Despite the circumstances, Frend managed a smile.

‘You have the documents?’ said Ilić as they reached him.

‘Yes,’ said Kauffmann.

‘What name have I been given?’

‘Thomas Rusin.’

Ilić repeated the name aloud. ‘I like it,’ he concluded.

‘That’s of no consequence,’ said Kauffmann, ‘not unless you intend to spend a lot of money changing it again.’

‘Show them to me.’

Kauffmann withdrew the envelope for the second time, tipped out the passports, and displayed for Ilić the relevant page on each, but did not hand them over. When she had finished, Ilić stepped back from the bag and invited her to examine its contents. Kauffmann knelt and unzipped it, revealing only a bundle of used copies of Der Standard. She looked up.

‘What is this?’ she said.

And Zivco Ilić shot her in the face.

Chapter LXXX

From the passenger seat of a van parked a block and a half from the hotel, Majid Ali al-Shihri, aka Mr Rafi, had watched his attempt to capture the lawyer Frend fall apart. Next to him sat the scarred man, Mohsin al-Adahi, the worst of his disfigurement hidden by a cap. More police cars passed, followed by an ambulance, although it was traveling without sirens or lights. Whoever it was coming for had either suffered only minor injuries or was already dead.

Mr Rafi tapped al-Adahi on the shoulder.

‘Time to go,’ he said.

Louis had betrayed them. There could be no other reason for what had occurred. The result had left Mr Rafi a walking corpse. He had lost two people in Paris and now more operatives here, in Vienna. In the eyes of his superiors, he would be adjudged desperately unlucky, fatally inefficient, or secretly working against jihad. None of these judgments was conducive to a long life. If he was fortunate, he might be permitted to reveal Louis’s perfidy before he died, and would go to Paradise knowing he had doomed the American.

Beside him, al-Adahi turned to him as though to ask a question. Mr Rafi felt a sudden coldness at his throat, followed by a burning pain. He raised his right hand as a spray of bright arterial blood obscured his view through the windshield. He was only vaguely aware of the driver’s door opening and closing as Mohsin al-Adahi walked away, the blade making a sound that was almost musical as it hit the road.

The darkness came for Mr Rafi. He fought against it as best he could, but in the end, as it always must, the darkness won.

Chapter LXXXI

Frend looked down at Kauffmann’s body. Her eyes were closed and her features contorted, as though she had survived just long enough to register the pain of the bullet’s passage. It had left a small hole in the bridge of her nose, but very little blood.