ATIE JAMES WAS SITTING in her small apartment on the Upper West Side in New York staring at a bottle of gin she had placed carefully on her kitchen counter. An empty glass sat next to it. She put five ice cubes in the glass and then added two fingers of tonic. She sat back and examined what she had done so far. She swirled the tonic around with a spoon, the ice clinking enticingly against the sides of the glass. She eyed the bottle of gin. One drink, that was all. And didn’t she deserve it?

She had nearly been killed, for starters. And then she’d flown home to New York to find she’d been canned from her job on the death page due to budget concerns. They’d replaced her with a freelancer who was pushing eighty.

They’d also given her a hearty “Good luck, Katie!” as they had her escorted from the building by security. She wanted to run back in, take the Pulitzers she’d won, and cram them down their fat throats.

Instead, she’d come home and was staring at the gin. She would stop at one. She knew she could. She could just feel that she had the strength to stop at one. She unscrewed the top, smelled the delectable gin. She dropped a wedge of lime in the glass, swirled it around as she worked herself up for the final step, the adding of the Bombay Sapphire. It would be a toast to her new career—in what she didn’t yet know.

But that wasn’t the whole story. The thing was, when she was sober she saw Behnam in her dreams. The little Afghan boy who had died so that she could win her second Pulitzer always came to her when she slept. He seemed very much alive, his curly hair being lifted by a stifling desert wind. The smile on his face would melt the hardest heart, light the darkest night. But the dream always ended with him lying dead in her arms. Always dead was Behnam.

It was only when she was drunk that she didn’t see him. It was only when she was wasted that he stayed away. And that meant she had seen him pretty much every night over the last six months. He had died hundreds of times after being resurrected in her dreams three or four times a night. She was tired of the spectacle. She wanted a drink. No, she wanted to be drunk. She didn’t want to see Behnam alive and then dead.

As she sat back on her bare haunches, a ratty old sweatshirt her only clothing, she stared out the window. There was a rally going on in Central Park today. It was a protest against the Russian government. Tens of thousands of people were marching and waving “Remember Konstantin” flags. Katie couldn’t know the flags had been secretly delivered to the rally organizers by a firm working for a shell corporation with an untraceable connection to Pender & Associates. Twenty million of the flags had been manufactured and distributed throughout the world for rallies just like this one.

Katie had decided not attend the protest. She had other things on her mind.

She glanced away from the window and happened to stare through the blue glass of the gin bottle to the TV beyond.

Breaking news. Right. There was always breaking news. The next big story. In the recent past she’d already be on a plane, hurtling five hundred miles an hour right to the epicenter of the storm. And loving it. Loving every second of it until it was over and the next big story came along. And then the one after that in a psychotically charged, adrenaline-burning race that had no finish line.

London again. Well, London had its share of breaking news, though nothing bad had happened while Katie had been there. Just her luck. She took a deep breath and idly looked at the building with police tape all around it. It looked familiar. She sat up straighter and forgot about the gin.

What was the woman saying? Westminster? What group? Katie jumped to her feet, jogged into the living room, and turned up the sound.

The newsperson was standing in the rain while police and people in white uniforms raced here and there. A curious, neck-craning crowd was being held back by portable barriers. TV film crews were arrayed up and down the street, their satellite masts flinging the story electronically around the world one frantic byte and pixel at a time.

“The Phoenix Group would be the last place most people would expect something like this to happen,” the reporter was saying. “Situated on a quiet London street, it has been described as a think tank conducting research on global policies covering myriad social and scientific subjects. Virtually all the people who worked here were scholars and scientists, many of them former academics that one would hardly expect to be the target of a brutal murder rampage. An official list of the dead has not been released pending notification of family. While details remain sketchy it appears that the massacre—”

Massacre? Did the woman say massacre? Katie slumped down on the carpet, her heart thudding against her chest. Her limbs felt dead.

The reporter continued, “As of right now, the authorities are only saying that there are nearly thirty victims inside the building. There has been no indication of any survivors.”

No indication of any survivors? Katie glanced at her watch and did a quick time zone calculation as her reporter mentality kicked in despite her rising panic. It was evening in London now. A few hours for the bodies to be discovered, the police called, and the news people and crowds to get there. It might have happened around three or four that afternoon. Then the panic resumed.

She bolted up, raced to her phone, grabbed the business card Anna had given her, and made the call. It went immediately to voice mail. Katie choked back a sob as Anna’s precise voice came on the line asking her to please leave a message. Katie hung up without saying anything.

Her next thought hit her like a lightning bolt. “Shaw!” she exclaimed.

She called the number he had given her. It rang four times and she thought it too was about to go to voice mail when someone answered.

“Allo?” a woman’s voice said in French.

Confused for a moment Katie said, “Um... can I speak to Shaw?”

The woman at the other end spoke to her again in French.

Katie thought quickly, trying to conjure up her college French and the little she had learned while overseas. She asked the woman if she spoke English and she said a bit. Katie asked her where Shaw was.

The woman did not know that name.

“You’ve got his phone.”

Now the woman sounded confused but asked her if she was family.

That didn’t sound too good, thought Katie. For a surreal moment she wondered if Shaw had been with Anna at The Phoenix Group and been killed too. Yet why would a Frenchwoman have his phone if the massacre had taken place in London? “Yes,” she told the woman. “I’m family. His sister. Who are you?”

The woman said that she was a nurse and her name was Marguerite.

“A nurse? I don’t understand.”

“This man, this Shaw is in hospital,” Marguerite said.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He has been injured. He is in surgery.”

“Where?”

“In Paris.”

“Which hospital?”

The woman told her.

“Will he be okay?”

Marguerite said she didn’t know the answer to that.

Katie ran to pack. Using her millions of frequent flyer miles, she booked a seat on an Air France flight leaving JFK that night.

She tried to sleep on the flight over, but couldn’t. As other passengers dozed all around her, Katie’s eyes were glued to the news channel on her personal monitor. There was a bit more information about the Phoenix Group massacre, as the media had initially termed it, but nothing really enlightening. Katie had tried to call Anna before boarding the plane, but it still went to voice mail.

As the jet zoomed across the ocean, Katie asked herself why she was doing this. She barely knew Anna or Shaw. And as Shaw had made quite clear, and quite correctly too, she had no right butting into their lives.

So why are you doing this, Katie? Why?

Perhaps the answer was as simple as she had nothing else in her life. And while she didn’t know Anna and Shaw very well, the very dramatic way in which she had met them both made the pair seem far more than mere acquaintances. She cared about them. She wanted them to be happy. And now? And now she felt as though a very close friend had died.

She landed at seven in the morning local time, passed through customs, and grabbed a taxi to the hospital, which was near the center of Paris.

She paid off the cabbie and ran through the front doors. Using her broken French she quickly found someone who spoke English and asked for the location of Shaw’s room. There was no one here under that name, she was told.

Damn it! She mentally kicked herself for not asking the nurse on the phone the name Shaw had been admitted under.

“He was badly injured. He was in surgery yesterday. He’s a big man, six-five or so, dark hair, really blue eyes.”

The woman looked at her blankly. “It is a large hospital, madame.”

“I spoke to a nurse here about him. Her name was Marguerite.”

“Ah, Marguerite, bon, that is helpful,” said the woman. She made a call, spoke for a minute, and then nodded at Katie. “Monsieur Ramsey is in room 805.”

As Katie ran to the elevator bank, her small carry-on rolling behind her, the woman started speaking into the phone again, her worried gaze on Katie’s back.