Finally, she admitted that it had to do with herself as well. What would I do in Europe? I don't even speak Spanish well!

She loved him, yes. When she saw how her refusal was killing him, she kept grabbing his face and kissing his flushed cheeks and telling him just how much she loved him. That, she insisted, wasn't the issue, wasn't even a question. She loved Milo completely, but that didn't mean she would ruin their daughter's life in order to follow him across the world, spending years looking over their shoulders for some hit man. What kind of life is that, Milo? Think about it from our perspective.

Well, he had, hadn't he? He'd imagined them with Stephanie at Euro Disney, finishing their aborted vacation with laughs and candy and no more interruptions from the cell phone. The only difference was that they used different names. Lionel, Laura, and Kelley.

Now he knew why the tears had finally reached him: It was the realization that she was right. Grainger's death had rattled him, turned him into a desperate dreamer, imagining that the soft-edged world of Disney could be theirs.

Milo had been too in love with his fantasies to realize how childish they were.

And now, where was he? In the desert. It went out in all directions-flat, two-toned, empty. His family gone, his one real ally in the Company dead, killed by his stupidity. There was only one ally left to him in the world, someone he never wanted to call, whose calls he always dreaded.

At Hobbs, just over the New Mexico border, he stopped at a generic gas station/convenience store with peeling white walls and no air-conditioning. The fat, sweating woman behind the counter sold him quarters and directed him to a pay phone in the rear, by the canned soups. He dialed the number he'd memorized back at Disney World, then put in all his quarters.

"Da?" said that familiar old voice.

"It's me."

"Mikhail?"

"I need your help, Yevgeny."

Terence Albert Fitzhugh stood in what had once been Tom Grainger's twenty-second-floor office. No longer. Through the ceiling-high windows behind the desk lay a vista of skyscrapers, the canopy of the urban jungle. Beyond the blinds on the opposite wall lay a field of cubicles and activity where all the young, pale Travel Agents made sense of Tourist chatter, culling it into slim Tour Guides that eventually made it to Langley, where other analysts produced their own policy-ready reports for the politicians.

Each of those Travel Agents, he knew, hated him.

It wasn't him in particular they hated, but Terence Albert Fitzhugh as a concept. He'd seen it in Company offices throughout the world. A kind of love develops between department heads and their employees. When a department head is ousted, or killed, departmental emotions grow volatile. When that department is, like Tourism, invisible to the outside world, the staff depends on its chief that much more.

He would deal with their hatred later. Now, he shut the blinds and went to Grainger's computer. Even a week after his death, it was still a mess, because Tom Grainger had been a mess-one of those old cold warriors who'd spent too much time depending on pretty secretaries to keep order. When faced with their own computers, these old men ended up with the most cluttered desktops on the planet. 1 le had made everything else into a mess as well.

At first, of course, Fitzhugh thought he had cleaned up Grainger's mess. Tripplehorn had received his orders, and when Fitzhugh called back, the Tourist confirmed in a strangely flat voice that the job was done. Fine.

Then, at the scene, he'd noticed the blood inside the house. Why had Tripplehorn taken away Weaver's body? There was no need for that. The next day, forensics almost gave him a coronary-the blood wasn't Weaver's. They didn't know whose it was, but he did.

Tripplehorn had not answered his phone; Milo Weaver had.

Then, after a frantic week of scouring the country, a miracle.

Fitzhugh accessed the network server, typed in his code, and replayed the video of that morning. A surveillance technician had done a quick edit of footage from various cameras. It began outside the building, among the throng of midtown commuters jostling wearily to their jobs. A time code ticked at the bottom of the screen: 9:38. Among the crowd was a head that the technician had marked with a roving arrow. It started on the other side of the Avenue of the Americas, paused, and jogged through a gridlock of yellow taxis to their side.

Cut to: a second camera, on their sidewalk. By then he'd been identified, and in the lobby the doormen were taking positions. On the street, though, Weaver seemed to reconsider. He stopped, letting people bump into him, as if suddenly confused by north and south. Then he continued to the front door.

A high lobby camera, looking down. From here, he could see where the doormen had positioned themselves. The big black guy, Lawrence, was at the door, while another waited by the palm tree. Two more hid in the elevator corridor, just out of sight.

Lawrence waited for him to enter, then stepped up to him. There was a moment when everything seemed all right. Agreeably, they chatted in low tones as the other three doormen approached. Then Weaver noticed them approaching, and panicked. That's the only explanation Fitzhugh could come up with, because Milo Weaver turned on his heel, swiftly, but Lawrence was ready for that; he'd already grabbed Weaver's shoulder. Weaver punched Lawrence in the face, but the other three doormen had arrived, and they piled on him.

It was a remarkably quiet scene, just a little scuffling and the gasp of the pretty desk clerk-Gloria Martinez-just out of sight. When they all got to their feet, Weaver was cuffed behind his back, and three doormen led him to the elevators.

Strangely, Weaver smiled as he passed the front desk, even winked at Gloria. He said something that the camera didn't pick up. The doormen heard it, though, and so did Gloria: "I think I lost my tour group." What a card.

He lost his sense of humor once he reached his cell on the nineteenth floor.

"Why did you kill him?" was Fitzhugh's opening gambit. Whatever Weaver said now would tell Fitzhugh what to do next.

Milo blinked at him, hands chained behind his back. "Who?”

“Tom, for Christ's sake! Tom Grainger!"

A pause, and in that moment of silence, Fitzhugh didn't know what the man would say. Finally, Weaver shrugged. "Tom had Angela Yates killed. That's why. He set her up to look like a traitor, then killed her. He lied to you and me. He lied to the Company." Then he pushed it further: "Because I loved that man, and he used me."

Had Milo killed Tripplehorn, and then, for his own reasons, shot Tom Grainger? If so, it was a burst of cool, fresh air in Fitzhugh's muggy life. He said, "I don't give a shit what you thought about him. He was a CIA veteran and your direct superior. You killed him, Weaver. What am I supposed to think? I'm your superior now-should I worry that if you smell something you don't like I'll be next on the slab?"

It hadn't been time for questions yet, though, so he made a show of frustration, claiming he had meetings to attend. "Reorganization. Restructuring. Cleaning up your goddamned mess."

On the way out, he'd whispered to Lawrence, "Strip him to his birthday suit and give him the black hole."

Lawrence, with his bloodshot eye, betrayed a moment of disgust. "Yes, sir."

The black hole was simple. Strip a man naked, give him a little while to become comfortable with his nakedness, and, after an hour or so, turn off the lights.