“Frankly, no.”

“Then let’s hope no one asks you too many questions. Ma’am?”

The waitress smiled, and just about restrained herself from doing a little bob as she topped up his coffee cup. “And for you, miss?”

“Do you do pancakes?”

“Sure we do!”

“With syrup?”

“Sweetie, all our pancakes come with syrup.”

“Whatever you’d recommend, please.”

“Sure thing!”

Coyle pressed his hands tighter against the coffee cup. “You’re not diabetic, I take it?”

“I can’t find any evidence that I am, and it feels like I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“Do you eat constantly?”

“I eat when I’m hungry. It simply happens that sometimes I’m hungry several bodies in a row. And I will concede that knowing someone else will top up on salad and exercise when I’m done can induce a certain gluttony. You going to tell me anything about your friend?”

“She works for Aquarius.”

“You’ll forgive me if that doesn’t fill me with confidence.”

“I trust her.”

“That’s fine, but does she trust you? You and your bosses did part in a rather spectacular manner.”

“She trusts me. We spoke. She trusts me. We… have been close, sometimes.”

“Did you tell her about me?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to—”

“No,” fast. Then, “No. I want… this to be clean. Honest.” He thought about it a moment longer. “And if something does happen, if she has… If Aquarius do come, then I may… need you.” The words came out, slow and bitter. “What should I say your name is?”

“What? I suppose… Susie. Call me Susie.”

“OK then.”

The pancakes came, a great pile of them, bacon in between, syrup all over. I tucked in gleefully, running my finger round the edge of the plate to mop up the oozing sauce while Coyle tried not to look too sickened.

Then, as is always the way when meeting strangers, a woman who could have been anyone from anywhere sat down on the padded orange couch opposite us, and she wore long sleeves, long trousers, long gloves, a long silk scarf that was wound across her face and neck, long socks that vanished high up her trouser legs and probably tights underneath, and though it might have been a particularly in-depth sports section that weighed so heavily in the newspaper as she laid it down on the tabletop between us, it was more likely to be a .22 calibre revolver, loaded and ready to fire.

Coyle looked up into the thin strip of veil from which grey eyes stared, smiled and said, “Hi, Pam.”

One of her gloved hands rested beneath the paper, the other pressed against the table’s edge. Eyes flickered from Coyle to me, and back again. “Where did we meet?” she asked. Her accent was pure Manhattan, brisk and hard.

“Chicago, 2004,” he replied. “You were wearing a blue dress.”

“San Francisco, 2008. What did we eat on the night of the op?”

“Japanese. You had sushi, I had teriyaki, and in the morning you had the early flight and didn’t want to wake me to say goodbye.”

“Tell me what you said when I left.”

“I said your husband was a lucky man, and I wouldn’t tell a soul.”

“And did you?” she asked, quick and sharp. “Did you tell a soul?”

“No, Pam. I didn’t tell anyone. I am me.”

For a moment her eyes lingered on his face, then slowly turned to me. “Who is this?”

“I’m Susie,” I said. “I’m a friend.”

“I don’t know you.”

“No. You don’t.”

“Pam,” blurted Coyle, “I don’t know what you’ve heard…”

“I heard that you were taken,” she retorted. “An operation went wrong. There’s an alert out on you. They say that you’ve been compromised by Janus.”

“And what do you believe?”

“I believe that you’re you. Don’t think that makes this easy. Phil—”

“I’m Nathan now.”

“OK, Nathan,” she went on in the same breath. “You’ve been compromised twice in as many weeks. There are orders.”

“And are you obeying them now? Are you going to do your job?”

“I… don’t know. I read the files you sent from Berlin.”

“Did you tell anyone?” he asked, eyes rising fast, and this was news to me too.

“No.”

“And?”

“And I can see different ways of looking at it.”

“Marigare shot me; he had orders to shoot me.”

Beneath the veil a flicker of her eyebrows. Surprise, perhaps disbelief. “Why?”

“We were bringing in a suspect, a possible ghost. Marigare decided the witness was compromised. We were supposed to…” he rolled the words slowly around his mouth, like the taste of aniseed that won’t wash away “… eliminate the threat. We took the body down to the river, and it said Galileo.”

“OK. Then?”

“Then Marigare shot me. ‘Just following orders’ and he shot me. In Berlin Kepler showed me the file and they lied to me, to us, Pam. They lied about what went down in Frankfurt, they lied about the hosts, they lied about Galileo, Kepler said—”

“Kepler lies.”

“You’ve seen the Galileo file too. Do you believe it? You’re the only one I trusted with it–what did you see?”

“You killed Marigare.” Her voice was high, cutting through words she didn’t want to hear.

“I… Yes. He shot me. He looked right at me and knew my name and shot me, Pam.”

Again her eyes flickered to me, quiet in my corner, then back to Coyle. “Say I believe you–how did you survive?”

The long breath Coyle exhaled was perhaps more expressive than any words. The gun beneath the newspaper turned my way. I wrapped my hands tight around my coffee mug. “Kepler,” I said. “You call me Kepler.”

An intake of breath. Her head rocked back, her arm jerked, the gun now turned firmly towards me, the muzzle sticking out a little from the newspaper. She didn’t speak, too many words at once for any to be spoken out loud, so Coyle spoke instead, low and urgent: “She… it’s no threat to us. It came here of its own accord.”

“If you know my name,” I added, “you’ll know that I have Aquarius’ computer records at my disposal, stolen from Berlin. I could have brought down Aquarius already, without ‘Phil’, without risking my neck. I’m here for Galileo–nothing more.”

“You’re working with this?” she hissed at Coyle.

“I would have died. She… it…” he spat the word, forcing the recollection of my being on to his lips “… it helped me survive. It hates Galileo and has done me no harm…”

“It tore Berlin to pieces.”

“It saved my life.”

“It’s worn you,” she hissed. “It’s violated you. Christ, do you even know what it’s done to you? Do you know what it’s made you do?”

“I haven’t—” I began, and she shrieked, shut up, shut up, loud enough for heads to turn, for Coyle to flinch, for her to shudder and force her voice down, her head down, a worm-like blue vein rising hot in the thin space between her eyes and her veil.

“Pam,” Coyle’s voice, soothing, “you disobeyed orders meeting me here. You read the Galileo file. I know you have. I know you understand. I know you know about… You understand what it is. What Galileo is. What he means to me. Now, perhaps you go through with your orders, perhaps you shoot me down, shoot this… girl in front of all these people. Or perhaps you have a team outside, ready to pick us up when we leave. I don’t know. But whatever you decide, believe this: Galileo is inside us. Aquarius ran a trial in Frankfurt and he took it, corrupted it, used it. I… killed a woman. No. That’s not even right. I murdered her. I murdered a woman on the steps of Taksim station because of Galileo’s lies. He’s been eating us up from the inside out, playing us. But… I did it. It was me. Kill me, don’t kill me, but whatever you decide, I need you to stop Galileo.”

She said nothing. Coyle reached out slowly across the table, rested his palm on top of her gloved hand and left it there. He left it there, and nothing changed, and she was crying without crying, refusing to let us see.

“Go,” she whispered.

“If you want us to—”