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now?
    No. She had taken its name into herself.
    A Threshrend daemon of the rank superiorae, in the sect of Qwm.
    “Cuchka derganaya,” she said again, as if repeating the truth would make it less so.
    “Colonel Varatchevsky,” the decoy shouted, “I will shoot. Step away from the…from the Swamp Thing.”
    From the dead Threshrendum, you mean?
    Karin’s head swam as she stepped, or really sort of fell away from…Superiorae Pr’chutt un Theshrendum un Qwm.
    The Clearance agent fired a warning shot into the thick hardwood beams of the roof. The solitary blast actually helped Karin focus again. She was regaining her cool with surprising speed.
    “Nice work, kid,” she said, smiling at the American, willing her to calm down. It was like she could sense the waves of confusion and fear coming off the young woman, and underneath them the effort it took her to maintain her calm and concentration. Karin had to acknowledge that. The decoy did good, as these buffoons would say. The goat was eating the wolf, and she said so, as much to herself as to her captor.
    Another American recovered and joined the tattooed half-breed. He was a mess, covered in food, probably from some tray of hors-d’oeuvres he’d fallen on. He grinned like a timber wolf though, and Karin soon recognized him through the shrimp cocktail sauce as he translated for his agent.
    “ A goat is eating up a wolf . Or something like that. My colloquial Russian is rusty.”
    His Russian was fine. Indeed, it was exceptional.
    Donald Trinder.
    So it was OSCAR then. Not the FBI or Echelon. If the FBI had come for her, Trinder would have been some anonymous bureaucrat in an off-the-rack suit. Were this an Echelon op, she would likely have been disappeared well out of public view. But the presence of Trinder confirmed her first suspicion.
    Clearance. Much worse than the feebs. Not quite as bad as falling into the web of Echelon’s dark Spider-Queen Caitlin Monroe. The Clearance agent ordered her to drop the weapon, by which Karin imagined she meant the katana she still held. She’d all but forgotten it, as though it had grown from the end of her arm many years before.
    One of the operators from Final Solutions was back on his feet, and looking as though he’d woken up in the wrong bed. She could almost feel his confusion.
    No. She actually could feel it when she looked at him. His name was Tony Keel. An Englishman, ex Royal Marine. He looked to her for orders, for clarification. His supervisor, Clarissa van der Hoeff, was of no use. Most of her body lay facedown near the rear window where the monstr had forced its entry. But now Keel was just as confused and unsettled by the arrival and threats of Trinder as he was by…
    Pr’chutt un Theshrendum un Qwm .
    Karin wondered what Keel would do if she barked a command at him to shoot them all down, and part of her knew he would do exactly as he was told. However, there were so many firearms pointed at her now that any sudden movements or noises would serve only to get her killed.
    “It’s okay, Tony,” she smiled, dismissing him.
    Trinder repeated the order for her to lay down the sword, pointedly addressing Karin by her military rank when he did so. She looked into his eyes and understood that he wanted her to resist, to try and escape. She carefully lowered the gore-covered weapon to the ruined floor and took a few steps away from it. At this point in an American movie, as her would-be captors relaxed just fractionally, she would produce two guns from somewhere within her cocktail dress and unload a scarcely credible amount of automatic fire upon them.
    But all she was armed with now were her wits, and they had been dulled by the events of the last few minutes. She raised her hands and stepped back from the Nagayuki katana. Trinder ordered one of the tactical operators forward to secure it. The operator looked as though he was about to kick the ancient weapon to one side, and she wondered whether he might