Shvets knew why the president had posted snipers around his compound.

“Do you believe that one of them had something to do with the attack on Ivanov?” he asked.

“I said no such thing.” But the president’s sour expression conveyed a different message. “Igor Ivanovich is a friend. He is also a patriot, which is more than I can say for the others. You will bring the state’s fullest resources to tracking down and punishing his attackers.”

The president hugged Shvets and kissed his cheeks three times, as was their custom. “And Sergei,” he said, holding the spy at arm’s length. “If, by God, they are Russian, I shall carry out the sentence myself.”

In London, Interior Minister Igor Ivanov lay sleeping in his bed in the intensive care unit of St. Catharine’s Hospital. One IV delivered a glucose drip to his arm. Another administered hourly doses of pentobarbital to keep him in an induced coma. A cuff monitored his blood pressure. Clamps on his fingers measured his blood oxygen. His face-or what was visible of it beneath his bandages-was colored a violent, multihued purple. Gashes on his forehead and cheek had required a total of ninety-nine stitches. He was not a handsome man to begin with. He would be less so upon his discharge, should he survive.

“Do you know who he is?” asked the nurse in charge, a soft-spoken brunette named Anna.

Dr. Andrew Howe, chief of neurology, finished entering the patient’s vital signs on his chart. “Ivanov? Some sort of diplomat, isn’t he?”

“He is a monster.”

“Say again?” asked Howe, taken aback by the vitriol in the woman’s voice.

“At home we call him the Black Devil.”

Howe put down the chart and took a closer look at the nurse’s name tag. Anna Bakareva.

“Where’s home?”

“ Grozny, Chechnya,” she said. “I left many years ago, when I was eleven. But I remember Ivanov. He led the troops who sacked the city.”

Howe was a former military man himself, a surgeon attached to the Royal Scots Guards, and he remembered hearing about the atrocities inflicted by the Russian army during their attack on the Chechen capital in the mid-1990s. It was a grim business.

The nurse had large black eyes that never left Ivanov. “His soldiers came to my neighborhood looking for one of the resistance leaders. When they could not find him, they rounded up all the men from my building and the buildings up and down the street and took them to the soccer stadium. They took old men, young men. It didn’t matter. Seven hundred in all. They took my brother, too. He was ten years old.” She stopped and pointed at Ivanov. “He personally shot every one of them.”

“I’m sorry,” said Howe.

“Will he live?” the nurse inquired in a tone inappropriate for a care-giver.

“Too soon to tell. Not much damage apart from the cuts and bruises. No broken bones. No internal bleeding. It’s the brain I’m worried about. He got knocked around pretty well inside his car.”

Howe knew a few things about cerebral trauma. A few years back, he’d done a tour in Basra, in southern Iraq. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were the most frequent cause of injury. During his time he’d seen over two hundred cases similar to Ivanov. So soon after the initial trauma, it was impossible to make an accurate prognosis. Some patients regained full control of all their faculties. Others persisted in a vegetative state for weeks or months. Others never woke again at all. Most, though, fell in between, suffering some form of lasting impairment, anything from a faulty short-term memory, to loss of their sense of taste and smell, to more serious neurological disorders.

“His MRI came back negative,” said Howe. “When the swelling goes down, we’ll know more.”

The nurse from Chechnya nodded. It was apparent that the news displeased her.

Howe left the room and walked directly to the aid station, where he made sure that Nurse Anna Bakareva would have nothing further to do with the care of Igor Ivanov, the Black Devil. He did not believe that she would do anything expressly to harm him. She might, however, forget to administer a painkiller or inadvertently dose him with the wrong medicine. It was not a risk he was prepared to take.

Hunched in the backseat of Colonel Charles Graves’s Rover, Jonathan watched as the country lanes of Hereford gave way to two-lane roads and the rolling hillocks yielded to asphalt plains. Finally they gained the M4 motorway and made a beeline for London. A police escort led the way lights flashing, siren muted. Another followed, practically riding their bumper. It was after six, but the fierce sun showed no signs of calming. Inside the car, the air conditioner blasted everyone with a torrent of humid, lukewarm air.

Technically Jonathan was a free man. Graves had said so, after all. But Jonathan had no illusions about the truth. He was a prisoner, and he would remain one until he brought them Emma’s head. If he dared think otherwise, all it took was a look at the uniformed policemen seated on either side of him or the electronic bracelet clamped around his left ankle.

“It’s a military model,” Graves had pointed out as he’d fixed it to Jonathan’s leg, purposefully notching it too tight. “We developed it for the bad boys in the tribal lands of Pakistan. Its signal can pinpoint you to within a meter of your position, no matter where you stand on God’s green earth. And if you try to take it off, it’ll snap your leg in two.”

At that, Graves had chuckled, but his eyes left Jonathan wondering whether he was joking or not.

The interrogation had begun in the hospital and continued as he’d had his skull X-rayed for a possible fracture or concussion (none), while he’d changed back into his street clothes, and up to the present moment. Graves and Ford rode up front and took turns peppering him with questions. What time had he gone to the cocktail party? When did the fake Blackburn make contact? Had Jonathan ever seen him before? (And here Graves was quick to insist that meant as long as he’d been with Emma.) What route did Jonathan take from the Dorchester to the tube? What was the address of the flat he visited on Edgware Road? Did he see anyone else before Emma arrived? What kind of car did she use to drive him back to the hotel? And, most important, did Jonathan have any clue whom Emma might be working for?

Jonathan spat out the answers dutifully but as the questions began to encroach on more private matters, he grew wary. Where did Emma grow up? Were her parents living? If so, where? And what about her schooling? Did she have friends in London? For these were matters that even he was unsure of.

Until five months earlier, he’d thought she’d been born and raised in Penzance, at the southwestern tip of England, and was a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford. A richly embroidered childhood history fell in between, replete with loyal dogs, skinned elbows, deceased parents, and even a wayward older sister named Bea whom Jonathan had actually met on three occasions. All of which was a complete and utter fabrication. A Gobelin tapestry of falsehoods. A Potemkin life.

Emma hadn’t been born in Penzance but in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her father was not a schoolteacher who had perished in a fiery car crash but a colonel in the United States Air Force who had dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty. Her impeccable English accent came from the eight years her father had been stationed at Lakenheath Air Base in Suffolk. As for college, she’d managed three years at Long Beach State in California, which was about as far away from Oxford as you could get, both literally and figuratively. Her real name wasn’t even Emma, even though she’d decided to keep it because it was how Jonathan thought of her.