There was a single apartment on the floor and Carmody picked up a rich, bready scent in the hallway outside. Hot dough, cheese, parsley and pork: pogaca. He stepped up to the door, tapped a second reader, entered, and poked his head into the living room.

Kali was at the table in front of her laptop, sitting sideways to the door. She gave him a slight nod, and he nodded back, even though she wasn’t looking. Then he hung his jacket on a peg and followed the aroma into the kitchen. A tray of the Carpathian biscuits was warming in the oven. He took two oven mitts off a hook, carried the tray over to her, set it down on the table and spun a chair around so he could sit with his legs spread around its back.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hello, Michael.”

“You’ve got your work cut out,” he said, nodding at the computer.

“I’m not alone,” she said.

Carmody handed her a biscuit in a napkin, took one for himself. He was wearing a black short-sleeved T-shirt. A rising phoenix tattoo covered his entire right arm. On the left were stylized runes in shades of blue.

“Super,” he said, eating.

“They’re from a Hungarian bakery around the corner.”

He made an appreciative sound deep in his throat. “The baker didn’t use yeast. It’s how authentic pogaca is made. Also the more difficult way to prepare the dough.”

“You know these things. I realized that back in Italy.”

He shrugged. “I grew up in a restaurant kitchen.”

“You told me you grew up in a traveling carnival.”

“That was later on. From when I turned sixteen till I enlisted.”

“And then?”

“I was through growing up.”

Kali held her napkin with both hands. They were small with long, slender fingers and did not seem capable of taking down a three-hundred-pound bruiser built like a tank. But Carmody had seen her do it before he could count to ten.

He glanced at the computer screen as she ate the pogaca in silence. Lines of multicolored source code ran across it.

“How does it feel not to be alone?” he asked.

“The premise of your question is wrong,” she said. “I have people I trust.”

“Like Franz Scholl. The guy in Munich who helped you take down Gunther Koenig’s outlaw geomapping operation.”

“He’s one.”

“And whoever you send messages to in cyberspace.”

Her brown eyes locked on his. “You didn’t learn that in a kitchen.”

“I was hunting you for over a year.”

“And you tracked me down.”

Carmody nodded. “My proudest moment.”

She was silent.

He said, “So, Scholl the web activist. Your other friend in cyberspace. Or friends, plural. Are they all connected?”

Kali didn’t answer. She finished her biscuit, dabbed her fingers with the napkin and slid it aside on the table.

“We have work to do,” she said.