Michael Morley - Spider

In the last hour or so, she's noticed that her mouth isn't only painfully dry, her tongue has started to taste bitter and almost poisonous. Were the gym monster around, he could have explained that her electrolyte balance is badly screwed, or, to be technical, critically destabilized. Her body cells are under fatal attack and her blood plasma is already seriously damaged.

Ludmila Zagalsky doesn't believe in God. She's never been in a church or, for that matter, anywhere holy in her entire twenty-five years. Her mother didn't even bother to have her birth registered, let alone have her baptized. But this very second she is praying. She is telling the God of her own special Darkness, whatever religion he is, that she is sorry for everything bad that she has ever done in her stinking, miserable, worthless life. She's telling him that she forgives her stepfather for all those things that he did to her; that she hopes he's fine and happy and healthy and that she didn't mean it when she told him that she wanted him to rot in hell while devil dogs chewed his bollocks off. She's asking for forgiveness for blaming her parents for her anger and for hating her mother for the beatings that she got. And she's confessing to all the sins she's committed and all the sinful thoughts she's ever had. And in return, she's asking God for only one thing.

Not to save her, but just to let her die quickly.

Rome Roberto returned to the Incident Room with four coffees and a mouthful of bad news.

He put the tray of drinks down on a table and politely waited until a conversation between Jack and Benito finished.

'I am sorry,' he said, 'but while I was making coffees, I got a call from my contact in Milano.'

'About the courier?' asked Orsetta.

'Yes,' confirmed Roberto. 'They are now sure there is no such courier company as Volante Milano. It does not exist.'

Jack lifted a coffee from the tray and accepted he was hooked again on caffeine. 'So how did BRK get the package here, if not through a courier?'

Orsetta was thinking the unthinkable. 'In person? You think he delivered it in person?'

Benito nodded. 'Something like that.'

'Please,' interrupted Roberto. 'My contact had an idea what might have happened. Right now, there are many students looking to earn some extra money. It seems in Milano they stand as advertisements outside airports and railway stations, offering to do anything.'

'Anything? What do you mean?' asked Orsetta.

'I am sorry, maybe I don't explain properly,' said Roberto. 'They hold up the card, saying they will carry things anywhere for you. They stand near the parcel offices and offer to take things anywhere on a train, even on planes. The courier companies they do not like this, they find this very bad.'

'I bet they do,' said Jack. 'So what you're saying is that BRK may have given the package to a student at the railway station, and had it delivered here?'

'Si, yes, that is what I am trying to say,' said Roberto, relieved finally to be understood.

'He's taking a bit of a risk, isn't he?' said Orsetta. 'I wouldn't trust a student to deliver something valuable for me.'

'How do these student couriers get paid?' asked Benito.

'It is cash, I think,' said Roberto.

Benito played with his goatee beard, thinking hard. 'BRK will have bought a return ticket for the courier, maybe rail, maybe air. He'll have paid cash, so we'll have problems tracing it. He may have given the courier some money upfront and then promised to pay him much more when he returned.'

'Doesn't work for me,' said Jack.

Orsetta was growing frustrated. She ran her fingers through her hair. 'This is just messing up my mind.'

'That's it!'Jack snapped his fingers. 'That's exactly what he's trying to do. Confuse us. Have us chasing shadows. There is no Volante Milano. Yet he went to enormous trouble to make it look as though he was there in Milan and used the company. He did this to make us think he had been there so that we would divert our resources to searching in Milan.'

'So he was never in Milan?' asked Orsetta, still struggling to make complete sense of it all.

'No, not at all,' explained Jack. 'I think you'll find that the Volante courier label was made on his own computer, and that the cardboard box and bubble wrap packaging will match the box from UMail2Anywhere sent to the FBI.'

'And the black felt-pen too,' said Orsetta.

'That too,' added Jack.

'He's pulling us all over the place,' conceded Benito.

'He's trying to,' said Jack. 'The courier story Roberto told us is probably old news and common knowledge. I've heard about students being used as couriers, it's been going on for a few years in the States. Like Roberto said, kids even get free holidays by babysitting boxes on flights all over the world. I think BRK will have wanted us to think our package was delivered by a real courier company in Milan, hence the label. If we got through that test, then I reckon he was sure we'd come across the widespread use of Milanese students as couriers and would have wasted even more time chasing that dead end.'

'Which means he really may have delivered the package in person,' said Orsetta, believing that the killer would no doubt get an enormous kick out of such an act.

Jack didn't think it likely. 'Remember that this guy is not a risk-taker, so I'd bet against it. No, I suspect Roberto's friend is partly right, but I think BRK used a student courier in Rome not in Milan.'

Benito volunteered another piece of the puzzle. 'Because in Rome he could pay the student on return, with nothing upfront, and be sure the package wouldn't be tampered with.'

'Which means,' said Jack, 'that our man flew to the States from Rome, not Milan, and that he probably left on the evening of the twenty-fifth of June or sometime during the twenty-sixth.'

'Maybe later,' said Benito. 'If he was confident that we'd be chasing around in Milan, he could wait in Rome until the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth and catch a transatlantic flight that would have him arriving in the USA and getting to the cemetery in Georgetown on June the thirtieth. We'll check all Rome flight details as well.'

They paused for breath and looked at each other. Each and every one of them knew that, for the first time, they'd picked up the real scent of BRK's trail.

'One final thing,' said Jack. 'I don't want to rain on our parade, but let's check for recent student deaths in Rome as well. You know how our guy likes to tidy up as he goes along.'

Pan Arabia News Channel, New York Crime editor Tariq el Daher was beginning to wonder whether he had made the biggest mistake of what he had once been told was a highly promising career. Just over a year had passed since he'd left his job at Reuters and joined the controversial Dubai-based station Pan Arabia to beef up their newly launched English language network.

At first, major technical problems had seriously delayed the station's long-awaited debut transmission and hugely undermined their credibility as a news outfit. But those difficulties had faded into insignificance compared with the vitriolic criticism unleashed upon them by competing Western media groups once they did get on air. Sitting in his New York office, scanning the digital airways to check the content of competing channels, Tariq consoled himself by recalling that neither he nor his bosses had been under any illusion that they were in for an easy ride.

As a Muslim, he didn't just understand the facts and figures of minority life – he lived them. Of New York's twenty million people, fewer than two per cent followed the doctrines of Islam and fewer than two per cent were Buddhists, Hindus or Sikhs. But behind those figures were the earthquake tremors of a massive change that wasn't yet visible. While New York is home to a quarter of all America's Jews, it has also quietly become the chosen land for a quarter of all America's Muslims.