It was that blue-grey hour of deepest cold when any heat from yesterday has finally dissolved in the night, nothing to replace it but the hope of sunrise yet to come. In the doorway of a supermarket, shutter down over the windows, slept a beggar man, dead to the world, blue bag pulled up around his head. From the slumbering square of Mileticova a garbage truck roared and grumbled as it scooped up and crushed the tatty remnants of market day, its yellow lights spinning off the grey-white walls. On the Danube a cargo ship of orange paint and rusting sides, riding high in the water, chugged and churned its way towards Vienna. I headed towards the swooping arch of Apollo Bridge and saw beneath it a single street sweeper sitting on a bench, his trolley resting while he had a fag, his eyes gummy and bags full of fallen leaves.

He glanced up as I approached, but saw no threat in me. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the handcuffs, snapped them round my wrists, pinning them in front. At the sound, he looked up again in time for me to put my hands across his shoulder, press my fingers into the soft skin where collarbone met neck and switch.

Nathan Coyle swayed as I rose to my feet, and before he could move I punched him, not particularly hard, but hard enough, in the shoulder. He stumbled and tripped over his own retreating feet, tried to brace his fall, found his hands cuffed and landed badly. I knelt on top of him, my right knee cracking, my body sticky and warm beneath its protective jacket, and before he could speak I laid my arm across his throat, pressed one hand against his cheek and hissed: “Who are you working for?”

I wanted to shout, but the river caught all sound, spun it outwards, bright and clear for all to hear, so I pressed harder against his neck and snarled, “Why did you kill Josephine? Who are you working for?!”

I’d caught one of his arms beneath my knee; now he tried to break free of my weight, rolling to the side, but I drove my fist across his face, pressed the full weight of my body on to his chest and screamed without screaming, roared without the lion’s lungs, “What do you want?!”

“Kepler…” The word barely made it out through my weight on his throat, rattling like sand down a mountain. “Galileo.”

“Who’s Galileo? What’s Galileo?”

“Santa Rosa.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Santa Rosa. Milli Vra. Alexandra.”

“What are these? What does it mean?”

He tried to move again, and at the curl of my lip he desisted before that mistake could go any further. “He kills because he likes it,” he whispered. “He kills because he can.”

“Who? Galileo?”

He didn’t answer, and he didn’t deny. I pressed my elbow against his trachea until his eyes boggled. “I am not a killer,” I hissed. “All I want is to live.”

He tried to speak, tongue waggling, and for a moment I thought about it. This face that had looked back at me from the mirror, now animated with someone else’s fear. This face had killed Josephine Cebula.

His cheeks were flushing swollen red, now heading for purple blue.

I pulled back with a snarl, letting him gasp for air, head bouncing in an effort to inhale. “Who are you working for?” I breathed, pressing my fingers into fists inside their heavy, smelly gloves. “Who’s coming for me?”

He lay and wheezed, and said nothing.

“They’ll kill you too. If they’re at all like you, they’ll come for me and shoot you in the process.”

“I know,” he replied. “I know.”

He knows but he does not care.

I can’t remember the last time I was willing to die.

“Why did you kill Josephine?”

“Orders.”

“Because she was a murderer?”

“Yes.”

“Because she killed people in Germany? Dr Ulk, Magda Müller–them?”

“Yes.”

I grabbed a fistful of shirt, pulled his face up towards mine. “It was a lie,” I hissed. “I did my research; I went over every inch of her life before making an offer. Your people lied. She killed no one, she was innocent! These are the fucking people you’d protect? What do they want?”

I could feel his breath on my face. It smelt of cheap toothpaste; when his mouth was mine, I hadn’t noticed. I let go; he dropped back on to the cobbles, lay breathless beneath me.

“What do you want, Mr Coyle?” I asked, squeezing my shaking hands tight. “Forget the ones who sent you, the ones who lied. What do you want?”

He didn’t reply.

“What would you do if I let you go?” I didn’t look at him as I asked the question.

“I’d put a bullet in your brain before you could touch another soul.”

“That’s what I thought.” Then, “I know about Alice.” An almost infinitesimal thing, a little pulling of muscles around the eyes, the chin, but it was as good a reaction as I was getting from him. “I went to see Gubler. He recognised me–you. Said you were nice, understanding, almost. Said you went to visit with Alice. You know, covert operatives shouldn’t leave their car registration number on the reception desk.”

His breath picked up a little speed. “You won’t find her.”

“Sure I will,” I replied. “And even if I don’t, she’ll find you. Wearing your face is the biggest come-hither I can conceive. Maybe she’ll tell me why Josephine died.”

I eased my weight off his chest, slipped down to the stones at his side. Coyle lay still on his back, hands cuffed in front of him, staring up into the rain. “I… followed orders.”

“I know,” I sighed. “You’re just the foot soldier.”

He opened his mouth to speak.

I grabbed his hand.

I couldn’t imagine he’d have anything interesting to say.

Chapter 33

A boat to Vienna.

The Danube’s flat silver waters are wide enough in places to mistake it for an inland sea. Travellers cross the border from Slovakia to Austria without noticing, passports merely glanced at by the conductor on the boat. Drowned wooden sheds for long-departed fishermen greet you along the waterside, in the waterside, the windows washed away by the flood. It is not fit for luxury yachts, but an industrial river, a practical river of great flatlands washed with silt. Factories feed off it; behind the fields squat little towns with long names where no one asks too closely the secrets of their next-door neighbours. The Austrians value their privacy, and so in silence the villages sit on the edge of the river, waiting for a change that never comes.

I shouldn’t have hit Coyle.

My face feels tender, red. In a few hours I’ll have a whopping bruise.

I have crossed into the Schengen zone, and can temporarily discard my passports as irrelevant. My spoken German is good enough, and if I was ever to disappear, this is the time. A new body, a new life, a new name. One dense crowd, perhaps leaving the cathedral or in a busy market, and I can switch bodies ten, fifteen times–untraceable, no matter how good your resources. Swallow poison and, before the drug can take effect, jump away, leave Coyle to his well-deserved fate. Move on to the next life, bigger, better than before. The next life is always better.

Josephine Cebula, dead in Taksim station.

I will not run.

Not today.

The boat moored just beyond Schwedenbrucke. On the west bank old Vienna, tourist Vienna, the city of spires, palaces, Sachertorte and Mozart concerts, ten a cent. On the east bank the antique rectangular windows of the city dissolved into the white concrete and iron-elevator apartment blocks of post-war Europe. I headed west, into the old city, past prim-buttocked matrons in their tight skirts walking pampered dogs on tight leashes through the immaculate streets. Past stiff-necked gentlemen with their briefcases polished black; hawking migrants selling DVDs from open rucksacks, chased away by the blue-capped police who know that drink and drugs are only a problem when the burgomasters of the city perceive them. I walked beneath the faces of stone cherubs, sad to see their streets defiled by the presence of uncouth strangers; past statues raised in stone to emperors and their steeds, empresses and their noble deeds, and dead generals famed for fighting Turks and civic dissent. I passed an art gallery showing an exhibition entitled Primary Colours: the Post-Modern Revival, whose posters explained that within you could find canvases painted entirely in red, blue, green, and, for those who were feeling radical, yellow, with a single pinpoint of white daubed in the bottom corner to draw the eye mystically in. Some had artistic titles–Aneurism Lover was a canvas of solid purple with a tiny tracery of blue just visible if you squinted. Others, such as two canvases of solid black, shown side by side, were simply Untitled.