Todd Belknap was thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, but his mind kept returning to his last sight of the Bancroft woman at that roadside lodge. There was, he knew, a good chance that they’d never see each other again. It would prove to be another brief encounter in a lifetime of brief encounters, if stormier than most. He had not opened the car windows right away as he drove off from the motel. He could still smell her light, citrusy fragrance in the vehicle, and he did not want the night air to push it away just yet. It somehow kept a damp feeling of despondency at bay. Dimly, he recognized that he was developing inappropriate and unreciprocated feelings toward Andrea Bancroft. They were not feelings he welcomed; too many people he let into his life ended up dead. Violence shadowed him, and, with uncanny sadism, picked off those he held closest to his heart. Yvette’s voice came to him like a distant echo: Where there is beauty, one finds death.

Andrea had asked him whether he felt fear; right then, he was feeling fear for her.

The sleep that finally overtook him offered little respite. Images crowded his unconscious, as vaporous as wraiths, and then as solid as real-time experience. He was back in Calí, reliving something that had happened half a decade earlier as if it were happening now. The sounds, the smells, the sights. The fear.

Then—from someplace behind him—Belknap made out the distinctive round of a long rifle. There were cracks, spaced perhaps two seconds apart, and the torrential buzzing of the machine guns ceased. A glance at his cracked rearview mirror told the story: Each of the Colombian gunmen had fallen. Four gunmen, their torsos still draped with bandoliers. Four head shots.

Silence had never been so welcome.

Belknap craned his head to the roadside area where the rifle shots had been fired. Saw, outlined against the darkening sky, a lean, almost elongated figure holding a scoped rifle. A pair of binoculars hung from a strap around his neck.

Pollux.

He approached with his long stride, swiftly assessed the situation, and then turned to his friend.

“I have to say, my heart’s in my throat,” Rinehart told him.

“Imagine how I’m feeling,” Belknap said, unembarrassed by his gratitude.

“You saw it, too, did you? Amazing, isn’t it! A flame-rumped tanager. I’m positive—the black head, the short beak, the incredible red oval on the wing. I even got a glimpse of the yellow breast.” He extended a hand, helped Belknap out of the car. “You look skeptical, my friend. Well, I’d show you, if only our Colombian friends hadn’t made such a racket. I swear, they’ve flushed every finch in earshot. What were they thinking?”

Belknap couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “What are you even doing here, Jared?”

Instead, he simply shrugged and said, “Where else can you hope to find a flame-rumped tanager?”

Now Belknap opened his eyes, peered through the fog of slumber, felt the stream of air from the nozzle overhead, fingered his lap belt, and remembered where he was. He was on a chartered jet that was taking the Empire State Chorus to an international music festival in Tallinn, Estonia. Todd Belknap—no, he was Tyler Cooper now—was tagging along as an official with the State Department’s cultural-exchange program. Belknap’s old ally and former colleague—“Turtle” Lydgate—knew the chorus master somehow and had arranged it. Lydgate had pointed out that chartered flights were less carefully monitored than those of the international carriers—and that, it being the week of Estonia’s annual choral festival, a goodly number of such chartered planes would be arriving at Tallinn, Estonia’s capital. Among the chorus members, there were vague intimations that the cultural-programs officers at State might provide funding for the chorus as an item in a new “civil society and the arts” initiative. They were to treat him as an honorary member of the chorus. In the event, they were both courteous and intimidated in his presence, which suited Belknap fine.

He tried to return to sleep, but over the sound of the engines, he heard—oh, God, more of their infernal singing.

The chorus master, Calvin Garth, had a helmet of orangey Grecian Formulated hair, an oddly full mouth, plump and delicate hands, and a little whinnying laugh. Worse, he was hell-bent on using the flying time for further rehearsals.

When Belknap surfaced again, three hours later, the chorus master was still at it, cuing the altos and basses; the young men and women in the chorus were seated according to their section. “Ar-ticu-late, ladies and gentlemen!” Garth implored. “Now, again! This is the Empire State Chorus anthem, so it’s got to be perfect!”

The passengers watched his downbeat carefully, and then began as cued:

The fussy man in the tan jacket cut them off. “Not good enough! Eighty soloists put together do not a chorus make. Adam, Melissa, you’re ruining the attack. This passage must be allargando. We’re slowing, we’re broadening—watch my right hand. Amanda, turn that frown upside down! Eduardo, you’re pressing against the beat as if it were marked affrettando. I mean, really—is there someplace you need to be? Next week, Eduardo, you go back to work managing the perfume counter at Saks Fifth Avenue and then you can coast. But this week you represent the United States of America, am I right? This week you represent the Empire State Chorus. I meant what I said. You’re all going to make yourselves proud. Eduardo, you’re going to make your adopted country proud, too. I know it.”

“Adopted?” A voice of confusion from several rows back. “I was born in Queens.”

Belknap suddenly sat up, his heart pummeling in his chest. It was the draggy, marchlike tune that the corpulent Omani princeling had sung in his drunken way. He struggled to remember the context. Something about how Ansari had begun to lose control of his arms network, something about new management. The drunken Omani had pretended to be a conductor. New maestro—that was something he had said, too.

The Ansari network had fallen into the hands of an Estonian. An Estonian who, if Robbins’s intelligence was accurate, had already seized control of a vast Cold War arsenal. Genesis? Or merely one of Genesis’s powerful confederates?

I’m coming for you, Belknap thought grimly. The Hound has caught your scent.

A long time passed before the operative got to sleep again.

As Belknap joined the others in a queue in front of a handful of overloaded customs-and-immigrations booths, he saw that Garth was not exaggerating. Around him were hundreds of foreign arrivals, just off full-to-capacity planes, some clutching sheet music, most having that unmistakable chorister’s twinkle. It was already obvious to Belknap that the customs officers weren’t seriously scrutinizing the flocking choristers; Tyler Cooper, ostensibly a member of the Empire State Chorus, was essentially waved through with no more than a cursory glance at his passport.

“It was something of a miracle,” Calvin Garth was telling him as he gathered his troops at the airport’s ground-transportation deck, “but we did manage to wangle a hotel room for you at the Reval, near the sea docks.”

“I’m much obliged,” Belknap said.

On the bus to the hotel, Garth sat next to Belknap. “We were all going to stay at the Mihkli Hotel, but the Latvians stay there and they are killers,” he explained in his loudly voluble manner. “I didn’t want to worry about their ears being pressed against the walls when my people rehearse their numbers. I swear, you have no idea the level of deceit and trickery those Baltic chorus boys get up to. They’ll put salt-peter in your tea if they think it’ll give them a leg up in the competition. You can’t be too careful.”

Belknap kept gazing out of the window, saw windmill farms give way to the familiar city-outskirt structures: gas stations, vast tanks of oil and natural gas. “Sounds pretty sordid,” he grunted.

“You have no idea, Tyler,” Garth said in his penetrating nasal voice, gesticulating with his hands. “The seamy underbelly of song. I’ve heard tales that would shock you.”

The young woman seated behind them got up and joined a friend a few rows away. Belknap wondered whether she found Garth’s voice as headache-inducing as he did, especially after the wearying flight.

“That so?” Belknap said.

“Really, it’s better that you remain innocent of what some of these folks get up to. But I have to counsel caution when I’m talking to my people. I hate to act like a den mother, but the stakes, you know, the stakes!”

Belknap nodded gravely. There was something in his voice that made him wonder whether the chorus master wasn’t pulling his leg. “I’m very grateful to you, as I say, for accommodating me. Very helpful as we rethink our cultural-exchange programs…”

Garth looked around before he replied. “Tertius asked me to do whatever I could for you,” he said quietly. It was an entirely different voice this time, devoid of the lilting vowels, the exaggerated animation, the hissing sibilants he had previously displayed. His hands were still, his face impassive. The transformation was startling.

“Appreciate it.”

“Understood.” Belknap found himself marveling. A globetrotting chorus master: the perfect cover—though for what? Lydgate had given him no hints, but Belknap could guess. He knew of retired spooks who had offered their services to a corporate clientele, helping firms clear the way for branch offices and subsidiaries in regions of the world where the rule of law wasn’t exactly ascendant. Regions of the world where the kind of local knowledge possessed by an experienced spy could prove its worth. Such post-service careers were condoned by the official spymasters as long as certain boundaries were observed. “Understood,” Belknap repeated.

“Then understand this, too.” Garth’s voice was a quiet rumble, and his eyes grew hard. “If you get burned, don’t come to me. Because I don’t want to know you.”

Belknap nodded gravely, then turned and gazed out the window again. The sky was a piercing blue; residents of a sun-starved nation were out, soaking up as much of it as they could, as if it could be banked and metered out during the long dark months. There was beauty here, and spirit, and history. Yet those long dark months made it a perfect incubator for those merchants of death, men who thrived on darkness and who profited through the convergence of two ineradicable features of human nature: violence and greed.

Digital instructions decanted money from one numbered account to another, pulled strings that would pull other strings that would pull yet other strings.

Once more, Genesis reflected on the simple key-cap labels: CONTROL. COMMAND.

But also OPTION. And, of course, SHIFT.

To shift the course of history would require more than a keystroke. But a string of keystrokes—the right ones, at the right times—might very well do it.

To know for sure would take time. A very long time. A very, very long time, really.

Perhaps as long as seventy-two hours.

Tallinn was more than 40 percent Russian—the residuum of empire. Russians were not just among the privileged classes; they were among the worst-off as well. Ethnic Russians were Mohawk-haired punk youths with safety pins in their cheeks; they were waiters in restaurants and redcaps in train stations; they were bureaucrats and businessmen. More than a handful were former apparatchiks who regarded the place as a picturesque province of a rightful Russian empire, and some—like the man Belknap set out to meet—were KGB men who had been stationed in Tallinn and, when they retired, found it a more restful prospect than the available alternatives.

When Belknap first made his acquaintance, they were on opposite sides of the great geopolitical divide known as the Cold War. Yet even then, the great states had common enemies: terrorism and insurgencies led by those who were hostile to the existing world order. Belknap had been looking for POSHLUST, the code name for a Soviet weapons scientist who had—on the “informal” market—been selling information to the Libyans and other unlicensed customers. The Americans had no name, just the coded legend, but Belknap had the idea of following a Libyan delegation to a scientific conference at the resort town of Paldiski, thirty miles west of Tallinn. There Belknap recorded a rendezvous between a man whom he knew, from his facebook, to be a member of Mukhabarat, the Libyan state-security services, and a Russian physicist named Dmitri Barashenkov. During a panel discussion at which Bareshenkov was present, Belknap let himself into the physicist’s room—the participants were put up at a slightly decrepit spa—and conducted a swift search. He found enough to confirm the identification. When he left the room, however, and made his way down the hallway, amber-and-white tiles set in discolored grout, he found himself accosted by a KGB man with peasant features and a look of exhaustion: Gennady. Later, Belknap realized that Gennady could have come with a full entourage but chose to appear alone in order to be less threatening. To the Soviets, POSHLUST was nothing less than an embarrassment—one of their own who had wandered off the reservation and was making side deals irrespective of state policies and official diplomacy. Their failure to have identified him over the past twenty-four months had been galling—as was the way they finally had done so.

“Would I be speaking to Mr. Ralph Cogan, science administrator from the Rensselaer Institute of Technology?” Chakvetadze had asked him.

Belknap had given him an uncomprehending look.

“G. I. Chakvetadze,” replied the Russian. “But you can call me Gennady.” He smiled. “At least if I can call you Todd. I think we are, in fact, colleagues. If you are an employee of RPI, I am with the Kiev Gas Company.” He put an arm around Belknap, who tensed. “May I say thank you? On behalf of the Soviet people?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Belknap replied.

“Come, we shall have tea in the lobby,” the slovenly KGB man replied, the buttons on his cheap navy jacket straining at his belly, his too-short tie askew. “Tell me, have you ever gone hunting for wild boar? Great sport in the republic of Georgia. You must use dogs. Two kinds, at least. Track dogs, which have the gift of scenting out and tracking down the wild hog. But once the boar has been located, then what? You bay them up. Then what? That’s when you need catch dogs. The catch dogs sink their teeth in its nose and hang on. A lesser skill? No doubt. But an indispensable one.”

The two were walking down the stairs together. There was no point in putting up further resistance. “We look for POSHLUST, but never find. Then we learn that the fabled Mr. Belknap is coming to a seaside resort here in Estonia. How? From you, Todd, I have no secrets, save the secrets that I have. Not your fault. One of your legend clerks gets sloppy. They accidentally doubled up on ‘Ralph Cogan’ documents. There’s a Ralph Cogan in Bratislava as we speak. The Estonian processor is puzzled, and the photo ID is kicked upstairs, and the determination is made. This is none other than Todd Belknap, the one they call sobak, the Hound. Who is he looking for? Could it be the one we look for? We wait and see.”

Once they had reached the ground floor, Belknap decided he would indeed have tea with the KGB man, take his measure as the other did the same.

Belknap took a long time before he answered.

The two had stayed in touch at irregular intervals over the succeeding two decades; each time was memorable. Belknap knew that the KGB agent wrote reports of their meetings; he also suspected that those reports were not complete. And when the Soviet empire shriveled up and the KGB was scaled down, Belknap assumed that the Georgian had retained his position, though he had so many guises that Belknap could not be certain. Sometimes, a legend was converted into reality: There were cases in which someone set up by the KGB to play a businessman would detach himself from his superiors and simply pursue his cover career in earnest. Belknap did know that Chakvetadze was retired now; the man was in his mid-seventies, after all, and the years of hard drinking had told. He also knew that Chakvetadze would have held on to a kit bag from his old trade; the ex–KGB officers all did, the way Second World War infantrymen often held on to souvenir sidearms.

Chakvetadze’s lakeside cottage, by Lake Ülemiste, was just a couple of miles south of Tallinn Old Town. It was not exactly a picture of arcadia; the airport was not far, and the sound of jets was as omnipresent as birdsong. It was a spare, bungalow-like house, a one-story structure of semicircular shingles, a redbrick fireplace sprouting from the center like a handle.

Perhaps as a point of pride, Chakvetadze did not admit to surprise at hearing from his old friend. “Yes, come, come,” he had said with a Slavic garrulity that had never been chastened by Estonian reserve.

Immediately upon Belknap’s arrival, the Russian ushered him through the house to a concrete patio, where there were a couple of worse-for-wear canvas-backed chairs and a table of silvered wood. Then he returned with a bottle of vodka and two glasses, and began pouring with little ceremony.

“I’m afraid I’ve got a long day ahead of me,” Belknap said.

“It will be longer if you don’t have some of this lighting fluid in your belly,” the Georgian said. “I’m sorry you didn’t come earlier. I could have introduced you to my wife.”

“She out of town?”

“I meant a few years earlier, durak, not a few hours. Raisa’s been dead for two years.” He settled down, took a generous swallow, and gestured toward the lake, from which wisps of fog arose like steam from soup. “You see that great boulder in the middle of the lake there? It’s called Lindakivi. According to Estonian folklore, the great king Kalev married a woman born of a hen’s egg, named Linda. When he died, Linda was supposed to carry great boulders to his grave, but one fell off her apron. So she sat on it and cried. Hence Lake Ülemiste. The tears, you know.”

“Do you believe that?”

“All national epics are truthful,” Gennady replied stoutly. “In their way, It is also said that Ülemiste the Elder lives in this lake. If you meet him, he asks, ‘Is Tallinn ready yet?’ and you must always answer, ‘No, much remains to be done.’”

“What if you answered yes?”

“Then he would flood the city.” The Georgian chortled merrily. “So you see, disinformatzia is a very old Estonian occupation.” He closed his eyes, turned to face the lake breeze. There was a sound like the whine of a distant gnat as an airplane came in for a landing.

“It is a powerful tool, disinformation,” Belknap allowed. “I am in search of others.”

Gennady opened one eye, and then the other. “I can deny you nothing, old friend, save what I must deny you.”

Belknap looked at his watch. It was a good start. “I thank you, moy droog.”

“So.” The Russian’s eyes were watchful, but his smile was unforced. “What outrageous requests have you come to make?”

The depository on Binnewater Road, Rosendale, just north of New Paltz, was an old mine that had been converted into a high-security storage center. As her cab pulled up to the address, little was visible from outside, other than a vast black plastic mat—a moisture barrier—that was stretched over a sandy knoll. She showed her ID to a guard in a booth, and a steel gate was raised, enabling the cab to pull into the large parking lot—a parking lot without a building, so it seemed, for the storage facility was underground. The terrain, she’d learned, had once been rich with veins of limestone, especially sought after because it was low in magnesium, making it desirable for the manufacture of cement and concrete. Indeed, much of the physical structure of modern Manhattan had been extracted from the county. It was in the remains of one of these “cement mines” that the Archival Storage facility had been built. Despite its colloquial designation as an “iron mountain,” it was, in fact, a steel-lined mine.

At an entrance area her photo ID was carefully scrutinized. Her friend at the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance had called ahead and authorized her visit; ostensibly she was an independent auditor contracted by the state for special research. Seated at a wood-veneer counter by the entrance was a pear-shaped man with deep-set eyes, broad sloping shoulders, and receding glossy black hair. He looked to be in his late thirties. Despite his bulky torso, his face was oddly fatless; his cheeks were grooved, almost gaunt, skin taut over a death’s head. Finally, almost reluctantly, the man gave her a special badge with a magnetic strip.

“How big is this installation?”

He returned to his college-tour voice. “More than a hundred thousand linear feet, on three levels. Atmosphere is monitored, with automatic CO₂ correction and humidity control. This ain’t no town library. Like I say, you really don’t want to get lost, and you really don’t want to misplace your badge. There’s a computer console at every stop of the elevator that you can use to get location coordinates for your research needs. There are numbers or letters corresponding to level, sector, row, rank, and shelf. I always say, it’s easy once you get the hang of it, but almost nobody ever gets the hang of it.”

She felt a heavy bleakness descend on her, perhaps because of the dimness of the light or a curious interaction between the normally opposite anxieties of agoraphobia and claustrophobia—the sense of being encrypted in a vastness. Let’s just get this over with, she coached herself. Now she walked across a seemingly endless concrete floor, following a white line, numbers in stenciled light-blue paint: 3l 2:566-999. The badge around her neck silently announced her presence, flicking on lights; some sort of electronic chip embedded inside must have responded to radio signals in a certain way. The air was curiously dustless, and it was cooler than she had anticipated; she was already sorry she hadn’t brought a sweater. All around her were vast steel shelves, extending all the way to the fourteen-foot ceilings. Small collapsible ladders were available at the end of each six-foot-long shelf segment. The place was really designed for spider monkeys, she decided.

She rounded the corner and turned down the next aisle; once again, a series of lights startled her by blinking on, activated by her badge sensor. It took her a good fifteen minutes of walking and searching before she located the first tranche of papers she was looking for. Having located it, she spent another hour before she came upon something that looked peculiarly like a loose thread.

Foreign-exchange data. Most people would have made nothing of it, but she knew better. When organizations were making a sizable conversion of U.S. currency into foreign currencies—in preparation for purchases or payments in other countries—they often established a hedge to protect themselves from adverse swings in currency valuation. At irregular intervals, the Bancroft Foundation had done so.

She was starting to feel like a Mohican tracker. She could not see the forest creature, but she could see a few broken twigs, an odd deposit of spoor, and she knew where it had been.

A hundred feet above her, the man with the deep-set eyes keyed in the woman’s badge number, and the multipaneled video screen in front of him lighted up with feeds from the cameras that operated in her immediate vicinity. He zoomed in with a few clicks of the mouse, then rotated the image so that he could read the type on the page. The Bancroft Foundation. He had standing instructions in a case like this. Probably this was no big deal. Probably this was one of their own—the honey’s name was Bancroft, after all. But they weren’t paying him to think. They were paying him to give them the heads-up. Yo, Kev, that’s why you get the big bucks. Okay, not big maybe, but compared to the pittance he got from Secure Archive Inc., it was damn generous. He picked up his telephone, his finger hovering over the number pad. Then he returned the handset to the cradle. Better not to leave a record at work. He took out his cell phone and placed the call.

It was that evening that Belknap’s bogus chorus affiliation proved its true worth. That evening, a reception, in honor of the international choral festival, was held at the residence of the country’s president. The Empire State Chorus was among the groups that were scheduled to perform at a goodwill concert following it. For top-level Estonian ministers, attendance was obligatory. For Belknap, a plan foggily drafted would now be made concrete.

Belknap was wearing the same Empire State Chorus badge that everyone else had on. He concentrated on blending in, adopting that slightly dazed, slightly dazzled expression that they all seemed to have, not to mention the hair-trigger grins.

The Kadriorg park, like so much of Estonia’s grandeur, was a legacy of Peter the Great: Russian richesse in the wake of Russian domination. Many of the pavilions had been turned into museums and concert halls, but the main part of the palace remained an official residence of the president, used for occasions of state—and, for Estonians, an international choral festival certainly counted as that. The largest building was two stories—two extremely grand stories, a baroque fantasy of white pilasters on red stone. Just up the hill, in a matching but somewhat simplified style, was the presidential palace, built in 1938, a year when, even as darkness overtook much of Europe, Estonia thought it saw a new dawn. A freshly inked constitution promised to guarantee democratic freedoms after four years of dictatorship; it did not last the year. Nor did the desperate attempts to preserve Baltic neutrality. The building enshrined illusory hopes; perhaps, Belknap mused, that was why it was so handsome.

Outside the palace was a tented makeshift vestibule, providing what passed as security in Tallinn. He saw Calvin Garth conferring with a blue-suited security officer, flashing documentation. Then the members of his chorus were waved through. Belknap made sure that his badge was prominently displayed as he fell into step with the others. Though he was more than a decade older than any of the real chorus members, he plastered a bemused grin on his face and was not stopped for additional scrutiny.

The foyer was lavishly decorated with intricate stucco work and plaster ornaments that rose to the level of sculpture. He exchanged glances with the young men and women in the chorus and pretended to be as overawed as they were. The banquet hall, where the reception was held, was already crowded, he was relieved to see. Now, stepping toward a wall, he pretended to examine a painting of the Empress Catherine while removing the badge from his jacket. This was the tricky part: Arriving as one person, he swiftly had to become another.

Not just anybody, either. He was now Roger Delamain, of Grinnell International. He replaced the soapy grin on his face with a look of slightly imperious suspicion, and quickly glanced around. Though he had previously studied the faces of the country’s high-level ministers, he would still have to wing it. The president was easily distinguished: With his bushy eyebrows and mane of white-silver hair, he was the very type of the ceremonial head of state, the well-educated man with a gift for making orotund pronouncements. He shook hands in a practiced squeeze-and-smile motion, although the real skill, as Belknap now saw, was in his ability to detach—for the man had to remove himself from one guest in order to greet another, swiftly, invisibly, having a moment of conversational significance that did not allow for entanglement. Belknap drifted closer. Flypaper questions were treated as witticisms, eliciting appreciative chuckles, or, depending upon tonal clues, as somber reflections that the president would surely take to heart. Handclasp, eye-lock, smile, dismiss. Handclasp, eye-lock, smile, dismiss. He was a virtuoso; the Estonian parliament did not go wrong in elevating him to this post.

Andrus Pärt was the deputy minister’s name, and, by Gennady’s reckoning, it would be worth Belknap’s while to get to know him. The logic was elementary. The mogul he was seeking was big. The nation of Estonia was small. Andrus Pärt, Gennady assured Belknap, had contacts with all the major figures of Estonia’s private sector, licit and illicit. Nobody operated in a small Baltic republic without reaching an accommodation with high-ranking members of the government. Andrus Pärt would know the players; he would know the man Belknap was hunting. As soon as the operative laid eyes on him, indeed, he felt all the more certain of it. The nose of the Hound, he mused.

Now came the hard part. Belknap drifted through clusters and crowds, across costly carpet and costlier parquet, until he was a few feet from the deputy minister. He wore an expression distinct from the usual ingratiating smiles at a reception like this one; he was a man on business. To a politician, the overly unctuous smile was a signal to move right along. But Belknap could not be discourteous, either. A tight, wary smile flashed on his face as he turned to the deputy minister.

“The honorable Andrus Pärt, if I’m not mistaken,” Belknap said. His accent was flat, ambiguous, the English of someone who had learned it as a foreign language but at posh schools.

“That’s right,” the deputy minister said blandly. Yet Belknap could tell he was intrigued. This was not a gathering of people conversant with Estonian politics, and Belknap’s level gaze was not that of the usual partygoer.

“Curiously, we’ve never met,” Belknap said carefully. Another morsel that would prolong the man’s interest: It was a statement that suggested that there might have been reason for them to have met. A glimmer of interest appeared on Pärt’s face, doubtless for the first time this evening. “I’ve been asked to remedy this.”

“Have you?” The Estonian’s hooded eyes betrayed little. “And why is that?”

“Forgive me.” Only now did Belknap extend a hand, and he did so with an air of noblesse. “Roger Delamain.”

The deputy minister’s eyes began to scan the room. “Of Grinnell International,” Belknap added meaningfully. The name belonged to an actual managing director of Grinnell; if the man looked him up, he would find a corporate biography, though no photograph.

“Grinnell,” the Estonian repeated. He gave Belknap a look that spoke volumes, all of them in a foreign language. “Really. Are you developing a musical division, then?” A quick, twitchlike smile. “Military music, perhaps?”

“It is my great passion,” Belknap said, gesturing around him. “The Estonian traditions of singing. This is not an occasion I could pass up.”

“It fills us with pride,” Pärt replied automatically.

“I’m devoted to other Estonian traditions as well,” Belknap said quickly. “I’m afraid I’m not here strictly due to my amateur interests. You understand. It is the nature of Grinnell’s operations. Unpredictable, sudden demands. They arrive with little notice and the company’s directors, like myself, must scurry to cope with them.”

“I only wish I could be of service.”

Belknap’s smile was almost tender. “Perhaps you can be.”

The archived corporate records contained nothing that made reference to it. She leaned against the shelves, scanning the black plastic clad boxes of the bank opposite, lost in thought. There was a movement in her peripheral vision, and she turned to see an electric cart driving toward her at top speed. Aren’t they supposed to beep? she wondered fleetingly, as adrenaline pulsed through her and she stepped out of its path.

Yet the cart now veered, tracking her movement. It was—impossible!—as if the driver wanted to hit her. She let out a shriek as she realized that the man on the cart was wearing a motorcycle helmet with a full tinted visor and face-shield. She could see only a reflection of herself when she looked at her, and somehow the image of her own terror just compounded it. At the last moment, she leaped up, sprang as high as she could with all the strength she had, and then, gripping a high shelf, pulled herself up and out of harm’s way. Oh, dear Lord!

She heard footfalls, perhaps twenty feet away. Someone else, then. She craned her head, caught a glimpse of another figure, dressed in paramilitary garb, obviously armed. Not here to help her. It was a difficult Gestalt shift; for her entire life, men with guns—policemen, usually—had been on her side. They worked for her. She realized this was not everyone’s experience of the world, but it was hers. Now they were working against her, and the realization clashed with so many of her settled assumptions. The badge. She gripped it, tugged on its lanyard. The badge was betraying her. She had to leave it behind. Or was there a way to enlist it?

With a sudden burst of speed, she darted down the end of the row and zigzagged across a few sections. She was now somewhere in P rank. She hid her badge inside a document-storage box and, just as the halogens blazed, she climbed up to the very top shelf, scuttled over a long row of metal canisters, the kind that held film or magnetic tape, and kept moving until she was at the other end of the row, where the reading lights remained dark. Had she been quiet enough? She stretched herself out on the top shelf, invisible, or so she hoped. Then she pulled out one of the heavy canisters so that she would have an angle of vision on what was happening on the floor, twelve feet beneath her.

The man in the paramilitary garb arrived first. Not seeing her, he darted to the aisles to either side. With a look of frustration, he returned to the lighted section, scanning the shelves, looking either for her or for her badge. Then he spoke into a handy-talkie.

“Bitch ditched the badge,” he said in a voice like gravel. “A goddamned risky strategy. We have kill clearance yet from Theta?”

As he spoke, he walked further down the P-rank aisle, closer to Andrea. Timing was everything. Now she held the heavy steel canister in both hands, waiting for the shadowy figure to get to the spot she was visualizing on the floor beneath her, and—now!—she let it drop.

She heard the man’s strangled yelp, then peered down to see him sprawled on the ground, the steel canister lying awkwardly on his skull.

Oh, Christ what have you done, Andrea? Oh, Christ!

A surge of nausea and revulsion rippled through her. This wasn’t her world. This was not what she did, not who she was.

But if her assailants thought she would not resist with every fiber of her being, they had underestimated her. We have kill clearance yet? The words returned like an arctic wind.

A fist of rage hammered in her chest. No, asshole, but I have.

She swung down, like a child on a jungle gym, and fell on the slain man. There was a gun holstered on his belt. The sides were flat, not curved, so it was probably a pistol. She grabbed it and, by the light of the distant halogens, examined it.

She had never held a handgun before. How hard could it be, though? She knew which was the business end, and that was a start, wasn’t it? She knew that rap artists in music videos liked to hold their guns sideways, though she couldn’t imagine how that made any difference to a bullet’s trajectory. She had seen too many movies where a gun didn’t go off because someone didn’t know about the safety. Did the gun have a safety? Was it even loaded?

Dammit. It didn’t come with handy instructions printed on the handle, and she didn’t have time to read anyway. The truth is, she had no idea what would happen if she squeezed the trigger. Maybe nothing. Maybe it needed to be cocked or something. But maybe the guy had left it in point-and-shoot mode.

One or the other. Probably the gun would do her more harm than good. The guy in the polarized-glass helmet would hear her squeeze the trigger, and nothing would happen, and he’d take her out. She scampered to the end of the bank of shelves and watched as the helmeted man raced over in the electric cart.

Then the man surprised her, getting out of the cart, stepping behind a pillar and—where was he?

Half a minute passed; still no sign of the man. She curled up on the lower shelf, concealing herself as best she could, and simply listened.

Then she heard him, and slowly craned her head. Her stomach dropped: The man had found her. He was walking toward her slowly. She remained stock-still, feeling like a frog that did not know it had been spotted.

“Come to papa,” the man said, walking slowly toward her. He held a black plastic device; electricity arced from one end of it menacingly. Some sort of stun gun, or Taser. He tossed a pair of plastic handcuffs at her. “Here, you can put the cuffs on yourself. Make things easy for you.”

Andrea still didn’t move.

“I can see you, you know,” the visored man said almost playfully. “There’s nobody else here. Just you and me. And I’m not in any great rush.” The electric wand arced and sparked as he strode closer to her. With his other hand, he loosened his leather belt, began massaging his crotch. “Hey, baby. Boss says it’s all about the greatest pleasure.” He took a few steps closer to her. “Yo bitch, why don’t you maximize my pleasure today?”

She squeezed the trigger without thinking, was shocked at the loudness of the report. The man in the visor stopped walking, but he did not fall to the ground or make a noise. Had she missed?

She squeezed the trigger again, and again. The third round shattered the man’s face-shield, and he finally fell backward in a heap.

Andrea clambered down to the floor, standing on wobbling legs. She walked over to the man she had shot. She recognized him, recognized the bat-wing eyebrows, the blotchy skin. He was one of the men who had taken her from her car at the Research Triangle Park. We have kill clearance yet? A shudder ran through her entire body. Then she saw the lifeless eyes of the man at her feet, and she suddenly doubled over and retched, the hot acid contents of her stomach streaming from her mouth, splashing on the man’s face, and, when she saw what had happened, she retched again.

A beefy arm reached around the Estonian minister’s shoulders. “Andrus!” boomed an overly hearty voice. A heavyset, boisterous man with an unshaveable beard shadow. His breath had the anise smell of a popular Estonian schnapps. “Come meet Stephanie Berger. She’s from Polygram. Very interested in the prospects of setting up a studio in Tallinn. Perhaps a distribution center, even.” He addressed the deputy minister in English out of deference to his English-speaking interloper.

Andrus Pärt turned to Belknap with an apologetic look. “This is unfortunate. You should have told me you were visiting Estonia.”

“My colleagues, on the contrary, think it’s very fortunate. That I happened to be in Tallinn when the crisis arose. Fortunate for us, that is.” He lowered his voice. “Perhaps fortunate for you?”

The deputy minister gave him a curious, unsettled look. “I will be right back, Roger…”

“Delamain,” Belknap said.

He drifted toward a long table draped in white lace, where servants busily took and fulfilled beverage requests, but he kept Andrus Pärt in the corner of his eye. The deputy minister listened to the woman with head nods and flashes of porcelain teeth. He clasped the upper arm of the boisterous man—a businessman, no doubt, and probably one of the underwriters of the affair—and made we’ll-continue-this-conversation-soon gestures. But he did not circle back immediately, Belknap observed. Instead, reaching for a cell phone, he disappeared into an adjoining room. When he returned, a few minutes later, he was decidedly more upbeat than before.

“Roger Delamain,” he said, giving the name a French pronunciation. “Thank you for your patience.”

“They say that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

“That’s almost exactly what we told the Cuprex Mining Company when they woke up and found that their African copper mines were being threatened by a murderous insurrection led by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Eternal vigilance, and twelve million dollars plus direct expenses: That’s the price of freedom, on an annualized basis.”

“And a bargain, I’m sure.” The deputy minister grabbed a small canapé from a silver tray that seemed to float through the crowd.

“It’s why I wished to speak to you, to be candid. I speak to you informally, this is understood, yes? I do not come as a registered agent of any company.”

“We are standing together at a reception, eating small triangles of cured meat on toast. What could be more informal?”

“I knew we should get along,” Belknap said conspiratorially. “What we seek to fulfill is a substantial order for small arms.”

“Surely Grinnell has its regular supplier.” Pärt was scrutinizing the bait.

“Regular suppliers do not always suffice for irregular demands. There are some who say I am given to understatement. I like to think I am only precise. When I say ‘substantial,’ I mean…enough to equip five thousand men, and fully.”

The deputy minister blinked. “Our entire army consists of fifteen thousand men.”

“Then you see the problem.”

“And this is to protect, what—installations, mines?” Black brows knitted in frank disbelief.

Belknap returned his curious, penetrative gaze with a bland one. “Minister Pärt, if you ever entrust me with a secret, you should feel confident that I will never divulge it. I speak institutionally as well as personally. One cannot prosper in the security business without earning a reputation for trustworthiness and discretion. I understand that you have questions. I hope you will not think ill of me if I decline to answer them.”

The deputy minister gave him a hard stare, which softened after a few seconds into something like approval. “I wish I could train my fellow nationals in the virtue of discretion. Greatly to my regret, they are not all so tight-lipped as you, Roger.” His eyes darted around, making sure that no one could overhear, and then he prompted, “But you somehow supposed I could be of help.”

“I was given to understand that you might be able to facilitate the kind of arrangement we require. I need hardly say that it would surely be profitable for all concerned.”

Belknap recognized the quickness of greed in the deputy minister’s face; it seeped through his veins like a drug and hurried his speech. “You said it was a substantial order you required.”

“Substantial,” Belknap repeated. Andrus Pärt was seeking reassurance about his kickback. “Which translates to substantial benefits and finder’s fees for the…matchmaker.”

“We are a small country, of course.” The man was testing him, tugging at the line.

“Small, yet rich in its customs, I had thought. If I am mistaken, if you do not have a vendor such as we seek, say so at once. We will look elsewhere. I should hate to waste your time.” Translation: Don’t waste mine.

The deputy minister waved to a tall, cadaverous dignitary across the room. He had spent too much time with the Grinnell director; it might become conspicuous, which would not do. “Roger, I do want to be of help. I do. Let me brood for a few minutes. We will talk again shortly.”

With that, the Estonian plunged into a crowd of chorus directors and music enthusiasts. Presently Belknap was able to hear Pärt’s voice exclaim, “A boxed set of highlights from the festival—what a marvelous idea!”

There was a rustling followed by admonitory hushing. On a raised, stepped platform on the far side of the room, the Empire State Chorus had assembled. Grinning from ear to ear, the baritones began snapping their fingers, and then singing. After a few bars, the room quieted enough to make them audible:

Belknap felt a shoulder tap, and turned to find the deputy minister at his elbow.

“Our national anthem,” Pärt whispered with a fixed smile.

“You must be very proud,” Belknap replied.

Through gritted teeth, the minister reproved, “Don’t be unkind.”

“Not unkind, I hope. Merely impatient. Can we do business?” Belknap spoke in murmured tones.

The deputy minister nodded, then gestured with a head tilt to the room off the main hall. They would speak there, out of view.

“Forgive me,” the Estonian said in a low, confiding voice. “It’s all very sudden. And irregular.”

“As it has been for us,” Belknap said. The deputy minister was still being coy; it was time to ratchet up the pressure. “I seem to have caused you more inconvenience than I had intended. There are other avenues for us to explore, and perhaps we should do so. Thank you for your time.” A curt bow.

“Your mastery of the subjunctive is admirable,” Belknap said in hushed reprimand. “I still fear that we waste each other’s time.” Now it is for you to win me back was the unspoken subtext.

“Earlier, Roger, you made a point about confidences and discretion. You observed that they are a mainstay of your business. Just so, caution is a mainstay of mine. You must indulge me in this respect. There may be occasions on which you are grateful of it.”

Drifting in from the banquet hall, in three-part harmony, came the words Forever may He bless and wield / O graciously all deeds of thine…

“Perhaps we will both need to compromise in our adherence to our cherished principles. You asked about our regular suppliers. I am sure a man of the world such as yourself understands that there can be upheavals in this business as in all others. No doubt you have heard reports of Khalil Ansari’s death.” He studied the Estonian’s expression as he pronounced the name. “No doubt you understand that established distribution networks can fall into disarray, while new ones establish themselves.”

Andrus Pärt looked uncomfortable; he knew enough about what Belknap was speaking about to realize that it was not an affair to be casually discussed—certainly not by a career politician like him. He needed to dig enough to be sure of his hunches; he did not wish to dig so far that his hands were soiled. Those would have been his calculations.

Belknap was weighing every word. “I know you are a man of taste. I am told that your country house in Paslepa is a thing of beauty.”

“It is a humble place, but my wife enjoys it.”

“Then perhaps she will enjoy it twice as much when you buy her a place that’s twice the size.”

A long, lingering look: This was a man pulled in different directions by avarice and uncertainty.

“Or perhaps not.” Another jerk on the fishing line, to set the hook: “I enjoyed my conversation with you immensely. But, again, perhaps it is time for me to look elsewhere. As you…cautioned me, Estonia is a very small country. I believe your message was that large fish seldom appear in small ponds.” Another curt bow, and this time Belknap really did walk toward the exit, where he heard the mass voices belt out This native country of mine!

A warm round of applause broke the silence, though it was muffled somewhat by the one-handed clapping from those holding glasses, napkins, canapés.

A hand on Belknap’s shoulder, a word whispered in his ear. “Estotek,” said the deputy minister. “On Ravala Puiestee.”

“I could have gotten that from directory assistance.”

“I assure you, the real nature of this entity is closely guarded indeed. I have your word that you will divulge it to no one.”

“But of course,” Belknap replied.

“The principal goes by the name Lanham.”

“An odd name for an Estonian.”

“But not so odd for an American.”

An American. Belknap’s eyes narrowed.

“I think you will find that your needs can be met,” Pärt went on. “We are a small pond. But some of our fish are sizable indeed.”

“Impressive,” Belknap said frostily. “This native country of yours. Shall I send Lanham your regards?”

The deputy minister looked suddenly uneasy. “The most intimate relationships are sometimes conducted at more than arm’s length,” he said. “Let me be clear. This isn’t someone I’ve ever met face-to-face.” He held himself stiffly, as if suppressing a shudder. “Nor do I care to.”