“You’re entitled to your opinion,” said Dewey, “but I don’t really give a fuck what you think, Derek. I was minding my own business. You’re the ones who dragged me up here.”

“Minding your own business?” asked Calibrisi. “You were dangling upside down in a fucking car. You’d be dead—”

“That’s my choice,” said Dewey, calmly.

“Yes, it is,” said Chalmers, agreeing. “And you’re right, you didn’t ask for our help. The truth is, we want Fao Bhang dead too.”

“So kill him.”

“You’re the one he’s developed the obsession with,” said Chalmers patiently. “That obsession is the only reason he’s vulnerable right now. Inserting ourselves into that obsession is the only way anyone is going to get within a hundred miles of Fao Bhang. So you’re right, you can try to do it on your own. You killed his brother on your own. I would imagine Bhang might be slightly more difficult, but, yes, you might be able to pull it off. Let me say this: I’d give you better chances than anyone else I know.”

Chalmers paused, then smiled at Dewey.

“But in the end, we both know, if you step foot out of this house, you’re a dead man,” said Chalmers. “I’d give it a day, maybe two. You know it, and I know it. What occurred in Lisbon is simply a taste of what awaits you. And not just here—everywhere.”

“That’s my choice. Let them try. And if they succeed, then I’ll wait for that motherfucker in hell.”

Chalmers shook his head.

“Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say you do manage to not get killed. Bhang hasn’t left China in ten years. How would you infiltrate China? Then, once you were there, how is it you’d get close to him?”

Dewey stared icily at Chalmers.

“Why don’t you worry about protecting Queen Elizabeth, and I’ll worry about killing Fao Bhang,” said Dewey.

Chalmers shook his head in disbelief.

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Chalmers said. “Do you want to fail? To die trying? Do you think there’s some sort of nobility in that? And is that what Jessica deserves? Doesn’t she deserve more?”

“She deserves to be alive, which she isn’t.”

The room went silent.

“I need a break,” said Chalmers, struggling to maintain his composure. He stood up and walked behind the sofas to the French doors. He walked onto the terrace and stood looking out at the gardens.

Calibrisi stood up and walked out of the room. He was followed by Katie, then by the two Brits on the couch. Only Tacoma remained in the room. He was seated on the sofa. He had removed one of his shoes and was scratching between his toes.

“Dewey?” asked Tacoma after a while, quietly clearing his throat. “You know I’m not good at saying stuff. So I’m just gonna say it. I’m sorry for what happened. It sucks, man.”

Dewey stared at the coffee table for several moments. Finally, he looked at Tacoma. Tacoma’s long hair was a disheveled mess. He looked more like a hippie than a highly decorated former Navy SEAL. He had on a flannel shirt with paint stains on it, and a prominent rip on the right shoulder. His face was covered in stubble. Their eyes met.

“But are you so fucking selfish you’d rather die than forgive the people in this room?” continued Tacoma. “Are you so fucking selfish you’d rather die than kill that son of a bitch, the one who actually did kill her?”

Dewey didn’t quite know why—he’d served alongside many men—but for some reason he couldn’t explain, Tacoma was like the little brother he never had. He had an older brother, but not a younger one, and it was different. He stared at Tacoma and he felt embarrassed, even ashamed. And in that moment, Dewey found something he needed badly, something that no amount of revenge or killing or alcohol or running could ever give him: in that brotherhood, he found a reason for living.

Dewey smiled. “Well, since you put it so politely, Rob.”

76

MARGARET HILL

CASTINE

Sam walked up the long gravel driveway toward his grandparents’ farm.

Before he left the club, he’d grabbed the nine iron from his golf bag. As he ambled slowly toward the farm, he was swinging it at the yellow dandelion heads that sprouted in the grass strip that ran up the middle of the driveway, and at anything even remotely hittable in the low bushes alongside the driveway—flowers, pinecones, even the occasional rock.

Truth be told, he didn’t like golf very much, so he actually didn’t care about not playing the back nine, which was, at nine-hole Castine Golf Club, simply the front nine all over again. But the thought of scrubbing down the cantankerous old pig Homer made Sam walk as slowly as humanly possible without drawing the suspicion of his grandmother, who was apt to go looking for him if he took too long walking up the meandering drive to the farm.

Sam came to a small green apple that had fallen in the middle of the road. He considered eating it, but then changed his mind. He got into a golf stance, then swung, firing the apple in a hail of scattering parts into the bushes.

After admiring his shot for much longer than it actually deserved, he started walking again, practically smelling Homer as he drew closer. His momentum was suddenly interrupted by the dull red speckles of a raspberry bush.

They wouldn’t want you to starve, he said to himself as he dropped the club and leaned over to pick a few raspberries and waste more time.

*   *   *

John Andreas stepped to the side of a large fenced-in pigpen. Three pigs were inside the pen, but there was little question as to whose pigpen it was. Homer lay on his side, covered in dried mud, sunbathing in the morning sunshine. He occupied the entire center of the pen, next to the feeding trough, guarding access to it and snoring.

“Hey, Homer,” called Andreas. “Sam’s giving you a bath. Don’t bite him, or I’ll cut another one of those legs off.”

If the pig understood anything that his sixty-six-year-old owner had just said, he didn’t act like it. Indeed, the sound of the big pig’s snoring hummed on through Andreas’s words, uninterrupted.

Andreas, trailed by an old sheepdog named Ginny, walked back across the lawn toward the farmhouse.

Inside the kitchen, he sat down at the table where his wife, Margaret, was already seated. Three plates with sandwiches on them, along with three glasses of lemonade, were on the table.

“Well, that was nice of you, Marge,” he said. “Who’s the third one for?”

“Sammy.”

“Hobey’s trying to teach him a lesson, hon.”

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with that kid. He’s a spitting image of his uncle. How did he turn out?”

“That’s not the point, Marge. It’s not our place to get in the middle of that.”

“We’ll tell him to keep it hush,” she said, patting his hand. “And before you have him clean that damn pig, I need his help in the garden. My arthritis is acting up. He can weed for a spell.”

*   *   *

Less than a half mile away, just past Hatch Cove, Dao took a right turn on Wadsworth Cove Road. She drove a few hundred feet, slowly, looking ahead and behind, making sure no one was around to see her. She turned into a grassy cutout lot to the left. She aimed the car across the thick field grass and parked between a pair of pine trees, out of sight of anyone driving or walking on Wadsworth Cove Road.

Outside the car, she took off her leather boots, then removed her white blouse and jeans, tossing them in the back of the Camaro. She pulled on tight green camouflage running pants, a matching running shirt, then a camo ski mask, which she pulled down over her head. She slammed a magazine in the Panther LR-308, then strapped the rifle across her back.

Dao began a fast run into the woods, due south, guided by the small compass on her watch. She’d never been to Castine before, but she knew precisely where she was going.