Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry Page B

for generations. The way it sounded, they were recruited by their fathers about the time they left Eton for Oxford, so they’d be sure to study hard and read the right books. Anyway, one thing he told me about was the room with the velvet boxes. When he’d been in the service only a few months, they called him in and showed him around. There were boxes in there for his father, who had helped crack some German code, and his great-grandfather, who’d done something or other in the Boer War, and I think somebody was in the Crimea. He kept raving on about the medals—the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and I don’t know what else.
    “The whole thing seemed to bother him a lot. At first I thought it was because when he got the tour he was so green. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, and seeing all those medals made him think he could never amount to anything compared to all of his ancestors. After the drug wore off, I asked him about it, and he said that wasn’t it. By now he had a few medals and citations in a box of his own. It was the secrets that bothered him. A lot of the things from a hundred years ago are still current: secret family contacts in Russia and East Germany, for instance, that have been kept up for generations. If those got out, the Russians would have whole families put up against a wall. Things change on the surface, but not underneath, in the world where spies live. It all seemed to him like a string that might unravel. If one thing came out, it could be traced to something else, and so on.”
    “But this is different,” she muttered. “What can it possibly hurt to give their families something to hold on to?”
    “It’s not different,” he said. “Knowledge is dangerous. You’d be doing them no favors.” He wondered if he had sounded ominous enough, but it made her stop asking, and he had to be satisfied with that.
    As the train rattled on toward London, he stared out at the grass and trees. He wondered if he detected in himself some annoyance at her for luring him out into the world where they could find him, but decided he did not. She had made such a small, innocent offer, and the consequences had been huge and abrupt. It wasn’t even a problem she could have imagined. But now he had to work his way out. He had done exactly what he had promised himself he would never do. He had become lazy and comfortable and forgetful. It had been so stupid that it now struck him as a kind of miracle. For some time, maybe for years, he had kept up a few hollow rituals and observed a few minimal precautions, but it was only out of habit.
    He remembered a day nearly fifteen years ago in New York, when he had waited for a man named Danny Catanno to come home from a night at the theater. He had sat in the dim light the man had left burning in the huge living room and contemplated the nature of human beings. This man no longer called himself Danny Catanno. He had been an accountant for a friend of the Castiglione family in Chicago, changing a few dollars into apartment houses and putting particular people on the payroll as managers or handymen or gardeners. But one day Danny Catanno had bought himself a BMW and paid for it in cash. Somehow the IRS had gotten curious about it because it had cost sixty thousand dollars that had not come through a bank account. Within a few days Catanno was sitting in a room somewhere that was full of men who could not afford BMWs but were good enough at arithmetic to prove to Danny that he couldn’t either.
    Years later—maybe seven—somebody had seen Danny Catanno in New York. The Castiglione family, by now run by the son and his two sons since the old man had retired to the Southwest, had quietly made inquiries. It wasn’t that he had done any real damage to the family reputation. The name had been famous since before the son was born. And the family friend had gotten off with a small fine and a wordy warning about fraudulent business practices