A minute or two later, the dish was finished. He added salt and pepper to the hash and sat down to eat the meal, along with a rosemary scone, at a very expensive teak table in the bay window of his kitchen. He’d baked the scone several days ago. Better with age, he reflected, as the herbs had bonded well with the hand-milled flour.

Swann ate slowly, as he always did. He had nothing but pity bordering on contempt for people who ate fast, who inhaled their food.

He had just finished when he received an email. It seemed that Shreve Metzger’s great national security intelligence machine was grinding away as efficiently as ever.

Received your text. Good to hear success today.

Liabilities you need to minimize/eliminate:

1. Witnesses and allied individuals with knowledge base of the STO operation.
   • Suggest searching Moreno’s trip to NY,
     April 30–May 2.
2. Identified Nance Laurel as lead prosecutor. IDs of the NYPD investigators to follow soon.
3. Individual who leaked STO. Someone is searching for identity now. You may have thoughts on how to learn ID. Proceed at your own discretion.

Swann called the Tech Services people and requested some datamining. Then he pulled on thick yellow rubber gloves. To clean the skillet, he scrubbed it with salt and treated the surface with hot oil; cast-iron should never meet soap and water, of course. He then began to wash the dishes and utensils in very, very hot water. He enjoyed the process and found that he did much of his best thinking standing here, looking out at a dogged ginkgo in a small garden in front of the building. The nuts from that plant were curious. They’re used in Asian cuisine—the centerpiece of the delicious custard chawanmushi in Japan. They can also be toxic, when consumed in large quantities. But dining can be dangerous, of course; when we sit down to a meal who doesn’t occasionally wonder if we’ve been dealt the salmonella or E. coli card? Jacob Swann had eaten fugu—the infamous puffer fish with toxic organs—in Japan. He faulted the dish not for its potential for lethality (training of chefs makes poisoning virtually impossible) but for a flavor too mild for his liking.

Scrubbing, scrubbing, removing every trace of food from metal and glass and porcelain.

And thinking hard.

To eliminate witnesses would cast suspicion on NIOS and its affiliates, of course, since the kill order was now public. That was unfortunate and under other circumstances he would have tried to arrange accidents or construct some fictional players to take the blame for the murders that were about to happen: the cartels Metzger had claimed were really responsible for Moreno’s death, or perps the police and prosecutor had put in jail, out for revenge.