The Ultimate Sacrifice_ , but he never had the guts to try anything so outré as a full frontal rape. It would require time to find the right words. Hannibal put his head back down, and went over everything he remembered from the previous night. He'd picked out his costume with care, the red shirt, the black leather pants and boots, the wide belt, the black cloak, his face powdered in black too so that only his white teeth were showing. He watched the man, and waited, and watched. The man was watching, too, but from a distance of thirty feet, and he was careful not to make any move that would betray his awareness of the red-haired man's attention. He was confident enough of himself to know that there was no way that this little fellow could stop him if he had a mind to run away, but he was smart enough to know that men like him, men with a mind to run away, make better targets than men who fight back. He waited. A waiter came to the man's table, and bent to speak to him. Hannibal saw the man's head, his dark curls, and thought, _That's a fake. That's the fake, come to keep an eye on him. Then the fake realizes that's the man I'm looking for. Or maybe he saw the white cloth of the jacket, maybe he recognized it, too. He's already put a lookout here. I'm just wasting my time_. He lifted his head and turned it slightly so that he could see better behind him. Another waiter had come up the row, behind him. He was moving very slowly, his feet soaking up time. The lookout was gone. _Time to move_. Hannibal moved up the row, stepping slowly as if he were a man who had come to enjoy the food, enjoying it too much to want to hurry. The distance between him and the target was shrinking with every step, but the target did not appear to be aware of him. But the man was looking up, now. The target was looking at the man behind his table, and Hannibal kept his head up, and waited until the man saw him. His name was Jack Starbright, and he was wearing a black silk tie beneath his white shirt, a little flashy, but he was a big man in the world of corporate finance and mergers, and he had to be impressed with himself to want to wear a tie like that. And now he was a target, so he had to be impressed with _that_. Hannibal smiled at him. Jack Starbright recognized him, but not as the one who had been hanging around last night, it was possible that he had never seen him before. He saw a man who was alone, in a black cloak that covered most of his face. Not his type. Jack Starbright was not going to stop a man in a black cloak who took a bite of his dessert and smiled up at him. Jack Starbright didn't have the strength of character to turn and go, and then Jack Starbright turned and _ran_. Hannibal saw the other man in the cloak's peripheral vision, just an arm's length away, and followed him, in perfect time to the beat of his heart. The man in black felt the pull of his coat collar, and he resisted it for a moment, but gave in, and let himself be slowed down, and stopped, and turned around slowly. He was Jack Starbright. Jack Starbright was a big man, taller than Hannibal, but smaller than he seemed. He was in his mid-thirties. He had blond hair, and light blue eyes. His face was smooth. His mouth was too small, his mouth was a thin pale line that looked as if it had never stretched into a smile. The blond hair was a little too long, and kept his skull a little bald at the sides, and his chin, and he had that faint tinge of sweat on his skin that showed the effort of being on display. He was wearing a white shirt and a black jacket and the black pants and boots of a waiter. He looked up at Hannibal, and for a moment he seemed to have trouble breathing. Hannibal spoke. "I'm here to kill you," he said. "I'm a dead man, waiting for you. Don't disappoint me." He could feel his heart pounding, and it wasn't the blood pounding in his chest anymore, but a faraway sound, like thunder. It was still there, but it was distant, fading away, something from outside the world he lived in, it wasn't his life pulsing. He took a step closer. The man was holding his hand in front of him, on the side that wasn't holding the knife. He was saying _no_ , he was saying _no, please, no, please, don't_. Hannibal took another step and still the man was saying _no_. _The knife. He's afraid of the knife. If I take the knife away he'll beg me for mercy, and I can't do that_. The knife was a thin blade, almost an innocuous-looking weapon, a Japanese copy of something. It was the length of a finger, but no thicker. _Not long enough_. He advanced on the man, who was backing up in fear. _The fake is watching him, the fake can't see him, this is my kill_. Hannibal moved towards the man, moving at the same slow pace, so slow that every instant was a millisecond, a fraction of a second, nothing to be noticed or remembered. A waiter's black jacket, his own black jacket, how did that happen? He must have taken the black coat from the waiter that he had killed. How long had it been? He could feel the jacket beneath the thin silk of his robe, how long had it been since he had been here last, how long had it been since that man had been here? The coat would carry the man's scent, even if the man was wearing a different coat now. Hannibal had a coat here in the little alcove, he could pull it out, put the coat back on, he wouldn't need it, but maybe it was necessary, maybe it was necessary to the game. The coat was under his arm, and if there was anything on the coat that could make a difference in the knife, then maybe. Hannibal started to step back, slowly, so slowly that there was no pause in his stride. The movement didn't register on his face at all. The man was still backing away. Hannibal watched the movement, and the man's fear seemed to increase his speed. He backed away, and a waiter came out of the kitchen with a dish, and the man ran. The knife still stuck up in the air where it had been. The waiter walked past him, and turned to look back, and saw Hannibal staring at him, and stared at him, and ran again. Hannibal watched him go. A good fake. He hadn't given the man time to identify him. It was possible he hadn't even seen him, it wasn't necessarily impossible that he'd never seen him, he could still be the man who had been walking, eating dinner, standing in the window. Hannibal moved off the way he had come in, keeping to the center of the rows, moving slowly. He took care to keep his face turned away from the window, he watched his own reflection in the glass as he walked away from it. He couldn't really tell much from that, except that he had never felt more alone. The knife was under his arm, and the fake was the only person he'd seen in the place. He reached his hotel and went upstairs, and sat in the room and waited. The day had already been long, but now he went back through it in his mind, making the connections. He couldn't find any. Had the target, the target's accomplice, the target's accomplice's wife, given him away? No, because he wasn't there any longer. He didn't know why he was being followed, but he had done everything he'd done the way he had planned, so he was being followed for a reason, but it wasn't to kill him. Had he been wearing a mask? No. The only thing that might have been close to a mask was a leather glove, but that wasn't enough to keep a coat from giving a little perfume away. And the man who wanted to kill him, who had hired the woman with the blond hair, who had tried to force his way in with the knives, but he had changed his mind. Hannibal didn't know why, but he knew that, for the moment, there would be no blood spilled. Hannibal called Ruffian and asked him to come and get him. He said he would meet him at the airport. He needed the car. He didn't want to be seen in a taxi. Ruffian arrived as Hannibal was looking out across the city, at the lights beyond the roofs of the houses, the stars over the river. He wanted a glass of wine and he wanted company, and he knew just who to ask for. He thought of the man who had been waiting for him on the steps outside the restaurant and he smiled at the image, he thought that maybe that was a nice touch, to send someone to spy on him,