Perry's killer playlist

understand it.”

Looking at that little spot, no bigger than a dime, I thought back to Swierczynski, what he’d said back in Venice:

The bullet is already in your brain.

“Apparently she’d had cancer once before,” Nolan said, “as a child, in the thyroid. Surgeons tried to remove it back in Lithuania, I guess, with a thyroidectomy, but they kind of botched the job.” Another shrug. This guy was turning out to be the world heavyweight champion of shruggers. “Eastern European medicine… what are you going to do?”

I thought of the scar across her throat, the one that Erich had mentioned to me back in Zermatt. I wanted to say something, anything, but all the moisture seemed to have disappeared from my mouth.

“But this puppy?” Nolan tapped the white spot on the MRI. “Going to be a whole lot trickier. I’m told there’s maybe five or six neurosurgeons in the world who can get it out without permanent brain damage, and even then…”

“And you promised her the operation if she took care of Armitage for you.”

“I told her what I had to.”

“What about now?”

“That’s the beauty of it.” Nolan grinned, and took another sip of his wine, which was almost gone. “She’s not our problem anymore. See how everything works out? That’s what makes America the greatest country in the world.”

Before I knew what I was doing, I grabbed the table and flipped it over, sending it forward with a splintering crash. Papers, photographs, and the bottle and glass all hit the floor. Nolan jumped up, and when he looked back to me, it was with the startled unease of a man who’d just discovered that the dog he’d been taunting wouldn’t just bark but might actually jump up and bite.

“There’s no need to get bitchy, kid. We’ll figure out what’s going on with your family-I already told you that. Twenty-four hours or less, we’ll get a phone call, bring ’em out all smiles and do the CNN shuffle.” He pointed at me with a big blunt finger. “Don’t piss in the wind on this one.”

“You owe her,” I said.

“Shit.”

“You made her a promise.”

Nolan studied me for a moment. Some of the intensity lifted from his face, and when he spoke again, his voice was different, almost earnest-suddenly he was a man who genuinely believed what he was saying and wanted to be understood.

“Let’s get something straight, Perry. I told you before, Zusane Zaksauskas is a born predator. She’s a dirty bomb with a pulse. It’s what she is-and it’s all she is. If she wasn’t doing this for us, she’d be doing it for somebody else.” He blinked, all watery-eyed and sympathetic, like maybe there was still a way that we could all walk away friends. “I’ve got kids of my own, all right? Two beautiful girls-they live with their mom back in Virginia. Amazing young women. They play violin and ride dressage. Someday they’re going to grow up and go to college and raise kids of their own and live long, happy lives.” His expression fell. “But somebody like this?” He looked at the Gobi file, scattered around his feet. “I don’t mean to sound callous, but short of a bullet to the head- cancer’s the best thing for it.”

I stared at him. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

There must have been something threatening in my voice, because I saw a second man standing up in the corner of the room, where I hadn’t noticed him until now. Without taking his eyes off me, Nolan gestured for the other agent to sit down.

“It’s okay, Jeff,” he said. “Kid’s emotional, that’s all. The teenage years.”

“I’m not emotional,” I said, and saying those words aloud, I realized it was true. I had finally remembered where I’d heard the name Monash before, and I felt calmer than I had in days. If I’d put my fingers to my carotid artery, I would’ve felt my heart rate running a steady sixty beats per minute, maybe even slower. “Let me see those pictures again.”

Grudgingly: “Which ones?”

“Of Paula, when she was little.”

With another almost indiscernible shrug, Nolan squatted down and picked up the papers that I’d spilled when I’d dumped the table. After gathering them up, he shoved them in my direction so that I could sort through them. Here she was standing in the Dubai Hilton with her nanny; here she was in Paris, walking along among the chestnut trees on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees toward the Arc de Triomphe with a pretty blond woman that I recognized from framed photos in Paula’s apartment as her mother. When I got to the next one, I stopped.

“This was her dad?”

“Everett Monash, yeah. The one that Gobi hit outside the train station, before Armitage.”

I looked at the snapshot. Paula, probably six or seven at the time, was sitting on his shoulders in Piazza San Marco, in front of the cathedral where we’d just stood two days ago. I looked at Paula’s young, smooth face, and then down at Everett’s-a tall, vaguely satanic-looking bald man with a trim goatee that looked much like it did when I’d seen it earlier tonight, when he’d been sitting in the helicopter-the man who had been pointing the rifle at Gobi. The man I’d first seen bursting out of a steamer trunk in the Grand Canal.

I pointed down at his face. “He was Gobi’s first Venice target?”

“That’s right. Monash. He and Paula were part of Armitage’s organization.”

“You know he’s still alive, right?”

Nolan’s eyes widened just a millimeter. “Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” I said. “He and Paula have Gobi right now. And they seem to think they can turn her to their side.” I looked at him. “You better hope she believed you when you lied about getting her that surgery, Agent Nolan-or I don’t think you’ll ever see her again.”

“You’re lying about Monash. We got independent confirmation that Gobi shot him and dropped his body in the canal.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and who do you think was in that canal with him when he opened his eyes?”

“Word of advice, kid. Don’t shit a shitter.” Nolan grabbed back his files, shuffled them away, then picked up his coat and slipped it on, all business now. “Here’s the deal. You’re going to let Jeff here drive you back to the embassy, and you’re going to sit there like a good boy and let us do our job, and nobody’s going to mention anything about Zusane Zaksauskas ever again. Got it?”

“Sure,” I said. “There’s just one problem.”

Now he just sounded tired. “What’s that?”

“I don’t trust you to save my family. I don’t think you know half of what you think you know.” I pointed straight at him. “And I definitely don’t trust the CIA to do anything more than what serves its own purpose to help me out of here.” I looked back over at the guy who’d stood up when I’d called Nolan an asshole. “And that means that whatever arrangement you might have planned with Gobi, I’m about twelve hours from pulling the whole thing down on your heads in the most publicly humiliating way possible.”

Nolan turned red, then purple. His fists tightened at his sides, clenched and pink and somehow anal. On the satisfaction scale, it wasn’t quite on par with watching him try to pass a kidney stone, but it was close.

“You smart-ass little punk, what makes you think-” He stopped himself mid-rant, and his whole face went stone cold, all trace of emotion gone, all at once. “You do not want to get involved in this, Perry. I promise you. I will make your life hell.”

“Too late,” I said.

In my pocket, something began to vibrate.

37. “Don’t Let Me Explode” — The Hold Steady

Nolan had already turned and started walking away. “You ready to go?” he asked, angling toward the door.

I slipped my hand into the pocket of the heavy winter parka that Gobi had tossed me back at Erich’s and felt