“Or conspiracy.”

“Goddamn it.” Buchanan pulled free of Vasquez, and headed for the long, rectangular park that stretched behind the tower, speed walking. His legs were sufficiently long that she had to jog to catch up to him. Buchanan did not slacken his pace, continuing his straight line up the middle of the park, through the midst of bemused picnickers. “Jesus Christ,” Vasquez called, “will you slow down?”

He would not. Heedless of oncoming traffic, Buchanan led her across a pair of roads that traversed the park. Horns blaring, tires screaming, cars swerved around them. At this rate, Vasquez thought, Plowman’s motives won’t matter. Once they were safely on the grass again, she sped up until she was beside him, then reached high on the underside of Buchanan’s right arm, not far from the armpit, and pinched as hard as she could.

“Ow! Shit!” Yanking his arm up and away, Buchanan stopped. Rubbing his skin, he said, “What the hell, Vasquez?”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Walking. What did it look like?”

“Running away.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, you candy-ass pussy.”

Buchanan’s eyes flared.

“I’m trying to work this shit out so we can stay alive. You’re so concerned about seeing your son, maybe you’d want to help me.”

“Why are you doing this?” Buchanan said. “Why are you fucking with my head? Why are you trying to fuck this up?”

“I’m—”

“There’s nothing to work out. We’ve got a job to do; we do it; we get the rest of our money. We do the job well, there’s a chance Stillwater’ll add us to their payroll. That happens—I’m making that kind of money—I hire myself a pit bull of a lawyer and sic him on fucking Heidi. You want to live in goddamn Paris, you can eat a croissant for breakfast every morning.”

“You honestly believe that.”

“Yes, I do.”

Vasquez held his gaze, but who was she kidding? She could count on one finger the number of stare downs she’d won. Her arms, legs, everything felt suddenly, incredibly heavy. She looked at her watch. “Come on,” she said, starting in the direction of the Avenue de la Bourdonnais. “We can catch a cab.”

—

III

Plowman had insisted they meet him at an airport cafй before they set foot outside de Gaulle. At the end of those ten minutes, which had consisted of Plowman asking details of their flight and instructing them how to take the RUR to the Metro to the stop nearest their hotel, he had passed Vasquez a card for a restaurant, where, he had said, the three of them would reconvene at 3:00 p.m. local time to review the evening’s plans. Vasquez had been relieved to see Plowman seated at a table outside the cafй. Despite the ten thousand dollars gathering interest in her checking account, the plane ticket that had been FedExed to her apartment, followed by the receipt for four nights’ stay at the Hфtel Resnais, she had been unable to shake the sense that none of this was as it appeared, that it was the setup to an elaborate joke whose punch line would come at her expense. Plowman’s solid form, dressed in a black suit whose tailored lines announced the upward shift in his pay grade, had confirmed that everything he had told her the afternoon he had sought her out at Andersen’s farm had been true.

Or true enough to quiet momentarily the misgivings that had whispered ever louder in her ears the last two weeks, to the point that she had held her cell open in her left hand, the piece of paper with Plowman’s number on it in her right, ready to call him and say she was out, he could have his money back, she hadn’t spent any of it. During the long, hot train ride from the airport to the Metro station, when Buchanan had complained about Plowman not letting them out of his sight, treating them like goddamn kids, Vasquez had found an explanation on her lips. It’s probably the first time he’s run an operation like this, she had said. He wants to be sure he dots all his i’s and crosses all his t’s. Buchanan had harrumphed, but it was true: Plowman obsessed over the minutiae; it was one of the reasons he’d been in charge of their detail at the prison. Until the shit had buried the fan, that attentiveness had seemed to forecast his steady climb up the chain of command. At his court-martial, however, his enthusiasm for exact strikes on prisoner nerve clusters, his precision in placing arm restraints so that a prisoner’s shoulders would not dislocate when he was hoisted off the floor by his bonds, and his speed in obtaining the various surgical and dental instruments Just-Call-Me-Bill requested had been counted liabilities rather than assets, and he had been the only one of their group to serve substantial time at Leavenworth—ten months.

Still, the Walther that Vasquez had requested had been waiting where Plowman had promised it would be, wrapped with an extra clip in a waterproof bag secured inside the tank of her hotel room’s toilet. A thorough inspection had reassured her that all was in order with the gun, its ammunition. If he were setting her up, would Plowman have wanted to arm her? Her proficiency at the target range had been well known, and while she hadn’t touched a gun since her discharge, she had no doubts of her ability. Tucked within the back of her jeans, draped by her blouse, the pistol was easily accessible.

That’s assuming, of course, that Plowman’s even there tonight. But the caution was a formality. Plowman being Plowman, there was no way he was not going to be at Mr. White’s hotel. Was there any need for him to have made the trip to West Virginia, to have tracked her to Andersen’s farm, to have sought her out in the far barns, where she’d been using a high-pressure hose to sluice pig shit into gutters? An e-mail, a phone call would have sufficed. Such methods, however, would have left too much outside Plowman’s immediate control, and since he appeared able to dunk his bucket into a well of cash deeper than any she’d known, he had decided to find Vasquez and speak to her directly. (He’d done the same with Buchanan, she’d learned on the flight over, tracking him to the suburb of Chicago where he’d been shift manager at Hardee’s.) If the man had gone to such lengths to persuade them to take the job, if he had been there to meet them at Charles de Gaulle and was waiting for them even now, as their taxi crossed the Seine and headed toward the Champs Йlysйes, was there any chance he wouldn’t be present later on?

Of course, he wouldn’t be alone. Plowman would have the reassurance of God only knew how many Stillwater employees—which was to say, mercenaries (no doubt, heavily armed and armored)—backing him up. Vasquez hadn’t had much to do with the company’s personnel; they tended to roost closer to the center of Kabul, where the high-value targets they guarded huddled. Iraq: that was where Stillwater’s boot print was the deepest. From what Vasquez had heard, the former soldiers riding the reinforced Lincoln Navigators through Baghdad not only made about five times what they had in the military; they followed rules of engagement that were, to put it mildly, less robust. While Paris was as far east as she was willing to travel, she had to admit, the prospect of that kind of money made Baghdad, if not appealing, at least less unappealing.

And what would Dad have to say to that? No matter that his eyes were failing, the center of his vision consumed by macular degeneration; her father had lost none of his passion for the news, employing a standing magnifier to aid him as he pored over the day’s New York Times and Washington Post, sitting in his favorite chair listening to All Things Considered on WVPN, even venturing online to the BBC using the computer whose monitor settings she had adjusted for him before she’d deployed. Her father would not have missed the reports of Stillwater’s involvement in several incidents in Iraq that were less shootouts than turkey shoots, not to mention the ongoing Congressional inquiry into their policing of certain districts of post–Katrina and Rita New Orleans, as well as an event in upstate New York last summer, when one of their employees had taken a camping trip that had left two of his three companions dead under what could best be described as suspicious circumstances. She could hear his words, heavy with the accent that had accreted as he’d aged: Was this why I suffered in the Villa Grimaldi? So my daughter could join the Caravana de la Muerte? The same question he’d asked her the first night she’d returned home.