Amarillo, Texas

“That thing still recording?” the large Texan asked with a grin. He had been expansive in defending himself from his critics, and seemed pleased that the reporter—was he from Forbes or Fortune?—didn’t interrupt him in midflow. The wall behind him was filled with photographs of him hunting, fishing, and skiing. A framed cover of a trade magazine proclaimed him the BUCCANEER OF BEEF.

“No worries,” said the smaller, bearded man in the visitor’s chair drawn up before the Texan’s mahogany desk. “I always bring spare batteries.”

“Because I can be a big talker when I get worked up.”

“A man doesn’t get to be the CEO of one of the country’s largest beef producers without knowing how to explain where he’s coming from, I’d guess.” The smaller man’s eyes were bright beneath his thick-framed glasses, and he smiled easily. Not like most journalists, in the Texan’s experience.

“Well, the truth is eloquent, like my pappy used to say. As for those rumors concerning the misuse of employee pension funds—rumors is all they are. The offer that I’ve proposed is in the best interests of the shareholders. What I’m saying is, Do the math. Aren’t shareholders people, too? Maiden aunts and little old ladies, plenty of ’em. You ever hear those community groups worrying about the shareholders?”

The man with the tape recorder nodded vigorously. “And our readers will want to hear more about that. But, while there’s still that good light from the outdoors coming in, I’m thinking that our photographer’s going to want to take a few shots of you. That okay?”

A toothy smile. “Bring it on. The left profile’s best, I’d say.”

The smaller man left the Texan’s corner office and returned with another man, powerfully built, with a square head and short light-brown hair, not immediately identifiable as a wig. He carried a camera bag and what looked like a tripod in a case.

The CEO extended a hand. “Avery Haskin,” he said. “But you knew that. I was telling your colleague Jonesy there that my left profile’s probably best.”

“I’m Smith,” said the photographer. “And I’ll make it as quick as I can. You mind sitting just the way you are, at your desk?”

“You’re the boss,” Haskin said. “No, wait—I’m the boss.”

“Funny guy,” Smith said. Standing behind the CEO of Haskell Beef, he opened what looked like a tripod case and removed a captive-bolt pneumatic gun.

The Texan turned around in his chair and saw what Smith had in his hands. Immediately his smile vanished.

“What the hell—”

“Oh, you recognize it. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? It’s what cattlemen use to slaughter cows, isn’t it?”

“Goddammit—”

“Be a mistake to move,” Smith interrupted in a chilly voice. “Course, it might be a mistake not to.”

“Listen to me. You fellers animal-rights activists? You gotta know something. Killing me won’t change a goddamn thing.”

“It’ll save the pensions of fifteen thousand workers,” Jones said airily, fingering his facial hair—wool-crepe fibers affixed with stipple wax. “Fifteen thousand of them, one of you. Do the math, huh?”

“But I like that you assume we’re animal-rights whackos,” Smith put in. “Natural assumption, when you dispatch the chief of a beef-producing company with the very instrument of professional slaughter. Leastways we thought so. It’ll definitely put the investigators on the wrong track.”

“Bet our friend Avery here isn’t much for seafood,” said Smith. “You an organ donor, Avery?”

“What?” Sweat beaded on the Texan’s forehead. “What did you say?”

“He is now,” Jones reminded his colleague. “I filled out the forms in his name more than a week ago.”

“So here we go,” Smith said, adjusting the lead-length of the captive-bolt stunner. “A veritable bolt from the blue, huh? A pretty funny way to go for a cattleman.”

“You think it’s funny? Oh, Jesus, please, sweet Jesus…”

“Fact is, one day we’ll look back on this and laugh,” said the man with the captive-bolt gun. He caught Jones’s eyes.

“And laugh? You’re off your rocker!” Avery Haskin’s voice rose in incredulity and rage.

“Oh, I didn’t mean you,” said Smith, as he sent the bolt deep into Haskin’s brain. Unconsciousness was instant, irrevocable, but the pons and the medulla at the base of the brain—responsible for respiration and heartbeat—would remain intact. At the hospital, an EKG would confirm that the CEO was brain-dead. Then the organ harvesting would begin.

Prime meat, Smith reflected. A fine destiny for the buccaneer of beef.

New York

Andrea Bancroft, who had been half-slumbering beside him, yawned and blinked.

“How are you doing?” he asked. She did not respond at first. He placed a hand on hers, gently. “You doing okay?”

“Still a little deafened from the trip over,” she said. They had traveled directly from Larnaca to Kennedy International Airport, but not in an aircraft made for passengers. Instead, they took a DHL jet, a windowless cargo hauler whose pilot Belknap had known for years. They had been, in effect, stowaways. The chartered DC-8 had returned to Tallinn, and he didn’t know what names might have been added to the international watch lists that the commercial airlines were obliged to track. The freighter solved a number of immediate problems. Still, a cargo jet was not designed for passenger comfort. Outside the cockpit, hinged benches were attached to the bulkhead, for backup crews, but the soundproofing, like the heating, was fairly perfunctory.

“Sorry about the ride,” Belknap said. “It seemed better than the alternatives, though.”

“I’m not complaining. At least I’m finished vomiting.”

“Your body was trying to get the fentanyl out of your system.”

“I’m just sorry you had to see it. Not very romantic.”

“The bastards could have killed you, or worse.”

“Right. I must remember to send you a thank-you note. Anyway, now you’ve heard all my secrets. I was running my mouth for a while, wasn’t I?”

“It passed the time.” His eyes were smiling.

“I still feel kind of wiped.”

“Four Duragesic patches. That’s going to pack a punch.”

“Four, huh.”

“I told you. Two on your ass, one on your shoulder, one on your inner thigh. All infusing a powerful narcotic into your bloodstream. Plus there’s a nasty bruise on your thigh you should keep an eye on.”

“Say, how did you get all those patches off me anyway?” She was blushing.

“How do you think? No nurse matron at hand.”

“I get the picture.”

“Respiratory depression isn’t a real healthy condition, okay? What was I supposed to do?”

“I’m not complaining. Christ. I’m grateful.”

“You’re embarrassed. Which is crazy.”

“I know it is. I know it is. It’s just a little…further than I usually go on a first date. The stripped-naked part.”

Belknap kept his eyes trained on the traffic ahead of him and said nothing. After a while he asked, “Still no memory of your abduction?”

“I remember arriving at Larnaca, I remember checking into the place on Nikolaou Rossou. Then it’s like a black fog. The drugs, I guess. There’s a long period where I can’t remember much at all. Just flashes and glimpses. Maybe I hallucinated this, but I had a memory of you holding me. For hours.”

He shrugged. “I guess I was scared.”

“For me?”

“Which is why you’re bad news, sister. A good agent should be unattached.” He spoke gruffly, but couldn’t avoid a catch-in-the-throat moment of recollection. “Jared always said that.”

“You think Stavros knew what he was in for?”

“Hard to say. Stavros was pulling strings, but he was in the grips of his own puppet masters, who were pulling his strings. Rashly, this time.”

“They feel threatened.”

“We’ve been trampling on a tripwire,” Belknap said. “The piano was supposed to drop on our heads.”

“And I’ve been rummaging through the records of the piano factory.”

He eyes darted to the rearview mirror, keeping tabs on the vehicles around him. Instinct would tell him whether they were being followed. He glanced at a bent-over woman on the roadside with a shopping cart filled with bottles: a plant? No, the real thing, he concluded, with the kind of matted hair that required weeks of neglect. “You told me about what happened at Rosendale. You can’t let it prey on your mind.”

“Doing what I did—does it change a person?” Her voice was small.

“It does if you let it.”

She shuttered her eyes. “When it happened, I felt like I was going to hell. Like I’d crossed a line, gone to a place I could never return from. And somehow, after what happened to me in Larnaca, I don’t exactly feel that way anymore. Because there’s a kind of evil here that doesn’t play by any rules I know about.” She opened her eyes, and there was a glint of defiance in them. “Now I feel I’m going to hell only if they drag me there. And I’ll go kicking and screaming.”

He looked at her gravely. You killed two people, he thought. Two people who wanted to kill you. Welcome to the club. “You did what you had to do. Nothing more, nothing less,” he said. “They thought you were weak. They were wrong. And thank God for that.”

They were wounded, he knew, both of them, in ways both deep and invisible. Yet he also knew that to take the time to tend to an injury would slow them down, maybe with fatal consequences. There would be a time for healing, but that time was not now.

“So what now?” Andrea said tonelessly. “What are we looking at?”

“You still mad at me for going to Cyprus?” Her hazel eyes glinted in the morning light.

“Mad and glad. I was there, driving around Stavros’s place, and it was the middle of the day there, and the sun was blazing. And you weren’t there. And, to me, even though it was the middle of the day, it felt like night. There was a kind of darkness to it all.”

“Darkness at noon,” Andrea mused. Another look of wan amusement. “That could make a good title for a novel, don’t you think?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. A lame joke. So what’s the plan?”

“Go back to something you just said. About them being threatened. Because we’re not the real threat. Something else frightens them more. Something or someone. Stavros was scared—but not of me. He was scared of what he thought I represented: Genesis. But also of Senator Bennett Kirk, the Kirk Commission. They were linked in his mind.”

“Could Genesis be working through the Kirk Commission?” she asked. “I’m just trying to connect the dots.” She shook her head. “Christ. A United States senator in the pocket of a crazed maniac? Now there’s a thought.”

“I don’t know that Kirk’s in anyone’s pocket, exactly. Like you say, maybe the idea was that Genesis was using him. Working through him. Feeding him stuff, maybe.”

“Meaning the senator’s a cat’s-paw? But that’s insanity!”

“Or hers, or its.” She wriggled in her seat, shifting to face him again. “Is that why we’re driving to Washington?”

“Glad you’re alert enough to read the traffic signs.”

“I’m getting a Daniel-in-the-lion’s-den vibe. Are you sure this is the safest course of action?”

“On the contrary. I’m sure it isn’t. You want me to do the safest thing?”

“Hell, no,” she answered without hesitation. “I want to make things right. I’m not built for living in fear, okay? I’m not built that way. Cowering in a cave somewhere isn’t my style.”

“Mine neither. You know, you could have made a kick-ass government agent. The salaries aren’t much, but you can’t beat the parking spaces.” Belknap’s eyes darted once again to the rearview mirror as he spoke. Still no sign that they had been followed. I-95 was the busiest corridor in the whole Northeast. There was protection in the sheer profusion of humanity.

“Join the world and see the army.” Andrea stretched. “Do we have an operating hypothesis? Let’s go over this one more time. Do we think Paul Bancroft is Genesis?”

“What do you think?”

“Paul Bancroft is a brilliant man, a visionary, an idealist—I truly believe that. But also a dangerous man.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s the extremity of his vision that makes it monstrous. But what motivates him isn’t vanity. It’s not a personal lust for power or money.”

“A man tries to impose his system of morality on the rest of the world, I’d say that—”

“But wouldn’t we all do that, if we could? Remember what Winston Smith says in Orwell’s 1984: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.’”

“Two plus two equals four. That works.”

“You can’t always doubt yourself. Sometimes, Andrea, you’ve got to be willing to take your own side of an argument.”

“No, Todd, you can’t always doubt yourself. I’ll give you that. But if someone else is going to define my freedom. I’d rather it be people who weren’t completely sure they were always right. Uncertainty can be a discipline. Not in the sense of being rudderless or indecisive, but in the sense of knowing we’re not infallible. Of being open to the possibility that our judgments aren’t definitive and beyond revising.”

“You’re the niece of a big thinker, and you sound like one, too. Maybe you’re Genesis.”

She snorted. “Please.”

“Assuming it isn’t Jared Rinehart,” he added bleakly.

“You really think it could be him?” Andrea’s gaze returned to the road, which spooled before them like an endless gray river.

“Maybe.”

“The way you described him running away from you, the way he looked—reminds me of something Paul Bancroft once told me. He said common sense isn’t a matter of seeing what’s in front of your eyes. It’s a matter of seeing what’s in front of the other fellow’s eyes.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Genesis. You think maybe it’s Jared Rinehart.” She turned to face him. “Maybe Jared Rinehart thinks it’s you.”

Belknap could tell that Andrea had something on her mind, and continued to study her, looking for the subtle fissures of delayed trauma.

“You want to talk about Rosendale?” he said, finally, after they had both brushed their teeth. He wanted her to know that this door was open; he wasn’t encouraging her to go through it.

“There’s…what happened,” she said haltingly. “And then there’s what I learned.”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“I want to tell you about what I learned.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

She nodded quickly. He could see the effort with which she pulled herself together. “You need to understand—in the world of securities research, there’s what we call the raw-data stage. That’s where I am.”

Even in the yellowish glow of the cheap lamp, she looked beautiful. “Should I want to wait for the glossy cover page and the spiral binding?”

Andrea half-smiled, but her eyes were intent. “I’m seeing patterns of payments. All around the world. Timing suggests the possibility of electoral manipulation.” She was focused now, speaking with growing confidence.

“Swinging elections? Getting favored candidates in office?”

“All circumstantial, but that’s part of it, I think. Can’t leave the fate of Partido por la Democracia in the hands of ordinary citizens, I guess.”

“Slow down, Andrea. Walk me through this.”

“And you know this how?”

“Basically, there’s evidence of a lot of exchange-rate optimizing, probably because they were shifting tens of millions of dollars into the local currency and the foundation wasn’t nearly as rich as it would later become. Likewise, in 1969 you see a major conversion into the Ghanaian cedi. I looked at the foundation’s official reports, and there were no major initiatives in Ghana dating to that time. But it’s the same time that the head of the Progress Party, Kofi A. Busia, is sworn into power as prime minister. I’m sure the guy was irresistible to Paul Bancroft.”

He glanced at Andrea. “What did he do?”

“Start with who he was. This guy had a Ph.D. from Oxford University, had been a professor of sociology at the University of Leiden, in Holland. I bet the Bancroft people were convinced that he was just their kind of guy, a cosmopolitan committed to the common good. Looks like he disappointed his backers, though, because two years later he was ousted. Dead two years after that.”

“And you think the Bancroft Foundation—”

Belknap looked it over. She must have uploaded the document online before she left and printed it out at the copy shop. “Pin money,” he grunted. “Chump change.”

“These are just the official subventions. They buy you the names of the relevant principals, that’s all. Based on currency-conversion data, I’d guess that the real transfers are actually a hundred times greater.”

“Christ. They’re buying themselves another government.”

“Because the people aren’t smart enough to decide for themselves. That’s how they figure it.” She shook her head. “And so much of the stuff is done through computer networks. There’s a guy I know, Walter Sachs, who’s a real whiz at the tech stuff. Works at the hedge fund I was at. A strange cat in some ways, but brilliant.”

“You’re talking about an I.T. guy at a hedge fund?”

“Strange, I know. Graduated near the top of his class at M.I.T. Working at the hedge fund is his way of not working. It’s tiddlywinks for him. Means he can spend most of the day vegging out. He’s a whiz with an ambition deficit.”

“Andrea, you need to be very careful who you talk to, who you trust,” Belknap said sharply. “For their sake as well as your own.”

“I know.” She sighed. “It’s just so goddamn frustrating. All this information, so little knowledge. Theta. Genesis. Paul Bancroft. Jared Rinehart. Rome. Tallinn. Arms dealing. Political manipulation. It’s like we’re looking at all these tentacles and we’re still not sure who the octopus is.”

They thrashed through what they knew for a few minutes longer, but made no real progress. Exhaustion, a bone-deep enervation they both shared, befogged their concentration like dark fumes, and, by mutual assent, they turned in. He chose the bed closest to the window. A shared room with separate beds: There was intimacy, and there was distance. It seemed right.

Sleep should have come easily, but it came with difficulty. He awoke several times in the night, staring at the hateful visage of Richard Lugner. At other moments Jared Rinehart appeared to him, shimmering with an unearthly glow, walking through the corridors and recesses of Belknap’s mind.

I’ll always be here for you. Rinehart at the funeral of Belknap’s wife.

Know this, my friend. You will always have me. Rinehart, on the phone just hours after Belknap heard about Louisa’s death during an operation in Belfast.

In a life of inconstancy, Jared Rinehart had proved the one constant thing. His cool intelligence, his steadfast loyalty, his quick, mischievous wit. He was a friend, an ally, even a polestar. Whenever he was needed he would suddenly appear, as if guided by a sixth sense.

He heard distant traffic sounds, and nearby breathing, Andrea’s. At first her breaths were deep, metronomic. Then they began to grow ragged. He heard her cry out in her sleep, muted sounds of distress, and when he turned toward her, her arms were flailing out as if to protect her from unseen assailants.

He came to her, touched her face. “Andrea,” he whispered.

She thrashed again in her sleep, convulsed by nightmares, and he held her flailing arms.

“Andrea,” he repeated.

Her eyes blinked open, staring, terrified. She was breathing hard now, as if she had been running.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You were having a nightmare.”

“A nightmare,” she repeated, her voice thick with sleep.

“You’re awake now. You’re here with me. Everything’s okay.” The dim light—street illumination leaking from the edges of the window blinds—modeled her cheekbones, her soft skin, her lips.

Her eyes focused now, registered the comforting lie. “Please,” she said. “Please hold me.” A whispered command.

He pushed the damp hair from her brow, put his arms around her. She was slender and firm in his arms. She was warm and made him feel warm.

“Andrea,” he said. He breathed in deeply, somehow intoxicated by her fragrance, her warmth, her presence. Her face glowed like porcelain.

“It’s not over, is it?” she asked. “The nightmare.”

He drew her nearer to him, and she clutched at him, at first with fear, and then with something else, something like tenderness.