MARK BURNELL
THE THIRD WOMAN

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © Mark Burnell 2005

Mark Burnell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007152674

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN 9780007369904

Version: 2015-12-14

Dedication

For Greta with love

Epigraph

The true religion of America

has always been America.

NORMAN MAILER

Most people are other people. Their thoughts

are someone else’s opinions, their lives a

mimicry, their passions a quotation.

OSCAR WILDE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Early October

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Day Six

Day Seven

Day Eight

Day Nine

Day Ten

Day Eleven

Day Twelve

Day Thirteen

Early February

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Early October

He loved the ritual. It was as essential to his enjoyment of the countryside as the open space or clean air. A final stroll around the property before bed, the last of a cigar to smoke, the glowing embers of a good cognac warming his stomach. His only regret was that he didn’t come here often enough. Otto Heilmann stepped out of his dacha onto brittle grass; five below zero, he estimated, perhaps even ten.

His guests had gone to bed. Their cars were parked beside the boat-shed; a black Mercedes 4x4 with dark glass, and an Audi A8 with an auxiliary engine and armour-plating. Frost had turned both windscreens opaque.

Heilmann wandered to the edge of the lake, trailing clouds of breath and smoke. The silvery light of a three-quarter moon shone on the ice. He saw buttery pinpricks in the blackness of the far shore; two dachas, one belonging to a senior prosecutor from St Petersburg, the other to a Finnish architect.

There was no cloud and only the faintest whisper of a breeze. Heilmann smoked for a while. As Bruno Manz, a Swiss travel consultant based in St Petersburg, he felt a very long way from the grim years of the German Democratic Republic. A long way from Erich Mielke, his Stasi boss during those years, and a long way from Wolfasep, the ubiquitous industrial-strength detergent that was the defining odour of the Honecker regime for millions of East Germans. Once smelled, never forgotten, a scar of memory.

He tossed his soggy cigar stump onto the ice and continued his circuit. Along the lake shore, past the creaking jetty, up towards the wood-shed.

‘Hello, Otto.’

A female voice. He thought he recognized it. Except she was supposed to be in Copenhagen. But it was her face that emerged from the darkness of the birch forest.

Heilmann clutched the coat over his chest. ‘I hope you know what to do if I have a heart attack.’

Krista Jaspersen stared deep into his eyes and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Otto. I’ll know exactly what to do.’

He wasn’t reassured.

She was wearing thick felt boots, a great overcoat and the sable hat he’d given her two nights ago at the Landskrona restaurant on top of the Nevskij Palace Hotel in St Petersburg.

He tried to recapture his breath. ‘What are you doing, Krista?’

‘Waiting for you.’

‘Out here?’

‘I remembered your routine.’

An answer of sorts, Heilmann conceded, yet hardly adequate. ‘You could have phoned to say you were coming. Like normal people do.’ He glanced over one shoulder, then the other. ‘How did you get here?’

‘By car.’

‘I mean … here.’

‘The men at the gate let me through.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’

She looked the same – long fair hair, dark green eyes, a mouth of invitation – but she was radiating a difference that Heilmann couldn’t quite identify.

‘It’s freezing,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

‘You have guests.’

‘They’re asleep.’

‘I’m not staying, Otto.’

‘The mystery is why you’re here at all. You should be in Copenhagen.’

Krista reached inside her coat and pulled out a gun. A SIG-Sauer P226. Moonlight glittered on a silencer.

There was no outrage. That surprised her; Heilmann had a notoriously fragile temper. Instead, after a digestive pause, he simply nodded glumly and said, ‘Let me take a guess: you’re not even Danish.’

She shook her head. ‘Not really, no.’

‘Who are you?’

The seconds stretched as they stared at each other, eyes watering in the cold, neither prepared to look away.

‘The stupid thing is, I knew it,’ he murmured. ‘In my head, I knew it. But I let my heart overrule and …’

‘More likely it was another part of your anatomy.’

‘You were too good to be true. That was my initial reaction to you.’

‘I’ve been accused of many things but never that.’

A deep breath deflated slowly. ‘So … what is it?’

‘You’ll never guess.’

‘The ghosts of the past?’

‘That doesn’t narrow the field much, does it? Not after your glittering career with the Stasi. But no, it’s not that.’

His surprise seemed genuine. He considered another option. ‘The S-75s?’

Krista smiled. ‘I knew you’d say that.’

The S-75 air defence missile was a relic of the Soviet era, prominent in conflicts from Vietnam to the Balkans. Hundreds of them had been transported from the nations of the Warsaw Pact to the Ukraine for decommissioning and dismantling. Many had vanished into thin air, leaving no trace, a feat made possible by the astonishing elasticity of the accounting practices at the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.

‘Scrapyard junk,’ Heilmann declared.

‘Maybe. But you know what they say about muck and brass. How much time have you spent in Kiev over the last decade?’

‘I don’t know. Plenty. What is your point, Krista?’

‘Otto Heilmann, store manager at the Ukraine Hypermarket, flogging the decrepit remains of the Soviet arsenal to Third-World psychopaths. A lucrative business judging by the way you live, Otto. And better than pulling fingernails out of old ladies in the damp cellars of Leipzig, I imagine. The gap in the military inventory from the Soviet era – how much would you say it’s worth today?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘The figure I hear most often is $180 billion. But I’ve heard higher. Last year, the Ukraine’s spending budget was $10 billion. In terms of a trading environment I’d say that left plenty of room for manoeuvre. What do you think?’

‘Is that what this is about? Missing missiles?’

‘Two hundred of them.’

‘They’re museum pieces.’

‘There’s value in antiquity, Otto. Even in yours,’ Krista smiled coldly. ‘Actually, that’s not what this is about. But it’s nice to know I was right about you. No, this is a private matter.’

‘Between you and me?’

‘Between you and your bank.’

‘My bank?’

‘You’ve over-extended yourself, Otto.’

‘So here you are? With a gun?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s shit. I have business with a lot of banks. Which one?’

‘Guderian Maier.’

Heilmann looked incredulous. ‘You work for them? I don’t believe you.’

‘You made a mistake in Zurich.’

‘And you’re making one here.’

‘Your money’s no longer any good.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Most bank managers send you a letter. Yours has sent me.’

Heilmann snorted dismissively. ‘Very funny. But banks don’t shoot people. So no more games, okay? Just tell me. Why are you here?’

Krista Jaspersen raised the SIG-Sauer P226. ‘I’ve come to close your account, Otto. Permanently.’

Day One

When she opened her eyes, the face beside her was a surprise. She’d expected to be alone in the bedroom of her crumbling apartment off boulevard Anspach. Instead, she found herself in a room with curtains, not shutters, a room overlooking avenue Louise, not rue Saint-Géry.

Brussels, twenty-to-seven on a bitter January morning. Outside, a tram grumbled on the street below. She’d always liked the sound of trams. Next to her, Roland was still asleep, half his head lost in the quicksand of a pillow. Stephanie pulled on his blue silk dressing-gown, which was too big for her, and rolled up the sleeves. In the kitchen, she poured water into the kettle and switched it on.

Gradually, she recalled a day that had started in Asia. She’d called Roland from the airport at Frankfurt while waiting for her connection to Brussels and again when she’d touched down at Zaventem. Earlier, in Turkmenbashi and then on the Lufthansa flight back from Ashgabat, she’d been aware of the familiar sensation; the seep of corruption that always followed the adrenaline rush. She’d needed Roland because she couldn’t be alone.

His bathroom belonged in a hotel; heated marble floor, marble sink, fluffy white towels folded over a ladder of hot chrome rails, a soap dish full of Molton Brown miniatures. Typical, really; a bathroom at home to remind him of the hotels he used abroad. Still, lack of imagination in a man was not always a disadvantage.

She showered for five minutes. Stepping on to the white bath-mat in front of the mirror, Stephanie saw Petra Reuter looking back at her. Her other self, the differences between them at that moment counting for nothing, though the body they shared now belonged more to Petra than Stephanie. In that sense, it was a barometer of identity. Where Petra favoured muscular definition, Stephanie slipped happily into softness.

She ran a hand over the stone ripple of her abdomen and looked into a pair of hard, dark eyes. Only her mouth appeared warm and inviting; there was nothing she could do about those generous lips. The rest of her looked cold and mean. When she was in this mood, even the slight bump on her nose – courtesy of two separate breaks – looked large and ugly. Worse was the cosmetic bullet-wound through her left shoulder. In forty-eight hours, beneath an Indian Ocean sun, Stephanie knew she’d despise it; Petra’s badge of honour was a reminder of the life she couldn’t escape.

She dressed in the crumpled clothes she’d scooped off Roland’s sitting-room floor; dark grey combat trousers with a neon-pink stripe down each leg, two T-shirts beneath a Donna Karan jersey and a pair of Caterpillar boots.

Towelling long, dark hair she returned to the kitchen, made coffee, then took two mugs to the bedroom, setting one on Roland’s bedside table. He began to stir. She drew the curtains. On avenue Louise, the first hint of rush-hour, headlights slicing through drizzle.

From behind her came a muffled murmur. ‘Marianne.’

Stephanie turned round. ‘You look a little … crumpled.’

Roland grinned, pleased at the description, then propped himself up on an elbow and patted the mattress. ‘Come back to bed.’

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘So have I. Now come back to bed.’

‘Exactly what kind of investment bank do you work for?’

‘The kind that understands a good worker is a happy worker.’

The candle of temptation flickered briefly. Generally, the more attractive the man the more cautious Stephanie was. In her experience, good-looking men tended to make lazy lovers. Not Roland, though.

‘Last night,’ he said, reaching for the mug, ‘that was really something.’

If only you knew.

A surgical procedure to cut away tension. That was what it had been. There, on the floor of the entrance hall, tenderness cast aside as roughly as their clothes. Around nine, they’d gone out to eat at Mont Liban, a Lebanese place on rue Blanche, a couple of minutes’ walk away. By the time they’d returned to his apartment, her desire had been back, less frantic but just as insistent. Which was how her clothes had ended up on his sitting-room floor.

Strange to think of it now, like an out-of-body experience. Roland was staring at her through the steam rising from his coffee, his disappointment evident.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

‘That I went to bed with one person and woke up with another.’

Stephanie said, ‘I know the feeling.’

It’s no longer raining when I step on to avenue Louise. Winter blows shivers through the puddles and snaps twigs from the naked plane trees. Ahead, the rooftop Nikon and Maxell signs are backlit by a cavalry charge of dark cloud.

Brussels; bitter, grey, wet. And perfect.

This city at the heart of the European Union is an ideal home for me. It’s a city of bureaucrats. In other words, a city of transient people who shy from the spotlight and never have to account for their actions. People like me.

In some respects, the city is an airport hub. When I’m here, there’s always the feeling that I’m passing through. That I’m a stranger in transit, even in my own bed.

I had a proper home once. It didn’t belong to me – it belonged to the man I loved – but it was mine nevertheless. It was the only place I’ve ever been able to be myself. And yet he never knew my name or what I did.

With hindsight, civilian domesticity – Petra’s professional life running in parallel to Stephanie’s private life – was an experiment that failed. I took every precaution to keep the two separate, to protect one from the other. But that’s the truth about lies: you start with a small one, then need a larger one to conceal it. In the end, they swamp you. Which is exactly what happened. One life infected the other and was then itself contaminated. The consequences were predictable: I hurt the ones I loved the most.

These days I no longer delude myself. That’s why I live in Brussels but spend so little time here. It’s why I was in Turkmenistan the day before yesterday and why Eddie Sullivan’s obituary is in the papers today. It’s why I see Roland in the way that I do and it’s why he calls me Marianne.

He became my lover in the same way that Brussels became my home; by chance and as a matter of temporary convenience. Random seat assignments put us together. We met on a train, which seems appropriate; sensory dislocation at two hundred miles an hour. All very contemporary, all very efficient. There is no possibility that I will ever give anything of my soul to him. For the moment, however, like the city itself, he serves a transitory purpose.

Rue Saint-Géry, the walls smeared with graffiti, the pavements with dog-shit. Home was a filthy five-storey wedge-shaped building with rotten French windows that opened onto balconies sprouting weeds. The bulb had gone in the entrance hall. From her mail-box she retrieved an electricity bill and a mail-shot printed in Arabic. The aroma of frying onions clung to the staircase’s peeling wallpaper.

Stephanie’s apartment was on the third floor; a cramped bedroom and bathroom at the back with a large room at the front, one quarter partitioned to form a basic kitchenette. There were hints of original elegance – tall ceilings, plaster mouldings, wall panels – but they were damaged, mostly through neglect.

Her leather bag was where she’d left it late yesterday afternoon, at the centre of a threadbare rug laid over uneven stained floorboards. The luggage tag was still wrapped around a handle. So often it was the smallest detail that betrayed you. In the past she’d been supported by an infrastructure that ensured there were no oversights, no matter how trivial. These days, as an independent, there was no one.

On the floor by the fireplace a cheap stereo stood next to a wicker basket containing the few CDs she’d collected over ten months. They were the only personal items in the apartment. She slipped one into the machine. Foreign Affairs by Tom Waits; more than any photograph album could, it mainlined into the memory.

The first albums she’d listened to were the ones she’d borrowed from her brother: Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home; David Bowie, Heroes; The Smiths, The World Won’t Listen. She remembered being given something by Van Morrison by a boy who wanted to date her. Not a good choice. She’d disliked Van Morrison then and still did.

Elton John’s ‘Saturday Night’ had been the song playing on the radio the first time she sold herself in the back seat of a stranger’s car. Every time she heard the song now, that same meaty hand grasped her neck, jamming her face against the car door. The same fingernails drew bloody scratches across her buttocks. Later, she’d been routinely brutalized and humiliated but nothing had ever matched the emotional impact of that initiation. She felt she’d been hung, drawn and quartered. And that the music coming from the tinny radio in the front had somehow been an accomplice.

Sometimes mainlining into the memory was as risky as mainlining into a vein; you didn’t necessarily get the rush you were depending on. So she changed the CD to Absolute Torch & Twang, a k.d.lang album she’d discovered as Petra.

Petra meant no bad memories. In fact, no memories at all.

She emptied the leather bag. Dirty clothes, a roll of dollars, a wash-bag containing strengthened catgut in a plastic dental-floss dispenser, an Australian passport in the name of Michelle Davis, a ragged copy of Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost and a guide to Turkmenistan featuring out-of-date maps of Ashgabat and Turkmenbashi.

In the bathroom, beneath the basin, she kept a battered aluminium wash-bowl. She shredded the passport, luggage tag, receipts and ticket-stubs, then dropped them into the bowl, which she placed on the crumbling balcony. She squirted lighter fuel over the remains and set light to them. A small funeral pyre for another version of her.

There were four messages on the answer-phone including one from Tourisme Albert on boulevard Anspach. Your tickets are ready for collection. Shall we courier them to you or would you like to collect them from our office? She looked at her watch. In thirty-six hours, she would be gone; a fortnight in Mauritius, intended as a buffer between Turkmenistan and the next place. Yet again, a woman in transit.

In her bedroom, she shunted the single bed to one side, rolled back the reed mat and lifted two loose floorboards. From the space below she recovered a small Sony Vaio laptop in a sealed plastic pouch.

Back in the living-room, she switched on the computer and accessed Petra’s e-mails. Spread over six addresses, split between AOL and Hotmail, Petra hid behind four men and two women. She checked Marianne Bernard’s mail at AOL; one new message. Roland, predictably. Gratitude for the best night of the year. Not the greatest compliment, Stephanie felt, in early January.

She sent one new message. To Stern, the information broker who also acted as her agent and confidant. It had to be significant that almost the only person she truly trusted was someone she had never met. She didn’t even know whether Stern was a man or a woman, even though she called him Oscar.

> Back from the Soviet past. With love, P.

She left the laptop connected, then took her dirty clothes to Wash Club on place Saint-Géry. She bought milk and a carton of apple juice from the LIDL supermarket on the other side of the square, then returned home to find two messages waiting for her. One was from Stern. He directed her to somewhere electronically discreet and asked:

> How was it?

> Turkmenistan? Or Sullivan?

> Both.

> Depressing, dirty and backward. But Turkmenistan was fine.

Eddie Sullivan was a former Green Jacket who’d established a company named ProActive Solutions. An arms-dealer with a flourishing reputation, he’d been in Turkmenistan to negotiate the sale of a consignment of weapons to the IMU, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The hardware, stolen from the British Army during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, was already in Azerbaijan, awaiting transport across the Caspian Sea from Baku to the coastal city of Turkmenbashi.

Petra’s contract had been paid for by Vyukneft, a Russian oil company with business in Azerbaijan. But Stern had told her that the decision to use her had been political. Made in Moscow, he’d said. Hiring Petra meant no awkward fingerprints. It wasn’t the first time she’d worked by proxy for the Russian government.

The final negotiation between Sullivan and the IMU had been scheduled for the Hotel Turkmenbashi, a monstrous hangover from the Soviet era. Hideous on the outside, no better on the inside, she’d eliminated Sullivan in his room, while the Uzbek end-users gathered two floors below. She’d masqueraded as a member of hotel staff, delivering a message with as much surliness as she could muster.

Distracted by the imminent deal, Sullivan had been sloppy. He’d never looked at her, even as she loitered in the doorway waiting for a tip. When he’d turned his back to look for loose change, she’d pulled out a Ruger with a silencer and had kicked the door shut with her heel. The gun-shot and the slam had merged to form one hearty thump. Two minutes later she was heading away from the hotel on the long drive back to Ashgabat and the Lufthansa flight for Frankfurt.

> Are you available?

> Not until further notice.

> Taking a vacation?

> Something like that. Anything on the radar?

> Only from clients who can’t afford you.

> Then your commission must be fatter than I thought.

> Petra! Please. Don’t be cruel.

The second message, at one of the Hotmail addresses, was a real surprise. No names, just a single sentence.

> I see you chose not to take the advice I gave you in Munich.

Petra Reuter was sipping a cappuccino at a table close to the entrance of Café Roma on Maximilianstrasse. It was late September but winter had already made its presence felt; two days earlier there had been snow flurries in Munich.

The man rising from the opposite side of the table was Otto Heilmann. A short man, no more than five-foot-six, with narrow sloping shoulders, he wore a loden hunting jacket with onyx buttons over a fawn polo-neck.

‘We will meet again, Fräulein Jaspersen?’

‘I expect so, if you wish.’

‘Perhaps you would consider coming to St Petersburg?’

Petra wondered where this stiff courtesy came from. Probably not from two decades with the Stasi. Nor from the last fifteen years of arms-dealing. She didn’t imagine there was much call for Heilmann’s brand of politeness in Tbilisi or Kiev. Or even in St Petersburg. Yet here he was, dressed like a benevolent Bavarian uncle, hitting on her with a formal invitation that fell only fractionally short of stiff card and embossed script.

She gave him her best smile. ‘I’d certainly consider it, Herr Heilmann.’

‘Please. Otto.’

‘Only if you promise to call me Krista.’

A small inclination of the head was followed by a reciprocated smile that revealed a set of perfectly calibrated teeth. ‘This could be the beginning of something very good for us, Krista.’

She watched him leave, a navy cashmere overcoat folded over his right arm. Outside, a Mercedes was waiting, black body, black windows, a black suit to hold open the door for him. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen Café Roma; black wooden tables, black banquettes, black chairs. Crimson walls, though. Like blood. A more likely reason for Heilmann to choose the place. Her eyes followed the car until it faded from view.

The remains of the day stretched before her. Nothing to do but wait for the call. More than anything, Petra’s was a life of waiting. Like a movie actor; long periods of inactivity were intercut with short bursts of action.

She drained her cappuccino and decided to order another. Twenty minutes drifted by. It grew busier as afternoon matured into evening; shoppers, businessmen and women, mostly affluent, mostly elegant.

‘Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it. Petra, Petra, Petra …’

She looked up and took a moment to staple a name to the face. Not because she didn’t recognize him but because he was out of context.

He misunderstood her silence. ‘Or are we not Petra today?’

John Peltor. A former US Marine. Still looking every inch of his six-foot-five.

‘Is this bad timing?’ he asked.

‘That depends.’

He glanced left and right. ‘Am I intruding?’

‘No.’

Clearly not the answer he was expecting. ‘You’re alone?’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘Always the smart-ass, Petra.’

‘Always.’

‘I wasn’t sure at first. The hair, you know.’

It was the longest she’d ever worn it. Halfway down her back and dark blonde.

‘Kinda suits you,’ he said.

‘Do you think so?’

She didn’t like it: although it went well with her eyes, which were now green. She wasn’t sure Peltor had noticed that change.

He looked into her cup, which was two-thirds empty. ‘Want another?’

‘I’ve got to go,’ she lied.

‘You sure? It would be good to catch up again.’

Perversely, that was true. Social opportunities in their solitary profession were rare although it wasn’t the first time they’d run into each other by chance. Peltor wasn’t her type but that hardly mattered. How many of them were there in the world? Not the cheap battery-operated types, but those rare hand-crafted precision instruments. Less than a hundred? Certainly. Whatever their respective backgrounds they were bound by the quality of their manufacture and they both knew it.

‘How long are you in Munich?’ she asked.

‘Leaving tomorrow, around midday. How about tonight?’

‘Busy.’

Another lie.

‘Can you make breakfast? At my hotel. Say nine?’

Petra tilted her head to one side and allowed herself a smile. ‘You won’t be sharing it with some lucky lady?’

Peltor feigned wounded pride. ‘Not unless you say yes.’

Petra arrived at the Mandarin Oriental on Neuturmstrasse at nine. When she asked for Peltor at the front desk – ‘Herr Stonehouse, bitte’ – her instructions were specific: he was running a little late so could she take the lift to the sixth floor, the stairs to the seventh and then proceed up to the roof terrace.

It was a freezing morning, no hint of cloud in the sky. The sun sparkled like the Millennium Star over a roof terrace that offered an unobstructed view of all Munich.

‘Not bad, huh? It’s why I always stay here when I’m in town.’

Peltor was floating at one end of a miniature swimming pool. Petra had seen baths that weren’t much smaller.

‘I hope that’s heated.’

‘A little too much for my taste.’

‘Always the Marine, right?’

Petra looked at the board by the pool. Next to the date was the air temperature taken at seven-thirty. One degree centigrade.

‘Love to swim first thing in the morning,’ Peltor declared loudly.

‘I thought you people loved the smell of napalm in the morning.’

‘Not these days. How long’s it been, Petra?’

‘I don’t know. Eighteen months?’

‘More like two years. Maybe longer.’

‘The British Airways lounge at JFK? You said you were going to Bratislava. Two weeks later I was stuck in Oslo airport flicking through a copy of the Herald Tribune and there it was. Prince Mustafa, the Mogadishu warlord, hit through the heart by a long-range sniper. A Sako rifle …’

‘A TRG-S,’ Peltor added. ‘Won’t use any other kind …’

‘A 338 Lapua Mag from seventeen hundred metres, wasn’t it?’

‘Seventeen-fifty. What were you doing in Oslo?’

‘Nothing. I told you. I was stuck.’

‘Cute, Petra. Real cute.’

Peltor climbed out of the pool. Massive shoulders tapered to a waist so narrow it was almost feminine, a feature that reminded her of Salman Rifat, the Turkish arms-dealer. But where Rifat’s extraordinary physique was steroid-assisted, Peltor’s was natural. He exuded power as tangibly as the steam coming off his skin.

Oblivious to the cold, he dried himself in front of her, neither of them saying anything. It was an extravagant performance. A muscled peacock, Petra thought, as he reached for a dressing-gown. She wondered whether he was really running late or whether he’d orchestrated the display deliberately.

His suite was on the seventh floor. He emerged from the bathroom in a navy suit without a tie. Stephanie caught a trace of sandalwood in his cologne. Peltor wore a trim goatee beard at the same thickness as the hair on his head, somewhere between crop and stubble. He stepped into a pair of black Sebago loafers and they went down to Mark’s, the hotel restaurant.

Orange juice and coffee arrived. Peltor ordered scrambled eggs and bacon, Petra stuck with fruit and croissants. She said, ‘You running into me at Café Roma yesterday …’

He took his time, sipping coffee, playing with the teaspoon on the saucer. ‘Yeah. I know.’

‘And?’

He struggled for an answer, then looked almost apologetic. ‘All my adult life, I’ve had my finger on a trigger, Petra. First for my country, then for my bank balance. In that time, I’ve been the best there is. We both have. Different specialities, same environment. But nobody knows what we do. We have to lie to everyone. We can’t relax. That time at JFK – we were just a couple of business colleagues shooting the breeze in an airport lounge. A few stories, a few drinks. It was nice. But I didn’t think I’d get the chance to do it again. Then yesterday … there you were.’

‘A coincidence?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Someone I used to know said that a coincidence was an oversight.’

He sat back in his chair and held open his hands. ‘Shit, it happens, you know? You’re walking down a street somewhere – Osaka, Toronto, Berlin – and some guy calls out your name. When you turn round there’s a face you haven’t seen since the fourth grade back in Austin, Texas.’

‘Is that where you grew up?’

‘Never let your defences down, do you?’

‘Never.’

Peltor held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Look, I saw you in Café Roma. I could’ve walked away but I didn’t. That’s all there is to it. I just thought we could talk again like we did in New York. You know, take a time-out. If you’re uneasy with that … well, then I guess you’ll leave.’

But she didn’t. Perhaps because she’d enjoyed JFK too. Taking a time-out, talking shop. Relaxing.

Peltor’s eggs and bacon arrived. The waitress poured Petra more coffee. The restaurant was mostly empty, the businessmen long gone, just four other tables occupied, none of them too close.

Gradually, they drifted into conversation. Nothing personal, not at first. They talked about Juha Suomalainen, a Finnish marksman whom Peltor had always regarded as a rival rather than a kindred spirit. Petra asked whether he was still active.

‘I doubt it. He’s been dead for six months.’

‘Who got him?’

‘Husqvarna.’

‘I don’t know the name. Sounds Nordic.’

‘Husqvarna make chainsaws.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘Juha was at his home in Espoo. Up a ladder, cutting branches off a tree. Somehow he fell and the chainsaw got him. And before you ask, I was in Hawaii with a drink in my hand.’

Petra pulled apart a croissant. ‘Well, statistically speaking, this is a risky business. You just don’t expect any of us to go like that.’

‘Right. Like Vincent Soares. Cancer. Wasn’t even forty-five.’

When Peltor talked about his time as a Marine, Petra was surprised to learn that he wasn’t the rabid jock-patriot she’d suspected he might be, although he admitted to missing the comradeship. But not much.

‘This is a lot better. Like owning your own business, know what I mean? You work hard but you got no boss busting your ass.’

As far as Peltor was concerned, she’d always been Petra Reuter, the anarchist who turned assassin. Originally, however, Petra had been created by an organization. And controlled by that organization. Petra was an identity handed to Stephanie. A shell to inhabit. And in those days there had been a boss. A man who had regulated every aspect of her life. But as time passed, flesh and fabric had merged and Stephanie had become Petra. Or was it the other way round? In any case, Petra had outgrown her fictional self. Now, both the organization and the boss were consigned to her past while Petra Reuter was more of a reality than she had ever been.

Peltor ate a piece of bread roll smeared with butter and marmalade. Petra waited for the predictable reaction: the grimace. He picked up the small marmalade jar.

‘Look at this, will you? Look at the colour. Way too light. Like dirty water. Too much sugar, not enough orange. And no bitterness. Marmalade doesn’t work unless there’s a trace of bitterness.’

When he wasn’t killing people Peltor liked to make marmalade. The first time she’d discovered this she’d laughed out loud. Later, when she thought about it, it simply reinforced a truth: you can never really know someone.

‘You still getting the same kick out of it?’ she asked.

When they’d last met, Peltor had explained what drove him on: the quest for perfect performance. It all comes down to the shot, Petra. Last contract I took was nine months from start to finish. All of it distilled into half a second.

There was no longer any trace of that enthusiasm. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll take another contract.’

‘That surprises me.’

‘I’m kinda drifting into something new right now.’ He tugged the lapel of his jacket. ‘Something … corporate.’

‘That surprises me more.’

‘It shouldn’t. You know the way the math works. I’ve had my time at the plate, Petra. And if you don’t mind me saying so, so have you.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, I’d guess you’re a decade older than me.’

It was more like fifteen years, but technically Petra was older than Stephanie.

‘It’s not about age. It’s about time served.’

She reduced her indifference to a shrug. ‘I’m touched by your concern.’

‘Don’t outstay your welcome, Petra. Most of the assholes out there – I couldn’t give a rat’s ass if they get wasted. But I like you. You got class. Don’t be the champ who doesn’t know when to quit.’

‘When it’s time, I’ll know.’

‘Bullshit. The people who say that never know. Know why? Because the second before they realize it, they find their brains in their lap.’

‘I’ll try to remember that.’

‘Just do it. Retire. Or shift sideways like I have.’

‘What is this venture, then?’

‘Consultancy I’d guess you call it. First-class travel, expense accounts, places like this. I swear, there are corporate clients out there – the biggest names – ready to pay a fortune for what we have up here.’

Petra watched him drum a finger against the side of his head and said, ‘Not quite the double-tap I’ve come to associate with you.’

‘Funny girl. Seriously, though, you can name your price. They pay off-shore, share options, anything you want.’

‘Now I’ve heard it all.’

‘You’re not too young to think about it, Petra.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘So what is it?’

‘You know perfectly well. It’s obviously already happened to you. But it hasn’t happened to me. Not yet.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The moment.’

Peltor’s evangelism sobered into silence and she knew she was right.

She said, ‘The moment you know. But before that moment … well, you don’t just retire from this life, John. You know that as well as I do. It retires you. Sometimes after just one job.’

Beyond the recognition, she thought she detected a hint of regret in his voice when, eventually, he said, ‘Damned if you’re not right, Petra. Damned if you’re not right.’

Stephanie was still thinking about Peltor’s e-mail and the meeting that had prompted it back in September when her taxi pulled up beside the church of Notre Dame du Sablon. When Albert Eichner had told her that he was coming to Brussels to take her to lunch, she’d been faintly amused by his choice of restaurant. The exterior of L’Écailler du Palais Royal was the essence of discretion; premises that were easy to miss, the name lightly engraved on a small stone tablet beside the door, net curtains to prevent inquisitive glances from the street. As the chairman of Guderian Maier Bank in Zurich, these were qualities that Eichner appreciated more than most.

He was at a table towards the rear of the restaurant, a solid man with a physique that had defeated his tailor. When she’d first met him his thick head of hair had been gun-metal grey. Now it was almost as white as his crisp cotton shirt. Each cuff was secured by a thick oval of gold. On his left wrist was an understated IWC watch with a leather strap.

Stephanie was wearing the only smart outfit she now possessed, a black Joseph suit with a plain, cream silk blouse. Chic and conservative, just the way she suspected she existed in Eichner’s imagination. As she approached the table he rose from his chair.

‘Stephanie, as beautiful as ever.’

Eichner was one of the few men Stephanie had entrusted with her original given name. As for the surname with which he was familiar – Schneider – that had been her mother’s.

A waiter in a blue tunic poured her a glass of champagne.

She said, ‘How long are you in Brussels, Albert?’

‘A friend of mine lent me his Bombardier. I flew here from Zurich this morning. I have to get back for a family engagement this evening.’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘Don’t be. You’ve earned it.’ He raised his glass. ‘To you, Stephanie. With our sincerest gratitude.’

It was three months since Otto Heilmann’s death. She smiled but said nothing. Eichner was right to be grateful. In the past, she’d saved him from personal disgrace and in return he’d consented to become her banker. This time, however, the entire institution had been under threat. In the first week of September, Eichner had implored her to come to Zurich. An emergency, he’d said. An emergency that threatened Guderian Maier. He’d let her fill in the blank spaces.

An emergency that threatens your arrangement with us.

Otto Heilmann. One of the very few to have become rich during the era of the GDR. Heilmann had links with Guderian Maier going back to the Seventies. When Stephanie had asked what kind of links, Eichner had reddened.

‘In those days, my uncle ran this bank. In the same way that he did when he first ran it back in the Forties.’ He’d paused to let her dwell on this, the gravity in his voice suggesting the subtext. ‘We do things differently these days. Heilmann doesn’t understand that. He’s of the opinion that a bank like ours will accept anyone’s money providing there is enough of it.’

‘I assume you’ve explained that this isn’t the case.’

‘As politely and as firmly as possible.’

‘But he’s not dissuaded?’

‘Unfortunately, no.’

‘Distressing.’

‘We can’t possibly be associated with an arms-dealer.’ When Stephanie had raised an eyebrow at him, Eichner had qualified himself. ‘Not like Heilmann. It’s simply out of the question. You know the kind of clients we have. The very idea of it is just too … appalling.’

‘I’d have thought your stand might have worked in your favour.’

‘On one level, possibly. But there’s something else. When the Stasi disintegrated, Heilmann headed to Russia and took what he needed with him. Information for his own protection, information for profit.’

‘Let me guess. You refuse him and he’ll find a way to incriminate the bank, tying it to the crimes of the Stasi.’

‘He won’t find a way. He has a way.’

‘The sins of the past …’

The traffic on Bahnhofstrasse and the ticking of the carriage-clock on the marble mantelpiece had provided the soundtrack to a moment of awkward truth.

Eventually, Eichner had said, ‘As I have already explained to you, Stephanie, we don’t behave that way any more.’

‘Yet you have me as a client.’

He’d smiled lamely. ‘The point is, my generation and the next generation have gone to great lengths to restore some honour to a very noble heritage. Despite that, if we had to, we would be prepared to face the potential humiliation he’s threatening. But it’s gone beyond that now.’

He’d slid a photograph across his desk. Stephanie had recognized Eichner at the heart of the gathering, his wife sitting to his right. A family portrait, the faces of their seven grandchildren scratched out by a sharp point.

‘Hand-delivered to this office last week. Six people in the bank have received similar material. Including my secretary.’

She’d told him not to worry. And when he’d raised the subject of her fee, she’d refused to discuss it. Consider it a gift, she’d said. From one friend to another.

Now, four months after that conversation, Eichner looked five years younger. ‘Shall we share a bottle of something good? The seafood here is fantastic but I hope you won’t be offended if we drink red wine. From memory, they have a very fine Figéac 93 but I think we’ll go for something a little better.’

He ordered for both of them, Iranian caviar with another glass of champagne, followed by grilled turbot and a bottle of Cheval Blanc 88. When they were alone again, he said, ‘That place you used to live – that farm in the south of France – remind me where it was.’

Her heart tripped. ‘Between Entrecasteaux and Salernes.’

‘Were you aware that it’s for sale?’

How many years was it since she’d been there? Four, perhaps? It felt longer. She’d rented it. The owner had been a German investment banker stationed in Tokyo. It was a beautiful place, a little run-down, terraces rising behind the house, olives, lemons, a vineyard falling away to the valley below, the house itself afloat on clouds of lavender bushes. She’d picked it as somewhere to hide from the world and had never wanted to leave.

‘The directors and I have discussed this and – with your permission, naturally – we have decided to acquire the property.’

Stephanie frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘For you. As a token of our gratitude.’

‘I told you in Zurich that I would deal with Heilmann for free.’

‘Exactly so. And we would like you to view this gesture in the same spirit. Consider it a gift. From one friend to another.’

She reached across the table and took his hand. ‘Thank you, Albert. That’s so sweet of you. But I’ll need to think about it.’

‘Is that you, Petra?’

Ten-to-eleven. When the call came, she was sitting on the living-room floor, sorting through Marianne’s domestic bills, listening to Bright Red by Laurie Anderson. The track ‘Tightrope’ was on repeat.

Roland doesn’t know me as Petra. That was her first thought, quickly followed by another: it’s not his voice.

‘Who is this?’

‘Jacob Furst.’

Out of the blue. Or, to be accurate, out of the past.

Furst took her silence incorrectly. ‘You don’t remember me?’

‘Of course I remember you.’

Furst was an old man – in his late eighties now, she guessed – with each year etched into the timbre of his voice. Not surprising, given the life he’d led. And now she recognized the strangely distinct sound of that voice too; high and quavering, almost feminine.

‘I apologize for calling you like this but I need to see you. It’s urgent.’

Another thought was forming; this was Marianne’s mobile phone. How had Furst obtained the number? Through Cyril Bradfield, perhaps, a mutual friend. Stephanie felt Petra taking over, concern making way for pragmatism. ‘Where are you?’

‘Paris.’

Where Furst lived, so far as she knew. ‘I’m going away tomorrow but I’ll be back …’

‘Where are you?’

She felt Petra’s reflex, her mobile had a German number. Did Furst imagine she was in Germany, or did he know that she was in Belgium?

‘I’m right … here.’

He seemed to understand. ‘Could you be in Paris tomorrow?’

‘I could be just about anywhere tomorrow.’

‘I would never have called you if I’d thought there was an alternative but …’

From what she remembered of Furst, that much was true. ‘What is it?’

‘I can’t say,’ he whispered. ‘Not over the phone.’

‘Can it wait?’

The pause undermined the lie that followed. ‘For two or three days, maybe.’

Stephanie pictured Furst; a small man with a crooked frame and surprisingly large hands. Miriam, his wife, was taller and broader.

‘Tell me this: is it the same as last time?’

His reply was barely audible: ‘Almost.’

Almost?

She said, ‘I can’t promise you anything.’

‘Will you try?’

No. Instinctively, that was what she felt. Petra hated situations like this. Unsolicited, unprepared. But there would be no easy escape here. There was a barrier in the way constructed of obligation and sentimentality.

‘One o’clock. If I’m not there by half-past, I’m not coming. Shall I come to your home?’

‘No.’

‘Where?’

‘The place we first met. Do you remember it?’

Day Two

My carriage is almost empty on the Thalys train service from Brussels-Midi to Gare du Nord in Paris. Belgian countryside scrolls smoothly across my window at high speed, flat and brown beneath a grey sky, ploughed fields speckled with small woods and copses. The tops of the electricity pylons are lost in low, rolling cloud.

A woman in a dark red uniform pours me more coffee. In an hour I’ll be in Paris. In four, I’ll be hurtling through this same stretch of countryside in the opposite direction. In twelve, I’ll be at thirty-five thousand feet, heading for the Indian Ocean.

I’m not sure what I can achieve while I’m with Jacob Furst but I’ll manage something. Furst is a man with a fierce sense of honour; the kind of man to squirm under obligation. And he will feel obligated towards me, no matter how hard I try to persuade him not to be. The truth is, my debt of obligation is greater.

For almost sixty years Furst was one of the great document forgers. A gifted painter from childhood, he was faking masterpieces for wealthy clients by the time he was twenty. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he turned his talents to a more practical purpose, forging documents to help Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Later, he joined the Resistance, creating papers for SOE agents dropped into France between 1942 and 1943, before his eventual capture. He survived for two years at Auschwitz. After the war, he developed the trade in forged documents for profit, protected by the legitimate screen of the family garment business.

He retired from his art – art being exactly what he considers it – in 1995 when the arthritis in his fingers began to affect the quality of his work. Over the years, Furst passed on his expertise to a small handful of apprentices. One of them was an Irish art student who was studying in Paris during the 1960s. His name was Cyril Bradfield.

Cyril has been creating independent identities for me as long as I’ve been Petra Reuter. In that sense he knows me better than any person alive. In the perverse way that logic works in my world, it seems appropriate that he’s the closest thing I have to a parent; after all, he’s fathered so many of me.

Cyril feels for Jacob Furst the way I feel for him. Which is why the only time he’s ever asked me for help was when it was on Furst’s behalf. It wasn’t a complicated situation, just undignified; an elderly man and his wife threatened by a crooked landlord and his troop of Neanderthal thugs.

That was four years ago and it was the only time I spent with Jacob and Miriam Furst. But we formed a bond. A bond that feels as strong today as it did then. It’s no exaggeration to say this: without Furst, there would have been no Cyril Bradfield for me, and without some of his documents, I’d probably be dead. But the reason I’m going to Paris is that I liked Furst. If I think of Cyril as a surrogate father it’s easy to think of Jacob and Miriam as surrogate grandparents. With some people, you don’t need time to make the connection; it just happens. Often, when you least expect it.

Twelve-fifty, boulevard de Sébastopol in Sentier. Stephanie dropped euro coins into the driver’s palm and climbed out of the taxi. Despite the hard rain, she wanted to walk the last bit. She entered rue Saint Denis from rue Réaumur and it was how she remembered it; clothes shops and garment wholesalers along either pavement, the road itself a narrow artery clogged by double-parked vans, their back doors open, rolls of fabric stacked for delivery. And noise everywhere; bleating horns, music, the rain, half a dozen shouted languages. At the intersection with rue du Caire a dozen Indian and Bangladeshi porters were loitering with trolleys, waiting to be summoned. In the doorways and alleys were the whores; oblivious to the weather, the wrong side of forty, sagging breasts and bloody make-up done no favours by the dismal daylight.

Stephanie entered Passage du Caire, an arcade of cramped passages with filthy glass overhead, and came to the place where the Fursts’ family business had once been. Part of the sign still hung above the door, the red plastic letters faded to dirty pink. The window was crammed with mannequins; beige females with no heads or arms. A piece of paper pasted to the glass offered fifty percent discounts for bulk orders.

Four doors down was La Béatrice, the kosher café where Cyril Bradfield had introduced Stephanie to Jacob Furst. Seven tables with magnolia Formica tops, a selection of snacks laid out behind a glass counter, fluorescent tubes taped to sagging ceiling panels, one of them hanging loose. On the wall beside the espresso machine was a large wooden framed photograph of George Clooney next to a smaller frame containing a certificate bearing the words ‘Shin Beth de Paris’.

There were half a dozen people in the place. Mostly from the arcade, she guessed; none of them were wet. Stephanie recognized Béatrice, a haughty-looking woman with dyed black hair. She ordered a cappuccino and took it to a vacant table by the small circular staircase leading to the upper floor. Béatrice fiddled with the portable radio on the counter until Liane Foly was singing ‘Doucement’. In the café’s wet warmth, Stephanie caught a whiff of cinnamon.

One o’clock came and went. So did Béatrice’s customers. Stephanie noticed a man who seemed vaguely familiar; slim, tall, well dressed, in his fifties with the same dark blonde hair she’d had as Krista Jaspersen. He was sitting at a table near the staircase. She couldn’t pin a name to the face but wondered whether she might have seen him on TV.

At one-fifteen her mobile rang.

‘Petra?’

‘Jacob?’

‘Where are you?’

The high-pitched voice sounded more tremulous than usual.

‘I’m where you should be. Unless my memory’s going.’

He didn’t reply straight away and she regretted her sarcasm.

‘I apologize, Petra.’

‘Where are you? I don’t have long, Jacob.’

‘Fifteen minutes, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘You’ll stay?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good. Two minutes, then …’

He finished the call and Stephanie sat there for a moment trying to remember something she’d forgotten. Something she’d intended to ask him. Something that had come back to her on the train.

The phone. The number. How had Furst got Marianne’s number? And now that she thought about that, there was something else. Fifteen minutes? Or two?

She found she was reaching into her coat pocket for loose change; as usual, Petra was ahead of Stephanie, her instinct taking over. There were no coins left. The last of them had gone to the taxi driver. She put a ten-euro note beneath the saucer and stood up.

Out in the passage she looked both ways. Nothing. She decided to wait for his call somewhere nearby. When he arrived and discovered that she’d left, he’d phone again. She was certain of it.

She turned back towards the rue Saint Denis entrance.

And was airborne.

The shockwave was the sound somehow. A flash. Light, heat, no air in her lungs. She was aloft in a hurricane of debris. Then gravity reclaimed her and she was smeared across … what, exactly?

Darkness followed. Unconsciousness? Or just darkness?

The screams began. Cutting through the hum in her head. When she opened her eyes she couldn’t see. A cloud of dust enveloped her, as impenetrable as highland mist. She didn’t know if she was injured because she was numb. But she was aware of wetness down her back. And dirt in her mouth. There was a smell too; something cloying. Burning plastic, perhaps?

Her foot was trapped, wedged between two solid shapes.

She closed her eyes. Time to sleep.

No.

Petra twisted her body so that she could see her right foot. A grey filing cabinet was on top of it, two of its three drawers blown out. Beneath it was half a beige mannequin. She used her left foot against the filing cabinet, creating a gap for the right, then rolled off her mattress of fractured dummies.

Water droplets splashed on her face. A burst pipe. Or rain. She looked up but saw only smoke and dust.

The right ankle was tender. She hauled herself to her feet. Nausea rose up inside her. One step, then another. For now, that was enough. Adrenaline, her most faithful servant, would see her through.

In the remains of the passage fires sprouted in the gloom, deep orange and gold. A severed cable spat white hot sparks over a soggy roll of material with a floral print. Except it wasn’t a roll. It was a body in a dress. Petra made out an arm, filthy black, the hand crushed to pulp.

The passage had a lawn of broken glass. Not just from store windows but from the canopy overhead; metres and metres of it reduced to splinters.

La Béatrice was burning rubble. How many people had been inside? Half a dozen? Maybe. The upper floor had collapsed into the café. She didn’t know whether there had been anyone up there. Scorched body parts hung from the fractured iron staircase. At the foot of the stairs, Béatrice’s head and upper torso were on fire. Petra couldn’t see the rest of the corpse but could smell her burning hair. Closer to the entrance, a single boot and shin protruded from beneath a concrete slab. Less than a metre away, blood was oozing through cracked brick.

There was music. Weak, muffled, rising up from beneath the debris; Béatrice’s portable radio, still working, no matter how improbably. Petra looked to her right. Rue Saint Denis had gone, concealed by the cloak of smoke.

She began to cough, lining her nostrils and mouth with dust. Stunned, all her training suspended, she staggered away, each step as uncertain as the one before. A few metres on, a pretty blonde woman in a lilac cardigan and brown tweed skirt lay on the ground, twitching, flayed by glass.

Under the screams she heard distant shouts; people making their way towards the carnage. Boots scrambled over loose brick, muttered curses followed falls.

To her left, a large fire was taking hold, glass cracking in the heat. She came to a fork in the passage. Over the ringing in her head an orchestra of alarms grew louder. She veered right, then stopped.

‘… to be careful, okay?’

A snatch of conversation coming her way. Then another voice: ‘Check everywhere.’

‘… watch overhead for collapsing …’

Shapes were forming in the murk.

‘… somewhere in here … keep looking …’

‘… extremely dangerous … and armed …’

Two figures, certainly, perhaps three.

‘… take any chances …’

Petra coughed again, spitting out brown saliva.

The first figure emerged from the dust, a light grey raincoat billowing around him. The next was in uniform. An armed police officer with a full moustache. Other silhouettes took shape behind them.

The first man saw her, halted abruptly, then pointed directly at her. ‘Shit! It’s her! There she is!’

There who is?

Who was he looking at? Why was he pointing at her?

A third figure was forming, another armed officer in uniform, then a fourth man in a tan leather coat.

‘Shoot her.’

A mistake, clearly. Except Petra knew that it wasn’t.

The first armed officer looked unsure.

‘It’s her,’ barked the man in the grey raincoat. ‘I tell you, it’s her!’

‘I don’t see the …’

‘She’s armed! Now shoot her!’

The man in the leather coat was already raising his right hand. The second officer was pushing past the first. And Petra was moving, taking the passage directly ahead, already aware of the fact that it was too straight. In a matter of seconds, before she could melt into the smoke, they would have a clear view of her back.

Behind her now, the same voice again. ‘Henri! Watch out! She’s coming your way! She’s got a gun …’

What gun?

Movement grew in the dimness ahead. Petra entered the smoking remains of a boutique; retro-punk T-shirts, studded leather mini-skirts, frayed tartan hot-pants, a severed hand with a silver thumb-ring. She dragged a sloping chunk of partition wall from across the doorway at the back.

‘Shit – Didi, you asshole! I nearly shot you! Where is she?’

More coughing. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you passed her …’

‘In there!’ cried a third voice. ‘Look!’

There was a single shot as Petra plunged into more darkness. She felt the thud of a bullet hitting a panel of MDF to her left. She came to a shoulder-wide passage with stairs to her right. Up to the first floor, a cramped storage area, the ceiling less than a foot taller than she was. The blast had blown the glass from the internal window overlooking the passage. She could hear them arguing below.

No weapon. No way out.

Except for the window. She approached the hole cautiously. Just above her was a web of iron struts, pipes and rubber cable, all of it ancient. Through the dust-haze she watched the four men beneath her. They were looking into the blackened shell of the boutique, shouting at those who’d followed her inside.

No choice, so no need to think about it. Up on to the sill and out on to the ledge, the remaining fragments of glass in the window-frame nibbling the palms of her right hand. There was a rusting water-pipe above her head. She gave it a quick tug; it seemed secure. She held on to it and swung, her toes catching the corner of a sturdy junction box, one of six bolted to a panel, cables spewing from them like black spaghetti.

‘Up there!’ bellowed a man below. ‘Quick!’

But not quick enough. She was already over the ledge above, propelling her body through a mesh of twisted metal ribs. On the roof, she gauged the way the passages worked, the ridges, the intersections. Most of the glass had gone. To her left, thick black smoke was curling skywards, the flames beneath undeterred by the rain.

It was slippery underfoot, years of grime given gloss by the downpour. She tried to work out where rue Saint Denis was so that she could head in the opposite direction. It wasn’t obvious from the backs of the surrounding buildings but there was a gap so she headed for that. The roof tapered to a short stretch of crumbling wall that abutted a taller building; apartments from the first floor up, a business at street level, the shutters pulled down over the windows.

She took the drainpipe to the first floor, swiping three potted plants from a window-ledge, then lowered herself on to the roof of a white Renault Mégane that was parked on the pavement.

Now she was in a small triangular square: rue Saint Spire, rue Alexandrie, rue Sainte Foy. She took Sainte Foy.

Five-past-two, the sirens now a long way behind her. She was still walking, the rain still falling. And helping. Under the circumstances, better to be drenched than dirty. Which was all the logic she could handle.

Head for Gare du Nord. Use the return ticket. Go home, have a shower, catch the plane. Worry about it over a cocktail on the beach.

She was sorely tempted yet knew she couldn’t. Stations were out. So was home. Which meant Marianne Bernard’s integrity was suspended. And it was Marianne’s name on the air ticket.

How had the police got there so quickly? How had they identified her so quickly? And the order to shoot – because she was armed – what did that mean?

One part of her wanted to stop and think. To collate. But another part of her wouldn’t let her. She had to keep moving. That was the priority.

Never stop. The moment you do …

Three-thirty-five. The cinema provided a temporary sanctuary of darkness. The film was a Hollywood romantic comedy, predictably short on romance, utterly devoid of comedy. Stephanie waited until the main feature had started before going to the washroom. She peeled off her denim jacket and the black polo-neck. Both were soaked. The long-sleeved strawberry T-shirt beneath was stuck to her skin. She filled a basin with warm soapy water, rolled up the sleeves to the elbow, scrubbed her face, hands and arms, rinsed, refilled the basin with clean warm water and dipped her head into it, before trying to claw some order through her hair.

A little cleaner but still dripping, she locked herself into one of the stalls, hanging the jersey and jacket on the door-peg. She lifted the T-shirt, examined her torso and ran her fingertips over as much of her back as she could. Nothing but a few cuts and grazes. She pulled down the toilet lid, sat on it, pulled off a dark grey Merrell shoe and checked the right ankle; swollen, tender to the touch, but no significant damage. When she envisaged Béatrice it seemed little short of a miracle. And all because of Petra; Stephanie would have stayed at the table for Jacob Furst.

She pulled on her wet clothes and checked her possessions; the return portion of her train ticket, Marianne’s credit-cards, a Belgian driving licence, flat keys, six hundred and seventeen euros in cash, mobile phone, cinema ticket.

Stephanie returned to the comforting dark of the auditorium, taking a seat near the back, and was grateful for the stuffy warmth. First things first, a plan of action. The primary urge was to run. And she would run. As she had in the past. That was the easy part. Nobody ran as effortlessly as Petra. But she couldn’t allow fear to be the fuel. Before that, however, there were questions.

She rose into the ethnic melting-pot of Belleville. The pavement along the eastern flank of the broad boulevard de Belleville was busy. Stephanie weaved through Afghans, Turks, Iranians, Georgians, Chinese. A group of five tall Sudanese were arguing on the corner of rue Ramponeau. A Vietnamese woman barged past her dragging a bulging laundry bag. Traffic was stationary in both directions, frustrated drivers leaning on their horns.

Stephanie switched on her mobile. No messages and no missed calls since she’d turned it off twenty minutes after clearing Passage du Caire. She return-dialled Jacob Furst’s number. No answer. She switched the phone off again and walked up rue Lémon to rue Dénoyez. The five-storey building was on the other side of the road. At street level, the Boucherie Shalom was closed. The restaurant next to it was open but Stephanie couldn’t see any diners through the window.

The Fursts’ apartment was on the third floor. No lights on, the curtains open. There were weeds sprouting from the plaster close to a fracture in the drainpipe. There was no building to the right. It had been demolished, the waste ground screened from the street by a barricade of blue and green corrugated iron.

She ventured left, away from the building, heading up the cobbled street past graffiti and peeling bill posters, past the entrance to the seedy Hotel Dénoyez – rooms by the hour – until she came to rue Belleville. Then she made a circle and approached rue Dénoyez from the other end at rue Ramponeau.

The Furst family had a Parisian lineage stretching back two centuries. In that time, there had been two constants: a family business centred on the garment industry and active participation within the Jewish community. Which included living among that community. And here was the proof. On rue Ramponeau, Stephanie stood with her back to La Maison du Taleth, a shop selling Jewish religious artefacts. Restaurants and sandwich shops all displayed with prominence the Star of David.

She returned to boulevard de Belleville. From the France Télécom phonebooth by the Métro exit she rang the police. An incident to report, some kind of break-in, she told them. She’d heard noises – screams for help, breaking glass, a loud bang – and now nothing. Please hurry – they’re an old couple. Vulnerable …

When they’d asked for her name, she put down the phone.

She watched from the bright blue entrance to Hotel Dénoyez. When the patrol car pulled up a pair of officers emerged and she noticed two things. First, they looked casual; from the way they moved she guessed they were expecting an exaggerated domestic disturbance. Or a hoax. The second thing was the dark blue BMW 5-series halfway between her and the patrol car.

It had been there as long as she’d been loitering by the hotel entrance. She’d assumed there was no one in it. But when the patrol car pulled up, the BMW’s engine coughed, ejecting a squirt of oily smoke from the exhaust. She peered more carefully through the back window and now saw that there were two people inside. The car didn’t move until the police officers had entered the building. Then it pulled away from the kerb, tyres squeaking on the cobbles, turning right at rue Ramponeau.

She continued to wait. A third-floor light came on. Stephanie pictured Miriam Furst in the kitchen at the rear of the flat. Making coffee for the policemen, taking mugs from the wooden rack above the sink. That was how she remembered it. Beside the rack, a cheap watercolour of place des Vosges hung next to a cork noticeboard with family photographs pinned to it: three children, all girls, and nine grandchildren, none of whom had been inclined to steer the Furst textile business into its third century.

Fifteen minutes after the arrival of the first police car, a second arrived. Followed within forty-five seconds by an ambulance, then a third police car and, finally, a second ambulance. Three policemen began to cordon off the street.

Now it was no longer just Stephanie’s fingers that were going numb.

We pull into Tuileries, in the direction of La Défense. I’ll probably change at Franklin D. Roosevelt and head for Mairie de Montreuil, then change again after a dozen stations or so. It’s five-to-eleven and I’ve been riding the Métro for more than two hours. There’s no better way to make yourself invisible for a short while than to ride public transport in a major city late at night. Later, they’ll see me on CCTV recordings, drifting back and forth. But by then I’ll be somewhere else. And someone else.

Above ground, in the bars and restaurants, in private homes, there is only one topic of discussion tonight. The bomb blast in Sentier. Many dead, many wounded, many theories. There’ll be grief and outrage on the news, and plenty of inaccurate in-depth analysis from the experts.

I know that Jacob and Miriam Furst are dead. Nobody will read about them tomorrow. They will have died largely as they lived; unnoticed. I also know that I should be dead too.

The men who chased me through the smoking wreckage in Passage du Caire were there to make sure. They were there so quickly. And they weren’t looking for anyone else; they recognized me.

I try to fix a version of events in my head. Furst is held against his will until he’s made the call to establish that I’m in place. He’s surprised that I’m there. Did he think I wouldn’t come? He tells me he’ll be with me in fifteen minutes, then two. Why the difference? To arouse my suspicion? To warn me?

How did he get the number? And why wasn’t I more vigilant? Perhaps, mentally, I was already halfway to Mauritius.

After our conversation is over, the explosion occurs within a minute. But the more I consider it, the more perplexing it becomes. They – whoever ‘they’ are – needed to be sure that I’d be in Paris today. That I’d be in La Béatrice at one o’clock. How could they be confident that I’d make the trip from Brussels? And if I’m to assume that they knew I was in Brussels, which as a matter of security I must, shouldn’t I also assume that they know I’m Marianne Bernard? And if they know that, where does the line of enquiry stop? Whether they knew about Marianne Bernard or not, it’s obvious who they really wanted. Petra Reuter. She’s the one with the reputation.

So why the elaborate deceit? Nobody who knew anything about her would risk that. They’d take her down the moment they found her. At home, for instance, in a run-down apartment in Brussels. They’d catch her with her guard down. Simpler, safer, better.

There can be only one answer: they needed me to be at La Béatrice.

Day Three

The Marais, quarter-past-five in the morning, the streetlamps reflected in puddles not quite frozen. Rue des Rosiers was almost empty; one or two on the way home, one or two on the way to work, hands in pockets, chins tucked into scarves.

It had been after midnight when she abandoned the Métro. Since then, she’d stopped only once, when the rain had returned just before three. She’d found an all-night café not far from where she was now; candlelight and neon over concrete walls, leather booths in dark corners, Ute Lemper playing softly over the sound system.

Stephanie stretched a cup of black coffee over an hour before anyone approached her. A tall, angular woman with deathly pale skin and dark red shoulder-length hair, wearing a purple silk shirt beneath a black leather overcoat. She smiled through a slash of magenta lipstick and sat down opposite Stephanie.

‘Hello. I’m Véronique.’

Véronique from Lyon. She’d been awkwardly beautiful once – perhaps not too long ago – but thinness had aged her. And so had unhappiness. Stephanie warmed to her because she understood the chilly solitude of being alone in a city of millions.

They talked for a while before Véronique reached for Stephanie’s hand. ‘I live close. Do you want to come? We could have a drink?’

Petra considered the offer clinically: Véronique was an ideal way to vanish from the street. No security cameras, no registration, no witnesses. Inside her home, Petra would have options; some brutal, some less so. But it was after four; there was no longer any pressing need for a Véronique.

Stephanie let her down gently with a version of the truth. ‘It’s too late for me. If only we’d met earlier.’

She turned left into rue Vieille du Temple. The shop was a little way down, the red and gold sign over the property picked out by three small lamps: Adler. And beneath that: boulangerie – patisserie.

Stephanie knocked on the door. Behind the glass a full-length blind had been lowered, fermé painted across it. A minute passed. Nothing. She tried again – still nothing – and was preparing for a third rap when she heard the approach of footsteps and a stream of invective.

The same height as Stephanie, he wore a creased pistachio shirt rolled up at the sleeves and a black waistcoat, unfastened. A crooked nose, a mash of scar around the left eye, thick black hair everywhere, except on his head. The last time, he’d had a ponytail. Not any more, the close crop a better cut to partner his encroaching baldness. There was a lot of gold; identity bracelets, a watch, chains with charms, a thick ring through the left ear-lobe. As Cyril Bradfield had once said to her, ‘He looks like the hardest man you’ve ever seen. And dresses like a tart.’

‘Hello, Claude.’

Claude Adler was too startled to reply.

‘I knew you’d be up,’ Stephanie said. ‘Four-thirty, every day. Right?’

‘Petra …’

‘I would’ve called, of course …’

‘Of course.’

‘But I couldn’t.’

‘This is … well … unexpected?’

‘For both of us. We need to talk.’

It was delightfully warm inside. Adler locked the door behind them and they walked through the shop, the shelves and wicker baskets still empty. The cramped bakery was at the back. Stephanie smelt it before she saw it; baguettes, sesame seed bagels, apple strudel, all freshly prepared, all of it reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything since Brussels.

Adler took her upstairs to the apartment over the shop where he and his wife had lived for almost twenty years. He lit a gas ring for a pan of water and scooped ground coffee into a cafetière. There was a soft pack of Gauloises on the window-ledge. He tapped one out of the tear, offered it to her, then slipped it between his lips when she declined.

‘Is Sylvie here?’

‘Still asleep.’ He bent down to the ring of blue flame, nudging the cigarette tip into it, shreds of loose tobacco flaring bright orange. ‘She’ll be happy to see you when she gets up.’

‘I doubt it. That’s the reason I’m here, Claude. I’ve got bad news.’

Adler took his time standing. ‘Have you seen the TV? It seems to be the day for bad news.’

‘It is. Jacob and Miriam are dead.’

He froze. ‘Both?’

Stephanie nodded.

At their age, one was to be expected. Followed soon after, perhaps, by the other. But both together?

‘When?’

‘Last night.’

‘How?’

‘Violently.’

He began to shake his head gently. ‘It can’t be true.’

‘It is true.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw the police. The ambulances …’

‘You were there?’

‘Afterwards, yes.’

‘Did you see them?’

Stephanie shook her head.

‘Then perhaps …’

‘Trust me, Claude. They’re dead.’

He wanted to protest but couldn’t because he believed her. Even though she hadn’t seen the bodies. Even though he didn’t know her well enough to know what she did. Not exactly, anyway.

‘Who did it?’

‘I don’t know.’

He thought about that for a while. ‘So why are you here?’

‘Because I’m supposed to be dead too.’

Adler refilled their cups; hot milk first, then coffee like crude oil, introduced over the back of a spoon, a ritual repeated many times daily. Like lighting a cigarette. Which he now did for the fourth time since her arrival, the crushed stubs gathering on a pale yellow saucer.

Now that he’d absorbed the initial shock, Adler was reminiscing. Secondhand history, as related to him by Furst: the pipeline pumping Jewish refugees to safety; the false document factory he’d established in Montmartre; 14 June 1940, the day the Nazis occupied Paris; smuggling Miriam to Lisbon via Spain in the autumn of 1941; forging documents for the Resistance and then SOE. And finally, betrayal, interrogation, Auschwitz.

Adler scratched a jaw of stubble, some black, some silver. ‘He always said he was lucky to live. Listening to him tell it, I was never so sure.’ He stirred sugar into his coffee. ‘You survive something like that, the least you expect is to be left alone to die of natural causes. Fuck it, he was nearly ninety.’

‘You’re right.’

‘You know what I admired most about him?’

‘What?’

He drew on his cigarette and then exhaled over the tip. ‘That it never occurred to him to leave. From 1939 on, he could’ve run. But he didn’t. He chose to stay behind, to create false documents to help others escape. He knew the risks better than most. Yet even when they got Miriam out, it never crossed his mind to go with her.’

‘That was the kind of man he was. Silently courageous. Understated.’

‘True. He was a man who believed in community. His community.’

‘Talking of which, did Jacob ever go back to Sentier?’

Adler stared at her. ‘That’s a blunt question on a morning like this.’

‘That’s why I’m asking it, Claude.’

He shrugged. ‘Not so much, I don’t think. Not since he sold the shop.’

‘I saw it yesterday.’

‘What?’

‘The shop. In Passage du Caire. Part of the sign is still above the entrance. At least, it was. It’s not any more.’

Adler’s jaw dropped. ‘You were there?’

‘Moments before the explosion, yes.’

‘My God … why?’

‘To see Jacob. He called me the night before last and asked me to come to Paris. He said it was important. He wanted to meet at La Béatrice. I turned up. He didn’t.’

‘At La Béatrice? That used to be his favourite place.’

‘I know.’

‘A coincidence?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

Adler’s gaze drifted out of the window. ‘We were up all night watching the news. Twelve dead, fifty injured. We were wondering who we’d know.’ He looked her up and down. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’d already left?’

‘No. I was just lucky. Everyone around me was dead or injured. I hardly got a scratch.’

‘What about Jacob?’

‘I told you. He never turned up. He died later. At their apartment.’

‘With Miriam.’

‘Yes.’

‘You think there’s a connection?’

‘I don’t want to. But it’s hard not to. When did you last see him?’

‘Thursday. Sylvie and I went over to their place and we went to the street market on boulevard de Belleville. Lately, it’s something we’ve been doing almost every week. The market is on Thursday and Friday mornings. After it, we have lunch. Usually at old Goldenberg’s place – you know it? He and Jacob were friends.’

She shook her head.

‘On rue de Tourtille. Great service, shit food. Jacob and Miriam have been going there since it opened, back in the Seventies. Jacob always used to say he only started enjoying it about five years ago when his taste buds went. He used to lean across the table when Goldenberg was hovering and he’d say to me, “Claude, there are two things that give me pleasure when I’m here. Not tasting the food and watching your face. Every mouthful is a masterpiece.” That was his big joke. Goldenberg has a sign in the front window: every mouthful is a masterpiece.’

Stephanie tried to muster a smile. ‘Did you always go over to see him? Or did he come here?’

‘Usually, we went there. When he sold the business he began to slow down. Recently, he’d become … fragile.’

‘At his age, he was entitled to.’

‘I agree with you. But he wouldn’t have.’

‘You didn’t notice anything on Thursday? He didn’t seem upset or preoccupied?’

‘Nothing like that, no.’

‘What about the last few weeks?’

‘No.’

‘Does it surprise you that he would have arranged a meeting with me at La Béatrice?’

‘Frankly, yes. He was fond of you. They both were. I would have expected him to invite you to their home. That was their way.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘How could he be connected to what happened in Sentier?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I can’t tell yet. I guess I’ll take a look at his place. After that … who knows?’

‘How will you get in?’

‘I’ll find a way.’

Adler stood up and shuffled past her into the hall. She heard the scrape of a drawer. When he returned he was holding a set of keys.

‘The one with the plastic clip is the top lock, the other one does the main lock. The number for the building is 1845.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It was Miriam’s idea. In case they needed help.’

Stephanie took the keys and put them into the pocket of her denim jacket.

Adler said, ‘Is there something I can do, Petra? I’d like to help.’

‘Then forget this conversation. In fact, forget I was even here.’

I’m sitting at a small circular table beside the window. Outside, the traffic thickens along rue de Rivoli. The street shimmers in the wintry light of early morning. Silver rain streaks the glass. I order some breakfast from the waiter and then spread the newspapers across the table; Le Monde, Libération, International Herald Tribune. The bomb dominates the front pages of the two French papers and shares the lead in the Tribune.

According to the French reports, there are twelve dead and forty-five injured. The Tribune has thirteen dead and forty-nine injured. A spokesman for the Préfet de Police concludes: ‘It’s a tragedy. And a grotesque act of cowardice.’

Much of the coverage is analysis. Since Sentier has a strong Jewish presence, the focus inevitably falls upon anti-Semitic extremists. With all the awkward questions that poses for a country like France. Or even a city like Paris. Libération reports that the Gendarmerie Nationale have two suspects, both men, both seen entering La Béatrice two or three minutes before the explosion. The shorter of the pair is about one-metre-sixty and is twenty to twenty-five years old. He was wearing a Nike tracksuit – dark blue with white flashes. The older one is probably in his mid-thirties, around one-metre-eighty, and was wearing denim jeans, black running shoes and a khaki jacket with a zip. They are Algerians but might be travelling on Moroccan passports. No names are suggested.

I read the descriptions several times. The detail is convincing but false. No such men entered La Béatrice while I was there, which was over a period of about twenty minutes. And if they’d gone in after I’d left, they’d almost certainly be dead.

The name of al-Qaeda is tossed over the coverage as casually as confetti at a wedding. The French papers, in particular, concern themselves with the possibility of an anti-Muslim backlash. Nothing I read is new.

The café is quiet. A crumpled, middle-aged man beneath the menu blackboard nurses a glass of red wine. I can’t decide whether it’s the last of the night or the first of the morning. Three tables away from me, a plump dark-haired woman is smoking a filterless cigarette. Smudged eye-liner draws attention to bloodshot pupils.

The waiter brings me bread, butter and hot chocolate. He stoops to lay them on the table, a lock of greasy grey hair falling from his forehead. He sees the newspapers, shakes his head and clucks his disapproval.

There’s no mention of me anywhere. No female suspect. No chase through the ruins. No gun-shot. I’ve been air-brushed from the picture.

Number 16, place Vendôme. Just inside the entrance, on the wall to the left, was a mirror with the names of the resident institutions picked out in gold letters; R.T. Vanderbilt Company Inc., Lazard Construction, Laboratoires Garnier. Under Escalier B, Stephanie found the name, once familiar, now largely ignored: Banque Damiani, Genève. This was only her second visit in seven years.

Escalier B was at the back of the paved courtyard, past the offices of Comme des Garçons, through a set of black double-doors. Inside, Stephanie took the stairs.

The reception room had been redecorated; a large Chinese carpet laid over a polished parquet floor, heavy curtains of plum brocade, a pair of Louis XIV armchairs either side of a table. There was a collection of oil portraits set in large oval gilt frames, each hung within a wall panel. Stephanie knew that the faces belonged to the original Damiani brothers and their sons.

The receptionist was about the same age as her. But standing in front of her desk, Stephanie felt like a gauche teenager. She wore a beautifully cut suit; navy-blue, simple, elegant. She was sitting in a throne chair, her spine nowhere near the back of it. On her wrist was a gold Piaget watch.

She greeted Stephanie with a warm smile. Elsewhere, that might have been a surprise considering Stephanie’s appearance – perhaps you are looking for some other place? – but not here. The few who made it to the receptionist’s desk at Banque Damiani usually did so intentionally. Regardless of appearance.

‘I have a box.’

‘Of course. One moment, please.’

The receptionist directed her towards the Louis XIV armchairs, then disappeared through the door to the right, the panels inlaid with antique mirror glass. Alone, Stephanie hoped she’d remember the process accurately; two number sequences and a one-time password to allow her access to the strongroom. She would be accompanied by a senior member of the bank and one security guard. In a private cubicle, her box would be brought to her. Once the door was closed, she would open the box using a six-digit code on the keypad. There were no keys in the process, which was one of the reasons she’d chosen Banque Damiani. Under the circumstances in which she might want access to the box, carrying a key – or even collecting a key – might not be possible.

Inside the box was Helen Graham; a thirty-one-year-old Canadian, born in Vancouver, now living in Chicago. Passport, identity card, driving licence, credit-cards, euros, dollars, a pair of glasses, a small case with two sets of coloured contact lenses (grey), a cheap plastic wallet containing thirteen family snapshots, and an insulin pen. Containing, instead of insulin, a strain of engineered tetrodotoxin, a substance found naturally in puffer fish, designed to act instantly by closing down the sodium channels in the nerves, thus rendering them useless, leading to death by paralysis of the breathing muscles.

Helen Graham was a member of the Magnificent Seven. She was one of five exit identities Stephanie had spread across Europe. The others were in Frankfurt, Valencia, Bratislava and Trondheim. Each was held in a safe-deposit box in an institution where the means of access was carried solely in the memory. Beyond Europe, there were versions of her in Baltimore and Osaka.

Over the years, these identities had been rotated. New ones were established, old ones destroyed, nearly always intact. This was only the third time she’d had to activate one. The last time had been in Helsinki and that had been almost four years ago. Since then, she’d only interfered with the identities once. Two months after the introduction of the euro, she’d visited all the European safe-deposit boxes to swap bundles of condemned deutschmarks and francs for pristine euro notes.

The Magnificent Seven had been established as an insurance policy. Created by Jacob Furst’s protégé, Cyril Bradfield, without the knowledge of her former masters, their existence had, until now, been more of an expensive comfort than a practical necessity.

The door opened and a man in a dark grey double-breasted suit entered, holding in his left hand a leather clipboard. Olive-skinned, black hair flecked with silver at the temples, he stood an inch shorter than Stephanie.

In clipped German, clearly not his first language, he said, ‘Welcome. A pleasure to see you again.’

Stephanie had never seen him before. He was speaking German because she was Stephanie Schneider, although no one at the bank was likely to mention the name in conversation with her.

‘I’m Pierre Damiani. Sadly, my uncle is abroad this week. He will be upset to have missed you.’

She doubted that. She hadn’t met him, either.

‘I hope I can be of some assistance to you. Sophie told me why you are here. Before we proceed, I would just like to take this opportunity to say that this bank and my family regard the interests of our esteemed customers as absolutely sacrosanct.’

Said with conviction, nothing obsequious about it.

‘I don’t doubt that,’ she replied.

He nodded curtly, then gave her the leather clipboard. On it was a cream-coloured card with the bank’s name and crest embossed across the top. Beneath, there were three boxes for the numbers and password.

‘You are familiar with the procedure?’

‘I am.’

‘Please read the sheet below.’

Stephanie lifted the card. The message was handwritten in blue ink: Your safe-deposit box has been contaminated. The front of this building is being monitored. Your appearance here has already been reported. In a moment, I will leave the room. Please do not go until then. Take the door on the opposite side of the room to the one I use. At the far end of the passage, there is a fire-exit. It’s unlocked. Our cameras are recording us – I hope you understand – so could you sign the bottom of the declaration form then fill out the card, as normal. Please understand that it is not safe for us to talk. With our sincerest apologies, your faithful servants, Banque Damiani & the Damiani family.

Ten-forty. The easyInternetCafé on boulevard de Sébastopol was busy. Stephanie settled herself at her terminal and sent the same message to three different addresses.

> Oscar. Need to speak. CRV/13. P.

She’d followed Pierre Damiani’s escape route without a problem. What more could they have done for her? Our cameras are recording us – I hope you understand. A plea more than anything else, meaning perhaps: our cameras are recording us … and who can say who will see this? Some entity with powers to sequestrate such recordings?

Yesterday she’d had security in numbers: Stephanie, Petra, Marianne, the Magnificent Seven. Now she was down to one. But which one? Or was it worse than that? Perhaps she was no one at all.

Generally, the deeper the crisis, the deeper she withdrew into Petra. Which fuelled the contradiction at the heart of her; Stephanie was only ever extraordinary as Petra and the more extraordinary Petra was, the more Stephanie resented it. Now, however, Petra seemed marginalized, her confidence faltering.

Helen Graham was useless to her now. That meant the rest of her Magnificent Seven were contaminated by association. Which prompted an unpleasant thought: Cyril Bradfield was the only other person who’d been aware of their existence. She tried to think who might have penetrated their secret. And, more worryingly, how. Through Bradfield himself? What other way could there be? The possibility made her nauseous. Magenta House had to be the prime candidate. Which was faintly ironic, since the identities were designed to protect her from them.

Magenta House was the organization for whom she’d once worked. Based in London, if an entity that doesn’t exist can be based anywhere, it had no official title; Magenta House was the nickname used by those on the inside. Created to operate beyond the law, it had never bothered to recognize the law. In that sense, it was a logical concept, especially if one accepted that there were some threats that could not be countered legally. Somebody has to work in the sewers, Stephanie. That’s why people like you exist.

They’d created her, they’d tried to control her and, in the end, they’d tried to kill her. Which, paradoxically, made them unlikely candidates now. They’d let her go. There had been a change. One era had ended, another had begun, and Petra had been consigned to history.

Nothing that had happened in the last twenty-four hours bore any trace of Magenta House. They shied away from spectaculars. They didn’t plant bombs in public places. Instead, they liquidated the kind of people who did. Quietly, clinically, leaving no trace, and sometimes no body. They deleted people from existence. If they’d wanted to kill her and they’d discovered where she was, they wouldn’t have bothered luring her to Paris.

On the screen, a reply directed her to a quiet confessional in the ether.

> Hello Oscar.

> Petra. Bored already?

The cursor was winking at her, teasing her.

> I’m in Paris.

> Not a good choice for a vacation at the moment.

> Especially not in Sentier.

> You were there?

> Yes. Has anybody been looking for me?

> You’re always in demand.

> I need help, Oscar. I’m running blind.

There was a long pause and Stephanie knew why. This was the first time Stern had encountered Petra in trouble.

> What do you need?

> Something. Anything.

> Give me two hours. We can meet here again.

She terminated the connection. Out on the street she buttoned her denim jacket to the throat and pressed her hands into the pockets. Which was where her fingers came into contact with the keys that Adler had given her. In the other pocket was Marianne Bernard’s mobile phone. She cursed herself for not dumping it earlier; when a mobile phone was switched on, it was a moving beacon. But she’d heard a rumour that it was now possible to track a mobile phone when it was switched off. She dropped the handset into the first bin she passed.

Five-to-one. Stephanie was back with Stern through a terminal at Web 46 on rue du Roi du Sicilie.

> I have a name for you, Petra.

> How much?

> This is for free.

> You must be going soft in your old age.

> Has it ever occurred to you that I might be younger than you?

> Only in my more humorous moments.

>This isn’t sentimentality. This is business. If anything happens to you, I’ll lose money.

> That’s more like it. Who is it?

> Leonid Golitsyn.

> Don’t know him.

> An art-dealer. Very rich. Very well connected.

> What’s his story?

> He has a gallery in Paris on avenue Matignon but he’s based in New York. He goes to Paris three or four times a year, usually on his way back to Moscow. Golitsyn is old school. Chernenko, Gromyko, even Brezhnev – he was cosy with all of them. In those days he was a virtual commuter between the United States and the Soviet Union. He’s always been close to the Kremlin. Even now.

> Putin doesn’t strike me as an art collector.

> I think it’s safe to say that Golitsyn’s been carrying more than canvas over the years. He’s one of those strange creatures who knows everybody but who nobody knows. A friend of mine once described him – rather memorably – as a diplomatic bag. An insult and a truth rolled into one.

> Why is he relevant?

> Anders Brand.

> What’s he got to do with this?

> He was one of the thirteen who were killed yesterday.

Stephanie was amazed. Anders Brand, the former Swedish diplomat, fondly known as The Whisperer. A man who spoke so softly you began to wonder if your hearing was impaired. A peerless mediator during his time at the United Nations. Stephanie remembered seeing him on BBC World’s Hard Talk. He’d only been half-joking when he’d said that being softly-spoken was one of the keys to his success at mediation: ‘It forces people to listen more carefully to me.’

She pictured Brand as he was usually seen – on a conference podium, in a TV studio, disembarking from an aircraft – and realized that his face matched a face she’d seen at La Béatrice. The face she thought she’d recognized but hadn’t been able to name.

> How come this isn’t headline news?

> It will be this evening. As I understand it, his death won’t be officially confirmed until later this afternoon.

> After more than twenty-four hours?

> I wasn’t there, Petra. But I’ve seen the pictures.

The photo-flash memory of Béatrice Klug’s flaming head gave the concept of delayed identification unpleasant credibility.

> What’s the connection with Golitsyn?

> I don’t know that there necessarily is one. What I do know is this: the day before yesterday, they had dinner together at the Meurice. Golitsyn arrived earlier in the day from New York. Brand was due to fly to Baghdad today. Golitsyn heads to Moscow tomorrow. Golitsyn and Brand go back a long way. Brand is another of Golitsyn’s twenty-four-carat connections. Maybe they discussed something that is germane to your current situation.

He’s not telling me everything.

Typical of Stern. Their relationship had lasted longer than any of Stephanie’s romantic relationships. Even the good ones. Both of them had secrets yet both of them had entrusted part of themselves to the other. That wasn’t something she could verify, it was something she felt.

> How do I meet Golitsyn?

> Tonight Golitsyn will be at the Lancaster. Do you know it?

She did. But only because the name of the hotel prompted another name: Konstantin Komarov. One of only two men to have found a way past all her defences. Even now, the mere mention of him was enough to send a jolt through her.

There was an image engraved on her memory; Komarov in front of the Lancaster with a woman on his arm. Not Stephanie but a tall Russian. Ludmilla. The woman who’d taken Stephanie’s place in his bed. A woman who, it transpired, was as intelligent as she was beautiful. In other words, a woman who hadn’t even allowed Stephanie hope.

> I know it.

> He has a series of business meetings there. I’ve arranged for you to see him at eight.

> And that’s it?

> Not quite. You will have to be Claudia Calderon.

> Who’s she?

Hector Reggiano’s brand-new art consultant. Reggiano was a name Stephanie recognized. An Argentine billionaire. Technically, a financier, whatever that meant in Argentina. In the real world, a common thief. But a cultured thief; an art collector with an appetite.

> Golitsyn has been courting Reggiano for years. From your perspective, Claudia Calderon offers two distinct advantages. One: she’s currently in Patagonia. Two: Golitsyn’s never met her. And he won’t turn down a last-minute opportunity to see if he can seduce the woman who controls Reggiano’s purse-strings.

> Is all this really necessary?

> To get you to see Golitsyn? Absolutely. Claudia Calderon gets you past Medvedev. Once you’re with Golitsyn – then it’s up to you.

> And who’s Medvedev?

> Golitsyn’s personal assistant. Ex-Spetsnaz. These days, everywhere Golitsyn goes, Medvedev goes too. He takes care of everything. Hotels, flights, meetings, money, girls.

> Perhaps I’ll suggest to Golitsyn he gets himself a female assistant so he can save himself some cash.

> Hardly a pressing consideration.

> Too rich to care?

> He’s more than rich, Petra.

> Meaning?

> Golitsyn floats above the world.

As Petra, there aren’t many situations I find intimidating. Composure is part of her make-up and when I wear it, it’s a genuine reflection of who I am at that moment. But everyone has an Achilles heel. And this is both hers and mine.

I’m on avenue Montaigne. So far I’ve been into Gucci, Jil Sander and Calvin Klein, looking for something that Claudia Calderon might wear. I don’t think Hector Reggiano’s art consultant would turn up for a meeting with Leonid Golitsyn wearing a grubby denim jacket and scuffed Merrell shoes. I have an image of her in my mind; tall, slender, sophisticated. All I can do is pretend in fancy dress. Escada and Christian Lacroix come and go.

It’s the fascism of fashion that annoys me. The eugenics of beauty. The people in these shops always seem to know that I don’t belong. Eventually, however, salvation presents itself in the form of MaxMara, on the junction with rue Clément Marot, opposite the jeweller Harry Winston. Whatever the city, this is the one place that doesn’t make me feel like a leper.

I drift through the store and end up with a figure-hugging dress, somewhere between dark grey and brown, with sleeves to the knuckle. To go with it I pick out a very soft dark brown, knee-length suede coat with a black leather belt, a pair of shoes and a black bag.

I take the deliberate decision to use Marianne Bernard’s American Express card. The transaction will be traced. But I’m banking on a delay. It doesn’t need to be a long one. Sixty seconds will do.

The purchase is processed without a problem and I leave with Claudia Calderon in a bag. Later, I wrap all Marianne’s cards in a paper napkin and toss them away. I’ll miss the life we shared. Marianne was good to me; a sure sign that our relationship wasn’t destined to last.

Late afternoon. Stephanie pressed 1845 into the keypad and took the damp staircase to the third floor. Jacob and Miriam Furst’s apartment was at the end of the corridor. The door was sealed with police tape. There was no noise from the other apartments on the floor. She hadn’t seen light from any of them from rue Dénoyez. She slit the tape and let herself in with Claude Adler’s keys, quietly closing the door behind her.

Inside, she stood perfectly still, adjusting to the gloom. The dull wash of streetlamps provided the only light. She smelt stale cigarette smoke. The Fursts hadn’t been smokers; Miriam had been asthmatic.

The small living-room overlooked rue Dénoyez. As her eyes became accustomed to the light, Stephanie saw a delta of dark splatters over the oatmeal carpet at the centre of the room. The blood had dried to a black crust. There was broken glass in the cast-iron grate. On the mantelpiece above the fire there had once been a large collection of miniature figurines, she recalled; horses, the glass blown with curls of fiery orange and emerald green. Only two remained.

In the kitchen, she recognized the cheap watercolour of place des Vosges and the wooden mug rack. There were no mugs left. They were all broken. Cutlery and cracked china littered the linoleum floor.

She wondered what the official line was. A violent burglary perpetrated against an elderly, vulnerable couple, their murders little more than some kind of sporting bonus?

The bathroom was at the back of the apartment, overlooking waste ground. It didn’t look as though regeneration was imminent. She lowered the blind and switched on the light. The wallpaper might have been cream once. Now it was pale rust, except for black patches of damp in the corner over the bath. By the sink was a shaving kit, the badger-hair brush and cut-throat razor laid upon an old flannel.

Stephanie washed herself thoroughly, then dressed in the underwear and stockings she’d bought from a depressing discount store on boulevard de Belleville, followed by the clothes she’d bought at MaxMara. She put her belongings into the black leather bag and put her dirty clothes into the MaxMara bags, which she placed beneath the basin.

Using Miriam’s hairbrush made her faintly queasy. She tried to ignore the sensation and examined herself in the mirror. What she needed was twenty minutes in the shower with plenty of shampoo and soap. And then make-up to mask the fatigue. But she’d forgotten to buy make-up and was sure that Miriam had never worn any. Besides, that would certainly feel worse than using the hairbrush; who’d wear a dead woman’s lipstick?

The Lancaster was small and discreet, a townhouse hotel, the kind she liked. The bar was an open area leading through to the restaurant. A few sofas, some armchairs, a cluster of tables. It was busy at quarter to eight, the centre of the room taken by a loud group; four skeletal women, two of them in dark glasses, and three skeletal men with designer stubble, open-necked shirts, suits. One of them was fiddling with a miniature dachshund. They were all drinking champagne.

Stern had said that Medvedev would be waiting for her at the bar itself, which was at one end of the dining-room. He was easy to spot; alone, a chilled martini glass at his elbow, on the phone.

Medvedev was a Spetsnaz veteran – FSB Alpha – but there was no longer any hint of it. Golitsyn’s influence, she supposed. A life of luxury to smooth away the rough edges. As she approached the bar, he finished his call, folded his phone shut and raised his glass to drink.

‘Fyodor Medvedev?’

He set his glass down without taking the sip.

In Russian, she said, ‘Dobryy vecher. Minya zavut Claudia Calderon.’

He took his time replying. ‘Sorry. Please say again. My name is …?’

It wasn’t worth the wait; his accent was atrocious.

Now Stephanie was the one looking confused. ‘Fyodor Medvedev?’

He switched to English; American, east coast but tempered. ‘Is that who I am? Thanks. I was starting to wonder.’

‘You’re not Russian.’

He shook his head. ‘Just like you.’

‘And you don’t work for Leonid Golitsyn?’

‘Never heard of him.’

She looked around – where was Medvedev? – and shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were …’

‘Have we met before?’

‘That’s original.’

‘I know. But have we?’

It occurred to Stephanie that they’d both thought they’d recognized each other. She’d thought he was Medvedev. And he’d thought she was … who? The moment he first saw her, who had she been to him?

‘I don’t think so.’

He offered his hand. ‘Well, I’m Robert. Robert Newman.’

‘Hello, Robert. Claudia Calderon.’

‘Calderon – you’re from Spain?’

‘Argentina.’

‘Lucky you. One of my favourite countries.’

Stephanie swiftly changed direction. ‘So … what do you do, Robert?’

‘Depends who’s asking.’

‘That makes you sound like a gun for hire.’

‘But in a suit.’

Which he wore well, she noticed. He has them made. Grey, double-breasted, over a pale blue shirt with a deep red, hand-woven silk tie.

‘They’re the ones you have to watch,’ Stephanie said. ‘Like the vicar’s daughter.’

His laugh was soft and low. ‘Then I guess I’m in … finance.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

‘My background is oil.’

‘But no dirty hands?’

‘Not these days. When I was younger.’

She could believe it. He was perfectly at home in the Lancaster’s bar, in his expensive suit, with the heavy stainless-steel TAG-Heuer on his wrist. Yet she could see the oil-fields. In his eyes, in the lines around them, across hands made for manual labour.

He summoned the bartender and said to Stephanie, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

A question she’d been asked too many times by too many men. But she didn’t mind it coming from him. He hadn’t made any assumptions about her. Not yet. Usually, the men who asked her that question were already deciding how much they were prepared to pay for her.

She had champagne because she felt that would be Claudia Calderon’s drink. That or Diet Coke. Newman ordered another vodka martini.

‘You live in Paris, Claudia?’

‘I’m visiting.’

‘Staying here, at the Lancaster?’

‘A man who gets right to the point.’

‘It’s an innocent question.’

The bartender slid a glass towards her.

‘No, I’m not staying here,’ Stephanie said. ‘What about you?’

‘I live here.’

‘In the hotel?’

‘In the city.’

‘How original. An American in Paris.’

‘If you consider a New Yorker an American …’

‘You don’t?’

‘Not really. I think of New York as a city-state. America’s another country.’

Which was something she’d felt herself. In New York, she’d always been at home. In the rest of America, she was constantly reminded of how European she was.

She tried to push past the remark. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘I’ve had a place here for ten years but I don’t use it much. I travel a lot on business.’

‘Where?’

‘The Far East, the Middle East, the States. All over. What about you? What do you do?’

Now that the moment had come, she couldn’t pass herself off as an art consultant. ‘Take a guess.’

He gave it some thought, allowing her to look at him properly. He had short dark hair and attractive dark brown eyes. His tanned face looked pleasantly weather-beaten for a businessman. In his forties, or perhaps a young-looking fifty, he appeared fit for a man with the kind of life he’d described.

‘Well?’ she prompted.

‘You know, looking at you, I really can’t think of anything.’

‘You’re straying.’

‘Straying?’

‘This is supposed to be a polite conversation. There are rules. One of them is: don’t even try to think. Thought breeds silence. That’s not allowed. If you can’t come up with anything decent to say, say something shallow.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t know.’

‘I’m surprised. All that travel, all those hotels. This can’t be your first time.’

‘My first time?’

‘Being approached. In a bar. By a woman.’

His smile was the wry badge of the world-weary. ‘I guess that depends on where you’re going with this.’

Stephanie smiled too. ‘That’s very neat.’

‘You didn’t answer the question.’

‘Maybe this is what I do. Approach strange men in hotel bars.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Why?’

‘You don’t have the look.’

‘What look’s that?’

He sipped some vodka. ‘Desperate predatory allure.’

Stephanie arched an eyebrow. ‘Desperate predatory allure? I like that. But it puts you at risk of sounding like an expert.’

‘Well, you’re right, of course. I’ve been in many bars. There have been many … situations. And they never fail to disappoint.’

‘No value for money?’

‘I quit before it gets to that.’

‘Naturally.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘Well, I’m not sure. I wouldn’t expect you to admit it.’

He took his time, sizing her up, deciding about her. ‘You always this direct?’

‘Only with complete strangers.’

‘Because you can be, right?’

‘Yes. Liberating, isn’t it?’

He nodded, comfortable with her; neither threatened, nor encouraged. She hoped he wouldn’t spoil it by saying something crass.

‘I guess that’s the game we’re playing.’ He rolled his glass a little, watching the oily liquid swirl. ‘Strange how that works, though. That you can say anything to someone you’ve never met before. The kind of things you wouldn’t say to someone you know.’

‘It only works when you think you won’t see them again.’

‘Like now?’

‘Yes. Like now.’

Newman said, ‘Scheherazade.’

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry. You’re going to have to excuse me.’

Stephanie turned round. A woman had appeared on the far side of the bar. She had beautiful thick black hair. A dark, liquid complexion set off the gold choker at her throat. Slender with curves, she wasn’t tall, perhaps only five-four, but she had poise and presence. Heads were turning.

‘Your date?’ Stephanie asked.

How typical, she thought, that she should be the one to be crass. Newman seemed to find it amusing.

‘It’s been a pleasure, Claudia. A rare pleasure.’

And then he was gone. Stephanie looked at the woman again. She recognized the face but couldn’t remember her name; high cheekbones, large dark eyes, a wide mouth, which now split into a smile, as Newman crossed the floor to meet her.

The phone behind the bar began to ring.

Scheherazade who?

They embraced, his hand staying on her arm. She glanced at Stephanie then whispered something to him. They laughed and then settled on the only spare sofa.

‘Excusez-moi …’

She turned round. The bartender was holding the phone for her. She took it and pressed the receiver to her ear. Over the crackle of bad reception, she heard an engine. Car horns blared in the background. ‘Yes?’

‘This is Fyodor Medvedev.’ His American accent was clumsy, words shunting into one another like old rail wagons in a verbal siding. ‘I’m sorry to be late. I’m in traffic. Not moving.’

‘At least I know you’re in Paris.’

He didn’t get it. ‘I will be at hotel in ten minutes. Mr Golitsyn wants to see you now. Is okay?’

‘Sure.’

‘Room 41. Emile Wolf suite. He waits for you.’

As she handed the phone back to the bartender, the name came to her. Scheherazade Zahani. A favourite of Paris-Match and the gossip columns. Usually seen at the opera, or stepping out of the latest restaurant, or on the deck of her one-hundred-metre yacht at Cap d’Antibes.

The daughter of a rich arms-dealer, she’d married a Saudi oil billionaire. Stephanie had forgotten his name but remembered that he’d been in his sixties. A student at Princeton, highly academic, very beautiful, Zahani had only been twenty-two or twenty-three. There had been a lot of carping comment. Fifteen years later, following her husband’s death in Switzerland, Zahani had moved to Paris, several billion dollars richer. Since then, the French press had attempted to link the grieving widow with every eligible Frenchman over thirty-five. If she was bored by the facile coverage she received, she never let it show. She seemed content to be seen in public with potential suitors but they rarely lasted more than a couple of outings. There had been no affairs, no scandal.

It was only in the last five years that her business acumen had become widely acknowledged. Now she was regarded as one of the shrewdest investors in France. As Stephanie watched Scheherazade Zahani and Robert Newman, she wondered whether they were discussing the only thing she knew they had in common.

Oil.

I know something’s wrong the moment I enter Leonid Golitsyn’s suite on the fourth floor. I knocked on the door – there was no bell – but got no reply. There are no Ving cards here either, so I tried the handle and the door opened.

Golitsyn is in the bedroom, lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. A large Thomson TV throws flickering light over his body. A game show is on, the volume high, amplified laughter and applause. A large maroon flower has blossomed across his chest. Blood is seeping into the carpet beneath him. There are drops of it on his face, like some glossy pox.

He blinks.

I circle the room slowly and silently, then check the bathroom. The second body is in the bathtub, one trousered leg dangling over the lip. On the floor is a gun. I pick it up, a Smith & Wesson Sigma .40, a synthetics-only weapon, the frame constructed from a high-strength polymer. It hasn’t been fired recently.

The man in the bath is wearing a crumpled suit and a bloodstained shower-curtain. Most of the hooks have been ripped from the rail. There’s blood on the floor and wall. He’s been shot at least three times. Using a very efficient sound suppressor, I imagine, because being a converted townhouse the Lancaster’s sound-proofing is not great.

I return to the bedroom. When I move into his line of sight Golitsyn blinks again and manages to send a tremor to his fingertips.

I crouch beside him. What an impressive man he must have been. Two metres tall, by the look of it, with fine patrician features down a long face, framed by longish snow-white hair and a carefully trimmed beard of the same colour.

I look at the chest wound and then the blood. He should be dead already. There’s nothing I can do for him.

He tries to force a word through the gap in his lips. ‘Ah … ams …’

‘Anders?’

He’d frown if he could move the muscles in his forehead.

I try again. ‘Anders Brand?’

Nothing.

‘You and Anders Brand?’

I kill the volume on the TV.

‘… da … ah … ams …’

This is all very recent.

‘Passage du Caire. Do you understand?’

‘… ter … da … ahm …’

‘Anders Brand. He was there. He was killed. After you saw him.’

In Golitsyn’s eyes the flame of urgency struggles against death’s chilly breeze. ‘… ams … ams …’

‘Who did this? The same people who killed Brand?’

‘… ter … da …’

‘What about the bomb?’

‘Ams … ter …’

‘Amster?’

I see an emphatic ‘yes’ in his eyes.

‘Amster,’ I repeat.

‘Dam.’

It’s almost a cough.

‘Amsterdam?’

He blinks his confirmation because he’s fading fast.

‘What about Amsterdam?’

He tries to summon one last phrase but can’t; the eyes freeze, the focus fails, the fingers unfurl. On the TV screen, a contestant cries with joy as she takes possession of a shiny new Hyundai.

Somewhere out there, a distant siren moans. Not for me, I tell myself. But a part of me is less sure. I take the cash from the table – Petra the vulture, a natural scavenger – and scoop his correspondence and mobile phone into a slim, leather attaché case that has three Cyrillic letters embossed in gold beneath the handle; L.I.G.

I return to the bathroom where curiosity compels me to check the body. Trying my best to avoid the blood, I reach inside folds of shower-curtain and pale grey jacket to retrieve a wallet and passport. I flip open the passport; flat features, light brown hair cut short and parted on the right, small grey eyes.

Fyodor Medvedev.

The man I spoke to … how many minutes ago?

There isn’t time for this. Not now. Get out.

I drop the gun into my black MaxMara bag. Dressed as I am, the attaché case doesn’t look too incongruous. At least something is working out today.

Outside the suite, I close the door and walk calmly to the lift. I press the button. A woman from Housekeeping passes by carrying a tower of white towels.

‘Bonsoir.’

‘Bonsoir.’

I step into the tiny lift with its polished wood and burgundy leather. The unanswered questions are spinning inside my head. The Medvedev in the bath isn’t the Medvedev I spoke to over the phone at the bar. I’m sure of that. Even if he’d been sitting in a car outside the hotel he would barely have had enough time to sprint upstairs and get shot before I found him. So if the corpse in the bath is Medvedev, who was I talking to before?

As for Golitsyn …

The doors open. I step out and head right. There are raised voices coming from reception, which is now just out of sight to my left. Some kind of commotion. I backtrack and go through the bar. The skeletal group are too self-absorbed to have realized anything is wrong but others have noticed; their conversations halting, heads turning. The sofa where Robert Newman and Scheherazade Zahani were sitting is empty. Perhaps they’ve gone through to the restaurant.

I push through the large glass door and head down the short hall towards the exit, catching a glimpse of the reception area to my right; two men are arguing with the woman behind the desk. One of them is showing her something. A card of some sort. She’s speaking into the phone, clearly anxious. Beside her, a man sorts through a collection of keys.

I step onto rue de Berri. To my left, a flustered doorman in a long overcoat is standing by a black Renault. There’s no one in it. Both front doors are open, the front left wheel has mounted the kerb. A blue lamp sits on the dashboard.

Whatever you do, don’t run.

I venture right. I’m a stylish businesswoman carrying an attaché case. In this part of town, that shouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Except my own; above the noise of the city, the sirens are getting louder. Ahead of me, at the junction with Champs Élysées I see the first signs of stroboscopic blue light ricocheting off buildings.

I look over my shoulder. The doorman turns round. We’re fifteen metres apart. He can’t decide whether he’s seen me before. Someone cries out from the hotel. I feel like a rabbit stranded in headlights. Where is Petra?

Next to the Lancaster is the Berri-Washington twenty-four-hour public car-park, a blue neon sign above a long, sloping concrete ramp. My right hand is inside the black leather bag, my fingertips touching the Sigma. The first patrol car enters rue de Berri. There’s another behind it. And I’m going down the ramp.

A subterranean car-park should have a fire-exit that rises somewhere else. I try to ignore the sirens but I’m expecting the shout. The order to halt, to remove my hand from the bag, to drop everything and turn round.

I’m halfway down the ramp when a car comes into view. The engine echoes off the concrete as it rises towards me. A silver Audi A6 Quattro.

Keep calm.

I’m just a woman going to collect her car. I move to one side to allow the Audi to pass. But it slows down …

Keep going.

… and then halts.

Please, no.

My right hand searches for the grip. A window lowers.

‘Small world.’

For a moment I’m too dazed to say anything. It’s Robert Newman.

Behind me, and above us, there are more sirens. Decision time. What if there is no other way out?

‘Need a ride?’

This can’t be right.

But I smile sweetly anyway. ‘Sure. Thanks.’

I climb into the back of the Audi, which is not what he’s expecting. He looks over his shoulder and says, ‘You can sit up front if you like. I promise I won’t …’

Which is when he sees the gun.

‘Drive.’

‘What the …’

‘Trust me – you don’t have time to think about it.’

He glances up the ramp.

I thrust the tip of the Sigma into his cheek and yell: ‘Drive!’

He accelerates towards street level.

‘Where to?’

‘Right. Go right.’

‘I can’t.’

‘What?’

‘It’s one-way.’

‘Then go left!’

‘And after that?’

‘Just do it! And whatever happens, don’t stop. If you do, I swear I’ll kill you.’

We reach the ramp. He pulls out, past the black Renault, past two police cars, blue lights aflame. Officers hover on the street, a crowd gathers. I keep the gun out of sight. A young officer, eager to get us out of the way, waves us past. I peer through the rear window as the Lancaster recedes. At boulevard Haussmann we turn right.

How did they get there so quickly? Yesterday at Passage du Caire, it was the same; uniformed police officers only moments away. I close my eyes. When I open them, I see him in the rear-view mirror.

‘Where are we going?’ he asks.

‘Nowhere. Just keep moving. And don’t do anything stupid.’

‘Looks like I already have.’

‘Pull over.’

It was a quiet street off place de la porte de Champerret, just inside the périphérique. When Newman switched off the engine they could hear the rumble from the ring road. Almost an hour had passed, most of it in silence. Stephanie had tried to think but had found she couldn’t. There were too many competing questions. She couldn’t separate one from another, couldn’t focus on a single coherent thought. Gradually, however, Petra had emerged and cold clarity had replaced panic.

‘Put your hands on the steering wheel where I can see them. Don’t take them off.’

The street was empty. She tightened her grip on the gun and shifted her position so that she had a less awkward angle.

‘Okay. Who are you?’

‘You know who I am. Robert Newman.’

‘Believe me, your next cute answer’s going to be your last.’

‘I don’t know what else to say.’

‘Well you better think of something. And quick.’

‘My name’s Robert Newman. I’m a businessman.’

‘We meet at the bar then you’re driving up the ramp. Explain that.’

He shrugged. ‘I can’t.’

‘Coincidence?’

‘I guess.’

‘I don’t believe in coincidence. You and Scheherazade Zahani – that must have been the quickest date in history.’

Newman flinched at the mention of her name. ‘I wasn’t there to meet her. She just showed up. She was meeting a friend who’s staying at the Lancaster.’

‘Another coincidence?’

He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge it. Stephanie leaned forward and pressed the tip of the Smith & Wesson into the back of his neck, just above the collar.

She said, ‘Let me explain something to you. Whoever you thought I was at the bar – she doesn’t exist. She never did.’

‘Look, I was due to meet someone. He called to cancel right after you left.’

‘I’m going to give you one more chance.’

‘See for yourself,’ he snapped, reaching inside his jacket.

‘Stop!’

Newman froze. And then clamped his right hand back on the wheel. ‘Jesus Christ! Take it easy!’

‘What did I tell you?’

‘I know what you said. I was just going for my cell phone. So you could see. The number, the time.’

Stephanie focused on her breathing for a second. Anything to slow the pulse. A couple were walking towards them, arm in arm, heads shrouded in frozen breath, hard heels clicking on the pavement. Stephanie placed the gun in her lap and shielded it with the black leather bag.

‘I need to disappear,’ she said.

‘Don’t let me stop you.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Île Saint-Louis.’

‘Alone?’

He hesitated. ‘Yeah.’

‘I’m going to ask that again. If we get there and there’s someone to meet us I’m going to kill them, no questions asked. So think before you speak. Do you live alone?’

‘Yes.’

The couple strolled past the car.

‘Give me your wallet.’

‘It’s in my jacket. Like my phone.’

Stephanie pressed the Smith & Wesson to the same patch of skin. ‘Then be very careful.’

He retrieved it – Dunhill, black leather with gold corners – and passed it back. On his Platinum Amex the name read Robert R. Newman. He had two printed cards, one professional, one personal, which included an address on quai d’Orléans, Île Saint-Louis. The other card carried a name she didn’t recognize with an address at La Défense.

‘What’s Solaris?’

‘A company. I work for them.’

‘An oil company?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘We’re going to your place. I need somewhere to think.’

Quai d’Orléans, Île Saint-Louis, half-past-ten. They found a space close to his building. People passed by, heading home from the restaurants along rue Saint-Louis en Île.

Inside the Audi, Stephanie spoke softly. ‘I don’t want to have to do it. But if you make me, I will. Understand?’

Newman nodded.

‘If we meet anybody you know, play it straight. I’m just a date.’

They got out. Newman carried Leonid Golitsyn’s attaché case and she clutched the Smith & Wesson which was in the pocket of her overcoat.

They reached the entrance to the building. He pressed the four-digit code – 2071 – and they stepped into a large hall, sparsely furnished. They took the cage-lift to the fifth floor. The entrance to Newman’s apartment was a tall set of double-doors that opened into a hall with a smooth limestone floor. On the walls were gilt-framed canvases; flat Flemish landscapes beneath brooding pewter skies, moody portraits of prosperous traders, pale aristocratic women. There were Casablanca lilies in a tall, tapering, octagonal vase, their scent filling the hall.

Stephanie glanced at the flowers, then at Newman who understood. ‘Yvette,’ he said. ‘She looks after the place. She’s not a live-in. She comes daily during the week.’

‘Does she have her own key?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you like her, remind me to get you to call her in the morning.’

At gun-point Newman led her through the apartment; two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, a large sitting-room, a modest dining-room, a generous kitchen, a utility room and a study. The sitting-room and dining-room were at the front of the apartment, French windows opening on to a balcony that offered a truly spectacular view of Notre Dame on Île de la Cité.

‘Nice place. Business must be good.’

They returned to the utility room. Stephanie made him open both cupboards; vacuum-cleaner, ironing board, a mop in a bucket, brooms, brushes, rags and cloths, cleaning products. She grabbed the coiled washing line from the worktop. On a shelf was a wooden box with household tools, including a roll of black tape, which she also took. Back in the sitting-room, she drew the curtains and dragged a chair to the centre of the floor.

‘Take off your jacket and tie.’

He did, unfastening the top two buttons of his shirt and rolling up his sleeves.

‘What happened to your wrists?’

Around each of them was a bracelet of livid purple scar tissue. She hadn’t noticed them before. He didn’t answer, glaring at her instead, his silence heavy with contempt.

‘Do what I say and I won’t hurt you. Now sit down.’

She bound his wrists with the washing line, securing them behind the back of the chair. Then she taped one ankle to a chair-leg.

‘Don’t make any noise.’

She left him and returned to the kitchen. It was a bachelor’s kitchen, no question: a central island with a slate top; two chopping boards of seasoned wood, both barely scratched; a knife-block containing a set of pristine Sabatier blades. In the fridge were two bottles of Veuve Clicquot, some San Pellegrino, a bottle of Montagny, ground coffee and orange juice. No food.

His suits were hanging in a wardrobe in the bedroom, all tailored. But in another cupboard another Robert Newman existed; denim jeans, scuffed and frayed, T-shirts that had lost their shape and colour, exercise clothing, old trainers.

On the bedside table was a Bang & Olufsen phone, a bottle of Nurofen and a copy of What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis. On the other table was a single gold earring. Stephanie picked it up. It curled like a small shell.

In the bathroom, Newman’s things were fanned out across more limestone. But in the cupboard behind the mirror Stephanie found eye-liner and a small bottle of Chanel No.5, half-empty. In the second bedroom, further evidence; a plum silk dress on a hanger, a couple of jerseys, a pair of black Calvin Klein jeans, some flimsy underwear, two shirts, a pair of silver Prada trainers.

She returned to the sitting-room. ‘Who’s the woman?’

‘What woman?’

‘The woman who leaves Chanel No.5 in your bathroom.’ She showed him the earring. ‘This woman.’

‘That could be mine.’

‘Trust me, I’m not in the mood.’

‘It’s none of your goddamn business.’

‘Sure about that?’

‘She’s history.’

‘If she shows up here, she will be.’

‘It’s been over for a while.’

‘It was on your bedside table.’

‘I’m the sentimental type.’

‘Her stuff is still here.’

She saw that he was extremely nervous – the sweat, the shivers – but he was determined to maintain the façade. The pretence was all he had to cling to. ‘You should see what I left at her place.’

There was no answer to that; Stephanie had left pieces of herself everywhere.

There was a large Loewe widescreen TV in the corner of the sitting-room. Stephanie sat on a sofa arm and flicked through channels; France 3, Canal+, France 2, pausing during a news bulletin on TF1. Continued analysis of the bomb in Sentier, riots in Caracas, an oil spill off the coast of Normandy. Then they were watching a female journalist with a red scarf around her throat. She was in rue de Berri, the Lancaster just discernible in the background, beyond the entrance to the Berri-Washington car-park.

The studio anchor was asking a question. The reporter nodded then said, ‘The police will say only that Russian art-dealer Leonid Golitsyn and another unidentified man have been shot dead in what looks like a planned execution.’

‘Have they suggested who might be responsible?’

‘Not yet. All we know is that their bodies were discovered by a member of the hotel staff and that …’

Not true. By the time she’d left Golitsyn’s suite, the police had arrived downstairs. She’d seen plain-clothed detectives at the front desk just seconds after stepping out of the lift. Yet seconds before, on the fourth floor, she’d exchanged a cordial bonsoir with the woman from Housekeeping.

Newman said, ‘No wonder I couldn’t guess what you do.’

‘I didn’t kill them.’

‘This guy Golitsyn – when you thought I was someone else, you thought I worked for him.’

‘When I got to the room, they were already dead.’

She couldn’t believe how guilty she sounded.

Newman stared at the Smith & Wesson. ‘That right?’

‘It hasn’t been fired. It’s not mine. I picked it off the floor.’

‘What are you saying – it was a suicide pact?’

She changed channels, choosing CNN’s coverage of the Sentier bomb. There was footage of the wreckage in Passage du Caire, a reprise of the casualty statistics and still no mention of Anders Brand.

In the CNN studio two experts sat beside Becky Anderson. One was a spokesman for Le Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), the other was a terrorism expert from the London School of Economics. The CRIF spokesman insisted the bomb was part of a growing campaign of anti-Semitic activity in France and went on to castigate the government and – by implication – the public for their lack of outrage.

The LSE analyst focused on the likely provenance of the two fake suspects. Snippets of information were threaded through the theory to lend it credibility; prescient rumours in recent days from sources at Le Blanc-Mesnil, a small town on the northern fringe of Paris with a largely immigrant population, formerly of Sephardic Jews from the north-African colonies, more recently of Muslims, many from the same countries.

The premise sounded convincing; racial hatred boiling over in an area known for it. Le Blanc-Mesnil fell under the scope of District 93, also known as the Red belt from an era when it was controlled by staunchly Communist mayors. Immigrants had always been a pressing problem. The man from the LSE managed deftly to link ill-feeling in Le Blanc-Mesnil to Jewish commercial interests in Sentier. Stephanie was almost persuaded by him until he mentioned the suspects again.

She turned off the television.

Two incidents in one city on consecutive days. Superficially independent of one another but linked by a third incident: the murder of Jacob and Miriam Furst. Not in itself significant enough to make the news – an old couple murdered in their home – but vital to Stephanie because she was the single factor common to all three.

Day Four

She woke with a start and checked her watch. Three-twenty-five. As a teenager, she’d been a hopeless sleeper. As Stephanie, she still was. But Petra had been trained to take sleep wherever she could, no matter how hostile the environment.

They were in the sitting-room. Newman was slumped in his chair, his head lolling to one side. Stephanie was on the sofa behind him. She’d chosen it deliberately for the small psychological advantage of being invisible to him.

Silently, she rose from the sofa and went to the bathroom. She showered then wrapped herself in one of his towels and sorted through his ex-lover’s wardrobe. The black jeans were the right length but Stephanie’s waist was slimmer. She pulled on a navy long-sleeved T-shirt, a chunky black jersey and the silver trainers.

She felt human again. As human as Petra could be.

In the kitchen she filled a kettle. While the water heated she investigated Newman’s study. On a large oak desk beside the window were two slim Sony monitors and a cordless keyboard. She looked in the drawers; stationery, bills and receipts, correspondence, cash – euros, dollars, Swiss francs – an Air France first-class boarding card from Singapore to Paris, and two American passports.

The first passport belonged to Robert Ridley Newman, aged forty-eight. It had been issued two years before but there were already dozens of stamps in it, some recurring frequently; Damascus, Riyadh, Beijing and Shanghai, Tehran, Jakarta. The second passport was seven years older. She flicked through the pages. There were only twelve stamps in it, nine of them issued at Ben-Gurion airport, Tel Aviv.

In the bottom drawer on the right she found a Vacheron watch with a leather strap. On the back was an inscription and a date: Robert, with love, Carlotta, 10–11–2001. A birthday? She checked the passports. Not his.

Back in the kitchen, she switched on the TV suspended over the slate worktop. Bloomberg was playing. She flicked through the channels until she came to BBC World, which was showing archive footage of Anders Brand. He was shaking hands with Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton to one side, the three of them sharing a joke. At the bottom of the screen the caption read: Former Swedish diplomat named among Paris dead.

A résumé unfolded; posts in Manila, Baghdad, Rome and Washington, as a junior diplomat, followed by two forays into business with Deutsche Bank in New York and Shell in London. Later, Brand had returned to the Swedish diplomatic service, serving in the Philippines, then Spain. After that, he’d joined the United Nations in New York, filling a series of increasingly undefined roles as his star rose. Divorced for almost twenty years, Brand was survived by his ex-wife, the former actress Lena Meslin, and their two adult sons.

A little late but just as Stern had predicted.

Stern.

Painfully, Stephanie surrendered to the one thought she’d been resisting since the Lancaster.

You set me up.

Now, more than ever, she needed information. For years, he’d been her preferred source. Information from Stern was bought at a premium but was cheap at the price. She’d never had reason to question its quality. He’d never sold her out. On the contrary. There had been occasions where he’d volunteered information to protect her. Or rather, as he usually put it, to protect his investment.

Safe from one another, their relationship had evolved into a form of sterile, electronic friendship, neither of them interested in finding out too much about the other because they both understood that security lay in anonymity. But in the beginning it had been strictly business; request, negotiation, payment, delivery. Cold and clinical.

Stern traded information, not affection. The faux relationship that Stephanie had allowed to develop between them had come to obfuscate that uneasy fact. Stern owed her nothing, nor she him. At the end of every transaction they were equal. It was true that he’d made money out of her. Just as she’d made money out of the information he’d sold her. She’d come to assume that he’d never trade her because she was valuable to him. But why not, if the money was right? She’d never guaranteed him anything. Each transaction ran the risk of being the last. Stern existed in a transitory environment; the currency of information tended to devalue with time. In both their worlds, it paid to seize the moment.

Ultimately, Stern’s fidelity was always going to be a question of price.

At first, he thought he’d imagined it. The sound of running water. A shower. His shower. He tried to straighten himself. Had he fallen asleep? Perhaps, but not in the regenerative sense. Sleep was nothing more than a brief lapse between uncomfortable bouts of waking. He was slowly seizing; numb hands, stiff neck, sore spine, cramping muscles. His mouth felt dirty and dry.

He wondered how long he’d been alone. Not that it mattered. There was nothing he could do. He and the chair had become a single entity, she’d made sure of that. An entity isolated at the centre of a Bokhara carpet, a castaway in his own apartment.

He couldn’t reconcile the woman in his apartment with the woman who’d approached him at the bar in the Lancaster. Claudia Calderon had been confident, relaxed, playful. And sexy. He could admit that, even now. And then there was the creature with the gun. What had she done? What did she want?

He tried to convince himself that she wouldn’t harm him. That she’d float away, like a bout of bad weather, leaving him as she’d found him. But Leonid Golitsyn and another man were dead. Newman had seen that on TV. She’d admitted to being in their room. And she had the gun. He’d barely heard her denial. Stranger still, she’d seemed more preoccupied with coverage of the Sentier bomb than events at the Lancaster. Were the two connected? Was she the connection? And if she was, what would that mean for him?

Stephanie said, ‘I’m going to untie your hands. You need to get your blood moving.’

The purple scars around the wrists were shiny and ragged. There was no smoothness to them, nothing … uniform. The hands themselves were swollen. As they separated a shudder coursed through Newman. He brought his arms to the front of his body in a series of stiff jerks, catching his breath with each halt. Once his hands were in his lap he flexed his fingers. She saw the solid tension in his shoulders, knotted muscle crawling on itself.

‘Who’s Carlotta?’

He didn’t answer.

‘I usually like to know whose clothes I’m wearing.’

Still nothing.

‘Was the earring hers?’

She could see no fear, no anger, no emotion at all.

She left him and took Golitsyn’s attaché case to the sofa. Keys, pens, a leather-bound address book, lots of business documents. His letters were addressed to him at several locations: the head office of MosProm on ulitsa Tverskaya in central Moscow; Galerie Golitsyn on avenue Matignon, Paris; the Hotel Meurice, Paris; an apartment on East 62nd Street in New York City.

In a see-through foolscap plastic wallet was a set of architectural plans. Stephanie turned it over to see the address. Cork Street, London; another art gallery, she assumed. There was something inserted between the folds of the drawings. She unzipped the wallet and a sheet of paper slipped free.

It was an agreement with an immobilier named Guy Grangé on boulevard Magenta in the 10ème arrondissement. A one-month rental, a one-room apartment in the Stalingrad district, cash paid in advance. Not the sort of area Stephanie would have expected Golitsyn to frequent. Or the sort of property, for that matter. There was no address, just a reference number. The printed key code corresponded to the number on the red plastic disk attached to the keys.

Why had Stern pointed her in the direction of this seventy-seven-year-old Russian?

There were some credit-card receipts in the attaché case, including one from the fabled jeweller Ginzburg, on place Vendôme. A small card was stapled to the receipt. On the back, written by a shaking hand, was a brief message:

Leonid, mon cher,

merci pour tout,

N x.

Beneath that, in Russian, was an addition:

Diamonds or bread? Only we know which.

Stephanie looked at the first part of the message. N for Natalya? Aleksandr Ginzburg’s widow was Natalya. And alive, it seemed. Stephanie was a little surprised. Aleksandr Ginzburg had died a long time ago – a famous car crash outside Cannes sometime in the late Seventies or early Eighties – so Stephanie had just assumed that his wife had died since then. Apparently not. Which now made her a very old woman. Except that Aleksandr hadn’t been so old when he’d died. Perhaps she was as young as eighty. In other words, of the same vintage as Golitsyn.

Stephanie stared at the message and felt the pull of its undercurrent.

Diamonds or bread? Only we know which.

London, 04:05

When the phone rang in Rosie Chaudhuri’s small first-floor flat off Chichele Road in north London, she was already awake. She’d fallen into bed at one, exhausted, a little drunk, unhappy. The alcohol was supposed to have soothed the pain but hadn’t. An inexperienced drinker, the very least she’d hoped for had been a deep sleep but she’d been awake by half-past-three.

Her first night out in a month, her first as a single woman in more than a year. Her friend Claire had insisted upon it. Time to move on. Time to consign him to history. Reluctantly, Rosie had capitulated. A poor decision, as it turned out. There had been no balm for the hurt, no boost for the self. Just a large bill and a hangover.

When her relationship failed, Rosie did what she always did: she buried herself in work. An easy solution which, for a week or two, seemed to deliver. Then came the familiar sensation; the weight in the chest, the suspicion of a greater malaise lurking at the heart of her. How could a smart, attractive woman continue to stumble from one third-rate relationship to another?

A second-generation Indian, Rosie ran an organization at the cutting edge of global intelligence. From any point of view – race, gender, age – she was a success. But she didn’t feel like one. Never had, if the truth be told, and now, at five-past-four on a dismal winter morning, she felt a total failure.

What good was her position – her power – if she couldn’t hold down a relationship? Dumped by an out-of-work actor because he was intimidated by her professional success. He thought she worked for the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College, London. That was the lie by which she was universally known among her family and friends.

The actor was a lovely man; kind, funny, good-looking. But not much of an actor. When he’d complained about the hours she kept she’d seen straight through him; he’d resented her work because it fuelled his own sense of professional inadequacy. Which, in turn, she’d resented. It wasn’t amusing to come home after a sixteen-hour shift to be criticized by a man who’d spent the day lying on a sofa watching Countdown and Neighbours, waiting for Steven Spielberg to call.

She picked up the phone. ‘Yes?’

‘This is Carter, S3.’

S3 was the intelligence section. ‘What is it, John?’

‘There’s a car on its way. It’ll be with you in eight minutes.’

‘Give me the bare bones.’

‘Last night, Paris. The Lancaster hotel. A shooting, two victims: Leonid Golitsyn and Fyodor Medvedev.’

The first name was vaguely resonant, the second meant nothing. ‘Go on.’

‘S9 has intercepted communication between DST and DGSE.’

Both agencies formed part of France’s intelligence community. The DST, the Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory, was concerned primarily with counter-espionage, counter-intelligence and the protection of classified information, and was under the direct control of the Ministry of the Interior. The DGSE – Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure – was responsible for terrorism, human intelligence and industrial-economic intelligence.

Rosie asked for a brief reminder of Golitsyn’s significance and then said, ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Stephanie Patrick.’

A sequence of syllables to rob the breath.

Impossible, she thought. Well, no, not impossible. But as close to impossible as unlikely could ever be.

Carter said, ‘They’re looking for Petra Reuter. There’s been positive identification.’

‘Photographic?’

‘We’re not sure. There’s something else, though. The two Algerians fingered by DGSE for the blast in Sentier – they’re a smokescreen. She’s the one they want.’

‘A bomb?’

The closest Petra had come to using a bomb was an exploding mobile phone that had decapitated an American lawyer in Singapore. As glib as it sounded, bombs weren’t her style.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Carter said, ‘but they seem very confident.’

‘They usually do. Are we sure she’s real?’

Like every star, Petra Reuter had her cheap imitators.

‘As sure as we can be.’

Rosie put down the phone, hauled herself from the bed and entered the bathroom. She was still wearing most of her eye-liner, smudged like bruises. No time for fresh clothes, she dressed in yesterday’s suit. In the sitting-room, she found her briefcase on a packing crate.

Six months on and she still hadn’t settled into the apartment. She’d sold her place just off the Seven Sisters Road but had been part of a buying chain that had collapsed. This place, a short-term rental, had been a stop-gap. She’d been looking for something small and comfortable in the heart of the city. Now she wasn’t sure what she wanted.

Her predecessor had installed a small bedroom at Magenta House. Towards the end, he’d never gone home. Rosie considered that symptomatic of much that had gone wrong within the organization; it had become too self-absorbed. Which, in turn, had led to levels of paranoia that had begun to affect its operational integrity.

In every walk of life, one needed interests outside of work in order to maintain a balance. Rosie believed that was especially true for the employees of an organization like Magenta House. Within a fortnight of replacing him, she’d had his bedroom dismantled to make way for a new debriefing suite.

The trouble was this: now that she was in his position, where would she find the time to achieve that balance herself?

She was outside her front door seven minutes after the call. The dark green BMW was already there. On the leather back seat was a slim briefing folder.

After Berlin, the future had assumed an obvious shape. Rosie would replace Alexander. His death had spared Magenta House’s trustees an awkward dilemma: how to substitute a man who had become utterly synonymous with the organization to its ultimate detriment? As for Stephanie, she was to disappear for good, sending the legend of Petra Reuter into permanent retirement.

False reports of Petra’s activities had always existed. Some were simply wrong, others were deliberate mischief. Several times she’d been accredited with assassinations that Magenta House knew to be the work of others. It didn’t matter. Any rumour, true or false, added to the legend. So Rosie hadn’t been surprised when new rumours began to circulate after Berlin; since nobody had ever suggested that Petra was dead there was no reason for stories about her to dry up.

Stephanie had spent most of her adult life seeking a divorce from Petra. Now that she’d got it, any form of reconciliation seemed inconceivable. Nobody at Magenta House knew Stephanie the way Rosie did. They’d been friends. They’d been the outsiders in an organization of outsiders.

Stephanie, can it really be you?

‘I need to go to the bathroom.’

Stephanie knew the procedure. Let him urinate or defecate in the chair. Reduction was the road to compliance. Yet even as she thought it, she knew she wouldn’t do it. She released his hands again and told him to tear the tape from his ankle.

He rose awkwardly. His thigh muscles and hip flexors were stiff, hamstrings tugging at his lower back. He had to place a hand on top of the chair to complete the movement. His first few steps were clumsy, as pins and needles began to work the nerves.

The bathroom door had a bolt instead of a key.

Stephanie said, ‘Don’t shut it.’

‘You’re going to watch?’

She tossed a hardback on to the floor, steered it into the doorway with her foot, ushered him in, then pulled the handle, leaving a six-inch gap. At the flush she pushed the door open. Newman was fastening his trousers.

‘Can I wash?’

‘Get on with it.’

He cleaned his hands then filled the basin with cold water and pushed his face into it, holding it there. He straightened slowly, water dripping down the front of his shirt.

‘How about a shave?’

‘No.’

‘I promise I won’t attack you with my razor. It has a safety strip.’

‘Let’s go.’

Stephanie directed him back to the chair, waving the Smith & Wesson at him for emphasis. She gathered the washing line and crouched behind him. He offered his hands before she’d asked for them.

She tried again. ‘How did you get your scars?’

‘I told you. It’s none of your goddamned business.’

She was tempted to pull the cord until the wounds reopened. But to hurt him would be to hand him a small victory. She wrapped the plastic-coated line around the wrists, securing them a little less firmly – something he would be sure to notice – before drawing the line down and fastening it to a strut beyond his reach. She was aware of him taking a deep breath and expanding his muscles as she bound him.

‘What time does the maid come?’

‘Seven-thirty.’

It was already after six-thirty.

‘Do you let her in?’

‘She has her own key.’

Stephanie picked up a phone. ‘What’s her number?’

‘What do I tell her?’

‘Anything you like as long as it sticks.’

‘Is it just today?’

‘Until further notice,’ Stephanie said. ‘Maybe a couple of days.’

She held the phone close to his ear but so that she could hear it too. When Yvette answered Newman said he had visitors and didn’t want to be disturbed. He told her he’d phone her when he wanted her to resume her schedule.

Stephanie took the handset from him. ‘She didn’t sound surprised.’

‘So?’

‘Maybe she’s used to such requests.’

‘Her husband’s serving twelve years for armed robbery. Two of her three sons are dead, the other’s a drag queen. It’s going to take more than a day off to surprise Yvette.’

‘Maybe. But if she shows up unexpectedly, I think I’ll manage it,’ Stephanie said, as she noticed the keys to the apartment on the side-table. ‘By the way, I may need to go out later. What’s the number for the door downstairs?’

‘9063.’

‘Nine-zero-six-three?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You sure about that? What about 2071? That was the number you used last night. Think about it. Take your time. Two-zero-seven-one.’

Newman bit his lip.

She shook her head. ‘Disappointing. And stupid.’

‘Why’d you kill them?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Then why are you running? Why are you here?’

‘I don’t know.’

Newman snorted.

And Stephanie reacted: ‘What does that mean?’

‘You don’t seem like a novice.’

‘How the hell would you know?’

He looked as though he had an answer but said nothing.

Annoyed with herself, Stephanie mumbled, ‘Forget it.’

‘Forget what? That you stuck a gun in my face?’

‘Be quiet.’

‘Maybe you are a novice.’

‘Shut up.’

‘What are you going to do? Shoot me?’

‘You don’t think I would?’

He wanted to press the challenge. She could see that. But he backed down. Just a fraction. He thought he was reading her correctly but what if he was wrong?

‘Why were you at the Lancaster?’ he asked.

‘Are you deaf?’

‘Tell me. I want to know.’

‘I said … shut up.’

‘Come on. You want me to believe you, don’t you?’

‘Just fuck off.’

I make myself coffee in the kitchen. I’m hungry but there’s not even any bread. I expect the maid brings it. Still warm from the baker, I’ll bet. With fresh Casablanca lilies to go in the octagonal vase in the hall. Nothing but the best for this one.

I’m angry with him, which is absurd. Only one of us has the right to be angry with the other. I should have let him piss himself. Just to establish my dominance over him. I hear echoes of a distant lecture: interaction with a hostage establishes a relationship, however unusual, which, in turn, humanizes the hostage in the eyes of the captor, making it harder for the captor to treat the hostage in the necessary fashion.

The necessary fashion. What is that in this situation? I have no idea. He was a matter of convenience. A spur-of-the-moment exit strategy in a crisis. He’s of no value to me. Unlike his apartment, which is a haven.

Perhaps the ‘necessary fashion’ should come from the business end of the Smith & Wesson. Avoid complications, kill the hostage, occupy his apartment for as long as required. But I’m not going to do that. I may be Petra but I’m not that Petra. Not any more.

I stand by the window. Above the light pollution the sky is brightening to plum. I expect it’s warm and sunny in Mauritius. I should be eating mangos to the sound of the surf.

I think about Stern, Amsterdam and Anders Brand. Most of all, though, Stern. My sense of betrayal extends beyond the professional to the personal. I feel like a rejected lover. I know that’s ridiculous but there it is. It hurts. I thought we had something special.

I try to put my feelings to one side. Stern gave me Golitsyn for free. That, perhaps, should have been a warning.

> This isn’t sentimentality. This is business. If anything happens to you, I’ll lose money.

Only the first two sentences ring true. Stern was making money before I ever used him. And he’ll still be making money long after I’ve gone.

Newman was angry. With her. With himself.

Now that he was alone again, he tried to impose some order on his scattered thoughts. It was an impossible situation to categorize. He’d been kidnapped. He was a hostage. But in his own home. These facts didn’t fit the general profiles that he knew well after years in the oil business.

Ninety percent of kidnaps worldwide were for ransom and the vast majority went unreported. Official estimates put the annual number of ransom kidnaps between five thousand and twenty-five thousand. The discrepancy between the two tended to be a matter of definition. What was beyond dispute among the experts was the true number, which was over fifty thousand. In certain sectors of the oil industry this was common knowledge; in those areas of the world where kidnapping was a national sport, employees of oil companies were a preferred target. The remaining twenty percent of kidnaps were mostly political and were far less predictable.

Newman wasn’t sure which kidnap category he’d fallen into. Most likely, something that accounted for a very small fraction of one percent of the total.

Once caught, there were certain rules for all hostages. Above all, that a hostage should do nothing to agitate a captor. Awkward hostages suffered. It was better to be cooperative. To try to establish a rapport. He knew this yet he’d still provoked her. And for what? Absolutely nothing.

His aggression had been fuelled by fatigue and anxiety but so long as she remained an unknown quantity he couldn’t afford to make such elementary errors. A hostage’s scope for influence was inevitably limited but the least one could do was not to make things worse.

He analysed what he thought he knew. His abduction wasn’t about money. And it wasn’t political. Or personal. Which probably made it criminal.

That was how it felt. A crime that had gone wrong. He was an accidental hostage. His had been a kidnap of chance, a kidnap of bad timing. Were the rules the same for such a thing? Until he knew better he chose to assume so.

Play the game.

These thoughts coalesced, gradually giving him something to focus on – a lifeline to cling to – which was crucial.

He knew that beyond all doubt.

‘I’ll bring you something to eat when I get back.’

‘You’re going out?’

I pull some tape from the roll and bite through it, leaving me with a six-inch strip. ‘For a while. Don’t get over-excited. You’ll still be here when I get back.’

‘Wait. What are you going to do with that?’

‘I told you. I have to go out.’

‘Is it for my mouth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please don’t. I swear I won’t make a sound.’

I raise an eyebrow. ‘Do I have your word on that?’

He starts to fidget, snagging himself on his bindings.

‘Relax,’ I tell him. ‘I won’t be long.’

But he’s not relaxing. His breathing quickens. The colour drains from his face. Being gagged is never pleasant but he seems to be over-reacting.

‘Start breathing through your nose.’

He shakes his head.

‘Calm down.’

He swallows. ‘You don’t understand …’

‘Doesn’t matter. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I’ll be back to take it off.’

‘Please – don’t do it.’

‘Look, I’m not walking out of here so that you can shout the house down. Now stay still.’

His grey skin starts to glisten. I step forward and try to place the tape over his mouth. He thrashes his head left and right.

‘For God’s sake, stop it!’

In his panic, he starts yelling. The chair rocks beneath him. I try to grab his hair but he ducks forward.

‘Calm down! I’m not going to hurt you.’

‘Get the fuck off me!’

My backhand swipe catches him on the cheek just below the right eye, snapping his head to the left. The contact feels like an electric pulse. It runs from the bones in my hand up to the shoulder socket.

For a moment, he’s stunned into submission. So I move behind him, grab his head in a lock and smear the tape across his mouth.

‘Now relax. And breathe through your nose.’

It was a beautiful day, no clouds to obscure a diamond sun set in sapphire sky. The moment she set foot outside the building she felt lifted. She chose to forget Newman and his reaction to the tape. A chilly breeze sent shivers through the Seine.

She crossed Pont Louis-Philippe and returned to Web 46 on rue du Roi du Sicilie, just five minutes away from the apartment. She didn’t bother checking any of her own e-mail addresses. Instead, she used a neutral Hotmail address – Joan Appleby – to send a message to Cyril Bradfield.

> Cyril – having a lovely time in NZ. Off to Sydney next week. Then Melbourne, Alice Springs, Darwin. HK next month, then home. Hope you’re well – Joan.

Then she created a new Hotmail address – no name, just a series of letters and numbers – and sent a second message to a third address. This one had been established by Bradfield but had never been used. He checked it twice a month to keep it active, but never did so from his own computer. A message from Joan Appleby would direct him to it.

> Cyril, Jacob and Miriam are dead. Whoever did it is after me. You’re in danger. Everything’s gone. If you can, contact me through our friend. Love, you know who.

When she’d finished, she went to a nearby café and ordered coffee, orange juice and an omelette. She hoped Bradfield would remember the process. When it came to technology beyond his own field of expertise, he remained stubbornly ignorant.

Apart from Stephanie herself, Bradfield was the only link between the Fursts and every version of Petra. Which meant that he was probably already dead. If he was alive and safe, he’d know what to do. And if he was alive and under duress, he’d still know what to do; she’d given him a secure way out.

> Contact me through our friend.

Any involved party reading that phrase would assume it referred to Petra. And Bradfield would confirm that. But he knew that in an emergency all Petra’s addresses were to be considered redundant. If he was in trouble, he’d be able to warn her in his response.

Guy Grangé, an immobilier on boulevard Magenta in the 10ème arrondissement. There were one-room and studio apartments for sale in the window. The digital images were fuzzy. The meagre rentals were hanging from a felt-covered board inside.

Central heating and cigarettes robbed the air of oxygen. The office was staffed by a middle-aged woman with tinted lenses in her glasses and tinted streaks in her hair. Defeated and grey, she was sitting beneath a cheerless property calendar with a photograph of a commercial rental. Nobody had bothered to turn the page since October.

Stephanie showed the woman the receipt she’d found in Golitsyn’s attaché case. ‘There’s no address on this.’

‘No.’

‘And no phone number.’

‘With short-term rentals, we keep the address and only issue the invoice number. It’s a question of security.’

‘Security?’

‘This isn’t the 16ème, you know. The people we deal with, well …’

Somewhere near the bottom of the heap herself, she still found plenty of others to look down on.

Stephanie showed her the keys she’d taken from Golitsyn’s case. ‘I have these but I don’t know where to go. My boss has gone away. I’m supposed to go over and check everything.’ She glimpsed the signature on the bottom of the receipt. Medvedev’s, naturally, not Golitsyn’s. ‘You don’t know how difficult these Russians are …’

The remark sparked a lightning strike of solidarity. ‘Almost as bad as the Africans.’

Stephanie rolled her eyes in sympathy. ‘Say one thing, do another.’

‘That’s the least of it. You know something? We lose money with them. Seriously. Even when we take it in advance.’

‘No. How?’

‘The condition of the places when we take them back – you wouldn’t believe it. Disgusting. As for the Chinese – I don’t know where to start …’

She was in her stride now, reaching into the memory bank for the worst offenders. And as she did so, she gathered a scrap of paper and a felt-tip pen.

New York City, 06:20

There was someone downstairs. John Cabrini sat up in bed, ears straining for the sound inside over the sounds outside; a distant dustcart, an alarm, two Cubans arguing on the pavement beneath his window.

The more he listened the louder the silence became. Until it was broken by a second clunk. Definitely inside.

He got out of bed and pulled on a grey towelling robe he’d stolen from a hotel in Turin. He wasn’t going to confront anyone in a pair of navy boxer shorts and a string vest. In the drawer of his bedside table was a Ruger P-85. Evelyn, his wife, had never let him keep a gun in the house. He’d bought the weapon three months after she’d died. Unable to endure the prospect of a life without her, he’d intended to use it on himself. At the last moment – safety-catch off, forefinger squeezing – he’d hesitated.

That had been fourteen years ago. The gun had never been fired. But on four previous occasions he’d been ready to shoot, two of them in the last twelve months. Both times, the intruders had vanished by the time he’d reached the pizza parlour downstairs. Both times, there’d been broken glass on the floor and no cash in the till.

Angelo’s on West 122nd Street in Harlem. Nothing fancy. Just good pizza and cheap prices. Part of a chain of seven Angelo’s restaurants in Harlem and the higher reaches of the Upper West Side and Upper East Side. Michael Cabrini, John’s younger brother, owned the business, employing his wife, two sons and a handful of nephews. As he was fond of saying, ‘Franchises ain’t worth shit unless you got someone you can trust running them. That means you, John. You and the boys. No outsiders.’ Which was why the empire had halted at seven; his brother had run out of employable sons and nephews.

Cabrini tip-toed down the stairs and through the kitchen. He paused in the shadow of the doorway that led into the restaurant, his eyes gradually growing accustomed to the gloom.

The man was making no attempt to hide. He was sitting at a table in the centre of the room. In front of him, on the red check tablecloth, was a cup and saucer.

‘Hope you don’t mind. Made myself an espresso.’

Pale-skinned, the remains of black hair greying at the temples, bald on top, in his fifties, he was wearing a navy-blue overcoat over a suit. Even in the half-light Cabrini could see how polished the tips of his black shoes were. He approved. Beside the cup and saucer was a felt hat.

‘I’m surprised you know how.’

A thin bloodless smile. ‘My wife bought a smaller version of that machine at vast expense. Naturally, she never used it. Personally, I can’t stand to see waste so I made the effort to learn myself. Now I use it every day.’ He raised the cup, took a sip, then added: ‘I’m sure we’d both be happier if you stopped pointing that gun at me.’

Cabrini laid it on the zinc counter. ‘How’d you get in?’

‘Far too easily. To your knowledge, have we met?’

‘No.’

‘But you know who I am.’

‘I have an idea.’

Gordon Wiley. A man whose instincts were more at home in Washington DC than in New York.

Wiley said, ‘Mr Ellroy is in Europe. I spoke to him earlier.’

‘What are we looking at?’

‘Salvage.’

‘What kind of assistance are we going to get?’

‘One hundred percent.’

‘What’s the damage?’

‘Who’s the damage? That’s the question. She’s a German named Reuter. Petra Reuter. I’d never heard of her until an hour ago. And now I wish I could turn back the clock. It’s a hell of a mess over there.’

‘What about Mr Ellroy?’

‘He’s staying. Which is why he wants his favourite anchor running the show.’

Wiley collected his hat. There was a black Lincoln waiting for him outside the door in front of a dilapidated white Datsun. Cabrini watched it leave through the first fall of the snow and felt relief rather than anxiety; no more pizzas. For a day or two, at least. And in a year or so, no more pizzas ever again.

It was quarter-to-seven when he phoned his brother. ‘Michael?’

‘Christ, John, you know what the time is?’

‘I’ve got to go away.’

There was a long pause. ‘When?’

‘Now.’

‘Is it serious?’

‘Always. You know that.’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You okay?’

‘I’m good. You gonna take care of things?’

‘Sure, sure. I’ll get Stevie to look after your place.’

The youngest nephew. The next in line, if the Angelo’s empire ever expanded to eight. After the call Cabrini went upstairs.

Salvage.

Well, he was the expert. Had been for twenty years. It was never pretty but then again it wasn’t a beauty pageant. Besides, he hadn’t had a failure yet. That was all that mattered.

He replaced the Ruger P-85 in the drawer of the bedside table. In the bathroom, he shaved. Most days, he didn’t bother. Serving behind the counter he preferred to be unshaven, sallow, dreary. Invisible to his customers. A fifty-five-year-old man dispensing pizzas; hardly one of life’s successes.

Beneath the weak light falling from the naked bulb was a lean man. The slight stoop and shuffle that his customers saw made him weak. But when he stood upright and walked with purpose, he appeared as he was: fiercely fit. He watched the welcome transformation in the mirror as he combed his hair and dabbed some Christian Dior aftershave on each cheek.

He returned to the bedroom, half-resurrected. Cabrini had always favoured fine clothes but almost everything he wore came from discount stores. In the back of the cupboard, however, was a tailored suit by Huntsman of London. Five years old, a masterpiece in fabric, Cabrini knew it would last the rest of his life. He laid it on the bed, then selected a pair of Lobb shoes and a black silk polo-neck that had been specially made for him by Clive Ishiguro.

His salvage uniform. He was the leader, he set the tone. It felt good to be able to shed the shoddy disguise from time to time.

When the farm overlooking Orvieto was ready, he would move to Italy and never return, content to comfort himself over the permanently painful loss of Evelyn by surrounding himself with beautiful things. A garden, porcelain, paintings, clothes, music.

The rusting white Datsun was twenty-one years old. Cabrini and Evelyn had bought it together. It was the only car he’d ever owned. He’d never wanted another. From Harlem to Brooklyn, he peeled off the Long Island Expressway and circled beneath it to the waterfront and a stretch of warehouses that were still awaiting development.

Cabrini came to the loading bay of the third warehouse: R.L. Gallagher Inc. Noiselessly, a large gate lifted. Cabrini drove to the back of the docking area, parked and then stepped into the waiting cargo lift. On the fourth floor, he crossed a vast storage area that was deserted, except for two matt black cabins on steel struts. The large sets of wheels which were now six inches clear of the floor were only just visible in the draughty darkness. Up a flight of aluminium steps was a sealed door. Beside the door, mounted on the wall, was a matt grey panel. He placed his face in front of it and said, ‘Cabrini, John, place of birth, Cleveland, Ohio.’

Cabrini had been born in New York but that didn’t matter. The biometric plate analysed voice timbre, the pattern of blood vessels in the retina, and traces of breath composition, a process that currently took between two and five seconds.

When the door parted with a hiss, John Cabrini stepped into a sanitized airlock of ultraviolet light.

Stalingrad, at the point where boulevard de la Chapelle becomes boulevard de la Villette. Overlooking the steel delta of rail fanning out of Gare de l’Est, the crumbling building was itself overlooked by an elevated section of the Métro. As Stephanie descended to the street the iron struts overhead began to creak. A train on the Nation-Porte Dauphine line was approaching. Pigeons fluttered at her feet.

The address was five storeys of peeling plaster and broken windows. There were commercial premises at street level. Not that many looked very commercial. Rusting shutters hid half of them. The rest were not busy; discount stores peddling cheap clothing, Chinese luggage, basins and toilet bowls in avocado and salmon pink. There was a bar-nightclub at one end. Coral was the name stencilled on to the dirty red canopy beside a cream silhouette of two entwined women.

Stephanie walked through an archway into the untended courtyard behind. Swing doors led to a staircase; unlit, cold, damp. The graffiti was as original as ever: Marie Z, I love you, Antoine; PSG are shit; Jim Morrison 1943–1971; Marie Z is a fucking slut. The apartment was on the third floor at the end of the corridor. From each door she passed came a different sound, a crying child, Arab rap, a barking dog. She smelt fried meat, sour tobacco, a pipe in need of a plumber.

The door had been recently replaced. The scratches on the frame hadn’t been filled or painted. Both locks were still shiny. She knocked twice then tried the keys she’d found in Golitsyn’s attaché case.

‘Hello?’

No answer. She stepped inside. It was dark. Instinctively, she withdrew the Smith & Wesson from the pocket of her MaxMara coat.

There were two main rooms, the curtains partly drawn in both. A cramped living area overlooked the street, the bedroom overlooked the rail-tracks. There was a tiny shower cubicle next to a toilet and sink. The woman in the agency had already mentioned that; a real luxury in that place – no communal toilet. A greasy film of green mould was colonizing the shower curtain. In the living area, a portable gas stove sat on the floor beside a small fridge. In the sink was a cracked glass, cutlery and a dirty plate. Two cockroaches crawled over a sauce that had dried to a dark brown crust.

The air tasted stale. She examined the receipt again. Ten days old.

Into the bedroom; an olive-green canvas hold-all lay beside the bed. She rummaged through it. Women’s clothes – two tatty jerseys, underwear, sneakers – a portable radio, a battered French copy of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. In the bathroom, a toothbrush sat in a plastic tangerine mug. There was a box of tampons on the floor by the toilet.

No sign of a man anywhere.

She peered through the bedroom curtains. A TGV emerged from beneath the bridge. In the living area, she checked the fridge: a plastic bottle of Orangina, a tube of tomato paste, three bottles of Amstel beer. On the table at the centre of the room was an old copy of France-Soir – 23 December – an empty box of cereal and a Samsung portable CD-player beside a few disks; Colour of Spring by Talk Talk, Achtung Baby by U2, Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Nothing recent, nothing French.

A woman, then. In an apartment paid for by Golitsyn, since the receipt was in his attaché case, despite Medvedev’s signature. Golitsyn floats above the world. Wasn’t that what Stern had said? Whatever that meant it presumably included not having to bother himself with signatures of this sort.

But what kind of woman? A lover? Not here. Money being no object, wouldn’t he keep her in a discreet apartment in a classier area? Then again, perhaps Golitsyn liked to slum it. What do you give a man jaded by plenty? A taste of what it’s like to have nothing, perhaps. Why not? A dip into the gutter to confirm and fortify the sweetness of his life.

She collected the Smith & Wesson, put it back in her pocket and let herself out. She double-locked, leaving the door as she’d found it.

‘You’re back.’

There were three of them blocking her path to the staircase. Clad and cropped in the homogenized uniform of the disaffected – Nike, Donnay, a scalp of fuzz – they were hard to source. Asian, perhaps. Two of them, anyway. The shortest of them, muscle-bound beneath the tight white T-shirt worn under his unzipped Adidas tracksuit top, might have been Arab. He had two zigzags shaved into the stubble above his left ear.

‘You weren’t here,’ he said.

He was staring at her with matt eyes. She wondered how old he was. It was hard to tell. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five, she guessed. With an attitude somewhere between menace and slouching insolence.

‘When?’

‘When they came.’

‘Who?’

‘Want to fuck?’

The tallest one laughed, took a drag from a joint and passed it to the third of them, who was attempting to cultivate a moustache. He wore a baseball cap with 50 CENT picked out in gold thread.

Stephanie said, ‘When who came?’

The short one looked her up and down, trying to make her nervous. ‘You know who.’

Stephanie smiled coldly. Of course I know. ‘What did they want?’

‘To speak to you.’

‘What about?’

‘Get on your knees and I’ll tell you.’

Another snigger from the tall one.

She returned the stare with interest. ‘When was this?’

‘Yesterday.’

Stephanie said, ‘I haven’t seen you around.’

‘So?’

‘How do you know I’m the one?’

‘They had a photo.’

‘Of me?’

‘Who else?’

‘You sure it was me?’

He nodded. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing. What else?’

‘They said to call them if we saw you. Said there’d be money for us.’

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