“Yeah,” she said. “You’d have to ask him about the rest. I can’t talk about it.”

“That also part of the deal?”

She nodded again.

Musil said, “Natasha... Ki was killed less than an hour ago. He was my friend. We were together when it happened.”

Natasha looked shocked. “I knew Ki. He would speak to my classes.” She hesitated, shaking her head. “I’m so sorry.”

Musil breathed deeply.

“I was probably the real target,” he said. “I’ve been looking into Gelfland’s disappearance. Spoken to people about him.”

Natasha was thinking hard. “Your daughters,” she said. “How did he—”

“Malkira, if that’s who it was, called their school. He asked to have them dismissed early and picked them up in a car,” he said. “I know the principal. We’ve met many times. But he was convinced he was talking to me.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “At Pinnacle they didn’t always know how we would turn out. Mostly, they didn’t. It was like they mixed the ingredients together in a test tube, shook them up and waited to see what developed. After we were born, they brought us to the secret city and put us on different tracks. They trained and educated us based on our abilities.” She paused. “I can see things other people can’t. Do different things. Like, I’m also a massive hyperpolyglot. A language accumulator. I hear somebody say a few sentences in German or Dutch or whatever and pick it up. My brain just computes and extrapolates. Phonetics, syntax, everything.”

“And Malkira?” This from Carmody behind her.

She turned to him.

“Grigor’s next level,” she said. “Better than me. He can sound like anyone. Act like anyone. But he isn’t doing impersonations. He sponges up dialects. Voices. How people walk. It’s like he’s a chameleon. Or an octopus. The way they make themselves invisible.”

“Aggressive mimicry,” Morse said. “That’s the term in the Pinnacle file.”

Natasha nodded. “And the thing is...” She swallowed dryly. “We all learned to kill. They trained us like animals. I don’t know how else to say it. That’s how it was. I hated it. But not Grigor. He liked to hurt people. Even at the orphanage, before the training. I was a little girl...and he hurt me, OK?”

No one spoke for a very long moment. She took a breath.

“What you’re saying fits Grigor. I mean, to the letter,” she said. “That call to the principal. And turning into Gelfland. He could do it. I don’t know about deepfakes across the internet. But he’d have help with them.”

“Russia again,” Harris said. “That’s who we’re talking about. Who would have sent him here.”

“Yeah.”

He started to say something, seemed to reconsider.

“What is it, Leo?” Morse asked.

He tugged his ear. “Just thinking.”