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yes.” He rose from his chair and crossed to a bureau, turning a key in the lid and folding down the writing stand. He withdrew a large, cream-colored envelope from within, holding it out for Donovan.
    Donovan stood, taking it from him. It felt thick with sheaves of paper. Whoever had assembled the file had clearly been doing so for some time. But hadn't Banks said it was only yesterday that Robertson's cover had been blown? Had they been keeping a file on him for a different reason, then? Something didn't add up, but Donovan didn't have the heart, or the energy, to force the issue now.
    Banks also rose from his chair, extending his hand to Donovan. “We won't forget this, Inspector.”
    The thought made Donovan's skin crawl. He took the senator's proffered hand. “I'll do everything in my power, Senator.”
    “Be sure that you do, Inspector,” Banks said dryly. “Be sure that you do.”
    Donovan quit the commissioner's office, pulling the door shut behind him. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief. He could hear the two men still talking on the other side of the door, but didn't wait around to hear what they had to say. He'd heard enough already. The commissioner was clearly moving in more significant circles these days. It was obvious to Donovan that this was not the first time the commissioner and Banks had met. He only hoped that whatever game Montague was playing, he knew what he was getting himself into. Whatever Donovan thought of the old man, he knew he wasn't a crook.
    He wasn't sure he could say the same about Isambard Banks.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    P eter Rutherford was feeling more than a little out of his depth.
    He was alone in a hostile country, his head full of state secrets, and he knew the authorities were on to him. That much had been made clear by the reaction of the British embassy when he'd tried to report in earlier that day. They had denied all knowledge of his existence, refusing to let him in through the doors.
    Just a day earlier, he'd been welcomed in with open arms and ushered to a back room where he'd been encouraged to use the holotube terminal to contact his handler back home. The staff at the embassy—people he'd been working alongside for months—had been proud to play a part in the protection of British interests, proud to welcome him into their midst, clapping him on the back and telling him what a stand-up job he was doing, how he was working on the front line for the good of the Empire.
    Today, however, those very same people had refused to acknowledge him, and that, Rutherford realized, was a very bad sign indeed. That meant they'd been leaned on by the US government and were now trying to protect him, to give him a signal that he needed to get out of New York as quickly as he could. If the US government knew there was an English spy in their midst, the embassy would eventually be forced into giving him up.
    He was under no illusion: he would be sacrificed to prevent a diplomatic incident, and the embassy would deny all knowledge of his actions. He'd be branded a renegade and hung out to dry. They would have no other option. Otherwise, given the tensions that already existed between the two nations, there was the potential for a full-blown outbreak of war.
    The irony was that war was exactly what Rutherford was attempting to prevent. If he couldn't get his warning to the people back home, everyone was in dire danger indeed.
    Now, he was sitting in Central Park, wrapped against the wintry chill in a thick woolen overcoat, trying to discern his next move. He needed to find transport to England, and he needed to find a secure means of communicating with the British secret service.
    Peter Rutherford had never expected to wind up working as a spy. In all his years of public school he'd trained to be a teacher, but then the war had come, and he had done what every self-respecting Englishman had done—he'd joined up.
    The war had not been kind to him, and he'd seen most of his friends cut to