“Russian sable.” Harriet flicked his hand away, then checked to see that her strand of black pearls was still around her neck. She paid the butcher for the steak. A few moments later she and Rakkim were walking down the sidewalk while her two bodyguards kept their distance. “Are you finally ready to take me up on my offer?”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Don’t play hard to get.” Harriet’s bright orange curls were gray at the roots, her cheeks crusted with rouge, but her gray eyes were intense. “I’ve got a CEO for an oil-drilling firm who’s involved in a messy patent dispute with one of his competitors. Very messy. He’s got an armored limo and twenty-four-hour bodyguard protection, but he still pisses his pants every time he goes to mosque. A two-year personal security contract with him and you could buy a villa in Hawaii and stock it with dancing girls. Assuming he survives, of course. Just name your price.”

“I don’t have a price.” Rakkim reached into her shopping bag. He passed up the peaches, snagged an apricot instead. Bit. It was incredibly sweet, perfectly ripe. Her bodyguards were closer now, the one in the peacoat pretending to examine a rack of lamb.

Harriet gave a hand signal, and her bodyguards moved back. “So, why are you here?”

Rakkim took another bite. “I’ve got a little problem.”

“You want a little gun to take care of your little problem?” Harriet said, chins bouncing. “I don’t handle such things, of course, but I have sources.”

“Guns are overrated.” Rakkim finished the apricot, tossed the pit into the gutter, scattering the seagulls who picked at the trash. “I need your help finding an assassin.”

“That’s easy enough. I work both sides of the street, you know that.”

Rakkim stepped closer. “A Fedayeen assassin.”

Harriet cackled. It sounded like a crow being torn to pieces. Other early shoppers glanced over, then away. She kept walking, her fur coat swirling around her knees.

“There’s not many of them on the open market, I understand that,” said Rakkim.

“There’s none on the open market. Twenty years in the business, and I’ve never met a real one. Oh, there’s been plenty tried to pass themselves off as the real thing, but they all turn out to be fakes.” She patted his arm, suddenly squeezed him with her thick fingers. “The real ones don’t draw attention to themselves, do they?”

Rakkim didn’t respond.

“I’ve got plenty of ex-military in my little black book, plenty of ex-police too, and even a couple former presidential bodyguards, but Fedayeen…you’re hard to come by. Like I said, you could write your own ticket just based on that.” Harriet’s eyes narrowed. “You’re more than Fedayeen though. I know that much.”

“I was no assassin.”

“Whatever you are, you’re grade-A top quality, I saw that the first time I met you. Smart and quiet and you have that three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision without being obvious, and it all just clicks, doesn’t it?” Harriet licked her crenellated, orange-painted lips. “I took one look at you and thought, this one could dodge his way through a rainstorm and not get wet.”

“This assassin I’m looking for, he may not have offered his services after he left the Fedayeen. Even if you haven’t met him directly, I’m hoping you might have run into his work. Maybe you had a high-profile client, one very well covered who turned up dead one morning and your people never saw it coming. Sound familiar?”

Harriet stopped beside a fishmonger’s stall, peered at the rows of silvery salmon and red-speckled trout lined up for inspection.

“Harriet? Has that scenario with a high-profile client happened to you before?”

“Occasional lapses in security are part of the business. When it happens, I pay the failure penalty to the family or whoever and move on.”

“This wouldn’t be a lapse in security. No one would have made a mistake. The man I’m looking for has flair. Everything would be fine one minute…your people might have even been in voice contact with the client’s security when suddenly things would go silent. When reinforcements showed up, everyone would be dead. Security, the client, everyone. They might be interestingly dead, or maybe you still haven’t figured out how they got surprised. Do you remember anything like that? Or something like that happened to your competitors?”

Harriet peered at him. “If you weren’t an assassin, what was your Fedayeen specialty? I know you weren’t standard-issue.”

“I was a laundry clerk. I never met a stain I couldn’t get out.”

Harriet smiled, moved along to a display of butchered meat, bright, shiny slabs of beef and sheep and goat. “Yes, that’s one way to look at it.” She checked out an arrangement of goat heads, tapping her chins with a forefinger. “Lovely, aren’t they?”

Rakkim glanced at the heads, all eyes and snout. Pink rivulets ran through the bed of ice they were nestled in. “I don’t like food that looks back at me.”

“Well, aren’t you the delicate flower.”

Rakkim saw the brute in the peacoat reflected in the stainless-steel basket of the butcher’s scale, the man’s image distorted as he shifted from one foot to the other. The one with the cane limped toward them from the other side of the street. “I think your boys are getting restless.”

“You spotted them.” Harriet shook her head. “I’m still evaluating these two. They may not be much good for surveillance, but they both have high combat ratings. Tipps, the tall one with the cane, was a street-fighting instructor with the Congressional Police. Grozzet, in the peacoat, is ex-Special Forces. Led a Black Robes kill squad for five or six years. A real Jew hunter from what I hear, passionate as a pig going after truffles. I guess I pay better or maybe he didn’t like the idea of working for the new mullah, Ibn Azziz.”

“Maybe Grozzet just ran out of Jews.”

“They say Oxley had a heart attack. That’s the official version, anyway.” Harriet made another hand sign. “What do you hear? Did Redbeard have anything to do with it?”

Rakkim kept his eyes on the scale. “Call off your boy.”

She turned, saw Grozzet closing in. “I don’t think I can. He’s a little twitchy.”

“I’m in a bad mood, Harriet.”

Harriet stepped away from him, settled into the soft pleasures of her sable coat. “Let the games begin.” Her eyes were girlish.

The other one…Tipps, was on the far side of the street. He pulled a rapier from his cane, circling. Grozzet was closer, fist flashing with something sharp, making no attempt to hide his intentions. Definitely twitchy. Probably on one of the heavy-duty amphetamine variants. The kill squads functioned best on lab courage…anything to amp them up and diminish any moral overrides for the dirty work.

“You sure you want to do this, Harriet? They’re not going to be any use to you dead.”

“They’re no use to me now. Not yet.”

The early-morning shoppers scattered, but not too far, taking cover behind the nearby counters. They wanted to watch, and so did the security guards, and the butchers and fishmongers, all of them leaning forward, murmuring to each other. A couple of Black Robes stood on the corner with their prayer beads, expressionless, silently counting out the ninety-nine names of God.

Rakkim greeted Grozzet. “Good morning.”

Grozzet slowed, a big man with a bull neck and a scraggly black beard. His eyes were pinwheeling. “This kike bothering you?” he said to Harriet.

“Do you require verbal confirmation of my distress signal?” snapped Harriet. “I’ll have to mention that to any perspective clients.”

“I was just leaving,” said Rakkim.

“No, you were just dying.” Grozzet crouched, clasping a Special Forces dagger.

“I never liked that fighting stance,” said Rakkim. “That position is fine for slash-and-dash Black Robes ops, but you lose mobility.” He yawned, clocked Tipps at the edge of his peripheral vision. “You’re holding it too tight, but maybe you don’t care.”