Driving to the Bancroft Foundation headquarters in Katonah on her own was an entirely different experience from being driven there. Andrea Bancroft was glad she had paid close attention to the sequence of turns when she was riding there in the backseat. Even so, she made a few wrong turns, and the trip took longer than it should have.

At the main door, she was greeted cordially by the woman with the stiff copper hair, who seemed slightly puzzled at her appearance.

“Just here to do research,” Andrea said. “Preparing for the next board meeting, you know. I remember you had that very impressive library on the second floor.” She was a trustee, after all. Her real purpose was to research possible projects for the twenty-million-dollar challenge that Paul Bancroft had set to her, but she judged that it would be better not to discuss with others the special grant he had allocated. It might be seen as favoritism of some sort. Reticence, at this point, seemed the wisest course. “Also, I’m returning the files you guys delivered to me yesterday.”

“You’re so very conscientious,” the woman told her with a set smile. “That’s wonderful. I’ll get you some tea.”

One by one the foundation officers appeared from their offices, greeted her, offered to assist with whatever questions she might have. They were nothing if not solicitous.

“Hey, you.” He grinned.

“Hey, you,” she returned. “A little light reading?”

“Actually, yeah. You know anything about the lancet liver fluke? Way cool. It’s this tiny wormy creature, and its life cycle is pretty awesome.”

“Let me guess. It commutes every weekday to an office in New York until retirement, and then moves to Miami to run out the clock.”

“Wrong species, lady. Naw, it gets snails to excrete it so that ants, which love snail poop, will eat it, and then when it’s inside, it goes to the ant’s brain and basically lobotomizes it. So now it programs the ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass and then paralyzes the mandibles, so the ant just stays there all day, so that it can make sure it gets eaten by sheep.”

“Hmm.” Andrea made a face. “It programs the ant to get itself eaten by sheep. Interesting. I guess everybody has his own idea of a good time.”

“It’s really about survival. See, the sheep’s intestines is where the lancet fluke reproduces. So when the sheep takes a dump, you get millions of them out in the world. All ready to sneak inside more ants and program them for destruction. Lancet liver flukes rule.”

“And I have a hard enough time wrapping my mind around the birds and bees,” Andrea said to him, shaking her head.

A little later, she was reshelving a box of CD-ROMs filled with morbidity and mortality data from the World Health Organization when a white-haired clerk gave her a lingering look.

Andrea nodded pleasantly. The woman looked to be in her sixties, her white hair offsetting a pink, slightly puffy face. Not someone she had seen before. On a desk in front of her was a sheet of library-style adhesive labels that she had been affixing to various disk boxes.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the clerk said diffidently, “but you remind me of someone.” She hesitated. “Laura Bancroft.”

“My mother,” Andrea said, feeling her face prickle. “You knew her?”

“Oh, certainly. She was a good person. A breath of fresh air, I always felt. I liked her a lot.” The woman sounded as if she might have come from Maryland or Virginia—her voice had a hint of Southern, but little more. “She was the kind of person who notices people, you know what I mean? She noticed people like us. With some people—her ex-husband, for one—clerks and secretaries are like pieces of furniture. Like, you’d be sorry if they weren’t around, but you don’t really focus on them. Your mother was different.”

Andrea recalled the words of the gray-suited man who had visited her: You look a lot like your mother. “I guess I hadn’t really realized how active she was in the foundation,” she said after a pause.

“Laura never minded upsetting the apple cart. Like I say, she was a noticing kind of gal. And I think she truly cared about the work. So much so that she refused to take any money for it.”

“Really.”

“Besides, since Reynolds had cycled off the board, it wasn’t like they’d be running into each other.”

Andrea sat down beside the white-haired clerk. There was something grandmotherly about her, some quality of undemanding sympathy. “So they asked her to serve as a foundation officer. Even though she was just a Bancroft by marriage, she fulfilled the family quota, was that it?”

“You know that the charter has all these rules about that. So yeah, that was pretty much the shape of it. I’m guessing she hadn’t mentioned it to you.”

“No, ma’am,” Andrea said.

“Doesn’t surprise me much.” The woman glanced down at her adhesive labels. “Wouldn’t want you to think we’re all gossips here, but we’d heard a thing or two about that marriage. It’s no wonder she wanted to keep you protected from the mess—she figured Reynolds would just find a way to make you feel bad about yourself, same as he did to her.” She stopped. “Sorry—I know they say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But if we don’t, who’s gonna? You don’t need me to tell you that Reynolds was a piece of work.”

“I’m not sure I understand, though. About my mother’s concern.”

The woman looked at her with cornflower-blue eyes. “Sometimes, when you’ve got a kid to take care of, you try to make a clean break seem a little cleaner than it really is. Too much to explain otherwise. Too many questions. Expectations get raised and crushed. I’m a divorced mother of four, all grown now. So I got my own perspective on it. What I think is, your mom aimed to protect you.”

Andrea swallowed hard. “Is that why she finally resigned?”

The woman looked away. “I guess I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” she said after a while. There was a slight cooling of her tone, as if Andrea had overstepped a boundary. “So, anything I can help you with?” Her face was professional, now, and somehow closed, as expressionless as polished slate.

Andrea thanked her quickly and returned to her carrel, but she felt a prickling again, and something else, some deep, glowing disquiet. It was as if embers that had smoldered for years were suddenly fanned.

She tried to direct her attentions to a page from a W.H.O. almanac, but it was no use. Her mind kept returning to the Bancroft Foundation itself. It undoubtedly kept archives of its activities at hand, and they would be at a level of detail far in excess of the federally required reports. If there were answers to be found, they might well be in the basement archives, where older documents relating to the foundation’s operations were stored.

As she made her way out of the library wing, she saw Brandon again, and something lifted in her as he caught her eye.

“You know, they don’t have a hoop at this place or I’d challenge you to a little one-on-one,” he said, giggling sweetly.

“Next time,” Andrea said. “I’ve got some archive-trawling to do right now, I’m afraid. The boring basement kind.”

Brandon nodded. “The good stuff’s shut in cages. All locked up like dirty magazines.”

“And what would you know about such things?” she asked, mock-censorious.

The boy’s face split open into another one of his joyful grins. He was nothing less than a genius; but he was also just a boy.

“So,” Andrea said, after the initial pleasantries, “I’m wondering if you can help me. If I’m being a bother, you let me know. All right?”

“No bother at all,” replied the man, whose name was Robby.

“It’s just that I’ve been asked to sort through various documents, you know, trusteeship stuff, and I’ve locked myself out of the basement archives,” she said, with a low cunning she hadn’t known was in her. “So embarrassing.”

“Not a bit!” the man replied heartily, grateful for a reprieve from the letter opener. “Not a bit! I could…I bet I could help you.” He looked around the office. “I’m sure one of these good people will have a key.” He rummaged through desk drawers until he found one.

“You’re such a blessing,” Andrea said. “I’ll get this back to you in two shakes.”

“I’ll come with you,” the man said. “Easier that way.” No doubt he was hoping for a quick smoke outside while he was at it.

“I hate to make myself a bother,” Andrea cooed.

But she was glad that he showed her the way, because instead of the exposed main staircase, he took her down a narrower rear staircase that descended to the basement in a few steep zigzags. The basement wasn’t very basement-like; it was elegantly appointed, steeped in the fragrance of lemon furniture polish, of old paper, even, faintly, of ancient pipe tobacco. The walls were wainscoted; the floors carpeted with a Wiltshire broadloom of evident distinction. The archives were divided into two sections, one of which was secluded behind a metal grate, just as Brandon had told her. The man let Andrea in and then took the stairs up, not entirely hiding the eagerness of someone craving a nicotine fix.

The fifth box she looked through contained itemized telephone bills made from the Katonah headquarters, as did the one beside it. She located the box at the end of that shelf and kept going until she found another box that contained bills from the period when her mother died. Again, she saw nothing that, on the face of it, seemed worth a second glance. Finally, she opened a carton that contained telephone bills from the past half-year. Without having anything particular in mind, she took the list of telephone calls from the last month and slipped it into her handbag.

She turned to another section, opened another box, then another. Intriguingly, she encountered a couple of references to a facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Now she scanned the other shelves swiftly, stopping when she found a series of document boxes with labels prefixed by the letters RTP.

What was this facility? She crouched down and sampled documents from the RTP boxes on the lowest shelves. A few budget lines for seemingly minor items suggested that it was lavishly funded. Lavishly funded—yet never mentioned during the board meeting. What could it be for?

She looked up, still musing, and was startled to see the powerfully built man who had visited her at her house in Carlyle.

He was standing with arms akimbo. He must have just arrived—but how had he known to do so? Andrea resolved to maintain an icy composure even as her heart hammered in her chest. She rose slowly to her feet and extended a hand.

“Just here to help,” the man replied blandly. She could feel him looking right through her. He was obviously there to keep an eye on her.

“You’re too kind,” Andrea returned freezingly.

The man seemed distantly amused by her ploys. “Just kind enough,” he assured her.

A long pause ensued. She did not have the mental fortitude, just then, for an extended standoff. She needed to speak to Paul Bancroft. She had questions. He would have answers. Yet did he himself know everything that was going on in the foundation? It would not be the first time that an idealist was exploited by others with less lofty objectives.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, Andrea.

“I was actually just about to have a word with Paul,” she said, using her intimacy with the great man as a weapon. She gave him a tight smile. And one thing we’ll be discussing is whether he really wants to have people like you in his employ.

“He’s out of town.”

“I know,” Andrea lied. “I was going to give him a call.” Already she was conscious that she was over-explaining. She didn’t owe this man any reasons.

“Out of town,” the man responded, imperturbable, “and unreachable. As they should have explained.”

Andrea tried to meet his steady gaze, but, to her chagrin, was the first to look away. “He’ll be back when?”

“In time for the next board meeting.”

“Right,” Andrea said, deflated. “Anyway, I was just leaving,” she said.

“Then let me escort you to your car,” the man said with studied formality.

“Thank you, I will,” Andrea replied.

“A lot of things can go wrong with a car,” the man persisted. “Things that can get you killed. You of all people should know what can happen.”

Getting into her car, Andrea felt a shivery wave of cold pass over her, as if she’d been licked by an alligator. A lot of things can go wrong with a car. It was, on its face, friendly advice.

Why, then, did it feel like a threat?

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

“So what did you find?” Todd Belknap demanded. He gripped the cell phone tightly.

“Almost all those names on that list have something in common,” Matt Gomes said. Belknap could tell that he had his lips close to the mouthpiece of his phone and was speaking softly. “They’re dead. And all in the past couple of weeks, too.”

“Murdered?”

“Causes of death are all over the map. Some straight-up homicides. Two suicides. Some accidental. Some natural causes.”

“If I’m betting my money? They’re all homicides. Some of them better hidden than others. And Gianni?”

“Massive heart attack. Just a few minutes ago.”

“Christ on a raft,” Belknap roared.

“You tell me all the names on that list?”

“Damned straight,” Belknap said, hanging up. All of them except one name: Todd Belknap.

Belknap’s scalp tightened with apprehension. The list. It bore all the signs of a mop-up. The sort of housecleaning that was typically performed before a make-or-break operation. It could mean that he had even less time than he’d feared to find Pollux.

It could mean it was already too late.

Something else gnawed at Belknap’s mind. Given the obvious ruthlessness of those in charge, it was even more perplexing that the Italian girl hadn’t been killed immediately, back in Rome. Why had they waited until his arrival forced the issue? Was she of potential value to them in some way that eluded Belknap? It seemed impossible. As confounding as her treatment was, however, it represented a wisp of hope—the hope that Pollux, too, had been allowed to live.

The Italian girl said she had been staying at a place past the Dhow Building Yard, on Marwat Road. He would drive there now in the rented SUV. Perhaps there were others there in whom she had confided. Perhaps the master of the establishment would have the information he needed.

The cell phone he had lifted from the death-squad leader purred. He answered with an ambiguous half-syllable: “Ya.” The voice at the other end, he was surprised to hear, belonged to a woman.

“Hello, is this…?” The woman—an American—trailed off.

Belknap said nothing, and a second later the woman hung up with a murmured apology. The squad’s controller? A wrong number? From the caller-log function, he could tell that the call originated from the United States. It was no random misdial; he was sure of it. Once more, he enlisted Gomes’s help.

“I’m not your freakin’ back office, Castor,” Gomes groused, as Belknap read him the digits. “You feelin’ me?”

“Look, help a brother out, okay? I’m in kind of a hurry here. Need you to step up and represent. Just ID the goddamn number, would you?”

Half a minute elapsed before Gomes got back to him. “Okay, man, I got Jane Doe’s name, did a quick records search, too.”

“Chances are good she’s the goddamn princess of darkness,” Belknap said grimly.

“Yeah, well, her civilian handle is Andrea Bancroft.”

Belknap paused. “A Bancroft Bancroft?”

“No duh. She just became a trustee of the Bancroft Foundation.” Cockily, he added, “Who’s your daddy now?”

Andrea Bancroft. How was she involved in the killings? How high up was she? Could she know something about—have been complicit in—the disappearance of Jared Rinehart? There were too many questions, too many uncertainties. But Belknap didn’t believe in coincidences. This wasn’t any wrong number. All indications were that Andrea Bancroft was a dangerous customer, or, at the very least, keeping dangerous company.

Belknap made a call to a retired operative he hadn’t spoken to in years. No matter. The man’s field name was Navajo Blue, and Navajo Blue owed Belknap one.

A few minutes later, a cinderblock structure came into view. Hidden from the road, near a series of industrial buildings, the building was dun-colored, just shy of derelict, and almost seemed to vibrate in the heat. As the Italian girl had described the setup, it was basically a warehouse for prostitutes. The place had doubtless seen all sorts of people from all walks of life. But it had never seen anyone like Todd Belknap.

What was it?

It was morbid of her, no doubt, but she could not help going over the painful teenage memory of her mother’s death. The policeman at the door…ready to break the news. Except she had already been informed by—who was that caller? It had happened more than a decade before. Yet someone had phoned to tell her that her mother had been killed. And then it came to her: what it was about the man with the hoarse smoky voice—the foundation officer who’d telephoned about security protocols and compliance issues—that made her blood run cold.

It was the same voice as the man who called that night.

At the time, she’d assumed it was someone from the police—yet the policeman at the door seemed puzzled when she mentioned the call. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was imagining things. And yet…something about that night had always bothered her, like a lash under her eyelid. Her mother, she was told, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.1—yet she didn’t drink. When Andrea said so, the kindly patrolman had asked a perceptive question: Had she once been an alcoholic? Yes, but her mother had joined AA, hadn’t had a drop for years. The policeman nodded; he admitted that he was a recovering alcoholic himself. One day at a time. Still, almost everyone falls off the wagon at one point or another. Andrea’s protests had been quietly, gently set aside, the indignation of a protective daughter unwilling to face the truth.

When did it happen? the seventeen-year-old Andrea had asked. About twenty minutes ago, the patrolman explained. No, Andrea said, it must have been earlier—they called me at least half an hour ago.

The patrolman had given her a strange look. She remembered little else, because then everything had been washed away by an ocean of grief.

She had to tell Paul Bancroft. She had to talk to him, she resolved. Yet what if he knew already? What if he knew far more than he was letting on? Her head began to pound.

As Andrea motored along the Old Post Road, she turned on the windshield wipers before she realized that nothing was obscuring the view except the tears that had welled up in her own eyes.

You’re losing it, Andrea, she scolded herself. Yet another voice, darker and deeper, spoke in contradiction: Maybe you’re finding it, Andrea. Maybe you’re finding it.

Nimble fingers roamed across the computer keyboard. Fingers that knew their destination, that executed a complex series of directives with precision and celerity. In a flurry of quiet clicks, an e-mail message was composed. A few more keystrokes and the message was encrypted, then dispatched to an offshore anonymizer service, where it would be stripped of all identifying codes, decrypted, and rerouted to its ultimate recipient, one with a senate.gov suffix. In less than a minute, a computer in the office of a United States senator would ping. The message would have arrived, and with it its signoff.

GENESIS.

In the next few minutes, other messages were sent, other instructions dispatched. Strings of digits shifted money from one numbered account to another, moving levers that would move still other levers, pulling strings that would pull still other strings.

GENESIS. For some, it was indeed the beginning. For others, it meant the beginning of the end.

The screen door banged noisily in the breeze, like a concussion bomb, he thought. A wasp buzzed in the doorway, and to him it sounded as if a Second World War fighter plane was overhead. And when the phone had rung a little earlier in the day, it had sounded like an air-raid siren.

Maybe it was an air-raid siren, of sorts. Castor had called, and it wasn’t to borrow a cup of sugar, either. Didn’t matter. He wasn’t someone you said no to, and Tom Mitchell—Navajo Blue had been his field name, when he had been in active deployment—figured he ought to be grateful for a chance to repay a debt. You didn’t want to get on the Hound’s bad side, that was for sure. Because the Hound had teeth, and his bite was worse than his bark.

The serenity of Tom’s New Hampshire idyll was killing him, anyway. He wasn’t cut out for the quiet life, that was the long and short of it, and it was asking too much from the booze to supply all the excitement that was missing from his daily routine.

Sheila had found the place. Post-and-beam construction, whatever the hell that meant. Wide plank floors under the particleboard—she crowed at the discovery as if she’d unearthed King Tut’s tomb. Just a little down the road of them to either side were ratty A-frames and piece-of-shit bungalows and car-killed raccoons, each with their own blowfly cloud. But there was enough land in back that he could take out his Ruger snubby for a spin once in a while and blast a few squirrels out of the trees, squirrels being the Vietcong of the rodent family, as far as he was concerned. The bird feeders were strictly designated for creatures of feather: A tree rat messed with their supply lines at its peril.

Sheila lasted for just over a year of it. That was all she could take. Probably saw more of him during that time than she had in the previous three decades. Which evidently was the trouble.

She tried to explain. She said she never got used to sharing her bed, somehow. She said a lot of things. Eight acres of New Hampshire wilderness and she complained that she Needed Her Space. Neither were great talkers, but they had talked a fair amount the day before Sheila headed off to Chapel Hill, where her sister lived and had found her a condo. She said: I’m bored. He said: We could get cable.

Tom would never forget the look she gave him then. Pitying, mostly. Not angry, but disappointed, the way you’d look at an incontinent old dog when it made a mess. Sheila called him once a week, and there was something nurselike about her conversations. She was acting like the responsible adult, checking to make sure he was okay, was keeping himself out of trouble. The truth was, he felt like a car rusting away on cinderblocks. A common sight in these parts.

He took a carafe from the coffee machine and filled a mug on which was emblazoned the once humorous logo DOES THIS BODY MAKE ME LOOK FAT? He poured a heaping spoonful of sugar into it. No Sheila glares to worry about, right? He could have all the sugar he wanted. Like the state motto said: Live free or die!

It took a good four hours before he reached Carlyle, Connecticut, and he was in a foul mood. Four freaking hours of his life. When he could have been doing—what? Still. Four hours. “Just nip over,” Castor had said. Four hours wasn’t any kind of a nip.

The job would be a cakewalk, though. By the time he’d made a few reconnoitering runs along Elm Street, he was sure about that. The Carlyle police were a joke. And the lady in question lived in a doll’s house of a Cape Cod. No visible security measures whatever. A screen porch. Ordinary glass on the windows. No house-hugging shrubbery that might have concealed security devices by the foundations. He wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t even lock her doors.

Still, this trip was strictly business, not pleasure; he was a professional. Castor would not have tasked him for no reason. Which meant it was time for the Navajo Blue show.

Navajo Blue saw an empty garage, no car in the driveway. Nobody in view from any of the windows. Nobody at home. He went to the door, rang the bell, prepared to pretend he had come to the wrong house if someone answered. As he expected, nobody did. He walked around to the rear of the house, found the place where the telephone and coaxial cables entered the house. Nothing could be easier than to place a listening device on the line. The one he would use—like a lot of retired ops, he kept a trick bag of such devices—was nothing special, but it was road-tested and reliable. He got down on his knees and took out what looked like a cable tester, a small black plastic gizmo the size of a garage opener with an LCD display, and reached under the cable cluster. He felt a small oblong object, a little like a small battery, and a lot like a signal-intercept device.

What the hell?

He squinted at it, visually confirming what he had felt. Someone had got there before he had. There already was a tap on the line, and it was a better model than one that he had. Now he let himself in the back—it took fifteen seconds with a couple of stiff bristles inside the keyhole, not his personal best, but not bad, either—and wandered through the place. Nicely but modestly furnished; a girl’s place but not a girly girl’s. Nothing too pink or fluffy. On the other hand, nothing that suggested it was a lair of iniquity, either.

Over the next fifteen minutes, he identified several other prime locations for surveillance devices. Each time he found that one had already been planted there.

His nerves were now sparking at him, and it wasn’t the hangover anymore. The fact was, 42 Elm Street was wired up like a goddamn studio. Something was very wrong.

His instincts might have grown muzzy, but they told him to get out of there fast, and he did so, walking out the back door and rounding to the street. He thought he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye—someone watching from a neighboring yard?—but when he turned for a second look, whatever he saw was gone. Now he strode the half-block to his truck and drove off. Castor said he’d check in within a few hours. Castor was going to get an earful.

A tinted-glass navy sedan glided to a stop just behind the van. The two men who emerged from it—both of medium height and medium build, medium brown hair at medium length, wholly unexceptionable save for their hatchet-like countenances—were efficient in their movements. Someone who met them might have taken them to be brothers, and they were. One of them lifted the truck’s hood and removed a spent flat canister from the air-conditioning system. The other opened the driver’s-side door to the truck and, taking care not to inhale, pulled the lifeless body out of it. His companion would drive the truck back to the address they had in New Hampshire, but first he helped carry the dead man into the trunk of the sedan. The body, too, would be returned to the man’s home and arranged in some plausible position there.

“You realize it’s going to be a four-hour drive,” said the first man, hoisting the body from beneath its arms.

“It’s the least we can do,” his companion replied. Together, they arranged the body in the trunk so that it would not slide around in transit. Before the trunk was closed, Navajo Blue’s body was curled around a spare tire as if it were hugging it. “After all, he’s in no condition to drive.”