Nothing happened. I’m still here, she told herself. She took another deep breath, this time to avoid having to breathe in too close to the thing sprawled across the fallen office chair at the far side of the office. She’d called Roland, told him to send cleaners—instead, these booby traps had materialized. When the Clan wants you dead, you die, she realized bleakly. If indeed it is the Clan…

There, on a rusting tool chest propped against the other wall, was exactly what she was looking for. She picked up the heavy-duty staple gun and checked that it was loaded. “Yup.” She hefted it one-handed, then mustered up a smile and picked up a pair of rusty pliers and stepped back out of the trailer.

Two minutes later, she had the door open. The wire, firmly stapled to the door frame, was severed: The mine was still armed, but the trigger wire led nowhere. “Come on,” she called to Brilliana. “It’s safe now! We can leave!” Brill hurried over. As she did so, Miriam glanced up and shuddered once more. What if they’d heard of infrared motion detectors?

Well, that was the Clan all over.

It was snowing lightly, and Miriam phoned for a taxi when they reached the main road. Brill kept quiet, but her eyes grew wide when she saw Miriam talking into a small gray box—and wider still as she took in the cars that rumbled past in the gloom. She glanced from side to side like a caged cat in a strange, threatening environment. “I didn’t know it would be like this!” she whispered to Miriam. Then she shivered. “It’s really cold.”

“It’s winter, kid. Get used to it.” Miriam grinned, slightly manic from her success with the bomb.

“It’s colder on the other side, isn’t it?”

A cab pulled alongside, its light turned off. Miriam walked over. “Cab for Beckstein?” she asked. The driver nodded. She held open the rear door. “Get in and slide across,” she told Brill. Then she gave directions and got inside, shutting the door.

The cab moved off. Brill looked around in fascination, then reached down toward her ankles. “It’s heated!” she said quietly.

“Of course it’s heated,” said the driver in a Pakistani accent. “You think I let my passengers freeze to death before they pay me?”

“Excuse my friend,” Miriam told him, casting a warning glance at Brill. “She’s from Russia. Just arrived.”

“Oh,” said the driver, as if that explained everything. “Yes, very good, that.”

Brill kept her eyes wide but her mouth closed the rest of the way to the Marriott Marquis, but watched carefully as Miriam paid off the cabbie using pieces of green paper she pulled from a billfold. “Come on, follow me,” said Miriam.