Ivan reached into his jacket. Where a gun would be, if he was armed with a shoulder holster.

And he would be armed; he had carried a gun for too many years to be comfortable without one now.

Alamandar got out of the open back door of the limo. As he rose to his feet, he shouted at the guards. “Shoot him, you fools! He’s going to kill the Caliph!”

Ivan’s gun was out. He fired, and the guard to Alai’s left dropped like a rock. The sound was strange—the barrel had a silencer, but Alai was close to being directly in front of it, so it wasn’t so much silenced as shaped.

I should drop to the ground, thought Alai. To save my life, I should get out of the line of fire. But he couldn’t take the danger seriously. He didn’t feel as though he were in danger at all.

The other guards had their guns out now. Ivan shot another one, but then the bullets—not silenced—flew in the other direction, and Ivan fell to the ground. His gun did not slip from his hand; he maintained his grip on it to the end of his life.

Or maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe he could spend his last moments explaining to Alai how he could betray him like this.

Alai walked to Ivan’s body and felt for a pulse. Ivan’s eyes were open. He was already dead.

“Come away, my Caliph!” shouted Alamandar. “There may be other conspirators!”

Conspirators. There was no possibility of other conspirators. Ivan didn’t trust anybody enough to conspire with them. The only person Ivan absolutely trusted was…

Was me.

Ivan was a perfect shot. Even at a run, he could not have aimed at me and then clumsily hit two guards.

“My guards,” said Alai, looking up at Alamandar. “The ones he shot—will they be all right?”

One of the other guards jogged back to look. “Both dead,” he said.

But Alai already knew that. Ivan had not been aiming at Alai. He had come here with one purpose in mind, the purpose that had guided him for years. Ivan was here to protect his Caliph.

It flashed into Alai’s mind with immediate clarity. Ivan had learned of a conspiracy against the Caliph, and it involved people so close to Alai that there was no way for Ivan to warn him from a distance without running the risk of alerting one of the conspirators.

Alai reached with one hand to close Ivan’s eyes, while with the other he pulled Ivan’s pistol from his slackened fingers. Still not taking his eyes off of Ivan’s face, Alai fired the pistol upward into the guard who was standing over him. Then he calmly aimed at the guard who had gone back to the bodies and fired. Alai had never been as good a shot as Ivan. He could not have done this while running. But kneeling, he was all right.

The guard he had shot without looking was lying on the pavement, twitching. Alai shot him again, then turned to Alamandar, who was getting back into the limo.