“Whatever. I know who your other clients are. Some of the big ones. The real nasty ones. So don’t try to tell me you care.”

“Come on, Lou. You know it’s not that simple. You never bought into the propaganda. You just went where the money is. Since I guess marrying the dirty money wasn’t enough.”

The last part of that didn’t come out quite as Donny intended. He wished his phone had the seven-second censor delay they used to have in the counterinsurgency courts.

“Sorry,” said Donny, before Lou could reply, or hang up. “None of those people were my clients.”

“They could have been.”

That was true. And the truth was, one of the terrorists was one of Donny’s clients. But Lou didn’t need to know that.

Donny had remembered the incident vividly even before he read up on it again that evening. He had seen the news clips when it happened. He meant to send Lou a note, but couldn’t get past his own lingering animus over everything else that had gone down.

It happened the autumn before the uprising. The rest of Lou’s family was at the Aransas Club, a former national wildlife refuge south of Galveston that had been turned into a private resort for the superrich. Water, sun, and fun, and wildlife to kill all year round, surf or turf. While Lou was back in Houston working a case, leaving his wife and daughter with his brother and family in their lodge, the club got raided by insurgents. Frogmen who came up out of the water in the night, but not like the ones in the propaganda movies. Angry class warriors who said they were there to free the refuge and its rightful inhabitants, by which they meant the animals. Lou’s brother was back in the administration then, working as a deputy secretary in the Commerce Department responsible for economic recovery in the blighted heartland, which made him a high-value target. That he was with his sister-in-law, heiress to the Promethean Resources fortune and the main backer of Tripto Labs, was an unanticipated bonus.

They made Lou watch while they made Helen eat her own diamonds, on a live feed they beamed out from their phones. That was after they shaved her blond hair off, and made her clean the toilets and bathe the feet of three of the guest workers. The diamonds were not crazy big, but they were big enough, and so were the guns, so she swallowed them all, no doubt hoping they would let her live.

They did not. At the press conference the next day, the government agents said the terrorists had shot them all, in the end, all the adults, in a big group. Then they fed them to the sharks.

Blood in the water.