He pushed a button on a garage-door opener attached to the car’s sun visor. The door rumbled open and gray daylight filled the garage.

“I’m moving the timetable up,” he told her. “Five p.m. That’s the new deadline for the exchange.” He backed the car out of the garage and drove off along the quiet street. “At the Lincoln Memorial. Lots of witnesses if you try something stupid.”

“I’ll need more time than that.”

“While you track me? Using the GPS on the phone you gave me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Hang on a second.” Simon stopped the car across from a small park where city workers were gathering trash bags. He accessed the call history of the phone he’d been given and memorized the number it was linked to. Then he called that number, but this time he used his own phone. “Marta, that buzz you hear is me. It’s coming from my personal phone. Answer it.”

She sounded confused, but did as he instructed.

He resumed driving, came abreast of the city’s open-backed truck, and tossed her phone among the garbage bags.

“I’m untethered, Marta,” he said into his own phone. “Five o’clock. The Lincoln Memorial. Don’t forget. Anything you do to Liz, I’ll do to your brother.”

• • •

IN THE BACK OFFICE OF a dry cleaner’s shop in McLean, Virginia, a tall woman with long blond hair, intense blue eyes, and strong Slavic features pressed the End button on her phone. She was in her midthirties and might have been considered a beauty if not for the cruelty around her mouth. She stared at a monitor where a pulsing green dot in Tysons Corner no longer moved. In the front of the shop, steam presses hissed and machines rumbled, but she barely heard them or registered the chemical smell that permeated the office.

Her brother had laughed at her when she’d suggested buying the business and using it as one of their fronts.

“What’s so funny?” she’d asked.

“Don’t you get it? Dry cleaning. That’s what needs to happen to all the cash we bring in from the drugs and the gambling and the whores. We should buy a couple of laundries also. Just don’t screw this up like you did when you bought those restaurants that gave people food poisoning.”

Marta kept staring at the pulsing dot.

She heard the voices of what seemed to be workmen talking about the unusual amount of trash they’d picked up in a park. Obviously Simon Childs had thrown away the phone he’d been given and was now using his own.

Could she trust him not to have police and FBI agents positioned near the Memorial?

Hardly.

“Let’s see how much you love your fiancée,” she muttered.

She pressed the button for the phone at the hunting lodge.

• • •

MAX OPENED THE DOOR.

“Rudy, what were you shouting about?”

He tensed when he saw the streaks of blood across the floor and then Rudy’s body slumped next to the Nautilus machine.