It had worked. Her fine green robe of interwoven silk and cotton with its trimming of gold and jewels had been spotless, no need to change it. Only wrap her gently in fresh-washed sheets and blankets, slowly, slowly, binding her gently, whispering to her the whole while. It seemed she’d welcomed the soft silk scarf blindfold. Or she hadn’t cared. She hadn’t cared anymore about anything. She was way past caring. Way past sensing that anything around her was amiss. Oh, that we become such monsters, it was unthinkable. It made Rhosh shudder.

Only once had there been a bad moment, an alarming moment. Benedict after binding her head securely in silk had backed off suddenly, almost stumbling in his haste to get away from her. He stood staring at her.

“What is it!” Rhosh had demanded. The panic was contagious. “Tell me.”

“I saw something,” Benedict whispered. “I saw something I think that she is seeing.”

“You’re imagining it,” said Rhosh. “She sees nothing. Go on, finish.”

What had that been, that thing that Benedict had seen?

Rhosh didn’t want to know, didn’t dare to want to know. But he couldn’t stop wondering.

When they’d had her securely bound like a dead one in a shroud, it had been possible then to leave that horrid place, that awful place that had been Maharet’s hearth and sanctum. Rhosh had had enough of looking through the storerooms, of looking at books and parchments and ancient keepsakes, enough, the desks, the computers, all of it. It was tainted with death. He would have taken the jewels perhaps and the gold, but he didn’t need these things, and he couldn’t bear to touch them. It was sacrilege somehow, stealing the personal treasures of the dead. He’d been unable to reason himself out of it.

When they were at the edge of the garden enclosure, he’d turned back, pulled the pin from the grenade he’d brought with him, and hurled it into the lighted doorway. The explosion was immediate. The flames raged through the buildings.

Then they had brought the silent burden to these shores, to a planned location obtained through the mortal attorneys with the least amount of delay, and put her to rest in a cool darkened cellar with its small windows soon boarded up by the ever-resourceful Benedict. Only the heartbeat of that bundled body gave evidence of life.

Benedict stood beside him at the railing of the deck. The wind off the Atlantic was deliciously cold, not as fierce as the winds of the northern seas, but bracing, clean and good.

“Well, I understand, you’ll be untouchable, but how can you maintain power over them, enough, say, to kill Benji Mahmoud before their very eyes?”