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it.”
    “She’s in Upstate New York this week. Scouting out a water project.” Callie checked her watch. “Lunchtime back there. I’ll try giving her a call.” She paused with her smartphone to her ear, then said, “Hello, Mariene. It’s Callie. Please call me when you get this. Thanks!” It was obviously a message to Kunstler’s voicemail. Callie clicked off.
    Antigone Wells had listened carefully and could detect no hint of storm clouds in the message, none of the anger she knew the younger woman must be feeling now. “Keep it light all the way,” she advised. “Just bring her back, give her a reason to meet with you, and we’ll arrange to include those officials from Los Angeles.”
    “Easy enough,” Callie agreed. “She’s overdue on justifying her expense reports.”
    * * *
    Mariene Kunstler looked at the message waiting on her smartphone’s display. She recognized Callie Praxis’s number, of course. She even punched in and listened to the woman’s innocent request for Mariene to call her back. She listened to it twice. No harm in that, because the voicemail service lived on Mariene’s side of the connection and so was untraceable.
    She heard nothing suspicious in Callie’s voice or wording. She might even have called her back—except that would have been traceable. Come to think of it, the phone itself had been bought for Mariene by Praxis Engineering & Construction, which paid for the account. She knew from her police experience that they could initiate a trace of the phone’s location without even bothering to ring it. Almost by reflex, she switched off the device’s power button, located the nearest waste container, and threw it in.
    Mariene was no longer registered at her hotel in Batavia, New York. She had flown out of Buffalo Niagara International Airport six hours earlier and was now in transit through JFK International. And the ticket she held was not in the name of Mariene Kunstler or anything like it. Instead, it matched a South African passport, credit cards, and pink-banded driver’s license she had cut from the lining of her second suitcase before heaving it—along with her PE&C business and credit cards, original travel documents, and the company-logoed fountain pen she carried—into a random dumpster near to where she made the taxi exchange between La Guardia and Kennedy. She had learned long ago to have nothing in her possession that was either personalized or monogrammed—no jewelry, no note cards or accessories, no underwear—so that any identity she needed would pass the closest inspection. And the photograph inside every passport clearly showed her Black Widow tattoo. She was a professional.
    And because she was a pro, Mariene had arranged for ongoing contact, using coded words and fallback numbers, with every person in whom she had the slightest interest. That morning she had routinely called Bernardo Gorgoni, Melissa Willbrot, and the half dozen other people with whom she had conducted illicit dealings in her role as PE&C marketing head. All had checked in fine—code word “sunny day”—except for Willbrot, who hadn’t picked up her messages in two days on either her primary or secondary service.
    Was that enough to cause someone like Mariene Kunstler to drop to the floor and roll, shred her current persona, and disappear sideways into the great, wide world?
    Probably not for someone like her, which was why other people who tried to do what she was doing eventually got caught. But not her.
    Now her only problem was figuring out how to get back in touch with Matteo di Rienzi, explain this mess, and not get herself killed over it.
    * * *
    After one whole day without hearing from Mariene Kunstler and leaving three more messages on her smartphone, Callie Praxis contacted the hotel in Batavia and learned that the woman had checked out some hours before getting her first call. Kunstler’s onward travel plans were not known to the concierge.
    Callie then contacted the