"Who dares, wins," he muttered to himself. "Or gets royally banged about if things go south."

Nigel Loring woke in darkness. He lay for a moment letting his eyes adjust, ears straining for the sound he'd heard. Had it been his imagination? A fragment of a dream-a dream of combat, before the Change or after it? God knew his life had provided plenty of material for nightmares, starting with Oman back in the seventies.

No. That was something. Perhaps an animal on the grounds, or a guard stumbling in the darkness, but something. Something real.

Maude Loring stirred beside him in the big four-poster bed. "What is it, dear?" she asked.

"Shhh," he said, straining to hear again.

Nothing, but there was a tension in the air. He put out a hand in the darkness and touched her shoulder. Then he swung his feet to the floor and padded over to the window. They were in the Covent Garden suite-bedroom, dressing room and bathroom, the latter restored to limited functioning. The same engineers who'd set up the wind-pump system to give the house running water had put a grid of steel bars over the window, mortising the ends into the stone. That was a rather soft local limestone; Sir Nigel had determined in the first days of his captivity here that he could get the frame out, with a few hours' unobserved work and some tools. He'd filched a knife and could have improvised a chisel from it, but the guards were quite alert-two below the window all night, and a pair at the doors-all stolid types who pretended they couldn't speak English or follow his halting Icelandic.

The bars were thick and close placed, allowing a hand to go through but not an elbow, but they didn't totally destroy the view, and the windows themselves were half-open on this warm summer's night. His eyes weren't the best-he'd needed corrective contacts since an RPG drove grit into them in a wadi in Dhofar-but seeing was as much a matter of knowing how to pay attention as sheer input.