“Good,” Lowen said. “Then I expect to see Consul Nascimento in half an hour.” She walked out of Vinicius’s office and was at the consulate’s elevator before Vinicius could blink.

Across the street at the doughnut shop, Lowen pulled out her PDA and called her father’s office, getting James Prescott, his chief of staff. “How did it go?” Prescott asked, without preamble, as he opened up the connection.

“Pretty much exactly as we anticipated,” Lowen said. “Nascimento wasn’t there and pawned me off on an egregiously stupid underling.”

“Let me guess,” Prescott said. “A guy named Vinicius.”

“Bing,” Lowen said.

“He’s got a reputation for stupidity,” Prescott said. “His mother is the minister of education.”

“I knew it,” Lowen said. “Mommy’s boy made a particularly dumb remark, and that allowed me to tell him to produce Nascimento or I would start a major diplomatic incident.”

“Ah, the gentle art of cracking heads,” Prescott said.

“Subtle wasn’t going to work on this guy,” Lowen said, and then the windows of the doughnut shop shattered from the pressure wave created by the exploding building across the street.

Lowen and everyone else in the shop ducked and yelled, and then there was the sound of glass and falling debris outside, all over Sixth Avenue. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw that the glass of the doughnut shop windows, while shattered, had stayed in their frames, and that everyone in the doughnut shop, at least, was alive and unharmed.

Prescott was yelling out of the speaker of her PDA; she put the thing back to her ear. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”

“What just happened?” Prescott asked.

“Something just happened to the building across the street,” Lowen said. She weaved her way through the still-crouching patrons of the doughnut shop and went to the door, opening it gently to avoid dislodging the shattered glass. She looked up.

“I think I’m not going to get that meeting with Nascimento,” she said, to Prescott.

“Why not?” Prescott said.

“The Brazilian consulate isn’t there anymore,” Lowen said. She disconnected the PDA, used it to take pictures of the wreckage on and above Sixth Avenue and then, as a doctor, started to tend to the injured on the street.

*   *   *

“Amazonian separatists,” Prescott said. He’d caught the shuttle up from Washington an hour after the bombing. “That’s who they’re blaming it on.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Lowen said. She and Prescott were in a staff lounge of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions. She’d already given her statement to the New York Police Department and the FBI and given copies of her pictures to each. Now she was taking a break before she did the whole thing over again with State.