"Are you telling me that this man, Yevgeny Primakov, is running a secret agency within the United Nations? Impossible."

"Why is it impossible?"

"If there was an agency within the UN, we would know about it."

"You mean you would know about it."

"Listen." Milo felt himself reddening. "For the last six years I've been running a desk that deals solely with Europe. If there was a new intelligence agency working the same beat, I'd figure it out pretty quickly. You can't hide that kind of stuff. Inexplicable events start to build up, little black holes that need filling. After a year or two, it becomes simple to put together, and there you have a new organization."

"But don't be so sure," said Morel, smiling. "Back in the seventies, this Primakov was running successful operations for the Soviets in Germany. He helped a network of Baader-Meinhof terrorists. He knows how to keep things quiet."

"Okay," said Milo, still not believing, but for reasons he couldn't share with Diane Morel. The same reasons he'd never shared with the Company, nor even with his wife. "Please. Tell me about Colonel Yi Lien."

"You seem to know everything already, Mr. Weaver. Why don't you tell me?"

So Milo did. "You met with him on weekends at his cottage. But you were working on him, weren't you? You might have slept with him-I suppose that was unavoidable-but he brought his laptop, so you could take what you liked from it. Am I right so far?"

Diane Morel didn't answer. She waited.

"We know all this because MI6 was watching the colonel. They're the ones who helped him when he had his heart attack; they also copied his laptop. That's how we learned he had some of our embassy documents, which he received at the cottage from a man named Herbert Williams, or Jan Klausner. We suspected that Williams received the documents from Angela, which is why we were watching her."

"Is that why Mr. Einner killed her?"

He shook his head. "You don't understand. Einner didn't kill her. He didn't want to kill her. We needed to see who she passed the information on to."

Morel's face had turned a deep shade of red as Milo talked. She appeared livid, but didn't shout. Quietly, she said, "Do you have a cigarette? I left mine in the office."

Milo tapped out two Davidoffs and lit hers for her. She took a long drag, exhaled smoke, then looked at the cigarette. "They're not very good."

"Sorry." Through his own smoke, he said, "Did you talk to Angela's neighbors? She took sleeping pills regularly, so they were probably switched on Friday, during the day. A neighbor could have seen the murderer come into the building."

"She took pills every night?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

"That's not very smart," she said, then glared at the surface of the table, perhaps at the ashtray. "Was Angela depressed?”

“She didn't seem so."

Morel took another drag. "We talked to the neighbors. A few descriptions, but in a town the size of Paris workmen and deliverymen show up all the time."

"Anyone suspicious?"

She shook her head. "They say she didn't get many visitors."

"Did you ever talk to her? In the last year, I mean."

"Sometimes. We were in the same business, after all. We remained friends of a sort."

"She came asking for information?"

"Sometimes I asked as well."

"Did she ever ask about Rolf Vinterberg?"

She blinked. "Once, yes. She wanted to know if we had anything on him."

"Did you?"

"No."

"What about Rahman Garang?"

A look flashed across Morel's face-whatever trust she'd felt was evaporating fast. "That was a mistake. We have them sometimes, just like the CIA."

He understood. "I don't care about that. But Angela was working with him, trying to figure out who killed Mullah Salih Ahmad. Did you help with that?"

Again, she shook her head. "The last time we talked was two weeks ago. A week before…" She shifted in her chair. "She was upset about that little terrorist's death. She wanted to know if we'd killed him."

"What did you tell her?"

"The truth. We didn't know anything about it."

Milo didn't doubt this. Two weeks ago, upon learning of Rahman Garang's murder, Angela's suspicions must have run in all directions, and like any good investigator she'd followed up on anything she'd had the ability to follow up on.

Morel looked into her empty espresso cup. "You were talking about Yi Lien earlier.”

“Yes."

"And his laptop computer.”

“Right."

She scratched the back of her neck. "Mr. Weaver, Lien never brought his laptop to the cottage. He never even took it out of the London embassy. It would have been an unforgivable security risk."

"Perhaps you didn't see it."

"I saw everything he brought with him."

"But that's…" He trailed off. He'd wanted to say "impossible," but it wasn't, not really. All it meant was that someone, somewhere between the ferry where Lien had his heart attack and Grainger's office in New York, was lying.

Morel watched the changing expressions on his face. She leaned forward to get a better look. "This is news to you, isn't it?"

There was no sense lying to her, so he didn't.

"I think you should find out why you're getting such bad information."

"I think you're right," he said, and when she didn't answer, he added with a grin: "I hear the novel's pretty good.”

“What?"

"The novel you're supposed to be writing."

"Oh, that," she said, leaning back again. "Some years ago a computer programmer in the Foreign Ministry committed suicide. Nothing suspicious about it, but for a long time she passed information to a Cuban boyfriend. Very devout Marxist, it turned out-you see, in France, Marx is not yet dead. When we went through her belongings, we came across the novel she'd written. She hadn't shown it to anyone. I imagine she thought it would be discovered and published posthumously." She paused. "Instead, I used it to convince the colonel that I'm not only beautiful, but a literary genius. Sometimes I feel sorry for the girl."

Morel got a long-focused, melancholy look in her eyes, so Milo said, "She loved you, you know."

"What?" The word seemed to terrify her.

"Angela. In the cafe, she told me she'd been dumped by a French aristocrat. That was you."

Morel tugged at the hem of the soiled tablecloth. Then: "Aristocrat?"

"Consider it a compliment." She nodded.

Gently, Milo said, "Where did you and she meet?”

“What do you mean?"

"Angela was a private person. Any relationship she had, she'd want to keep secret. Particularly if her lover was a DGSE agent."

Diane Morel raised her shoulders, looking squarely at him, but didn't answer.

"You wouldn't meet in her place, because people would know. You wouldn't meet in your place for the same reason. It would have to be somewhere else."

"Of course. Security is always a consideration."

"Where did you go? Did she have another apartment?"

Morel smiled. "So you've been to her apartment, and you've searched it. And you're hoping there will be another place where she hid the evidence that will prove your innocence. Is that right?"

"In a nutshell."

"Well, you're out of luck. It was a friend's apartment, in the Nineteenth Arrondissement. You won't find anything there. We went there two, three times. After that, we only used hotels. Understand?"

"The address," he said. "Please."

"Rue David d'Angers, number 37, apartment seven. Near the Danube metro stop." He committed it to memory by repeating it back to her; then she said: "Tell me about the man with the red beard."

He blinked at her, and she smiled. "Let's not play games. Just tell me."

"It's the man Angela was seen with during the surveillance on her. Herbert Williams. The one we thought was her contact to the Chinese."

Morel nodded. "Why?"