And what could explain the money in the Cayman Islands account? Had someone set him up? It was a very expensive method, if so. Who could even put their hands on that kind of money? No government agency could. Yet it would not be out of reach for a senior officer of the Liberty Foundation. The ancient question presented itself: Cui bono? Who benefits?

Now that Novak was out of the way, who at the Liberty Foundation would gain? Was Novak killed because he was about to discover some sort of immense malfeasance within his own organization, some malfeasance that had previously eluded his and Márta Lang’s notice?

A small, fleet feral cat bounded down the sidewalk: Janson was again nearing Athens’s feline capital, the National Gardens. Now he raced to catch up with the cat.

A few bystanders looked at him oddly.

“Greta!” he cried, scooping up the gray cat and nuzzling it. “You’ve lost your collar!”

He snapped the plastic-housed positional transponder around the animal’s neck. It was a snug but not uncomfortable fit. When he approached the gardens, he freed the furiously squirming animal, which bounded into the thickets, in search of field mice. Then Janson stepped into the brown wooden cabin where the park’s rest rooms were housed, and shoved the cap and yellow windbreaker in a black steel waste canister.

Within minutes, he was on the no. 1 trolley, no surveillance in evidence. The team members would soon be converging on the feline-infested center of the gardens. If he knew the Athens sector, their real ingenuity would go into face-saving reports later.

Athens sector. He’d spent more time there in the late seventies than he cared to think about. Now he racked his mind to try to remember someone he might know who could explain what was going on—explain it from the inside. Plenty of people owed him favors; it was time to collect.

The face came to him a moment before the name: a middle-aged desk jockey from the CIA Athens station. He worked in a small office on the third floor of the U.S. embassy, which was on 91 Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, near the Byzantine Museum.

Nelson Agger was a familiar sort. A careerist with a nervous stomach and little by way of larger convictions. He’d graduated from Northwestern with a master’s in comparative politics; though his grades and recommendations were good enough to get him into a handful of doctoral programs, they were not good enough to earn him the scholarship or tuition abatement he needed. The support would have to come from an outside source—a State Department–run foundation, in his case.