When she turned to him, his smile was of a peculiar character that disturbed her, although she couldn’t define the quality of it that she found unsettling.

She remembered what Enrique de Soto had told her on the phone the previous day: But I have to say he’s a weird duck … got this blood obsession.

He seemed about to speak but then broke eye contact again. He went around the desk, opened a drawer, and withdrew a Heckler & Koch Compact .45 still in its original sealed box.

New weapon, no history, no waiting period, no background check, no formal or de facto registration. The guns Ferrante sold probably came from his uncle Ricky, which meant they were stolen and provided a terrific profit margin.

“How much?” Jane asked.

He met her eyes directly and for the first time did not quickly look away. “I won’t accept money from you. There’s something else I want, something better than money.”

She put down the tote to have both hands free.

5

CARTER JERGEN FINDS THE PLACE abhorrent on first sight. In the passenger seat of the VelociRaptor, he shivers with cold disgust.

Rooney Corrigan, pooh-bah of sandsucker society, maintains a small carbon footprint by generating his own electricity. The most prominent structures on his property are two sixty-or seventy-foot-tall windmills. They aren’t the picturesque stone windmills with huge cloth sails seen in Holland, but ugly steel constructs, tripods reminiscent of the Martian death machines in The War of the Worlds.

The single-story green-stucco house—where the “crocodile incident” has occurred, whatever that might be—boasts a roof entirely of solar panels and stands on several acres of pale and sandy dirt, lacking even stones-and-cactus landscaping. The only evidence that the planet produces flora is three struggling king palms with more brown than green fronds and a misshapen olive tree lifeless for so long that its bleached, leafless limbs and weather-shredded bark might be an avant-garde sculpture wired together from the bones and brittle hair of dead men.

The long, unpaved driveway is defined only by parallel lines of stones arranged to mark its borders.

Parked near the house are two black Jeep Cherokees.

As Dubose brakes to a stop fifty yards from those vehicles and stares at the house with a dour expression, he says, “I call it a crocodile incident. He called it ‘the possible assertion and triumph of the reptile consciousness.’ There’s like a one-in-ten-thousand chance an adjusted person might have a catastrophic psychological collapse after the control mechanism activates.”

Jergen frowns. “I never heard such a thing. Says who?”

“The genius who invented the nanoimplants.”

“Bertold Shenneck is dead.”

“I’m not claiming he spoke to me at a séance. He worried about this from day one. He foresaw two kinds of psychotic breakdowns.”

“How do you know this, and I don’t?”

“I knew someone who knew the great man. Inga Shenneck.”

“His wife?”

“Before Shenneck and then for a while after she married him, she and I had this thing going.”

Jergen wants to deny the obvious intended meaning of the words this thing. “But she … she was a stunner.”

“Hot,” Dubose says. “A lot younger than Shenneck and so hot she was thermonuclear. And insatiable. She wore me out.”

Carter Jergen is not na?ve. He doesn’t believe life has some grand meaning. He doesn’t believe in good and evil. He doesn’t see any issue in black-and-white, only in innumerable shades of gray. He doesn’t believe that life, society, and justice are fair or ever can be. He doesn’t believe they should be fair. Fairness is unnatural; it’s seen nowhere in nature. He believes in power. Those with the desire and the will to seize power are those best qualified to shape the future.

But it is so unfair that a backwoods cretin who surely got into Princeton on a fraudulently obtained scholarship, who at breakfast folds two strips of bacon into a thick bonbon of pig fat and pops them into his mouth with his fingers, who wouldn’t know which fork to use for the fish appetizer if the butler snatched it off the table in frustration and stabbed him in the face with it, so unfair that this kind of man could have had a woman like Inga Shenneck.

Jergen says, “I admired her grace, her style, her taste.…”

Dubose nods. “Exactly why she was drawn to me.”

“You never told me about this.”

“I don’t talk about my ladies. A gentleman is always discreet.”

“Discreet? You just said she was insatiable.”

Dubose looked puzzled. “She’s dead. So what’s to be discreet about after she’s packed off in a coffin?”

For a moment, Jergen stares in silence at the windmills looming behind the house, their enormous blades carving the air and probably a significant number of birds in any twenty-four-hour period. The sun flares off the solar panels. The stucco is a bilious shade of green. A ragged dog of numerous heritages wanders into the driveway in front of them, squats, and takes a dump.

“I’m in Hell,” Jergen says. “I don’t believe in Hell, but what is this”—he sweeps one hand across the vista before them, where the dog craps in front of a house that by all appearances is built from the animal’s previous defecations—“what is this if it isn’t Hell?”

Dubose cocks his head and raises one eyebrow. “Are you going all dramatic on me? We can’t afford existential angst in our line of work. My advice is don’t watch those historical dramas on PBS, they just get your panties in a wad. Don’t watch, and you’ll be happier. I want you to be happy, my friend.”

“Comme vous êtes gentil!” Jergen butters the flattery and thank-yous with sarcasm. “Vous êtes trop aimable! Merci infiniment!”

Dubose sighs and shakes his head. “De rien, mademoiselle.”

Astonished by this revelation, Jergen says, “You speak French?”

“Do bears shit in the woods?” He places a hand on Jergen’s shoulder. “Buddy, calm yourself. If just the outside of this place freaks you, then you won’t be able to handle what’s inside.”

Enduring the hand on his shoulder because it will be there only a moment, Carter Jergen says, “Yeah? What’s inside?”

“Dead people.”

“I’ve seen plenty of dead people. Made a few of them myself.”

“Yeah, but these didn’t die pretty.”

6

AS THOUGH HE READ DISAPPROVAL in Jane’s face, Ferrante Escobar said, “We sell only to wealthy, reputable clients needing protection in an increasingly dangerous world. They don’t want to risk having their weapons known and confiscated if some crisis leads to martial law. Many of them have large security staffs, and they buy in bulk, but we don’t sell to anyone who might intend to resell.”

His self-justifications were self-delusions, but Jane couldn’t afford to alienate Ferrante Escobar. She must be in Borrego Valley this afternoon. She’d already needed more time to put together this operation than she would have liked. Further delay was unthinkable.

Nevertheless, instead of responding to his declaration that he would not accept money from her, that he wanted something else in return for the pistol, she said again, “How much?”

Anxiety molded his face. “This is a world of lies and always has been. We live in a time of even greater deceptions than in centuries past. So much of what we’re told, what we see on TV, what we read in the newspapers or on the Internet, is invented to conceal the truth, protect the wicked, increase the power of those who already have more power than all the kings of history combined.”

“I don’t disagree,” she said. “But what does that have to do with the price of a pistol?”

He became more excited, speaking fast. Earlier he’d been unable to endure her stare for more than a moment. Now he was unable to look away.

“They claim you’re a true monster. No redeeming qualities. So dangerous, vicious, hateful. But all they’ve done is make you as unreal as the supervillain in some bad Batman movie. All over the Internet, they’re talking about what you really might be. They think you know something that could bring down a lot of powerful people.”

Ferrante continued to meet her eyes, but his demeanor changed. He pressed his right hand over his heart, his left over the right, as if his heart must be pounding so hard and fast that pressure needed to be applied to quiet it. With this strange posture came a change in his voice. He spoke neither as fast nor as loud as before, and there was a new tone that she could not at first name.

“They say maybe you have proof of something big. But you can’t find a way to use it or get it out to the public. Because everything is so corrupt these days. Because you have to run as fast as you can just to stay alive.”

When he fell silent, Jane said, “And what do you think?”

Anxiety faded from his face, and a tenderness replaced it. “I think you’re the truth in a sea of lies. There is a painting in the Louvre in Paris. I own a print of it. She’s shown in armor when Charles the Seventh was crowned the king of France.”

“No,” Jane said.