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But any candids of an event this big were going to be valuable, and the mood of the room was the general understanding that Bo was good and had just lucked into the right shots at the right time. Not even Kate said anything cutting to Daniel about it, which was about the time he suspected that he was being deliberately handled when it came to Suyana.

The footage was in four-second bursts of Ethan laughing and Suyana taking back books from someone on the other side of the river wall and them kissing for the cameras as they grinned chastely against each other's lips; they were played between talking-head debates as analysts looked at their body language and decided how in love these two really were. Verdict: Very. Daniel ignored the commentary. Rules of
the game; he'd been doing his homework, and these things were easy to rig. Those same experts had also decided Grace was Very in love with the guy from the Hong Kong Territories when she'd dated him for three months a few years back. She'd fallen out of love with him shortly after Hong Kong had given the UK preferential trading rights and a stronger promise of mutual aid than it did to mainland China. She and he were still friendly—once a year they went out to dinner at some restaurant with big windows. Magazines occasionally name-checked them in articles about IA relationships, as an example of a best-case breakup.

Afterward, everyone who had a late-night follow filed out for the evening shift. Bo hadn't even been there; his shift had started at dawn and wasn't going to be over until Suyana got home from the Deneuve Theatre Awards after-party, close to two in the morning.

“Daniel,” Li Zhao called.

He stepped inside, kept his hands in his pockets.

“How are you liking Grace?”

“I sleep more. Works out for me.”

“You still try to see her?”

“You know I don't.”

She took off her glasses and set them on the desk (not held in one hand like when she was making a point, and Daniel didn't know what point she was making now).

“I'd like to make the assignment permanent. There are going to be some changes this session. Grace is in line to get a committee position in Humanitarian Aid. And Suyana's out of the question—you know you can never go back.”

He didn't bother answering. Some things were clear. Any shot at Margot? he almost asked—big game, and though Daniel was a monster, he was a monster who made plans—but the glasses on the desk distracted him, and he only nodded. (It meant something; she was considering something she couldn't quite bring herself to ask.)

In the main room, Kate's chair was pulled up to the dining table, and she was picking at some flaw in the carving along the edge. For Kate, it was practically vandalism. He slowed down.

“What's the matter?”

She looked up. “What? Nothing.”

“All right. Good night, Kate.”

“Has Margot landed yet?”

He sank his weight on his back foot, like her question had nailed him right through his boot. “I have no idea.”

Kate was watching him. The tips of her hair were bleached-out aqua now, and made her look like she was still sitting in front of a glowing computer in a dark room. Every time she picked at the table, a little silver star earring on her
right ear shivered.

“You should keep an eye out for her,” Kate said. “You'd be surprised. Bo always knew where she was. He was excellent at it.”

“That was Bo's assignment.”

A flake broke away from the table under her fingers. “She wanders if you're not careful—you've seen it.”

That felt like a bigger vote of confidence than he deserved—he'd only seen Margot once, when she'd gone to a museum and met up with a hired gun and he'd risked his life to get Bo to follow.

Then Daniel understood, and his knees went heavy.

From the open door to Li Zhao's office, Daniel could hear typing. He could hear Kate's nails scraping the finish off the table in places Li Zhao would never see.

“I'd love to,” he said, “but sadly my camera makes it hard to pursue outside interests.”

“Cameras malfunction,” Kate said, with her hair falling in front of her face. The silver star in her ear had gone perfectly still.

Cold slid down his spine. Whatever Kate was suggesting, if she was willing to help him, it was bad news. “I thought you were loyal.”

“I am,” Kate said. “I'm loyal even when she isn't.”

He nodded, once, slow enough that the camera wouldn't quite register it. “I'd better go,” he said carefully after a second.
“I feel pretty tired.”

“You look it. Sweet dreams. Take rue Palmatier home; you'll avoid the traffic.”

Kate texted him a number and a name from her personal cell before he had rounded the corner. He'd halfway decided to ignore her warning about Margot and go home, but the name changed his mind. He was a sucker for a good story.

So he walked half a mile out of his way and sat in the café across the street from the unassuming building on rue Palmatier until Margot left.

It was another half hour's walk to the small art nouveau building she disappeared into. And whatever happened inside must have been engrossing, because by the time he gave up and turned for home, the light had been on for an hour, illuminating the room right through the filmy curtains.

He wished he could narrow his guesses; he wished he could look into the future and understand it like Suyana did, or be Bo and disappear. But it turned out all he could do was stand casually across the street and dread the dark as Kipa and Margot sat across from each other like a pair of shadow puppets waiting for their cue.

× × × × × × ×

G
lobal
ran one of Bo's candids in a feature the week after it ran a cover with America's official photos from the fucking Louvre, with Suyana in a gray dress she couldn't
sit down in and Ethan in a tux that made him look like the president of something. Bo's snap was the polar opposite—practically a new story—but it only enhanced the party line and made them look more earnestly in love than the stately photo had.

The candid drove the engagement story right back up the ladder, but it was just long enough after the official parties had had their say that no one from the American team felt scooped enough to start demanding the magazine's sources. A smart play.

It was a smart photo, too. Suyana's veil had slid from her hair (she looked markedly less surprised about it than Ethan did, which markedly did not surprise Daniel), and she was reaching for it with her free hand and grinning sidelong at Ethan, who was too busy staring love-slack at her and leaning in to help to notice yet that she was pushing her book against his chest for him to hold, held fast against him by the wide spread of her hand.

It looked truly candid. The veil puffed out just at the edges like a ghost, and the pearl-covered comb had vanished in the crunch of Suyana's hand and left just the clean line of the net against the stones of the river wall, and the book was almost out of frame against Ethan's body, like something you weren't supposed to see.

“Good shot,” he admitted once, during one of the brief
moments he and Bo both occupied the flat and were conscious. “Really good shot.”

“Yeah,” said Bo, shrugging on a jacket of no particular color. “You'd almost think she didn't know I was there.”

Daniel tacked it up on the wall in their living room, to remind them to be frightened.

× × × × × × ×

Grace didn't like late dinners. The small places got crowded deep in the evenings, and even among the chic sort, getting a glimpse of one of the Big Nine was a thrill. To avoid pictures and autographs, she had to be seated by six, out by eight. (“I hate you,” Bo said as they passed in the apartment hall, the last time Daniel had seen him.)

When she was going out with Martine, the evening started at ten, and the bodyguards showed up half an hour ahead of time and opened the service doors in the building lobby and stood in the bottom of the stairwell as she took the elevator down.

Grace came out in heels and a dress that looked carved from granite, which meant a nightclub with dancing—when dancing was involved, Grace planned for dresses that stayed where she put them.

Daniel feared they were headed for Terrain (he didn't have a quarter-million-dollar necklace in his pocket this time, and that sort of entrance only worked once),
until they pulled up in front of somewhere dark and low that had a bouncer reassuringly open to bribes. Daniel barely lost sight of them on the way inside.

He was preparing his lie for the VIP area when he realized they'd taken a booth off the dance floor instead. That alone was a concern. There was no way Martine didn't go for the most exclusive possible seating; she liked a pointed remove.

“—in the goddamn Central Committee,” Martine was saying as he slid into the nearest booth.

Grace laughed. “That's terrible. Since when do you want Committee work?”

“That's what worries me,” Martine said. She sounded nearly like she had outside Sessrúmnir in Norway, as haunted as anyone since Suyana, and for reasons he didn't understand.

(If Margot had her eye on Martine, Daniel could only wonder that Martine was so calm. Maybe she had yet to turn Margot down and realize the price of Margot's disappointment. He thought about the shadow of a small hotel and the sound of gunfire, and wondered—slipping, he was distracted, he worked hard not to think about it—where Suyana was now.)

Grace was quiet for a second. “Don't you think she's just trying to punish Argentina a little after how they voted
on the environmental amendment? It would make sense. So would you, as replacement. You did do that tour of their new toy in Norway.”

Daniel held his breath until it hurt before Martine said, “Yeah, I guess it's because of the tour.”

The song changed, and people applauded. It was an excuse to look over at the cloud of vapor smoke above Martine, and the way Grace had gone still, looking at the dance floor and not her friend, so when she spoke it seemed a less piercing question than it was.

“What are you worried about?”

Daniel wondered about the odds that Kate would be true to her word about cutting his signal when it mattered, and then thought about Suyana holding a knife in her hand and doing what no one else had been able to do for her, and the thing in her eyes that had shifted and shuttered when she realized she'd been so alone.

By the time he was thinking of anything else, he'd already slid into the booth beside Grace, and they'd frozen the conversation to look at him, the combined force of their stares nearly enough to send him scrambling back out.

“You should ask Kipa,” he said. “She's the one getting late-night visits from Margot.”

“Why on earth?” Grace asked, at the same time Martine said, “What the fuck's your problem, On the Record?”

“Not tonight,” he told Martine, hoping it was true. “And I don't know why, but if Margot was going to see her late at night, I'd be curious, wouldn't you?”

“It's more than I'm worth to be curious,” said Martine. She sat back pointedly, turned her face to the dance floor, and hissed out a stream of smoke.

Grace was still looking at him, and if it didn't seem like she quite believed him, she looked as if she wanted to. “What would Margot even have as a hold over Kipa?”

Don't lie, he thought, even he knew better than to lie now, but there were true things he didn't dare say. He settled on, “Whatever she had a year ago, against Suyana.”

From Grace's face, it was close enough to what she needed to hear. Absently she curled one hand into a fist, perfectly painted nails vanishing under her knuckles, as she slipped into the hundred-yard stare he knew by now was a Face running through their options and calculating odds.

Martine was watching them sidelong, the tips of her fingers bloodless against her cigarette.

“If Kipa's begun to pull away from the public,” Grace said, “we'll need to—”

“You sure you're off the record?”

They both startled and looked at Martine. Daniel said, “I hope I am, but that's up to somebody else's kindness.”

The song over their heads was thumping into his bones. Martine shook herself once, sequined dress moving like a fish, and looked at Grace.

“In the car on the way back from the airport, after Norway, Margot was checking her tablet every few seconds, and I thought how funny it was—it was deep night, all the press from our visit was over. I figured she was looking for vanity mentions. But she checked over and over, for a long time, until she saw something and sat back and turned out the light.”

Beside him, Grace had gone perfectly still. Martine, who was no longer looking at either of them, ground the cigarette onto the table like that could snuff it out.

“When I woke up later that morning, I heard the UARC outpost had been destroyed and Suyana was in the wind for it, and then I forgot it as hard as I fucking could, because that means I sat on some hotel stairs drinking myself stupid while Margot, the chair of the goddamn IA, was looking the place over so she could tell somebody how to blow the other one up.”

Chordata. Daniel couldn't imagine the entire organization in Margot's pocket, but he could see her convincing one or two people—Columbina maybe, maybe a mole in the UARC branch of Chordata—to do what they could, and report whatever possible. There had probably been enough
desire to blow the place that anyone with information would have been of use. Maybe someone in Chordata had even admitted to Kipa the new IA recruit they'd scored. If Daniel was in Margot's shoes, that would be what he came over unannounced at night to find out.

The world had been a singular fool. The IA Central Committee didn't have a head of intelligence these days—a sign of transparency, they'd said when the position was dissolved, a sign of international trust—but of course there was one. She'd just been good at her job.