“Every time seems an inconvenient time for you.” There was no misconstruing Benjamin’s displeasure. “You are two days late with your report.”

Maggie closed her eyes and imagined thrusting a knife into his heart. “The field is the field,” she said. “I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what, precisely?”

“What our plan set out to do: discredit Christopher Hendricks in order to protect FitzWilliams from scrutiny during our acquisition phase.”

“And? I have not seen any negative reports concerning Hendricks.”

“Of course you haven’t,” she said shortly. “Do you think something like that can be established in seventy-two hours? He’s the United States secretary of defense.”

El-Arian was silent for a moment. “What progress have you made?”

Maggie sat up, pushing the pillows behind her back. “I don’t care for your tone, Benjamin.” Then she sat, silent and waiting, determined not to say another word until he relented.

“The field is the field, as you pointed out,” El-Arian said after allowing the silence to stretch on past a normal length.

Figuring that was as much of an apology as she was going to get, she relented. “Do you think anyone but me could have gotten to Hendricks in such a short time?”

“I don’t, no.”

Another concession. How lucky can a girl get? she thought.

“The legend you prepared was pitch-perfect,” she said.

Actually, it was people lower on the Domna food chain who had prepared her Margaret Penrod identity, but it never hurt to use a little sugar. Especially, she thought, now that I’m walking such a perilous tightrope.

“And what of Hendricks himself?” El-Arian asked.

“Hooked,” she said, “completely.” It was curious—and not a little frightening—how much disquiet saying this out loud to Benjamin caused her.

“Well then, now is the time to reel him in.”

“Slowly,” she said. “We can’t afford to have him become suspicious at this point.”

El-Arian cleared his throat. “Skara, in twenty-four hours the acquisition period will come to its end phase. We need you to meet that ETA.”

Twenty-four hours, she thought. That’s all the time I have left?

“I understand perfectly,” she said. “You can count on me.”

“I always have,” he said. “À bientôt.”

Skara threw the phone across the room.

Hendricks stood in the garage at what had been the Treadstone building, but which he had ordered abandoned immediately following the car bomb explosion. This was his second visit to the crime scene, the first being less than an hour after the explosion had detonated. At that time, having ordered a phalanx of federal agents to do a secure search of the immediate area and Peter’s house, and not knowing whether Peter Marks had been blown to kingdom come, he had assembled a task force to investigate the matter.

The forensics team had determined that Peter had not been in the car. So far, so good. Then where was he? The task force had had no luck finding him. Hendricks called Marks’s cell but, as before, got his voice mail. Next, he called Ann at the temporary offices he had secured for the Treadstone personnel, but she hadn’t seen or heard from Marks. He gave up and departed the crime scene.

Hendricks arrived home early and unannounced. While his security team scoured the interior for electronic listening devices, as they did twice a week, he went into the kitchen and poured himself a beer. He stood watching the suits go about their business, controlled and precise as ants. Picking up the phone, he tried again to call Jackie, but his son was still in a forward position in the Afghanistan mountains, maintaining communications blackout.

He’d finished half his beer when the team members nodded on their way to take up positions outside. He put down his glass and went into his study, closing the door behind him. The windows were fitted with wide-slatted jalousies, which he kept closed all the time. Sitting down at his desk, he removed a small key from his wallet and inserted it in a lock in the lower left-hand drawer. He took out a tiny disc approximately half the size of his thumbnail. He knew what it was but he had never seen the design before. What he couldn’t understand was why his security team had failed to find this electronic bug in their continual sweeps of his house.

He had discovered it ten days ago purely by accident. He had been in a hurry, his hand sweeping across the desk to snatch up a file that had been delivered by courier. In the process, he had upended a glass Eiffel Tower, swirls of color embedded in it, that Amanda had bought him the first time they had been in Paris. As such, it was a beloved token, a way to keep her close after her death. The tower’s four feet were covered in felt, but when he’d upended it he’d seen that one of the felt discs had been replaced by this curious and frightening electronic bug.

Two possibilities had immediately occurred to him. The first was that someone on his security team had planted it and was deliberately ignoring it during the sweeps. The second was that this bug was so sophisticated, it was invisible to the electronic sweeps. Neither hypothesis was comforting, but the second one disturbed him more because it meant an unknown entity was in possession of surveillance equipment that far outstripped the US government’s own. He had made several discreet inquiries, pulling in favors from people deep inside the intelligence community whom he thought might be able to tell him if a cabal inside the government was working against him. So far, no hint of such a group had surfaced.

He stared at the bug now, a dull silver-green, scarcely distinguishable from the felt pads on the bottom of Amanda’s gift. He had quite deliberately kept it live, putting it on his desk, making innocuous calls and such because he did not want its owner to know that he had discovered its existence. It was this bug that had prompted him to form the complex communications system with Peter Marks. He replaced it, shut the drawer, and locked it.

Opening his laptop, he logged onto the government server on which his files resided, navigated to the encrypted file, and opened it. To Peter’s credit, he had figured out the system and accessed the encrypted file on Hendricks’s computer. A message detailed what Marks had discovered. At a regional meeting in Qatar in the spring of 1968, Fitz was listed as a consultant for El-Gabal Mining, a now defunct government-run company. What interested Marks—and now Hendricks himself—was that Fitz had neglected to list El-Gabal on his CV.

In light of Marks’s own investigation, it might not be so surprising that he hadn’t reported in, Hendricks thought now. If Marks had found something further on Fitz, then, following the attempt on his life, he might have gone undercover to check it out himself. Maybe he had contacted Soraya. Hendricks rang her cell but, again, got no answer. He pulled out his cell and went out of the study, down the hall, and into a bathroom, where he turned on the taps.

It was after nine in Paris, so he called Jacques Robbinet at home. His wife told him that her husband was still at the office. Apparently there was an international incident he’d had to handle. Worried now, Hendricks called Robbinet’s office. While the connection was being made, he stared out at his deserted house and not for the first time wished with all his heart that he could hear Amanda puttering about, cleaning out the closets as she loved to do. It depressed him to think that the closets hadn’t been touched since her death. He wondered what the house would be like with Maggie in it permanently.

Robbinet finally answered. “Chris, I was just going to call. I’m afraid there’s been a bit of an incident.”

“What kind of incident?” Hendricks listened with sweaty hands as Robbinet related the meeting with M. Marchand, how Soraya, Aaron Lipkin-Renais, and the Egyptian Chalthoum had followed Marchand, and all that had happened.