Once upon a time, Santoro had been the conscience to Hugo Vox, the King of Fear, a founding member of the Seven Kings. That had been a real name for an organization that ran miles deep in terms of subtlety, maturity, and elegance. Now he worked for the ex-CIA master spy who called himself Kuga—taking the pseudonym from the Bosnian word for plague. That much was fine; there was a certain panache to that. And although his new boss was quite capable of subtlety, he was hardly as refined as Vox had been. Capable of it, perhaps, but not inclined to it. If anything, Kuga saw himself like some kind of absurd blend of Hugh Hefner and a James Bond villain.

On his more tolerant days, Santoro wondered if maybe that was an artifice designed to keep him off guard. And to provoke Santoro. Kuga was certainly manipulative and petty enough to do that, even to his allies. It was, however, a bad habit shared by powerful narcissists. It tended toward excess, and Santoro was not much of a fan of excess when it came to running a global criminal empire. He preferred true subtlety—to vanish into the woodwork, to be unseen and unfelt until the blade slipped between the ribs. To stay many layers removed from anything actionable; to let other people take the blame.

But, no. Kuga had styled himself after Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories. He wanted to be known as the master manipulator, the Napoleon of crime, who crouched like a spider at the center of thousands of webs of criminal enterprise. And, after the events in Korea and Norway last year, he had accomplished that. There was probably no one except bushmen in Africa and unnamed tribesmen in the Amazonian rain forest who did not know the name Kuga. No one was more fiercely sought by the world’s many—many—law enforcement agencies and intelligence networks. And as a result, Santoro’s own name shared those Most Wanted lists.

These thoughts, in infinite variation and levels of gloomy speculation, ran through Santoro’s head as he sat next to Kuga on an Adirondack chair in the shade of a canopy, watching three very lovely young women swim slow laps in a massive pool. Kuga was on his third bourbon of the morning; Santoro was sipping café con miel—coffee with honey, a shot of espresso, and steamed milk. He’d made it himself, layering the ingredients and adding touches of ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom.

The two of them had been sitting there for nearly an hour, with Kuga slowly getting smashed while watching the women in the pool. One—a petite brunette—splashed and floundered, her head up above the water the way the inept do because they don’t know what they’re doing. She was a pretty woman, but the poor form made her ugly to Santoro. He disliked weakness in any of its manifestations.