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family in Madrid, an Italian playboy from Milan, and an elderly French financier with multiple residences and a floating palace he usually calls home. The only common thread is the uniqueness of the killings, the absence of leads or follow-ups, and the fact that they all took place within a time span of forty-eight hours. August twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth, to be exact.”
    “If there’s linkage, that’s where it could be, isn’t it?”
    “I just said that, but that’s all there is.”
    “No, there’s more,” interrupted the deputy director.
    “What?”
    “Information we deleted from the file.”
    “For God’s sake,
why?
It’s maximum classified, you just said so.”
    “Sometimes those folders get into the wrong hands, don’t they?”
    “Not if handled properly … good Christ, you’re serious,
it’s
serious.”
    “Extremely.”
    “Then you’re not playing fair, Frank. You asked me to evaluate data when it’s not all there.”
    “You came up with the right answers. The lack of traceability and the time span.”
    “So would anybody else.”
    “I doubt as quickly, but then we’re not looking for anyone else, Cam. We want you.”
    “Flattery, a bonus, and increased contingency funds will get you my undivided attention. What’s the missing dirt?”
    “Orally delivered, nothing on paper.”
    “Very,
very
serious—”
    “I’m afraid so.… First, we have to go back to the natural death of an old woman a thousand miles from Moscow several months ago. The priest, who was with her at the end, finally sent a letter to the Russian authorities after debating with himself for weeks. In it he wrote that the woman, the wife of the Soviet Union’s preeminent nuclear physicist, reportedly killed by a crazed bear during a hunt, said her husband had in fact been murdered by unknown men who shot the animal and forced it into the scientist’s path. They subsequently disappeared.”
    “Wait a minute!” Pryce broke in. “I was only a kid then, but I remember reading about it or hearing it on television. ‘Yuri’ something or other. It was the sort of thing that rivets a kid’s imagination—a famous person torn apart by a large animal. Yes, I remember.”
    “People my age remember it very well,” said Shields. “I’d just started with the Agency, but it was common knowledge here at Langley that Yurievich wanted to stop theproliferation of nuclear weapons. We mourned his death; a few of us even questioned the veracity of the reports—there was one rumor that Yurievich had actually been shot, not killed by the bear—but the underlying question was, why would Moscow order the execution of its most brilliant physicist?”
    “The answer?” asked the former case officer.
    “We didn’t have one. We couldn’t understand, so we accepted Tass’s account.”
    “And now?”
    “A different equation. The old woman, apparently with her last breath, blamed her husband’s death, his murder, on an organization called the Matarese, claiming it was—in her words—‘the consummate evil.’ Ring any bells, Cam?”
    “None. Only a pattern of untraceability as it applies to these recent killings.”
    “Good. That’s what I wanted to hear. Now we jump forward to the French financier, René Pierre Mouchistine, who was gunned down on his yacht.”
    “Along with four attorneys from four different countries,” interjected Pryce. “No fingerprints, which assumes the killers wore surgical gloves, no traceable shell casings, because they were all so common, and no witnesses, because the crew was ordered off the boat while the conference was taking place.”
    “No witnesses, no leads—untraceability.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Sorry, it’s wrong.”
    “Another surprise, Frank?”
    “A beaut,” replied the deputy director. “A close friend, later determined to be Mouchistine’s personal valet of almost thirty years, knew how to reach our ambassador in Madrid. A meeting was arranged, and this man, one