Kovalenko froze. After a moment, he said, “I can give you a letter.”

“And what would I do with a letter?” Aherne asked.

“As Legat, I’ll acknowledge that a mistake was made. And that it was our fault.”

“You mean, your fault,” Aherne told him.

“Exactly. It was my fault. You can do what you want with the letter. I’m sure your solicitors will think of something.”

Aherne grunted his grudging assent, and went for pen and paper.

When the letter was written, and the ink blown dry, Aherne said, “Michael’s in the States, isn’t he?”

“Where?”

“Nevada,” the old man told him.

“Where in Nevada? It’s a big state!”

Aherne shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “If he calls, I’ll tell ’im you want a word.”

At first, Kovalenko thought the old man had tricked him, and that he was lying. But, eventually, he accepted the depressing truth. The old fart didn’t know where his son-in-law was. And no, Burke hadn’t said anything to him about d’Anconia’s real identity.

“But didn’t he tell you all about it?” Aherne asked. “He said he went to London. Were you not in, man?”

It took only a day to confirm that Michael Burke had entered the United States from Ireland two days earlier, passing through immigration control at JFK. Credit card information revealed that Burke flew to Reno from New York, and rented a car from Alamo. A green Hyundai with California plates.

But that was it. Kovalenko contacted the FBI office in Las Vegas, and asked them to put out a BOL for Burke’s rental car.

Then, seventy-six hours and seven phone calls after Andrea Cabot’s initial call, Kovalenko persuaded his contacts in the Garda to visit Burke’s apartment. “We’re getting information from a confidential, but very reliable source that Mr. Burke is a victim of foul play. If you could visit the apartment discreetly, just to see if he’s dead on the floor, we’d be very grateful. Oh! and while you’re there, hopefully this morning, maybe you could make a copy of the hard drive on his computer and shoot it over to me…”

Eighteen hours later, he had the name of “the American” Andrea was screaming about.

Wilson. Jack Wilson.

CHAPTER 47

Wilson was impatient – and worried that Irina had run into some kind of trouble at Immigration. Where was she? Her flight had landed half an hour ago. He stood with his double bouquet of red roses, looking for her in the parade of humanity streaming through Security.

He felt sorry for them. They were thrilled to be in Vegas – you could see it on their faces – but if they were here on June 22, they were going to be in for a rough time. The city was as artificial as that place in the Middle East, where they had the “underwater restaurant.” A metropolis in the middle of nowhere, Vegas boasted nineteen out of twenty of the largest hotels in the world. And it was almost entirely dependent on the kindness of technology. The hotels would be uninhabitable in the absence of air-conditioning. (This June, temperatures were around a hundred degrees most days.) And what would they drink? The water supply depended on pumps that run on electricity, and even the dams allocating water around the state relied on state-of-the-art electrical systems using digital technologies. The water would be gone in a tick of the clock.

Forty miles away, Lake Mead would become a mecca once everyone realized that the grid wouldn’t be coming back “up.” Not soon. Not ever. Maybe a few of them would think of Culpeper, and realize what was happening. But what they wouldn’t know, and couldn’t guess, was that this time they couldn’t just walk to the next town. This time there was nowhere to go. This time the whole country was going down and, with it, the world.

Just getting to Lake Mead would be difficult for most of them. It was forty miles through high desert, so it wasn’t as if they’d be able to carry much in the way of food and water. Eventually, the ones who survived would defend their access to water, build defensive perimeters, and retribalize. How long would that take? A month? Two, at the most.

Vulnerable people passed him. A woman in a wheelchair, a mother with an infant in a sling, a very obese man. They wouldn’t have a chance. And neither, of course, would Mandy. He’d been tempted to bring her to the B-Lazy-B. But he’d resisted, hardening his heart to his purpose. Mandy was the past, and the past was something he could not risk revisiting.

The P.A. system was delivering its message about “unattended luggage” when he finally saw Irina, a hesitant figure in blue, wheeling a black suitcase. She was scanning ahead, looking for him, a sweet furrow of concern in her forehead. He raised his hand and his voice: “Irina!” And when she turned to see him, her face uncoiled into a child’s unfettered delight. Her joy at seeing him bowled him over. He felt a rush of euphoria.

And then she was in his arms – sweet-smelling, real, a dream come true.

Showing Irina around Las Vegas was like taking a child to Disneyland. Wilson was more than indifferent to the pleasures the city offered, but her happiness gave him so much pleasure that, like an indulgent parent, he couldn’t stop smiling.

She gaped at the casinos on the way from the airport, practically bouncing with excitement. She oohed and aahed at the lobby in the Mirage, and once they were in their suite, ran around like a little kid. “Oh you are joking me! This is our room?!” She left no corner unexplored – delighted with the minibar, the toiletries, the television, the lavish bathroom, the gigantic bed. She threw herself on it, giggling and bouncing.

He joined her there and when they kissed, Wilson felt it in every molecule. Soon they were beginning to make love. She unbuttoned his shirt. She widened her eyes when she saw the tattoos. “You have… pictures,” she said.

“Ummm-hmmmm.”

She traced the dragonfly with a finger, then ran her lips along the outline of the crescent moon. Raising her head, she saw the unfamiliar words emblazoned on his chest. “And this? What is this meaning?”

Wilson smiled. “It means, ‘Don’t be afraid.’”

As her lips moved to the words, he reached for the buttons of her blouse, and she squirmed away.

“What?” he said, as he got up to turn out the lights, then climbed back into bed.

“I like the dark,” she whispered, and who was he to argue with her? Beyond the window, through the privacy sheer, the city glittered like a strange galaxy.

Afterward, she wrapped herself in a sheet and, blushing, closed herself into the bathroom to dress. When she came back, he opened a split of champagne. They drank a toast “to us,” and went down to the casino. Wilson showed her how the games were played, and her glee at hitting a ten-quarter payoff at the slots was so endearing that even the most hardened gamblers smiled. Her wide-eyed apprehension as she sent the dice flying across the table, and her look of expectation and alarm as the roulette ball raced around the wheel, was pure gold.

It was the first time in a long time that Wilson had been happy. He’d been living on adrenaline the last few months, going from Allenwood to Washington, then Dublin, Belgrade, Bled, and Beirut. Odessa and Bunia, and places in between. Moving the money, buying the ranch, building the weapons. Then Culpeper and San Francisco, with Maddox as the filling.

It left him with a feeling of unreality, as if he’d been playing at being himself. It was a role of his own devising, that was true – he’d written the script. But the constant need to stay within himself and his emotions, to be on guard and always in the moment… it had taken a toll.