The dark woman stumbled back and collided with a chair, which she tripped over, falling and hitting her head hard upon the carpeted floor. The carpet was not thick and the concrete below was heavy. Tesla heard the woman’s teeth snap together and a trickle of blood began to flow at once from her mouth; Grover’s daughter had undoubtedly bitten into her tongue. She still held onto the gun, however, and Tesla could not afford to wait to discover how stunned the assassin might be. In a sweeping gesture, graceful and excruciating, she raised the wooden chair as far as the wound would let her and smashed it down against the assassin’s back. She wanted to stun her, to incapacitate her, but hopefully not to kill her. She wanted the woman alive and able to answer questions, but Tesla would kill her if she had to.

The pain rocked through her and she thought she might faint, but she willed herself alert, willed herself to ignore the agony. She hardly noticed that her towel had fallen off. She lifted the chair again, this time no higher than her waist. It felt impossibly heavy and she felt herself stumble both from her diminished strength and from dizziness. Her vision went black around the edges as she raised the chair, preparing to strike again. That was when the door opened.

Charley Middleton, her face glowing with perspiration, walked into the room carrying bags from a Parisian bakery. She froze, and Tesla could only imagine how shocking things must seem—this strange woman, motionless on the floor, mucusy blood oozing from her mouth, and Tesla herself, naked and bloody, wielding a chair like a club.

Tesla dropped the chair, fell to the floor and burst at once into tears and insane laughter.

By all rights Archer should have been afraid. Any sane man would be afraid. Well, he amended, any sane normal man, but he had never been a normal man, could not understand what it would be like to be a normal man. His brother Harris had been a normal man and Harris was dead. There was much truth to be learned from that simple fact.

He sat around a low table in a small village outside Jhelum in Pakistan, near the border of the Jammu and Kashmir. He sat with three men, all dark-skinned South Asians, and understood his own fair complexion was his greatest obstacle. He had always known it would be and he had calculated the solution. It seemed hardly possible to Archer that these men, with their suspicion of outsiders—their suspicion of everyone, really—could outmaneuver his calculations. Even so, for a moment Archer envied Sikari and the easy passage his appearance had brought him. He, a devout Hindu, had fooled these Muslims—fools, but clever fools. It could not have been easy for him and now Archer’s task was that much harder.