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of a smile. “I know two hundred ways of killing a man, and more men than that who deserve to die.”
    To Marissa, the silence that followed felt suffocating. Involuntarily, it seemed, Bobby looked from Okimbo to the corpses, hanging with eerie stillness in the dense night air.
    Seeing this, Okimbo placed his hand on the back of the body nearest him, idly shoving it toward Bobby as though propelling a child on a swing. As the dead man slowly swung between them, Okimbo said softly, “For you, hanging will do nicely.”

PART I
The Dark of the Sun

1

    T HE DAY BEFORE HIS DIVORCE BECAME FINAL , D AMON P IERCE SENT an e-mail to a friend, a woman he cared for deeply, the one who had chosen another man and another life.
    Pierce was alone at Sea Ranch on the last weekend before the house became Amy’s, contemplating the rugged California coastline and what his own life had brought him. Now it was early evening, and the sun slowly setting over the cobalt-blue Pacific was so bright that Pierce squinted at the screen. Despite this, he composed his words with care: he had met her in a creative writing class and, even now, their exchanges strove to capture events in a way the other would appreciate and make a good-natured effort to surpass. It was a pleasure that Amy, far more literal and less romantic, had never understood; still less did she appreciate that this complex blend of admiration and remembered attraction, surviving time and distance, had come to hold a mirror to their marriage.
    His e-mail reflected his mood, the ironic yet sober assessment of a man on the cusp of midlife—a partner in a fifteen-hundred-lawyer megafirm caught between an increasingly thwarted professional desire to do good and a former blue-collar boy’s appreciation of fine dining, good wine, and travel undreamed of in his youth. Among Pierce’s specialties was complex international litigation, in which he enjoyed a considerable reputation; as he had told his correspondent several years ago, “not everyone has put away for life the murderous president of a former Balkan rump state.”
    Perhaps this experience as a war crimes prosecutor, the clearest expression of his still flickering idealism, reflected his admiration for hercommitment to others, the harder choices she had made. But his work in Kosovo was now years in the past. For Pierce, the chief residue of this time was the several hundred dead men, women, and children—the defendant’s victims—on whom the world’s attention had focused far too late, and whose images still came to him in dreams.
    “Since returning to the firm,” he wrote now, “my practice has become more or less what you predicted. My principal clients are investment bankers and tarnished corporate titans staring at a stretch in prison for ambitions that exceeded the law. Some strike me as almost tragic; others as loathsome. A few are even innocent. Many of them I like—it’s me I wonder about. Often I remember what Charlie Hale, my best friend at the firm, said after our first week as associates: ‘Damon, my boy, us two will do well here. In ten years, we’ll be partners; in twenty we’ll have more money than time; in forty we’ll be looking back at our careers. And after
that
. . .,’ he finished with a sardonic grin, ‘there’s only one big move left.’
    “Charlie, however, has a nice wife and three bright-eyed daughters he adores.
    “As for me, I have a condominium with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and sufficient cash to indulge in pleasures you might think superfluous. But remember that when we met I was mired in student loans; compared to me you were born to have a restless conscience, and to act on it. Still, I question myself every time I imagine you asking, ‘Is this a life of meaning?’ Then I imagine the conveyor belt of life leading straight to my premature demise, keeling over at my desk on another weekend of too much work for no great cause. Perhaps that’s why I spend so much time at the