He looked at her. “I didn’t think anyone would still recognize me,” he said.

The girl blushed. “Where have you been?”

“Montana.”

“So you’re here for a visit?”

He nodded and she showed him to the table that had been his regular place. He didn’t know the waitress’s name and she didn’t know his.

He sat and looked around the diner. Nothing had changed. The same ketchup and mustard bottles on the tables, the same ceramic coffee mugs with the handles slightly lower than normal, the same plastic-coated napkins that repelled more grease than they absorbed.

“What’ll it be?” the waitress said.

“You remember my usual?”

She smiled and left. A moment later she came back with black coffee.

Everywhere Lance looked, the past came flooding back to him. The way Clarice flipped her hair from her eyes, the way she looked away when he said something she especially liked, like she thought what he’d just said was too good to be true and that she might jinx it by looking at him.

Whatever they’d had sure as hell was jinxed.

She’d been his handler from day one, from the day he came out of training at the Farm, and when she died, he swore he was done for good.

32

Sheldon Goldin sat in the back of a town car, looking out the window.

“We can’t sit here all night,” the driver said.

They were on Madison Avenue at Twenty-Fourth. Across the street was an upscale bar called the Beverly, the type of place where the waiters wore tuxedos and the drinks came in crystal glasses.

“There’s cars lined up behind me, boss.”

Goldin glanced over his shoulder at the traffic.

“Move when I tell you to move,” he said.

The driver, a large man, sank into his seat like he was trying to hide. He winced each time a car behind them honked.

Goldin examined his fingernails, he’d had them manicured that afternoon, and put on a pair of leather gloves.

“There she is,” he said.

Timokhin had sent pictures. The girl was a real piece of ass, the kind that practically begged to be used as a weapon. There were many ways to wage war. This creature, in her black dress and pearls and dangerously high stilettos certainly was one. Just looking at her gave him the same thrill as the sight of a new piece of military hardware.

He bit his lip in anticipation of spending a night with her.

Russians killing Russians, that was how he justified himself. Not that he lost much sleep over it. He’d long ago sold his soul.

The first time Timokhin approached him, almost thirty years earlier at a conference in Warsaw, Goldin had been employed by a big defense contractor.

“I’m no traitor,” he’d said to Timokhin.