Sixteen hours Boyd spent inside that dark room dotted by flickering lights garnishing the electronic equipment, with no other weapons but his headphones and his frayed knowledge of how to clean the ambient noise from the tracks. He could barely hear the recordings with clarity. Most of the time he could only make out the far-off noise from a radio, a TV, both at the same time, or nothing at all. But Landau rarely appeared in them; just some comments to the dog, some phone calls, a monologue to an empty audience, too much silence. In some specific moments, laughter, curses, clicks of chips, glasses thudding against the table, short words, silences, lies and curses, more laughs, occasional sounds that Boyd identified as those relating to poker games in the living room. Beyond the purely anecdotal, he couldn't find a single truly useful recording that would provide a reliable hint, a confession, a motive at best, to cut that Gordian knot. Even the recording of the murders provided nothing really useful, beyond the curiosity of the shooting themselves.

From the very moment he began the legwork, he had already acknowledged there was no logic to what had happened. The pieces of the puzzle didn't fit, and he suspected Norton was keeping the missing pieces within his guilty conscience. For Boyd's old age endowed him with a class of mastery which allowed eyes once the scholars of toga and papyrus to see that Norton was much more engaged in getting Landau, if he was still alive, than in knowing the reasons for what had happened. And that was because he already knew, because he was to blame, and because he felt embarrassed. So, Boyd knew that the real reason for these recordings was, ultimately, to provide the place where Landau might be or who had killed him. Nothing else.

Sixteen hours he spent in that dark room, and he found nothing of value. If he had been a rookie, his first instinct would have been to try collecting all the useless files, structure them carefully and with pageantry, and then be cheeky enough to present them to Norton with formal solemnity, fleeing from the stage after the minor backhanded slap of the air he would give as a sign of dismissal. But that would have been one more head impaled on the tyrant king's pikes, and Boyd was burned out enough by life to speak to his boss face-to-face. With those rusty certainties, he stood up, took his coat from the chair, and left.

He calmly made his way through the facilities and up to the waiting room with the vending machine. This time, he had in his pocket a blue coin that allowed him to get into the elevator and go down to the room. There was Norton, wearing the same clothes, in the same position, with the same insane gaze. It looked as though time had stalled, as if nothing more than a few seconds had passed between Boyd's departure and his return. This time, the anticipation of news made the wretched Norton twist his head and look Boyd in the face.

"Talk," he said flatly.

"The camera feed shows a hooded man with a polar neck over half his face entering the house to burn Landau's office. Clayton comes in with a copy of the key to see what's going on, and the two meet in the dining room. Looks like they have a quick conversation, and then Clayton seems to forget about him and goes straight up to the office. The killer follows him, shoots him in the back when he's entering the room, and then leaves him there while the desktop burns. He's about to leave when Page, who's watching from the street, pulls out his gun and wounds him in the left arm. The killer shoots back, and Page dies right away. The man leaves, and the dog follows him."

"Have you tried facial analysis?"

"Impossible. The resolution's too low to single him out, and he only shows less than half of his face."

"What about his way in?"

"A camera spotted him arriving in a blue Chevrolet and parking it on the street, but neither our database nor the FBI's has been able to identify its registration. We believe the car's geared not to be tracked."

Norton crushed his neck against the pillow and dropped a resounding sigh, which was interpreted as a full stop from that section.

"What about the mic in the warship?"

"I've looked over the recordings of the last eleven days, and there's absolutely nothing that can be of interest to us. If you want, I can go back and check out the recordings from the twelfth day backwards."

"Forget it. Got no grounds to go further. What about the blood?"

"It's being parsed right now in the lab. Geneticists say it's still too early to draw any conclusions."

One could tell Norton's fear to keep asking.

"And Landau...is he really dead?"

"The CIA's bringing the corpse here, along with the recording of his alleged death."

"When will they be here?"

"Half an hour, I've been told."

"OK, OK," Norton said, almost to himself. "What was in the mic recordings?"

"All right. Let's see...He sometimes put on the radio or television; newscasts, mostly. And music. He listened to lots of music, both on the radio and on music devices. The few times he spoke on the phone were to make up some excuse not to go to work, or to ask about weird collectibles. He also spent a lot of time in silence, probably reading or sleeping. Sometimes organized poker games at home; in these last eleven days, he organized two, which may indicate pathological gambling."

"Leave deductions to me," Norton said roughly.

"And he also talked to himself, or to his dog. Pretty common."

"What did he say?"

"I have no idea. Jibber jabber, I suppose. He spoke in whispers, just like anyone who talks to himself. There isn't much to get out of that."

"And apart from poker, he didn't have contact with anyone?"

"Not that I could figure."

"Was anything recorded during the murders?"

"The shootings themselves, not much else."

"What's that 'not much else?'"

"The dog barking, mostly."

"Did you bring the tape?"

"Yessir."

"Play it, then."

Norton pointed to a piece of music equipment at his side, into which Boyd slotted the cassette tape. He waited a second before setting the recording in motion.

"Have you cleaned off the ambient noise?"

"As much as I could, sir."

Norton then pressed the play button. Silence...A padlock clicking, a door opens, closes with a slam. The dog barks twice, gasps, a barely audible far-flung whisper, silence. Some footsteps thudding up the stairs and walking away, silence. Minutes later, the padlock can be heard opening again, while steps go abruptly down the stairs and head to the door. The door opens fully. There's a very distant, hardly distinguishable conversation. Norton stopped the tape.

"Why can't I hear it right?"

"Because the conversation takes place at the threshold of the door, and the microphone is on the other side of the room."

Norton pressed play again. The conversation went on. It went on until it stopped, a few quick steps, followed by others chasing them. Both went up the stairs, with just one second of separation between the two. Short silence, followed by a few gunshots. Dog claws walked away, scratching the floor, some growling in the distance. Hectic steps went down the stairs. Shooting interspersed far and near, barking. Strong barking. A blurred voice said something, the dog fell silent, the footsteps faded away, the door slammed. Boyd cleared his throat with pride.

"As you can see, sir, there's hardly anything we can dig up."

"What I can see is that you are no good with these things. Let's recap."

Norton rewound the tape down to the first slam.

"Listen. The lock's heard disengaging. That means the door is being opened with a key, not by force. And the dog barks, but nothing aggressive, it's rather friendly. It means it already knew the hooded man."

"Maybe he was a player who went to Landau's games, posing as a friend of his. Maybe he stole the key and made a copy," Boyd said, almost to himself.

"And what he says at the end..." Norton sped up the tape to the strange words. "He says..."

Boyd also sharpened his ear. The microphone was so far away, and the polar neck blurred the voice so much, that they could not distinguish the voice was, in fact, that of a woman.

"Pidpasdanabaya?"

"No, 'Podpisyvaytes' na menya.' 'Follow me,' in Russian."

Boyd's eyes grew wide.

"The murderer's Russian? And how come the dog follows him?"

"Landau's mother was Russian, so he may have taught it orders in Russian, too. I'm guessing the killer memorized them. The question here is, why would he want to take the dog, too?"

At that instant, a beep sounded in Boyd's pocket, from which he pulled out his beeper.

"Sir, they're ahead of schedule. The CIA's already here with the body and the tape."

Norton shucked off his sheets with a blunt flip and put his feet on the ground, ordering a wheelchair and his Ray-Bans brought to him. Nobody could dissuade him from leaving.

Boyd took Norton to the autopsy room as soon as possible. His emaciated knees prevented him from going as fast as he would have liked, despite the hammering complaints of his boss. Upon arriving at the room, fringed by two bodyguards, they were asked for accreditation despite being within a government facility. It went without saying what was in there was much higher than top secret.

They finally got to the morgue, occupied by no more than four people Norton didn't recognize at first, filtered under the mortuary blue light of fluorescent lamps. In the middle of the room, a long black bag over a stretcher made him spring to his feet and, aided by Boyd, come to the edge of the stretcher where the zipper was located. He finally picked out Dennis Chambers approaching from the other side of the stretcher.

"Have you seen it already?" Norton asked.

"Not yet. We were waiting for you."

Chambers opened the zipper just enough to exhibit the head, clubbed, bloody, and deformed. He looked back at Norton.

"So?"

Norton took some gauze and swabbed it gently over the left side of the face. Everyone waited in silence for his verdict, which wasn't long in leaving his lips with a mixture of relief and anger.

"This ain't Landau. I could see Landau was wounded on the left side of the face, and this moron's not. We've been fooled."

Those present exchanged glances with each other, masking their befuddlement in their protocolary formality. Norton, for his part, threw the gauze into the garbage with determination and spoke to Chambers.

"Play me the tape."

Chambers took the music device, dropped it on the corpse's chest, and pressed the play button.

"Oh shit, Landau's bleeding to death! What do I do? Over. No, the driver is dead, Landau's the one who's injured."

"Mmm...Damn, how it hurts, I'm dying!"

"There's nothing I can do for him. I'm gonna put him down."

Then, a tough shot.

"So," Chambers said, "you think Landau was faking it?"

Everyone could see in Norton's half-smile a sinister aspect.

"Yeah, and I also know who the other one is. You should be able to make his voice out too, Chambers."

"What? But who?"

"The one who stole the Nighthawk two years ago. If I recall, the name was Seiber. Ulrich Seiber."

Chambers rewound the tape and listened to it carefully.

"Holy shit, you're right! How could I miss it? That son of a bitch stole the Nighthawk, now he nabs Landau too!"

Norton sensed again a rising dizziness from the tip of his toes. He clenched his fist and threw a compact side-handed punch at the body's gut, as if to take revenge on both Landau and fainting alike.

"We're gonna hunt them down. Both of them. They won't live to see me fail," he muttered before dropping to the wheelchair amidst powerful breaths, on the verge of a blackout. "We need a team. Make me one. Call Kaufmann. Tell him to set it up. Five days tops. Time's..." He propped his hand on his forehead, hiding his closed eyes as they rolled slowly back. "Time's on their side."