“Marie-Thérèse is going to find out that the money Sir Edward promised her isn’t in her bank—that’s my guess, anyway, having dealt with Sir Edward this once. And if he’s as duplicitous as I think he is, there’s going to be blood in the streets—your blood, and Sir Edward’s and Mason’s, and whoever in your service is foolish enough to stick his head out of doors.”

“You think we should all leave town, then? Run?”

“I think you should leave the planet, if you can, because you still don’t grasp how determined this woman is and what she’s capable of. You wronged her once, and you lost half a dozen people. If you’ve wronged her again . . . Well, there’ll be no end to it, until all of you are dead—her, too.”

“Felicity,” Dino said, “is the money going to be in her bank tomorrow morning?”

Carpenter looked at Dino. “Yes,” she said, turning toward Stone. “I made the banking arrangements myself. Now I’m getting out of here. I’m sick of Stone’s moral superiority.”

“It’s easy to feel morally superior to some people,” Stone replied.

She picked up her handbag and walked out.

Dino turned to Stone. “She says they paid the money. Maybe this is going to be all right.”

“She’s lying,” Stone replied. “That’s all they do, these people, is lie and kill. This is going to be a disaster, you wait and see.”

“Ever the optimist,” Dino said.

47

Marjorie Harris arrived at her desk at Manhattan Trust half an hour early, as she usually did. She switched on her computer and opened the wire transfer file. She had prepared a list of transactions that had been ordered too late for the two P.M. deadline the previous day, and now all she had to do was press the send key, verify the instruction twice, and tens of millions of dollars were automatically wire-transferred to banks all over the world in a matter of seconds.

She waited for the confirmations to come back, and, one by one, each transaction was confirmed by a computer in another bank somewhere. Human hands were not involved, though in some cases the instructions were received by fax.

Marjorie, her first duty of the day accomplished, opened the bag from the deli, removed a warm cheese Danish, which was not on her diet, and a black coffee, then turned to the New York Times crossword puzzle. The rest of her day would not begin until she had finished it.

At that same moment, in the Cayman Islands, south of Cuba, Hattie Englander let herself into St. George’s Bank and went to her desk in the wire transfer department. She placed her coffee and ham-and-egg sandwich on her desk, then went to the fax machine, bent over, and removed a stack of faxes that had arrived during the night or earlier that morning.