Charley’s miscarriage; his ex-wife Sylvia’s violent death; the mayhem and destruction that trailed him since the meeting in Krakow: Now he was determined to right all that, coming on like St. George to slay the dragon as in the richly colored depiction by Raphael Sanzio he admired, even if Faust had chosen Kali’s Court in some sort of a sick cosmic joke. He smiled to himself. Wasn’t Kali the Hindu goddess of annihilation?

As he peered through the fog, Middleton reminded himself to focus. The forces aligned against him were vile and dark. The equation he followed was simple. He had come to slay evil, which had manifested in numbing complexity.

Nora Tesla’s voice squawked in his earpiece. “Target’s in. Alone.”

That’s strange, he thought, marching over the same cobblestones he’d been tossed to like trash so many years ago. “Kaminski isn’t with him?”

“I said, ‘Alone.’”

So you did. Middleton pushed his shoulders back, fixed the collar of his coat and entered the restaurant. A hostess with a frosted smile stopped him with hard blue eyes. “You have a reservation?”

“I’m meeting someone. A man. Mid-thirties, long dark hair, slicked back, tall. Just arrived . . . ”

“I know him. Yes.” Suddenly flummoxed, she managed to smile and frown at the same time. “He said he was dining alone.”

“Not tonight, my dear.”

Middleton’s Dover Saddlery riding boots reverberated confidently across the walnut floor past Tesla and Lespasse in a nearby booth, along with an FBI agent and another man, ambiguously titled, but one whose job became clearer if you knew his phone number was an exchange near Crystal City, Virginia, the home of the Pentagon.

Outside, in a control van, were some other distinguished visitors: Emmett Kalmbach and Homeland Security’s Richard Chambers.

Such seniority at a surveillance operation was unusual. But Faust was such a wild card, and the recent shootings so troubling, that both the major agencies responsible for tracking foreign threats within the U.S. wanted direct involvement. Middleton knew Kalmbach. The man could be spineless, but Middleton didn’t care; all the easier to get what he wanted from the feebies on Ninth Street. As for Dick Chambers, the regional director wouldn’t have much personal interest in Faust. The politics of the Balkans hadn’t intrigued him. He’d made one trip to the region during the conflicts, apparently deemed it solvable by underlings and headed off for the Middle East—where he saw more of a threat to the U.S., about which he was right, of course.