1

Blessington, Ireland

“She was a witch, of course.”

Salem’s head snapped up. “Excuse me?”

She’d been sneaking a glance at her cell phone. Bel had texted her, this interview was going nowhere, and there was a ham, cheese, and mustard on fluffy white bread calling for her from the backseat of the rental car. All those distractions were suddenly forgotten, the unpleasant thump of Muirinn Molony’s words echoing off the rustic cottage walls.

“A witch. My grandmother.” Mrs. Molony, several times a grandmother herself, smiled, revealing tiny twisted teeth.

Salem guessed the woman didn’t receive many visitors on this lonely County Wicklow road. In fact, she’d assumed that’s why the woman had called the FBI. Forced Bedside Interrogations, is what Agent Len Curson, Salem’s current partner, called these visits. They had spread like a virus since the UN had advertised its threat line in advance of the First International Women’s Rights Conference to be held in London in three short weeks.

“Many women were considered witches back then,” Mrs. Molony continued, her smile still in place. “At least that’s what they were called by the people who didn’t understand the country ways. Really, my Maimeó was a midwife, not that it woulda mattered, would it have? Nurse, healer, cook. They were all labeled as witches. You sure I can’t get you a bit of tea?”

The woman spoke it all as one long word, her accent thick. Salem was still trying to catch up. “Your grandmother was a witch?”

Mrs. Molony released a sound of gentle disgust. Och. She stood, her head nearly brushing the low ceiling. “It’ll be easier to show you, won’t it?”

Salem glanced at her partner. Judging by his sour face, he was more convinced than ever that they were on a snipe hunt. He brushed imaginary dust off his ironed jeans and followed the woman outside her cottage.

Salem took up the rear.

Her initial shock at the mention of witches had passed. Mrs. Molony had been referring to country superstition, not a world conspiracy. Salem stepped out into a rolling green she had yet to get used to, surrounded by scrawny chickens, a low stone wall, and the smell of manure. The weather had changed three times since she’d stepped off the small plane at the Dublin airport.

Len had driven to Mrs. Molony’s house. While he’d input the directions into the GPS, Salem had swallowed an Ativan, a habit she’d re-upped since joining the FBI’s Cipher Bureau two months earlier. The Cipher Bureau—or, as it was more commonly called, the Black Chamber—had been dreamed up in 1919, when the US State Department and the army proposed a peace-time cryptanalysis bureau. The organization initially disguised itself as a commercial coding company and set up stakes in New York City. The front office produced commercial coding while the back office cracked the diplomatic communications of some of the most powerful nations in the world.

It’d been shut down after Secretary of State Henry Stimson famously declared in 1929 that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” President Gina Hayes, the first female US president, felt no such compunction. Her first unofficial act after taking office was to revive the Black Chamber as a top-secret branch of the FBI.

Only a handful of people knew.

The revived Black Chamber was licensed to operate across international boundaries in service of Americans. Len Curson and Salem Wiley were two of the first agents hired. Their assignment? Intercept and decode every threat coming in advance of the UN’s First International Women’s Rights Conference.

The conference was drawing leaders from all over the world, including President Gina Hayes, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, leaders of NGOs and progressive organizations, professors and researchers, actors from around the globe, and most exciting of all, Fereshteh, the sixteen-year-old Saudi Arabian activist so famous that the world knew the girl by a single name.

Salem had been living in a cubicle for the three weeks since she’d been stationed in London, spending her days sifting through piles of dead-end code before heading home to gray temp barracks not much bigger or brighter than her cubicle. When she and Agent Curson had been assigned their first field job—rare for straight-up cryptologists—she’d jumped at it, even though it meant taking a four-seater plane across the water to Dublin.

A Mrs. Muirinn Molony had called the threat line, reporting that Fereshteh and President Gina Hayes would be killed at the conference. She insisted she needed to speak to agents in person, to show them the threat, that lives were at stake. These agents must be able to crack codes, she’d said.

Following the lonely country woman down the rutted garden path, Salem wondered what series of life choices had brought her to exactly this moment.

Mrs. Molony tightened her apron as she walked, raising her voice so Len and Salem could both hear. “The symbol is just ahead. It’s after I uncovered it that I had the dream about the assassination of Fereshteh and your president, of course. Straight from my dead Maimeó.”

Len tossed a glance over his shoulder. Told you so, it said. Snipe hunt.

Salem stepped past Len as they crested a small hill, determined to treat the woman with respect. So what if she wasn’t all there? She had gotten them out of their cubicle and into this lovely green countryside. “You weren’t actually informed of a threat, Mrs. Molony? You dreamt it?”

“Aye, at first.” She had a humping walk, as if one leg was longer than the other. She limped through the hedgerow and over a line of stones. “Then the visions came. I see them eyes open or closed now, I do. I wouldn’ta wasted your time otherways. Right around this bend we go.”

They stepped into a clearing surrounded by knobby, gnarled trees no taller than Salem. She smelled it before she saw it: fresh-dug brown dirt, loamy and alive. A headstone tipped three feet away. The trees cast fingered shadows over the grave.

Mrs. Molony nodded. “Here’s where I was talking. The well I was to dig. That’s where I uncovered the symbol that brought you here.”

Salem pushed a loose curl from her eyes. “You dug a well by your grandmother’s grave?”

The woman shrugged. “That’s where the water is.”

Salem didn’t meet Len’s glance. Instead, she focused on the story she’d relay to Bel—Bel, who was in physical therapy and learning to navigate the world without workable legs, who’d threatened to drug Salem and tattoo Loser on her forehead if she didn’t take the Black Chamber job, who’d joked that it was easier to land dates in a wheelchair because all the women she met wanted to take care of her.

Salem was smiling when the bird swooped at her. “Gah!”

She swung wildly at the air, ignoring Len’s startled laughter. The magpie flapped and squawked before taking off for the copse of trees.

Salem straightened her jacket and glanced around, embarrassed. Muirinn was staring at her, her rheumy eyes suddenly clear. Her smile was gone. Salem’s stomach clenched uncomfortably.

A ripple passed across Muirinn’s lined face. She pointed a bent finger at Salem, and then the bird. “Tip your hat at it, or you’re destined for a life of bad luck.”

Lady, you don’t know the half of it. But Salem made a tipping motion with an imaginary hat. Len coughed.

Muirinn’s smile returned just as a cloud scudded over the sun. “That’s all right, then. Here it is.” She stepped to the fresh-dug hole and indicated that Len and Salem should do the same. “When I first saw the symbol, it put the heart crossways in me. Thought it was a tiny set of graves right next to me Maimeó’s.”

Len reached the hole first. He went completely still.

Salem stepped beside him.

She followed his gaze.

Her breath turned to dust in her throat.

There, in a divot of dirt as thick and fresh as blood, someone had first dug and then scraped away an area the size of a manhole cover. In the center, a diorama jutted like teeth from the ground.

It was an almost perfect replica of Stonehenge.

Constructed over four thousand years ago, the original Stonehenge was made up of enormous rocks, some of them bluestones transported more than 200 miles. How the stones were moved was shrouded with as much mystery as the purpose of the stone ring. Some archeologists argued that it was a burial site. Others, citing the unusual number of deformities and the broad ethnic diversity in the human remains found at the site, contended that the original Stonehenge was a place of mystical healing. Still others were sure that it was a type of astronomical calendar.

The original Stonehenge was different from the miniature Mrs. Molony had uncovered in only two regards: the size, and Mrs. Molony’s had an extra piece.

And if archeologists could see what Salem was looking at now, they’d have no question what Stonehenge was built for. But that’s not why Salem’s heart was thudding in the cage of her chest.

No, what had her suddenly feeling like a hunted animal was the tiny letters carved on that extra piece, their edges dull but still legible: mercy.

The same three initials found on the locket worn by Bel’s mother the night she was murdered.

Former FBI agent Clancy Johnson sat across the table from the connection, surrounded by the clamor of Rome. Clancy’d been on the move since he’d bungled the assassination of President Gina Hayes. He was tired of running. “It’s got to happen in London.”

The connection’s brow furrowed. “Her security detail will be even higher outside of her regular routine.”

“Yes and no.” Clancy patted his shirt and tugged out a pack of Camels. He’d quit six years earlier but had decided that as a dead man walking, the least he deserved was to smoke.

“More security, less certainty,” he continued. “It’ll be chaos at the convention. Protestors. Media. That girl has the world on fire. Everyone will be watching her. Plus, we have someone the president trusts on our side.”

“Who?”

Clancy grabbed the sleeve of the waiter passing by. “Light?”

The waiter scowled but flicked a matchbook out of his pocket. The one good thing about Rome was that everyone smoked. That, and the pepper cheese pasta dish they served. Clancy could bathe in the stuff, it was that good. He inhaled the soothing fingers of smoke, letting them caress his lungs from the inside. “Before I give up that information, I’m going to need verification you’re with the Hermitage.”

Across the table, the man’s face started twitching. Clancy first thought the connection was going to smile. Then it looked like the guy was on the north side of a seizure, which’d be a damn shame because it would mean Clancy’d have to get dressed up and sell this story to someone else. A half second later, the twitches rode deeper, and a sound like wishbones snapping came off the guy’s face.

Clancy wondered if he was on some weird hidden camera show.

Or maybe he was asleep, dreaming this whole time?

Then the man’s face shifted entirely. Suddenly, he was so beautiful it hurt to look at him. If Clancy’d had any food in his body, he’d have shit himself.

The man spoke, his eyes watering from pain, his face an angel’s. “In Europe we don’t call ourselves the Hermitage. Here we’re the Order.”