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affair with an ottoman sitting under a massive lamp whose base was made of carved oak. Grandfather had carved it on one of his pilgrimages to the caverns in the mountains. Sam cherished it because so much of his grandfather was in the wood that had been held in his hands and molded by his knife. It was an eagle with its wings spread. Sam's Indian name was Kalok, which meant "eagle."
     
    Sam sat in his chair and Harry promptly jumped in his lap and settled in. On the coffee table was a baseball mitt that had belonged to his son, Bud. Some days Sam would pick it up and put his hand in it. Today he studied the old leather mitt and noticed that it needed oil. There was still an ache in him that felt like it would split him open when he thought about Bud. It had been four years. Today he would not put on the glove and feel the leather that his son had touched. It seemed unholy to mix love with the rage he felt at Gaudet. Attachments were hard because the world carried no guarantees of their permanence. Bud was gone, Grandfather was gone, and Suzanne was gone—and now Paul as well, one of his best friends.
     
    Sam also kept memorabilia from the period before he had learned that he was a Tilok. There were pictures of him with his father in Alaska, a long-ago life that ended with Sam's discovery at age twenty-one that he was half Tilok with a living mother he had never met. All his life he'd been told that his mother was a mestizo, a whore, a drunk, and dead.
     
    The phone rang, the display indicating it was Jill.
     
    "You know he loves it so much when you call."
     
    "What? Have you got that boy's phone bugged?"
     
    "He calls me all excited."
     
    "How are things with Anna?"
     
    "I think you lead a charmed life. Right at the moment of truth with Anna, the CIA calls. First they say nothing all week. Now they demand we take the French as a client on the Gaudet case."
     
    "As in, France?"
     
    "Yep. And you'll never guess who the French have hired to represent their interests in this matter?"
     
    "I suppose Figgy wants to meet immediately."
     
    "You're a mind reader."
     
    "Tell Anna I'll meet her at Forbes for dinner." He wondered if the subject of his house would come up at dinner. Actually, he wondered whether the world would be the same by dinner.
     
     
     
    Grady Wade sat at her desk with a stack of Michael Bowden's books and a letter from his publisher. Her half-full coffee mug read: if it's not outrageous, it's boring. From what she'd read—and she'd now read all of Michael Bowden's books—he seemed anything but outrageous, but far from boring. A welcome surprise for a young woman who found little in life that invigorated her.
     
    At the end of her career as a stripper, Grady had told Sam that the major problem in dancing naked for a living had been the truth in the coffee mug inscription. In the end that had been what frightened her most. Perhaps a life of kids and family and an old oak tree in the backyard would leave her listless and drive her to constant excess. The irony, of course, was that her cure, working for Sam's organization, was undoubtedly more outrageous than dancing naked. Actually, Grady did two things at this desk: work for Sam and study for college, and which activity received her attention depended on the demands of each.
     
    Anna Wade, Grady's aunt, had a profound need for Grady to become "self-actualized"—a normal person would say "succeed"—and Sam did his best to play godfather to Grady, determined that she make herself into something that she would eventually approve of. The catch there was that Sam claimed unique insight into what it was that Grady should approve. Many days she felt like a social-conditioning project, but even that felt better than working in a strip club and coming down from a coke addiction. And so Grady studied, worked, slept a bit, and had little time for boys. Perhaps she had overloaded on men in her former occupation. For a time she had dated a man named Clint,