“Best of both worlds.”

“Started out that way. Washington’s falling apart. Both the cities, actually. Less comfortable, more dangerous.”

“Did you go armed?”

“No, I’m fatalistic about that. Elza had a gun, but I don’t think she carried it normally. Namir usually did, and he had a bodyguard as well. But he was threatened all the time, and attacked once.”

“In the city?”

“Oh, yeah, right downtown. Stepped off the Broadway slidewalk and a woman shot him point-blank in the chest. Somehow she missed his heart. She turned to run away, and the bodyguard killed her.” He shook his head. “He got hell for that, the bodyguard. No idea who she might have been working for. No fingerprints or eyeprints. DNA finally tracked her down to Amsterdam; she’d been a sex worker there twenty years before.”

“No connection with Gehenna?”

He shook his head. “And Namir says he’s never used the services of a ‘sex worker,’ not even in Amsterdam. Men lie about that, but I’m inclined to believe him.”

“Point-blank in the chest. That must have laid him low for a long time.”

“Had to grow a new lung. Takes weeks, and it’s no fun.”

Another bit of mystery for the mystery man. “He’s made other enemies, obviously, since Gehenna. Being a peacekeeper.”

“Mostly in Africa. Very few pale beautiful blondes.”

“It’s not my field. But I assume you could hire one.”

“Yes and no. In New York, you could rent a beautiful blond hit woman and probably specify right- or left-handed. But you can’t hire someone so totally off the grid, not in America. If she ordered a meal in a restaurant, she’d get a cop along with the check, asking what planet she just dropped in from.”

“It’s gotten that bad?”

“Since Triton, yeah. But even then, a couple of years before that, America was . . . more cautious than most places.”

“A police state, my mother said. She calls herself a radical, though.”

He laughed. “She’s no more radical than I am. From her dossier.”

“You’ve read my mother’s dossier?”

“Oh, sorry. You thought I was a lepidopterist.”

“No, but . . . I assumed you’d read mine and everybody’s . . .”

“I’m just nosy. And seven days is a long time to kill on the Space Elevator.”

“So what about my father? Was he banging his secretary?”

“Nothing personal. Just blow jobs.” He smiled at my reaction. “Bad joke, Carmen, sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets into gear a little ahead of my brain.”

“I like that in a spy,” I said, not sure whether I did. “Not so Earl Carradine.”

“You see the last one?” he said. “Where he solves your little problem with the Others?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure. What, he takes his Swiss Army knife and turns a bicycle into a starship?”

“No, he discovers the whole thing is a hoax, from a corrupt cabal of capitalists.”

“Oh, good. We can go home now.”

“It actually was a little clever this time. Not so much gadgets and gunplay.”