"Frank Donovan's son is bringing three Moretti brothers to my study. That is not the war I wrote."
"No."
"That is a better war."
He opens his eyes, looks at me, and smiles one more time.
"The math feels clean."
The doorof the study opens.
The man in the doorway is not Sean.
It is one of Kostas’s security men—young, pale, visibly shaken.
The sky outside is going gold. The helicopter is at the gate. The four Moretti brothers are coming up the drive.
Kostas does not look at him. He is still looking at me.
"Sir."
"Yes."
"They’re at the gate. All four of them."
"Yes."
"What are your orders?"
Kostas closes his eyes. He breathes. He opens them.
He smiles at me.
"Let them in. It is time."
19
SEAN
The gravel gives under my boots. The estate is older than I am. The dawn is the color of an old coin.
I am thirty yards behind Alessandro. Matteo is on my left flank. Luca is on my right.
Matteo said something to me at the gate.
He said it the way he says everything. Without warning. Without inflection. Without giving me time to absorb it before he moved past it.
She used to look at me like she was looking at a ghost. I thought it was something I was doing. It was you.
He did not say it again. He clipped his vest, racked his rifle, and walked past me to take his position on Alessandro's left.
Maria Moretti looked at her surviving son every day of his life and saw the shape of the son she had lost. She loved him anyway.
The ghost was alive in Queens running the files of a family he did not know was his.
We move.
The helicopter istwo hundred yards back at the gate, rotors winding down. Alessandro's lead element took the gate post in the first sixty seconds. The noise has done what noise always does. Woken the house.
