As his eyes took in the miniature, Kuhl thought of the long effort it represented, the concentrated application of his learned skills. Its piece-by-piece construction had been painstakingly slow, but impatience rather than patience had held him to it, an irresistible drive to see the model take on finished shape from its raw makings. He thought of the hours he had spent sketching plans from the digital reference images stored in his laptop computer, of the careful fabrication of its segments with his saws, rasps, files, gouges, chisels, and wood knives. He summoned back to his very fingertips the tactile impressions of working his materials, methodically hand carving unformed balsa to replicate the church’s brick and tile facades; its crests, moldings, and traceries; its every architectural feature and texture—even cutting small pieces of glass to fit its windows.

Inside his church, Kuhl had re-created San Ginés’s three arched naves and the figure of the Virgin Mother in her apparition as the Lady of Valvanera, patroness of remedies, whose grace was sought for healing and protection in war. There, it was said, a group of assassins had once stolen into the vestibule and murdered a young man as he knelt before the Lady in adoration, leaving his headless corpse to be discovered at her feet, and his spirit to haunt the aisles with ghostly elegies to a transgression unpunished . . . and, Kuhl imagined, a restless anger at reverence scorned and unrewarded.

After detailing the model to his satisfaction, Kuhl had sanded and primed its subassemblies for the paints he had mixed to create the earth tones of its outer walls, the darker colors of rail and roof, dome and steeple, as well as the age-tarnished iron bell in the proud tower of San Ginés, and the crucifix raised high above all. He had applied his coats of paint with precise brushstrokes, done his staining and streaking with a sponge applicator to approximate the effects of age, sun, and soot. Then he had used clever dashes of color to hint at the rare artwork decorating the interior walls—canvases by El Greco, Salvatierra, Nicolás Fumo, and a reproduction of a work by the Venetian master Sebastiano Ricci that had been destroyed in an eighteenth-century fire. Ricci, whose devout paintings commissioned by the authorities in Rome contrasted strongly with his reputation for impiety and willful defiance of religious law.

Kuhl stared at his miniature from his chair across the room, his eyes fixed on the bell tower he had epoxied to its rooftop just minutes before.

Like flames, the westering sunlight boiled through its semicircular arches.

With the dying of the day, Kuhl’s period of latency had also reached its end. Minutes from now he would depart for Barajas airport and exit the country using a fraudulent identity and supporting documents—one of many aliases he’d seeded around the world and kept in reserve for when he received his signal from DeVane. Thousands of miles away, Kuhl’s cell of sleeper agents in America had been activated and made rapid arrangements for his coming. On his specific instructions, they had secured a base that fit his cover and conformed nicely with his tactical imperatives. It would provide crucial seclusion, exploitable terrain, and at the same time place him within close reach of his potential target or targets.