With a spurt of energy, she jumped up, almost turning over a chair as she made her way back out to the narrow cobblestone street, then quickly disappeared past a cheese-and-bread shop. She was smartly dressed, but she wore shoes that could handle Amsterdam’s many brick and cobblestone walks and streets, reminding him that she wasn’t eighteen anymore.

A large group of American tourists started rearranging tables, calling loudly, cheerfully, to each other about who would sit where.

A street musician fired up his accordion and moved in, playing a cheerful tune. The tourists laughed, loving it.

Janssen paid for his coffee and walked down the street to a small Mercedes that awaited him. The back door opened, and he slid onto the cool leather seat next to Claude Rousseau, his most experienced bodyguard.

“She won’t say anything,” Nicholas said. “She hasn’t told anyone that we’ve met. She’s not going to now that her son’s been shot. It would only complicate the situation for everyone-her, her husband, her son. The president.”

“Is she afraid?”

“Terrified.”

He sighed, his pulse quickening. Yes, terrified. And yet all beautiful Betsy Quinlan Dunnemore knew was that her old acquaintance from college was a convicted tax evader.

“Did she believe you?” Rousseau asked.

“About her son? I don’t know.” That troubled him, because he’d told her the truth. He’d had nothing to do with the shooting. “Have you heard from our man in New York? Does he have any idea what the hell’s going on there?”

Rousseau shook his head. He was dark haired, angular, good-looking and lethal. Thrown out of the French army. A mercenary, plain and simple. “Nothing.”

“Be prepared. You might have to go to there.”

Claude smiled. “All of my passports are in order.”

Janssen knew not to ask how many passports, how many identities, Rousseau-if that was his real name-had at his disposal. Even if Claude would tell him, which he wouldn’t, there was always, for Nicholas, the question of plausible deniability. Some things he was better off not knowing. His people knew it and sometimes didn’t trouble him with details.

Could his man in New York have taken it upon himself to try to kill Rob Dunnemore?

If so, he should have finished the job-done it right and killed both marshals. Now it could look like a botched job, which, if his friends or enemies thought he was behind it, would only make Nicholas appear weak.

The Mercedes pulled out into Amsterdam’s tangle of impossibly narrow streets, many indistinguishable from the sidewalks and ubiquitous bike paths. Janssen settled back in his seat and shut his eyes, picturing himself bike riding in the hills of northern Virginia as a boy, picking wild strawberries on a warm spring day, driving north into Pennsylvania with his father and walking up Little Round Top as his father regaled him with details of the Battle of Gettysburg. It had all sounded so romantic. To Father, the soldiers on both sides exemplified duty, honor, integrity and courage. They were men who’d never given up.

Nicholas imagined the federal agents hunting him were much the same. He had no illusions they’d forgotten about him. “Failure to appear” was not a good thing. If convicted of the tax charges, he faced a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison-what would taking off to Switzerland before his trial tack onto his sentence?

Going to trial wasn’t an option.

Prison wasn’t an option.

But he could never go home.

That was what he hadn’t realized, on a soul-deep level, when he’d fled.

He did now.

He opened his eyes, saw a Dutch couple riding bicycles with their blond toddlers in little seats on the handlebars. Everything seemed so foreign to him. He felt the familiar lump in his throat. He was, he thought, so far from home.

Eight

Sarah passed bellmen and limousines on Central Park South and lingered a few seconds under the awning of the expensive hotel where the news conference touting the joint fugitive task force had been held.

She could almost see Nate Winter and her brother walking out onto the street in their dark suits, relieved to have that tedious ninety minutes behind them.

The weather was better today. Cool, partly cloudy.

And it was later in the day. Afternoon rush hour. Sarah made her way across the busy street. There had to be more cars and more pedestrians on Central Park South now than yesterday at midday.

For the first time all day, she was-at last-alone. She walked alongside the stone fence overlooking the south end of the park until she came to Fifth Avenue, which ran north along the huge park’s eastern side.

Her interview with Joe Collins had been short and to the point. Sarah had made it clear that President Poe had checked on her simply as a friend. It wasn’t that big a deal. She didn’t know whether Collins was convinced or not. She spent the afternoon with her brother for five or ten minutes at a time. He was still out of it from his surgery and medications, but when he was awake enough to talk, he told her to go back to Tennessee.

Sarah had finally told everyone she needed to get out on her own for a while. By herself. No marshals, no FBI, no doctors. No seriously injured brother she was upsetting with her presence.

What if Rob got into trouble for being the president’s friend? Had he intentionally kept it a secret from his bosses, and now his twin sister had opened her big mouth? In hindsight, Sarah wished she’d taken the phone into the bathroom of her hotel room instead of talking to Wes right there in front of a deputy U.S. marshal. Let Rob be the one to tell his colleagues about their friendship with the president.

She stopped hard at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance into Central Park, the same one her brother and Nate Winter had used yesterday. Across from her, the Grand Army Plaza split Fifth Avenue. She noticed the bright gold statue of William Tecumseh Sherman on his horse. The “Grand Army” was the Union Army of the Potomac, the plaza named in its honor after the Battle of Gettysburg.

She’d read about it in a New York guidebook Juliet had thrust at her during a long wait at the hospital while doctors were in with her brother.

The new leaves on the trees were a fresh spring-green, not as thick as the leaves in Night’s Landing, and when Sarah started down the stone steps, she saw the stretches of lush grass and the thousands of tulips that had been shown repeatedly on the television coverage of the shooting.

The crime scene tape was gone. Sarah didn’t notice any FBI agents or reporters, but she did see two uniformed NYPD officers on foot.

Her breathing was shallow, her stomach tight with tension.

Ducks floated along the pond’s edge. An elderly woman with a cane settled onto a bench as if nothing had happened there, and three animated women in sneakers fast-walked north into the park.

Normalcy.

People must have accepted that the sniper had specifically targeted the two marshals, and yesterday’s shooting wasn’t a random act likely to be repeated, at least not with regular New Yorkers in the crosshairs. Maybe with another deputy.

Maybe with a deputy’s sister.

Sarah pushed the ridiculous thought out of her mind and continued gingerly down the steps.

There’d been no warning-no man seen running with a gun, no shouted demands from the bushes. Just Rob jerking with the impact of the first shot, Nate Winter seeing the blood and getting them both to cover.

She spotted the rock outcropping and realized for the first time that the park was well below street level here at its southeast corner.

Was the shooter hiding somewhere in the bush now, watching, waiting?

She warned herself not to succumb to her family penchant for drama and instead tried to absorb some of the get-on-with-life spirit of the tourists and New Yorkers around her.