“Forget it,” Janson said. “In about a minute, I’m going to steal a car. This is an act of larceny, and anybody who’s with me at the time is legally an accomplice. That put things into perspective for you?”

“I’ll steal it for you,” she said huskily. “Lookit, I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t care. But if you get away, I’ll never know the truth. I need to know what’s true. I need to know what isn’t.”

“The answer is no,” Janson said shortly.

“Please.”

His temple began to throb again. To take her with him was madness, self-evident madness.

But maybe there was some sense in the madness.

“Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus!” Clayton Ackerley, the man from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, was practically keening, and the sterile phone line did nothing to diminish the immediacy of his terror. “They’re fucking taking us out.”

“What are you talking about?” Douglas Albright’s voice was truculent but alarmed.

“You don’t know?”

“I heard about Charlotte, yes. It’s awful. A terrible accident—and a terrible blow.”

“You don’t know!”

“Slow down and tell it to me in English.”

“Sandy Hildreth.”

“No!”

“They fished up his limo. Goddamn armored limo. On the bottom of the Potomac. He was in the backseat. Drowned!”

A long silence. “Oh Jesus. It’s not possible.”

“I’m looking at the police report right now.”

“Couldn’t have been some sort of accident? Some horrible, horrible coincidence?”

“An accident? Oh sure, that’s what they’ve got it down as. Driver was speeding, eyewitnesses saw the car as it skidded off the bridge. Like with Charlotte Ainsley—some cabdriver loses control of his car, does a hit-and-run. And now there’s Onishi.”

“What?”

“They found Kaz’s body this morning.”

“Dear God.”

“Corner of Fourth and L Streets in the near Northeast.”

“What the hell was he doing there?”

“According to the coroner’s report, there was phencyclidine in his blood. That’s PCP—angel dust. And a lot of other shit besides. Officially, he OD’d on the street corner, outside a crack house. ‘We see this all the time,’ is what one of the city cops said.”

“Kaz? That’s crazy!”

“Of course it’s crazy. But that’s how they did it. The fact is that these three key members of our program have been killed within twenty-four hours of one another.”

“Christ, it’s true—they’re picking us off, one by one. So who’s next? Me? You? Derek? The secretary of state? POTUS himself?”

“I’ve been on the phone with them. Everybody’s trying not to panic and not doing the greatest job of it. Fact is, we’re all marked. We just joined the goddamn endangered-species list.”