The old KGB man looked down at Middleton, eyeing the worthless SIG Sauer in his grip. His lips curled into a withering smile as, in syrupy English, thickly accented, he said, “An excellent icon. The Novgorod school, yes?”

“Nothing speaks to good old Anglo-American homesickness like a bowl of oatmeal.”

Charley glanced up from her Wall Street Journal Europe. The man addressing her was the same natty stranger who’d been tailing her yesterday as she’d walked along the Champs Élysées, lunching in the sunlight with the Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. He was handsome in an aging, rough-trade sort of way, tanned, fit, salt-and-pepper hair. He dressed expensively, conspicuously so, like a social climber hoping to escape the inescapable, his class. So British, she thought. Too British.

Why, she wondered, does he want to kill me?

He said, “Might I join you?”

His accent had a flat Mersey drag to it that she recognized from specials on the Beatles. She hadn’t understood then that John Lennon’s accent wasn’t perfectly upper crust—or lardy, as they said. If the Beatles weren’t nobility, who was?

“Please do,” she said, resisting a glance toward Leonora Tesla who sat across the hotel’s elegant dining room. She’d flown over from London to warn her that her life was in danger and to watch over her. Felicia Kaminski had been kidnapped from Middleton’s Bloomsbury apartment in the mistaken belief she was Charley.

The dapper Brit pulled back the opposite chair, sat down. “Ian,” he said charmingly, extending his hand.

“Charlotte.”

“I know.”

A dark-skinned busman appeared—Algerian perhaps, maybe a Turk—bearing a coffee pot. Barrett-Bone declined.

Charley, affecting an ingénue’s innocence: “You know my name?”

“You’re in considerable danger, Ms. Middleton. I’d like to help—”

Leonora materialized behind him, nudging the back of his chair. One hand rested inside her pocket, the other settled gently on his shoulder. The hand in her pocket held a pistol, with which she gently prodded the back of his head.

He broke into a helpless smile. “You Yanks . . . ”

“It would appear,” Charley responded, gesturing for the check, “that there’s considerable danger all around.”

“That wasn’t really necessary, you know.”

They were seated in the back of a taxi, driving aimlessly through the Eighth arrondissement, the cabby’s rai music turned down so they could talk. Prayer beads strung from his rearview mirror rattled with every turn. Ian Barrett-Bone sat between the Volunteers; Leonora Tesla still had her pistol trained on him from her coat pocket. Glancing out the back window, Charlotte Middleton watched for trail cars.

Tesla demanded, “What do you want with Charlotte?”