He went to the cops. He took witnesses. No one had seen the actual snatch. But three friends recalled two American women. The cops weren’t very interested. Paris was full of bigger stuff—Muslim unrest, terrorism, heists, dope. But then one of the three friends said that one of the two American women had been pale and moving awkwardly, like she was in pain, and she had a dark stain all over her shirt, like blood.

A possible gunshot wound, in a city where guns were still rare, and in a city where two victims had just turned up shot to death.

The cops weren’t dumb. They knew the chances were that the laptop would be trashed when the battery ran out. On the other hand, the MacBook Air was an attractive thing. Very desirable. So maybe the thieves would try to buy a charger. Which gave them a limited number of destinations in Paris. Easy enough to stake them all out. No shortage of young officers willing to hang around such places. When they were bored with the shiny toys, they could look at the tourist girls.

Archer looked again at the picture of Charley Middleton, dead. He revered it, because he liked dead people, and because it came from Jana. It was like a love letter. It showed the girl down and crumpled, in a bloody shirt. The resolution wasn’t great. But it was good enough to be interesting.

And good enough to be a little unsettling.

There were two things Archer wasn’t quite sure about. The first was the dead girl’s posture. Archer had seen plenty of dead people, some quite recently. There was nothing like the slackness and the emptiness of a corpse. And he wasn’t sure those characteristics were there, in Charley Middleton’s body. And the bloodstained shirt didn’t look . . . organic. It didn’t look like she had been wearing it at the time of death. It looked . . . thrown on, maybe afterward.

Which made no sense.

And there was a scrap of paper that had apparently spilled out of a trash-can. Scribbled green handwriting that seemed to make no sense either. A code, perhaps, or a foreign alphabet. Maybe Cyrillic. Or a combination of foreign letters and numbers. He stared at it for a long moment.

Then he turned his phone upside down.

GREEN LANTERN. EVAC.

He thought of Harris, immediately. For a moment he wished it had not been necessary to eliminate him. Harris had loved comic books. Which was a part of what had made him a useless wastrel. But he would have understood the reference, maybe.

Archer texted Jana: CALL ME NOW.