Hendricks felt a fluttering at the base of his belly. “I don’t… I don’t know who those people are.”

She came over to him and he breathed deeply of her special scent. His throat constricted so badly he could barely get the words out. “Do you want to sleep with me?” He sounded like such a schoolboy!

But she didn’t laugh. “Yes, but not tonight. Tonight I’d like to talk. Is that all right?”

“Yes. Of course.” He cleared his throat. “But I haven’t talked to a woman since…” He could not evoke Amanda’s name, not here, not now. “In a long time.”

“It’s all right, Christopher. Neither have I.”

He led her to one of the sofas—his favorite. He often fell asleep on it, late at night, with a report open on his chest. His bed still felt cold without Amanda lying beside him. He liked that Maggie called him Christopher, no one did these days, not even the president. He despised the term Mr. Secretary. It seemed to him something to hide behind.

As they had settled on the cushions, he reached for a lamp on the end table closest to him, but she stopped him.

“Please. I prefer it just the way it is.”

The glare from the guards’ flashlights had become more intermittent as they returned to their constant patrol. Pale bars of streetlight striped the rug at their feet, illuminated the bottoms of their legs. He saw that she had not put her shoes back on. She had beautiful feet. What was the rest of her like, he wondered.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said. “What were your parents like?” He paused. “Was that too personal?”

“No, no.” When she shook her head, her hair floated around her face like a liquid frame. “But there’s not much to tell, really. My mother was Swedish, my father American, but they divorced when I was little and my mother took me to Iceland for five years or so, before returning to Sweden.” This was true, enabling her to better sell the lie of her Maggie Penrod legend. “I came to the States when I was twenty-one, mainly to see my father, whom I hadn’t seen since the divorce.” She paused for a moment, staring into space. More truth was emerging than she had intended. What did that say about her? “I don’t know who or what I expected to find here, but my father wasn’t happy to see me. Maybe it was the illness—he was dying of emphysema—but really, it seemed to me that his imminent death would make him all the more grateful for my presence.”

Hendricks waited a moment before speaking. “He wasn’t, though.”

“Something of an understatement.”

Her smile was grim. It did something to her face he didn’t like. He wanted to put his arm around her. But he made no move.

“He had forgotten I existed. In fact, he denied who I was, said I was an impostor out to get his money after he died. He said he’d never had a daughter. In the end, his nurse showed me the door. She was big and burly—I guess she had to be in order to carry him around. But she was so intimidating that I left without saying another word.”

“Did you try to go back?”

“I was so hurt I couldn’t make up my mind. By the time I decided to try again, he was already dead.” She hated her father, hated everything about him, including his American crudeness at fucking another woman while he was still with Skara’s mother, his arrogance at leaving her alone in Sweden with a small child he cared nothing about, his narcissism that insisted he had never given life to her. Leaving a wife was one thing, and might under any number of circumstances be excused, but to deny your child’s existence was unforgivable.

Much to her dismay, she discovered tears rolling down her cheeks. Leaning over, elbows on thighs, she put her face into her hands. Her head was about to explode. She felt crushed underfoot, as if her heart was breaking all over again. But, so strangely that it made her dizzy, a part of her had separated itself, as if she were watching her own grief the way she might watch the rushes of a film, raw and overfilled with emotion.

Now Hendricks did touch her. He put a hand lightly on her shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said, not unkindly. “I can’t—I won’t be sorry for myself.” Picking her head up, she turned to him. Her tear-streaked face seemed suddenly very young and vulnerable. “I don’t often remember the past—and I never tell anyone about it.”

Naturally, Hendricks was flattered. Recognizing that, she felt the divide within herself widen. In deep-cover work, there existed the possibility of wanting to be your legend, of feeling as if you never wanted to leave the circumstances in which you found yourself. This, Skara sensed, was what might be happening to her now. She was being drawn toward her Maggie identity and away from Skara. She was comfortable in this house, comfortable with Christopher Hendricks. He was not at all how she pictured him—the cynical, double-dealing, greedy American politician. The human face on the target was, she knew, the most dangerous aspect of cover work.

Hendricks, sitting next to her, was of course unaware of her thoughts. And yet, the connection between them he had sensed when they first met had strengthened and deepened during the course of the evening to such an extent that he felt the conflict within her, though he was unable to divine its nature.

“Maggie,” he said now, “is there anything I can do?”

“Take me home, Christopher.”

And she meant it from the bottom of her cynical, double-dealing, greedy heart.

Karpov took the U-bahn to the Milbertshofen stop and walked several blocks to Knorrstrasse. The watchmaker Hermann Bolger’s shop was on the second floor of a narrow old-fashioned building incongruously sandwiched between an ultramodern branch of Commerzbank and the garish facade of a fast-food chain sandwich shop.

Outside, an ancient sign depicting clockwork innards creaked in the fitful filthy wind. The stairs were steep and very narrow, the gray marble hollowed by decades of foot treads. The stairway smelled faintly of oil and hot metal. A radio was playing somewhere above him, a sad Germanic song that made him clench his teeth. Boris passed a small window, through whose grimy panes he could just make out a cramped back alley lined with galvanized garbage cans.

Bolger’s shop door was open and Karpov stepped in. It was a small space. The sad German song sung by a sad and smoky female voice swirled around the shop, emanating from the innards of the place. Three walls were filled with clocks on shelves. Boris peered at them; they all seemed to be genuine antiques. In front of him was a low counter with a glass top and sides. Inside were watches in stainless steel and gold—all, he saw, as he bent to take a closer look, custom-made, presumably by Herr Bolger himself.

Speaking of which, the proprietor was nowhere in sight. Boris rapped his knuckles sharply on the glass counter, then called out, his gaze fixed on the open doorway to the back room where, presumably, the watchmaker had his workshop. The song ended and another began, tearful nostalgia for the Weimar Republic.

Growing impatient, Boris went around the end of the counter and into the back room. Here the smells of oil and hot metal were more concentrated, as if Herr Bolger were cooking up an odd, industrial stew. Light came from a rear window overlooking, Boris assumed, the same back alley he’d glimpsed on the staircase. The music was unbearably loud. He stepped over to the radio and turned it off.

Silence flooded the workshop, and with it a smell that mingled with the others. It was a familiar and galvanizing scent to Karpov.

“Herr Bolger!” he called. “Herr Bolger, where are you?”

Making his way through the overstuffed space, he yanked open the ridiculously narrow door to the WC and said, “Dammit to hell!”

Herr Bolger, on his knees, presented his backside to Karpov. His arms hung down loosely, the backs of his hands against the tiny gray tiles. His head was in the toilet, submerged in water.