Shaw looked at her with new respect. “That’s sort of what Anna was thinking.”

“I’ll take that as a big compliment.”

“Any ideas?” he asked.

Katie pulled her chair closer and lowered her voice. “I’ve actually been giving that some thought.” She dug in her purse and pulled out a battered notepad. “When I was in Anna’s office that day she had to step out to see someone and I sort of looked around.”

“You mean you were snooping,” Shaw said a little angrily, instinctively defending Anna’s right to privacy.

“Do you want to hear what I found or not?”

“I’m sorry, go ahead.”

“I looked through some of the Red Menace stuff on her desk and some notes she’d jotted down. One was a list of Web sites or e-mail addresses. Maybe she’d contacted them. Anyway, one stuck with me and I wrote it down.”

“Why’d it stick with you?”

“It was called Barney’s Rubble-Land. You know, The Flintstones? It was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. Anyway, it was a blogger page. I didn’t check it out then, but while you were showering back at the hotel after Dr. Doom worked on you, I accessed the site from my laptop.”

“What’d you find?”

“This blogger, apparently his name is Barney, had some questions about the Red Menace too. From his postings he didn’t think it was legit.”

“How does that help us?”

“Well, quite frankly, I didn’t think the blogger site was legit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think Barney is a sham. I have lots of friends who’re bloggers. You get obsessed with them, write stuff all the time. There’s really nothing regimented about them. Free association, spur-of-the-moment stuff. And you usually have a place for people to discuss things. I mean, that’s one of the main reasons to have a blog in the first place. Right?”

“Right.”

“Well, this blog didn’t have that. I checked the dates of the postings. They come out every other day at the same time. That doesn’t sound like Barney’s Rubble-Land to me. It sounds like it was on some sort of preset spit-out-a-blog mode, bi-daily pattern.”

“Why would someone set up a system like that?” Shaw wondered out loud.

“They might if instead of a real blog, it was a way to test the waters.”

“Test the waters?”

“Yeah, people in the entertainment and ad fields do it all the time. I actually did a story on it years ago. You put out a product and you want to gauge people’s reaction to it. You can have focus groups, opportunities to phone in opinions, Web site discussions. But some companies go a step further. They use blank drops, like a façade to get people to really let them know how they feel without feeling pressure. It can be a fake Web site, 800 number phone bank, or a questionnaire put out under a sham company’s name.”

Shaw looked very interested now. “So you’re saying this Barney Rubble might have been a façade to test how people were reacting to the Red Menace campaign?”

“And since Barney’s blog was highly critical and suspicious of the campaign…”

“They might have put that carrot out there to see if anyone else felt the same way. But you said there was no forum on the site to leave your opinion.”

“But if you e-mailed the site, which Anna did-”

Shaw finished for her. “Then they get your e-mail address. And Anna’s e-mail was AFischer@ThePhoenixGroup.com.” He looked sharply at Katie. “That may be how they found out about The Phoenix Group. Not through you.”

“That’s probably something we’ll never know for sure.”

A minute of silence passed while they fiddled with the remains of their meals.

“Katie, I…”

“Don’t even go there, Shaw. This thing is complicated and we’ve both made mistakes. And we’ll both probably make some more along the way.”

“Let’s just hope one of them doesn’t end up getting us killed.”

“Can we track this Web site somehow? I’m not that great with technical things.” Shaw nodded, made a call to Frank. He put his phone away and finished his wine. “We’ll see what he comes up with.”

“So are we staying in Dublin?” she asked.

He shook his head. “We’re flying out tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“Germany. A little town called Wisbach.”

THERE IS NEVER A GOOD DAY to bury someone. Even when the sun is shining and the air is warm, there is nothing whatsoever positive about laying a cold body in the cold earth, particularly someone with three bullet holes that cut her life short by at least four decades. And in Wisbach there was no sun, no warmth. The rain was coming down in sheets and buckets as Shaw and Katie sat in the car at the graveyard that was set next to a small church.

They’d flown into Frankfurt that morning and driven over. Going through airport security in Dublin the alarms had sounded when Shaw had stepped through the metal detector. The wand the security guard ran over him homed in on his left arm.

“Roll up your sleeve, sir,” the guard had ordered, an edge to his voice.

When his gaze hit the row of metal staples revealed under the bandage, he flinched.

“Damn, does that hurt?”

“Only when I roll up my sleeve,” Shaw answered.

At the gravesite the rain had turned the mound of fresh earth next to the six-foot-deep hole into a mud pile. Anna’s coffin and the people here paying their respects were under a large tent set up next to the gravesite to keep them reasonably dry.

Shaw had decided not to join the mourners. He’d spotted Wolfgang Fischer’s lumbering figure, Natascha next to him. Neither looked very tall today. They seemed bent, destroyed. So Shaw just sat in the car. And watched them lower the coffin into the grave. Wolfgang nearly collapsed with grief. It took several men to get him back to the car.

Next to him Katie felt tears slide down her cheeks as she watched. Thank God, she thought, that I don’t have to write death lines about this. She looked at Shaw. His gaze was impassive, his eyes dry.

“It’s so sad,” she said.

Shaw didn’t answer. He just kept watching.

Half an hour later the last person had left and the gravediggers moved in, tempest and all, to plant Anna in the earth of Wisbach for good.

Shaw got out of the car. “You remember what to do?”

She nodded. “Just be careful.”

“You too.”

He shut the door, glanced around, and headed to the hole in the earth, trying not to think about the much bigger one in his heart.

He pulled some euros from his pocket and asked the diggers, in German, to give him some time alone here. No doubt happy to be relieved of their wet duty, they took the money and fled.

Shaw stood next to the grave and looked down at the coffin. He did not want to visualize Anna inside that box. She didn’t belong there. He spoke in quiet tones to her, saying things he should have said while the woman was alive. He had many regrets in his life. The most devastating by far was not being with Anna when she needed him most.

“I’m sorry, Anna. I’m sorry. You deserved a lot better than me.”

He grabbed a shovel and spent the next half hour filling in her grave. He felt it was his task to perform, no one else’s. He was soaked through to the skin by the time he was done, but didn’t seem to notice.

He looked at the headstone. It gave Anna’s full name, Anastasia Brigitte Sabena Fischer. Her dates of birth and death. And the phrase at the bottom in German, “May our beautiful daughter rest in peace.”

“Rest in peace,” Shaw said. “Rest in peace for both of us, Anna. Because I don’t see peace ever coming my way again.”

He knelt down in the mud, his head bowed.

As he did so the two men stepped clear of the trees, guns in hand.

The car horn instantly split the silence of the cemetery and then Katie slid down in her seat.

Startled, the two men ran straight at Shaw.