“Huh?”

“I didn’t tell him on purpose. He came to see me this afternoon. To apologize, and we were talking, and I just said it without thinking. That it was in the trunk of the car.”

Mitch stared. “Who? Who did you say that to?” But in his heart, he knew the answer already.

“Alex.”

IT WAS ALL FALLING APART.

Not, Ian reflected, back in Jenn’s kitchen, wet suit plastered to wet skin, that it had ever exactly been together. Everything about their situation had been screwed pretty much from the jump.

OK. So things are bad. What do you do?

Only one answer. The same one he’d always fallen back on. Think about it like a game.

Not gambling or one of the political modeling games. Strategy, then. Like the battlefield sims he’d played in college. Balance strengths and weaknesses, figure the goal, and then move toward it. Meanwhile, try to forget that you have a phone number memorized, that relief from sickness and doubt is one call and a stop at an ATM away. It was only midnight. He could be the proud owner of an eight ball by 12:30-

A game.

Right. OK, then. Strengths.

“I can’t believe he took it.” Jenn was twisting a lock of hair like a phone cord.

“I can,” Mitch said.

“I know, you hate him-”

“No, I don’t.” Mitch sighed. “I don’t. I was trying to become him, I think. But you had it right from the beginning. His daughter. He wouldn’t be thinking about anything else.”

“But to give Victor chemical weapons-”

“He didn’t know what they are, remember? Maybe on some subconscious level, he suspects. But he’ll be ignoring that, same way we did. Telling himself that it’s just chemicals to cook up drugs. Set against Cassie, that won’t mean much.”

Strengths. Well, they knew what the bottles held. Neither Johnny nor Victor would expect that. What else?

Nothing leapt to mind.

Against that, the weaknesses. Victor and his bodyguards and their guns and easy violence. Alex’s head start. Nothing to take to the police now, no bargaining chips. The fact that the four of them couldn’t manage to have each others’ backs for half an hour.

Who was he kidding? They were fucked.

“You know how I said this wasn’t our fault?” Jenn’s voice pitched like she was talking to someone who wasn’t there. “That’s not true, is it?”

“Well, you were right, we didn’t make it-”

“Mitch.”

He sighed. “Yeah. It’s our fault.”

“And a thousand people could die because of it.”

Her words hit Ian hard, took him back to September. No matter how many years passed, he would always think of it simply as September. How he had watched TV for hours, the towers falling over and over. That terrible video of the second plane, the way every time it ran you prayed that somehow this time it would happen differently, that it would slide sideways, miss by inches. That there would be a Hollywood ending.

The sick feeling when it didn’t. Over and over again.

He’d just been starting out then, working from a half cube under fluorescent lights. But trading was a virtual gig. He spent all day on the phone, on the computer, talking to people all over the world, but especially in New York. He’d had friends in those towers. Every time he’d watched people jumping, that agonizing footage, too grainy to tell anything, he’d wondered if the body plummeting through the air was someone he knew.

Now they would have to live with the fact that the next time they turned on the TV, it might have another ungraspable story of broken bodies and mass panic and that sudden awareness that they were not invulnerable, that there were people in the world who wanted to hurt them, and that those people could.

Only this time, he had helped them.

MITCH FELT A SCREAM building inside. All that time they could have done right. Not just when they had the chemicals. Before then. When they sat around and bullshitted each other about what mattered, when all the time in the world lay splayed at their feet.

And worse, this final irony. By giving Victor the bottles, Alex had made them safe. It was over for them. No one would come after them. The police would never know. They could go on with their lives. With a lot more money.

All they had to do was nothing.

“Goddamn it.” He hit the counter with the flat of his palm. The sting was sharp and clean, and reminded him, for a half second, of what it had felt like to hit Jenn. He pushed the thought away. One more sin. “I’m not going to let this happen.” He rubbed his hands together. “Jenn, call your detective. The two of you go meet him. Tell him everything. The robbery, the guy in the alley, the DF, everything. Tell him that I’ll turn myself in soon.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going after Alex. I’ve got a guess where he’ll be.”

“Where’s that?”

“Where this all started.”

“Johnny’s restaurant?”

“Victor isn’t going to invite Alex over to his house. But they need a place where they can be alone. It’s after midnight. Johnny’s is closed. It’s safe ground. No risk of being seen, and no chance Alex can have cops with him.”

“If he’s there, then so is Victor,” Jenn said. “You’ll just get yourself killed.”

“Maybe not. If I can get to him first, I can tell him what he’s carrying. Alex is stubborn, but once he knows, he’ll come with me to the police, and we can end this thing.”

“And what if you can’t get to him before Victor does?”

“Then I’ll just have to try anyway.”

“That’s suicide.”

“I don’t care.” He stepped closer to her, took her hands in his. Looked her in the eye. “Jenn, I have to do this.”

“Why?”

For my sins. For a body in an alley and the lie that was my life and the lie I tried to turn it into. But what he said was, “You know why.” He thought about trying to kiss her. Instead he turned to Ian. “Can I borrow your car?”

The man dug in his pocket, pulled out a slender ring of keys. Mitch took them. It felt good to be moving, to finally be acting instead of letting life happen.

“This is stupid,” Jenn said. “You’re feeling guilty, so you’re just walking into this?”

“If there’s even a chance to stop him, I have to take it. Besides,” he said and forced a smile, “I have insurance. You two.”

“Why don’t we just call the cops and tell them to go there right now?”

He shook his head. “They wouldn’t believe us. You’ll get transferred around, have to tell your story over and over. Eventually maybe they would send someone. But it will be too late.”

“I could call Detective Bradley and tell him-”

“You’d just be a voice on the phone. No, you have to go and turn yourselves in and tell him enough details, in person and in his custody, to convince him. It’s too big a risk otherwise. You have to convince him. And do it fast, all right? I’m depending on you.” He took a deep breath, held it for a moment. It took all his strength to make himself look calm, like fear wasn’t scrabbling inside of him, a living thing. “OK.” He started down the hall.

“Mitch.” It was Ian’s voice.

He turned. Ian opened his mouth, closed it. Finally he said, “We won’t let you down.”

Mitch looked at them. Two of the three friends he’d once considered the only people who knew him. Torn apart by stupidity and selfishness, and now responsible for something more horrible than they could imagine. Average people, each weak in their own way, all afraid and lost and lonely.

“I know,” Mitch said. “I trust you.”

Then he turned and headed for the door.

THE DETECTIVE ANSWERED on the fourth ring. It was after midnight, but she supposed Saturday night was prime time for a homicide detective.

“This is Jennifer Lacie. You came by my house-”

“Yes, Ms. Lacie. What can I do for you?”

She took a deep breath. Once she said what she had to say, there was no going back. No return to safety.