A slight intake of breath. “Did we?”

“It would have been as easy for me to walk you through Chinese customs with five kilos of heroin strapped to your belly as it is to have a conversation. If you talk to me, you might have a chance.”

“You steal life, you steal choices–her choices.”

“Not right now. In a few hours her body is her own again and we’ll be gone. A few minutes, a few seconds, everything changes. Or nothing at all. What you do when that moment comes is all that matters.”

“A thief is a thief.”

“And a killer a killer. That is the extension of your argument, is it not?”

He shifted, barely, against the bed. “What do you want?”

“You killed Josephine,” I answered, a mere breath in the chilly gloom. “You know how I feel about these things. Why did you try to kill me, Mr Coyle?”

“You tell me.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to fight than to have a conversation.”

“You’d talk to the smallpox virus?”

“If it had stories to tell me of plagues it had seen, of great men it had visited, of children who lived and mothers who died, of hot hospitals and cold freezers in guarded trucks, I’d buy it a three-course meal and a weekend in Monaco. Don’t compare me with a DNA strand in a protein shell, Mr Coyle; the argument is beneath us both. Your passports, your money, your weapons; you’re clearly organised, part of a wider operation. You keep yourself in excellent shape–I haven’t been following the diet or doing the press-ups, I’m afraid. And now you kill people like me.” I sighed. “For no better reason, I’d guess, than because we exist. Did you think you were the first? Sooner or later someone always tries. Yet here we are, as persistent as death itself. In two separate continents through two different paths, two entirely different yet functionally identical species of vulture evolved, nature filling a void. No matter how many of us you kill, we keep on recurring, nature’s hiccup. Here it is, then,” I murmured. “You killed my host, who I loved. You may find the concept hard to believe, but I loved Josephine Cebula, and you killed her. You killed her because there was a note in her file which said she wasn’t just a host, she was a murderer. This was a lie. Your masters lied to you. That, and only that, is something new.”

“The file didn’t lie,” he replied. “Josephine Cebula had to die.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“I really don’t. The names in the file–the corpses she was meant to have left behind–Tortsen Ulk, Magda Müller, James Richter, Elsbet Horn. I hadn’t heard of them until I read them, and the manner of their death–brutal, sadistic perhaps. Josephine was not that woman. She lacked motive, opportunity and means, and if you’d done your own research you’d know that. She was my skin, nothing more, nothing less.” He wasn’t meeting my eyes. I caught his chin, pulled his head up and round, forcing his gaze to meet mine. “Tell me why.”

“Galileo,” he said. I froze, fingers tight across his jaw. He seemed surprised to have heard himself speak. “For Galileo.”

“What is Galileo?”

“The Santa Rosa,” he replied. “That was Galileo.”

I hesitated, looking for something in his face, something more, and as I did, he struck, his left hand slamming up in a fist, into my face. I cried out and fell to one side, rolling off the edge of the bed. He scrambled up on to his knees, pulling at the handcuffs, ripping with both his hands at the metal chain, even as the bedpost cracked and begin to splinter. I staggered to my feet and he swung one leg into my belly, but I caught his foot, and as he ripped his hand free from the bedpost I flailed against his trouser leg, felt ankle beneath my fingertips

and that was the end of that.

Chapter 23

We have always been hunted.

My first encounter with this truth was in 1838. I was in Rome, and how they found me I will never fully know.

They came in the night, men in thick leather gloves and black masks with long sweet-smelling beaks, plague doctors hunting a most unusual disease. They had tied rope around their sleeves, ankles and waists so that I might not burrow my fingers against their skin. Two of them sat on my chest while a third locked a collar on a three-foot pole around my neck then swung me up by my throat. I wheezed and scrambled and kicked and tried to catch at a hand, a hair, a foot, a finger–any stranger’s skin–but they were careful, so careful, and as they marched me on the end of my collar through the midnight streets, like a naughty dog on his master’s leash, they reminded each other, beware, beware, don’t get too close to the demon-devil, don’t let his fingers so much as brush yours in passing. In the dead dark of the night Roman emperors with broken faces, dead gods with shattered limbs, the weeping eyes of the Holy Mary and the hooded glares of the scuttling thieves as they slipped into the stone alleys between the leaning, stinking homes looked down and showed no comfort.

In a stone cell beneath a stone tower built by a long-dead Roman and renovated by a long-dead Greek, they clamped me down with iron shackles to a wooden chair, so no part of my body could move. Then came the priests and the doctors, the soldiers and the violent men, who beat me with long cudgels, and swung incense in my face and said, begone, evil spirit. In the name of the father, the son, the holy ghost, I banish you, begone.

On the third day of my captivity three masked men entered the room with a woman whose eyes were red from weeping and who tried, at the sight of me, to throw herself at my feet, to kiss my gloved and bound hands, and who was immediately restrained from crossing the line of salt that had been sprinkled around my chair.

And she wept, and cried out, my son, my son, what demon has done this to you?

If they hadn’t broken my ribs, poisoned me with their rem edies and fed me no more than a little water and soggy bread with a very long spoon, I might have said, these men, good mother. These men that you see before you, they have done this to me. Come a little closer until your ear touches my lips, and I will tell you how.

As it was, they had, so I didn’t, but sat limp and broken before her while she wept and wailed and called out for her boy and against all demons, until she was calmed and given a cup of wine with a little something extra to drink, and sat upon a low stool.

Then the leader of my tormentors, a man in a great red cowl and huge crimson gloves that swelled outwards from his wrists, only to be clipped back in and tied to his forearm, knelt down before my mother and said, “Your son is dead, and in heaven. What you see here is a mockery of his flesh, a ghoul in the rotten body of your boy. We could have executed it without telling you, but you are his mother, and to not know the fate of your son is worse than knowing what horrors this creature has performed.”

At this, she wept a little more, and I almost admired the compassion with which my would-be killer bestowed mercy on a mother.

Then he went on: “This demon has fornicated with your son’s flesh. It has lain with both women and men. It has worn your boy’s face as it commits sin upon sin, revelled in its power, delighted in its wickedness. With every act it commits it brings dishonour upon the memory of your boy and it must die. Do you understand this, good mother? Do you forgive us the deed that we must now perform?”

The woman looked up from this angel of death, to me, and I breathed, “Mother…”

At once my killer clamped his hands tight around the woman’s own and hissed, “It is not your son. It is the demon. It will say anything to live.”

And so my mother looked away from me, and with tears running down her face she breathed, “God have mercy,” though upon whom she did not say.