Steven Savile - Silver

That gelled with what Konstantin had found in Berlin. That similarity in itself made this garret in the poor quarter worth following up.

“His work?” Noah asked. He knew that Simmonds had been interning with the Vatican archivist, but beyond that it was anyone’s guess.

“I’ve got one of my team trying to make inroads over there,”-he nodded across St. Peter’s Square toward the dome of the basilica-“but between you and me, I suspect Dante was writing about that place when he designed his Purgatory.”

“That good?”

“Trust me,” Neri said, reaching for his tobacco tin yet again. “It’s enough to make a guy like me believe in the Devil.” He nodded to the older man reading his newspaper. The man returned the gesture and folded the broadsheet neatly before paying his bill and leaving the table. Smiling wryly, Neri nodded toward the young couple who, likewise, put away their Rough Guide and settled their bill, leaving a generous tip as they vacated the table.

“They were your people?”

“They were.”

“Trusting soul, aren’t you?” Noah said.

“This is Rome, Noah,” Dominico Neri said with an almost friendly smile. “You can’t trust anybody. Faces of angels, morals of devils.”

Konstantin had been on both sides of enough black-bag jobs to know when something was wrong.

He liked that euphemism, black bag. It was just a polite way of saying burglary. The British were peculiar like that, they liked to use words like cut-outs, false flags and honey traps instead of calling a robbery a robbery. It was all terribly 1950s, stiff upper lip and all that.

From the surveillance side the set-up with most of these jobs was simple: you baited the trap, sat back and waited. Something would shake loose. It invariably did. Surveillance was all about patience. You sit, you wait, you see who shows up.

Metzger’s apartment was the baited trap in this case, and he’d just walked right into it.

There was nothing sixth sense-ish about it. No prickling hairs on the nape of his neck. No instinctive mental alarm tripped to warn him. It wasn’t his reptilian brain or anything like that. Konstantin was a practical man on all levels. He had no time for the stuff and nonsense of superstition. That didn’t mean he dismissed well-honed instincts, though. A trained man would recognize things on a subconscious level that a normal man would more than likely miss. That was simply the way of it. It was all about tradecraft. Konstantin Khavin knew he was being followed because he was observant. There was no great mystery to having your eyes open. Konstantin had learned to interpret the signs left by careless people. More than once, being observant had kept him alive.

He had picked up the tail as he left Metzger’s building on Schlossstrasse.

There had been three tells that gave the watchers away, and each of them was surprisingly obvious (and therefore amateurish) given the level of sophistication the U-Bahn attack had demanded. That was something to worry over later. Right now his first concern was learning as much as he could about the people following him-which meant turning the whole thing on its head and following the followers.

The first tell was as thoughtless as an unshielded lens cap in an upper window across the street from Metzger’s place. Whoever was up there in the otherwise darkened room had been taking photographs of everyone coming and going from Metzger’s building. It was a grunt job. Observe and log for further investigation. Someone else would do the foot work, and they’d probably relieve each other on eight- to ten-hour shifts up in the dark room to alleviate the boredom of staring out into the street if nothing else. As the noonday sun hit the camera’s beveled lens it sent a momentary splash of glare across the window. It was just careless. He imagined they had been up in their rented room for days without a break. That was when sloppiness set in.

He would have dismissed it if it hadn’t been for the second tell, the engine of one of the cars across the street gunning as he walked toward the kiosk at the end of the street. The two together were more than mere coincidence.

Konstantin was tempted to go pay the watchers an unexpected visit and bust a few heads. That was his Russian blood. He turned away from the apartment without so much as an upward glance. There would be time enough to return to Schlossstrasse later. A four a.m. visit would satisfy his heritage.

The final giveaway was the guy on the corner who still sat on one of the red benches in front of the sausage kiosk, still eating a bratwurst sprinkled with dried onions. Konstantin had noticed him sitting there, hunched up against the cold, when he had turned onto Schlossstrasse looking for Metzger’s home. In the time it had taken Konstantin to go through Metzger’s apartment the sausage eater hadn’t managed a single bite-probably because he had bought it in the early hours, and now it was cold and greasy and more likely to make him throw up than to sate any real hunger he might have.

The devil was in the details.

He walked up to the window and ordered himself a brat with all of the fixings, then made a show of licking his fingers as he enjoyed it. The sausage was hot and tasted twice as good for it. He washed it down with an apple spritzer. Konstantin nodded to the cold man with the half-eaten sausage and said, “God, I needed that,” before he walked away. He smiled. It was unnecessary-a game-but he liked the idea of letting the man know he’d seen him, twice. Konstantin was interested to see how they would deal with the knowledge that they had been compromised. How they reacted would tell him how good the team he was up against really was.

He stopped on the corner, ostensibly to retie a shoelace. He checked out the street. The sausage eater hadn’t made a move to follow him, which was unsurprising. There was no point in the one face he would recognize tailing him if they had someone else on the street.

The car rolled slowly up to the end of Schlossstrasse and indicated a right turn. He watched it make the turn and drive away. There were two ways the car could play it-it could drop off another watcher once it was around the corner, allowing them to follow him from the front, or it could hope to pick him up again later and assume one nondescript sedan was much like another in this city of nondescript BMWs and Mercedes, Volvos and Saabs.

There was an element of risk in trying to drop back onto his tail that Konstantin himself would never have allowed if he had been running the operation, so he had to assume whoever his opposite number was, the man was every bit as methodical as he was. And that meant they had at least one more man on the street that he had missed.

Konstantin took his time. There was a green pissoir fifty feet further down the road. Berlin’s elaborate city crest was embossed on the swing door. He walked toward it, counting out his footsteps on the paving stones. Each step sounded crisp in the chilly air. Twenty feet away the reek of urine came his way as the wind picked up. It was one of a thousand unpleasant smells in the city. Some cities had a thousand stories, he thought, remembering the old TV show-Berlin had a thousand reeks. Konstantin grunted. He decided to relieve himself.

The pissoir was built in such a way that he could see over the top into the street as he urinated. It was a rather peculiar idea, very German. It did, however, give him a full minute to watch people, see who was moving, who was slowing down, and who the sausage eater was watching-because it wasn’t him. Konstantin tried to follow the direction of the man’s gaze without dribbling on his shoes.

The man seeme looking intently at Grey Metzger’s doorway.