Technically the place was hers to use for another month, but it felt melancholy to be a tenant rather than an owner.

As Kayla found a safe spot for the small, unframed landscape painting she carried, she remembered her excitement at discovering the piece in a garage sale. It had been just after her parents had died, when she’d been making the difficult adjustment from beloved child to adult orphan. Something in the painting of a predawn forest had whispered to her of time and loneliness and the faintly shimmering hope of a sunrise that might be more imagined than real. When she’d turned the painting over and seen “Maybe the Dawn” written on the back, she’d known she would buy it.

She touched the name slashed in the lower left of the painting. “R. McCree.” The artist had helped her through a bad time. She’d been looking for his-or her-paintings ever since, but hadn’t found any.

Leaning against the cool metal frame of the vehicle’s door, she glanced around at the ten acres of Dry Valley Ranch that had been her home for her whole life. The adobe walls of the house were the dusty color that came of age and Arizona weather. Sun had turned the timber fence of the corral a lovely shade of gray. The lean-to barn looked lonesome and enduring, like a windmill at a remote cattle tank-like the windmill that still supplied water to the house and corrals.

Ten acres of memories.

Sadness curled around her with the cool morning breeze. She hoped the new owner would love Dry Valley as she and her parents had. She hoped, but she didn’t know. She’d sold the ranch to someone she’d never met, never seen, and knew only through his agent.

“Change, change, change,” she said, pushing her dark hair away from her eyes. “Hello, good-bye, hello to something new. And good-bye, always good-bye.”

Despite her lingering sorrow, Kayla knew that selling the little ranch was the right thing to do. The grazing leases on federal lands had lapsed long ago. Without the leases, there was no way to make a living. Even one cow would starve on Dry Valley’s ten acres. The ranch was a tiny piece of desert at the farthest fringe of Phoenix’s urban sprawl. The house was as spare as the land and needed expensive repairs. Yet taxes had steadily risen as the county assessor reappraised the ground for its potential, instead of its reality.

Good-bye, ranch.

Hello, career in private banking.

Too bad she really wasn’t happy in her work. But every request she’d made to transfer out of private banking had been met with a polite, firm refusal.

It was enough to make a girl think of hitting the road.

I’m not a girl. I’m an adult. Lots of people don’t like their jobs, but they suck it up and get the job done anyway.

“Think of tomorrow as going to another continent,” Kayla told herself. “Everything fresh and undiscovered.”

The thought of distant horizons made her restless. Her job as a private banker was demanding, often fascinating, but it didn’t ease her wanderlust.

Okay, so don’t think about new continents and of years backpacking around the globe. I’m an adult now, with an adult’s responsibilities.

Grow up.

Kayla slid into the driver’s seat, made sure that the pile of escrow documents she’d signed earlier wouldn’t spill off the passenger seat, and admired the check clipped to the big folder. As a private banker she’d handled much larger checks, but none of them had been her own. Her clients’ money was just that-theirs, not hers. If she thought of their money at all, it was simply as numbers to be moved from one place to the next.

The check clipped to the folder was hers-$246,407.

Exactly.

Without meaning to, she looked at the battered backpack stuffed into the passenger foot well.

I could go anywhere in the world.

Until the money ran out. Then I’d have nothing.

Grow up.

It was a good chunk of money, but Phoenix’s red-hot housing market would gobble it up and not even burp.

Looking away from the backpack, Kayla started the vehicle. She hoped her next real estate deal would be as clean and easy as this one had been. On the real estate agent’s advice, she’d offered the ranch at a high price, “looking for the market.”

She’d found it, at full price.

The buyer’s agent had handled the transaction with the dispatch of the lawyer he was. She’d gotten her price, subtracted the closing costs and rent for the next month, and driven to the ranch to begin packing.

Today she’d have her own money to deposit in her American Southwest account. It wasn’t the answer to all her problems, but it was a financial security she’d never had before.

Maybe that security would help her to deal with Elena Bertone, the most demanding client in the history of the demanding world of private banking.

4

Phoenix, Arizona

Thursday


8:40 A.M. MST

Andre Bertone shifted his weight, making the expensive leather chair creak. Few office chairs were built well enough to accommodate the barrel-chested bulk of a man who stood six foot three inches and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds, most of it muscle. The satellite phone he held to his ear looked almost dainty against his hand.

The musical accents of Brazilian Portuguese spilled out of the decoder and into Bertone’s ear. Despite the beauty of the language, what was being said made a red flush crawl up Bertone’s face. There were very few people in the world who could call him to task. Joao Fouquette was one of them.

For now.

“Naturally, you are impatient to-” Bertone cut in.

Fouquette kept talking. “-more than a quarter of a billion dollars American must be laundered to pay for the arms. The money is coming in from France, Liechtenstein, and Dubai. I counted on you to-”

“And I’ve never let you down,” Bertone interrupted. “Relax, my friend. All is well.” Besides, asshole, half of it is my own money.

A big gamble, but Bertone hadn’t gotten where he was by being timid.

“All is not well,” Fouquette insisted. “Neto hired St. Kilda Consulting.”

“What? I thought Neto was ours.”

“He was until he found out who we really backed in the revolution five years ago.”

Bertone shrugged. Allies were people you hadn’t screwed yet, and peace was bad for business. “I assume that’s why he refused to extend the oil contracts with us.”

Fouquette didn’t bother to respond to the obvious. “There will be a rise in oil prices soon. We want to sell Camgeria’s output at the new level. We’ve moved up the timetable for revolution. Do your connections have the arms we need?”

“As soon as they see the money, we see the arms. Arms are easy to find. The only problem comes in transportation and distribution.” That was Bertone’s area of experience. He’d seen the choke points in the arms trade, bought planes and pilots, and got very rich transporting cargoes no one else would touch.

“Whatever you do, don’t use the old laundry,” Fouquette said. “St. Kilda is probably watching LuDoc, waiting to pounce.”

“LuDoc is dead.”

Fouquette laughed. “So you finally discovered how much he was skimming.”

All Bertone said was, “I have been developing a new conduit. A true naïf.”

“You have a day to transform your naïf into a whore. The arms exchange must be completed immediately.”

“What? You gave me four weeks to-”

“Complain to Neto,” Fouquette cut in. “He’s the bastard who brought in St. Kilda. I have to move the money fast and get the arms to Neto’s enemies faster.”

“When will you have all the money transferred to me?” Bertone said.

“As soon as you set up an account, each participant has agreed to put in his share within forty-eight hours.”

“By Saturday?” Bertone grunted. “I can’t guarantee weekend bank-”

“Don’t tell me your problems,” Fouquette said over the complaint. “Since he has become president, my sponsor has lost all patience. Get that account set up immediately.”

“Perhaps Brazil needs a new president. It could be arranged, yes?”

“Not soon enough. If the arms aren’t on the way to overthrow Neto’s New Camgerian Republic very quickly, I’m out of a job. And you, my Siberian friend, you are dead.”

5

Manhattan

Thursday


12:15 P.M. EST

Former ambassador James B. Steele rolled into the conference room on the fifty-seventh floor of the UBS Building as if he owned the television network headquartered there. He was fifteen minutes late and he didn’t apologize. He had more to bring to this meeting than the five people he’d kept waiting.

“Good afternoon,” Steele said to everyone and no one.

He guided the electric wheelchair over to the rosewood conference table. An overstuffed leather armchair blocked him from taking his place.

“Oops. Okay, I’ll get that,” Ted Martin said quickly.

“Thank you.”

The field producer had been Steele’s principal UBS contact for the past two months of research and negotiations. As Martin scrambled to shove the armchair aside, Steele rolled forward. His position put him opposite the most important man in the room, Howard Prosser, executive producer of The World in One Hour.

Steele greeted Prosser and nodded to the most famous face at the table, Brent Thomas. Being the best-looking guy in a war zone drew a television audience, but Steele had seen his own war zones. They hadn’t been nearly as pretty as Thomas, who was one of the network’s hottest correspondents. And the most ambitious. Fortunately for Steele’s plans, Thomas was as smart as he was camera-ready.