Her hand jerked, and in some distant recess she felt warm liquid splatter onto her wrist, heard a spoon clatter to the table. He was just on the other side of the gilt railing, standing as still and fixed as a statue in a square. He was staring at her.

It was the last person in the world she wanted to see.

*   *   *

Christine felt like she was falling into an abyss. She tried to breath, yet somehow couldn’t, as if the surrounding atmosphere had drawn to a vacuum. Anton Bloch said nothing. He simply stood there, blunt and immovable. Knowing the effect he was having.

A decorative railing was all that separated them. Christine wanted more. She wanted iron bars or bulletproof glass. A thousand miles. His face, stony and dour, was just as she remembered. That he made no effort to feign surprise was the only positive, no what-a-small-world lie pressed into his expression. Bloch waited for her shock to run its course. When it did, he said, “Hello, Christine.”

She took a deep breath to gather herself. “Anton.”

“Do you mind if I join you?” he asked, his accent a crush of consonants.

“If I said no?”

He ignored this and circled around to the entrance. Bloch had a quick word with the hostess, and thirty seconds later he was there, easing his bulk onto the delicate white chair across the table. He started to speak, but the waitress swooped in and took his order. Coffee, black.

The moment the waitress was away, Christine seized the initiative. “What do you want?”

Bloch hesitated, and Christine took that moment to study him. He’d changed little in a year, perhaps a few pounds heavier in retirement, but retaining the sober gaze and furrowed brow she’d come to know in their brief association. A brooding Buddha.

“How is the conference at the Strand?” he asked.

A question that was no question at all, Christine thought. More a statement to announce that there would be no pretenses. I know why you are here. Where you are staying. What you are doing. Spies, she’d learned, by some strange paradox, had a way of being succinct.

“The conference? I’d been enjoying it until now.”

“Why didn’t David come with you?”

“Edmund, you mean?”

“Do you really call him that?”

“When I have to. Cocktail parties, dinner with friends. Lying has become a way of life for me.”

Bloch said nothing.

That silence weighed on Christine. At essence, she knew Bloch to be a decent man. He had once been David’s boss, ordering him to do Israel’s dirtiest work. But he had also helped David leave that impossible life and disappear. What really bothered her, she supposed, was what Bloch represented—her husband’s past.

“I’m sorry, Anton.”

“I know this must be a shock, but I’ll take it as a good sign. You’ve had no other … surprises in the last year?”