“Fall for it or don’t fall for it,” said Nemo, for the first time in the conversation sounding angry. “I don’t give a shit. That guy is a lot more heavily armed than you are and at this point I don’t really care why he wants to kill you. I just want to get out of here. You got a back door?”

Patton paused just a moment before jumping to her feet. She didn’t trust this guy, but on the other hand, she didn’t relish getting into a shooting match with somebody whose assets included a high-powered sniper rifle and a buddy locked in her shed. Plus the intruder had said one thing that resonated with Patton. “We don’t have time for emotion.” This was combat, Patton thought, and the man was right—combat was no place for emotion. She crossed the room in two steps and swept Nemo’s gun off the bed, tucking it into her belt while keeping hers trained on him. “Back through the kitchen,” she said. “And keep low.”

On the day Nemo arrived in Alta Vista two weeks earlier, Ingrid Weiss sat in the back room of her modest house on Döbereinerstrasse in the Obermenzing district of Munich looking out at her compact garden. A tall evergreen hedge lined the high fence that surrounded the space, so her neighbors would have had to look out their attic windows to glimpse the delights of her garden. On this late spring morning she especially liked the roses, just past peak bloom—reds and pinks starting to drop their petals to form a carpet on the ground. Those who passed by the front of her house might have seen evidence of her green thumb in the window boxes upstairs—the front garden, too, was hidden by the thick hedge. But neighbors rarely came calling, and when they did, Ingrid rarely answered the bell.

Ingrid loved her solitude as she loved her garden. Most days she worked here in the sunny back room, papers and books spread out on a wide farm table, computer and phone close at hand. This morning, in between sips of rich coffee and sweet sticky bites of her daily Puddingbrezel, she was engaged in the work of Columbia House Enterprises, of which she was founder and chief officer. The three other associates of Columbia House lived in Germany, but sometimes worked abroad. Only at their quarterly meetings, or if some bit of unexpected business arose, did she see them all face-to-face. Those meetings took place in her unassuming home. She never wondered what the neighbors thought when, every three months, two men and a woman, dressed in business suits, passed through her usually tightly shut gate.