“No, you listen to me,” she said in a calm, icy voice. “It doesn’t matter why you did what you did. I don’t care. Do you understand? I don’t care about your explanation, and I don’t care about you. Go home, Martin.”

“You don’t care?” His eyes sought to make eye contact with hers.

Heloise didn’t look at him.

Martin shook his head. “You do care.”

“Just go home,” she repeated, and started closing the door.

He put a hand on the outside of it.

“I quit my job,” he said.

His words stopped Heloise.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he continued. “You’re not the only one who got screwed over. You’re not the only one who was used.”

He sounded tired, not like he had given up or been beaten, just exhausted.

When Heloise finally spoke, it was through the half-closed door. “Did you really quit your job?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I realized what had happened when your story got shot down last Thursday.” He carefully pushed the door open a couple of inches so he could see her.

Their eyes met.

“I wasn’t lying to you,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

There was a long moment of silence between them.

Then she took a step back and opened the door all the way.

CHAPTER

12

ONE OF HIS front teeth was crooked. It was also a little bit bigger and darker than the other one. It was the only feature of Martin Duvall’s face that wasn’t completely symmetrical. Maybe that was why Heloise liked that tooth so much; there was something so disarming about his imperfect smile.

“Are you planning to come forward with what you know?” she asked as they sat together over the tea tray in her kitchen having coffee the next morning.

“Publicly, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Martin turned toward the window, and a ray of sunlight hit his face and his bare chest. He closed his eyes for a second. “I don’t really see that I have any other choice.”

“It wouldn’t be particularly good for your career,” she reminded him.

“If I were worried about that kind of thing, I would have stayed at the ministry.”

“How high up do you think this goes? Who gave you the documents?”

“Carsten Holm,” he replied, finishing the last of the coffee in his cup.

“The Sun King?”

Holm was the Danish secretary of commerce’s right-hand man and spin doctor. A tall and seemingly perpetually suntanned man who was almost as well known in journalistic circles for his fondness for cocaine and women as for being an unmatched strategist.

“What are the chances that the secretary knew?” she asked.

“Oh, he must have known,” Martin said. “He might even be the one who thought the whole thing up. Who knows?”