It was a Saturday night. Most of Mid-East was in town already for the meeting on Monday, and everyone was gathering at the Commodore for dinner and drinks, but Valsamis was headed home. He had realized early that his place in the Agency would always be separate from the others, and he knew better than to pretend that wasn’t the case.

  Mina was standing in the doorway of the building across the street from the embassy; he saw her as soon as he turned onto the street. Her hair was pinned neatly in a head scarf, and she was dressed in the modest, smocklike attire that was the uniform of so many of the city’s young Shia women. An attempt at disguise, Valsamis had thought, though a poor one, for here in the northern part of the city, the costume made her stand out more.

  Valsamis didn’t approach her. He made sure she’d seen him, then kept walking, listening for her footsteps on the sidewalk behind him. Though they had talked about this kind of thing before, this was not one of the scenarios they had agreed upon, and Valsamis wasn’t sure how to proceed or what she wanted from him. Eventually he ducked into a café on the rue Clémenceau.

  Their previous meetings had all been on her territory, and Valsamis could tell she was nervous as soon as she stepped inside. Her eyes ranged across the café as she made her way toward him. She sat down at the next table, ordered a coffee, and drank it quickly and without looking at him. When she was finished, she stood as if to leave, then glanced hastily back at Valsamis.

  Without saying anything, she reached into her smock, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and set it on the table next to Valsamis’s coffee cup. Her hand was shaking, and her face was pale beneath the scarf. She had taken a huge risk coming here, and she knew it. Valsamis knew it as well.

  “Sabri wanted you to have this,” she said. Then she turned and made her way out of the café and back onto the dark street.

  Valsamis stopped at the edge of the garden and let his shoes sink into the snow. He was panting from the walk, and his own ragged breath was all he could hear, his old lungs working against the cold. His father’s lungs, he thought, and he was back in the Pintlers again, tailing the old man up into some godforsaken draw. Even handicapped by forty years of Lucky Strikes, Valsamis’s father had always been able to outwalk him.

  There was no car in Nicole’s driveway, but the downstairs lights were on, the windows of the kitchen and living room shining out onto the snow. At the back of the garden, where the hump of the stone wall rose up like a surfacing whale, two neat sets of footprints, now partially obscured, emerged from the woods and crossed the yard toward the house.

  Valsamis slid the Ruger from inside his coat and checked the clip one last time, then fitted the silencer on the barrel. Still as the evening was, a gunshot here would be heard all the way down in the valley. He scanned the garden, then started walking again, hugging the wall as he went. From somewhere in the distance, past the dark fringe of the trees, came the sound of a dog barking, lonely and wild.

  There would be Nicole’s dog to contend with, Valsamis reminded himself, angling toward the front of the house and the driveway, and the kitchen door, which he remembered as being slightly blind. Nicole’s dog, and the two women, and the twelve-gauge he’d seen in the hallway on his first visit.

  Valsamis stepped into the side garden, then stopped himself and drew back. It was dark here, the windows on this side of the house all black, but in the meager illumination the snow threw up, Valsamis could just make out the silhouette of a figure moving through the snow. Not Nicole.

  It was Graça Morais, her long hair loose down her back. She was carrying a basket in one hand, and in the other, something Valsamis couldn’t see. She made her way to the fence that surrounded the chicken coop, then pulled the gate open against the snow and slipped through it.

  It was surprisingly warm inside the small house, the hens tucked into their nests, the rooster perched on one of the upper rafters, his lizard eyes glistening like crushed glass. Graça closed the door behind her and switched on the camp lantern she’d taken from Nicole’s kitchen, then set it on one of the empty roosts and took a step into the coop. There was a general disquiet at her presence, the rustling of feathers, the birds’ cosmic dialect of fear and warning playing on their throats’ crude flutes.

  It’s better this way, Graça heard Nicole say. Better for each woman to know only what she needed to survive. Yet Graça understood more than she would have liked, could see clearly now the price of what she’d taken from Rahim.

  She closed her eyes and thought of her grandfather’s house in the Alfama, the place to which she would not be going back, the chipped face of Saint Vincent above the front door, the tiny garden in the back, the patio where she’d first seen Rahim, where she’d first seen Nicole as well. And later, through the window of the front room, the two of them embracing beneath one of the gas lamps. Rahim’s hand beneath Nicole’s shirt. Nicole’s mouth on his ear. Then something whispered and they were gone again, slipping off down the hill. She’d thought Nicole sophisticated at the time, and she had been, mysterious as Eduardo’s workshop, the jars of ink and acetone, the shelves of tools Graça was forbidden to touch.

  It was in this same way that Graça had come to fall in love with Rahim, wanting not him but the idea of him, the place he came from and the mystery of it. The medina, with its secret alleyways and hidden gardens, women swaying behind dark veils.

  Ten years later, with Eduardo asleep inside, trundled off early to bed after too much wine, they’d found themselves awkwardly alone together for the first time. Nothing happened between them, but when Rahim got up to leave, he put his hand on Graça’s arm, and she understood that it was just a matter of time.

  It was two months before they ran into each other outside the Café da Ponte down at the Santo Amaro docks. Both of them had been dragged there by friends, and both were looking for an early exit and a cab ride home. In the end, they’d taken the train together and walked up into the Alfama. Not to Eduardo’s house but to Rahim’s apartment in the tumbledown neighborhood on the hill’s western flank.

  What she hadn’t told him then, what she had never told him: This had been her first time. There in the dark foyer of his apartment, her legs failing, her hands shaking so hard he’d had to undress them both.

  Graça reached her hand into the nest of one of the Marans, and the bird rose up from the touch, fluttering her wings like a bony, feathered angel. The straw was hot where she’d lain, the egg red, dark as blood.

  Better not to know, she told herself again, slipping the egg into the basket, moving on like the robber she was. Then the coop’s door flung open, and for an instant she felt the breath knocked from her body, felt herself a vessel filled entirely with fear.

  There was one scream, high and quick, and then there was nothing. Graça, I told myself, setting the next letter back in the box unread, straining to hear across the silence. In the garden, though I couldn’t be sure, fleeting as the sound had been, muffled by the attic’s rafters, the stone walls of the house.

  Grabbing the shoe box and the letters, I peered out through the open trapdoor, then carefully lowered my body down. It was a house full of creaks— the loose board in the front foyer, the groaning hinges on the kitchen door— but I could hear nothing.

  Sliding the FEG from the back of my pants with my free hand, I ducked into my office and peered out the window at the driveway below. The outside light was on, the snow churned and muddled where tracks led from the kitchen door and disappeared around the side of the house toward the garden and the chicken coop.

  Stupid. Silently cursing myself for having used the computer, I moved back out to the hallway, then into the dark spare bedroom. I could see the continuation of Graça’s tracks from the window, her footprints veering across the yard and in through the door of the chicken coop. I could see another set of prints as well, this one emerging from the woods, joining Graça’s at the hut.

  I turned out of the office and went downstairs to the kitchen, switching off the lights behind me. It was a calculated sacrifice on my part, for it meant Valsamis would know I had heard something, but the advantage of the darkness was worth the trade. I set the letters on the kitchen counter and made my way carefully into the living room.

  I’ve often wondered, driving past the old Cathar refuges on the Perpignan-Quillan road, what my choice would have been had I been one of the unlucky inhabitants when the soldiers of the pope came riding across the valley. There was hardly any hope for salvation, for those who stayed faced certain slaughter, and those who fled were almost invariably captured and burned as heretics.

  Standing alone, staring out through the glass patio doors toward the back garden, I thought of the Cathar women in the stone coffins of their fortresses, and I felt a desperate urge to run.

  Steady, I told myself, taking a deep breath, feeling the FEG against my palm. Silently, I slid the door open and stepped outside. It was snowing again, the flakes fine as pastry flour, settling on my bare arms and in my hair, veiling the woods and the valley below, the meager lights of the town. I took a step forward and another, hugging the house with my left shoulder, picking my way through the drifts.

  As I rounded the corner of the house, I could see that the door to the chicken coop was open, and there was a light on inside. My camp lantern, I thought, the one I kept by the back door. Graça must have found it, but there was no sign of her now and no sign of Valsamis. Only the breathy warnings of the hens, and the rooster squawking excitedly.

  Then, through the tattered scrim of the snow, I saw two dark silhouettes hobbling together toward the driveway like a pair of drunks. Valsamis had his arm around Graça’s shoulder, but the gesture wasn’t a friendly one. In his other hand he held a gun, the barrel obscenely distended by the silencer that had been fitted to it, the muzzle pressed against the back of Graça’s neck.

  Crouching close to the house, I lifted the FEG and sighted at their retreating backs. Easy, I reminded myself. I tried to get a bead on Valsamis, but it was impossible to distinguish him from her. My finger caught against the trigger, and I could hear the rush of my own heart.

  The duo reached the far corner of the house and stopped suddenly. At first I thought Valsamis had heard me, but he turned toward the woods instead, his gaze resting on the dark fringe of the trees. The marten again, I told myself, or an owl cruising for its dinner. In trees this thick with snow, the slightest movement was catastrophic.

  And then, out past the garden wall, I saw the humped back of a creature moving through the underbrush. Lucifer.

  “Luce!” I whispered fiercely. “No!” But it was too late.

  The dog burst forth into the yard, his front legs churning through the drifts, his neck bristling, his lips pulled back against his teeth. He lunged forward, then stopped in front of Valsamis and crouched down, snarling and barking.

  Valsamis regarded the dog, then lifted the gun from Graça’s neck and pointed it at Lucifer’s head. It was a swift and easy motion, Valsamis’s hand and arm sweeping out in perfect alignment, as if the gun were an extension of him, as if it always had been. There was one shot and then another, the muzzle flaring with each round, and Lucifer collapsed into the snow.

  As if from some unrecognizable source came the sound of a third gunshot. Valsamis spun around, and I fired again, my hands steady on the FEG’s grip, the gun suddenly my own. The second round caught Valsamis’s forearm, and his pistol leaped from his hand.

  “Go!” I yelled to Graça. “Get inside!”

  She wrenched herself free and staggered forward, her boots kicking up snow as she disappeared around the corner of the house.

  I pointed the gun at Valsamis’s head but didn’t fire. “Get down!” I shouted. “On your knees!”

  He hesitated, looking back at me, cradling his injured arm. Slowly, he lowered himself into the snow.

  THE FESTIVITIES WERE IN FULL SWING by the time Valsamis got to the Commodore. There was a sense of overblown joviality among the crowd, the locals wanting to show their guests an authentic Beirut good time, and the visitors hungry for a taste of wartime camaraderie.

  The hotel was no one’s first pick. Too many journalists were there, for one thing, too many other Westerners hanging around the bar drinking Scotch and sodas. But since the siege and the attacks on the Multinational Force a month earlier, there was really nowhere else to go, so everyone was making the best of it. There were two female journalists at the bar, a Swedish AP photographer and a young reporter from The Irish Times, and both were enjoying unlimited free drinks.

  Valsamis ordered a bourbon and found Kip Bryce in a corner booth opposite the bar. Bryce was a good Mormon kid who’d just transferred in from Cairo, and he appeared to be the only sober one in the bunch. “You seen the chief?” Valsamis asked. He needed to let the station chief know about his meeting with Mina as soon as possible.

  Bryce shook his head. “He and Sproul went up to the Chouf.”

  “You know when they’ll be back?”

  The kid shrugged. “Sometime tonight. They must have gotten stuck at a checkpoint.” His eyes wandered across the room and lingered on the Irish girl.

  Siobhan, Valsamis thought, digging deep to remember her name. Sproul had introduced her to him once at the Summerland. Valsamis had given him a hard time about it later. Sleeping with the enemy, he’d said when he saw Sproul the next morning at the embassy. He’d been joking, but Sproul hadn’t been amused.

  “For fuck’s sake,” he’d shot back, then hastily apologized. “I mean, we all want the same thing for this place, don’t we?”

  Valsamis had laughed. It wasn’t intentional, and he’d immediately felt bad about it, seeing the hurt look in Sproul’s eyes and realizing for the first time that the younger man really meant all of it.

  Valsamis left Bryce and crossed to the bar, fingering the note in his pocket. Islamic Holy War. Valsamis repeated the words to himself, what Kanj had called this new group. It was a name none of them had heard before, though they’d known it was coming for months, since the siege, since rumors of a split within Amal had begun to circulate. A new, more frightening face to the Shiite militia, financed by the Iranians.

  “Why do Arab girls carry a fish in each pocket?” Valsamis overheard one of the agents, a man named Jack Bentley, say to Siobhan and the other woman. Bentley had been in Beirut when Valsamis had first arrived in Lebanon; he worked out of the Damascus office now.

  Bentley’s drink sloshed precariously against the lip of his glass as he leaned in toward the two journalists. Valsamis could see the looks of horror on the women’s faces as they waited for the inevitable punch line. They’d heard the joke, or variations of it, too many times, and not one of them had been funny.

  Bentley caught Valsamis looking and leered back drunkenly, his face a mixture of warning and contempt.

  Yes, Valsamis thought, he knew his place, but still, he hated to be reminded of it. Just as he hated being forced to work their scrap pile. Five years, he told himself. Five years of an asset so plum they were teaching it at the Farm, and Valsamis was still picking the shit out of other people’s shoes.

  “So they can smell like their mothers,” Bentley said, turning back to the women and laughing proudly.

  “Get up.”

  Valsamis turned his head just slightly so that he could see my face, and I moved the barrel of the gun with him.

  “Get the fuck up,” I repeated.

  This time Valsamis struggled to rise. His right arm was bleeding badly. Worse than I had expected from the Makarov round. The flesh and bone were shattered where the bullet had hit. He staggered to his feet, and I pushed him forward, then bent down and picked up his Ruger.

  I could see Lucifer in the snow, his body caved in on itself, what was left of his head twisted to one side. There was no sense in going to him, nothing I could do to help him.

  “Inside!” I nudged Valsamis again with the pistol, and we moved together across the yard and the driveway, in through the back door, into the kitchen, where Graça was waiting.

  I pulled a chair out from the table and pushed Valsamis into it, then handed the Ruger to Graça. “Watch him,” I told her. Then I opened the upper cabinet above the sink and took down a first-aid kit and two pill bottles. “Here.” I shook two pills from each into my palm. “Vicodin and amoxicillin.”

  Valsamis watched as I set them on the table just beyond his reach.

  “How much was it worth?” I asked, opening the first-aid kit, taking out a package of hemostat sponges. “Did Hezbollah pay you off, or was there something else?” If Valsamis wanted to live, he would have to work for it. I looked down at his arm and the growing red stain on the floor. “Talk soon,” I told him, “or you’re not going to be able to talk at all.”

  He lifted his head and blinked up at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Here he was, I thought, after all these years. Here was the man who had murdered my mother. I closed my eyes briefly and thought of Lucifer, the way his legs had buckled beneath him, of Rahim in the doorway, his hand on mine.

  Valsamis shook his head wearily and glanced at the gilt Dior box on the counter.

  “Is this what you came for?” I asked angrily. I lifted the lid, took out the last two letters, and laid them on the table in front of Valsamis. “Here,” I told him.

  The pain was like a living being, singular in its purpose. When Valsamis moved, the pain consumed him. To be aware of much more than this was difficult, and yet he knew he had to try. Valsamis read the letters, then read them again, trying to find a way around the pain, trying to make sense of it all.

  According to Sabri, Mina had written, they have their own contact within the new movement. If this had been true, if someone in the Beirut office had managed to cultivate an asset in Hezbollah, then it seemed almost impossible that Valsamis hadn’t known. And yet there had been someone: Kanj had said so.