It took Hoffmann six hours, two favors, and a very expensive phone call to arrange a video visit with Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, and at four o'clock that afternoon, Frankfurt time, Ethan sat in front of a laptop in a borrowed office and watched his ex-wife walk into frame.Claire had always known how to enter a room. Even here, even now, she did it well. She sat down in the plastic chair on the other side of the screen with her chin up and her shoulders back, as if she were arriving at a gala rather than a prison visiting room. The orange jumpsuit should have made her look small, but it couldn't hide the long legs or the slim waist or the full breasts that had once turned every head on Fifth Avenue. Her hair was pulled back in a plain ponytail now, and there were lines around her eyes that hadn't been there a year ago, but her face was still the face he had fallen in love with, and for a second, it hurt to look at her."Ethan," she said, with a small, crooked smile. "You loo

The photograph arrived on Ethan's phone at six in the morning, Frankfurt time, and he looked at it for a full minute before he could make himself breathe.He had known Victoria Cross for almost thirty years. She had married his father when Ethan was four years old, after his real mother walked away, and she had never once pretended to love him. She'd been cold at birthdays and colder at funerals, and when Richard died, she had stood at the graveside in black pearls without shedding a single tear. Ethan had always assumed she simply hated him for being another woman's son.He'd never imagined she had a son of her own.His phone rang before he could put it down. It was Seraphina."I'm in Geneva," she said, without saying hello. "I took the first train this morning. Marcus said the Swiss records were sealed, but sealed records still exist on paper somewhere, and I know someone at the civil registry office who owes me a favor.""Sera, you didn't have to...""Yes, I did." Her voice was tir

The police helicopter set them down on a hospital helipad on the edge of Zurich at ten-forty, and by ten fifty-five, Ethan was sitting in the back of an unmarked BMW across the street from the private bank where Lorenz Graf kept his money.Albrecht sat in the front passenger seat with a radio earpiece in one ear, and Hoffmann sat beside Ethan, chewing her thumbnail. Two Swiss federal officers waited in a second car farther down the block. The Bahnhofstrasse was busy with shoppers and tourists, people carrying bags from Cartier and Chanel and pausing in front of the window displays, and nobody paid any attention to the gray sedan parked by the tram stop."There," Albrecht said quietly.Graf came around the corner on foot, walking fast. He wore the same charcoal overcoat Ethan had seen in the photograph from Salzburg, and he carried a slim leather briefcase in one hand. His silver hair was uncombed, and even from across the street, Ethan could see that his face was gray with exhaustion.

Courtroom 9B at the Manhattan Family Court had never been so full.Reporters packed the benches at the back, shoulder to shoulder with their notebooks open, and two court officers stood at the doors turning people away. Outside on Lafayette Street, a dozen satellite trucks lined the curb, and every major network in the country had a camera pointed at the courthouse steps. The story of Ethan Cross had everything the public loved: a billionaire, a terror charge, a secret son, a beautiful wife who had walked out on him, and a red-haired assistant photographed in his arms at one in the morning.Ethan sat at the respondents' table in a dark suit, with Hoffmann's colleague, a blunt Manhattan litigator named Dorothy Pryce, beside him. He had slept for three hours. He had shaved, and showered, and drunk four cups of coffee, and he still felt like he was moving through water.Across the aisle, Victoria sat at the petitioner's table in a cream suit with her pearls at her throat and her silver h

By nine o'clock that night, the war room on Floor 40 of Vault Three was full.Marcus sat at the main console with three monitors glowing in front of him and an energy drink at his elbow. Vance leaned against the concrete wall with his arms folded. Volkov had taken a chair by the door, where he could see everyone who came in, and was cleaning a pistol on his knee with the calm of a man doing a crossword. Natalia sat in the corner with a blanket around her shoulders, her eyes red and swollen, clutching her phone as though it might ring with her son's voice at any moment.Chloe sat beside Ethan at the long steel table. She had refused to go back to Greenwich. Alexander was safe at the estate with her grandfather and a dozen of Volkov's men, and she had made it very clear, in the car on the way back from Green Haven, that she was done sitting in houses while other people decided what happened to her family."Walk me through it," Ethan said. "What exactly are the master keys?"Marcus spun