Suspicion

33

Danny tried to read in bed but couldn’t make any headway. Maybe he was too much of a wimp to be a dad, but he couldn’t stand watching Abby cry. He hated the fights and the struggle that came with having a kid. Generally, he tried not to give in to emotional blackmail, or to be a pushover-kids needed to be given boundaries and limits. Maybe not as much as his own parents had done. But you couldn’t go too far in the other direction, either. Kids, he decided, were like iPhones: They didn’t come with an owner’s manual.

He wished he could be open with Abby, tell her the truth-that her father had gotten involved in some very scary stuff, that her best friend’s father worked with people who murdered without hesitation. That he couldn’t allow her to be a hostage.

But he couldn’t say anything about it. He didn’t trust her to keep a confidence. Certainly not from her BFF.

Lucy came into the bedroom after almost an hour in Abby’s bedroom. She looked tired. He could see dried traces of tears on her cheeks.

He looked up, raised his brows.

She shook her head. “She’s still upset. I told her to forget about homework, and she didn’t fight me on it. She basically cried herself to sleep.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“I think the nose piercing looks kind of cute on her.” She slipped out of her jeans, then pulled her shirt over her head.

“Oh, come on. She can mutilate her body after she turns eighteen.”

“Whoa, what happened to Cool Dad?”

“I never claimed to be Cool Dad.”

She unlatched her bra and her breasts swayed. “She did it. Okay? That was her little act of rebellion. Believe me, there are far worse ways for kids her age to rebel.”

“She could have pierced her septum and had one of those little horseshoes coming out of her nose.”

“Worse than that. But that’s not what pissed you off, really.”

“That wasn’t the only thing. She went off the grid for three hours. This girl, who sleeps with her phone in her hand and probably posts things on her Facebook page during math class. She just went dark. How would you have felt?”

She settled onto the bed. “You overreacted, okay?”

“I was scared something might have happened to her. She knew I was picking her up at school, and she just vanished.”

“When we were kids, we could go for almost the whole day without talking to our parents, right? On a summer day, you’d go out in the morning, the screen door would slam shut behind you, and you spent the day riding bikes or hanging out with your friends, and there were no cell phones. You didn’t have to check in.”

“It’s a different world. There’re abductions and child molesters and sickos with chloroform driving panel vans.”

“There’s no evidence that kids are more endangered these days. That’s a media myth. Anyway, that’s not even the point.”

“Which is what?”

“You know, I always resented it when people tried to tell me how to raise Kyle. Especially when I was a single mom. Everyone always had advice. Don’t be so strict, don’t be so lax. Don’t let him watch TV, don’t make TV the forbidden fruit. Don’t let him play computer games or video games. I mean, it drove me crazy. Even when people were right. From the very beginning, when you and I first started seeing each other, I told you I was never going to play shrink. Never going to tell you how to be a dad.”

“I asked you to go in there.”

“And I’m flattered she wanted to talk to me. It means a lot. I mean, it’s complicated, navigating our relationship. I’m not her mom, and she doesn’t want that.”

“So tell me what she said. How bad is it?”

“Look, Danny, you’re a terrific father.”

“But?”

“But nothing. You are.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “Why are you doing this, Danny?”

“She’s over there too much. Let’s not you and me argue, too.”

“You’re cutting her off from her best friend.”

“It’ll be good for her.”

“I don’t get it. You don’t mind if Jenna comes over here, you just don’t want Abby going over to the Galvins’ house?”

“Something like that.”

“Why?”

He exhaled, frustrated at his inability to tell her the real story. “Spending all that time over there is just giving her unrealistic expectations. It’s warping her.”

“But that’s not what you told her. You said she can never go over there.”

“Well, for the time being.”

“You need to think about why you’re doing this.”

He reached over, stroked the silky skin of her breasts, gave a nipple a gentle squeeze. She folded her arms.

“What?” he said.

“There’s something you’re not telling me about the Galvins.”

He shook his head, didn’t hesitate, and came right out with the lie. “Not true.”

“There’s something. Something about them you don’t like. What is it?”

“That’s not it at all.”

“Cut the crap, Danny. I know you. I can read you like a book. That time when you claimed you went to the Wellesley College library and you so clearly didn’t?”

“You’re not still on that, are you?”

“There’s something going on. Something about Galvin. Why don’t you tell me?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” he said, and he rolled over and switched off the bedside lamp. “Nothing to tell.”

She looked at him for a long time, but she left it there. The conversation was over. He awoke some time later, realizing he’d forgotten to send a text message to the DEA confirming that he’d done the deed. He got out of bed as quietly as he could. The floor creaked, and Lucy stirred in her sleep.

In the living room he switched on the lamp on one side of the couch, opened his laptop, and waited for it to join the wireless network.

He signed in to the JayGould1836@gmail.com account and began composing an encrypted text message, when he saw there was already a message waiting for him:

Nice work, it said. Meet 10 a.m. tomorrow morning to return equip. location tbd.

He wondered how they knew he’d managed to upload the contents of Galvin’s BlackBerry. He’d only told them he’d try. How did they know he’d succeeded? Maybe it had been uploaded automatically; was that possible? Probably.

How much did they know about him? How closely were they watching?

And when, he wondered, would they finally leave him alone?

34

During the ride to school, Abby gave him the full-on silent treatment.

“Let me guess,” Danny said after a moment. “You’re pissed about this Galvin thing.”

She stared straight ahead.

“Abby, talk to me.”

Silence.

“I hate seeing you like this, Boogie. Let’s talk.”

She opened her mouth, looked like she was about to let loose a stream of invective. Instead, very carefully, she said: “No.”

But he kept at it. His working assumption was that she’d tell everything to Jenna anyway, so he had to be mindful of what he told her. “Look, the Galvins are great people. A totally great family. And Jenna is terrific.” He was willing to exaggerate for the sake of family harmony. “But sometimes people just need to take time off, even best friends. I want us to spend time as a family again. You and me, or you and me and Lucy. Okay?”

She stared straight ahead and didn’t reply. When they reached the drop-off point in front of the school, she hefted her backpack, opened the car door, jumped out, and slammed it without saying good-bye.

Have fun, Danny thought.

Five or six cars ahead in line he saw Galvin’s Maybach limo. Just seeing the car made his stomach clutch. Galvin knew something, suspected something, about him. He had to. Danny prided himself on being a careful observer of people-most writers were-and he’d seen the suspicion dawn on Galvin’s face when he found his BlackBerry in the wrong pocket. It wasn’t exactly subtle.

Though that didn’t mean Galvin would connect Danny to the DEA. That was a logical leap even a highly suspicious person wouldn’t easily make. Galvin had brought Danny into his orbit; Danny hadn’t wormed his way in. And Danny didn’t have the profile of a man working with the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Unless Galvin had other sources. That was possible. Assume Galvin had protection, people working for the cartel who watched out for him. People who stayed in the background and kept an eye on whoever he came into contact with, as Yeager had said. Was that such a stretch? Galvin was an important player for the cartel. Of course they’d take care of him, keep an eye on him. Make sure he wasn’t being compromised in some way.

Maybe Galvin had other sources. Maybe, finding that his BlackBerry had somehow moved to the wrong suit pocket, he’d asked around. Maybe the cartel’s people had turned their scrutiny on Danny and found out-somehow-what Danny was up to.

That wasn’t impossible at all, was it?

As he rounded around the circular drive, he saw that Galvin’s limousine was parked on the shoulder of the road by the school gates. Right by the exit. As if waiting.

Danny was tempted to gun the engine, get the hell out of there. But then Galvin’s new driver-what was his name, again?-stepped out of the car and waved him over.

Keep going? Ignore the guy?

He couldn’t. He couldn’t just drive by. That in itself would have been suspicious. He slowed, pulled over. Lowered his window.

“Mr. Galvin he like talk to you,” the driver said.

Danny parked the Honda behind the Maybach and got out. He approached the limousine, trying to appear casually curious. The rear passengers’ door came open.

“Get in,” Galvin said, looking grim.

35

“Something wrong?”

“We have to talk,” Galvin said.

Danny’s mind raced, trying to compose a plausible-sounding explanation. But nothing came. Only a flat-out denial. You serious? You think I took your BlackBerry? Why the hell would I do that? How? Come on, man, get real. Jesus.

“What’s the problem?”

Inside, it was even more luxurious than he’d imagined. It looked like a private club and smelled like expensive leather. The passenger compartment was large enough to contain two big, comfortable-looking seats in back, facing forward, and three facing rear.

Galvin, sitting in one of the two rear seats, patted the one next to him. He was wearing another one of his very expensive-looking suits, this one a nailhead worsted. Clambering in, Danny could smell Galvin’s cologne, something subtle and peppery, and he realized for the first time that this smell made him anxious. It smelled of power. It smelled vaguely toxic.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Danny said. The seat was deep and comfortable, the leather buttery.

Between the rear seats was a console, its surface some kind of tropical wood veneer. Galvin touched it and it popped open. He pulled out two cold water bottles and handed one to Danny.

“Diego,” he said with a quick motion of his left hand, and a glass divider slid up between the passenger compartment and the cockpit.

“Come on, let’s take a quick drive. Just leave your car here for a while. We can talk, and I can show you my boat.”

“Your what?”

“My boat. My yacht. I’m heading over to the harbor now. Check out my new nav system.”

“I really should work.”

“Come on-take us half an hour. I’m launching it early this year so we can sail down to Anguilla over spring break.”

“Where is it, down in Quincy?”

“Boston Yacht Haven. Right here. Come on.”

Danny nodded. He unscrewed the cap from the water bottle and took a sip. “Okay. Sure.”

Ten minutes later they were pulling over a series of speed bumps and into a private marina in the North End, on Commercial Wharf on the Boston harbor. Danny waited for Galvin to bring up whatever it was he wanted to talk about, but he just chatted away, small talk.

“You can just wait right here, Diego,” he told his driver. “Shouldn’t be more than ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Si, señor.”

Danny could barely keep up as Galvin led the way around the side of the rambling, angled clubhouse and along a dock. The air was crisp and clean and tinged with salt. A gentle breeze came off the water. Moored to the pier were several yawls and a small boat-it was too early for most people to put their boats in the water-and on the other side of the building was what had to be Galvin’s boat. It was a big, beautiful, streamlined thing, cream and white, all swooping lines and aggressive angles. Painted on its bow was EL ANTOJO.

“That yours?” Danny said.

“Yep,” Galvin said. He stopped at a black-painted security gate on the dock and swiped a key card and pulled it open. Danny followed Galvin down a gangway to the slip.

“El Antojo?”

“It’s sort of an inside joke in our family. It’s one of those Spanish words that’s impossible to translate. It means ‘whim’ or ‘craving,’ something like that. When I bought it, Lina and I had a big fight-she said she couldn’t believe I’d dumped millions of dollars on an antojo-a caprice, a whim.”

“It’s a beauty, though. For an antojo.”

“Thanks. The Italians know how to build them.”

Standing on the slip, watching the yacht bob gently in the water, Danny experienced the momentary illusion that the dock was rocking, not the boat.

“What kind of boat is it?”

“It’s a Ferretti. Their Custom Line-the Navetta 26 Crescendo. Took almost three years to build.”

“It looks fast.”

“Not especially. Cruising speed is twelve, thirteen knots. She’ll get up to fourteen knots. But she’s sporty. And she can go all the way down to Anguilla without refueling. And she’s smooth. Semidisplacement hull. Know anything about boats?”

“I grew up in Wellfleet, remember?” Somewhere a distant ship’s horn sounded. A jet passed by low overhead, taking off from Logan Airport.

“Right, right.” Galvin climbed a short ladder onto a wide main deck. Danny followed him up another set of stairs to a spacious sky lounge.

“Do you drive it yourself, or do you have a crew?”

“Depends. For long trips I usually hire a captain, but most of the time I take it out myself.”

“It’s gotta be more exciting to drive it yourself, right?”

“Exciting? Lemme tell you something. Exciting is the one thing you don’t want when you’re at sea. Exciting is when you hit an iceberg or sail into a hurricane or have your bilge pump fail. Or hit a rocky shoal. I’ll take boring anytime.”

“Ever come close?”

“To what, sinking?”

Danny nodded.

“No. Not that I know of.”

Danny looked down at the water, green-tinged black with a surface that looked like velvet. “When I was a teenager, I helped scuttle a ship.”

Galvin looked at him, head tipped, half smiling, unsure whether this was a joke.

Danny could hear the hum of the fuel barge nearby. The pilings underneath the marina were exposed, like the mouth of a cave. It was low tide.

“Remember when they sank this big old navy warship in Cape Cod Bay to use for target practice?” Danny said.

“Sure, like twenty years ago or something.”

“The demolition guys hired to do it were one of my dad’s subcontractors. So when I was sixteen, I got a job helping place the explosive charges along the hull.”

“Really? Cool.”

“It was nasty work, actually. We had to put all these shaped charges on the hull below the waterline so when they went off, it was like cutting a line all the way around. And a twenty-thousand-ton ship went down like a rock in less than two minutes.”

“Must’ve been cool when it all went boom.”

“A bunch of little thuds, actually. They time the explosions. The trick is to keep the boat upright as it sinks so it’ll settle straight down onto the ocean floor.”

“Blowing shit up is fun no matter how old you are. It’s a primal instinct. Legalized violence.”

“Sure. Instead we watch hockey or football or boxing and compete in business. We don’t actually take part in the violence ourselves anymore. We’re civilized.”

“Yeah,” Galvin said, but he sounded like his thoughts were somewhere else. “Yeah.”

They both fell silent for a moment, peering at the horizon, the scudding clouds, the seagulls diving and swooping and cawing. “You know,” Galvin said, “sometimes when you’re out on the boat in the middle of the ocean, with nothing around for miles, nothing in sight, nothing but water, you realize how insignificant we are, in the scheme of things. You find yourself thinking, you know-O Lord, be good to me. Your sea is so wide and my boat is so small.”

“Hmph,” Danny said. “Not all that small, actually.”

“Okay, asshole,” Galvin said, feigning annoyance but visibly pleased. “I guess it’s all relative. The big fish doesn’t look so big to the even bigger fish.”

“Guess so.”

“Danny,” Galvin said. “So this thing I wanted to talk to you about?”

“Yeah…?”

“Look, you told Abby she can’t come to our house anymore. I want to know why.”

So that was it. Not what he’d expected at all.

“It’s complicated, Tom.”

“They’ve become close. Best of friends. Does that concern you?”

Was Galvin onto him, somehow? Did he know why Danny wanted to keep Abby away?

“It’s not the closeness that concerns me.” Danny said. “It’s… I want her home more often.”

“That all?”

Danny felt his guts constrict. “That’s all,” he said. “Nothing more than that, really.”

“Be straight up with me. This isn’t about that nose piercing, is it? I mean, yeah, Jenna never should have taken Abby to get her nose pierced. That was wrong. Celina shouldn’t have just assumed that Abby had permission. Just because she said so doesn’t make it true. I know how angry you were about that, and hell, if I didn’t have the two older boys, I’d probably be freaking out, too. But-”

“I-Abby said she had permission?”

“And Celina should have checked with you. I don’t know what else I can say but that she screwed up. She meant well, Celina did, but she screwed up. We screwed up. In loco parentis, all that crap.”

Danny couldn’t help laughing with relief. “I’ve already cooled down. I mean, I was angry last night, but, well, if that’s the extent of her teenage rebellion, I’m lucky. She’s not pregnant, and she doesn’t have a tattoo on her butt or something.”

“As far as you know.”

Danny groaned comically.

“My parents wouldn’t let my sister Linda get her ears pierced until she graduated from high school.”

“I don’t get the whole piercing mania anyway, to be honest.”

“Danny, listen, I’m not one for deep talks, you know? Feelings and all that? Not my department. But you and I both know this isn’t just about the piercing. Right?”

Danny felt trapped. He heaved a sigh of frustration. He couldn’t keep pretending that this was all about a nose piercing, not anymore, not face-to-face with Galvin. He hesitated.

Galvin went on: “It’s about the money, isn’t it?”

No, Danny was about to say, but then he caught himself. “Maybe that’s it.” His iPhone emitted the tritone text alert, but he didn’t dare check it.

“You know, I was afraid this might happen. That’s why I never lend money to friends. I made an exception in your case because I saw how desperate things were for you. But it almost always causes tension in a friendship. I’m a man, you’re a man, I get it. You feel somehow embarrassed that you had to take money from me. Now you feel obligated. There’s just no way around it. Maybe I didn’t handle it the right way. I don’t know.”

“No, Tom,” Danny said. He shook his head, fell silent. Of course he felt awkward about it, who wouldn’t? But if only that were the problem. “It was incredibly generous.”

His iPhone made another text alert sound.

“Danny, you gotta understand something. Abby’s like family. What she’s done for Jenna-I can’t even begin to express my gratitude. Your girl, her heart, her friendship-she’s-” Danny was quite sure that Tom Galvin’s eyes were moist. “I don’t want anything to happen to that bond between the two girls. It’s too important to her. It’s too important to me. So listen. Whatever I’m doing that makes you uncomfortable, we have to sort this out. Okay? Whatever it is.”

“Of course.”

“I have an idea. We’ve got a place in Aspen. How about we all go out there this weekend, just the two families? You guys and us. Bring your girlfriend, too. We’ll take my plane; it’ll be fast and easy and a good time. My two sons both have other plans, so it’ll just be the girls. You and I can hang out, schmooze, talk this thing through. For the sake of our daughters, huh? What do you say?”

36

The little boy was screaming. He was afraid of the big vaccine needle. And the young woman aide clearly didn’t know how to stick the needle in without inflicting pain.

Dr. Mendoza saw this and placed a gentle hand on the nurse’s shoulder. “¿Puedo probar?” he said. May I try? He never liked to make the aides feel inadequate.

“Por supuesto, Doctor,” the young woman said right away, nodding, handing him the hypodermic.

The boy, who looked to be around three, was yowling and bucking in his mother’s strong arms. And who could blame him? To little children, all hypodermic needles looked big and scary. “What is his name?” he asked the mother.

“Santiago,” the mother said. She was missing most of her front teeth.

“Santiago, I’d like you to meet my friend Nicolás.” He pulled from the front pocket of his white coat an orange rubber toy with colored nobs for eyes and ears. “Nicolás is a Martian. He’s very, very scared of needles. Look.”

Santiago stopped struggling for a moment and looked warily at the toy. His cheeks were wet with tears, and a dribble of mucus ran down from one nostril.

Dr. Mendoza moved the hypodermic needle near the toy, touched the needle against the orange rubber skin of the toy’s tummy, then squeezed its belly. Its eyes and ears bugged out in comic fear. Santiago burst out laughing and reached for it, and Dr. Mendoza let the boy have it. He had a dozen more in the back room of the clinic. Every time he visited the United States, he bought them at a toy store in San Diego. The children loved them.

“Can you help Nicolás? He needs his shot to make him all better.”

Santiago was happily squeezing the rubber toy’s belly, making the eyes and ears pop out, and laughing delightedly.

“Now maybe you can show him what a brave boy you are. Can you close your eyes and count to three, very slowly?” asked Dr. Mendoza.

He held the needle just above the boy’s shoulder.

“Uno…”

The needle’s point touched the shoulder.

“Dos…”

Then Dr. Mendoza inserted the needle lightning fast, and it was over.

“Tres,” the boy said, squeezing his eyes tight, bracing for the shot that had already come.

“We’re done!” Dr. Mendoza said. “You did it! You did such an excellent job!”

The boy opened his eyes wide. “Really?”

The clinic was located in the outskirts of Culiacán, the capital of the Sinaloa state in Mexico. The neighborhood was desperately poor, and the people couldn’t afford to see a doctor. So they queued up for hours, sometimes all night, to see a doctor without charge. Some days, there were dozens waiting when he arrived at seven in the morning. Some brought tortillas for their lunch.

Dr. Mendoza volunteered here two days a week. It was a good break from his surgical practice at the private hospital in downtown Culiacán, where all his patients were well-heeled. He felt it was good karma.

It had been a long and busy day. A man of around seventy, complaining of tenderness in his groin, had a bulge the size of a lemon. It had been there for more than a year. It was a right inguinal hernia that was incarcerated but not, thank God, strangulated. Dr. Mendoza scheduled the man for an outpatient procedure.

A young man had accidentally slashed one of his wrists with a machete while chopping weeds in a coconut grove. He’d come in with the laceration bound in a dirty, bloody handkerchief, blood dripping everywhere. A little girl had stepped on a sewing needle at home, and her mother, a seamstress, had tried to pull it out but succeeded only in breaking off one end. A teenage boy’s arm had been broken for three weeks, had been reset wrong, and Dr. Mendoza had to yank it into place to reset it properly. An adorable little baby girl with tiny stud earrings, wearing a pink sweater, was screaming in pain. Her eyes were red. He reassured the baby’s nervous parents that their child had nothing more serious than a bad case of conjunctivitis, easily treated with ophthalmic Cipro.

The waiting room bustled with patients and their families, people dirty and sweaty from working in the fields or the maquiladoras, many of whom had no teeth and no last name. With the squalling of infants and the screams of children and the shouting of the adults, you could barely hear yourself think. But Dr. Mendoza didn’t mind it at all.

Even though he was a surgeon, most of the work he did at the free clinic was general medicine. He was vastly overqualified. But that was fine. He believed in balance. He believed that the good he did here two days a week compensated for… his other work.

Then he noticed the clamor of the waiting room subside. Something had happened to quiet all but the youngest. He stepped out of the examination room and saw a man standing at the entrance to the waiting room. He wore snakeskin boots and jeans and a gaudy silk shirt. He wore a little gold AK-47 on a gold necklace, and a black cowboy hat. A tattoo covered most of his neck.

Everyone in the room was frightened of the man. They recognized his type. He was a gavillero, a trigger man for the cartel. A killer. The man squinted, his shrewd eyes scanning the room, then falling on Dr. Mendoza. Heads turned toward the surgeon and back toward the gavillero.

Dr. Mendoza beckoned him in with a flick of his hand.

Away from the eyes of an audience, the gavillero seemed to become another person. He was polite and deferential, almost obsequious.

“Don Armando,” he said, bowing his head. “I come with a message from el gran jefe.”

Dr. Mendoza’s eyes bored into the gavillero’s.

The younger man handed the surgeon a folded slip of paper and gave another nod.

Dr. Mendoza took it, glanced at the name and telephone number, folded it, and slipped it into the breast pocket of his white coat.

“Tell el gran jefe I will take care of this tonight. After I see my last patient.”

“Yes, sir,” the gavillero said with another nod.

“Well?” Dr. Mendoza said.

“Sir?”

“You may go,” Dr. Mendoza said. “I have patients waiting.”

37

Galvin’s invitation, the more Danny thought about it, was baffling, even nerve-racking.

Was it some sort of mind game? Was Galvin toying with him? On two occasions he’d caught Danny in compromising, or at least highly questionable, circumstances. That time when he returned home unexpectedly to find Danny loitering in his study. And when he noticed his BlackBerry had unaccountably migrated to the wrong suit pocket. His driver had taken the fall for the transmitter discovered on his desk. But how could Galvin not suspect Danny? He’d have to be oblivious or hopelessly naïve-neither of which described Thomas X. Galvin.

Or playing him in some patiently twisted way. Why else would he have invited Danny to spend a weekend in Aspen, to burrow even deeper into the bosom of his family-unless he was three steps ahead of Danny and was playing the long game. Some complex scheme in which Galvin would confront him, trap him, expose him.

Or worse.

On his way back home, he called Lucy and told her about Galvin’s invitation. He half expected her to react negatively, or at least skeptically. He always trusted her instincts. She’d been right, probably, to warn him against accepting a loan from Galvin, even though she had no idea what the terrible cost would be.

“Aspen!” she said. “Are girlfriends invited?”

“Expressly.”

“Aspen sounds great.”

“Really? I’m surprised.”

A secure text message alert interrupted the call, that strange plinking sound. It was from AnonText007: 10 a.m. McDonald’s Central Square, Cambridge

“I’ve never flown in a private plane,” she said.

“You don’t mind all this?”

“All what?”

“Extravagant, conspicuous wealth.”

“Why should I mind it? It sounds fabulous. I haven’t been skiing in years, ever since Kyle started snowboarding.”

“How about all that time up close and personal with the Galvin family?”

“It’ll be fascinating.”

“You have no idea.”

“Aren’t you and he becoming best buds?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. We get along.”

“Well, let me remind you, I’m a trained psychiatrist. Maybe I’ll gain some useful insights into Abby’s relationship with the Galvins.”

“I’m surprised.”

“What, you expected me to tell you not to go?”

“I expected you to agree with me that it might not be a good idea.”

“Is there some reason I’m overlooking?”

He exhaled. He was keeping so much from her now that he was finding it hard to keep track of what he’d told her and what he hadn’t, what she knew and what she didn’t.

“I suppose not,” he said.

Central Square in Cambridge was barely a mile away from Boston’s Back Bay but a world apart. The Back Bay was wealth and European sophistication: harmonious Victorian architecture, redbrick sidewalks, tree-lined streets, gas streetlamps, stratospheric real estate prices. Whereas Central Square, just across the Charles River, was seedy and shambling, perennially run-down, in a state of constant urban decay.

Danny had driven past this McDonald’s probably a thousand times before but had never noticed it. As soon as he pulled into a space on Mass Ave, half a block away, he had a fairly good idea why Slocum and Yeager had selected it for a meeting. The restaurant was inconspicuous and was on the corner of Mass Ave and a narrow side street, with plate-glass windows on either side, a glass box. If you were sitting inside the McDonald’s, you could observe everyone coming on both sides.

It was also the kind of place where you could sit at a table and hang out indefinitely without being disturbed. The counter staff were talking among themselves and taking the occasional order from a customer.

Danny entered, grabbed a corner table, set the gym bag on the floor. The whole place smelled like French fries, which was not unpleasant. The DEA guys weren’t there yet. Two young men were speaking Portuguese, one wearing a Red Sox cap. An Asian kid in an MIT sweatshirt was devouring a Big Mac, wearing giant headphones, and fiddling with his iPod or iPhone at the same time. No one else was there.

He glanced at his watch, brushed a crumpled drinking-straw wrapper off the table along with the crumbs of the last patron’s meal, touched a splotch of something sticky.

The side entrance, on Douglass Street, opened, letting in a rush of cold air. It was Glenn Yeager, in a black North Face fleece ski jacket and an oversize pair of sunglasses. He went right up to Danny’s table without looking around.

“Bad cop,” he announced in a low, guttural voice, “will not be joining us. In answer to your question.” He removed his sunglasses. His eyes looked slightly out of focus.

“Bummer,” Danny said.

Yeager removed a glasses case from a zippered side pocket of his fleece, took out steel-rimmed bifocals, put them on as delicately as a surgeon doing microsurgery. He glanced down at Danny’s feet, at the gym bag containing the device. “See, I told you that thing was idiot-proof.”

“How did you know it worked?”

“It uploaded the data remotely, right after you finished.” He shimmied his hands. “The magic of the Intertubes.”

“So now you have everything you need,” Danny said brightly. “You have the mother lode.”

“Well, we have some, anyway. But a lot of the contents of his BlackBerry were encrypted.”

“That surprises you?”

“Not at all. The cartels have gotten really sophisticated about their comms. And they don’t use BlackBerrys for the really sensitive stuff. They use the Internet. Still, they like to use BlackBerry’s PIN-to-PIN messaging system for routine communication because it doesn’t go through a server. Doesn’t leave any digital bread crumbs. We didn’t capture much of his e-mails, but at least we got the phone numbers of contacts in his address book.”

Danny shrugged. “So we’re done here.” A statement, not a question.

Yeager smiled thinly. “We were delighted to hear about Aspen.”

“To hear what about Aspen?”

“That you’re joining the Galvins there this weekend.”

Danny stared at him for a few seconds. Then he hunched forward. “If you have some kind of bug in his limo, what the hell do you need me for?”

Yeager’s face was impassive.

“I didn’t give Galvin an answer. I haven’t decided yet.”

Something about Yeager’s eyes.

“You son of a bitch,” Danny said. “Did you plant some kind of bug on me?”

Yeager shook his head slowly. “Come on. Anyway, point is, he’s meeting someone in Aspen. We think it’s someone quite high up in the cartel hierarchy.”

“In Aspen?”

“The ski weekend is probably just a cover. They’re extremely careful about locations and venues. If they’ve chosen to meet in Aspen, it’s because they know they can do it without being monitored. Any trackers will be spotted at a distance. They’ll stand out. The terrain in Aspen works well that way.”

“So why don’t you fly out there and tail him? You don’t need me.”

“That’s not how it’s going to play out. You’ll be with him. You’ll have access to him. We want to know who he’s meeting. If we get that, it’s huge. The definitive link between Galvin and the cartel we’ve been trying to nail down for three years now.”

“You don’t get it, do you? This is a family ski weekend, not some Iron John initiation. Tom Galvin and I aren’t going to be sitting around nude in a drum circle in the snow, howling at the moon.”

He smiled. “He trusts you.”

“I’m not doing it. I almost got caught downloading his BlackBerry. The fact that I’m still alive is a miracle. I’m not doing any more.”

Yeager spread his hands on the table. His left hand drew back when it touched the sticky gunk. “Danny, you’re understandably nervous. I get that. But if he were suspicious about you, he wouldn’t have invited you to spend time with his family.”

“Unless he has some other plan.”

“Come on, now. You’re overwhelmed, I can see that. I completely sympathize. Every confidential informant I’ve ever worked with goes through a crisis of nerves. Look, Danny, you’re not alone. You have the full force of the US government behind you.”

“And that’s supposed to reassure me? The fact is, the more often I do this, the greater my odds of getting caught. I got you the contents of his BlackBerry. Now I’m done. We’re done.”

He stood up. There was a steady stream of people entering and leaving, getting late breakfasts or early lunches. The MIT kid was gone. A couple had taken a table nearby, both of them in their midforties with matching bushes of Chia Pet hair.

“Sit down, please.”

“I’ve cooperated with you more than was reasonable. More than was safe, frankly.”

“You’re done when we say you’re done,” Yeager said, softly but with steel in his voice. Then, more gently: “You’ve signed a contract. If you renege, our deal is off. The agreement’s dead. You’ll be indicted and charged and you’ll have no leverage whatsoever.”

“Hold on-”

“You’ll be in the worst of all possible worlds. Not only will you be indicted, but the cartels-they’re going to realize you cooperated. And we’re not going to be able to help you. Not at all. No witness protection program. No protection at all. If you’re lucky, you spend your life in jail. But far more likely, you get killed. Is this really what you want?”

“The information I already got you? That doesn’t count?”

“Read over your copy of the agreement you signed. Until we have enough to justify an arrest warrant for your friend, you’re still on the hook. You don’t get to walk away until we’re finished. You quit now, it’s like you never cooperated in the first place. You agreed in writing to testify.”

Danny sat back down. “Testify? Do you have any idea what would happen to me if ever I testified in court? If I even make it that long? My daughter would be without a father.”

“In all my years, I’ve never had an informant killed. Never. Not once.”

“It’s happened. You know it.”

“Listen to me, Danny. We’re in the process of building an overwhelming case against Galvin, a case that’s going to be so strong that he’ll have no choice but to plead out. These cartel guys, they never go to trial. Once you get us what we need-once we have probable cause and we get an arrest warrant for that asshole-we’ll have enough to put him away. It’ll be so strong that I doubt we’ll even need you to testify. We’ll do everything we can to minimize your role in this. We’re not going to put you in harm’s way. I mean, look-you do us no good dead.”

“That’s sweet.”

“On the other hand, you walk away now, you’re committing suicide.”

“Because you’re going to leak, is that it?”

“No. You walk away, we’ll have no choice but to indict you, and it’s going to be all over the indictment-which is, by the way, a public document-that you cooperated with us. It’s like painting a target on your chest.”

“And if I do this? Is that it? The end?”

“Absolutely.”

“How do I know you’re not going to charge me anyway?”

“We’re not interested in you. You’re not just a small fish, you’re plankton, for God’s sake.”

“I want that in writing. I want a letter of immunity.”

“We can’t get you a letter of immunity if you haven’t been indicted.”

“But the US Attorney can.”

“And what makes you so sure of that?”

Danny waggled his hands. “The magic of the Intertubes.”

“Well, let me assure you, that never happens. Maybe on TV, but not in reality. You’re going to have to take me at my word. You’re going to have to trust us.”

Danny stood up again. “Well, I don’t.”

“This is not going to end well.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Danny said, and he walked out without turning back.

38

Dr. Mendoza entered the lobby of the Executive Suites Hotel in Oakland, California. Off the lobby was the bar-lounge, a dismal and subdued place, and sitting at the bar-a long, shallow half-moon topped with fake granite-was a somber collection of people. A couple in their late sixties, both florid-faced, who appeared to be married and bored with each other. Three businessmen in their thirties, probably here for some convention, all staring blankly at the football game on the TV mounted just above them. They all seemed transient and lonely.

Dr. Mendoza found a seat at the bar next to a pinch-faced, middle-aged businessman type, hunch-shouldered, in a navy blue golf shirt and khakis. The man was alone, drinking a Scotch and soda and staring into space.

“How’s the game?” Dr. Mendoza said, indicating with a wag of his head the football game on the TV.

The man turned to him and shrugged. “I have zero interest in football.”

“Nor I.” Dr. Mendoza was relieved, since he knew almost nothing about American football and had no interest in learning anything about it. “If only my investments gave me time to watch sports.”

He let that hang for a few seconds until the man next to him replied, as Dr. Mendoza knew he would. “What sort of investments?” he said, trying to sound casual.

“Oh, mostly for myself and my family,” he said airily, glancing up at the TV set as if he’d suddenly developed an appreciation for football.

They chatted for a while. Dr. Mendoza remained tantalizingly vague about the nature of his fortune while letting it be known that it was substantial. He was more interested in learning about the real estate market in and around the Bay Area. The businessman had gotten a lot more talkative. Dr. Mendoza had been transformed, in his eyes, from an annoyance to a potential client. Of course, the man didn’t say why he was staying at the hotel, and Dr. Mendoza was careful not to ask.

When the man got up from his stool and excused himself to use the restroom, Dr. Mendoza said, “Please allow me to buy you a drink.”

“I think I’ve had all the Scotch I need for the night, but thanks anyway.”

“Just one more drink? I need to pick your brain a little more about real estate in this area.”

“Well… I suppose just one more drink. After all, I don’t have to drive home.”

The businessman returned a few minutes later, settled himself on the bar stool, and saw the fresh drink in front of him. “Thank you kindly,” he said. He raised his glass to Dr. Mendoza’s.

“To a long life,” Dr. Mendoza said.

They each took a drink. “Your accent,” the businessman said after a while. I can’t place it…”

“Argentina,” Dr. Mendoza said, beaming. “And after all these years in Portola Valley, I thought I’d lost it.”

“I knew it was Spanish or Mexican or something.” He made a tiny grimace as he swallowed, and Dr. Mendoza worried that the Scotch wasn’t adequately masking the acrid taste. But then the man took another sip, and Dr. Mendoza was able to relax. “Argentines speak Spanish, huh?”

“Indeed,” said Dr. Mendoza. “Of course there are differences between the way we speak and the way the Spaniards speak. Just as there are differences between the way they speak in, say, Oaxaca and the way they speak in, say…”-he paused to let the name slide into place with a satisfying click-“Sinaloa.”

The banker stiffened, just as Dr. Mendoza expected. He was an emotionally volatile man. The cartel’s dossier indicated that he took medication for a heart condition. A volatile temperament like his would not long withstand the DEA’s pressure. With trembling hand he set down his tumbler.

But he had drunk more than enough of the chemical.

Panicked, he said, “Who the hell are you?”

“I am the angel of mercy, Mr. Toth.”

Toth closed his eyes for a moment. “Oh, dear God in heaven, I don’t know what you’ve been told, but I haven’t said anything to anybody.”

Dr. Mendoza nodded patiently. “Of course not.”

“How-how did you find me here?”

Dr. Mendoza shrugged. The banker had gotten sloppy. The DEA had stashed him under a false name at this hotel, and then he’d used his credit card to order out for Chinese food.

“I told them there was no point trying to hide me. I told them you people could find me anywhere. But you need to understand something.” He wielded a stern index finger. “I told them nothing. Nothing, do you understand?”

Dr. Mendoza shrugged.

“The ‘angel of mercy,’ you said-”

“You are a drowning man and I am your life raft.”

“I never said a word, not-not a goddamned word!”

“Of course not.”

“They-they came to me!”

“Of course they did.”

Dr. Mendoza’s placid unconcern rattled Toth more than any explicit threat might have done. “Never-I never gave them-didn’t say a goddamned word! They moved me here”-he looked around with distaste-“said I needed protection. I never made-never cooperated-I didn’t-say anything! You have to-believe me!”

“I’m sure you haven’t.”

“And I won’t-won’t say anything.” He masked his pleading tone in steely emphasis.

“I believe you.”

“You-your employers have made me a lot of money and-I mean, why the hell-I wouldn’t turn myself in to the DEA! Why would I?”

“Perhaps because you fear them less than you fear us,” Dr. Mendoza suggested gently.

“I’m not an idiot!” Toth was beginning to gather his wits, to speak in an aggrieved tone. “I know you people can get to me anywhere-I mean, the fact that I’m here doesn’t indicate anything. They threatened me. I don’t know how the hell they knew about me, but I never told them a thing. Why would I? That would be insane.”

“It would indeed.”

“Why-why are you here?”

Dr. Mendoza shrugged again. “Just for a friendly chat.”

“Well, let me make it absolutely clear to your-” Something suddenly occurred to him. Toth smiled, lifted his head, eyes wide with desperate enthusiasm. “I hope you’ve considered the possibilities here. I hope your… your employers realize that we can use this situation to our advantage. To plant disinformation. To mislead the DEA, do you understand? This could be a brilliant strategy. The DEA will think they have a cooperating defendant, but what they won’t know…” He closed his eyes. “I need to lie down for a… I think I overdid… the Scotch. Feeling a little light-headed…”

“This is because your blood pressure is dropping,” Dr. Mendoza explained. “You take a vasodilator for your heart condition, do you not?”

Toth looked surprised. “What does that have to do with…?”

“No one who takes a vasodilator should ever take Viagra,” Dr. Mendoza explained. “It is quite dangerous. Your blood pressure will drop to zero.”

Toth could barely keep his eyes open. “Viagra? I’ve never taken-” The tumbler of Scotch slipped from his grasp and thudded on the bar.

He looked down at it, and he knew.

“This will not be painful, not at all,” said Dr. Mendoza. “This will go quite easily.” Dr. Mendoza rose from the stool and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I told you, I am the angel of mercy.”

There were far, far more painful ways to die than to imbibe thirty milliliters of sildenafil citrate suspension mixed with whiskey. Even if he had drunk no more than half, that was still, for him, a lethal dose. No one would ever suspect foul play. It would look like he’d foolishly got hold of some Viagra and didn’t know how dangerous it was for him to take any of the stuff.

It was quite clever, actually.

“Good evening,” Dr. Mendoza said. He left the bar without turning back once. He didn’t need to. He heard the banker slump to the floor as he lost consciousness.

To die in such a painless manner was indeed a mercy.

Particularly given the alternatives.

39

Tom Galvin’s private plane was a Challenger 300, made by Bombardier. Its exterior was white and shiny and glinted in the sun on the tarmac at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Mass.

He’d driven Lucy and Abby in the Honda. They’d parked in the lot at eight thirty A.M. and rolled their bags into the general aviation terminal to wait for the Galvins.

On the dot of nine, the Galvins arrived. Through the plate-glass window in the terminal, Danny watched the Maybach limo pull right up to the plane. Tom, Celina, and Jenna got out of the car while Diego, the chauffeur, unloaded their luggage. A short staircase popped open, and everyone climbed in like they were taking a shuttle bus. Danny noticed the Galvins didn’t bring any skis. Presumably, they left them at their house in Aspen. Danny, Lucy, and Abby all planned to rent skis when they got there.

Celina turned and waved them over.

“We don’t have to go through, like, security?” Abby asked.

“I guess not,” Lucy said.

No tickets, no security lines, no taking off your shoes or stuffing a Ziploc bag with liquids.

It was good to be Galvin.

When they’d boarded the plane, Danny introduced Lucy to the Galvins. Celina greeted him and gave her a kiss. Abby and Jenna went off together so Jenna could give her the tour.

The cabin was roomy, over six feet tall and around seven feet wide. In the forward part of the cabin were four big beige leather club chairs, two facing two. In the aft was a long couch facing a couple of club chairs. There was no flight attendant.

“Not bad,” Danny said, trying not to look impressed.

“It’s better than the Green Line,” Galvin said with a laugh. He turned, saw the two girls sitting in the club chairs up front. “Hey, move it, those are the grown-ups’ seats!”

“Can this thing go to Aspen without refueling?”

“It can fly to Europe without refueling.”

“This is awesome,” Abby said, a big smile on her face. She didn’t bother pretending to appear nonchalant. “Do we have to turn off our cell phones and stuff?”

“Yeah, right,” Galvin replied. “What a crock, huh?” With a smile, he called to Danny, “The only hitch is, they won’t let me smoke my cigars in here.”

“Wanna watch a movie?” Jenna asked.

“Don’t you girls have homework?” Celina said.

“They’re not allowed to assign homework on a three-day weekend,” Jenna answered.

“What about your Prejudice paper?”

“It’s Pride and Prejudice, Mom, and it’s not due till Tuesday.”

“I want you to work on your paper for at least one hour,” Celina said. She waggled an index finger. “After that, you can watch a movie.” She turned to Lucy. “These girls, they can’t be without a screen in front of them or they go crazy with boredom.”

“Speaking of screens,” Galvin said, “we’ve got Wi-Fi on board and a coffee machine in the galley kitchen.” He pointed aft.

“I’m good,” Danny said. “Sorry your sons can’t join us.”

“Yeah, well, Brendan has exams, and Ryan and his girlfriend are doing… whatever they do.”

“Thomas,” Celina said warningly.

“They’re probably screwing,” said Jenna.

“Hey!” Celina said. “I don’t want to hear these word out of your mouth!”

“Sorry,” Jenna said quickly.

“All right,” Galvin announced. “Let’s all get seat-belted and get this show on the road.” He and Danny sat in the club chairs next to each other in the front of the cabin, and Celina and Lucy took the other pair. Lucy took a book out of her handbag-a new biography of Cleopatra-and set it in her lap. The pilot gave a safety briefing over the PA system, and a few minutes later the plane took off.

The chairs were white leather and far more comfortable than any airplane seat he’d ever sat in. Hell, maybe more comfortable than any chair he’d ever sat in, period. Galvin was working on a laptop on a pull-down table. Danny had set up his laptop on the table in front of him, too, but he was far too tense even to think about working.

All he could think about was the DEA. How much of their threats was bluster, and how much was for real? He had no way of knowing. He had no one to talk to about it.

A low hum of anxiety had taken hold of him. It knotted his stomach. He felt like he’d drunk ten cups of strong coffee.

He wanted to stop cooperating with the DEA but didn’t know how he possibly could. You walk away now, you’re committing suicide, Yeager had said. He’d be painting a target on his chest. Once the word got out that he’d been working with the DEA against the cartel, he wouldn’t be alive much longer.

Why? Because if he walked away, they’d move to indict him, and that indictment would detail his cooperation with the DEA against Thomas Galvin. And the cartels would learn the details from the indictment.

Or so the DEA warned him.

But maybe that threat was hollow. Maybe.

Thanks to a few hours on Google late the night before, Danny had his doubts.

For one thing, a federal indictment could be sealed. The details didn’t have to leak out.

Anyway, the DEA wasn’t going to move against him until they’d nailed down their case against Galvin. He’d read through all sorts of stories on federal prosecutions until he had a good idea of how the government tended to move in big drug cases.

They wanted the big kahuna, not the big kahuna’s insignificant little buddy. They weren’t going to screw up their case by tipping off Galvin and the cartel. That would be just plain stupid.

And then there was the fact that he was here, sitting on Tom Galvin’s private plane. If Galvin was really working for the Sinaloa cartel, and if Galvin had any reason to believe Danny was a DEA informant… well, Danny and Galvin’s wife and daughter wouldn’t be here. Simple as that.

At least, if Danny’s reasoning was correct, anyway.

He wondered whether he should meet again with Jay Poskanzer, and try to figure a way out. Or some other lawyer. Get a second opinion.

He looked up and noticed Galvin watching him. He felt a wriggle of fear in his gut.

“Not bad,” he said, his hands outspread, indicating the airplane they were sitting in. “Mind if I ask, do you own this?”

“Nah, charter. Told you, they won’t let me smoke my stogies in here. Owning is a huge pain in the butt. You gotta have full-time pilots on payroll, lease a hangar, all that crap. I don’t really fly often enough to justify it.”

Danny nodded. Lucy and Celina were talking animatedly. They seemed to have bonded right away.

“Plus, whenever we fly to Aspen, I always insist on the most experienced pilot they have,” Galvin said.

“Why’s that?”

“Aspen’s a scary place to fly in and out of. It’s in the middle of a mountain range, the runway’s only five thousand feet long, there’s just not much room for error. If you miscalculate, you could slam into a mountain.”

“I see,” Danny said. Air disasters were not his favorite topic while flying.

“When the ceiling’s less than a thousand feet, the pilot can’t see the runway. You’re flying four hundred miles an hour, and-”

“Got it,” he said curtly.

In a lower voice, Galvin said, “Your girlfriend’s great. Really cool.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“They look like they’re getting along.” An hour into the flight and Lucy and Celina hadn’t stopped talking. “How does she do with Abby? That’s got to be a tough gig.”

“Well, actually. Better than me.” Danny was surprised at Galvin’s question. Most guys wouldn’t notice something like that, let alone remark on it.

“Your wife-she passed, right?”

“Last year. She was my ex-wife by then.”

“Breast cancer?”

Danny was certain he hadn’t given any details of Sarah’s death. Maybe Galvin had heard from Abby. Danny rarely talked about Sarah’s cancer or the terrible days before and after her death. He’d never have expected Galvin to ask about something so personal.

Danny nodded.

“Poor Abby, huh?”

“It’s been a rough couple of years,” he said sadly.

“Rough for you, too, I bet.”

Danny looked at him. “Yeah.”

There was a long pause, and then the moment seemed to have passed. Galvin looked at his laptop screen. Danny wasn’t sure whether Galvin had gone back to whatever he was working on, or had just fallen silent, not wanting to dig further.

Then Galvin said crisply, “Could I ask you something?”

Danny looked at him, glimpsed the grave expression, felt his stomach tighten. “Okay…”

Galvin looked over at the women, who were still deep in conversation. Then back at Danny.

“My security people found something on my BlackBerry.” His gray eyes locked into Danny’s.

“Security people?” Danny felt his face grow hot. He wondered whether his face was flushing visibly. He hoped not.

Abby and Jenna laughed again, and Celina got up from her seat and went to where the girls were watching a movie.

“My clients-I told you, they’re an extremely wealthy family, right? Well, they’re really private. I mean, almost paranoid. Part of my deal with them is, I agree to regular security audits and intrusion detection systems and communications security, all that. I mean, real crazy, over-the-top stuff.”

“Okay…?” Danny shrugged, palms up, with a mystified what-does-this-have-to-do-with-me? look.

“They found an attempt to access my BlackBerry.”

Galvin paused. Danny wasn’t sure if Galvin was waiting for a response. So he said, “Huh.” His throat had dried up. He swallowed a few times. “Weird.”

“So I need to ask you something.”

Danny cleared his throat, swallowed. “Sure.”

“I never put the thing down. Celina calls it my electronic pacifier. I always have it with me. In bed, in the crapper, everywhere. And I’m trying to remember when the last time was it wasn’t in my hands. And it comes to me.” He paused. “It was when we played squash a couple of days ago.”

“At the Plympton Club?”

Galvin nodded.

“I don’t remember,” Danny said smoothly. “You sure you didn’t take it with you onto the court?”

He shook his head slowly, deliberately. “They don’t allow you to bring cell phones into the squash courts.”

Danny shrugged. He felt a rising tide of panic. His mouth was so dry now, he could barely swallow. His heart was pounding. He tried to look unfazed, or maybe even bored, but he knew it wasn’t working.

“And then-I know this’ll sound nutty to you-but when I got back to my locker after the game? The phone was in the wrong pocket.”

Danny laughed, once, a dry, brittle laugh.

“I know, I know-like, how OCD is that, right? But it’s just a habit. I’m right-handed, so I keep my BlackBerry in my left inside pocket.” He touched the left side of his chest, right over the left breast pocket of his suit jacket. “You know, like how Buffalo Bill always kept his gun holster on his left side or whatever. So I can draw fast.”

Galvin smiled casually but watched Danny’s eyes.

Damn it to hell, Danny thought. Just come out with it. Stop toying with me. Accuse me; get it out there so I can bat it away with a casual denial.

Don’t act defensive. Don’t act angry. Act, if anything, bored.

An innocent person won’t take a wild accusation like that seriously.

Danny broke the silence. “You think maybe one of the snotty club members is engaged in corporate espionage? Like maybe the Exeter T-shirt guy?”

Galvin was no longer smiling. “The security people say the time when someone tried to access my BlackBerry-well, it was when you and I were playing squash.”

“Bizarre.” Danny was starting to feel queasy.

“So help me out here,” Galvin said. He was no longer looking directly at Danny. He was staring past Danny’s right shoulder at the window.

“Okay.”

“You went to the locker room when I was on the court.”

“I did?”

“You went to get some water. Some bottles of water.”

“I vaguely remember.”

I pretended to take his locker key “accidentally.” He barely seemed to notice at the time.

“Remember that kid, the Hispanic kid, José? In the locker room?”

“The one you were speaking Spanish to?”

“Yep. Him. You didn’t see him near my locker, did you?”

Danny blinked a few times. He couldn’t decide whether to continue acting bored or look like he was trying hard to remember something so minor, so obscure, that no one could possibly be expected to recall.

He opted for the eye squint, the furrowed brow. The trying-as-hard-as-I-can-to-remember look.

Trying not to show the relief that washed over him.

And now what? Accuse the locker room attendant of loitering near Galvin’s locker, of breaking into Galvin’s locker? That innocent kid? So he’d end up like Esteban, the chauffeur, sliced and diced in a Dumpster somewhere? Anyway, what would a locker room attendant want with Tom Galvin’s BlackBerry? That made no sense.

Or did it? What if José made a regular habit of ransacking members’ lockers, stealing pocket change here and there, and for some reason-not beyond belief, not at all-he picked up Galvin’s BlackBerry to make a call, or just to look at it? Out of good old-fashioned curiosity?

That was a plausible explanation. But Danny knew that if he pushed that lie, and the cartel believed that some kid from the Plympton Club locker room had tried to get into Tom Galvin’s BlackBerry…

Would the kid really end up carved into a dozen pieces?

Galvin fidgeted. He drew a long breath.

Then something occurred to Danny. “The locker room attendants have access to all the locker keys, I bet.”

“Huh.” Galvin looked dubious.

“Then again… I don’t know, he seemed like a real nice kid.”

“You never know. You think you know someone…”

“Well, who else would have access to your locker?”

“I don’t know what to believe. You wanna know the truth, I don’t care. But my clients-man, do they ever care.”

He looked like he was about to go on when Celina appeared behind him. “Tom, do you know the girls were watching Knocked Up? I told Jenna that’s not for kids. I told her, no more movies or TV for her for the rest of the day.”

Galvin shrugged. “Ah, Celina, she’s got a guest this weekend. Let’s give her a break.”

“No,” Celina said severely. “She has to learn, she breaks the rules, there are consequences.”

A few hours later they landed at Aspen/Pitkin Airport, where they were picked up by a driver, a different one, in a black Chevy Suburban.

This one was armored, too.

40

If he hadn’t known it was a private house, Danny would have assumed they were pulling up in front of a deluxe ski resort. It was an immense, rambling contemporary structure with a Japanese feel to it, built of stone and logs, a short drive north of town in a part of Aspen called Red Mountain. The curves and peaks of the roof were dusted with drifts of snow like powdered sugar.

The floors inside were blond wood, the walls rough-hewn stone and glass. Mostly glass. There were cathedral ceilings, a huge stone fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling picture windows that looked out onto the steeply canted mountainside: an astonishing view.

The driver-a sour-looking, barrel-chested man of around forty-carried everyone’s bags inside. He wore a necklace of colorful wooden beads and seemed to speak no English and talked only with Celina, in Spanish.

“Let me show you two to your room,” Celina said, taking Lucy by the elbow. “Jenna, Abby can sleep in your room, okay? But don’t let me catch you watching videos! Read books! You remember what is books?”

Jenna rolled her eyes. “I’m taking her to the Bowl.”

“The Bowl! Abby, querida, are you a very strong skier?”

“Sure,” Abby said.

“No,” Danny broke in. “She’s not.”

“Dad!”

“You haven’t skied in three years,” Danny said.

“It’s not like you forget,” Abby said. “It’s like riding a bike.”

“You two go to Buttermilk.” Celina waggled a finger.

“That’s for babies!” Jenna protested.

“Don’t argue with me,” Celina said. “Anyway, don’t they have that superpipe?”

“True,” Jenna said. “Can we take the Vespas?”

“No,” Celina said sternly. “Alejandro can take you. No more talk.” She pointed toward a hall off the main sitting area. “Go.”

“And I’ve got work to do,” Galvin said to Danny. “You guys settle in, you can rest, take it easy, whatever.”

“No,” said Celina, “I want to take Lucy cross-country skiing out behind the house. Danny, is okay if I borrow your beautiful girlfriend later this afternoon? After you have a little rest?”

“Sounds wonderful,” Lucy said. “Where can I rent skis?”

“No problems. We have skis for everyone in the mudroom in the back,” Celina said. “Everything you need.”

Danny’s iPhone sounded a text message alert. He saw it was from AnonText007 and slipped it quickly back into his pocket.

When they got to their room and Celina had left, Lucy sank down on the king-size bed, covered in a moss-green-and-gold-striped comforter, and let out a long, throaty sigh.

“You have a good talk with Celina?”

“I like her a lot,” Lucy said. “She must be lonely out there in the burbs, just doing the mom thing.”

“Well, she doesn’t have to work, that’s for sure.”

“She wants to have lunch when we get back to Boston.”

“You gonna do it?”

“Sure. She wants to talk about the homeless center.”

“You gonna hit her up for a donation?”

“The idea’s crossed my mind.”

“Maybe not such a great idea.”

She gave Danny a curious look. “Why not?”

“It’s already sort of awkward, all the money he’s lent me.”

“Yeah, the homeless aren’t as worthy a cause as a five-thousand-dollar trip to Italy.”

“Lucy. No fair. You know damned well what that was about.”

“I’m sorry. Cheap shot. But I didn’t twist her arm or anything like that. She kept asking about what I did, wanted to know more about it, and she said she wanted to get more involved.”

“Just what we need-get more involved with the Galvins.”

“He says, standing in the Galvins’ Aspen house,” she teased.

Danny exhaled. She was, of course, absolutely right. “It’s… complicated. It would just put us even deeper in their debt.”

“Can we change the subject?” She tugged at his belt. “Come lie with me and be my love.”

He smiled and turned to the enormous window, the stunning view of Aspen Mountain. There were no drapes or blinds.

“You think anyone can see in?” she said.

“Not without a telescope,” Danny said, “and if they’re that determined to watch us make love, they deserve a free show.”

She laughed, and he felt the first tug of arousal.

Lying naked in bed, Lucy said, “I don’t think she’s terribly happy in her marriage.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Just from the way she talked about Tom. There’s something not quite right.”

“How long have they been married?”

“It’s not just the normal stuff, the stresses and strains of a long marriage. Something else. I barely know her, and she was unburdening herself. She comes from some plutocratic Mexican family.”

“Plutocratic, as in rich?”

She nodded. “I always assumed their money came from her husband’s investment business.”

“She actually told you her family is superrich?”

“No, of course not, not like that. I inferred it. But her father was the governor of one of the Mexican states-Veracruz, I think? She went to some convent school in Paris and traveled a lot as a kid, had servants, lot of horseback riding, all that.”

“She told you all this?”

Lucy nodded. “Oh, and do you have any idea how Galvin makes his money?”

“Just that he invests money for some very rich family.”

“Three guesses who that family is.”

Danny smiled. “Holy crap. He’s working for his in-laws, huh?”

There was a knock on the door.

“Lucy, it’s Celina. You are ready for some skiing?”

“Be right out,” she said.

Dinner was at a place called Munchies Grill, which was a wealthy ski resort’s idea of a burger place. Rustic wooden picnic tables inside and curls of wood shavings and sawdust on the floor and cutesy neon signs. Its hamburgers were made from grass-fed beef from a small local supplier, rib meat, ground with bone marrow, stuffed with pork shoulder, and served either on house-made pretzel bread or house-made English muffin. Instead of mashed potatoes, they offered “smashed” Yukon gold potatoes. Not plain old French fries but truffle curly fries with roasted garlic aioli.

Their burgers took forever. After two Diet Cokes, Danny excused himself to use the restroom, at the back of the restaurant.

As he stood at the urinal, he heard the door bolt slide into place. Then, immediately behind him, a familiar baritone, a voice with a metallic rasp.

“You didn’t really think you could just walk away, did you?”

41

Danny finished his business and zipped up and turned to face the DEA agent, Philip Slocum.

His heart pounded, but his voice was steady. “You didn’t follow us here,” he said. “I was watching since we left Galvin’s house. There was no one behind us the whole way.” He turned slowly. It was only him and Slocum in the restroom. The door was bolted.

“So you’re a countersurveillance expert now?”

“You put a tracker on the Suburban.”

“What difference does it make, as long as we’re together?” Slocum gave a leering smile.

“Sorry you’ve wasted a trip. Maybe you can get in some skiing while you’re here.”

The side part in Slocum’s jet-black hair was a broad line of pale white scalp. His eyes were dark and hard.

“How about we go out there and say hi to Tom Galvin?” said Slocum. “Let him know we’re old friends, you and I. That we’ve been working together for several weeks now. I could hand him my business card.”

“I doubt you want to screw up your investigation.”

“Yeah, hate to have him think the DEA is looking at him closely.” Slocum smirked. “I’m sure that would never occur to him.”

“What do you want?”

“Pictures. Photos of whoever Galvin’s meeting with.”

Someone was trying the door. The knob twisted. Then, from outside, a muffled voice: “Sorry.”

“And for that you need me? Won’t the DEA spring for a good telephoto lens?”

“We don’t know when and where he’s meeting. Whereas you’re spending the weekend with him.”

“He’s not on a leash. You expect me to stalk him? Follow him everywhere he goes?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, unless you want me to use my iPhone to take pictures, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“I’ll have a camera for you tomorrow morning.”

“What, you’re going to drop it off at Galvin’s house?”

“No. You’re going to meet me in town early tomorrow morning. Seven A.M. Place called Sweet Tooth on South Galena. It’s a coffee shop. You’re an early riser, and you need your coffee.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“You don’t need one. You’ll walk into town.”

“And what happens if the mister or missus happens to be awake and says, where’re you going, coffee’s on?”

“You say thanks but no thanks, you need to clear your head to start your writing day. You’re a writer-make something up. Tell ’em you like to take walks. It’s not even two miles. Shouldn’t take you more than half an hour. Any longer than that, you’re in lousy shape and you really do need the exercise.”

42

Dr. Mendoza was perplexed.

He had stanched the flow of blood but hadn’t yet discovered the cause of the bleeding.

Eliminating the banker had been an urgent necessity, of course. If the man had spilled, the consequences would have been immense. Truly catastrophic for the cartel.

But his employers had bigger worries. The question was how the Drug Enforcement Administration had even learned of the banker’s existence. Obviously, someone on the inside had tipped them off.

An informant. A “confidential source,” as the DEA called a snitch.

But who?

Surely, it was someone close to Thomas Galvin, the cartel’s US-based investor. Someone in his office, perhaps. Or on his personal staff. Someone who had access to his home.

Unfortunately, the cartel had reacted to the leak with customary crudeness. They’d thought they had identified the culprit and sent their gavilleros armed with knives and machetes.

But they’d guessed wrong.

Well, Dr. Mendoza knew where to find out. Maybe the leak was in Boston, maybe not. But the identity of the source would without question be in Washington, DC. At DEA headquarters.

Like all government bureaucracies, the DEA kept records, great masses of paper, with a manic compulsion. Even on their most closely held sources they kept notes, papers, documents. Naturally, these files were sealed and locked away. But files always needed to be updated and indexed and accessed. Such was the nature of a bureaucracy, its lifeblood. And that work was always done, without fail, by low-level file clerks.

And here was the DEA’s weakness. The human factor, always.

Low-level file clerks were extraordinarily easy to turn.

He needed to fly to Washington, DC.

He could barely remember a time when he wasn’t in the employ of the Sinaloa cartel. He had been barely thirteen on that sun-scorched afternoon when the big black Lincoln pulled into the gas station/bodega where his mother worked as a cashier. The heat shimmered up from the asphalt. He ran to the pump and took the driver’s order. The man spoke in Spanish. In that part of San Diego, everyone spoke Spanish.

“Okay, kid,” the driver said, handing him a twenty, “a pack of Winstons, two packs of Marlboro unfiltered, couple cans of Pepsi, and today’s paper.”

“Do you have a quarter?” Armando Mendoza asked.

“I just gave you a twenty, kid.”

“Yes, but it’s not going to be enough.”

The driver looked skeptical. “How the hell do you know that?”

Mendoza had shrugged. How to explain simple arithmetic? “Well, it’s sixteen ninety for the gas, the three packs of cigarettes is one eighty-nine, and with the Pepsi and the newspaper, that’s twenty dollars and twenty-four cents. So, I mean, this is close, but…”

“You some kind of math genius?”

“I just added it up.”

“In your head?”

He nodded. He was showing off, of course.

The driver said to a man next to him in the front seat, “You see this?” Then he stuck his elbow out of the window and leaned closer to the teenager. He removed his mirrored sunglasses. “How much is 239 plus 868 plus 102?”

“That’s too easy.”

“How much, huh? You can’t do it, can you?”

“One thousand two hundred and nine.”

“Hold on, hold on.” The driver turned to the other man. “Your watch has a calculator on it, right? Okay. Kid, what’s 7566 plus 8069? Quick, now.”

Mendoza smiled. He paused for a few seconds. “Fifteen thousand six hundred thirty-five.”

“That right, Carlos?”

“Nope,” said the other man.

“Nice try, kid,” the driver said. “You almost had us there for a while.”

“Hold on, hold on,” the other man said. “Fifteen six three five. He’s right.”

“That’s what I said,” Armando protested.

“Jesus, kid.”

Later, his mother was furious when she heard he’d gotten into the backseat of the Lincoln. Just a few months earlier, a kid in New York City had gone missing, and his face appeared on milk cartons. She’d told him this story as if to inoculate him from the possibility of anything so terrible happening to her only child.

But all they’d done was to take him to meet their jefe, to show off his math skills. El jefe, the great Héctor Luis Palma Salazar. El Güero as he was called: the Blond One. El Güero was impressed and made him an offer. They would rescue him from the barrio. They’d even send him to college. They’d train him as an accountant, and then he’d work for the cartel.

But even at the age of thirteen, Armando Mendoza knew he wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon: That was his true desire. Not an accountant.

El Güero didn’t argue. There was need for medical talent as well. He was farsighted, a brilliant organizer who had built the Sinaloa cartel into the most powerful drug-trafficking organization in history. El Güero Palma needed someone utterly reliable to enforce discipline, ask questions and get answers, conduct “interviews,” as Mendoza began calling them, whatever it took. And administer justice when it had to be done: with a scalpel and not an AK-47.

Dr. Mendoza was young-too young-but his time would come. The cartel would pay for medical school in Guadalajara and support him during his surgical residency. In return, he would belong to the cartel. He would provide them with surgical services as needed. Later, after he became a surgeon, he asked them to underwrite the clinic in Culiacán. If he was going to work for the cartel, much of the work unpleasant, he wanted to do good works, too.

His work for the cartel, his nonsurgical work-his special work, as he thought of it-this gave him no pleasure. He was not one of those miscreants who took sadistic pleasure in such things. He simply believed that it was better that a job be done well than poorly, and in his hands, it was always done well.

It was also a fact that he had saved many more lives, through his work at the clinic and at the private hospital in Culiacán, than he had taken. He had alleviated at least as much pain as he had caused.

Dr. Mendoza felt the need to remind himself of this, since very soon, he was quite sure, he would be inflicting a great deal of pain.

43

At six o’clock the next morning, Danny’s iPhone alarm went off. The bedroom was dark and a bit overheated, and for a moment Danny, woozy, nearly gave in to the temptation to go back to sleep.

Until he remembered.

Lucy mumbled, “Why are you getting up?”

“To do some work,” Danny said.

“What time is it?”

“Six. In Boston, it’s eight o’clock.”

She murmured, “We’re not in Boston,” and rolled over.

No one else was up, which was a relief. Before the grown-ups had retired for the night, Galvin had announced that they weren’t crack-of-dawn ski types and everyone should feel free to sleep in. But Danny was prepared in case Tom or Celina were up-he knew the girls wouldn’t be-and offered him coffee and wondered why in the world he was headed out so early. He’d say he was mentally outlining the next chapter of his book. Fresh air always helped him think clearly. Who’d question that? Writers were an enigma to most people anyway.

The front door sounded a chime when he opened it, but it wasn’t alarmed. Outside it was dark and cold and the snow crunched and squeaked underfoot. The frigid air stung his cheeks and earlobes as he walked along the shoulder of the road.

There was hardly any traffic, with the exception of a Jeep passing by, blaring a snatch of something hip-hop and unmelodic. Gung-ho skiers, probably, on their way to sample early-morning corduroy.

The walk to town took just over twenty minutes. Gradually the sky began to brighten.

Sweet Tooth was exactly as Danny had expected, a hipster coffee shop/bakery that offered chai latte and gluten-free brownies and organic fair-trade coffee roasted by hand in small batches. Something by Ray LaMontagne was playing on the speakers. The only patrons were an exhausted-looking young dad with a squalling baby in a stroller, and, sitting by himself on a beat-up leather couch, Philip Slocum.

Danny ordered a small black coffee, which set him back four dollars, and joined Slocum on the couch.

An idea had just occurred to him, and he took out his iPhone.

“Hold on,” he said, feigning annoyance at some dull task he had to get out of the way.

It wasn’t easy to snap a photo of Philip Slocum furtively. But he muted the phone’s volume and then held it up vertically as if trying to get a better view of something on the screen.

And hit the CAMERA button. No sound, no flash. Just a half-decent, fairly in-focus picture of Slocum’s face.

“Did anyone watch you leave the house?” Slocum asked.

“I doubt it. Everyone was asleep. Why?”

He slid a small black nylon pouch across the sofa toward Danny. “Because you didn’t leave the house with this, so you might not want to flash it around.”

Danny unzipped the pouch. Inside was what looked like just the lens for an SLR camera, a small black barrel. But on second glance he could see it was an entire camera, extremely compact, its body dwarfed by its lens.

“And where’s this meeting taking place?”

“We don’t know. Just that it’s going to be fairly remote. They’re concerned about tracking devices and surveillance.”

“I told you, I don’t have a car.”

“You don’t need a car. Galvin’s not taking a car. Too easy to be tracked.”

“So maybe they’re meeting at Galvin’s house.”

“Doubt it.”

“Then, what?-he’s walking?”

The baby let out an ear-piercing shriek. Danny sometimes missed having a little kid-Abby was a heart-meltingly adorable little girl-but he sure didn’t miss having an infant that age.

“Most likely it’ll be a location where cars can’t drive to-where you can’t park a van. Where you can’t point a parabolic microphone. And where the cell phone coverage is so unreliable, or nonexistent, that no concealed transmitters are going to work. It’ll have 360-degree visibility, so they’ll be able to see anyone approaching.”

“Including me,” Danny said. “So they can pick me off with a sniper rifle.”

“No,” Slocum said patiently. “You’re a friend. A houseguest. If for some reason you’re spotted, Galvin will vouch for you.”

“And when is this supposed to happen, this meeting?”

Slocum shrugged. “This weekend. Today or tomorrow. That’s all we know.”

“And it could be anywhere. Anywhere he doesn’t need a car to get to.”

“Right. So try not to leave his side.”

When Slocum had finished his instructions, Danny stood up.

“Hey,” Slocum said. “Buy some muffins and scones to take home to the Galvins. Be a nice houseguest.”

Danny jammed the camera case into the outside pocket of his down parka. He bought an assortment of scones and muffins. With a white paper sack in his hand-SWEET TOOTH printed on it in the same typeface the Grateful Dead used to use on their albums-he left the coffee shop.

The first thing he noticed was a black Suburban.

Standing a few feet from the coffee shop, smoking and watching the front door, was Galvin’s driver.

44

The Suburban passed Danny on his way back.

He half expected Alejandro to pull over and offer him a lift. There was no question they’d recognized each other. The chauffeur had looked away too quickly.

Of course, it was possible that the chauffeur genuinely didn’t recognize him. But if he did, and if he’d witnessed the transaction between Slocum and Danny, had seen Danny pick up the camera…?

By the time he got back, the Suburban was parked in front of the house, its engine block ticking and creaking as it cooled. He glanced around. Alejandro was nowhere to be seen.

And through the glass front door he saw a light on that hadn’t been on before. He stamped his boots on the welcome mat, unlaced and removed them when he entered. In stocking feet, he followed the light into the kitchen.

Galvin, in a white bathrobe, his back to Danny, sat at a high chair at a long granite island. Coffee had just been brewed.

Danny held up the Sweet Tooth paper sack by way of efficient explanation. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Galvin said heartily. He laughed and pointed to an identical paper bag on the counter by the coffeemaker. “Alejandro just got back from there.”

Had the driver gone into the shop right after Danny had left?

“Great minds think alike,” he said.

“You went all the way into town on foot to get coffee?” he scolded. “I told you guys to make yourself at home. Mi casa es su casa.”

“I guess I’m still on East Coast time.” He set the bag down on the island. “The terminally hip barista said their cinnamon buns are to die for.”

“Well, no one’s going to complain about seconds.”

“Amazing view,” Danny said, pointing at the enormous picture window. “You probably take it for granted by now.”

Galvin pushed back his chair and stood up. “That view is what sold us on this property. That and the fact that there’s a cross-country trailhead close by. We can just put on our cross-country skis and take off from the backyard if we want to. In town’s a lot more convenient-you can walk pretty much everywhere-but you don’t get the view.”

“What are we looking at?” Danny approached the window, and Galvin joined him.

“Snow,” Galvin said.

“Thanks.” The comfortable sardonic banter of a couple of buddies. “Is that Aspen Mountain?”

“Aspen Highlands Bowl.” He pointed. “Steeplechase. That’s upper Castle Creek valley.”

“Beautiful.” There was no backyard, really. No fence defining property lines. Just a few stands of birch trees jutting up from the snow and lines of scrub pines. And a blanket of snow that went on for as far as he could see. And no other houses in view.

“Anytime we’re not here, you guys are welcome to stay. Otherwise it just sits here empty.”

Danny nodded. “Thanks.” They both stood admiring the scenery.

“And when we are here, too, of course. Celina and your, uh, girlfriend look like they’re becoming fast friends. Abby and Jenna are inseparable. And you’re not so bad yourself.” Galvin clapped an arm on his shoulder. “Seriously, the first time I met you, I knew you.”

“Knew me?”

“Recognized you. Like you were a kindred spirit among all those phonies at Lyman, all those hoity-toity types.”

“I don’t exactly belong,” Danny said.

“Neither of us does.”

“Except you’re-”

“Rich?”

“You could put it that way, yeah. As long as you’ve got beaucoup bucks, Tinsley Thornton couldn’t care less where you come from.”

“Lally, you mean. Please.” A tart grin. “See, Danny, that’s where you’re wrong. She knows who I am and where I’m from. To her, and to everyone at that school, I’ll never be more than a blue-collar kid from Southie who got lucky. As far as they’re concerned, I’m no better than some jamoke who works at a gas station and just won three hundred million bucks in the lottery. I’ll always be, you know”-he extended a pinkie and mimed drinking a cup of tea-“below the salt, as they’d say. They’re happy to take my money, sure, but I don’t have any illusions about the kind of smack they talk about me at board meetings.”

Danny shrugged, grinned. “Jamoke. My dad’s favorite insult.”

“You grew up on the Cape, right?”

“Yep. Wellfleet.”

“But not McMansion Wellfleet, I’m betting.”

“Not even close.”

“I forget if you told me, he was a plumber like my dad, right?”

“Contractor. Carpenter, really-that’s what he most loved doing.”

“Bet he was good at it.”

“He was great. A real craftsman. Meticulous. But a lousy businessman.”

“My dad was a good businessman but not exactly meticulous.” He laughed. “But everyone loved him. Did you say your dad passed?”

“No, they’re both alive.”

“Lucky. Mine are gone. Funny how the relationship changes when they get old. You start giving them advice. They even listen to you once in a while. They need your help, and you don’t need theirs anymore.”

Danny nodded.

Galvin went on, “Whatever stuff you went through, whatever ticked you off about your mom and dad, you just move on from that. You take care of them, because that’s what you do.”

Danny nodded. “Dad’s starting to lose it, you know, so we may have to put him in a home pretty soon. But he’s gonna go kicking and screaming.”

“I see the way you look at Abby. I see it in your eyes. You’d do anything to keep her safe.”

Danny felt tears spring to his eyes. “You know it.”

“I mean, I’d kill to protect my family. Bet you’d do the same.”

Danny nodded, uncertain what he was getting at. He looked Galvin in the face, just as he heard Celina say, “What big trouble are you two plotting?”

“Morning, babes,” Galvin said as they kissed.

“Good morning,” Danny said.

He thought about what Galvin had just said. He’d kill to protect his family. From anybody else, that would be a figure of speech.

From Galvin, though, it sounded awfully like a threat.

45

Celina made French toast and bacon for breakfast, which they had along with the pastries from the coffee shop, and then they all suited up and took the Silver Queen Gondola to the summit of Aspen Mountain, six of them in one cabin. The sun glinted off the snow trails, dazzling ice-encrusted trees, the skinny pine trees far below like the bristles of a coarse brush.

The three Galvins were wearing expensive ski outfits. Jenna had on a gold down jacket and ski pants that looked like blue denim but weren’t. Her mother wore a long silver metallic coat with a fur collar, too high fashion to be practical on the slopes. Tom had a bright yellow Salomon parka that resembled a rain slicker with a high collar. A bright green-and-yellow-striped knit cap with a pompom. With that outfit, Danny thought, he should be easy to spot at a distance.

The girls sat on the bench facing the adults and didn’t stop talking the whole way. Abby wore the hot-pink Helly Hansen ski parka that Sarah had bought her a couple of years ago, a little worn and a size too small.

Lucy held Danny’s hand. She leaned in close and said, under her voice, “She really looks happy, doesn’t she?”

Danny nodded. In the bright light, he could see a few faint freckles across Lucy’s nose. She hated her freckles, usually hid them with makeup. He thought they were adorable. She was wearing a light blue down jacket with a blue scarf and white pants that made her great legs look even greater.

Abby paused in midsentence and looked at them. She had the hearing of a bat, at least when she was the subject of conversation.

“We’ve never skied before, have we?” Lucy said.

“This is a first.”

“You know I’m pretty good at this sport, right?”

“I’m not surprised. You’re good at most sports.”

“You’re not going to be embarrassed, I hope.”

“At what?”

“At how much better a skier I am.” She said it with a coy smile, almost flirtatiously.

“Not at all. I’ll be inspired, more likely. You make me a better man.”

“That’s for sure,” she said with a laugh.

But Danny wasn’t thinking about skiing.

He was thinking about a way out. The DEA had him in a corner, it was true, but that didn’t make him powerless. If he were actually able to snap a picture of whoever Galvin was supposed to be meeting with, then he’d have something the DEA wanted.

You want the pictures? How about I get a letter of immunity? Signed by the DEA and the Department of Justice and whoever the hell else was necessary to make it ironclad. The president, if need be. A guarantee that he would never be indicted for anything to do with Galvin.

That would finally banish the threat hanging over his head, which kept them coming back and coming back. He was fed up with being a marionette. The only way to cut the strings was to be ruthless.

But how safe would it be to trail Galvin? If he were actually meeting someone from the Sinaloa drug cartel, he’d take precautions against being followed. And Danny was a writer, not a spy. Not a trained intelligence operative. He didn’t know the first thing about surveillance. From everything he’d read on the subject-mostly, he had to admit, spy thrillers-following someone without being detected was a skill acquired by a professional after long practice. Not a skill he had. No way.

Short of chaining himself to Tom Galvin’s ski boots, there was simply no way to make sure Galvin didn’t go off somewhere during the course of the afternoon. Galvin could ski down the mountain and disappear into the streets of Aspen. He could meet someone at a café, a restaurant, a bar, and Danny would never know about it.

All he could do was keep Galvin in sight as long as possible. And hope he got lucky.

At the top of the mountain, they got off the gondola, snapped into their skis, and gathered to confer.

“There aren’t any green trails?” Abby asked, trying to sound casual. She swallowed hard.

“Just intermediate and expert,” Danny said. “You can snowplow for a while until you get used to it. It’ll all come back to you. Wasn’t it you who said it’s like riding a bike?”

“The blue trails really aren’t so scary,” Jenna said.

The girls didn’t want to ski with the oldsters, and who could blame them? Abby pulled her goggles into place, and the two of them started down the slope, a blue trail called Easy Chair, which didn’t in fact look particularly easy.

Celina said, “Everyone: One thirty at the Sundeck for lunch?” She pointed at the building behind them. “Okay? Girls? Yes?”

Jenna waved an impatient acknowledgment to her mother, and the two girls were off. If Abby was nervous about her skiing ability, she was no longer showing it.

A minute or so later, the adults set off down the same slope, giving the girls enough of a head start to be on their own. Galvin was nimble and graceful, clearly an expert. Lucy was even better. Celina was good, about on par with Danny.

They quickly came to a juncture with a black trail.

“What do you think, Danny?” Lucy said. “Stay with the blue?”

Galvin said, “I’ll probably be doing mostly black trails. Don’t worry about trying to keep up with me.”

There was no way to explain to Lucy why he needed to stay with Galvin at all times. He hesitated a moment, then said to Galvin, “I’ll be fine,” and he followed Galvin toward the expert trail, leaving Lucy and Celina behind.

The black trails weren’t easy. They were scary at times, with some incredibly steep runs, but Danny managed to keep up with Galvin, more or less, for the next two hours or so. They skied on black diamond trails, but not double black diamond ones. The difficult ones, but not the “expert only” ones. He took a few spills, wounding just his dignity. He worried about the camera, hoped the down padding would protect it from damage.

A few times he spotted Abby and Jenna on the chairlift or cruising down the slopes. Abby seemed to be doing just fine. Twice he and Galvin met up with Lucy and Celina on the Shadow Mountain chairlift line. If Lucy was annoyed about being left behind in favor of Galvin, she didn’t display it.

At a few minutes past one thirty, the adults all gathered out behind the Sundeck restaurant by the picnic tables to wait for the girls. They stashed their skis in a rack. Galvin lit up a cigar. He waggled it at Danny with a questioning look.

Danny shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”

A few diners at the picnic tables were giving Galvin poisonous glares, but he didn’t seem to notice, and if did, he didn’t care.

Something about him seemed different. He was unusually preoccupied, pensive. Maybe he’d made a bad trade at work. Lost a couple hundred million dollars. Maybe he and Celina had had a fight.

Maybe that was all.

Anyway, how well did he really know the guy? They’d had a couple of friendly chats. They’d bonded over their similar backgrounds. Men don’t sit around sharing their feelings. They do stuff together. They don’t cry together or gossip; they watch football on TV, maybe play poker. They drink together, rib each other.

Maybe he was preoccupied. Or maybe he really was about to meet his contacts from the Sinaloa cartel.

“Hey, you,” Lucy said to Danny. “You took off.”

“I’m sorry about that. I guess I just wanted to push the edge of the envelope. My bad.”

“Men and their competitiveness,” she said, shaking her head, amused.

Danny made a stop in the men’s room, clomping, with his ski boots on, like Frankenstein’s monster.

When he returned, Galvin was gone.

“Tom went back to the slopes,” Celina said. “He said he wasn’t hungry.” Something about the way she spoke, the way her eyes wouldn’t meet his, prickled Danny’s suspicions.

“Which way did he go?” Danny said. “I think I’ll join him. I don’t mind skipping lunch.”

“I saw him going that way,” Abby said. She pointed vaguely toward the uncleared back section of the mountain, away from the blue and black trails, down the hill on the other side of the gondola landing.

“Oh, stay with us,” said Lucy.

“Knowing Daddy,” said Jenna, “he’ll be doing one of the double black diamond runs.”

“I wouldn’t mind trying a couple of double black diamond runs,” Danny said.

“I think maybe Tom is just wanting to ski by himself,” Celina said. Her tone was brittle. She gave Danny a quick but penetrating look.

Danny, pretending not to hear her, headed toward the uncleared area.

“You’re not staying for lunch?” Lucy said. “You sure?”

“I’m good,” he said.

And he set off in search of Tom Galvin.

46

On this side of the mountain, beyond the railing, were yellow signs on tall posts warning SKI BOUNDARY. The area was cordoned off with a pink neon rope. A diamond-shaped yellow caution sign: DANGER-NO SKIING BEYOND THIS POINT. Another one read WARNING! HAZARDS EXIST THAT ARE NOT MARKED-SKI WITH CARE. Just beyond that, a red sign mounted on a pole declared: THIS IS YOUR DECISION POINT. BACKCOUNTRY RISKS INCLUDE DEATH.

There were no marked trails here. There were no trails at all. This was the off-piste, ungroomed section, reserved for the most adventurous expert skiers, the hard-core powder heads and freeriders, the rippers and the shredders.

He could see a few lone tracks from skis and snowshoes. Also the parallel corduroy tracks laid down by the teeth and tread of a Sno-Cat, the snow vehicle that could climb up or down the mountainside. People generally didn’t ski terrain this rough on their own. Adventurers usually went in groups led by guides on Sno-Cats.

Had Galvin really taken off down this side of the mountain? It didn’t seem likely.

It didn’t seem at all likely that Galvin had gone this way. Abby must have been mistaken.

Then he noticed something dark and gnarled and malodorous in the snow a few paces ahead: the discarded butt of a cigar, like the turd of a small dog.

He peered down the mountainside, hoping to catch a glimpse of Galvin’s yellow parka among the glades. Nothing. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t skied down this way. He might just be out of sight, down a gulley, on the far side of a swell.

The sunlight reflecting off the snow dazzled his eyes. He put on his goggles and took a deep breath and stood at the lip of a cornice.

The snowdrifts looked seriously deep. Based on the diameter and taper of the tree trunks, he estimated that the snow was as deep as six feet in some places. This was not terrain he was used to skiing. Untouched, ungroomed runs like this, with such a deep snowpack, were meant for backcountry skiers.

Not him.

He briefly weighed making a desperation move-attempting a controlled descent, carving long turns side to side, zigzagging to slow his speed. But standing on the ledge and looking down, he realized what a preposterous idea it was to try skiing this side of the mountain. He turned his skis to one side-and felt the ledge crumble beneath him.

Suddenly he was plummeting, rocketing down the steep decline. He found himself whooshing through powder a foot deep, unlike the hardpack on the other side of the mountain, where the snow was flattened by hundreds, maybe thousands of skis every day. Here the snow was fluffy and lighter than air. It was like gliding through a cloud.

But the wide-open bowl quickly gave way to a more densely forested area, the tall pines scattered on the mountainside. Now he found himself weaving in and among and around the trees, picking up speed. Pines popped up before him like the looming obstacles in a video game. He carved a hard turn to one side, swerved to the other, slaloming between closely set tree trunks. From somewhere deep in his memory he recalled that the best trick for swooping between the trees was to focus on the white spaces in between, aiming carefully.

He swooped and carved, faster and faster, propelled down the hill by gravity and momentum, and he tried to slow himself down. But the only way to do that was to carve back and forth, shift his weight from one side to the other. And that he couldn’t do. Because he was catapulting downhill so fast, with so little clearance between the trees, he couldn’t afford an unnecessary turn even a few degrees to one side or the other. His skis shuddered. His legs and thighs burned from the unaccustomed muscular exertion. And the terrain between the trees was wildly inconsistent. In some places the snow was deep and fluffy; in other places were sheer patches of ice, and every so often he hit a rocky knuckle. His face felt frozen solid. He caromed faster and faster, always aware that the slightest miscalculation would send him crashing into a tree trunk.

Suddenly his skis crunched against something, which he realized only too late was a ridge, a cliff.

Midair, soaring, he felt time slow. He could see the sharply pitched slope, the rocky chasm directly below, and he knew that if he dropped too quickly, he would hit the rocks and be instantly killed.

He knew his fate was outside his control. He couldn’t alter the force of gravity or the trajectory of his descent. He’d vaulted down an icy chute into a twenty-foot drop, a vertical rock wall, with nothing but slippery boards strapped to his feet and no brakes.

And yet, for one brief passing moment, it was exhilarating. To feel nothing below him. Airborne, free falling, a human projectile, a missile. It was thrilling. Like nothing he’d ever experienced before. The wind howled in his ears.

He was just a few seconds, and one wrong turn, away from the finality of death.

And he realized at the deepest level of his consciousness how thin the margin was between extreme, awesome, energizing terror-and death. For the first time in his life, he understood thrill seekers, extreme skiers and mountain climbers. Hang gliders and skydivers and tightrope walkers. He finally understood the intoxicating sensation of defying death, of facing down our hardwired instinct for self-preservation.

And then, just as quickly as this realization had come over him, another kind of understanding seized him. That he might actually meet his death on the rocks below.

And the instinct for self-preservation reasserted itself.

This might have taken as much as two seconds. Certainly no more. He bent his knees, squatted, braced himself-

– and landed hard on the ground, absorbing the impact, a blow to his entire body all at once. He catapulted forward. He’d lost control.

The tip of his right ski caught on something. He flipped over and landed, hard, on his back, and for a moment everything was absolutely quiet. He’d come to an abrupt stop.

He tasted blood.

He twisted, felt pain shoot through his limbs, then throughout his entire body, jagged, like the crackle of lightning.

Icy snow bit his ears, his eyelids, the back of his neck. He tried again to move, wriggled, and found he could move his legs, his arms. He felt bruised all over, but nothing seemed to be broken. Then he remembered how to get up with skis on. He tucked his feet in toward his butt and leaned his knees to the left side. He realized he’d lost both skis. Slowly, carefully, he rolled over. Felt something twang in his lower back, a pizzicato pluck of nerve endings. A tendon? A pulled muscle? He hoped it was nothing more serious than that. For a moment he needed to rest, so he sank down, his face buried in the snow, which felt strangely warm, and then icy cold.

Then, bracing himself on his elbows he pushed up, the exertion sending more daggers of pain through his arms and shoulders. He pushed through the pain and got to his knees. He tasted more blood, probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue, realized he’d bitten his lower lip during the fall.

Unsteady on his feet now, he saw something maybe two or three hundred feet away. An old shack, it appeared, built from logs. It couldn’t have been more than ten feet by ten feet. Squat and sturdy and old, with a shingled roof. It looked like an old mining hut, left over from the mining boom at the end of the nineteenth century. He knew that Aspen had once been a silver mining camp, the largest in the country, until the day Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, demonetizing silver; in a matter of months, Aspen was a ghost town. But many of the old buildings remained, dotting the mountainside.

Through a small window on the side facing him, Danny could see a flickering amber light within. And silhouettes moving inside. Instinctively, he sank to the ground, sat in snow. He rooted around in his pockets until he located the nylon pouch that held the camera.

He yanked it open, the ripping sound of the Velcro closure loud in the muffled silence.

He trained the strong lens on the window, dialing the focus in and out until a face came into focus.

Galvin’s.

Even this far away he could smell one of Galvin’s cigars.

Galvin seemed to be rocking back and forth. No, he was pacing. Behind him was a man, or maybe two men, both of them wearing dark coats. One of the other men was bald. Danny refocused on the bald man. A plump, cue-ball round face with a goatee festooning a double chin. A heavy brow, unshaven-looking. He heard the crack of a tree branch, and he turned to look.

A man in a black parka and ski mask was lunging toward him. Before Danny could scramble to his feet, something crashed into the side of his head, an almost inconceivable explosion of pain, and the white light had bloomed to blot out his entire field of vision, the blood bitter and metallic, like copper pennies in his mouth, and then everything was absolutely quiet.

47

Later, the paramedics told Danny that he’d probably lost consciousness for no more than twenty or thirty seconds. But whatever happened in the hour that followed, he had no recollection of it. Later he was told he kept asking, over and over, “Where am I?” and “What happened?” He had nothing more than fleeting strands of memory, swirling like the streamers of yolk in a partly scrambled egg.

One minute he’d been staring through the camera lens at an old log cabin. The next minute, he was lying flat on his back in some sort of large barnlike room with plywood paneling. He had no idea where. Faces swam in and out of his field of vision. One face loomed directly above his, upside down, the funny-looking harp of a mouth forming nonsense words.

The cadence made the gobbledygook sound like a question, but the words meant nothing.

He tried to look around, but he could barely move his head. The room was overheated. Stifling hot, actually. He felt drenched with sweat.

Again he tried to look around, to figure out where he might be and how he’d ended up there, but his head wouldn’t move, his neck wouldn’t swivel. With a flutter of panic, he tried to lift his entire torso, but he was totally immobilized. His legs, his arms, his hands, and feet-all were frozen in place. Nothing would move.

He was struck with a terrible realization: I’m paralyzed. I’m a quadriplegic.

“… the United States,” said a voice.

“What?” Danny said. I can’t move my limbs, can’t even move my head. I’m frozen in place, locked in. I’m paralyzed.

“Who’s the president of the United States?” The upside-down face, the harp mouth. A raspy baritone.

Danny stared up at him in disbelief. I’m a quadriplegic, and you’re wasting my time with ridiculous questions like that?

“Calvin Coolidge,” he said.

The upside-down face swam out of his field of vision. Someone chuckled and said, “Wiseass.”

“At least his sense of humor is intact.”

Galvin.

An image came back to him. Galvin and someone else in the window of a small log cabin. The other person in the cabin was someone he’d never seen before. Cue-ball head. Spherical. A goatee floating in the middle of a double chin. Heavy brow.

How long ago had that been? Hours, maybe? Galvin meeting with some unidentified person in an old slopeside hut. But now he and Galvin were here.

“Where am I?” Danny said.

“America in 1925 or whatever, I’m guessing.” Galvin again.

“I can’t move,” Danny said.

“Hey, baby.” Lucy’s face was close, her eyes wide. She looked scared.

“Hey, you. Will you tell me where I am?” He smiled with relief, with gratitude, with love.

“Ski patrol hut at the base of the mountain. Sweetie, do you remember falling and hitting your head?”

“No… not really.”

“You remember going off to ski the uncleared side of the mountain?”

“That was sort of an accident. I didn’t mean to.”

“How’s your head? Do you have a headache, or are you dizzy, or…?”

“I can’t move.”

“Guys, there’s no reason for him to be strapped down like that,” Lucy said. “Come on. This is silly.”

“I’m strapped down? That’s the best news I’ve gotten in years.”

Now the same voice that had just asked him about the president of the United States said, in a hoarse baritone, “I’m going to insist he go to Aspen Valley Hospital to have a CAT scan.”

Danny could hear noises, snaps and buckles and something rubbing against something. The sharp pain of something squeezing against his wrists. Then he could feel his hands, tingling and heavy. He could move them.

Then the same thing with his ankles and his feet, which also tingled from a loss of circulation. He wriggled his fingers and found they worked just fine. His toes as well. A strap came off his chest, and a pair of hands helped him to sit up.

Lucy’s hands. She leaned in and kissed him. A warm swell of love lapped over him. “Do you have a headache?” she asked again.

He moved his head side to side gingerly and didn’t reply.

The front of his head, his temples, began thudding, hard. Truth was, he had a terrible headache. Like his brain was sliding back and forth in his skull. The pain seemed to be centered just behind his eye sockets. The thudding kept time with his heartbeat. If he could only grab the front of his head and detach it at the temples, he felt as if he could remove the headache and hold it, blood-slick and throbbing, in his hands.

“Seriously,” she said.

“Yeah, some,” he said.

Everything was bright and blazing with fierce color. He saw a few men in red-and-black parkas marked with white first-aid crosses, obviously members of the Aspen Mountain Ski Patrol. A few others he didn’t recognize mulling around. Galvin standing behind them, his bright yellow down jacket unzipped.

Next to him, in a black parka with the zipper partway down, stood his driver, Alejandro. He was an odd-looking man, Alejandro. His head was unusually wide, but his face was narrow, the features clustered close together. A pale line in his upper lip looked like the trace of an old scar. His necklace of green and black beads had a pendant dangling from it that looked, from this distance at least, like the Virgin Mary.

But it was the black parka that chimed something in his memory.

Danny noticed his ski boots had been removed. He was in stocking feet.

One of the men in the red-and-black parkas leaned forward. “Your pupils look normal, and your vital signs seem to be fine,” said the raspy-voiced one who seemed to be in charge. “You passed all the cognitive tests. Except the one about the president.

“Fact is, you got knocked out. Might have been for only a few seconds, but you were disoriented for a long time afterward, and that’s something you have to take seriously.”

Danny nodded, carefully. It hurt to move his head.

“You’re a very lucky guy. Your friend here happened to see you and called us immediately.” He glanced at Galvin. “If it wasn’t for him, you might have frozen to death out there.”

“Thank Alejandro, not me,” Galvin said. “He’s the one who found you.”

Danny turned to look at Galvin, then at Alejandro, and then back to Galvin. He remembered a black parka and a black ski mask. Galvin said something to his driver, and Alejandro left the ski patrol hut.

Something about the black parka stirred a vague, fragmentary recollection.

The ski patrol guy said, “We’re going to give you a ride over to Aspen Valley. You might have a skull fracture or internal bleeding, so you need to have a CAT scan at the very least.”

“I think I’m okay. I hate hospitals.”

“You don’t want to fool around with head injuries.”

“I understand. But I think I’ll be okay. Thank you guys so much for everything.” He looked at Lucy. “Where’s Abby?”

“The girls are skiing with Celina,” Lucy said. “Let me help.” She reached for his elbow.

“Really,” Danny said, “I’m fine.”

Galvin said, “Alejandro’s getting the car. I’m going to take him home. We’ll see you guys in front of the lodge.” He gave a quick wave, a flip of his hand, and went outside.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said to the patrollers.

Even though he didn’t need any support, he took Lucy’s hand. She helped him put on his sneakers-she, or someone, must have retrieved them from the rental area.

“You don’t look so good,” Lucy said when they were outside. “Do you hurt all over, honey?”

He smiled. “Just my head.”

“I know you hate hospitals, but you should go. If you start babbling nonsense, I’m taking you in. No debate.”

“You sure?”

“About what?”

“Sure you’ll be able to tell if I’m babbling nonsense? Worse than usual, I mean.”

“You have a point. Any idea how you got knocked out?”

“I really have no idea, Luce. I can’t remember much of what happened.”

But he did remember, more than he wanted to say. He hadn’t fallen. He’d been knocked out.

By the man in the black parka and the black ski mask.

Who must have been Galvin’s driver, Alejandro.

He needed to sit down. The throbbing behind his eyeballs started up again. If he kept his head steady as he walked, he found it hurt less. It didn’t feel as if his brain was thumping back and forth.

“Are you feeling sleepy?”

“Not sleepy. Just… I don’t know, crappy.”

The black Suburban was idling at the curb in front of the Little Nell. Tom Galvin got out of the front seat and opened the middle passenger door. Lucy came around between Danny and the Suburban to help him in. “I’m fine, really,” he assured her.

When he was seated, Lucy began climbing in, but Galvin stopped her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Would you mind staying with the girls?”

“I think I should stay with Danny.”

“Celina needs to meet a friend for coffee for some fund-raiser they’re cochairing. She’s not crazy about leaving the girls out there on the slopes alone. Don’t worry about our boy. I’ll get him straight home. He’s in good hands.”

She gave Danny a kiss on the lips, one that lingered a few seconds longer than usual. Her eyes, meeting his, radiated concern. “All right,” she said, and reluctantly waved good-bye.

When they’d pulled away from the curb, Danny waited for a long moment. The only sound was the purr of the Suburban’s 320 horsepower and V8 engine.

Then he said: “We both know what happened.”

Galvin didn’t reply. Danny wondered if Galvin had heard. Maybe not.

He was about to say it again when Galvin turned around and looked right into Danny’s eyes. “I think it’s time we talk.”

48

Galvin gave his driver a sidelong glance. Alejandro nodded, barely perceptibly.

Danny’s forehead thrummed as fast and as violently as his heart.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s time.”

Another long silence. The Suburban pulled into a gas station parking lot, bypassed the pumps, and executed a U-turn. No one said anything. After a moment, Danny noticed the terrain changing, unfamiliar. “Aren’t we heading back to the house?”

“Not just yet,” Galvin said. “There’s some Motrin back there in the seat compartment. You should probably drink some of that water there. You’ll feel better.”

“I’ll be fine when I get some rest.”

“First we’re going for a drive,” Galvin said.

Danny felt his stomach flip over. He started to protest, then sat back in his seat.

He heard the whine of the Suburban’s automatic transmission as it shifted gears.

They were heading northwest on Highway 82, Danny noticed. Galvin didn’t speak. Neither of them did.

Finally, when the silence had gone on long enough, Danny said, “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere we can talk in private.”

“You want to talk, let’s talk. Pull over.”

A long pause. “There’s a place I want to show you.”

“Some other time.”

He wondered whether Galvin was planning a talk. Or something else. He tried to suppress a surge of panic. He thought about texting Slocum and Yeager to let them know what had happened, how he’d been knocked out…

Which reminded him about the camera Slocum had given him. He was pretty sure he hadn’t taken any pictures of Galvin meeting with whoever he was meeting with. He hadn’t gotten the chance before someone-was it in fact Alejandro the driver?-struck him, knocked him out. Which meant the camera was still in his pocket. He patted the pockets of his down parka, then rummaged through them but found nothing. The camera wasn’t in the zippered pocket. Or had he been holding it when he’d been knocked out? Probably so.

Making it likely that someone-Alejandro?-had taken it.

Galvin turned around, looking at Danny. “I want us to talk in private,” he said. His eyes slid toward the driver and back again. Was Galvin saying he didn’t want his driver to hear? “We’re gonna go for a walk.”

They kept on driving for a while. Danny had no sense of how long it was. He’d grown sleepy, lulled by the monotony of the road, yet he was too apprehensive to doze. A few cars passed, but not many. Then the Suburban signaled left and turned onto an unpaved road. Not just a dirt road, but rock-strewn: The vehicle canted and crunched and sidled and shuddered. They came upon a yellow diamond-shaped sign:

4-WHEEL DRIVES ONLY PAST THIS POINT

That was followed by another sign, bigger and rectangular and more urgent:

ATTENTION DRIVERS

EXTREMELY ROUGH ROAD AHEAD

VEHICLE TRAFFIC DISCOURAGED

4X4 WITH EXPERIENCED DRIVERS

AND NARROW WHEEL BASE ONLY

“What’s the plan?” Danny said uneasily.

“You’ll see,” Galvin said.

The road quickly grew narrower, lined on either side with trees and wild shrubbery: spindly spruce and fir trees caked with snow, dense stands of barren aspens, wind-deformed willows and scraggly branches, snow-dusted scrub oak and pines.

Another road sign loomed into view:

THIS IS THE LAST CHANCE TO TURN AROUND OR

PASS ANOTHER VEHICLE FOR MILES.

NARROW ROAD WITH STEEP DROP OFFS.

IF YOU ARE NOT ON FOOT, A BIKE, OR AN ATV

YOU SHOULD TURN AROUND NOW!

In another five hundred or so feet the road ended. A ROAD CLOSED sign, striped with orange reflective tape and screwed on to a couple of ground-mounted I-beam supports, barricaded the way. It didn’t look temporary. It looked seasonal. The road was closed for the winter.

Danny now had a fairly good idea what kind of walk Galvin intended to take him on, and he was finding it hard to breathe.

There was no one around, no one within sight, no one within earshot. For miles, probably.

Lucy was the only one who’d seen Galvin leave with Danny, and as far as she knew, Galvin was dropping him off at home. He’d made a point of saying so, Danny now recalled.

The Suburban pulled over to the side of the road, next to a downed paper birch.

Galvin said something to his driver in rapid Spanish.

“Tom,” Danny said.

But Alejandro had switched off the engine and gotten out, then came around and opened the middle passenger door and reached in to get him.

49

Something in the set of the driver’s grim expression told him not to bother struggling. He got out of the car and said, “What’s going on?”

“I told you. I want us to go for a walk.”

“I’m not really up to it, Tom.”

“I want to show you something.”

Alejandro went around to the passenger’s side of the front seat and opened the door for Galvin, who also got out.

Galvin crossed in front of the Suburban and put an arm around Danny’s shoulder and walked with him toward the ROAD CLOSED sign.

“What’s this all about, Tom?”

At the barrier, Galvin stepped ahead of him, between a fence post and a coil of orange plastic road barrier mesh that looked like it had been just tossed there. Danny looked back, saw Alejandro standing by the car, waiting.

Reluctantly, he followed Galvin.

Just up ahead, he saw, the mountain road juked at a sharp angle.

“I want you to see one of God’s miracles,” Galvin said. He leaned down, picked up a stone, and hurled it.

Danny didn’t hear it drop.

When he rounded the bend, he saw why. The road was no longer a road. It had become a narrow ledge that ran along the side of a jagged, rocky canyon cliff.

A cliff that dropped straight down forever.

The canyon wall below the path was a sheer, straight drop, virtually perpendicular. It looked like a shelf that had been blasted out of the rock face. He didn’t see how even a small four-wheel-drive vehicle could fit all four of its tires on the one-lane road. Or how a car approaching from the opposite direction could possibly get by.

There was no guardrail. There were patches of snow and ice.

His heart began hammering.

Galvin was wearing Timberland boots; Danny wore sneakers. It wouldn’t take much for Danny to lose his footing on the ice or the rubble-covered ledge and slip and plummet a thousand feet into the ravine.

The body probably wouldn’t be recovered until the spring. The assumption would be clear: out-of-town hiker, inexperienced and on his own.

An unfortunate accident.

He’s going to kill me, Danny realized.

It was perfect.

Galvin beckoned him on. His face was grim. “Let’s go. Come on.”

“I can see quite well from here, actually.”

“Come on. I won’t let you fall.”

“I can see it great from here.”

“This is my favorite place in the world.”

“Yep, it’s nice.”

“No, Danny boy. It’s not ‘nice.’ Get over here. Do I have to ask Alejandro to carry you over here?”

Danny hesitated, but only for a few seconds. A scuffle on the edge of a cliff would be risky for Galvin, though not as risky as for Danny. But Danny was determined to put up a struggle. If he was going over the edge, Galvin was coming with him.

He thought of the old Hitchcock movie in which Joan Fontaine is convinced that Cary Grant is trying to kill her. He brings her a glass of milk, and Hitchcock supposedly put a little battery-powered lightbulb in it to make it glow ominously, to turn something comforting into something terrifying.

Maybe Joan Fontaine was imagining things, but Hitchcock made sure we shared her suspicion.

The view over the canyon was indeed remarkable-the crystalline blue sky with white cirrus smudges, the raked bristles of pine forest blanketing the folds and ripples and gouges of the mountainside, the boiling pristine waterfall far below.

The wind howled and bit.

“That’s the Devil’s Punchbowl down there. And that’s Crested Butte. Imagine driving this, huh?”

Danny paused for a few seconds. “Lot of fun, I bet.”

Galvin laughed again, one sharp bark. “This is an old wagon road built to connect a couple of mining towns. Hacked and blasted out of the mountainside over a hundred years ago. I’ve driven it, and let me tell you, it’s an asshole-puckering experience.”

They stood there in silence for a long moment. Galvin at the edge of the cliff and Danny ten or twenty feet away, not far enough.

“Don’t do this, Tom.”

Galvin didn’t reply. A long silence passed. Maybe it was only a minute, but it felt like four or five.

Then he said, “I know you went to the back of the mountain, and you saw I wasn’t skiing. You saw me with someone.”

“I got hit in the head. I don’t remember anything.”

Galvin inhaled, exhaled. “You know about the Parsis in India, what they do when they die?”

Danny shook his head.

“The Parsis believe that earth and fire and water are sacred elements that must never be defiled. So they prohibit cremation or burial.”

“What do they do instead?”

“They take the bodies of their loved ones to a place they call a Tower of Silence, and they put them on a marble slab for the vultures to eat. A couple of hours later, the vultures are fat and happy and the flesh is gone.”

“Leaving only the bones.”

“That goes to feed the soil, I think. I forget. Anyway, so a while back, the vultures in India started dying out. And it turned out that the hospitals in India were administering painkillers to patients. Painkillers that are toxic to vultures. So you kill pain in humans, you kill the vultures.” He paused. “But we need the vultures.”

“The circle of life.”

“Like this road, sorta. You can be the best professional driver in the world, but one slip, and you’re over the side. Or there’s a rock slide. Or a boulder comes down at you. Or your brakes get wet. You do everything right, but there’s always a factor out of your control.”

“What’s your point, Tom?”

“I need to come clean with you,” Galvin said. “I’m in serious trouble.”

50

“What kind of trouble?” Danny asked. He felt his body start to uncoil.

“Ever think about just, you know, disappearing? I mean like, go off the grid.”

Danny nodded, didn’t know what to say.

“Just disappear forever,” Galvin went on. “Leave all this behind. Shuffle off this mortal coil. Erase your digital footprints and go somewhere like Belize or Madagascar or New Zealand and start over.”

“Sure,” Danny said slowly. “Sometimes.” But he had the feeling Galvin wasn’t speaking hypothetically. “Of course, it’s probably not so easy to do anymore. With everything online and all…”

“There are books about how to do it. People who specialize in it. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’m out on my boat and I slip and fall over the side and my body’s never found.”

“And you’re alive and living in Madagascar.”

“Like that.”

“A fantasy, sure. But you can’t do it. You have a wife and kids. We have people who depend on us.”

Danny turned to look, but Galvin seemed to be peering into the chasm. “Tom,” Danny said quietly. He paused for a few seconds. “You almost sound like you’re planning to kill yourself.”

“Remember I told you I was just a lucky son of a bitch?”

A smile played on his lips, but not a happy smile. Danny watched and waited. Galvin was still peering down at the yawning chasm below their feet. “Look up right place, right time, you’re gonna see my picture, right? Well, my luck finally ran out.”

Danny nodded. “Your luck… with, what?-Money? Business?”

He shook his head. The wind howled. It stung Danny’s cheeks and ears.

His mind raced. Was Tom Galvin about to unspool some elaborate lie to explain what Danny had seen? When in fact Danny had seen nothing more than a meeting, two men in a slopeside shack. Galvin, though, seemed to be agonizing over something, struggling.

“About twenty years ago,” he said, “I went down to Cancun to scout out an investment opportunity in Playa del Carmen. A couple of Mexican businessmen had a vision for a high-end, luxury resort on the Mayan coast near Tulum. I thought the business plan looked great, the location was perfect. The lead partner was this guy named Humberto Parra Fernández y Guerrero.” Galvin pronounced the name quickly and fluently in his native-sounding Spanish. He paused for a long time. “The guy seemed to be loaded. Someone told me he used to be the governor of the state of Michoacán before he went into business. I guess that’s one way to get rich in Mexico-get elected to political office and then make a bunch of deals.”

Danny nodded.

“So Fernández and his associates wined and dined me, showed me a good time. They knew I was working for one of the biggest mutual fund companies, so I represented a hundred billion in assets. And they really seemed to want me to invest some of that money.”

“Okay.”

“I went back home. Told my bosses I thought we were onto something that might really work big-time. I convinced them to make the investment. A month later I went back down to Playa del Carmen, and we closed the deal.” He paused. “Mexicans are big into family, you know? Fernández invited me to have dinner with his wife and his daughter. His beautiful daughter.”

Danny smiled. “Celina.”

“I asked her to join me for dinner the next day, and we totally, you know, clicked. Head over heels. I stayed down there in Mexico and we started seeing each other. Really fell in love. When I first met her, I spoke a little high school Spanish, but, man, did I learn the language.” He laughed ruefully. “After I got back to Boston, I started making up reasons to fly back to Mexico. I had to see her. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Lina would fly to Boston, or we’d meet here, in Aspen, or go to New York for a weekend. Four months later we got married.

“Well, I guess her dad saw something in me he liked. I was family now, but that wasn’t the main thing. He saw I had a good head for deals. I was a young guy on the make, and he liked that. He gave me some money to invest on my own, not with Putnam-half a million US dollars-and I guess I did all right. More than all right. Good timing, good picks, whatever whatever-and I more than doubled it in five months. So he gave me more cash.” He shrugged, turned back to Danny. “What can I say? When you’re hot, you’re hot. I didn’t double it in five months again, but I beat the market easily. He said no one in Mexico even came close to what I was doing. Pretty soon he was one of my biggest private clients.

“And then one day, I told him I was thinking about leaving Putnam and going off on my own, starting my own investment-management firm, and he said he had a proposal for me. He had a hundred million dollars for me to invest.”

“Jesus.”

Galvin nodded slowly, as if remembering his own amazement. “He said he’d see how I did after a year, and if I kept performing the way I’d been performing, there’d be more. A lot more.”

“Amazing. So he wasn’t just rich, he was super-rich.”

Galvin made a funny head movement, half nod, half tilt, accompanied by a shrug. “Or so I thought. But the money came with one condition. He had to be my only client. I had to agree to invest no other money besides his. So I had this huge decision to make. Do I leave Putnam and go off on my own with one client? Who happened to be my father-in-law?” He turned slowly and said, “Let’s walk, okay?”

Danny followed Galvin along the middle of the road. It was off camber, sloping down toward the outside edge. The surface was dirt and loose gravel, caked with snow and ice and scattered with the detritus of broken rock.

Galvin pointed. “If you look over there, you can see the old mining town. It’s a ghost town now.”

“You’ve really driven this road?”

“Sure.”

“Not in the Suburban, though…? The wheel base is too long.”

“No, I used to have an old Land Rover Defender 90.”

“Love those trucks.”

“I miss it.”

“But I wouldn’t call this a road.”

“Not here it’s not. It’s barely a trail. Forest Service wants to close it. They’re losing too many tourists.” He kicked a rock, sending it over the edge. It rolled wildly downhill, accelerating, and then launched into the air and plummeted down toward the stream.

Danny couldn’t hear the rock hit ground. It was too far away.

“So obviously you made the deal,” Danny prompted.

“Here’s the thing. I’d been working for Putnam for five years by then, and I was making around three hundred grand, maybe three fifty. And I’m thinking, why in hell should I bust my butt working for chump change when I could be making real money?”

“Sure.” Danny winced inwardly-three hundred fifty thousand dollars a year didn’t sound like chump change to him-but he said nothing.

“I was tired of being a lackey. Working for idiots in a giant bureaucracy. The only reason to keep working there was job security. And, I mean, you want job security, go work for the post office.”

“Sure.”

“Here, finally, was a chance for me to prove how good I really was. Put myself on the line every single day. And I ran the numbers. I figured, if I run my own fund, I’m gonna make two and twenty-two percent management fee, twenty percent of the profit, right? Assuming I make twenty percent and I don’t splurge on fancy office space, whatever whatever, I’m taking home five mil. In one year, Danny. Five million bucks in my first year.”

“Not bad for a plumber’s boy from Southie.”

“And get this: Worst-case scenario, if I screwed up and lost money, I’d still pocket a million bucks! How could I say no to that?”

“You couldn’t.”

“I couldn’t. A no-brainer.”

“But you strike me as the kind of guy who always does his due diligence.”

Galvin looked at him, surprised to find Danny a step ahead, then gave a sly smile. “You really are a smart SOB, aren’t you? But look, here’s the reality: A guy offers you a hundred million dollars to play with, the chance to set up your own shop, how close are you really gonna look? You think Putnam or Fidelity asks all their investors how they made their money? Right?”

“Of course not.”

“Anyway, my first year, I beat the S &P by eight points. The guy was happy. His partners were happy.”

“Partners?”

“Turns out my bride’s dad wasn’t your run-of-the-mill entrepreneur.” He paused for a beat. He looked at Danny. He waited a few seconds longer.

Maybe he was being dramatic. Or maybe he knew that once he told Danny, nothing would ever be the same.

Galvin let out his breath. “Turned out I was working for a Mexican drug cartel,” he said.