There were moments when Janson almost felt that he, too, had been stuffed and mounted. Nearly every raptor was now on the endangered-species list, not least the bald eagle, and Janson recognized that he himself had once been a raptor—a force of aggression against forces of aggression. Janson had known exwarriors who had become addicted to a diet of adrenaline and danger, and who, when their services were no longer required, had effectively turned themselves into toy soldiers. They spent their time stalking opponents in the Sierre Madre with paintball guns or, worse, pimping themselves out to unsavory firms with unsavory needs, usually in parts of the world where baksheesh was the law of the land. Janson’s contempt for these people was profound. And yet he sometimes asked himself whether the highly specialized assistance he offered American businesses was not merely a respectable version of the same thing.

He was lonely, that was the truth of it, and his loneliness was never more acute than in the odd interstices of his overscheduled life—the time spent after checking in and before takeoff, the time spent waiting in overdesigned venues meant, simply, for waiting. At the end of his next flight, nobody was anticipating his arrival except another visored limo driver who would have misspelled his name on a white cardboard sign, and then another corporate client, an anxious division head of a Los Angeles–based light industrial firm. It was a tour of duty that took Janson from one corner office to another. There was no wife and no children, though once there had been a wife and at least hopes for a child, for Helene had been pregnant when she died. “To make God laugh, tell him your plans,” she used to quote her grandfather as saying, and the maxim had been borne out, horribly.

Janson eyed the amber bottles behind the bar, their crowded labels an alibi for the forgetfulness they held inside. He kept himself in fighting trim, trained obsessively, but even when he was in active deployment he was never above a slug or two. Where was the harm?

“Paging Richard Alexander,” a nasal voice called through the public announcement system. “Passenger Richard Alexander. Please report to any Pacifica counter.”

It was the background noise of any airport, but it jolted Janson out of his reverie. Richard Alexander was an operational alias he had often used in bygone days. Reflexively, he craned his head around him. A minor coincidence, he thought, and then he realized that, simultaneously, his cell phone was purring, deep in his breast pocket. He inserted the earphone of the Nokia tri-band and pressed SND. “Yes?”

“Mr. Janson? Or should I say, Mr. Alexander?” A woman’s voice, sounding strained, desperate.

“Who is this?” Janson spoke quietly. Stress numbed him, at least at first—made him calmer, not more agitated.