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Amena said, “Jennifer told me you’d take me to the Air and Space Museum before we go.”

I looked at Jennifer and she wiped her eyes, smiling. She said, “As long as we’re here. Kylie is staying because of Veep. I figured it couldn’t hurt.”

I chuckled and said, “As long as I don’t have to sleep in a tent.”

Amena said, “Me either.”

We drifted apart, talking to the others there, dusk starting to fall, and I found myself with Axe.

He said, “I heard you had those Badr guys dead to rights, in the crosshairs, and didn’t take the shot. That true?”

I’d thought about that decision a lot in the last few days, wondering if it had been right. I knew that Shakor and his friends had American blood on their hands, and they deserved to be planted, but killing a man takes something out of you. It’s like a chip in the armor of your soul each and every time. Killing in self-defense was one thing, but putting a bullet in their heads that day was something else.

I said, “It’s true. I let them walk.”

“Even after Carly?”

I said, “We slaughtered the men who hit her. They’re dead. This wasn’t them.”

He said, “You’re a better man than I am. I’d have smoked them no matter who they were. Badr 313 aren’t good guys. In fact, I’llprobably end up doing that very thing someday. Cleaning up your leftovers.”

And that was the crux of the argument. Had I let Shakor go only to have him kill some other Americans? But you can’t see the future. You can’t put a bullet into somebody’s head just because you think hemightbe dangerous. Because of that, I hadn’t taken the shot. By all rights, they should have been dead for what Ghulam had tried to do against Branko, and I’d let them live. It would haunt me.

I said, “Maybe you will, Axe. Maybe you will. But I have to look in the mirror each morning, and I want to like what’s looking back.”

He nodded and said, “I hear you. I know.”

His eyes held a sense of loss, and I realized he’d been in a similar situation before and had gone the other way. I didn’t know what to say to that. He clinked my glass and said, “To Carly,” then wandered away, joining Knuckles and Brett.

I sat down in a chair and saw Amena hovering near the bar. She’d heard the conversation. She came over and said, “This is because someone died, isn’t it?”

I hadn’t explained anything to her, just letting her run around the bar figuring she wouldn’t understand, but I should have known that was dumb.

I said, “It is.”

“Carly was a friend?”

“Yes. A friend.”

“And you had the ability to avenge her death and didn’t take it, like you did with me?’

She’d heard the exchange between me and Axe, and now I was going to listen to my adopted daughter tell me how I’d screwedup. Amena had lost her entire family to a sociopathic Chechen, her father and brother killed right before her eyes. She had a little bit of a vengeance streak because of it, and I’d satisfied that streak, killing the man hunting her.

I said, “Honey, this was a little different. It wasn’t the same thing. The men weren’t trying to kill me. It was a meeting we’d agreed to have.”

She stared into my eyes, then said, “But you regret it.”

I said, “I don’t know. Maybe I do. It’s not that simple.”

She crawled into my lap, saying, “My father used to tell us to do the right thing. Even when I was stealing from the tourists in Monaco, he would say that. I kept what I did hidden, because he would never understand, but we needed money for food. I’d come home and get a lecture about how it was easy to do wrong, but sometimes hard to do the right thing.”

She laid her head into my chest and said, “I think what you did was the hard thing. But it was the right thing.”

And that was all the absolution I needed.