Special Agent George Martin leaned against a gravestone at the far southern corner of the cemetery. He glanced at his watch—an old Seiko that he was tired of looking at, not just because it was a reminder that his contact was late, but because it reminded him of how he had to scrape and scrimp and save just to buy the most basic essentials. He knew people he’d gone to law school with who wore watches that cost more than he made in a year. For a long time, he’d been OK with that. They led empty lives, he told himself, working for bloodless corporations and hedge funds, so they had to console themselves with the trappings of success. He, on the other hand, was doing good work—work that helped protect the American people and put bad guys in jail where they could no longer do anyone any harm.

It was a lie, though, and he could no longer breathe enough enthusiasm into it to get himself to believe it. His second divorce had cost him what little savings he’d been able to amass, and now he was paying alimony and child support to two women who hated his guts. His daughter was looking at colleges, and he didn’t know how he was going to be able to tell her that he wouldn’t be able to pay for her to attend anywhere but a state school. He’d gone to Yale Law School, for Christ’s sake, and now he was on the verge of bankruptcy. He wondered how it had come to this.

He heard the footsteps in the snow even before the figure appeared. Martin was expecting him to come from the north, where the cemetery met Bennington Street, so that he would be able to watch him approach and steel himself against the fear and revulsion at his own betrayal, but the man came from behind him, out of the thin shrubs that bordered the airport.

Martin turned, and his breath caught in his chest, the way it had the first time he’d beheld Javier Carpio. Martin never thought of himself as small—he was a little under six feet tall, and his once athletic build, while softer than it had been in his youth, made him feel adequate in most circumstances. Looking up at Javier Carpio, though, made him feel Lilliputian. With the airport lights shining from behind Carpio, all Martin could see was a giant black silhouette against the white snow that seemed to have claimed a permanent right to blanket the city. Standing there in the cemetery, surrounded by the rotting remains of men and women who’d passed more than two centuries before, Martin couldn’t help feeling as though he’d entered a Stephen King novel.

“Does she believe Soh’s information?” Carpio asked.

“She does,” Martin responded.

“And the plans?”