I open my eyes.
Forty-foot container. One wall cut and reinforced to form a door. A single overhead bulb on a portable rig, plugged into a generator I can hear outside.
A man is sitting on a stool across from me.
The suit of a man who has stood in courtrooms wearing ties that do not stand out, put men in prison, and gone home to a brick house in Westchester and a wife who stopped asking. Sixty-one years old. I know because I have been studying him for two years.
Victor Crane.
He smiles.
"Ms. Ferraro."
The voice is exactly the same. I have not heard it from across a room since I was twenty-five on K Street, when it told me I had until the end of the day to clear my desk.
"Crane."
"You found your tongue."
"I never lost it."
"You have been hunting me for two years. You built a file. You did not surface it."
"I was waiting for the part where you told me what you have been doing for the last twenty years so the file would close itself."
He smiles.
"I was hired by Kostas Stavros in 1986. Placed in the Treasury two years later. Your supervisor for a year and a half. You were not just an analyst, Nadia. You weretheanalyst. He sent me to make sure that if you stayed at Treasury, you would never do the work I could not let you do."
"You set me up."
"On his order. He was very specific. Make her useful to someone else, and make sure that someone else is the Morettis."
I do not move.
Crane has been Stavros's man since before I was born. I have been his variable for twelve years.
"You knew I went to Geneva looking for my aunt."
"I knew exactly who you were looking for."
"You used her."
"I used the fact that she has never been able to resist saving women who remind her of your mother. The courier thought he was helping a young attorney. I terminated him in 2014 because he had become inconvenient. You will already know how."
I know.
The courier was Lukas Reiner. He was found in the Limmat. The case closed in forty-eight hours. I have reread that file every February since, because he was the man who introduced me to Eleni. Four months later, Eleni told me the courier had been killed for things he did not know.
Eleni knew who killed him.
Eleni did not tell me.
She did not tell me because she was protecting me from the architecture I am now in.
"Why am I in this container?”
"Because Mr. Stavros wants the lost heir. You are going to bring him. You are zip-tied to a chair on a dock across the water from the building where the lost heir is sitting. He is going to come for you. I have been watching him for twenty-four hours. I know the kind of man he is."
