Shocked out of her angry reverie, she slid back down the drainpipe, scraping hands and cheek on the rough stonework, and landed in a snowdrift hard enough that it nearly knocked the breath out of her. Quick! Fumbling for her pistol, she skidded toward the door and yanked it open. She brought the gun up in time to see a man turning toward her. He was dressed all in black, his face covered by a ski mask or something similar: The long knife in his hand was red with blood as he straightened up from the body at his feet. “Stop—” Miriam called. He didn’t stop, and time telescoped in on her. Two shots in the torso, two more—then the dry click of a hammer on a spent cartridge. The killer collapsed toward her and Miriam shook her head and took a step back, wishing she hadn’t heard the sound of bullets striking flesh.

Time caught up with her again. “Shit!” She called out, heart lurching between her ribs like a frightened animal. A sense of gathering wrongness overcame her, as if what had just happened was impossible. Another old reflex caught up, and she stepped forward. “Gurney—” she bit her tongue. There were no gurneys here, no hemostats, no competent nurses to get the bleeding staunched and no defibrillators—and especially no packets of plasma and operating theaters in which to struggle for the victim’s life.

She found herself an indefinite time later—probably only seconds had passed, although it felt like hours—staring down at a spreading pool of blood around her feet. Blood, and the body of a man, dressed from head to foot in black. A long curve-bladed knife lay beside him. Behind him—“Margit!” It was Lady Margit, Olga’s chaperone. The fat lady had sung her last: There was nothing to be done. She still twitched, and maybe a modern ER room could have done something for her—but not here, not with a massive exsanguinating chest wound that had already stopped pumping. Probably the dorsal aorta or a ventricle, she realized. Oh hell. What was she doing here? For a moment, Miriam wished she believed in something—someone—who’d look after Margit. But there wasn’t time for that now.

She turned back to the assassin. He was alive—but no, that was just residual twitching, too. She’d actually nailed him through the heart with her first two shots, the second double-tap turning his chest into a bloody mess. There was already a stench of excrement in the air as his bowels relaxed. She pulled back his hood. The assassin was shaven-headed and flat-faced: He looks Chinese, she realized with a mixture of astonishment and regret. She’d just killed a man, but—there was a chain around his neck.