The two men shook hands. Luke looked into the eyes of the larger man. Newsam didn’t do anything overt—he didn’t, for example, try to crush Luke’s hand in his own. But his eyes said it all: You don’t command me.

Luke begged to differ. But this wasn’t the time or the place to worry about it. If they were going to work together, though, especially in a combat zone, the time would almost certainly come.

Don said a few words of encouragement to send the group off. But Luke wasn’t listening anymore. He just watched those hard young eyes, as they watched him.

CHAPTER NINE

11:15 p.m. Central European Summer Time (5:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

Institut Le Rosey

Rolle, Switzerland

It was the most famous school in the world.

Well, it was the most expensive, anyway.

But really, it was just very boring, and she didn’t want to be here. Her mom and dad had sent her here for a year of “finishing” before she went to college. And it had been the dreariest, loneliest year of her life. Maybe things would get better now that it was almost over. She was accepted to Yale for the fall.

Of course she was. Her father was one of Yale’s most well-known alumni, so why wouldn’t they accept her? She was Elizabeth Barrett, younger daughter of David P. Barrett, the current President of the United States.

In fact, she was finishing up on the telephone with her dad right now.

“Well, sweetheart, are there any positives that you can take away from this year?”

That was her father, always talking about “positives.” Was it even a real word? He said words and phrases like that all the time—there were always positives, and takeaways, and we were always moving forward, and climbing the ladder, and building something great. She had begun to suspect that he wasn’t nearly as optimistic as he talked. The whole act was a fake, a fraud. He just said these things because he knew that in his life, there was always someone listening.

She hated that part of it. She hated the security detail from the Secret Service that hovered nearby twenty-four hours a day. She liked some of the agents themselves, but she hated the fact of it, that it was necessary, that her life was stilted and thwarted at every turn because of it. They were listening to this phone call, of course, and they were never far away—a man stood out in the hall all night while she slept.

“I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “I just don’t know. I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

“Well, you got to go skiing in the Swiss Alps, right? You met people from all over the world.”