The Vuksans had been advised to keep their heads down, and avoid leaving the suburban safe haven sourced for them through the efforts of the lawyer Frend. The kitchen was well stocked with food and alcohol, and the rear garden, although small, was secluded. There was a TV with a Netflix subscription, and a selection of fiction and nonfiction books – none in Serbian, but that was probably for the best. Had Frend instructed the intermediary to source some titles, it would rather have given the game away. In any case, of the three men destined to be sequestered in the house, only Radovan was a reader, and his English and German were both adequate to enable him to read in translation. Should he have been obliged to conceal himself alone, he would have been quite content with these quarters.

Unfortunately, Spiridon Vuksan had no patience, and disliked being contained for long. He did not value books, could watch television only in short bursts, and slept just four or five hours a night. Had he not been permitted to leave the apartment at least once a day, he would have torn it apart in the process of going crazier and crazier, driving his brother mad along with him.

So, barely fifteen hours after their arrival in Vienna, Spiridon was already out walking the streets, disguised as best he could and accompanied by a similarly camouflaged Zivco Ilić.

And shadowed by the Other.

Nahid Hasanović had been traveling to and from Heitzing, Vienna’s 13th District, for more than fifteen years, ever since deciding that Bosnia-Herzegovina was no longer a country in which he wished to live. He had tried to make a life there, but the memories of the conflict were too painful and the price he had paid was too high: he had lost two brothers, five cousins, three nephews and a niece, who had variously been shot by snipers, bludgeoned to death in ditches or, in the case of his niece, left to bleed out after multiple sexual assaults. This would have been ample cause for any man to leave his homeland – that, or take up arms until a bullet found a way to put him out of his misery – but Nahid had chosen to remain, if only for a while. He stayed, worked, prayed, and waited until the bodies of each of his relatives had been dug up and identified before taking advantage of ties in Austria to move his immediate family – a wife, two sons, and a daughter – to Vienna before someone decided to shoot, bludgeon, or rape them to death, too.