“Hakim,” Raf said. “Go join Ahmed. Understand?” The big man nodded doubtfully, then looked at Raf and shrugged.

“Is that an order, Boss?”

“Whatever it takes,” said Raf.

Hakim gone, Raf turned his full attention to Kamila. He was pretty sure the pathologist’s face showed open contempt, though that could have been his imagination, given that she wore a green surgical mask over her nose and mouth.

“You know why the General appointed me governor?”

The shake of her head was quick, abrupt.

“You want to know?”

She thought about that. Her face tilted slightly to one side. Dark eyes flicked over his shoulder to the shut door beyond. No, she shook her head again, she didn’t . . .

“Good,” said Raf, “because I haven’t a fucking clue.”

“That makes two of us.” He wasn’t meant to hear her aside, but he did. Just as he heard a raggedness in her heartbeat, the rush of her breath and the crackle of paper as she pushed her hand through a slit in the side of her surgical gown, searching for a cigarette.

Ignoring a dozenNO SMOKING signs, Kamila tapped a Cleopatra straight from its packet to her mouth and zapped the end, tugging smoke down into her lungs. She put the crumpled packet back without offering a cigarette to Raf.

Nicotine-heavy and carcinogen-free, the smoke mixed with formaldehyde and almost swamped the underlying signature of slowly decaying meat. And while a clock on the wall ticked off the seconds, an air purifier scrubbed at the smoke and a humming wall unit kept the tiled room not far above zero.

The morgue was fifteen feet below the sidewalk, soundproof, cut out of solid rock. Back times, before it was used for dead bodies, it had been a prison for live ones. Then the soundproofing had been more useful. Before this it was a charnel house for dry bones. Earlier still, Gnostic heretics had hidden there from the might of Byzantium.

History backed up inside Raf’s head like memory, ghost after ghost, silent and hopeless. Some days he could almost taste it.

“Ever read any Ibsen?” Raf asked.

She hadn’t.

“Small town gets poisoned, everybody wants to keep it quiet. I’ve forgotten the end . . .” Behind her mask, the girl’s face remained impassive.

Raf sighed. “Show me the bodies,” he said.

Kamila nodded. They were back to a relationship she understood. He gave orders, she quietly resented them. “This way,” she said, walking across to a trolley that was on its own. “This is the man you insisted we take . . .” Pulling back a body cloth, she indicated something with the stink of stale embers and the consistency of twisted bog oak.

Clothes had fused in places to flesh, where flesh was left, legs were bent at the knees, the body angled forward, fists raised, as if fighting an invisible enemy . . .

Occasional flakes of barklike flesh dotted onto the trolley’s top but mostly what remained of the man was polished anthracite. The thread of a toe tag had been looped round one ankle, the actual toes having fused together.

“PA,” said Kamila, indicating the twisted limbs. “ Pugilistic attitude, it happens when strong muscles cook in the heat. Muscles tighten, spine expands, head goes back. You find it in everything from house fires to the dead at Pompeii. He got caught in a fireball, then fell beneath the worst of the flames. You got lucky.”

Raf looked at her.

“If the heat’s intense enough, the brain boils and the skull explodes . . . looks like a gunshot. Well, if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Instead,” said Kamila, “the skull’s in one piece and X-rays show not all of the fillings melted. And he did have fillings, rather than replacements. Which makes him a traditionalist.”

Or an idiot.

“And fillings will tell me what?”

“Country of origin, if God wills . . .” She shrugged. “I’ll take a look as soon as the surface work is complete.” Kamila stubbed out the remains of her cigarette and picked up a UV rod, flicking its switch.

“Forget that,” said Raf, quietly taking the rod from her hand. “I need his nationality now. Anything that’s not now is already too late.”

“Okay, you’re the boss,” Kamila said, the tightness around her eyes contradicting the politeness of her words. Picking up a scalpel, she hacked open one blacked cheek, swapped instruments and reached in with a pair of tiny snub-nosed pliers. “Already heat-cracked,” she said to herself. To Raf, she said, “We can do this professionally or we can do it fast.”

Not waiting for his answer, Kamila crushed the tooth and used the pliers to extract a minute shard of amalgam from deep inside. The fragment went into a glass dish, the dish into a little spectrometer and Kamila punched a button. Behind smoked glass, a laser vaporized the amalgam and data began to scroll down a tiny flat screen.

“Austro-Hungarian,” she said, “maybe German. Could be American, just about, though slightly wrong composition for US amalgam.”

“So he’s not Iskandryian?”

“I’m talking about the fillings,” said Kamila.

“I’m not,” said Raf. “What about the girl?”

“That’s all you want on this one?”

“It’s enough.”

It was too. Tourists butchered by tourist. The dead man was a foreigner. If necessary, he could be made into a tourist. That gave him something to give the newsfeeds. And the earlier deaths could also be put down to this man. Raf was still writing headlines in his head when Kamila walked over to another trolley and pulled back the sheet, exposing the face and shoulders of a blonde teenager.

She treated this corpse with more respect. Maybe because the victim was female or this was a victim, not a killer. Perhaps just because the body was more obviously human. A jigsaw of a human, true enough, with some pieces missing, but still more obviously like her, even when dead.

The dead girl looked unnaturally thin beneath the cloth, and then Raf realized why. Both her large and small intestines were already in a surgical chill bucket beneath the trolley. The bucket tagged and numbered. The more Raf looked at the corpse the more it reminded Raf of himself. He could swear there’d been one time he was across the other side of an operating theatre looking at his body as it lay on a table, figures in white coats standing around it.

“She’s American,” said Raf. “Nineteen, a politics major, doing well at university. Originally from Kansas City. Her father works for Hallmark . . .” Raf caught the pathologist’s look and held it. “I was talking to the poor bastard half an hour ago.”

And saying nothing of any consequence, obviously enough, the meeting brief and painful. A jowly middle-aged man, still jet-lagged and pale with shock, accompanied by a vodka-sodden woman whose anger was barely in check. First they learn their kid is missing, then—once they arrive where she’s meant to be—no one in authority will even take their calls. And then twenty-four hours later, just as they’re ready to flip, Iskandryia’s chief muckety-muck turns up at their hotel, accompanied by three armed guards.

In the end, Raf had apologized to the Haugers and left, trailing his guards behind him. And the parting glare from the dead girl’s mother made it obvious she held him personally responsible for every injury inflicted on her child.

Only manners and being in a foreign city made Mrs. Hauger swallow her words. On his way out of the hotel, Raf had met Senator Liz coming in. From the look on her face she also held Raf accountable.

All he’d learnt from his uncomfortable encounter with the Haugers was that their daughter Dawn didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs and wasn’t interested in boys . . .

Pulling the modesty cloth back to her hips, Raf looked down at what was left of their daughter. She’d been beautiful in an ordinary sort of way and she was someone’s child. And those someones were trying to hold their life together in a Hyatt hotel room, in a city so alien it might as well have been on another planet.