"Yes, we should."

They both looked at her boots. "Will you take them off?" she asked.

"Sure." He unzipped the right boot and removed it as though that foot had been injured too. He went even slower with the left one. Every little movement caused pain, and at one point he said, "Would you prefer to do it?"

"No, please, go ahead." The zipper stopped almost exactly at the ankle. The swelling made it difficult to ease the boot off. After a few long minutes of delicate wiggling, while the patient suffered with clenched teeth, the boot was off.

She was wearing black stockings. Marco studied them, then announced, ''These have to come off."

"Yes, they do." Her mother returned and fired off something in Italian. "Why don't you wait in the kitchen?" Francesca said to Marco.

The kitchen was small but impeccably put together, very modern with chrome and glass and not a square inch of wasted space. A high— tech coffeepot gurgled on a counter. The walls above a small breakfast nook were covered in bright abstract art. He waited and listened to both of them chatter at once.

They got the stockings off without further injury. When Marco returned to the living room, Signora Altoneili was arranging the ice around the left ankle.

"She says it's not broken," Francesca said to him. "She worked in a hospital for many years."

"Does she live in Bologna?"

"Imola, a few miles away."

He knew exactly where it was, on the map anyway. "I guess I should be going now," he said, not really wanting to go but suddenly feeling like a trespasser.

"I think you need some coffee," Francesca said. Her mother darted away, back into the kitchen.

"I feel like I'm intruding," he said.

"No, please, after all you've done today, it's the least I can do."

Her mother was back, with a glass of water and two pills. Francesca gulped it all down and propped her head up on some pillows. She exchanged short sentences with her mother, then looked at him and said, "She has a chocolate torta in the refrigerator. Would you like some?"

"Yes, thank you."

And her mother was off again, humming now and quite pleased that she had someone to care for and someone to feed. Marco resumed his place on the stool. "Does it hurt?"

"Yes, it does," she said, smiling. "I cannot lie. It hurts."

He could think of no appropriate response, so he ventured back to common ground. "It all happened so fast," he said. They spent a few minutes rehashing the fall. Then they were silent. She closed her eyes and appeared to be napping. Marco crossed his arms over his chest and stared at a huge, very odd painting that covered almost an entire wall.

The building was ancient, but from the inside Francesca and her husband had fought back as determined modernists. The furniture was low, sleek black leather with bright steel frames, very minimalist. The walls were covered with baffling contemporary art.

"We can't tell Luigi about this," she whispered.

"Why not?"

She hesitated, then let it go. "He is paying me two hundred euros a week to tutor you, Marco, and he his complaining about the price. We've argued. He has threatened to find someone else. Frankly, I need the money. I'm getting one or two jobs a week now; it's still the slow season. Things will pick up in a month when the tourists come south, but right now I'm not earning much."

The stoic facade was long gone. He couldn't believe that she was allowing herself to be so vulnerable. The lady was frightened, and he would break his neck to help her.

She continued: "I'm sure he will terminate my services if I skip a few days."

"Well, you're about to skip a few days." He glanced at the ice wrapped around her ankle.

"Can we keep it quiet? I should be able to move around soon, don't you think?"

"We can try to keep it quiet, but Luigi has a way of knowing things. He follows me closely. I'll call in sick tomorrow, then we'll figure out something the next day. Maybe we could study here."

"No. My husband is here."

Marco couldn't help but glance over his shoulder. "Here?"

"He's in the bedroom, very ill."

"What's-"

"Cancer. The last stages. My mother sits with him when I'm working. A hospice nurse comes in each afternoon to medicate him."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I."

"Don't worry about Luigi. I'll tell him I'm thrilled with your teaching style, and that I will refuse to work with anyone else."

"That would be a lie, wouldn't it?"

"Sort of."

Signora Altonelli was back with a tray of torta and espresso. She placed it on a bright red coffee table in the middle of the room and began slicing. Francesca took the coffee but didn't feel like eating. Marco ate as slowly as humanly possible and sipped from his small cup as if it might be his last. When Signora Altonelli insisted on another slice, and a refill, he grudgingly accepted.

Marco stayed about an hour. Riding down in the elevator, he realized that Giovanni Ferro had not made a sound.

Red Chinas principal intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, or MSS, used small, highly trained units to carry out assassinations around the world, in much the same manner as the Russians, Israelis, British, and Americans.

One notable difference, though, was that the Chinese had come to rely upon one unit in particular. Instead of spreading the dirty work around like other countries, the MSS turned first to a young man the CIA and Mossad had been watching with great admiration for several years. His name was Sammy Tin, the product of two Red Chinese diplomats who were rumored to have been selected by the MSS to marry and reproduce. If ever an agent were perfectly cloned, it was Sammy Tin. Born in New York City and raised in the suburbs around D.C., he'd been educated by private tutors who bombarded him with foreign languages from the time he left diapers. He entered the University of Maryland at the age of sixteen, left it with two degrees at the age of twenty-one, then studied engineering in Hamburg, Germany. Somewhere along the way he picked up bomb-making as a hobby. Explosives became his passion, with an emphasis on controlled explosions from odd packages-envelopes, paper cups, Ball-point pens, cigarette packages. He was an expert marksman, but guns were simple and bored him. The Tin Man loved his bombs.

He then studied chemistry under an assumed name in Tokyo, and there he mastered the art and science of killing with poisons. By the time he was twenty-four he had a dozen different names, about that many languages, and crossed borders with a vast array of passports and disguises. He could convince any customs agent anywhere that he was Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese.

To round out his education, he spent a grueling year in training with an elite Chinese army unit. He learned to camp, cook over a fire, cross raging rivers, survive in the ocean, and live in the wilderness for days. When he was twenty-six, the MSS decided the boy had studied enough. It was time to start killing.

As far as Langley could tell, he began notching his astounding body count with the murders of three Red Chinese scientists who'd gotten too cozy with the Russians. He got them over dinner at a restaurant in Moscow. While their bodyguards waited outside, one got his throat slit in the men's room while he finished up at the urinal. It took an hour to find his body, crammed in a rather small garbage can. The second made the mistake of worrying about the first. He went to the men's room, where the Tin Man was waiting, dressed as a janitor. They found him with his head stuffed down the toilet, which had been clogged and was backing up. The third died seconds later at the table, where he was sitting alone and becoming very worried about his two missing colleagues. A man in a waiter's jacket hurried by, and without slowing thrust a poison dart into the back of his neck.