The Metropolitan Museum of Art is not a museum, but rather a monument. It is a temple raised to peoples gone and stories lost, a haven of ancient beauties picked out by long-dead fingertips, an offering to the vanished craftsman and the mighty emperor. It is full of beautiful things that I want and cannot have for myself.

All of which said, the entrance fee, as I line up in the queue behind Coyle, would deflate anyone’s good mood.

Coyle climbs the great stone stairs that lead up through great stone halls. At one end of the museum is an Egyptian temple, and between there and us are breastplates of gold, silver scimitars, statues of ancient emperors serene in death, and the axe that severed the necks of greedy princelings. Here are the chests of lacquer and pearl in which the opium smugglers carried their goods into China, pipes of the dreamers who withered while inhaling the scent. There the muskets that were fired at the rebellion of Cairo, the Koran that was rescued from the ashes of the mosque, blood still visible on the hand-inscribed pages. Here the ballgown of a Russian aristocrat who danced her way to the revolution; there fine blue porcelain from which Victorian wives once drank their Indian tea. All these things were once beautiful, and time has made them sacred.

Coyle wants to hurry through.

I say, stop, wait, I want to look at this.

We look.

A gallery of faces, portraits of kings and queens, presidents and their wives, revolutionaries and martyrs to their cause. They fascinate me, watching me as I watch them. Coyle says, we’ll be late.

It’ll wait a few more minutes, I reply. It’ll wait.

“Kepler?”

I hum an answer, distracted, my eyes on the face of a woman who seems surprised that the painter has caught her there, face half-turned away from the canvas, eyes looking back over her shoulder as if a stranger had just that moment called her name when she had thought herself alone.

“Kepler.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. For Josephine.”

The words are enough to make me look away. Coyle seems tiny beneath these faces, a little hunched-up thing of skin and flesh. Inhuman almost beneath the living canvas, his gaze turned down, words shrivelled in. “I’m sorry.”

He’s sorry for being wrong.

And again: I’m sorry.

Sorry for murder, which he called something else.

And one more time: I’m sorry.

Sorry for…

a list probably longer than the time we have available.

Then:

“If something goes wrong, if it’s a trap. Be me.”

“What?” My voice is a mumble. For a moment I cannot remember what shoes I wear, what gender I am; my body is some other place.

“If Pam has… If we’re betrayed, if this isn’t what it should be. The woman you are now, I think… she is beautiful. Now that I look. Now that I can see… her. As well as you. Both of you. I have done some things, and they were not… Anyway…”

He lets out a breath, draws in another. Where is that man who in a no-place in eastern Europe could calm his heart with a single thought, who looked up proud and knew himself to be right? I look for Nathan Coyle in his face and cannot see him. Someone else, the face of that man, vandalised, looks back.

“Anyway,” he says again, drawing himself up a little straighter. “If you have to choose–if there comes a moment where you have to decide–then I want you to be me. I think… it’s better that way.”

“All right,” I reply, and find that it is. “All right then.”

Then we reach a door, and a red rope has been drawn across it, barring us access, and a sign proclaims, CLOSED FOR SPECIAL OCCASION, and a single security guard, radio clipped to her belt, wears the look of one who long ago ceased to be impressed by anything.

“Kepler…” Coyle wants to say something more, hesitates. “You never told me your name.”

“No. You never told me yours. Does it matter?”

A hesitation, a half-shake of the head, and then, unexpected, beautiful, the smallest smile. “Good luck.”

Then the woman called Pam appears from the circle-shaped doorway behind the guard and simply says, “They’re with me.”

The guard leaves.

We follow Pam inside.

Chapter 86

It was a Chinese tea garden.

Through a round door and then a square, a walkway covered with ceramic tiles ran around the edge of a courtyard, in which bamboo swayed, water dribbled into a pool of orange and white mottled carp, and twisted volcanic rocks like the trapped scream of a frozen monster writhed around the wall.

In the centre of it all a small wooden table had been laid, and on the table were a blue porcelain teapot, three porcelain cups and a silver stand of tiny cakes. A man sat, his back to the door, a grey scarf wound around his neck, black jacket and silver hair. He did not look up, did not cease his slow sipping as we approached, but rather Pam, her face still obscured by the grey veil she had worn when last we met, a gun tucked with no discretion at all in the pocket of her beige overcoat, stood between us and him, and even with her mouth and nose covered her eyes were grim.

“Stop,” she barked at Coyle. “Tell me something I want to know.”

“Elijah. My call sign is Elijah.”

Her gaze turned to me. “Is this her?”

“This is Kepler,” Coyle replied before I could speak.

She didn’t answer, but with the little finger of one hand gestured me away from the table, towards the whitewashed wall. “You come within three metres of me, or anyone in this room, and I’ll put you down,” she breathed. “So I shall.”

I raised my hands, let her guide me towards the nearest wall.

“Stop. Face the wall.”

Hands still raised, I faced the whiteness of the wall.

Feet behind me, keeping their distance, keeping safe.

Coyle: She’s not a threat.

Pam: That’s a dumb thing to say.

“She came here knowing the risks.”

“Then she’s dumb as well as ugly.” Pam’s voice, high and out of tune.

Then a third voice, older than the rest, tired–the voice of the silver-haired man with the grey scarf–said, “You didn’t ask me here to enjoy a lovers’ spat, did you?”

There was

familiarity

in that voice.

Staring at a whitewashed wall, a gun at my back, fat carp swimming by my side, several thousand dollars’ worth of jewels and clothes on my gently dying body.

I am Kepler, and I know who the sponsor is.

Then the voice spoke again. “Mr Coyle, may I offer you some tea?” The pouring of hot water into a white bone cup. “I understand you wanted to see me urgently. Normally I wouldn’t be amenable to these encounters–particularly with one who appears to be as compromised as yourself–but Pamela raised some interesting points that I would like to discuss. Please. Sit.”

A creaking of a chair, the tinkle of plate and cup.

“I am the sponsor,” the voice went on after a suitable pause for the sipping of tea. “You should understand that I have very little day-to-day interest in the running of your organisation. Its activities are entirely of its own deciding. I merely… afford it some resources. As, indeed, I do for this museum. My interests are eclectic.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“For what?”

“For… the tea.”

“You are most welcome.”

“And for seeing me.”

“There you are perhaps less welcome, especially considering the company you keep.”

“Kepler has been… helpful.”

“Mr Coyle, let me say right now that any statements you may make in support or sympathy towards the entity you have brought into this place will only serve to compromise you in my eyes. I would urge you to focus only on the single statement that aroused my and Pamela’s interest in this affair.”