Panin gives her a look. "Yours. And mine. James advised me to tell you that I have been involved in CLUB ZERO from another angle. The Black Brotherhood do not only fish in British waters."

"That's not news. Nevertheless, I hope you will excuse me for saying that if your illegals are taken while working overseas, blaming the local authorities is not—"

"He disappeared in St. Petersburg."

"Oh. Oh, my sympathies."

"I take it you can see the problem?"

"Yes." Mo takes a sip of lemonade, looks apprehensive. "I'd be very grateful if you could tell me everything you know about this particular incident. Did Ang—James—explain why it's of particular interest to us right now?"

"One of your mid-level controllers has been taken, no?"

"Not definitely, yet." Her fingers tense on the glass. "But he's out of contact, and there are indications that something has gone badly wrong, very recently. We've got searchers looking for him right now. Anything you can tell me before I brief the extraction team ..."

"You are briefing—" Panin's eyes unconsciously flicker towards her violin case. "Oh, I see." He eyes her warily. "What do you know of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh?"

"As much as anybody on the outside—not enough. Let's see: the current group first surfaced in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the establishment of the monarchy there, but their roots diverge: White Russian emigre radicals, freemasons from Trieste, Austrian banking families with secrets buried in their family chapels. All extreme conservatives, reactionaries even, with a basket of odd beliefs. They're the ones who reorganized the Brotherhood and got it back in operation after the hammering it took in the late nineteenth century. They're not based in Serbia anymore, of course, but many of them fled to the United States immediately before the outbreak of war; that's the trouble with these cults, they fragment and grow back when you hit them."