In a blur the woman rushed out. She was dressed in a British army soldier’s uniform, but the poor fit and a small red stain on the chest told Middleton how she’d come by the outfit. He didn’t recognize her.

She hesitated in shock, not expecting the other two to be in the room. But before she could lift the .22 again, Middleton drew the Beretta that Chernayev had given him. When he touched the muzzle to her head she debated only a moment and dropped her own weapon.

Tesla then stepped forward, grabbed the woman and, wincing from the wound in her own shoulder, flung the attacker to the floor hard. Then she struck her furiously in the head and face.

“Nora, stop!” Middleton said, pulling her off and securing the shooter with one of the dead guard’s handcuffs. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Oh, yes, I did.”

Middleton frowned.

Tesla said, “You don’t know who she is, do you?”

“No.”

“It’s Jana Grover.”

“In Paris, did you check on my body?” Jana snapped contemptuously at Tesla. “Did you call les gendarmes, did you call Le Deuxieme Bureau. No, of course not. What you saw floating in the Seine was my jacket. And you took that at face value. I’m sorry I escaped and deprived you of another chance to torture me.”

Middleton glanced at Tesla, silent at this. He now understood the earlier reaction to what Ian Barrett-Bone had said. He let it go.

They sat in the same trailer that had been Chernayev’s cell. And his coffin. The body had been removed. And a forensic team was going through the place.

In addition to Connie Carson and Wiki Chang, Ian Barrett-Bone was here. He was lip-biting mad at the Indians for letting the hit woman into the trailer. The officer who’d been bribed by Jana to okay access was in custody, but that was small consolation.

“Why?” the British agent asked.

“She treats all colleagues that way,” Tesla said bitterly, “if there’s any chance they might be witnesses against her. Just like she killed Kavi Balan in the South of France.”

“I’m not so sure,” Middleton said, again considering unanswered questions. “I think something else is going on here.”

“Ah, you’re as sharp as I thought, Colonel. How I wish Balan had been successful that day at the beach at Cap D’Antibes.”

“I don’t understand,” Barrett-Bone said.

“No, you certainly do not,” the beautiful Pakistani said. “You haven’t understood anything—any of you, from the beginning . . . I wasn’t with Chernayev or the Chinese. They were my enemies. I’d been struggling for months to find them and kill them.”

“What on earth do you mean?”