“No.”

“And I’m assuming that since you’re here and since you’re the big chief of this sorry little tribe my participation is not exactly voluntary?”

“Right.”

“Because if I say go to hell, get out of my house, I’m calling the police because the three of you broke in, and that there’s no way I’m taking a trip with you — if I say all that, then you’ll simply bring up the trust funds. Right?”

“Right.”

The nausea hit like lightning. Baxter bolted from the bed, shedding his sport coat as he stumbled through the door to the bathroom. The vomiting was loud and long and mixed with waves of profanities. He washed his face, looked at his swollen red eyes in the mirror, and admitted that a few days of sobriety was not a bad idea. But he couldn’t imagine a whole lifetime with no booze and no drugs.

The trust funds had been established by a great-grandfather who had no idea what he was doing. In the days before private jets and luxury yachts and cocaine and countless other ways to burn the family fortune, the prudent thing to do was to preserve the money for future generations. But Baxter’s grandfather had seen the warning signs. He hired the lawyers and changed the trusts so that a board of advisers could exercise a measure of discretion. Some of the money arrived each month and allowed Baxter to survive quite comfortably without working. But the serious money could be turned off like a spigot, and Uncle Wally controlled it with an iron fist.

If Uncle Wally said you were going to rehab, then you were about to dry out.

Baxter stood in the bathroom door, leaning on the facing, and looked at the three. They had not budged. He looked at the specialist nearest to him and said, “You guys here to break my thumbs if I put up a fight?”

“No,” came the reply.

“Let’s go, Baxter,” Walter said.

“Do I pack?”

“No.”

“Your jet?”

“Yes.”

“Last time I was allowed to get hammered.”

“The clinic says you can drink all you want on the ride in. The bar is stocked.”

“How long’s the flight?”

“Ninety minutes.”

“I’ll have to drink fast.”

“I’m sure you can handle that.”

Baxter waved his arms and looked around his bedroom. “What about my place? The bills, the maid, the mail?”

“I’ll take care of everything. Let’s go.”

Baxter brushed his teeth, combed his hair, changed his shirt, then followed Uncle Wally and the other two outside and into a black van. They rode in silence for a few minutes, but the tension was finally broken by the sounds of Baxter crying in the rear seat.

The bar review course was offered at Fordham University on Sixty-second Street, in a vast lecture hall that was filled with anxious former law students. From 9:30 until 1:30 each weekday, various professors from nearby law schools covered the intricacies of constitutional law, corporations, criminal law, property, evidence, contracts, and many other subjects. Since virtually every person in the room had just finished law school, the material was familiar and easily digested. But the volume was overwhelming. Three years of intense study would be reduced to a nightmare of an exam that ran for sixteen hours over a two-day period. Thirty percent of those taking it for the first time would not pass, and because of this there was little hesitation in forking over the $3,000 for the review course. Scully & Pershing picked up the bill for Kyle and its other new recruits.

The pressure was palpable the first time Kyle walked into the room at Fordham, and it never went away. By the third day he was sitting with a group of friends from Yale, and they soon formed a study group that met every afternoon and often worked into the night.

During three years of law school, they had dreaded the day they would be forced to revisit the murky world of federal taxation or the tedium of the Uniform Commercial Code, but the day was at hand. The bar exam consumed them.

Scully & Pershing was typical in that it forgave the first flunking of the exam, but not the second. Two bad tests, and you’re out. A few of the crueler firms had a one-strike policy, and there were a handful of more reasonable firms that would forgive twice if the associate was showing promise on all other fronts. Regardless, the fear of failure boiled just under the surface and often made it difficult to sleep.

Kyle found himself taking long walks around the city, at all hours, to break the monotony and clear his head. The walks were informative, and at times fascinating. He learned the streets, the subways, the bus system, the rules of the sidewalks. He knew which coffee shops stayed open all night and which bakeries had warm baguettes at 5:00 a.m. He found a wonderful old bookstore in the Village and resumed his rabid new interest in spy and espionage novels.

After three weeks in the city, he finally found a suitable apartment. At daybreak one morning, he was sitting on a stool in the window of a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, sipping a double espresso and reading the Times, when he saw two men wrestle a sofa out of a door across the street. The men were obviously not professional movers, and they showed little patience with the sofa. They practically threw it into the back of a van, then disappeared through the door. A few minutes later they were back with a bulky leather chair that received the same treatment. The men were in a hurry, and the move did not appear to be a happy one. The door was next to a health food store, and two floors above it a sign in a window advertised an apartment available for a sublet. Kyle quickly crossed the street, stopped one of the men, then followed him upstairs for a look around. The apartment was one of four on the third floor. It had three small rooms and a narrow kitchen, and as he talked to the man, Steve somebody, he learned that Steve had the lease but was leaving town in a hurry. They shook hands on an eight-month sub at $2,500 per. That afternoon, they met again at the apartment to sign the paperwork and transfer the keys.

Kyle thanked Charles and Charles, reloaded his meager assets in his Jeep, and drove twenty minutes uptown to the corner of Seventh and West Twenty-sixth. His first purchase was a well-used bed and night table from a flea market. His second was a fifty-inch flat-screen television. There was no urgency in furnishing or decorating. Kyle doubted he would live there beyond the eight months and could not imagine having guests. It was an adequate place to start, then he would find something nicer.

Before leaving for West Virginia, he carefully set the traps. He cut several four-inch pieces of brown sewing thread, and with a dab of Vaseline stuck the threads to the bottoms of three interior doors. Standing and looking down, he could barely see the thread against the oak stain, but if anyone entered the apartment and opened the doors, they would leave a trail by displacing the threads. Along one wall in the den he had stacked textbooks, notebooks, files for this and that, generally useless stuff that he wasn’t ready to part with. It was a haphazard pile, but Kyle arranged everything in careful order and photographed it all with a digital camera. Anyone looking through it would be tempted to toss things back into the collection, and if that happened, Kyle would know it. He informed his new neighbor, an elderly lady from Thailand, that he would be gone for four days and was not expecting any visitors. If she heard anything, call the cops. She agreed, but Kyle was not at all confident she understood a word he said.

His counterintelligence tactics were rudimentary, but the basics often worked just fine, according to the spy novels.

THE NEW RIVER runs through the Allegheny Mountains in southern West Virginia. It’s fast in some places, slower in others, but on any stretch of it the scenery is beautiful. With Class IV rapids in some areas, it has long been a favorite of serious kayakers. And with miles and miles of slower water, it attracts thousands of rafters each year. Because of its popularity, there are several established outfitters. Kyle had found one near the town of Beckley.