UBLIN WAS ONE OF Shaw’s favorite cities. With a pub and bookstore on virtually every corner, what wasn’t to love? Half the population was under thirty and the second most spoken language was Mandarin Chinese: young, diverse, and well-read pub dwellers, who often settled differences with a glib Irish tongue, speedy Irish fists, or sometimes both.

Shaw had gotten into two fights in Dublin pubs, both one-punch victories for him. He could have held back and made them suffer, but combat to him had always had one rule: when given the opening, deliver the haymaker and let somebody else sweat the eulogy.

When the opponents had regained consciousness they’d each asked the victor his name.

“Shaw.”

“Scottish?”

“No.” The truth was Shaw didn’t really know his origins. For him, one past was often as good as another, when you needed it to be.

“Well, damn, that explains it,” one of them had said in his brogue, with soft, truncated vowels and rock-hard consonants as he rubbed his smashed jaw. “You’re bloody Irish!”

After tossing his bags in his hotel room and changing clothes, Shaw pounded along the 709 hectares of Phoenix Park, a green paradise over twice the size of Central Park. Along his run he passed the residences of the U.S. ambassador and the Irish president and failed to salute at either one, though at various times he’d worked for both as a freelancer. He covered five miles in half an hour. Not his personal best, but a good pace. He could run it faster and he knew the time would come when he would have to.

He returned to his hotel, took two showers, put on lotion and extra swipes of deodorant, and still swore he could smell the stink of the Amsterdam canal oozing from his every pore. He checked his watch. He still had some time to kill so he took a stroll, finally reaching the spot on the river Liffey where as recently as 1916 the Brits had sent a gunboat up and commenced lobbing shells into Dublin proper to quell the “Uprising.” It was no wonder, Shaw thought, that the Irish were still a bit prickly with respect to their neighbors to the east.

Wars. They were the easiest things to start and hardest things to end. Shaw knew this, unfortunately, from experience.

He checked his watch again. It was time to go see Anna.

Anna Fischer. Born in Stuttgart, university-educated in England and France, she was now currently living in London, except when she was giving a speech, which she was doing in Dublin. Hence Shaw was here too. He and Anna often hooked up around the world, yet this time was different. And the nerveless Shaw suddenly felt his heart rate quicken and his breathing grow more shallow. It really was time.