ahead, concentrating on driving. The nighttime streets of New York were their usual blaze of light, action, noise, and bustle. Gideon could feel the man’s dislike of him radiating from his face and body language. Gideon didn’t care. The silence let him prepare for what he was sure was going to be an unpleasant confrontation. He had a pretty good idea of what Glinn would want now.
When Gideon was twelve, he had witnessed his father gunned down by FBI snipers. His father had been a civilian cryptologist working for INSCOM, the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, and had been involved with the group that developed codes. The Soviets broke one of those codes only four months after it was introduced, and twenty-six operatives and double agents had been rolled up in a single night, all tortured and killed. It was one of the worst intelligence disasters of the Cold War. They had said it was his father’s fault. His father had always suffered from depression, and under the pressure of the accusations and investigations he broke down, took a hostage, and was shot and killed in the doorway of Arlington Hall Station—after he had surrendered.
Gideon had witnessed the entire thing.
In the years following, Gideon’s life had gone off the rails. His mother began drinking. A succession of men came and went from the house. They moved from town to town, following one broken relationship or school expulsion after another. As his father’s money had dwindled, they lived in houses, then apartments, trailers, motel rooms, and boardinghouses. His strongest memory of his mother during those years was of her sitting at the kitchen table, glass of Chardonnay in her hand, cigarette smoke curling about her raddled face with its thousand-yard stare, Chopin’s Nocturnes playing in the background.
Gideon was an outsider and he developed a loner’s interests: math, music, art, and reading. One of their moves—he was seventeen at the time—had brought them to Laramie, Wyoming. One day, he’d gone into the local historical society and spent the day, killing time instead of going to school. Nobody would find him—who’d think of looking there? Occupying an old Victorian house, the historical society was a dusty warren of rooms with dark corners, packed with memorabilia and Western bric-a-brac—six-shooters that killed famous outlaws nobody had ever heard of; Indian artifacts; pioneer curios; rusty spurs; bowie knives; and a miscellany of paintings and drawings.
He found refuge in a room in the back where he could read. After a while his attention was attracted by a small woodblock print, one of many badly hung prints wedged uncomfortably along a wall. It was by an artist he had never heard of, Gustave Baumann, and it was called Three Pines. A simple composition, with three small, straggly trees, growing on a barren ridge. But somehow, the more he stared at the print, the more it drew him in; the more remarkable, even miraculous, it became. The artist had managed to imbue those three pines with a sense of dignity, of worth, of essential treeness.
The back room at the historical society became his refuge. They never figured out where he was. He could even strum his guitar and the deaf old lady who dozed at the admissions desk never noticed. He didn’t know how or why, but over time Gideon fell in love with those snaggle-toothed trees.
And then his mother lost her job and they were going to have to move again. Gideon hated to say good-bye to the print. He couldn’t imagine never seeing it again.
And so he stole it.
It turned out to be one of the most thrilling things he’d ever done. And it had been so easy. A few casual questions revealed that the historical society had virtually no security, and its set of dusty accession catalogs was never checked. So one bitterly cold winter’s day he walked in with a small screwdriver in his back pocket, removed the print from the wall, and put it under his coat. Then, before leaving, he wiped down the wall the print had been hung on to get rid of the dust mark, shifted two other prints to cover up the screw holes and obscure the gap. The entire process took five minutes, and when he was done nobody would even know a print was missing. It was, truly, a perfect crime. And Gideon told himself it was justified—nobody loved the print, nobody saw the print, nobody even looked at it, and the historical society was letting