A thought, in the night. It hits so hard, so fast that I bolt upright, wide awake.

The Turkish authorities have no reason to track my British, Canadian or German passports, but that was because they didn’t know what to look for.

Whereas Coyle’s colleagues, whoever they might be, knew all of Coyle’s names.

A racing mind at 4 a.m. The street light is a yellow rectangle on my ceiling, the shape of the window. The rest of the room is deepest blue, the not-dark of the city.

I had been careful–so careful. Careful to avoid security, careful to slip over the borders quiet and fast, lest someone check my passports too particularly. Johannes had told me my Turkish passport was blown, and so it was destroyed. But buoyed up by that overconfidence I had let the hotel receptionist at the desk scan my German documents.

Was that enough?

I had trusted in border posts to be sluggish in their checks, for hotels to keep records rather than immediately search databases or contact the police. Were I merely evading a national agency, my precautions would be enough.

But I wasn’t just hiding from a police force. Whoever had given me the name of Kepler cared nothing for the sanctity of borders, the discretion of a hotel. And even if I were safe for tonight, having paid in cash, if someone looked hard enough

and for certain they would

as matters stood, the body of Nathan Coyle could be tracked.

A face in the mirror at 4.30 a.m., grey by fluorescent bathroom light. I’ve worn better faces, I’ve worn worse. I could get comfortable with these features, given time, but no amount of scrutiny can offer me the answers I need. The eyes are heavy, the mouth is slack, the scars tell me no more and no less than that the original occupant of this flesh wasn’t always great at making friends. Are the frown lines his or mine?

I gather up my belongings, put the handcuffs in my outer jacket pocket, key in my inner, and head out into the city, no rest for the wicked.

Chapter 31

She calls herself Janus.

On the shores of the Red Sea she wore the body of a Nuba princeling, and when I tried to move in on this most desirable of properties, we both came away with a stinking hangover.

Over a hundred and fifty years later she came to me in the body of a seventeen-year-old girl, and said, “I’m looking to relocate.”

We met in a bar on East 26th Street. Her body had been out in the sun, which was impressive, as in Chicago in the rain-soaked autumn of 1961 the only flushing I saw was from vodka and windburn.

The place had been a speakeasy once upon a time. The man with the greying chin and fading hair who stood behind the bar polishing a glass had once stood behind the very same long wooden counter cleaning coffee mugs with an old towel, ready for the cops to bust in and the clients to bust out. He still ran a quiet joint, one of the few left as the 1960s came roaring across the world, and still kept the good stuff in a locked cabinet, hidden away beneath the bar.

Janus wore blue, I wore Patterson Wayne, a businessman from Georgia I’d acquired the day after he liquidated his assets into a suitcase of cash, and the day before his company flopped, taking with it forty-seven employees and sixty-three private pensions. He was healthy, and of that age which the young respect and the old envy.

She said, “I’m absolutely divine, make no mistake. Have you felt my skin? It’s brushed silk, and my complexion! Do you know I don’t wear any make-up? I don’t need to! It’s just sensational.”

Her skin was indeed very smooth, and though she had to be the only woman in downtown Chicago who wasn’t adorning her features with the garish colours of the decade, yet the absence of paint only served to draw the eye, novelty in a crowd.

“There’s just one problem,” she murmured, head tilted away from the lone proprietor and his eager ears. “When I picked this skin up, I thought she looked just radiant. It was at the bus stop, and she was heading north anyway, and I thought… why not? It’s obvious no one’s interested in the girl, except for the usual, so a few months, a few years, it could be delightful. Only the problem…” A conspiratorial palm pressed gently into her own belly. “I know,” she whispered, her voice quivering with delight at its conspiratorial outlay, “why I had to leave in the first place, and I reckon it’s only five months more until I pop.”

I pushed my bourbon to one side, rested my elbow on the bar, pulled a slim black notebook from my inside jacket pocket and a stub of pencil. “What precisely are you looking for?”

Janus sucked in her lips judiciously. “Male, unmarried, twenty-five, I think–although I can go with younger so long as he looks like he can hold his own, I won’t be having boys–thirty-two at the maximum, any older just isn’t worth the effort. Unmarried, naturally. I’m not interested in excessive body hair. I don’t mind the regular shave, but the all-over carpeted look is very 1880s. I’d love it if he has a place to live already, no further west than Princeton; if there’s a mortgage that’s fine, but I don’t want to handle the paperwork on an initial purchase.”

I licked the end of my pencil-scrubbed fingertip, turned the page of my notebook. “Any academic qualifications, career prospects?”

“Absolutely. I’m looking at a long-term investment. I want to start a company, I want to have a family, I want… what do you want, Mr Patterjones Wynne?”

The question came so suddenly, at first I wasn’t sure I’d heard it. “Me?”

“You. What do you want?”

I hesitated, pencil balanced on the edge of the page. “Is that relevant?”

“First time we met you wanted… whatever her name was.”

“Ayesha,” I murmured, and was surprised how quickly the name was on my lips. “Ayesha bint Kamal. She was… but I had to go.”

“A woman,” she concluded with a twitch of a shoulder. “A wife. A normal life. What do you want now?”

I considered, then laid my notebook down, looked her in the eye and said, “I want what everyone wants–something better.”

“Better than what?”

“Better than whatever life it is I happen to be living right now. ”

A moment which could have gone any way at all.

Then Janus grinned, slapped me on the shoulder and exclaimed, “You’re gonna be really busy with that. Good luck!”

I sighed and picked up my notebook. “What else were you looking for? Acceptable health issues, inoculations…?”

She shrugged, shoulders swelling, elbows tucked in. “OK,” she said. “You want to talk shop, that’s fine. No fallen arches.” She jammed her finger into my thigh with each vital word. “You may call it petty, but I have no time for them. I don’t mind spectacles–lend a certain dignity–but tinnitus, eczema–any sort of sense or skin disorder–absolutely out, and I don’t want any surprises in the sexual area again, thank you very much.”

“Height?”

“Over five foot six, but I don’t want to be a freak. At six two you’re respectable, at six five people start to wonder.”

I made a note. “I take it we’re looking at years, not months?”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“Any goals I should be made aware of?”

She considered. “Well,” she said at last, “I wanna build a life, marry a girl, find a house and have a baby. If you can get me someone who’s been to Harvard, that’d be just peachy.”

Chapter 32

Fifty years later I walked through the pre-dawn streets of Bratislava, bag over my shoulder, handcuffs in my pocket, and I was angry.