Except with the cursed Americans, who bulled their way around Europe, threatening companies with their sanctions, telling them who they could and couldn’t do business with, interfering with their sovereign rights as French citizens to follow their own laws, see to their own interests. Americans sought the role of the world’s peacekeeper, depending on who was in power any given year, but Henri thought them imperialists, like their cousins the now toothless English had been throughout history. What choice did they leave him but to find ways around them? Off the books, of course—disguised shipments through third countries, payments in cash through small regional banks, even using the ancient Persian system of havaleh and its regional brokers to make sure his payments moved across borders secure and out of sight, as they had since the eighth century. No traces of anything to piss the Americans off, all under their radar.

He sighed. All was going so well, until the unexpected cock-up by the Iranian military, and loss of the flash drive that could end with the American CIA tracing it all back to him. It would mean prison and the destruction of his company, and he wasn’t about to let that happen. He’d railed at the Iranian general who’d sent the soldiers after the CIA agent, and he, naturally, had blamed the captain for disobeying orders. And now the flash drive had disappeared as well as one of the CIA agents. Henri had sent his own man to the US to take care of the matter, and he’d failed. Claude Dumont, the idiot, had left a dead man behind, and not just any dead man. Razhan Hasid was an Iranian security agent they’d insisted be involved. Well, that hadn’t worked out as they’d hoped, had it? Henri had no doubt the American CIA would identify Hasid soon, what with all the new computer technology the Americans had. He rubbed his fist into his palm. Dumont’s incompetence was unacceptable, and anyone who worked for him knew it. He hated failure.

In fourteen years he’d had to use mortal discipline only three times. Perhaps now he’d have to make it four if there was any chance the Americans could trace Claude back to him. But how could they? He might give Claude one more chance.

Henri drummed his fingers on his ebony desktop, thinking through the blunders that shouldn’t have happened. For the first time, he felt a tingling of fear. He got hold of himself; he could deal with this.

He rose, walked to the window of his sixth-floor office to stare beyond the thriving city of his birth to the hills beyond, toward his family vineyard. His vineyard now, since he’d saved it from bankruptcy along with the company from his father’s excesses and stupidity.

At a knock on the door, he called out, “Entrez.”