“And all this because he’s afraid she’ll embarrass him politically?”

“I’m only Senator McDermott’s lawyer, not his conscience, Mr. Kelly. He pays me well.” Owens gestured at the envelope full of money. “Another amount equal to that will be paid when Daryn is safely, discreetly returned. Don’t try to get in touch with me or with the senator before that time. Once she’s home at her apartment in Washington, the senator will know.”

“What, does he have his own daughter’s apartment bugged?”

Owens spread his hands. “I won’t comment on that.”

“Nice guy.” Sean fingered the envelope full of cash. “And if I do this, the senator does what he can to get me reinstated in ICE?”

“The senator will use whatever influence he may have to make sure you’re able to continue in federal law enforcement.”

“Typical lawyer’s response,” Sean said. He rubbed his forehead. He was buzzing right along now, his headache gone. “I’ll look into it.”

“Good,” Owens said, sounding relieved. “Everything you need to know about Daryn is in that first packet. Except for one item.”

Sean looked up at him.

“The girl is, quite frankly, very promiscuous,” Owens said.

Sean folded his hands together on the table.

“Her sexuality is very…open,” Owens said. “Men, women…it doesn’t matter. This has presented problems in the past as well. Maybe she’s taken up the cause of legalizing prostitution as a vicarious sort of thing. Perhaps she secretly wishes she was a prostitute herself, so she could indulge herself and be paid for it.”

“Are you a psychiatrist too?”

“No, but I did fall under her spell myself once,” Owens said. “All I can say to you is to be careful. Remember what your job is.”

“I think I can take care of myself. Even around a politically radical, oversexed sociology major.”

Owens didn’t smile. He snapped his briefcase closed. “This is a nasty place,” he said.

“Yeah, but it serves its purpose,” Sean said.

“So it does.”

“Sorry about your nose.”

Owens shrugged. “The pain’s going away already.”

“Told you it wasn’t broken.”

Owens nodded and left the cantina. Sean sat for a long moment and looked at the two envelopes. Then he downed one more shot, stood a bit unsteadily, and left a wad of cash on the table. He took the envelopes, and before he left the building, pulled another tortilla out of the basket on the bar. He saluted the bartender and the old smokers with it, then headed out into the bright desert sun.

Tobias Owens drove the Lexus steadily north on 286 until it merged with Highway 86, which headed east back toward Tucson. Twenty miles outside the city, Owens pulled onto an unmarked gravel road that snaked north for several miles. He parked in a stand of cactus, right beside another car, a nondescript four-door, the kind typically used by rental agencies.

Another man got out of the rental car and looked at him. The other man was as nondescript as the car, around Owens’s age, with average features. Modestly handsome, but not memorable. His clothes were khaki pants and a blue polo shirt. Unremarkable.

“He took the job,” Owens said, placing his briefcase on the ground between the two cars. “But the drunken SOB nearly broke my nose.”

The other man’s neutral expression didn’t change. “I’m sorry to hear that. You told him everything?”

“Followed the script exactly,” Owens said. “Now about my fee…”

The other man had kept the car between the two of them, his hands shielded from Owens’s view. He quickly raised his right hand, which held a pistol, and shot Owens point-blank three times in the chest. The lawyer lunged backward across the hood of his Lexus, then rolled to the ground.

The other man had no worries about the sound of gunshots. This was the Arizona desert, and gunfire was often heard as ranchers chased off various vermin, both of the two-legged and four-legged varieties. He went through Owens’s pockets, removing the man’s business cards and wallet. After a moment’s consideration, he took the bloody handkerchief as well. He removed the license plates, registration, and insurance cards from the Lexus and placed them all in Owens’s briefcase. He left Owens’s body where it had fallen.

The man got back into his rental car and drove away without looking back. He had much to do, and far to go. The game had only just begun.

4

FAITH KELLY DOUBTED SHE WOULD EVER HAVE grandchildren, but if she did, she could imagine telling them the story:

Once upon a time, I was a deputy United States Marshal. But then I got caught up in a secret unit of the Justice Department called Department Thirty, and it helped to protect some bad people. See, we thought that these bad people could help us catch other bad people and keep them from doing bad things, so instead of punishing these bad people, we protected them and gave them new names and new jobs and made them promise to stay out of trouble. We did things like protecting the two most notorious assassins in the world. And there was this one time that I was forced to shoot a man. He’d worked for years and years to become very powerful and wanted to topple the president. And how about this one-I found out that the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was actually a murderer.

Oh, grandma, the kids would say, you’re just making all that up.

And she would smile. Of course I am. You caught me. Now go to bed.

Faith had learned a few things in the last year, ever since she’d been given her first Department Thirty recruit. Aside from that first one-where the recruit actually turned out to be innocent, a pawn in a scheme that brought down the chief justice-she’d learned that there were two types of recruits: those who were guilty and had been caught red-handed, yet continued to protest their innocence; and those who cheerfully and arrogantly admitted their guilt, almost proud of their crimes, even proud to a point of getting caught, of being asked to tell their story.

Leon Bankston fell into the latter category. He sat at the kitchen table of the safe house in the Oklahoma City suburb of Yukon, crossing and uncrossing his legs and smiling at Faith. Faith had wanted to smash his face in several times, but she forced herself to keep her mind on the job.

“You know, Leon,” she said, “I understand you. I can see your perspective on this. It’s the whole ‘honor among thieves’ thing. You haven’t disputed for a second that you smuggled those guns onto that truck, or that the truck was headed to Galveston to transfer the load to a ship, or that the ship was bound for Iraq. You know what you did.”

“That’s right,” Bankston said. He was a small man in his forties, bald except for a few tufts around his ears, with quick eyes that darted all around the room at every sound. “I did what I did. That’s my living. I’ll do my couple of years in a federal country club, then I’ll be back in business and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Faith stood up and stretched. At five ten, she was a good four inches taller than Bankston, her body slim and toned. She wasn’t quite in the shape she’d been in when she ran the New York and Boston Marathons, but she still ran. It was her only obsession, other than trying to stay above the mud and muck of her job. She passed a hand through her hair, still not used to its new short cut. Her Irish-red hair had fallen to the middle of her back for most of her life, but she’d finally had it cut into a short shag a couple of months ago, the kind of haircut that magazines liked to describe as “sassy.” Faith had laughed at that-she was sassy enough without a haircut, but she had to admit it was low maintenance.

“There’s just one problem, Leon,” she said, leaning over the table.

“What’s that, beautiful?”

She smiled. “First thing is: if you call me ‘beautiful’ or ‘sexy’ or ‘doll’ one more time, I’m liable to kick you in a place where it would really, really hurt.” She leaned in close to him, her face inches from his. “You believe I could do that, don’t you?”