He reached for her arm. “Maura, please. Let’s not walk away from each other like this. You know I love you. I just need time to work this through.”

She saw the pain carved on his face. All the months of deception, the indecision and guilt, had left their scars, had darkened whatever joy he’d found with her. She could have comforted him with just a smile, a reassuring squeeze of his arm, but at that moment she could not see past her own pain. All she could think of was retaliation.

“I think we’ve run out of time,” she said, and walked away, into the terminal. The instant the glass doors whooshed shut behind her, she regretted her words. But when she stopped to look back through the window, he was already climbing into his car.

THE MAN’S LEGS were splayed apart, exposing ruptured testicles and the seared skin of buttocks and perineum. The morgue photo had flashed onto the screen without any advance warning from the lecturer, yet no one sitting in the darkened hotel conference room gave so much as a murmur of dismay. This audience was inured to the sight of ruined and broken bodies. For those who have seen and touched charred flesh, who are familiar with its stench, a sterile slide show holds few horrors. In fact, the white-haired man seated beside Maura had dozed off several times, and in the semi-darkness she could see his head bob as he struggled between sleep and wakefulness, impervious to the succession of gruesome photos glowing on the screen.

“What you see here are typical injuries sustained from a car bomb. The victim was a forty-five-year-old Russian businessman who climbed into his Mercedes one morning-a very nice Mercedes, I might add. When he turned the ignition key, he set off the booby trap of explosives that had been placed underneath his seat. As you can see from the X-rays…” The speaker clicked the computer mouse, and the next PowerPoint slide appeared on screen.