Two agencies. One dead child. One formula that makes a warhead invisible. And one retired man holding both ends of the string.

Sarah Beth McCulley was five years old. She died on the grass in Arlington, four seconds after Sam Jameson said, “Take him.”

Homeland suspends her. Justice indicts her. A senator says her name on television, slowly, the way you say a thing you want remembered.

Then Sam finds a maintenance event on her alarm log that never happened, and the video archive in her basement panic room wiped clean. She stops calling it a mistake.

She runs. Toronto, Izmir, Tripoli. Forged papers from a Baltimore basement, a burner phone, and a money trail that keeps ending in dead men.

In Sardinia she puts a pistol on a man leaving a hilltop villa and learns he is CIA, watching the same house for different reasons. His name is Hayward. The Agency sent him to work his way into a Spanish chemist's family and steal a paint that makes weapons-grade material invisible to every detector on earth. He warned them instead. His handlers took the family apart.

Two investigations. One address.

Above both of them, a retired legend named Artemis Grange holds both strings. He has read the file on the dead child and knows exactly who ordered it. And he has already decided which of his employers to bury first.

Book Seven in the Sam Jameson series.

A Homeland Security counterespionage chief, suspended and indicted after her operation ended with a five-year-old dead in a public park, and a CIA access agent who sabotaged his own mission for the woman he was sent to exploit.