For a few moments she said nothing. Then she slowly sat up in the bed. Anger settled onto her bruised countenance. “They lied,” she said softly. “They lied,” she repeated, and this time there was steel in her voice.

“There will always be lies,” Janson said.

“The bastards set me up,” she said, and now she was trembling, with cold, or with fury.

“No, I think I was the one being set up,” Janson said levelly.

He refilled her glass, watched her raise it to her cracked lips, drink the water in a single swallow.

“Comes to the same thing,” she said. Her voice was distant. “When it’s your own team does it to you, there’s only one word for it. Betrayal.”

“You feel betrayed,” Janson said.

She covered her face with her hand, and words came out in a rush. “They set me up to kill you, but I don’t feel guilty, somehow. Mostly, I just feel … so pissed off. So angry.” Her voice broke. “And so damn ashamed. Like a goddamn dupe. And I’m starting to wonder about everything I think I know—what’s real, what isn’t. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

“Yes,” Janson said, simply.

She fell silent for a while. “You look at me like I’m some kind of wounded animal,” she finally said.

“Maybe we both are,” Janson said gently. “And there’s nothing more dangerous.”

While the woman rested, Janson was downstairs, in the room that the house’s owner, Alasdair Swift, used as a study. Before him was a stack of articles he had downloaded from online electronic databases of newspapers and periodicals. These were the lives of Peter Novak—hundreds of stories about the life and times of the great philanthropist.

Janson pored over them obsessively, hunting for something that he knew he would probably not find: a key, a clue, an incidental bit of data with larger significance. Something—anything—that would tell him why the great man had been killed. Something that would narrow the field. He was looking for a rhyme—a detail that would be meaningless to most people, yet would resonate with something that his subconscious mind had stowed away. We know more than we know, as Demarest liked to say: our mind stores the impress of facts that we cannot consciously retrieve. Janson read in a zone of receptivity: not trying to puzzle out a problem but hoping simply to take in what could be taken in, without preconception or expectations. Would there be a fleeting allusion to an embittered business rival? To a particular current of buried animus in the financial or international community? To a conflict involving his forebears? Some other enemy as yet unsuspected? He could not know the kind of thing he was looking for, and to imagine that he did would only blind him to the thing he must see.