A world of thank-yous and apologies to the Routh family, who invited me into their home for the holidays and then fed me while I hunched over my laptop and frantically tried to wrap up the first draft of Amnesty, while simultaneously line-editing Armistice.

And most of all, my love and thanks to Eliot, who had to live with me while I finished this book. You’re a hero, and you kept me sane.

Map

Epigraphs

We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really, I mean … one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold.

—John le Carré,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

—Graham Greene,
The Quiet American

PART

1

CHAPTER

ONE

Aristide didn’t hear the bell of his telephone over the racket of radio and ticker tape and typewriter keys. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have answered. That was what secretaries were for. Because he hadn’t had the benefit of a warning ring, Daoud caught him unawares, head sunk low to a ledger, spectacles sliding down his nose.

“Ari,” said Daoud, and when Aristide finally heard his name it had the air of a third or fourth repetition.

“Sorry,” he said, blinking as his vision adjusted for the top half of his bifocals. “What is it?”

“Telephone.”

Aristide took off the new spectacles and pressed the heels of his hands into the aching muscles around his eyes. Damned new prescription. Damned old body. “Tell them to ring again tomorrow. I’m ready for a drink.”

Daoud’s lips crimped to one side, tugging the line of his beard askew. “It is His Highness. Prince Asiyah.”

Attention pulled him taut as a piano wire. He set his pen aside with unwarranted care. “All right. Send it back.”

There was every chance this was the warning Aristide had been ready for since last autumn, when he and Merrilee Cross sent their first cargo of tar to the newly pacified port of Amberlough. Asiyah wasn’t vice or port authority by any stretch, nor was he precisely a confederate of Cross-Costa Imports or any of its multiple subsidiaries. Still, he had in the past let hints fall for an old friend. Perhaps out of pity or guilt, since the information Aristide originally cajoled from him led to neither profit nor satisfaction. Cyril DePaul had not appeared from the jungles of Liso.

Or perhaps this wasn’t about the tar, but an order to cease skimming Porachin aid shipments. Aristide had done his best to keep that from royal or intelligence attention.