world mouths we continue to feed and protect to maturity so they can spit in our eye.
The glass door opened silently behind him. Trask knew it from the faint whisper of cool air that brushed his neck. He also knew, without turning, the angel-light tread of his valet, Peter Robinson.
“Sir?” said Robinson.
“She’s here?” Trask asked without turning.
“Yes, sir,” the young man replied.
“Take her to the sunroom. I’ll be there when I am ready.”
“Yes, sir.” There was a catch in his voice.
“Mr. Robinson, what’s the latest on Baltimore?”
“The situation is still very chaotic,” Robinson replied. He seemed pleased to have been asked, allowed to react. “No one seems to know whether this is an isolated incident or part of a larger-scale event. Homeland Security has promised a press conference at seven p.m.”
“Thank you,” Trask said. “It’s horrible, but we will survive this, Mr. Robinson.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied.
The door shut, and Trask placed the daisy he’d just clipped into the container. He’d never thought he would treat such delicate things with care. As a boy, he would take pleasure in kicking up the moist soil in his mother’s garden, unearthing the thin, spirally roots of the freshly planted flowers of the month. He’d hated how she bragged about them. Her hands never even touched the dirt. It was always the gardener. Never her. That was his small way of getting back, taking some of her unearned credit away. Too bad the dog had to take the fall.
Setting the shears on a towel-covered tray at the end of the aisle, he walked to the small locker beside the door. He changed into a leisure suit, then paused to mop the perspiration from his face and brush back his full head of gray hair. He checked his appearance in the mirror before closing the locker and heading out.
You never cared how you looked until there was no one around to take pictures, he thought ironically. Yet it wasn’t vanity that drove him. This was no different than the maestro who tugged the hem of his swallowtail jacket before heading onstage or the on-deck batter checking his helmet. He was preparing to put something in motion. Every man in every field had a moment of reflection, of self-examination, before setting out. The physical manifestation of that was just an excuse to pause, to steel oneself.
He was ready. Great events were about to transpire. History was not just going to be made.
It was going to be directed.
It was with rage and a sickening sense of deja vu that Jessica Muloni watched the events in Baltimore play out on the large flat-screen TV. It reminded her-as it would anyone of a certain age-of the attacks on September 11, 2001.
She had been newly arrived in Washington then, recently graduated with a master’s degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she had been recruited to work at the CIA. She was outside at Langley, having arrived at the office later than usual, when she heard the distant explosion at the Pentagon, saw the black smoke curling upward.
Those attacks in New York and Washington were many things, but most of all they were a bookmark. Thereafter, like so many other people, whenever she heard a siren or smelled tart smoke that lodged in the throat- even at a barbecue or passing a car fire on the highway-the entire event came back.
As it did now.
No one knew yet whether these new attacks were homegrown or the efforts of a foreign network, whether they were an isolated occurrence or the first part of a wave. Just like on September 11, Langley and the White House and the Capitol and other buildings were evacuated, because no one was sure what was happening.
But there was one difference between 2001 and today. Now Muloni was an agent and she had a mission. And it was clear that her mission was suddenly more significant, more urgent, than it had been when she left D.C. ninety minutes before.
She turned from the TV at the gate and headed to the baggage claim area to rent a car. There must be no record of her destination; indeed, only her supervisor and Jacob Trask knew about it.
She had read numerous files on the reclusive billionaire. A profligate for the first decades of his life, spending exorbitant amounts on cars, boats, and turning his home into a fortress. The perfect place to stay out of the spotlight and the perfect excuse not to leave his home office. If there needed to be a gala or benefit, it could be hosted at his estate, where after an hour he could tuck himself safely away in one of his hiding rooms.
Trask was a master of hiding out, something he’d perfected in his teen years. The day Trask got his driver’s license in 1965, he uncharacteristically got the courage to ask his boarding school crush, Kathleen, to the drive-in to see The Beach Girls and the Monster, a beach murder mystery starring Jon Hall and Sue Casey. Halfway through the opening credits Kathleen noticed Christopher Andrews. The most athletic, the most likely to succeed and, apparently, the most likely to take whatever he wanted. Kathleen made up some excuse-Trask couldn’t recall it, or maybe he pushed it out of his mind-as he watched her toss her thick golden hair over her shoulder and slide into the front seat of Christopher’s ’64 Morgan Plus Four Plus. Trask finished the movie solo. Seventeen years later he introduced the extremely rare ’64 Morgan Plus Four Plus to his personal collection.
Things changed for Trask upon the unexpected death of his father, Clark Trask. According to the files on Trask, it was the discovery of a cache of letters written by his grandfather, Foster Trask, that had turned the young man around: his father was the beneficiary of shrewd, if contemptible, dealings his own father had enjoyed with the Nazis. Foster Trask was a junk man-turned-antique dealer who had buyers in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Morocco. During the final days of the Third Reich, he had set up a small bank to channel mountains of cash from German institutions-concealed in Spanish chests, Louis XV dressers, and other pieces-to banks in South America… for a 10 percent fee, of course. The German expatriates benefited and the Trask family benefited, though young Clark was given all the credit.
Not only was Jacob Trask humiliated by his family’s close association with Hitler’s top advisors, but he was liberated by the revelation that his father was not the wunderkind investor he had pretended to be, but a front for the secret dealings of his own father. Since that discovery, Jacob Trask had used his resources to stand up for America, first against the Japanese takeover in the 1980s-when he bought an interest in every publicly traded company that mattered-then against the Saudi buying spree in the 1990s, during which he outbid the Saudis for property and corporations wherever possible, and now against the slow Chinese influx of capital. Muloni was particularly impressed as she considered what a remarkable mind Jacob Trask must possess to have foreseen that a mission like this would be necessary.
Muloni had been an active participant in the war on terror for her entire career, but now she would be on the front lines. She had a sense of being somewhat in control, which set her apart from other anxious passengers and airport workers who were looking into one another’s eyes, searching for anything foreign or dangerous.
She stopped as she entered the main terminal, looked around for a driver with a card that had her host’s name. She saw none.
After a moment of scanning the busy hall, Muloni noticed a liveried older woman approaching.
“I was afraid you had missed the flight,” she said.
“Sorry. No… I was watching the news at the gate.”
“Tragic. Just so tragic.”
Muloni nodded.
“I’m Liz,” the driver said.
“Happy to meet you.”
“Do you have any luggage, ma’am?” the driver asked.
“I don’t,” she replied.
“Will you follow me, then?” She smiled.
Muloni nodded. It was a nice smile, woman to woman, probably warmer than most new arrivals got. It was probably more than most of her passengers would have noticed. It didn’t unnerve Muloni, and it shouldn’t have surprised her that her host would have given her driver a photograph to identify the pickup. A name scrawled on a piece of cardboard was not the style of Jacob Trask.
There was no small talk. The silver-haired driver moved purposefully through the crowd; she was only about five foot two, but she had a no-nonsense stride. There was a spotless white stretch limousine at the curb, with a uniformed officer with Airport Security Services standing beside it. He wasn’t ticketing the vehicle or waiting for it to
