Hennessy’s vision blurred. He saw the face of Professor Hani Ibrahim hovering before him, the same wide and disbelieving eyes as when he’d first displayed his FBI identification at the door of Ibrahim’s MIT office, snapped on the handcuffs, booked him into the detention center, and then walked him past news cameras into federal court for his arraignment.

As Hennessy watched what he knew was nothing but the projected face of his own guilt, the economist’s brows furrowed, and his pupils contracted into a stare, and then into a glare of accusation.

The image perished in a mortar burst of floodlights that exploded around him, turning night into artificial noon. Stripped of the shadow’s protection, Hennessy imagined crosshairs marking the front of his trench coat and a distant figure steadying a barrel and squeezing a trigger.

He bolted down the zigzagging marble steps and

ducked under the pedestrian bridge. But even as he bent over to catch his breath, with blood hammering at his temples and the frozen air biting at his throat, he cringed at his paranoia: Not everything worth dying for is worth killing for.

Hennessy crept to the shadow’s edge, where he obtained a view of the Vieux Port, fifteen hundred yards away. The building façades glowed yellow, orange, and purple in the lights reflecting off the water. He pulled binoculars from his coat pocket and scanned the bordering streets, his shoulder braced against a granite wall, afraid to blink, taking long, slow breaths to keep the lenses steady.

One minute passed, then two or five. The time seemed discontinuous, measured not by the watch on his wrist, but by a mental clock that pulsated with fear, guilt, and shame, and with the hope that the man he came to meet would find a way to meet him.

Hennessy wondered what excuse Federal Reserve Chairman Milton Abrams would give for his late arrival at the French president’s dinner, and whether it would be inert enough that it wouldn’t draw to him the intelligence services that enveloped the International Economic Forum like an invisible chemical cloud.