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Purell in my pocket.
    “Remember,” he said, “that you have been instructed to wait for ten minutes after my departure before leaving this coffee shop.”
    With that he turned and left. Feyd opened the door for him and gave me a single withering stare, which I managed to endure without dying of fright. I stood by the glass and watched them walk around the corner of the building out of sight, presumably to a waiting car.
    The next ten minutes took about ten thousand years.

 
    Chapter Eleven
    Driving in the City
    Tehran, Iran
    June 15, 8:17 a.m.
    The passenger in the limousine rolled up his window as the tall American agent stepped out of the Starbox. The limousine idled one hundred feet down the side street, mostly hidden by a sidewalk stand selling dried lentils and wheat flour. The American agent looked up and down the street and then turned away and headed in the direction of the hotel district.
    The passenger slid open the glass door between the front and rear seats. “Sefu, follow him. We need the name of his hotel but for God’s sake don’t let him see us.”
    “Sir,” grunted the driver. Sefu was an Egyptian Christian who had worked for many years in this man’s service. He was not in the habit of letting anyone spot him when he tailed them, though he was circumspect enough not to say so. He put the car in drive and eased into traffic three cars back from the one closest to the American.
    In the rear seat, Charles LaRoque, a French businessman and one of the world’s leading brokers of fine Persian rugs, pushed the button to close the soundproof glass partition. He cut a look at the rearview mirror to assure himself that the driver was not watching him, then he fished a small compact mirror out of his pocket. He opened it to reveal that both top and bottom held small mirrors. LaRoque studied his face in one mirror and then the other, back and forth for several moments, tilting the compact and changing his expression over and over again. A strange little laugh burbled from his chest.
    “Delicious, delicious, delicious,” he said to the alternating images. There was so much to see there, so many faces. His father and his grandfather. The trickster and the priest. The Red Knights with their red mouths. The King of Thorns. It was all so very delicious.
    “Oh yes it is,” LaRoque said, and laughed again.
    A soft musical tone filled the car. Not the ringtone of his regular cell but the much more elaborate encrypted device given to him by a friend of his father’s.
    “I’ll talk to you later,” LaRoque said to his mirror and shoved it back into his pocket, then closed his eyes and composed himself before he reached for the cell phone. When he opened his eyes he felt composed and ready to play his role.
    “Yes?” he said into the phone, his tone serious and sober. Even so, LaRoque almost giggled and caught himself. He took a breath and forced himself to live his role. On this call, and in this matter, he was no longer Charles LaRoque. He was the Scriptor of the Ordo Ruber , the Sacred Red Order. The Scriptor did not giggle. The Scriptor was stern, decisive. That was how the old priest wanted him to play it.
    “Was it Ledger?” asked Hugo Vox. “Was he there?”
    “Yes,” confirmed LaRoque. “Just as you said.”
    Vox laughed. He had a bass voice and a rumbling grizzly laugh. “What happened? What’d they talk about?”
    “How would I know?” said LaRoque in a waspish voice. “I was outside in the bloody car, wasn’t I?”
    “Charlie,” replied Vox with false patience, “don’t fuck with me. You heard every goddamn thing they said and we both know it.”
    LaRoque cut a guilty look at the headphones lying next to him on the car seat. He debated lying to Vox. There was no strategic benefit to it, but lying was fun. But, he sighed instead and grunted. “I listened.”
    “And?”
    “It wasn’t what we thought,” said LaRoque. “It had nothing to do with the Red Order or the Holy Agreement.