‘Paulus,’ said De Jaager softly, as though he might yet summon him back from the place to which his soul had fled, but the voice that answered was not that of his driver, his aide, his nephew. Instead it spoke with a pronounced Eastern European accent, even after all those years away from Serbia.

‘You’ll soon speak with him again,’ it said. ‘In the meantime, rest assured that he’ll be able to hear you screaming.’

Chapter III

In New York, SAC Edgar Ross of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was seated before his immediate superior, Conrad Holt, in the bar of the White Horse Tavern on Bridge Street. They were at an isolated table, not a booth, because that way they could be sure they would not be overheard. Holt was drinking a beer, Ross a coffee. The two men often met in private conclave at the White Horse, because it was unwise to discuss subjects of importance or delicacy in a building full of snoops. Ross never even read a newspaper at 26 Federal Plaza, for fear someone might take note of a headline and decide to pass judgment accordingly.

Ross and Holt were going over the recent death of the federal legat, Armitage, in the Netherlands. Officially, her death was being described as a suicide. In the days before her body was discovered, Armitage had been absent from her desk at the US Embassy in The Hague due to some unspecified illness, and her colleagues had become concerned for her health, psychological as well as physical. Her remains were subsequently discovered in the shower of her apartment, her arms slit from elbow to wrist. These were incontestable facts.

More problematical, in terms of this narrative, were the absence of a blade and the presence in the shower of an Arabic word, written in red on the tiles – or more precisely, hacked into the ceramic, the implement used first having been dipped in Armitage’s vital essence in the manner of a nib being plunged into an inkwell. Clearly, therefore, Armitage had not met her end by her own hand but by that of another: an Islamic terrorist, quite possibly, given the origin of the word on the tiles: or djinni.

Yet no group had come forward to claim credit for the killing, which was unusual. In addition, the CIA had struggled to find any terrorist operating under the nom de guerre of Djinni or Genie, or any reason, beyond her nationality, for Islamists to have targeted Armitage in particular. Another complicating factor was that Ross now believed Armitage had been involved in a criminal conspiracy, thanks to evidence gleaned from a burner phone discovered in her apartment after her death. It appeared that the legat had been dirty in ways her superiors did not yet understand, which was the worst kind of dirt because it was so hard to expunge.