THE CHIMERA’S MASTER BEDROOM. WEARING A SILK robe dyed the shaded grays of twilight by the handloom weavers of Andhra Pradesh, Harlan DeVane sat at his computer in the depths of the African night and appraised the second e-mail to his enemy. He wanted to carefully reread the words he had written and view the animation his technicians had embedded with graphic image files, assuring himself that each component enriched the other, that the entire product met his every criterion.

In his intense, unmoving concentration, DeVane’s tightened lips were the same noncolor as the rest of his features. He almost could have been a waxwork figure, showing no outward sign of his satisfaction with the message’s wording and form.

Yet, satisfied he was.

Here was an example of manipulative power wielded with brilliance. Here was real wallop. How often was a hoodwink conceived to smack the eyes with its falsity . . . make one aware he was being toyed with?

It brought a symmetry to things that DeVane did not believe he could have manufactured, but could only have wrested from existing circumstance.

Pain did indeed cut many different ways; the child that was loved could bring about the father’s fall as surely as the child shunned and hated.

Locked onto this thought, fascinated by its many ironies, DeVane fired his ultimatum into electronic space.

Palo Alto. Morning. A downcast brow of clouds over the hills threatened another day of chill rain and mist.

In the Gordian home, Megan Breen had been running on coffee and nervous energy for hours and found her caffeine level in increasingly frequent need of a recharge. She had spent the greater part of the night doing what she could to comfort and support Ashley, and the rest of it conferring with the Sword ops who’d turned the living room into an ad-hoc base of operations. Inside, their surveillance techware occupied every available surface. Outside, their vehicles had crowded the entire drive. The thirty-acre estate had been secured by armed patrols to ensure Ashley Gordian was as safe from physical harm as anybody on earth . . . but Megan knew her heart could not be protected in similar fashion, and that very deeply worried her.

The e-mail arrived at the precise tick of eight o’clock. Ash had fallen off into a doze that not even total exhaustion would sustain for too long. Megan was in the kitchen dumping a soggy coffee filter into the waste bin with one hand and scooping fresh grinds into the maker’s basket with another.

One of the ops—Lehane—thrust his head into the entry.

“Ms. Breen,” he said. “Something’s jumped into your queue. We think it could be—”

Megan didn’t hear the rest as she ran past him into the living room.

The subject line of the e-mail read:

Aria di Bravura: A Song of Love and Sacrifice