At half past ten, on a morning budding with the promise of joy, Esau Rose hurried to a FedEx office on Columbus Avenue, filled out the international shipping form, and sent a package containing a rolled-up canvas to former general De Solis in Argentina. It was a late spring day, and a light wind followed him. Crossing over to West 81st Street, he reached inside his jacket pocket, pulled out a note he’d written to his twin brother, checked the address on the envelope, and dropped it in the dark blue mailbox on the corner.

    Returning to his apartment, Esau smiled: This is a good day for singing a song. Truth be told, he felt like jumping up and kicking his feet in mid-air. He settled for singing a Doors’ tune:

    Love me two times, baby.
    Love me two times girl …

    He mixed up words and stanzas and he didn’t care. This was unquestionably the moment to phone the general in Argentina.

    The general picked up the phone immediately. “Your mission is accomplished?”

    Esau paused a moment to hum the tune he’d been singing. “Yeah, all squared away. Dotted the i’s and crossed all the t’s. The package will arrive tomorrow in the a.m.”

    “And we’ll drink a toast with champagne when you get to Buenos Aires tomorrow.”

    “Yeah, we’ll toast with the most expensive bottle of bubbly from your collection,” he lied. For Esau, double-dealing and lying had been part of his adult life as a covert operative for the U.S. military for twenty-five years, and as a key aide to De Solis for the last six.

    He glanced at his watch. Six hours and thirty-two minutes before he’d lock the door to the apartment for the final time, hail a cab to drive across Central Park, then down to the Midtown Tunnel, and on his way to JFK to board his flight. He’d leave yet again, this time for good, arriving the following dawn for the Fiji Islands to meet up with his lover and live secretly, thousands of miles from New York or Buenos Aires with funds from a numbered bank account stuffed with eighty million dollars.

    Esau was a brutish man of fifty-one years, with an abundance of red hair on his head and body. For the past four days, he’d been closing deals with Saudi bankers as a liaison for the general. Yesterday, he transferred money electronically into two nameless, numbered bank accounts&