How about that? He was exhausted. Red rivulets filled the spaces between the cobblestones. I'm dead. Off to the left, Angela ran after the dwindling form of Frank Dawdle.

Amid the indecipherable noises coming from the pregnant woman, he heard one clear phrase: "I'm in labor!"

He blinked at her, wanting to say, But I'm dying, I can't help you. Then he read the desperation in her sweaty face. She really did want to stay alive. Why?

"I need a doctor!" the woman shouted.

"I-" he began, and looked around. Angela and Dawdle had disappeared; they were just distant footfalls around a far corner.

"Get a fucking doctor!" the woman screamed, close to his ear. From around that far corner he heard the three short cracks of Angela's SIG Sauer.

He took out his telephone. The woman was terrified, so he whispered, "It'll be all right," and dialed 118, the Italian medical emergency number. In stilted, too-quiet Italian from just one painful lung, he explained that a woman on the Rio Terra Barba Fruttariol was having a baby. Help was promised. He hung up. His blood was no longer a network of rivulets on the ground; it formed an elongated pool.

The woman was calmer now, but she still gasped for breath. She looked desperate. When he gripped her hand, she squeezed back with unexpected strength. Over her heaving belly, he looked at the dead girl in pink. In the distance, Angela reappeared as a small form, hunched, walking like a drunk.

"Who the hell are you?" the pregnant woman finally managed.

"What?"

She took a moment to regulate her breaths, gritted her teeth. "You've got a gun."

The Walther was still in his other hand. He released it; it clattered to the ground as a red haze filled his vision.

"What," she said, then exhaled through pursed lips, blowing three times. "What the hell are you?"

He choked on his words, so he paused and squeezed her hand tighter. He tried again. "I'm a Tourist," he said, though as he blacked out on the cobblestones he knew that he no longer was.

The Tiger. It was the kind of moniker that worked well in Southeast Asia, or India, which was why the Company long assumed the assassin was Asian. Only after 2003, when those few photos trickled in and were verified, did everyone realize he was of European descent. Which raised the question: Why "the Tiger"?

Company psychologists, unsurprisingly, disagreed. The one remaining Freudian claimed there was a sexual dysfunction the assassin was trying to hide. Another felt it referenced the Chinese "tiger boys" myth, concerning boys who morphed into tigers when they entered the forest. A New Mexico analyst put forth her own theory that it came from the Native American tiger-symbol, meaning "confidence, spontaneity, and strength." To which the Freudian asked in a terse memo, "When did the tiger become indigenous to North America?"

Milo Weaver didn't care. The Tiger, who was now traveling under the name Samuel Roth (Israeli passport #6173882, b. 6/19/66), had arrived in the United States from Mexico City, landing in Dallas, and Milo had spent the last three nights on his trail, camped in a rental Chevy picked up from Dallas International. Little clues, mere nuances, had kept him moving eastward and south to the fringes of battered New Orleans, then winding north through Mississippi until late last night, near Fayette, when Tom Grainger called from New York. "Just came over the wire, buddy. They've got a Samuel Roth in Blackdale, Tennessee -domestic abuse arrest."

"Domestic abuse? Can't be him."

"Description fits."

"Okay." Milo searched the cola-stained map flopping in the warm evening wind. He found Blackdale, a tiny speck. "Let them know I'm coming. Tell them to put him in solitary. If they've got solitary."

By the time he rolled into Blackdale that Independence Day morning, his travel companions were three days' worth of crumpled McDonald's cups and bags, highway toll receipts, candy wrappers, and two empty Smirnoff bottles-but no cigarette butts; he'd at least kept that promise to his wife. In his overstuffed wallet he'd collected more receipts that charted his path: dinner at a Dallasarea Fuddruckers, Louisiana barbecue, motels in Sulphur, LA, and Brookhaven, MS, and a stack of gas station receipts charged to his Company card.

Milo shouldn't have liked Blackdale. It was outside his comfortable beat of early twenty-first-century metropolises. Lost in the flag-draped kudzu wasteland of Hardeman County, between the Elvisology of Memphis and the Tennessee River's tri-border intersection with Mississippi and Alabama, Blackdale didn't look promising. Worse, it was as he drove into town that he realized there was no way he could make his daughter's July Fourth talent show that afternoon back in Brooklyn.

Yet he did like Blackdale and its sheriff, Manny Wilcox. The sweating, overweight officer of the law showed surprising hospitality to someone from the most-despised profession, and didn't ask a thing about jurisdiction or whose business their prisoner really was. That helped Milo 's mood. The too-sweet lemonade brought in by a mustached deputy named Leslie also helped. The station had a huge supply on tap in orange ten-gallon coolers, prepared by Wilcox's wife, Eileen. It was just what Milo 's hangover had been pleading for.

Manny Wilcox wiped perspiration off his temple. "I will have to get your signature, understand."

"I'd expect nothing less," Milo said. "Maybe you can tell me how you caught him."

Wilcox lifted his glass to stare at the condensation, then sniffed. Milo hadn't showered in two days; the proof was all over the sheriff's face. "Wasn't us. His girl-Kathy Hendrickson. A N'Orleans working girl. Apparently she didn't like his kind of lovemaking. Called 911. Said the man was a killer. Was beating on her."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. Picked him up late last night. I guess that's how you guys got it, from the 911 dispatch. The hooker had a few bruises, a bloody lip. They were fresh. Verified his name with the passport. Israeli. Then we found another passport in his car. Eye-talian."

"Fabio Lanzetti," said Milo.

Wilcox opened his calloused hands. "There you go. We'd just squeezed him into the cell when your people called us."

It was about two inches beyond belief. Six years ago, unbalanced and living under a different name, Milo had first run into the Tiger in Amsterdam. Over the ensuing six years, the man had been spotted and lost in Italy, Germany, the Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, and Israel. Now, he'd been trapped in a last-chance motel near the Mississippi border, turned in by a Louisiana prostitute.

"Nothing more?" he asked the sheriff. "No one else tipped you off? Just the woman?"

The flesh under Wilcox's chin vibrated. "That's it. But this guy, Sam Roth… is that even his real name?"

Milo decided that the sheriff deserved something for his hospitality. "Manny, we're not sure what his name is. Each time he pops up on our radar, it's different. But his girlfriend might know something. Where's she now?"

The sheriff toyed with his damp glass, embarrassed. "Back at the motel. Had no cause to keep hold of her."

"I'll want her, too."

"Leslie can pick her up," Wilcox assured him. "But tell me-your chief said something about this-is that boy really called the Tiger?"

"If it's who we think it is, yes. That's what he's called."

Wilcox grunted his amusement. "Not much of a tiger now. Pussycat, more like. He walks funny, too, kind of weak."

Milo finished his lemonade, and Wilcox offered more. He could see how the police got hooked on Mrs. Wilcox's homebrew. "Don't be fooled, Sheriff. Remember last year, in France?"