The truck groaned like a mortally wounded beast, sinking down into the soft ground. Flix was up and running as Dante began to climb out of the vehicle. Then the sky seemed to split open in a blinding, deafening flash, and whatever had been airborne was careening wildly downward to the earth.

*   *   *

“I shot him.”

“You should have killed the fucker,” Hemingway said.

Julie stared at him as if he had grown a second head. “Excuse me?”

“I told you that St. Vincent has been a pain in my ass for years now. I haven’t had the leverage to shoehorn him out of NSA. It seems no one does—or no one has had the guts to try, including me.” Hemingway shook his head. “What does Directorate N do, anyway? No one knows, and that’s just the way St. Vincent likes it, hiding in the shadows like a fucking vampire.”

“He must wield some fabulous ju-ju.”

“He does, my dear. But I very much doubt it stems from the usual suspects.”

Julie and her boss sat in a brown leatherette booth in a sleazy roadhouse bar off Route 270, northwest of the Beltway, past the periphery of D.C.’s action. A glorious juke burping colored lights was playing Sinatra and Fitzgerald while antediluvian barflies clung to their old-fashioneds or gin and tonics as if they were life preservers. A bartender with a pate as smooth and shiny as glass read a dog-eared copy of The Odyssey, never even bothering to lift his head when required to refill one of his customers’ glasses.

“No,” Hemingway went on, “I’m certain Mr. St. Vincent’s ju-ju, as you call it, comes from a nongovernmental source entirely.”

She had told him as much as she had dared about what had happened the night before. Leaving out any of the sexual context, which was no one’s business but her own. He didn’t question any of it, and why should he? She had done precisely what he had asked her to do: find out more about Sydny.

“It interests me that both St. Vincent and Whitman had a relationship with this woman,” Hemingway said now, paralleling her train of thought.

“Oh, I don’t think St. Vincent knew her at all,” Julie said. “I heard him. He killed her because she and Whitman had a relationship that was a bit more than all-business.”

Hemingway sat back, his fingers drumming the table as he contemplated this news. “So her death was an object lesson.”

Something quailed inside Julie. But she had been there, and she knew. “That’s a horrid way to look at it.”