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by the one man they’d never thought to question—their boss.
    Caroline understood now exactly how she’d been used, and how she’d allowed it to happen. Thirty April had become her obsession, and like all consuming desires, this one had blinded her. She and Cuddy were the ideal pawns: eager for justice, hungry for revenge, dedicated and single-minded with time to burn. Neither of them had any family to speak of. Their hobbies were long dead. But they had each other and that perfect understanding that springs up sometimes between inhabitants of the covert world. A world gone black, Caroline thought now, where the only friend you trust is the one who remains a stranger.
    They’d been endlessly useful to their boss, Scottie Sorensen, the CIA’s subtle Chief of Counterterrorism. Two personable, intelligent people in their late thirties who could render the most complex organizational diagram into policymaker’s English. Scottie had backed them up and supported them to the hilt and unleashed them on the truth with a pocketful of lies. Cuddy looked prepared to continue telling those lies as long as necessary; Caroline had typed her resignation and e-mailed it to the chief an hour ago.
    Cuddy was on duty today, in the pressed khakis and Oxford cloth shirt of a man who might be summoned at any moment to the White House Situation Room. The fact that he could continue to slave for a boss who’d wasted more than two years of his life was disturbing to Caroline; but then, Scottie Sorensen had not planted Cuddy smack in the middle of 30 April. Scottie had saved that plum—that honor—for Caroline’s husband, Eric, the guy he’d loved like a son and thrown to the wolves without a backward glance.
    Eric is dead, he’d told Caroline nearly three years ago when a jet went down off the coast of Turkey; 30 April blew up his plane. That much was true, of course—only Eric hadn’t been on MedAir 901. He’d been busy crafting a legend: a perfect backstopped identity for an undercover operation so secret only Scottie knew it existed. Eric had become a terrorist killer in the employ of Mlan Krucevic, head of the 30 April Organization, while Scottie ruthlessly buried him in the minds of the people he’d known and loved. Nobody—not Dare, not Cuddy, not the budget wonks who funded covert ops—had suspected Eric’s survival. Not even Caroline, his widow.
    For two and a half years, the yearning for vengeance got Caroline up in the morning and kept her from bed at night. When she learned her husband was still alive—and had actually helped kidnap the vice president of the United States—it was Eric she accused of betrayal, not Scottie. Eric, after all, had walked away from a woman and a marriage and a life; Eric had handed her a living death. Sent out to find him—to find Vice President Sophie Payne—Caroline had wavered between hatred and a desire to hurt him the way she’d been hurting for years.
    Now she knew it was Scottie, not Eric, who’d pulled all their strings.
    Our boy got out in time, Scottie said as she walked off Air Force Two behind Sophie Payne’s casket. He’s 30 April’s last man standing and you’re never to speak his name out loud again, hear? Blow the whistle on me and I’ll have you up in front of a Congressional investigation so fast your head will spin, lady. Believe that.
    “I’ve already talked to Dare,” she told Cuddy now. “There’s nothing left to say. She has everything Eric could give her about 30 April’s networks worldwide. She knows all there is to know about Scottie. She won’t fire him, Cuddy. He’s too dangerous.”
    He glanced down at the document in his hands, as though it were a script. “And you won’t work here as long as he does.”
    “Would you?”
    Of course he would. Despite the fact that Eric was his best friend.
    “This is your career, Caroline. Christ—it’s your life. What’re you going to do out there alone?”
    A glimpse in her mind suddenly of water fragile