"Let me jog your memory. In America, they infiltrated—some say, founded—the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom as a local cover organization. They do that everywhere, taking over a splinter of a larger, more respectable organization; in Egypt they use some of the more extreme mosques of the Muslim Brotherhood. In America . . . the Free Church is a small, exclusionary brethren who are so far out of the mainstream that even the Assembly of Quiverful Providentialist Ministries, from whom they originally sprang, have denounced them for heretical practices. Some of the Church elders are in fact initiates of the first order of the Black Brotherhood; the followers are a mixture of Christian believers, who they see as dupes, and dependents and postulants of the Brotherhood. The Church is mostly based in the United States—it is very hard to move against a church over there, even if it is suspected of fronting for another organization, they take their religious freedom too seriously—but it has missions in many countries. Not Russia, I hasten to add. The nature of the Church doctrine makes the personal cost of membership very high—they tend to be poor, with large families—and discourages defection from the ranks; additionally, the Brotherhood may use low-level glamours to keep the sheep centered in the flock. We hear little more than rumors about the Brotherhood itself; despite fifty years of attempted insertions, we've been unable to penetrate them. Their discipline is terrifying. We have heard stories about ritual murder, incest, and cannibalism. I would normally discount these—the blood libel is very old and very ugly—but complicity in war crimes has been repeatedly used to bind child soldiers into armies in the Congo, and I have some evidence that those practices were originally suggested by a Brotherhood missionary ..."

Mo shudders. "Whether they eat their own children or not, they have no problem eating somebody else's."

"You have evidence of this?" Panin leans towards her eagerly.

"I've seen it." Panin flinches at the vehemence of her response. "Although they may not have been strictly human anymore, by that point—they had been thoroughly possessed—"

"That was the Amsterdam business, was it not?"

Mo freezes for several seconds. Then she takes another deep breath, and a hasty mouthful of lemonade, then wipes her mouth. "Yes."

"Cannibalism is a very powerful tool, you know. The transgression of any strong taboo—it can be used for a variety of purposes, bindings, and geases. The greatest taboo, murder, provides two kinds of power, of course, both the life of the victim and the murderer's own will to violate—"

Mo shakes her head, raises a hand. "I don't need that lecture right now."

"All right." Panin sips at his wine. "Excuse me, but—there is a personal connection?"

"What?"

"You appear unduly upset ..."

"Yes." She looks at her hands. "The missing officer is my husband."