PRAISE FOR JAMES W. HALL

“A masterful writer.”

—James Patterson

“No writer working today . . . more clearly evokes the shadows and loss that hide within the human heart.”

—Robert Crais

“The king of the Florida-gothic noir.”

—Dennis Lehane

“Delivers taut and muscular stories about a place where evil always lurks beneath the surface.”

—Michael Connelly

“I believe no one has written more lyrically of the Gulf Stream since Ernest Hemingway.”

—James Lee Burke

“Hall keeps the tension mounting as motives and alliances shift with the foul-scented wind. Even as violence looms, Hall’s talent for description adds a balancing, poetical note.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Big Finish

“As ever, Hall is in colorful command of his South Florida setting . . . Compared to other mystery writers, he plays things refreshingly low key, but he’s always in control, thriving on the setup as much as the payoff . . . with its nicely observed characters and lively dialogue—and terrific sex scenes—it keeps readers turning the pages.”

—Kirkus Reviews on Going Dark

“A damn good mystery.”

—Booklist on Dead Last

“Hall is one of those rare thriller writers who can build character as he ratchets tension, who can do no-holds-barred action scenes with panache and, in the midst of bedlam, never lose sight of nuance. All those skills are on display here, as Hall assembles a full-bodied supporting cast whose stories hold our interest as much as Thorn’s attempt to save his son without helping to bring about a South Florida version of Chernobyl. A fine thriller on every level.”

—Booklist on Going Dark

“Hall’s latest novel, titled Going Dark, proves he’s one of the best genre writers working today.”

—Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered

OTHER TITLES BY JAMES W. HALL

Harper McDaniel Series

When They Come for You

The Thorn Series

Under Cover of Daylight

Tropical Freeze

Mean High Tide

Gone Wild

Buzz Cut

Red Sky at Night

Blackwater Sound

Off the Chart

Magic City

Hell’s Bay

Silencer

Dead Last

Going Dark

The Big Finish

Stand-Alone Novels

Bones of Coral

Hard Aground

Body Language

Rough Draft

Forests of the Night

Short Story Collections

Paper Products

Over Exposure

Nonfiction

Hit Lit

Hot Damn

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2018 by James W. Hall

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781503903067

ISBN-10: 1503903060

Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

CONTENTS

START READING

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

PART TWO

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

PART THREE

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

PART FOUR

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off.

—Deuteronomy 28:40

PART ONE

ONE

Madrid, Spain

Gerda watched the tall American leave the vegetable market with her net bag half-full. As usual, the woman was oblivious, doing no countersurveillance, no backward glances or sidelong looks, no sudden stops, no switching back against the flow. Dim-witted woman heedless of Gerda, her icy shadow.

Gerda followed on the sidewalk across the avenue, a half block back. The woman, Harper McDaniel, was doing her daily food shopping, venturing to the same four shops as yesterday. After shopping, she would return to her hotel. Almost a month in this city and every day was the same routine.

The American was a slow walker. To keep pace with her, Gerda had to reduce her stride to an amble. She hated ambling.

Gerda also detested Madrid. Late September and it was still muggy and crowded with noisy children and tourists, and the food was foul. She would be relieved when the woman departed the city, headed off to wherever it was she was going next.

The McDaniel woman stopped at a fruit stand to buy more oranges. Or perhaps a single banana, which she fancied now and then.

After grocery shopping, she would take her prizes back to the hotel and stay inside her room until one o’clock in the afternoon, when she strolled to the national library and photocopied internet articles and pages from books, all of it about the olive-oil business. Gerda hovered nearby as the McDaniel woman read and searched the stacks, watching her page through periodicals and books, choosing what to copy.

Around five the woman carted her papers back to the hotel and stayed in her room all night, where she dined alone, no pleasure, no friends. Hotel to markets, hotel to library, back to hotel.

In the weeks Gerda had been tailing her, the woman’s limp had improved. Back in Bilbao, the American dragged her left leg as though it were hollow and filled with lead shot. Today it appeared almost normal.

Gerda had been warned the American woman was a skilled combatant. She was instructed to proceed with care. She was told the woman was smart, strong, fast, dangerous. Gerda saw none of this. She saw a half-lame woman, too skinny, too tall, a gangly creature with a weak leg and long black hair that would be easy to grip and use to twist her head back and expose her naked throat. This was not a woman to fear, not a woman who required special precautions.

While the American woman chose her fruit, Gerda dallied in a cramped pharmacy. She pretended to interest herself in a rack of pain pills. Pain pills for every part of the body, in every dosage and shape. Gerda had no pains. She was untroubled by discomfort of any kind.

She was fit and strong, “a perfect anatomical specimen,” as the newspapers had described her after her triumph at the Olympic decathlon. She’d won a silver medal for her homeland, while the gold went to a Russian steroid junkie. Betrüger. Cheater.

Even today, these three years later, Gerda remained superbly fit. She was five foot nine, still exactly 67.5 kilograms, or 149 pounds of ripped, perfectly proportioned musculature. She could sprint, vault, and hurl the discus and javelin, high-jump, long-jump, shot-put better than any female decathlete in the world. Her high-jump record still stood at six and a half feet. Her standing vertical jump was thirty-seven inches. Better than most American basketball stars.

Gerda followed all the international track-and-field events, checked the times and distances of her former competitors and a few promising newcomers. No one matched her performance records, no one even close. Still at her peak. No pains. No injuries. She was Gerda the Invincible.

Undefeated, except for that miserable, drug-assisted Russian, Tatiana Zyablikova. Dead and buried now, poor thing, a gruesome end. Decapitated in a hit-and-run accident. Which was no accident.

Struck down by a five-ton snow-removal truck with its plow raised to shoulder height. That beastly vehicle smashed into poor Tatiana at high speed as she crossed Sobornaya Square in the black heart of her country. Russia . . . now there was a truly wretched land.

McDaniel was moving again, off to the panadería for her daily baguette, which meant there was only one store left on her rounds, la quesería. The woman loved her cheese.

Patience was not one of Gerda’s gifts. Obedience, however, was. If it had been Gerda’s choice, by now the McDaniel woman’s body would be decaying deep inside the earth. But Gerda was not permitted to act until the order came. Till then she would follow and observe as instructed. Simply record the woman’s movements and note any contact she made with other individuals.

Until Gerda was notified by her boss, all she could do was watch. Watch and salivate.

TWO

Hotel Gran Meliá Fénix, Madrid, Spain

“This line’s secure?”

“You damn well know it is,” Lavonne said. “And your phone?”

“Burner,” said Harper. “I’ll toss it when we’re done.”

“Still in Bilbao?”

“Madrid.”

“You left Bilbao why?”

“Needed a change of scenery.”

“Are you on the run, in hiding?”

“I’m fine. It’s just what I said. Four months rehabbing my leg on those steep streets, I was sick of Bilbao. It was dreary, rained all the time. I’m a Florida girl, I need sunshine. Bilbao’s sky was so hazy I just wanted to nap all day. It was time to move.”

“Not getting out of bed . . . maybe that was more than the weather.”

“Of course it was. I’m not trying to fool myself.”

Harper McDaniel looked out the hotel window at the scene below, a sunny side street near the Plaza de Colón, the smell of pastries and diesel fumes. A steamy Madrid morning, summer hanging on. Absently, she ran a fingertip around the sleek rim of scar tissue above her knee. It was a new bad habit, reliving the grim memories that flooded back when she fondled that seam in her flesh.

After a moment she caught herself and tugged the hem of her skirt to hide the scar. She peeled off another wedge of orange and slipped it into her mouth. Succulent with a tart edge, like the ones in the backyard in Miami, her home. When she’d still had a home.

“So talk to me, Harper.”

“I’m ready to get back to work.”

A pause. Lavonne humming to herself, buying a few seconds.

Then: “Rehab complete? Everything healed?”

“If you mean my leg, yes.”

“And the rest of you? Has the sunshine helped?”

“What do you want from me, Lavonne? Am I still grieving? Damn right. Everybody says give it time. Screw that. It’s like I’m wading through quicksand. Most mornings I wake up, there’s a bag of cement on my chest. So yes, my leg is better. That’s the best I can say.”

Lavonne was silent for several breaths, then in a quiet voice:

“Last winter, after Ross and Leo were killed, it was just a week later, you got on your saddle and rode after the bad guys. Africa, Switzerland. I didn’t say anything at the time. Everybody handles loss their own way. But what I’ve seen is, you can’t cheat grief, no way to speed up the process. Yeah, you can push it aside for a while, go manic, but sooner or later it comes back and won’t stop ripping at your guts till it’s done.”

“Look, I appreciate your concern. I do. You’ve been a good friend, Lavonne, and I thank you. But I need to get back to work.”

“Just so I’m clear, you talking about coming back to work for me?”

“No, not that.”

“Okay.” A pause that lasted several breaths. “So what then?”

“I need new IDs, a passport, maybe a couple of different ones just to be safe, a few other docs I’ll tell you about, just little things.”

Lavonne groaned. “You consider those ‘little things’?”

“Can you help me?”

“For your personal vendetta, you want to tap into DCS resources?”

“You’ve got a dog in the fight,” Harper said. “Albion shot you too.”

“He wasn’t the first, probably won’t be the last.”

“If he’d killed your husband and son, would you be so glib?”

Lavonne fell silent for a moment, absorbing the blow.

“That’s not fair, Harper.”

Harper didn’t reply.

“Look, the man was found innocent. Extradition failed. It’s over. I don’t like it, but there’s nothing to be done.”

“DNA match, public confession, a video showing him in the act, for god’s sake. The judges were paid off.”

“Sorry, honey. Doesn’t matter. Guy’s one of their leading citizens. Maybe money changed hands, maybe it didn’t. All we know is the magistrates caved. It’s officially finished. As difficult as it is to accept, when the courts have spoken, that’s it. Unlike you, I’m bound by the law.”

“Sure you are, whenever it’s convenient.”

“Anything else you want to talk about?”

“Okay, okay,” Harper said. “I get it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I called.”

They’d known each other for years, she and Lavonne. First contact was in Milan when Harper was working alongside her mother, Deena, on a photo shoot. At dawn one morning Lavonne rapped on Harper’s hotel room door. Harper opened the door to the statuesque African American stranger, and Lavonne breezed past Harper into the room, introduced herself, and launched into her pitch. Recruiting her as an asset for a special task force within the Defense Clandestine Service, an elite intelligence unit buried away inside a half dozen obscure agencies within the Defense Department.

Other than two decades of martial arts training, Harper had zero relevant experience at the time. But because her mother, Deena Roberts, a celebrity photographer, had regular access to some of the globe’s most influential people—from rock musicians and movie stars to reclusive princes and brutal despots—Lavonne believed that Harper, who worked as Deena’s assistant, was perfectly positioned to gather intel on certain power players hidden behind otherwise impenetrable layers of security.

All Harper had to do was listen, pass along anything juicy, maybe take guidance from Lavonne now and then. Espionage Lite.

Bored and directionless at the time, disenchanted by her menial role as her mother’s protégé, Harper had been intrigued by the idea and eventually accepted.

Next had come training. Claiming she needed a break, Harper took a leave from her apprenticeship with Deena and did a six-month stint at Harvey Point, a DOD facility in North Carolina, followed by six weeks at Quantico. Weapons training and surveillance techniques. Skills that last winter had saved her life.

Now in her Madrid hotel room, Harper listened to the empty phone line, to the white noise that haunted the thousands of miles between them, a fierce low crackle like the hum of blood in her veins.

Breathing quietly, she kept her eyes on the street below, expecting at any second for Lavonne to sever their connection. Sever it forever.

After another pause, Lavonne cleared her throat and said, “Do you have a plan?”

Harper settled back in her chair and exhaled quietly.

“Olive oil,” she said.

“Olive oil?”

“It’s Albion’s current pet project, groves in southern Italy.”

“Olive oil isn’t a plan.”

“Don’t worry, Lavonne, I have a plan.”

“And how do you happen to know this is Albion’s pet project?”

“Is that important?”

“Let me guess. Adrian Naff, he’s feeding you information.”

After a moment of internal debate, Harper said yes, Adrian had steered her to olive oil. A place to start, nothing more. Olive groves in Puglia, the bootheel of Italy. Beyond that, she was on her own.

“What’s Naff’s agenda? Top dog on Albion’s security team takes a huge risk and throws you a tidbit? What makes you think he isn’t playing you?”

“He’s an honest guy.”

“You know that how?”

“I know, Lavonne.”

“Oh, right, you read his eyes. A superpower skill you picked up from Deena. Photographer’s trick. You gaze deep into Naff’s baby browns and, bingo, you know he’s honest.”

“Scoffing at me, Lavonne? Is that how it is?”

“Okay, let’s say you’re right. Naff is honest. You think that’s his sole motivation for helping you?”

“He’s trying to get me in the sack.”

“Well, of course he is, a single guy that age. So you’re leading him on, not the other way around? That’s what you think?”

“Don’t worry,” Harper said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“All right,” she said. “Go on, then. I’d like to hear this plan. In fact, if I’m going to assist you, I have to hear it.”

Harper closed her eyes, summoned the lines she’d prepared.

“Have you ever seen a bullfight, Lavonne, start to finish? A real one?”

“I know how they work, but no, can’t say I’ve seen one.”

“Well, there’re three acts. First is the tercio de varas. That’s the picadors. They come on horseback with their barbed lances. They injure the bull, slow him down, piss him off. Display the bull’s tendencies. Next is the suerte de banderillas.”

“Yeah, yeah. Guy with the fancy spikes or whatever they are,” Lavonne said. “Stabs the bull’s shoulders, which pisses him off even more.”

“Right, and last there’s the suerte suprema. The matador, with his cape and sword.”

“And that’s you?”

“Anger, enrage, dominate. Those are the three stages.”

“Dominate, as in kill.”

“Draw Albion out, knock him off balance, infuriate him until he charges.”

“And you have no choice but to defend yourself. Eye for an eye.”

Harper didn’t answer.

“Very convenient. Keeps you on the moral high ground.”

“Morality isn’t a consideration.”

“Oh, come on, Harper. I know you better than that. If it wasn’t a consideration, you’d walk up to him on the street and gun him down.”

“Risk getting caught, spending the rest of my life in jail? He’s not worth it.”

“Who you trying to fool? You don’t worry about risks. Face it, like it or not, girl, you’ve got a conscience.”

Harper looked out her window and said nothing.

She could hear Lavonne tapping a pen against her desk, a solemn cadence.

“Albion won’t come himself. He’ll send others for you.”

“When they all fail, he won’t be able to resist. That’s who he is.”

“And how do you go about provoking him? What’s your red cape?”

“I’m still working out the details.”

“What happened to Sal, your charming goombah granddad? And your debonair brother, Nick? They bail on you?”

“I want to do this alone.”

“Alone but with my help.”

Harper stared down at the street at an elderly man on a bicycle with a dozen baguettes strapped to his rear fender. Every day at this hour she saw him pass, a cook’s helper at a tapas bar on the main plaza.

“I think that’s a mistake. Cutting your granddad and brother out of the equation.”

Harper said nothing. The topic wasn’t open for debate.

“Sal, Nick, they give you stability.”

“I’m plenty stable on my own.”

“Sure you are. I’m not questioning that. But how long’s it been since you talked to either of them?”

“A few weeks.”

“Do they even know where you are, what you’re up to?”

“How’s that any of your business?”

“You just cut them off? Left Bilbao without a forwarding address?”

“This is my war, not theirs.”

“Weeks since they heard from you, those two must be worried sick. That’s cruel, Harper. Least you could do is stay in touch, let them know you’re safe.”

“I sent them each a postcard last month, told them I’m fine and they should sit tight till they hear from me again.”

“A postcard.”

“I didn’t just disappear. I’m not cruel.”

But of course Lavonne was right. Despite the postcard, Sal and Nick would be distraught over her disappearance. But hurt feelings were a small price to keep them safe.

“Look, honey, those two guys round you out. There’s a synergy boost with them around. You make a good team. Do me a favor, okay?”

Harper was silent.

“Give them a call. Bring them up to date. Talk this through. Listen to their input, what they can offer. I worry about you going this alone.”

“I’ll consider it.” Though Harper had no intention of taking her advice. “So are you going to help me or not?”

Lavonne said in a quiet voice, “This has to be off the books. Way off.”

“Thank you, Lavonne. Thank you.”

“And when it’s done, you’ll come back to work for me. That’s the deal.”

“Deena’s dead. What do I have to offer on my own?”

“You still on a first-name basis with superstars and sultans?”

“A few.”

“Good enough,” Lavonne said. “I’ll give you names I’m interested in, you dream up a project that includes them. Something flattering, a chance to have their pretty faces in a coffee-table book, on the walls of some fancy-ass art gallery. Same way Deena worked.”

“I’ll think about it. But I’m not Deena. I don’t have her magnetism or her fame.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, girl.”

There was more silence, then Lavonne said, “Where you staying in Madrid?”

“A hotel.”

“What hotel?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“If I get your passports done in time, I’ll have them delivered.”

Harper told her the name of her hotel.

“Okay, good. Now there’s one more condition. It’s nonnegotiable.”

Lavonne’s terms were simple. If Harper was determined to put herself in harm’s way again, she needed to upgrade her combat skills. A dead agent, Lavonne said, was no use to her.

Harper didn’t object. A month to finish getting in shape, refine her hand-to-hand technique, prepare for the battle ahead. Lavonne needed a week to set it up with the sensei at the dojo. A week was fine, Harper told her.

The good news: there was no need for Harper to return stateside, because the trainer Lavonne had in mind was only a few hours south of Madrid. The man’s name was Marco González, and his dojo was in the Santa Cruz district of Sevilla. Though he was perhaps a bit unorthodox in his methods, Marco had trained several of Lavonne’s top field agents, and all of them, she said without a trace of irony, were still alive.

“You’ll like Sevilla. It’s beautiful,” Lavonne said. “Flamenco y sol.”

“I was there when I was eight. I remember it vividly.”

“One of Deena’s celebrity shoots?”

“That’s right.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Moonwalk, sparkly white glove.”

“Deena shot the King of Pop?”

“He was on a European leg of the Dangerous tour. Had a couple of days free between Madrid and Lisbon. He was sponsoring a charity in Sevilla, so Deena met him there. Took some outdoor black-and-white shots. Very simple, very authentic. He loved the photos. Used one on an album cover.”

“Deena brought you and Nick along? You met Michael Jackson?”

“He was very kind, very shy.”

“It always amazes me,” Lavonne said, “the circles you run in.” She gave Harper the address of the dojo in Sevilla, then said, “Really? You’re not shitting me. Jacko himself?”

“A sweet man . . . sweet and sad.”

As eager as Harper was to resume her quest, her fitness had clearly declined in the years since she’d last trained in judo and karate in Miami. A teenager then, in her midthirties now, her muscle memory was sharp, and the moves still there, though there was no denying her speed and power had diminished.

The bad news: reconnecting with Lavonne meant Harper would be tethered to a desk spy in DC. Though Lavonne was a good woman, honest, frank, and ingenious, with access to a vast arsenal of databases and invaluable back-channel info, Harper would still be tethered.

But by god, she was determined to keep her granddad and brother out of the next phase of her war against Lester Albion and the corporation he headed.

Though Sal and Nick had been invaluable partners in her earlier battle against Albion, she would shield them from further risk. This was her fight.

If more of her family’s blood were spilled, it would be hers alone.

THREE

Santa Cruz District, Seville, Spain

After another week in Madrid, waiting in vain for the documents to arrive from Lavonne, Harper packed her single suitcase and her camera bag and took the three-hour train ride to Sevilla.

The dojo was on a back street in the western end of the Santa Cruz district. The freshly painted, two-story building looked tidy but otherwise unremarkable. Only a single white tile with blue numerals above the doorway identified it. Like most of the buildings on the street, it had ornate wrought-iron bars crisscrossing its windows. The building was wedged between a tourist shop that seemed to specialize in bullfight paraphernalia and a hair salon.

Marco González answered her knock, bade her welcome, and showed her to a Spartan upstairs flat, which would be her home for the next month.

Maybe forty, maybe ten years older, Marco was lanky and roughly Harper’s height, a couple of notches under six feet. He had short, grizzled hair and skin patched with age spots, and his features had a noble angularity, a high forehead, strong nose and chin, jutting cheekbones, as though he descended from Roman centurions. Though he moved with a supple nonchalance, his pale-blue eyes were as cutting and intense as those of a falcon scouring an open field.

After she set her bag down, Marco questioned her about her martial arts training. When she finished, he said, “Trophies, belts, ribbons, these are sin sentido.”

She nodded, well aware how pointless they were.

“Cuando estés lista, empezaremos.” When you are ready, we will begin.

After he left, she unpacked her clothes, settled them in the flimsy cabinet, then went into the bathroom and tucked the single photo she had of Leo and Ross into the edge of the mirror. She studied the fading images of her baby son and husband, then took one more look around the austere room, decided it suited her perfectly, and joined Marco downstairs.

He removed his shoes and motioned her to the practice mat, both of them in street clothes. No one else around. She unstrapped her sandals, set them on the floor, and stepped on the mat to face him.

He bowed his head to her and she bowed hers in reply.

“No seas tímida.” Don’t be shy. “Take me down, then finish me.”

“Finish?”

“Enséñame lo que sabes.” Show me what you have.

She circled him at arm’s length. He faced forward, tranquil, his eyes focused on the mat as she made a slow circuit around him. She halted in front of him, two feet away. Marco’s hands hung loose at his sides.

She chose a simple inner-thigh judo throw. Uchi mata. Stepping swiftly forward, she planted her right foot in front of his, grabbed his sleeves at the elbows, jerked upward to break his balance, and tipped him a few degrees off-center. Then, with her grip tight on his shirtsleeves, she swiveled her back to him, shot her right leg back and upward between his legs, bent forward, and rolled him across her hip and thumped him onto his back.

Nothing fancy, a basic but efficient throw she’d executed hundreds of times. Start to finish, not more than three seconds.

She dropped onto him, astride his waist, gripping hard with her thighs, and began to throw mock blows to his face and throat. “Ground and pound,” as it was known on the street. Take them to the asphalt and, from that superior position, continue to punch until the opponent was out of commission.

After four or five simulated blows, Harper heard the slap of footsteps behind her, and as she turned, she glimpsed a barefoot kick aimed at her head. She didn’t duck in time, and the heel struck her temple. Her eyes fluttered, red sparkling lights filled the room, and she was gone.

She resurfaced in stages through gray and dizzying layers of light. She found herself lying flat on her back on the hard floor with a hot spike throbbing behind her right eye. Through the haze, she could make out Marco’s face hovering over her.

His first words of counsel were spoken in a quiet voice.

“Like many students of the martial arts, you learned to fight in the ambiente controlado of the dojo, where it is one against one. Everyone is luchando justo, playing by rules. But on la calle, attackers may be numerous, and they may be disguised and come from unexpected angles. Your most dangerous enemy may not be the one facing you. Therefore, you must always be awake to your surroundings. If you fail in this, one day you will die. And if you die in battle, my reputation will suffer.”

Marco showed her the sly hint of a smile.

She felt half-dead, all right. A hollow ringing in her ears, a queasy blur in her vision. Teeth not meshing.

The blindsider stood nearby, a woman about Harper’s age. Marco’s lover, she would learn in the days ahead. A woman with curly, black hair, an inch taller than five feet, compact and powerful, with dark, resolute eyes.

Her name was Gabriella, and she and Marco would be Harper’s primary sparring partners during her month at the dojo. Gabriella rarely spoke, and when she did it was for purely utilitarian purposes. After four weeks living in close proximity to the woman, Harper knew nothing of her history or views of the world. All she knew for certain was that Gabriella’s deep, brown eyes were haunted by some grim secret.

For Harper, it was a bruising, highly educational month. Each day was split into three segments. Hand-to-hand battles on the mats in the morning. Harper versus Gabriella or Marco, or both at once. Harper versus tall men; short men; husky men; tall, slender women; all of them quick and strong and agile, with sharp elbows and fast hands and feet.

These visiting sparring partners were present solely to hone Harper’s technique, and each made only one appearance. Unlike other clubs where Harper had trained, Marco’s dojo was not a gathering place or communal facility. Marco had no disciples and taught no group classes. For those four weeks, Harper remained his exclusive focus.

He coached her in a stripped-down, pitiless blend of judo and karate, with the brutal chops, slashes, eye gouges, and choke holds adopted from Krav Maga, a cutthroat self-defense system used by the Israeli military. She learned to grapple on the ground, defend and attack with arm bars and scissor head locks. Air chokes to shut off breath, and the more lethal blood chokes meant to rob the brain of nourishment. All of it was intended to end the fight quickly and decisively. Option one, escape. Option two, immobilize the attacker, then escape. Option three, with no possibility of escape, completely disable the attacker. Or as Marco called it, “Arrasar.”

Obliterate.

The afternoons were devoted to stretching, weight training, then pounding the heavy bag: leg kicks, knee kicks, elbow strikes, hammer fist, palm strikes, knife hand, open slaps, and uppercuts. Jolt after jolt meant to callus her hands and accustom her joints to the shocks of a solid punch.

And for two hours every night, there were the butterflies.

Monarchs, black-veined whites, southern orange tips, clouded yellows, ilex hairstreaks, swallowtails. That first night, Marco identified them one by one as Gabriella shooed them out of a large glass terrarium, a dozen in all.

They fluttered around the big dojo, drawn upward toward the domed ceiling lights, then swooped down to eye level as if to inspect the long-limbed creature with the shoulder-length black hair and angular features standing wordlessly beneath them, finally continuing their random, skittering flights.

“The most important thing,” Marco said: “No pierdas el equilibrio.” Don’t lose your balance.

“I’m supposed to catch one of these?”

“No,” he said. “All of them. Catch lightly, do not kill.”

As if catching were not challenge enough.

She watched as butterflies lit on the mat, the windowsill, the edge of the heavy punching bag, but Marco warned her catching one in repose was not allowed. They must be in flight.

She set about it, supervised by Marco and Gabriella, who stood together at the far end of the room. Felt the absurdity of it as she swatted and snatched at empty air. She stalked one, then another, tried to find one slower than the rest, tried to chart their flight paths.

But their stumbling trajectories, their slow, awkward, soaring flights, their random dodges and feints defied her. Foiled and foiled again, one fruitless swipe after the next. The end of that first night left her breathless, sweating, dizzy, and ready to abandon this place, this preposterous man, and his silly methods.

Marco clapped his hands twice.

“Bastante bien por esta noche.”

Pretty good? Harper considered it a pitiful performance. A humiliation.

“Enséñale cómo se hace, Gabriella.”

Gabriella nodded and proceeded to demonstrate how it was done. Hands so quick and sure Harper could not detect the magic in her technique as she nabbed them one by one from the air and deposited them back in the glass terrarium, where they transformed into a pulsating cloud of color.

Gerda never called her employer by name. Though she’d come to know him better in the last few years, this was a habit begun years ago when she was a child and knew her mother’s employer only as an important older man, not someone likely to warm to a young lady like herself. Mostly she called him “sir.” Her overseer, her master.

His first text message had arrived months earlier: Work for me, five thousand a week. Text your reply to the number below.

No signature, no further explanation. That’s how it began, how she was recruited. She presumed her mother had referred her to Lester Albion, for her mother was the only one who knew exactly what crimes Gerda was capable of.

Gerda had been languishing at the time, uncertain of her future, in need of a leader, a direction. The job was a godsend. Though Gerda did not believe in God. After she’d accepted the work, texts remained their only form of contact.

From this moment on, one of those early texts read, there will be no in-person communication about any of these matters.

Upon her arrival in Seville, Gerda texted him that she had departed Madrid and had trailed the target three hours south by train and was awaiting further instructions. He didn’t text her back, which was not unusual, for he was a busy man.

While in Madrid throughout September, twice daily she had updated him on McDaniel’s daily trips to markets and her afternoons roaming the stacks of the National Library. She had quickly pointed out the target’s zealous interest in her research. It was a new passion, for the McDaniel woman had shown no similar behavior in Bilbao. In that Basque town, she’d confined herself to daily walks through the steep and winding streets of the old fishing village of Algorta, where she had been staying.

Partly because Gerda didn’t know the exact purpose of her surveillance and partly to amuse herself, she filled her texts with the minutiae of Harper McDaniel’s days. Her purchases of oranges and bananas, bread and cheese, the improvement in her injured leg, the weather, descriptions of the hotel where McDaniel was staying. Better to err on the side of excess than risk demerits.

Gerda was well aware that Albion had recently become besotted by her. The way his lips parted in her presence, the manner in which he tracked her with his pining eyes, the way he grew tongue-tied and even clumsier than usual when Gerda lingered nearby. She’d had that effect on men before and knew the symptoms well.

Though she found the man physically repellent and emotionally juvenile, she had not rebuffed his graceless flirtations. Given the precarious nature of her new career, she understood that someday she might need to exploit his affection for her.

While it made her shudder to consider the possibility, someday she might even need to admit the pitiful man into her bed.

Lester Albion was watching the video again. How many times had it been? A hundred? A thousand? No way to count. He had to admit this had become a compulsion. The last thing he did before he fell asleep, the first thing come daylight, and sometimes even in the depths of night, when he’d pad over to his computer and watch it again. He couldn’t stop. He knew he should. He knew he was spending far too much time on this, but he simply could not find the will to cease.

Over the years, he’d met the girl at the office dozens of times and always found her intriguing, but it was not until Albion’s divorce was finalized last spring that, in his lonesome state, he had begun to fantasize about a desirable new mate and thought of her again.

In an offhand remark, he’d mentioned the girl to Larissa Bixel, and that must have been what prompted her to show him the video that first time.

He and Bixel watched it together in her office, Albion mesmerized by the girl’s extraordinary physical gifts, her grace, her power.

“I’m very proud of the young lady,” Bixel said that day.

“As well you should be. She’s quite a marvel.”

In the months since, as his obsession grew, Albion had become unfocused. More and more, he was neglecting his business affairs, deserting Bonnie, his eight-year-old daughter, avoiding human contact except what was absolutely necessary to run his global empire, Albion International. He had grown deeply bored with business: trading and shipping agricultural commodities from vegetable oils to candies, chocolate, potash, and phosphate. He had lost his zeal.

This secret folly was all consuming: a video, less than five minutes in length, poor quality, poor camera work. But he could find nothing else of the girl’s early days posted anywhere. Though there were many online videos of her later athletic triumphs, and Albion found most of those captivating, none could rival the video of her when she was only eleven years old.

Wearing black tights spangled with red glitter, she walked solemnly onto the mat, bowed at the applause, then started her routine. Already, her body was more mature than those of her elfin competitors.

She gathered herself, then sprinted across the mat, leaped high in the air, and hung there for several impossible seconds, legs extended into a split. Beautiful legs, muscled and achingly long. Back on the mat, with toes pointed, she kicked up high, she twirled, she aimed one leg straight up into the air, a standing split, and spun around as fast as an ice skater on the toes of her planted foot. She did somersaults, layouts, cartwheels, vaults, and flips, pirouetting from one corner of the mat to the other.

Though it seemed a nearly impossible feat, all the while as she spiraled and danced, she also lashed and swirled a glittery red ribbon behind her. Holding the control wand in one hand, she formed figure eights in the air, made hoops that she jumped through, cyclones of color and strange and fleeting hieroglyphics, then whipped the ribbon in circles around herself so it enclosed her firm body like a chrysalis, capturing her flesh within its dazzling spin, until she broke free of the crimson cocoon and flung the wand into the air, backflipped twice and caught the plummeting wand behind her back and twirled the ribbon into eddies of undulating patterns like gentle ocean waves.

Each time he watched the video, Lester Albion was awestruck, lost in a starry-eyed, blissful trance, his heart overflowing. Once he started, he never failed to watch it through to the end, to her last leap, her proud final stance, her triumphant wave and kiss to the crowd. A single arm raised in joyous victory. And his own heart clenched and soared as it never had before. No love, no lust, nothing he’d ever felt even approached this delicious rapture.

Watching it and watching it again further fortified his resolve. Goddamn it all, before he made an overture to the object of his longing, Lester Albion was hell-bent on remaking himself into a man truly worthy of this astonishing girl.

FOUR

Hotel Monaco, Washington, DC

Adrian Naff was seated at the bar at the Dirty Habit, a flashy glass-and-chrome affair inside the Kimpton Hotel Monaco, waiting for an old colleague from his special-ops days in Islamabad and Cairo.

For the last half hour Naff had been keeping his head down, taking occasional sips of his Jim Beam on the rocks, shooting stealthy glances into the bar mirror to survey the room behind him. He wore a baseball cap pulled low and aviator sunglasses, a minimal disguise, probably an unnecessary precaution. He’d been out of the army and the private-ops business for years. Highly unlikely he’d bump into one of the old gang. But with all the ex-mercenaries running around in three-piece suits, this town always made him jumpy.

For the last week he’d been in DC and was headed back to Zurich in the morning. Seven days tagging behind Larissa Bixel, acting as her private muscle, with Bixel constantly showing off Adrian to the fawning K Street lobbyists she consorted with. Giving Adrian endless step-and-fetch-it chores to impress her subordinates.

These lobbyists were the highly paid, elegantly tailored men and women who lubricated the wheels of the government on behalf of the investment-and-commodities-trading wing of Albion’s global empire. Albion International, Adrian had learned, was far more than an agribusiness. Food products and agricultural supplies were only the public face of the company. The investment shop was the hidden gold mine.

He wasn’t privy to the content of Bixel’s meetings, and she hadn’t confided details, but from stray remarks Adrian overheard in elevators and hallways during this DC trip, Bixel was troubled about a bill working its way through Congress that would create stricter SEC oversight of dark pools.

Dark pools, Adrian learned from an internet search, were private financial exchanges that allowed large institutional investors like Albion International to buy and sell high volumes of securities with complete anonymity. Though it seemed slimy as hell to Adrian, all of it was perfectly legal. And Bixel was doing her part to keep it that way.

He took another taste of his booze. The glass was still at his lips when the tap on his shoulder jerked him upright, and he spattered half his drink on the bar.

“Whoa there, Naff. Wound pretty tight, aren’t we?”

Lavonne Jones drew out the stool next to him and settled in. She was a stately six-footer with the broad shoulders of a long-distance swimmer, gleaming caramel skin tone, and cinnamon-brown eyes that Adrian had always found fetching. She was wearing her black hair long and wavy today. If it was a wig, it was a classy one.

The bouncy, red-haired bartender wiped up the spill and asked Lavonne what she’d be having, giving Adrian yet another quick smile.

Lavonne reached over and dabbed a fingertip in the remains of Adrian’s drink, licked it, and frowned.

“What is that, Old Crow?”

“Beam,” Adrian said.

“Bring us two Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Year.”

“Your friend has taste,” the bartender said and winked supportively at Adrian as if Lavonne might be out of his league.

“You staying here, this posh hotel?”

“No, I just like the bar. I’m down the street.”

“Looking good, Adrian, very prosperous. Working for Lester Albion has its perks, I suppose.”

He took off his sunglasses and set them aside.

“I’m surviving.”

“Word is, Albion’s gotten paranoid.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Is it true?”

“Your intel’s pretty good. Last month he had my tech guys install keystroke-logging software on the entire network. Phones, computers, he’s snooping on everything. Packet sniffers, the whole nine yards. These days, you want to send a secure comm, you write a letter and lick your own stamp.”

“I’m surprised he hasn’t fired your ass yet.”

“I may have been demoted, but no, he hasn’t cut me loose.”

“Demoted, meaning you’re not all buddy-buddy anymore?”

“After last year’s legal issues, guy doesn’t know who to trust.”

“Does he have reason to mistrust you in particular?”

“I believe he still considers me a loyal employee.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

Their drinks arrived. Adrian had a sip and cocked an eyebrow.

“Wow.”

“A couple more sips, Naff, you’ll never go back to the rotgut.”

“How’d you know I was in town?”

“Smart security professional like yourself, I think you’d figure that out without my help.”

“You’re tracking Albion’s people worldwide, waiting for somebody to slip up, so you can nail him. Customs flagged us when we came into Dulles, sent you a heads-up.”

“See, I knew you could do it.”

Naff took a larger bite of the bourbon, felt the golden warmth spreading through his chest, a lush buzz. He set the glass down. He didn’t usually drink the hard stuff. More of a draft-beer guy. But he was finished with his most recent tour of duty and ready to relax. No more meeting rooms to stand guard over. He and Bixel would be on the Gulfstream G650 back to Zurich in the morning. This was his first night off in weeks.

“So are you still taking Albion to the range for shooting lessons?”

“He’s moved on. He’s into weightlifting now. Trying to bulk up.”

“You’re kidding. That little bantam rooster?”

“This is why you got in touch, ask about his latest hobbies?”

“You know exactly why we’re having this talk, Adrian.”

“So tell me something, Lavonne. Have you ever informed Harper that you and I were hunkered down in the same trench more than once?”

“Never been any need to go into that.”

“So what is she to you, an old friend? You doing her a personal favor helping her go after Albion? Somehow I don’t think it’s that.”

Lavonne smiled and took a sip of her drink, rattled the cubes, held the liquid up to the light as if evaluating its hue.

“I must be getting warm.”

“The reason I wanted to see you,” she said, “is because I understand you gave Harper a bit of a clue where she might go looking in her quest for justice.”

“I may have intimated something a while back.”

“Olive oil, Puglia. Do I have that right?”

Adrian looked around the bar. The hum of the happy-hour crowd was thickening, the clink of dishes, conversational volume rising, waiters upshifting to high gear. Nobody was eavesdropping on the guy in the baseball cap chatting up the elegant African American woman in the dark business suit.

“I believe I said something to that effect.”

“So you sent her on a wild-goose chase? Or do you expect me to believe you’re trying to bring Albion down?”

“Come on, Lavonne. You’re not sure which side I’m on?”

“You’re security chief for the whole damned corporation, but you’re giving a woman who wants to destroy your employer a treasure map to help her do just that. I find that odd, Adrian, and yes, I’m trying to fathom whose side you’re on.”

She reached into the inside breast pocket of her jacket and came out with a photograph and laid it on the bar between them.

Adrian looked down at it. Six-year-old Julie Marie Douglas in her wheelchair on another sunny day in Phoenix. Her thick glasses flared in the brightness. She was cradling the floppy-eared hound dog he’d sent her two birthdays ago. She’d named it Benny the Beagle.

“She’s always got that dog with her,” Lavonne said. “Hardly ever puts it down.”

Adrian looked at Lavonne, the rising anger constricting his throat.

“She’s doing okay,” Lavonne said. “Those meds are helping.”

“Did your people bother her or Shelly?”

“We kept our distance.”

“Fucking around in my private life, Lavonne? Why?”

“You know how it works. Yeah, we worked together a ways back, and personally, I like you fine. But I need to know what your motives are. If you’re friend or foe. Why you’d keep working for Albion on the one hand and toss Harper a bone on the other. Having a sick daughter in Phoenix, that might shed some light.”

Adrian sighed.

“Because I have a sick daughter now you trust me?”

“I assume it’s why you stay with Albion. Fat paycheck, a big chunk of it wired to Phoenix every month. Except a guy with your background, your skills, you could find good work somewhere else.”

“Check the job market lately, Lavonne? These endless wars are churning out lots of guys with my credentials.”

“You could come work for me.”

Adrian looked into her brown eyes. She sounded serious. But with Lavonne you never knew. A pro like her could con a Vegas card shark.

“Though I couldn’t offer you what Albion is paying.”

“I’ve grown fond of the private sector. Less red tape.”

“So you keep working for a guy you know is dirty as hell, then maybe to ease your moral discomfort, you feed Harper info to undermine the guy. Do I have that right?”

Adrian tapped the edge of the photograph.

“I’m not married to Shelly. She was in the 101st in Kabul. We did time over there, foxhole romance, that’s all.”

“Fourth Brigade Combat Team, I know about those ladies. Tough chicas.”

“Shelly’s definitely tough.”

“So you’re not married, got no legal responsibility to pay the kid’s bills. But you do it anyway. An honorable guy.”

“Okay, let’s say I’m staying with Albion for the paycheck. But my helping Harper, that’s something else.”

“You’re hoping someday she’ll fall for you. Sail off together into a perfect sunset.”

Naff took another sip of his drink, kept his eyes from her.

“Adrian, get real. The woman’s still grieving. She lost her husband and child less than a year ago. We know for a fact your boss murdered them, then managed to evade prosecution. You head up security for the asshole killer. This isn’t a match made in heaven.”

“That why you’re here? To warn me off?”

“What’s in Puglia? I know Albion’s been buying up thousands of acres along the seashore, olive groves. Is that what we’re talking about?”

“You tell me something first. Is she working for you, for DCS? You got Harper on the payroll? It’s only fair I should know what I’m dealing with.”

“Puglia, Adrian. That’s what we’re talking about.”

“Maybe that’s what you’re talking about.”

“So I assume you didn’t really know anything incriminating? Sent Harper off on a fool’s errand. You bullshitted the woman?”

Adrian mulled it for a moment, eyes on the mirror, watching the action behind them. He had another taste of the bourbon and set it down.

“Okay, look, I’m going to tell you what I know, not because of your threats or clever interrogation techniques, but because I’m worried.”

“About what?”

“What Harper’s getting into.”

“Talk to me.”

He told her the little he knew. Last winter, when Albion’s second-in-command, Larissa Bixel, came to Adrian for the names of a few reliable operatives who’d be willing to handle a couple of dodgy missions, Adrian had supplied a list of men he’d worked with as a military contractor. Guys long on courage and short on morals.

Lavonne sipped her bourbon and listened.

“One of the jobs was in Africa, that one you know about already, the chocolate thing. But Bixel also wanted a specialist for an operation in Italy, in Puglia.”

“What kind of specialist?”

“Basically, the same skills as the other job—a guy with a military background, weapons training, usual job description, but also something extra.”

“Which was?”

“Biology.”

“You be more specific?”

“That’s as specific as Bixel got. Guy with a military background who’d seen action plus knew his way around a biology lab.”

“This is the man she wanted to send to Puglia?”

“Yeah. If he happened to know anything about olive trees, so much the better. But that wasn’t required.”

“Okay.”

“I knew somebody that fit the general description. Guy I knew from Iraq, a SEAL, he ran a special-ops team out of Mosul for a while. Search and destroy. He was very good at destroying.”

“And the biology part?”

“The guy was in his twenties, halfway through med school when the fuckers brought down the twin towers. Turned patriotic, dropped out of school, made it through SEAL hell, winds up in Iraq looking through night-vision goggles for three tours. Calling in bombing runs.”

“You gave this guy to Bixel for an errand?”

“They like ex-military for their dirty work. Never know when combat skills will come in handy.”

“So this guy went to Italy?”

“No. He met with Bixel, heard her pitch, turned her down.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“Help me. What’s this hero’s name?”

“I could tell you, but it wouldn’t do any good.”

“What? He’s in hiding? Won’t talk to me? I can get tough guys to open up. Made a pretty good career out of it.”

“His name is Vaughn Morrison. But that won’t help you.”

“Why? Is Mr. Morrison no longer with us?”

Adrian nodded.

Lavonne finished her drink, got the bartender’s attention, and pointed at both glasses.

“What happened?”

“Few days after he got home from his interview with Bixel, his body was found lying at the end of his boat dock. House he was renting down in Islamorada, in Florida.”

“Natural causes?”

“Strangulation.”

“Unpleasant way to go.”

“Vaughn was a SEAL. Average bad guy trying to take him out one-on-one . . . It’s hard to imagine.”

“But it happened. Somebody strangled him.”

“Used a flexible weapon, cloth of some kind, possibly silk. So said the autopsy.”

“Silk garrote, that’s a method you don’t see every day.”

Adrian looked down into the melting ice.

“And now you feel guilty,” Lavonne said. “You steered this guy to a job, he hears the details, turns it down, bingo, somebody shows up at his front door and takes him out. All your fault.”

The fresh drinks came. Adrian knocked back the rest of his first one, skimmed a sip off the second. The playful bartender had turned serious, concerned. Probably read the look on Adrian’s face.

“You talk to Morrison before he died?”

“No.”

“So whatever it was, the job Bixel offered, it was too dirty for his taste. That’s how you read it?”

“Or beneath his dignity. Doesn’t matter why he turned it down. It was hearing about it in the first place that may have gotten him killed.”

Lavonne studied the bar mirror, the bustling room behind them.

“Vaughn started out a straight-up kid, wanting to be a doctor, do something positive with his life, but after Iraq and a few years freelancing, he didn’t much care how he made his living anymore.”

“So not many jobs he’d walk away from.”

“Right.”

“Well, I expect whoever Bixel found to replace Morrison is in deep shit. If they killed a guy after just hearing about the job, not likely they’d let his replacement walk when the job was done.”

“Thought the same thing.”

“For god’s sake. This is a global food corporation, they’re a multibillion-dollar operation, and they’re out killing people to make more money?”

“Guy like Albion, it’s not money. He’s got the morals of a spoiled twelve-year-old. He sees something he wants, he does whatever he has to do to get it. Maybe twelve is too old. More like seven or eight.”

Lavonne turned on Adrian. “So your SEAL friend gets strangled, and you send Harper straight at ’em without a clue what she’s getting into?”

“Back in May, when I told her about Puglia, I didn’t know Vaughn had been killed. Later, soon as I heard about it, I tried to get in touch with her. I’ve been trying ever since. She must’ve changed numbers. That’s the only reason I agreed to meet you.”

Her face relaxed a fraction, but she was still pissed.

“You should’ve called me the minute you found out.”

“Yeah? And how would I do that? You’re not exactly in the book.”

“Well, unfortunately I don’t have an active number for Harper.”

“How do you stay in contact?”

“Lately, she calls me. Tosses her phone afterwards.”

“Then there’s nothing to do but wait for her to ring you up?”

Lavonne was quiet, weighing something, eyes in the distance.

“What is it?”

“I know where she is,” Lavonne said. “Her physical location.”

“Great. I’ll go see her face-to-face, lay it out for her myself.”

“No, you need to stay put, don’t expose yourself. We’re going to need you on the inside.”

Adrian grunted and shook his head. Joining forces? Not so fast.

“If you know where Harper is, send one of your people.”

Lavonne pushed away her unfinished drink.

“Oh, I will,” she said. “I just hope it’s not too goddamned late.”

FIVE

Santa Cruz District, Seville, Spain

By the end of her four weeks of toil under Marco’s tutelage, Harper had regained her youthful speed, fine-tuned her synapses so they were once again trip-wire quick. She was ten pounds heavier than she’d been last winter in the grim months after her husband and child were murdered. Ten pounds of fresh, limber muscle.

And her mind had quieted; the ache of grief had subsided. What remained was the blue flicker of rage deep in her throat, a reminder with every breath that her vengeance was not complete.

Faster, stronger, more lethal, yet after those four long weeks she’d still not caught a single butterfly.

There was a Zen purity to her days in the dojo, and a no-nonsense solemnity to Marco’s coaching. Simple, direct, and detached while he reset her hands, showed her more-efficient moves, described the most barbaric measures and countermeasures in his dulcet voice. The death blows, the savage wrenching of joints and crippling elbow strikes, the suffocating guillotine choke. Punches and gouges meant to leave her foe deaf and blind, broken, or lifeless.

The sparring had been grueling. She’d suffered bruises, sprains, gashes, more than one black eye, but she never complained. She’d relished the work, the basic food, the spare accommodations, the utilitarian ethic that guided Marco. She’d felt no sense of deprivation. This was exactly the boot camp she’d needed. A complete immersion in the killing arts.

There’d been no music, internet, or TV, not even a radio to distract in the limited downtime before bed. Instead, each night Harper pored over the research materials from news magazines, books, and industry pamphlets she’d downloaded from the internet and photocopied in Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional.

Olive oil, its colorful history, its complex chemistry, the international laws governing its import and export, news stories about the European Union’s efforts to regulate its purity, protect against fraud and bribery.

She studied the art of olive-oil production, learned about grindstones and presses and filtration, and the sophisticated vocabulary of taste testing extra-virgin oil, floral notes, harmonious structure.

The business journals featured the stars of the olive-oil industry, the innovators, the third- and fourth-generation grove owners who were cultivating new strains, learning novel methods of harvesting and pressing the oil.

Harper had been searching for a place to start, the hint of criminal activity, a thread she could tug that would reach back to Lester Albion, something she might use to provoke him into action.

Her research turned up one tantalizing possibility. In recent years, the Italian mob, working with corrupt commodity traders, were making hundreds of millions of euros by producing cheap imitations of extra-virgin olive oil and passing it off as the real thing. Blending the genuine stuff with cut-rate soybean or canola oil that arrived at Italian ports in the vast bellies of tankers from Africa. Using industrial vats, workers stirred in synthetic coloring and flavor, and the crooks sold the crap in green bottles with fake labels from fake companies. Less than a dollar to make, selling it for thirty. But so far, she’d found nothing linking Albion to the rip-offs.

And then one night, two weeks ago, a turning point.

In the footnotes of an article on the EU’s efforts to root out olive-oil fraud, Harper saw a name she recognized: Daniela Aguilar, owner of one of the largest olive groves in Spain, located in the Andalusian hill country a few hours east of Sevilla.

Two years earlier, Harper’s brother, Nick, had thrown a small dinner party at his Miami condo to introduce Daniela to Harper and her husband, Ross. At the time Daniela had been marketing director for the global food giant Nestlé. She was in Miami for an international conference.

“Just a business friend,” Nick had said on the phone.

But that night after seeing Daniela and Nick together, Harper could tell the young woman was far more than that.

All through dinner Nick was animated, talkative, not his usual pensive, guarded self. Daniela was a handsome woman with rich black hair and the delicately fashioned features of her aristocratic forebears. She had expressive eyes that by turns were intense, earnest, and mischievous.

She was curious about Harper’s work as a photographic assistant, and the conversation flowed easily that night as Harper told tales about some of the celebrities that she and her mother, Deena, had photographed over the years.

Seated next to Nick, Daniela laughed easily and often, and when describing her own work on behalf of Nestlé, she was wry and self-deprecating. Nick, clearly enthralled, tried without success to keep his eyes off Daniela.

“A beautiful woman,” Ross said on the drive home. “And smart.”

“They make a great couple,” said Harper.

“How does that work?” Ross said. “They both travel so much.”

“People in love find a way.”

“I suppose,” Ross said, sounding doubtful.

When Harper saw Daniela’s name in her research notes, she rose, dug her latest disposable phone from her suitcase, and began trying to track down a number for Daniela Aguilar. It took her two days and numerous calls to Nestlé’s headquarters and the Aguilar Olive Oil offices before, one evening in mid-October, Daniela answered her personal phone.

Harper introduced herself and said, “You probably don’t remember me.”

“¡Por supuesto! Of course, I remember you,” she said. “Oh, and I was terribly sorry to hear about your loss. Ross and your lovely son. The pain and horror, it’s unimaginable.”

Harper didn’t mention Nick. She wasn’t sure if the two of them were still close.

“You’re not at Nestlé anymore?”

“My father died last spring,” she said. “I took a leave and came home to settle his affairs. I’ve decided to stay on for a while and try my hand running the family business.”

“Olive orchards?”

“That’s right. How did you know?”

Harper hesitated. She wasn’t sure how frank to be. But Daniela made the decision for her.

“Is this about Lester Albion? Nick told me last winter you were on a crusade to bring him to justice.”

“I still am.”

“I know the man,” she said darkly. “If there is something I can do to help, please name it, and if it’s within my power, I will assist in any way I’m able.”

That was the first of a half dozen phone conversations between them. Daniela set about tapping her network of former business associates and olive farmers across southern Europe, inquiring discreetly about Albion and his olive-oil business in Puglia. Trying to uncover any hint that he might be engaged in fraud.

But the information she gathered was disappointingly vague.

“People are guarded,” Daniela said. “As if they know more than they feel comfortable sharing. But I still have a few more calls to make. I’m sorry I haven’t been more helpful.”

On the Friday night before Harper’s last weekend in Sevilla, Daniela said, “I have discovered something significant. It’s not about fraud or counterfeit oil, but I believe it could be relevant. However, I’d rather not speak about it on the phone. Is it possible for you to come to Canena? I would meet you in Sevilla, but it is almost harvest time, and things are very busy in the groves.”

Harper told her, yes, she would find a way to get to Canena as soon as possible, maybe tomorrow or the day after.

“You can stay here with me,” Daniela said. “There’s lots of room.”

The next morning, the last Saturday in October, her final day in the dojo, Marco announced that Gabriella and he had business to attend to in Barcelona. Harper had her final day free.

If she had known this would be the last time she’d see Marco, she would have thanked him for all he’d done, the strength he’d help her find. Though Marco would no doubt have dismissed her gratitude as senseless. He had done nothing at all. Everything flowed from Harper, he would say. So it was probably just as well she hadn’t had a chance to wish him farewell. Sometimes his Zen dispassion was indistinguishable from indifference. It could have made for an awkward parting.

After Marco and Gabriella left, Harper sat in her room, cradling the photo she’d taken of Leo and Ross in their final moments. If she allowed herself, she could relive every unbearable second of their last evening together. Their parting words, the last touch, the simple, unwitting looks in their eyes, Ross’s intimate smile, Leo’s bubbly grin . . . as she left them for the evening and forever.

But she braced herself and willed it away, forced herself to refocus on the here and now, this room, this bed, the day ahead. She was tougher and more disciplined than she’d been last winter in the yawning depths of her grief. However, she was not yet disciplined enough nor fierce enough in her resolve to tear that last photograph into bits and leave it in her wake as she knew one day she must.

SIX

Santa Cruz District, Seville, Spain

Using her phone to search train schedules, Harper found an express leaving for Canena late that afternoon, putting her in the village well after dark. Not good enough, so she checked for local car-rental offices and found one fifteen minutes away on a side street near the cathedral. By car, she could be in Canena in two or three hours. The sooner the better. With her training at the dojo complete, it was time to rejoin the battle.

But until the moment when she left the hush of the dojo and stepped into the street on that sultry afternoon, she hadn’t realized just how starved her senses had become. She cringed at the noise and bustle in the crowded avenue. The bewildering swirl of tourists and locals, their raucous voices, the thoroughfare swarming with motorbikes. She was overwhelmed, frozen in place, her heart thudding. The colors blinded her, the sunlight was stunning.

She stood by the front door and considered returning to the monastic quiet of Marco’s world. But she fought the weakness and held herself in place until finally the panic subsided, the noise lost its edge, and she acclimated to the chaos.

She set off into the heart of the Santa Cruz district, armed with the Leica, which she’d grabbed on impulse as she left her room. As if her previous identity, Harper the artist and photographer, the observer, the woman she’d been before the loss of Leo and Ross, had reawakened and was challenging Harper the warrior.

As she pushed through the narrow lanes, Harper began to shoot photographs of the colorful commotion of Sevilla’s street life. She captured the speechless confusion of an ancient woman in a black shawl who carried a straw basket overflowing with headless dolls. She snapped a man who might have been forty or ninety in cape and beret, his eyes silvery and a single tooth showing in his lusty grin. She captured children running, children crying, children napping in their mothers’ arms. Birds and flowers and more children.

Snapping, snapping, she wandered in and out of sunbaked plazas pushing through walls of airless heat, savoring the sudden coolness of shaded alleyways, down one, then another, meandering through the maze, entering small plazas paved in ancient stone, others layered with sand like tiny manicured beaches stranded within the medieval Jewish quarter. She ambled past an outdoor bar, men drinking red wine, women in wide-brimmed hats sipping coffee, children running unattended, chasing the wind. Around her the stucco walls were interrupted here and there by intricately tiled mosaic archways, Spain and Morocco forever intertwined.

She was surprised at how alive her senses had become and even more surprised at the twinges of joy she felt looking through the viewfinder again, seizing those vivid images. And immediately she felt shame that joy remained in her working vocabulary.

After twenty minutes she found the rental office. The blinds were shut.

HORA DE LA SIESTA. VOLVEREMOS A LAS DOS Y MEDIA. Siesta time. We’ll be back at two thirty.

Nearby she found an empty park bench in the Patio de los Naranjos in the shadow of the Catedral de Sevilla. A young man on a nearby bench was clapping a light flamenco beat while his girlfriend danced coyly in front of him, twisting and turning like a coil of smoke from a newly kindled fire.

Between those two lovers a butterfly stumbled past and sailed in Harper’s direction, a blue-and-yellow monarch. It headed directly at her, passed by her face, a faint whisper against her cheek, and Harper watched as it danced in the distance, then circled back as if to taunt her a second time, and with her right arm loose and easy, she snapped the creature from the air, her hand cupping softly around it, trapping its delicate quivering wings against her palm and fingers.

After holding it for a few seconds to feel its pulsing strokes, to bask in the achievement, she raised her hand and set it free and watched it tumble into flight and sail away on a hot gust that pushed it crazily toward the cathedral.

How she’d managed to catch the damn thing, she couldn’t say. After weeks of trying and failing, this time, out of Marco’s view, she’d done it easily, without thought or planning.

She turned and walked on. The rush she’d felt for the last half hour had vanished. The blue flame burned again in her throat. Ross and Leo were gone, and the hollow in her chest would never be filled. Lavonne was right. There was no escaping it. No reprieve till you’d served grief’s full sentence.

With two hours to kill before the rental office reopened, Harper headed back to the dojo. But after a couple of blocks she made a wrong turn, then another, and was soon disoriented. She passed down one winding street after the next, no longer recognizing her surroundings, but forged ahead as the lane narrowed, curved, and became a dead-end alley. When she turned, started to retrace her steps, a big man appeared and blocked her way.

He was in his thirties, a half foot taller than she, and outweighed her by a hundred pounds. He was smiling as he came forward slowly. The narrow passage left no room to slip around him. If outstretched, the big man’s hands could touch both opposing walls. Fleeing in the other direction was out because the street behind her was closed off by an iron gate.

Beside the big man a second man appeared, wiry and short, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt that exposed his inked-up right arm, a solid sleeve of green and blue. He was muttering to himself some muted incantation as if to summon the power of his dark gods.

The large man grinned as he took another step, closing to six or seven feet, his sinewy cohort staying a step behind.

“You American lady?”

“Yes, American,” she said. “Now step aside.”

“Este es mi callejón privado.” This is my private alley.

“Step aside.”

“Why you frightened?” the big one said. “I nice man.”

“Yes,” said the smaller man. “Him and me both very nice, you see. We treat you good.”

Their English was seasoned by the clipped local Andalusian dialect.

“You lost, no? We help you find your way.”

The big man wore a black polo shirt and camo fatigues. His boots were scuffed and dusty. When he halted, his feet were planted side by side and his hands dangling at his hips, a lazy stance that said he didn’t take Harper seriously. Beside him, his buddy’s eyes twitched. He was stooped forward in a defensive crouch, his glance dodging left and right as if he expected something to leap from the solid walls onto his back.

“That’s fine camera. We take picture? You and me together, a selfie, right?”

His partner leered. “Desnuda.”

The big man came forward two more steps, extending his right hand. He was well inside the range for a roundhouse kick. She felt the tension flow from her muscles, a familiar loosening of her joints. Poised to strike, but content to wait for the best opening.

Big Man halted and brushed his left hand across the front of his shirt as if to clean away the crumbs from a recent meal and make himself more presentable.

“Un paso más y os hare daño a los dos.” She made her warning stern but quiet.

The smaller man grinned at his partner and whacked a hand against his shoulder. “You hear, Ángel? Another step, she hurt us.”

Ángel said to Harper: “Hablas bien castellano.” Praising her Spanish.

“Yo puedo hacerlo.” She could do it, hurt them both.

This showdown was not what she’d been training for, but she accepted the situation, eyes in neutral focus, holding to a spot waist-high, midway between them. Registering their balance, the pace of their breathing.

The big one would be easier. Strong but slow. As long as she stayed outside his range, didn’t let him box her in. Go for his knees, his groin, his throat, anywhere above the clavicle. Too much padding elsewhere to hurt him. If he wrapped her up in those bulky arms, things could go south quick.

She deemed the smaller man the more serious threat. Sneaky quick, possibly a blade in his pants. He had that look. He’d wait for his friend to start things off. Come in for the kill after Harper was injured or down.

She knew what Marco would say. Her lack of vigilance had invited this confrontation. She had, in effect, baited these two men into stalking her, guided them into this dead-end alley. It was the familiar argument rape apologists used. The drunk woman in the short skirt and tight sweater had flaunted herself, asking for the sexual assault. Harper had always been disgusted by such alibis.

But Marco framed the issue differently. In the perilous quest Harper had undertaken, the wrong moves could be fatal. Maybe other victims of crime could be granted their innocence, but Harper could not afford that luxury. For her, all strangers were dangerous, every encounter carried risks. She could not let her mind wander. She could not lose her bearings. Paying attention was now her higher calling.

In Marco’s eyes, she was, at that moment, undeniably at fault. These two were simply tropistic creeps, no more in control of their actions than poisonous flowers twisting toward the sun. She softened her stance.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “Take the camera and go.”

She unlooped it from around her neck and held it by the strap and offered it to them.

“Fuck the camera,” the little one said as he edged closer.

“It’s old,” the big man said. “No vale para nada.” Worthless.

“Fuck the camera,” his buddy said again. He came another step.

“Ya os he advertido.” You’ve been warned.

She was wrong. Wrong about the little one waiting for an opening. He came first and fast, a wild overhand right that she slipped easily. And she was dead wrong about Ángel being slow.

SEVEN

Santa Cruz District, Seville, Spain

Ángel slid forward in his partner’s wake, and his fist flashed at her face, a jab so quick and true it made it past her defensive dip, grazing her cheekbone. Only a brush, but so substantial it staggered her back several steps and sent her eyes swimming. Both of them were quick and strong but amateurish and sloppy and out of shape. Both were already breathing hard after only one messy swing.

As they angled in on different vectors, Harper blinked away the pain and shifted her feet backward a half step, readying for their next assault. It was clear she couldn’t let the big man make decent contact. Even a glancing blow could do serious damage.

She kept her eyes low and came to a stop, holding her ground. In her right hand the R8 still dangled from its strap. A sturdy camera, twenty years old, it weighed about two pounds with the thirty-five-millimeter lens attached. It had been Deena’s go-to equipment for most of Harper’s adult life and the single possession her mother had bequeathed to her.

Both men halted. Ángel eyed her body as if weighing her erotic potential, then turned his head slightly toward his buddy and hissed something she couldn’t hear.

Harper took the opening, an instinctive move, using this weapon of convenience like the ones she’d practiced with at the dojo under Marco’s steady gaze.

She pivoted to her right, gripping the neck strap to swing the solid heft of the Leica at Ángel’s face. He sensed the blow a fraction late, and the camera whacked him in the skull behind his right ear, then bounced back toward her. She spun cleanly to the left, adding her own weight to the orbit of the two-pound missile, a full rotation and a last-second hitch downward to catch the scrawny man on his chin.

He barked in pain and stumbled sideways, his shoulder banging the stucco wall. While he tried to recover, she stepped forward and kneed him in the groin, then hooked her left leg behind his ankles and with a right hand thrust, she toppled him backward to the pavement, his skull slamming pavement with a hollow thump.

Ángel was on his hands and knees, blood issuing from the ragged gash at his hairline. He looked up at her, growled, and struggled to stand, but she jacked a knee into his face and heard the crunch of cartilage.

Harper didn’t allow him to recover. She stepped closer and unleashed a hammer blow to the back of his head and pummeled him again and then again until he crumpled forward, flattened on the street.

With both men prone, she knew she should flee. That was Marco’s rule. Perhaps it was paranoia, but she couldn’t let this go without knowing for sure who these two thugs were. If they had any connection to Albion.

She rifled through Ángel’s pockets first. Found a single key ring with half a dozen keys, a plastic money clip with five euros, and a folded slip of paper with a scrawled list of grocery items: apples, toilet paper, wine, bread, and baby formula.

Ángel raised his head. His breath was raspy. He tried to spit at her.

“So kill me, bitch. Go on, see if I care.”

She moved to the smaller man, who protested and tried to roll away as she dug through his pockets. She grabbed him by the ears and slammed his face into the cobblestone. He groaned and fell silent.

He had a wallet of graying leather. A single euro in the bill flap, several photos in a plastic foldout array. Blurry color pics taken with a cheap camera, all of them showing a boy with the same wolfish features as his dad. In most of them the kid, maybe nine or ten, was wearing a soccer uniform. In one he was kicking a ball toward a guarded goal; in another his arms were flung around his smiling teammates. A father’s pride.

Two hapless muggers. A simple crime of opportunity. She dropped the wallet on the pavement.

No one was stalking her, not yet anyway.

She left the men still breathing, a lifetime ahead to consider their mistake.

When McDaniel abandoned the narrow lane, Gerda checked both directions, saw no one nearby, and slipped into the shaded passageway. She stooped over the small man and grabbed him by the hair and lifted his face from the stone walk, twisting him so he had to look into Gerda’s eyes.

“Lo siento, lo siento. No me hagas daño.”

The pleading little shit.

“Oh, poor Ricardo. Why would I hurt you? You did such a fine job. You’re worthy of praise. You dropped everything when I called and came running. I’m grateful, mi amigo.”

“I miss my boy’s football game to get this beating.”

“I said I was grateful, didn’t I? There will be other football games.”

“You say woman is weak. But no, she is fast and fight like man.”

“And you assured me that you and Ángel were tough, but you’re not so tough, not tough at all.”

“We did as you ask. Atacarla, ved si puede pelear.” Attack her, see if she could fight.

“She hit you with her goddamn camera. You call these fighting skills? The woman is a joke.”

“My twenty euros, I want. Give me.”

“Oh yes,” Gerda said. “I have your payment. And, mi amigo, I’ll even provide a bonus for doing such a bang-up job. Here you go.”

She gripped Ricardo’s jaw with her right hand and with her left she slipped her black silk scarf from her neck. She rocked his head back and pressured the scarf against the splenius capitis and the splenius cervicis, the ropy muscles of the neck. Going slowly so the wretch would absorb the horror of what was coming.

He wriggled in her grasp, but his struggle was futile, as she looped the scarf around with a single wrap, released his jaw, then gripped the ends, crossed them, and tensed the silk binding hard against the resistance of ligaments and tendons. Millimeter by millimeter she tightened the fabric until she heard the gasp, a last sputter, and watched him go limp. Less than thirty seconds and he was gone.

She kept the pressure on until she was certain.

From the beginning, the scarf had been her weapon of choice. Innocuous, in plain sight, always at the ready. For these last few months, Gerda had drilled with the scarf in her hotel rooms, a quick release knot, and with a flick of her wrist she could lash it around her victim’s neck. She’d practiced those moves, repeating and repeating till they were effortless and automatic, till she could employ the weapon in complete darkness, exactly as she’d once done with her gymnastic ribbons.

She rose from Ricardo’s body and turned to finish off Ángel, but the big man was on his feet, stumbling away.

Gerda pursued, gaining with every stride, but outside the alley Ángel headed into a throng of tourists and began to shout in terror, turning to point back toward Gerda.

She melted into a crowd at the doorway of a shop, slipping behind a tall man speaking on a cell phone. She tucked the scarf into her pants pocket and, over the stranger’s shoulder, watched Ángel shove people aside and lope away through the streets of Seville, his wails of panic rising above the rooftops into the autumn sky like the heavenward scream of a rocket.

Let him run. She’d deal with him later. She knew where the man lived. He and Ricardo had served their purpose. Gerda had witnessed the woman’s fighting skills and was unimpressed. Using her camera as a weapon, she’d avoided direct contact until the men were disabled and on the ground. Which only confirmed there was little to fear from her when the time came.

Now Gerda would resume her vigil in the café three doors down from the shabby building where McDaniel had hidden away for the last four weeks.

She retraced her steps through the Santa Cruz neighborhoods and was only a block from McDaniel’s home base when her phone pulsed in her pocket. A text from her employer. His first contact in weeks.

Do you have your target currently in view?

The man seemed to have a telepathic link to Gerda. Half a continent away and he could sense Gerda’s lapse in surveillance.

Of course, I can see her plainly, was her reply.

In Madrid the woman worked in the library. What was she doing?

He’d finally gotten around to reading his old texts.

Gerda answered, Researching materials.

What materials?

Business journals and other magazines.

On what topic?

Olive trees, olive oil.

Gerda walked on. The phone was silent. Typical of his childish manners, Albion never said a formal good-bye. She might not hear from him for another month. She passed tapas restaurants, small cafés, tourist shops with revolving racks of postcards, whitewashed walls festooned with T-shirts and ceramic tiles decorated with flowering gardens. Art galleries, tiny hotels, apartments. All had windows covered by ornate bars in this town of thieves. Most of the streets were too narrow for cars. In the air were the smells of sizzling chicken and onions and the voices of mournful baritone crooners, the rhythmic clapping of hands, and the guitar work of flamenco coming from competing speakers. The balconies above her were draped with laundry and ferns. A motorbike squeezed past. The two boys riding it checked her out and one whistled.

Gerda’s phone buzzed again, and she stepped out of the flow of pedestrians to read the text.

Why did you not bring this to my immediate attention?

She had to scroll back to see what he was referring to. Olive oil.

I did bring it to your attention. I texted you.

Never specified subject. You should have notified me instantly.

Why is that important? Olive oil? You tell me nothing.

The phone was silent. Gerda walked on past the gray stucco building where Harper resided and returned to her seat in the café a half block distant.

As the waiter brought her espresso, her phone vibrated again.

I tell you only what you need to know. To ensure your safety.

You are most kind.

Gerda smiled as she read his reply.

Remove target now. Destroy phone. Text when complete.

She had a sip of her coffee, set it in the dish, then typed, It shall be done.

Gerda pried open the phone, pulled out the SIM card, that small rectangle of plastic embedded with semiconductors, tough as a credit card. Her waiter stood nearby watching, openly curious, as Gerda gripped the two sides of the card, holding it up so the waiter could observe more clearly. Her grip strength had been maximized from years of pole vault, discus, and javelin, hands and fingers of iron. Gerda ripped the plastic card in two. Most would have required a pair of shears for the task. But this, for Gerda, was a minor exertion.

Mouth agape, the waiter stared at her as she counted out the coins for her check, and then Gerda stood and walked away, feeling a bright tingle in the tips of her fingers, as if she were sprouting talons.

EIGHT

Santa Cruz District, Seville, Spain

Back inside the dojo, Harper marched into the training room, shut the door behind her, and went directly to the heavy bag. She kicked it once, then again. Tentative strikes.

Gradually increasing the pace with foot sweeps, knee strikes, axe kicks, jumping front kicks, the momentum building, roundhouse, crescent, double front jump kicks. Kicking without pause, unable to stop.

The Leica R8 was on the floor nearby, smears of blood on its body and bits of tissue snagged on the viewfinder. She would clean it later. But first she needed to do this. Work and work, empty her lungs, jack her pulse to redline and beyond. Tornado kick, spinning reverse, spinning hook, back thrust, side snap. After ten minutes, her heart was slamming, she gasped, eyes stinging with sweat. Spinning wheel kick, side thrust.

Then the punches. The big leather bag, 150 pounds, its four chains squealing, the bag swinging away from her and back again. She smacked it full force with a scissor punch, hook, jab, double fist spear hand strike. A furious flurry. Her fists throbbing from the mountain punch, heel strike.

More kicks, punches. Breath scalding her lungs. She punched the bag faster. Fast as automatic-weapons fire, fast as a Bourbon Street tap dancer. Drilling it harder and harder until she was soaked with sweat and her legs softened and she wilted to the practice mat, flung her arms wide, spread-eagled on her back, heaving for air, heaving as if she’d dived to the bottom of the deepest Atlantic trench, touched bottom, and turned back, swimming up and up until she broke through the bright surface of the ocean, gasping.

Minutes later her pulse had slowed and she was climbing to her feet when she heard the squeak of the front door. She quieted her breath and listened. No way Marco and Gabriella could have made it to Barcelona and back already. In the four weeks she’d been living in the dojo, not a single uninvited guest had wandered in from the street, no panhandlers, no nosy tourists. The building was anonymous. Just a street number, no hint of what took place inside.

She rose and slipped to the doorway. But the intruder had already moved past the practice room. There were footsteps on the stairs that led to Harper’s room. She heard the squeaky fourth step, the distinctive crackle of the sixth. She opened the door a slit but from her vantage point couldn’t see the stairway.

She stepped into the corridor, moved quickly to the base of the stairs. They were empty. She could hear the intruder’s tread on the landing, and the familiar squeak of the hinges to her room.

Light-footed, she slipped up the stairs, staying close to the wall to keep from giving herself away. On the landing, she saw the door to her room was shut. She edged along the wall, paused, and listened. The box springs creaked once, as if the intruder were testing the softness of her mattress.

She mapped out the oblique angle she’d take toward the bed, the obstacles, chair, wood table, metal standing lamp. She reached across the width of the door. Gripped the knob, drew a careful breath, then threw open the door, dived head first into the room toward the bed, tucked her left shoulder, rolled, and came to her feet with her right leg snapping forward for a flying roundhouse kick.

But pulled back in time.

“A kick in the snout? I come all this way, this is the greeting I get?”

Sal Leonardi, her grandfather, in yellow walking shorts and a pink seersucker shirt, carried a chunky backpack slung over one shoulder, a liter water bottle in his right hand, and a manila envelope in his left. He was standing with his back to the bed, shirt dappled with sweat, a tired grin on his lips.

“Should’ve called first,” he said. “Sorry, sorry. I barge in, probably scared the bejesus out of you, but that’s me, no social graces. Hey, at my age, set in my ways, I’m a lost cause, what can I do?”

Before she could speak, he raised his hands defensively.

“Truth is, I did call. Last two months, I called ten times a day. Called so much my poking finger’s bruised. And did you once answer your phone? No, ma’am, you didn’t. Instead you send a postcard to me and Nick, a postcard for Christ’s sake, a postcard saying nothing, it might as well have been blank.”

“How did you find me?”

“Better be glad I did. You’ll be thanking me in a minute once I show you this.”

He held up the manila envelope and rattled its contents, then lifted the plastic bottle to his lips and swallowed a three-bubble gulp. Now in his mideighties, Sal had once been a sturdy man of nearly six feet, though now his frame had shrunk several inches, his shoulders hunched, his arms and legs frail. In his day, he’d been a charismatic charmer, a dashing lady’s man. A teller of tall tales, romancer of showgirls, big-tipping raconteur, cigar-wielding, captivating grandpa, although Deena, mortified by her father’s occupation, had tried her best to keep Sal and Harper apart.

For forty years Sal worked as a bookkeeper for the Tessalini crime family. These days he’d retired from the mob and was living out his last years in a two-room apartment ten blocks from South Beach. Just another white-haired pensioner with bones dwindling to dust and skin so sheer it was nearly translucent. Though his blue eyes could still flicker with mischief, today they were pinched and shadowed by something Harper hadn’t seen in Sal before—an anxious strain.

“All right, Sal, tell me right now. How’d you find me?”

He drew a breath, set the water bottle on her bedside table, looked around the room, and frowned.

“Jesus, what a dump. Dreary as a convent. Place like this, I expect a big crucifix nailed to the wall, picture of long-haired Jesus. What’s wrong, Harper, couldn’t afford a decent hotel? You usually got such good taste in accommodations. The one in Madrid, the Gran Meliá Fénix, that was a beauty. I say that name right?”

“Sal, goddamn it. You were in Madrid?”

He raised his open hands and shrugged. What’s the difference?

“Have a look at what I brought. That’ll answer everything.”

He unsnapped the manila envelope, reached inside, and removed a handful of documents bundled by rubber bands. He held them out.

“Don’t thank me yet. Check these over, then make an old man happy saying you’re glad to see me, you missed me, you’re sorry you didn’t stay in touch, disappearing like you had something to hide, which you don’t, and even if you did, even if it was something terrible—murder, kidnapping, whatever—I’d forgive you in half a heartbeat. And when you’re done looking, you can thank a tired old-timer coming all this way, and you can’t even say a decent hello, not even a kiss on the cheek.”

She took the packet, stripped away the rubber bands, and leafed through it. Three passports with her photograph and specs, three different identities. One was Canadian, another British, the third American with an address in Arizona, a town she’d never heard of. All were stamped at national borders that a typical tourist might cross, nothing that would raise a red flag.

Crafty Lavonne.

There were other IDs as well, the ones she’d asked Lavonne to create for her.

“That one,” Sal said, pointing at the photo ID in her hand. “What’s that about? OLAF? Never heard of it?”

She waved away the question. Not about to bring Sal any deeper into this.

“Fine, take your time, but there’s something else you need to see.”

“Lavonne sent you?”

“Kind of,” he said. “Last month I e-mailed her, asked if she knew where the hell you’d gone to, what you were doing, maybe something clandestine, a job she sent you on. I was worried. Nick was frantic, shaking every tree he knew to get your whereabouts.

“Last we knew you were in Bilbao, coming home when your rehab was done, then nothing. I don’t hear back from Lavonne, time goes by, then last month, end of September, a guy wearing a suit and tie shows up at my door, jaw the size of Kansas, hands me that envelope and a slip of paper with the name of the hotel in Madrid, doesn’t say a damn word to me, just hands it off and leaves. So I pack my knapsack, catch the first plane out. That’s like five weeks ago.”

“You were in Madrid, but you didn’t contact me.”

“Lavonne’s idea.”

“What the hell is going on, Sal?”

Sal flinched, looked down at the floor, and shook his head as if he could wait no longer to deliver the bad news.

“Well, it was a total accident. I fly into Madrid. I’m just off the plane, walking up the sidewalk to your hotel, I don’t know, it was eight thirty in the morning, nine maybe, I’d taken one of those red-eyes, so there I am, I’m a block away, I see you coming out the front door, an empty shopping bag in your hand, and you head off in the other direction, so I tag along, I’m bone-tired, gimpy, bad knee, shitty hip, all that jazz, but I’m trying to catch up, get close enough to yell out your name, when I see this woman across the street, a little ahead of me.

“End of the block you turn a corner, and she cuts across the intersection, dodging traffic, staying on the other side of the street, and I mean it was plain what was going on, but I waited to make sure what I was seeing was what I thought it was.

“You went to some markets, bought French bread, an orange, and she was there the whole time, a half block back, on the other side of the street. By the third market, okay, yeah, now I’m sure what I’m seeing is what I thought, so I hang back and watch some more.

“All those years doing the work I did, consorting with assweasels of every stripe, kind of guys when they’re on a public street they’re always peeking over their shoulder, see who’s bird-dogging them, ’cause more than likely someone is, the feds or a button man from another family, or some asshole brother-in-law doesn’t like how his sister is being treated, so I guess that rubbed off or it was osmosis or some damn thing. Anyway, I never saw any tail as locked in as this one. She’s scary good.”

The air in the room had thickened. Harper’s lungs weren’t filling.

In a quiet, precise voice, she said, “A woman was following me?”

“Still is.”

“Here?”

“In Madrid, she was staying in your damn hotel, which is nervy as hell, right down the hall from you, same floor. Very unprofessional for a tail, but that’s what she did. Every night while you’re sleeping, she’s in the fitness center, pumping iron, beating up the machines for hours. I walked by the gym one night, look in, she’s bouncing up and down, going up in the air so high I thought she was on a trampoline. I stick my head inside the door to see better and, Jesus, she’s just jumping off the concrete floor, three, four feet high. Springs in her legs, vertical leap like Jordan in his prime.”

Sal made an upward motion toward the ceiling.

“Here in Seville, she’s a half block away, staying in a little boutique hotel, got a window looks out on the street so she can see you if you ever walked out the front door, which you haven’t till today. I’m in the same hotel, floor above her. She’s up early, goes to the gym downstairs, breakfast in a café nearby, drinks coffee, waiting and waiting, a month goes by without seeing you, but she’s a bulldog or else totally nuts, I mean, okay, she saw you go into this building, same as I did a month ago, walk from the train station, and disappear into this place, and you didn’t come out till today. If it was me tailing you, all that time goes by without eyeballing you, one day I would’ve walked in here to make sure you’re still around.

“But see, I didn’t need to do that because I knew what you were up to. Lavonne says you were getting in shape, martial arts bullshit or whatever it is you do, and now that I see you, yeah, I can tell all that exercise, it’s working. You got a rosy glow, bigger in the shoulders, standing taller, straighter. You look good, girl. You look strong. I sure as hell wouldn’t mess with you.”

Harper’s pulse had finally slowed to a normal pace. “Does Lavonne know you’re still here?”

Sal nodded. “It was Lavonne’s idea I keep my distance, watch the watcher. See if could find out what she was up to, if anybody met with her, her boss, her handler. So far nothing. I see her texting is all, love to get hold of her phone, but other than that, she’s solo. I’m here today ’cause Lavonne called, told me to pass on an urgent message.”

“Describe her,” Harper said. “This woman following me.”

“I can do better than that.”

He unsnapped one of the pockets on his backpack, slipped out a black smartphone, punched in the code to unlock it, and held it out to her.

Harper set the passports and documents on the bed, took the phone, and scrolled through the photos. Some were taken on the streets of Madrid near her hotel, others on the sidewalk near the National Library, and several were shot in a café down the street from Marco’s dojo in Sevilla. All featured the same woman.

She had coppery hair, a pixie cut, eyes that were the eerie, luminescent blue of glacier ice. In most of the photos she was squinting, as coolly intent as a sniper sighting through a scope.

Her face was squarish, with a muscular jaw and finely fashioned cheekbones. She had heavy eyebrows, plush lips, and the knowing look of a wanton temptress skilled at seduction. She was maybe five nine or ten, with a sturdy build. She wasn’t beautiful in a conventional sense, but her face had the striking singularity of an offbeat fashion model. And she reminded Harper of someone else, an unpleasant echo from the past that she couldn’t place.

“You get a look at those legs, those arms? I’m thinking this dame is a bodybuilder or something, I don’t know.”

Harper kept scrolling. Yes, the woman wasn’t shy about showing off her body. Sleeveless tops, spandex shorts, midriff-baring tank tops. And always a scarf, around her neck, draped over her shoulders or worn as a headband. Red, green, blue, black. Always a scarf, whatever the weather. And Sal was right about her physique. Zero body fat, the finely honed figure of a hardcore jock.

“And you get a load of that six-pack?” Sal said. “There’s guys spend eight hours a day in the gym would kill for that stomach.”

“This woman is following me.”

“For weeks, yeah. Surprised you never noticed. I mean, sure, you been busy, getting in shape, got serious things on your plate, reading up on olive oil, I get it, making a plan, figuring out what comes next. But still, I would’ve thought maybe you’d notice her. She jumps out.”

“I should have, yes.” Christ, she’d been so self-absorbed, so trapped in an obsessive spiral of anger and grief, she’d lost her situational awareness. She hadn’t noticed the street punks earlier in the afternoon and hadn’t once registered this distinctive woman who’d been tracking her for weeks. Yes, she’d mastered Marco’s fighting techniques, the punches and kicks, but she’d failed to absorb his first lesson, to maintain a constant state of vigilance. Always be aware of your surroundings. If you fail, surely you will die.

She studied the woman’s face. So damned familiar.

“Gerda Bixel.”

Harper stared up at him.

“What?”

“Woman following you. Name is Gerda Bixel, daughter of Larissa Bixel, second-in-command of Albion International. I believe you made the mother’s acquaintance back in March. She was in that boardroom when Albion started shooting, you got hit in the leg. This is her only child, Gerda. A track star. Olympian decathlete.”

Harper eased into the desk chair.

“Gerda Bixel.” That was it: the nasty echo Harper couldn’t place.

Sal nodded. “Lavonne ran her through a face-finder program. The woman won a silver medal in the last Olympics. Famous in certain circles. She’s German.”

She spoke the words aloud, tasting them, getting used to the idea. “Larissa Bixel’s daughter is stalking me.”

“Albion and his crew must still be worried about you, wanting to make sure you aren’t targeting them again.”

“They should be worried.” Harper sighed. “What’s Lavonne’s urgent message?”

Sal rubbed his palms together as if to warm them.

“Okay, well, in a nutshell, Bixel, the mother, a while back she interviewed some guy, trying to hire him for the Puglia olive-oil thing, whatever that is. The guy she offered the job to turned her down, then a few days later winds up murdered. Punch line: Guy was a Navy SEAL. Major tough guy. And, PS, the killer strangled the SEAL.”

Harper shook her head, trying to absorb this.

“You want me to repeat?”

“I heard you.”

“Point is,” Sal said, “this is some bad shit you’re wading into. Dangerous. Lavonne wants you back home. I’m here to escort you.”

Harper said, “How did Lavonne learn about this SEAL’s job offer?”

“Don’t know,” Sal said. “Lavonne’s a smart lady. Got her fingers in all kinds of pies. Turns out she knows more about me than I know myself.”

Harper looked up at the ceiling and smiled.

“This is funny? Guy gets killed just learning about a job? This is what you’re sticking your nose into!”

“This is good news, Sal. This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

“Good?”

“I was starting to worry this olive-oil thing was a dead end. Now I know I’m on the right path.”

“Lavonne’s not going to like that attitude.”

“I don’t work for Lavonne.”

Sal took a slow turn around the room. He peeked into the tiny bathroom. He looked at the table stacked with photocopies. He lifted his head and sniffed. Then he turned to Harper and said, “So what do we do now?”

“You gave me the message, so go home. I’ll handle it from here.”

As if he didn’t hear, he said, “This is your last day, right? All done with gym workouts?”

“That’s right.”

“Where you headed next?”

“Not your concern.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get that. You don’t need help, mine or anybody else’s. Okay, well, at least humor me. Let me help you get out of here. Give Gerda the slip.”

Harper glanced around the room, considering the offer.

“How do you propose to do that?”

“Is there a back door to this place? I scouted it but didn’t find one.”

“Only the front door.”

“So we go out the front.”

“Then what?”

“Unless Gerda has a car, which I haven’t seen, it shouldn’t be hard.”

“You have a car?”

“No, I don’t.” He shrugged, gave her a half smile. “But Nick does.”

“Christ,” she said. “Nick’s here too?”

“Flew in from Vienna this morning. Parked a couple of blocks away. He can’t wait to see you, give you a piece of his mind. Disappearing like you did without a word.”

Harper closed her eyes and shook her head.

“You got to leave this place anyway, right? So let us get you out of town, leave Gerda in the dust. We’ll take you where you want to go, drop you off. Let us do that much.”

She debated it for half a minute, then nodded. “But you have to promise me, once we get away from Sevilla, you’ll go home, back to Miami. Let me handle this myself.”

“If that’s what you want, sure. It’s a deal.”

Harper went to the closet and took down her suitcase, opened it on the bed, and began to empty her dresser drawers.

Sal backed out of her way, took a seat at her writing table.

“Following you these last few weeks,” Sal said, “to me, you looked lonely. You looked a little lost.”

She stared past him at the far wall.

“Do I have that right? You develop a secret hunger for human companionship? Because me, I got a lot of that to offer. Nick too.”

“We have a deal, Sal. You already backing out of it?”

“I’m just telling you what I observed.”

She folded a top, bras, underwear, her trousers, and settled them in the suitcase. She turned to Sal, took a minute to take him in, this seersucker grandfather of hers. Frail and dwindling but still robust of heart. She’d wanted to steer clear of him until she’d finished her battle with Albion, but here he was, courtesy of Lavonne, who assumed she knew better what Harper needed.

“Okay, Sal. Maybe what you saw is right. I’ve been a little lonely. It’s good to see you. It’s very good. Thanks for coming all this way.”

She stepped across the room, opened her arms, and Sal stood up, came over to her, eased into the embrace. He patted her on the back while Harper rested her cheek on his shoulder and fought off the mist growing in her eyes.

“But once we get clear of Gerda, you’re going back to Miami. That’s the deal. And Nick is heading back to Vienna.”

“Sure, sure. Whatever you say. Just want you to be happy. And safe.”

PART TWO

NINE

Olive Orchards, Bari, Italy

John Jefferson Dickens had been in Italy since late May, six full months, and in that time, he’d developed an intense dislike for meadow spittlebugs, also known as froghoppers. Like all bugs, they had a Latin name too: Philaenus spumarius.

The adults had black bodies with yellow bulgy eyes. About the size and shape of a compact cockroach, they could run, fly short distances, flick their legs, and jump about a yard, or catch the breeze and sail off. Ugly little bastards best known for spewing out a white foam from their asses to protect the newborn nymphs. Hence spittlebugs.

Though he hated the bugs, the money he was making, man, that put a zing in his pulse. A better wage than he’d ever seen. Sweetening his bank account, wired in every month from a bank in Germany. Lots of zeros added to his available balance, something he’d never seen before.

Ordinarily Dickens shunned outdoor work. Had enough of that growing up on an Oklahoma wheat farm and doing two tours in the merciless open spaces of Afghanistan. These days he preferred the great indoors. Quiet days in his El Paso ag lab and nights in smoky cowboy bars with loud jukeboxes, pretty ladies, and dance floors where everyone was drunk and sweaty.

Dickens had fled the life of a farm boy on his family homestead and gone to college so he wouldn’t have to sit in the cab of a goddamn John Deere harvester the rest of his life. And what had he ended up doing after escaping a foreign war without being killed or maimed? Soil analysis, grid sampling, determining the optimum levels for secondary and micronutrients in plant samples. The busywork of an agriculture lab.

Lab work wasn’t exciting, but the air-conditioning was good, and the salary and benefits were fine, plus nobody had shot a weapon at him or planted an IED in his path in years.

For the last six months, he’d become a farm boy again, roaming the olive grove that sprawled over a few thousand acres. His job: carting box after box after box of spittlebugs up and down the rows of olive trees and letting the insects go. Starting back in April, hour after hour, box after box. When one load was done, it was back to the port at Bari to pick up another load, drive his Jeep back to the orchard, and repeat.

Nobody bothered him. The foreman of the grove, a stumpy Italian named Pagolo, watched him coming and going, never smiled, never returned his wave, simply watched as Dickens checked off another quadrant of the grove, then another quadrant after that.

Releasing dozens at a time, distributing them along the narrow sandy roads between the rows of trees. By the time July rolled around, the bugs he’d released in June had spewed out their protective foam sacks, and the next crop had metamorphosed into adults. They mingled with the other froghoppers and spread fast, jumped from tree to tree, sailed off on the breezes, and, sometime in early September, the females laid another fifty eggs apiece. Before long, their offspring were spewing out foam nests in olive trees miles away in every direction.

Dickens could see these spittlebugs were doing a tiny bit of damage to the olive leaves, here and there nibbling on a few, but it was nothing major, so releasing so many must’ve been a part of a pest-prevention plan. He’d e-mailed Bixel several times, asking her to explain the purpose of his job, but she never answered. Dickens explained that he was a college grad, a professional. He could understand whatever the goal was. If he knew that, he might do a better job.

No response.

He assumed the spitters were meant to outcompete some other destructive bug and crowd it out. Some of his colleagues at the Albion lab in El Paso were doing that kind of research. Pitting bug against bug in different ecosystems to see which would dominate.

Why Dickens had been tapped for this assignment, he hadn’t a clue. Out of the blue, he’d gotten the phone call while sitting at his desk. The voice said to hold, an executive at the ag lab’s home office in Zurich wanted to speak to him.

She introduced herself, Larissa Bixel, executive vice president for global affairs at Albion International, and asked a few questions: Would he be willing to live in Italy for the next six or seven months? (Sure, he loved pasta.) Could he handle delicate insects? (Of course he could.) Could he transfer them from one location to another without damaging them? (Yes, he believed he could do that as well as any other ag tech.) Then she posed a series of personal questions: Was he married? Did he have children, close friends? No, he wasn’t married, had no kids he knew about, and yes, he had a couple of drinking buddies and old army pals he stayed in touch with. Mostly he was a loner, had been all his life.

And the question she saved for last: Could Dickens keep a secret? He didn’t see why not.

Finally, Bixel told Dickens to pack his bags. A ticket to Bari, Italy, would be waiting at El Paso International later that afternoon. In his absence, the ag lab he’d been working for would continue to pay his salary and benefits, plus he’d receive a healthy bonus each month from his new employer. His El Paso boss would know nothing about the exact nature of his work, only that he’d been reassigned temporarily to a project for the home office.

Detailed instructions to Dickens would follow via a special e-mail account she’d set up just for him. Tell no one at the lab or anyone else about the nature of his new job. Okay, though it was sounding more top secret by the minute. And on the plane to Italy he should begin to familiarize himself with the life cycle of the meadow spittlebug.

“Now write this down,” she’d told him, giving him the name of his contact in Bari, a man who’d make sure the cartons he was picking up made it safely through customs and port inspection without undue delay.

“I thought shipping live insects internationally wasn’t kosher.”

Bixel went quiet and Dickens thought, Shit, I’ve lost the job.

“Is there anything else you need to know about the position?” she asked.

And that was that.

Turned out the work was mind-numbing, but Dickens loved Italy. Excellent food and loads of delectable women. He’d enticed a couple to his hotel room for romps. Something about a Catholic woman rolling around on hotel sheets, sinning with a godless foreigner, made those gals mortally crazy, made them buck and squirm so wild he’d been thrown clear more than once.

A couple of months ago, he’d met Valentina Lombardi. In her late thirties with jet-black hair, a solid meatiness on her frame, garlic on her fingertips and herbs he couldn’t name that scented her secret parts. She lived at home with her aging father and mother, worked behind the bar at their little trattoria. Her English was basic, and she wasn’t the prettiest woman he’d ever slept with, but Dickens had fallen for her. Her sweet smile, her dark hungry eyes, her voluptuous body, their talks in the darkness.

Damned if he wasn’t in love. Only the second time in his life. Couldn’t stop thinking about her as he was distributing the spittlebugs in the grove. Lately, he’d been working up his nerve to ask her if she’d consider coming back to the states with him. Just a holiday, look around, see how she liked El Paso. He was building up his nerve, his time in Italy running out.

It was a Saturday afternoon, late October, winding down to the last day of the job, flying back to Texas in a couple of days, back to the air-conditioned quiet of the Albion lab. Dickens was making the usual bonfire of cardboard shipping cartons full of twigs and needle clusters of eastern white pine, the sap of that tree being the favorite food source for spittlebugs. When the fire burned out, he’d head back to the hotel, wash up, wait for Valentina to close down the bar. And he’d ask her. Tonight was zero hour.

It was sunset, a damned fine one, with veins of blood and gold running through the slab of purple sky out over the Adriatic Sea. A good sign.

He was poking the bonfire with an olive branch, making sure the last of the cardboard caught before he left, when Pagolo came walking out of the woods behind him. Dickens turned around, said hello. Pagolo halted ten feet off, scowling at Dickens.

“Boss want speak.”

“To me?”

“You.”

“Where?”

The man pointed back into the grove. Pagolo wore gray overalls over a white long-sleeve jersey. His face was square and raisin dark and wrinkled. A stumpy man with big-knuckled hands, heavy arms and legs. He was breathing slow and shallow. Dickens had never heard the man speak and was surprised how deep and throaty his voice was. Like Johnny Cash slow-talking one of those ballads about a man who’d lost his wife of fifty years.

“What? Boss is on the phone?”

“Phone, yes. This way.”

He followed Pagolo through the olive trees. Must’ve gone a half mile before Dickens said, “Hey, how much farther is it? Maybe I should take the Jeep.”

“Close,” the old man said. “Up ahead.”

Night shadows were sneaking between the trees, the sky almost drained of color, and Dickens’d had enough. He stopped and told Pagolo to go fuck himself, ready to circle back and look after his fire. If the boss wanted to talk to him, she could call him later at the hotel.

Pagolo said nothing, and Dickens turned back and headed down the empty lane between the rows of trees. Something wasn’t right. The way Pagolo was looking at him, the phone off somewhere in the woods, it didn’t compute. Dickens sped up, getting a prickle down his neck and a chilly streak of sweat across his ribs.

He was almost back to the fire when he heard a shuffle in the woods off to the left. Dickens stopped.

“Hey,” he said. “Pagolo? Come on out, you old fool.”

Must’ve been a bat, a cut-down baseball bat, the kind Dickens’s dad used to brain fish flopping on the boat deck. That’s the meaningless, stupid thought Dickens had when he was falling. Pagolo had hit him with a bat. Like it mattered, like a pipe wouldn’t have done just as well.

He slammed flat on the ground, busted his nose against the earth. But he was still awake, could feel the man grab him by the shirt, turn him over, take hold of his collar, and drag him on his back across the dusty ground. Stunned but not dead. If he could just get his feet under him, he could take the old man.

But Pagolo was hauling him over the hard, bumpy ground, and Dickens was feeling sick and distant from his body. Floating a little way off above the treetops and thinking how stupid he was for not finding out exactly what the hell he was doing with those foamy spittlebugs. He should have asked. Should have insisted. Maybe he would have quit, but, damn, the money was so good, twice what he was making in the lab. That should’ve been a red flag, the money.

Pagolo stopped. The man was out of breath. Strong little bastard, hauling Dickens so far. It was full-on dark.

Dickens opened his eyes, or maybe not, he wasn’t sure. Everything was midnight black. He knew he was still alive because, Jesus, his head ached, and all down his backside where he’d jolted across the rocks and gullies of the olive grove he knew he was bleeding, could feel the slick warmth.

He should’ve asked more questions. He tried to ask one now. What’s going on? That’s what was in his mind, but it didn’t reach his throat.

Pagolo was rolling him. Onto his front side, onto his back, then onto his front side. The man grunted from the effort. He was probably getting paid pretty good too. Probably better than Dickens.

Then one more revolution, front, back, then the ground wasn’t there, and Dickens pitched into a hole. Thumped hard, lost his breath.

The smell of dirt, the taste of it, gritty Italian dirt. Didn’t smell a bit like dirt in Oklahoma or Afghanistan. Had some kind of honeyed herb scent like Valentina’s secret parts. An herb he couldn’t name. He should’ve paid more attention to herbs. All those scents with exotic names. He should’ve asked Valentina to marry him, come live in Texas. He should’ve done a shitload of things, a shitload more than he had.

Dirt was raining on him. Dickens wasn’t dead, but he could feel everything bleeding away fast like the color fading from the Adriatic sky after sunset.

The money was too damned good. That should’ve been the tip off.

TEN

Albion Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland

Summoned by Lester Albion to the infirmary, Adrian Naff found his boss lying on a leather recliner cocked back so far he was almost flat. Behind him, company nurse Jackie Neiderhoff was monitoring the high-speed blood separator that whirred between Albion’s chair and the chair of his eight-year-old daughter, Bonnie.

Adrian nodded hello to Albion and stepped over to Bonnie’s chair, patted her shoulder, and gave her a reassuring nod. She looked up at him and frowned. He waited in silence as the machine rumbled and purred.

As he understood it, the centrifuge was drawing out Lester Albion’s blood and spinning it to separate the red cells from the plasma and platelets, then pumping the depleted blood back to Albion, while Bonnie received the plasma-rich concoction from a different plastic tube that originated in the other side of the blood separator. According to Albion, the newly refreshed blood was going to bring Bonnie back to full health.

Adrian hadn’t been told the name of Bonnie’s ailment. He’d asked Albion, Neiderhoff, and Larissa Bixel, but they always replied in generalities. “A not-uncommon childhood malady.” “Very treatable condition of the hemoglobin.” “We’re just lucky Lester and his daughter are the same blood type.”

“I’m sick of being sick,” Bonnie said to Naff. Her blue eyes were bright and agitated. “I say we shut down this whole deal, yank the plug. It’s obviously a fake cure that isn’t working, and I’m tired of getting stuck in the vein twice a week. I want to go to school. Can you take me to school, Mr. Naff? Much more of this and I’ll never catch up.”

“Hang in there, kiddo. You’ll be in fighting shape soon.”

“Everyone says that, but I feel worse every day.” She shut her eyes against Naff and the rest of the oppressive adult world.

The kid was a few light-years beyond precocious. She was also irrepressibly articulate. Fully formed paragraphs had been streaming from the kid’s mouth since Adrian first met her three years earlier. A truth-telling machine locked in overdrive.

Last winter it was Bonnie’s unfiltered remarks that incriminated her father in front of a half dozen witnesses and caused Albion to draw a pistol from his suit coat and fire wildly at those assembled, wounding several, missing Adrian by inches. If it hadn’t been for Harper McDaniel’s bravery and quick reaction, that room might have been piled high with bodies.

In the court cases that followed, to the surprise of no one familiar with Swiss culture, Albion was exonerated by the high courts and his behavior brushed aside by the national media as mildly scandalous. Lester Albion was simply defending himself against armed intruders who had conned their way into the boardroom that day to make scurrilous and defamatory public claims and cause financial injury to the corporation.

A few months after the incident, Lester was back at work as if none of it had ever happened. And as far as his 150,000 employees in seventy countries were concerned, whatever had gone down in the Zurich headquarters last winter was irrelevant as long as it had no detrimental effect on the corporation’s bottom line. Since yearly global revenues were up 13 percent, all was well with the Albion workforce.

Nurse Neiderhoff shut off the blood separator and drew the needle from Albion’s arm, then did the same for Bonnie.

“I feel worse,” Bonnie said. “Thanks for nothing. Who’s taking me to school?”

Albion told Neiderhoff to send for one of the drivers stationed on the first floor of the office building.

“You can’t take me, Daddy? You’re so busy you don’t have time for your own sick daughter?”

“Sorry, dear. I’ll see you at home tonight. We’ll watch something together on television.”

“Oh, joy. Sit side by side and watch the screen? This is exactly why Mother divorced you.”

Albion shook his head and grimaced helplessly at Adrian. He was a small-boned man, just over five feet tall with thinning brown hair and a weak chin. His intense blue eyes were his strongest feature, almost offsetting his diminutive stature.

Neiderhoff helped Bonnie to her feet. The girl blinked a few times as if the room were whirling.

Without another word to Bonnie, Albion waved for Adrian to follow.

“I have a job for you.” Using the same brusque tone he employed with all his staff, though Adrian had once been exempt from such disdain. “I do hope I’m not taking you away from anything important.”

Adrian said no, he was at Mr. Albion’s service.

“Well, I should certainly hope so.” He was at the door of the infirmary. “Bixel, you come too. It’s gym time.”

“Of course.”

Larissa Bixel trailed Adrian down the corridor between the infirmary and the fitness center. Bixel was in her late forties. She’d recently let her buzz cut grow out a few inches and had bleached it an unfortunate shade of yellow that Adrian thought resembled motor oil.

She wore leggings in a black-and-gray faux camouflage and a loose teal hoodie that didn’t quite conceal her burly physique. Her garish running shoes looked like she’d been wading in fluorescent paint. Maybe the mishmash was hip. Adrian had no idea. He didn’t stay up on pop culture. Clashing colors might be in this fall. Or maybe Bixel had no fashion sense, and being a fortysomething woman, second in line at a global empire, she’d decided, what the hell, she could wear whatever she pleased. Fine by Adrian.

Albion, in a gray jogging suit with white stripes, led them into the gym and halted just inside the door. A couple of midday joggers were slogging along on the treadmills, a young woman Adrian knew from accounting was doing abdominal crunches on the inclined board, and there was a beefy new guy from Adrian’s security team bench-pressing about three hundred pounds while Jerome Bennetto, another of his security jocks, spotted for him.

Albion clapped his hands three times, and the action in the room slowed to a halt.

“Tell them,” Albion said to Adrian.

“Tell them what?”

“To get out, go back to work. I want the room.”

In the Zurich office, all Albion employees had an hour each day to use as they wanted. Not surprising to find the gym occupied at any hour.

“Why would I do that?” Adrian said.

Albion scowled at him and turned to Bixel.

“You do it.”

Bixel marched into the center of the fitness area and called out, “Hey, hey. Everybody out. The gym is closed. Go now. Back to work.”

As the staff filed out, Bennetto passed by Adrian and cocked a questioning eyebrow at him. How do you put up with this shit-heel? Adrian shrugged apologetically. Good question.

When the staff was gone and the door shut, Albion lowered the privacy shade across the glass.

“I want a word with Naff, Ms. Bixel. You set the weights on the bar. I’ll start with a hundred pounds. I want to work on my pectorals first.”

She nodded but kept her eyes fixed on Naff.

“Adrian,” Albion said. “I wanted to remind you about that pickup at the airport I told you about yesterday.”

“Yes, sir. I have Graham heading out in an hour.”

“Graham?”

“He’s one of our best. Big, tough, and a good driver.”

“No, not Graham. I want you to do it yourself.”

“Me? An airport pickup?”

“Do you consider such a task beneath you?”

“Well, if that’s what you want, but I do have a staff meeting at one.”

“This is not just any airline passenger. This is a dignitary. Horst Schneider. You probably recognize the name.”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Olympic coach? Does that help?”

“Not really.”

Albion sniffed at Adrian’s ignorance.

“Horst was the German national trainer in track and field for a dozen years. His teams won countless medals, dozens of gold.”

“Impressive,” Adrian said, though he wasn’t particularly impressed.

“Coach Schneider has agreed to become my personal trainer.”

“Really? Replace Bixel?”

“I believe I’ve moved beyond Bixel’s capabilities. I’m setting my goals ever higher.”

“The Olympics?”

Albion studied Naff’s expression.

“You think this is amusing, Adrian? Worthy of mockery?”

“I think you should have the coach you want. I’ll be happy to pick up Mr. Schneider. It will be my honor.”

Across the room, Bixel was watching them, her head tilted in their direction to eavesdrop.

Adrian smoothed a hand across his mouth to erase any hint of a smile. In the few years that Adrian had known the man, Albion had been working constantly to remedy his deficiencies in manliness. Handguns had been his obsession last year, now weight training. In the last few months, his runty physique had bulked up a fraction, adding maybe a few pounds of new muscle, but the man’s frame was simply too slight to carry any serious brawn. His paunch had retreated and he stood a bit straighter, but beyond that, Adrian could see little evidence the new regimen was working.

“You know Ms. Bixel’s eldest daughter, Gerda. Am I right?”

“I met her once,” Adrian said.

“The man you’re picking up at the airport, Mr. Schneider, was Gerda’s Olympic coach. He helped mold her into the superior athletic specimen she is today.”

Specimen was exactly the word Adrian would have used for Gerda. Pin her to a museum wall, labeled ATHLETICUS FREAKOID.

“Listen to me, Adrian. I’ve given you a second chance. Don’t let it slip away.”

“I’m not following you.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“No, sir. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

In the months since Albion’s shooting spree and his subsequent court case, he had not discussed with Adrian the events of that day or the days that followed. They’d kept a cool, businesslike distance, which was fine by Naff. He had no desire to be Albion’s buddy again or his manhood adviser.

“Truly,” Albion said. “After the way you betrayed me, you should be grateful you still have a position. Don’t pretend otherwise. Last year when I most needed your backing, you were nowhere to be found.”

“You mean the court case?”

“I mean all of it.”

“I believe I testified on your behalf. Gave several depositions.”

“Yes, and what did you say? You equivocated. You quibbled over my right to defend myself against life-threatening conditions.”

“In my opinion, no one was threatening your life,” Adrian said.

“There it is again. Until this very day, you’re determined to test my patience.”

“I don’t mean to do that, sir.”

“You broke my heart, Adrian. I thought the two of us were friends. My god, how idiotic I must have seemed to you, but I really believed we’d formed a deep, personal alliance. We had a bond, or so I thought.”

“I’m sorry I disappointed you.”

“No, you’re not. You’d do all the same things again exactly in the same way. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

He was right, of course. But Adrian tried to keep the fact out of his expression. Bowing his head briefly and trying for a penitent grimace.

“I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ll do what I can to restore your confidence.”

But Albion wanted to get in one more lick.

“I trusted you, Adrian. I put my faith in you, believed you were the right man to guide the security apparatus of our organization while others doubted my judgment.” He flicked a glance toward Bixel.

Adrian waited. Bixel was taking her sweet time adding ten-pound weights to the bar on the bench press.

“Go to the airport,” he said. “Pick up Coach Schneider.”

“Yes, sir. Happy to do it.”

Lester Albion lay on the weight bench, extended his arms, gripped the cold steel bar, and lifted the weight from the hooks. Brought it slowly down to his chest, drew in a breath, then pushed it back to full extension. Down and up again, down and up. Expelling breath with each lift.

Larissa Bixel stood over him, at the ready.

When he reached ten, he settled the bar back in the hooks, lay still for a count of ten, then sat up. His chest muscles engorged, arms and shoulders flushed with blood.

“Any ill effects from the transfusion?”

Albion drew a deep breath.

“I feel fine. Quite good, actually.”

“I’m pleased to hear it.”

Albion sat up on the bench. He ran a hand over his pectorals. Cupped them, squeezed lightly as if he were feeling a tingle of pleasure at the engorgement.

“You’re sure you’re not offended that I’m bringing in Coach Schneider?”

“Of course not,” Bixel said. “Shall I add more weight?”

“Yes, let’s go up five pounds.”

“That’s a big step.”

Albion lay back on the bench as Bixel began adding the silver disks.

“You know, of course, Ms. Bixel, I’m quite taken by your daughter.”

Bixel added the final disk to the bar and tightened the locks.

“Oh yes,” she said. “You are not the first to fall under her enchantment. For the right man, Gerda will be quite a catch.”

Albion took a large swallow of air and spoke in a sigh.

“Tell me the truth, Bixel, and I want complete honesty.”

“And you shall have it.”

He drew another deep breath and steeled himself.

“In your opinion, am I man enough for Gerda?”

Stretched out on the weight bench, Albion looked up at her, his lips parted, his hazel eyes beseeching her for the answer he wanted to hear.

Larissa Bixel said, “Perhaps I should add ten more pounds. What do you think? Are you up to it?”

ELEVEN

Andalucía, Spain

“I told Nick to rent the Mercedes, at least go with the 3 series Beamer, but no, he’s a frugal boy, had to take the Fiat, barely room for a couple of starving goats, much less three full-size Americanos.”

Sal turned in his seat and looked at Harper, flicking his eyes toward Nick in the driver’s seat. Prompting her. Do something, say something, break the ice.

Nick kept his eyes on the road, his face a mask of detachment. In the rearview mirror, Harper studied Nick’s dark, unflinching eyes.

He hadn’t responded to Harper’s greeting. Once she was inside, the door shut, he’d pulled away from the curb in front of the dojo and wound through the alleyways, following Harper’s directions out to the highway, A-4. Sulking or fuming, she couldn’t tell. She’d never seen her brother like this.

Adopted from a Russian orphanage at eight years old, Nick had been a frail and bashful child when he arrived at his new home in Miami. For the next few years, Harper became his protector against the schoolyard bullies who targeted him because of his Russian accent, his girlish lashes, his slender build.

While their mom, Deena, globe-trotted and their dad stayed late at work, Harper had prepared their meals, read him bedtime stories, snuggled with Nick as he drifted off to sleep. She’d played every role. Sister, mother, mentor.

To stand up to Nick’s tormenters, together they devoted themselves to martial arts classes, moving up the ranks year by year until Nick mastered the fighting skills to hold his own, and his coltish body finished filling out, leaving him a formidable young man, sleek and strong and just over six feet in height. The bullies drifted away and turned on easier marks.

Over the years, the bond between brother and sister never faltered. Never a harsh word between them. Harper, his guardian, his advocate, his confidant, sharing his struggles with adolescent love affairs and his secret longings, soothing his nightmares and his memories of the hardships he’d endured in the orphanage. She’d taught him to ride a bike, fly a kite. She’d bandaged his scuffed knees.

With the car locked in stony silence, Nick steered them through the frenetic freeway traffic, gliding from lane to lane with effortless dexterity. In half an hour, the traffic thinned and the roadway rose onto a ridge that overlooked the central plain of Andalucía. Coppery fields of grain and grassy, cattle-grazing land, olive groves and grape vineyards. They passed through the city of Carmona, where Roman ruins were scattered along the hillside visible through the trees, highway signs pointing the way to Córdoba and the fertile lands beyond.

Thirty minutes of rigid, unnatural silence.

“Jesus,” Sal said. “Would you two please make up? I’m an old man. The tension in this car, it could give a guy a myocardial heart attack, you two would never forgive yourselves, your old granddad pushed over the edge by brooding youngsters.”

When Nick didn’t respond, Harper leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry, Nick. It was cruel to disappear like that. Not stay in touch.”

“Why’d you do it?” Nick’s voice was nearly inaudible. His lips barely moved, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

Harper was trying to frame her response when Sal piped up.

“I’ll tell you what Lavonne said. Harper was trying to protect us, Nicky. Keep us in the dark because she thought the situation was too risky, the shit she’s into now. Personally, I find that severely discourteous, considering the above-and-beyond help we gave her last winter. The risks we took, you and me, Nicky.

“So is Lavonne right, Harper? You were trying to protect us, didn’t think we were up to the job, this strong resourceful young man, and your old granddad, one foot in the grave already, I could die, who’d even care?”

“It’s my fight,” she said. “It’s not fair to drag you two into it again.”

Sal swiveled in his seat, gave her his full attention.

“Lavonne says this olive-oil thing, it’s how you’re trying to get to Albion.”

Harper nodded.

“From what I’ve seen, the guy’s untouchable. That corporation of his, it’s a fortress, and the fucking Swiss courts, they’re not going to help you bring him down.”

“Nobody’s untouchable.”

“So what is it, butt your head against a multinational conglomerate, like what, the rest of your life? Your mission forever? Give up your career in photography, be a one-woman vigilante?”

“Nobody said I was giving up anything.”

“Hey, believe me, I get it, the revenge thing is potent stuff. You come down with a bad case, it keeps you running in high gear for years. I know firsthand. And sure, the shitty way you lost Ross and Leo, that sweet beautiful kid, yeah, that was as bad as it gets, like losing a major organ. But you can’t spend the rest of your time on earth getting even with some goddamn corporation.”

“Can’t I?”

Sal shut his eyes, shook his head. Getting nowhere.

She said, “Anyway, I’m not going after the corporation, just Albion.”

“It’ll be thugs coming for you, not Albion.”

“I know that, Sal. I’m ready for them.”

“Are you?” Sal said. “’Cause thugs, they’re bowling pins—knock ’em down, new ones pop back up before your ball rolls back to you.”

“I’ll see about that.”

“Don’t you ever just want to go home, live a normal life?”

Harper looked out the side window at the golden countryside.

“My home was burned down.”

“That was your house. I’m talking about Miami, place you were born, grew up, went to school, got married, had a baby boy. Where your brother and your granddad still roost. That place. Your home.”

“All that’s over.”

“So now you live on the road? A nonstop string of hotel rooms? That’s what you’re looking forward to?”

“What do you want from me, Sal? I’m supposed to go back to Miami and do what? Come over to your condo every Sunday, grill burgers and listen to you reminisce about the good old mafia days?”

Sal shut his lips hard, looked to the side as if he’d been slapped.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was stupid.”

Sal managed a quiet smile of forgiveness.

“No need to apologize. From where I’m standing, yeah, grilling and reminiscing wouldn’t be bad. A lot I don’t know about my granddaughter. Someday I’d like to catch up.”

“Maybe someday, Sal, but not anytime soon.”

“I want you to be happy is all. Just you being happy. That room back there, place you were living, it was a depressing shithole. You’ve gotten stronger, sure. Muscles and all that. But I can take one look at you, see you’re not happy. Not a bit happy.”

“Happy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Yeah, yeah, it isn’t everything. But what you’re doing now, you’re bitter. On a revenge binge. Burning up inside. That to me is not a healthy way to be. That’s the kind of poison, you keep sipping long enough, I don’t know anybody can survive a steady diet of that.”

“You’re a therapist now?”

Sal smiled to himself, his eyes swimming out of focus.

She drew a deep breath. He was right, of course. Right about all of it. But none of it mattered. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t give up until this was finished. Till Albion was finished.

“About this woman who’s following you . . .” Nick said.

“Name’s Gerda Bixel,” said Sal.

Nick shot a look at Harper in the rearview.

“What about her?” she said.

“So they’ve been watching you, the Albion people.”

“Apparently, yes. I should’ve spotted her, but I didn’t.”

“What did Gerda see? What could she have learned, all that time tailing you?”

“Not much,” Harper said. “I shopped for food, stayed in the hotel mainly.”

“You went to that library,” Sal said. “Every day at one o’clock, stayed all afternoon.”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?” Nick said.

“Researching the olive-oil business, looking for an angle, some way to get to Albion.”

“And did you find anything?”

Harper sighed and looked out her window at the rolling hills. With every response she was allowing them deeper into her mission.

Nick said, “Where are we going? Where are you taking us?”

“Somebody I need to meet, somebody that could be helpful.”

Nick asked who this person was, watching her in the mirror.

Harper shook her head, not yet.

Sal said, “Your library research, did it turn up anything?”

“I know there’s a lot of money being made in phony extra-virgin olive oil. Italian mob’s involved.”

“Mafia guys love olive oil,” Sal said. “It’s how Corleone got his start, remember, used the business as a front for all the criminal shit he was into.”

Nick glanced over at Sal. “You know that’s fiction, right? A novel, a movie.”

“I know what I know,” Sal said.

Nick spoke over his shoulder: “Is Albion making counterfeit oil?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I intend to find out.”

“Seems like small potatoes,” Sal said. “A million here, million there.”

“Unless there’s more at stake than money.”

“You got something in mind?”

Harper shrugged. “Not yet.”

Nick’s shoulders stiffened. His eyes clicked to the rearview.

“Don’t anybody turn around,” he said. “But two cars back I believe there’s a baby-blue Peugeot on our tail.”

Sal slanted his head to the right and peered into the outside mirror.

“Well, well,” Sal said. “Looks like Gerda, and she’s got company. Somebody riding shotgun.”

Nick held Harper’s eyes in the mirror.

“Your call, Harper. Tell me what you want to do.”

TWELVE

Andalucía, Spain

A damn chicken was loose in the rear seat, and Gerda, her hands tight on the steering wheel, could do nothing about it. The chicken was flapping around, turning crazy circles on the grandmother’s lap. In the rearview mirror, Gerda saw the grandmother was still alive, chest rising and falling, but her face was white and her eyes had rolled back. Either a stroke or she’d passed out. Couldn’t take the excitement.

Holding her place two cars back, Gerda watched as the white Fiat slid into the fast lane and began to speed up. Inevitable. They’d spotted her and were making a run.

In the passenger seat beside Gerda, the gray-haired woman was dead. It had taken three chops to her throat to stop her screaming. Rail thin, the woman was in her fifties. Looked like the daughter of the granny in the back. Gray Hair wasn’t wearing her seat belt, so each time Gerda adjusted the wheel, the woman rocked against the passenger window or tilted far to her left, about to topple onto Gerda.

Not an ideal situation, but back in Seville the Peugeot was the first car she’d encountered after McDaniel and the two men fled in the white Fiat. Gerda leaped in front of the powder-blue car, and the driver, a middle-aged man in a suit and tie, braked hard, his front bumper grazing Gerda’s knee. She went to his door, tore it open, dragged the man from his seat, and slung him to the pavement. Gerda slipped behind the wheel and sped after the white Fiat.

At least a dozen witnesses were present at the scene. A messy moment, but unavoidable. Gerda kept it swift and smooth, not more than a few seconds of exposure. There was a remote chance someone had thought to record the Peugeot’s license plate, and an even more unlikely possibility that someone had managed to video-record the episode.

But what else could she do? Let Harper and the two men escape? Risk losing her prey entirely? She had to make an instant decision, and now, half an hour later, with no sirens in the distance, she was feeling optimistic.

Except for the gray-haired woman whose skull continued to sway left and right, and that damn chicken doing its war dance on the granny’s lap. Why the hell were they transporting a chicken? Was it a pet they took wherever they went? A gift for someone’s dinner? Gerda was not a lover of chickens, and this one seemed even more ill-tempered than others she’d encountered. Could chickens fly? She didn’t know. Beyond her area of expertise. If it could fly, then it was only a matter of time before the maniac launched itself over the seat back and presented a serious danger to Gerda’s safety. Especially now that her speed was creeping up to keep pace with Harper and her two associates down the crowded Autovía de Andalucía.

Gerda was a fearless driver. First learning to handle a car on the Bundesautobahn, the German motorway that had no speed limit, only a suggested lower end of 130 kilometers per hour, or around eighty-one miles. Ninety-five miles an hour was normal, 120 not unusual. The Porsches and Mercedes that the German sports federation used to transport Olympic athletes often grazed the lower end of the 150s. She was used to speed, enjoyed the sensation, the uptick in her pulse, the rapid eye movements and fine-tuned reflexes required to stay alive.

At that moment Gerda was doing only one hundred miles an hour, passing everything on the highway, the Fiat and the Peugeot cutting in and out of lanes, staying in tight formation. Gerda’s one worry: the older-model Peugeot had begun to protest with a rattle in the transmission, a quaking in the front seat as though welds might be coming loose. The car was not built for speed, probably never pushed past sixty before. If she was going to make her move, she could wait no longer.

While the accelerator pedal still had some slack, it was time to pull alongside the Fiat and ram it off the road and, with luck, into the rock wall bordering the highway. Her mission would be complete.

The chicken seemed to sense the strain of the engine, the growing vibration in the chassis. It shrieked and fluttered off the grandmother’s lap and hovered in the air.

Steering with her left hand, Gerda reached back and swiped at the bird and swiped again. Somehow, she snagged a leg and yanked the creature forward. It shrieked and pecked at her arm and wrist and fluttered madly against Gerda’s headrest. An admirable fighting spirit.

Before she could drag the damn bird into the front seat and put it out of its misery, its leg snapped off in her hand.

Gerda watched in the mirror as the panicked bird backstroked into Granny’s lap, a fierce resolve in its tiny eyes.

Turning back to the road, she saw a long stretch clear of traffic. Only the Peugeot and the white Fiat and several empty miles of asphalt.

Gerda flung the chicken leg into the back and flattened the throttle.

“She’s coming,” Nick said.

“Buckle up, kiddos,” said Sal.

Harper leaned forward. “That next exit. It’s one kilometer.”

“You sure?”

“We can’t outrun her,” said Harper. “It’s the best option.”

Alongside the highway, flat fields of grain stretched off toward the horizon. There were dusty roads leading through farmlands, the humps of smoky-blue mountains in the distance. Very few trees, scarcely any houses or barns. Not the best place to find a hiding spot.

Harper turned in her seat and watched as the Peugeot continued to gain. A hundred yards back, closing fast.

“The next exit, Nick,” she said. “Last possible second.”

“Nick, Nick,” Sal said. “Told you to get the Benz, but no, you had to pinch pennies, go with this tin bucket.”

Nick held the speed, eighty, ninety miles an hour, Harper guessed, as she couldn’t see the dashboard, but the engine was wailing and the low rock wall was a gray blur, and the tiny car seemed to be lifting off the pavement, almost airborne.

They flew past a sign for the Écija exit two hundred meters ahead. Harper didn’t know Écija or this part of Spain, but from what she could see of the countryside, it might have been Kansas.

Nick was holding his speed. She felt a shimmy in the chassis, the front tires out of line. Nick was a skillful driver, but at this speed she didn’t know if he could manage the turn onto the ramp. She could see the exit coming up in fifteen, twenty seconds.

“Maybe slow down a tad?” Sal said. He was checking his seat belt.

“I got this,” Nick said. “Hold on.”

The blue Peugeot appeared next to them. An older woman was slumped in the passenger seat, her gray hair smooshed against the window as if she’d passed out. Harper couldn’t see past her to Gerda. But she sensed what was coming.

“She’s going to ram us,” Harper said.

Gerda drifted a few feet left as if to sharpen the angle of her strike, but Nick acted first and cut the steering wheel hard in Gerda’s direction, slamming the Fiat’s front left fender into the Peugeot’s passenger door, then swung the steering wheel to the right and swerved onto the exit. The Fiat lost traction and began skidding sideways down the ramp.

“Aw shit,” Sal said. “Wouldn’t you know.”

A hundred yards ahead, a wooden wagon piled high with hay and a team of horses trundled slowly down the ramp to the intersection.

“Don’t worry,” Nick said. “I took a class.”

Sal stared at him, dumbfounded. “A class? What class?”

Nick braked, downshifted, made a quick adjustment to the wheel, and the Fiat slid into a leisurely 360 rotation, back wheels kicking up gravel along the shoulder, and the front tires screaming against the asphalt. The driver of the wagon swiveled around, his mouth opening as he watched the Fiat careering toward him.

Nick fine-tuned the steering again, and the Fiat came crisply out of the spin and passed the wooden wagon, lightly brushing one of its big wheels with the front bumper. One more correction, and Nick guided the Fiat right onto the two-lane local highway and sped west.

“Two-week course in Poznan,” Nick said. “That’s Poland.”

“Course in race-car driving?”

“Something like that.”

“What, like a hobby?”

Nick shifted through the gears till they were back at cruising speed on a long straightaway that stretched for miles into the featureless farmland.

Harper’s pulse was still revved from the spinout and scrape with the hay wagon. But Nick seemed as serene and self-possessed as always.

He said, “World Bank picks up the tab, two weeks at the European Security Academy. I go every year for the evasive-driving course. Comes in very handy in Miami.”

Looking back at the freeway, Harper said, “I think we lost her. But you probably need to step on it anyway.”

“Where’re we going?” Sal said.

“A few hours east, a town called Canena.”

“What’s in Canena?” Sal said.

“Someone with dirt on Albion.”

Nick was squinting at her in the rearview mirror.

“Canena, Harper? What the hell?”

“Yes,” she said. “Daniela’s helping me.”

“Jesus Christ.” He reached up and adjusted the mirror to be eye to eye with Harper. “Of all the people in the world, why the hell drag her into this?”

“She’s connected, knows tons of people in the olive-oil industry. I needed a place to start. Somebody who could steer me in the right direction.”

“Does she know what you’re doing? What your endgame is? Bringing down Albion? She know about the violence last winter? All the fucked-up bad guys that were coming for you?”

“I told her everything. She’s not afraid.”

“No,” Nick said. “She wouldn’t be.”

Harper said, “She’s been calling around, talking to people, and she’s learned something she thinks is important. She wants to talk, but it has to be face-to-face. I was going to see her in the next day or two. I had no idea you’d be showing up. It was just between Daniela and me.”

“Goddamn it.”

“Hey,” Sal said. “You going to tell me who this Daniela person is?”

Harper left it to Nick. It took him a few seconds, but finally he said, “Daniela and I used to be close.”

“Close, huh?”

Nick looked over at Sal but said nothing.

“First I heard of this,” Sal said.

“I don’t share everything with you, Sal.”

“You in love with her? That kind of close?”

Nick sighed and said, “Yes, but it didn’t work out.”

“With you it never seems to,” Sal said. “Starting to wonder why that is.”

“Travel,” Nick said. “Both of us were on the road all the time.”

“Bullshit,” said Sal. “Nothing personal, Nicky boy, but you love a woman, you find a way. That’s how it works. People find a way.”

Nick focused on the road ahead.

Before the silence could harden again, Harper said, “Just let me off in Canena, Nick. I’ll take it from there.”

“No,” he said. “Now that you’ve got Daniela involved in this shit, somebody’s got to look after her.”

“Now you’re talking, kid,” Sal said. “That’s more like it.”

Gerda blew past the exit, braked hard, swung to the right, and came to a stop on the shoulder. The east-west highway was divided by a six-foot retaining wall, and the next exit was nowhere in sight, so Gerda saw no alternative.

She waited for a gap in the eastbound traffic behind her, then U-turned in the middle of the highway, switched on her high beams, and headed back into the stream of oncoming cars. Horns blared, headlights flashed, cars swerved from her path, a transfer truck hurtled toward her but at the last second swung into the shoulder and rammed the rock wall.

After two more near misses, Gerda made it back to the exit that McDaniel and her crew had taken, squealed down it, and slammed the shifter through the gears. In the backseat, the chicken was quiet. And Granny’s eyes were open. She was glaring at Gerda in the mirror and clutching the bird tightly against her breast as if Gerda might try to steal the damn thing.

Halting at the end of the exit ramp, Gerda looked north then south, saw nothing but empty road in both directions. She lowered her window and sat for a few seconds, listening, but could hear only the roar of the highway overhead. She sat awhile longer, trying to decide which way to go. North would eventually lead her toward Madrid, south toward Málaga or Gibraltar.

This was the reason Lester Albion should have told her more about the nature of her mission. She had no idea of her ultimate destination. All she knew for certain was that olive trees and the olive-oil business seemed to play a role in her task. For all she knew, olive groves might be growing in either direction.

Her gut told her to pick north, if only because more landmass lay in that direction, the bulk of Europe, and far to the north and east was her own fatherland. As she swung into the road, she took a quick southward glance and spotted a small plume of dust drifting in the wind far in the distance. A car kicking up a trail on some unpaved road. It might be nothing, but she’d seen no other sign of life as she scanned the countryside.

Already into her turn, she reversed direction, spun the wheel, floored it, skidded, lost control, banged the passenger door against a guardrail, got the car straightened, and floored it again. A half mile later the sluggish Peugeot managed to reach fifty-five.

With the throttle flat to the floor, she kept her focus on the dust cloud, let it guide her off the main highway onto a rutted, one-lane trail of gravel and dust. Ten minutes later she saw the white Fiat about a mile ahead, just a glimpse of its rear end as it rounded a curve, brown dust boiling up behind it. They must not have spotted her yet because she was gaining quickly.

“You sure this is right, Harper?”

She studied the map on Nick’s phone, tightened her fingertips against the screen to enlarge the view.

“This leads to Santaella, then on to La Rambla, and after that we pick up N-432 for a while. Better roads to Jaén and on to Canena. Or so says this map.”

“It gets any bumpier,” Sal said, “my spleen is breaking loose.”

“You’re right, Sal. The Benz would’ve been better.”

“Next time, listen to me. The old man knows a few things.”

They jostled along in silence for a while, then Nick said, “I hate to tell you this, guys. But she’s back there again.”

Harper turned and looked through the dust at the pale-blue Peugeot closing in.

Nick shifted into third, and the bumpy road got a whole lot bumpier.

Three against one. Was Gerda worried about those odds? Was she concerned that on this isolated back road she would not be able to confront a woman and two men, one of them elderly, and take them down? Was she worried that one of her adversaries was armed?

Well, yes, that last possibility was sobering. But Gerda the Warrior would not be deterred. She’d received her orders and would carry out her mission no matter the risk. Gerda saw this as her greatest strength—bending her will to the will of her superior, subduing her own petty wishes and grievances and yielding to a higher authority. A dutiful soldier.

She entered the thick cloud of dust, pushed on, gripping the wheel tighter and craning forward as her vision was hindered by the thick veil kicked up by the Fiat. She forged into the brown fog, her right foot jammed against the pedal, her body jolted by the ruts and potholes, the washboard furrows, Gerda bouncing in her seat, sightless now, lost in the brown haze, tasting the dust as it seeped into the car, becoming slime in her mouth, and onward she drove until finally, finally she saw the white shape appear close before her, the squat little Fiat with the red decal on its rear bumper, an advert for the rental car agency, and Gerda pushed harder on the accelerator, hard enough to jam her shoe through the floorboards, her quadriceps straining as if her leg muscles alone could power this flimsy car, and a second later she rammed into the rear of the Fiat, bounced back a foot or two, then rammed it again.

It was then that her engine belched and sputtered, then she was falling away, ten feet, twenty, the dust cloud thinning, Gerda stomping on the pedal again and again, but it was useless. The engine made a last stammer, then went dead.

“Estás sin gasolina.”

Granny was giving Gerda a baleful glare. The Peugeot was out of gas.

Gerda turned to face the wretched woman and was met with a stinging spray of violet and lavender. A spurt of the old lady’s cheap perfume.

Blinded, Gerda drew back and cursed the old fool. While she scrubbed at her burning eyes, she heard the rear door open, the granny trying to escape. Gerda opened her door and stepped out into the dazzling afternoon light, the heat, the haze of dust. Through a bleary film she caught sight of the old one hurrying down the road, the chicken clutched to her chest.

Gerda was on her in seconds. She seized her thick white hair and slung her to the ground. The chicken broke loose and fluttered a few feet away. Gerda stood over Granny and rubbed the last of the prickle from her eyes.

Then she lowered herself and sat astraddle Granny’s belly.

“Eres un diablo. Diablo, diablo.”

No, Gerda was not the devil. At best, she was his tireless servant.

She quieted the granny’s denunciations with a hand across her mouth. Quieted her for a minute, then a minute more, until there were no more harsh words rising from her throat, not even a warble from her lungs.

The chicken stood nearby watching solemnly as Gerda climbed off the dead woman and walked back to the Peugeot. She opened the trunk, searching for extra petrol. With a few gallons she could resume her pursuit of Harper McDaniel and the other two. That’s all she needed, just a gallon or two, and she knew she could catch up to them.

But there was no gasoline. Only a few tools and a roll of duct tape.

Gerda looked back at the chicken. It was staring at the granny. Its imprisonment had ended, but with only one leg it could not escape. It settled its plump breast in the dusty road alongside the dead woman as if waiting for her to wake and resume their journey.

Gerda opened the back door of the car, located the chicken’s leg lying on the floorboard. From the Peugeot’s trunk she picked up the roll of duct tape and walked back to the chicken.

The bird fluttered, clucked, and tried to swim away, but Gerda caught it, lifted it up and cradled the hen in her arms and braced it against her own indomitable heart, holding it there until finally the bird quieted and looked up into Gerda’s face with something like resignation.

Gerda carried the bird to the side of the road and took a seat in the yellowing grass. What she was doing was silly and very unlike her. Gerda the Warrior, Gerda the Ruthless. But she couldn’t stop. Not sure why.

She tore off a length of duct tape, set it aside, then lifted the chicken up and fit the severed leg against the bird’s stump. After several attempts, she managed to mesh the broken leg with the stump. She then wrapped the tape tightly around the joint, just as athletic trainers had so many times bound compression bandages around Gerda’s torn muscles, her ruptured tendons, her hairline-fractured bones, repairs not meant to last forever, only long enough for Gerda to climb to her feet and compete in the next event, um ihr eine faire Chance zu geben. To give her a fighting chance.

Once Gerda completed the repair, she set the chicken on its feet and watched as the bird experimented with its rejoined limb. After a few practice steps, it hobbled away, taking a direct path down the dusty dirt track toward the two-lane highway, drawn forward by whatever mysteries inspired such creatures.

THIRTEEN

Albion International, Zurich, Switzerland

Adrian Naff’s secretary, a smart young Austrian named Derek Müller, had the best damned posture of anyone Adrian had ever met. His spine was a steel rod, his chin always pulled in as if he were about to be inspected by a zealous drill sergeant. Derek was punctual, factual, direct, and to the point. One-word answers to ten-word questions. An air of utter calm and proper respect for the chain of command.

Best of all, the kid showed no hint of disdain for Adrian’s informality or his lax administrative skills. Adrian was a laissez-faire boss. He’d gotten that way after years of service in the mechanized ranks of the military, where blind loyalty was often blindly rewarded.

On numerous occasions, Adrian had invited Derek Müller to join him for a drink after work, and each time Derek declined, offering no excuse. Adrian would love to get the kid tipsy, see who was lurking beneath the starched oxford shirts and brutally creased trousers.

Derek was standing in Adrian’s office door. His brown hair had a healthy gleam and, as always, was perfectly parted.

“Still jet-lagged, sir?”

“Does it show?”

“You’ve got that foggy look in your eyes.”

“What’s up?”

“Miss Campos is here to see you, sir.”

“Show her in,” he said. “And remind me, what time’s my flight?”

“Four o’clock at Kloten. Your car will be downstairs in half an hour.”

Back from DC on Saturday evening, flying to Greece on Monday afternoon. This time to bodyguard one of the senior vice presidents who was giving a paper at a World Bank symposium on microfinance. Whatever the hell that was.

Adrian kept a packed suitcase in his office for such surprise outings. It happened with grim regularity, various vice presidents requesting Adrian’s own company on treks to unfriendly corners of the globe, often preferring the boss to the members of his top-flight security team.

Adrian knew he wasn’t in high demand because he was a charming seatmate. It was all about vanity. Traveling with the head of security as their personal bodyguard conferred a hint of prestige to a junior executive in the status-obsessed corporation. Though Adrian found the practice annoying, he played along, partly because he was a good soldier, but mainly because Julie Marie’s medications were costing more every month, and after the recent American election, some of her meds were no longer covered under Shelly’s health-care plan.

Lucia Campos slipped into Adrian’s office and asked if she could shut the door.

“Of course.”

She was a petite woman with jet-black hair boyishly cropped. She had obsidian eyes and narrow lips and the high, hard cheekbones of her Portuguese mother, who came on yearly visits to shop Zurich’s boutiques. Lucia wore a trim, gray pinstriped suit that was tailored to conceal the best features of her figure. Features that Adrian had gotten to know intimately last winter, when they’d shared an intense though brief affair. She’d cut it short, concerned that an interoffice relationship, while not formally forbidden, might compromise her ethical credibility. Lucia Campos was Albion International’s chief compliance watchdog, after all. Ethics were her life’s blood.

“I understand you’re on your way to the airport, so I’ll be quick.”

“As long as you like. Sit down, relax. You look jittery.”

“I didn’t know who else to speak to.”

“It’s good to see you. We might as well work on different continents lately. It’s been weeks.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” she said. “I try to keep my distance.”

“I understand.”

Though he didn’t. Not really. He’d relished their time together, thought it might grow into something richer. She was smart and had a quirky sense of humor and was a hell of a cook. Though a devout Catholic, she liked her wine and was boisterous and athletic in the bedroom. They’d shared a string of breathless nights, which Adrian occasionally recalled in exquisite detail.

“Look, I’m sorry to bother you with this. I shouldn’t be here.”

She took a seat in the leather wingback chair in the far corner, then came to her feet and began to pace in front of Adrian’s desk.

“Is it about work?”

“Yes.” She gave him a rueful smile. “These days everything is about work.”

From the inside of her jacket she withdrew a sheet of paper, unfolded it, and handed it to Adrian. He laid the paper on his desk, smoothed out the creases, and looked it over. Her handwriting was elegant, the words formed with schoolgirl precision. But the two paragraphs were loaded with business-school gobbledygook and columns of numbers. The only phrase he recognized was one he’d encountered last week during his trip to DC.

“Dark pools,” he said. “I’ve heard of those.”

“That seems to be the cornerstone of this swindle.”

“Who’s getting swindled?”

“I don’t have a name. Not yet.”

“So all of this, these numbers, it’s, what, some kind of calculation?”

“You could call it that, yes. A calculation that doesn’t add up.”

“But that’s your job, isn’t it? To catch things that don’t add up?”

“That’s the accounting department. My job is to make sure everyone is following the rules. International banking regulations, the Third Basel Accord. Leverage ratio, liquidity requirements.” She halted, looked flustered. “I’m sorry. No one seems to know exactly what I do. Not even you. It’s difficult to explain to the uninitiated.”

“I’ve tried,” Adrian said. “Your job is impressively incomprehensible.”

“Okay. For one thing, in my world there’s something we call ‘tone at the top.’ What’s the message being sent throughout the corporate structure about complying with ethical and legal regulations? That message flows from the top down. That’s my greatest challenge in this company.”

“Let me guess,” Adrian said. “The tone coming from Lester is whatever you can get away with.”

She shook her head. “Worse than that. Aggressively worse.”

“And this?” Adrian tapped a finger on the sheet of figures.

“It seems to be the outline of a scam. Either it’s already in process, or it’s a plan about to be enacted. I can’t tell from what I’ve uncovered so far.”

“Where did you find this?”

“I have unrestricted access to all corporate transactions, past, present, and upcoming. I can look at what I choose. Top to bottom.”

“So what do you do with it?”

She sighed and shook her head and picked up the sheet of paper.

“I’m supposed to present items of this sort to Mr. Albion and Ms. Bixel. That’s my responsibility. To prevent them or any of their employees from committing ethical or regulatory lapses.”

“But this is more than a lapse?”

She nodded.

“So you’re not sure it’s wise to run it by them?”

“If, as I believe, this originates in Albion’s office or Bixel’s, showing it to them would be pointless.”

Naff leaned back in his chair, blew out a long sigh. This goddamn company was warping everyone who worked there, crushing the weak and gnawing away at the decent ones like Lucia. A soulless environment whose only guiding principle was maximizing profit.

“Adrian,” she said. “I’m afraid.”

“What? For your safety?”

“No, no. Not that. I’m afraid my work will be dismissed out of hand. Or that I’ll be dismissed. Either way, it’s the end for me.”

“So this is illegal. You’re sure of it?”

“It is worse than illegal,” she said. “But yes, if this were exposed, certainly ESMA would prosecute. ESMA is the governing body for the EU, the organization that enforces the regulations, like the SEC in the United States. But I suspect this is more than financial wrongdoing. There’s another element here. This appears to be a crime against nature itself.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Do you know what a pathogen is?”

“It isn’t good, I know that much.”

“It’s a microorganism that can cause disease—a virus, bacterium.”

“I see,” Adrian said. “We’re talking about biology.”

She nodded.

Adrian sat up straighter. Not sure he wanted the answer, but he asked anyway.

“By any chance is this scam related to olive groves?”

“How in the world did you know that?”

“Biology,” he said, but didn’t have a chance to finish because that was the moment Larissa Bixel pushed open the door to Adrian’s office and stepped into the room. Derek Müller stood behind her, looming over her shoulder, giving Adrian a shrug of helpless apology.

Bixel stared at Lucia, at the paper in her hand, then to Adrian she said, “I need a minute with Mr. Naff. You may leave, Campos.”

When the door was shut behind her, Adrian spoke first: “Horst Schneider is checked in at the Baur au Lac, room 305. A very nice suite. He’s an interesting man, quite a conversationalist. He had some fascinating insights about Mr. Albion’s passion for weightlifting.”

“Never mind Schneider,” Bixel said. “Why was Campos in here?”

Bixel had changed out of her garish gym clothes and into a gray sweater and a shiny black bomber jacket. Her trousers were charcoal, and her boots were made from animal hide that matched the jacket. Some unlucky beast had been snatched from its pastoral life so Larissa Bixel could look tough and trendy.

“Lucia and I were having a conversation.”

“About what?”

“Personal matters.”

“Are you entangled with the woman again?”

“Entangled?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Not that my personal life is any of your business, but no, Lucia and I are not entangled.”

“But you were.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“There’s little that goes on in this building I’m unaware of.”

“Ms. Campos and I are not involved.”

With a skeptical squint, Bixel digested that, then glanced around Adrian’s office as if searching for damning evidence against him. She wouldn’t find much. No photos, no knickknacks, no decorations of any sort. As barren as a monk’s cell, which is exactly the way Adrian liked it. Purely functional and colorless. No way anyone could draw conclusions about Adrian’s life beyond these walls.

“Can I help you with something, ma’am?”

Bixel drew a deep breath, expelled it, and said, “Come to my office. I want to discuss a matter with you.”

“What’s wrong with right here?”

“Five minutes, in my office.” She turned and left.

Adrian dallied at his desk for fifteen minutes, a childish show of disrespect, then walked past the elevator and climbed the four flights up to Bixel’s suite. It was three times the size of his own office, with far better furniture and a sweeping view of Zurich’s orderly skyline. Her teak desk alone would have consumed Adrian’s entire floor space.

Hanging prominently on one wall were several photos of her daughter, Gerda. Adrian had never paid much attention to the photos before, but while Bixel ignored his presence, busying herself with signing a stack of documents, Adrian studied the ones closest to him.

In a couple of them, Gerda was eight or nine, wearing a sparkly bodysuit. She was waving one of those long brightly colored ribbons in a snaking figure eight that seemed to wrap around her body. She’d been a stocky child, built like her mother, not the lithe physique Adrian associated with gymnasts.

“That’s how she began.” Bixel had moved to his shoulder as silent and swift as a snake through wet grass. “It’s called rhythmic gymnastics. It’s women only, a floor exercise. They perform with ropes, hoops, balls, clubs. Gerda preferred ribbons, as you can see.”

Adrian said, “She started early.”

“She loved the ribbons, but floor work didn’t suit her—too much emphasis on gracefulness and delicacy. All that silliness.”

“So she switched to track and field.”

“Correct. High jump, at which she excelled. Then her coach persuaded her to try the decathlon. I resisted it, but I have to admit he was correct in his appraisal of her prowess.”

“Silver medal, yeah, that’s some prowess.” Adrian moved past Bixel to look at the awards-ceremony photograph. Gerda was glowering up at the woman one podium step above her.

“My daughter is a highly gifted individual. She deserves only the finest that life has to offer.”

“Every parent’s belief,” Adrian said.

“Perhaps,” Bixel said. “But not every parent has a child as exceptional as Gerda. She will marry a wealthy man, a man who can provide the best life has to offer. She has earned it.”

It seemed an odd tangent for Bixel. More personal, more revealing than she ordinarily was.

“Have you ever been poor, Mr. Naff?”

“I’ve never been anything else.”

“Poverty can turn people into animals. My daughter and I have firsthand knowledge of that intolerable disorder. Never again for either of us.”

Adrian drifted away from the wall of photographs. The display of Gerda’s transformation from a light-footed, girlish dancer whirling her ribbon to a brawny marvel of German industrial-strength coaching was making him irritable. He was picturing Julie Marie, her thick eyeglasses, her limp legs, her wheelchair, her resolute smile. Don’t pity me, that smile said. I’m doing fine.

“Mr. Albion has a problem and needs your assistance,” Bixel said. “He’s running a surveillance operation on an individual, and Mr. Albion’s personal tracker has lost contact with the target.”

“A surveillance operation I’m not aware of?”

“It’s a private matter,” Bixel said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

Adrian waited, trying to maintain his poker face.

“As a result of this loss of contact, Mr. Albion needs to know the name of a specialist on our tech team with the capability of tracking the whereabouts of a particular cell phone signal.”

Bixel’s eyes had grown twitchy. Her glance was skittering around the room, as if searching for a safe place to land. Bixel had an aversion to eye contact, but today’s jumpiness seemed of a higher order.

“Sure, I have someone who can handle that,” Adrian said.

Bixel moved back to her desk and took a seat in the large padded chair. She looked down at the stack of papers before her. “And who is that person, Adrian? His name, please.”

“Who’s being tailed? Tell me that first.”

“As I said, it’s a private matter and doesn’t concern you or the security team. That’s all I can share. If you’re unwilling to assist me, tell me now. But I must caution you, Naff, Mr. Albion has no patience left for your insolence. You wouldn’t want him to reconsider your future with the organization.”

Later, when Naff reflected on that moment, his hesitation seemed to stretch out for several minutes as he considered walking out of Bixel’s office and exiting the building for good, weighing all he had to lose or gain in continuing to work for Albion International, along with all he had already lost and gained in this lucrative, miserable job that was sapping his moral integrity.

Julie Marie also flashed into his mind, along with the meds that eased her muscle contractions and slowed the progress of her condition. Surely his daughter’s welfare alone outweighed all other considerations.

But in fact, his hesitation probably only lasted a second or two, and it was only later that he would assign to that moment any level of deliberation. The simple fact was that Adrian wanted to know what the hell was going on, if only for Harper McDaniel’s sake, and the best way to accomplish that was to stay in the game a little longer.

“Jennifer Dowdy,” Adrian said. “She’s in the computer lab. I’m sure she can pinpoint a particular cell phone’s GPS coordinates. Though I’m not sure that’s legal.”

Bixel dismissed his concern with a backhanded wave.

“Of course, Jennifer would need the number for that cell phone. And an approximate location would be helpful. At least the right country.”

“I believe that shouldn’t be a problem,” Bixel said. “Thank you, Naff. You’re free to go.”

In the hallway outside Bixel’s suite, Adrian drew his cell phone from his pocket and called Jennifer Dowdy’s extension to alert her to what was headed her way and to make sure she texted Adrian the cell phone’s coordinates and the name attached to the account as soon as she had them.

FOURTEEN

Castillo de Aranjuez, Canena, Spain

“You can shut off the map,” Nick said. “I know my way from here.”

As twilight settled and the car grew silent, Harper set Nick’s phone aside and turned her attention to the Leica. If she waited much longer, the thugs’ blood and tissue would harden and might be impossible to fully remove.

She drew the cleaning kit from her camera bag, unscrewed the camera’s lens, unfastened the eyepiece and the battery pack, and set them on the seat beside her. With the microfiber cloth, she wiped away the larger streaks of blood and specks of tissue. Then she dampened a cotton swab with the cleaning solution and began to work on the corners and crevices of the outer body.

The two men, Ángel and his partner, would require stitches. She’d gashed them badly. Without a doubt, Marco would’ve accused her of excessive force. She’d gone further than she should have, a few punches too many, unnecessary head slams. She’d lost control, let her emotions overrule her training.

She wiped down the lens mount, dampened another swab, and cleaned the viewfinder, followed by the battery terminals, flash contacts, and eyepiece. Using the rubber bulb blower, she squeezed out several puffs of air to clear away loose particles inside the camera. With a light touch, she wiped the mirror clean and caught a refracted glimpse of her face. Taut and tired, not herself, an anxious strain in her eyes.

Maybe Sal was right. She’d already taken her best shot at bringing Albion to justice, and she’d failed. There was little likelihood a second assault would succeed. A sane woman would let it go and return to some semblance of normalcy. Find love again. Start another family. Commit herself to her craft. She was still young. Still had time for second chances.

She reassembled the camera, tucked it back into the bag.

Nick was looking at her in the rearview mirror.

“You doing okay?”

She blew out a breath, tried to smile but felt it fail on her lips.

“I’m fine,” she said. “You?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tell you in an hour.”

“She’ll be happy to see you,” said Sal. “Handsome stud like you, she’d have to be nuts otherwise. Is she nuts?”

“No, Sal. She’s not.”

Later, as Nick steered the Fiat up the narrow road that twisted through a sea of olive trees fanning out for miles in every direction, Harper watched as the western sky flared crimson, and higher in the atmosphere, the twilight heavens were mottled by hints of plum and cinnamon, a fleeting tapestry as chromatically rich as the Florida sunsets that had taken her breath away since childhood. The day’s last gaudy gasp, its dazzle and color bleeding away in a few exquisite seconds before black night closed in.

For a dreamy instant, Harper was a teenage girl again, and she and Nick were lazing across a silky backwater bay in Nick’s sloop, a Bermuda rig that Nick had salvaged from a boatyard after Hurricane Beatrice tore through Miami and left behind the wreckage of thousands of watercraft, a bonanza for enterprising folks of modest means.

Nick spent most of a year restoring the boat, and the two of them used it to poke around the secluded sounds and creeks of Biscayne Bay and the Upper Keys. They’d become connoisseurs of sunsets, bathing in the eerie serenity and exhilaration of hundreds of them, Harper shooting endless panoramic photos that inevitably failed to capture the scope and grandeur of even the most ordinary setting sun.

Eventually she was so humbled by the challenge of sunsets she felt she’d discovered her limits as an artist. It was partly that inability to catch a faithful replica of those flamboyant, rippling skies that led her to portraiture. She decided that the human face, even with all its deceits and layers and masks, was challenge enough for her skills.

“This is the second-largest plantation in Spain,” Nick said. “A half million trees. The olives in this province are picual. Normally they have a musky pong like cat piss. It’s the cheap stuff. They use it for lamp oil.

“But that’s the old picual. Daniela’s father developed a new cultivar, a picual that’s very complex, more like a fine Bordeaux. These days the Aguilar orchard is winning awards for their extra-virgin oil.”

“She teach you all that?” Sal said.

“Daniela grew up in the olive orchard,” he said. “It’s in her blood.”

“Seeing her again,” Harper said, “how awkward will it be for you?”

“I’ll be fine,” Nick said. “We parted friends.” Then he waved a hand at the windshield. “Voilà.”

As the Fiat came around a sweeping bend, Harper saw it glowing against the hilltop, the ramparts, parapets, and turrets of the medieval citadel.

Nick had sketched out its history a few miles back. Set on one of the highest promontories in southern Spain, Castillo de Aranjuez had been both a Moorish and Roman stronghold in centuries past. A fortress with ten-foot-thick walls, the command post to countless monarchs and chieftains who held dominion over vast regions of the Iberian peninsula and portions of the continent beyond. So many men had died attacking the castle or defending it that the hills still echoed with their battle cries, and the creeks and rivers that ran south to the Alboran Sea were forever tainted with their lifeblood.

“Where’s the drawbridge?” Sal said. “The moat with alligators.”

“Impressive,” Harper said.

Nick said, “Just wait.”

Using the credit card Albion provided, a black Amex, Gerda rented an Audi A3 at the Hertz office inside the train station in central Córdoba. New car, dark blue, almost black. Roomy, low mileage. Then she used the same card to buy a fresh phone in a kiosk down from the train station, a smartphone paid up for two months.

The smartphone was pricier than what she usually paid for a burner, but she wanted a screen, wanted internet maps, so she could find her way across this part of Spain, or wherever the hell Harper McDaniel was headed.

In central Córdoba, she parked the Audi and chose a tapas bar, Taberna El Poema, a corner café. Sat outside under a striped umbrella, ordered a plate of anguilas, eels cooked in garlic sauce. Cleaned her plate, ordered another, feeling the need for protein, packing her gut with eels, slimy creatures like short strands of spaghetti.

She watched the people walking past in the gathering darkness. The night was cooling, men shooting her enticing looks, trying to charm the tough broad with big shoulders. She texted Albion to give him her new number. Ordered coffee. It was almost eight o’clock.

A half hour later, her waiter was hovering, ready for her to leave. New customers lined up at the entrance. Her plate was empty, coffee gone, the check lying in front of her. Her phone jingled.

A text. She read it once, then again. It was the location of the cell phone belonging to one of McDaniel’s companions. Gerda scribbled the address on the back of the check. Castillo de Aranjuez. Canena.

In reply she sent a thumbs-up emoji. Then she entered the castle’s name in her phone’s search engine. A map appeared, showing the route. Seventy miles due east. An hour and a half. But with the Audi, Gerda could make it quicker.

Harper, Nick, and Sal were met at the door by a gray-haired man wearing white trousers and a white shirt and a red sash cinched at his waist. He bowed and waved them inside, giving Nick a familiar pat on the shoulder.

“Señor Nicholas, muy buenas. La señora es así.”

Nick introduced the gentleman as Mateo López, el mayordomo. The butler.

A golden light from the sconces on the foyer walls bathed the castle’s interior. Nothing cold or stark about this place.

Daniela appeared at the far end of the hallway. As she approached, her initial look of confusion softened into a wide smile.

She wore her black hair in a bun with a few stray strands loose against her graceful neck. Her dark eyes were large and calm, though there was a mischievous radiance to the smile she devoted briefly to Nick. The look that passed between them suggested the private hours they’d shared still burned brightly in both their memories.

She wore loose turquoise trousers and a silky cream blouse that rippled in the golden light. She was trimmer than Harper remembered and taller, only a couple of inches shorter than Harper. With an informal dignity to her posture, Daniela moved in easy harmony with the opulent surroundings.

She gave each of them a warm greeting, then led the way down a corridor that passed a banquet hall, then a two-story library, followed by a smoking room and a gallery decorated with oil portraits of ancient men and women posing for posterity, and another room whose walls were mounted with the trophies from hunting expeditions: gazelles and rams and other horned creatures. They passed by rooms with intricately carved chiffoniers and armoires, credenzas, drop-leaf desks, hutches and benches and armchairs. An abundance that filled but didn’t clutter the enormous spaces. Each room appeared stately and imposing yet somehow comfortably lived-in.

She guided them to a sitting room with a fireplace encircled by three roomy couches. A low fire crackled behind the grate, the logs shifting and releasing a stream of sparks.

Above the mantel hung a portrait of a dignified patriarch in suit and tie standing before the columns of a loggia, his arms crossed casually across his chest while behind him spread thousands of gnarled olive trees—the master and his orchard.

There were mahogany side tables sheathed in embossed copper, several standing lamps, and a cushioned window seat carved six feet into the stone wall.

“These thick walls,” Sal said. “Love to have them in my condo back home. My walls are so damn thin I can hear my neighbor clipping his toenails. Not a problem here.”

She laughed with genuine amusement. “No, it’s very quiet here. Sometimes too quiet, actually.” Her gaze passed over Nick before she settled a smile on Sal.

Mateo reappeared with a decanter of red wine and glasses. When everyone was served, he passed around a platter with triangles of toast and small sampling dishes of extra-virgin oil from olives harvested from the castle’s own orchard.

Sal had a taste and smacked his lips.

“Damn,” he said. “Sweet as a first kiss.”

“With a peppery bite at the end,” Nick said and gave Daniela a quick, private smile.

Daniela tucked her legs beneath her and turned to Harper.

“I’ve had Mateo air out the guest rooms. I know you are on an important journey, but I hope you’ll honor me with your presence at least for tonight, and longer if you like.”

Harper extended her hand to Nick. His call.

Nick said if Sal and Harper agreed, it was fine with him.

They agreed.

Daniela had a husky contralto voice, perhaps roughened by cigarettes or else inherited from patrician Andalusian ancestors like the rugged outdoorsman in the painting above the fireplace. As she chatted about the harvesting of the olives, which had recently begun, her eyes wandered the room, landing on Sal and Harper at intervals but lingering on Nick’s face with greater frequency.

Even from the side, Harper registered the softening in Daniela’s gaze each time her eyes settled on Nick. As Harper watched this happen several times, it occurred to her that perhaps the real reason Daniela had given up her job with Nestlé and decided to settle in Castillo de Aranjuez was not simply because her father had died and the orchard needed tending, but because it made her more available to a nomad like Nick.

Everyone fell silent and watched when Mateo came into the room. He moved aside the grate and used a poker to adjust the logs, then added two more from the stack on the hearth. When he’d finished and departed the room, Daniela swiveled to the side and gave Harper her full attention.

“Shall we talk now, or would you prefer privacy?”

“Decision time,” Sal said to Nick. “Will our leading lady sideline her own family, push us away after all the risks we took on her behalf, treat us like we can’t be trusted, or let us in on the straight dope?”

“If she wants to sideline us,” Nick said, “she’s entitled to do it.” He came to his feet. “Come on, Sal, let them talk. We’ll go outside, get a breath of air.”

“Oh, sit down,” Harper told Nick. “You made your point. It’s okay, Daniela. You can speak freely.”

Nick settled back on the couch, crossed his legs, and folded his arms across his chest, the remains of a wounded scowl fading from his face.

“As you know, I’ve been making calls,” Daniela said. “Tactful inquiries to friends with ties to the olive-oil industry as well as business associates I became friendly with during my years with Nestlé. I tried to be as circumspect as possible in raising Lester Albion’s name, and as I told you, until recently I had uncovered nothing that might be useful in your crusade.”

“Good word,” Sal said. “Got that same religious fervor.”

Daniela resettled herself on the couch, looked into the fire as it popped and sputtered. “Before I begin,” she said, “I must ask you, What do you know about dark pools?”

On her way back to her Audi, Gerda stopped at a wine shop and bought three bottles of cheap red, uncorked them, and emptied the contents into the gutter.

She recorked the bottles and laid them on the passenger seat, then followed her phone’s route-guidance commands out of Córdoba onto the highway that led to Canena. In less than an hour she arrived in the outskirts of the small town. She could see the silhouette of the castillo on a knoll maybe a mile distant.

She pulled into a petrol station, gassed up the car, then filled both empty bottles with high test and replaced the corks.

Inside the petrol station she looked around for a while, then purchased three miniature Spanish flags and a plastic cigarette lighter. Outside the store she tore the flags off their wooden staffs and dropped the staffs into a trash bin.

It would be over soon. Calm assurance warmed her body. She could hear the hum in her veins drop to a lower register like the growl of a predator closing in.

FIFTEEN

Castillo de Aranjuez, Canena, Spain

Dark pools, Daniela explained, were private exchanges set up by investment banks to avoid the transparency of public stock exchanges. Traders who were making large buy or sell orders and wanted to avoid exposing their intent to competitors, shareholders, or the market at large could execute trades in one of the fifty or so dark pools that operated in the United States and the eurozone.

“For many months now, Lester Albion has been buying up dozens of family-owned olive groves throughout southern Italy. Many of the families resisted his entreaties, but it seems Albion found ways to coerce them into selling—threats and sometimes outright acts of violence.”

“You have proof of this?” Harper asked.

“Not the sort of proof that might sustain a legal case. But several friends in the Italian oil business, honest people, have told me these stories about Albion’s business practices as he has put together larger and larger holdings in Puglia. They describe poisoned livestock, mutilated goats or pigs, a prize horse’s eyes gouged out, a farmer’s child nearly run down on the road while walking home from school, barns and sheds incinerated, various forms of intimidation.”

“Imbrogli della mafia,” Sal said.

“More than tricks,” said Harper. “He’s built his own little olive-oil empire . . .”

“In Puglia, it’s estimated that there are sixty to seventy million olive trees, grown primarily in small, family-owned orchards. Perhaps a quarter of a million Pugliese operate these small groves. They live on their land, the land of their ancestors, in tiny whitewashed cottages with small sheds, a few goats or mules. It’s very primitive. There are no large orchards as we have in Spain, like the one that surrounds us here. The average grove in Puglia has two or three hundred trees. For centuries, those small orchards have been passed down from one generation to the next. So what Albion is doing, constructing a large tract by buying up the family groves, has never been seen before. It’s a radical departure from the traditions of the past.”

“A hostile takeover.” Nick’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes restless, flicking around the room, lighting on random objects, then moving on as if he’d discovered that being in such close proximity to Daniela was proving to be more challenging than he’d imagined.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Why would he do that?” Harper said. “From what I’ve read, the olive-oil business is very demanding, the profit margins small.”

“Sadly, that is true,” Daniela said. “In Albion’s case, this is where the dark pools come into play.”

Sal heaved himself to his feet. “Sorry, but I need to check out your facilities.”

Daniela looked to Nick for a translation.

“He has to pee,” Nick said.

Daniela rose from the couch and guided Sal out of the room and down the hallway.

When they were out of earshot, Harper said, “Are you all right, Nick?”

He nodded, but his eyes said otherwise. A faint blur of distress muddied them.

“This was a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t realize . . .”

“Maybe it wasn’t a mistake,” Harper said. “I think you needed to see her again. She’s a remarkable woman, smart and gentle, and quite beautiful. And she’s being very helpful.”

“I’m glad you like her.”

“I do. I like her very much.”

A few moments later, Daniela’s throaty laughter punctuated Sal’s stream of one-liners down the corridor.

Nick rose as they entered the room, a loose, boyish smile on his face, as if Harper’s approval had eased his inner tension.

Daniela resettled herself on the couch, and Sal said, “I was telling our lovely hostess about that fancy driving stunt Nick pulled on the highway. The hay wagon, all that. Making that last-second swerve. But don’t worry, nothing about Gerda.”

“Gerda?” Daniela turned a puzzled smile on Sal.

Sal zipped two fingers across his lips as Daniela turned to Harper.

“And who is this Gerda?”

“Oh, it’s a long, not-very-entertaining story. You were telling us about dark pools and Albion.”

Daniela smiled thinly. Not buying it, but letting it go.

“Well, there’s a certain banker in Rome, Sandro Moretti, who handled several of Nestlé’s Italian accounts during my years with them. I knew that Sandro’s bank, Crédit Agricole, did a great deal of business with other agricultural concerns, so he was on my list of calls. It was quite fortunate that I contacted him, because it was through Sandro that I learned about a gentleman named Manfred Knobel.”

Harper looked across at Nick and Sal, who shrugged in unison. Harper turned back to Daniela.

“Knobel is a young German who several years ago built an industrial oil-processing complex just outside Bari, which, as you may know, is the major port city in the Salento peninsula, that stiletto heel on the boot of Italy. Because the local community of olive growers is small and tight-knit, it was apparently difficult for Mr. Knobel, an outsider, to make headway in this community with his bold and disruptive ideas.”

“Such as?” Harper asked.

“You see, always in the past, the olive farmers of that region depended on a collection of small mills to extract the oil from their fruit. Old-fashioned granite millstones were used, and the whole process was done by hand, the grindstones turned by mules or farmhands. It was a quaint process and could produce delicate oils from the strongly flavored coratina olives that are grown in that region. But in the last decade, with the rapid growth of the market for extra-virgin oil, new methods of milling have been introduced. And this is where Manfred Knobel became important. In Bari, he brought in an engineering firm, Alfa Laval, which has developed innovative technologies for crushing olives and malaxing and oil extraction. The new systems are far more efficient and cost-effective than the old methods, and the oil they produce is excellent. Knobel’s plant incorporates centrifuges and stainless steel hammer and disk mills. The very latest and finest methods of oil making.

“Over the past three years, Knobel’s won over the majority of small olive producers in the region. In that time, he has practically cornered the market for milling olives in Puglia. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t done quickly, but his business has been on a steep upward trajectory. These days, even the most recalcitrant olive farmers in the region ship their product to Knobel’s plant, and with those greater efficiencies, they’ve seen their own profits grow handsomely.”

Sal said, “Enter Lester Albion.”

“Yes,” Daniela said. “As Albion’s share of the region’s groves has expanded, he’s acquired great leverage. My banker friend tells me Albion Olives, which is a subsidiary of Albion International, controls around seventy percent of the olives grown in the region, and their share is increasing all the time.”

“So he and Knobel are on a collision course,” Harper said.

“Exactly.”

Sal drew his smartphone from his trouser pocket, tapped and swiped his fingers across it, then said, “Mind giving me your Wi-Fi password? Want to google a couple of things.”

“Encantado,” she said. “Shall I spell it?”

Sal said no thanks, he could handle it.

“Where does Knobel fit in with the dark pools?” Nick asked.

Daniela gazed at him as though considering the question, but the silence lasted so long that it became awkwardly clear she had lost her train of thought in the thrall of Nick’s eyes. Her heartache exposed.

“Dark pools?” Nick prompted her quietly.

She blinked and shook her head and said, “Sorry, yes. Dark pools.”

“Let me guess,” Sal said, eyes on his phone’s screen. “Albion’s putting the screws to Knobel. Trying to dicker a better price for milling.”

“That would be expected,” Daniela said. “But Albion is employing more extreme measures.” She paused and looked at Harper. “Mind you, there is no other large-scale milling alternative in the region. The small mills are mostly gone now. Add to this the fact that long-distance transport of freshly harvested olives is far too expensive to be profitable. And not practical either, as olives should be milled within hours of harvesting.

“Another factor is that Knobel is not a wealthy man. Sandro tells me that everything he has is invested in the mill. Now the harvest is about to begin—under normal conditions, the milling in Puglia will commence in only a week or two. By the end of November, Knobel’s mill should be running day and night. So the time frame is very tight. Missing out on processing seventy percent of the local harvest would be fatal. Knobel knows this, and Albion knows this as well.”

“That’s some leverage,” Sal said.

“No,” Daniela said. “Closer to ricatto, blackmail. What Sandro tells me is that Albion recently made a proposition to Mr. Knobel. He wants to sell the entire tract of Albion Olives to Knobel. And he’s made an outrageous threat. If Knobel refuses to buy his groves, Albion will withhold this year’s crop from Knobel’s mill, let his olives rot on the ground, which means Knobel would be out of business by Christmas.”

“Hence the dark pool?” Harper said. “For the sale?”

“Yes, because if it were publicly known that Albion Olives was being offered for sale, particularly under these questionable circumstances, its stock price would plummet, as would the price of the parent company. Investors would be scared off. So the dark pool arrangement is the only way to make certain such a sale would keep the stock price stable. Sandro is aware of the arrangement only because Crédit Agricole is the lien holder on Mr. Knobel’s mill, and Mr. Knobel is negotiating a larger loan to purchase Albion Olives and had to explain his predicament.”

“This dark pool thing’s supposed to be secret,” Sal said. “But we know about it. How secret can it be?”

“We know of it,” Daniela said, “only because Sandro was willing to confide in me. Old friends, dear friends.”

“How much are we talking about?” Harper said. “What’s Albion asking for his groves?”

“I do not have the exact figure,” Daniela said. “For ethical reasons, Sandro could not go into that level of detail, but he assures me the price is surprisingly modest, considering the amount of land involved. The same as or possibly even slightly less than what Mr. Albion paid for it.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Harper said. “Albion goes to all the trouble of buying up dozens of groves, puts the screws to the processor, and then sells the whole thing at the same price or cheaper. Why?”

“Yes,” Daniela said. “It’s quite mysterious.”

“There’s something else here, something we’re not seeing.” Harper took the last sip of her wine and set the glass aside.

“Manfred Knobel,” Sal said, staring at his phone’s screen. “Name like that, can’t be too many of them running around. Looks to me like these two Manfreds might be the same Manfred.”

“What’re you talking about?” Harper said.

Sal came over and presented the phone. An image of a rangy man with a mop of blond hair, well built, strong jaw, pale-hazel eyes.

“This is Manfred Knobel, owner of Bari Milling Works. The guy Albion is hustling.”

“So?”

Sal swiped a finger across the screen and showed her a different photo. A man with a blond flattop, wearing red shorts and a matching tank top, frozen at the precise second he cleared the pole-vault bar, muscles in his arms flaring, legs extended behind him, flying midair with the blue, cloudless sky above him, his mouth open wide in what looked like a scream of exultation.

“What do you think?” asked Sal. “Same guy?”

“Similar, yes. But what’s the point?”

“Manfred Knobel, owner of the olive mill. Guy with the same name, same jawline, he’s the Olympic gold medalist in the pole vault for Germany a few years back.”

“The Olympics,” Nick said. “Like Gerda.”

“All right,” Daniela said. “You’re going to have to tell me now. Who is this Gerda?”

Gerda moved through the dark, listening for guard dogs and peering up at the high castle walls, scanning for CCTV cameras. Heard no dogs, saw no security devices. The village that fanned out below the castle was quiet. Only a single jukebox in a bar down the hill several blocks away. It was playing an American tune about drunks. “Margaritaville.” And there was the distant hum of the highway, the chirr of crickets, a small dog yapping mindlessly from more than a mile away.

Lights still burned in two of the second-story windows.

She wedged her body through the hedge that rimmed the castle walls. Came out the other side and stood still with only ten feet of open ground between her and the massive front door.

She slipped across the exposed space and flattened her back against the rock walls. Took a deep, slow breath. Felt the heat rising to her face. The door was to her right, only a yard distant. She set the wine bottles down to free her hands. She had removed the corks from the bottles, dampened the Spanish flags with gasoline, then crammed them into the spouts. Her hands reeked of the gasoline, but she hadn’t washed them because she might need to dampen the rags again before she breached the entryway.

She reached across the span of stone wall and tried the door latch. It was open, unlocked. The foolish inhabitants were feeling safe in the belief that they’d escaped Gerda, thrown her off the scent. Now they were holed up inside a fortress on a hilltop. Perfectly secure, or so they thought. But they were wrong. They had not escaped. They were not safe.

Gerda wasn’t certain if there was sufficient wood and flammable material inside a stone castle. If there was not, then at the very least the smoke and flames from her petrol bomb would flush them all outside, and in the confusion and panic she would finish McDaniel.

She drew back from the door, picked up two of the bottles, cradling the third under one arm, recrossed the open perimeter, and ducked into the nearby bushes. She would wait. Wait until all the lights went out inside the castle, till everyone was asleep. It would not be long. Then it would be finished.

She was so close. Her pulse racing as it had years ago on the final stretch of the fifteen hundred meters, the closing event of the decathlon. Exactly as it had been when Tatiana Zyablikova pulled alongside her, challenging her down the home stretch. Gerda’s heart roared, 150 beats per minute, 160, her focus fixed on the finish line, legs a blur beneath her, arms pumping, Gerda flying ahead of Tatiana, ahead of the pack, toward victory, so close. So very close.

SIXTEEN

Castillo de Aranjuez, Canena, Spain

Almost midnight, alone in her bedroom, Harper didn’t disrobe. She extinguished the light and lay atop the embroidered bedspread and stared up at the darkness.

Against her chest she clutched the photograph of Leo and Ross. She didn’t need to look at it again. The image was achingly clear in her memory, their last minutes together, the night they parted, the words, the looks, the gestures, the quality of light in the living room as they said their good-byes, words they did not know would be their final ones.

In the darkness, she set the photograph on the bedside table.

She calmed herself by listening to the night sounds. The sifting of wind through open windows, the creak of timbers, the scuttling of vermin across the attic floor. For a while she heard a jukebox in the village below, song after song, some she recognized, American rock. The jukebox was quiet now, the bar closed. Even the dull hum of traffic from the distant highway, the rumble of transfer trucks had fallen silent. For a while, she heard an owl’s mournful hooting and the baying of a moonstruck dog, then those sounds too faded to nothing.

Two hours later, she was still awake and listening to the cavernous hush of the thick walls. A cool dampness seemed to seep from the stone.

Harper rose, slipped on her shoes. She carried her suitcase and camera bag into the hallway and shut her bedroom door.

Nick’s room was two doors down. He was a deep sleeper. So deep that when they were young children and shared a bedroom, Nick used to frighten Harper because he never budged all night. Not the slightest shift in position. He lay on his back, arms tight against his sides, legs straight, no pillow. A defensive strategy he’d acquired during his two years in the Russian orphanage. Use the smallest space possible. Don’t dare disrupt the boys to your left and right. Never draw attention to yourself.

Setting down her suitcase and camera, Harper put her hand on the door latch of Nick’s room.

With a gentle touch, she opened it and stepped from one darkness to another. Light shone through a crack between the shades. A slender band of moonlight spanned the white sheets at the head of the bed, illuminating Nick’s black hair and, pressed against it, the flawless, satin skin of Daniela’s cheek. She was nestled against his right side, and her left arm was slung across his naked chest.

She listened to Nick’s slow, rhythmic breath and Daniela’s melodic snuffle. Harper felt her way along the wall, encountered a straight-backed chair, stepped around it, eyes adjusting slowly to the gloom. On the far wall she found another chair, then a chest-high dresser, and with her right hand she wandered its surface, bumped a ceramic saucer, then, with a delicate touch, explored its contents. A few coins, a leather wallet, and the fob for the Fiat’s ignition key.

She pocketed the key and retraced her steps, opened the door, and stood listening to the lovers sleep. The cadence of Nick’s breathing was slower and his tone deeper than Daniela’s, but their rising and falling notes seemed to harmonize as flawlessly as rhyming couplets.

Earlier in the evening, when she’d brought her luggage inside, Harper had scouted the exits with a plan in mind. Now she navigated a hallway near the kitchen and found her way to a rear door that led to the parking area in back. She shut the door behind her and slipped through the darkness to the Fiat and clicked the doors unlocked. She set her suitcase and camera down. Then stopped.

She turned slowly and peered into the shadows. She’d heard a flicker of noise she couldn’t identify, perhaps the scuff of shoes on the pavement or, Christ, she didn’t know, maybe she was simply registering a shift in the barometric pressure.

But she felt a human presence. Marco’s training kicking in. Her flesh prickling, an electric tingle in her muscles. She held still, hands rising to defend or attack.

“Going somewhere?”

Sal stepped forward, his pale shirt glowing with moonlight. “Thought you might be jumping ship, so I been waiting out here just in case. Off to Puglia, I suppose. Leaving us behind to fend for ourselves.”

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

“If this is how you want it, guess there’s not much we can do. Can’t hold you prisoner, force you to accept our help.”

“I have to do this, Sal.”

“I know you do. But alone?”

“If it were your wife and child who were murdered, would you invite me along to help settle the score?”

Sal was silent. Somewhere nearby a car crunched across gravel.

Sal said, “So go. You don’t need my blessing. Go on, get your justice or revenge, or whatever you decide to call it. But when you’re done, come home, all right? Come home.”

She hesitated for several breaths, then stepped close to Sal, and he opened his arms, and Harper came into the embrace. His arms felt frail against her, but he held her in a solid bear hug for a few hungry seconds. Her face against his neck, inhaling his musky scent, balsam and lavender, some liniment he used on his papery skin. A hint of lime from his fading aftershave.

When they parted, Sal hung his head, staring at her feet. “You got Nick’s number. You’ll call if you need us.”

“I will,” she said.

She loaded her suitcase and camera bag in the backseat, climbed behind the wheel. She U-turned in the parking area, and as her headlights washed across him, Sal gave her a thumbs-up and a half-assed attempt at a smile.

Harper wound through the narrow village streets, rolling downhill till she located the lighted thoroughfare that led north to the highway. Earlier that afternoon, on their way into Canena when they’d exited the Andalucía highway, she remembered seeing a Shell station at the foot of the exit ramp. A sign out front promoted its all-night comedor. A sit-down diner for the long-haul truckers on the adjacent expressway.

She pulled up to the pumps and, as she filled the Fiat’s tank, looked back to the village of whitewashed houses that climbed the hillside. On the summit, Castillo de Aranjuez was silhouetted against the first gray light of dawn. A gracious fortress whose mistress lay entwined with Harper’s brother. It gave her some trifling satisfaction that, even if her self-appointed mission accomplished nothing else, at least it had brought those two lovers back together.

When the tank was full, she parked the car in a space in front of the diner. As she shut off the engine, her headlights lit up a young man bent over the newspaper vending machine by the front door. Taking out yesterday’s unsold papers and replacing them with a fresh stack of the morning edition.

When he shut the glass-front box, Harper could see the front page less than ten feet away. A photograph, the face of a man.

Her pulse stumbled. She killed the headlights and got out.

She dropped two coins in the slot and withdrew a copy of the Diario de Sevilla and carried the paper into the brightly lit diner and took a seat at a booth by the window. She laid the newspaper on the table and studied the man’s face.

The photograph had been taken a year or two ago. The man was fresh faced, his hair neatly combed, and he was wearing a well-pressed shirt. But it was him. Definitely him.

Ángel’s tattooed partner. The scrawny, wolfish man from the alleyway in Sevilla. According to the paper, his name was Ricardo Ramírez. His body had been found yesterday afternoon in Calle Jamerdana in the Santa Cruz district. Cause of death: strangulation.

Buried in the ten-paragraph story about Ramírez’s death and the rising murder rate in Sevilla was a reference to Ricardo’s close friend, a man named Ángel Gallardo, an unemployed carpenter. Señor Gallardo was said to be assisting the police in their investigation with important eyewitness testimony.

Gerda had completed her task. All she needed to do now was put some distance between herself and the castle on the hill. Then she would text her boss and give him the good news.

She worked her way back through the sleeping village, down the hill to the main road, and back toward the highway. The stink of gasoline was still on her hands, a problem she would remedy at the first public bathroom she encountered.

Her spirits were deflated, a familiar emotion after a mission achieved, a victory complete. It had always happened the moment she crossed a finish line—the initial thrill died and withered quickly, replaced by a dull melancholy, a blankness in her heart.

For a day or a week or even longer, she might cast about in that gloomy state. After the Olympics the despair had gripped her for months and gradually deepened until she was all but immobilized. The black mood lasted until the moment she realized she had another job to accomplish—the obliteration of Tatiana Zyablikova, the drug-assisted Russian who’d finished three points ahead of Gerda in the Olympic decathlon.

Plotting Tatiana’s death, then carrying out the plan, had revitalized Gerda and reminded her of the transcendent power of killing. For even as a teenager, when she’d committed her first murder, it had produced a thrill beyond any elation she’d ever known.

Her athletic career had taught her over and again how intimately intertwined were pain and pleasure. So many times she had pushed through torturous drills and excruciating training regimens, driven on by her coaches and her mother, and by doing so her bloodstream was flooded with endorphins that sent her surging beyond the trifling pains and propelled her into the intoxicating high that was her own version of religious rapture.

Now in the distance she saw the lit sign for the Shell station next to the ramp for the highway. It would have a bathroom where she could cleanse her hands. She slowed and debated whether she should pull in to a place so close to the castle or drive farther east.

She was still debating when she saw the white Fiat parked outside the petrol station’s diner. White Fiats were common. It was probably nothing. No doubt the car belonged to some local villager eating an early breakfast or trying to stifle last night’s drunkenness.

But Gerda could not pass it by. When she was a child, her mother had quoted the proverb to her, a stray bit of wisdom that rightly or wrongly had shadowed Gerda’s entire adult life. In essence, it meant Work, work, never let up. And now, as it had done a thousand times before, the adage replayed in her mother’s iron voice:

Wer rastet, der rostet. He who rests gets rusty.

So yes, she would make a quick pass by the Fiat simply to see if it had the rental agency’s red decal on its rear bumper.

It was probably nothing.

SEVENTEEN

Canena, Spain

Harper read the newspaper article twice to be sure she’d missed nothing. When she folded the paper back together and laid it to the side, her hands were trembling. She was certain Ricardo had been alive when she’d left him in the alleyway. Absolutely certain.

She ordered una taza de café, drank the cup of strong coffee, and ordered another. After paying her bill, she used the restroom and was headed back to her car when she saw a dark Audi swerve into the parking lot, idle past the gas pumps, then pull directly behind her Fiat, blocking its exit.

Harper waited at the diner’s front door until the driver stepped out of the Audi. A tallish woman with coppery hair cut short. Square face, strong jaw. Dressed in a black track suit with a dark scarf knotted around her neck. The outfit was cut tight, showing off her rugged physique: broad shoulders, slim hips. A supple swagger to her movement.

Gerda Bixel had come calling.

Harper opened the door of the diner, stepped into the cool air, and glided a few steps to her right, choosing a position with her back to her own car as Gerda turned to face her from a dozen feet away. With the Fiat at Harper’s rear, any accomplice of Gerda’s would have no choice but to attack face-to-face.

Gerda’s ice-blue eyes glittered in the parking lot lights. No trace of humor or pity in those eyes, nothing but a bland resolve. Harper had met the woman’s mother, Larissa Bixel, and knew for certain that she’d been an eager accomplice in Lester Albion’s murderous plots. But even having such a monster for a parent could not completely account for the vacancy in the eyes staring into her own.

“You’ve been following me for weeks,” Harper said. “Why?”

Gerda coughed out a humorless laugh.

“Does it have to do with Albion’s land deals in Italy?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Gerda’s empty stare seemed to confirm her denial. Gerda said, “Where’s your camera? How do you defend yourself without it?”

“Oh. You were watching us fight.”

Gerda’s lips tightened into a sour smile. “That was a fight? What I saw was a fainthearted weakling who blindsides her adversaries.”

“Ricardo and Ángel, were they yours?”

She was silent, but the light in her eyes said yes.

“So you cleaned up afterward to be sure they couldn’t implicate you. You strangled Ricardo, but what about Ángel? Why let him escape? Not worried he’ll identify you? He’s working with the policía now. Did you know?”

Gerda blinked, her expression doing a quick reset. From cold contempt to a flicker of uncertainty, then back to the baleful glare that seemed her default look.

“Why use them? To soften me up before you came for the kill?”

“Keep asking questions, it will get you nowhere.”

“Who pulls your strings, Albion or your mother? Or is it both?”

That tripped her again. Her gaze making a longer detour this time, several seconds before her icy glower returned.

“How about Manfred Knobel? Where does he fit in?”

Harper had simply thrown it out, not expecting anything, but she watched in wonder as Gerda’s facial muscles flickered like a jittery silent film, moving so quickly through a string of intense reactions that Harper couldn’t identify any of them.

Trying without success to mask the emotion in her voice, Gerda said, “How do you know Manfred?”

“He’s an Olympian like you. You were probably friends, maybe you still are. Maybe more than that.”

“Du Mutterfänger.”

Harper’s command of German idiom wasn’t fluent, but she was pretty sure she’d just been called a motherfucker.

“Tell you what, Gerda. Why don’t we call a truce, sit down, have a glass of wine, and you can tell me all about Manfred and Albion and your mother. How they fit together. I can tell you what I know, and you can fill in my blanks. What do you say? Woman to woman, leave the men out of it.”

“You think you can mock me, manipulate me, make me deviate from my path, which only demonstrates you know nothing about me.”

“Sure, sure. Staying on the path, that’s important. Orders, rules.”

Gerda was silent, her glare hardening.

“Makes sense,” Harper said. “Top athlete like you, everyone’s been telling you what to do since you were a little kid, coaches correcting your form, judges assigning a number, somebody with a stopwatch pushing you. All those years in training, staying inside the lines, maybe you never learned how to be free.”

“Oh, and you, McDaniel, you’re so free? I watch you for weeks and I’ve seen no freedom. Every day the same thing, like the robot.”

Harper couldn’t help herself. She smiled.

“Point taken. Maybe we have something in common.”

“We have nothing in common. Nothing.”

Gerda’s hands tightened, and she was tilting forward ever so slightly onto her toes. A telltale giveaway of an inexperienced fighter. No doubt she was strong, and Harper knew she was low-down dirty, willing to commit any act necessary, such as strangling a half-conscious man in an alley.

Out on the road fronting the diner, the whoop and wail of a siren passed by. Gerda glanced over, and Harper flicked her gaze to the right to catch an ambulance flying past, its red strobe lights slashing across the asphalt between the two of them.

As Harper expected, Gerda chose the distraction as her opening. She plunged forward, covered the ten feet between them in a blinding half second, and sprang into the air.

Harper shifted left to slip what she judged was a right-footed flying kick. Ready to employ an evasive block she’d used many times before. But this was no flying kick. Gerda sprang four feet in the air, as graceful and effortless as a puma bounding over a fence rail. Like nothing Harper ever faced on the practice mats or the streets.

She sailed past Harper’s shoulder, landed on the hood of the Fiat, and as Harper was spinning to face her, Gerda dropped to Harper’s side, a length of cloth lashed around Harper’s throat as Gerda rode Harper to the pavement in a painful heap.

Slamming hard against her hip and shoulder with Gerda’s full weight atop her, Harper was stunned. In only those few seconds, with the material locking against her airway and tightening, she knew she was already close to choking out. Thirty grueling days on Marco’s practice mats neutralized by a high jumper’s blitzkrieg.

Groggy and pinned, with one of her legs bent backward and trapped beneath her, Harper heard one of Marco’s regular chants: Break the choke. Break the choke. Above all else, get air. Get air.

She wedged her fingers between her throat and the fabric binding her flesh, wriggled them beneath it, then levered an elbow against the pavement, pulling the scarf away slightly, and managed a single breath. Then another.

Heaving for air, Harper wriggled her trapped leg free, rolled flat on her back, knees bent, and arched her torso up, bucked Gerda backward, the stranglehold loosening as Gerda writhed, fighting for leverage. Gerda’s hands fumbled as she tried to reset the cinch, her fingers reeking of gasoline.

Thrusting to the left, Harper did a sharp sit-out, a grappler’s exit move, then swung her right elbow, hammering it into Gerda’s gut. The woman’s belly was so ridged with muscle it felt like paving stone. Harper drove the elbow into her stomach again, then once more, concentrating all her weight behind each blow. At last Gerda’s clenched muscles softened, and Harper hammered again and again until Gerda gasped and her hands relaxed, and Harper twisted free of the cord around her neck and scrambled to her feet.

A crowd had gathered outside the diner.

Mostly men. But they were not watching the two women locked in combat on the pavement. They were craning to the west, peering above the roofs of the cars, up toward the mountain’s summit, staring at the Castillo de Aranjuez, where flames were flaring from windows and lashing the castle walls.

More sirens screamed past as Gerda struggled to her feet.

Harper turned on her and snapped a right-handed blow to her nose, a straight jab to her throat, then executed a spinning back kick, using the momentum to slam her heel deep into the meat of Gerda’s solar plexus. Gerda gagged, staggered against the white Fiat, and her eyelids fluttered as she slumped to the pavement.

Harper sprinted to the driver’s door of the Audi that blocked the Fiat, saw the keys lying in the seat. Slid inside, started the engine, and screamed in reverse, tires burning, then cut the wheel and roared back up the hillside toward the flames.

PART THREE

EIGHTEEN

Zurich, Switzerland

Lucia Campos, compliance director and chief ethics watchdog for Albion International, was hiding out in the Hotel Sonne in Bremgarten, twenty-seven miles west of Zurich, waiting for Adrian Naff to return from his trip. She didn’t know when that might be, nor did she know the purpose of his trip. She’d tried Adrian’s cell repeatedly but had gotten no answer, not even his voice mail.

The day after Adrian left, Lucia had made her decision and gone to Adrian’s office.

Adrian’s secretary, Derek Müller, glanced up at her, blinked, and asked what in the world was wrong.

“Where is he? I need to speak to him. It’s urgent.”

“I don’t know. He didn’t make his flight to Greece. He walked out of here with his suitcase and hasn’t checked in since. What’s this about?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“You’re in some kind of trouble?”

Before Lucia could frame a response, Derek took an educated guess.

“It’s about Mr. Albion, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t talk about it.”

“All right then.”

“Does Adrian call, check in with you?”

“Usually, yes. He hasn’t yet, but he will soon, I’m sure.”

“Listen, Derek, do me a great favor. When he calls, tell him to contact me immediately.”

He nodded. “He has your cell?”

“I’m not using my cell.”

Derek squinted in confusion.

“So how should he contact you—I mean, when he calls?”

She saw no choice but to confide in him. Her cell could be tracked. She was well aware of the capabilities of the tech department at Albion.

“I’ll be staying in a hotel for a while.”

“A hotel? Are you leaving Albion? Did you give notice?”

“There’s no need for that. I’m finished here.”

“What’s happened? You can tell me.”

“Can I?”

“You know you can.”

Lucia wasn’t certain. All she knew for sure was that Derek was aware of her affair with Adrian, and he’d apparently been tight-lipped with that knowledge. There’d been no gossip about their romance, no knowing looks from her fellow workers as she passed in the hallways. No snide remarks whispered behind her back. None that she knew of.

Still, it was a leap of faith to trust Derek with her whereabouts. But if she hoped to speak with Adrian at the earliest moment possible, what choice did she have? If Adrian trusted the young man enough to keep him as his personal secretary, then wasn’t that reason enough for Lucia to trust him?

She scribbled the name of the hotel she’d chosen on a slip of paper and handed it to him.

“Read it and give it back to me. Don’t speak the name aloud.”

Derek stiffened and looked around the office with suspicion.

“Bugged?” he whispered.

She nodded in the affirmative. The whole building was. She’d seen the work orders and the receipts. Hallways, offices, even the restrooms. E-mails, internet activity, everything logged.

Derek examined the slip of paper, nodded, and handed it back.

“Tell Adrian and no one else. No one.”

“You’re terrified, Lucia.”

“I am,” she said, and left.

That was two days ago. She abandoned her apartment, taking only a single bag and a briefcase with the relevant documents. She believed she understood Albion’s goals now. The twisted scheme he had put into motion that seemed to have only one purpose, to spring a financial trap on another individual, though what his motives were, she had not been able to ascertain.

It had started with her discovery of the dark pool Albion had set up through the company’s finance office. After that it had taken Lucia Campos several weeks to uncover and decipher the various requisitions and transfers of funds to support the purchases of large tracts of land, and finally the travel documents for a man named Dickens.

Mr. Dickens was employed in an Albion laboratory in El Paso, Texas, but had been dispatched on a mission to Italy for work on the ever-expanding olive grove owned by Lester Albion.

Searching for other references to Dickens, Lucia combed hundreds of computer files before she discovered a trail of curious shipments made from yet another Albion agricultural lab, this one in Minnesota. Crate after crate shipped throughout the spring and summer of this year, all of them traveling from Minnesota to Bari, Italy. The same location where Mr. Dickens had been sent, which was also the heart of Mr. Albion’s expanding olive-grove empire.

The manifests listed the contents of the shipping cases as “fertilizer.” Lucia, using an alias, made phone calls to the lab in Minnesota and managed to convince a secretary that she was doing a follow-up report for Lester Albion himself. She needed to confirm the contents of those shipping crates. Lucia had been affable and indirect until finally the woman in Minnesota relented.

“Spittlebugs,” she said. “A ton of the little bastards. You didn’t know that already?”

“Yes, yes, spittlebugs,” Lucia had said. “That’s what the records indicate, so I thank you for confirming.”

“Those things are pests, you know. They’re not locusts, they don’t gobble up crops or anything, but they’re great at carrying pathogens like the ones those were exposed to. Only reason we breed them in our lab is to find better ways to neutralize the little devils. What in the hell were they using all those infected bugs for?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

“Yeah, yeah. Top secret, I know. Same thing the other one said. Bixel, whatever her name is. You know Bixel? Boy oh boy, now there’s a pushy one.”

“Yes, that’s her,” Lucia said. “Thank you for your kind assistance.”

Lucia spent her days inside her hotel suite. Again and again, she called Adrian Naff’s cell phone but got no answer. Finally, when she managed to get through to his voice mail, she became so flustered she babbled for several minutes about Albion and Dickens and the spittlebugs shipped to the docks at Bari, Italy, before she lost the connection without ever telling him where he could reach her. She redialed immediately and got nothing.

She spent her waking hours reading novels that failed to distract her. She tried the television but found nothing of interest. She napped, she ordered room service. She paced.

Before arriving at the hotel, she had cleaned out her savings account and had a certified check made out to her in the amount of 37,000 euros. Some she’d saved, but most of it she’d inherited from her father upon his death two months earlier. Ordinarily, she would’ve telephoned her father, a strong and resourceful man, and he would have invited her to stay with him at his condo in Milan. The condo he had bequeathed to Lucia, his only child. If Adrian didn’t return to Zurich soon, she decided she would travel to Milan and settle into the flat. There was little chance Albion or Bixel knew of her father’s gift to her.

She had been living in the hotel room for exactly three days when the room’s phone rang. She crossed the floor quickly, picked up the receiver, and held it to her ear, saying nothing.

“Lucia? Lucia, it’s me. It’s Derek.”

“Did you hear from Adrian?”

“I need to see you, tell you what I’ve found out.”

“You can tell me now.”

“I need to do it in person. I’m downstairs in the lobby.”

A steel band tightened around her chest.

Breathless, she asked him what he wanted.

“They won’t tell me what room you’re in.”

“Tell me on the phone, Derek.”

Derek was silent.

“Whatever it is, you can tell me now, Derek, and then leave.”

“I don’t believe this. You don’t trust me.”

She rocked her head back and stared up at the pale-pink ceiling.

“I wasn’t followed,” he said. “I was very careful. I parked my car ten blocks away and walked. No one’s tailing me. I’m sure of it.”

Lucia told him her room number and set the phone down.

A second later she realized her error. Adrian Naff often made fun of Derek, his straitlaced secretary, and one of the many things Adrian found so amusing was that Derek had such an unshakeable aversion to automobiles that the young man claimed to have never set foot in one. Why had he lied about parking his car?

Lucia didn’t waste time untangling the puzzle. She snatched up the briefcase and stepped into the hallway. Twenty yards down the corridor, the elevator dinged.

A surge of panic sent her at a trot down the hall, empty except for a maid’s cart three doors down. She had only a few seconds before Derek would emerge from the elevator and see her fleeing.

She slipped past the cart, ducked, and folded herself behind it. Across the hallway, Dolores, the red-haired maid who’d serviced Lucia’s room each day this week, stepped out of the room she was cleaning and saw Lucia crouched behind her cart.

Lucia waved a warning hand and pressed a finger to her lips and pointed down the hallway. Taking a careful look around the edge of the cart, Lucia saw Derek rapping on her locked door. Though it was ten in the morning on a weekday, Derek was dressed too informally for work. He had on a dark hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and running shoes, and he wore a pair of sunglasses.

Dolores busied herself with her cart, rearranging drinking glasses and bars of soap and bottles of shampoo.

“Is he dangerous?” she whispered to Lucia.

“I think he may be, yes.”

“I shall roll the cart to the door of the room I just cleaned. Stay behind it and he won’t see you. You can hide in the room. The guests checked out this morning.”

Lucia mouthed a thank-you.

As Dolores steered the cart toward the open door, Lucia duckwalked behind it. A foot from the doorway, Dolores halted.

“He’s coming,” she murmured and she moved alongside the cart to block Derek’s sight line.

Lucia saw his running shoes and the cuffs of his trousers approach.

Dolores said, “Puis-je vous aider, monsieur?”

“J’ai perdu la clé de ma chambre—405.”

Dolores switched to English: “I will need to see your identification papers, sir. It is hotel policy.”

“I have no ID with me. I’m Lucia Campos’s husband, the woman staying in 405. Please give me the key.”

Again, Dolores refused politely.

“All right. You will either give me a key to the room or I will be forced to speak to the management about your insubordination.”

“Sir, if it is what you desire, I will call management myself and let you speak to them. But I cannot give out keys to rooms. If I do so, I will lose my position.”

“You’ll lose more than your job if you don’t give me the goddamn key immediately.”

“I cannot do that, sir. It is forbidden.”

“This is your last chance. Give me the fucking key.”

Lucia heard Dolores draw a long breath.

“Non, monsieur. Even a pistol will not change my answer. I cannot provide you with a key.”

“Goddamn it, woman. Goddamn it.”

A few seconds later there were two muffled thumps like a hammer striking rotten wood, and the maid’s cart was jarred several inches to the side. To Lucia’s right, visible around the edge of the cart, Dolores fell against the corridor wall and slid to a sitting position on the carpeted floor. At the breast of her white blouse were two ragged punctures.

Only a few inches from Lucia’s face, Derek’s pale hand patted Dolores’s clothes and searched her pockets until he located the white plastic card that served as the master key.

He cursed under his breath and she heard his retreating footsteps, then the sound of a door opening down the hall. When she heard it shut behind him, she came to her feet, felt Dolores’s throat, and, finding no pulse, turned and ran for the fire exit at the end of the hallway.

“I searched her room and found nothing.” Derek Müller held the cell phone in his left hand, his right hand gripping the Heckler & Koch 9mm inside the pocket of his hoodie. There was a tremor in the joints of his hand, and the muffled sound of the two shots he’d fired into the insolent maid’s chest still echoed in his ears.

“And Campos?”

“She’s gone. Her clothes and suitcase are still there, but no documents. I searched thoroughly.”

“The little bitch.”

“I’m sorry. I did my best.”

“The hotel maid is dead? You’re sure of this.”

“Yes, I felt I had no choice. She was going to call the front desk.”

“Was it a messy scene?”

“You’re asking me to describe it?”

“Maybe later. Where are you now?”

“In the street outside the hotel. Watching the police go in and out.”

“You should leave. You don’t want anyone to notice you.”

“Yes,” Derek said. “I should leave.”

“Are you all right? You sound ill.”

“Does it ever get easier?”

“What’s that?”

“The thing with the maid, the thing I had to do.”

“Are you truly a man?”

“Of course I am.”

“Then start acting like one. You wanted an opportunity to improve your position, all right, I gave you such a chance. Stop whining.”

“I thought I was going to be sick. It was terrible.”

“Müller, listen to me.”

“Yes.”

“Dispose of the weapon immediately.”

“You don’t want it back? It’s a very expensive pistol.”

“No. Throw it in the river, in the lake, deep water somewhere. Do not keep it. Is that clear?”

“Throw it into deep water. I understand.”

“You should leave. You’re not thinking clearly. You should get away from there now.”

“Yes,” Derek said. “I’m leaving.”

“And you may take the rest of the day off. Go somewhere, have a stiff drink, I’ll be in touch soon. I have an idea where Campos may have gone.”

NINETEEN

Hospital Universitario La Paz, Madrid, Spain

With second-degree burns on both legs extending from his feet to his thighs, Nick Roberts was in severe pain, but the doctors assured Harper that his injuries were not life-threatening.

Nick spent half a day in the intensive care burn unit of Madrid’s university hospital before being transferred to a private room. Mottled blisters, cracked and peeling skin showed at the edges of his bandages. For the next two days, he drifted in and out of consciousness, but as his meds were adjusted, his spirits improved and now he was awake and alert for more hours than asleep.

His room had a long-distance view of downtown Madrid and was stylishly furnished with a sleek leather couch, a matching recliner, and a teak desk topped with a potted orchid in bloom. The soft gray walls were decorated with small, detailed line drawings that depicted mythical creatures leaping and dancing, like modernized cave art.

The decorations were no doubt meant to soothe and uplift and enhance a patient’s recovery. Maybe the room’s aesthetics helped Nick, but it would take more than tasteful furnishings to ease Harper’s remorse. This had been her nightmare from the start—putting her loved ones in jeopardy. The firebombing had been meant for her, not these innocents.

She spent long hours at Nick’s bedside, stepping away at his request during the daily ordeal when the moist gauze dressing on his legs was changed. Several times a day she looked in on Daniela, who was so heavily sedated that she was unaware of Harper’s presence.

During Nick’s waking hours, she read to him from the International Herald Tribune, articles she thought might interest him, or at least divert his attention for a while. She played soft music she’d downloaded to her smartphone, his favorite vocalists, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, Rhiannon Giddens. Throughout the day, she adjusted the window blinds, because even indirect sunlight caused him pain.

Two beefy twins, Marvin and Benjamin Rossi, wearing skintight T-shirts and jeans, rotated shifts in the hallway outside the door to Nick’s room and the reception area downstairs. Without consulting Harper, Sal Leonardi had flown the Rossi brothers in from Philly, where Sal’s former employer, the Tessalini family, still held sway.

Nice enough guys for hired muscle, but a needless layer of security as far as Harper was concerned. She believed Gerda Bixel had lost their trail in Andalusia when they’d been flown to Madrid from the local hospital where they’d been triaged immediately after the fire.

At first the hospital administrator objected to the presence of the Rossi brothers, but Sal spoke to the woman privately and slipped her a hefty soborno, and her protests ceased. Sal also brought in a specialist from Doctors Hospital in Augusta, Georgia, one of the top burn units in the United States. Again, the hospital administrator objected strenuously, but this time Sal didn’t need to dig out his wallet, because the attending Spanish physician intervened. The Spanish doc was well acquainted with the reputation of Dr. Roger Ford from Georgia and said he would be greatly honored to work alongside him.

“Where do you find these people?” Harper asked Sal.

“You’d be surprised how many mobsters get burned one way or another. Forty years paying Tessalini’s bills, I got to know a shitload of burn docs. Ford’s the top of the heap.”

From the Diario de Sevilla and Madrid’s El País, Harper managed to put names to Gerda’s growing victim list. Besides Ricardo Ramírez, whom she’d strangled in that Sevilla alley, there were two women Gerda had carjacked, both also murdered. Two days after the castle fire, Ricardo’s friend Ángel Gallardo was discovered on his front stoop by his own nine-year-old son. Another victim of strangulation.

Mateo López, the silver-haired butler who’d met Nick, Sal, and Harper at the door at Castillo de Aranjuez, had escaped the fire because he’d spent the evening with his seventy-three-year-old novia, who lived in a nearby village. For days now, Mateo had sat silently in the reception area, waiting for Daniela Aguilar to regain consciousness.

On the night of the fire, Daniela had smelled smoke and left the bedroom to investigate. When Nick woke to Daniela’s screams, he rushed into the hallway and found her writhing on the floor at the head of the stairs with her legs already badly burned. He scooped her up and carried her down two flights of stairs through the thickening flames, and out into the night air.

With third-degree injuries on her legs and lower torso—30 percent of her body—Daniela had already endured a dozen escharotomies, surgical incisions in her feet and stomach to relieve the pressure from swelling tissues. Dr. Ford was prepping Daniela for debridement surgery, to be followed by her initial skin graft, when she spoke her first words since the fire. Struggling for breath, she asked if Nick had survived. Dr. Ford assured her that Nick was recovering nicely, exactly as she would be soon.

The anesthesiologist waited for the go-ahead from Dr. Ford, and when Daniela absorbed his words and sank back into repose, Dr. Ford nodded and the drugs were administered. Two hours into the surgery, with her blood pressure crashing, Daniela Aguilar’s pulse flat-lined.

Ford promptly identified Daniela’s condition as an allergic reaction, perhaps to latex, perhaps some ingredient in the anesthesia itself. In any case, Ford injected a dose of epinephrine into Daniela’s lateral thigh muscle, standard procedure, but the drug failed to revive her.

The Spanish surgeon called for the defibrillator paddles, but Dr. Ford waved him off, drew another syringe from his medical bag, and injected Daniela in the other thigh muscle. It was, he explained later, a newly released drug that Ford and his colleagues in Georgia had helped formulate. The FDA had only recently approved it, and it was not yet available outside the United States. The drug revived Daniela’s pulse. After monitoring her for several minutes, Dr. Ford resumed the grafting operation with no further complications. According to the lead Spanish surgeon, had anyone but Dr. Ford been managing the operation, it would have been the end for Daniela.

“I told you he was good,” Sal said.

“Took seventy years,” Nick said, “but Sal’s criminal career finally paid off.”

After the night nurse who delivered Nick’s bland evening meal left the room, Sal unzipped his jacket and produced a jar of olives, a hefty wedge of manchego, a baguette, and a bottle of rioja.

Nick, woozy from his pain meds, skipped the wine but feasted on the bread and cheese. As he was finishing the last of the manchego, he said, “So now what, Harper?”

She drew a breath and searched for a reply.

Sal said, “She’s guilt ridden. Paralyzed with shame, doesn’t know what to do. This is why she disappeared in the first place, didn’t answer her phone for months, why she’s been pushing us away. Afraid it would put you and me in the crosshairs, which it did. Now she’s lost her nerve, not sure she should keep going.”

“Is that true, Harper?”

“I haven’t lost my nerve.”

Sal said, “Okay good, then you’re going ahead, going to settle the score. For Ross’s sake, for Leo’s.”

A hard knot of words backed up in Harper’s throat. During her month of training with Marco, she’d focused all her energy on her body, its power and speed, its killing potential. Like everything else in Marco’s world, conversations were stripped bare to their kernel. In those weeks of near silence, she’d lost some of her emotional fluency, her ease with speaking from the heart.

Though she couldn’t put words to it at that moment, she knew full well what was driving her. Since losing Ross and Leo, a brew of grief and rage and pain had been boiling within her and, now, added to that toxic mix was an immobilizing dose of guilt.

“Don’t be stupid, Harper,” Nick said. “It’s the only way you’re ever going to heal. I know you. You’ve got to finish this, that’s who you are. You’ll never be whole again unless you take Albion down.”

She nodded.

“By the way, just so you know,” Sal said, “I screwed with your phones.”

“What?”

“I asked myself, How the hell did Gerda track us down?” Sal said. “Not like we left a trail of breadcrumbs to that castle. How’d she do it? Had to be the phones. People back at Albion doing the hacking, breaking into cell towers, monitoring traffic. Had to be that.”

“What do we do,” Nick said, “throw them away?”

“Like I said, I fixed them. Installed a spoofing program, it broadcasts fake GPS markers, bounces your signal from one cell phone tower to another, so from this point on, there’s no way anybody can tell where the hell you are. You’re good to go.”

“Your hacker neighbor taught you how to do this, Sal?” Nick said.

“Basic stuff. Coding is what keeps my brain ticking. Otherwise, Christ, what would I be doing, playing pickleball and mah-jongg? Hell with that.”

“When did you do this?” Harper asked.

“First day we were here, Nick was doped up in the ICU, you were asleep in the waiting room. I helped myself to your phones. Hope that’s okay, ’cause I assumed you’d give your permission. Did I assume right?”

Nick smiled, the first Harper had seen from him since the fire.

After a few moments of silence, Harper asked if she could take another look at Sal’s phone, those photos of Gerda.

He unlocked it, handed it over.

She scrolled through the dozen or so images of Gerda. As she’d thought, in every one Gerda was wearing a scarf, usually black, sometimes camo or checked. Gerda varied the styles, using wrist wraps, a cowgirl ascot, a bow tie, a turban wrap, each one blending in with her outfit of the day, unobtrusive but always present.

Harper enlarged a couple of the images and studied the knots. She couldn’t tell for sure, but they all seemed to be slipknots, easily loosened, quickly employed. A low-tech weapon that would pass any security screening and, when used, leave few identifying traces behind.

The obvious drawback of a scarf as a killing tool was that it required face-to-face proximity. And Gerda’s close-in fighting skills, offensive and defensive, seemed limited. Perhaps her quickness, strength, and her jumping prowess compensated. And as Marco often warned, “Cuidado con el aficionado. Es valiente y tiene sangre fría.” Beware the amateur. He’s brave and cold-blooded.

Sal said, “So we’re assuming it was Gerda who set the fire?”

“It was,” Harper said.

Nick asked how she could be sure.

“I smelled gasoline on her fingers.”

“On her fingers? When?”

Harper described her encounter with Gerda in the parking lot.

“And you’re just now telling us about this?”

“The condition you were in, I didn’t want to upset you.”

“You actually tangled with her?” Sal said.

“Yeah, and you were right about her jumping ability.”

“I know, I know. Woman’s part kangaroo.”

“So what set her off?” Nick said. “She’s been shadowing you for weeks, hanging back, then out of nowhere she attacks. Why now?”

“Her orders must have changed,” Harper said.

“But why?”

“Maybe I’m getting closer to something. I’ve bumped a trip wire. I don’t know. Does it really matter?”

“Well, I guess it’s good news,” Sal said. “You wanted to draw them out in the open, so there you go, it’s working.”

Marvin, one of the Rossi twins, cracked open the door and stuck his shaggy head in the gap. He held up a two-way radio.

“Somebody showed up downstairs,” he said. “Looking for Harper.”

She came to her feet.

“Who?” Sal said.

“Don’t know. Somebody poking around, asking questions and whatnot. Benjy’s got ’em incarcerated in a broom closet.”

Harper headed for the door.

“Go with her,” Sal told Marvin, “and make sure nobody gets hurt too bad.”

TWENTY

Hospital Universitario La Paz, Madrid, Spain

It was a janitor’s closet tucked away at the bottom of a stairwell on the first floor. A tiny room filled with mop buckets, brooms, dustpans, white uniforms hanging from pegs. Two fluorescent bulbs flickered overhead, giving the room the garish feel of a carnival sideshow.

In the far corner, perched on a step stool, was Adrian Naff. He had on faded blue jeans, a khaki shirt, and silver running shoes.

“Want me to punch him again?” Benjamin asked when she stepped into the tiny space. “Just say the word. Guy’s got a smart mouth.”

“You can leave us.”

“You sure?”

“Mr. Naff won’t hurt me. Will you, Mr. Naff?”

“Can’t think of any reason I would.”

“Okay, if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

Benjamin said, “So Marvin’s going to pick up coffee in the cafeteria, then head back upstairs for guard duty, but I’ll be outside the door right here if you need me. Make a squeak, I’ll be in here.”

The Rossi boys stepped back into the hallway and shut the door. Harper edged closer to Naff. His nose was bleeding, a single dribble that he licked from his lips, then knuckled away the rest.

“Sucker punched me. Guy wouldn’t last ten seconds in a fair fight. I assume those are friends of Sal’s.”

Harper didn’t reply. She was looking him over. Trying to get a fix on this man who’d pointed her toward Albion’s olive-oil business. Back then she’d halfway trusted him, though now she wasn’t sure.

His black hair was shaggier than it had been in the spring, when they’d last met in Bilbao. Not the tight, bristly military cut he’d worn before. His face was fuller too, as if perhaps he was growing comfy with the deep, padded office chairs of corporate life. Only his eyes gave him away. They remained as probing and intense as before, dark brown with spirals of golden sparks that seemed almost electrified.

If his face had not been so weathered by the arid winds of Iraqi deserts and harsh Afghani winters, and if his cheekbones were not knuckle scarred and his nose hadn’t been knocked out of line more than once and poorly reset at least one of those times, then perhaps, in his younger days, Adrian Naff might have passed as a lady’s man.

Last winter, when they’d been trying to get a fix on Naff, Sal had hacked into a US Customs database and managed to download a half dozen different passport photos of Adrian Naff—different aliases, different looks, different nationalities. In his years of special-ops work, Naff had acquired the proficiency of a skilled illusionist. He could use wigs and phony mustaches like the finest makeup artists, but his best disguise depended on none of those devices.

Naff could use his facial muscles and bearing to fade from view when necessary, assuming an appearance so ordinary, so utterly bland that only by placing the passport photos side by side and studying them carefully could Sal and Harper be sure all of them were Naff. His command of this form of tradecraft was as artful as it was unteachable.

But now, the man who sat gazing into her eyes seemed fully exposed, a guileless half smile that appeared authentic playing on his lips.

She still wasn’t completely buying his sincerity act. For one thing, Adrian Naff had held on to his job with Lester Albion even after witnessing firsthand the depravity of the man. And second, though she usually trusted her ability to read a person by their eyes, Naff was such a seasoned trickster, a cloak-and-dagger pro, who’d run ops deep behind enemy lines, that his skills of deception put him on a different plane from anyone Harper had tried to decrypt before.

“What do you want, Naff? Why’re you here?”

“To help you.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you? Why would I do that?”

“Because our goals align.”

“Which goals are those?”

He dabbed a finger at his bloody nostril, examined the fingertip, then wiped it on his jeans.

“You’ve got unfinished business with Lester Albion, and so do I.”

“What’s yours?”

“Okay, I’m no Boy Scout,” he said. “I’m not pretending I am. But what Albion did to your husband and child last winter, that sickened me. I should have left that company as soon as I learned about it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I wanted to, but I couldn’t. For reasons I can’t go into. But it’s been eating at me.”

His brown eyes were watchful, waiting, holding solidly to hers.

“Look,” he said. “You trusted me enough to start digging into this olive-oil thing. What happened? What’d I do to lose your confidence?”

“That’s the point. You’ve done nothing. You stayed put.”

“Let me work with you,” he said. “You won’t regret it.”

“Not interested.”

He sighed and reset himself on the step stool.

“Okay, you don’t want to partner up, fine. But like it or not, I’m going to be acting on your behalf anyway.”

“I’ll have Mr. Rossi lock the door to this room and lose the key.”

“Last week I had a face-to-face with Lavonne in DC, and I asked her to get word to you that this olive-oil thing was more dangerous than I originally thought. Did she contact you?”

“I don’t care how dangerous it is. I don’t need your help. I don’t need anybody’s help.”

“Sure you do. You just haven’t realized it yet. For one thing, I have information that could be useful. Maybe even crucial.”

“Oh, really.”

“Somebody I work with at Albion, a woman I trust, she stumbled on some kind of shady deal related to the olive groves in Puglia. Some kind of swindle Albion is running that has to do with dark pools. Do you know what those are?”

Harper drew a slow breath, trying to conceal the spike in her pulse. Dark pools, swindle. Same story Daniela had been telling.

“Who is this person?”

“Her name is Lucia Campos. She’s the compliance officer for Albion. She’s supposed to keep all corporate dealings on the straight and narrow. She came across this olive-oil scheme, which wasn’t straight and it wasn’t narrow. She told me a little about it. She was worried. She has documents, evidence about the whole deal.”

“What whole deal?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t get to the details because we were interrupted. Later that same day, I dropped everything and flew down here to find you. I haven’t talked to Lucia since I left.”

“How do I get in touch with her?”

“Her cell number’s in my phone in my rental outside.”

“You don’t carry your phone.”

“Can’t chance being tracked. I keep the little bastard disassembled until I’m ready to use it.”

“If this is such damaging information, why’d Lucia Campos tell you?”

“She’s a good friend. She didn’t have anybody else she trusted.”

“How’d you find me? Here at the hospital?”

“Wasn’t that hard.”

“How?”

“You want every step?”

“Cut the shit, Adrian. Tell me.”

“Okay. Bixel ordered one of my techs to track down a cell signal. That tech is a friend of mine, and she let me know whose phone Bixel was tracking and where she located it. It was Nick’s phone. In Canena, Spain.

“I figured, shit, they were moving on you. So I walked out of work, caught a flight to Seville, drove to Canena. I get there, hear about the fire at the castle. Lady of the estate was badly burned along with a second guy, an American man, youngish, dark hair. Two other Americans escaped unharmed, an older gentleman and a tall, dark-haired woman. Sounded like you, your brother, and Sal.

“I asked around, heard you got medevacked, but no one seemed to know where you were sent, and the local officials refused to talk to me. So I tried the closest town, Hospital San Agustín. No luck. I drive to Córdoba. Reina Sofía University Hospital. I ask around there, admissions, administration, nobody’s helpful. Very tight-lipped. I kept working regional hospitals, one after the other. Police departments were no help.

“Three days like that, I’ve lost the trail. Then it hits me. Where’s the best burn unit in Spain? Should’ve thought of that first.

“Got here an hour ago, hung around the lobby, chatted up a nurse, mentioned your name, and apparently she let your pit bulls know I was sniffing. Bottom line, it wasn’t that hard. Most anybody could’ve done it.”

“Including Gerda.”

“Gerda?”

“Gerda Bixel. Larissa Bixel’s daughter. You know her?”

“Met her, don’t know her.”

“She’s been shadowing me for weeks. She set that fire in Canena and tried to kill me the same night. Last few days, she’s left behind a string of corpses. Four, maybe more.”

Naff waved both hands as if to slow a speeding car. “Wait. Gerda Bixel? She’s a world-class athlete, a minor celebrity. I mean, okay, she’s freaky weird, but a killer? I can’t see it.”

“Then your vision is impaired. Or you’re trying to con me.”

Adrian was about to respond when his eyes broke away from hers. He sat up straight, cocked his head to the side, stared at the closed door, listening for something beyond it. Harper didn’t follow his gaze. It felt like a trick, a bid to distract, give him an opening to jump her.

Then she heard it too, a grunt, a long gasp, the thumping of legs or arms against the door.

Adrian got there first, pushed the door open as far as it would go, only a crack. Then set his shoulder against it and shoved, forcing it farther, an opening of no more than half a foot. Harper joined him and together they thrust it a few inches farther.

Adrian squeezed out, Harper close behind him.

Lying on his back, Benjamin Rossi blocked the door, eyes closed, body limp, a black scarf wrapped tight around his throat. Two steps away, Gerda Bixel was edging backward, eyeing the two of them, deciding between fight and flight.

Harper pushed past Adrian and snapped a front kick at Gerda’s midsection, but Gerda dodged to the side, and the kick glanced off her ribs. She gasped, gave Harper a brief flat stare, spun, and broke into a sprint.

Harper chased her around a corner and into the main hallway, and in a few seconds Adrian was at Harper’s side, a heave of breath passing her, hurtling ahead down the long corridor.

Halfway to the lobby, one of the trauma center’s doors opened, and an orderly rolled a gurney into the middle of the corridor, blocking it. Gerda didn’t break stride. In a graceful arc she hurdled the gurney, sailing over it, landing softly beyond it without a hitch in her gait, then continued to race toward the lobby.

Harper was fast, Adrian was faster, but neither could rival Gerda. She flew past the reception desk, dodging incoming visitors and patients, and exploded through the double doors, disappearing into the night.

Adrian slung aside the empty gurney and continued his pursuit. But Harper halted, swung around, a flash of dread seizing her. How long had it been? Nick and Sal had been alone in the room upstairs, vulnerable. One Rossi brother out of commission, the other getting cafeteria coffee.

She found the closest stairwell and raced up three flights, sidestepped a couple of nurses, and flung open the door to Nick’s private room.

Sal was tilted back in the leather recliner, studying the latest edition of El País. Nick was asleep beneath his sheets, arms pressed firmly against his sides as if about to be fired from a cannon.

Sal glanced up and said, “I keep thinking if I stare at this newsprint long enough, Spanish will start making sense. So far, no luck.” He took a longer look at Harper. “Jesus, what the hell happened?”

Still panting, Harper sat in the desk chair. She recounted the episode in the janitor’s closet, then had to repeat it a second time to Nick, who’d been awakened by their talk.

“I need to go back down and check on Naff and Rossi.”

“Go with her, Sal,” Nick said.

Harper told him to stay put, she’d be fine.

She was headed to the door when Adrian barged in with Benjamin Rossi’s right arm slung over his shoulder. Adrian hauled him into the room with Marvin following.

“A little CPR, the guy’s good as new,” Naff said. “We’re buddies now, right, Benj? Blood brothers.”

Benjamin tried and failed to form words through his injured voice box.

Sal stood and let Adrian lower Benjamin into the recliner. Adrian held out the black silk scarf to Harper.

“Something for your wardrobe,” he said.

From the recliner, Benjamin said, “Bitch was quick, had it coiled around my neck like a bullwhip or some damn thing.”

“You won’t fall for that again,” Marvin said. “See it coming next time, step in and put a fist through her face.”

“That’s her weapon?” Nick said. “A goddamn scarf?”

“As a kid she was good with ribbons,” Adrian said. “Rhythmic gymnastics. You’ve seen them on TV, girls dancing on the mat, making designs in the air while they do flips and somersaults.”

“Ribbons?” Sal said. “Scarves? Jesus, what happened to guns?”

Nick said, “I think you guys probably scared her off. But don’t you think we should report her to the police? The fire, Daniela, this attack. Give the cops her photograph. Let them track her down. They’ve got the resources.”

Sal grumbled and said, “Do that and we’ll be stuck answering a lot of cop questions, some complete strangers going over everything hour after hour, who we are, why we’re here, what Harper is up to, what Albion did to Ross, Leo. Get tangled in all that from a year ago.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” Nick said. “The police should know.”

“It’s the right thing,” said Adrian. “But Sal’s got a point.”

An Asian nurse tapped on the door and stepped into the room, cleared her throat, and nodded to Harper.

“Ella dijo que era tu hermana y yo le creí.” She said she was your sister and I believed her. “Lo siento, lo siento. I hope you can forgive me.” The nurse went on to explain that she had been manning the admissions desk and had directed Gerda to the janitor’s closet she’d noticed Harper entering a few minutes earlier.

“Todo está bien,” Harper told her.

The nurse nodded her gratitude and was about to leave when she swung back and held out a telephone handset.

“I have forgotten,” she said. “Tienes una llamada.”

Harper didn’t move. She asked the nurse who was calling.

“Ella dice que su nombre es Lavonne.”

Harper cursed under her breath, took the phone, stepped into the hallway, and said, “How the hell did you—”

Lavonne cut her off, speaking in a quiet, steely tone Harper had never heard from her before. Harper listened until Lavonne reached the end of her explanation and finished by saying, “Of course, it’s your call, Harper. I’m sure you’ll do what’s best.” And clicked off.

Harper stepped back into Nick’s room, thanked the nurse, and returned the phone. The nurse looked around the room at the odd group, gave Harper a confused smile, and departed.

“What was that about?” Sal said.

Harper waved him off and asked Benjamin Rossi if he felt well enough to return to his post in the hallway.

“I’m good,” he croaked and climbed out of the recliner. He gave Adrian a two-finger salute. “Thanks again, hotshot. I owe you.”

When the Rossi brothers were gone, Harper walked to the window and looked out at the hazy glow of Madrid’s city center a few miles to the south.

After debating it for another minute, she turned around and took a longer look at Naff’s steady brown eyes, their depths clouded by distant pain, comrades lost, battlefields still vivid in his memory. They were eyes that didn’t weep easily or often, and only in private. His talk was cocksure, but those brown eyes gave him away. Vulnerable and lonely but too proud to admit either.

“What’d she want?” Adrian said.

“To tell me about a girl named Julie Marie who lives in Phoenix.”

Adrian shook his head and looked away. “She had no right to do that.”

“You going to let us in on this?” Nick said.

“Not right now,” Harper said. “I need to get going.”

“Where?” Nick said.

“Mr. Naff and I are going to Puglia. Aren’t we, Mr. Naff?”

PART FOUR

TWENTY-ONE

Weinegg District, Zurich, Switzerland

Bonnie Albion, eight years old, believed her father Lester Albion was trying to kill her. But she needed evidence, so she devoted herself to researching the subject, then devised an experiment to prove her case.

First, she needed to buy supplies, a simple task since Bonnie was unsupervised from the time her limo dropped her back at home after school until her father returned from work, most nights around six o’clock. So, after arriving home one afternoon, she waited till the limo disappeared down the avenue, then left the house straightaway and walked to a nearby pet shop.

She told the shop owner she was performing a science experiment for her biology class at Lakeside School Küsnacht. She needed four white mice. Two young and two old. Could he provide them?

The proprietor told Bonnie he had lots of mice in stock, but he was not sure of their exact ages. She laid a two hundred–franc note on his counter and asked him to please speak to his supplier and provide her with two old mice and two young mice no later than one week from today.

The owner, an elderly man with a fringe of white hair and a bushy mustache, smiled at her. She was used to adults smiling at her, whether being indulgent, patronizing, or amused by her precociousness. It was usually one of those reasons, but she could never be quite sure. Adults had been calling her “precocious” since she’d uttered her first complete sentence at two years old. Now, after a few years of associating with other children her age, she accepted the description, considering it a fair evaluation. She was clearly more intellectually advanced than her classmates, and even some of her teachers.

“Can you do it, or shall I take my business elsewhere?”

The shop owner knew Bonnie’s father, because Bonnie and her father had shopped in this Tierhandlung for many years. She’d bought her first cat, Tinkerbelle, in this shop, as well as her current cat, Miriam, a Siamese.

“I will do my best to satisfy your wishes,” the gentleman told her.

He held out the cash to return to her. “There will be no charge for the four mice, should I be able to find what you are looking for.”

Bonnie hid her hands in her pockets. She had learned that service proceeded more smoothly when money changed hands.

“A week from today,” she said and left the shop.

When she returned a week later, the shop owner smiled and said, “I have what you asked for. Four white mice. Two of them are only three months old, and the other two are approximately three years of age. As you know, mice more than three years old are uncommon.”

“That will do,” Bonnie said. “You will say nothing of this transaction to my father or anyone else. Is that understood?”

“If that is what you wish, most certainly, this shall remain our secret.” Again, the unreadable smile.

At home, Bonnie kept the two old mice separate from the two young ones for the next week. She fed them and observed them. She studied online videos and read medical descriptions of the procedure until she felt certain she was competent to go forward.

From an online medical-supply warehouse, she secured a twenty-five-gauge needle to fit on a syringe as well as a plastic restraining tube, each of which she’d procured from a different medical-supply operation. On the day she determined she was ready, she tucked one of the young mice into the restraining tube so that its head and most of its body were inside the tube, but its rear legs protruded.

By holding the mouse close to a table lamp for five minutes, Bonnie warmed the creature, which was the proper technique for increasing the blood flow. From the far corner of the room, Miriam, her Siamese, was observing her work attentively.

When the five minutes were up, Bonnie tugged the left leg straight and clipped away the fur from its thigh. She dabbed the bare skin with petroleum jelly to prevent blood from running. She tightened a length of twine around the mouse’s left leg just above the knee. A tourniquet. She located the saphenous vein and punctured it with the tip of the needle. She left the needle in place for fifteen minutes. The mouse quivered in protest, and squeaked three times, but otherwise was docile.

When the fifteen minutes had elapsed, she withdrew the needle, tugged the mouse out of the restraining tube, and let it loose on the bedroom floor. It had served its purpose. Miriam required only a few seconds to trap the mouse under Bonnie’s bed. She played with the creature for half an hour before losing interest in its lifeless form.

Bonnie repeated the exercise on the old mouse. It protested less, squirmed less, but otherwise acted similarly. When the tests were complete, she deemed the results satisfactory. Bonnie had only to wait till the following Tuesday to perform the experiment for real.

On that Tuesday, Bonnie concealed the old mouse in the right zippered pocket of her jacket and the young mouse in the left pocket. She drove with her father to Albion International’s offices as usual, where her father let her out in the parking garage and told her he’d meet her in half an hour in the infirmary.

Her father always made Bonnie wait that long while he made phone calls or went over his daily schedule in his office. His thoughtlessness in this regard annoyed her, this habit of making her wait for the transfusion of the plasma from her father’s blood. Today, however, that half hour of freedom was crucial to her plan.

She went directly to the infirmary. Let herself into the procedure room, where the two lounge chairs sat on either side of the centrifuge that would separate the red cells from the plasma and platelets, and pump the depleted blood into her father while Bonnie received the plasma-dense blood from a second plastic tube attached to the blood separator.

Bonnie put the old mouse and the young mouse in their plastic tubes, rear legs exposed. She set the old mouse in her father’s recliner and inserted the needle into its saphenous vein. Then she repeated the process with the young mouse and laid it in her own chair.

She recalibrated the device for the reduced size of the subjects, then switched on the machine and let it run for fifteen minutes, pumping enriched blood from the old mouse into the young mouse. At the end of that time, she withdrew the needles, extracted the mice from the restraining tubes, and put them in the pockets of her jacket, zipped shut.

The company’s nurse, Jackie Neiderhoff, entered the infirmary as Bonnie was hanging her coat on the wall hook. Her father and Ms. Bixel entered a minute later. Bonnie lay on the recliner and endured the procedure for the next half hour. When it was done, she claimed to be feeling weak and dizzy and kept complaining about her condition until her father relented and ordered one of the corporate limos to take her back home.

In her bedroom Bonnie returned the mice to their separate cages, which she had hidden in her underwear drawer. Both seemed weary and listless. She watched them for a while until both fell asleep, then she curled up on her bed with her laptop and continued her research.

For two weeks, Bonnie repeated the process, subjecting the mice to the same twice-weekly blood enrichment procedures she was receiving. After that period, the results were abundantly clear. To substantiate her case, she had taken photographs with her phone and had recorded careful observational notes, which she kept in a loose-leaf binder. This was the evidence she would present when the time came.

The young mouse had lost its appetite and had become lethargic. His fur had grown dull and patches were falling out. His gums were bleeding. The old mouse grew larger and stronger and more active. His coat was shinier, and he ran in circles for hours at a time in his straw-covered cage. The old mouse was becoming young and the young mouse was becoming old.

Precisely as she’d suspected, her father had lied. The nurse had lied. It was likely Ms. Bixel was aware of the scheme too. Of course, if confronted by Bonnie’s evidence, all would deny that the centrifuge was meant to do exactly the opposite of what they claimed.

Bonnie was being subjected to a reverse case of parabiotic rejuvenation. The regular plasma transfers from Bonnie’s body to her father’s enriched Lester Albion’s blood chemistry. His old kidneys and liver were benefiting from having his blood scrubbed by Bonnie’s kidneys and liver—a benefit far greater than a simple blood transfusion could provide.

Her father was feasting on Bonnie’s youth. Growing strong, enhancing his muscles and his skin and his internal organs while Bonnie was receiving regular dosages of her father’s geriatric blood—which explained her recent lassitude and lack of focus.

She had documented the evidence. Now she needed to decide whom to present it to. She was all but certain the police would not take her seriously. They had failed to prosecute her father for murders he’d clearly committed. Her father wielded such power over the nation’s justice system, and his influence was so widespread and so profound, that she doubted anyone in Zurich or possibly in all of Switzerland would be immune to his authority.

It was even possible there had been no crime committed. It might be perfectly legal for a father to use his daughter’s blood to boost his own system. Perhaps other fathers and mothers were using their children in the same fashion. She didn’t know for sure. Though she doubted it.

The only man in the world she knew and trusted fully was Adrian Naff. Bonnie had witnessed Mr. Naff standing up to her father when no one else would. She believed Naff was independent and honest. But she had to find a time and place to lay out the evidence before him. And it had to be soon. She was afraid the day was fast approaching when she would lie down on her sheets, like the young mouse in his bed of straw, and never rise again.

TWENTY-TWO

Bari Milling Works, Bari, Italy

For many years, Gerda had believed herself incapable of orgasms.

She believed she would have to be satisfied instead with nonsexual versions of bliss: the exalted rush of athletic triumph, the delirium of endorphins, or the intense rush of homicide.

In her bed alone, she tried everything to achieve sexual release. Phallic toys, vibrating wands, lubricants. In those solitary attempts, she sometimes came close, rolling the rock of self-gratification up the steep hill of self-consciousness. But her mind inevitably interfered. She could not find the fantasy that persisted to the end.

She imagined different men, black and white, sinewy or soft. She created perfect lovers, one more powerful than she, another exquisitely tender and willing to go to any lengths to please. She pictured them in exact detail. She gave them seductive words, she let them disrobe her stitch by stitch, peeling away her layers, touching her flesh lightly with their fingertips, or treating her roughly, overpowering her. It did not work. None of it.

Once, she had filled her room with scented candles. In the dark, she lay back on silk sheets amid the fluttering light, then rolled the rock inch by inch up the mountainside, her fingers doing quick, slippery duty.

That night she could feel it coming. She braced herself, she raised her hips to her hand, probed her muscular depths, and she could feel the clench, the explosion so close. Then, as always, the self-hypnosis failed. She woke from her dream. She was simply a pathetic girl on the sheets of a lonely bed, surrounded by melting wax that stank of vanilla. The rock slid from her hands and rolled back down the mountainside. She believed herself defective.

Four men had lain between her thighs. Five, if she counted Max Bixel, her father. Which she did not.

“Wir tun, was für die Familie nötig ist,” her mother would repeat. We do what we must for our family’s sake.

Max Bixel had been an Olympian—one of the greatest weightlifters of his generation. Six feet tall and more than three hundred pounds. His combined total in the snatch together with the clean and jerk was 1,043 pounds. A record that lasted well beyond his death.

After retiring from sports, he found work on the loading docks in a nearby town, carrying crates of machinery from one truck to another, a menial job that paid poorly but was all the man aspired to.

When Gerda was only five, Max came into her bed. It may have started earlier, although she had no recollection of anything before that age. She remembered that room because her father had affixed glowing stars and moons and meteors to the ceiling in her bedroom in that house in the town of Falkensee, just west of Berlin.

She watched those stars glow as he satisfied his needs and while her mother, Larissa, sat in a chair in the corner of the room, typing on her laptop. Her mother told her that she stayed nearby to be certain no harm came to Gerda. She’d read while Max grunted and heaved and Gerda watched the moon and stars and meteors.

“Heirate keinen armen Mann, denn so verhalten sie sich,” her mother would say. Do not marry a poor man, for this is how they behave.

Three other sexual partners came later, all schoolboys. They fumbled and they finished fast and left her lying with her britches at her ankles and that was that. Nothing to remember, nothing to forget.

Gerda was seventeen when it ended with her father. For years he had been as gentle as a big man could be while committing such an act. But as Gerda matured and her body bulked up from her athletic training, Max became increasingly rough. At the same time, her mother grew ever more focused on her work at Albion International and no longer had time to chaperone the evening events.

The final night with Max began like all the others. He entered her room, shut the door, and pulled the covers back and, without preamble, mounted her. She didn’t struggle, didn’t try to fight him off. She never had. She never complained, never told her mother that these violations should end. She endured them because she saw no remedy. The man’s strength was brutish and overwhelming.

But by that night in Gerda’s seventeenth year, Max had grown old and paunchy, his muscles slack, and no longer fearsome in his strength. And her mother’s job at Albion was sufficient to take care of their needs without Max’s paltry income. Her mother had made sure Gerda knew every detail of the family finances because, as she liked to say, “How much you have in your wallet is exactly how free you are.”

When Max finished that night and rolled from her body, buried his face in the pillow, and began to snore beside her, Gerda slipped from the bed and drew from her dresser the red-and-green Christmas scarf her mother had given her that very year.

Without waking her father, she took one wrap around Max Bixel’s throat and crossed the scarf into an X behind his hairy shoulders, then took tight handholds on the two ends. She climbed aboard Max’s broad back, gripping him with her thighs as one would mount a wild horse in need of breaking.

She cinched the material tight and pulled back with all her strength. Max Bixel woke, coughing, gasping, and tried to buck her off, tried to roll away, tried to swing his beefy arms behind him to strike her. But she dodged his frantic blows and rode him without mercy, tightening the material, tightening it against that thick, soft neck, and as he reared and twisted and struggled up to his hands and knees, she held firm with her thighs and tipped her head back to see the glowing moon and stars and meteors above, and she choked him till he collapsed flat on the bed and heaved his last heave.

“Good for you,” her mother said. “It is finished now.”

She stood in the doorway while Gerda continued to tighten the silk.

“We will have to find a place to bury him. It will not be easy with all that bulk. He let himself get fat, didn’t he? Ein echter Slob. This will be our secret and will bind us even closer, you and me . . . bind us forever.”

“Where are you, Gerda?”

“I’m here, of course. Right beside you, exactly where I belong.”

Manfred Knobel rolled up on his side and reached out, and with a slender finger he traced the fine golden hair that rimmed her navel, a tickling touch. His bedroom was sunny and smelled of lavender and fresh linen and the astringent chemicals wafting up from the olive mill on the floor below.

She heard the workmen down there dumping crates of olives into the stainless steel tubs. She heard their voices, felt the rumble of the machinery, the olives jostling through the stages that Manfred had shown her, so proud of his shiny machines that removed the stems and leaves, washed the fruit before it rolled down chutes into the mill itself, where giant grindstones big as the wheels of bulldozers crushed the olives into a paste, then pumped that paste through another machine, a trough with mixing blades, and on and on. Such a complicated process. Such enormous, noisy hardware to extract those droplets of golden oil.

Manfred wanted Gerda to share his love of the mill, to partake in his fascination for olive oil itself, and she had tried to do so, tried to learn the vocabulary of his business to become his faithful partner.

Manfred was caressing the ripples of Gerda’s abdomen, the ridges and contours of muscles she worked so hard to maintain. His gentle hand stroked back and forth across her flesh between her breasts and the brim of her pubic hair as if slathering her belly with oil.

His attention to her body was worshipful, much as hers was for his. Who else but Manfred appreciated the excruciating labors she had endured and fully understood the triumphs her body had accomplished? And who but Gerda fully understood the ordeals Manfred had suffered on his way to his countless victories?

“Are you ready again?” she asked. “So soon?”

“You want to climax? You haven’t, have you?”

“No, I haven’t yet,” she said. “So yes, I do.”

Penetration did not work for Gerda, which no doubt was her father’s fault. With Manfred, insertion was pleasant enough, for his equipment seemed a perfect fit, filling her to what felt like the exact depth and fullness she desired. Together they would find a rhythm in harmony with their mutual needs. But no matter how pleasurable it was, it did not bring her to completion.

However, in the early weeks of their courtship they had discovered a way to achieve her satisfaction. She could not reconstruct exactly how they stumbled upon the arrangement, but like dark magic, it seemed to come from nowhere, and it worked.

Manfred lay flat on his back, one leg stretched out on the mattress, the other cocked up with that foot flat on the bed. Gerda, facing away from her lover, mounted his raised thigh and poised herself against that beautifully sculpted muscle, sliding and grinding for minutes, her breath becoming fast, her heart rising to tumult, until the instant of release she’d never known before.

The first time, for several minutes afterward, she’d sobbed in ecstatic relief, and on every subsequent occasion she wept again.

Today when their lovemaking was done and they were lying side by side on top of the rumpled sheets, Manfred wiped a tear from her cheek and said, “I can’t believe you’re here. So long apart, no word from you, then you’re in my bed again.”

“I’ve been working.”

“But you can’t tell me what it is you are doing.”

“All right,” she said. “You’ve made me weak. I will confess.”

“So?”

“I’ve been following someone.”

“What?”

“I’ve been shadowing a woman. First in Bilbao, then Madrid, then in the south of Spain. And now I believe she’s somewhere nearby.”

“Near here?”

“I believe she is, yes.”

“Shadowing someone. I don’t understand.”

“My employer believes this woman intends to do harm to him and his business concerns. So I’ve been assigned to follow her and send reports on her actions so he can defend himself against her, if need be.”

Gerda left out the killing part, because Manfred, a strictly moral man, would disapprove.

“Then you’re acting like a spy. A good spy.”

“All right, yes.”

“And this woman is in the vicinity? Here in Bari.”

“I haven’t located her yet. I lost her trail several days ago, but my employer believes this is her ultimate destination.”

“Who is your employer?”

“I cannot say.”

“Well, in any case, this is quite fortunate for me.”

“And for me as well.”

“I wish you could stay with me.”

“I’m with you now.”

“You know what I mean. No more shadowing, just stay here, make a home. Be with me forever.”

“We have discussed this, this ‘forever’ business.”

“You love me, I love you. What is left to discuss?”

“You know the reason for my caution. I refuse to be destitute. I have promised myself I will never struggle for money. I’ve seen the ugly sacrifices being poor requires.”

Manfred was silent.

Gerda said, “You are uncomfortable discussing your finances. I know that, and I won’t press.”

“As I’ve told you, my finances are more than adequate,” he said. “In fact, in a short while I will complete a transaction that will make me one of the largest olive-oil producers in all of Italy.”

“Truly?”

“It is nearly done. A few documents to sign.”

“And what then? You’ll move out of these quarters into a house?”

“Of course. A villa large enough for a family, many children, a maid, a chef, everything you could want.”

Gerda stared up at the blank ceiling. “Tell me please this is not a fantasy, a fairy tale you want me to believe.”

“It is true, Gerda. I’m very close.”

Gerda was rolling onto her side to kiss Manfred when the phone beside his bed rang.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I told Pagolo to call only in an emergency.”

Gerda said it was fine, business came first.

He answered, spoke a few words, and listened.

“I will come down,” he said. “Tell her to look around if she likes.”

He set the phone aside and told Gerda he had to go downstairs.

“A woman?” Gerda said. “Who is this woman who interrupts us?”

“Are you jealous?”

“Should I be?”

“Of course not. In any case, I’ve never met this woman before. She’s an inspector from OLAF, the European antifraud commission, the olive-oil task force. I must go and answer her questions.”

“Will this be trouble for you?”

“Oh no. There is no fraud here. The mafia is scared of me. I will not play their games, so I have nothing to hide.”

“Good,” Gerda said. “I will leave now too and return tonight, and perhaps then we can discuss your finances in greater detail.”

Manfred gave her a patient smile and nodded. “I will open my books, show you every number, if this is what will make you happy.”

She watched him climb from the bed and amble across the room, his naked body still lean and supple from his years of pole-vaulting. She’d observed him hundreds of times during training and at meets—the sprint down the forty-meter runway, the plant, the takeoff, the deep bend of the pole, Manfred uncoiling, launching upward, his powerful arms rippling as he thrust his body into a beautifully timed, perfectly controlled flight, sweat glistening as he flew like a meteor across the empty sky.

Later, as Gerda dressed, she heard an angry argument in the street below. She stepped over to the front window and peered through the slats of Manfred’s blinds at a view of the front of the mill, the busy street, the trucks lined up with their loads of olives, a small bar directly across the avenue, a plaza with stone benches and pigeons and a fountain where children splashed water on one another.

Gerda had to tilt the slats wider to see the source of the altercation. Two truck drivers vying for a position at the head of the line. Both were shouting and waving their fists out their windows, neither giving an inch.

As she was turning away from the window, her eye was caught by a man sitting on a park bench. His stillness seemed out of place next to the frolicking children and the angry truckers and bustling street.

He wore a baseball hat tucked low and sunglasses, and he pressed a cell phone to his ear. He was staring across the street at Manfred’s mill.

Gerda felt a shudder of recognition. What was he doing here?

Only a few days ago in Madrid, this same man, along with Harper McDaniel, had chased her down the hallway of the university hospital and out into the parking lot, where she’d lost him.

Even that night, his face had seemed familiar, but she hadn’t been able to place where she’d seen him before or in what context. Now she remembered. This was Adrian Naff.

He worked for Gerda’s mother and Lester Albion as chief of security. She’d met him only once, a brief encounter in the elevator at the Albion Building when Albion, her mother, and she had been leaving for lunch. They’d ridden together down to the lobby. Introductions were made, and Adrian Naff shook her hand and said he’d heard a great deal about her. He even congratulated her on her Olympic success, but there’d been a tiny smile on his lips that suggested he found her somehow amusing.

Gerda finished dressing, draped her black scarf once around her neck, and hurried down the back stairways to the rear of the mill, then took several minutes to circle the block so she could approach Naff from behind.

Had Lester Albion dispatched his head of security to take Gerda down? She considered that but found the idea impossible to imagine. Albion desired her. Of that she was certain. And Albion had sent her on a mission to defend his empire. The only logical explanation for Naff’s presence in Madrid and here in Italy was that he had defected and now was working with Harper McDaniel.

Which made him as much of an enemy as McDaniel was. Fair game.

McDaniel’s damning words echoed in the chambers of her memory. She’d claimed Gerda had never learned to be free. That a lifetime of obeying the strict discipline of her sport had conditioned her to mindlessly follow the orders in her employer’s texts and her mother’s endlessly repeated adages.

It had the ring of truth, but was it true?

Gerda drew a long breath and steadied herself. McDaniel was the enemy. It was only natural that she would try to plant the seeds of doubt in Gerda. Gerda had experienced the same trickery employed by countless opponents, the seemingly innocent remark made in passing whose only intent was to fuel insecurity and undermine her confidence.

Gerda had learned to brush aside such ploys and refocus on her singular mission. And now she did so once again. Staying within the boundaries, the rules and regulations of any event, produced all the freedom Gerda would ever need. Cheaters like Tatiana—the rule benders, the freelancers—they weren’t free at all. Their achievements came too easily, their victories false.

She walked on, and as she approached the park, she slid off the scarf and readied it in her right hand. But when she stepped into the plaza, the bench where he’d been sitting was empty. Naff was gone and the plaza was vacant.

Even the children and pigeons had vanished as though they’d all been summoned away. A dark feeling swept across her, the same uneasy sensation she’d had so many times before: the sense that everyone in the world, even the creatures in the forests and birds in the sky, were attuned to a frequency that for some reason she was unable to hear.

TWENTY-THREE

Bari Milling Works, Bari, Italy

Harper had twisted her shoulder-length black hair into a low, flat bun, suitably conservative for posing as an EU investigator. She wore a gray tweed blazer with a black skirt and simple white blouse. In a pharmacy near her hotel, she’d found a pair of blue-tinted glasses with black frames. With the glasses and heavy makeup, including severe slashes of rouge along her cheekbones, she believed she looked the part of a graceless bureaucrat, in keeping with the credentials Lavonne had provided.

Earlier that morning, she’d read through the OLAF guidelines she’d photocopied in Madrid. According to the antifraud agency’s protocols, OLAF investigators were charged with probing a wide range of illegal activities: embezzlement, fraud, misspent public funds, and a host of other financial crimes. The olive-oil business had long been a prime target for OLAF investigations because it was so heavily subsidized by the EU. With all that cash sloshing around, corrupt officials and their mafia partners were forever lurking close by.

Although OLAF didn’t have the power to arrest or even charge an individual with a crime, the offenses their investigators uncovered often resulted in prosecution. So they weren’t cops, but close.

From the same xeroxed documents, she’d studied the fact-finding techniques OLAF investigators used in past cases to bring criminal charges. Then, relying on the confidential banking information Daniela Aguilar had shared, Harper had sketched out her attack plan.

But despite being well prepared, when she arrived at the front door of Knobel’s mill, she felt a twinge of panic. If things went badly and her con was exposed, the only plan B she had was to make a run for it.

After she entered the mill and presented her OLAF credentials, a worker pointed her toward the floor manager, a short, barrel-chested man who identified himself as Pagolo. Pagolo studied her ID, examined Harper warily, grunted something to himself, then telephoned for the boss. When he finished, he turned to Harper and said, “Attenda qui.”

So she waited there in front of the glassed-in office and observed the milling operation humming around her. The plant floor was the size of a basketball gym, and the walls were lined with stainless steel tubs and conveyor belts and the noisy hammer mill, centrifuges, and blowers. Despite the half dozen trucks lined up outside, the plant seemed to be operating at no more than a third of capacity. Perhaps Albion was carrying through on his threat to withhold the fruit from his trees.

Such hardball bargaining would threaten the bottom line of any business, but from the looks of Knobel’s flashy operation, this guy was even more vulnerable. From the trade journals Harper’d studied, she had a rough idea of the cost of the technology arrayed before her. Well more than a million euros. If those machines sat idle throughout the harvest, it would mean certain ruin.

What had never made sense was why Albion would use his extensive landholdings as leverage to coerce Manfred Knobel into purchasing those groves for roughly the same price Albion had paid for them.

After a ten-minute wait, a door near the owner’s office opened, and Manfred Knobel appeared. He stood a few inches over six feet with a shaggy mop of blond hair. Wide shoulders, narrow waist and hips, and long legs. He wore a rumpled green T-shirt and tight-fitting charcoal jeans and black canvas sneakers. Even if she hadn’t known he was a former Olympian, she would have guessed he was a hardcore athlete. For a big man, he moved with the tightly coiled grace of a jungle cat and the sureness of one who had devoted years to defying the pitiless laws of gravity. Like Gerda, Manfred was a jumper.

His smile was stiff, and the hand he extended in greeting was more rigid than welcoming. In his hazel eyes, Harper saw a quick calculation, then his mouth relaxed, as if he’d dismissed her as unworthy of concern. Exactly Harper’s intention.

“Irene de Jong,” Harper said. “OLAF investigation team. Would you like to see my papers?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Manfred said. “Are you French?”

“Dutch,” Harper said. “Shall we proceed in English? My German is adequate but not fluent.”

Manfred told her English was fine. “I suppose you would you like a tour of the mill?”

“Not necessary. I’ve had a chance to observe while I waited.”

“I’m sorry to have delayed you, but I was engaged in a personal matter in my living quarters upstairs.”

“How convenient for you, living above the mill. No commute.”

Harper smiled and Manfred responded with a curt nod.

“I see your plant is not in full operation.”

“The harvest is just beginning. In the next week or two, we expect to see a sharp increase.”

Manfred shifted uneasily and looked over to Pagolo, who was loitering nearby as if he might soon be needed.

“I’ve never had an OLAF investigator at the plant before. I’m not quite sure how you proceed.”

“Perhaps we should go into your office and I’ll explain.”

“Of course.”

Manfred held the door and she stepped inside.

He followed her into the tidy room with empty bookshelves lining one wall and a long oak desk consuming most of the floor space. Several computer monitors sat side by side on the desk.

Manfred swept a hand toward the single visitor’s chair wedged into a corner of the office.

“I’ll stand,” Harper said.

“As you wish.”

Manfred fit his lanky frame into a high-backed desk chair and settled into an insouciant slouch. He brushed a hand across the sleek desktop and gave her a complacent look.

On the wall behind him hung an array of photographs. A few were snapshots of the mill before it had been updated, a dusty, empty space with broken windows and jumbles of roofing tiles and other building materials scattered about. Then a few photos showed stages of the remodeling: gangs of workmen smiling for the camera, holding up the tools of their trade. Finally came the spotless mill, floors polished, windows clear, gleaming new machinery, and Manfred Knobel with his arms outstretched, as if to say “Look at this marvelous place I’ve created.”

Beside the photos of the mill were studio portraits of an older couple who appeared to be Manfred’s parents—a stern father with the same blond thatch and strong jaw as his son, and a delicate mother who had passed on her hazel eyes but not much else.

There were also track-and-field photos. Manfred as a strapping teenager sailing over hurdles and standing proudly on the Olympic medal platform, his hand over his heart as his national anthem played.

A single framed photo sat on his desk, facing away from Harper.

“You started as a hurdler, I take it?”

When Manfred turned around to follow Harper’s gaze, she drifted forward to the desk and turned the framed picture around. It must have been a publicity shot taken a few years earlier. Gerda Bixel was posed with a hand beneath her chin, a broad unnatural smile that had probably been bullied from her by the photographer.

“Ist das deine Freundin?”

Manfred swung back around. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m an investigator,” she said. “I’m investigating.”

“She’s a friend.”

“Must be a special friend, to look at you all day while you work.”

“Just a friend,” he said more firmly. “Now, Ms. de Jong, what brings you to our humble mill?”

“An allegation.”

His bored look vanished. Eyes tightened, chin tucking in.

“I’m sorry?”

“Do I have your full attention?”

“Allegation?” he said. “What kind of allegation?”

“Let’s start with money laundering.”

“What! You must be mad.”

“As you said, you’re unfamiliar with OLAF’s procedures. For one thing, we don’t drop in on businesses at random. Someone must make a credible allegation of malfeasance or a crime. Then it becomes our duty to pursue this allegation to be certain that EU funds are not being misappropriated in any fashion. Either through fraud, corruption, embezzlement, or other means.”

“Who made this outrageous allegation?”

“If we were to reveal the identities of our sources, it would have a chilling effect on information flow, so I’m not at liberty to do that.”

“Anybody can simply walk in off the street and make a claim and that sends you auf einer wilden Jagd.”

“No, we try not to waste our time on wild-goose chases.”

He spread his hands. “Well, there’s no money laundering here. We mill olives, make extra-virgin olive oil, and that is all we do.”

“That may be,” she said. “But we need to discuss your loan from Crédit Agricole in Rome.”

Manfred Knobel’s face lost its color, and he came slowly to his feet and stepped around the desk.

“Let me see that ID,” he said.

Harper drew it from her jacket pocket and held it out. Knobel studied it carefully, then backed away, walked to his desk, and settled into his chair again. A sheen of perspiration gleamed at the edge of his scalp.

“Tell me about Lester Albion and his real estate proposal that sent you to Crédit Agricole for that substantial loan.”

Knobel closed his eyes and leaned back against the leather headrest. The last of his nonchalance had drained from his face. With his eyes still shut, she couldn’t tell if he was frightened or angry or both.

“If anyone is laundering money, it’s Albion, not me.”

“All right. I’m listening.”

He opened his eyes, sat up straight, pressed his palms on the desktop, and stared hard at her. His features were a rigid mask of bitterness.

“I’ve never spoken with the man, yet I’m certain of one thing. Lester Albion is a ruthless bastard.”

Harper sighed. She felt the tension in her body subside. She turned and took a seat in the visitor’s chair.

“Yes, let’s start there,” she said. “Anything and everything you can tell me about Lester Albion.”

“You’re after him, not me, is that what you’re saying?”

“Let’s put that aside for now, shall we? What we know, Mr. Knobel, is that Mr. Albion has coerced you to purchase a large tract of land, thousands of hectares of olive orchards. The price for this sale is quite curious. It has raised red flags.”

“I know, I know. I’m paying more or less what he paid for the land. It feels like some kind of sleight of hand.”

“Has he asked you for a Schmiergeld? Some kind of kickback to make the deal go forward? Money under the table.”

“Nothing like that, no. It’s just a straightforward transaction. I buy his groves, or . . .” He hesitated and looked off.

“Or he withholds his olive harvest and torpedoes your business.”

“Where did you hear all this?”

“Is it true?”

He flinched, then nodded.

“I’ve not done anything illegal.”

“No,” Harper said. “So far you haven’t.”

“The bank has approved the loan,” he said. “I sign the papers this Friday, four days from today. If this is illegal, please let me know now.”

“If you want to buy his land, you have every right.”

“I certainly don’t want to assume more debt. But I do not see an alternative. I feel quite trapped.”

Harper let his words hang in the air, then said, “Perhaps we should set a trap of our own.”

That revived him. His eyes brightened, and he tilted his head to the side as if replaying her words in his mind.

Outside the glass walls of his office, Harper saw the man named Pagolo staring at her. He had an ape’s sloping shoulders and long arms, and his face was darkened by the sun or perhaps his Moorish ancestors. When he saw her returning his look, Pagolo turned away and walked across the open floor toward one of the centrifuges.

“Who is that man?” Harper asked.

“What man?”

“The man who was glaring at me.”

“He glares at everyone. That’s Pagolo. He worked for Albion until recently, managing one of his larger groves, the Bellomo farm. I hired him to help me oversee the same land when it becomes mine. He knows the trees better than anyone in these parts. Disagreeable but knowledgeable. As I transition from being only a miller to maintaining the orchards as well, I will need more people like Pagolo.”

“Do you have any idea why Albion resorted to threats and intimidation to pressure you to purchase his land?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he bought those groves impulsively, then changed his mind about owning them, and I was the most likely buyer.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I’ve tried to convince myself,” Manfred said. “But no, I believe he has some other scheme in mind. That’s how it feels. Forcing me to buy so much land, it is pushing me to my financial limits. I’m actually quite surprised the bank has approved the loan.”

“Your friend, the young woman on your desk. Her name is Gerda Bixel, is it not?”

He drew a sharp breath. “How did you know that?”

“I’m an investigator. This is what I do.”

His eyes ticked to the photograph. He swallowed hard.

When he spoke, his voice sounded oddly faraway. “Gerda has nothing to do with my business.”

“Gerda’s mother, you’ve met her, I suppose?”

He took a deep swallow.

“Of course, I’ve met her on many occasions.”

He was looking into Harper’s eyes again. The sudden shifts in the conversation had so unsettled him Manfred seemed adrift, vulnerable.

“Larissa Bixel is Lester Albion’s second-in-command. Correct?”

“She is.”

Something happened in his eyes at the mention of Larissa Bixel, some darkening of his mood, but Harper let it pass to continue her questioning.

“And Gerda, she’s more than just a friend, isn’t she?”

He drew another long breath, filling his lungs.

“All right, yes. Gerda and I are very close. In truth, I would like to marry her. I have proposed.”

“Has she agreed?”

“She’s considering my offer.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Why are you asking me these questions? What does any of this have to do with money laundering or crime of any sort?”

“It goes to motive,” she said. “I’m trying to understand why Lester Albion would take such a powerful interest in your business affairs.”

“All right,” he said. “Gerda and I have known each other since childhood. We were schoolmates, teammates.”

“When and where did you last see Gerda Bixel?”

“Earlier today, here in my quarters.”

He motioned toward the ceiling.

“Is she still here?”

“I don’t believe so. Why? Do you want to meet her? Cross-examine her?”

Harper gave his attempt at sarcasm a tolerant smile.

“Does Gerda know anything about your real estate negotiations with Lester Albion?”

“No.”

“But surely her mother is privy to what Albion is doing.”

“I would assume she is, yes.”

“And you believe she would withhold such information from her daughter even though it concerns someone so close to her?”

“Gerda has no interest in business matters and rarely speaks with her mother. They are not close.”

“What exactly does Gerda do for a living?”

“That’s quite enough.” Manfred came to his feet. “You have no right to ask these questions.”

“Are you refusing to cooperate with the OLAF investigation?”

He straightened, drew his shoulders back, chin rising as if he’d heard some patriotic tune and was about to march off to battle.

“If Albion is using me to commit a crime, then I have no choice but to help you bring him to justice. But you will please leave Gerda out of these matters.”

“All right, I’ll consider that request,” Harper said. “So your closing is to take place in four days’ time?”

“That’s right.”

“Where?”

“Here in my office.”

“Will Lester Albion be present?”

“No, his lawyer will attend, acting as the Vollmacht.”

“Power of attorney,” she said.

“Yes. Power of attorney.”

“I want Lester Albion to be present.”

Manfred Knobel chuckled dryly. “Such a man would never bother with something so inconsequential.”

“We’ll make him bother.”

“And how will you accomplish that?”

“You will pass the word to his attorney that you will be bringing an assistant to the closing.”

He shrugged and raised his hands, mystified.

“Tell him your assistant’s name is Harper McDaniel.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand. Just make sure Albion knows that Ms. McDaniel will be present at the closing, and I assure you, Albion will come.”

“What will this achieve, bringing Lester Albion to Bari?”

“When all the pieces are in place,” Harper said, “I’ll explain.”

In truth she had very few pieces to put into place so far. But at least now she had a theory about what Albion was up to. She needed to hash it out with Adrian, see if her hypothesis stood up to scrutiny. Adrian knew Albion far better than she did. If she was right, they had three days to put together a plan.

“Ms. de Jong, please listen to me. I am willing to perform my part in the interests of justice. But I must have your promise that my purchase of Albion Olives will be completed no later than this coming Friday. The olives are ripe and already falling from the trees. If I don’t gain access to Albion’s crop by then, all the fruit will rot on the ground, and everything I’ve worked for will be lost.”

She gave him her word. Even if she had to move heaven and earth, nothing would stop her from finishing this by Friday.

“And this person—Ms. McDaniel—she will be attending the closing?”

“Yes,” Harper said. “She most certainly will.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Bari, Italy

A few minutes later, on the Via Dante Alighieri, Harper tracked down an electronics store, Calabresi Elettronica. The establishment was empty except for a man behind the front counter who identified himself as the owner and hopped down from a stool to assist her. He was in his seventies and had a shiny bald head, a two-day beard, and a gut that strained against the buttons on his white shirt.

He followed her up and down the aisles, breathlessly explaining the virtues of each item she passed, speaking with such fervor that it seemed Harper was the first customer who’d wandered into his store in months.

When she found the shelf she was looking for and took down a box to read the installation instructions, the man said, “Oh no, we have much better than this. Much better. This one is inferior. It will die in days, and you will be back in my store complaining. I can’t sell you that one. But the one next to it, yes, that one, it is superb. Crystal image. It connects with wireless and sends messaggi di avviso to phone. Best security camera money will buy.”

“I’ll take it,” she said.

“Only one? Oh no, you must use several for the many angles a burglar could take to enter your house and locate your valuable items.”

“Only one,” she said.

She paid in cash and left the man pouting in disappointment.

Next, she stopped in a pharmacy, bought cosmetics, toothpaste, a toothbrush, razor, shampoo, floss, deodorant, and a few feminine hygiene products. Then another stop in a nearby boutique, where she picked up three blouses in her size, a few undergarments, and two pairs of slacks.

On the waterfront two blocks from her hotel, Harper stepped into the Caffetteria Diaz. She ordered coffee and a roll, then entered the bagno delle donne and scrubbed away the garish makeup, shook out her long black hair, and finger-combed it straight. She didn’t want to confuse the staff at her hotel.

At the front desk of the Grande Albergo delle Nazioni, the clerk greeted her by name—that is, the name on the bogus passport she’d presented at check-in. To the fine people of the Nazioni, she was Louisa Andrea Hartwell of Montreal.

“I have a friend coming to town tomorrow,” Harper told the clerk. “I’d very much like to reserve her a room.”

“But of course,” the young man assured her.

“Here’s the thing,” Harper said. “I’d like to put her in the adjoining room next to mine so we can go back and forth. We haven’t seen each other in ages. It’ll be a weeklong girl’s night.”

She’d exceeded the limits of the young man’s English idiom, and he gave her a puzzled smile.

“I don’t think anyone’s next door to me . . . could you look?”

With a few keystrokes, he assured her that the room was, in fact, available. How long would she like to reserve it for?

“A week would be perfect. Let me take the room right now so I can dress it up for her arrival. A few surprises, you know.”

“Of course,” he said. “And your friend’s name?”

“An American. Her name is Harper McDaniel. I have a photocopy of her passport and her American Express card if that would be helpful.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Very helpful.”

On the sixth floor, Harper unlocked the door to the adjoining room, went inside, and scouted the layout from the doorway to the balcony and back again, making two laps around the room before she decided on the exact spot to locate the video camera—on top of the tall armoire, where it would be invisible from almost any position in the room.

She had to stand on a dining chair to place the camera correctly and make sure it had a clear sight line to the door. It took her a few minutes to hook it up to the hotel’s wireless system, and a few more to download the app to her phone and connect to the unit, then readjust the camera so the doorway stood in the center of the frame.

She unbolted one side of the adjoining door, went into the hallway, and entered her own room and unbolted her side. Through the connecting door she carried her suitcase over to the new room and set it up on a luggage rack in plain view. In the closet she hung some of her slacks and blouses, then dropped a small pile of her dirty laundry on the floor nearby.

She went back to her room, collected her used cosmetics and toiletries, brought them to the new room, and spread them out on the bathroom counter. An orderly arrangement, but not too orderly. She ran the shower, dampened a towel, dropped it in a corner of the bathroom. She plucked a couple of long black hairs from her scalp and dropped one in the bathtub, the other she let fall on the counter. She opened a bar of soap, foamed it up, spattered some suds on the countertop and the mirror, then rinsed and dropped the bar on the edge of the sink.

She wasn’t sure who would come looking for Harper McDaniel in her hotel room. It might be Gerda, or it might be someone else in Albion’s stable of jackals. She did not intend to disappoint them.

She hung a NON DISTURBARE sign on the outside knob to keep her handiwork safe from housekeeping, then came back into the room and switched on the camera, went back into her own room through the adjoining door, then entered the new room through the hallway door. Her phone squealed in her hand. On the screen was a clear image of Harper McDaniel staring down at her phone.

Gerda sat in the sunshine on a public bench along the waterfront and sent her boss a text.

Adrian Naff is in Bari, partnering with target. Instructions?

This time, the answering text came only minutes later.

Do you have Naff’s location?

No

Acquire his location and I will do the rest

Gerda texted back before he had a chance to set his phone aside: I need a photo of Naff. Something to show around.

Several minutes later Naff’s face filled the screen on her phone. Probably pulled from the employee directory. Hair shorter than it was now, face leaner, but the photo suited her needs. Naff had the leathery look of an outdoorsman. Too much sun, not enough lotion. A man who kept advancing when he should’ve retreated, who walked into punches he should’ve ducked. Rough-and-tumble wise guy who believed himself invincible, much like Vaughn Morrison had, the Navy SEAL Gerda had throttled on his dock in the Florida Keys. It was the tough ones who didn’t take her seriously who went down easiest.

Good, Gerda typed fast. What about McDaniel? Photo?

No

Maybe your tech people can see if she used passport at hotel check-in or credit card maybe

Gerda had to wait for several minutes before the reply came.

She wouldn’t be that stupid

Worth a try, no? She’s not unfehlbar. Infallible.

I will see what our people can do

On her phone, Gerda pulled up a list of hotels, B and Bs, and guesthouses in Bari. More than three hundred. If she got lucky, it might take a week to find Naff. Unlucky, she’d still be at it in six months. Until she had a better idea, she decided to start with the cheapest places, the hostels. Naff had the look of a Geizhals. Fucking cheapskate.

Maybe he was shacked up with McDaniel, and it would be zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen. Two birds, one stone.

She decided to work from the waterfront to the inland hostels, start from the north end of Bari, where Manfred’s mill was located and where she’d seen Naff earlier, then progress to the south end of the town.

By the third hostel, she’d refined her story. She was looking for her dad, a rimbambito, a dotard. He’d wandered off, and could they please help? The police were unsympathetic. She handed out her cell number to all the desk clerks. If you see him, please, please call, for my poor mother is back at home sobbing. There is a reward, a thousand euros.

It was nearing dinnertime, and Gerda had stopped at a dozen places already, each hostel taking longer than she’d thought, when a woman in her forties, who had the haggard look of the grandmother she would one day become, took a long look at the photo and said, yes, she’d seen such a man—not here in her own establishment, but down on Via Giuseppe Capruzzi, not far, six or seven blocks.

He was sitting in the piano bar at the Hotel Excelsior Congressi. The woman worked there in the kitchen as her second job. This man, this rimbambito, sat in a chair by himself and drank whiskey. She didn’t know if he was staying at the Excelsior or just drinking in the bar. But she could use that thousand euros. She was supporting three bambini of her own, and two more who had been left by her sister, who died of . . .

Gerda didn’t wait around to find out how the sister had died. She left the hollow-eyed woman and trotted inland till she reached the Excelsior. A luxurious hotel, five stars. So he wasn’t a miser, but a bon vivant.

“I’m looking for Mr. Naff,” she said to the concierge, who was reading a newspaper behind his podium at the front of the lobby.

He gave her a long once-over and cocked one eyebrow.

Gerda brought up Naff’s photo on her phone.

“He might not be using that name.”

“What do you want him for?” With the tip of his tongue, the concierge touched the corner of his mouth and kept it there.

Maybe that was something Italian men did to excite their women, but it incensed Gerda. She loosened the scarf at her throat, pulled it free. Of course, she couldn’t strangle the man in a public place, but holding it at her side and picturing how she’d take the man down eased her irritation.

Gerda said, “He’s my father. He ran away after he was diagnosed with cancer. But his tests were confused with another man’s. I must find him and tell him the wonderful news that he is healthy before he does something terrible to himself. Do you hear me, sir?”

She had never before told such a fabulous lie. She wasn’t sure how she produced it. Maybe it was a gift from her hours of ecstasy with Manfred. Her inventiveness boosted by the afterglow circulating in her veins.

“I wondered what is wrong,” the concierge said. “Your father look so disperato, and so much whiskey he drinks.”

“Just tell me what room he’s in, ti prego.”

“Of course, of course, wait here, if you please.”

He was back a minute later, a forlorn expression.

“Your father left this morning, checked out. I’m very sorry, young lady. So sorry I could not help.”

She walked outside, wrapping the scarf back around her throat. She used her phone to check for other five-star hotels in Bari and found seven more, all along the waterfront, all nearby.

Naff was so close she could almost smell his sweat.

TWENTY-FIVE

Grande Albergo delle Nazioni Hotel, Bari, Italy

Tuesday morning, Harper McDaniel was having morning coffee on her fourth-floor balcony at the Grande Albergo delle Nazioni, overlooking the Adriatic. Today in the crystal light, the Italian sea was a pale aquamarine, a shade that reminded her of the blue glacier martinis she and Ross used to drink on special occasions, a splash of curaçao in the Ketel One vodka, with a twist of lemon. Sipping them on the back porch of their Coconut Grove cottage long ago, when their future seemed as bright and infinite as the stars on a summer night.

The coded taps on her hotel room door came just after eight o’clock. Adrian’s secret knock.

She stood to the side of the door and looked through the peephole. Adrian gave her a lazy salute. She watched him for a few seconds more. Dressed in a dark-blue crewneck pullover and chinos, his hair combed, and a flake of toilet paper stuck to his chin where he’d blotted a shaving mishap.

Ross had been on her mind, the blue glacier martinis he loved, so it was jarring to see this man outside her hotel room door, a stranger she was about to admit inside. A man bristling with vitality.

She unlocked the door, and Naff followed her silently into the room and stood aside as she rolled the room service cart off the balcony and closed the curtains. They’d flown separately, Madrid to Bari, agreed to meet at the hotel Harper selected. Early that morning she’d called his hotel phone and given him her room number.

“I talked to Sal this morning,” she said.

“Everyone healing up?”

“Nick’s better, Daniela too, but she’s still got a way to go.”

“Good to hear it.”

“I told Sal he could let the Rossi brothers go home.”

“You did?”

“They were making noises like they were ready to leave. And the threat from Gerda’s over now.”

Adrian frowned and shook his head.

“What? You think that was a mistake?”

“Your call. But I’d feel better if they were nearby till this was done.”

Adrian wandered over to the room service cart, helped himself to coffee, and took a seat at the dining table, then glanced around Harper’s suite and gave her an approving smile. “You OLAF inspectors know how to live. EU expense accounts are a beautiful thing.”

“The reason the threat from Gerda is over,” Harper said, “is because she’s here in Bari. She was with Manfred Knobel yesterday, visiting him in his apartment over the olive mill.”

“Interesting.”

Harper said, “Manfred and Gerda are lovers. Manfred says he’s proposed marriage.”

His flippant air faded. He sipped his coffee, eyed her over the rim. “Anything else?”

Harper recounted her conversation with Knobel. His willingness to work with OLAF. His disgust for Lester Albion, his suspicions that there was some other game afoot behind the business deal. All of which Harper believed were sincere claims.

“I told him to let Albion know that Harper McDaniel would be attending the closing this Friday.”

“Which accomplishes what?”

“Lure Albion off his turf. When he sees me, he’ll be so twitchy I’m betting he’ll erupt like he did the last time we met.”

“High noon, make him draw, then take him down.”

“He’s a killer, Adrian. He murdered my husband and child and got away with it. He’s a fucking monster.”

“I’m not questioning any of that. It’s just not much of a plan. What if he doesn’t erupt? What if he keeps his cool? If you’re not defending yourself, can you still take him down?”

“I can.”

“Which would make you an out-and-out assassin. That’s a whole different moral universe from what you had in mind. Have you ever done that before? A cold kill.”

“There’s a lot I’ve never done before.”

“You’re being smartass now, but this is serious. It’ll change you, put a mark on your . . . I don’t know. It’ll stain your soul.”

“I can worry about my own soul.”

He shook his head at her stubbornness.

“You have something better, Naff, let’s hear it.”

“Okay,” he said. “I think we need more information before we walk into a room with Albion.”

“I know all I need to know.”

“You’re underestimating the guy. He’s a twisted fuck, yeah, and he’s juvenile. But he’s crafty and wary, and he won’t go down easy. We need more info. Something that tips the balance in our direction.”

“I’m listening.”

Adrian tugged up the sleeves of his sweater, biding his time, nodding to himself as if making some kind of calculation.

“You ever hear of a guy named Horst Schneider?”

She hadn’t.

“Coach for the German Olympic team. Gerda’s ex-trainer.”

“Is this relevant?”

“Just hear me out.”

Harper drew a breath, starting to regret accepting Naff’s help.

“Albion decided he needs a major-league personal trainer. He chose this guy, Horst Schneider. Last week it falls to me to pick Coach Horst up at the airport in Zurich, drop him at his hotel. They use me as a chauffeur sometimes for the hotshots. Anyway, Horst is a chatty guy. We hit it off. I made a remark about Albion, what a challenge it was going to be to build up a puny body like his. And the coach says no, Mr. Albion is highly motivated, that’s what matters.”

“Is there a point, Naff?”

“I’m getting there.”

“You’re dawdling.”

“I’m telling a damn story. Like a joke, you don’t just jump to the punch line, it wouldn’t make sense. Wouldn’t make you laugh. You got to hit all the notes along the way.”

Harper poured herself another cup of coffee, had a sip, and motioned for him to proceed.

“So Coach Horst is describing how driven Albion is to get muscled up, and I tell him about me teaching Albion how to shoot pistols last year, and how this new phase seems like it’s part of the same pattern, the need to be manly, tough. And the coach looks at me and shakes his head. ‘No, you’re wrong, it’s not about being manly.’ ‘Oh yeah?’ I say. ‘What’s driving him then?’ And he says, ‘It’s all about Gerda Bixel.’”

Adrian took a sip of his coffee and set it down on the saucer and said, “See, there’s your punch line. Gerda. That’s what’s driving Albion. The guy’s head over heels.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Wasn’t relevant. Just felt like an oddball factoid, an outlier. Now it makes sense.”

“Yeah,” Harper said. “Manfred Knobel is Albion’s rival.”

“Another thing I picked up last week, didn’t seem like much at the time. Ready for another story?”

Harper sighed. “Like I have a choice?”

“A little while after I spoke with the coach, I was in Larissa Bixel’s office. She’s got a wall of photos, Gerda as a little tyke bouncing around the mat, waving her ribbons. There’s one of Gerda wearing her silver medal, glaring up at the Russian girl who beat her out and won the gold.”

“And the punch line?”

“You always in such a hurry? Like about everything?”

Harper caught a whiff of something vaguely sexual in the question but let it go. She pushed her cup and saucer aside, brushed some crumbs off the white tablecloth.

“Okay, so there I am looking at the photos. Gerda, this little girl who had some of the best coaches in the world, she’s got muscles everywhere muscles can be found and places they shouldn’t be. And Bixel’s bragging about what a deserving girl Gerda is. I say something like that’s the way every parent feels, proud of their kid, and she comes back with what seemed like a non sequitur, you know, out of the blue she says Gerda’s going to marry a rich man, somebody who can provide the very best things in life.”

Harper was staring into Adrian’s eyes. “That’s it? The punch line? Gerda’s going to marry a rich guy?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

“I must have missed a step.”

“Manfred Knobel versus Lester Albion. Who’s the rich guy?”

Harper reached across the table and plucked the toilet paper off Naff’s chin and dropped it on the tablecloth.

“Knobel’s got money,” she said.

“Does he?”

“Nothing like Albion, but he’s not poor.”

“And when this olive-grove deal gets done?”

“Sure, he’ll have more debts, but he’ll be a major landowner, and from now on he’ll be supplying his own olives to his own mill. The machinery in that mill is worth at least a million euros. Anyway, Bixel might hope her little girl will marry a rich man, but if Gerda’s in love with a pauper, that’s the end of the story.”

“Hm.” Naff shrugged his doubt.

“But this could work,” Harper said.

“What?”

She told him about setting up the adjoining room with the video cam. Putting the room in her own name.

“To entice Gerda.”

“Yeah, deal with her one-on-one, take her off the board.”

“Listen to yourself,” Naff said. “You’re an executioner now.”

Harper brushed that aside and said, “But since now we know Albion’s sweet on her, she’s more valuable alive.”

“Okay, let’s say Gerda somehow finds that room, goes in, walks around. Then what?”

“Capture her, tie her up. Maybe use her as bait for Albion.”

Naff considered it. He finished his coffee, poured another cup. Looked off toward the balcony. He glanced back at Harper, grimaced, then turned back at the balcony.

“So now you got Gerda and Albion in a hotel room together, both of them tied up. I don’t see what happens next.”

“Eliminate them,” she said.

“Really?”

“They’re murderers, both of them.”

“What happened to justice, rule of law, a noble intent? Or even plain old self-defense?”

“At this point, anything I do to them is self-defense.”

“You’re playing with words.”

They sat in silence for several minutes. Harper trying to script the perfect ending. Albion dead, the outcome she’d been imagining for months. But Naff was right, and Lavonne had said the same thing. Killing Albion in self-defense was acceptable. Even if she manipulated him into the showdown, she could live with that. But simply murdering him on sight if he was unarmed and didn’t threaten her? She wasn’t sure. All her drills with Marco and her work with Lavonne’s people at the training camp in Carolina, all of that had been defensive.

She could kill. She had done it more than once. But only for her own survival.

“Your daughter—Julie Marie, is that her name?”

Adrian opened his mouth to reply, then shut it and nodded.

“You have a picture?”

“Why?”

“I’m curious. We’re getting to know each other, right?”

Though the truth was, before she got any more reliant on Naff, Harper wanted to be sure Lavonne hadn’t been bullshitting her, using some fictitious sick daughter to set Harper up with this guy. It wouldn’t be beyond Lavonne.

Adrian considered her request for a moment, then dug out his wallet, flipped it open, and thumbed a color photograph from one of the slots. He laid it on the table between them.

A blonde kid about seven with braided pigtails, thick glasses, her head tilted almost to her left shoulder. She was sitting in a bulky motorized wheelchair with a controller lever at her right hand. A stuffed animal lay in her lap.

“Benny the Beagle,” Adrian said. “She carries it everywhere.”

“Cerebral palsy?”

“Wish it were that. It’s ALS, Lou Gehrig’s. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord start dissolving. It’s what Stephen Hawking had, the black-hole guy.”

“I thought it only struck older people.”

“Children are extremely rare.”

“No cure?”

“Some medications help with cramping, a couple slow the progression—riluzole, for instance—but yeah, there’s no fix.”

“Got to be hard,” Harper said.

“Julie doesn’t complain. Can’t say the same for her mother.”

“Your wife?”

“Wartime fling. Never married.”

“What’s her name, this woman you never married?”

“Shelly.”

“You have a lot of flings, do you?”

He fixed his eyes on hers and shook his head.

“Your daughter’s beautiful.” Harper slid the photo back to him. “Do you see her often?”

“Her mother won’t allow it. I’ve seen her exactly twice in the last five years. Shelly cashes my checks, but that’s all.”

“Maybe Shelly blames you for Julie Marie.”

“Maybe she does.”

“I’m sorry.”

Harper knew the terrible inadequacy of those words. A hundred times since the loss of Ross and Leo, she’d heard them directed to her. The polite helplessness of friends and family attempting to soothe what could never be soothed.

“And you?”

“Me?”

“Photos of your family. Have any?”

“Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“A fire burned down our house. Photos, everything lost.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. So you don’t even have a snapshot? I showed you mine.”

Harper blew out a breath. She weighed it for a few seconds, then got up from the table, went into the bedroom, and came back with the black-and-white she’d taken that final night.

“Since we’re sharing.” She laid it down in front of him.

Adrian Naff picked it up and studied the photo.

Harper stared down at her hands. She’d never shown that picture to anyone, not even Sal or Nick. That image had become sacred to her, the last trace of those she loved, their bodiless essence. No matter how often she looked at it, the photo still hollowed out her gut, turned her breath cold. To share it with a virtual stranger was a violation, a defilement, especially this man who worked for Ross and Leo’s killer, who spoke with Albion on a daily basis, did his bidding. Still, she’d shown him her family, not sure why.

She heard Naff speaking but she didn’t catch the words.

She looked up. He was holding out the photograph, returning it, his eyes were glassy and desolate, as if he’d just felt the cold whisper of his daughter’s breath across his neck.

Naff’s grief had to be far different from her own. He endured it in torturous increments, hour by hour, month by month. Maybe that was even more agonizing than her own sorrow. Her loss had been sudden, cataclysmic, a devastating jolt that ended her old life in an instant and left her with a pain that would shadow the rest of her days. But Naff was being poisoned, drip by drip, his every hour tainted by the certain knowledge of his daughter’s slow, pitiless descent.

She took the photo, turned it facedown on the table.

“All right, then,” Harper said and swallowed the knot in her throat. “If we’re going to wipe out this son of a bitch, we need to know exactly what’s going on and come up with a better plan.”

You were right.

The text came while Gerda was having coffee and a fruit cup at a restaurant along the waterfront.

She picked up her phone and typed: Right about what?

McDaniel used her credit card to check into the Grande Albergo delle Nazioni Hotel. Room 407.

Good. I will take care of it.

Be most careful. This is unlike the woman. Could be trap.

Gerda had a last sip of the coffee and set down her cup and thumb-typed a reply. It was a maxim Coach Schneider taught her long ago.

Take no risk, reap no reward.

TWENTY-SIX

Villa Romanazzi Carducci Hotel, Bari, Italy

Back in his room at the Villa Romanazzi, Adrian reassembled his cell phone for the first time in more than a week, inserting the SIM card and the battery. He’d been using hotel landlines to stay in touch with Harper. Safer than bringing that GPS beacon back to life.

But now he wanted to speak to Lucia Campos, hear the details of her discovery. During his time in Spain, he’d had terrible reception, but here in coastal Italy, with the battery back in place, five bars appeared on the screen. Thirty missed calls popped up, most from the same number, one he didn’t recognize, though it seemed vaguely familiar. All the calls coming from a 41 country code, Switzerland.

Also, there were two voice mails.

Adrian settled into one of the chic, low-slung chairs with a view of the leafy hotel grounds—palms and cypress and a few olive trees, grassy gardens, rocky paths. He tapped the voice mail icon, and a child began to speak. She didn’t introduce herself, so it took Adrian a few seconds to put a name to the voice. Bonnie Albion.

Very precisely she described in detail an experiment involving a couple of white mice. Over a short period of time, the older of the two mice had grown more active while the younger mouse grew weaker until finally it could no longer rise from its bed of straw and died soon after.

Adrian had no idea what she was talking about, and the voice mail ended abruptly as Bonnie asked if Adrian could help her with this matter.

He tapped the icon for the second voice mail and listened to a few seconds of static, then Lucia’s voice came through, panicky loud, her words hurried, her sentences fragmentary, the transmission garbled, but her urgency palpable. He listened a second time, then a third.

She mentioned an American man named Dickens who worked in an Albion lab in El Paso, Texas, then said something about an insect called a spittlebug shipped to the Port of Bari, where Dickens had picked up crates of them for months and took them to Albion’s olive groves. Check the groves. This was the secret heart of Albion’s scam. Spittlebugs.

He called Lucia’s cell and got a message that her number was no longer in service. He redialed just to be sure, and the same message repeated.

Adrian rose, searched his hotel room, located a tourist map of the city, and found the port and nearby local attractions.

He called Harper, made it quick, told her to meet him at Cattedrale di San Sabino, a couple of blocks from the port’s warehouse district.

“What happened?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. Give me thirty minutes. I need to make another call.”

He dialed Albion International’s main number and asked for Lucia Campos, director of compliance.

“Ms. Campos is no longer with us, sir. I can transfer you to the compliance main desk.”

Adrian clicked off, dialed his own office. Derek Müller picked up.

“Albion International, Chief of Security Derek Müller speaking.”

“I’m gone a week and you get promoted? Sitting in the big chair.”

“Mr. Naff?”

“Listen, Derek, I need to speak to Lucia. Where is she?”

The line was silent.

“Derek?”

“She’s not here. She left the company. She didn’t say why.”

“You talk to her before she went?”

Adrian could hear the kid sucking air like he was doing some kind of deep-breathing exercise that wasn’t going well.

“Hey, what the hell’s going on?”

“She left something for you.”

“Lucia left something?”

“A package. She said it was documents, important documents. If you were to call, I should get your address and have them overnighted to you immediately.”

“Have you looked at these documents?”

Again, Derek took too long to answer, a gulp, a sigh, still struggling with his breath.

“I did not look, no, sir. She told me they were confidential. They’re all wrapped up in a bundle. I just left them like that.”

“Where’d Lucia go?”

“I don’t know, no one does. A little while after you left, she walked out the door, and no one’s heard from her since.”

“Have either Bixel or Albion been by to ask about her?”

“No, but they were upset she quit that way. I heard that much.”

“Do they know about this package?”

“No, no. Absolutely not. No way.”

Working too hard to deny. If the kid was going to flourish at Albion International, he’d need to learn how to prevaricate a whole lot better.

Derek said, “So if you give me your address, I’ll ship the package to you. If I get it to the mail service soon, you’ll have it tomorrow.”

Adrian watched a flock of black birds settle into the nearest olive tree, maybe crows, maybe not. Black wings, silvery-gray bodies, black heads. Better dressed than American crows. Typical Italians.

“Grande Albergo delle Nazioni Hotel,” Adrian said. “The room is in the name of Ms. Harper McDaniel. Ship it now, Derek.”

He clicked off, confident that Derek would waste no time before passing on Adrian’s location to whoever was pulling his strings. Above all else, Derek was a company man. Adrian expected nothing less. Naff was never returning to Albion International, so if Derek inherited his title, fine. Just one word of advice, kid: don’t get too comfortable, and always, always watch your back.

Maybe Harper’s plan was shaping up after all. Lure them one and all to her interrogation chamber, truss them up, and start grilling. He couldn’t anticipate the entire cast of characters, but he suspected there’d be several Albion people appearing in Harper’s adjoining room soon.

He rose and headed to the door.

While he was out, he would have to shop for zip ties, those quickie handcuffs, or else buy a ton of rope.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Bari, Italy

Harper and Adrian sat in a back pew at the seaside Cattedrale di San Sabino. The basilica’s walls were pale-yellow limestone, so unadorned of embellishments and sacred icons that the chapel had the stark dignity of a convent.

“I checked out of my hotel,” Naff said. “Found a room at yours.”

“Why?”

“Closer to the action. Got the suite across the hall from the adjoining room you set up. In case you need me, I used an alias, Steve Benson, room 408.”

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

Naff kept his voice low as he told her about his conversation with Derek and the likelihood of more Albion goons showing up in Harper’s adjoining room.

“Good,” she said. “The more the merrier.”

Then he described the message from Lucia Campos, the compliance officer at Albion. Her rush of nearly unintelligible words and phrases. Spittlebugs, a man named Dickens from an Albion lab in Texas, Lucia’s urgent insistence that Naff take a long look at Albion’s olive groves.

“That’s it?”

“I wish there was more, but no, that’s all she said.”

“You call her back?”

“No luck. Number’s no longer in service.”

“What in the world are spittlebugs?”

Adrian lifted his shoulders and said, “I have no idea what she was talking about. She sounded unnerved. Wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

Harper watched a young father and mother and their two kids padding quietly down the main aisle, a guide book in the mother’s hands.

Naff said, “I thought we’d work the docks first, ask around for this guy Dickens. Then, later, we can take a drive through the groves.”

Harper said no, they should split up. He could go check out the docks, she’d return to Manfred Knobel’s mill, find out what he knew about spittlebugs, maybe get a better idea of which groves to target.

“Split up,” Adrian said. “Sure, I get it. You’d rather work alone.”

“It’s more efficient,” she said. “Don’t take it personally.”

He eyed her for a few seconds, a skeptical cock of an eyebrow.

“Maybe you’re hoping to cross paths with Gerda, and you don’t want me cramping your style when you take her down.”

“Quit trying to save my soul, Adrian. It’s unbecoming.”

He chuckled. “I guess I don’t make much of a moral guide, do I?”

“If I needed one, you wouldn’t be my first choice.”

He winced and looked around the quiet chapel, watched the family heading back down the aisle.

“You religious, Harper? A believer?”

“Not much of one.”

“People seem to get comfort from it.” He nodded at the departing family. “Something to pass on to their kids—values, principles.”

“Maybe loving them is enough.”

Naff looked at her and nodded. “You know, for years I wondered what kind of father I would’ve been. I think now it’s probably best I never had to find out. Don’t have much of value to pass on.”

“Your charming good looks, your wit.”

“You’re too kind.”

He rose from the pew, and she followed him out into the sunshine.

“Before we split up,” she said, “besides these bugs, do you have any idea what else I’m looking for in the groves?”

“I don’t know. Lucia just said that spittlebugs were the secret heart of the scam.”

“Secret heart.”

“Those were her words, yes.”

“Does Lucia have a boyfriend, someone close, family?”

“A mother in Portugal, but I don’t know how to reach her.”

They agreed to check in by cell later that afternoon, then Adrian headed off to the waterfront, and Harper hustled back to her hotel, where she donned a pair of dark slacks and a sky-blue blouse, her conservative OLAF outfit of the day. She applied the crude makeup, put on the large-framed glasses, slipped her phone and wallet and ID in a small crossbody handbag, then wound her hair into a bun and left the hotel by a back stairway.

She walked the ten blocks to Bari Milling Works and, when she entered, found Manfred Knobel with a wrench in one hand and a rag in the other, kneeling beside a stainless steel malaxer with its side panel open, exposing the collection spirals.

The rest of the mill was silent, the workers gathered nearby observing the progress of the repair. Evidently, the malaxer was a crucial link in the process of converting fresh olives to extra-virgin oil, as the entire operation seemed to have been shut down until Knobel fixed it.

When he looked up at her, Knobel was sweating and red-faced.

“Yes? What is it now, Miss de Jong?”

“I need to take a look at one of the groves Albion is selling you.”

He wiped his hands on his rag and rose to face her.

“Why?”

“It’s the next phase of my investigation.”

Pagolo had drifted over and was standing close by, his scowl directed at Harper. In his late forties, Pagolo was several inches shorter than she but at least fifty pounds bulkier. His arms were long and thickly muscled and bulging with veins—a body shaped by years of hard work.

“There’s a lot of land. Do you have a particular area in mind?”

“A man has been working in those groves, an American named Dickens. I want to see the place where he’s operating.”

Pagolo hardened his stance and turned his face away.

“I know of no one named Dickens,” Knobel said. “But there’s a lot about these lands I don’t know. Perhaps Pagolo can assist you.”

Knobel turned to Pagolo and in rudimentary Italian asked if he knew of such a man named Dickens.

Pagolo considered it for a moment then nodded grimly.

“Sì, ha lavorato per il signor Albion.” He worked for Albion.

“And where is Mr. Dickens now?” she asked Pagolo.

“È scomparso, è partito senza dirlo a nessuno.” He disappeared without telling anyone.

“When was this?”

He gave her a noncommittal shrug. Who knows, who cares?

“What was Dickens doing in the grove? What kind of work?”

This time his shrug was sharp and scornful, as if being publicly interrogated by a woman was intolerable, a disgrace to his manhood.

Knobel repeated Harper’s question, and Pagolo gave his boss a sleepy look of insolence.

“Ha giocato con gli insetti.”

Knobel made a face.

“He played with insects? What does that mean?”

“Significa ciò che ho detto.” It means what I said.

“What kind of insects?” Harper asked.

Pagolo turned his back on the two of them and called out to some of the workers gathered nearby. Harper couldn’t interpret his local slang, but the workers sniggered and a couple of them gave Harper lewd grins.

“Was Dickens working with spittlebugs?” Harper said.

Pagolo swung around and fixed her with a defiant look.

“I want to see where Dickens was working,” Harper said to Knobel.

“What the hell are spittlebugs?” Knobel said. “For god’s sake, what is going on here?”

“I take her,” Pagolo said. “I know where Dickens stava lavorando.”

Pagolo attempted to soften his snarl into a smile, but it turned his mouth into a lopsided mess.

Manfred asked which grove Dickens was working in, and Pagolo said, “Il frutteto di Bellomo.”

“Bellomo’s orchard?” Harper said.

“Sergio Bellomo’s family owned the land before Albion purchased it from them. It’s a relatively small piece of land, but its trees are very productive.”

“Dickens worked on il frutteto di Bellomo?” she asked Pagolo.

He nodded, his eyes roving her body with cold appraisal.

Manfred said, “I can spare Pagolo for the afternoon. Will that be sufficient?”

She followed Pagolo outside to the parking lot, where he climbed aboard a dusty Jeep, an army-surplus model from several wars ago.

He cranked it up, and before she was fully seated, the Jeep jolted into gear. He swung into the street and sped out of the industrial area of Bari, cutting in and out of the light city traffic with fierce abandon.

The Jeep had no top, no doors, and no seat belts. Road dust kicked up into Harper’s eyes, wind buffeted her hair, tearing loose the bun. Pagolo jammed the shifter through the gears, mashing the clutch, the brake, and accelerator in a crazed pattern that lurched her forward or pinned her to the seat, then threw her sideways.

Harper braced her heels against the floorboard and gripped the base of her seat to keep her balance as Pagolo rammed the Jeep ahead, passing a line of stalled traffic on the bumpy shoulder, then veering in to merge at the head of the pack of cars. Angry drivers honked at him, but Pagolo honked back and continued at his headlong pace past the last of the warehouses and auto-repair shops, plant nurseries, stone churches, apartment buildings, then into the countryside, where olive trees began to appear on the hillsides.

Their weathered, gray-green trunks corkscrewed from the rocky soil, their limbs as gnarled and twisted as arthritic fingers. She’d read that trees in this area of Puglia might be a thousand years old, some so ancient the crusaders had seen these very specimens on their way to the Holy Land. Yet they were still producing fruit, the branches laden, the canopy lush. That something so ancient could remain so bountiful and so highly valued was an ecological miracle.

Thickets of trees were scattered up and down the hillsides in every direction. Grove after grove interspersed with low, white-washed farmhouses and outbuildings. Sandy roads led off the main highway into the expanse of shadowy green orchards.

Harper had been studying the Italian olive industry from afar, but those articles and books with their occasional photographs didn’t do justice to the majestic feel of the groves. That these trees were older than any living thing she’d ever seen before gave her a reverent flutter.

They’d been driving for most of an hour when, without warning, Pagolo cut the wheel to the right, swerving between the limestone columns of an entranceway, and bumped onto a narrow track that ran beneath the outstretched branches of towering olive trees, whose trunks were thick and sinewy, warped by centuries of adaptation to droughts and floods and windstorms and the incessant predations of man. At an intersection of two sandy paths, Pagolo braked the Jeep hard and switched off the motor.

“Dickens work here,” he said and waved an arm in a circle.

Harper waited for him to say more or climb down from behind the wheel and lead the way, but he did neither.

“I’ll look around on my own,” she said.

“Fai con calma.”

Yes, she would take her time, with or without his permission.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Bellomo Grove, Bari, Italy

Harper jumped down from the Jeep and followed the road that stretched ahead of where they were parked. She peered into the snarl of branches laden with ripening fruit. Penetrating deeper into the grove, she stayed on what seemed like the main artery. Twice she glanced back to see Pagolo still sitting in the driver’s seat. He’d lit a cigarette and was blowing the smoke up toward the sky, a cell phone pressed to his ear.

Harper followed the sandy path around a broad curve, hearing something off to her left, a soft clicking. She halted, but with a brisk breeze from the east rattling the leaves all around her, it was difficult to pinpoint the source of the sound. She listened intently, homed in on its direction, then ducked beneath some spreading limbs and pushed forward toward the faint noise.

A few feet later she stopped and listened again, but the clicks had ceased. She waited another moment, then turned and was heading back to the road when she heard it once more, louder this time, like the warning ticks of a Geiger counter.

Harper swung back beneath the limbs, pushed aside low-hanging branches, and followed the noise another ten yards into the shadowy depths of the grove.

As she stopped to get her bearings, a black bug the size of a dime landed on the sleeve of her blouse, then another landed near the first, then a third appeared a few inches away from the other two. She raised her arm to examine the creatures, but all three flicked away before she got a decent look. She stood still and gazed around her at the dense foliage, still hearing the clicking nearby.

Another bug fluttered past, and Harper shot out her hand and nabbed it from the air. Pleased to discover her reflexes remained butterfly quick.

She pinched the bug lightly and looked it over. Its black hard-shelled body was marked with three garish orange stripes running across its width. Its hind legs were bright red and its tiny feet black, its head blunt with the glowing scarlet eyes of a miniature demon.

She committed its markings to memory in case it escaped, then she cupped the bug in her left hand, felt its legs thumping against her palm. With her free hand she unzipped her bag and dug out her leather cosmetic pouch, drew open the zipper, and tucked the bug inside the pouch and zipped it shut.

She waded through a tangle of branches, following the sound until she stood in a small opening in the trees. A swarm of insects identical to the one she’d caught were flicking from branch to branch all around her. A cyclone of bugs.

She noticed the leaves where they were clustered were brown and withered, the branches appeared to be scorched. She stepped close to one of the brittle limbs and snapped off its tip. The few olives still clinging to the branch were stunted as if this isolated section of the tree had been burned by frost.

She tucked the damaged twig into her bag and headed back to the Jeep, but when she rounded the wide curve, it was gone. She kept walking until she reached the rutted intersection where Pagolo had braked to a stop. His smoldering cigarette lay in a shallow groove in the dust. She called out his name but heard nothing more than the rattle of wind in the leaves.

Inside her bag, her phone made a squeal she didn’t recognize. She dug it out and saw the alert warning from her security camera back in the adjoining hotel room.

She tapped the camera icon and, after a short delay, a video began to stream. In real time, she watched Gerda Bixel prowling the suite, a dark scarf dangling from her right hand. Gerda ran her fingertips across Harper’s hanging clothes, then walked to the open suitcase and bent close and ruffled her fingers across the folded garments as if sprinkling poisonous fairy dust.

She walked on, moving out of the camera’s range, deeper into the room, possibly as far as the balcony doors, then came back into view, entered the bathroom, stayed for several seconds, then returned to the living area and surveyed the space left to right and back again. The video image was so sharp Harper could read the wired look in Gerda’s eyes. A woman primed to kill.

The image blinked once and turned to white fizz. The connection lost. Only one bar of cell phone reception remained, then that bar vanished. No way to call Naff and alert him to Gerda’s presence. She could only hope Gerda would still be lying in wait when Harper returned to the hotel.

She tucked her phone back in her bag and called out Pagolo’s name again. This time he answered, stepping into view down a narrow side path.

“Boss want speak.”

“What boss?”

“On phone, boss need speak you.” Pagolo pointed to his right toward a path through the olive trees.

Harper approached, closed to within ten feet. Wary, not trusting the bland look in his eyes.

“Scarsa ricezione del telefono.”

Yes, Harper was aware of the poor phone reception.

“La ricezione è buona laggiù.” Good reception over there.

She peered down the lane where Pagolo was pointing.

He’d parked the Jeep thirty feet down the dirt lane. The cell phone was positioned on the rear bumper. A long walk facing away from Pagolo.

She turned and examined him closely. He wore denim overalls over a long-sleeve white jersey. The bib of the overalls was stretched flat over his thick chest. Nowhere to hide a pistol, but the bagginess at his waist could easily conceal a weapon.

He read her look and said, “You no trust Pagolo? You think I have gun. No, no gun. You look, you see.”

He unsnapped the buttons on the straps of his overalls, shook it loose, and let the garment fall to his ankles. No underwear. He drew up his white jersey, exposing his hard, hairy belly and chest, then he rotated 360 and came back around and gave her another look at his manhood. Nothing special.

“Is good?” A smirk.

While he was pulling up his pants, Harper started down the pathway, listening for movement behind her.

Ten feet down the path, twenty. She was reaching for the phone when she caught the breathy grunt of effort close by. She ducked and spun to her right and saw the blur of a club whisking past the spot where her skull had been.

She straightened and stepped back. Pagolo was smiling at her, the baseball bat cocked onto his shoulder.

“Drop it.”

His eyes narrowed briefly, and he took another rip at her head, but she easily dodged out of range.

She had no doubt she could outrun this squat, heavyset man. Ordinarily that’s the tactic Marco would have urged. But here in the isolation of the grove, miles from familiar terrain, it didn’t seem a viable option.

Though it was a risky choice and one Marco would have frowned upon, Harper decided to take her chances and grapple with Pagolo, neutralize him, sling away his bat, then inflict enough pain to interrogate him and get an honest answer. Who was he working for? It could be his former employer, Albion, or his current one, Knobel. And what did he know about these spittlebugs and the withered, frostbitten branches she’d discovered?

Pagolo was smiling at her, waggling the club like a batter taking short practice swings. The wooden bat was dented and stained. It had seen hard use. Maybe Pagolo had been Albion’s local enforcer, intimidating the stubborn farmers in the region, pressuring them to sell their properties to Albion Olives.

She kept a buffer of several feet between them, dancing backward at his every forward move. She’d decided to wait till he took another swing and his balance was compromised before making her move, a side kick at whatever target he presented.

Moving past the parked Jeep, she took another backward step as he came closer, then moved another step farther out of range. She hadn’t paid close attention to the lay of the land behind her, and it was too late now to venture a look, but she didn’t remember seeing any rocks or roots or other stumbling blocks down this sandy path.

He backed her down the road another ten feet before she halted. She’d given enough ground. She saw something flicker in Pagolo’s eyes, a cagey smile curling onto his lips.

He cut his eyes to the right. “Mi chiedevo dove cavolo avevo lasciata quella cosa.”

He wondered where he’d left some damn thing.

In her peripheral vision, she caught the glint of metal on the ground nearby.

He took that small opening and lunged and aimed the bat at her head, but a half step back was all she needed, the bat slashing inches in front of her, to reset her feet for the side kick she’d planned, but when she planted her back foot, it found nothing but air beneath her shoe.

She staggered to the right, fanned her arms, and was about to regain her balance before pitching backward into a pit or hole or whatever the hell it was when Pagolo grunted and rammed the head of the bat into her gut like the lance of a jousting knight and sent her sprawling into the freshly turned earth.

Landing on her hands and knees, she scrambled upright, found her footing just as Pagolo took another swipe. She bobbed out of the bat’s path, felt it scrape her right temple.

The hole she was standing in was waist-deep, a shallow oblong six feet long—a goddamn grave. She was trapped but still had room to maneuver.

“You fast,” Pagolo said. “Hard to hit.”

He circled the hole, Harper swiveling with him, her eyes locked to his, watching for the telltale squint she’d spotted immediately before he took his last swing.

She had to time it right, but it was clear his quickness and agility weren’t close to her own. She plotted it out, step by step, then waited with her hands raised chest high as though she meant to catch a medicine ball.

On Pagolo’s next trip around the hole, she saw the object that earlier had gleamed in her peripheral vision. A red-handled shovel with a shiny new blade propped against the hollowed-out trunk of an olive tree. Near it was a rectangular patch of soil darker than the ground around it. The same shape and size as Harper’s hole. A previous grave.

Her eyes had strayed to the shovel for only a half second, but long enough to miss Pagolo’s warning squint. The bat’s incoming path was different this time. He’d stopped aiming for her skull and was targeting her torso.

As the bat hurtled toward her ribs, she fell away, using her hand speed and timing to snag the cudgel in its downward flight. In a flowing motion, she grabbed it with both hands, softening its momentum, then yanked it toward her body.

Stubborn, Pagolo held his grip, believing he could outmuscle this woman, but Harper dropped to her knees, using the earthen pit’s edge to lever her weight against his handhold. She twisted hard against the grip of his thumbs.

Pagolo should have let go, should have surrendered the bat, made a run for the shovel, a better weapon anyway, but his honor wouldn’t allow such a thing, so he held on and tried to wrestle the bat from her, but she had the better leverage by far, and he tipped forward farther and farther until he lost his balance, Harper yanking him into the hole.

After he tumbled onto her, she wrenched the bat from his grip and squeezed out from under him, clambering to her feet. She found the adhesive grip of the tapered end, raised the bat high, but before she could bring it down, Pagolo squirmed to his knees, lunged forward, and tackled her. He locked his arms around her knees and drove her backward against the far wall of the pit.

She slammed the bat against his spine, but his clenched arms stayed tight around her legs as he continued to jam her body into the dirt wall. Though her angle of attack was blunted, again she raised the club and bashed his backbone. This time his grasp loosened, but he continued to churn his legs as if he meant to bulldoze her straight through the solid earth.

Now he drove upward, his right shoulder crushing into her sternum. She struggled for breath, her ribs nearing the breaking point. Her knees sagged, and a haze crept into the edges of her vision. Leaving her no choice.

She took aim and hacked the bat against the back of his skull and hammered it a second time, harder than the first. He dropped his hold and fell away, but a moment later he swung back and took another shot, clawing at her leg, his long nails drawing blood. He locked his powerful fingers around her right ankle and yanked his full weight against her balance, trying to bring her down, growling as he struggled to rise.

With her free foot, she stomped on his wrist and ground down against those delicate bones, and while the man wailed, Harper took another crack at his head, the blow landing solidly and harder than she intended. Arrasar, Marco liked to say. Obliterate.

Pagolo quivered once, then his body flattened against the dirt and he grew still.

After she caught her breath, she knelt beside him and felt for a pulse at his throat. His flesh was cool, clammy, and mottled, his heartbeat no more than a thready tap.

The interrogation would have to wait.

TWENTY-NINE

Albion International Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland

“There’s something going on with Bonnie. Something wrong.”

Cradling a load of documents awaiting Albion’s signature, Larissa Bixel sighed impatiently and asked what Bonnie’s problem was.

Lester Albion leaned back in his office chair, swiveled to his left, and gazed out at the Zurich skyline. Beyond the sweep of rooftops, in the far distance, he seemed to regard the magnificent snow-capped Tödi in the Glarus Alps. A billionaire’s unobstructed view.

“She’s lethargic,” Albion said. “She sleeps late, takes naps during the day, which is quite unusual. She’s fallen asleep during the evening meal, simply nodded off while I was talking. She is usually so full of zest, such a spunky dynamo. And lately she seems quite angry all the time, even somewhat bitter.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bixel said.

Albion was decked out in one of his new outfits, a snug turtleneck of pale yellow with slimly tailored trousers and gleaming loafers. Another vain attempt to show off the enhancements in his physique wrought by his long hours in the gym with Coach Horst Schneider.

Then again, maybe Albion wasn’t looking at the sweeping view at all, but admiring his own image. It had been happening a great deal lately, Albion taking furtive, sidelong glances at any reflective surface he passed, mirrors and department store windows and even the black granite walls in the lobby of his building. Turning his head just so to view his profile, his new shoulders-back, head-erect posture, his deepening chest. All of these were, at best, slight improvements in his build. Certainly nothing that would impress Gerda. Though Larissa Bixel would never hint at such a thing to Lester Albion. At this critical juncture of her scheme, fawning had become her primary job.

In the last few months, Albion had been so intent on channeling his energies into physical betterment that he’d neglected more and more of his business chores, paying scant attention to the flood of memos and contracts and accounting documents crossing his desk every day.

Hence, an increasing proportion of the corporate workload had fallen to Bixel. Not that she minded. It was all for an excellent cause, the merger of the Bixel family with the Albion clan, a project that Bixel had been plotting for years.

“So do you have any idea why Bonnie is out of sorts?” he asked.

“I don’t know, perhaps the transfusions are taking a toll.”

Albion swiveled back to her.

The transfusions were most certainly causing a decline in the girl’s health. Bixel had observed it herself while attending the twice-weekly blood exchange in the infirmary. She raised the issue only so she could dismiss it, leaving Albion free to continue pursuing his obsessive goals. His physical-fitness delusion had been a highly useful distraction. For these last few months, the man had been so utterly self-absorbed that Bixel had been free to develop her strategy unhindered.

She stepped forward and set down the load of documents near his elbow. Earlier she’d arranged the paperwork with the precision of a stacked deck. Intersplicing mundane contracts, routine shipping orders, and weekly accounting printouts with the crucial documents that would complete the Manfred Knobel transaction and finish driving a stake through that suitor’s heart.

Bixel stepped back, coming to rest a few feet from his desk, assuming her usual submissive position. Subjugating herself so that Lester Albion would not feel dwarfed by her physical superiority or daunted in any way. This was her daily challenge: to be his sycophant, his faithful lackey, a tool for him to use as he saw fit. Hiding her own supremacy with loose-fitting clothes and deferential remarks, tiptoeing across the eggshells of his insecurity.

“It couldn’t be the transfusions,” he said. “I was assured she would rebound easily. That I would reap great benefits and Bonnie would experience negligible effects. And it’s true, the gains in my vigor and stamina have been quite remarkable.”

“Yes, I quite agree,” she said. “And I think I know what Bonnie’s trouble might be.”

“Do you?”

“Perhaps she is experiencing the first twinges of puberty. That could explain it.”

“Really? So young?”

“In Gerda’s case, the process started at seven. She was a woman by nine.”

A lie, of course. Like most girls who endured the grueling regimens of gymnastics, Gerda’s coming of age was delayed into her middle teens.

Albion exhaled and leaned back in his chair, his eyes drifting off, as if absorbed in imagining Gerda’s blossoming sexuality, which made this the ideal time to secure his signature on the last of the legal instruments and would bring her project a step closer to completion.

“If you don’t mind, sir.” She clicked the gold ballpoint Albion preferred, scooted the stack of papers closer to him, and handed over the pen.

He took it, his eyes still glazed.

Albion removed the first document on the stack and opened it to the SIGN HERE tab, scrawled his signature, and handed it to Bixel. He did three or four more in quick succession, then seemed to tire.

“Puberty? Really? My little girl?”

“Gerda was irritable and drowsy too, but that stage went quickly.”

“Maybe I should call Bonnie’s mother and let her know. She should be alerted to something like this, don’t you think? Such a momentous rite of passage?”

Although Albion’s divorce had been finalized last spring, and his ex-wife had shown nothing but contempt for Lester Albion for years, Bixel still felt threatened by the slightest hint of a resumption in their connection. Anything that jeopardized the union of Lester Albion and her daughter could not be abided.

“Let me talk to Bonnie,” Bixel said. “I’ll find out what’s going on.”

“Would you do that? I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Of course, of course.”

Bixel lifted the next document off the stack and laid it before him.

Lester Albion hunched forward and began to sign, but something on the page caught his eye, and he set the pen aside.

“What is this?” he said. “Imposta Municipale Unica.”

“Property taxes, sir. In Italy.”

“Italy? Remind me, what exactly are we doing in Italy?”

“Olive groves, sir, in Puglia, southern Italy. It’s a long-term project.”

“Olive groves? I didn’t realize we were invested in this.”

“The forecasts for rising profits in extra-virgin olive oil are sharply higher. The Americans have been snapping up groves around Tuscany, but we get a far better price per hectare for the orchards in Puglia. And the olives, I’m told, are quite good. Even better than Tuscany.”

He looked up at her, lost.

She smiled supportively. “You’ve been so busy you’ve probably forgotten the discussion in our last sales-and-marketing meeting about the global opportunities in olive-oil production. I believe Margaret Hinshaw described the excellent fit that olives would have with our current grains and oilseed presence. The supply chain is already activated and quite flexible.”

“Yes, I’ve been so busy.”

She handed him the pen, and he signed the payment voucher for the Italian property taxes and set the page aside.

“I should start paying more attention to business,” he said.

“It’s entirely normal to be distracted, a man in your condition.”

He looked up at her with a puzzled frown.

“What condition do you think I’m suffering from?”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘suffering,’ sir.”

“What do you call it?”

“Well, I believe at the very least you’re infatuated, possibly even more than that.”

“What? You think I’m in love?”

“You didn’t realize?”

Lester Albion stared into her eyes, his lips parting as if he were about to speak, but no words came.

“She’s a wonderful girl,” Bixel said. “And I do believe she would be receptive to your advances, but if she has no knowledge of your feelings, if you continue to withhold yourself from her, only gaze at her from a distance, how will she be able to return your affection? At some point you must act. You must be bold.”

“Yes,” Albion said faintly.

“Gerda is presently traveling, but she will be finished with her work soon and will return to Zurich.”

“I will wine and dine her,” Albion said. “I will lavish her with gifts.”

“Gifts are fine, of course. But Gerda is a girl of simple tastes. A restaurant meal, yes, of course, but my girl is not a romantic. Jewelry and gifts have their place, naturally, but I think you should proceed slowly and, first of all, be kind and caring, gentle and sweet. I’m sure Gerda would find that quite appealing.”

He sighed gloomily.

“I have much to learn,” he said. “Are you willing to help me, Bixel?”

“Of course. Nothing would make me happier than to see you find a soul mate.”

He swallowed and looked down at the stack of papers before him.

“I feel like such a child. As though I’m fifteen again, insecure, unsure of how to proceed.”

“You’ll do fine, sir. You’re not a child. You’re a grown man, the head of a powerful corporation. A man of the world. A cosmopolitan. And you’ve worked hard to transform yourself physically.”

“Yes,” he said, turning again to gaze out his window, or revisit his reflection. “A man of the world.”

“Don’t forget, sir, Coach Schneider is at ten.”

Albion glanced at his watch and came to his feet.

“Before you go.” Bixel gestured at the remaining documents.

“Oh yes, yes.” Albion made a peevish grimace and picked up the pen, stooped over the stack, and scribbled his signature on the dozen remaining contracts.

When Albion was out the door, she paged through the pile of papers, extracted the three that would complete the sale of the Puglia groves to Manfred Knobel, slipped them into a separate folder, then neatened the edges of the rest of the stack and carted everything back to her office.

She was setting the stack of documents on her desk when her phone trilled. A text.

Located McDaniel. Instructions?

Same as before. Take her at first opportunity.

All right.

And one more thing

Yes?

Bixel had worked for days on the phrasing. Something that would entice the girl without scaring her off. The sort of stilted diction Lester Albion might use, an opening gambit in their courtship.

I would like to present you with a gift of gratitude for your excellent service. Would diamonds please you?

Gerda did not answer immediately. Larissa Bixel could imagine her struggle—weighing a future of wealth and comfort against her aversion to Lester Albion, a repugnance she had shared with her mother more than once. Bixel had the good sense not to argue with her daughter over the matter, for she was convinced Gerda’s feelings would soften once Manfred Knobel was ruined.

At this early stage, all she hoped was that Gerda would not dismiss the overture outright.

Bixel set the phone aside and began to organize the signed contracts before taking them down to legal for a final review.

As she was departing her office, her phone trilled with Gerda’s response. Larissa Bixel set aside the stack of documents and read the message, then exhaled a long breath and smiled.

What girl doesn’t love diamonds?

THIRTY

Weinegg District, Zurich, Switzerland

Bonnie was lying in bed, watching suicide videos.

They were posted in clandestine sites on the dark web, but she had tracked them down without a great deal of difficulty.

The hanging videos had been recorded by the victims, left behind, she supposed, as cinematic suicide notes. Apparently, they’d been uploaded later by friends or relatives.

Hangings were neither quick nor final, and there was often writhing at the end when the rope went taut, as if the victim had miscalculated and not dropped from a sufficient height to break their neck, or else their squirming indicated a last-second change of heart. Alas, too late.

In the videos of wrist slitting, the victims mostly sat in bathtubs filled to the brim. Warm water, of course, to hasten blood flow. Some of the videos played quiet music, some loud rock and roll, one Beethoven. Candles surrounded the bath in some. Those had a pretty golden glow, but for Bonnie the slow leakage of blood, the gradual darkening of the bathwater, seemed messy and unappealing. The deaths came so slowly that victims sometimes had time to reconsider their decision, and a few rose from the water, their naked bodies glistening, stumbled from the tub, and collapsed onto the floor. To Bonnie, these seemed like unsuitable complications.

Two videos had been shot by onlookers. Those were the roof jumpers. One was a woman, another a teenage boy with long hair. The woman was dressed in a skirt and blouse, and she walked slowly to the edge of the roof and looked down for several seconds, then simply fell forward into the air as though her knees had given out. The teenage boy, wearing only white underpants, took a running start and kept running through the air all the way down, his long hair trailing upward.

Bonnie found the idea of flying through the sky during her last moments quite appealing. But the images of the bodies on the ground after impact, the splatter, crushed faces, the woman’s arm torn loose and lying several feet from the body, no, that didn’t seem like the way she wanted to begin her afterlife.

Gunshot suicides were the ones she preferred. They were quick and decisive, and although it made a mess of the walls and the floor, the method seemed more dignified than the other ways. She watched a dozen of those, some with the muzzles pressed against temples, some with the barrel thrust into mouths or pressed under chins. She liked the temple press the best.

Bonnie’s only fear about suicide was that her brain might survive for some period of time after the rest of her body died. Her brain had proven so robust that it seemed entirely possible it would still be functioning long after her heart ceased pumping and her lungs no longer drew air.

A pistol against the temple would solve that concern. Also, she knew her father had several pistols in his gun safe, which made that avenue feasible. She didn’t have the combination to his safe, but she doubted that would prove a hurdle. Her father wasn’t supersmart. He had skills, of course, because otherwise he would not be a successful businessman, but high intelligence wasn’t one of them. Bonnie believed her father was, in many ways, more childish than she had ever been herself.

So it was decided. A pistol to the temple, using one of her father’s weapons. The only decision left was to pick the day and time. In that regard, she knew only that it had to be soon. Already her legs were so shaky, her stamina so low, her vigor in such decline that if she waited much longer, pulling the trigger might be beyond her capabilities.

As Bonnie was rewatching the temple shooters, Miriam, her Siamese, jumped onto the bed and climbed onto Bonnie’s stomach and began to purr. Then Miriam hunched up her back and blocked Bonnie’s view of the screen, as if casting her vote against suicide. Perhaps she wanted to remind Bonnie of the plight Miriam would suffer if left alone with only Bonnie’s father to look after her. Miriam had never taken to her father. He found cats offensive.

But this was not reason enough for Bonnie to reassess her decision. Suicide seemed the best solution to her condition. If she didn’t act while she was still able, she might be trapped and forced to linger in her current state indefinitely, not fully alive, unable to concentrate, incapable of reading her books, her mind continually drifting into sleep or a waking daze.

Already, each day was a grueling battle against the drowsy pull of slumber.

Miriam purred and climbed higher on Bonnie’s body and rubbed the side of her face against Bonnie’s cheek. Maybe she should take Miriam with her into the afterlife. Bonnie wasn’t sure if that was possible. Animals might be shunted off in one direction, humans another. No one knew such things. There had been no research, no reliable witnesses returning from the void. Death was the great mystery awaiting all of humankind.

But none of that frightened Bonnie, because death was a natural state, inevitable, unavoidable. Not so different from being born. Except that suicide offered a choice that being born did not. Bonnie had not chosen to enter the land of the living. She had simply been pushed out into the harsh lights of the delivery room and was supposed to be grateful ever after.

Miriam continued to purr and fell asleep on Bonnie’s chest, her furry head pressed to Bonnie’s heart. It did trouble her greatly, she had to admit, that Miriam might be mistreated after. Her father’s casual cruelty toward the animal enraged Bonnie, the way he’d kick her aside—not a football kick, little more than a nudge, but no matter how gentle it was, the kick was still a kick. Her father was a loathsome man, he truly was.

It wasn’t long before Bonnie’s breath slowed, and she followed her faithful chum down into the foggy chasm of sleep.

THIRTY-ONE

Bari, Italy

After Naff and Harper had separated at Cattedrale di San Sabino, he walked into the warehouse district of the Bari waterfront, listening again to Lucia Campos’s voice mail. The relevant part was exactly as he remembered it: for several months, an American named Dickens had picked up crates of spittlebugs at the Port of Bari and had taken them to Albion’s olive groves.

On the pier, Adrian spent an hour walking from one loading dock to another. If this guy Dickens had worked on the waterfront for months, someone had to know him. He spoke to a dozen different men and three women, asking each if they knew Dickens or maybe they’d heard about crates from America regularly being unloaded from arriving ships.

Some of the folks he approached were dockworkers, a few were managers. All were unhelpful, either blowing him off with a shake of the head and a dismissive backhanded wave or simply turning away from him without a word. Such consistently negative reactions suggested that Dickens was as widely known as he was despised.

After that hour, he gave up on the warehouse district and—because he had a lifetime of familiarity with soldierly institutions—moved on to the Capitaneria di porto Guardia Costiera, Bari’s harbor Coast Guard.

The local unit was housed in an unimpressive two-story building with a most impressive view of the surrounding terminals, loading docks, and piers.

Naff presented his ID as head of security for Albion International and said he was searching for the whereabouts of an Albion employee named Dickens. That got him through two layers of Coast Guard bureaucracy before he was invited to the upstairs office of a short, pugnacious man with the smooshed-in face of a bulldog. He wore a rumpled white suit that would have fit a man twice his size. Why a civilian was working in a corner office in a Coast Guard building was an issue Adrian decided not to pursue.

“Dickens? First name or last?”

“Last, I believe.”

The man, whose name Adrian hadn’t caught, eyed him suspiciously.

“He work for you, but you do not know his name?”

“He worked for my company, but he was a very junior employee.”

“Yet you come all the way from Switzerland to locate him, this junior person.”

Adrian sighed. He hadn’t worked hard enough on his cover story.

“Maybe I should go see the harbormaster.”

“You know the harbormaster?”

“No.”

“You don’t know the man, so why you think he will be better at helping you than me?” He picked up the stub of a dead cigar from an ashtray on his desk and ran it beneath his nose and set it down again. “Harbormaster won’t help you. I am only one can do that. Anyone work on the piers, I have him in here. Everyone in here.”

He thumped a fat finger against a thick leather binder that was at the top of an untidy pile of similar binders. The room smelled like dust, like tedium, like the stale body odor of overworked and underpaid civil servants who kept thick binders that no one ever came to check.

Was this the moment Adrian was supposed to dig out his wallet? Or had the EU’s anticorruption inspectors managed to put the fear of god into functionaries like this? For all Adrian knew, offering a bribe to this guy might well put Adrian in prison.

The man waited, watching Adrian with disapproval.

“Mr. Albion has been buying olive groves in the area, and this man, Dickens, was working on one of them.”

“I know about Albion and these groves. Not good, not good.”

He rubbed his hands together briskly as if wiping away scum.

“Okay. Appreciate your time,” Adrian said and started for the door.

“I don’t need to look in book for Dickens.”

Adrian stopped and turned back to face the man.

“You know him?”

“Everybody in Bari knows the man named Dickens,” the man said. “You wait here.”

“What?”

“Wait. I will return il prima possibile.”

The little man picked up his unfinished cigar and left.

After pacing the office for fifteen minutes, Adrian went into the hallway. He paced for another ten minutes, then decided his host was taking a lunch break or he’d headed off for an afternoon tryst with his mistress.

Adrian wandered downstairs and out the front door and stood on the sidewalk in the sunshine for another five minutes. Thirty minutes in all, which was as long as he waited for anybody unless he was being paid.

He was proceeding to the headquarters of the harbormaster, a five-story tower that he’d passed earlier, when someone behind him called out his name.

The little man in the baggy white suit was marching down the sidewalk, accompanied by a tall, dark-haired woman in a blue dress and a white apron spattered with what at first looked like blood but, Adrian realized as she came near, was probably tomato sauce.

“You did not wait as I instructed,” the small man said.

“I waited long enough.”

The man said something in Italian to the woman, and the woman nodded and turned to Adrian.

“My name,” the woman said, “is Valentina Lombardi.”

It didn’t sound as though she was introducing herself, more like she was revealing the answer to a secret.

“What is this about?” Adrian asked the bulldog man.

Valentina stepped between them and said, “You know where is Dickens?”

“No, I don’t. I’m looking for him.”

She made a show of smoothing a hand over her belly beneath her sauce-dappled apron, and Adrian could see from the shape of the bulge that Valentina was several months pregnant.

“Your man Dickens is the father,” the little man said. “He made promises to this girl. Now he bring great grief and sorrow to the Lombardi family and much vergogna.”

It was a word Naff didn’t know but assumed meant disgrace.

“Where is Dickens?” Valentina stepped closer to Adrian, so near he could smell rosemary and garlic.

“I’m trying to find him too. It’s why I’m here. To find him.”

“You talk between you,” the bulldog said. “I have done the good deed of my day.”

He turned and headed back toward the Coast Guard building.

“Come,” Valentina said and swung around and marched away.

She was a sturdy woman with a handsome face, frank blue eyes, long lashes, and sumptuous lips, a heavy masculine jaw, and a nose that was more noticeable than noses were supposed to be.

Her stride was long and flowing, and Adrian had to break into a half trot to catch up. In a few blocks she led him inland, into the old town’s shadowy, narrow streets and souvenir vendors, vegetable markets, and shops selling brightly painted plates, straw hats, and baskets.

Valentina cut to her right down an even narrower lane where restaurants and bars pumped out their delicious scents and cheerful music. She halted outside the door of a bar named Lombardi.

“Tell Father what you do,” Valentina said and waved a hand for Adrian to enter.

It was a cozy grotto, dimly lit, with stone walls and an arched ceiling of limestone bricks. Ten stools lined the leather-covered bar, a half dozen small tables scattered around the tight space. A tall man with a drooping mustache and watery eyes the same ocean blue as Valentina’s was pouring a shot of whiskey for an elderly lady in furs and jewels.

“Papa, this the man,” Valentina said. “Look for Dickens.”

“Do not speak that name in here,” her father said.

He motioned for Adrian to come deeper into the bar and led him into a tiny office at the rear and shut the door behind them.

Adrian tried to explain why he was looking for Dickens, but while Adrian spoke, Mr. Lombardi stared up at the ceiling and tapped a foot as if he were simply waiting for Adrian to finish his useless speech so Lombardi could unleash his fury.

When Adrian stopped, Lombardi wiped his lips with the back of his hand and peered into Adrian’s eyes.

“Dickens work with Pagolo Martinelli in the olive trees. You know Pagolo?”

“No,” Adrian said.

“Pagolo work on the farm of Sergio Bellomo. Pagolo is a bad man. Rough and mean and inaffidabile, or you say, ‘not worthy of the trust.’ Sergio Bellomo is my friend since we are children, and he sold his farm and orchards to this man Albion but did not want to do so. And now it is all sick.”

“Sick?”

“Insetti, how you say? Bug.”

“Bugs? Insects?”

“Insects.”

“Spittlebugs,” Adrian said.

“Name of bug, I not know. But bug come, then later tree is sick. Begin in settembre. Sergio see it. He go into his groves that are no longer his to own. He see it. Una malattia. A sickness of tree.”

“Dickens did this?”

“I warn you. Do not speak that name in my presence.”

“A crime against nature,” Adrian said, recalling Lucia’s words.

Lombardi looked puzzled.

“Sickness of tree,” Adrian said. “Has this been reported?”

“Government is more bad than disease. Better tell no one.”

“So no one knows about this?”

“Bellomo know, Pagolo know. I know. You know.”

“And Manfred Knobel, does he know?”

“Why he need to know? He run mill.”

“So you’re keeping this private—this disease is your secret.”

“Trees sick,” Lombardi said. “Very bad sick.”

THIRTY-TWO

The Olive Groves, Bari, Italy

Down in the open grave, Harper hauled Pagolo’s unconscious body upright, then twisted and shoved him up over the lip. She climbed out, then took hold of his cuffs and dragged him to the Jeep. He bumped across the rough ground without a grunt of complaint. At the Jeep, she settled him in a sitting position with his back against the rear bumper.

She dug around in the bed of the Jeep till she found a length of rope and a spool of thin cord. With a pair of dull wire clippers, she cut two pieces of rope and used the first to lash Pagolo’s right wrist to the rear bumper of the Jeep. When it was secure, she knotted his left wrist, his arms stretched wide in a seated crucifixion.

She took his cell phone from the rear bumper and tried to bring it alive, but found it was locked with a numerical code.

She waited for a while, watching the man’s shallow breaths as the pain from her own injuries faded. From the little she’d witnessed of Pagolo’s behavior, he wouldn’t give up easily. Even in his current state, bound, vulnerable, she doubted anything short of torture would cause him to surrender useful information, especially to a woman.

She dug through the bed of the Jeep again and drew out the spool of cord, a thin-gauge woven rope, no fatter than a common clothesline. Probably used as staking straps for supporting newly planted saplings.

She unrolled it, stretching out a length that would reach from Pagolo to the closest olive tree a few yards away. She wrapped one end of the cord around the trunk, knotting it firmly, then brought the other end back to Pagolo, giving herself a foot of slack to work with before she snipped it.

She had to move fast. If he saw what she was up to, he might be able to keep her at bay kicking with his legs. Of course, she could hammer his skull again, but she didn’t want to risk killing the guy. Not that his life mattered to her, but his information did.

She unsnapped the metal buttons on his shoulder straps and dragged down his overalls across his chest, peeling them to his waist and muscling them past his butt to his ankles.

She squatted beside him, took a deep reinforcing breath, then looped the cord around the base of his testicles, binding the cord around his scrotum as tightly as it would go to create an inescapable cinch.

She tied a knot and then another just for safety’s sake. Stood and wiped her damp hands hard against her slacks until they were dry.

Pagolo was a heavy sweater.

Confident he was secure, she went back to the grave site, got the shovel, and began to dig in the mushy, discolored ground she’d noticed earlier. It took fifteen minutes before she’d reached the first sign of the body, a few more minutes to uncover it by hand.

His face was purplish black, and maggots thronged over his remaining flesh. The reek was so intense her stomach constricted, and she swallowed back a spurt of bile in the back of her throat. She leaned away from the putrid grave to draw a clear breath, then held it as she came back into the halo of stench.

He had been a lean man, maybe five ten, wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt that was in tatters from the rot. She had to lie on her stomach and reach her arms into the shallow grave to turn his body over. It was ugly work, the cloth of his shirt crumbling in her fingers, his flesh as pliant as fresh dough.

Mastering her revulsion, she turned him facedown, then reached into his back pocket and extracted the leather billfold she’d been hoping was there. Fat with cash and membership cards and an American Express and a driver’s license. John Jefferson Dickens, a street address in El Paso, Texas.

Back at the Jeep, Pagolo howled, a cry of horror at his predicament.

She walked back to him and squatted nearby and held out the wallet, letting him have a look at Dickens’s driver’s license. He blinked at it several times, his eyes still out of focus.

“You killed this man.”

Pagolo turned his gaze down to his crotch, the knotted cord, his eyes tracking the length of rope to the olive tree.

“Soon I kill you.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Vaffanculo!”

“And fuck you as well.”

Moving beyond the range of his legs, Harper reached out for the cord, giving Pagolo time to observe what she was doing before she gave the rope a tug. He cringed and wrenched his heavy arms against his restraints. The ropes held fine.

“Baldracca! Puttana.”

“You’re the whore, Pagolo. Who is your pimp, your protettore?”

He tried to spit at her but his mouth had gone dry.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s make this easy. Give me the number, the code to your phone. You do that, I’ll consider cutting you loose.”

“You lie.”

“The code to your phone and you might go free.”

He spat another vaffanculo.

“All right,” she said. “If that’s how you want it.”

She rose and walked around to the driver’s side of the Jeep, slipped behind the wheel, depressed the clutch, put the shifter in neutral, and cranked up the engine. She revved it and revved it again.

Pagolo yelled something inaudible, and Harper yelled back, “I can’t hear you.”

She gunned the engine one more time, then cut it off.

She climbed down and went back to Pagolo. Sweat was rolling off his face, coursing down his hairy chest. His testicles had turned bright red and seemed to be pulsating, though that might have been Harper’s imagination.

“Four, six, five, eight, five, two.” His English had improved.

She got the phone from the back of the Jeep and tapped in the code and opened the phone.

She went to “Recenti.” His recent calls. The last one he’d made, a few minutes earlier, was to an international number with a 41 country code, Switzerland. She tapped the number, and after a few connecting clicks, the line rang twice before a voice answered in British English, “Ms. Larissa Bixel’s office, this is Millicent. How can I help you?”

“Thank you,” Harper said. “You’ve done quite enough already.”

She scrolled through the rest of his calls and found several to that same number in Switzerland. From what she could see, the calls had started back in April, not long after Adrian Naff suggested Harper might want to look into Albion’s olive-oil business in Puglia.

She supposed it was possible Lester Albion had farmed out this scheme to Bixel, his chief understudy, but it was also possible Bixel had plotted this on her own and had been using her daughter to keep the project in the family and secret from Albion.

She went back to Pagolo and squatted down to grip the cord.

“I give you what you ask.”

Harper tugged the cord and tugged it again, light twitches, nothing more. Pagolo shut his eyes and rolled his head back and gasped.

“Who ordered you to kill Dickens?”

“Woman.” His eyes were open now, and he was concentrating on her hand. “Boss woman.”

“What is the name of the boss woman?”

“Pixel. Pixel.”

“Bixel with a B?”

He nodded, the sweat streaming. He bent his head to the side, trying to shoulder away the sting in his eyes, but the restraints didn’t allow it.

“Did you ask Bixel for permission to kill me?”

He grinned at her. “Bixel no answer phone. Not there.”

“Does Bixel have a boss?”

He shrugged. “She the boss.”

“She never mentioned any other name? The person she works for.”

“Only talk to her. She calls, tells me to do a thing. Money arrives.”

“Cash?”

He nodded.

“How does it arrive? Does someone bring it to you? A person?”

“Come into bank by electricity.”

“She wires it to you.”

He nodded, eyes fixed on her hand. He was being most cooperative. She knew that torture wasn’t supposed to work. That victims confessed to whatever they thought their torturers wanted to hear. So she was trying to make her questions open-ended. Not lead him or hint at anything.

She dropped the cord and opened her purse and dug out the damaged branch and showed it to him.

“What is this?”

He shook his head.

“You don’t know? Or you refuse to say?”

She moved it closer to his face.

“Tree dying,” he said. “Una moria.”

“What disease? Blight?”

“Don’t know name. Bad disease. Un morbo.”

“Is it just here?” She waved her hand in a circle around her. “Is it only in this grove? Or is it in other groves too?”

Harper’s hand inched toward the cord. Pagolo followed the action with unblinking attention.

“Segue l’insetto,” he said in a defeated whisper. “La malattia va dove va l’insetto.” The disease goes where the bug goes.

THIRTY-THREE

Albion International Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland

Later in the afternoon, Larissa Bixel hand delivered the last of the Manfred Knobel closing documents with Albion’s signature to the legal department.

Her contact on the legal team was Wolfgang Weber, a satisfactory lawyer, but his legal acumen was not the reason she’d chosen him to handle the paperwork for her Puglia transactions.

Before last July she had never laid eyes on Wolfgang Weber and had no interest in doing so. It had always been Bixel’s habit to keep Albion employees at arm’s length, choosing instead to devote her attention exclusively to Lester Albion and avoid the ordinary rabble who occupied the offices of the headquarters. But when she’d devised the Manfred Knobel plan, she knew she would require the assistance of one of the in-house attorneys, so she’d set about searching for a candidate.

Wolfgang’s name had landed on her desk early in the spring in the form of a sexual-harassment complaint. Several female lawyers on the legal team had filed actions against Wolfgang with Albion’s human resources office. Each of their claims gave explicit details of Wolfgang’s naughtiness. It seemed that he was fond of exposing his private parts to women in his office as they passed by his desk.

Since these claims had been made by lawyers against another lawyer, they had been written with great care and used graphic descriptions of Wolfgang’s male apparatus so there could be no doubt about the veracity of their charges.

Bixel had summoned Wolfgang to her office and confronted him with the women’s claims, and when the young man began to deny them with dramatic indignation, she told him that he could prove his innocence simply by showing her his organ so she could compare it to the detailed descriptions in the grievances.

“You’re sure this is what you want?” he said, a repellant smile flickering on his lips.

“Quite sure.”

Wolfgang unzipped his pants and drew out his male equipment and let it dangle outside his suit pants.

Bixel rose from her seat and came around her desk and gave the offending organ a closer look. And yes, it was, as the women described, quite long with a mole as big as a bottle cap halfway along the shaft.

“I have a job for you, young man,” she’d said as she went back to her chair. “If you complete it to my satisfaction, I will make these claims against you disappear. But I don’t want to hear that you’ve exposed yourself to another worker at Albion International. Now put that creature away.”

And so it was that Wolfgang Weber became her legal point man on the Manfred Knobel project. He never questioned the purpose or the motivations behind his legal activities on her behalf. He simply executed each of her commands with speed and accuracy.

“These are the final documents. Signed by Lester Albion and ready for your review.”

Wolfgang stood at attention behind his desk, as he did each time Bixel entered his office. An obsequious gesture that Bixel found quite charming.

“You might be interested to know,” he said, “that I’ve received a communiqué from Manfred Knobel.”

Bixel was taken aback but showed nothing to Wolfgang except a charitable smile.

“Yes? And what did Mr. Knobel have to say?”

“He wanted me to let Mr. Albion know that he has invited another party to attend the closing in Bari this Friday. I thought I should run this past you before presenting it to Mr. Albion.”

“What other party has Mr. Knobel invited to the closing?”

Wolfgang consulted a legal pad on his desk and said, “A woman by the name of Harper McDaniel.”

“I see.” Bixel’s throat clenched, but she tried to keep her face the picture of tranquility. “And did Mr. Knobel happen to say why he asked this particular woman to attend the closing?”

“No, he did not. Only that I should let Mr. Albion know.”

“Well, I’ll take care of that,” she said. “As I’ve told you more than once, Mr. Albion is not to be bothered with any of these transactions. Now you finish up with these documents and let me know when they’re done. I want them before you leave today.”

“Not a problem,” he said.

“So happy to hear it.”

When Bixel returned to her office, she found Derek Müller entertaining Millicent, her secretary, with what sounded like the punch line to a dirty joke.

Seeing her enter the office behind Derek, Millicent tried to shush him, but Derek blundered on:

“And he never wiped his own butt again.” Derek chuckled. “Get it?”

“Young lady, is this how you behave behind my back?”

Millicent blushed and lowered her eyes.

Turning slowly to face her, Müller appeared properly mortified.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Bixel, but . . .” Millicent’s blush deepened.

“But what?”

“You received a call from a gentleman in Italy. He said he would call back.”

“Did he leave a number?”

“No, ma’am.”

“His name?”

“I believe he said his name was Pagolo, but I’m not sure, the connection was very poor, and his English was not clear.”

“If he calls again, put him right through.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, Müller,” Bixel said. “In my office. Now.”

“Again, I’m sorry,” he said, when she’d shut the door. “But I do have good news.”

“Let’s hope it’s very good.”

“Adrian called. I told him about the package, the story you wanted me to relate, about Lucia Campos and the documents. He bought it.”

“Did he?”

“I know him quite well, and yes, ma’am. I’m sure he believed me.”

“And did he tell you where to send this package?”

“A hotel in Bari, Italy. He’s staying in a room with a woman named Harper McDaniel.”

“Is he now?”

“What’s wrong? I thought this is what you wanted.”

She sat down in her desk chair and swiveled it to the side so she could see the wall of photographs, her Gerda performing on the world stage. Triumphs of athletic skill, years of hard work and determination that had led to zero financial reward. Gerda, her darling girl.

“So Naff has teamed up with McDaniel,” she said. Derek looked on mystified. “Which puts my girl in grave danger. She’s quick and strong with excellent instincts, but Naff is a warrior, a professional assassin. This changes the calculus.”

“You’re thinking out loud,” Derek said and nodded appreciatively as though, now that he understood he was being left out of the conversation, he could relax.

“So, in that case, I must resort to another approach with Naff. Fortunately, I have done the background work and know his vulnerabilities, and thus how I must proceed.”

Derek nodded again, pleased to be on the sidelines.

“Do you suffer jet lag, Derek?”

“Ma’am?”

“I want you to go on a journey, a crucial passage back and forth across the Atlantic. Can you do this for me?”

“Of course, but will it involve . . .” He swallowed. “Violence?”

“No, but it will require a modicum of stealth.”

“I will be honored to do what I can to help.”

“Do you have your passport with you in the office?”

“No, it’s in my apartment, at home.”

“You’ll leave now, go directly to your apartment, retrieve your passport, pack a single bag. Where you’re going is warm, no sweater, no jacket necessary. You’re fond of hoodies, I believe.”

“They’re okay.”

“I will make your flight arrangements myself. You’ll leave today. A car will be waiting downstairs to take you home, then off to the airport.”

“And my itinerary?”

“A sunny spot in America, then off to Italy. I’ll text you the details. Your number is still the same as before? During that whole Campos hotel incident?”

Yes, his number remained the same.

Gerda checked out of the Santa Claus B and B, a wretched place in the old town, Barivecchia, located on the headland between two harbors. Noisy and unclean.

She booked a suite at the Villa Romanazzi about a mile from the waterfront. A posh hotel with an Olympic pool and a first-rate gym. She’d been needing a workout in a well-stocked weight room for days, but the true reason she picked that hotel was because it was where she’d discovered Adrian Naff was staying.

A very trusting concierge had swallowed her cancer story. Her poor father and his mixed-up diagnosis.

After checking into her suite overlooking the shutdown pool, she texted her boss.

Naff is staying at the Villa Romanazzi Carducci Hotel. Don’t know room number yet. Shall I take him when I find him?

Your information is incorrect. He’s sharing hotel room with McDaniel. You have fallen one step behind

I think it is you who is incorrect

Stand down. Take no action on Naff or the woman

Why?

Leave them to me came the reply.

Don’t understand

No answer came immediately. Gerda unpacked some of her shopping bags and fitted her new wardrobe into a suitcase she’d bought that morning. She had lost her favorite scarf in the scuffle at the Madrid hospital, leaving her only one more that she could use as a weapon, so she’d purchased two more during her shopping spree on the Via Sparano and Via Manzoni, both the correct size and weight to suit her purpose.

Her phone buzzed with a text.

Sending a helper. Will arrive soon

For me?

For you

I need no help

Repeat, stand down. Do nothing till helper arrives. He will explain next step.

THIRTY-FOUR

Bari, Italy

Harper used an arm bar to restrain Pagolo while she hauled him upright. It was an excruciating hold that hyperextended his right elbow, and with only the slightest additional pressure, she could ruin his arm for the rest of his life. Even the most pain-tolerant combatants Harper had gone up against couldn’t take more than a second or two before they did a quick double-tap signaling their surrender.

With the arm bar paralyzing his right arm, she frog-walked Pagolo to the Jeep, leaving his overalls in a sweaty heap where he’d been sitting. The cord that was still knotted tight around his scrotum dragged behind him through the sandy soil like a grotesque tail.

At the Jeep, she released the hold, wrenched his weakened right arm behind him, and tied a length of rope around his wrist. While she was knotting it, Pagolo lurched around and tried to attack her, but she sensed it coming and bent his wrist hard against the joint and locked it. Pagolo froze.

“Do that again, I’ll break every bone in your wrist.”

He went quiet, and she finished securing his hands together behind his back and prodded him into the passenger seat.

“What are you doing?”

“Going for a drive,” she said. “Hold on, don’t want to lose you.”

Once he was settled in the seat, she took the cord in her hand and walked around to the driver’s side and got behind the wheel. She wrapped the cord around the steering column several times and tied it off, leaving only a few inches of slack. If pantsless Pagolo tried to jump out of the vehicle, he’d have to leave his gonads behind.

She opened the glove compartment, dug through the jumble of screwdrivers and pliers and cigarette packs, a girlie magazine and a pint bottle of booze, until she located a pad of paper and a ballpoint.

She wrote the note in Italian, keeping it simple and to the point:

My name is Pagolo. I murdered an American man named Dickens. I hit him in the head with a wooden bat. I left the weapon and the victim’s body in an open grave in the Bellomo olive orchard. I was paid to kill Dickens by someone at Albion International. Payments were wired to my bank account.

As she was pulling out of the grove, her phone shrieked with another alert from her security camera. Harper pulled over, drew the phone from her purse, and watched Gerda exit the hotel room. For at least an hour, Gerda had been lying in wait and hadn’t triggered the motion sensor once in all that time. Who could say what she’d been doing for so long? Napping on the king-size bed, or perhaps doing jumping jacks out on the balcony?

It took almost two hours and several wrong turns, but Harper eventually found her way back to Bari, then cruised around the waterfront until she located the Polizia, which she’d noticed earlier in the day walking to Bari Milling Works.

She pulled into the no-parking zone directly outside the state police office. She turned off the engine, then poked around in her purse, dug out a safety pin, and used it to attach the note to the front of Pagolo’s white jersey.

“After I kill you,” he said, “I will chop you up and throw the scraps into the sea.”

His English had improved greatly in the last hour.

Harper climbed out of her seat, stood on the sidewalk, and honked the horn on the Jeep, holding the button down, making one continuous blare for over a minute until an officer came stomping out of the building to investigate the commotion.

He walked over to her, a young man, handsome and tall with a gleaming head of black hair, and he asked her what she was doing.

“Qualcuno ha risolto un caso di omicidio,” she said. She wasn’t positive she’d gotten the tenses right, but what she meant to say was that someone had solved a murder case.

Harper walked away from the confused officer, and though he called out for her to stop, he didn’t come after her, which was a great relief, because she felt suddenly exhausted and simply wanted to get back to the hotel and teach the bartender how to make a blue glacier martini.

“As I said, Gerda, I’m not a rich man, but I am building a profitable business. It will take time, but I believe I’m on the correct path.”

Gerda finished adding the last column of figures on her phone’s calculator, then switched it off and closed Manfred’s ledger with its lined pages full of antiquated, handwritten accounting.

It was eight o’clock in the evening, and through the glassed-in walls of his office, she could see his workers dumping crates of olives into a metal tub, then guiding the fruit through the milling process. Trucks were still lined up at the loading dock, with their beds full of olives. A buzz of talk and machinery, the clang of metal drums, the tremors in the floor from the giant whirling centrifuges. It was a busy display of industry at odds with the figures in his ledger.

She scooted back from Manfred’s office desk and looked at him across its broad wood surface. Propped in front of her was a photo of a younger, damaged Gerda. For a girl so young, she’d known far too much about the follies of the world, the deceits and betrayals of humankind. It was only through sport that she had managed to survive.

“You have a great many debts,” Gerda said. “And you are about to assume even more.”

“Yes, but with a respectable season this year and the next, I will be able to unburden myself of much of that debt. Surely you understand one must invest today to reap the rewards of tomorrow.”

“A great many debts,” Gerda repeated. “And even with the rosiest projections, including abundant harvests, no breakage of equipment, labor costs staying exactly at the same level, my calculation suggests it will take at least ten years to clear yourself of these liabilities. And what if one year the harvest fails? What about drought or fires or other acts of God? Where are your contingency funds? I see none.”

“You’re being very pessimistic, my love.”

“I’m being sensible and levelheaded. This is who I am.”

“And I love you for it. It is one more thing that makes you a perfect match for me. And yes, yes, it is true, I may be something of an idealist. I have great hopes, great aspirations. I have always set lofty goals, and I have always managed to clear the bar no matter how high it was raised.”

“Yes, yes,” Gerda said. “You achieved great things, you won gold medals. And yes, I loved to watch you flying over the bar, so graceful, so strong, such a fine-looking body.”

Manfred rose from the visitor’s chair and came to her, lured by her flattering words.

“But can you afford diamonds, Manfred?”

That stopped him halfway around the desk. He peered at her.

“Diamonds?”

“The finer things in life. The beautiful things. I do not see these numbers adding up to diamonds. I see Sparsamkeit. Thrift, frugality, Pfennigfuchserei.”

“Is it really diamonds you want? Beautiful things you cherish? This is not the Gerda I have known. Our love is not about jewels or euros, it’s fueled by our desire for one another. I thought we shared this belief. Was I wrong?”

The workmen out on the floor had begun to sing. It was a song Gerda had never heard before, a manly, rousing melody with the heavy beat of a military marching band or perhaps a soccer tune.

“Love has value, yes, of course,” she said. “Sexual satisfaction is wonderful and has its place. But there are other considerations before a marriage bargain can be struck.”

In truth, she felt disheartened by the paltry profits she’d seen in Manfred’s ledger. And now her mind was set upon by dark memories of her impoverished childhood, her beastly father, Max, her mother warning her again and again to avoid the mistake she had made in marrying such a pitiful man—an Olympian who, after he had accomplished his dreams of athletic glory, had no dreams left.

The text from Lester Albion earlier in the day, his offer of diamonds, had sent her head whirling. Were her feelings for Manfred a childish error in judgment? Was she about to surrender her future to a man whose financial prospects were as precarious as her father’s had been? Was she about to marry a duplicate of Max?

It was true that Manfred was more ambitious than her father, but Manfred’s business was quite unstable, depending as it did on the vagaries of weather and many unforeseeable market variables. And he had zero capital to fall back on in times of need. Olive oil was a valuable commodity this season, but what about the next season and the one after that?

On the other hand, Albion’s future was secure and prosperous, and he was among the wealthiest men on the planet and would no doubt remain so. But what of her distaste for him? He was a weak man. Physically, he repulsed her. Were these conditions she could overcome? Could she learn to see beyond his unappetizing appearance and his juvenile behavior and come to relish or at least tolerate his touch?

As though he had seen into her mind, Manfred said, “There is someone else, isn’t there? Another man who has stolen your affection.”

She felt a hot flush darken her face.

“My god, there is,” he said. “You have found another. It’s in your eyes.”

He trudged back to the visitor’s chair and sunk into it and slumped forward, head dropping.

“How long?” he said without looking up. “How long has this infidelity been occurring?”

“There is no infidelity.”

He raised his head and implored her with his hazel eyes. “No?”

“It’s true I have received romantic propositions. Men have made their feelings known. But I have never acted on any of those entreaties. I have been loyal to you, Manfred, faithful and true. But this . . .” She tapped the ledger. “There is no villa in these pages, no children, no maids or cooks or housecleaners. There is grueling work. There is only scarcity here.”

“Such things take time,” he said. “Nothing great is achieved easily or overnight. You know that, Gerda. Look how long you worked for your own success. Years and years, but you didn’t shrink from the struggle, you battled on through injuries and disappointments, you triumphed in spite of all your difficulties. All good things require work. You and me together, we will blend our souls, blend our energies, and we will succeed. I’m certain of it.”

“These numbers scare me. They should scare you too.”

“Don’t do this, Gerda.”

“I’m speaking the truth. There are choices to be made for all of us. Marriage is a decision that shapes our fates forever. I have made a promise to myself that I will never be destitute again. I would rather live without love than live as a pauper.”

“This is because of your father and what he did to you. His terrible abuse of your body. The pain he caused you, the poverty he subjected you to.”

“What?”

“I understand, Gerda. I do. But I assure you, I am not Max.”

“How did you know this? I never told you about my father. I never told anyone.”

Manfred opened his mouth, then shut it. A fine dapple of sweat had sprung out on his forehead. Gerda watched him hunting for the right word or phrase, some way to escape this panicked moment.

“You told me, sweetheart. Many years ago, we were walking home from a biergarten in Berlin. We weren’t yet intimate then, just good friends. You were drinking beers and I guess you don’t remember. You told me about Max and the horrors he forced on you.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re lying. I’ve never told anyone those things. Never. I’m certain of it.”

“You were drinking,” Manfred said. “You were perhaps drunk.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“All right, then, how would I know of such a thing unless you told me? How, Gerda?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

The only possibility was too staggering to imagine.

At that moment, one of the workmen arrived at Manfred’s office door and tapped on it timidly.

Manfred called out for the man to enter.

“What is it, Roman?”

“It’s Pagolo, sir.”

“What about him?”

“È in prigione.”

“In jail? Has he been fighting again?”

“Nossignore, it is murder. They say he has killed a man and left his body in the groves of Bellomo.”

Manfred shot Gerda a helpless look as he headed toward the door.

“This is not finished, Manfred. Far from it.”

He swallowed deeply.

“I know,” he said and stole past her and left.

Out on the plant floor, the singing had ended, but the machinery continued to wash and grind and crush the olives into plum-colored paste, and the walls and floors of the entire building continued to rumble as though a locomotive were passing close by.

Or was that the shuddering of Gerda’s heart?

THIRTY-FIVE

Bari, Italy

Wednesday morning, Harper had breakfast in the hotel’s rooftop restaurant, sitting on the terrace in the mild sunlight, a view of the waterfront and the promenade below, with the silvery blue Adriatic stretching to the misty horizon.

Adrian arrived and sat, and she pushed the plate of pastries his way.

Naff noticed something in her face, squinted at her, inspecting her features as if perhaps he could see the blood banging in her temples.

“You must’ve stayed after I left.”

“Too long,” she said.

“I see that.”

“Thanks, Naff, you look swell too.” Harper blew on her espresso, had a sip, set the cup down, then took a cautious bite of her cornetto semplice.

“Hey, those blue glaciers are tasty, and I don’t even like martinis.”

“Too tasty,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Had my share of rocky mornings. Luckily these days, at my advanced age, I usually nod off before I can get seriously hammered.”

Harper had another sip of espresso.

“Completely understandable,” he said. “Not every day you dig up a corpse. Turn a murderer over to the cops.”

“Yeah,” Harper said. “It was a long day.”

“You happen to bring that branch you were talking about?”

She slipped her hand in her purse and took out the withered stem and set it on the table. Alongside it she placed the black bug, which had expired overnight.

Naff picked up the branch and studied it.

“From Bellomo’s grove?”

“Correct.”

“And you think Bixel’s the mastermind, she put this scheme together, not Albion?”

“Certainly looks that way.”

“Where’s the proof of that?”

“Bixel was running Pagolo. I think this is her baby.”

“But how can you know that for sure? Bixel could be doing Albion’s bidding, and this is all about sabotaging Albion’s romantic rival. That makes more sense than Bixel taking out her daughter’s boyfriend.”

She shook her head, then regretted it. The headache flared.

“If it was just about Albion removing his rival, he would’ve had Knobel murdered. He wouldn’t concoct some elaborate plan like this. This isn’t about just sabotaging the guy, it’s about punishment. This is personal. Teaching someone a lesson. It’s hateful.”

“Hateful,” Adrian said. “Okay, let’s go with that. Then where does that come from, hate like that? Why would Bixel feel so strongly about this guy, she’d go to all that trouble and all that risk to torpedo her daughter’s beau?”

Harper shrugged. In some people hate seemed to float just below the surface every minute of the day. Bixel struck her as one of those.

She sipped her espresso. They were silent for a few seconds.

“All right,” Harper said. “I need to pick at this a little more.”

“So pick.”

“I’m wondering how Bixel manages all this without Albion knowing.”

“You just said it was Bixel, not Albion.”

“I know what I said. But I’m having trouble leaving Albion out of it. How does Bixel buy up all those family farms, put together this enormous tract of olive groves, then bring Dickens in to spread these bugs? Set up a dark pool to hide the sale to Knobel? Coerce Knobel to buy these groves? All that and Albion never gets wind of it? You work in the same building with them. Could she get away with that?”

Naff flicked a housefly off the tablecloth, watched it circle back and land just out of reach. “Sure, it’s possible she could pull it off. Far as I can see, these days Bixel is running the damn place. Albion’s even loopier than usual. This physical fitness bullshit, he’s fanatical about that. Spends most of his day in the gym.”

“Bixel’s certainly got motive,” Harper said. “If Gerda marries the boss, Bixel isn’t an employee anymore, she’s family. That’s a motive times ten.”

“True.”

Harper had another bite of the pastry, her headache fading.

“When Gerda and I were in the parking lot in Canena, I learned a couple of things from her.”

“Yeah?”

“Saw something in her eyes when we were talking. She didn’t know the reason she was shadowing me. She was out of the loop.”

“So?”

“Bixel wanted to keep track of me, okay, there’s that. Make sure I wasn’t going to cause more trouble for them. So that’s a reason to send Gerda out to tail me. But I was thinking, maybe Bixel was also trying to keep Gerda occupied, keep her away from Knobel, let things cool off between them while Bixel set her plan in motion. Gerda follows orders, does what she’s told. A lifetime of being coached will do that to someone, rob them of their autonomy.”

“So I ask again, Where’s the hate come in? Why does Bixel have that kind of grudge against Knobel?”

“Why do people hate?”

“Question of the day.”

“Do you hate anybody, Naff?”

He drummed his fingers on the table, looking off at the sea, then shook his head.

“Not at the moment.”

“Well, then let me take a crack. A person hates because they were wronged. Hurt, betrayed, grievously fucked over. Something unforgivable was done to them. A wound that will never heal.”

“Okay,” he said. “Say Bixel was wronged, she’s pissed at Knobel, very pissed. That requires Bixel and Knobel to have some kind of history.”

An elderly couple had been seated at the table next to them. They had a small spaniel on a leash that the woman was holding. The white-haired woman was speaking to the dog in French while her husband opened a newspaper and began to read.

“Not hard to imagine they would have known each other for a long time,” Harper said. “We know Gerda and Knobel trained on the same Olympic team. That means they and their parents were probably in the same orbit for years. So Bixel and young Knobel had to rub shoulders. There’s at least some kind of history between them.”

“As evidence goes,” Adrian said, “there’s not much there. It doesn’t get us to why Gerda can love Knobel, but Bixel hates his guts.”

The waiter floated up to their table and asked if the gentleman was going to have breakfast.

Adrian glanced at his watch. “We’re going to need the check.”

The waiter nodded and left.

“What’s the hurry?” she said. “You just got here.”

“We have an appointment. Can’t be late.”

“What appointment?”

“Her name is Dr. Maria Mugnozza. She’s only got a few minutes between classes. Bring your branch and bug.”

The University of Bari Aldo Moro was a fifteen-minute walk from the hotel, and by the time they arrived, Harper’s headache was nearly gone, and she knew more than she ever needed to know about Aldo Moro, who’d been born in a nearby village and become Italy’s prime minister in the sixties before being kidnapped and held hostage by the Red Brigade for weeks. Eventually they shot him ten times and left his body in the trunk of a car in Rome.

“We forget,” Adrian said, “terrorists didn’t pop up out of nowhere on 9/11. They’ve been killing good guys and innocents since forever.”

“Is this relevant to anything in particular?”

“Jeez, does every damned thing have to be relevant?”

“I guess not.”

The university was housed in a dignified three-story building of limestone and granite on the far edge of a grand plaza that featured a fountain so large it would have taken ten minutes to swim across.

They found Dr. Mugnozza in a sunny corner office on the second floor in the food science–and-agriculture wing. She was sitting behind her messy desk, making marginal notations on a page full of numbers and formulas. A few feet away a lab table held an array of chemical testing trays and half a dozen electronic devices Harper couldn’t identify.

Adrian tapped on her open door and introduced himself, and she waved them in.

“This is Harper McDaniel, the woman I mentioned.”

Mugnozza rose and shook their hands and directed them to comfortable leather chairs. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman in her late forties with long, dark hair and bangs that brushed her eyebrows. Her earrings were bulky and bejeweled and matched the delicate pink of her lacy blouse. A professor who dressed with style and attention to detail.

“Thank you for giving us a few minutes,” Adrian said.

“It is my pleasure. You had a question about the olive trees. First, I must warn you my specialization is in research on the microchemistry of plant structure, but I know a few general things about the olive groves and trees. What is your question?”

Adrian nodded to Harper. She drew the withered branch from her purse and set it on the desk before the professor, and alongside it she placed the dead insect.

Dr. Mugnozza stiffened.

“Is this a spittlebug?” Harper said.

“These two items were together?” the professor asked.

“Bug and branch, yes. Together.”

The professor came to her feet and opened a desk drawer and withdrew a yellow pencil. She used the pencil’s point to slide the branch closer to her. She bent forward, examined it, then looked up and eyed them more cautiously than before. Her graciousness was gone, brisk and businesslike now.

“Where did you find this?”

“The branch?” Harper said.

“The branch, yes. Where?”

“In a grove an hour outside Bari.”

“What grove?”

“Why?”

Mugnozza walked over to her laboratory and returned with a pair of stainless steel forceps. She pinched up the stem with the forceps and carried it over to her laboratory workstation. She snipped off a piece of withered leaf.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand,” the professor said.

“Try us,” Adrian said.

“I’ll be making a real-time isothermal DNA amplification assay that utilizes recombinase polymerase amplification technology. That will facilitate rapid nucleic acid—either DNA or RNA—amplification at an operating temperature of thirty-nine degrees centigrade using a single crude sample extract.”

“You win,” Adrian said. “We don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“And this will tell you what?” Harper said.

“I hope it will determine whether this is an innocuous sample of one of the region’s common ills or something more serious.”

“How long will this take?” Harper said.

“We should know something in thirty minutes. But if it turns out to be what it appears to be, more extensive testing will be required.”

Adrian’s cell phone chirped. He got up, went to the door, and stood just outside in the hallway to answer it. He listened for several moments, then said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.”

He came back into the room and motioned for Harper to join him.

“How’s your Portuguese?”

“Lousy,” she said.

“That makes it twice as good as mine.” He handed her the phone. “This is Inês Campos, Lucia Campos’s mother. She’s upset.”

Harper took the phone. “Olá. Meu português é muito ruim.” Letting Inês know upfront that Harper wasn’t fluent.

When Inês responded, something in her manner immediately reminded Harper of Nick’s lover, Daniela Aguilar. She had the same patrician intonation, a woman rarely ruffled, dignified, and polite to a fault.

But despite Inês’s precise delivery, Harper’s meager Portuguese couldn’t keep up.

After the first few sentences, Harper said, “Por favor, vá mais devagar.” Asking her to slow down.

“I try,” Inês said.

Minutes later, in spite of Inês’s awkward English and Harper’s faulty Portuguese, the horror of Inês’s tale became all too clear. In closing, Harper said she was very, very sorry and that she would let Adrian know and perhaps he could find out more about the situation soon.

“It’s not good,” Adrian said as she handed the phone back. “I can tell that much.”

His brown eyes were dulled over, a stoic clench in his jaw.

Harper told him what Inês had said. Lucia Campos was dead. Her body had been found in a condo in Milan that once belonged to her father but had been left to Lucia. It appeared she’d hanged herself, but evidence at the scene suggested otherwise. The Italian police were treating it as a suspicious incident. Also, just yesterday, Inês had received a folder of documents in the mail that Lucia sent from Milan with instructions that they be passed on to Naff.

“Those fucking bastards,” he said. “Bixel, Albion, they did this. They snoop on the employees day and night. They must’ve known exactly what she was up to.”

“I’m sorry. You obviously cared about her.”

“I did,” he said. “We were close once.”

Standing nearby, Dr. Mugnozza cleared her throat.

“Sorry to disturb,” she said. “But I must call and report this immediately. Please stay where you are.”

She started for the phone on her desk, but Harper stepped in front of her, blocking her way.

“Report it to who?”

The professor raised her hand as though to fend off a blow. “Who are you people? Why are you here?”

“For information,” Adrian said. “So this is serious?”

“Serious? Actually, I would call it dire,” the professor said, keeping a wary eye on Harper. “As I said, I will need to do additional testing on a more sophisticated diagnostic platform, but at this point, I can say with little doubt this olive branch is infected with the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa.”

“How bad is that?” Adrian said.

“Bad, no,” the professor said. “‘Bad’ is not an adequate description. Xylella fastidiosa has never been seen outside of the United States, where it is endemic. It would be quite alarming to find it in Europe. Such a disease could be particularly devastating in an area like Puglia that is essentially one large olive grove.”

“Sit down, please,” Harper said. “Just tell us more about this, then you can go ahead and report it all you want.”

Dr. Mugnozza took several seconds to search Harper’s eyes, as if weighing her potential for menace. Whatever she saw gave her no assurance to press forward.

“Please,” Harper said. “We mean you no harm. We just want information, that’s all.”

The professor lifted her head and drew in a long, calming breath, and a moment later the tension seeped from her face. Harper stepped out of her way, and Mugnozza returned to her desk chair.

“I will need to cancel my labs for the rest of the day,” she said, motioning to her office phone. “Will that be acceptable?”

“Parlo la tua lingua, quindi non fare niente di stupido,” Harper said, just to let the professor know that Harper spoke the language, so don’t try anything silly.

When Mugnozza finished the call, she settled back into her chair.

“All right,” she said. “You want information, then I will tell you a few things. Olive quick decline syndrome is a disease caused by the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa. The bacterium invades the plant and multiplies inside the plant’s xylem vessels. Those are the vessels that transport water and nutrients from the roots to the shoots and leaves. The bacteria block these vessels, which in turn causes the condition you see before you. Withering and desiccation of the terminal shoots, which in time expands to the rest of the canopy, all of which eventually causes the tree to collapse and die.”

Adrian said, “Serious business.”

“How long does the process take?” Harper said. “From initial infection to the death of the tree.”

“As I said, it is called quick decline syndrome. It is quick.”

“Days, weeks, months?”

“The health of the tree determines that. But typically, the bacterium is established in the third or fourth month, which means the tree is dying, though it may show no signs. A while longer before the canopy begins to wither and turn brown, somewhere in the sixth or seventh month.”

“Six, seven months,” Adrian said. “That doesn’t seem quick.”

The professor clicked her tongue at Adrian.

“For a tree that is hundreds of years old, six months is nothing.”

“Timeline fits,” Harper said to Adrian. “Lets Bixel put her plan in play. Acquire the groves, hire Dickens to let loose the insects. Set up the dark pool, complete the sale of the groves to Manfred, then shortly after the sale’s complete, he discovers his trees are dying.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow,” the professor said.

“And the bug, what is it?” Adrian pointed to the black insect.

“It appears you already know the answer. Philaenus spumarius. The meadow spittlebug. It is common in this area, where it thrives primarily on the olive. It is also a known vector of Xylella fastidiosa.”

“Meaning these bugs transmit the disease?” Adrian asked.

“Correct.”

“What would happen if someone brought spittlebugs into Puglia, bugs that were already exposed to this bacteria, and released those bugs into the grove?”

“That would be illegal, a serious crime.”

“But say someone did it anyway.”

“Why would anyone do such a thing?”

“What would happen?”

“All right. The invasive insects would mate with the local species and, in all likelihood, would spread the bacterium in all directions. The spittlebug does not fly long distances, but wind carries them easily.”

“Is there a cure?” Harper asked.

“Cut the infected tree down and incinerate the remains. Cut down every tree nearby and burn them to create a containment zone. Continue to cut and burn until the outbreak is contained.”

“Does that work?” she asked.

“It might,” the professor said. “But so far, to my knowledge, it never has.”

THIRTY-SIX

Bari, Italy

While the professor phoned the authorities to notify them of the appearance of Xylella fastidiosa in a local grove, Harper and Adrian went into the hallway to talk.

“If Knobel hears about this, he’ll back out of the deal, call off the closing,” Harper said. “Everything falls apart—Albion, Bixel, they won’t show up. Do we want that?”

“Do we have a choice?”

“We can walk out of here now, leave the professor with that branch. She has no idea where it came from.”

“And let this wildfire burn out of control?”

“At this point, what’s a few more days?”

“I’m not a tree hugger, but this could be an every-minute-counts situation.”

“We have different priorities, then.”

“Jesus, you just can’t stop, can you? Not for a second.”

“Not until Bixel and Albion are gone.”

Adrian massaged his forehead, then raked his fingers through his black hair.

“Regarding hate,” he said. “Seems to me if Bixel is willing to release this apocalyptic bug in the middle of all these orchards, risk wiping out every goddamn olive tree in Italy just to ruin Knobel’s business, I’d say the motive here is something worse than hate.”

“Malevolence,” Harper said. “Evil.”

“Going biblical on me? I think evil might be too broad to count as motive.”

“You familiar with the seven deadly sins, Naff?”

“The nuns had their way with me for years. So yeah. Gluttony, lust, greed, pride, wrath. How many’s that?”

“You’re three short,” Harper said. “But pick any of those if you’re looking for motive. Or maybe all of them mixed together. As if there could be some reasonable explanation for something like this. And what difference does it make if we give the right name to what’s driving Bixel or Albion? Whatever it is, it’s about as rational as what’s driving that bacteria. It’s written in their genes. Simple as that.”

“Listen,” Adrian said. “Motive might not matter to you, but—call me old-fashioned—I like to know how things work, cause and effect. Why people act how they do. It keeps me sane. If I give up trying to figure out how things fit together, the cogs and gears, the machinery of things, I don’t know if I could get out of bed in the morning.”

Harper was searching for a snappy reply to bring the lofty exchange back to earth when her phone screeched with a video-cam alert.

“Action in the hotel room,” she said as she drew out the phone.

Adrian leaned close.

Dressed in a bright top and dark leggings with a scarf hanging loose around her neck, Gerda entered the room, walked a few feet, then stopped. Behind her, another person came into the frame, a man in a dark hoodie and jeans, carrying a bundle tied up with string. His face was turned to the side, the hoodie concealing his features.

“Well, well,” Adrian said. “Special delivery. I’d recognize that posture anywhere.”

“You know him?”

“Tell you for sure in a minute.”

The guy in the hoodie took the package to the desk near the doorway and set it down. Gerda said something to him and pointed at a spot across the room, and the guy picked up the package and walked out of view of the camera.

A minute later the guy came back and stood looking into the room, his face to the camera.

“My loyal assistant,” Adrian said. “Derek Müller.”

“Let’s go,” Harper said. “This could be our shot.”

She broke into a trot down the hallway and Adrian followed. Behind them, Dr. Mugnozza called out for them to wait. They couldn’t just run off. She needed to know where the infected branch came from. Harper could still hear her shouting as they hustled down the far stairway.

In minutes, they were back at the hotel’s front entrance, Adrian panting, Harper drawing smooth, easy breaths. In the lobby, Adrian said, “Split up? You take the elevator, I’ll use the stairs.”

“Go,” Harper said.

The elevator was empty and waiting. When the doors closed, she checked the video app, but her phone had lost its signal.

As she rode to the fourth floor, Harper stared at her reflection in the mirrored panel beside the buttons. There was a hollow, haunted look in her eyes, and the color had leached from her face as if she’d been trapped in an underground cavern for months, starved of human contact, caught in a swoon of make-believe.

Was it the murky lighting and the distortion of tinted glass, or had Harper truly become the soulless body double looking back at her? Had she so completely remade herself into a bitter, avenging angel consumed by her need for retribution that her old self had dwindled to nothing but this bloodless silhouette?

The doors opened and she stumbled forward, got her balance, then turned right and rounded the corner to the long corridor. Her room and the adjoining one were halfway down. She tried to erase the image of herself in the elevator glass, but it dogged her as she jogged the last few yards to the door of the room.

At the far end of the hallway, Adrian appeared and called out to her.

“We just missed them.”

He trotted down the hall and joined her at the door. He bent forward, put his hands on his knees, and took a minute to catch his breath.

She waited, eyes closed, head bowed, still recovering from the ghastly reflection.

“I was on my way to the stairwell and saw them through the side doors getting into a black Volkswagen and driving off.”

“Did they see you?”

“No way.”

“Let’s have a look.”

She entered her own room, unbolted the adjoining door, and swung the second interior door open. The package was prominently displayed on the back of the couch in the suite’s sitting room. They’d watched Gerda nix the first place Müller had chosen. Apparently, she’d picked a better spot for dramatic effect.

“Doesn’t look like a bomb,” he said.

“Just to be sure, stand in the other room. Okay?”

As Adrian moved back to the doorway, Harper looked around the room, then selected the copper ice bucket. She moved to within ten feet of the package, slung the bucket at it, then ducked behind a chair. The bucket crashed into the package, knocked it off its perch, and both bucket and package tumbled to the floor.

From the way the parcel rolled and bounced, she could tell it was lightweight and soft sided.

Harper picked up the bundle and examined it. The white wrapping paper was several layers thick, disguising the contents. But it felt spongy and weighed less than a pound.

“It’s not a bomb,” she said. “And it’s not documents.”

She handed it over to Adrian. “It’s for you,” she said. “Your name.”

Adrian ripped off the string and tore away the layers of paper.

When he reached the item inside, his face blanched. He clamped down hard on nothing.

“What the hell, Adrian?”

He held it out, a brown-and-white stuffed animal with floppy ears.

“Those motherfuckers,” he said. “It’s Benny the Beagle.”

“Your daughter’s? You’re sure?”

“Oh yeah. I’m sure.”

He drew out his phone and walked onto the balcony and made the call. He was outside for ten minutes. Harper couldn’t make out the words but could hear his quiet manner, soothing, trying to pacify; then his voice turned terse, followed by a clipped back-and-forth, a bitter argument, then silence.

When he reentered the room, his face was flushed and his breathing strained.

“Julie Marie’s okay?”

“Somebody stole the thing from her bedroom. She woke up, saw him, and she screamed, and the guy—it had to be Müller—came over to her and clamped his hand over her mouth, almost suffocated her. Her lips are cut up and swollen, and she’s so scared she can barely speak. It’s my fault, of course. Shelly said as much, and I really can’t argue the point.”

“It’s not your fault, Adrian. It’s mine. I’m dragging everybody into this, putting everyone at risk, even your little girl thousands of miles away.”

“Bullshit, Harper. I’m here because I want to be. Doing what’s right.”

He gazed toward the balcony, then used the heels of his hands to rub at his eyes as if to erase the images of his daughter’s suffering.

“There’s a note,” Harper said and held it out. “It was inside the wrapping paper.”

He turned and searched her eyes before he read it. What he saw made him wince.

She waited as he read the note a second time. When he finished, he sighed heavily, then wadded it up and flung it to the floor.

“No way,” he said. “No fucking way I’m giving you up.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did,” she said.

He shook his head and for a long uncomfortable moment couldn’t meet her eyes. He seemed to disappear into a place inside his head where no one else was allowed.

She reached out and touched his arm to draw him back.

“Is Julie Marie safe?”

He blinked, and when he’d fully returned, there was a strain in his eyes, a hardness she’d not seen before, and when he answered her, his tone was distracted, as though part of him was still lingering in the faraway place where he’d retreated a few seconds earlier.

“They drove to Shelly’s mother’s ranch near Salt Lake. I told Shelly that was too damn obvious, to get out of there right now, go to a motel, somewhere anonymous. Drive to another city, Albuquerque, Taos.”

He finally looked at her again, his eyes heavy and mournful.

“Would she know if she was being tailed?”

“I asked her the same thing, but she got pissy and hung up on me.”

“What about Lavonne?”

“What about her?”

“Maybe she could send people to protect them. At least locate them somewhere secure. A safe house.”

“Even if Lavonne was willing, Shelly wouldn’t go along. Eight years in the service, she’s finished following orders. She’s a full-on rebel now.”

Harper left him there in his unsettled state, walked out to the balcony, and stood looking toward the sea. A container ship was steaming into port, its wake extending for miles behind it, sending waves sloshing ashore along the narrow beach. Gulls wheeled and screamed above the frothy water, diving into the foam, feeding on the stunned baitfish. Along the promenade a parade of tourists meandered by, lovers holding hands, mothers with strollers, boys chasing other boys. A picturesque and cheerful world Harper had barely heeded in her days in Bari.

In her chest she felt a pang of regret for all she’d failed to see in recent days. And not just now, but in the joyless months since Ross and Leo had been murdered, all of it lost in a bleary whirl. Thousands of disjointed images had washed over her, but few had left lasting impressions.

She walked back inside. In those few moments on the balcony, nothing had changed, but things felt different. The ocean air was tangier, the light had a richer luster, and she felt a swell of certainty in her chest. She was ready now. Past ready to bring this mission to a close, to do whatever was required, accept any risk.

“Let’s take them up on their offer,” Harper said.

“Yeah? And how would we do that?”

“Call the number on the note, let Bixel know you’re ready to talk.”

“About what?”

“Handing me over.”

“Really? Deliver you to those animals? And then what?”

“That’s when we take them.”

He shook his head as if to clear it of her nonsense, then he reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder, keeping her at a safe distance while he searched her eyes.

“They know about Julie Marie. Maybe they’ve lost her for now, but they’ll find her if they try hard enough. Are you so sure you can trust me? What if I were to accept their bargain for real? Trade you for my daughter’s safety.”

She managed a smile and kept it in place, and after a few seconds, his eyes softened.

“Give me up?” she said. “I’m willing to take that chance.”

Naff held her eyes, and Harper felt something shift inside her, then a pins-and-needles tingle, as though a crucial part of her viscera that had been numb for a long while was awakening.

Adrian removed his hand from her shoulder, turned, and retrieved the wadded-up note. He took it to the table and flattened it. Then he drew out his cell phone and punched in a number.

“Adrian?”

“I’m not calling the number on the note. A different one.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know her. Name is Jennifer Dowdy. She’s a tech wiz, a friend of mine back at Albion. Got some serious skills.”

“What kind of skills?”

He tapped the note. “Kind that might come in handy in taking down these fuckheads.”

Bonnie Albion cracked her father’s gun safe with ease. The four-digit combination her father had used was the month, day, and year of his own birthday. Not particularly clever, her father. Nor was he particularly fatherly. She believed if another father had been so unoriginal as to choose a date for his combination, he would have chosen the birthday of his only child. But not Bonnie’s father. No, not hers.

She tested the pistols, holding each in her hand, feeling their heft, their balance. Next, she stood before her father’s bedroom mirror and pressed each pistol to her temple to see if her hand quivered, which might alter the trajectory of the shot. In her readings about suicide, she had discovered that some attempts with handguns resulted not in death but in debilitating injuries because of such tremors. Victims doomed to live out their days in a vegetative state. It seemed impossible that one could miss one’s own skull at such close range, but apparently it happened.

The pistol that seemed to fit her hand most naturally and whose muzzle conformed best to the shape of Bonnie’s skull was a revolver made by Smith & Wesson. So another decision was made.

She used the ammunition in her father’s gun safe to load the weapon, then, again, touched her temple with the muzzle. Although she could sense the small increase in weight of the loaded gun, even after holding the muzzle in place for several seconds while observing herself in the mirror, Bonnie detected not even the slightest tremble in her hand.

She returned the other pistols to their proper places, locked the gun safe, then returned to her bedroom with the revolver. Miriam was waiting for her, perched on Bonnie’s pillow and mewling.

Before Bonnie committed the act, she had one more consideration. She needed to reflect on Miriam’s fate and make a decision. Her cat depended on Bonnie and never left her side when she was at home. Bonnie could not simply put Miriam out on the street to fend for herself. The cat would not survive a night in the outdoors. Bonnie had no friends she trusted enough to be Miriam’s caretakers. There was Bonnie’s mother, who had always shown affection for Miriam, but if Bonnie called her mother and proposed she adopt the cat, her mother would surely become suspicious and probe Bonnie’s motivation. Her mother was quite shrewd that way. If she caught the slightest whiff of Bonnie’s plan, she would undoubtedly intervene.

So there it was. Until she had resolved the issue of Miriam’s future, Bonnie would have to delay her exit and simply hope she had sufficient strength to squeeze the trigger when that hour came.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Bari Milling Works, Bari, Italy

“Who is that man?”

“His name is Derek. My employer sent him as my helper.”

Beyond the glass wall of Manfred’s office, Derek Müller was roaming the plant floor, observing the workers as they performed their labors with the olives and the machinery.

It was almost nine on that Wednesday evening, and the hum of the mill was quieter than the night before. The muted rumble might have seemed soothing to Gerda if she had not been so furious and so broken.

“I missed you last night, love,” Manfred said. “I made you a special dinner, all your favorite dishes. Käsespätzle, Kürbissuppe, Bratkartoffeln. You didn’t return. Where were you? You didn’t answer my texts. I was worried.”

“You behave as if nothing has happened between us, as if there are no problems.”

“Gerda, please. You’re clearly angry. What is it?”

“Last night,” Gerda said, “you left me standing here and went to the jail to see about one of your workers, this man, Pagolo. You walked away and now you expect me to pretend we did not say those words. To pretend that everything is normal between us.”

“Pagolo is charged with murdering a man. An American. I had to answer questions from the polizia and to make sure Pagolo was represented by an attorney. I texted you to explain.”

“You’re avoiding the issue, Manfred.”

He crossed the room, opened his arms, and tried to embrace her, but she put her hand against his chest and shoved him back.

“Money?” Manfred said. “You want to talk more about money? Is that it?”

“Not money,” Gerda said. “I’m done with that.”

“What then?”

“You spoke of my father. You knew of his mistreatment of me.”

He blinked, looked away, then back at her. Nodded hesitantly.

“I never told you about my father. Never.”

He used both hands to sweep his shaggy blond hair away from his face, then looked down at the floor and let it fall back into place.

“You’re lying, Manfred. I wasn’t drunk in the biergarten in Berlin. I am never in my life drunk. I remember that night distinctly. Why are you lying about this?”

He took a slow turn around the office, shutting and opening his eyes as if trying to fend off an excruciating pain. He halted near his desk, put a steadying hand against it. Gerda fingered the bright-red scarf hanging loose around her neck. Toying with a terrible idea.

“All right.” He looked off through the glass at his workers churning the fruit to oil. “You’re right. I lied.”

“I already know that. Tell me how you knew something I’ve never told anyone?”

Manfred could not summon the words. He walked over to the glass window and rested his forehead against the glass. So dramatic, this boy, who she had believed was a full-grown man.

“My mother told you,” Gerda said. “She’s the only one who knew.”

Manfred turned back to her and nodded, then bowed his head as if waiting for her to attack him. Gerda was close to doing it. Close to binding the scarf around his throat and choking off the rest of his lies.

“When did she tell you these things?”

“Months ago, in the spring.”

“Why did she tell you?”

“Because she learned that you and I cared for each other, that we were in love, and our love was serious. That I had intentions to marry you.”

“That doesn’t explain why she’d tell you something like this. Talk to me, Manfred. Explain.”

“She told me about . . . those events, I believe, to cause me hurt. To poison me against you. To suggest that you were damaged, soiled, contaminated. But it did not work, Gerda. It did not achieve any of that. It only made me love you the more.”

“Why would she do that? You’re not telling the complete truth.”

“To hurt me. To punish me.”

“For what? Punish for what?”

“I think you know, Gerda. I think you know already. I see it in your face. I hear it in your voice. You know already.”

“Say it. I want to hear it from your lips. Say it, Manfred.”

His shoulders sagged and he twisted away from her and said, “She was punishing me for betraying her.”

Gerda drew an acid breath. Her lungs were suddenly laced with fire as they had been so often in the final lap of the thousand meters. Gasping for air, throat smoldering, desperate for the finish line.

“When did this happen? What did you do?” Gerda did not want to know. Gerda had to know.

“The year in Stuttgart, it started then. You were there, Gerda. It was when you were first working with Coach Schneider, those long hours with the discus and the javelin.”

“While I worked, you were in bed with my mother?”

“I was fifteen. I knew nothing of women. Your mother, she took me to your apartment in Weilimdorf. She gave me peach schnapps, made me drunk. I didn’t realize what was happening, what I was doing.”

“How long did this last, this love affair with my mother?”

“It was not love. It was never love.”

“How long?”

“Years.”

“How many years?”

“Four.”

Gerda looked away and said, “That’s a great deal of peach schnapps, Manfred. Were you drunk for those four years? I don’t think so.”

“She threatened me,” he said. “If I ended it, she’d claim I overpowered her, I raped her. She’d destroy my career. I was stupid. I didn’t realize how foolish her threats were. I was afraid of her, Gerda. I was afraid.”

Gerda waved a hand in front of her as though fanning away a noxious smell.

She took a moment to calm herself, then said, “All right. So let me understand. You started with her at fifteen and you continued until you were nineteen. Which means, if my addition is accurate, there was a time when you were fucking my mother in the afternoon and kissing me in the evening.”

“I never felt anything for her. It was mechanical. That’s all.”

“Did you ever tell her that?”

“What you and I have, it is real. With her, it was nothing, it was as insubstantial as a dream, nothing more.”

“A dream.”

“It meant nothing.”

“It meant something to her, I believe.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I want to hear everything, Manfred. I want every detail. The sex, every position, the sound of her orgasm, the smell of her, everything.”

“No, I can’t do that. Even this much, putting these things into words, is torture.”

“I will hear it. If you hope to make this right between us, I must hear everything, no matter how much it hurts you or it hurts me. If there is any chance for us, I must know it all.”

She drew the scarf from her neck and held it in her right hand. Manfred looked at the dangling red cloth, then looked into her eyes. He moistened his lips.

“So that too? She told you this as well?” She jerked the scarf.

“What are you asking?” Manfred took a step away from her.

“She told you how Max died. Didn’t she? Didn’t she?”

He said nothing. He didn’t need to. His eyes, his face said enough.

“It’s all right,” he said. “What you did was brave. It was right and just and moral. You did a good thing, my love. Killing your father, it was a noble thing.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Bari, Italy

Thursday morning, Adrian came to Harper’s suite to share a room service breakfast. More pastry, more espresso, and today, for Adrian, a plate of scrambled eggs with sausage. The ocean breeze was bellying out the gauzy curtains and filling the room with a medley of odors that had been whisking Harper back to her distant life in Miami.

“I texted a message to the number on the note, made my offer to hand you over.”

Harper sipped the coffee and nodded, prompting him to go on.

“I said we’d meet them at ten o’clock tomorrow at Bari Milling Works. Made sense to piggyback on the real estate closing. They were coming anyway. Now they get a bonus. You.”

“Do they trust you?”

“Not any more than I trust them. But they’ll show.”

“How can you be sure?”

“They have no choice. I threw in a clincher.”

“Something you didn’t run by me?”

“I knew you’d approve.”

“Go ahead, tell me.”

“I said I knew about spittlebugs and a man named Dickens and a charming disease that might just undo the real estate transaction they’re so gung-ho about. Either they show up and prove Julie Marie is safe, or I tell Knobel he’s about to buy a whole bunch of doomed trees.”

Harper shook her head. “Take their word for it that she’s safe?”

“You have a better idea?”

“Chop the head off the snake.”

Naff motioned for her to finish her thought.

Harper said, “If Albion and Bixel don’t make it out of the room alive, seems like that would guarantee Julie Marie’s safety.”

Naff searched her eyes for a moment, then shook his head in wonder.

“You just don’t stop, do you?”

They finished their breakfast in silence. Twice Harper caught him shooting coy glances her way, but she kept her focus on her food and La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, the morning paper.

When they were done, Harper pushed back her chair, reached into her purse, and drew out a folded map.

“We need to drive around,” she said. “Check out more groves.”

“Why?”

“I want evidence,” she said. “Something concrete to put under Knobel’s nose, show him this is for real.”

“Like what?”

“Like that branch we left with the professor yesterday.”

“We don’t know which groves are in the Albion Olives tract.”

“True.”

“I know a local who could help,” Naff said. “I need to see him about something else anyway.”

“What local do you know?”

“Stick with me, kiddo, and find out.”

They left the hotel and walked into the old city, Adrian guiding them down one narrow lane after another, doubling back a couple of times, stopping, looking around, until Harper asked him if he was lost.

“Maybe a little.”

“Tell me where we’re going and I’ll ask someone for directions.”

“We’re close,” he said. “Give me a second, I’ll find it.”

Ross had been the same. Determined to find his way without help, even if it took twice as long. Harper had teased him about the habit, but Ross argued that it was more than male vanity. For men like her husband, who’d had frontiersman ancestry, there was an ingrained need to keep their pathfinding skills well honed—you never knew when they might be critical to survival. It sounded like pure bullshit, but Ross seemed to take it seriously, so she hadn’t called him on it.

A few minutes later, Adrian turned down an alleyway and halted in front of a trattoria named Lombardi.

“Voilà,” he said.

“You’re a regular frontiersman.”

He gave her a curious look. “Thanks. Nice of you to say.”

It was only a few minutes after ten, and the sign on the window said the establishment didn’t open until noon, but Adrian hammered on the heavy wood door and kept hammering until it creaked opened and a woman in her late thirties looked out at him through the crack.

Her eyes were red and swollen, and she dabbed her nose with a handkerchief.

“Remember me, Valentina?” Adrian asked. “The guy who was looking for Dickens. Can we come in?”

Valentina looked past Naff at Harper and asked who she was.

“This is my friend. She’s the one who discovered his body.”

Her chin trembled, but she stepped aside and drew open the door.

“She’s carrying his child,” he whispered to Harper.

They followed Valentina into the bar, and she called out for her father.

Papa Lombardi stalked out of the kitchen, his hands dusted with flour, his face stippled with flecks of dough.

Without a word, he waved for Adrian and Harper to follow him to his office in the back and wiped his hands on his apron as they walked.

“This is the woman digs up that man?”

“I discovered the body, yes,” Harper answered for herself. “And I delivered Pagolo to jail.”

“You beat him first. This is what I hear. Beat him bad and tie up his palle.”

“L’ho fatto solo per domarlo.” Just to subdue him.

“You should have killed the bastardo.”

Adrian explained that they needed Mr. Lombardi’s help. He pulled out the map and asked if the man could mark the groves that Albion had purchased.

“Stolen, not purchase. Like mafia.”

Lombardi laid the map on his desk and studied it for several minutes, then opened a desk drawer, took out a pen, and drew a single large circle around an area south and west of Bari.

“And the Bellomo grove?”

He drew an X in the exact center of the circle.

“I thank you,” Lombardi said to Harper. “Is better to know for sure this man Dickens is dead, not that he run away and leave Valentina and her baby behind.”

Harper told him she was very sorry for Valentina’s loss.

“One more thing,” Adrian said.

Lombardi gazed at Adrian with large, damp eyes and said nothing.

“I need a gun.”

“What gun?”

“Preferably a pistol. Do you happen to have one you can let me borrow until tomorrow evening? Or maybe you know someone who has one I could use.”

Harper said nothing for the rest of the visit, but walking back to the hotel to get the car, she said, “A goddamn pistol, Adrian? Why?”

“We don’t know how this is going to shake out. Who’s going to be there, or if they’ll be packing. You’re great with that hand-to-hand stuff and I can hold my own, but going into a situation like this, I’d like a little more firepower.”

“That pistol looks ancient. You sure it works?”

“Lombardi says it does, I trust the guy.”

“I hate guns.”

“Necessary evil,” he said. “This one’s a dandy. Astra A-100, feels like a Sig P229. A nine with seventeen in the magazine. A little bulky, but, hey, can’t be too picky, right?”

“I hate guns.”

“But you’ve used them.”

“When there was no other choice.”

In Adrian’s rented Opel, following the map into the countryside, Naff drove while Harper navigated using the map.

They worked their way around the rim of the circle Lombardi had drawn, parking along the shoulders of the road and hiking into the groves, peering up into the branches until they spotted a brown patch of leaves. For the ones they could not reach from the ground, they shared the climbing duties, shinnying out onto the heavy limbs to snap off the withered stalks.

When they exited each grove, Harper jotted a note on the pad she carried in her purse, the approximate location of each stalk they collected. She speared the tip of the branch through the page to keep track of which was which. She laid the stems in the backseat, the pile growing to several dozen by the time they’d completed the giant circle.

“Spread pretty far,” Adrian said as they were heading back to Bari. “And that’s just the perimeter. We didn’t go very deep inside the circle.”

“And we didn’t look beyond the circle either.”

She and Adrian carried the branches into the lobby of the hotel, and Harper asked the concierge if he could find a bag of some kind big enough to hold them. He took a long, inquisitive look at the desiccated branches festooned with Harper’s notes and said, yes, of course, he’d be only too happy. He returned with a large hotel laundry bag barely big enough to hold the collection of branches.

She and Adrian had a drink in the bar. A Peroni for him, a gin and tonic for Harper. For the moment she’d lost her taste for blue glaciers.

“Take a look at this.” Adrian held out his phone.

On the screen was a map of Bari with a flashing red dot at the Bari Karol Wojtyła Airport, the local international hub.

“Jennifer Dowdy sent me the link. I told you she was a tech wiz.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The dot is the current location of the phone from the number on that note. Looks like they just arrived at Bari airport.”

Adrian studied his phone and shook his head.

“Must’ve turned the phone off. No more red dot.”

“Well, at least we know they’re here. Keep checking that thing.”

When they finished their drinks, Adrian said, “You feel like dinner somewhere? My treat.”

She did, but she said no.

She claimed she was tired, needed to rest before tomorrow’s showdown. He patted her on the back, accepting her lie.

“You change your mind, I’ll be in the rooftop restaurant looking longingly at the view.”

“Call me if that dot lights up again.”

In her room, Harper called Sal’s phone and got Nick instead. Sal was sacked out in the recliner. Nick said his burn wounds were healing nicely and he was up and around, feeling restless, ready to come help Harper in any way he could. Not necessary, she told him. Things were about to come to a close. She was hoping to be back in Madrid by the weekend.

He filled her in on Daniela’s progress. She’d endured two more skin grafts and was doing slightly better than the doctors expected. She and Nick took long hallway walks together twice a day and were talking about what they’d do once she was released. One plan was that Nick would take some time off from work and go back to the olive groves in Canena and help Daniela supervise the harvest and the reconstruction of Castillo de Aranjuez. Harper hadn’t heard him so animated in years.

She didn’t need to ask him if he was falling more deeply in love.

After the call, she slipped into her pajamas and lay atop the sheets and stared at the ceiling for a long time before finally she rolled over and switched off the lamp.

In the darkness, she continued to stare at the ceiling, and during the little sleep that followed, she dreamed of moonscapes populated with skeletal trees, and sometime near morning she had a long and vivid vision of a seaside cottage with its doors and windows flung open to the ocean breezes, and on the beach exuberant children ran freely, playing tag, throwing a ball to a floppy-eared retriever, and every so often one of the children stopped to wave up at Harper, who stood on the sunny verandah, shoulder to shoulder with a man whose face she could not see.

THIRTY-NINE

Bari Milling Works, Bari, Italy

Planning to arrive well before the scheduled meeting at ten, Harper and Adrian left the hotel at half past eight. They’d decided to walk to the mill to get the blood circulating before the face-off. Harper was carrying the hotel laundry bag full of diseased branches.

She’d chosen her best close-quarters combat outfit: loose, gray, stretchy trousers and a dark, long-sleeve cotton top, rubber-soled flats. She’d used a scrunchie to bind her hair in a tight ponytail.

Naff wore faded blue jeans and a button-down shirt, with a gray sport jacket to conceal the bulge of the pistol he’d wedged between the waistband and the small of his back.

“I should’ve asked Lombardi for a holster. This thing is wrecking the hell out of my lumbar.”

“You need to try a little yoga, Naff. You’re not very limber.”

He smiled but looked mildly offended. “You can tell that just by looking at me?”

“The way you walk, your posture. How you get up from a chair, basic movements. Yeah, it’s pretty obvious.”

“I’m flattered you’ve been paying so much attention.”

“Don’t be. It’s part of my training. Knowing the limitations of my fighting partner. Whether I can depend on you or not.”

“Jesus, now you tell me. I could’ve done some knee bends when I got out of bed this morning, be ready to go.”

“I think it’s beyond knee bends.”

“Well, all the more reason to be packing heat.”

The air was cooler this morning, a marine mist like an invisible fog was rolling off the Adriatic. A few thousand feet overhead, a haze had dulled the blue of the sky. Not quite a dreary day, but heading in that direction.

“Since we’re noticing things about each other,” Naff said, “you’ve been balling up your fist and opening it every few seconds for the last four blocks. That part of your training too?”

Harper shook out her hand.

“Yeah,” she said. “A little tense.”

“Nothing to worry about. We’ve got our plan. It’s a good one. If things go south, I got seventeen bullets to turn ’em around.”

She gestured at his phone. “Your red flashing dot?”

“Yeah, yeah. I checked last night, again this morning. They must’ve turned off their phone. It’s been blank.”

“Check again.”

Naff pulled out his phone, swiped, and tapped the screen till he brought up the map.

He stared at the screen. He swiped and tapped a little faster. Looked up at her.

“What is it?”

He halted, stepped to the edge of the sidewalk out of the way of the foot traffic, and she leaned in for a look at his phone.

“Madrid,” she said. “The assholes went to Madrid.”

“Wait a second, let me enlarge the damn thing.”

He fiddled with the symbols on the bottom margin of the screen until he managed to tighten down on the street map.

“Haven’t made it to the hospital. Looks like maybe ten, fifteen minutes out, depending on traffic.”

Harper was already punching in Sal’s number on her phone.

She heard a series of clicks, then several more, the signal struggling between satellites and cell towers.

Sal, sounding very distant, said, “You never call, you never write.”

“Someone’s coming for you.”

“Who?” Sal said. “When?”

“Albion or his thugs, they’ll arrive in the next few minutes. Call security, get them up to your room. Make sure Daniela’s covered too.”

“How many are there?”

“I don’t know. Hang up, get security moving, and call me back when you’re all set.”

“Don’t worry about us. The Rossi boys decided to stay. Benjamin fell in love with a nurse in the hospital. Can you believe it? Wise guy like that, he’s gotten so goofy he’s started writing poems. He’s trying to learn Spanish, for god’s sake. I told him, You don’t need to learn their language. Use the universal language, right?”

“Are both Rossis close by?”

“Yeah, yeah. I can see Benjy just outside the door. I don’t know where Marvin is, probably the cafeteria. That guy eats—”

“Enough! Get them close by and call hospital security, now. Let them know bad shit’s coming your way. Hang up and do it right now. Okay?”

“Okay, okay. Man, you’re pushy. You need to relax, Harper. Take some deep breaths.”

He clicked off before she could yell at him again.

“Now what?” Adrian said.

“We’ve done what we can. We go ahead as planned.”

“And if Bixel and Albion are in Madrid?”

“They aren’t,” she said. “Bari’s where the real estate deal is going down. This is where Knobel is, where you’re handing me over to Albion. All the big fish will be here. Going after Sal and Nick has to be a diversion. Maybe it’s Gerda, maybe it’s your pal Müller. We know both of them were here in Bari. Maybe they were at the airport flying out.”

“Could be that. Let’s hope you’re right.” He blew out a breath. “So we’re going with the same plan.”

“Yeah, same plan,” she said. “Let’s crush these bastards.”

A block before the mill, Harper stepped into an alleyway full of garbage cans and refuse. Cats were teeming around piles of food scraps.

“How about here?” she said.

Adrian looked up and down the sidewalk and nodded.

“Perfect.”

He drew the white plastic zip tie from his jacket pocket. Harper set the bag of branches on the ground and turned her back to him and put her hands behind her, crossing her wrists.

Adrian cinched her wrists together, closing the zip tie snug.

“Too damn tight,” she said.

“Has to look believable.”

“Snip this one off. Do another one not so tight.”

Adrian took hold of the zip tie and drew it tighter.

“Jesus, Naff, what’re you doing? That hurts.”

“Good,” he said, his voice harsher than she’d heard it before.

“Cut it off, Adrian. I’m going numb already.”

He gripped her shoulder with his right hand, holding her in place, and before she knew what he was up to, he’d let go of her shoulder and lashed a gag across her mouth, knotted it behind her neck, then, with a rough shove, swung her around, face-to-face.

“Small change in the plan,” he said.

His eyes were blank. His face assumed a bland detachment.

He stepped behind her, grabbed hold of the plastic tie, and wrenched it upward, pressuring her shoulder joints. She heaved and tried to spin around and break his hold, but he yanked up harder. On the practice mats she’d seen shoulders dislocated with less pressure.

“Don’t fuck with me, Harper. I like you fine, but family comes first.”

Her legs were free. She had an arsenal of tactics. Ashi barai, a simple foot sweep. Fumikomi, a stomping kick. Hiza geri, a knee strike. There were roundhouse kicks and circular falling kicks and jumping double front kicks. But Naff clearly knew what she was capable of and kept prodding and heaving her forward, keeping her off balance, keeping enough distance to make a successful strike impossible. The numbness in her hands crept up her arms and into her shoulders. The plastic tie was cutting deep into her wrists. A trickle of blood running into her right hand.

She needed to get centered, to load up her thighs and spring away from him, but he was stronger than she’d realized, and his grip on her wrists was unyielding and ruthless.

She hadn’t seen this coming. She hadn’t read him well, falling for his playful banter, his wistful eyes, that exchange of family photos.

Another failure of situational awareness.

A minute later, they were at the mill’s loading dock. Workers stopped to watch this spectacle, a woman bound and gagged and staggering up the ramp into the plant, shoved along by a dark-haired man in a sport coat.

Inside the glass office, Manfred saw the two of them appear and rose from behind his desk and hurried out to the plant floor.

“What is this?”

“You Manfred Knobel?”

“I am. Who are you?”

“Never mind that. This is for you.” He handed Knobel the laundry bag full of desiccated twigs.

While Naff was beside her, engaged with Knobel and exposed, Harper unleashed a roundhouse kick aimed for his midsection.

But Adrian skipped back and batted her foot away. Then he drew back his hand and snapped his right fist flush into her nose. She felt the entire mill spin a full rotation around her, watched as the bright bulbs in the ceiling winked once, then dimmed, and a blackout curtain inched across the room and finally shut out the last of the light.

FORTY

Bari Milling Works, Bari, Italy

She tasted blood. Her jaw ached but not as much as her shoulders. Surely she’d dislocated one of them when she slammed onto the cement floor.

She opened her eyes. She’d been positioned upright in the visitor’s chair across from Manfred Knobel’s desk. Gerda Bixel, slouched in the leather chair, was watching Harper regain consciousness.

“Forgot your camera?” Gerda said.

Someone had removed the gag. Trapped behind her, her hands were numb, probably swollen and turning blue, wrists burning from the plastic band cutting into her flesh.

She made a quick inventory. Feet and legs okay. Stomach fine, internal organs, check. She was dazed but the fog was clearing. Her shoulders throbbed, but her arms were no longer merely numb. Now they felt paralyzed.

Adrian and Manfred entered the office.

“The bitch woke up,” Gerda said.

Manfred came to her and leaned over to peer into her eyes.

“You tricked me,” he said. “You’re not an OLAF investigator.”

“Did you tell them about the branches?” she asked Adrian.

“Shut up or I’ll gag you again.”

Gerda had drawn one of the stems from the laundry bag. She was turning it between her fingers like a freshly rolled joint.

“Cut me loose, Adrian.”

“Can’t do it,” he said. “You’re too valuable, and too dangerous.”

“Her?” Gerda scoffed.

Adrian’s phone buzzed, and he drew it out and checked the caller ID.

He answered it, listened for several moments. He closed his eyes and kept them closed for a long minute.

“Don’t do that, Bonnie. Do not do that. Wait. I’ll send someone to help you.”

He listened a little longer.

“All right. Then I’ll come myself. I’ll come soon, very soon. Don’t do anything till I arrive, okay? Can you promise me?”

When he clicked off, his face was pale. He shot Harper a quick, enigmatic look.

“Bonnie?” Manfred said. “Who is that?”

“Albion’s daughter. She got a pistol from somewhere and she’s holding her father hostage. Threatening to shoot him unless he confesses.”

“For god’s sake,” Manfred said. “Confess to what?”

“She says he’s been trying to kill her. Has to do with blood transfusions. Long story.”

“Albion’s still in Switzerland?” asked Manfred.

“Yeah, he won’t be attending our little soiree.”

Manfred walked to the desk, pointed at the laundry bag. “What’s this about?”

“Bixel sabotaged the groves,” Naff said. “It’s a disease called olive quick decline syndrome. A bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, spread by the meadow spittlebug. Bixel hired a man named Dickens to release infected insects into your groves months ago. The disease is a time bomb that’s been ticking all summer, and now it’s about to explode. Not long after you sign the documents and take title to the groves, you’ll discover you’re the owner of thousands of acres of dying trees.”

Gerda came slowly to her feet. “My mother did this?”

“Yes,” Harper said. She braced herself with an elbow and wriggled upright to a standing position in front of the chair. “The trees are beginning to die. You can see the tags on those branches, where each branch comes from. It started in the Bellomo grove, and it fanned out in all directions. Soon the government will come in and cut and burn it all. And that still won’t stop its spread.”

Adrian turned to Manfred.

“I’m curious about Bixel’s motive. Why would that very busy lady go to such lengths to fuck you over, kid? Spread this shit through the olive groves, wangle you into buying the groves. Why would she go to all that trouble? Got any ideas?”

Gerda swept the bag of stems off the desk. Her mouth twisted into a gargoyle’s dreadful scowl. “It’s justice,” she said. “Exactly what you deserve, you shit-covered pig. To lose everything. The mill, the olive groves. Everything.”

Manfred said, “Gerda is right. I am guilty of terrible wrongdoing.”

“What wrongdoing?”

“He fucked my mother, that’s what. Fucked her for years. They were in bed together while I toiled on the track and the field. While I sweated and strained, they kissed and fondled and whispered.”

“She seduced me,” Manfred said. “I was just a child. Barely fifteen. She got me drunk.”

“Fifteen, ha,” Gerda said. “A boy that age knows exactly what he’s doing. You were drunk on sex. You loved it so much you couldn’t stop for years.”

“And you, Gerda?” Manfred’s face was flushed, his throat quivering. “Did you also love the sex with your father, Max? Did you secretly enjoy it so much you waited years before you finally killed the bastard?”

“Whew,” Adrian said. “Wait a minute, let me process this.”

“So there you go, Naff,” said Harper, taking a cautious step forward. “You’ve got your cause and effect. Happy now?”

“Sit down and shut up, Harper,” he said. “Or I’ll put you down.”

To Harper’s right, she saw Larissa Bixel enter the plant’s front door. She was toting a briefcase and dressed in a black business suit with low heels. Behind her was a burly man wearing a similar suit. Bixel stopped to ask directions from a worker, who pointed to the glassed-in office.

Bixel and the man marched across the concrete floor and entered the office.

“Well, hey there, Graham,” Adrian said. “Come all this way to join our merry group. Bet you didn’t realize what you were getting into.”

“Oh yeah,” Graham said. “I realized.”

Graham was broad shouldered and just over six feet. His hands were large and big knuckled, and his square face was dinged from dozens of fistfights, some that looked recent. He moved with the sure-footed confidence of a heavyweight boxer who’d won more rounds than he’d lost. And there was a lump visible through his suit jacket near his left armpit, which told Harper that there were at least two handguns in the room.

For as long as she’d been conscious, Harper had been tensing and releasing her arms, trying to roll her shoulders just enough to bring circulation back to her extremities. At Marco’s insistence, she’d practiced escaping various restraints, police handcuffs, ropes, and chains. She’d had reasonable success with the zip tie, but in such close quarters she wasn’t sure she could pull off the technique.

She’d been inching her fingers around the plastic band, trying to locate the small, open case where the plastic teeth locked the tie in place. That joint was the weak link in the zip tie, but it had to be positioned exactly.

As Bixel came close and inspected Harper’s swollen face, Harper finally found the lock and began to edge it clockwise until the joint was in the gap between her crossed wrists, where the laws of physics made it most vulnerable.

Now with one hard smack of her wrists against her tailbone, the plastic band should snap open and her arms would be free. On the practice mats the move worked half the time. But during training she got a second chance and more chances if she needed them, while here in a room packed with adversaries, one crack was probably all she’d manage.

What worried her most was that even if she did break free, would her arms be able to serve her?

Bixel grabbed Harper’s shoulder and hauled her halfway around. She traced a finger along the edges of the zip tie, then curled a finger under the plastic band and tugged, testing its tightness.

Satisfied, she shoved Harper away and turned to face the room.

“Our boy Graham here,” Adrian said to the group, “he’s the top dog on my security team. Mean-ass ex-ranger, got all the necessary skills to murder whoever needs to get murdered. Right, buddy?”

“Thanks, Adrian,” Graham said. “Nice to meet you folks.”

Bixel turned to Graham and ordered him to go out onto the mill floor and send the workers away and, once they were gone, to make certain all the doors were locked.

When Graham left, Bixel said, “Did you punch McDaniel, Naff?”

Naff shrugged. “She wouldn’t shut up.”

“Well, I must confess, I’m pleasantly surprised you were true to your word and actually brought her along. I wasn’t sure you’d go through with it.”

“I want my daughter safe. If this is what it takes, fine.”

“I’m true to my word. Julie Marie has seen the last of us.”

“Okay,” Adrian said. “So take the bitch away. I want her out of my sight.”

“Easy now, Adrian. What’s your hurry?”

“Hello, Mother,” Gerda said. “Didn’t you see me over here?”

“I saw you, sweetness. Hello. So glad you could come. Now if you would be so kind as to help Mr. Graham escort McDaniel to the car, I’ll join you shortly.”

She favored her daughter with a smile.

“And me,” Manfred said. “Do I get no greeting? No sweetness?”

“From you, Mr. Knobel, we simply need a few signatures.”

She opened the briefcase and drew out the paperwork and arranged the documents on the desk and stepped aside. Harper caught sight of a dark glint inside the case. Maybe a weapon, maybe not.

Graham came back in, said, “Place is all locked up.”

“So then. If you please, Mr. Knobel. Let’s all be professionals, shall we? Sign the papers and we’ll all be on our way.”

“Manfred knows about the spittlebugs,” Harper said. “You’re too late. It’s not going to work.”

Bixel turned to Graham. “Get this fucking whore out of here. What’re you waiting for?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Harper took a quick breath, did a deep bow from the waist, lifted her hands behind her back as far as the restraints allowed, then slammed her wrists against her rump. The plastic strap cracked apart.

When she straightened and tried to throw her hands up in a defensive pose, she found her arms were mush.

“Shoot her, Graham. Do it now.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Naff said.

Naff was sighting Lombardi’s ancient automatic at Graham’s gut.

“Fuck you, Naff.” Graham lurched to his right, made a grab for Harper’s arm, trying to swing her in front of him as a shield.

Before he could close the distance, Harper snapped a side kick against Graham’s knee, nailed it, felt the joint give, heard the crunch.

Graham whooped and sagged away, trying to take her down with him as he fell, grabbing her wrist and dragging. She twisted her arm free, and when the big man landed on the floor, she stomped on the side of his head, adding another brushstroke to the scarred canvas of his face.

While focused on Graham, Harper had ignored the pistol shots, three of them, and one more as she was straightening.

Across the room, Adrian Naff was blown backward against the wall of photographs, his body twisting as he gasped and sank to the floor. A foot from where Adrian fell, Manfred was huddled behind the desk, whimpering, “No, no, no.”

Larissa Bixel swung her aim to Harper, a compact Glock 43, ten feet between them. “Now, Gerda, you will do what I say. It is best that you do not witness any more of this. Go outside and sit in the car. It’s a white Audi parked directly across the street. Go now, girl, while I clean up this mess.”

“No.”

“Gerda, go. Follow orders, dear.”

“Fuck your orders.”

While Bixel was glaring at her daughter, Harper dived to the side of the desk. Sliding across the floor, she fumbled for the pistol that had spilled from Naff’s hands. Clutching it finally with her deadened fingers.

Before she could regain her footing, two rounds blew apart the oak veneer near her head, one shot clipped Manfred in the shoulder, and he began to keen a wild banshee scream.

Harper rolled into the desk’s kneehole. Below the skirt of the desk, she followed Bixel’s ankles and low heels as she stalked around the perimeter. Harper aimed a yard above the ankles and fired through the wood, two shots, three, and another until Bixel barked in pain.

Surging from the kneehole, Harper sighted on Bixel’s chest, an arm’s length away. Bixel’s eyes were woozy, her head making small circles as if to find her balance on the dizzy floor beneath her. Her arms were slack, the Glock hanging out of sight, beneath the level of the desk. Near her waist, a ragged tear in the fabric of her suit seeped blood.

“Drop that gun. I want to hear it hit the floor.”

But Bixel didn’t move. She held Harper’s stare, as if daring her to fire, daring her to take down a defenseless woman.

“Shoot her,” Gerda said from across the room. “Shoot the bitch. Go on, do it. Why are you waiting?”

Even as Bixel lifted the Glock inch by inch with grim, wobbly effort, she remained a helpless target. Despite Harper’s claims, when the moment came, she couldn’t do it.

Killing the woman in such a state was unpardonable, a violation of the line Harper had drawn for herself in years of training.

Bixel’s Glock was waist-high, still pointed to the floor.

“Not as easy as you thought.” Bixel’s speech was a slurred hiss, the clumsy tongue of a drunk.

“Drop it,” Harper said again. “Goddamn it. Drop it now.”

“Not so easy, is it?” Bixel said. “Not so easy to kill.”

The muzzle of the Glock was tipping up, then coming level.

“Easy enough,” Harper said.

Harper’s arms were still weak and trembling, but she had to trust her training. She’d worked too hard to do otherwise.

She dropped Lombardi’s pistol on the desktop, snapped out her open hand, and seized the Glock, wrenching it from Bixel’s grasp. As wired as she was at that moment, there wasn’t a butterfly on earth that could have escaped her.

She caught a glimpse of Gerda stalking around the far side of the desk. Harper flung the pistol, aiming at Gerda’s head, but she ducked, and the pistol smashed into the wall of glass, sending cracks across its length. In the return motion, Harper chopped Bixel’s throat, a blow so hard and so precisely struck it sent the woman staggering backward, clutching her neck, gagging, and Harper tracked her across the room, ready to hack her throat again, crush her larynx, snap her hyoid bone, forever cut off air to her lungs, except Bixel’s head snapped to one side, two blasts of the Glock sending slugs into her face, tearing it apart, her nerveless body lurching backward and going down.

Before Harper could swing around to face the pistol, Gerda dropped it on the floor and screamed and leaped high across the desk and mounted Harper’s back.

She clenched her thighs around Harper’s waist and locked her ankles and, in the same instant, looped a silk scarf around Harper’s throat, yanked it hard, and held on.

Harper grabbed Gerda’s hands, but the bite of the scarf was quickly turning her arms and legs to slush. With the noose already sinking so deep, Harper had only seconds to find a solution before she choked out.

Across the room she spotted a flimsy possibility, and with that vague idea floating dimly before her, she staggered around the desk, Gerda’s breath heaving in Harper’s right ear. Ten feet to the glass door, half that to the clear panel that looked onto the plant floor.

The workers were gone, but the mill continued to churn, a low grumble of machinery vibrating through the floor. Millstone turning, stainless steel hammers bashing, the conveyer belt rattled on with only a few straggling olives bouncing along inside its ridged trays.

Gerda muscled the scarf tighter, and her legs crushed Harper’s ribs. Harper pried her fingers under the scarf, but they were too soft to open a gap, and worse, she was starting to feel lazy and indifferent, a melancholy gloom darkening the edges of her vision.

Inside the haze, a single wink of light drew her toward the glass wall. The glimmer of Leo’s smile, the flicker in her husband’s eyes, Ross and Leo, those two fading lights retreating into a distant fog bank.

Harper used her last seconds of clarity to focus on her footwork, a cross-step, a half spin, then she bent her knees and executed a backward thrust, vaulting into the ten-foot expanse of glass. Banging Gerda’s back against it, then banging again. But that didn’t break her hold. If anything, Gerda cinched the scarf tighter.

Harper reckoned she had only a handful of seconds before she blacked out. She tried one more backward thrust, put her remaining strength into the leap, driving Gerda’s backside into the glass. And this time the glass gave way, the wide single sheet fracturing around them and breaking apart in a cascade of splinters and large wedges.

Gerda screamed as the razory glass rained down.

Harper was cut, arms, face, ear, but it hardly mattered.

The scarf fell away from her throat, though Gerda’s legs remained clamped around Harper’s waist.

Fine, fine, everything was always fine in Marco’s world. No sweat, stay quiet inside the fray, stay smooth and supple, and work with what’s at hand. Use the tools before you.

To her right Harper saw the bottom frame of the glass wall still held the jagged remnants of the waist-high window, a row of spiky teeth like the lower jaw of a shark.

She kept her backward tilt and walked Gerda’s backside along the glass saw blade. Blocking out her wails, Harper walked the entire length of the office and started a return trip, slicing up the meat of Gerda’s back and rump, feeling the warm blood saturating Harper’s pants, running down her legs. Hers or Gerda’s, it didn’t matter.

Until Gerda let go. Until Gerda fell away.

Gasping and still faint, Harper stood over the young woman lying on her back, panting. Gerda opened her eyes and struggled to rise as Harper raised her shoe and stepped on Gerda’s throat and bore down until the high jumper, the Olympic silver medalist, stopped flailing, stopped quivering, and finally, before Gerda ceased all movement, Harper lifted her foot.

Across the factory floor, beside the rumbling machinery of the production line, the front door caved in, and four men in black body armor and automatic weapons poured through. As Harper was sinking to her knees, she glimpsed the tall African American woman in a Kevlar vest and a handgun at the ready, leading the pack of agents into the olive mill.

Lavonne. Lavonne.

FORTY-ONE

University Hospital, Bari, Italy

The surgeon stitching up Harper’s wounds protested bitterly, but while he worked, Harper insisted on calling Sal in Madrid.

“Hey, kid, molte grazie for the heads-up,” he said. “You were right. Guy named Derek Müller showed up with a big-ass pistol. Marvin spots him coming in the front door, grabs him while he’s trying to sneak up the back stairway, then drags the kid into an empty room, beats the holy mother of Christ out of the little shithead until he confesses who he worked for. No surprise there, it was Bixel. Then Marvin pitches the turdball out a third-story window. Sadly, the kid didn’t survive the landing. Police are investigating, bless their hearts. Wish them luck in their endeavors.”

When Harper’s stitching was done, Lavonne appeared in the recovery room, and Harper told her about Bonnie’s phone call to Naff. Lavonne asked her a few questions, but Harper could only repeat the little she’d heard from Naff’s end of the conversation. Lavonne drew out her cell and called Zurich’s criminal investigation unit, advising them to dispatch a team to check on Albion and the girl.

Forty-five minutes later, Lavonne’s phone rang, and she had a long conversation with a representative of the Swiss authorities, most of it spent listening. She relayed their story to Harper:

Shortly after Lavonne had called the Swiss cops, around eleven o’clock, three police officers arrived at Albion’s front door. When no one responded to their repeated knocking, the officers moved to the back entrance, where they breached the door, and after clearing the downstairs and finding no sign of life, they moved upstairs and went room by room until they discovered Lester Albion lying on the carpet at the foot of his daughter’s bed. He had been fatally shot in the heart. Three rounds.

Bonnie lay in bed, a pistol in her hand and a cat on her lap.

The female squad member spoke quietly to Bonnie, asking if she could describe what had upset her so.

“I couldn’t leave Miriam alone with that man. He kicks her when he thinks no one’s looking. Kicks her hard. And he confessed to the transfusions.”

Bonnie explained that Albion had been stealing her blood, using it to boost his own body’s chemistry so he could add muscle and improve his chances with a woman. Further, Bonnie believed Ms. Bixel and an Albion corporate nurse were accomplices in the scheme.

After a long exchange with the female officer, Bonnie handed over the weapon. Bonnie’s mother was contacted, and it was decided that the girl would be placed in the mother’s custody. Whether or not charges would be filed against her would be up to local prosecutors. But if Bonnie’s claims proved to be true, charges were highly unlikely.

“Does that disappoint you, Harper?”

“That Albion’s dead but I didn’t get to pull the trigger? Hell no. I wanted justice. It was never about bloodlust.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I wanted justice. This will do fine.”

“Well, personally, I’m thrilled the man’s dead. I’m only sorry that little girl has to carry the weight of it.”

“I’ve met Bonnie. If there’s any little girl who can handle the weight, it’s Bonnie Albion.”

“Hope that’s the case.”

“And Gerda?”

“From here on, Gerda Bixel will have to be content with prison gyms.”

Harper nodded at Lavonne and was silent.

“You haven’t asked about Naff.”

“I don’t care about Naff.”

But Lavonne brought her up-to-date anyway.

Hours earlier, when Lavonne’s team swept into the Bari Milling Works, they found Adrian Naff still conscious. He was treated on-site by one of Lavonne’s men, then whisked to the same university hospital as Harper. He’d taken three slugs, one in the right forearm, another in his left biceps, and one in the hip.

After hours in surgery in the operating room on the floor directly above Harper’s, Naff was still alive. His hip injury appeared to be the most grievous wound. The slug had struck the hip bone, shattered it, then ricocheted upward, where it tore through his spleen, liver, and part of his small intestine. Multiple surgeries would be required. He was in critical condition, and it was likely to be touch and go for days.

“Screw him,” Harper said.

Lavonne said, “You got it wrong, kid.”

“I don’t have it wrong. Naff was handing me over to Bixel. It was a betrayal, and I fell for it.”

“You fell for it, all right.”

Harper touched the bandage that covered her right ear. A pane from Knobel’s glass wall had sliced off a chunk of it. The tissue had been retrieved, and a plastic surgeon had reattached it. The damn wound throbbed like hell, but it was the itch beneath all that gauze that bothered her most.

“Yeah? Okay, so tell me, what did I fall for?”

“How do you think I wound up at the mill? Like that was an accident? It was my doing.”

“I assume you’ve got good intel.”

“Yeah, I do. And Naff was it. He kept me posted every step of the way. I gave him the okay on each detail.”

“Punching me in the face? Cuffing me so tight I still can’t feel my fingers?”

“Look, Harper, as good as you are at some things, I’m sorry, but your acting skills . . . well, you’re no Meryl Streep. If you tried to fake being Adrian’s hostage, Naff and I knew Bixel would see right through your act. If she had, you and I wouldn’t be having this talk. Soon as she read the con, you’d be dead.”

“He played me? You played me?”

“Did it work? That’s what matters. And yes, it worked.”

“Out on the street when he gagged me, the look he gave me—cold, dead eyed. That was fake?”

“Adrian’s good.”

“That punch, he could’ve broken my nose or my jaw.”

“He could have, but he didn’t. As I said, he’s good.”

“Shit.” She fingered one of the bandages on her arm. “Shit.”

“Okay, now I need to move. I’ve got irons in a few other fires. And a Gulfstream G550 to catch. But one more thing before I go.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m supposed to come back to work.”

“No, not yet. Here’s the deal. I want you to go home, back to Miami. Find a place to live—a nice, big, airy place, a place that makes you happy. Settle in, restart your business life, the photography. Maybe set up a couple of high-profile photo shoots with luminaries, rock stars, an ex-president, whatever, do an exhibit, a show, anything you can put together. Get your name in the news. People need to know you’re back at work, and you’re doing flashy stuff. If you need suggestions, I can help. I know some people.”

“I don’t need that kind of help.”

“Six months, maybe more, whatever it takes. When you’re a hundred percent settled and the career’s back in high gear, then we’ll talk about what’s next. Sit down, pick a target.”

Harper nodded. Hard to picture going home, hard to imagine being so close to ground zero, where her old life had been reduced to ashes.

“And there’s one more condition.”

“Always one more with you,” Harper said.

“You’ll work with him.”

“Who?”

Lavonne looked up at the ceiling, the floor above, where the operating rooms were.

“Naff?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“I don’t have a say?”

“No, not on this you don’t,” Lavonne said. “Okay, you heal up. I’ll be in touch.”

After Lavonne shut the door, Harper waited awhile, then spoke his name again, listening to the sound of it aloud.

And she may have repeated it one more time as she was drifting away into the deepest sleep she’d had in months. His name on her lips.

Adrian Naff.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2007 Maggie Evans Silverstein

A winner of the Edgar and Shamus awards, James W. Hall is the author of more than twenty novels, including The Big Finish, the latest in the Thorn Mysteries; When They Come for You, the first book in the Harper McDaniel series; as well as four books of poetry, two short story collections, and two works of nonfiction. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Hall holds a BA from Florida Presbyterian College, an MA from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD in literature from the University of Utah. He divides his time between North Carolina and Florida. Visit him at www.jameswhall.com.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

CONTENTS

START READING

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

PART TWO

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

PART THREE

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

PART FOUR

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR