“I have to warn you,” I said, “I’m more of a ‘Joe’ personality type.”

“We’ll see.”

“Wait, rewind a second. You called that guy a knight. Knight of what? Round Table? Columbus?”

“No,” she said. “I can’t tell you that without approval.”

“Whose approval?”

She didn’t answer.

“You’re wasting my time, girl,” I said. “I’m going to hang up now and get my ass out of here.”

“You can’t,” she warned. “The knight was dropped off by a car and it keeps circling the block.”

“You’re still watching my hotel?” I asked, not sure if that was a comfort or another layer of worry to stack on top of everything else.

“Yes, and if you go outside they’ll see you. The best thing you can do right now is wait.”

“I don’t want to be here when the cops arrive.”

“I’m monitoring the police channels. No one has reported a thing.”

Which is what I expected, but didn’t say so. “What if they send in another of these knights? Or a whole team of them?”

“I don’t think they will. Its broad daylight and they won’t risk a full-out raid, and they won’t risk a room-by-room search. Especially since they can’t know what happened to the knight who attacked you. They’ll circle for a while and then they’ll break off and fall back to wait for fresh intelligence.”

“You seem to know a lot about them.”

“We know enough.”

“We?” I asked again. “Who’s team are you on? Mossad, MI6?”

“No.”

“AISE?” I asked. With her accent she could easily be with the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna, Italy’s version of the CIA.

“No, and stop trying to guess,” she said. “You won’t.”

Impasse.

“What can you tell me?” I asked, fighting to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “If you’re on my side, Violin, then help me out. What am I facing here? That bastard had incredible strength and fangs. Tell me something that makes sense of that.”

“The knights are extremely dangerous. That’s all I’m prepared to say right now. Just be glad you’re alive.”

“I’m always glad I’m alive. I leap out of bed singing Disney songs. But look, I know a little bit about genetics and I can’t see how gene therapy accounts for his strength. He threw me all over the place and he simply did not have the mass for it. That guy was spooky strong.”

Again she evaded the question. “Be glad he didn’t bite you.”

“I’m also always glad when people don’t bite me.” I checked the trace. It was still running but it was clearly getting nowhere. According to the meter the call was coming from Antarctica, which I somehow doubted. “If I tell you what the knight said to me, will you tell me what he meant?”