Washington, DC

April

The young woman climbed out of a taxi near the FDR memorial in West Potomac Park. It was almost midnight, and she zipped up her blue nylon jacket against the cold spring air. When she dug in her pocket, she found that she had only enough dollars to give the driver the exact fare, so she offered him a twenty-euro note for the tip.

“Es tut mir leid,” she murmured, apologizing.

The driver replied with a grumble of annoyance. Even so, he snatched the crumpled foreign bill from her outstretched fingers, then screeched away from the curb so quickly that she had to jump back to avoid the vehicle running over her toes. The cab’s tires splashed through a pool of muddy water, which sprayed the cuffs of her red jeans and the suede tops of her Morgen Trainers.

She waited where she was and didn’t move until the taxi had disappeared. Those were her instructions, which she’d followed precisely since landing at Reagan National two hours earlier. Take a cab, not an Uber. Don’t take the first one in line; skip the first two, and take the third. Give your destination as the National Archives, and when you get there, cross the mall on foot. Leave your phone on, but hide it near the fountain where it’s not likely to be found. Then take a second cab to the FDR memorial.

Only a paranoid mind would insist on those precautions, but the man she was meeting believed in conspiracies. His whole life had been about creating fiction that was more real than the so-called truth. That was why she’d chosen him for her story. She needed someone who was willing to reject the lies that everyone else believed.

Meine Lügen, she thought. My own lies! The lies that kill!

When the taxi was gone, the woman—she was twenty-eight years old—shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket and marched quickly into the park. She was tall, with a thin, gangly frame and messy black hair parted in the middle. Her face was elongated and narrow, her chin making a deep U, her small nose sculpted with sharp ridges, her pale skin dotted with freckles. She had thin lips and a mouth not easily given to smiling. Her dark eyes always studied the world with a grim stare, but they were also eyes that missed very little.

She crossed the plaza, where she spotted FDR’s famous saying carved into a stone wall: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But Roosevelt had been wrong. She knew there was plenty to fear.

As if to prove that was true, a sharp metallic click stopped her in her tracks. It sounded to her ears like the cocking of a gun somewhere in the darkness. She studied the gnarled tree trunks and looked for the source of the threat. She didn’t see anyone else, but the sickly sweet smell of marijuana and the low rattle of a cough told her there were unseen strangers watching her in the park. The street people hid in places like this, but they weren’t the ones who frightened her.

It was the others. The men from the Pyramid.

Had they found her?

Hurrying now, the woman continued to the paved sidewalk that ran beside the Tidal Basin. Cherry blossoms blew off the trees in clouds like pink snow. The overhead lights cast strange shadows and made her body look like a giant. She was in the open now. A target. But how could they even know where she was? How could they already know she was planning to betray them? She’d been so careful. She’d told no one what she was going to do.

Except for Oskar. She couldn’t leave him behind and not explain why. But even her message to him had been hidden, left behind with a friend, and she doubted he would find it until long after this night was over.

Even so, her instincts told her that she was being watched. She looked nervously behind her to make sure she was still alone, and then she followed the path beside the glistening water. She passed several empty benches until she found the one she wanted—the one that had a small X scratched on the seat in white chalk. Another precaution—a way to make sure she really was the woman he was expecting to meet.

She took a seat, checked her watch, and saw that it was five minutes until midnight. Five minutes until he was supposed to join her.

Across the water, the tower of the Washington Monument glowed like a rocket ready for launch. Stars gleamed over her head in the cloudless, moonless sky. It was a beautiful night. Perfect. She wished that Oskar could be with her now. She remembered all the times he’d talked about the two of them taking a trip to America to see things like the Smithsonian, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Grand Canyon. He’d said they could go together, maybe even as a honeymoon trip, which was his way of hinting that a proposal was coming soon. He had no idea that she’d been to the U.S. many times, that she’d done missions for the Pyramid all over the country for several years.

The lies that kill!

Her last trip had been in October last year. Ever since then, flashbacks of that terrible night had tormented her memory. She still shivered as she pictured the thousands of people in the Atlanta streets, the screaming and chanting, the Molotov cocktails, the clouds of tear gas. And the fire. The fire was what had pushed her over the edge. They’d sworn to her that the building was empty. They’d insisted that no one would be hurt. The fire was supposed to be a symbol and nothing more; that was enough. Instead, she’d watched them drag out nine dead bodies, nine zipped vinyl bags lined up on the street.

Including three children.

That was when she’d made her decision. That was when she’d realized that she had to stop the lies.

She checked her watch again, and worry crept through her. Too much time had passed. It was 12:07 a.m. Where was he? She looked up and down the trail, hoping to spot that familiar face, which she’d recognized on the back covers of books since she was a teenager. She’d devoured all of them, even the ones that went back long before she was born. On the plane from Germany, she’d read his latest—a novel called Serpent!

But there was no sign of the writer anywhere. Her heart began to sink as the reality hit her. He wasn’t coming.

Had he betrayed her? No! Not him, never him!

Or was he already dead?

In the dark woods behind her, she heard a violent disturbance. Instantly, she jumped to her feet and spun around. Between the twisted trunks of the cherry trees, a huge, unkempt man stumbled drunkenly down the dirt slope directly toward her. At first, he was nothing more than a giant silhouette, but when he came into the light, she saw that his face was wild, his mouth open in silent agony, beads of sweat running down his forehead. He came at her like some kind of overgrown monster, then shuddered to a stop, his body contracting with spasms. He toppled like a tree, jerked several more times, and lay still.

She ran to the dead man and looked down at him. It was not the man she’d been hoping to see here. This man lay on his back, eyes fixed and open. He had greasy black hair and pockmarked skin, and the dark stubble on his face indicated that he hadn’t shaved in days. He wore a dirty white T-shirt that stretched over his huge frame and jeans that were torn and caked with mud and stains. A potent smell of sour body odor made her cover her nose and mouth to block out the stench.

A homeless man. An addict suffering an overdose. She could see the bruises in the seam of his arm where he’d injected himself again and again. The European newspapers told her that deaths like this happened all the time in American cities.

But it was too much of a coincidence that he would die here and now.

She glanced at the man’s giant right hand and saw something clutched between his fingers. It was a woman’s leather purse, compact and expensive. She knelt by the man and separated the purse from his hand and opened it. Inside, she found a wallet, and when she opened the flap, she saw several hundred dollars in cash, along with credit cards made out in the name of Deborah Mueller. A stranger’s name. Someone she’d never met.

There was also a German passport in the purse.

With a strange sense of horror, the woman opened the pages of the passport and had to stifle a scream. The name on the passport was the same as on the credit cards. Deborah Mueller. But the face was all too familiar. It was her face.

The photograph of the woman called Deborah Mueller was a photograph of her.

Another lie!

She knew what it meant. She knew they were coming for her. She dropped the purse and turned to run, but she was already too late. When she looked both ways on the path, she saw two men closing on her from each side. They were dressed identically in black, their faces hidden behind cartoon masks. With only one direction open to her, she sprinted up the slope where the homeless man had run to his death, but as she neared the cherry trees, a third man emerged from the darkness immediately in front of her.

The dogs had flushed the prey to the hunter.

The man wore a dark suit with a tweed wool coat down to his ankles. He had blond hair and a ruddy face and the ugly red gash of a scar down one cheek. What drew her eyes was the knife in his hand, an old, dull, dirty knife, the kind a homeless man would carry as a tool. But in the hands of this man, it was a deadly weapon. She froze in despair. She couldn’t move or run. The man’s lips pursed, and, oddly, he whistled the fragment of a Beatles song. Just a short fragment, but enough for her to recognize it, like one last bitter joke.

“I Should Have Known Better.”

Yes, she should have known better. She should have known how this would end.

“Liebst du der Beatles, Louisa?” the man asked with a cruel smile as his fingers tightened around the knife handle.

She sighed with a whimper of regret. The blade would come next. The blade and the blood. In the last seconds of her life, she realized that she would never have the chance to come back to America with Oskar.

She’d lost, and the Pyramid had won. Varak had won.

The lies would continue.