"Angelo! Fifteen years ago, she was responsible for his face getting so badly burned he almost died."

Vinnie fumbled in the side pocket of his jacket and tried to pull out his cell phone. In his haste, the phone seemed to resist. When he finally got it free, he quickly made a call. Franco answered. Vinnie put the phone on speaker.

"How are you two guys doing? Enjoying the cruise?"

"We're having a ball," Franco said. "The first part of the evening was a pain in the balls, but the second part has made up for it. The fish have been fed."

"Terrific," Vinnie said. "Is Angelo there?"

"He's right here."

"Put him on."

Angelo's unique voice came through the phone's speaker. Since he could barely oppose his lips, his b's, d's, m's, and p's had a distinctive muted quality.

"Angelo," Vinnie said. "What if I were to tell you that Dr. Laurie Montgomery… You remember her, don't you?"

Instead of answering, Angelo merely laughed in a decisively mordant fashion.

"What if I were to tell you she is endangering an important deal of ours and that you and Franco need to talk some sense into her like you boys did yesterday with Mr. Yang."

Angelo laughed again, but this time with obvious glee. "I'd tell you that you wouldn't even have to pay me. I'd do it for free, provided I could do it my way."

"Guess what? Frankie boy just sang that song a few minutes ago here at the Neapolitan. It appears that you're going to get your wish."

Vinnie disconnected. He put his arm around Michael's shoulder and guided him back through the kitchen. "Seems that this is your lucky day, too. The eight-K problem has been put to bed, and you can stop worrying about Laurie Montgomery. Not bad for a night's work."

Michael merely nodded that he'd heard. He was speechless. Twenty minutes later, after having a glass of wine at Vinnie's table, he sat in his car, still marveling at the unpredictability of life.

14

Adam Williamson was nestled into his Range Rover like a hand in a perfect-fitting, cashmere-lined leather glove. Ludwig van Beethoven's remarkable Ninth Symphony had been playing for the last hundred or so miles, and the astonishing final choir was about to begin. Adam had the volume almost full blast so the sound was as if he were seated in the center of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. As the choir suddenly commenced, Adam sang along in German, his voice drowning out the professional singers. It was so moving that Adam could feel goose pimples spread over his back and down his extremities. It was nearly orgasmic.

With almost precise timing the last few notes of the symphony died away as Adam completed a wide three-hundred-sixty-degree right-hand turn that culminated in a row of toll booths blocking the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel leading from New Jersey to New York. After paying the toll he entered the tunnel.

A Bach CD was the next selection, and the sounds of the fragile strings and harpsichord were the perfect foil for the brooding drama of Beethoven, and Adam's fingers began to play lightly on the steering wheel in time to the music.

It had been a pleasant drive from Washington, D.C., up to New York City, but Adam was now eager to arrive and eager to carry out his mission. He knew very little about his target, and that was the way he preferred it, a fact that his handlers appreciated. In his current line of work, too much knowledge served only to complicate the issue. All he needed was a name, an address of either work or home, and a few photos. If no photo was available, then a description would suffice. On those missions where there was no photo and only a description, he always allowed himself more time. Adam was not the kind of person who brooked mistakes, so the setup invariably took longer. And this current mission happened to be one of the no-photo types, so he had reserved three full days on the outside chance he might have difficulty with the ID.

The Range Rover emerged from the tunnel into the very heart of midtown Manhattan. Adam had not been back to New York since he'd come home from Iraq. As he headed north up Eighth Avenue, he observed the city dispassionately, which was hardly strange, since in his current persona he viewed everything dispassionately. When he was young, even while in college, he'd come to the big city on numerous occasions with great excitement, at first with his family and then alone, and even on occasion with his fiancee, but now as he drove north along Eighth Avenue with its tawdry shops, it seemed as though it had been in a previous life, and in some respects, it had been. Adam had been a totally different person back then. In fact, he labeled his life as BI and AI, meaning before Iraq and after Iraq.

BI Adam Williamson had been a rather reserved, gentlemanly, quietly intelligent young man with clean-cut good looks who'd fit into his upper-class New England life in an exemplary fashion. He'd gone to a respected boarding school, had learned and respected good manners, and had gone to Harvard, as did his father and his grandfather and back ad infinitum, back to when the Mayflower's long boat had scraped ashore in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The beginning of the interim between BI and AI hadn't been a nativity but rather the horrific event of 9/11, which had jolted Adam's comfortable and predictable world, akin to one of the planets being knocked out of its orbit. At the instant the first plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, Adam had been brushing his teeth in the Harvard Business School dorm, where he was dutifully learning the ins and outs of business as preparation ultimately to assume control of the family owned financial company.

Against his parents' wishes as well as his law-student fiancee's Adam insisted on volunteering for the military in a sudden burst of messianic zeal to do his part for America and democracy. As a natural athlete who'd been an all-American lacrosse player as well as a polo devotee, combined with a personality that motivated him to approach everything he did with one hundred percent effort, once in the military, which he'd previously known nothing about, he became fixated on becoming a member of the Special Forces. And in keeping with his personality, even that wasn't enough, and he wasn't satisfied until he became a member of the Delta Force.

Adam had enjoyed the training and reveled in its difficulty, as if the training in and of itself was helping the cause of democracy. But the real thing, meaning actual combat, came as an utter shock, because Adam was far more cerebral than physical. On his second night mission in Iraq, he was forced to kill with a knife another living, breathing human being, and his reaction shocked and shamed him. The experience had triggered a transcendental guilt and sadness, which he hid from his squadmates. To overcome what he construed as a weakness and a failing, he went out of his way on subsequent missions to kill. Over time and with equal horror and relief, he came to accept what he was doing as well as accept that he'd been metamorphosed into a true killing machine with little or no emotional response. It wasn't something he was happy about or proud of. It was just what he thought was expected of him.

Adam turned right at Columbus Circle, and the Bach Brandenburg Concertos seemed so apropos with the sudden appearance of Central Park, with its lacy, budding trees providing a welcome relief from the hard, angular, and mostly concrete city. Adam's route was to take him along Central Park South all the way to Madison Avenue where he'd turn north. At that point, it was a matter of going around the block to arrive at his destination, the Hotel Pierre, a New York City landmark from the Gilded Age.