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ruler who expanded the Roman empire?”
    She quickly wiped her face with her fingers and turned around to him. “Of course. What about him?”
    “Trajan was ruthless and cunning and won every great battle he led his troops into. He had a rule: If you can’t win, don’t fight. If you don’t fight, it’s no defeat. You will survive. Take the deal, Eva. Survive.”

3
    Washington, D.C.
    April, Two years later
    Carrying a thermos of hot coffee and two mugs, Tucker Andersen crossed into Stanton Park, just five blocks from his office on Capitol Hill. The midnight shadows were long and black, and the air was cool. There were no children in the playground, no pedestrians on the sidewalks. Inhaling the scent of freshly cut grass, he listened as traffic rumbled past on C Street. All was as it should be.
    Finally he spotted his old friend Jonathan Ryder, almost invisible where he sat on a bench facing the granite statue of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene. Tonight a call had come in from Tucker’s wife that Jonathan was trying to reach him.
    Tucker closed in. A slender man of five foot ten, he had the long muscles of the runner he still was. His eyes were large and intelligent behind tortoiseshell glasses, his mustache light brown, his gray beard trimmed close to the jaw. Mostly bald, he had a fringe of gray-brown hair dangling over his shirt collar. He was fifty-three years old, and although his official credentials announced CIA, he was both more and less.
    “Hello, Jonathan.” Tucker sat and crossed his legs. “Nice to see you again. What’s it been—ten years?” He studied him. Jonathan looked small now, and he was not a small man. And tense. Very tense.
    “At least ten years. I appreciate your meeting me on such short notice.” Jonathan gave a brief smile, showing a row of perfect white teeth in his lined face. Lean and fit, he had a high forehead topped by a brush of graying blond hair. He was wearing black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt with a Yale University logo on the sleeve instead of his usual Savile Row business suit.
    Tucker handed him a mug and poured coffee for both of them. “Sounded important, but then you could always make sunrise seem as if it were heralding angels.”
    “It is important.” Jonathan sniffed the coffee. “Smells good.” His hands shook as he drank.
    Tucker felt a moment of worry. “How’s the family?”
    “Jeannine’s great. Busy with all her charities, as usual. Judd’s left military intelligence and isn’t going to reenlist. Three tours in Iraq and a tour in Pakistan were finally enough for him.” He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the past lately.”
    Tucker set the thermos on the seat beside him. They had been close friends during their undergraduate days at Yale. “I remember when we were in school and you started that investment club. You made me a grand in two years. That was a hell of a lot of money in those days.”
    Jonathan nodded. Then he grinned. “I thought you were just a smart-ass—all looks, no brains, no commitment. Then you saved my skin that night in Alexanderplatz in East Berlin. Remember? It took a lot of muscle—and smarts.”
    After college, both had joined the CIA, in operations, but Jonathan had left after three years to earn an MBA at Wharton. With an undergraduate degree in chemistry, he had worked for a series of pharmaceutical companies, then gone on to found his own. Today he was president and board chair of Bucknell Technologies. Monied and powerful, he was a regular on Washington’s social circuit and at the president’s yearly Prayer Breakfast.
    “Glad I did the good deed,” Tucker said. “Look where you ended up—a baron of Big Pharma, while I’m still tilling the mean streets and urine-scented dark alleys.”
    Jonathan nodded. “To each his own. Still, if you’d wanted it, you could’ve headed Langley. Your problem is you make a lousy bureaucrat. Have you heard of the video game called Bureaucracy ? If