Zara didn't come to the library that night, or the next.She'd moved out of the staff quarters behind the kitchen, because the room had come with the job, and Mila had given her the spare bed in the Iron girls' wing. Alexander went to see her there twice, and both times Mila met him at the door with an apologetic face and said that Zara was sleeping, or in the shower, or out walking."She's not angry with you," Mila said, the second time, in a low voice. "She's just... she's trying to work out what to do. She's been on the phone to her mum for hours. Her mum wants her to come home.""Does she want to go?"Mila hesitated. "I don't think she knows."He walked back up to the attic and sat on his bed in the dark and stared at the wall, and for the first time since he'd arrived at Aldermoor, he seriously considered calling his father.One phone call. That was all it would take. One phone call, and his father could make the Ashcroft Family Foundation disappear, or buy the whole kitchen scho

The London offices of Ashcroft Maritime Group occupied the top six floors of a glass tower overlooking the Thames, and at eleven o'clock that night, only one light was still burning in them.Conrad Ashcroft sat alone behind a desk the size of a small boat, in an office lined with oil paintings of ships, holding a glass of whisky he hadn't touched in an hour.It had been the worst month of his life.The Greek port authority had expanded its investigation into Meridian Bulk to include three more of his subsidiaries. Two of his biggest banks had cut his credit lines. His bonds were trading at sixty-one cents on the euro, and his shareholders were calling for his head. He'd sold the Lang debt to a Luxembourg fund for eight and a half million euros, thinking it was worthless junk, and two weeks later read in the Financial Times that the fund was about to make something close to ninety million from it. And today, his son had called him from Switzerland, sobbing like a child, to tell him tha

Conrad Ashcroft stared at him as if he'd spoken in a foreign language."I don't think you understood me," he said. "I have the photograph. I have the birth certificate. I have the holding company. One button, and...""I understood you," Alexander said. "My answer is no. To all three."He walked forward until he was standing a few feet from the big man, close enough to see the burst veins in his cheeks and smell the whisky on his breath, and he kept his voice very quiet and very calm, because that was how his father did it, and because he'd learned in the last two months that calm frightened people far more than shouting ever could."Here's what I understand, Mr. Ashcroft. Your company is dying. Your banks are leaving. The Greeks are going to charge you with fraud in January, and you're so frightened about it that you've come to a boathouse in Switzerland to blackmail an eighteen-year-old." He tilted his head. "That isn't power. That's drowning."Conrad's face went red. "You little..."

Aldermoor closed for the winter break on the nineteenth of December, and Alexander flew home on a commercial flight from Zurich, in economy, with a backpack and a borrowed coat, because that was what Alex Reed would have done.Zara took the train to Basel and a budget flight to Leeds. She hugged him for a long time on the platform at Chur, with her face pressed into his neck, and made him promise to call every night."And tell your mum I said thank you," she whispered."For what?""For you." She pulled back, pink-cheeked, and laughed at herself. "God. That's the cheesiest thing I've ever said. Forget I said it.""Never," he said, and she hit him on the arm, and then the train was leaving.---His mother was waiting at the arrivals barrier at JFK, exactly where she had dropped him off in September, and when she saw him walk through the doors, she made a sound he'd never heard her make before and ran.She hugged him so hard that his backpack slid off his shoulder. Then she stepped back

Aldermoor reopened on the fifth of January, under two feet of fresh snow.The castle looked like something from a fairy tale. Every slate roof was white, every tower wore a cap of snow, and long icicles hung from the gutters and the stone gargoyles along the battlements, gleaming in the low winter sun. The lake below the cliff had frozen solid at the edges, and students were already skating on it in the afternoons, their laughter carrying up the cliff on the cold air.Alexander barely noticed any of it.He'd had exactly one message from Conrad Ashcroft over the holidays, on New Year's Eve, at midnight. Three words, from an unknown number.Nine days left.Now there were four.---"The Negotiation Trial begins on Monday," Felix said, laying a thick folder on the table in the back corner of the library on Thursday night. "Dame Sterling announced the details this morning while you were at breakfast. Every team will be given the same target company and the same budget of fifty million euro