Anderson leaned forward. “Can you explain that to me?”

It was all Richards could do not to let out a howl. Working for three masters was nerve-wracking enough without this interference. “Some other time maybe.”

Anderson was just about to ask another question when his mobile buzzed. Answering it, he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. “Fuck.” The more the voice spoke, the more he scowled.

Richards risked a glance over at him. “What is it?”

But Anderson was already striding across the room. Snatching up his coat, he raced out the door.

Shrugging, Richards returned to his intricate sabotage.

"I need a body.”

Secretary Hendricks spoke to Roger Davies, his first adjutant, on his mobile. “Male, no family ties. A B&E rap sheet would be ideal. Also, I need you to send over a hand-picked clean-up crew. An apartment needs to be sterilized.” He listened briefly to the buzz of Davies’s voice on the other end of the call before he interrupted. “I understand. Just make it happen now.”

Hendricks disconnected and looked down with distaste at the body of Charles Thorne. “That’s damn good shooting, Ann,” he said. “But I wish to God you’d found another way.”

“So do I.” Ann stood beside him in her bedroom, a thick bathrobe tied around her. After she had called her handler, she had considered getting dressed, but Hendricks had trained her too well. She didn’t want to disturb the scene until he arrived with further orders. “But he gave me no choice. I guess he just snapped.”

Hendricks, hands in the slash pockets of his overcoat, wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He’d had Ann pick up her dress off the floor while he checked it for blood spatters. Then he directed her to hang it in her closet. Her shoes were another story. He discovered several blood spatters and placed them in a plastic garbage bag he had brought with him. He had donned disposable gloves and booties before crossing the threshold into the apartment.

He picked up her Walther PPK/S and began to methodically wipe it clean of her prints. “You think you can handle Li by yourself?”

“I’ve worked for you in secret for, what? Sixteen years?” Ann nodded. “I sure as hell can handle him.” She eyed Hendricks. “But it isn’t really Li you’re concerned about.”

“No.” Hendricks sighed. “It’s whoever he reports to.” He turned away, not wanting to look at the corpse again until Roger arrived with his burden. He could have given this dirty job to any one of a number of subordinates, but he knew that was the way leaks developed, even in the most secure of clandestine organizations. The dirtier the job, he had learned, the more imperative it was that you handled it yourself. And this was an exceptionally dirty business. He sighed. “The structure of the Chinese Secret Service is more than a bit opaque. It would be immensely helpful to know who we’re really up against.”

He turned back to her. “That’s what I’m going to need from you now, Ann. We couldn’t ask it of poor Charles.” Of course they couldn’t. Thorne had been a dumb conduit—he was passing on disinformation to Li without knowing the intel was false. His overweening urgency for power had blinded him. Bad for him, but good for Hendricks. As Hendricks had anticipated, such urgency led to mistakes in judgment, which was just what Charles Thorne had made when he climbed into bed with Li in order to gain scoops for Politics As Usual. Now, sadly, that phase of the operation was prematurely terminated.

It was possible, the secretary mused, that Ann had mismanaged her private life with him. He shrugged mentally. That was the chance you took when manipulating human beings; their behavior wasn’t always predictable.

“Don’t worry,” Ann said.

One thing you could say about Ann Ring, Hendricks thought, she had ice in her veins.

“Nevertheless, you do look worried.”

“It’s Soraya.”

“Ah, yes. I heard.” Ann tilted her head. “How is she?”

“She almost died,” Hendricks said with more emotion than he had intended.

Ann regarded him coolly, her arms crossed over her chest. “But she hasn’t died, has she?”

“No.”

“Then let’s thank our lucky stars.”

“I should have chosen—”

“You chose her because she was the right person for the job.”

“Once you told me that your husband was infatuated with her.”

“Really, Christopher, that wasn’t the reason at all. Charles’s infatuation with her just made the assignment you gave her that much easier. She would have found another way; she’s an exceptionally clever girl. And from what you’ve told me, she enjoyed passing on the bits of disinformation to Charles.”

Hendricks nodded. “It gave her a great deal of pleasure to have a direct hand in taking down Li and his cohorts.”

“There,” Ann said. “You see? You’re just feeling remorseful because her concussion landed her in the hospital.”

That wasn’t it at all, Hendricks thought sadly. Or, at least, not all of it. What worried him most of all was Soraya’s pregnancy. It seemed clear to him that she was carrying Charles Thorne’s child. If that was the case, how was Ann going to react? She was his most closely held, and therefore his most precious, asset-in-place. He could not afford to lose her, especially now that they had made such definitive contact with Li.

The question that vexed Hendricks most was the identity of Li’s handler. Not one of the DoD’s vaunted sources could tell him who might be running Li Wan.

Hendricks turned his mind to more practical matters. “Ann, I want you dressed and out of here before the team arrives. You have a place?”

She nodded. “A room at the Liaison. I use it when I have late nights on the Hill.”

“Go there now. Tomorrow you will assume your role as a grieving widow.”

“What about Li?”

“He’ll want to convey his condolences,” Hendricks said. “Encourage him to do so in person.”

“It won’t be easy. As we’ve seen, he is a very wary man. If he becomes suspicious now, we’ll never find out who’s running him and what they want.”

“You’re right.” Hendricks thought for a moment. “You’re going to have to give him something that will allay any suspicions he might harbor.”

“It’ll have to be something big—something important.”

Hendricks nodded. “Agreed. Give up his girl.”

“What?” Ann, plainly shaken, stared at him, stupefied. “We can’t. You know we can’t.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Silence.

“Good God,” Ann Ring said, “I didn’t sign up for this.” “But you did, Ann. You know you did.”

She licked her lips. Her face was pale. “It’s people’s lives we’re manipulating.”

“Not civilians,” Hendricks said. “We all signed the same document.”

“In blood.”

He did not contradict her.

She glanced over one last time at the corpse of her husband. “At what point,” she said, “are you completely drained of all human emotion?”

“You’d better get going,” Hendricks said. He had no clear answer for her.

Four minutes after Ann Ring departed, the clean-up crew arrived. Shortly thereafter, Davies delivered the man who had shot Charles Thorne to death in the midst of a break-in robbery. Hendricks settled the Walther into the corpse’s right hand, curling the forefinger over the trigger. When he and Davies had set it in place and made certain everything was correct, he called Eric Brey, director of the FBI, and emotionlessly filled him in on the murder.

Fuck,” Peter Marks said, “I’m alive.”

“You sound disappointed,” Anderson said.

There was a jouncing, along with the steady vibration of a vehicle engine. His eyes roved.

“Ambulance,” Anderson said. “It was Delia who got to you first. She was inside the school when the shooting took place. She called me first thing.”