"Where"s the family?"

"In a hotel," I said. It was basically true. I decided Nolan didn"t need to be informed that my parents were staying in separate hotels on opposite sides of the Seine. There were some things that even the CIA didn"t need to know.

"What about the band?"

"They went back to New York yesterday with our manager."

"And you? Flying home soon?"

"Tomorrow," I said, "probably," and started to reach for the remote.

Nolan looked back up the hall toward the OR. "How long"s she been in surgery?"

"Thirteen hours. They"re finishing now."

"They get all of it?"

"What do you care?"

"Crazy, huh?"

"What"s that?"

"She"s wearing a bulletproof vest up there, saving her life, and the whole time it was the tumor that was killing her."

He started to say something, and I turned my bad ear back toward him. When he saw me do that, he walked straight in front of me, blocking the TV set.

"Listen, Perry. Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Maybe you got a rough lesson in gunboat diplomacy-who knows?" He shrugged. "That part I asked you before about her... I was just being polite. I already talked to the neurosurgeons. They said she"s in a coma."

"Induced," I said.

"What?"

"It"s an induced coma. It"s what they do to protect higher brain function during and immediately after major neurosurgery."

"Somebody"s been reading his Wikipedia."

I switched off the TV and looked at him. "Why are you here?"

"As a matter of fact..." He sighed and sat down next to me, plucking at the seams of his suit pants. "I want to help."

"Unless you can give me back the hearing in my left ear or..."-I almost said "save my parents" marriage"-"undo what happened here, you"re pretty useless to me."

"I never said I wanted to help you personally," Nolan said. "Although in this particular situation, I might be in the position to do so." He opened his briefcase and took out a thick stack of official-looking doc.u.ments, some of them in English, others in French. "n.o.body knows how your little Lithuanian princess is going to come out of surgery, or if she"s going to come out at all. Even the docs say it"s too soon to tell. But one thing"s for sure: At the end of the day, somebody"s gonna get stuck with a h.e.l.l of a hospital bill. We"re talking millions in rehab, all that s.h.i.t. She"ll be in debt for the rest of her life."

"Let me guess," I said. "You can take care of that."

"The agency could. Probably." He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. "In exchange for certain considerations."

"Forget it," I said.

"Easy, kid. Let"s not get ahead of ourselves. At this point we don"t even know if she"s going to make it. And if she does?" Another shrug. "She might not be able to shoot straight. But we"re willing to take that risk."

"That"s big of you."

"Hey, like I said, we do what we can. In any case, in the spirit of starting over, I want to just let you know, Uncle Sam"s got this one. Whatever it takes to get her back on her feet." He grinned. "Alive and kicking, am I right?"

"Agent Nolan."

"Yeah, kid?"

"And I mean this from the bottom of my heart-"

"Yeah?"

"Go f.u.c.k yourself."

He snapped his briefcase shut and stood up.

"That"s not friendly, Perry." His voice was cordial but just barely, as if every word was costing him a little bit of dignity. "I extended the hand of friendship and you just p.i.s.sed on it."

"Maybe I was just practicing some gunboat diplomacy."

"Hey, no harm, no foul." Now his grin was tighter, narrower, seeming to flatten out the broad planes of his face. "No matter who pays, we"re on her. You know that, right? If Zusane Zaksauskas does walk out of here, there"s not a place on this planet that she can hide from us. She"s ours for life."

"Lucky her."

He snorted and started for the door. What stopped him was the surgeon in scrubs and a mask and hairnet standing in the entryway. He glanced at Nolan, and then at me.

"Perry?" the doctor said.

I stood up, felt my heart vault upward into my throat. "Yes?"

"I"m afraid I"ve got some bad news."

I stared at him, and Nolan stared at him, and I could feel the air molecules in the room fall absolutely motionless around us.

"We did everything we could," the surgeon said, "but she never recovered consciousness after the operation. I am very sorry."

Nolan sighed and shook his head, then looked back at me. "Sorry about that, kid. Like I said before, though, it"s probably for the best."

After he left, the surgeon took off his mask and looked at me.

"I thought you told me you weren"t a doctor," I said.

"What is your American saying?" Erich tapped his finger against his head. ""I play one on TV"?"

"So Gobi..."

"The body seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Or soon will."

"I take it you"ll be making the proper arrangements?"

"Ja," Erich said. "Is already taken care of."

47. "We Own the Sky"

-M83 The day after Gobija Zaksauskas was officially declared dead for the second time in her life, her remains whisked away from the hospital morgue by persons unknown, my mom and Annie and I flew back to the States. My dad stayed in Paris to catch a later flight. How much later remained to be seen. He didn"t tell us, and n.o.body asked.

Walking through customs at JFK, Mom stopped and looked at the Christmas tree in the international terminal.

"We missed Thanksgiving," she said, in a funny voice, like she was just now realizing how far away we"d been. I knew how she felt. America sounded loud and frantic in my one good ear, people running, shouting, flights being announced in a barrage of noise and information. All around us, time had pa.s.sed, and we"d been plunged right back into the flow again, trying to get our balance.

Then, like that, it was December.

Annie and I spent a lot of time at home over the next few weeks, going to movies, playing board games, wrapping Christmas presents, and downloading holiday music. Even the most normal, boring American things felt rea.s.suring somehow, like they were anchoring us into place.

n.o.body said much about my dad. I tried to say something once or twice to Annie about it, but she didn"t seem to want to talk, so I let it go. My mom said she didn"t care about getting a tree this year, so Annie and I went out and brought one home ourselves on top of the Volvo while she was at work. Norrie, Caleb, and Sasha came over and helped us decorate it, stringing popcorn and cranberries because Annie had always wanted to do that. We practiced some of the new material and even did a couple of Christmas songs with Annie singing the background vocals on "Santa Claus Is Back in Town." Mom said it sounded nice, but it was in that distracted kind of voice that could have been referring to anything, or nothing at all. She was being too quiet, spending too much time alone, but there didn"t seem to be any way to mention it.

Two weeks after our arrival back in New York, Chow came home from Berkeley on Christmas break. He stopped by the house one night for pizza and eggnog. Naturally, he"d read about everything that happened with me and Gobi in Europe and couldn"t wait to talk about it-ever since we"d come home, it was all over the news and the Internet and everywhere else.

It was good to see him again, and we stayed up late into the night, talking by the fire. He told me that while they were home, he and his old high school flame were back together "on a temporary basis," which as far as I could tell meant they"d started sleeping together until they had to go back to their respective colleges in January.

"What about you, dawg?" he said, looking over at the Christmas tree. "Another Christmas at home with your red lights and your blue b.a.l.l.s?"

After everything that had happened, it was a pretty freaking insensitive thing to say, but I found myself laughing, and that felt good.

For a long time, I was afraid I"d forgotten how.

Then, two days before Christmas, my dad came home.

He called from the airport, and showed up at the house that night with a full beard and a bag of gifts like Santa except without the laughs. It was all very civil, very polite, and completely jarring. Mom stayed on her side of the couch, he stayed on his. At the end of the world"s most awkward conversation, he said goodbye, hugged me and Annie, and started back for his hotel.

I wanted to say, "Dad, wait."

I wanted to ask him what really happened with Paula. I wanted to hear his side of the story. There had to be a reason for what he"d done, right?

Someday I want to hear it.

"You coming downstairs?" Mom asked. "Your sister"s making hot cocoa and she wants to watch Elf."

I glanced up from the computer. "Maybe in a while." It was Christmas Eve, and I was not much in the holiday spirit despite a prediction of scattered flurries tonight and Death Cab for Cutie on the radio doing their version of "Baby Please Come Home."

I looked down at the online application for next fall"s admission to UCLA. It was only half finished, and I didn"t have the strength to seek out one more letter of recommendation. I knew I had to finish it, though. It was time to move forward, to aim past it and punch through. I thought maybe California was far enough away to get a new start.

"Oh, I almost forgot," Mom said. "This came for you."

I looked at the envelope she"d dropped on my desk. There was no return address. I looked at the blurry postmark. It looked like Fiji.

I tore it open.

It was a Christmas card from the Hotel Schoeneweiss, showing a huge crowd of men and women in Santa suits trying to climb a wooden pole in the annual ClauWau compet.i.tion in Zermatt. Inside was blank, except for two lines of block print at the bottom.

NEW LOCATION FOR THE HOTEL. ONLY ONE GUEST SO FAR. SHE HAS ASKED TO SEE YOU NEXT TIME YOU ARE IN THE ISLANDS.

It was initialed with the letters ES.

I tucked it in my desk along with my pa.s.sport, slid the drawer shut, and went downstairs to the smell of hot cocoa, to join Annie and my mom.

Acknowledgments.

Countless thanks are due to my agent, Phyllis Westberg, for standing by me over the years, and Margaret Raymo, editor extraordinaire at Houghton Mifflin. Also at Houghton, I want to thank Betsy Groban, senior vice president and publisher, and Rachel Wasd.y.k.e, publicity manager, neither of whom have been anything less than wonderful from the very beginning-plus, you throw a great party, guys. Across the pond, thanks also to the charming Ali Dougal, commissioning editor at Egmont, for her light editorial touch and a delicious lunch on a cold November day in London.

To that end, I must finally thank my wife, Christina, and my children, who followed me across the U.K., France, Switzerland, and Italy to research this book, giving me inspiration to face the blank page and the courage to walk through doorways that I never would have entered alone. The bottom line here is that you"re quite simply the best part of me. I love you, dudes.

About the Author.

JOE SCHREIBER is the New York Times best-selling author of adult novels Death Troopers, Chasing the Dead, and Eat the Dark, as well as his first young adult novel, Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick. He lives in Pennsylvania. Visit his blog at www.scaryparent.blogspot.com.

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