The silence in the interview room was growing taut, and he guessed their watchers were waiting to see what he and Alison would say to one another. He turned to her to smile, and found her staring right at him, all the words bottled up in her face.

“Could we get coffee or something?” he drawled for the benefit of their minders, testing the boundaries. To his surprise, Dave Whoever stuck his head out of the door to ask, and yes, this would be a Meeting With Coffee. This incrementally improved his best guess at how much shit he was in. And it would be him, after all. Alison had been a prisoner of hostile operatives.

“Spiker…” Her voice came out with all the emotion bound up and sealed in triplicate. “How are you feeling?”

He frowned at her, because it was the sort of question someone asked when they meant You’re falling down drunk, maybe you should go home, or I hear your wife left you. Then he clicked and managed a smile.

“Pretty much good as new.” He was in fact bruised from collarbone to groin, but he’d take that as an alternative to dying in gutshot agony.

He had some surprisingly sharp memories from when that had been going on. He remembered the gunman seizing Khan and Pryor and somehow walking away—very fast—to somewhere not on the Natural History Museum’s tourist map. The other woman, from the security footage that started all this, had gone after them. And, although he’d been too middle-class polite to mention an embarrassing faux pas like being shot, Alison had made quite a fuss about getting help for him. Which he was grateful for, all things considered.

The Plug-uglies had been dealing with their wounded. One heavyset woman had loped over, though. She had long, greying hair and her broad face was human enough to be hideous, yet shorn of any empathy. He half expected her to go away, or get out a jar of leeches or finish him off. He had been in a great deal of pain, shivering with cold, aware that the metrics of his life were skiing rapidly down that slope from which there was no return.