“Does your visit have an amusing component?” the DCI said.

“Ah, no. Just a passing thought.”

Danziger spread his hands. “Care to share?”

“A private moment, Max.”

M. Errol Danziger hated being called by his first name, which was why he had shortened it to an initial.

Reade was still in the room, thinking of filing his nails, for all Hendricks knew.

“Does the boy need to be here?” It was interesting, Hendricks thought, to see how both Danziger and Reade bristled at precisely the same moment.

“Lieutenant Reade knows everything I know,” Danziger said after a frozen moment.

Hendricks kept silent, and, after several moments, Danziger got the point. He raised a hand in the lazy fashion of Old World royalty, and, following a murderous glare at Hendricks, Reade departed.

“You really shouldn’t have embarrassed him like that,” Danziger muttered.

“What is that, Max? A threat?”

“What? No.” Danziger shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

“Uh-huh.” Hendricks scooted forward. “Listen, Max, let’s get something straight. I don’t care for Reade, and I certainly don’t give a shit about his feelings. That being the case, I don’t want to see or talk to him the next time we meet. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly,” Danziger said in a strangled voice.

Without warning, Hendricks rose and stepped toward the door.

“Wait a minute,” Danziger said. “We haven’t even—”

“The job is yours, Max.”

Danziger jumped. “What?” He trailed after Hendricks.

At the door, Hendricks turned toward him. “You want Samaritan, it’s yours.”

“But what about you?”

“I’m out, Max. I’ve pulled my people.”

“But what about the preliminary work they’ve done?”

“Shredded this morning. I know you have your own methodology.” Hendricks pulled open the door, half expecting Reade to have his ear to it. “As of now, you’re in charge of security at Indigo Ridge.”

Maggie heard the encrypted cell phone even in her sleep. The ring was “The Ride of the Valkyries.” She was no fan of that Nazi Richard Wagner, nevertheless she dearly loved the Ring cycle. She turned over, her eyelids heavy, gluey with sleep. Returning to her apartment after her lunch with Christopher, she had crawled into bed and immediately fallen fast asleep. She’d been in the midst of a dream in which she and Kaja were engaged in the same argument that had defined pretty much their entire childhood. In fact, her throat ached as if she had been screaming in her bedroom as well as screaming in her dream. Screaming at Kaja had never worked. Why had she continued to do it? Their relationship, the secrets they knew about each other, made conflict inevitable. Had they been brothers, they surely would have beaten the crap out of each other. They had worked with what they had, which was precious little, and in the end they could no longer stand the sight of each other. If circumstance hadn’t pulled them apart, they would have parted anyway. And yet, in dreams Maggie missed her sister. Mikaela never appeared in her dreams, but Kaja did. And seeing her, Maggie cried dream-tears, her dream-heart breaking. But when their dream-conversations began, they were invariably acrimonious from the very first words: the bile of two sisters who loved each other but could find no common ground. In latter days their arguments had revolved around their father. Their memories of him were so different, as if he were two people. The arguments, grown ever more bitter and vitriolic, saddened as well as angered her.

With the Valkyries riding herd on her consciousness, she rolled over and stared balefully at the cell phone atop the nightstand. She knew who was calling her: Benjamin El-Arian was the only one with the number.

She dug her thumbs into her closed lids to haul herself into full wakefulness, but ignored the call. Instead she stared at the evening’s dusty shadows extending across the ceiling. Mid-note the Valkyries ceased to ride. In the eerie silence she thought about Benjamin. It was a mystery how she ever could have been attracted to him. He seemed part of another life, another person.

America had changed her. She had traveled to many places in the world, but never, before this, to the United States. Benjamin had planted the idea of America as corrupt and evil, a country that had become weak after a string of diplomatic and military defeats. But she’d had no hands-on experience on which to base that idea. Now that she was here, now that she had spent time at Christopher’s side in the core of capitalism’s prime engine, so to speak, she found America to be dynamic, vital, filled with the thrilling cross-currents of dissent. In short, quite agreeable.

And with that road-to-Damascus moment had come understanding of the speciousness of Benjamin’s bitterly anti-American screed. She had pretended to buy into it, to get close to him, but it was only now, having come into contact with Benjamin’s avowed enemy, that she realized the depth of his self-delusion.

Even now, after having spent so much time with him, she didn’t know whether he had kept his extremist views hidden from the other Domna directors until he was in a position of power, or whether they had been grafted onto him later by Semid Abdul-Qahhar.

She despised the leader of the Mosque, a man animated by a hatred so pure and unrelenting there was no room in his world for compromise. If there were Evil in the world, Evil with a capital E, as the Catholic Church preached, she was certain it must be cultivated and maintained by such hatred.

At first she had been confounded by the alliance between the two men, but gradually, from incidents she witnessed, it became clear that Benjamin was using Abdul-Qahhar as his enforcer to maintain and consolidate his power, to keep the other directors in line. She had seen the result of Abdul-Qahhar’s handiwork on a director who had been foolish enough to publicly defy El-Arian. His corpse had been a sight so diabolically foul that, as a matter of self-preservation, she had immediately consigned it to the realm of nightmare. Only Jalal Essai, of all the directors, had managed to survive as a dissident, and now sought to challenge Benjamin’s leadership. Abdul-Qahhar’s slaughterers had failed to silence his voice, which was why El-Arian had dispatched Marlon Etana to take care of Essai.

She was acutely aware of what a dangerous game she was playing with Benjamin, but she remained resolute in her desire to continue on the path she had chosen. She knew El-Arian found it amusing to have her—the daughter of Christien Norén—under his thumb. She had been meticulous in her planning, careful to give him what he wanted: someone subservient to his will. Her father—secretly working for another entity—had betrayed the Domna. This was a sin Benjamin would not forgive. She understood that the sin of Christien Norén would one day be visited on her. The tricky part lay in clearing out before that day arrived.

And now here she was in America, a place in which, ironically, she felt safe. It wasn’t the luxuries of American culture she responded to; she’d had her pick of luxuries while in Paris. It was the freedom to say what she thought, to be who she wanted to be without fear of ridicule or reprisal. A new life so different from her childhood, which just as well be light-years away. There was a reason it had been known as the New World, and in certain circles still was. Was it any wonder she didn’t want to return to her life inside the Domna, at Benjamin El-Arian’s side? And it was becoming clear to her that the time was near when she would be free of El-Arian and Severus Domna. Either that, or she would be dead.

The Valkyries rode again, making her teeth clench. This time she knew she had to take the call.

Picking up the phone, she hesitated for a moment, then activated it. “This is an inconvenient time,” she said.