Departure

06:05 a.m. Teterboro Airport, New Jersey.

There are two ways to avoid a conversation on a private jet. You can sleep, or you can pretend to read. Vega had tried both for the first forty minutes and was now attempting a third, which involved studying the stitching on the leather armrest as if it contained a map to her future.

It did not. It contained a small brown stain that she decided, firmly, was coffee.

"You're glaring at the upholstery," said Silas, from the opposite seat.

"I'm appraising it."

"It is a Gulfstream G650. The upholstery is Italian calfskin. It has seen a Saudi prince and two heads of state."

"Then it's seen worse than me."

"I would not count on it."

The cabin was long and low and quiet, the color of warm sand, with six wide seats facing each other in pairs. A lamp glowed at every table. Somebody had laid out coffee, cold chicken, and a bowl of grapes that nobody was going to touch. At the far end, behind a sliding door, the pilot and co-pilot murmured over the radio in the steady contented voices of men who liked their work.

Roman sat at the rear of the cabin, alone, with a laptop open and a pair of reading glasses on his nose.

Vega had not known he wore reading glasses. She had been trying all morning not to know it.

Thin black frames. Slightly crooked on the left. She turned a page of a magazine she was not reading. You are a professional. You are a getaway driver. You have outrun the Chicago police on three separate occasions. You can stop thinking about his nose.

"Vega."

"I'm reading."

"You are holding it upside down."

She looked. She was.

…

"Colombia," said Silas, an hour later, "is not Miami."

He had spread a map across the table between them. It was the real kind, paper and ink, folded in eighths and soft along the creases. He had a pencil behind his ear. The sun came in sideways through the cabin windows and lit up the little hairs along his forearms, and Vega, who had expected him to give a briefing like a man reading a legal document, was startled to discover that he was enjoying it.

"The meeting is with a man named Alvaro Pereda. Fifty-nine. Rancher, cattle baron, landowner, politician by marriage. He controls forty thousand hectares in the eastern plains. He also controls an army of about six hundred men whom he calls his farmhands, and a supply of Soviet-era hardware that he found in a warehouse in 1998 and has been very discreet about since."

"Discreet."

"He told no one but the Russians, the Americans, and the Chinese."

"That's not discreet."

"No," Silas agreed. "It is a rather loud form of discretion. It has kept him alive."

"And what does Roman want?"

"Pereda's brother-in-law runs a rail terminal in the Llanos. The Foundry needs a route for a shipment of surplus tank engines." A pause. "I will not tell you why. You will find out, or you will not."

"It's always one of the two."

"Indeed." He tapped a point on the map with the pencil, a smudged gray triangle in a green sea. "We land at Villavicencio. From there it is a six-hour drive, off-road, to the hacienda. Mountain passes. River fords. Most of it unpaved. Mr. Ashcombe does not like helicopters in Colombia. He says they are loud enough to be noticed and quiet enough to be shot."

"So he needs a driver."

"So he needs you." Silas folded the map. His eyes, gray and level, rose to hers. "Do you understand why?"

"Because I'm good."

"Because you are the only person he has ever trusted with his back."

She said nothing.

Silas looked at her for a moment longer. He did it without his usual veil of contempt. He did it like a man trying to describe a color to someone who has never seen it.

"I have been with him nine years," he said. "I have known him to speak of Eli exactly twice. I have known him to sleep in a chair for three days rather than ask for a mattress. I have known him to put a bullet in a man's head and then straighten the man's collar." His voice was perfectly dry. "I have never known him to bring the same driver to the same meeting twice. And he told me this morning, in the car, that you will be present at every one of the next thirty-eight."

"Thirty-eight?"

"Forty, less two. He is counting."

Her ears went hot.

"That's... just contractual."

"Of course it is." Silas stood. He took the map. "Eat the grapes, Vega. Someone should."

…

They flew for four hours before he spoke to her.

She had gone forward to the galley for coffee, and he had followed, and for a moment they stood in the narrow space beside the pilot's door with a tiny steel counter between them and nothing to say.

"The glass," Roman said finally.

"Which glass?"

"In the garage. I broke it."

"You didn't. Silas's radio did."

"I would prefer to take the responsibility." He had taken off the reading glasses and held them folded in one hand. The cabin lights made his face look softer, and also much more tired. "I owe you an apology."

"For the glass?"

"For the... interruption."

"It wasn't your fault."

"It was my fault that I was in a position to be interrupted." A faint, dry exhale. "I should have chosen a more private location. A locked room. A soundproofed one."

Vega choked on her coffee.

"That's not—" She coughed. "That's not what I meant. That's not funny."

"I did not intend it to be funny."

"It's very funny. You're being funny. You've turned into a funny man."

"I assure you that I am not."

"You are. You've got a face on."

"I have always had a face. It is a standard feature."

She was laughing. She was actually laughing, with her hand pressed over her mouth, in a Gulfstream at forty thousand feet, on the way to a meeting with a man who owned a private army. He stood there with the glasses in one hand, utterly composed, and the only sign of his own enjoyment was a faint creasing at the corner of the left eye that she'd begun to treat as a sort of weather report.

"Vega."

"Yes?"

"I would like to say something. And I would like you to let me finish."

She wiped her eyes. "Okay."

"I have thought about what happened in the garage for six days." The words came slow and careful, as though each had to be fitted through a keyhole. "I am not a man who does things without understanding them. I find that I do not understand this. I know only that I would do it again."

Her laugh went out like a candle.

"Roman—"

"I would also like to say that I will not repeat it unless you wish me to. You are under contract to me. You live in my house. You cannot leave without my consent. There is a profound imbalance of power between us, and I am aware of it. I will not allow you to feel that anything between us is a condition of your freedom."

She looked at him.

It was a strange speech. It had been rehearsed; she could hear the rehearsal in it, like a drum beneath a melody. But it was also the single most frightening thing anyone had ever said to her, because it contained no angle. He was not trying to win. He was not trying to move her. He was simply handing her a key and asking her to see that the lock was hers.

"Okay," said Vega.

"Okay?"

"I heard you." She put down the coffee. "Let me tell you what I think."

"Please."

"I think you're wrong about the imbalance. It's not the contract. It's the fact that you're afraid." She said it lightly. "You're afraid I'll do it because I have to. You're afraid that if I say yes, it won't count."

His face did not change. But the hand holding the glasses closed, slowly, until the frames creaked.

"And?"

"And I think I'd like to find out." She smiled, a small crooked smile. "Not now. Not on a plane. But I'd like to do it right. When I'm free. When I can say no and it costs you something."

The silence stretched for the length of a breath.

"That," said Roman Ashcombe, very quietly, "is the most reasonable thing anyone has ever said to me."

"I'm a reasonable girl."

"You are the most unreasonable person I have ever met."

"I contain multitudes."

"You contain a great many exits." He put on the glasses again. His voice was rough. "I will see that you have a clear one."

…

The first thing she noticed was the quiet.

It was a small, wrong quiet, the kind that lives under engines. She had grown used to the drone of the Gulfstream's turbines, a steady flat note that you stopped hearing after the first hour. Now, somewhere south of the Caribbean, with the green carpet of the Andes unrolling below the wing, the note faltered.

A tiny waver. A hesitation. Like a singer who has forgotten the next word.

Vega looked up from the window.

Across the cabin, Silas had lifted his head. He was already out of his seat. Behind the sliding door the pilot's voice, which had been murmuring about wind shear, stopped in the middle of a sentence.

"Mr. Ashcombe," said Silas. "I think we—"

"I know."

"The engines are—"

"I know, Silas."

The cabin tilted.

It did not lurch. It leaned, gently and deliberately, like a man settling into a chair. Cups slid across the table. A grape rolled slowly to the edge and fell on the floor. The pilot's voice broke through the intercom, urgent now, clipped, professional: "Brace, brace, we have a warning on the starboard—"

The sound that cut him off was not a bang.

It was a long rising shriek, like the tearing of a sheet of metal as wide as the sky, and it came from outside the plane, from the bright blue gulf of air beyond the window, where something narrow and white and fast had drawn a perfect line across the sun.

Missile, thought Vega, with absolute clarity.

She did not scream. She had no time. Roman was already across the cabin, one hand on her shoulder, the other locked on a rail, hauling her down into the seat with a strength she hadn't known he possessed. His face was inches from hers. His eyes were enormous.

"Belt," he said. "Now."

"Roman—"

"Belt."

The world went white.