“Two days,” was the answer as she watched him drink. When he finished, she set the cup back on the small table beside the bed. “And they’ve been a royal pain, if you know what I mean, the whole time.”

His brows pulled together. “They?”

She darted a sour glance toward the door of the room. Beyond the narrow strip of glass inset beside it Gregor saw a trio of men, two uniformed gendarmes flirting with an unseen woman at the nurses’ station, standing with their backs to him, and one seated man in a plain black suit with spectacles and a patch over one eye. He was looking away so Gregor saw him only in profile, but he knew exactly who it was.

As if he felt him watching, Agent Doe looked over. Their eyes met through the glass.

“Say what they want?” he muttered, holding Doe’s icy blue gaze.

“Well, mon amie,” said the pretty nurse with a wry little smile, “you made quite an entrance when you checked in. The damage to the front of the hospital was extensive. And your girlfriend scared the merde out of one of our senior doctors. He took a few days’ personal time after your surgery. I’m not sure if he’ll ever come back.”

Gregor’s hand flew to his bandaged chest. Surgery. He’d been shot. Eliana—

“What happened to the woman—the woman who brought me in?” He caught the nurse by the wrist. “Where is she? Is she hurt?”

With the slow, nonthreatening movements of one trained to deal with irrational people, the nurse removed her wrist from his grip and then patted his hand. “She walked out of the emergency room on her own two feet, Mr. MacGregor. From what I understand, she was not injured. You’re lucky she got you here so quickly, though. You nearly bled to death on the way over.”

Gregor slumped back against the pillows, clammy with relief. She wasn’t hurt. But where was she now?

“The car you arrived in, on the other hand, was not so lucky.” She chuckled and moved around to the other side of the bed to check the readouts on the heart monitor and the amount of pale liquid left in a plastic bag hanging from a hook on a rolling pole. There was a length of clear tubing from the bag to his arm, a piece of white tape over the vein on the back of his hand where the tubing was attached with a needle. “Antibiotics,” she said, seeing his look. “Just to make sure you don’t get any infection from the wound.”

The door swung open. He and the nurse turned to watch Agent Doe, leaning on a cane, enter the room, followed by the two uniformed officers. The three of them sent him baleful glares.

“Well.” The nurse shot Gregor a meaningful glance. “My name is Lily. I’m on until nine o’clock. If you need anything, just push that red button on the remote beside the bed and I’ll be in momentarily.” She brushed past the men and let herself out, closing the door behind her.

Gregor said into the following silence, “Agent Doe. We meet again.” He glanced at the two unsmiling gendarmes. “Where’s my good friend Édoard? Our little reunion won’t be the same without him.”

Agent Doe’s knuckles were white around the curved handle of the cane. His jaw worked, but his cold, cold eye revealed nothing. “He’s at your building as we speak.”

There was a lump in the mattress the size of a cat that was pinching a nerve in his lower back, but Gregor refused to shift his weight to relieve the discomfort. “Oh?”

Doe grew a smile that would have looked at home on Hannibal Lecter. “Do you have any idea how long the prison term is for operating a bordello?”

So they’d found it. Gregor said flatly, “Five years to life. Or so I’m told.”

“Ah, but you are correct! Your lawyer must be very intelligent. Though not intelligent enough to dissuade you from engaging in such a reprehensible activity. Pity.”

Gregor did have an intelligent lawyer. A genius lawyer, in fact, who charged fifteen hundred dollars an hour and had drilled into his brain never, never to admit anything, even if caught standing over a decapitated body with a bloody machete in one hand and a severed head in the other. Which in Gregor’s case was not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

“Actually, I only know that from television. It’s amazing what you can learn from those—”

“—crime shows,” Doe finished for him. “Yes, you said so before.” His ugly smile grew mocking. “You certainly do watch a lot of television.”

The two officers snickered. Gregor and Doe stared at one another, deadlocked in silent animosity, until Gregor made a motion with his hand.

“What happened to your eye?”

Doe stiffened. The smile leached from his face, and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I am not after you, MacGregor, you should know that up front so you can make your decisions going forward accordingly.” In answer to Gregor’s plain expression of disbelief, he said, “I am after far bigger fish, and if you assist me in that regard, all charges against you will be dropped.”

“I thought you weren’t with the police. How can you have the authority to do that?”

Ominously, he said, “My organization is above the police.”

Gregor’s interest was piqued. “Is it now? And here I thought no one was above the law.”

“Enough money can put you above anything, even God Himself.”

Without explaining further and apparently tired of standing, Doe snapped his fingers and one of the officers brought him a chair from the corner of the room. He settled himself into it—lips pinched, legs stiff—and then waved a hand, dismissing them. They looked at one another for a moment before leaving the way they’d come. Gregor saw them take up position outside his door, noticed they both wore sidearms.

The police were acting as his very own armed guards. Even more interesting.

“Speaking of God, are you a religious man, MacGregor?”

Gregor blinked over at him and watched as Doe withdrew a cigarette from his inner coat pocket, lit it, and drew the tip into flame. His deep, satisfied exhalation sent out a cloud of smoke.

“I assume there’s a point you’re trying to make, Doe. Make it.”

Doe chuckled. “Neither am I, as it happens. But there are things we don’t understand in this world, wouldn’t you agree? Things beyond our comprehension? Things…you may have even seen yourself. In the very flesh.”

Gregor stared at him, giving nothing away.

“Have you seen the video of your quite spectacular arrival at the hospital? No? Hmm. Well, it’s actually not that interesting”—his one good eye, icy blue, peering at him from behind round spectacles, grew positively arctic—“when you compare it to the video we retrieved from the security cameras at your building. Amazing system you have there. State of the art, I’m told.”

“Doe—”

He leaned forward in the chair, suddenly intent, all humor vanished. “Did you know what she was all along? Did you have any idea what you were really dealing with?”

Gregor leaned back into the pillow, silent, and Doe struggled to his feet. From another pocket he removed a cell phone and held it up between two fingers. “A copy of the feed. It’s been edited. I thought you might enjoy the highlights.”

He touched a button and then edged nearer to Gregor, holding the phone out. He took it, gazed down at the small square screen, and found he could not look away.

In all his life, he’d never seen anything move like they did. They’d crawled up the building’s exterior glass walls—literally crawled, like lizards—and entered from the roof. From a dozen different perspectives he saw the assassins running, jumping, bounding, all so quickly their movements were just an on-screen blur. He saw himself and Eliana in the stairwells, the chase in the parking garage, the horrifying impact with the metal door. He saw the Ferrari vanish into the distance out of camera range, but not before he saw, edited from a dozen different angles, five grown men morph into snarling animals and give chase.