“I guess you trust me,” the voice said. “I now have one-point-five-five million dollars from you and I haven’t done shit. But I am a businessman, and I will fulfill my end of the deal.”

The man gave instructions for paying the rest of the money once the job was finished. The job would be done sometime in the next month. Edmund said nothing.

“But one more thing first. Something I need to know, otherwise I am afraid I won’t be able to go ahead.”

Edmund said nothing.

“Who gave you my phone number? Was it your partner, Mr. Russell Lefevre?”

“No.”

“So, who was it?”

Edmund was silent.

“I really want to know.”

So Edmund told him.

“Okay, thank you. Now release Mr. Mathews.”

From the front seat of the van, a man turned back toward Edmund. He was wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap but Edmund could see a livid scar on the man’s forehead running up toward his scalp. The man was holding out his right hand.

“Shake my hand, then we have a deal.”

The men shook hands, and Edmund heard nothing more, until March 25.

Aleksander Buda thought some more about the information he’d just received, and with his phone still in his hand, he called Edmund Mathews.

“Yesterday we followed to the letter the course of action you recommended, and it didn’t work. I didn’t think it would. Someone I have on-site tells me he saw her going around today with a Geiger counter, her and that guy she hangs out with. You know what that means? It means someone’s seen through your brilliant plan.”

“Shit.”

“Yes, shit. As in what we are standing in up to our knees. Unless we do something right now, it’s going over our heads.”

The conversation was much too specific for Buda’s liking. But he felt he had to get the okay from the banker and make sure Edmund realized the price had gone up. The job itself shouldn’t be difficult, the girl was hardly being discreet, but he had a troublesome task to take care of. When he heard the girl’s name was Grazdani, he paused. It sounded Albanian to him, and he wanted to be very sure that killing an Albanian girl wasn’t going to step on anyone’s toes. He didn’t want to be the cause of a blood feud like there’d been in the 1990s. He’d have to snatch her, hold her, and put feelers out to see if there were any Grazdanis in the crews in the neighboring areas. But what were the odds?

“Okay,” Edmund said finally, feeling the same numbness he had felt when he agreed to the deal in the first place.

“There are two of them, actually,” Buda was saying. “It will be another ten percent.”

“Ten percent of the total or the balance?”

“Ah, ever the money guy,” said Buda. “The total.”