“I can’t keep you here,” she said, placing a fresh bandage on the wound and then stepping back from the patient. “But I’d like to. At least for a day or two for observation.”

“Two days? Forget it.” Rizzo said.

“It’s your choice if you want to check yourself out. I can’t stop you, but I’d advise against it. If a blood vessel broke suddenly in your brain, you’d be dead before an ambulance could get you here.”

“And if one breaks while I’m here, I’ll be dead before the nurse can get in from the coffee machine,” he said. “I can sign myself out?”

“If you wish to,” she said. “And again, I emphatically advise against it.”

“Thank you. Show me where to sign,” Rizzo said.

He got to his feet but was unsteady. Alex reached forward and extended a hand.

“You really want to check yourself out?” Dr. Morin asked.

“Bloody right, I do,” Rizzo snapped. “The coffee here this morning was unbearable. I think they were trying to poison me.”

Half an hour later, Colonel Pendraza, Alex, Rizzo, and their armed escorts were back on the street in front of the hospital. They climbed into the colonel’s car, Rizzo sitting up front riding shotgun, Colonel Pendraza again in the rear with Alex.

Rizzo continued his diatribe. It was difficult to tell for whom he had the greater anger, the men in the bar who had assaulted him or the hospital staff that had treated him.

Nonetheless, another twenty minutes of weaving through morning traffic in Madrid and they pulled up at the side entrance to a nondescript brick building on the outskirts of the city, about two blocks from the Plaza de Toros de las Ventas, where the great bullfights were held.

The building was set between a dental office and a Chinese restaurant, on a busy narrow street that was cluttered with traffic. With no external marking other than a small sign, this was the office of the medical examiner for the Policia Nacional.

The car doors opened. Pendraza jumped out and walked at a quick pace, a phalanx of bodyguards around him, Alex, and the unsteady Rizzo.

A few minutes later, the three of them stood over two steel slabs where a pair of male bodies in red canvas bags were set forth for their examination.

Alex winced. Pendraza and Rizzo stood stony faced.

The wounds had been stitched shut and the dried blood had been cleansed away. But the gunshots had smashed into the heads, necks, and upper chests, ripping away flesh and pounding the bones of the recipients. Each corpse was missing part of the skull. Each man had been shot through the heart and neck. Alex had seen many corpses in her life. Too many, in fact, and the events of Kiev came rushing back to her as she looked at these. And yet these, in their own way, were particularly horrifying.

Never mind the fact that they might have killed her. The gunman who had covered her back had dispatched these two men with an unholy precision.

One half of one man’s head had been hammered away by bullets and the remaining eye socket was hollow. The other man’s face had been completely smashed in by gunfire so horribly that Alex wondered whether it had been done intentionally to make identification difficult, or pathologically out of some unknown vengeance.

“These were the two men in police uniform?” Pendraza said. “To the extent that you can recognize them.”

Rizzo looked at the corpse that had half a head remaining. His eyes slid back to Alex. He gave her a nod.

“I agree,” she said. “That’s one. Not much question really if you picked up the bodies at the scene of the shooting. Any identification yet?” she asked.

“No,” Colonel Pendraza said. “They weren’t police; you know that. Exactly who they were and why you were targeted, we don’t know. I can only assume it has something to do with the pietà, but you’ve been in this line of work. It could have been left over business from something else.”

“Possibly,” she said.

“We’ll do DNA and fingerprints to the extent possible,” the colonel said. “Dental isn’t possible because the oral cavities have been destroyed. We have some bullet fragments. Those might tell us something. Anything else here?” he asked. “Either of you? Any thoughts at all?”

“Just the machinelike precision of the shooter,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. And I’m not sure I will again.”

“Unless it saves your life again,” Rizzo added. “Good Lord.”

“Unless it saves my life,” she said, “yes. Point well taken.”

“And then there’s the picture that begins to emerge,” Alex said. “Two men posing as police officers, another two in the bar, along with a woman. Whoever we’re dealing with begins to look like part of a fairly extensive organization. And then there’s the actual museum thieves who probably were none of these people.”

“I like the way you think,” Pendraza said. “I agree with you.”

Colonel Pendraza motioned to a lab technician, a young woman in blue scrubs. She rezipped the bags, then summoned more help from the next office. The team at the morgue would return the bodies back to the deep freeze.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 10, EARLY AFTERNOON

Alex moved quietly through the lobby of the Ritz and took the elevator up. The hallway on the fifth floor was quiet. A maid was working with a vacuum cleaner in a room two away from hers. The maid gave Alex a polite nod as Alex passed.

Alex came to her own door, paused out of caution, listened, heard nothing from within, and swiped her room card in the slot. She pushed the door forward. The door was still moving when Alex saw two legs lazily folded, belonging to a man in a suit sitting on her sofa.

“LaDuca!” roared out a booming male voice. “Finally! About time you got here!”

American, with slightly mid-Atlantic Coast inflections. It was a voice that she recognized instantly. She pushed the door the rest of the way open, reaching by instinct for her new weapon at the same time. The legs unfolded and shifted toward her. She stepped forward without closing the door, her pistol aloft and pointed.

The man looked at her. The man’s hands were in plain sight, holding no weapon.

“Oh, honestly, Alex. Don’t be overly dramatic.” Mark McKinnon, the CIA’s chief honcho assigned to western Europe, whom she had most recently worked with in the ragged aftermath of Kiev.

McKinnon gave her a smile. There was a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey on the table in front of him, with a bucket of ice and a bottle of water. There was a glass in his hand. He seemed more relaxed than he should have been, but it was Bushmill’s Eighteen Year Old. The good stuff relaxes a man real fast.

But someone else was in the room too, and that someone was behind the door.

She stepped away but was not quick enough. From the other side of the door came a lithe, agile man of about six feet. He had his hand on her pistol like a velvet hammer, quickly turning her hand upward against the thumb, removing the pistol quickly, and taking it from her. He did all this with such a deft touch that he managed to not hurt her at all, much like a parent removing a dangerous toy from a child’s possession.

Then with a leg, before she could say anything, he pushed the door shut and they stood eye to eye.

“Hello again,” he said. No smile. No emotion.

“Come on in, LaDuca! Have a drink with us!” boomed McKinnon, finally standing. “And relax, would you? It’s about time you formally met Peter Chang. Peter’s come all the way from Peking. I know you’ve seen him before, and I think you’re going to like working with him. Know what? My guess is that you already do!”

Peter Chang smiled very slightly. Then it was gone again.

Up close, he had movie star good looks. An Asian Adonis in a fine suit with a classic Western tie and a light blue shirt. His eyes were dark and sharp, his stature strong but nimble. His hair was perfect. Werewolf of London, she found herself thinking.