“¿What were you doing at this secret place?”

“Checking out what kind of threat J.E.D.D. Mason was. It is my job, Ockham, I do my job.”

“Not without reporting it to me.”

She took a deep breath. “Look, the name aside, the President made it very clear that—”

“Stop!” Cato half shouted.

All turned, as startled as you are to hear the coward Cato raise his voice.

“¿What’s wrong?”

“It’s hot in here.”

What you cannot see from sitting inside Mukta is that, for some minutes, Cato’s hands have been playing with the controls of some mad devices he wears strapped to his forearm under his sleeve. “It’s hotter in here than the system thinks it should be,” Cato repeated, “I’d say two point six degrees hotter than seven people should make it.”

Perhaps about now, reader, you realize, as our witness does, that Ockham has backed out of sight behind you, stalking around the back of Mukta, maybe drawing some weapon from his belt while you cannot see. Panicked, you wonder: does he realize? Does he too see what a perfect hiding place this old museum piece provides? Perhaps in childhood he played hide-and-seek inside the ancient car with Lesley, or made a play-fort of it as he and one twin weathered a pillow-bombardment from Sniper and the other. If you had my pacemaker, eavesdropper, it would bleep alarm.

“¡A spy!” Ockham rips the hatch open faster than you can turn, and presses a weapon to your back, just at the neck’s base where even a nonlethal dart could cripple. Before he even speaks, a prick injects you below the ear, and your vision wobbles as the muscles of your limbs lose two-thirds of their strength. “Hands where I can see them!” he orders in cold English. “No fast moves. Back down out of the car, now.”

And who is the intruder whose eyes and ears you have shared while spying on this deadly conference?

“What? Carlyle!” Thisbe recognized her first, rising with a despairing condescension on her face. “Oh, you idiot!”

It was Carlyle indeed, shivering like a fevered child as the drug magnified the after-stress of Dominic’s ‘session,’ a cocktail worse than vertigo. It has been four hours since we left Carlyle, switching off her tracker in Dominic’s cell, and the flight from Paris to Cielo de Pájaros takes barely one.

Lesley sighed like a melting snowdrift. “Again? I really liked this one, too.”

“Quiet, all of you!” Ockham ordered, digging his fingers into Carlyle’s scarf as he walked her down Mukta’s extending stair. “You used your clearance as our sensayer to get inside?” he asked.

“Yes.” Carlyle’s voice cracked as she answered. “I had an appointment with Sniper but I showed up early. The computer let me in but no one was here and… I just wanted to look at Mukta, and then I was so tired, I fell asl—”

“How much did you hear?”

“Wait!” Lesley cried, suddenly shrill with hope. “It was all in Spanish! Cousins don’t speak Spanish. They won’t have understood a thing, right, Carlyle?”