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doorway.
    Lotte stepped off the curb and started walking toward them; behind her the man took a step forward and then stopped. He rested a hand on the roof of the car, glancing toward the shop and then smiling.
    “We’ll wait for you here.”
    Lotte was already halfway across the road, Anja a few steps behind. Anja glanced back over her shoulder at the young man and smiled. He was handsome, tall, well built, and well dressed.
    His smile was gone; he was now watching the German officers on the other side of the street, tugging at their collars and heading off toward the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus.
    LO TTE KOEHLER WASN’T a normal officer’s wife.
    Lotte Koehler had shot her first wolf when she was nine years old.
    When she was eleven she and her father had tracked a wounded boar for two days. She had finally killed that same boar after it thundered out of the blackness of the forest and into their camp at midnight before goring her sleeping father as he lay next to their dwindling campfire.
    Lotte Koehler knew how to fight, she knew how to look after herself, and she knew how to look after those whom she loved.
    But most of all she knew when something felt wrong.
    As she walked toward the tailor’s shop with Anja, watching the men in the Opel in the reflection of the shop window as she approached it, Lotte Koehler knew something was seriously wrong.
    She knew that Ernst would have told her about a plainclothes security service. She also knew that while the young man spoke excellent German, really excellent German, it wasn’t his first language. It sounded like someone from the movies: perfect, too perfect, clipped and polished so that it was cut like glass.
    Cut glass with a tiny trace of an American twang.
    The other thing that wasn’t right was that they had said Ernst had sent them; it wasn’t right because Ernst didn’t know where they were.
    She hadn’t told him she was shopping. It was her and Anja’s little secret, time to buy a present for their dearest Ernst before they left him to go back to Berlin.
    Something was wrong, and she knew she had to do something about it, because if she and Anja were in danger, Ernst was in danger, and this lioness protected her pride.
    THERE WAS A deep mahogany gloom inside the tailor’s shop. What light struggled through the windows seemed to be sucked up by the dark red carpet and the solemn tick-tock of the old grandfather clock that was standing sentry by the door.
    Only one member of staff was visible as Lotte pushed Anja ahead of her. Anja turned to look at her mother.
    “What is it?” she asked, but Lotte looked back out through the door and didn’t reply.
    Across the street she could see that both men were now standing on the pavement, talking and ignoring the snow that was bucketing down around them. They were staring at the shop, and neither seemed pleased with the way events were unfolding.
    “May I help you, madam?” the shop assistant said slowly in English, speaking clearly, as if addressing a child.
    “Sie verfügen über ein Telefon?” Lotte replied, still looking through the glass at the men outside.
    The shopkeeper smiled, holding out his hands apologetically.
    “I’m terribly sorry, madam. One doesn’t speak German; I normally have an assistant who does, but with the weather . . .” The tailor’s statement trailed off redundantly with a shrug.
    “Do you have a telephone, please?” Anja translated for her mother into perfect English. Lotte breathed a sigh of relief that she and Ernst had chosen to employ a British nanny back in Germany.
    “If you would like to step this way.”
    Lotte and Anja followed the tailor to the back of the shop. They’d barely made it halfway when the door behind them opened and the two men from the car entered.
    The first smiled at Lotte as he brushed some snow off his shoulders and then looked past her to the tailor. Behind him, the driver stared out through the door toward Regent Street, in the manner