Charles, the most sophisticated of them, understood first that the only thing of value he had left to sell was information, and he sold it — all of it, everyone, without hesitation.

And I meant it when I said I never had to lift a finger for that part.

I had spent a year building the case that froze the money.

Their own greed, unpicked from the money that had disciplined it, did the rest, exactly as a careful man had promised me it would.

I have wondered, since, whether any of the three of them has grasped that they were undone less by my cleverness than by their own — that the same appetite that made them dangerous made them, in the end, entirely predictable.

I built the trap.