As she approached, she could hear the squawk of a walkie-talkie and the hushed voice of a man speaking awkward Persian with a European accent, though she could not make out the words. The man was inside the second van. From his tone, though, he sounded agitated, concerned. He kept repeating a word, or perhaps a name, and got no replies.

“Krystos! Krystos!”

Then the rear door of the van opened and four men stepped out. They were dressed in ordinary clothes, but they held their sports coats closed in the way men do when they are trying to conceal something. Violin had seen it a thousand times. It amused her.

She needed to be amused. It was that or let the memory of her conversation with her mother turn her into a screaming wreck.

The men saw her and paused. They said nothing to her but their eyes were on her as she walked past the van. They were only pretending to be Iranian, but their stares were frank and impudent by Muslim standards. Invasive and rude.

No way to treat a lady, she thought.

Violin let herself trip over a crack in the sidewalk. She stumbled and dropped the grocery bag. One of the men made a reflexive move to catch her.

And he died.

The other three men never saw the blade. All they were aware of was a flash of black cloth and the sparkle of sunlight on steel, and then the man who had reached to help the woman was sagging to his knees as a jet of impossibly bright red geysered from his throat. Violin gracefully sidestepped to avoid the spray.

The men were shocked, but they were professionals. Even without understanding what was happening they knew something was wrong, that this was an attack of some kind. They went for their guns.

And then Violin was among them.

Her chador flapped and popped like laundry on a clothesline. Her hands became a blur as she moved into the center of the group, a blade in each hand, her body twisting with a dancer’s grace. The steel wove patterns of light around her. Rubies of blood filled the air and splashed along the side of the van and on the front of the building. One gun cleared its holster but the hand holding it was no longer attached to its owner’s wrist.

The men had no time to scream.

Violin cut their faces and throats and mouths and eyes. She slashed tendons and muscle and bone and then she suddenly froze in the center of the storm of blood. The men collapsed around her, their many parts creating a grotesquely artistic pattern on the ground.

From the first cut to the last it took four seconds.

Violin stared dispassionately down at the carnage.

Four seconds.

Beneath her scarf her mouth twitched in disgust.

It should only have taken three.