I did as I was told. David was in the Château library, going through our own pages again as he’d been doing since Kapetria left, searching for some clue as to how the great connecting web might work. He said he would go to Paris now, if we wanted him to. He would do anything we wanted. I rang off.

“Don’t you think you might call Fareed personally and tell him we’re coming?” Louis asked. “That’s my last request, I promise.”

I didn’t really need the phone for that. Fareed’s telepathic antennae were as powerful as mine. I sent out the message that Louis and I would be joining him within minutes. Louis felt it was important. But then I heard the voice of Thorne in the shadows nearby.

“I’ve texted him,” he said. “We are ready to go.”

And so it was done. Louis was putting on his jacket and scarf. I was unhappy. I watched him pulling on his gloves. I couldn’t imagine how this could end productively or happily. I didn’t want Louis to be humiliated, but what could Fareed and Seth say to talk of the silver cord? If they became impatient and short with him, I’d be furious.

It was a matter of minutes to reach Paris.

I caught sight of the unmistakable light patterns of the roofs of Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals and within seconds we were on the tarmac surface and headed for “our door” that led directly to Fareed’s secret quarters and work area, with Thorne and Cyril following.

These new facilities had been remodeled last fall especially for Fareed, and he had an immense glass-walled office which opened directly into a vast laboratory with tables, machines, sinks, cabinets, and apparatuses of ornate and baffling complexity that wandered on for half a city block.

The office itself was furnished, as all of Fareed’s offices were, with a mixture of ornate antiques and comfortable modern couches and shapeless chairs.

There was the de rigueur marble Adam fireplace with its porcelain gas logs and the array of carefully modulated flames. There was the Louis XV desk for writing, and then there was the endless computer table with its five or six brilliantly illuminated monitors, and Fareed, in his white lab coat and white cotton pants, slumped in a great engulfing leather office chair replete with buttons and levers on the arms, and, opposite him as he turned to face us, the inevitable “conversation pit” of velvet recliners and a broad couch that ran on forever and the coffee table littered with medical journals and sketch pads filled with nightmarish drawings and diagrams—and Seth, in a white thawb, standing beside Fareed.