Slaton studied the ceiling overhead, taking it for a mirror of what he would find below—a lightweight lattice of decorative panels mounted on a grid of metal stringers. It was common construction, simple and cheap. The problem was that the panels did little to attenuate noise. He began with the knife, but made barely an outline before turning to the handsaw. It was slow and tedious work that would have been far easier with an electric saw. Unfortunately, in a complication he’d faced before, the resultant noise would be like setting off an alarm.

The blade bit and chewed through old wood, and his bricklayer’s hands went numb from pressuring the handle. When the blade finally breached the cavity between floors Slaton stopped to listen. He heard the faint sound of a vacuum, and somewhere a muted television newscast in German. The groan of plumbing as toilets were flushed and the odd thump of a closing door. For a busy hotel, nothing out of the ordinary.

Slaton took off his jacket and set back to work. His fingers soon ached and blisters began wearing into his already hardened hands. Sweat dripped from his brow, and when he checked his watch he saw that he’d been in the room for twenty minutes. He hoped Madame Dupre had a healthy appetite. In a perfect world he would have rented the room for a night and taken his time. As it was, he had to improvise. The thin blade finally met the fourth corner, and with his cut complete he left the saw blade in place and wedged his fingers into the crease, rocking the panel slowly upward. When it came clear he looked through and saw the top of the ceiling panel in Hamedi’s closet.

Again Slaton listened. Still nothing unusual.

The dead space between the floors, no more than four inches, was strewn with dust and dead bugs, and he saw that by sheer luck he’d narrowly missed slicing through an electrical conduit. He reached down, dug his fingernails into one soft corner of the ceiling panel, and lifted ever so slightly. It moved, and he was happy to see no light at the opening. The closet door below was closed. There was enough ambient light, however, to see shadows inside the closet. With an urge to move quickly, Slaton slid forward, pulled the panel completely clear, and dropped his head into the gap. Hanging upside down in the darkened lower closet, he looked left and right at a rack of men’s clothing. There was one leather jacket, and two of everything else. Dress shirts and trousers, and three feet to his right what he was after—a pair of suit coats. Here, Slaton knew, was the most dubious part of his plan—there was no way to be sure that Hamedi would wear either of them tomorrow evening. Yet like every mission, there came a time to go with the odds.