger continued. “He’ll make his kids and wife surround him.”

“The bastard uses them as human shields,” Elena said bitterly, which amazed Roger. She still cared about who got hurt.

“It works for him,” Roger said. “He’s a small man. His wife is the same height. By now one of his sons will probably be taller.”

“Audacious,” she murmured. “And evil.”

“We might have to take out the shields.”

They exchanged a long look.

Roger broke the stare first, taking another sip of his coffee and gazing at passersby.

“We’ve never done that,” Elena said. “We’ve sworn not to.”

“It’s impossible to infiltrate Gustavo’s inner circle…so other measures have to be taken to eliminate him. And times are changing. You know that as well as I.”

“No collateral damage. That’s always been our rule.”

“Everything changes. Don’t hold on too tight. Just hold on to our mission. Taking out Gustavo, no matter what the cost, advances our end, and that’s still pure.”

Elena Mistow peered up at the gray-blue sky. She seemed to study something in the atmosphere. A minute passed, then another. “Jesus,” Elena said.

Roger stayed silent. He sensed the searching of her mind, the processing, the emotion. He hoped she would draw the conclusion he’d already made.

Finally, she nodded. “So we take out the shields as a last resort.”

Roger permitted himself the faintest of smiles before he raised his cup and took another sip.

2

One week later

Oakbrook, Illinois

I looked out my kitchen window. The Saturday afternoon sun was lighting the empty swing set and the bare winter ground. Another endless Saturday lay before me. I could remember, in a distant way, a time when my weekends were packed with activity and bursting with possibility.

I picked up the phone and called Liza’s cell phone. “It’s your sad, pathetic friend Kate,” I said when she answered.

“Don’t call yourself sad,” said Liza.

“Can I still call myself pathetic?”

“Absolutely.”

I laughed. Talking to Liza was about the only thing that got me laughing anymore.

“Are you back?” I asked.

“I was back, and I left again.”

“Where were you last week?”

“Montreal. And I got something for you.”

Liza Kingsley was always finding gifts for me on her travels. In Tokyo, she bought me a handbag in taupe-colored silk. I carried it for years until the lining began to shred. When Liza was in Budapest, she sent back a handwoven rug swirled with gold and celadon green. She was always going to London and bringing me packets of sweets from Harrods and, once, a cocktail dress in a chocolate brown, which she said would complement my eyes.

She was that kind of a friend. A great friend. Her friendship went beyond thoughtful gifts and a shared history. It was her phone calls and her visits and her cheerleading and her love that had propped me up and sustained me since Scott left.

And now this souvenir from Montreal.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I found you a man.”

I coughed. “What?”

“He’s amazing,” Liza said.

“I’m not ready to date.”

“Kate, it’s been ten months since he left. It’s time to dip your toe in the waters.” A pause. “And look, you’re not going to date. You’d just go on a date.”

Wind forced one of the swings into the air. A second later, it listed to a halt. “I don’t think so.”

“His name is Michael Waller.” She paused. “And he’s French.” Now she had a little goad in her voice.

“Don’t kid.”

“It’s true. Well, he’s American, but he’s of French descent, and he speaks the language fluently.”

“You’re taunting me.” Liza knew that French men, or at least men who could speak French, were my downfall. It was a trait uniquely embarrassing, because everyone I knew hated French men. Such men were thought pompous. Affected. Liza and I had grown up in Evanston, Illinois, but I’d spent six months after high school in a small town outside Paris, where I fell in love with a boy named Jacques. It was tragic. It was ridiculous. But I was hooked on the accent and the hooded eyes and the utter disdain French men carried for everyone, including themselves.

“It’s true,” Liza said again. “Of course, it’s just one of the six languages he knows.”

“Stop.” I turned away from the window and leaned against the stainless steel fridge.

“All true.”

“How old is he?”

She cleared her throat. “He’s a little older than you.”

“Spill it, Liza.”

“Michael is a very young fifty-five.”

“That’s seventeen years older than me!”

“I know, I know, but I wouldn’t recommend him if I didn’t think he was the perfect rebound man. Remember, this is just for fun.”

“But seventeen years?”

“Hey, Scott was our age, and that didn’t make a damn bit of difference, did it?”

I squeezed my eyes closed. It stung, yet Liza was absolutely right. The only thing that had made a difference was that I couldn’t have a child. Oh, I could get pregnant with a little medical assistance—and I did three times, in fact—but such pregnancies always ended in miscarriages. My body rejected the babies, and in return, Scott rejected me. Having a family was the most important thing in the world to him, even more important than his wife. And he was fiercely opposed to adoption. He wanted a baby who was his, he’d said over and over. Strangely, I didn’t think I even wanted children anymore. The quest had sucked me dry, left me with little maternal desire. So Michael’s age didn’t matter in that respect.

“You there?” Liza said.

“Unfortunately. I’m stuck in the house that Scott built.”

“Sell it.”

“I will. Soon. I just can’t take any more changes for a while.”

“What you need is a good night out with a nice, attractive man.”

“And that’s it? A night out?”

“That’s it. He lives in Vermont but he visits Chicago for business. It’s perfect.”

“How do you know him?”

“Work. He used to be at Presario. I haven’t seen him in years, but I ran into him in Montreal. And how fantastic is this? He’s opening a restaurant called the Twilight Club in St. Marabel. It’s outside Montreal.”

“Exactly how am I supposed to date a man who lives in Vermont and is opening a business in Canada?”

“Have you not heard me? I’m just talking about one date.”

“Why don’t you date him?”

She made a snorting sound. “He’s not my type, and I have no interest in the French thing, unlike you. So can I have him call you? He’s coming to Chicago to meet with investors for his restaurant. He’s staying at the Peninsula.”

“Expensive.”

“Well, he’s got money. I’m telling you, this guy has everything, Kate—looks, smarts, money, sense of humor.”

I stood away from the fridge and walked into the powder room just outside the kitchen. I flicked on the light and looked at myself in the mirror. “I’d need a haircut,” I said. My blond hair, which I normally wore to my chin, had become unruly over the past few months. The too-long bangs had to be pushed aside now and the ends were in desperate need of a trim.

“So get a haircut, for Christ’s sake,” Liza said. “Get some new clothes, get a massage, treat yourself. Head down to Michigan Avenue and do some Christmas shopping.”

“Maybe,” I said in a noncommittal way.

The truth was, I’d lacked motivation of any kind since Scott took off. For the first time in my adult life, I hadn’t even put up a Christmas tree. All I could manage was to drive to work every day, which was tough since I’d come to despise my job as an accountant at a medical-supply company. Before Scott and I got married, I used to work downtown at a big accounting agency, where we had major clients with interesting portfolios. Most people consider accounting boring, but I’ve always loved the order of it. My job seemed a challenging puzzle. But once I began working in medical supplies there were very few puzzles. Instead, I was crunching numbers about bedpans and catheters. The job was easier than my old one—and it was just a ten-minute drive from the house—but these things mattered only when Scott and I assumed we’d be having children. At least I hadn’t changed my name. My family’s name, Greenwood, was the one thing about my life that still felt like mine.

“God, I wish I was there to get you out of that house,” Liza said.

“Where are you now?”

“Copenhagen.”

Liza had an apartment in Chicago overlooking Lake Michigan, but as the head of international sales for Presario Pharmaceuticals, she was often globe-trotting.

“Your cell phone works in Copenhagen?”

“My cell phone works everywhere. And if it doesn’t I forward it to one that does.”

“How is Copenhagen?” I asked.

“Freaking freezing.”

“Are you having any fun?”

“When do I have time for fun?”

“Liza, you can’t work all the time.”

“Shut up, we’re talking about your pathetic life, remember? Let him take you to dinner.”

“You’re relentless.”

“Someone’s got to be. So what do you say?”

I groaned. And yet I felt buoyed just by talking to Liza. She had that effect on me. I glanced out the powder-room window at the lonely swing set. “All right. Have him call me.”

3

Thirty-seven years earlier

Fort Benning, Georgia

A t fifteen thousand feet, the door of the DC-47 was unceremoniously yanked open, letting in a roar Michael Waller could compare to nothing he’d heard before. A piercing, silvery morning light flooded the plane, and fierce winds stung his eyes.

“This is it!” his team leader shouted. “Hook up, check down, stand in the door.”

Michael adjusted the pack straps on his parachute, tightening them past the point that had been recommended.

“Waller! You’re up!” he heard, sending his heart rate into full gallop.

He walked toward the door, crouched low and hunched forward like a turtle with too heavy a shell on its back. He’d endured much in his specialized army training—jungle school at Holabird, where his group was forced to walk for days in jungle-like conditions, and enemy captivity training at Fort Polk, where they were put into metal lockers and buried underground—but nothing was as intense or terrifying for Michael as having to dive out of a plane.

He knew this was considered fun for most, and he’d told no one how scared he was. His fear of heights embarrassed him, almost as much as the reason for that fear. As the yawning door of the plane came closer, he saw his father’s face—handsome but cruel—as he stood on the high dive of their local pool, right before he picked up his five-year-old son and dangled him, headfirst, above the water, the glints of yellow sunlight thankfully blinding Michael’s eyes. His father had thought this stunt would make Michael tough. Unfortunately, it had had the opposite effect where heights were concerned, and that too mortified Michael. He’d always told his father in later years that the high-dive trick had worked. He wasn’t afraid of heights at all. But he’d lied.

If Michael’s son-of-a-bitch father could see him now, he’d be proud. Finally. The problem was, Michael hadn’t been able to tell anyone about the training they’d been put through. He’d volunteered for the army for the same reason a lot of guys did—boredom, literally a lack of anything better to do. He had checked Intelligence as his desired field, mostly because it sounded very James Bond.

He’d been put through testing and accepted for agent training and the intelligence corps. At Holabird, his schooling had been fun at first, as had the after-hours trips to downtown Baltimore. But the training had become more intense, and agents were weeded out. Michael knew he must have shown an aptitude for something to have been allowed to continue. Yet it was confusing, because no one knew what kind of program they were being brought into, or what, exactly, they were being trained to do.

And now this. Now he had to throw himself out of a goddamn plane.

“Waller, ready!” his team leader yelled as Michael reached the door.

He stood paralyzed, feeling the sting and scream of the wind on his face. He looked down and saw the land fifteen thousand feet beneath him, resembling a patchwork of emerald and dirt brown, while the sky’s powdery blue spread around him. No way, he said to himself. He turned his head, ready to call it off for the sake of survival, when again he saw his father’s face.

“Waller, ready!” his team leader yelled again.

This time he shouted back, “Waller, ready!” surprised at the heartiness of his voice.

He grasped the sides of the door, rocked himself three times and flung himself out. His body flipped head over toes. Over and over again. His brain fought every instinct and warning that his frantic nerves sent. He arched his chest and hips to the point of pain, forming a U shape, the way he’d been taught. Finally, the position of the body worked, and he was hovering facedown, flying through the blue, his cheeks flapping. There was no sensation of falling. He’d been told that but hadn’t believed it. He was simply suspended there, bouncing in the sky, above everything, above reason or fear now.

Too soon, he checked his altimeter and it was time to activate the chute.

In the hangar, as other unit members landed, Michael clapped them on the back and accepted their congratulations. They were all giddy and high. Michael marveled at the capacity of his mind to move from sheer fear to exuberant joy. It was a lesson he was grateful to learn.

The team leader walked up, and the unit automatically went silent.

“We have a special guest,” the team leader said. “Colonel Coleman Kingsley.”

He and the rest of his unit snapped to attention in full salute.

An arresting figure stepped through the doors of the hangar and paused. The sunlight flooded behind him so that Michael couldn’t see his face.

“At ease,” the colonel said, stepping closer. His voice was deep and calm, so different from the terse barks of Michael’s commanding officer.

Michael felt a thrill race through him. He’d never met someone of such high rank. And then there was the man’s imposing presence—the way he stood with a calm confidence that spoke of battle, and the way his eyes, the color of an exotic sea, assessed the unit with an all-knowing gaze.

“Gentlemen,” Colonel Kingsley said, “congratulations on your first jump. There will be others, I assure you, and there will be more training. Training that will test every fiber of your body, every cell of your mind. You will succeed in this training. You will do so because we have selected you carefully. When you complete this, you will join me.”

Colonel Kingsley paused then, his blue, blue eyes landing for a moment on Michael. And in that moment, Michael wanted to make the man proud. He wanted to succeed for him, in a way he’d never wanted to for his father. Michael raised his chin at the colonel, hoping the gesture would show he’d do anything, anything, he was asked to do.

4

Oakbrook, Illinois

T he goal of babymaking had sapped all my energy and focus for the last few years. It had taken all of Scott and me. And since he left, my goal had been to get some peace in my life, less focus, less intensity, more freedom. No more hormone shots. No more doctor visits or blood tests. And I got that peace, I suppose. It had been very peaceful in the house that Scott built. But I was ready for some excitement. So when Michael left a message five days after my talk with Liza, I didn’t play coy and count the prescribed, recommended amount of days to reply. I called him immediately. I was geared up for something new, some craziness perhaps, maybe just a touch of chaos.

“How did Liza convince you to call me?” I asked him.

“Liza is very persuasive.”

“That’s the truth.”

We both chuckled.

We launched into a long get-to-know-you discussion. The next night, he called again. And again a few days after that. They were easy conversations, filled with stories that required a new audience to be fresh and entertaining, stories my old friends had heard way too often.

Michael was charming and interesting. He talked of jazz and art and restaurants all over the world. His conversations were filled with anecdotes from the numerous jobs he’d held throughout his life—a photographer in Washington, D.C., a pharmaceuticals salesman in Boston, a winery owner in Napa.

“How did you get from taking pictures all the way to stomping grapes?” I asked.

“Well, let’s see. The winery thing happened because I was having a midlife crisis, and I wanted a legitimate reason to drink a lot.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Hey, it was a rough time. My thinking wasn’t entirely clear.”

I laughed and listened to Michael talk about going from photographing senators to selling vaccinations to testing soil. He could be serious as well, mentioning the tough years in Vietnam, and his marriage afterward to a woman named Honey.

“Her name was Honey?” I said, a wry tone to my voice.

Michael wouldn’t take the bait. “She was Southern. And a lovely woman.”

I was silent for a moment. I liked how he wouldn’t engage in the usual divorcé pastime of ex-bashing.

“What about you?” he asked.

“His name was Scott. It’s still pretty raw.”

“Want to talk about it?” Michael had a smooth, melodic voice, and now there was a kindness in his tone that touched me.

I told him I wasn’t quite ready. Not yet anyway. But I had a strange inkling that Michael might soon be someone I could talk to about anything.

When he asked me out, a week and a half after our first conversation, I said, “Took you long enough.”

“Yes, well. I’m not as good at this as I used to be. So, what do you say? I’m in town on Friday. I’d love to take you to dinner.”

“Great.” My voice went a little high despite myself. “That would be wonderful.”

He called a few days later to say he was on his way. It was a moment I’d been thinking about all week, and I was nervous. There were the usual first date jitters, but they were multiplied exponentially because I hadn’t dated since I ran into Scott at our high-school reunion five years ago. Also, I was anxious about the age difference. I had forgotten about it during our conversations, but soon he would be on my doorstep—a fifty-five-year-old man. I was drawn to him on the phone, but what about when I saw him? Could I be attracted to someone so much older?

I flitted around the house, trying to apply lip gloss while straightening the crap that had accumulated during my self-imposed seclusion. I scooped up stacks of newspapers and shoved them in the recycle bin. I pitched old iced-tea bottles and rinsed a couple of crusty plates sitting in the sink. I wished I’d had the sense to get a Christmas tree this week, or at the very least a wreath, something to cheer up the place. But maybe it was just me who saw the house as gloomy, a mere receptacle of what-could-have-been.

I darted into my bedroom, and stood still a moment, gazing at the bay window with its padded silk bench and olive-colored pillows, and at the corner bookshelf filled with mementos. Finally, I let my eyes move to the bed. I hadn’t made up the linens before work this morning, and I debated whether to do so now. Wasn’t making the bed akin to wearing brand-new, skimpy underwear on a date? Weren’t you jinxing yourself? I reminded myself that I didn’t actually want to sleep with Michael. The thought of having sex with someone new was mortifying. Yet I did want the date to go well. Was there some kind of bad karma in making the bed?

I decided I was being ridiculous and quickly pulled the sheets straight, yanked the comforter up and plumped the pillows. I hurried back to the kitchen and opened a bottle of Merlot. It was a good bottle that Scott and I had splurged on last year when we were trying to get over the third miscarriage. We never did drink the wine. We never did get over it.

As I took glasses from the cabinet, the doorbell rang. I froze for a second. No one—save the UPS man—had come to my door in a very long time. I glanced down at myself. Presentable enough—slim black pants, a cream silk blouse, ridiculously high heels. And I’d gotten my hair cut and highlighted. But what was I doing going on a date? My divorce wasn’t even final for three more weeks. I thought of the rumors around town that Scott was dating a twenty-five-year-old law student, someone young and fresh, someone who could probably give him the children he wanted. The thought put my feet into motion.

When I opened the door, I saw a slim man nearly six feet tall, wearing a camel-hair sport coat. He smiled, showing white teeth. A light snow had started, dropping flakes on his brown hair, which had only a few shots of gray at the temples. In his hands, he held a small copper pot covered in cellophane. Inside was a white and purple orchid.

“Kate,” he said, his voice stirring something inside me to life. “This is for you.”

He handed the orchid to me, then leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the cheek. His skin smelled warm, like he’d been in the sun, and it reminded me of getting off a plane in Florida after a long Chicago winter.

I’d lived in or around Chicago for most of my life, and yet Michael took me to a place I’d never been before. It was called Cucina Carrissima, and it was far west on Grand Avenue.

We got a parking spot in front, a bad omen to my mind. In Chicago, the enjoyment of a restaurant seemed inversely related to how far away you had to park. To me, walking a few blocks or more usually meant good food and service.

“How do you know this place?” I asked Michael. He opened my door and helped me from the car. Scott had never done such a thing.

“The owner is an old friend. In fact, he might invest in my restaurant.”

“So, I better be on good behavior?”

Michael grinned, his hand still light on my arm. “You don’t have to impress anyone, Kate. You’re already marvelous.”

I flushed deeply. In my recent existence, compliments were as rare as a solar eclipse.

The door was a black industrial thing, scarred and nicked. The hallway was dark with low-hanging ceilings, the kind you might see in a tenement house. But when we reached the end of the hall and Michael threw open the inside door for me, the world opened up. The space was small and looked like a moonlit courtyard. The ceiling was painted with vines and a half moon and decorated with strings of tiny lights. The tables were covered with crisp white linen. Spotless silverware and vases of vivid blue irises adorned the tables. Violin music twisted elegantly through the room.

A man in a black suit approached us. “ Benvenuto, Michael!” he said loudly.

He and Michael kissed on both cheeks. “Tomaso,” Michael said. “How are you?” Michael’s words seemed strangely overenunciated.

They exchanged a few words, and I noted the man had an odd way of speaking, as if he had something in his mouth, but then he was clearly Italian, so possibly it was a language thing.

Michael turned to me and introduced me as “A new but very dear friend.”

I smiled and shook Tomaso’s hand. “So nice to meet you.”

As I commented on the restaurant, Tomaso bent his head slightly, his eyes intent on my mouth, his face close to mine. I almost pulled back in surprise.

Tomaso caught my expression. “I am sorry,” he said. “I read lips.”

“Oh, you’re…” I stopped short of uttering the word deaf, afraid such a term might not be PC somehow.

Tomaso and Michael both broke into laughs. “I don’t hear so good,” Tomaso said. He pointed to his ears, making Michael laugh harder.

“He’s one hundred percent deaf,” Michael said. “But be careful, because he’ll read your lips across the room.”

“Only with friends who I suspect might say something unkind about me.”

Tomaso led us to a table near the center of the room and pulled out a chair for me. “Champagne to start?” he said.

Michael looked at me. I nodded.

Michael and I began with champagne and moved to Chianti. After the glass of Merlot we’d already had at home, I immediately caught a wine buzz. I enjoyed the slight fuzziness of my brain and the electric stars over my head. Michael told me how he’d met Tomaso in Italy when he was still working in the pharmaceutical business.

“That’s how you met Liza, too, isn’t it?” I asked.

Michael nodded, pouring me more Chianti. “Liza is an exceptional young woman.”

I chuckled. “She’s not so young anymore. Neither of us is.”

“Well, you’re both young to me.”

There was a moment of silence. This was the first time we’d acknowledged our age disparity.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said. “Is that not appropriate first-date banter? I have no idea anymore.” He gave me a shy smile that melted me.

I laughed. “I can’t remember either.”

“Vive la différence?”

“I’ll toast to that.” When I thought about it, I really didn’t mind being younger than Michael. In fact, I was enjoying it. He’d already introduced me to a new person and a new place, all within the span of half a date. And I could tell that Michael was filled with such people and places—he had an air of worldly experience that appealed immensely.

“So, you and Liza have known each other since you were kids?” Michael asked.

“Seventh grade.”

“You two must have made quite the pair.”

“Yes, hormones and the power of a new best friend will make you do just about anything when you’re thirteen.” I told Michael of the time I’d dyed Liza’s normally auburn hair jet-black because she wanted to try out for the role of Velma in the school’s production of Chicago, and the time we stole her brother’s bike and accidentally rode it into a pond.

“Her brother, Colby,” Michael said. “He’s no longer around, right?”

I shook my head. “Colby died when Liza and I were seniors in high school. Car accident. Drunk driving on the part of the other guy. I’ve always hated that, aside from the obvious reasons, because it seems almost a clichéd way to die, and Colby was so special.”

I thought of Liza’s older brother—a tall, big guy. He’d shared Liza’s smattering of freckles, but his hair had been a darker auburn, and he had a crooked way of smiling, one side up. His eyes were devious and fun. We both adored him, looked up to him. He was a few years older than us, while all my own brothers were much older and long gone from the house.

After Colby died, something crumpled in Liza. I didn’t know how to help her, and this failing of mine was one of the reasons I grabbed the opportunity to participate in an exchange program in France for six months. I left Liza alone, hoping that when I came back she might be better and we could return to the way we’d been for years. It was a coward’s way out, and I still feel guilty about it, particularly when Liza was the one who got me through my divorce. But we had been young when Colby died, and my time away seemed to have worked. Liza was never exactly the same—how could she be?—yet by the time I returned, she had lost the sad tinge to her eyes and the slow way of moving.

I took a sip of Chianti and looked at Michael. He was studying me, almost the way Tomaso might if he was trying to read my lips.

“ You’re special, Kate,” he said.

I opened my mouth to protest, to say I certainly hadn’t felt special for a very long time. But I stopped, because I realized that something had shifted over the last week since I’d met Michael. Instead of protesting, instead of telling this man that there was nothing unique about me at all, I smiled.

“Thank you,” I said. And then before I could think twice, I leaned across the table and kissed him.

5

Moscow, Russia

T he day after his date with Kate, Michael Waller entered the passport control area of the Sheremetyevo airport. He reached into his carry-on bag and removed a Russian passport, then he got in the line marked for Russian citizens. It was only minutely shorter than the massive, slow-moving line for foreigners. Some things about Russia would never change.

Michael lifted and dropped his shoulders to release the muscle tension and rolled his neck to try to shake away the headache he felt coming. He simply wasn’t the traveler he used to be. Rarely had he noticed his age all these years crisscrossing continents, but now he felt all of his fifty-five years.

He thought then of Kate. God, how unlikely that he should be thinking of her. That he should be thinking of any woman. He’d learned from his divorce that his life did not lend itself to marriage. While secrecy was everything in his business, he simply couldn’t stomach it in a romantic relationship. It made everything feel false, even the parts that were true. And yet now he’d found himself here, easing out of his business. He was pulling away, forcing the Trust to make him one of the outsiders, one of the support staff.

This mission to Russia would hopefully be his last. Thank God. Because age made it harder to stomach the missions, too. Or maybe it wasn’t age. Maybe it was the Trust’s recent descent toward the ruthless and the careless. That wasn’t how they used to operate. Luckily—if you could call it that—his mission in Moscow was absolutely necessary for the good of the organization, and most importantly for the good of the United States. And so he would do his job, no matter how distasteful, and then he would go home, and he would try to start living a more normal existence. And he would call Kate. Because if he was no longer playing the same role he used to, there might be room in his life for a partner. And he might have found her.

He moved forward in the line. He would be next to give his documentation to the agent. A flicker of anxiety hit him—a slight increase of his pulse, a knotty feeling in his stomach. Even though the Soviet Union had died and the cold war was over, Michael still felt nervous every time he arrived in Russia. The truth was, “Michael Waller” would have serious problems getting through the passport check. The U.S. government had placed restrictions on his passport for travel into any country once considered communist because he had, technically, worked for the CIA in the past. His presence in a post-communist country might be taken as an act of espionage. But Michael wasn’t “Michael Waller” today.

He took a full breath into the lower lobes of his lungs. He forced his pulse to slow. His anxiety calmed quicker than usual. He wondered if the speedy calm was because he’d done this so many damn times. Then another possibility came to him. Maybe it was because of Kate. She made him feel younger, and somehow cleansed of the sins he’d committed, although she knew nothing about those sins, nor would she ever. That thought stalled him for a moment—no matter how present he was now with Kate, no matter what the future held, she could never know his past. Michael felt a wave of sadness, but he let that emotion evaporate from his body. He focused instead on how Kate made him feel—virile and youthful, yes, but more than anything optimistic, actually looking forward to his future.

The customs agent signaled to Michael. He stepped up to the man and handed him the passport he was holding. The man flipped it open and read it.

“Sergei Kovalev?” the agent said.

“Da,” he said. Yes.

“What countries did you visit?” the agent asked in Russian.

“Italy. France.”

“How long were you gone?”

Michael continued to answer the man’s questions in Russian, all the while giving the air of a wearied traveler eager for his trip to be over.

The agent paused then, his eyes flicking from Michael to Sergei’s passport photo.

Michael felt his breath become shallow, but he continued to give the agent a bored look.

Finally, the agent lifted his head and stamped the passport with a hearty thud. “Welcome home.”

“Thank you,” Michael said. But really, his trip had just begun.

6

F ive hours later, Michael walked through the lobby of his Moscow hotel, a once shabby place that was now grand again, the gold ceilings sparkling like new. The combination of the shabby memory and the new gold made him think of Vegas. Like Vegas, Moscow now had its glamorous sides, its historically seedy sides and its always dangerous sides. Yet Moscow was still much, much tougher.

Michael stepped outside the hotel and walked to Red Square, where gray snow edged itself along the perimeter. He walked through the square, admiring, as he always had, the brightly colored, funhouse cupolas of St. Basil’s. The square was different now than it used to be. In the past, the cathedral and the Kremlin stood stark against the bleakness that used to permeate Moscow, making the square almost eerie, sinister. Now the square boasted a skating rink and a new mall filled with designer stores. Michael preferred the old Red Square, but it remained an excellent place to stroll and to search for a tail.

He crossed the square twice, stopping to gaze occasionally at the star atop the Kremlin tower. Yet he was always aware of all the people around him, most of them tourists, along with stylish Russian youths and a few babushkas seeking alms. Each person who came into his sightline turned away in time. He wasn’t being tailed. At least not right now.

Michael walked to the metro station with its arched marble doorways, bronze sculptures, ornate chandeliers and vaulted, chrome ceilings. Michael had always been intrigued by the stations. They’d been Stalin’s pride, built in the thirties, forties and fifties, and they were intended to display preeminent Soviet architecture and art, to show the privilege of the Russian lifestyle. Whether the opulent stations were optimistic, delusional or simply deceiving, he had never been able to decide, but he could certainly see their beauty.

He took one of the long, long escalators downward, studying the mosaic walls while methodically glancing over his shoulder, memorizing the faces of the other commuters. At the landing, he looked at a portrait of Stalin receiving flowers from a group of children. He walked to another lengthy escalator and took it farther into the bowels of Moscow. The landing boasted a mosaic of Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, made of colored glass.

The Muscovites pushed past Michael, no one stopping to notice the art, much less him. Two minutes later, he boarded a train, rode two stops and disembarked. Once street side again, he held out his hand and waited for a car to stop. Muscovites didn’t take cabs, they simply waited until a driver headed in their direction pulled over. A fare would be negotiated, usually a few hundred rubles, and off they went. It was sort of an elevated level of hitchhiking.

A car pulled over. Inside, it was cramped and smelled of cigarettes. The driver was a grim woman in her sixties who wanted no talk, only cash, which was fine for Michael.

After a mile, Michael asked her to stop. He took a minibus in the opposite direction. He got out after a few miles and took another metro ride on a different line, all the while calmly watching anyone he came into casual contact with. There was no indication that he was being tailed. Even if he was, the Moscow Metro was the best place in the world to lose a tail because there were so many levels in the stations, so many trains.

Finally, he disembarked again and went to the street level. Using an international cell phone he’d rented at the airport, he dialed a man he knew as Sebastian Bagley, a Trust operative stationed in Seattle. Sebastian, a man about ten years his junior, was probably the smartest person Michael had ever met, and one of the most humble. Sebastian and Roger Leiland were his two best friends at the Trust, and Sebastian, like Roger, had a medical background. But a long time ago, Sebastian became enthralled with computers and technology. Once he was a member of the Trust, Sebastian had willingly become backup staff, running things behind the scenes. He had never suffered dreams of glory, he just wanted to do an exceptional job, and as such he was a preeminent Trust staffer. Luckily, Michael had enough seniority that he got to work with Sebastian whenever he requested.

“It’s Andrew Marson,” he said when Sebastian answered, giving one of the aliases he used in the field.

“You’re ready,” Sebastian said calmly.

“Trotsky in his office?”

“Yes.”

“His usual staff in place?”

“Yes. How do you feel?”

Michael smiled. No other backup ever asked an operative how they felt. And he wasn’t sure if Sebastian did this for anyone else but him, but he liked it. It was nice to have someone give some small measure of appreciation for what he now had to do.

And so finally, he walked a half a mile to the squat concrete office building where he was to meet Radimir Trotsky.

Radimir Trotsky was a high-ranking member of the Mafiya, the Russian mob, and he was one of the most dangerous. Since the Soviet collapse, Michael had shifted his focus to the Mafiya, and he had not been satisfied with that shift. In days past, he’d felt his work made him an honorable warrior. Now he felt like a beat cop chasing gangsters. And these gangsters were even more brutal than the KGB had been. It was part of the reason why he wanted out of the game. But the Trust didn’t let people out, and it was only as a favor to him that they were letting him step down. Or they were trying to let him step down. The fact was, no one knew the Mafiya like he did, and Radimir Trotsky needed to be dealt with. Now.

Trotsky had seemingly come out of nowhere six years ago. They knew little about his early years. From what they could tell, he’d been raised in a small town in Siberia, and eventually became a hockey star for one of Russia’s many pro teams. A knee injury sidelined him for good, but he used his star power to get into business with Boris Petrov. Trotsky took easily to Petrov’s petroleum and cigarette running, the prescription-drug counterfeiting. But it was in the back office—with the skull bashing, the threats, the physical intimidation—that Trotsky’s hockey skills really came in handy. Brutality was highly praised and rewarded in the Russian Mafiya, leading Trotsky right to the top of Boris Petrov’s organization, where he became Petrov’s right-hand man.

Then Trotsky turned his sights on the U.S. He’d always had exceptional language skills and a particular affinity for English. So when Boris started looking toward the lucrative streets of New York, Trotsky was the man he sent. In the last few years, Trotsky was believed to have ordered the killings of at least twenty-nine men and five women who had crossed him in one way or another. And that was what the Trust cared about—the loss of American life, the potential for much greater loss. They cared even more when Trotsky stepped on the wrong toes, those of the oil and cigarette companies, many of whom had representatives in the Trust.

Michael hadn’t been watching the Mafiya for a while, but had been told by the Trust that Trotsky was still the poster boy for everything that was so keenly dangerous about the Russian mob—they had no code of ethics, and they were unbelievably ambitious. They would stop at nothing to get what they wanted, and what they wanted was money, power and control in the United States. Their kill-or-be-killed tactics worked, and they always carried out their threats. So the people who dealt with them gave them anything they wanted. But Michael was about to stop that. Or at least a piece of it. The Trust had asked Michael to get back in the game for this one mission because of his expertise. Michael had accepted because, from what he’d learned in the past, it was the right thing to do.

He entered the building through the glass-and-steel doors. He gave the name of Sergei Kovalev to the young man at the front desk who had feral eyes and, Michael could tell from the way he sat, a pistol tucked in the back of his jeans. Sergei Kovalev, thanks to Michael’s painstaking work in creating him over the last few decades, had a reputation as a quiet but very wealthy and respectable Russian businessman. A few phone calls to Trotsky’s people indicating Sergei wanted to join forces had led to this meeting while Trotsky was in the country. To get within even a block of Trotsky would have been impossible but for Sergei.

The young man with the feral eyes squinted into a computer screen. After a minute, he said something into a handheld radio. A door behind the man clicked open and a large, bald guy stepped into the lobby. He instructed Michael to take off his coat and to spread his arms and legs. He ran a wand over Michael’s body, covering every inch in a slow, meticulous fashion. He patted down Michael’s arms, chest, back, crotch, ass, legs and feet, then asked Michael to open his mouth and peered inside. He ran Michael’s coat through a gunpowder sensor. Finally, he stepped back, pointed to the elevator and said, “Four,” in Russian.

Inside the elevator was another young man with cold eyes, dressed in jeans. Michael asked for the fourth floor. The man eyed him and hit the button.

When they reached the floor, the man escorted Michael down an unadorned concrete hallway to a set of double steel doors. He pressed a bell. They both looked up at a security camera above the doors. Soon the doors clicked open. Inside, the man walked Michael down another concrete hall, past closed doors, until they reached the last door on the left. He knocked, then stepped back.

Radimir Trotsky opened the door and shook Michael’s hand. He was a pleasant-looking man with short brown hair, gray eyes and a blue wool sweater. He could have passed for a Midwestern, suburban father. But then, Michael had found benign appearances common to many heartless people.

Trotsky shook his hand, led him into the office and closed the door behind him. To steel his nerves against what he was about to do, Michael reminded himself of the man’s laundry list of crimes. He reminded himself of how much danger this man posed to the United States, should he continue his climb to power.

“Thank you for meeting me,” Michael said in Russian. “I won’t keep you long.”

Michael launched into his spiel about his business of making petroleum products, his exportation of his products, his contacts in the U.S., and how he thought their joining forces with Trotsky would benefit them both. When Trotsky turned his head to get a document off the credenza behind him, Michael leaped forward and over the desk, his body falling easily into a maneuver he’d performed too many times now. He locked Trotsky’s head with one arm, the other one covering his mouth and holding tightly to his chin. The Russian’s arm shot toward an emergency call button, but Michael anticipated the move and pivoted his body away. Michael knew he had to do this fast. The former hockey player was bigger than him, younger than him. If given even a second, Trotsky would gather his wits and make this a real fight, which would no doubt alert the guards. But Michael’s knowledge and experience trumped Trotsky’s brawn.

So Michael stopped reminding himself why this was necessary. He allowed himself no prayer for the soon-to-be-dead, no prayer for forgiveness for himself. He pushed down on Trotsky’s head and, at the same time, wrenched it to the left, then the right, then once back again, snapping the vertebrae, ensuring death.

Trotsky’s body slumped and Michael froze, listening for any sounds from outside. The breaking of a neck was a noisy maneuver, but it was the best alternative under the circumstances. His body was tingling with adrenaline and sick with the knowledge of what he’d done. He listened in fear for the sound of running feet. But Michael heard nothing.

Michael draped Trotsky’s torso over his desk. He took a tiny digital recorder from the lining of the waistband of his pants. It was nearly as thin as a business card and had escaped detection from the guard downstairs, as Michael knew it would. Pulling his sleeve over one hand, he lifted the phone off Trotsky’s desk and dialed the number for the security personnel outside Trotsky’s office.

When he answered, Michael pressed play on the digital recorder. The Trust had been watching and, more importantly, listening to Trotsky for over a year and had been able to splice together words they’d recorded.

Michael averted his eyes from the body, as he heard Trotsky’s voice shoot from the recorder. “He is coming out. And I want to be left alone for an hour.”

The security guard confirmed he understood. Michael slipped the recorder back in his belt, left the office and nodded to the guard on the way out.

Trotsky had been his last job, he reminded himself. It had to be his last, because Michael knew what would happen now. He would return to his hotel, check himself out and head for the airport. He would fly home in a comfortable first-class seat that folded out into a bed, but he wouldn’t sleep. He could never sleep for days after a job like this. During those days, he would remind himself why the Trust existed, why he had done what he had done.

Yet this time, he didn’t dread the next few days like he normally did, because he would insist that this be his final job, and that thought filled up the usually empty well where his optimism was to be stored. But it wasn’t just the thought of his diminishing role in the Trust that was filling the well. There was Kate. Thoughts of Kate. Kate’s quick, deep laugh. Kate’s vulnerability. Kate’s luminous brown eyes that gazed at him with wonder, seeing only the good in him. Kate was like water, clear and cool, rushing into his well. And he couldn’t wait to see her again.

Time to leave Moscow. Time to leave this world. Time for Kate.

7

Oakbrook, Illinois

“I can’t take it,” I said, holding the phone. “I can’t take this anymore.”

“God, I can’t either,” I heard Michael say. His voice was low and rough, his breathing ragged.

I turned over in my bed and lay on my stomach, still holding the phone. “Jesus, Michael.”

“I know, I know. This is the best sex I’ve had, and I haven’t even touched you yet.”

Since our date two weeks ago, Michael and I had been on the phone every night. We talked about our work, our comings and goings, our marriages, our dreams—those that had failed us and those we still had—but we also talked about how we would kiss each other if we were together; how we would do all sorts of things.

Technically, this was phone sex, a practice that had mystified me before. I mean, what’s the point? I used to think. Why not simply wait for the real deal? I hadn’t realized how much imagination was involved with phone sex. I hadn’t realized how it forced you to talk about precisely how you liked your body to be handled, your thighs to be stroked, your ear to be whispered in. And you learned from the other person what they liked as well.

While at work, as I analyzed the company’s quarterly earnings or talked to the office manager, I could not stop hearing Michael’s voice. I could not stop seeing us in bed together. Because, of all the explicit details we’d discussed, these images were as vivid as if we’d actually made love.

But now it had gone too far. Now I was mad for him.

“I don’t know if I can wait two weeks.” Michael was supposed to return to Chicago in two weeks and we would have our official second date.

“I know. I can’t wait either.”

“I’ll get a flight tomorrow morning,” Michael said.

“Thank God.”

The next night, we had dinner at Merlo, an eclectic Italian place on Maple Avenue. Our conversation never waned, nor did our intense looks across the table. Later, I walked out of the place with Michael’s arm around my back, and I was electric from just that touch.

The Gold Coast was awash with lights, but it was quiet with the post-holiday lull. A light sprinkling of snow covered the sidewalk.

“Careful,” Michael said as we walked down the restaurant’s front steps.

I stopped. Michael, who was one step below me, did the same.

“I’m sick of being careful,” I said. I grabbed his face, his warm, smooth-shaven face, and I kissed him hard. Within seconds, our bodies were pushed against each other, our arms wrapped around each other tight. I could feel my body temperature shooting high until I wanted to tear off my cashmere coat.

“Let’s go to your hotel,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“Shut up.”

In his hotel bed, Michael held himself up on his arms, gazing down at Kate. Gorgeous, smart, sexy Kate.

They were stripped of their clothes, and in fact, he felt they were both stripped of everything —every pretense or artifice. His body felt as lean and hard as it ever had, and yet his core was somehow liquid and alive. They were right on the brink, about to consummate this intangible chemistry.

He stared into Kate’s eyes—neither of them had closed their eyes tonight, even while they were kissing—and he felt the momentousness of the instant. Sex had never been like this for him. He almost laughed because they still hadn’t technically had sex yet, but this was it. This was it. That phrase kept returning to his mind. His life was different now. He was taking a step back from the Trust into a normal existence, and yet he was taking a step forward with Kate.

“Ready?” he asked Kate.

Her brown eyes stared into his—into his soul, it felt like. She didn’t say anything. Not a word. Instead, never letting her eyes stray from his, she reached for his hips. Slowly, slowly, she drew him into her.

8

Four months later

St. Marabel, Canada

“K ate, my girl, it’s your wedding!” Liza yelled, bursting through the door of the church’s anteroom. “I can’t believe you’re shameless enough to wear white.” The sides of her auburn hair were pulled back, a few wavy tendrils escaping. She wore a soft pink dress that draped over her shoulders and exposed her collarbones.

My mother shot Liza a disapproving look.

“Liza, stop,” I said, laughing. I loved when Liza was like this—funny and over-the-top—and the fact was, she was like this ninety percent of the time. The other was a serious, soulful Liza, moody and hard to reach. She rarely let anyone see that Liza.

My mom scurried around me, fluffing my dress, and pinching off a few bouquet flowers she saw as less than ideal. We were in a tiny church tucked on an angled alley street of St. Marabel. The church was where Michael came to Mass the few times a year he did so while summering in this town. Despite the fact that I hadn’t gone to Mass in years, I found the church cozy and comforting. I needed that because now that Michael was opening a restaurant here, and Michael was about to become my new husband, and all of this meant that my life was entirely new and different and unknown. Fitting that it was spring.

“I need one minute alone with my friend,” Liza said, drawing me away from my mother and against a stone wall. Her smile waned. She looked contemplative. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she said, her voice low.

“Liza. We’ve been through this.”

Liza had seemed pleased when my first date with Michael had gone so well. She seemed delighted when he came to see me again in Chicago. She sounded cautious when I went to visit him for a weekend. And when we got engaged, she was alarmed. I understood. Our relationship had progressed so rapidly, I hardly knew how to process it myself.

Long-distance relationships are the toughest breed. Michael and I fell for each other—hard—aided by the phone sex and the long weekends and the painful goodbyes that often brought me to tears. And then I couldn’t stand being away from him. It literally wrenched something inside me that I couldn’t see him, that I was forced to only hear him at night on the phone. And so our relationship had moved with electric speed. It was either that or pretend I didn’t care and try to let it grow with a slow build. But Michael wasn’t slow, at least when it came to me. He told me the first weekend I visited him that he loved me. We were in Vermont, riding horses down the back trail of his property and watching the sun sink fast over a small mountain ridge. His horse nudged up to mine. I tightened my gloved hands on the reins, surprised. Then I relaxed when I looked into his face, a face so familiar somehow.

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this after such a short time,” he said. “But I have to.” He paused.

I heard a branch break somewhere in the woods, then the hum of a distant plane.

“I love you.” He said this with certainty. And certainty was a concept I hadn’t been familiar with for a long time. I’d been living with Scott, wondering and wondering and wondering—Would we have a baby? Would we last without one?

I didn’t return the sentiment that cold day in Vermont. I wanted to. But I also wanted to be smart. I wanted to take Michael’s words home and roll around in them. I wanted to see if they fit.

Yet the next day, when I was about to leave him at the ticket counter of the little airport, I felt a clutch in my chest. I would miss this man so much. And I didn’t want to miss him. I wanted to see him every morning, and every night. Before I’d met Michael, I’d honestly believed I would never feel like this again. Scott—like a thief who carries off valuables in the night—had stolen from me trust, hope, innocence, belief, all the components of first love. I had assumed the theft was complete and that I would never possess those things again. But now I had this surge in my chest, the return of feelings lost.

I dropped my bag on the concrete sidewalk. I stood on tiptoe and grabbed Michael’s face in my hands. “I love you, too.”

“Well, it’s about time.”

We kissed, laughing.

I went back to Vermont the next weekend. The week after I visited his summer place in St. Marabel, where he was moving to permanently open his restaurant. The weekend after that when he returned to Chicago, I walked into Michael’s room at the Peninsula to find it wasn’t a room, it was a suite, and it was filled with peonies, my favorite flower. A table was set up under the window, laden with a meal made of my favorite Chicago dishes—a cheese flight from Avec, endive salad from Bistrot Margot, sea bass from Spring and chocolate truffles from Vosges called Black Pearls.

“If you were to leave Chicago,” Michael said, “I know you’d miss the city. But I promise to try and bring Chicago to you whenever I can. My home is wherever we’re together.”

In that instant, I saw where this was going and I started to tremble.

“Kate.” He cupped one cheek with his big hand and kissed my eyes, my forehead, then, slowly, my mouth. “I want to do that every day. Will you marry me?”

I didn’t hesitate a second before I said yes.

I put my house on the market within a week. I won’t say that I didn’t sob—great, gulping sobs—when I left. But once I was in my mother’s car, on the way to the airport and away from Chicago for good, I felt like I was lifting off.

And now I was in St. Marabel, about to be married again.

“Liza,” I said. “Remember, it was you who set us up.”

“I know, I know.” She tucked a tendril of auburn hair behind her ears and peered into my eyes. “I just didn’t think…”

“You just didn’t think what?”

“That you’d get married. He was supposed to be a transition guy.”

“Well, he turned out to be my guy.”

She breathed out hard.

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

“It’s just so soon.”

“Liza, you like Michael, right?”

“Of course.”

“Why do you like him?”

She shrugged. “Because he’s an honorable guy. He’s a great man.”

“Right. And you know that just from meeting him at work. You should see his personal side. You should see him at home with me. He’s amazing.”

I watched Liza’s face as I said this. It had occurred to me early on that maybe Liza and Michael had had a fling. Sometimes the way they spoke of each other made them seem more familiar than just two old colleagues. But Liza had flatly denied this when I asked her, and Michael had laughed.

“I’m in love with him,” I said. “Can’t you be happy for me?”

Liza stood straighter. She kissed me softly on the cheek. “Of course. I am happy for you.”

Behind us, my mother cleared her throat. I turned to her. “You okay, Mom?”

My mother, Geri Greenwood, was a worrier at heart. My brothers, seven and eight years older than me, had created enough trouble that she worried her weight away, leaving her a diminutive sixty-six-year-old, whose designer clothes were a size zero. She had on a beige chiffon dress today, and although I knew she was happy for me, the lines at the corners of her mouth looked deeper than usual.

She smiled, then went about fluffing the hem of my dress. “I just want what’s best for you.”

“ This is what’s best for me!” My voice rose, despite myself. “C’mon, you guys! It’s my wedding day, and I’d like a little support, and—”

My mother’s hand reached out and touched my arm, stopping my words. She looked at me. The lines of her face softened. “I know you’re in love. And I’m thrilled for you.”

“Me, too,” Liza said. “So let’s do it, ladies.”

Liza turned and threw open the door of the anteroom. I could see the small cobblestone foyer of the church and, beyond that, the open, arched doors leading to the aisle.

I took a few steps and peeked my head forward, peering down that ivory-covered aisle, and I caught a glimpse of Michael—tall and beautiful, hands clasped, rocking back and forth on his heels. Michael smiled at Roger Leiland, his best man, whom he’d met while married to his first wife. Michael’s marriage had split up years ago, but he said he’d never split from Roger, even though Roger had changed a lot. Apparently, the love of Roger’s life died many years ago, and he’d become hardened and callous in many ways. But Michael said he’d never give up on a friend, and I loved his unabashed loyalty. Roger was shorter than Michael, more powerfully built, and probably five or six years younger, but they had a camaraderie that could always be felt when they were together.

I took in the rest of the tiny church, mostly empty, although Tomaso, the restaurateur from Chicago, was there with his wife. My brothers and their wives were in attendance, too. They were all grinning big, no doubt relieved that their little sister wasn’t the depressed creature she’d been for a year now. And there was my dad, nervously twisting around in his seat. I’d told him that I wanted to walk down the aisle by myself this time. It felt more adult somehow, more honest and real, that I and only I would walk toward my new husband.

I felt a rising of something through me—a vision of a new husband, a new town, new friends, a new life.

“Ready?” Liza said, bumping her hip into mine.

I threw back my shoulders. “Absolutely.”

Michael and Roger stood at the bar of Jameson Place, a small, charming pub in St. Marabel where the reception was being held. There were only twenty people, but the mood was as ebullient as if hundreds were in attendance.

St. Marabel was the place where Trust members from around the world had been meeting for years, and so Michael had spent a lot of time there. But now, newly married to Kate, it felt like home for the first time.

Michael ordered a glass of Lagavulin scotch from the bartender. Roger asked for red wine.

“No, no,” Michael said, “he’ll have a Beychevelle Bordeaux.” He turned to Roger. “I’ve told you, my friend, you can’t just ask for red wine or they’ll give you some Cabernet swill.”

Roger accepted his glass from the bartender and sipped. “Delicious. You became such a wine snob when you ran that winery. That was the best cover the Trust has ever given someone.”

Michael laughed. “Now what will I become? A restaurant snob?”

“No, from the way you’re staring at Kate, I’d say you’re about to become one of those insufferable people who believes everyone can find true love. If they just look in the right place.”

Michael dragged his eyes away from Kate’s incandescent face and met the gaze of his best friend. “Guilty as charged.”

Roger turned to face the bar. Michael’s scotch was delivered, and they sipped in silence.

“So,” Roger said, “I haven’t had a chance to tell you personally—good work in Moscow.”

Michael’s body tensed ever so slightly. No one would have noticed, but he knew Roger did. They were friends, after all, but they were also trained to look for such physical clues in everyone.

“That has to be the last job,” Michael said. “Now that I’m here running the Twilight Club for the Trust.”

“Now that you’ve got Kate.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Are you going to give me hell for wanting to be a good husband? A normal husband?”

Roger held his hands up in mock self-defense. “Jesus, Michael, Moscow was just something you had to finish.”

Michael sighed. “I don’t want that anymore. I want to give Kate a great life. I want to make her happy.”

“You can’t tell her anything about the Trust.”

Michael gave him a withering look. “I would never. You know that.”

Roger nodded. “I gotta tell you, buddy…” He trailed off, shaking his head, and Michael readied himself for more ribbing about true love. “I’m jealous,” Roger said simply. “I miss feeling like that.”

Michael looked at him. “I thought you never wanted another relationship after Marta.”

Roger shrugged. “You never know.”

They shared a silence during which Michael gave his friend an opportunity to elaborate. He didn’t.

“I’m telling you, I’m fine running the Twilight Club,” Michael said. “I’m excited that the Trust will have a meeting place, and I like being in on the ground floor of it. But that’s it for me. That’s my involvement now, and that’s all.”

“You’re repeating yourself.”

“Well, I just want you to know. You’re a member of the board.”

“You used to be as well.”

“That’s right. Used to be.”

Roger took another sip. “Fine, I’ve gotten the message, for what it’s worth.”

“It better be worth something. I’ve given my whole life to this.”

“Who hasn’t?”

“Michael!” Kate’s voice rang out. She and Liza were holding on to each other, cracking up. “You have to hear this story.”

Michael could feel the grin stretch across his face. Genuine, spontaneous smiles still felt foreign to him.

“Go,” Roger said.

The two men looked at each other.

“Thanks,” Michael said.

Roger gave him a clap on the back, and as Michael walked toward his wife, he let that smile take over his face again.

9

A few hours later, after most of the wine had been drunk and the bride and groom had waved goodbye, Roger Leiland approached the bar and the one person he’d wanted to talk to all night.

She stood with her back to him, one strap of her pink dress falling over a lightly freckled shoulder. Roger felt himself stirring, turned on by the sight of her. But that wasn’t the only reason he wanted to talk.

There were only a few people left at the pub. Kate’s brothers and their wives were tucked in at the end of the bar, completely blotto and shrieking with laughter. At one of the tables, Michael’s contractor from the Twilight Club plied his date with a bottle of champagne.

“Hello, Elena,” Roger said, stepping up to her, using her alias.

She turned to him. In her eyes, he saw a look of worry. She quickly cleared her expression. He was surprised she’d let any emotion show, even for that fraction of a second, since she was notoriously stoic. He wondered what it was that troubled her.

“Hello, Paul,” she said, using his alias as well.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

“Cut the bullshit,” she said, although not harshly. He liked how she talked simply and sometimes crudely, like a man, but how when you looked at her—with that body and that red hair and those intense green eyes—you were always very aware that Liza was a woman.

He looked around to make sure no one was listening. The bartender was taking care of Kate’s brothers. “So why did you introduce them?”

She gave him a hard stare, then picked up her glass of white wine and took a sip. “I didn’t think they would get married. Jesus, I just thought they could go on a date or two. I mean, Kate is my best friend, and she’d been moping around for almost a year since her marriage fell apart. And you know Michael. He hadn’t been out with someone in forever.”

“That’s because he didn’t want to bring anyone into this world.”

“Give me a break. He’s settling down here in St. Marabel. Why shouldn’t he be with someone who makes him happy?”

“Because it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for your friend.”

She swallowed more wine, her brows knitting. “They’ll be fine. Michael has a totally different role now, right?”

He nodded. “That’s right. He’s requested step-down status, and running the Twilight Club is the assignment we’ve given him.”

“But you won’t let him out.”

“He can’t be out entirely. You know the rules.”

Liza sighed and turned to face the bar. “God, do I.”

He stepped closer. He could smell the lotion on her skin—scented with vanilla and something a little darker—and he felt himself grow hard. He could have stopped it. Like her, Roger had gotten very good at concealing emotion when he wanted to. But he didn’t want to. Just for tonight, and with someone exactly like Liza, he wanted to let sensation get the better of him. Although she was his subordinate, she was a star in his world. The thought of capturing that star, consuming her, was intoxicating.

“It’s not so bad, is it?” he said.

She stared at her wineglass. “It’s tough. You know how it is.”

“This is your legacy.”

“Sometimes I don’t care.”

“If it helps, I can tell you that the research we’re doing in Chicago is going well. Incredibly well, actually. I’d love to show you sometime.”

Liza gave him a confused look. “I know nothing about that research, and since I’m not involved, you shouldn’t be telling me. That’s protocol.”

He shook his head. “Rules can be bent.” If she only knew how he’d bent the rules.

“Since when?” Liza said.

He stepped even closer, to the side of her now. “I want to make you feel better.”

She looked up at him, and her face shifted to one of surprise. She’d seen his open desire.

“Roger,” she said sternly, dropping the alias, and taking a step back. “Don’t.”

He stepped closer. He could smell that scent again, and it made him want to pin her arms down and bite the side of her long, white neck. “Why not? Why should Michael and Kate get everything?”

“No fraternization. Those are the rules. And you helped make those rules.”

“I’ll break them.”

She gave a short laugh. “Have some respect for yourself. Stop while you’re ahead.”

“Let me make you feel better.”

“Roger, get the fuck away from me.”

The word fuck coming from her mouth made him angry and yet it turned him on even more. He was losing a little bit of control. He saw that. But he liked it. It had been a long, long time.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. “C’mon. Come back to my hotel.”

“Roger, maybe you’re not understanding. I have no interest in you, I have no interest in your body, and I’d rather spend six months in solitary confinement than go to your hotel room.”

He tightened his grip on her arm. Now she was pissing him off.

She dropped her voice. “If you don’t get your hand off me, I’ll break it. I will break every phalanx and every joint and every metacarpal.”

Just then, one of Kate’s brothers yelled “Liza!” from the end of the bar.

She yanked her arm away and shot them a smile. “Be right there,” she called.

She turned her attention back to him, her features growing stern again. “I’m going to pretend this didn’t happen. And it will not happen again. Do you get that?”

He felt the urge to smash her face with his fist. He was embarrassed now that he’d let her get the better of him, but he would never show her that. He merely gave her a smirk.

Liza tossed her shoulders back and walked to the end of the bar. She accepted a beer from one of Kate’s sisters-in-law and pecked one of the brothers on the cheek.

A minute later, she glanced over her shoulder to see if Roger was still there. He stood, trying to let his anger sift away. She was a star in their world, yes, but the way she treated him, as if he were some commoner, as if he weren’t someone, was inexcusable.

Finally, Roger turned and left the bar. The cobblestone streets of St. Marabel were slick. It must have rained. Roger put his hands in his pockets and headed for his hotel. He’d been able to clear most of his emotions and leave them at the pub—he’d left behind his desire and his momentary lack of control. But he was still carrying one emotion with him. His anger. He was having a very hard time getting rid of that.

10

Chicago, Illinois

L iza Kingsley crossed LaSalle Street at Madison and entered one of the block’s smaller buildings, which bore brass plates by the entrance. Nine of those plates proclaimed the names of local law firms. The other plate read simply, Presario Pharmaceuticals.

“Morning, Ed,” she called to the security guard, as she did every morning she came to the office.

“Morning, miss.”

Liza walked to the elevator and got in with two lawyer types who hit the button for a firm called Toffer and Brodley. She nodded at them and smiled.

“Hey,” one guy said to her, allowing his eyes to linger on her face. Those eyes had also darted down Liza’s body when she stepped inside the elevator. He probably thought she hadn’t noticed. She had.

Liza wore a sleek, black pantsuit, as she did many days at work, but today she’d added a low-cut, salmon-colored silk blouse. Something about seeing Kate and Michael at their wedding last week had made her think that it was about time she found someone to date. Or at least someone to sleep with. She’d spent her weekend deciding that it had been entirely too long.

“How was your weekend?” the guy asked Liza, as if they knew each other.

She turned to face the lawyers. The one who had spoken wore khakis and a blue button-down shirt that matched his eyes precisely. He had brown hair, cut short—typical lawyer fashion—but he had a wicked grin. Liza knew his type. Full of confidence. Full of bravado. Full of himself. And usually very good in bed.

“A little lonely,” she answered.

His grin deepened. “Yeah, me too.”

They stood, their eyes not leaving the other’s face.

“So you work at Presario Pharmaceuticals, huh?”

She nodded.

“What kind of pharmaceuticals do you specialize in?”

The elevator dinged and the door opened to the spacious, ivory-painted foyer of Toffer and Brodley. The other lawyer got out and took off down the hallway.

Her guy stood in front of the doors so they couldn’t close. “I’m Rich Macklin,” he said, holding out his hand.

She shook it. “Liza Kingsley.”

“I’m from Boston, but I work out of this office part-time. Maybe I’ll stop up at Presario and say hi someday.”

“Oh, no, don’t do that.”

His cocky grin faded.

“It’s a zoo, and the receptionist can never find anybody.” She rolled her eyes at the imagined craziness of her office.

He pulled a card out of his pocket. “Well, then, call me when you’re heading downstairs for a coffee sometime, okay? Or whenever. My cell phone number is on there, too.”

“Sure,” she said, taking it from him, liking the tiny race of her pulse.

Even though the number for her floor was already lit, she hit it again. “I’ll see you then.”

“Yeah, I’ll see you.” He gave her that grin again and stepped back.

Liza held Rich Macklin’s card as the elevator climbed. She liked the feel of it—light but with sharp edges. She stepped out when the elevator reached her floor. A large, glass block sign hung in the foyer with heavy, steel letters spelling out Presario Pharmaceuticals. Below that were two visitors’ chairs with an end table between them and a single black phone atop the table.

Liza lifted the phone, which was a STU-III, a secure telephone device designed to take audio signals, mix them digitally into a serial data stream and encrypt the voice. She rattled off a series of letters and numbers. “X68BTY233BR5Y780.”

A door in the side wall, barely perceptible, clicked twice. Liza pushed it open and entered a hallway with thick beige carpeting, the kind that might be seen in Rich Macklin’s law office downstairs. But the offices here weren’t filled with open doors and chatting lawyers. Every door was locked. No sound filtered into the hall.

Liza walked to her office door and held her thumb to the fingerprint pad. When prompted, she punched a different series of numbers and letters into the keypad. She stepped into her office. Its plain white walls surrounded a scruffy but beloved pine desk that had been handed down from her father. Her only adornments were an Oriental rug—plum and olive green—that she’d picked up in China, and two pictures frames, an oval one showing her and Kate at college graduation and one of her family taken in the mid-eighties. In it, her father stood behind Liza, Colby and her mom, his arms stretched out, trying to encircle them. She still thought of her dad that way—trying to hold all of them close, keep all of them safe. It was hard to believe she and her mom were the only ones left.

The phone on the desk made a single buzzing sound. Liza picked it up and held it to her ear without a word.

“Good morning, Liza,” said a female voice.

The voice belonged to a woman who was one of the analysts for the Trust. Her job was to monitor and interpret world events and to notify Trust operatives, like Liza, when those events might be of the slightest interest. But there was usually no “good morning” or “how are you doing” involved in these discussions. Why the formality? Liza wondered.

“Morning,” Liza replied cautiously.

“A small plane went down at the Moscow airport about half an hour ago.”

Liza furrowed her brow, still confused. “Was it carrying any cargo?” Moscow was one of the few Russian cities where Presario actually sold product.

“No.”

“Casualties?”

“Seven. The crew. Four passengers.”

“Anyone we know?”

There was a pause. An odd, surreal pause when the walls of her office seemed to close in one minute and then expand like a balloon the next. Liza swallowed hard. She closed her eyes and opened them.

“Aleksei Ivanov,” the woman answered.

Liza let her weight fall against the chair behind her. She felt as if a cannon had been shot at her insides. “Aleksei?”

Why was she having such a reaction? She hadn’t laid eyes on him in a few years. She sat immobilized then, unable to speak.

But Liza knew why—because Aleksei was different than anyone she had ever known or would ever allow herself to know.

She could imagine him as clearly as the first time they’d met in Rio. She could see those deep green eyes that went from shrewd to laughing in a split second, the perpetually mussed sand-colored hair, the thin, worn leather jacket. And those reporter’s notebooks he was always carrying around. He tried to get her to carry them, too. “For memory,” he said, tapping her gently on the forehead, his green eyes laughing then. She told him she didn’t need help with her memory. But now Aleksei was gone, and she wished she’d filled a notebook with the other details she remembered of him.

Liza struggled to take a breath. “Do we know why the plane went down?”

“No, but the other passengers were journalists, too.”

“Thanks for the call,” she managed to say.

“Of course.”

Liza hung up the phone and left her office just as quickly as she had entered it.

11

Five years earlier

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

A s a warm blanket of darkness settled over the city, Liza Kingsley drew away from the spotting scope she’d been peering into. She took off the headphones. She stood and stretched, then allowed herself to slump onto the polished wood floor of the apartment. With her back against the outside wall, she stared at the place. Recently, this apartment had been owned by a wealthy Brazilian couple. It was in the Gávea neighborhood—a gentrified area in a city of favelas or shanty towns—but the couple hadn’t been wealthy enough to pass up the insane amount of money Liza offered them through a broker. The couple might have known that they lived directly across the street from João Pedro Franco, a business partner of Luiz Gustavo de Jardim. They would have undoubtedly followed Gustavo’s push for power and occasional threats to run for the presidency. They probably didn’t know that their apartment would be used solely to study and listen to Franco, Gustavo’s main confidant.

Gustavo, along with all of his close associates, was being watched. If ever reelected to the political realm, Gustavo would be in charge of many things other than the value of the real, the Brazilian currency, and the arms dealing he already controlled. Gustavo could eventually control the country’s vast oil resources and its production of fighter jets. It was not a power to be taken lightly. Gustavo was also known for being as corrupt as they come. When he’d been in office once before, it was widely suspected that he’d funneled significant funds meant for AIDS research to dummy companies in his control. Worse, they now had intel that he was taking meetings with different terrorist organizations and promising under-the-table sales of fighter jets, along with private aircraft. These terrorist organizations had been quietly searching for such jets for years, hoping to fill them with explosives and use them as flying bombs to attack the United States.

The Trust was attempting to determine whether such intel was correct, and if Gustavo meant to keep his promises once in office or if he was just shooting off his mouth. And so somewhere across the city, Gustavo’s house and office were under surveillance, while Liza watched his buddy, Franco (and his wife, kids, housekeeper and cook). In reality, Liza mostly listened to the conversations of all these people through the bugs they’d placed in Franco’s house. Like many of Rio’s nicest homes, Franco’s was built around an internal courtyard, invisible to the front, with only one window facing the street.

And so now across the street from Franco the newly purchased apartment had been bled dry of personal effects, and family memories and color, and it was filled with the cool blacks and silvers of surveillance equipment. Liza felt this apartment was somehow a metaphor of her own life, the way it was taken up with work and work only.

Before the light completely disappeared, Liza roused herself, packed away her scope and replaced it with an ATN night-vision scope. She returned the headphones to her ears. As she focused the scope across the street, watching for any visitors to Franco’s home, she saw a man approach the house, stop briefly to adjust his shoe, then move on down the street.

Liza refocused the scope and watched his retreating figure. The man had hair that was messy, as if he’d just roused himself from bed. He wore jeans and a lightweight leather jacket, despite the sticky heat. She’d seen this guy before, sometime yesterday. She remembered because of the jacket. Was he simply a neighbor? But he didn’t look Brazilian, nor did he look like he could afford the neighborhood.

Liza brought the scope back to the house and stared at the spot where the man had squatted to adjust his shoe. A knowing smile took over her face.

She left the apartment, locking the four double-cylinder dead-bolts and punching in the numbers on the keypad to arm the fingerprint-ID lock, all of which had been installed after the purchase of the apartment. She left the building and crossed the street, walking quickly past Franco’s house, then turned at the end of the block and walked back the same way. On the second pass, she saw what she was looking for—a rock in the tiny front lawn, right by a post of the black iron fence. She bent slightly and scooped up the rock. She took it upstairs with her and settled into an interior room with no windows, where she flicked on the lights.

She studied the rock, then turned it over and saw the false bottom. She smiled again as she removed it. A tiny camera had been installed, no doubt to take photos of guests arriving at Franco’s house. The rock was simple in design, the color too uniform to look real. If Gustavo and his crew were already in power, with a large security detail in place, the device would have been discovered easily.

She switched off the lights, left the apartment again and walked one block away. She hid herself in a dark corner of an alley where she had a half view of the street. She waited for an hour, then another. It was a Friday night, and a few couples strolled home from dinner, tipsy and laughing. She disappeared deeper into the alley at those times. Sometimes it made her feel too lonely to see couples. She hadn’t been a part of one in a long time. Not ever in her adult years, if she admitted it.

Her loneliness had been hammered home a few weeks ago when Kate had married Scott, who was a friend of theirs from high school. Scott was a decent enough guy, both in looks and personality, but in Liza’s opinion he wasn’t a match for Kate’s wit and smarts. Maybe Liza was just being protective, or maybe she simply felt the sting of still being single—and very much alone—while her best friend charged into marriage and family.

After another hour from her vantage point in the alley, Liza saw what she was looking for, the man in the leather jacket. She’d had a feeling he’d be back sometime tonight. Franco often had people over for drinks on Fridays, and the man probably expected his little rock to have taken a few snapshots of the guests. She watched, amused, as the man ambled by Franco’s place, then did his bend-and-adjust-shoe technique. But this time, he didn’t rise as quickly. She saw his hand dart onto the lawn, grasping for an object that was no longer there.

He had the sense not to linger and was soon walking the other way. Liza tailed him until he reached a busy avenida. She came closer to him. The noise from the restaurants and bars hid the sound of her footfalls. Soon they were shoulder to shoulder.

He stopped abruptly and turned to her. “May I help you?” he said in Portuguese, but with a very distinct accent. Russian.

“I think you may have lost something,” she answered in English. She paused to make sure he understood the language and saw from his eyes that he did.

“I think you are mistaken,” he said in English. But there was anxiety in his green eyes.

She flashed the rock at him, then closed her fist and crossed her arms. “You need to come with me.”

He hesitated. His eyes darted toward her arms. He wanted that rock back.

“A few questions, then I give you back what you’ve lost.”

The man glanced around. Liza scanned the crowd with him. Did he have backup? She pulled up her shirt slightly, just enough to show him the pocket Glock tucked in the waistband of her jeans. It was one of the smallest Glocks available, one that could only be handled by the sharpest of shots. Which she was.

At the sight of it, the man’s shoulders drooped and he pressed his lips together. He wasn’t armed.

“I will give you back what is yours,” she said.

“Yes, okay,” he answered.

It turns out, Aleksei Ivanov was a terrible spy. Actually, he wasn’t a spy at all, just a journalist who’d been convinced he could become one.

Ordering him to walk ahead of her, Liza directed the man from the streets of Gávea, into the neighboring favela of Rocinha. The vertical streets were winding and barely shoulder width, lined with shanty-style houses. The sheer volume of people and sounds and smells was overwhelming. The man had clearly never been in Rocinha before, she could tell from the way he flinched at the shouts from the children, many smiling despite their plight.

He looked back at her once, and she could see he was analyzing his chances of bolting. “Keep going,” she said, flashing her Glock again.

The man looked from the pistol to her face, then continued his trudge through Rocinha. They were openly stared at by the residents of the favela. The adults looked wary, the children shouted for money or cameras.

At one point, Liza saw the man reach for his pocket.

“Don’t,” she said in a sharp bark.

The man turned to her with a slightly pained expression. “I don’t have a weapon. I just thought I would give them some money.”

Liza felt herself soften, but she shook her head. “They’ll mob you if you do.” She gestured at him to keep walking.

When they reached the top of one of the coiling streets, Liza stopped the man and nodded at a shanty. The walls were covered by haphazardly placed tiles, most of which were crumbling or discolored with soot. A young man stepped outside the structure. He wore a red cloth tied around his head. His eyes were black, and to Liza, they appeared dead. He was the kind of man who scared her most—one with nothing to lose—but he was her contact in this neighborhood, someone who took money for information or accommodation or just about anything. His name was Faustino, and despite his meager standard of living, he knew lots of people in this corrupt town. Liza had found that he could get nearly anything accomplished for the right price.

“Faustino,” Liza said.

He nodded.

Surreptitiously, she took some réis out of her pocket and passed it to the man.

“May I use your residence?” she said in Portuguese.

He nodded again.

Liza directed the Russian inside. The house was just a room, really, with three dingy, uncovered mattresses shoved against the far wall. A sink and toilet, rarities in this part of town, stood unceremoniously against another wall, next to mildewed cardboard boxes filled with clothes. One wood chair, old and battered, sat in the middle of the room. Liza directed the man to sit. She turned over an empty plastic milk crate and sat across from him.

“Who are you working for?” she asked.

The man looked less frightened now, more weary. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Why were you surveying the home of João Pedro Franco?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he repeated.

“Why were you taking photographs of Franco’s home?”

He shook his head. Same answer.

They went on like this for an hour. Liza could have gone long into the night and through the next day. She’d been trained that way. But this man had not, and he soon became exhausted. Liza could see it in the way he kept searching the room, looking for an out. There were many, but apparently he hadn’t been educated in how to run. More than anything, she could tell he wanted the rock back. It was tucked in the pocket of her jeans, and Liza could see his glance continually coming back to that area of her body. The gun was there, too—in her waistband. He might have been staring at that, but Liza also wanted to think that his glances had something to do with her looks. Surprisingly, she hoped this hapless man found her attractive. There was something about him that appealed to her, an air of having seen too much, incongruously combined with the fear of having something to protect. That fear, she decided, meant there was still newness in him. She imagined that he had not been beaten down by his profession the way Liza had.

Into the third hour, almost midnight, he broke. “Please,” he said. “Please just give it back to me.”

She scooted the milk crate closer. “What will happen if I don’t?”

He looked on the verge of tears. He blinked, and the expression disappeared, but Liza had seen it. “What will happen?” she said again.

“I am a writer.” He named a well-known newspaper in Moscow.

“You’re an international journalist?”

“Yes.”

It was easy enough for Liza to guess the rest, for this was an old story. “They recruited you to provide intelligence while you traveled for your writing.”

“Yes.”

“And you did it because you needed the money.”

“No!” His green eyes slitted into anger.

“Why then?”

He looked away. “I said I would not be a part of it. I would never compromise my career. And I thought they went away.”

“Who? Who approached you?”

He exhaled loudly. “I do not know. I believed it was the F.S.B., although I couldn’t be sure. I only know that two weeks later I was visited by a man I did know. You see, I had covered this man for a story on the Russian Mafiya.”

Liza raised her eyebrows and sat back. The F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., could be nasty. But the Russian Mafiya was even worse. She nodded at him to continue.

“I believe this man had been asked to help the F.S.B. convince me. And this man had also been waiting for the right time to punish me for the article I’d written.”

He had a scar on his cheekbone, the only mark on his pale skin, and he rubbed at it with his forefinger.

“Did they do that to you?” Liza pointed at the scar.

He laughed. “No. My brother did this to me when I was six.” Then the laughter in his face died away, replaced by anguish. “My brother is a priest. My sisters are married. One has five kids, another four. My mother is…how do you say?…handicapped. My father takes care of her.”

“Ah,” Liza said, understanding now. “They threatened your family.”

“Yes.”

“They said they would kill them all unless you provided intelligence.”

“Yes.”

Liza reached out and touched his knee. He almost pulled away from her, she saw that. But then he simply met her gaze. “You’re terrible at it,” she said.

He laughed again, this time for a long time. A cleansing, relief-filled laugh. “I know! I told them I would be terrible. I have no mind for secrecy.”

“What happens if I don’t give you the rock? What happens if you don’t return it to them with photos?”

He stopped short. “Please don’t let me find out.”

“What is your name?”

He paused, then shrugged. “Aleksei Ivanov.”

Liza took the rock out of her jeans. She handed it to him. “I can help you, you know.”

“How? Who are you?”

She thought of the words she’d heard many times from the person who’d pulled her into this world. Her father. “I’m an American who loves my country,” she replied. It was a rather cheesy thing to say, but it was the truth. One of the only truths in her life.

“I cannot be seen with you,” he said. “I may have already risked my safety and my family’s by being here.”

“That’s not a problem,” Liza said. “I know how to keep a secret.”

12

Manhattan, New York

R oger Leiland stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his loft office on Fifteenth Street. In his hand was his secure phone, ready for the call he’d been waiting for all afternoon. The windows in front of him had been professionally coated with a darkening solution to prevent anyone from seeing inside his office, day or night, whether he had the lights on or not. And so he stood, legs apart, knowing he was invisible and dreaming of invincibility.

This was not the only unit Roger owned in the building. His home was an even bigger condo one floor down, filled with the trappings that would make most New Yorkers happy—incredible space, hardwood floors, exposed brick. When the upstairs unit had come up for sale seven years ago, Roger had purchased it. He was proud that he could afford it. He loved that, as a member of the Trust whose stock was rising, he no longer had to go into the New York office every day.

But desires, once met, tend to evolve and grow. And Roger had begun to believe that he wasn’t destined to be just a cog in the wheel of the Trust, but rather a driving force. He began to crave—in a hungry, insatiable, almost voracious way—wealth and greatness. His own personal brand of greatness.

As Roger watched the traffic stream by on Fifteenth Street, he wondered where those desires had come from. Raised in a suburb of Pittsburgh, with a teacher mother and a veterinarian father, his family was comfortable but not exactly ambitious. He went to Penn for undergrad, where he got a joint major in biology and Spanish. And when he was recruited for the Trust two years out of Penn medical school, he was thrilled. His surgical residency had made him question whether he really wanted to practice medicine. The malpractice premiums were going up and fellowships tougher to land than ever. There was too much gore and not enough upside.

In his early years with the Trust, it had never occurred to him that someday he might want to take over the organization, that someday he might want to take the group in a very different direction. He was in Brazil then, and he had Marta. But then Marta died. And that gave him an incredible toughness. The Trust had also given him confidence. Really, the Trust required confidence from its operatives in order to do their jobs. To compensate for the loss of Marta, he worked harder and harder. Eventually, over the years, which had taken him from Brazil to Chicago and then New York, his confidence grew to a point where he sensed he might assert his own vision, rather than that of his superiors.

And now, his loft office and his loft apartment no longer satisfied him. The view of the inelegant Fifteenth Street frustrated him. He wanted a palace with a rooftop garden and twenty-four-hour staff and mural-painted ceilings. He wanted a driver outside, always at the ready. He wanted two other homes—one mountainside in Aspen, one ocean-side in St. Barts. He wanted a private jet to take him to these homes, and he wanted to own that jet.

But the Trust, at least the way it had always been, was not going to bring him those things. And so Roger had been biding his time while his stock slowly rose. He’d helped spearhead the Juliet Project in Chicago, becoming an integral part of the process, and finally he’d become an integral part of the Trust. He cultivated relationships with members and contacts around the world, even when he didn’t need to do so for a particular mission. Now that he was a ranking board member, now that purist members like Michael were stepping down, and others had been helped in that direction, he was going to take the Trust toward his vision and his desires. The Juliet Project was just the beginning.

The phone rang. Roger glanced at the display, which scrambled incoming numbers according to a code developed by the Trust and further personalized by each individual member. It was the call he’d been waiting for.

He answered it with a polite, “Yes.”

“The apartment has been searched,” said a man’s voice.

Roger checked his watch. “It’s 11:00 p.m. there. What took so long?”

“A dinner party in the building. We wanted to make sure no one saw us entering.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re certain?”

“Of course.”

“I want it cleaned out, just to be sure.”

“Not a problem. We’ll have it done within two hours.”

“Thank you.”

Roger turned, walked to his desk in the corner and hung up the phone. The desk was merely a maple table, minimally adorned with a few stacks of papers, all of which would be placed back in the safe when he was finished for the day. And then what would he do with his evening? he wondered. Maybe he would call one of the women he dated (and slept with) who knew little about him?

He had hoped the phone call would give him reason to celebrate. He hoped the evidence they were searching for would have been discovered in the apartment and that anything that could shed light on the Trust and its role in certain events would have been destroyed. Trust only worked if it worked in secret. That was true whether it operated his way or the way it had for decades. And so he would always protect the secrecy of the Trust. No matter what it took.

But there was no reason to celebrate right now. That would come. Roger walked around his desk, took a seat and continued working.

13

St. Marabel, Canada

“T ell me about the first boy you kissed.” Michael said as we strolled St. Marabel’s long main promenade on a Tuesday evening.

“What?” I punched him lightly on the arm. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

“I do. I want to know everything.” Michael tucked my other hand tighter into the crook of his arm, and I nuzzled against his shoulder, unbelievably content.

It was June, when the days were getting longer and the summer had only begun to show itself, just like my new life, my new marriage, my new home of St. Marabel. St. Marabel, so far, had not disappointed. I adored its main street with its steep mansard roofs and brightly painted shutters over dormered windows. I loved the bistros protected by striped awnings, the little boutiques that stayed open until eleven at night, the galeries d’art. I liked the sight of vacationers moving languidly from store to bistro and back again. I loved the sound of French being spoken around me, buffeting me.

“Michael, I can’t tell you about my first kiss,” I said. “That’s the kind of thing people tell each other when they’re dating, not when they’re married.”

He made a stern face. “What kind of ridiculous statement is that? And besides, I will always be dating you. ”

“We’re married.” I loved the sound of it.

“But still courting.” Michael steered me onto a side street that curved its way around an old stone building. The scent of chocolate and pastry permeated the air. “So tell me about the first boy you kissed.”

I inhaled deeply, breathing the scent of the pastries and the cool, earthy smell that came from the cobblestones. “Maybe my first kiss was with you.”

“You were married before, my dear.”

I waited for the pain in my abdomen that always came when I was reminded of my relationship with Scott. But it didn’t hit. Not even a pinch. “Just because I was married doesn’t mean I kissed him.” I said this teasingly and felt a burst of relief that I could make a joke about my first marriage.

“Hmm, excellent. So I’m the first.”

“Yes.”

“I like it,” Michael said.

Suddenly, there was a rapid staccato sound from somewhere up the alley.

Michael swung me around and shoved me hard against the side of the building.

“Ouch! Michael, what—”

“Get down,” he barked in a low but insistent tone.

I did as he said and dropped to a squat, my heart thumping fast.

Michael spun around and faced the alley, one arm reaching behind to protect me, the other reaching toward his waist.

Two teenage girls ran past, their high heels clicking on the stone. Michael sighed, heavy with exasperation.

“I’m sorry,” he said, turning to me. “Sorry. I got jumpy.”

“Jesus,” I said, standing up. “What was that about?”

He stared in the direction of the girls. He blinked fast. “Sorry.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“What did you think was happening there?”

“I don’t know. I got startled, I guess.” He lowered his head to kiss my neck and then whisper in my ear. “So where were we?”

I pulled his face to mine, so I could see his expression. The calm demeanor he usually wore had returned. “You’re okay?”

“I’m with you, aren’t I?” He grabbed me around the waist and nuzzled my collarbone.

“Yes.”

“Then I’m good.”

I wrapped my arms around him. “You’re sure?”

“I’m fine,” he said, but under his shirt, I could feel his heart beating fast.

14

Anguilla, West Indies

L iza sat on her balcony at Cap Juluca resort. Below her, the white sand was combed smooth and the morning sun glittered like diamonds on the aqua of the Caribbean Sea. She turned her attention to the table in front of her. Like many vacationers at the resort, Liza’s table bore coffee, rolls and the mini version of the New York Times. But Liza was not a vacationer, and so she pushed away the rolls, took a sip of her black coffee and opened up the complete version of the Times on her BlackBerry.

It was hard to focus on the articles. Normally, when she was on a job like this, focus was never a problem. But now Aleksei was gone, and she hadn’t been able to find out a damn thing about the crash. The Trust, which knew all about her and Aleksei and also knew that she might be distracted by his death, had sent her on this mission to Anguilla. She’d been grateful, but now she was finding that she was the distraction.

Normally, Liza would conduct surveillance and collect intel, and if an elimination was necessary, and only then, would she design the job based on what she’d found. In this situation, she hadn’t performed the legwork, she’d just been asked to take care of the end result. The piecemeal approach was the way the Trust seemed to work these days, which made Liza uncomfortable. She liked to know everything about a project and a target. Today’s mission was a simple one, at least for her, but seemingly simple jobs could turn into chaos if the operative wasn’t completely attentive and alert.

So Liza tried to put aside thoughts of Aleksei and questions about his death. Later, she told herself. Later. Yet she found it impossible not to remember.

15

Five years earlier

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

T he Trust called it a safe house, but really it was just a different apartment, bought the same way the place in Gávea across the street from Franco’s house had been purchased—quickly and with a lot of money. Similarly, the safe house had been stripped of the remnants of its previous owners, and then it had been decorated in what Liza liked to call Twentieth-Century Hotel. It was clean and decently appointed in lots of beige. Spending any amount of time there had always reminded Liza of the starkness in her life. But now Aleksei was with her. And the safe house seemed bursting with light and chock-full of something very new and very exciting.

It had been three days since she’d accosted the poor man and made him tell his story. After they’d left Rocinha, she’d placed the rock for him in a better spot, one which would catch the faces of those entering Franco’s house instead of their profiles. She had no interest in stopping the Russians from gaining information about Franco and Gustavo. The photos were easy, the kind of surveillance anyone could get, and Liza’s organization wouldn’t compete. They left other countries, other groups, to their own devices unless it appeared those countries or groups could compromise the United States and its citizens. Then they could get highly competitive. The results weren’t pretty, but they were necessary. That’s what Liza had always believed—would always have to believe if she were to keep her sanity.

One of the things Liza taught Aleksei was how to perform without emotion. It was never lost on her that she’d done the exact opposite when she’d met him. But she kept trying to teach him this nonetheless, because he also had to do his job without being particularly successful at it. He didn’t believe in what he was doing, not like Liza did, but for the safety of his friends and family he had to appear as if he cared very much. His handlers had instructed him in a rudimentary way on how to spot a tail and how to make a drop and various other tactics, but he was awful at them. Liza taught him the way she’d been taught.

They made sure it appeared as if Aleksei was living in the small hotel room where he’d been told to stay, and they made sure he checked in with his handler and turned over the photos that his sad little rock acquired every day. Once those things were done, no one seemed to care much about Aleksei. Except for Liza.

Every day, Liza conducted lessons with him, breaking the rules in a whopping way by letting him into the apartment in Gávea. She showed him the scopes and the listening devices and the alarms and bugs. She was reckless; she felt literally out of control. She had at first entertained the idea that Aleksei’s facade was just that—a facade—and that he might be a much better spy than she was, one who had quickly and easily wormed his way into her world.

And yet, for once, Liza trusted someone. She felt pulled toward him by an undercurrent she’d never seen coming and didn’t totally understand. She was attracted to him, but there was also something intangible that made her feel deeply connected to him. Throwing caution to the wind was intoxicating.

He never asked who she worked for, and she never told him. If an outsider learned about the Trust’s existence, there was a serious possibility that outsider would be eliminated. So Aleksei didn’t know her employer, but he knew everything else. She told him everything about her life, and she felt like he had grown to know all of her.

“You’re so lucky I’m teaching you all these things,” she said one night.

They were stationed in front of the window in Gávea, peering through night scopes at Franco’s front door and the one window that faced the street. Because of a party Franco was having, the window was open and the drapery pulled back.

Aleksei had been trying to quit smoking, he said, but Liza could smell the scent of a cigarette on his jacket. She hated cigarettes, and yet with him she didn’t mind. She even liked it. She liked everything about the man—his book-smarts, the way his thick hair was colicky and hard to tame, the way his green eyes filled with pain when he saw children barely clothed and nearly starving on the Rio streets.

“I am lucky,” he said, and then he was silent. His silences were different than that day in Rocinha. They were comfortable silences now.

“You probably would have been killed sooner rather than later if it wasn’t for me.” She had no idea why she was doing this bragging. “I could be killed for teaching you what I know.”

Aleksei remained quiet, then out of the corner of her eye, she saw him sit back from the scope. He gazed at his hands. He gazed at her.

In the moonlight filling the apartment, he appeared larger, the scar on his cheek almost white.

He moved toward her. It was a quick, clumsy rush of physical movement, and Liza almost blocked him. She could have easily defended herself if he were trying to harm her. But in a fraction of a second, in that moonlight, she caught the look in his eyes, and it was not the look she’d seen when she’d been attacked by someone before. This was a gentler look, and Liza thought, Is he going to kiss me? Then she thought, Finally.

Aleksei’s body met hers, his weight pushed her off her stool and the two of them tumbled to the hardwood floor. And then he was kissing her, and then his hands were on her shoulders, on her breasts, on her back, her waist. He was all over her. Liza felt enveloped by his eager touch. And she was happier than she ever remembered.

16

Anguilla, West Indies

L iza shook the thoughts of Aleksei from her brain. Enough, she said to herself. She checked her watch: 10:45 a.m. She looked at the villa to her right. She had fifteen minutes.

She stood, readjusted her black tank bathing suit and opened the straw bag on the chair next to her. She checked that the yellow tube that read Caprilano Sunscreen was tucked in the inside pocket.

Caprilano Sunscreen was sold only in two places—Barneys New York and a store in the Galleria Alberto Sordi in Rome. This tube, however, had not been purchased at either store. Instead, it was a replica. Likewise, the contents inside looked exactly like the white Caprilano sunblock and had been designed to bear its faint, citrusy scent.

Liza adjusted her earbud and put on her large, floppy beach hat. One side of the hat drooped almost to Liza’s jaw and had a tiny mike sewn into its cotton folds.

“Tucker,” she said into the mike. “Ready?”

“Confirmed,” came the reply in her earbud.

She went to the edge of her balcony and leaned over the railing. A hundred feet off shore, the multicolored sails of a Hobie Cat flapped prettily as it tacked back and forth across the water.

Liza called the front desk, gave the name Elena Mistow and checked out of her room over the phone. She asked for a bellman to collect her bags, which she put outside her front door, and requested that a cab be called. She left the room, walked downstairs and made her way to the beach’s edge.

Once there, she didn’t step into the sand immediately. Instead, she looked at the villa to her right. She glanced at her watch again. Any minute now. She waited patiently in her bathing suit, her straw bag in one hand, her hat firmly on her head, hiding her auburn hair. As she stood there, some of the resort’s guests began to filter down to the beach, throwing towels over the plush chaise longues and settling in with books or stacks of magazines.

Liza envied those people. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone on a real vacation or simply sat on a beach and read.

She turned her attention back to the villa. Five minutes later, she saw the French doors open and, as they had every morning for the last five days, the members of the Naponi family began to make their way to the beach. As usual, Angelo Naponi was the last to cross the threshold.

Angelo Naponi was the president of a wealthy family company that owned waste-disposal facilities around the world. Liza and the Trust had no problem with Naponi’s company and the work they did. What they had a problem with was how he spent some of his money. Lately, Naponi had been funding a militant Muslim organization that had its sights on a large-scale bombing in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Naponi himself was Roman Catholic, and was unsympathetic to the Muslims, but such a bombing would wreak havoc in Vilnius where Naponi had been trying to get a foothold for years. Once such havoc occurred, outside companies, just like Naponi’s, would be called upon to help clear the wreckage.

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