Page 58 of Lone Wolf

The man turned crisply on heel, crossed the vast foyer with its stories-high tumbling-waterfall feature and sweeping staircase. Against the boundless interior, his progress up the stairs seemed comedically slow.

Holding a five-meter standoff, the security guards looked down at their boots or at Evan’s and made no move for the handguns strapped to their hips.

A two-minute pause and then the majordomo reappeared, making the same painstaking progress down the stairs and across the foyer.

“He is taking an early supper in the upstairs drawing room,” he said, with a pivot of his slim hips and a flourish of his palm. “I’m happy to accompany you.”

“I know the way, thank you,” Evan said, brushing past him.

Of all the global power players Evan had encountered, Luke Devine was the most skilled and the most dangerous. After building a fortune as a hedge-funder, he’d used his wealth and connections to spin a lavish social scene into existence around him. Everyone from Supreme Court justices to media moguls to foreign leaders attended his hedonistic affairs, and he caught them in a web of intrigue, surveillance, and blackmail to bind them to his will.

It was Devine’s belief that his will led to a greater good. And in fact, he was motivated by some higher calling than merely his own power—pushing through more effective legislation, holding big conglomerates and meddlesome bureaucrats accountable, taking down those he deemed to be bad actors on the global-corporate stage. He thought of himself as doing what Evan did as the Nowhere Man but at a much more important level. He was grandiose, narcissistic, manic, and a first-rate mind-fucker.

Evan might have been the only person in the world who had managed to put Luke Devine in his place.

The drawing room was rimmed with bookcases, wainscoting, and an enormous depiction of Kahlil Gibran above his famous quotation: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Devine prided himself on providing pain to those who required greater understanding.

The man himself sat alone facing away at a curved mahogany bar the length of the entire wall. He ate from a silver bowl of snow-crab cocktail claws cracked open to expose a Popsicle bulge of meat. A cuboid of terrine wobbled on a small china dish, and a two-finger pour warmed a crystal rocks glass, the bottle of fifty-five-year-old Yamazaki scotch set beside it, available for replenishments.

Devine didn’t turn around. He was diminutive of stature with elegant posture, a tousle of blond hair with the faintest touch of scalp showing through at the back.

“Mr. Nowhere Man,” he said, to the twinkling rise of bottles before him.

“How’s the Yamazaki?” Evan asked.

“Meh,” Devine said. “Overpriced.”

The bottle cost $950,000.

Devine neatly lined the edge of a butter knife with a bite of terrine, transferred it onto a wheat cracker, and made it disappear. Evan walked across the drawing room and pulled up the barstool next to him. His lower back complained, displeased from the flight and the previous days’ pummeling. His vocation had hastened the inevitable; even on the forgiving side of forty he knew he’d live with some kind of pain every day until his death.

At last Devine favored him with a sideways glance. “I hoped I’d never see you again.”

“Same.”

“The main course is coming if you’d like to join. What would you like?”

“What do you have?”

Luke looked at him flatly. “Everything.”

“That must be boring.”

“Yes. Yes. So few people understand that. It’s not a position that can be pitied, of course, but it’s a loss to have whatever you want whenever you want it. A loss of anticipation, of delayed gratification, of new frontiers. It makes me feel … expired. Fat with contentment.”

There wasn’t an ounce of extra weight on him. His brain probably burned everything off as fast as he could fill his body.

“I’ll have a drink,” Evan said.

Devine shoved back his stool with a chirp against the polished hardwood and circled behind the bar. It was a long way.

He set his palms flat on the mahogany and leaned in, propped on his arms, elbows locked—the classic bartender pose. “What can I get you?”

Luke Devine was nothing if not polite.

“Let me guess,” he said quickly, before Evan could answer. “Vodka. Every last time. I wonder what would happen if you drank something different. Would your carefully curated sense of self come crumbling down?” He flashed a mirthless grin. “Or maybe you just like the taste.”

Evan stared at him.