Rafe looked at him. Was this an explanation? An excuse? “Who was it?” he said. “Was it you?”

“I was in Chamonix,” Frank said. “With a lady friend.”

“But it was us,” Rafe said. “We have contractors, black operatives . . .”

Frank and Sykes exchanged another look. Sloppy.

“We do intelligence,” Rafe said. His voice rising. Not professional. He didn’t care. “We investigate. We analyze. We report. We don’t kill people.”

“We killed the ISIS officer whose computer game led us to Homeboy,” Frank pointed out.

“That was . . .” Rafe searched for the word. “There.”

Sykes sat back in her chair, looked Rafe straight in the eye. “Unfortunately,” she said, “there is here now. There is everywhere. I thought everybody knew that.”

0.0

0.0

There was another Harvard Business School alumni reception, and they all went. Rafe because it was part of his job. He was mortified by his job now, but there were still homicidal terrorists out there. He might get over it. And, if he didn’t, a Harvard Business School alumni reception was an excellent place to network, maybe get a different job, back in finance, which was definitely not a dance of angels, but at least in finance he never had to step over actual corpses.

Majid and Catherine came because it was better than sitting home alone, even alone together, each unable to tell the other, both exhausted from dwelling on the suspicions that their clients, with varying degrees of their own complicity, had murdered his partner and her boss. Unlike Catherine, Majid was mourning. He’d had to speak to Ron’s father several times, including the call that broke the news. He’d had to make the arrangements to ship Ron’s body home (“Will it be the intact body, monsieur, or just cremains?”)—so mechanical, so industrial, so awful. He and Catherine had spent one night together since the deaths, their natural reserves deeper than ever, their conversation insanely banal (the future of the Euro, really?), their sex a failed attempt to escape from thinking into sensation. Neither thought to question the other’s coldness; each assumed it was coming from themselves.