Don’t think, he told himself. Don’t think of Peter. Here, in this house where we played hide-and-seek and pummeled each other, conspired in whispers in the middle of the night, screamed and laughed and cried.

  Peter’s gone, and now you’ve got to hang in there for him too.

  Ben had no idea how to begin, how to broach the subject. On the plane out of Basel he’d rehearsed how he was going to confront his father. Now he’d forgotten everything he’d planned to say. The one thing he’d resolved was not to tell him about Peter, about his reappearance, his murder. For what? Why torture the old man? As far as Max Hartman knew, Peter had been killed years ago. Why should he be told the truth now that Peter really was dead?

  Anyway, confrontation wasn’t Ben’s style. He let his father talk business, ask about the accounts Ben was managing. Man, he thought, the old guy is still sharp. He tried to change the subject, but there really wasn’t any easy or elegant way to say, By the way, Dad, were you a Nazi, if you don’t mind my asking?

  Finally, Ben took a stab at it: “I guess being in Switzerland made me realize how little I know about, about when you were in Germany …”

  His father’s eyes seemed to grow larger behind the magnifying lenses. He leaned forward. “Now, what inspires this sudden interest in family history?”

  “Really, I think it was just being in Switzerland. It reminded me of Peter. This was the first time I’d been back there since his death.”

  His father looked down at his hands. “I don’t dwell on the past, you know that. I never did. I only look ahead, not behind.”

  “But your time at Dachau—we’ve never talked about that.”

  “There’s really nothing to say. I was brought there, I was fortunate enough to survive, I was liberated on April 29, 1945. I will never forget the date, but it’s a part of my life I prefer to forget.”

  Ben inhaled, then launched in. He was keenly aware that his relationship with his father was about to be altered forever, the fabric about to be torn. “Your name isn’t on the list of prisoners liberated by the Allies.”

  It was a bluff. He watched his father’s reaction.

  Max stared at Ben for a long moment, and then to Ben’s surprise he smiled. “You must always be wary of historical documents. Lists thrown together at a time of enormous chaos. Names spelled wrong, names omitted. If my name is missing from some list compiled by some U.S. Army sergeant, so what?”

  “But you weren’t at Dachau, were you?” Ben asked quietly.

  His father slowly swiveled his chair around, turning his back to Ben. His voice, when it came, was reedy, somehow distant. “What a strange thing to say.”

  Ben felt his stomach flutter. “But true, right?”

  Max swiveled back around. His face was expressionless, blank, but a blush had appeared on his papery cheeks. “There are people who make a profession out of denying that the Holocaust ever happened. So-called historians, writers—they publish books and articles saying the whole thing was a fake, a conspiracy. That millions of Jews weren’t murdered.”

  Ben found his heart thudding, his mouth dry. “You were a lieutenant in Hitler’s SS. Your name is on a document—a document of incorporation listing members of a board of directors of a secret company. You were the treasurer.”

  When his father replied, it was in a terrible whisper. “I won’t listen to this,” he said.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s why you never spoke about Dachau. Because it was all a fiction. You were never there. You were a Nazi.” “How can you say such things?” the old man rasped. “How can you possibly believe this? How dare you insult me this way!”

  “That document—it’s in Switzerland. Articles of incorporation. The whole truth is there.”

  Max Hartman’s eyes flashed. “Someone showed you a fraudulent document, designed to discredit me. And you, Benjamin, chose to believe it. The real question is why.”

  Ben could feel the room revolving around him slowly. “Because Peter told me himself!” he shouted. “Two days ago in Switzerland. He found a document! He found out the truth. Peter found out what you had done. He tried to protect us from it.”

  “Peter—?” Max gasped.

  The expression of his father’s face was terrible, but Ben forced himself to keep going.

  “He told me about this corporation, who you really were. He was telling me everything when he was shot dead.”

  The blood had drained from Max Hartman’s face, the gnarled hand that rested on his desk visibly trembling.

  “Peter was killed before my eyes.” And now Ben almost spat the words: “My brother, your son—another one of your victims.”

  “Lies!” his father shouted.

  “No,” Ben said. “The truth. Something you’ve kept from us all our lives.”

  Abruptly, Max’s voice became hushed and cold, an arctic wind. “You speak of things you cannot possibly understand.” He paused. “This conversation is over.”

  “I understand who you are,” Ben said. “And it sickens me.”

  “Leave,” Max Hartman shouted and he raised a quivering arm toward the door. Ben could picture that same arm raised in an SS salute, in a past that was distant but not distant enough. Never distant enough. And he recalled some writer’s often quoted words: The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

  “Get out!” his father thundered. “Get out of this house!”

  Washington, D.C.

  The Air Canada flight from Nova Scotia arrived at Reagan National in the late afternoon. The taxi pulled up to Anna’s Adams-Morgan apartment building just before six. It was already dark.

  She loved coming home to her apartment. Her sanctuary. The only place where she felt utterly in charge. It was a small one-bedroom in a bad neighborhood, but it was her own perfectly realized world.

  Now, as she got out of the elevator on her floor, she met her neighbor, Tom Bertone, who was heading down. Tom and his wife, Danielle, were both lawyers, both a little effusive, a little too neighborly, but pleasant enough. “Hey, Anna, I met your kid brother today,” he said. “I guess he’d just gotten into town. Really nice guy.” And the elevator doors closed behind him.

  Brother?

  She had no brother.

  At the door to her apartment, she waited a long moment, trying to calm her racing heart. She fished out her gun, a government-issue 9 mm Sig-Sauer, holding it in one hand as she turned the key with the other. Her apartment was dark, and, recalling her early training, she went into standard E&S, evasion and search, tactics. That meant flattening yourself against a wall with a pistol drawn, then shifting to an orthogonal wall, and repeating the process. They drilled it into field agents with the training sets, but she never imagined she’d be doing it in her own apartment, her home, her sanctuary.

  She closed the door behind her. Silence.

  But there was something. A barely detectable odor of cigarettes, that was it. Too faint to be from an actual lighted cigarette; it had to be the residue from the clothing of someone who smoked.

  Someone who had been in her apartment.

  In the dim light provided by the streetlights outside, she could see something else: one of the drawers of her file cabinets was slightly ajar. She always kept them neatly shut. Someone had been searching through her belongings.

  Her blood ran cold.

  There was a draft from the bathroom: the window had been left open.

  And then she heard a sound, quiet but not quiet enough: the almost inaudible squeak of a rubber-soled shoe on the bathroom tile.

  The intruder was still there.

  She flipped on the main overhead light, wheeled around in a crouch, her 9 mm drawn, the weight of it balanced in her two hands. She was grateful that it was a Sig factory short trigger, which fit her hands better than the standard model. The intruder wasn’t visible, but the apartment was small and there weren’t many places he could be. She straightened up and, adhering to the perimeter rule—hug the walls, the E&S instructors liked to say—she made her way toward the bedroom.

  She felt the movement of air an instant before the gun was dislodged from her hands by a powerful kick from seemingly out of nowhere. Where had he come from? Behind the bureau? The filing cabinets? The gun clattered as it hit the sitting room floor. Retrieve it, whatever you do.

  Abruptly she was slammed backward by another kick, and she sprawled against the bedroom door, her back hitting it with a dull thud. She froze in place as the man took a few steps back.

  Except that he was hardly a man. He had the slender frame of an adolescent. As powerful as he was—sinewy muscles flexed under a tight black T-shirt—he looked no older than seventeen. It didn’t make sense.

  Slowly, carefully, she got to her feet and began moving, with feigned casualness, toward the oatmeal-colored sofa. The blue-gray butt of her Sig-Sauer protruded from under its plaited hem, just barely visible.

  “Burglary’s a real serious problem in this neighborhood, isn’t it?” the man-boy said in a tone of rich irony. His glossy, black hair was cut short, his skin looked as if he’d only recently started to shave, and his features were small and regular. “The statistics are shocking.” He scarcely sounded like the typical delinquents who haunted Southeast Washington. If she had to guess, she’d say he wasn’t a native of this country; she thought she detected a trace of an Irish brogue.

  “There’s nothing of value here.” Anna tried to sound calm. “You must know that by now. Neither of us wants any trouble.” She realized her hand was still numb from the blow. Keeping her gaze on him, she took another step toward the sofa. Trying for a light tone, she added, “Anyway, shouldn’t you be in school or something?”

  “Never send a man to do a boy’s work,” he replied agreeably. Suddenly he unleashed another roundhouse kick and she reeled backward against her small wooden bureau. The blow had landed squarely on her stomach, and she found herself gasping for breath.

  “Did you know,” the young intruder continued, “that as often as not it’s the owners of handguns who are killed by them? Another statistic that bears thinking about. You really can’t be too careful.”

  He wasn’t a burglar, that much was obvious. He didn’t talk like one either. But what was he after? She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, mentally taking an inventory of her sparsely furnished apartment, her paltry belongings, the clothes, the lamps, the humidifier, the clothes … the M26. Must try to find the M26! No doubt he’d searched the place thoroughly, but this was an item whose function would not be obvious to those unfamiliar with it. “I’ll get you money,” she said loudly, and turned to the bureau, opening drawers. “I’ll get you money,” she repeated. Where had she kept the device? And would it still work? It had been at least two years. She found it in the large central drawer, next to several red cardboard boxes of checkbooks. “All right,” she said, “here it is.”

  When she turned around to face him, she had the M26 Tasertron firmly in her grasp, switched it on, a high-pitched whine indicating that the device was fully charged.

  “I want you to listen to me carefully,” she said. “This is an M26 Taser, the most powerful one they make. Move away from me now, or I will use it. I don’t care what kind of martial arts you know—twenty-five thousand volts will take the starch out of you.”

  The intruder’s expression was blank, but he began to walk away from her, backing into the bathroom.

  The instant the stun gun was activated, the cartridge would fire off the contactors, two fine conducting wires ending in quarter-inch needle points. The electricity discharged would be of a voltage sufficient to immobilize him for a spell, perhaps even knock him out.

  She followed him toward the bathroom. He was inexperienced; by backing up into the small room, he had allowed himself to be cornered. A bad move, an amateurish slip. She switched the Taser on maximum; there was no point in taking any risks at this point. The device in her hand hummed and crackled. A blue arc of electricity played between two visible electrodes. She would aim for his midriff.

  Suddenly she heard an unexpected sound, that of water running, the roar of the tap turned up full. What the hell was he up to? She lunged into the bathroom, aiming the Taser, and saw the man-child wheel around with something in his hands. Too late, she realized his gambit. It was the nozzle of her handheld shower, which propelled a drenching blast of water in her direction. Water that would ordinarily have been harmless. She dropped the primed M26 an instant too late. A bolt of electricity arced from it toward her drenched torso, a blue bolt of agony. As her major muscle groups spasmed, she collapsed to the floor, only the pain cutting through her dazed state.

  “It’s been a blast,” the young man said tonelessly. “But I’m already running late. Catch you later.” He winked, in a caricature of affection.

  She watched, helpless, as he clambered out the bathroom window and disappeared down the fire escape.

  By the time she was able to call the municipal police, she had verified that nothing was missing from the apartment. But that was the only question she’d been able to answer. The cops, when they arrived, asked the usual questions, debated whether to classify the incident as a home invasion or a burglary, and then seemed to run out of ideas. They’d do the crime-scene workup—they understood that she was some kind of fed, that she seemed to know what she was talking about. But it would take several hours. And in the meantime?

  Anna glanced at her watch. Eight P.M. She called David Denneen’s home number. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but is that guest room of yours free? It seems my apartment has just turned into a crime scene.”

  “A crime … Jesus,” Denneen said. “What happened?”

  “I’ll explain later. Sorry to spring this on you.”

  “Have you eaten yet? Come on over now. We’ll set an extra place.”

  David and Ramon lived in a prewar apartment near Dupont Circle, a fifteen-minute cab drive away. It wasn’t grand, but it was nicely appointed, with high ceilings and leaded windows. From the savory aromas she inhaled when she came in—chile, anise, cumin—she guessed that Ramon was cooking one of his moles.

  Three years ago, Denneen was a junior agent under her command. He was a fast learner, did good work, and was responsible for several breaks; he’d tailed a White House special assistant to the Qatar Embassy, a lead that resulted in a major corruption investigation. She’d filed glowing reports in his personnel file, but soon she learned that Arliss Dupree, as the unit director, had been appending “fitness” evaluations of his own. They were vague but damning in intent: Denneen “wasn’t government material.” He “lacked the fortitude” expected of an OSI investigator, was “soft,” “possibly unreliable,” “flighty.” His “attitude was problematic.” All of it was nonsense, the bureaucratic camouflage of a visceral hostility, a reflexive prejudice.

  Anna had become friends with both David and Ramon, had met them as a couple when she’d stopped in Kramerbooks, on Connecticut Avenue, and saw them shopping together. Ramon was a small, open-faced man with an easy smile, his white teeth dazzling against his dark complexion. He worked as an administrator for the local Meals on Wheels program. He and Anna warmed to each other immediately; Ramon insisted that she dine with them that evening, as a spur-of-the-moment thing, and she agreed. It was a magical occasion, partly because of the excellence of Ramon’s paella, partly because of the relaxed conversation and easy banter, none of which ever touched upon office matters; she envied them their easy intimacy and affection.

  David, with his square jaw and sandy hair, was a tall, ruggedly handsome man, and Ramon noticed the way she looked at him. “I know what you’re thinking,” he confided to her at one point, when David was across the room with his back to them, fixing drinks. “You’re thinking, ‘What a waste.’”

  Anna laughed. “It’s crossed my mind,” she said.

  “All the girls say that.” Ramon grinned. “Well, he ain’t wasted on me.”

  A few weeks later, Anna had lunch with David and explained to him why he hadn’t received a promotion from E-3 grade. On paper, he reported to Anna, but Anna reported to Dupree. “What would you like me to do?” Anna asked.

  Denneen responded quietly, with less outrage than Anna felt on his behalf. “I don’t want to make a big deal of this. I just want to do my work.” He looked at her. “Truth? I want to get the hell out of Dupree’s division. I happen to be interested in operations and strategy. I’m only E-3, so I can’t arrange it. But you might be able to.”

  Anna pulled a few strings. It meant doing an end-run around Dupree, which didn’t exactly endear her to OSI management. But it worked, and Denneen never forgot it.

  Now she filled in Denneen about what had happened at her apartment, and between Ramon’s chicken mole and a bottle of a velvety Rioja, she felt some of her tension ebb. Soon she found herself joking grimly about having been “trounced by a member of the Back Street Boys.”

  “You could have been killed,” Denneen said solemnly, not for the first time.

  “But I wasn’t. Which proves that wasn’t what he was after.”

  “And what might that have been?”

  Anna just shook her head.

  “Listen, Anna. I know you probably can’t talk about it, but do you think there’s any chance it has to do with your new assignment at ICU? Old Alan Bartlett has kept so many secrets over the years, there’s no telling what he’s got you up against.”

  “El diablo sabe más por viejo que por diablo,” Ramón muttered. It was one of his mother’s proverbs: The devil knows more because he is old than because he is the devil.

  “Is it a coincidence?” Denneen persisted.

  Anna looked at her wineglass and shrugged, wordlessly. Were others interested in the death of the people in the Sigma files? She couldn’t think about this right now, and didn’t want to.