The three classmates sat together at a round table at the edge of the gathering. An older alumnus was drunk and making a fool of himself hitting on a handsome bartender half his age. A young alumnus was handing out business cards, so uncool. Rafe was pleased, despite everything, to see no sign of emotional connection between Catherine and Majid. In fact, he saw her looking at him, Rafe, a few times with an odd intensity, very un-Catherine-like. He wondered but had no way to know it was because she wanted him to tell her more about Pleski, to help her confirm or deny. She wanted to know but didn’t want to ask. Majid also wanted to know more than he could ask. How much did Rafe know about the trades he’d made for Stavro, what did Rafe know about Stavro (who was he? was he a killer?), was he in legal jeopardy himself, should he sprint out of the reception (no thank you, not another crab cake) and head straight to the airport for the Emirates flight to Dubai? He was drinking Scotch.

Rafe couldn’t talk, really talk, to Majid either. “Hey, these guys I work with, or guys who work for the guys I work with, they killed your partner. Didn’t mean to. Sorry.”

They all left the reception early, no better off than when they arrived.

Ten hours later, before dawn, Catherine was at the Piscine de Vernets, suited up and alone. She came out of the locker room and tested the board, stepped down to adjust the fulcrum, remounted. She intended to start with something simple, a front one-and-a-half, a dive she had done a thousand times, a dive she could do without thinking. No thinking of any kind. She took three steps, jumped, bounced, rebounded, and then she was in the empty air she knew so well. She went into the pike position but her momentum was wrong. Her butt went forward and her head moved back, an unthinkable mistake, and then there was the water, too soon, where she landed, on her back, with an ugly and noisy splash.

Part Three

PART THREE

Okoro

OKORO

And then nothing happened.

Rafe and Frank and their unseen colleagues, above and below, discovered that there were a lot of people named Stavro. It was an especially common name in Latvia and Greece and Albania, and a lot of Stavros had departed their homelands for pretty much everywhere, including Geneva, but none of them had any discoverable connection to Sterling Wealth Management. The documents on Ron Mayfield’s desk had been notably lacking in specifics. It looked like he had been trying to track down a Stavro too.