Cross chose a place Karlos would not have chosen.
A small restaurant in the old quarter, half-empty on a Tuesday night, with tables pushed together and poor lighting and the smell of something frying in the kitchen. The kind of place that looked like a mistake until you understood that nobody important would ever be seen in a place like this, which was precisely the point.
Cross was already seated when Karlos arrived.
He looked the same. That was the first thing Karlos noticed and could not stop noticing. The white hair. The careful grey-blue eyes. The folded hands of a man who had decided before he arrived what he was and was not going to say.
He looked exactly like the man who had sat in Karlos's sitting room at midnight and laid documents on his table and shaken his hand.
Karlos sat down across from him.
He did not speak.
