Ridgeway nodded faintly to himself. He pushed away from the wall, pulled a corner of the curtains aside, and stared out into the murky storm. The storm’s fury mirrored his innermost thoughts. He had to cooperate with them, he decided. There was simply no other alternative. He’d never find her by himself. But he would have to be careful to use without being used. The NSA had a reputation for ruthlessness that a Borgia would be proud of.

“All right,” Ridgeway said as he turned away from the window. “I’ll work with you.”

Stratton smiled. “I thought you’d eventually see the wisdom.”

“I have a few conditions, though,” Ridgeway said. “I work independently. We share information. I don’t want you following me. If the Russians get on to you, I don’t want them on my tail too.”

Stratton tried to look unperturbed. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said. “I’d hoped we’d work a bit more closely.”

Ridgeway shook his head. “No way.”

They locked eyes for a long moment, each trying to see past the meaning of what they had told each other.

Stratton hesitated. He looked at Highgate, at the ceiling, and finally back at Ridgeway. “Okay. You have a deal.”

Zoe followed Thalia into the gallery area and sank into the supple leather of the Mies van der Rohe armchair. Thalia handed her a glass of wine, then sat next to her on a chrome and leather sofa.

They had relaxed this way half a dozen times before, mostly on nights such as this one when their work took them late into the night. They purposely stayed away from the very best-known names, and for that discretion their forays into Willi Max’s hijacked wine cellar earned them frowns and scowls from their captors but no real punishment.

Thalia closed her eyes and rolled the wine about in her mouth for an instant before swallowing. When she opened her eyes, she said: “One of the oddest things I ran into when I lived I New York City was the way Americans—especially some of the men—took all the fun out of drinking wine.”

Zoe tilted her head. “Odd? How?”

“I think they’re afraid of it,” Thalia said. “They have a problem with the sensuality of wine… sexuality if you will.” She swirled her glass and looked at the deep ruby liquid for a moment. “They want to think about wine, not feel it. The feeling is the part that scares them to death so they desensualize wine by quantifying it: they score it with numbers, dissect it into acid and sugar components; they write endlessly about the winemaker, the weather, the inches of rainfall the vineyard got. They want to collect it, not just drink it. They have self-anointed priests and holy men—sommeliers, collectors, and wine geeks—who speak a jargon that excludes the uninitiated. They have dogmas about which wines are good, which are not, which ones to drink with which food, which glasses to use—their rituals put any established religion to shame. They have books and magazines that are like holy scripture that they all memorize. They worship the concept of the wine rather than the experience of drinking it—yadda, yadda.” She waved her free hand dismissively. “They’re all like a bunch of Moonie cult drones. Problem is they get so wrapped up in all this left-brain, bean-counter bullshit that they never actually experience the sensuality, they never just let themselves feel the pleasure.