Valerius Sin did not summon people.
He had spent enough of his life being summoned, to parliament, to crisis meetings, to the bedside of dying colleagues and the offices of foreign dignitaries, that in retirement he had made a quiet but absolute rule: he went nowhere he did not choose to go, and he received people only when he felt like receiving them.
Today, he felt like receiving Evelyn.
His private residence was forty minutes from the main estate, a Villa outside Munich that sat behind high hedges and older trees, guarded by a team of Security officials and the Military. The house itself was warm and cluttered in a way the main estate was not, books stacked on every surface, maps framed on every wall, the accumulated evidence of a long and consequential life.
He was eighty-one. He moved slowly and thought quickly and missed absolutely nothing.
