Her voice was filled with pleasure and pride as she said, “You want to see it?”

“You bet.”

They rose and she walked toward the bedroom, believing that she heard footsteps in the corridor outside. All the other tenants should have been at work, this time of day.

Could it be the deliveryman?

Well, at least she wasn’t alone.

They got to the bedroom door.

Which was when the black widow struck.

With a jolt Alice now understood what had been bothering her, and it had nothing to do with the deliveryman. No, it was about Arthur. When they’d spoken yesterday he’d asked when the Prescott would be arriving.

She’d told him she was getting a painting but had never mentioned the artist’s name. Slowing now, at the bedroom door. Her hands were sweating. If he’d learned of the painting without her telling him, then maybe he’d found other facts about her life. What if all of the many things they had in common were lies? What if he’d known about her love of the Spanish wine ahead of time? What if he’d been at the tasting just to get close to her? All the restaurants they knew, the travel, the TV shows…

My God, here she was leading a man she’d known for only a few weeks into her bedroom. All her defenses down…

Breathing hard now…Shivering.

“Oh, the painting,” he whispered, looking past her. “It’s beautiful.”

And, hearing his calm, pleasant voice, Alice laughed to herself. Are you crazy? She must have mentioned Prescott’s name to Arthur. She tucked the uneasiness away. Calm down. You’ve been living alone too long. Remember his smiles, his joking. He thinks the way you think.

Relax.

A faint laugh. Alice stared at the two-by-two-foot canvas, the muted colors, a half dozen people at a dinner table looking out, some amused, some pensive, some troubled.

“Incredible,” he said.

“The composition is wonderful but it’s their expressions that he captures so perfectly. Don’t you think?” Alice turned to him.

Her smile vanished. “What’s that, Arthur? What are you doing?” He’d put on beige cloth gloves and was reaching into his pocket. And then she looked into his eyes, which had hardened into dark pinpricks beneath furrowed brows, in a face she hardly recognized at all.

The trail had led from Scottsdale to San Antonio to a rest area in Delaware off Interstate 95, filled with truckers and restless families, then finally to the improbable destination of London.

And the prey who’d taken this route? A professional killer Lincoln Rhyme had been pursuing for some time, a man he’d been able to stop from committing a terrible crime, but who’d managed to escape from the police with only minutes to spare, “waltzing,” as Rhyme had put it bitterly, “out of the city like a goddamn tourist who had to be back at work Monday morning.”

The trail had dried up like dust and the police and FBI could learn nothing about where he was hiding or what he might be planning next. But a few weeks earlier Rhyme had heard from contacts in Arizona that this very man was the likely suspect in the murder of a U.S. Army soldier in Scottsdale. Leads suggested he’d headed east-to Texas, then Delaware.

The name of the perp, which might have been real or a cover, was Richard Logan. It was likely that he came from the western portion of the United States or Canada. Intense searches turned up a number of Richard Logans, but none fit the profile of the killer.

Then in a burst of happenstance (Lincoln Rhyme would never use the word “luck”), he’d learned from Interpol, the European criminal-information clearinghouse, that a professional killer from America had been hired for a job in England. He’d killed someone in Arizona to gain access to some military identification and information, met with associates in Texas and been given a down payment on his fee at some truck stop on the East Coast. He had flown to Heathrow and was now somewhere in the U.K., the exact location unknown.

The subject of Richard Logan’s “well-funded plot which originated at high levels”-Rhyme could only smile when he read the polished Interpol description-was a Protestant minister from Africa, who’d run a refugee camp and stumbled on a massive scam in which AIDS drugs were stolen and sold and the money used to purchase arms. The minister was relocated by security forces to London, having survived three attempts on his life in Nigeria and Liberia and even one in a transit lounge at Malpensa airport in Milan, where the Polizia di Stato, armed with stubby machine guns, scrutinize much and miss very little.

The Reverend Samuel G. Goodlight (a better name for a man of the cloth Rhyme couldn’t imagine) was now in a safe house in London, under the watchful eye of officers from Scotland Yard, the home of the Metropolitan Police Service, and was presently helping British and foreign intelligence connect the dots of the drugs-for-arms plan.

Via encrypted satellite calls and e-mails flying around several continents, Rhyme and an Inspector Longhurst of the Metropolitan Police had set up a trap to catch the perp. Worthy of the precise plots that Logan himself crafted, the plan involved look-alikes and the vital assistance of a larger-than-life former arms broker from South Africa who came with a network of curried informants. Danny Krueger had made hundreds of thousands selling weapons as efficiently and dispassionately as other businessmen sell air conditioners and cough syrup. But a trip to Darfur last year had shaken him badly, seeing the carnage his toys caused. He’d given up the arms trade cold and had resettled in England. Others on the task force included officers from MI5, as well as personnel from the London office of the FBI and an agent from France’s version of the CIA: La Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure.

They hadn’t known even the region of Britain in which Logan was in hiding, planning his hit, but the boisterous Danny Krueger had heard that the killer would be making his move in the next few days. The South African still had many contacts in the international underground and had put out hints about a “secret” location where the meetings between Goodlight and the authorities would take place. The building had an exposed courtyard that was a perfect shooting zone for the killer to assassinate the minister.

It was also an ideal place to spot and take down Logan. Surveillance was in place and armed police, MI5 and FBI agents were on twenty-four-hour alert.

Rhyme was now sitting in his red battery-powered wheelchair on the first floor of his Central Park West town house-no longer the quaint Victorian parlor it had once been, but a well-equipped forensic laboratory, larger than many labs in medium-size towns. He found himself doing what he’d done frequently over the past several days: staring at the phone, whose number-two speed-dial button would call a line in England.

“The phone’s working, right?” Rhyme asked.

“Is there any reason for it not to be?” Thom, his caregiver, asked this in a measured tone, which Rhyme heard as a belabored sigh.

“I don’t know. Circuits overload. Phone lines get hit by lightning. All kinds of things can go wrong.”

“Then maybe you should try it. Just to make sure.”

“Command,” Rhyme said, getting the attention of the voice-recognition system hooked to his ECU-the computerized environmental control unit that substituted in many ways for his physical functioning. Lincoln Rhyme was a quadriplegic; he had only limited movement below the place where his neck was broken in a crime-scene accident years before-the fourth cervical vertebra, near the base of the skull. He now ordered, “Dial directory assistance.”