Chapter One: The Rain-Bar

The rain over New York looked like gray glass. At 1:17 a.m., neon bled across Lower Manhattan and taxi lights dragged red scars along the wet street. At the end of Ninth Avenue, a bar called the Rusted Door still kept its lights on. The sign was old, there was no bouncer, and the room held two dozen people who had been wrung out by the city and were using cheap whiskey and tired jazz to postpone tomorrow. Ethan Kane stood behind the counter with his white sleeves rolled to his forearms. He moved quietly, almost without presence. Ice into a glass. Whiskey over ice. Lemon cut clean. A wet mark wiped from the bar. No one in that room would have connected the silent bartender with a classified death report written six years earlier.