2

LONDON’S SKIES THAT DAY SHONE blue as a bright eye; a rare sunny day for November after two weeks of gray, looming clouds. I had been in London for nearly a year. That final morning, in my somber suit, taking the tube to Holborn, I might have looked like one of the young lawyers heading for a firm or for court. Except my briefcase carried a Glock 9 mm, a laptop full of financial information on suspected criminal networks, and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Lucy is sentimental; she liked to make my lunch for me because I made breakfast for her. She would be in the office later, when her doctor’s appointment was done. We’d worked together for nearly three years, first back in Virginia where we’d met and married, and then here. I liked London, liked my work, liked the idea of The Bundle being born here and spending his early years settled in one of the world’s great cities, not jumping latitudes like I had. Some kids start each year in a different school; I’d often started in a different hemisphere.

Holborn is a mix of new and old. Our office building was close to where the street goes from being High Holborn to plain Holborn. It was a contemporary glass-and-chrome creation that I don’t doubt irritated architectural purists; next to it was a building undergoing a major refurbishment; scaffolding studded its façade. In front, a walkway funneled pedestrians into two lines, and I avoided it when I could. The space opened up in front of our building and I worked my way through the spilling crowd.

The office building was mostly occupied by small firms—solicitors and marketing consultants and a temp agency—except for the top floor. The sign on the elevator read CVX Consulting. The initials had been picked by the throws of a dart at a newspaper stuck to a dartboard one night. I joked with Lucy and my boss, Brandon, that CVX stood for Can’t Vanish eXactly.

I stepped into a bare room where a guard named John, a thick-necked Brooklyn expatriate, sat at a desk with enough firepower in his drawer to blow several holes in me. John was reading a book on cricket and frowning. Me, I’d long given up on deciphering that game. I walked to the door facing me, scanned my ID card; the door unlocked and I walked inside. The CVX offices were deceptively spare. The walls and windows were reinforced steel and bulletproof glass; the computer networks were moated with the strongest firewalls available. Offices and a few cubicles, a staff of eight people total. It smelled like all offices: a bit like ink, burned coffee, and Dry-Erase.

And the meeting I thought started at ten was apparently already under way. Brandon was sitting in the conference room with three other suits from Langley, frowning at a PowerPoint display that was three days out of date.

Oh, hell.

I stepped inside. “Not at ten?”

“Eight. You’re twenty minutes late.” Brandon gave me a forced smile.

“My apologies.”

Two of the suits were older than me and already looked doubtful. The other was younger than me, and he had a page filled with scribbled notes. An eager type.

“If Lucy’s in labor, you’re forgiven,” Brandon said. He was originally from South Carolina and he’d kept the slow cadence of his speech during all his years abroad.

“I have no baby and no coffee,” I said. “But I have a more up-to-date presentation. Give me five minutes?”

The suits nodded and all stood and introduced themselves, shook my hand, and went out to refill their cups with bad American-government-approved coffee, and I set up the laptop.

“I don’t like late, Sam,” Brandon said, but not with anger.

“I don’t either, sir. I’m sorry.”

“I hope you have good news for us. These guys are from the budget office. They think we might be wasting time. Convince them we’re not.”

Nothing so concentrates the mind as the possibility of the job being scrubbed.

When the suits returned with their bad coffee, I had jumped past the insomnia-inducing series of bulleted slides and stopped on a blurry photo that filled the presentation screen. The man’s face was florid, a bit heavy, with small ears. His hair was dark and curling, as though it had just been ruffled.

“Gentlemen. We are hunters. Our game is international crime rings, operating with impunity across borders because they have managed to get their fingers deep into governments around the world.” I pointed at the photo. “Think of us as lions, chasing antelope. This man is the weakest one in the herd. We’re closing in on him. He might be the CIA’s most important target.”

“Who is he?” one of the suits asked.

“He’s what we call a ‘clear skin’—no name, no confirmed nationality, although I believe he is Russian, due to other evidence we’ve received. We believe he moves and handles large amounts of cleaned cash to these global criminal networks. I call him the Money Czar.”

Brandon said, “Tell us about the networks, Sam.”

“Sure. The Mafia is an old-school criminal network—a distinct leader, a bureaucracy of muscle and money cleaners that support him. New-school networks are highly specialized. Each part—whether muscle to enforce security or to intimidate or kill, or financial to clean money, or logistics to smuggle goods—is autonomous. Each is brought in only for specific jobs, and each time it may be a different set of people to do the work. It’s therefore much harder to break the network down, to get any detailed information on how it works as a whole.”

“I know we’ve been paying particular attention to certain networks that might have government ties,” the youngest suit said. “There’s a Croatian gunrunner network we might infiltrate, the Ling smuggling family in Holland, the Barnhill network in Edinburgh…”

The young suit was on my side. I took that as a good sign. “The Feds were able to break the Mafia because it was a hierarchy—lower-level thugs could testify against the big guys. But the only weak links here are the common elements that move from network to network.” I tapped the Money Czar’s ugly face on the screen. “This guy is the glue between some very bad people. It goes beyond crime. It moves into threats not only to our allies, but to the United States. This man may represent our best hope of uncovering some of the biggest threats to Western security.”

“He doesn’t look that scary,” Brandon said, and everyone laughed. Except me. I was prepared to scare the hell out of them when I told them what I knew.

“So the question is how do we find this Money Czar and—” My phone beeped. When your wife is seven months pregnant, you get a free pass on taking calls in meetings.

“Sorry,” I mouthed to Brandon. “Pregnant wife,” I said to the suits. I stepped out into the hallway. I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

“Monkey?” Lucy said. “I need you to meet me outside.”

“Um, I’m in a meeting.”

“I need you to step outside. Now, Sam.” Then I heard it: an awful undercurrent in her words, like a shadow eddying under summer water.

I started to walk to the door. “Did you get a new phone?”

“I lost my old one this morning. Just bought a new one. It’s been a rotten morning.”

I heard the shaky tension in her voice. “You sick?”

“Please, just come outside.”

Bad news, then, to be delivered face-to-face. Not in the office, where emotion might be seen. A coldness gripped my heart. The Bundle. She had gone to the doctor. Something was wrong with the baby.

I hurried out of our offices; past John the guard, who had abandoned his cricket book for a British tabloid. Down the hallway. “Where are you?”

“Out on Holborn.”

“Are you okay?”

“No… just come find me outside. Please.”

I raced down the stairs, six flights, not waiting for the elevator. I came out into the lobby.

No sign of Lucy.

“Come out into the street,” she said. “Please, Sam. Please.”

“What’s the matter?” I headed out onto the busy street. It offered a steady stream of pedestrians—office workers, couriers, shoppers, the inevitable London tourists. Two young women leaned against the building in fashionable coats, smoking, sipping tea from plus-sized paper cups between gossipy laughs. I scanned the street. No Lucy. “Where are you?”

“Sam, now. Please. Run.”

I ran, even before Lucy said to, because it was all so wrong, I could feel it in every cell of my body. I headed under the covered scaffolding of the building next door, hurrying along the steady march of people. Finally I pushed past a man in a suit, past a woman in a hooded sweatshirt.

I stopped when I stepped back out of the temporary tunnel; there was no sign of Lucy, on the sidewalks, in the herky-jerk of London traffic. None. I turned, looked every way.

I heard my pregnant wife crying on the phone.

“Lucy? Lucy?” I gripped the phone so hard the edges bit into my fingers.

Now I heard her sobbing: “Let me go.”

My eyes darted everywhere and I heard a car honk. I turned and saw a truck whip around an idling Audi, thirty feet away, the car facing me on the opposite side of the road, Lucy in the passenger seat. My office building stood between me and the Audi. My first thought was: no one stops on Holborn. The car was silver gray, like the sky in the moments before rain. A man sat in the driver’s seat, bent toward Lucy. Then he straightened and I could see him better. Late twenties. Dark hair. Dark glasses. Square jaw. I saw a flash of white as he turned his head, the pale curve of a scar marring his temple, like a sideways question mark.

Lucy looked right at me.

Then the blast hit.