This morning Kuhl’s brisk pace had carried him to the stand as its owner was still slicing open the wide plastic straps of his newspaper bundles. With a few minutes to spare before the papers were separated, he had turned into the church and paused at a side altar to light a votive candle for a lover he remembered with particular fondness, and whose life he had reluctantly taken to preserve secrets of which she had known far too much, leaving her body in the beautiful rolling hills of Castilla y León in the Spanish countryside. The votive was a memorial Kuhl believed she would have appreciated.

Now he came down the porch onto the street, noticed El Mundo had been put out for sale, took a copy, dropped his pesetas into the vender’s hand, and pushed his way back through the thickening foot traffic on Calle de Alcalá to Casa Real. Waiting for a stoplight to change at the street’s busy intersection with Calle de Hortaleza, Kuhl folded it open to the classified pages and traced his eyes down columns of personal entries. Most were straightforward casts for sex or companionship that shared a certain banal, desperate vocabulary. There were the people seeking long-term partners, thrill dates, discreet adulteries. The common descriptions of age and appearance, and predictable mentions of candlelight, music, and travel.

Kuhl found the entry meant for his eyes in the third column. Adhering to the established format, it was a brief lettre d’amour, identifiable by distinctive matched, reusable pairs of sender and recipient names chosen from a list of twenty-four he had committed to memory—twelve of them male, twelve female. In fact, mnemonic triggers were the basis of the code. Information stored away in his mind provided the context for its key elements, making it absolutely foolproof. Kuhl knew the first letter of the recipient’s name always corresponded to a time at which he would, if necessary, have the ability to reach his sponsor over a secure Internet live conferencing connection. The letter “A” matched with one o’clock, “B” two o’clock, “C” three o’clock, and so forth. Whether the start time for the viable SILC was before or after noon depended on the sender’s first initial: a vowel pointed to the morning while a consonant marked it for the afternoon.

Here, Kuhl instantly noticed that the ad began with “My Darling Anya” and ended with “Your Unforgetting Lover, Michael-Sebastian.”

These routine elements of the message elicited no reaction from him besides a rapid noting of the timetable. The short window of contact would open at one o’clock Greenwich Mean Time that afternoon—the GMT standard was used, again for consistency’s sake—and shut at two o’clock after the predetermined hour passed.

It was something in the body of the message that quickened his pulse.

The text between salutation and closing said: