Mindful of his digestive problems, Morgan resisted the tray of biscotti in front of him, and instead raised a glass of carbonated mineral water to his lips. He drank slowly, watching buds of filtered sunlight shrivel on the burgundy curtains over the room’s terrace doors. Two floors below, in the main hall of the restored medieval guild house he had occupied since his lamented flight from the States, the art gallery his family had run for nearly a hundred years was silent, its staff having canceled the day’s appointments at his instruction. With dusk, the specialty shops and fashion houses along the right bank of the Limma would be closing as well. Morgan imagined their owners offering courtly good-nights to prosperous clients, the musical tinkle of chimes above their shutting entries, and then their lights blinking out one by one. That was Zurich for him. A city of ritualized decorum and sterile elegance. Of priggish, elitist bankers and financiers.

And, Morgan thought, of ultimately civilized exiles.

He put down his glass, scanning the group around the table, his eyes gliding from person to person. Stored in his mind were two curricula vitae for each of them—the public and private, sanctioned and unsanctioned, licit and illicit details of their personal lives and careers. All were tangled up in invisible strings, pulling some while they themselves got pulled by others.

Take Feodor Nikolin down at the opposite end of the table. On the front of the sheet, Nikolin was an advisor to the elected governor of Russia’s Baltic oil and gas pipeline region. Back of the sheet? The election and his civilian appointment had been fixed by the new ultranationalist boss at the Kremlin, President Arkady Pedachenko, whose Honor and Soil Party had crested a populist wave to power . . . Nikolin by no coincidence being Pedachenko’s nephew by marriage, and a former colonel from the military’s Raketnye voiska strategicheskogonaznacheniya, or Strategic Rocket Forces, which oversaw Russia’s nuclear arsenals.

Take Azzone Spero, the Italian Treasury and Economic Planning Minister. King of the kickback, he’d violated a slew of legal bidding procedures to award government waste-collection licenses to front companies run by the LaCana crime syndicate, known to earn billions annually from the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes throughout Europe.

Or take Sebastian Alcala, the squat, dark man seated opposite Nikolin. His open résumé showed him to be a mid-level administrator with the Argentinian mining exploration secretariat. But Morgan’s secret file tied him to everything from embezzlement of state funds to facilitation of illegal arms traffic for the black marketeer and narco-terrorist El Tio, who’d recently slipped into limbo like a vanishing ghost.