For the first time that day, Ashley threw back her head and laughed.

It wasn’t until she was thirty thousand feet above Virginia that she wondered if she’d been a perfect jackass. Again. Perhaps she’d fled from Jeremy not because she didn’t trust him, not because she was too hardhearted to give him another chance, but because she didn’t trust herself. There were too many sparks between them. She couldn’t be thinking about sex and romance now. Her head hurt and her brother was in the hospital with a broken leg and her uncle was out skulking around the countryside with a fortune in diamonds and pearls. And there was an ex-spy involved now. And muttering about mad monks. And a desperate Houston socialite and executive.

How could she possibly think about screwing with Jeremy Carruthers? Because she couldn't can’t help it. Well, tough. She was practical and self-possessed. Besides which, she’d undoubtedly alienated Jeremy for the last time. She sighed with regret. There was nothing to be done about it now.

As Barky would say, the egg was broken, and there’d be no putting it back together again.

19

The next morning was warm and bright in Boston. Ashley had spent the night, alone but in luxury, at the Four Seasons Hotel, in a room overlooking the Public Gardens. She registered under the name Phyllis Mysticeti, mysticeti being the Latin name for baleen or “whalebone” whales, the largest animals in the world and one of two suborders of cetaceans, i.e., dolphins, porpoises and whales. It was as good a name as any, she thought. Certainly as good as Wakefield. And the clerk didn’t bat an eye.

More to the point, no one had found her—not Barky, not Mac Stevens, not reporters, not Jeremy Carruthers. She’d called David, but that was all. He’d promised, this time, to keep his mouth shut about her whereabouts.

She breakfasted in the elegant Four Seasons dining room, reminding herself that until a few days ago she had led a very different kind of life, and then she ventured over to lower Chestnut Street. Rumpled red jumpsuits weren’t appropriate attire for the president of a prestigious communications firm. Stifling an unexpected pang of loneliness, she put on a jade linen suit.

Afterward, she stood outside on her steps and looked around. But there was no indication that Jeremy Carruthers was anywhere in the neighborhood. And even the interest of the gossip journalists was fading: there was nary a reporter or photographer to be seen.

She walked to the waterfront. Caroline Kent was there, and they shut themselves up in Ashley’s office and began what Caroline called “Hungarian History 101.” For more than an hour, she briefed Ashley on what she had learned during her intensive study at the Boston Public Library.

Like those of so many countries in central and eastern Europe, Hungary’s borders had changed radically over the centuries. Historic—or Greater—Hungary is two-thirds larger than modern Hungary, which had been chopped up under the punitive measures of the Treaty of Trianon after World War I. Located in the Carpathian Basin, with the Danube River bisecting it, Hungary has traditionally been the breadbasket of the region.