“I actually met him in Traverse City, Michigan,” I said.

“Even so, monsieur,” the woman said apologetically.

“Hang up!” Lucy shouted.

“Well,” I said to the woman, “thanks anyway—”

“Hang up now!”

I disconnected.

“We clean?” I said to Lucy.

“We are clean,” she said. “But whoever was tracing the call was next-level good.”

After waiting for thirty minutes, I was ready to pull the plug.

The burner phone rang.

“Hello,” I said tentatively.

“Mr. Snow?” A man with a not-quite-German accent. “How nice to hear from you. It has certainly been a while.”

“The trace has started again!” Lucy whispered.

“Are you tracing this call?” I said to the man I knew only as the Cleaner. “Or do we have a listener?”

“Jesus!” Lucy said. “They’re almost on top of us!”

“Oh,” the assassin said. “That would be me. Here . . .”

“Three seconds!” Lucy said. Then she said, “Wait a minute—what?”

“Is that better?” the Cleaner said.

“Trace is gone,” Lucy said, flopping back on my sofa and sighing with relief.

“That’s better,” I said. Suddenly, it hit me: I was talking to an internationally wanted criminal who made a living shooting people in the head with custom weaponry. I faltered, cleared my throat and said, “So—uh, yeah—how’ve you been, big guy?”

The looks from Lucy and Tatina were incredulous.

“Do you have people with you, Mr. Snow?”

“No.”

“Mr. Snow . . .”

“Yes,” I conceded, feeling a lump form in my throat. “No one you need know about—and no one who presents a threat to you now or in the future.”

“Good,” the Cleaner said. “You struck me as one who could be trusted. Skilled and personable. Which is, of course, why I left you my card.”

I told him the reason for my call: I seemed to have made myself the fully dilated pupil in the bull’s-eye of a high-end international real estate scheme. A scheme that threatened to populate areas of the city with—well—folks like him. All at a time when regular folks were being bulldozed and buried under the rubble of “progress.” And if I was right, he was much closer to the boarding school near Geneva, Switzerland, than I was, and that a young girl needed protection.

“Did you take these people’s money, Mr. Snow?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I have no need for it.”

There was silence on the line for a moment. Then he said, “I’ve heard of these people. Hundreds of millions funneled through Hong Kong, Germany, Belgium, Argentina and France. Estate specialists for terrorist cells, weapons and drug dealers, black-market art and antiquities dealers and freelance intelligence. They’ve grown fast, but like most fast-growth businesses, their layers of management are unstable.”

“Have they ever offered you work?”

“Yes,” he said. “Nothing of interest.”

I asked him if he had any interest in providing cover for a schoolgirl in Switzerland.

“I can pay,” I added.