“Excuse me?”

“Savi is his wife.”

“Ah, that explains a lot. Well, it doesn’t matter now. I know you all helped him. Your travel logs showed us you were all in Kintore ten hours ago.”

“Proves nothing,” Alana said.

“We’re not in court,” Yuri said. “And, sadly, you’re already dead in this terrible fire.” His hand waved expansively at the empty, sun-soaked courtyard.

“Bastard!” Raina screamed. “I’m not some eco-warrior that you can disappear. I have friends, family.”

“Yeah, it was all very fucking tragic,” Yuri said. “The fire at the chemical plant reached some chemical drums that exploded. You were all killed. The coffins will be sealed, to spare your families.”

“You can’t do this.”

“It’s already done. It happened the moment you chose to help Hepburn.”

“What are you going to do to us? Just execute us in cold blood? We didn’t do anything wrong! You took his wife from him.”

“Nobody is being executed.”

“What then?”

“You will be joining Callum and Savi.” Yuri turned to the paramilitaries. “Take them away.”

—

Yuri had been awake so long he’d lost track of time zones. So he wasn’t surprised that dawn light was shining through the windows of Poi Li’s New York office. He didn’t even wait to be invited to sit, just slumped into a chair in front of her desk.

“It’s over then?” she said.

“Yeah. Your Arizona team took them out of Albania. The deaths have been announced. We included Callum.”

“Well done. That was a good catch, Yuri. Connexion appreciates it.”

“So will I get to shake hands with Ainsley?”

“Gunning for my job?” she asked archly.

“No.”

“Yes, you are. No need to be coy. We’re both realists. You’ll get here eventually. This operation showed me you have what it takes.”

“Okay. But I will need to know Arizona S and E isn’t Connexion’s secret death squad.”

“It’s not. I would never agree to run such a thing for Ainsley Zangari and his associates.”

“Associates? You mean it’s not just Connexion doing this?”

“There is a covenant between several of the globalPACs,” Poi said. “Ainsley is allied with some of them, naturally. They carry huge influence; some would say they are Earth’s true supra-government. And I am a realist. I looked around at the world we live in and agreed with their proposal.”

“Which is?”

“Society has been under siege from malicious elements for too long now. Law and order must be paramount for any civilization worthy of the name to flourish, especially now we are all neighbors, one step away from each other. Those who do not accept due process, who refuse to acknowledge the democratic mandate, are a cancer on society. And it is a terrible irony that our very liberalism allows such danger to flourish. There has to be a time when we say: no more. And thanks to Connexion, that time has now come. As Edmund Burke said—”

“ ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ ” Yuri quoted.