Harper gripped her stick, trembling. The acid of fear within her turned to the acid of anger. She cursed herself. He was still smarter than she was. Still. Smarter and quicker and more cunning by half. She had meant to acquire the Madonna and set a trap for him. Well, he had got there first. And now he had set a trap for her.

No, not for her. He had set a trap for Bernard.

And Bernard was headed straight into it.

6

As it will in England, the rain ceased suddenly. The clouds blew out of London to the northeast, and Bernard trailed his quarry through clear weather.

The scarred man’s black car—a Mercedes, Bernard determined—tooled smoothly over the glistening roads ahead of him. Down the back ways and closes to avoid the traffic, over switchbacks to anticipate the complex system of one-way streets. Slithering like a silverfish through caulk, seeming sometimes to meander. But south ultimately, Bernard noticed, always south. And faster, probably, than by the main roads.

It was a cabbie’s route, he thought, a Knowledge run. The scarred man definitely knew his way through town.

It made it difficult for Bernard to keep out of sight. To lose track of the Mercedes’ red taillights even for a moment on those twists and turns might be to lose track of the car entirely. But to stay on it, to stay after it on the short spurs, round corner after corner, Bernard had to stay close behind. Sometimes the Morris’s front end was no more than a few meters behind the Mercedes’ boot. Sometimes the two cars were alone together on an empty stretch of road. And twice—once in Finsbury and once as they descended together through Clerkenwell—Bernard thought he saw the scarred driver lift his pink eyes to the rearview and stare directly back at him with piercing intensity. Bernard braked and slipped back into the night then. But it didn’t reassure him much. His heart was beginning to rap against his ribs like a fist. He had to tighten his abdomen, practice his nogare breathing by force of will to keep himself steady at the wheel. Had he been spotted? He wasn’t sure.

The Mercedes went on—and the Morris followed—into the dense and suffocating alleyways beneath the Barbican.

Moment by moment now, Bernard had very little idea where he was. Modern offices, warehouses crowded close on either side of him, moldering homes and faceless blocks of stone replaced them and hemmed him in. Boarded pubs, empty bakeries and restaurants, an open construction site, all dark, all deserted, were before him, then past. The Mercedes kept winding round, turning, avoiding the thoroughfares, hiding from the traffic.