Vienna, Asher thought, with the tiniest pinch of nostalgia. Then he saw the man's face.

Dear God.

He stopped at the head of the steps down from the platform, and the blood seemed to halt in his veins. But even before his mind could form the words Ignace Karolyi in England, he saw the face of the other man.

Dear God! No.

It was all he could think.

Not that.

Later he thought he would not have seen the smaller man at all had his eye not been arrested, first by Karolyi's greatcoat, then by the Hungarian's face. That was one of the most frightening things about what he now saw. In the few seconds that the two men spoke-and it was not more than a few seconds, though they exchanged newspapers, an old trick Asher had used hundreds of times himself during his years with Intelligence-Asher's mind registered details that he should have seen before: the fiddleback cut of the small man's shabby black greatcoat, and the way the creaseless buff-colored trousers tapered to straps under the insteps. Under a shallow-crowned beaver hat his hair was short- cropped, and he did not gesture at all as they spoke: no movement, no change of stance, not even the shift of the gloved fingers wrapped about one another on the head of his stick.

That would have told him, if nothing else did.

Three women in enormous hats, feathers drooping with wet, intervened, and when Asher looked again, Karolyi was striding briskly in the direction of the Paris boat train.

There was no sign of the other man.

Karolyi's going to Paris.

They're both going to Paris.