As Andrea Bancroft made her way along the bosky path to Paul Bancroft’s house, her mind filled with drifting skeins of half-formed thoughts. The air was fragrant from the mounded borders of lavender, wild thyme, and vetiver grass fringing the gentle berm that subtly screened one property from another. Bancroft’s house seemed to be of similar vintage as the foundation’s, and in a harmonious style. Like the foundation’s headquarters, the facades of aged brick and red sandstone melted into the landscape in a way that made it all the more impressive when at last its outlines could be clearly made out, and one realized how much of it had been in plain sight all along.

At the door Andrea was met by a uniformed woman of around fifty; her hair was a mixture of red and gray, and her broad cheeks were freckled. “You’ll be Miss Bancroft?” she asked, with the faint brogue of an Irishwoman who had spent most of her adult life in America. Nuala, wasn’t it? “The gentleman will be down presently.” She gave Andrea a look that segued swiftly from appraisal to approval. “Now, what can I get you to drink? A taste of something nourishing?”

“I’m fine, I think,” Andrea replied hesitantly.

“You’re telling me. How about a light sherry, then? The gentleman likes it quite dry, if that agrees with you. Not like the sticky stuff I grew up on, I can tell you that.”

“One fino coming up,” the Irishwoman said. “I’m Nuala, by the way.”

Andrea shook her hand and smiled, already beginning to feel welcomed.

Nursing her glass of fino sherry, Andrea began to take in the prints and paintings that hung in the dark wood-paneled foyer and adjoining parlor. She recognized some of the images, some of the artists; others, no less captivating, were unknown to her. She found herself drawn to a black-and-white drawing of a gargantuan fish on a shore somewhere, a fish so vast that it dwarfed the fishermen who surrounded it with ladders and knives. A dozen or more smaller fish spilled from its mouth. Where a fisherman had sliced open the leviathan’s belly, another bevy of smaller fish had tumbled out.

“Arresting, isn’t it?” Paul Bancroft’s voice. Andrea had been studying the picture so intently that she had not heard him arrive.

“Who’s it by?” Andrea asked, turning around.

“It’s an ink drawing by Pieter Bruegel the elder, from 1556. He called it Big Fish Eat Little Fish. He wasn’t one for decorous indirection. It used to hang in the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, in Vienna. But, like you, I found myself drawn to it.”

“And you swallowed it whole.”

Paul Bancroft laughed again, heartily, with his whole body. “I hope you don’t mind dining on the early side,” he said, “The boy’s still at the age where he has a bedtime.”

Andrea sensed that her host was eager to have her meet his son but anxious as well. She was reminded of a friend who had a child with Down Syndrome—a gentle, sunny, smiling child, whom the mother loved and felt pride in and, on some dark unacknowledged plane, some tincture of shame about, too…a shame that itself inspired shame.

“Brandon, was it?”

Paul Bancroft, too, had a small glass of sherry in his hands, and had taken off his jacket, though the houndstooth sweater vest made him look as professorial as ever. “Welcome,” he said, raising his glass in a toast, and the two settled down in tufted leather chairs in front of an unlighted hearth. The walnut paneling, the old, worn Persian carpets, the simple hardwood floors, darkened with age: It all seemed ageless, tranquil, a kind of luxury that scorned luxury.

“Andrea Bancroft,” he said, as if savoring the syllables. “I have learned a thing or two about you. Graduate study in economic history, am I right?”

“For two years, at Yale. Two and half. Never finished the dissertation.” The fino was pale straw in color. She took a sip of it and the flavors blossomed in her mouth, her nose. It had a light toffee-like scent, tasted deliciously of nuts and melon.

“No wonder, given your independence of mind. It isn’t an attribute that’s valued there. Too much independence breeds discomfort, especially among would-be gurus who don’t quite believe what they’re saying.”

“I guess I could claim I wanted to be more grounded in the real world. Except the humiliating truth is, I dropped out of grad school because I wanted to make more money.” She stopped, appalled that she had actually said it out loud. Great going, Andrea. Be sure to tell him about the factory outlet sale you drove two hours to get to last weekend.

“Thank you,” Andrea said, suddenly embarrassed and eager to change the subject. She couldn’t help but think back to her closets filled with knockoffs of costly designs, her aspirations, the pride with which she paid off her charge-card balances in full every month. It seemed so absurd now. Would she have left the sheltering groves of academe if she hadn’t been concerned about money? Her academic advisers had been encouraging; they’d assumed that she would soon be wheeling along on the tenure track, making the sort of decisions and compromises that they had made. Meanwhile, her student loans grew more onerous; she felt suffocated by the bills she couldn’t quite pay, the credit-card debt she serviced with the minimum payment due as she watched it grow from one month to the next. Perhaps, too, on some scarcely conscious level, she yearned for a life where she wouldn’t have to study the numbers on the right-hand column of the menu—for the life that had almost been hers.

She felt a strange moment of upheaval as she reflected back on all those “practical” choices and worldly accommodations she had made—and for what? Her salary as a securities analyst was considerably more than what she could have expected as a junior faculty member; but it was, she now saw, a trivial sum. With her grubby fixation on discounts, she had discounted herself.

When she looked up, she realized that Paul Bancroft had been speaking.

“So I know what it’s like to lose someone. My wife’s death was shattering both for me and my son. A difficult time.”

“It must have been,” Andrea murmured.

“Alice was twenty years younger than me, for one thing. She was supposed to have been the one to carry on. To wear black at my funeral. But somehow she got a short straw in some infernal genetic lottery. It makes you realize how fragile life is. Unbelievably resilient. Unbelievably fragile.”

“‘Work for the night cometh,’ right?”

“Sooner than we know,” he said softly. “And the work is never done, is it?” He took another sip of the pale-straw fino. “You’ll have to forgive me for dragging down the mood. It’s the fifth anniversary of her death this week. There’s the consolation that what she left behind is as precious to me as anything.”

The scrambling sound of coltish footsteps—someone taking the stairs two at a time, then jumping down to the landing.

“Speaking of whom…” Paul Bancroft said. He turned to the new arrival, who was standing in the arched doorway to the parlor. “Brandon, I’d like you to meet Andrea Bancroft.”

The mop of curly blond hair was what she noticed first, and then the boy’s apple cheeks. His eyes were an unclouded blue, and he had his father’s fine symmetrical features. He was, she decided, an exceptionally handsome boy, even beautiful.

Then he turned to her and his face broke in a smile. “Brandon,” he said, extending a hand. “Nice to meet you.” His voice had not yet acquired the husk of adolescence, but it was deeper than a child’s. A beardless youth, as the ancients would have said, but with a perceptible darkening of the down on his upper lip. Not yet a man, no longer a child.

His handshake was firm and dry; he was a little shy but not awkward. He sprawled on a nearby chair and maintained eye contact with her. There was none of that “command performance” resentment that children his age have around guests. He seemed genuinely curious.

She was curious herself. Brandon wore a blue plaid shirt, untucked, and gray trousers with lots of zippers and pockets, pretty much standard garb for his cohort.

“Your father guessed that you were instant-messaging unsuitable people,” Andrea said lightly.

“Solomon Agronski was whuppin’ my behind,” Brandon said merrily. “We were doing DAGs, and I was way off-base. Got my ass handed to me.”

“This some kind of game?”

“I wish,” Brandon said. “DAGs—it’s, like, a directed acyclic graph. I know—snooze city, right?”

“And this Solomon Agronski…” Andrea prompted, still at a loss.

“Handed me my ass,” Brandon repeated.

Paul Bancroft crossed his legs, looking amused. “He’s one of the country’s foremost mathematical logicians. Runs the Center for Logic and Computation at Stanford. They’ve developed quite a correspondence, if that’s the word for it.”

Andrea tried to hide her astonishment. This was a far cry from Down Syndrome.

The boy sniffed her glass of sherry and made a face. “Yuck,” he said. “Wouldn’t you like some Sprite instead? I’m gonna have some.”

“Actually, I’m okay,” Andrea said, laughing.

“Suit yourself.” Then he snapped his fingers. “I know what we could do. Let’s shoot some hoops.”

Paul Bancroft traded glances with Andrea. “I’m afraid he thinks you’re here as a playmate for him.”

“Naw, seriously,” Brandon persisted. “Want to show me your moves? While it’s still light?”

Paul cocked a brow. “Brandon,” he told his son, “she’s just arrived and she’s not exactly dressed for the playground, is she?”

“If I had the right shoes,” Andrea said, apologetically.

The boy was all business. “Size?”

“Seven and a half.”

“Which is seven in a man’s size. Each size represents an increment of a third of an inch, starting at three and eleven-twelfths inches. Did you know that?”

“Brandon’s filled with fun facts,” his father jested. But there was no mistaking his doting gaze.

Paul Bancroft crooked a smile at her. “Resourceful, no?”

“He’s…remarkable,” Andrea said, risking polite understatement.

“He’s already certified as an international chess master. When I achieved the rank, I was twenty-two. People said I was precocious, but there’s no comparison.”

“An international chess master? Most kids his age spend their time doing Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStations.”

“Guess what. Brandon does, too. He’s always playing Sim City. The thing to remember is, he’s just a kid. He’s got the intellectual firepower to make significant contributions to a dozen fields, but—well, you’ll see. He’s also a kid. Loves video games and hates to clean his room. He’s an American thirteen-year-old. Thank goodness.”

“You ever have to tell him where babies come from?”

“No, but he’s asked some pretty pointed questions about the molecular basis of embryology.” A contented look settled on the savant’s face. “He’s what they call a sport of nature.”

“Sounds like a good sport, anyway.”

“With a good nature.”

Brandon galumphed back into the parlor triumphantly holding a pair of canvas sneakers in one hand, green track pants in another.

His father rolled his eyes. “You can say no, you realize,” he told her.

Andrea changed in a bathroom off the foyer. “You’ve got five minutes,” she told Brandon when she emerged. “Time enough to show me your stuff.”

“Fine. You want to see my moves?”

“Bring it, on kid,” she deadpanned, spoof streetwise. “You gotta represent.”

The court—basic concrete with chalked lines—was tucked behind a tall privet hedge to one side of the house.

“Just keepin’ it real,” Andrea returned. Brandon drove to the hoop and picked up the rebound; he was unpracticed and inexperienced, but surprisingly coordinated for a boy of his age. He seemed to study her stance when she put the ball through the net, and copied her moves. Each time he shot, he came a little closer. By the time they returned to the house—she insisting on keeping to the five minutes they had agreed on—they both had color in their cheeks. She changed out of the athletic shoes and track pants in a small powder room off a side parlor—how many did this house have, anyway?—and returned to the sitting room with the leather furniture.

The dinner was simple but delicious—a sorrel soup, grilled poussin, savory wild rice, a salad of lamb’s lettuce—and Paul Bancroft steered the conversation back to the issues they had discussed earlier, without appearing to hold forth.

“You’re a woman of many talents,” he said, with a twinkle. “What do they call it? ‘Ball control.’ I’d say that’s what you have. A skill that applies to argumentation as well as to competitive sport.”

“It’s just a matter of keeping your eye on the ball,” Andrea said. “See what’s in front of your eyes.”

“Dad’s idea of the eleemosynary,” said Brandon, stumbling over the last word. “However you say it.”

“Try el-ee-uh-mosynary,” Bancroft said, correcting his son’s pronunciation. “From the Latin eleemosyna, alms.”

“Got it,” the boy said, a new datum stored away. “But what about the idea that you should treat others as ends, never as means?”

Paul caught Andrea’s eye. “He’s been reading Kant. German mysticism, when you come down to it. Rots the brain, I tell you. Worse than Grand Theft Auto. We’ve had to agree to disagree.”

“So you have a problem with adolescent rebellion, too, huh?” Andrea smiled.

Brandon looked up from his plate and returned her smile. “What makes you think it’s a ‘problem’?”

Suddenly the hooting of a distant owl could be heard. Paul Bancroft looked out the window, where tall trees were silhouetted in the dusk. “The owl of Minerva, Hegel said, flies only at dusk.”

“Then wisdom comes too late,” Brandon said. “Thing I don’t get is how the owl got a reputation for wisdom, anyway. What an owl is, actually, is just an efficient killing machine. That’s the one thing it’s good at. Flight’s nearly silent. Their powers of hearing are almost like radar. Ever see one fly? You see these big wings flapping, and it’s like someone turned the sound off. That’s ’cause they’ve got tattered fringe feathers that break up the sound of rushing air.”

Andrea tilted her head. “So you never hear it coming until it’s too late.”

“Pretty much. Then there’s four hundred pounds of pressure at the tips of each talon, so by that point you’re history.”

Andrea took a sip of the simple and refreshing Riesling that Nuala had poured. “Not wise, then. Just deadly.”

“Efficient when it comes to means-end rationality,” Paul Bancroft put in. “Some would say there’s a kind of wisdom in that.”

“Are you one of them?”

“No, but efficiency has its place. Too often, though, talk of such things is taken to be heartless, even when it’s in the service of kindness. You were talking about perverse consequences earlier, Andrea. That can be an intricate subject indeed. Because, once you accept the logic of consequentialism—the notion that acts must be judged by their consequences—then you realize that the puzzles go beyond the matter of good deeds that have bad effects. We must also grapple with the conundrum posed by bad deeds that have good effects.”

“Maybe so,” Andrea reflected. “But there are some acts that are simply heinous in themselves. I mean, it’s impossible to imagine anything good coming out of, oh, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., let’s say.”

Paul Bancroft lifted an eyebrow. “Is that a challenge?”

“I’m just saying.”

Andrea put her fork down. “Maybe as a matter of cold calculation…”

“Why cold? I never understand why people think that the calculus of consequences is cold. The betterment of humanity sounds abstract, yet it entails the betterment of individual men and women and children—each with a story that could tug at your heart and ravage your soul.” The tremor in his voice bespoke conviction and resolve, not diffidence or doubt. “Remember, there are seven billion people living on this small planet. And two-point-eight billion of them are under twenty-four years of age. It’s their world we need to maintain and improve.” The savant’s eyes drifted toward his son, who, with the appetite of a growing boy, had already cleaned his plate. “And that’s a moral responsibility as grave as any.”

Andrea could not tear her eyes away from the man. He spoke with penetrating logic and a gaze as clear as his argument. There was something magical about the force of his conviction, the sinuous power of his mind. Merlin, of Arthurian legend, must have been inspired by someone like him.

“Dad’s a big one for running the numbers,” Brandon said, perhaps embarrassed by his father’s intensity.

“The harsh light of reason tells us that a prophet’s death can be a boon to humanity. On the other hand, eradicate sand fleas in Mauritius, say, and you may discover that the knock-on consequences are dire indeed. In either scenario, the line we draw between killing and letting die is something of a superstition, don’t you think?” Paul Bancroft pressed on. “It makes no difference to the one who dies because of our action or failure to act. Imagine that a runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks. If it continues on its course, it will kill five people. If you throw a switch, it will kill only one person. What do you do?”

“Throw the switch,” Andrea said.

“And save five lives. Yet you have thus sent a trolley toward an individual with foresight and deliberation, knowing that it will kill him. You have, in a sense, committed homicide. Had you done nothing, you would have no direct complicity or involvement in the deaths. Your hands would be clean.” He looked up. “Nuala, once again you have outdone yourself,” he said as the red-cheeked Irishwoman brought more wild rice to the table.

“You’re saying it’s a kind of narcissism,” Andrea said slowly. “Clean hands, four lives needlessly lost—a bad deal. I get it.”

“How we feel must be disciplined with what we think. Passion must be within reason, so to speak. Sometimes the noblest act of all is also the one that most appalls.”

“I feel like I’m back in a college seminar again.”

“Do these issues strike you as academic? Merely theoretical? Then let’s make them real to you.” Paul Bancroft looked gnomic, a man with a surprise in his pocket. “What if you had twenty million dollars to spend on the uplift of your species?”

“Another what-if?” Andrea allowed herself a small smile.

“Not exactly. I’m not speaking hypothetically any longer. Before our next board meeting, Andrea, I’d like you to identify a particular project or cause that you’d like to spend twenty million dollars on. Work out exactly which, and exactly how, and we’ll do it. Straight from my discretionary funds. No deliberation or conferral. It will be done on your say-so.”

“You’re joking.”

Brandon gave her a sideways look. “Dad’s not a big prankster,” the boy told her. “He’s not Mister Leg-pull, believe me.”

“Twenty million dollars,” Paul Bancroft repeated.

“On my say-so?” Andrea was incredulous.

“You’re dealing with so many unknowns.”

“Unknowns? Or partially knowns? Incomplete knowledge is not the same as ignorance. Informed judgments can still be made. Indeed, they must be made.” His gaze did not waver. “So choose wisely. You’ll find that doing the right thing isn’t always easy.”

Andrea Bancroft felt dizzy, intoxicated, and it was not because of the wine. How many people had a chance to make a difference like that, she wondered. She had been given the ability to snap a finger—and transform the lives of thousands. It felt…almost godlike.

Brandon interrupted her reveries. “Yo, Andrea, you gonna be up for another quick game of hoops after dinner?”

Rome

Trastevere—the neighborhoods to the west of the Tiber River—was, for many residents, the real Rome, its medieval warren of streets having largely escaped the nineteenth-century rebuilding that transformed the city center. Squalor plus age equals cachet: Was that how the formula worked? Yet there remained corners that time had forgotten, or, more accurately, remembered—corners where the rising tide of new money had left only driftwood and detritus. Such was the ground-floor apartment of a dark side street where the Italian girl had lived with her parents. The Zingarettis were an old family, in that they knew the names of their forebears from hundreds of years ago. But those forebears had invariably been servitors and subalterns. It was tradition without grandeur, lineage without history.

The conversation did not go smoothly.

Ma non capisco!—But I don’t understand, the girl’s mother, a black-garbed crone, kept repeating. She looked older than most women her age, but also stronger. A vocational trait: She was, in the British idiom, “a woman who does.”

Non c’è problema, insisted the father, a potbellied man with rough, callused hands and thickened nails. There’s no problem.

But there was a problem, and she did understand—understand more than she pretended, anyway. They sat together in their gloomy sitting room, which smelled of burned soup and mildew. The cold floor, doubtless once tiled, was a rough, unvarying gray, as if slathered with a layer of grout in preparation for tiles that never arrived. The lamps were of low wattage, their shades frayed by heat and age. None of the chairs matched. They were a proud family, but not a house-proud one. Lucia’s parents were clearly aware of her beauty, which they seem to have regarded as a potential vulnerability—indeed, a likely source of heartbreak, to her and to them. It meant early pregnancy, the flattery and then the predations of unscrupulous men. Lucia had assured them that the Arab—they referred to her employer only as l’Arabo—was religiously devout, disciplined by zealous obedience to the Prophet’s word.

And where was she now?

When it came to the crucial question, the girl’s parents feigned obtuseness, incomprehension, ignorance. They were protecting her—because they knew what she had done? Or for another reason? Belknap would get through to them only if he persuaded them that the girl was in danger, and that candor, not evasion, would best protect her.

It was hard work. To gain information, he had to pretend to have information that he lacked. Again and again, he told them: Your daughter is in danger. La vostra figlia è in pericolo. He was not believed—which meant that they were in touch with her, that she had given them reassurances. If she had truly disappeared unexpectedly, they would be unable to conceal their anxiety. Instead, they feigned confusion as to her whereabouts, retreating into vagueness: She said she had gone on a trip, she had not elaborated further, but perhaps it was for her employer. No, they did not know when she would return.

Lies. Tales proven false by the ease with which they were related. Amateurs believed that liars gave themselves away by their anxiety, their nervousness; just as often, Belknap knew, they betrayed themselves by their lack of nervousness. That was the case with Signor and Signora Zingaretti.

Belknap let a long moment of silence elapse before he started on them again. “She has been in touch with you,” he said. “We know this. She has assured you that everything is fine. She believes that everything is fine. But she does not know. She does not know that she is in imminent danger.” He made a quick throat-cut gesture. “Her enemies are resourceful, and they are everywhere.”

The Zingarettis’ wary gaze told him that they regarded the American interloper as a potential enemy. He had induced a flicker of hesitation, a glimmer of concern where there had been none before; but he had not won them over. Still, a small fissure had appeared in the stone wall, their front of obliviousness.

“She has told you not to worry,” he began again, calibrating his words to their expression, “because she does not know that she has cause to worry.”

“Just yesterday, I saw the body of a young woman who…” Belknap broke off. He noticed the couple’s widening eyes, shook his head. “It’s too horrible. Very upsetting. There are certain images that stay with one forever. And when I think what they did to that young woman, a beautiful young woman just like your daughter, I can’t help but shudder.” He stood up. “But I’ve done all I could here. I have to remember that. You must remember it, too. Now I will leave you in peace. You will not see me again. Nor, I fear, your daughter.”

Signora Zingaretti placed a clawlike hand on her husband’s. “Wait,” she said. Her husband shot her a glance, but it was clear that she was in command of this household. She stared at Belknap, making her own assessment of his character, his probity. Then she made a decision. “You are mistaken,” she said. “Lucia is safe. We speak to her regularly. We spoke to her last night.”

“Where is she?” Belknap asked.

“This we do not know. This she does not tell us.” The vertical lines on her upper lip were like the tick marks on a ruler.

“Why not?”

The potbellied man said, “She tells us it’s a very nice place. But the location is confidential. She cannot say. Because of…terms of employment.” Termini di occupazione. He gave an uncertain grin—uncertain because he could not know whether his words had refuted the worries the American had expressed or given fuel to them.

“Lucia is a clever girl,” said her mother. Her face was drawn with fear; it was as if there were ashes in her mouth. “She knows how to look after herself.” She was trying to reassure herself.

“You spoke to her last night,” Belknap repeated.

“She was fine.” The old man’s beefy hands shook as he folded them in his lap.

“She will take care of herself.” The crone’s words were a defiant pledge, or maybe just a hope.

As soon as Belknap was back on the cobblestone street, he called an old carabiniere contact, Gianni Mattucci. In Italy—and Italian law enforcement was no exception—you got things done through friends, not formalities. He quickly conveyed his request to Mattucci. Lucia might have been just as close-mouthed as her parents had claimed, but the phone records would surely be more forthcoming.

Mattucci’s voice was as astringent as a young Barolo, and as rich. “Più lento! Slower,” he prompted. “Give me the name and the address. I’ll run the name through the city database, get her INPS code.” That was the Italian equivalent of a Social Security number. “Then I’ll take that to the municipal phone registry.”

“Tell me this won’t take long, Gianni.”

“You Americans—always in such a rush. I’ll do my best, okay, my friend?”

“Your best is usually pretty good,” Belknap allowed.

“Go have an espresso someplace,” the Italian police inspector said coaxingly. “I call you.”

Belknap had barely walked a couple of blocks when his cell phone buzzed: It was Mattucci again.

“That was fast,” Belknap said.

“We just got a report about the very address you mention,” Mattucci said. He sounded agitated. “A neighbor reports gunfire. We’ve got a couple of squad cars on their way. What’s going on?”

Belknap was thunderstruck. “Oh, Christ,” he breathed. “Let me check it out.”

More tires, skidding on cobblestone: this time the sound of arrival. It was a coupe, dark blue save for its white roof. On the roof was a stenciled number meant to be visible to helicopters, along with three lights. The world CARABINIERI was lettered on the side, in white, a red racing stripe above it. It was the real thing, and so were the two police officers who, scrambling out of the vehicle, ordered Belknap not to move.

Out of the corner of his eye, Belknap saw another police car coming. He gestured frantically in the direction of a side street, signaling that the assailants had gone in that direction.

Then he ran.

One of the policemen gave chase, of course; the other had to secure the crime scene. Belknap hoped that he had sown enough confusion to discourage his pursuer from shooting at him: They had at least to consider the possibility that he, too, was in pursuit of the criminali. Belknap dashed around metal trash canisters, around Dumpsters and parked cars—anything to obscure the sightline between him and the policeman. The line of sight.

The line of fire.

As he started up the van and sped away, however, he saw, in his rearview mirror, another police vehicle—a Jeep-style carabinieri car with a boxy top, meant for holding prisoners. At the same time, his cell buzzed again.

Mattucci’s voice, even more agitated than before. “You must tell me what is happening!” he said, almost shouting. “They say this elderly couple has been massacred, the apartment shot up. Evidently the bullets are semi-jacketed U.S. special-op hollowpoints. Do you hear me? The scalloped-copper jackets you happen to favor. Not good.”

Belknap spun the steering wheel sharply to the right, making a last-minute turn. To his right was a green tramcar with four rubberized expansion joints, half a block in length. It would block him from the view of anyone on the opposite lane. “Gianni, you can’t possibly believe that—”

“A fingerprint technician will be arriving shortly. If they find your prints, I won’t be able to protect you.” A pause. “I can’t protect you now.” This time it was Mattucci who clicked off first.

Another police car was pulling up behind Belknap. He had to have been spotted getting into the van, and it was too late to change vehicles now. He steadily increased the pressure on the accelerator pedal as he veered through the traffic on the Piazza San Calisto and onto the faster-moving viale de Trastevere, speeding toward the river. Now the police car behind him had activated its own siren and flashing lights. By the time he crossed the via Indumo, he had picked up another cruiser—a Citroën sedan emblazoned with the word POLIZIA in backward-slanting capitals of blue and white. There was no room for ambiguity. He was being chased.

Something had gone very wrong.

The box was beginning to form.

If, as seemed likely, a third cruiser were to appear, Belknap’s chances of evasion would drop precipitously. He had been hoping to enter the higher-speed thoroughfare that wrapped along the Tiber, along the high, tree-mounded, brick-and-concrete embankment. That was too risky now.

Abruptly he swung the steering wheel to the right, and his vehicle swerved onto the Lungotevere Aventino, the road that ran along the Testaccio side of the river. He felt his torso hurtled toward the left, restrained only by the seat and shoulder belts.

Now he made another sharp turn, onto the café-cluttered via Rubattino, and then took a breath and swung the van back onto the via Vespucci—this time driving the wrong way, against traffic. He only had to traverse a few hundred yards of it before he could turn onto the fast-moving Tiber-side road—assuming he could avoid collision on the Vespucci.

The horns of a dozen cars shrilled and blared as motorists frantically tried to avoid the white postal van that was rushing toward them.

The world was reduced to nothing more than a ribbon of pavement and a swarming constellation of cars, every one a potential deadly weapon. The underbody of the postal van, with its low-riding chassis, bounced, scraped, and sparked as it descended too fast onto the ramp leading back to the fast-moving embankment road, but he made it over the next bridge, the Ponte Palatino, and, with another sharp, skidding turn, onto the Porta di Ripagrande.

Now he could breathe, he told himself, as he powered the van on the straightaway past grand anonymous buildings. Yet when he looked in his rearview mirror, he saw half a dozen police cruisers. How had they materialized so quickly? Then he remembered the large police station located near the Piazzale Portuense. He steered onto the left road shoulder, gutterballing down it and peeling off onto the Clivio Portuense, one of the faster streets in the area. Once again, only the restraint belts kept him from being flung across the vehicle.

The cruisers swept past him, unable to slow down in time to catch the turn. He had lost them—at least for the moment. He powered down the streets until he reached the via Parboni, and took a left.

Yet what was that ahead of him? He could scarcely hear himself think above the blaring siren, the straining motor, the squealing tires.

It seemed impossible! Ahead of him, at the corner of the via Bargoni, he saw a roadblock. How had they put it up so fast? He squinted, saw that it was made up of two cruisers and a portable wooden barricade. He could try to crash it…

Except that, behind him, roaring up seemingly from out of nowhere, was an unmarked car from the polizia municipale’s highway-patrol unit, a three-liter-turbo-engined Lancia sedan especially equipped for high-speed vehicular apprehension.

Now Belknap released the parking brake, floored the accelerator, and straightened out the steering wheel. The vehicle juddered, and a loud clattering noise told him that the pressure on the sidewalls had caused the hubcaps to fly off. At the same time, the torque on the transmission had caused oil to surge into the system, and in the rearview mirror he could see a cloud of thick black smoke pouring from his exhaust. But he had reversed direction without pausing. Now he was skimming the wrong way down via Bargoni, except this time the street was nearly empty. By blocking it off at the other end, the police had unwittingly done him a favor. He turned left on the via Bezzi, whipped onto the speedy viale de Trastevere, past the Autorità per la Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione—and lost his pursuers.

Ten minutes later, he was seated at a café, where he finally ordered the espresso Gianni Mattucci had recommended. He disguised his exhaustion as the ennui of a bored tourist, but phoned his carabiniere contact at first opportunity.

“Now we can talk,” Belknap said quietly, keeping his voice conversational. Many fugitives swiftly gave themselves away by their anxiety; they were keyed up in a way that invariably brought them attention. Belknap would not make that mistake.

“Ma che diavolo! Do you have any idea what I’m dealing with right now?” Mattucci’s voice was beyond strained. “You must tell me what you know!”

“You first,” said Belknap.