“I got older, Harold. Quickly. You remember? With the company you introduced me to it seemed to make sense. What is this?”

She opened the evidence bag and removed the gleaming bright bracelet, studying it closely. When she was done she examined the two other items that had been alongside it: a slip of paper and a recent Indian passport in the name of Kavi Balan. The photo inside showed an inoffensive-looking Indian man perhaps 30 with a bland, perhaps naïve face. He had, she thought, very prominent and unusual eyes and wondered whether they had noticed. Probably not. Harold Middleton and Leonora Tesla were both intelligent, hard-working officers, trapped, Felicia had observed, inside an organization they seemed unable to leave. But small details often escaped them. They possessed neither the time nor the inclination to look much beyond the obvious.

“Our business, not yours,” Middleton announced.

“He’s dead, I imagine,” she said, and they didn’t reply. “Didn’t you notice his eyes . . . ?”

She was stalling and they knew it. As she spoke, she scanned the sheet of paper. The writing was in Harold Middleton’s hand, easily recognizable for its cultured yet hurried scrawl.

It read: Kashmir. Search for water. Geology. Copper. Bracelet. Scorpion. Devras Sikari.

“It sounds like a puzzle,” she said. “I love riddles. I never knew you did . . . ”

“I hate them.”

“What does Scorpion refer to?”

“It was a reference in an email from Sikari. I think it’s a person, but I don’t know if he’s allied with Sikari or is a threat to him.”

“The bracelet is beautiful.”

It looked like copper, though the color was lighter, more golden than most bangles of its type. In Poland, copper wristbands were popular among the elderly who believed they warded off rheumatism and disease. The jewelry she saw hawked around the cheap street markets in Warsaw looked nothing like this. The metal here was softer, paler, as if it were some kind of subtle alloy, the edges, flecked with green, more finely worked, with a line of writing in a flowing, incomprehensible Indian script, and, most curious of all, an oval feature like a badge, a mark of pride for its wearer perhaps.

“What does this mean?” she asked.

“I wish I knew,” he replied. “We think it’s from Kashmir. An identity bracelet, maybe denoting membership in a gang, a cult, an organization of some kind. Presumably the emblems stand for something. It could be connected with India. Or Pakistan. They’ve been fighting one another over Kashmir for half a century. I need to get it to the lab, get the inscription translated.”

Felicia stared at it and frowned.

“You have any ideas?” he asked.

“What? Some little kid Polish musician? What would I know?” She looked at the copper bracelet again. “You never do crosswords do you?”

“I told you. I hate puzzles.”