“I would have been executed forthwith, I think, but for the presence of the boy, which puzzled the men who took me, and puzzled their master when we were brought before him. Had they let him go, I would have gone to my death with a degree of equanimity—after all, when one has cheated The Great Illusion as many times as I have, it is hardly sporting to complain when it catches one up. But they held the boy, and they were preparing to use him to open me up.

“So I offered to give them what they wanted, without having to go to the effort and delay of torture, if only they would let him go free. And moreover, I told the maharaja, I would offer him a great prize, one he would never get from me by the brand or the rack, as soon as I had seen the child cross the Khanpur border. I promised him that it would be worth it, and he looked into my eyes, and he decided to gamble that I was giving him the truth.

“I sent the boy to my friends, extracting from him first the promise that he must never enter Khanpur again without my word, and watched him go down the road and through the guard’s post. As soon as he had passed, I turned to my captor and told him who I was. That I was not only an agent of the British Intelligence service, but that I was also the boy known to the world through the writings of Rudyard Kipling.”

“And you gave him your word that you wouldn’t try to escape under your own power,” Nesbit concluded. “Thus condemning me to a case of severe back-strain.”

“I did make a considerable effort not to grow fat inside the prison,” O’Hara countered. “Since I thought it possible that such a scenario might come about.”

“Possible, my foot,” his superior officer said with a grin. “You planned for it. That’s why you worded your vow the way you did. You knew someone would come after you sooner or later, and had to trust that they would be able to haul you off.”

“Or drive me at gunpoint,” O’Hara said, shooting a grin of his own in my direction. “Yes, I admit it: another tit-bit of pride, to sweeten the tongue.”

“The sweetness of the plan must have faded considerably, after two years in a cell.”

“Not at all. I knew my son was safe, and I knew he would arrange things as needed, with the assistance of my . . . friends. Once I had the amulet away, I knew it was literally only a matter of time.”