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one fixed constant in his life. For as long as he could remember, through all the moves, all the travel, all the strange cities and foreign languages and new friends, there was always his mother there to comfort him, buck him up, and send him back into the fray that he already knew was life.
    Civilians always ask service kids whether growing up without a hometown, without old friends, is hard. Absent the familiar anchors, the life that the boy and thousands of others like him lived seemed difficult, intimidating. Better to stay in one place. Better to have a hometown. Nothing ever happens in a hometown.
    Harder to grow up without a father or, worse, with an absent father. Devlin’s father’s business was entirely his own. Later, Devlin understood the nature of that business, perforce embraced it, and took it to lengths his father never could have dreamed. Ironic that he hated his father, hated the business that kept his father away from him, hated the thing that took both his father and his mother away from him, and yet here he was. In it, deeper and darker than dear old Dad ever could have hoped to be. Not by choice, of course.
    Until it ended the way it ended, that trip was the happiest memory of his life. Corfu, Biarritz, Palma de Majorca, and finally the Eternal City, where they’d stayed at the Villa Hassler atop the Spanish Steps. How beautiful his mother looked in her bathing suit on the Mediterranean beaches, in her evening dress when they went to the opera performances, in her slacks and blouse, sweater thrown casually over her shoulders, when they threw the petty coins into the Fontana di Trevi, when they stuck their hands in the Bocca della Verita and hoped the Thing inside the Mouth of Truth wouldn’t bite them off.
    And the best part was, they didn’t even have to travel that far. Not one of those long trips that his father took, not one of those overnight airplane flights, the daylong train trips. They were living in Munich, where his father was working at Radio Free Europe, although some of the German kids in his Grundschule liked to tease him that RFE really meant CIA. When Devlin would ask his mother where his father was, she would always reply that he was trying to stop some very bad men who were trying to hurt people. Americans, like them.
    One night, lying in bed, he managed to overhear a scrap of his parents’ conversation. There was somebody else in the room. They were talking in low voices with someone else, switching languages from English to German to Italian to Spanish to Russian to a couple of other tongues that Devlin did not have, practically in midsentence, as they often did.
    He was too young to follow everything they spoke about, but he could still catch scraps. At eight, Devlin not only spoke fluent German, but Bavarian as well. From listening to ORF, he had also picked a very fashionable, if slightly goofy, Austrian accent, and could differentiate among Tyrolean, Viennese, and the Italian-inflected Südtirolisch of Merano and the Alto Adige; his mother loved to ski. Languages were something he didn’t even have to think about. They were like listening to music, or working out long division in that particularly German way that so mystified his American-born parents. No “carry-the-anything.” Keep the whole thing in your head and just do it.
    One of the things they were talking about—no, arguing about—was some kind of animal: a hyena, a dingo, something like that. Devlin had read about beasts like these, opportunistic scavengers that ripped the living flesh from wounded animals, and he wondered why three grown-ups would be discussing creatures from the veldt in the middle of the night.
    A burst of Russian followed, and he picked out the word, “Ilyich,” and he was proud that he already knew who he was: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His father spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union; not that he ever admitted it to Devlin, directly, of course,