Extraordinary Powers

Le Monde

Germany Elects Moderate As Next Chancellor

Relief Sweeps World Capitals as Troubled Germany Turns Away from New Fascism to Select Centrist Wilhelm Vogel

BY JEAN-PIERRE REYNARD IN BONN

Europe no longer has to fear the return of Nazism, as voters in the economically ravaged Germany voted overwhelmingly to…

FORTY

White, the softest, palest linen-white: I became aware of the color white, not the absence of color, but a full and rich and creamy white that soothed me with its stillness and radiance.

And I became aware of soft murmurings from somewhere far off.

I felt as if I were floating on a cloud, turning upside down, then right-side up, but I didn’t know which way was upside down, and I didn’t care.

More murmurings.

I had just opened my eyes, which seemed to have been glued shut for an eternity.

I tried to focus on the murmuring shapes before me.

“He’s with us,” I heard.

“His eyes are open.”

Slowly, slowly, my surroundings came into focus.

I was in a room that was all white; I was covered with white, coarse white muslin sheets, white bandages on my arms, which were the only part of my body I could see.

As my eyes focused, I saw that the room I was in was a simple room with walls of whitewashed stone. Was I in a farmhouse, or something like that? Where was I? An intravenous line fed into my left arm, but this didn’t look like a hospital.

I heard an accented male voice: “Mr. Ellison?”

I tried to grunt, but nothing seemed to come out.

“Mr. Ellison?”

I attempted another grunt. Again nothing emerged, I thought, but perhaps I was wrong. I must have made some sort of noise, because the accented voice now said, “Ah. Good.”

Now I could see the speaker, a small, narrow-faced man with a neatly trimmed beard and warm brown eyes. He was wearing a thick, coarsely knit gray sweater and gray woolen slacks, a pair of worn leather shoes. He was thick around the middle, in early middle age. He thrust a soft, plump hand toward me, and we shook hands.

“My name is Boldoni,” he said. “Massimo Boldoni.”

With great effort I said: “Where…?”

“I’m a physician, Mr. Ellison, although I know I don’t look like one.” He spoke English with a mellifluous Italian accent. “I don’t have my doctor’s costume on because I don’t normally work on Sunday. In answer to your question, you are in my house. We have several vacant rooms, unfortunately.”

He must have seen the confusion in my face, for he continued: “This is a podere-an old farmhouse. My wife runs this as a guesthouse, the Podere Capra.”

“I don’t…” I tried to say. “How did I…?”

“You’re doing very well, considering what you’ve been through.”

I looked down at my bandaged arms, and looked back at the physician.

“You were very fortunate,” he said “You may have sustained some hearing loss. You suffered burns only on your arms, and you should be recovering quickly. The burns are not serious; very little skin has been burned, as you’ll see. You are a lucky man. Your clothes caught on fire, but they found you before the fire had a chance to do much damage to you.”

“The rats,” I said.

“No rabies or diseases or anything of the sort,” he reassured me. “You’ve been thoroughly tested. Our Tuscan rats are healthy specimens. The superficial bites have been treated and will heal very quickly. There may be slight scarring, but that’s all. I’ve put you on a morphine drip for pain relief, which is why you may feel as if you’re flying at times, yes?”

I nodded. It really was quite pleasant; there was no sensation of pain. I wanted to know exactly who he was, and how I had gotten there, but I was finding it difficult to articulate words, and I seemed to be overcome with an inertia.

“Gradually I’ll be reducing that. But now some friends of yours would like to pay a visit.”

He turned around and knocked lightly a few times on a small, rounded, wooden door. The door opened, and he excused himself.

I felt my throat begin to throb.

In a wheelchair, looking weary and diminished, was Toby Thompson. Standing beside him was Molly.

“Oh, God, Ben,” she said, and rushed toward me.

I had never seen her look so beautiful. She was wearing a brown tweed skirt, a white silk blouse, the strand of pearls I’d bought her at Shreve’s, and the good-luck gold cameo locket her father had given her.

We kissed for a long time.

She looked me over, her eyes full of tears. “I was-we were-so worried about you. My God, Ben.”

She took both of my hands.

“How did you two… get here?” I managed to say.

I heard the whir of Toby’s wheelchair as he approached.

“I’m afraid we got here a little late,” Molly said, squeezing both of my hands. The pain made me wince, and she drew her hands back suddenly. “I’m so sorry.”

“How are you feeling?” Toby asked. He was wearing a blue suit and a shiny pair of black orthopedic shoes. His white hair was combed neatly.

“We’ll see when they take me off the painkillers. Where am I?”

“Greve, in Chianti.”

“The doctor-”

“Massimo is entirely trustworthy,” Toby said. “We keep him on retainer-on occasion we need his medical services. Once in a great while we use Podere Capra as a safe house.”

Molly put a hand on my cheek, as if unable to believe I was really lying there before her. Now that I looked at her closely, I could see that she was exhausted, with deep circles under her bloodshot eyes she’d obviously taken pains to cover with makeup. But she looked beautiful despite it all. She was wearing Fracas, my favorite perfume; I found her, as always, irresistible.

“God, I’ve missed you,” she said.

“Me, too, babe.”

“You’ve never called me ‘babe’ before,” she marveled.

“Never too late,” I mumbled, “to learn a new term of endearment.”

“You never cease to impress me,” Toby said gravely. “I don’t know how you did it.”

“Did what?”

“How you managed to blow a hole in the side of that stone house. If you hadn’t done it, you’d probably be dead by now. Those guys were fully prepared to leave you there until you were eaten alive, or, more likely, died of fright. And certainly our people wouldn’t have known where to look for you if it weren’t for the explosion.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How did you know where I was?”

“Let’s take this a step at a time,” Toby said. “We were able to trace your call from Siena in eight seconds.”

“Eight? But I thought-”

“Our telecommunications technology has improved significantly since you left the business. You have the ability to ascertain that I’m telling you the truth, Ben. I’ll move this damned chair closer if you like.”

For the time being, his assurance was enough; in any case, even if I’d wanted to, I was too woozy to focus my mind.

“As soon as we got a lock on where you were from the phone trace in Siena, we were able to get out here.”

“Thank God,” Molly said. She continued to hold my hands, as if I would slip away from her if she didn’t.

“I immediately secured Molly’s release, and she and I flew into Milan, accompanied by a few fellows from security. Just in time, I might say.” He smacked the arms of his wheelchair. “Not too easy, in one of these. Italy doesn’t have much in the way of handicapped ramps. In any case, we had a good warning system in place. Have I told you that if you place even a single tiny drop of water at the entrance to an ant nest-”

I groaned. “Spare me the ants, Toby. I don’t have the strength.”

But he continued, ignoring my interruption: “-the worker ants will run through the nest, making alarm runs, warning of a possible imminent flood, even pointing out emergency exits. In less than half a minute a colony will begin to evacuate the nest.”

“Fascinating,” I said without much conviction.

“Forgive me, Ben. I do get carried away. In any event, your wife has been supervising Dr. Boldoni rather closely, making sure you get the best treatment.”

I turned to Molly. “I want the truth, Mol. How badly wounded am I?”

She smiled sadly, yet encouragingly. Tears still shone in her eyes. “You’ll be fine, Ben. Really, you will. I don’t want you to worry.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“You’ve got first- and second-degree burns on your arms,” she said. “It’s going to be painful, but not serious. No more than maybe fifteen percent of your body.”

“If it’s not serious, why am I rigged up to all this stuff?” I noticed for the first time that some peculiar bandage, affixed to the end of my index finger, was glowing red, like the extraterrestrial in E.T. I held it up. “What the hell is this?”

“That’s a pulse oximeter. The red glow is a laser beam. It measures your oxygen saturation, which is maintaining at ninety-seven percent. Your heart rate is a little up, around one hundred, which is to be expected.

“Ben, you sustained a mild concussion during the explosion. Dr. Boldoni suspected inhalation burns from the fire, which could have been trouble-your trachea can swell, and you can die, if you’re not watched carefully. You were coughing up some stuff-he was afraid it was charred pieces of your own trachea. But I took a good look-it was only soot, thank God. We’ve ruled out inhalation burns, but there is some smoke inhalation.”

“So what’s the treatment, Doc?”

“We’ve got you on IV fluids. D-5 one-half normal saline. With twenty of K at two hundred an hour.”

“English, please.”

“Sorry, that’s potassium. I wanted to make sure to hydrate you well, give you plenty of fluids. You’re going to have to have dressing changes every day. That white goop you can see under the bandages is Silvidene ointment.”

“You’re lucky to have your own personal physician accompanying you,” Toby said.

“Plus, you’ll need plenty of bed rest,” she concluded. “So I’ve brought you some reading material.” She presented a handful of magazines. Atop the pile was a Time magazine cover which featured a close-up photograph of Alexander Truslow. He looked good, vigorous, although the photographer seemed to have made a point of emphasizing the pouches beneath his eyes. THE CIA IN CRISIS, the cover line read, and underneath that: A NEW ERA?

“Looks like Alex hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in ten years,” I observed.

“The next picture does him more justice,” Toby said. He was right; on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, Alex Truslow, his silver hair neatly combed, was beaming proudly. “Can He Save the CIA?” the headline asked.

Beaming proudly myself, I set down the thatch of magazines. “When’s his confirmation by the Senate?”

“He’s confirmed already,” Toby replied. “The day after the appointment-the Senate intelligence committee was persuaded by the President that we need a full-time director in there as soon as possible. A lengthy confirmation process would just cause turmoil. He was confirmed by all but, I think, two votes.”

“That’s terrific,” I said. “And I’ll bet I know who his two opponents were.” I named the committee’s most outspoken extreme-right-wing senators, both from the South.

“Right you are,” Toby said. “But those clowns are going to be nothing compared to the real enemies.”

“Inside the Agency,” I said.

He nodded.

“So tell me this: Who were the thugs masquerading as Italian cops?”

“We don’t know yet. Americans. Private mercenaries is my best guess.”

“Agency?”

“You mean, were they CIA personnel? No-there’s no record of them anywhere. They’re-they were killed. There was a… rather fierce shootout. We lost two good men. We’re running prints, photos, and other essentials through the computers, see what, if anything, turns up.”

He looked at his watch. “And just about now…”

A telephone on a nearby table rang.

“That should be for you,” he said.

FORTY-ONE

It was Alex Truslow. The connection was a good one; his voice sounded so clear it had to have been electronically enhanced, indicating the line was very likely sterile.

“Thank God you’re all right,” he said.

“God, and you guys,” I replied. “You look a little ragged on the cover of Time, Alex.”

“Margaret says I look freshly embalmed. Maybe they chose such an unflattering shot because they ask if there’s going to be a new era, and they conclude: No way, this chap isn’t up to the task. You know-I’m such an old fossil. People always want new blood.”

“Well, they’re wrong. Congratulations on the confirmation.”

“The President really twisted some arms on that one. But more important, Ben, I want you to come back.”

“Why?”

“After what you’ve been through-”

“I don’t have the goods yet,” I confessed. “You told me about a fortune-we’re on secure, right?”

“We certainly are.”

“Okay. You talked about a fortune, a missing fortune, but I had no idea the magnitude of it. Or its origin.”

“Care to brief me?”

“Right now?” I looked questioningly at Toby.

He in turn glanced at Molly and said, “Would you mind terribly leaving us to talk for just a few minutes?”

Molly’s eyes were red and swollen, and tears started down her high cheekbones. She glared at him. “Yes, I would mind terribly.”

Over the phone, Alex said: “Ben?”

Toby went on apologetically: “It’s just that we need to get into some rather boring, technical things-”

“I’m sorry,” she said coldly. “I’m not leaving. We’re partners, Ben and I, and I won’t be excluded.”

There was a long silence, and then Toby said pleasantly, “So be it. But I have to count on your discretion-”

“Count on it.”

Over the telephone, and at the same time to Molly and Toby, I related the gist of what Orlov had told me. As I talked, both Toby’s and Molly’s faces registered their astonishment.

“Dear God in heaven,” Truslow breathed. “Now it makes sense. And so damned wonderful to hear! Hal Sinclair wasn’t engaging in criminal activity at all. The man was trying to save Russia. Of course. Now, please-I want you to come back.”

“Why?”

“For God’s sake, Ben, these men who subjected you to that god-awful torture-they had to be employed by the faction.”

“The Wise Men.”

“Has to be. Nothing else makes sense. Hal must have confided in someone. Someone he depended upon to help him make the elaborate arrangements with the gold. Someone he confided in was a double. How else could they have learned about the gold?”

“Same deal in Boston?”

“Possibly. No, I’d say probably.”

“But that doesn’t explain Rome,” I said.

“Van Aver,” he said. “Yes. And you ask why I’m insisting you come back.”

“Who was behind that one?”

“On that I haven’t a guess. There’s no evidence to connect it to the Wise Men, though I can’t rule it out. Certainly whoever did it knew the details of your planned meeting with him. Maybe through leakage of cable traffic between Rome and Washington. Or maybe it was local-who the hell knows?”

“Local?”

“Through monitoring of Van Aver’s phone, maybe even the telephones of everyone at Rome station. You know, there’s a good chance we’re talking about some of Orlov’s former comrades. We may never find out for sure. You know, it’s odd.”

“How’s that?”

“There was a time when I would have leapt at the opportunity to head CIA. I would have given anything for the directorship. But now-now that I have it-it feels like a death trap. The long knives are out for me. Far too many powerful people don’t want me in there. It just feels like a death trap.”

“Were you able to read Orlov’s thoughts?” Toby asked as soon as I had hung up.

I nodded. “But there was a wrinkle,” I said. “Orlov was born in the Ukraine.”

“He’s a Russian speaker!” Toby objected.

“Russian is his second language. When I realized that Orlov thought in Ukrainian, I was convinced I’d been defeated. A cruel twist. But then it came to me: That Agency fellow who tested me, Dr. Mehta, had speculated that I was receiving not thoughts per se but extremely low frequency radio waves emitted by the speech-producing center of the brain. I could, in effect, listen in on words as the brain readied them to speak-or not to speak. So I switched our conversation back and forth between English and Russian, since I knew Orlov could speak both. And that enabled me to understand what he thought, since his mind was now putting English words to his Ukrainian thoughts.”

“Yes,” Toby said, nodding. “Yes.”

“And I asked him several questions, knowing that whatever he chose to speak aloud, he would at least think the replies.”

“Very good,” Toby said.

“At times,” I said, “he was trying so hard not to reply that he was thinking the English words he didn’t want to say.”

The painkiller had begun to overwhelm me, and I was finding it hard to concentrate. I wanted nothing more now than to fall back asleep for a few days.

He shifted in his wheelchair, then moved it a few inches closer by flicking a lever. It responded with a quiet whir. “Ben, a few weeks ago a former colonel in the old Securitate”-the Romanian secret police under the late dictator Nicolae Ceauçsescu-“contacted a backstopper well known to us.” He was telling me that the Romanian had contacted a document forger who prepared bogus cover identity papers for freelance agents. “Who in turn contacted us.”

I waited for him to continue, and after a minute or so, he did. “We brought the Romanian in. Under intensive interrogation it developed that he knew of a plot to kill certain highly placed American intelligence officials.”

“Whose plot?”

“We don’t know.”

“Who was targeted?”

“We don’t know that either.”

“And you think it’s connected to the diverted gold?”

“It’s possible. Now, tell me this: Did Orlov tell you where that ten billion dollars was stashed?”

“No.”

“Do you think he knew and didn’t want to say?”

“No,” I said.

“He didn’t give you an access code or anything?”

He was visibly disappointed. “Isn’t it possible that Sinclair, in effect, pulled off a grand swindle? You know, told Orlov that he was going along with this scheme to remove ten billion dollars in gold, and then-”

“And then what?” Molly interjected. She gazed at him with a ferocious intensity. Two tiny red spots appeared on her cheeks, and I knew she had heard more than she could stand. She whispered, almost hissed: “My father was a wonderful man and a good man. He was as honest and as straight as they come. For God’s sake, the worst thing you could say about him was that he was too much of a straight arrow.”

“Molly-” Toby began.

“I was in the back of a cab with him in Washington once when he found a twenty-dollar bill wedged into the seat and gave it to the driver. He said maybe whoever lost it would realize it and contact the cab company or something. I said, Dad, the cabbie’s just going to pocket it-”

“Molly,” Toby said, touching her on the hand. His eyes were sad. “We must consider every possibility, no matter how unlikely.”

Molly fell silent. Her lower lip quivered. I found myself trying to tune in on her thoughts, but she was a little too far away, and I couldn’t summon the mental energy. To be honest, I had no idea whether this strange gift was still with me. Maybe the experience in the burning rat house had knocked it out of me as suddenly as it had appeared. I think I wouldn’t have minded very much if it was gone.

Whatever she was thinking, she was thinking with great passion. But in any case, I could imagine the turmoil she was going through, and I just wanted to leap out of bed and put my arms around her and comfort her. I hated seeing her like this. Instead, I lay there in the bed, arms bandaged, my head fuzzier by the minute.

“I don’t think so, Toby,” I said musingly. “Molly’s right: it doesn’t fit what we know of Hal’s character.”

“But we’re back to where we started from,” he said.

“No,” I replied. “Orlov did supply me with one lead.”

“Oh?”

“‘Follow the gold,’ he said. ‘Follow the gold.’ And he was thinking a city name.”

“Zurich? Geneva?”

“No. Brussels. There are ways, Toby. Since Belgium isn’t known as a major gold center, it can’t be all that difficult to figure out where in Brussels ten billion dollars worth of gold might be hidden.”

“I’ll take care of your flight arrangements,” Toby said.

“No!” Molly exclaimed. “He’s not going anywhere. He needs at least a week of bed rest.”

I shook my head wearily. “No, Mol. If we don’t track it down, Alex Truslow is next. And then us. It’s the easiest thing in the world to arrange ‘accidents.’”

“If I let you leave this bed, I’m violating my Hippocratic oath-”

“Screw the Hippocratic oath,” I said. “Our lives are in danger. An immense fortune is at stake, and if we don’t find it… you won’t be around to live up to that goddamned oath.”

Almost under his breath, I heard Toby say, “I’m with you,” and with a high-pitched electric whine he began slowly to wheel away.

The room was quiet and peaceful. In the city, we become so habituated to the city’s noises that we no longer hear them. But here, in a remote part of northern Italy, there was no noise outside. From the window I could see, in the pale Tuscan afternoon light, a field of tall, dead sunflowers, shriveled brown stalks bowing in pious rows.

Toby had left Molly and me alone to talk. She sat on my bed, absently stroking my feet through the blanket.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“I accept your apology.”

“I hope it’s not true about your father.”

“But in your heart-”

“In my heart I don’t believe he did anything wrong. But we have to find out.”

Molly looked around the room, then gazed out the window at the spectacular view of Tuscan hills. “You know, I could live here.”

“So could I.”

“Really? Could we, do you think?”

“You mean like, I open the Tuscany office of Putnam & Stearns? Come on.”

“But given your talent for making money…” She smiled wryly. “We could just move here. You quit the law, we live happily ever after…”

A long silence, and then she continued: “I want to go with you. To Brussels.”

“Molly, it’s not safe.”

“I can be of help. You know that. Anyway, you shouldn’t travel unless accompanied by a physician. Not in your condition.”

“Why aren’t you objecting anymore to my traveling?” I said.

“Because I know it’s not true about Dad. And I want you to prove it.”

“But can you deal with the possibility-even the likelihood-that if I find anything, it may not make your father look good?”

“My father’s dead, Ben. The worst has already happened. Nothing you find’s going to undo that.”

“All right,” I said. “Okay.” My eyelids were beginning to close, and I couldn’t gather the strength to fight it any longer. “But now let me sleep.”

“I’ll call ahead and find us a hotel in Brussels,” I heard her say from a million miles away. Fine, I thought; let her do that.

“Alex Truslow warned me of snakes in the garden,” I whispered. “And… and I’m beginning to wonder… whether Toby is that snake.”

“Ben, I found something. Something that might help us.” She said something else, but I couldn’t make it out, and then her voice seemed to fade away.

A little bit later-perhaps minutes, perhaps seconds-I thought I heard Molly slip quietly out of the room. I heard the bleat of lambs from somewhere far away, and very soon I was fast asleep.

FORTY-TWO

Toby Thompson saw us off at the entrance to the Swissair terminal in Milan’s international airport. Molly gave him a kiss, I shook his hand, and then we passed through the metal-detector gate. A few minutes later came the boarding call for Swissair’s flight to Brussels. At the same moment, I knew, Toby was boarding a flight to Washington.

The painkiller that had kept me afloat for the last two days had begun to wear off (though I still felt too woolly-headed to “read” Toby). I knew it was better to get off the stuff if I wished to remain alert. Now, my arms, particularly the insides of my forearms, felt as if they were on fire. They throbbed, each pulse sending knives of pain all the way to my shoulder. And on top of it all, since the painkiller had worn off, I’d had a terrible, unceasing headache.

Still, I was able to lift my two carry-on bags (neither of us checked any luggage) and make it to my seat without too much pain. Toby had purchased first-class tickets for us and provided us with fresh passports. We were now Carl and Margaret Osborne, owners of a small but prosperous gift shop in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

I had a window seat, as I’d requested, and I watched closely as the Swissair maintenance crew on the tarmac bustled here and there, completing their last-minute checks. My body was taut with tension. The front entrance to the plane from the Jetway had been closed and sealed a few minutes earlier. The first-class area afforded me an excellent vantage point from which to watch. Just as I saw the last crew member leave the cockpit area and descend the service steps toward the tarmac, I began to scream.

Thrusting my bandaged arms up in the air, I yelled: “Let me out of here! My God! Oh, my God! Let me out!”

“What is it?” Molly shrieked at me.

Virtually all the passengers in the first-class cabin had turned toward us. They stared in horror. A flight attendant ran down the aisle toward me.

“Oh, Jesus,” I shouted. “I’ve got to get off-now!”

“Sir, I’m sorry,” the flight attendant said. She was tall and blond, with a plain, mannish, no-nonsense face. “We’re not allowed to let passengers deplane at takeoff. Is there anything we can do for you-”

“What is it?” Molly asked me.

“Let me out!” I stood up. “I have to get out of here. The pain is incredible!”

“Sir!” the Swiss woman protested.

“Get our bags!” I commanded Molly. My arms still thrust in the air, moaning and keening, I began to shove my way into the aisle. Molly quickly grabbed our bags from the overhead compartment, and somehow managed to wriggle the shoulder straps of two of the valises over each of her slight shoulders and, at the same time, grab the others with her hands. She followed me down the aisle, toward the front of the plane.

But the flight attendant blocked our way. “Sir! Madam! I’m terribly sorry, but regulations stipulate-”

An elderly woman screamed out in terror: “Let him out of here!”

“My God,” I shouted.

“Sir, the plane is about to take off!”

“Move! Out of our way!” It was Molly, ferocious in her anger. “I’m his physician! If you don’t let us off of this plane at once, you’ll have a goddamn huge lawsuit on your hands. I mean you personally, lady-and you’ll take the whole goddamned airline down with you, do you understand me?”

The Swiss woman’s eyes widened as she backed down the aisle and then flattened herself against one row of seats to let us pass by. With Molly in tow, struggling mightily with our luggage, I ran down the service stairway, which was, thank God, still bolted to the side of the plane.

We ran across the tarmac and reentered the terminal. There, I grabbed all the bags from Molly-it was painful, but I was certainly able to do it-and pulled her toward me as I ran to the Swissair ticket counter.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Quiet… Just-quiet for a while!”

The Swissair ticket agents, fortunately, hadn’t seen where we had come from. I pulled out a wad of cash (courtesy, too, of Toby) and bought two first-class tickets to Zurich. The flight was leaving in ten minutes.

We would just make it.

Although the Swissair flight from Milan to Zurich was pleasant and uneventful-I’ve always preferred Swissair to any other airline-I found myself in almost constant physical agony.

I nursed a Bloody Mary and tried to make my mind a blank. Molly was fast asleep. Before getting on the plane, even before the whole business with switching flights, she’d complained of feeling ill, queasy. She dismissed it as insignificant, though: some bug she’d picked up on the flight over to Italy in what she called a “toothpaste tube” and a “Petri dish” of a 747. She obviously didn’t much like to fly.

I had decided that it would be folly to trust Toby at this point. Perhaps I was being overly suspicious. But we could no longer take chances, and if Toby were the serpent in the garden…

Hence my telling him that I was headed to Brussels. No, Orlov had not thought “Brussels,” but only I knew that. In an hour or so, I was sure, CIA personnel in Brussels would realize that Mr. and Mrs. Carl Osborne had not arrived from Milan, and alarms would go off. So this was at best a temporary diversion; but it was better than nothing.

Follow the gold, Orlov had called out to me a few seconds before his gruesome murder. Follow the gold.

I knew now what he had meant. At least I thought I did. He and Sinclair had transacted their business in Zurich. He hadn’t told me the name of the bank, but he had thought something, thought a name. Koerfer: it had to be a name. Was it the name of a bank? Or an individual? I would have to locate the bank in Zurich where the two spymasters had met.

Follow the gold meant follow the paper trail, which was the only way to learn the nature of the beast that had killed Sinclair. And most likely, the only way for Molly and me to remain alive.

I tried to relax. One of the first questions he’d asked me, after we had finished the debriefing, was whether my… ability, as he delicately put it, had survived the fire intact. And the truth was, I didn’t know what to answer then; I didn’t yet have the strength, or the will, necessary to concentrate sufficiently.

Now, however, I gathered my resources, and as Molly slept, I tried. My head ached-worse now, it seemed, than any headache I’d ever had before. Was this related to the injuries I’d sustained in the fire?

Or, more ominously, did it have something to do with the power I’d acquired in the Oracle Project’s laboratory? Was something beginning to degenerate, to go wrong? Who was it-Rossi? Toby?-who had mentioned, ever so casually, that the only person on whom the protocol had worked, the Dutchman, had gone crazy? The clamor in his head had driven him to suicide. I began to understand the impulse.

Yet at the same time I worried that this damned telepathic ability, which had gotten me into all this, after all, might no longer be with me.

So I furrowed my brow, squinted my eyes, frowned, tried to make my mind receptive, and found it difficult. I was surrounded by sound, which made it maddeningly difficult to separate out the ELF waves. There was the noise of the plane’s engines, muffled and droning and lulling; the mostly indistinct chatter of nearby passengers; a loud, whooping laugh from somewhere back in the smoking section; an infant wailing a few seats behind us; the clatter and clink of the serving carts moving down the aisle, loaded with miniature bottles and cans.

Asleep next to me was Molly, but I didn’t particularly want to violate my pledge to her. The nearest fellow passenger-this was first class, after all-was a good distance away.

Furtively, I bent my head toward Molly, focused, and heard her murmur something aloud. She shifted suddenly, as if she’d detected my proximity, and opened her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Checking on you,” I said quickly.

“Oh, yeah?”

“How do you feel?”

“Lousy. Queasy still.”

“Sorry.”

“Thanks. It’ll pass.” She sat up slowly, massaged her neck. “Ben, do you have a clear idea what you’re going to be doing in Zurich?”

“Fairly,” I said. “The rest I’ll play by ear.”

She nodded, touched my right hand. “How’s the pain?”

“Subsiding,” I lied.

“Good. I mean, a nice try at playing the macho man, but I know how badly it hurts. Tonight, if you’d like, I’ll give you something to help you sleep. The nights are the worst, when you can’t stop yourself from rolling over on your arms.”

“Won’t be necessary.”

“Just let me know.”

“I will.”

“Ben?” I looked at her. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “Ben, I had a dream about Dad. But you probably know that.”

“I told you, Molly, I won’t-”

“Never mind. This dream I had… You know all those places we lived when I was growing up-Afghanistan, the Philippines, Egypt? From as early as I can remember, I felt his absence. I guess that’s pretty common among CIA brats-Dad’s always gone, and you don’t know where, or why, or what he does, and your friends are always asking why’s your dad never there, you know? It always seemed like Dad wasn’t around-it wasn’t until much later that I understood why-but I remember thinking that if I were just nicer to Mom, he’d spend more time at home playing with me. When I got older, and he told me he worked for the CIA, I took it okay-I think I’d pretty much figured it out, and a couple of my friends had already speculated as much to me. But it didn’t make it easier.”

She slowly tipped her seat back until it was almost horizontal, then closed her eyes, as if she were in analysis. “When he went overt, when he was publicly identified as a CIA officer, it wasn’t any easier then either. He worked all the time, a real slave to his career. So what did I do? I became a slave to my career, went into medicine, which in some ways is even worse.”

I noticed she’d begun to cry, which I attributed to her being tired, or the trauma we’d both just been through.

She continued, heaving a soulful sigh. “I guess I always thought that he and I would get to know each other better after he retired, and when I had a family. And now-” Her voice got small, choked, high-pitched. A little girl again. “And now, I’ll never…”

She couldn’t continue, but I stroked her hair to let her know she didn’t need to.

The last time I saw Molly’s father was on a business trip to Washington. He had been Director of Central Intelligence for several months. I was in Washington on legal business. There was no good reason for me to call him from the Jefferson, where I was staying. Probably I wanted, on some level, to share in the excitement of Hal’s new importance, of having my father-in-law in such a prominent office. Selfish? Naturally. I wanted to bask in the reflected glory. No doubt, too, I wanted to return to CIA headquarters in some triumphal manner, even if the triumph was someone else’s.

On the phone Hal said he’d be delighted to get together for a quick lunch or a drink (he’d become a health fanatic, had given up all alcohol; he’d drink some nonalcoholic beer or his favorite pseudo-cocktail, cranberry juice, seltzer, and lime).

He sent a car and a driver for me to take me to McLean, which made me nervous: what if The Washington Post caught wind of Hal’s abuse of office? Harrison Sinclair, that avatar of rectitude, had sent a government limo, at taxpayer expense, to pick up his son-in-law. Who could have gotten a cab. Would I see my picture on the front page of tomorrow’s Post, getting into a big black government limo?

Unlike my last time at CIA, when I skulked out with a cardboard box under one arm, trudging alone through the cavernous lobby to the parking lot, this time was indeed triumphal. I was met in the lobby by Sheila McAdams, Hal’s thirtyish, attractive executive assistant, who brought me up the elevator to Hal’s office.

He radiated good health. He really did seem delighted to see me. Part of it, I think, was that he was excited to show off his new digs. We had lunch in his private dining room: Greek salads and grilled-eggplant sandwiches and tall, icy glasses of cranberry juice, seltzer, and lime.

We talked for a bit, perfunctorily, about the business that had brought me to Washington. We talked about how the Agency had changed since the demise of the Soviet Union, about what he planned to do in his tenure as director. We gossiped about people we knew. A little political talk. Altogether, a pleasant if unremarkable lunch.

But I will never forget something he said as I left. As I walked out, he put his arm around my shoulders and said: “I know we haven’t ever talked about what happened in Paris.”

I looked quizzical.

“What happened to you, I mean-”

“Yes-” I said.

“Someday I want us to talk,” he said. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

I felt instantly nauseated. “Let’s talk now,” I said.

I was relieved when he said, “I can’t.”

“Your schedule must be-”

“Not just that. I can’t. We’ll talk. Not now, but soon.”

We never did.

When Molly and I arrived at Kloten airport, we took a Mercedes taxi into the center of Zurich. We passed the mammoth, newly renovated Hauptbahnhof, swerved around the statue of Alfred Escher, the nineteenth-century politician who’s credited with making Zurich a modern banking center.

I had booked us at the Savoy Baur en Ville, the oldest hotel in the city and a favorite among well-to-do American lawyers and businessmen. It had been nicely renovated, in 1975, and was right on the Paradeplatz, near everything-and, most important, next to the Bahnhofstrasse, where nearly every other building is a bank.

We signed in, and went up to our room, which was pleasant-a lot of brass and pearwood marquetry cabinets-and neither modern nor antique. We talked for a while until we were both too drowsy to continue. Once again she offered to get me a sedative; I refused. I watched Molly begin to drift off; I tried to join her. I desperately needed sleep, but it wouldn’t come. The pain in my hands and arms was surging with a tingling heat, and my mind was spinning with the events, the revelations, of the last several days.

In one of the vaults under the Bahnhofstrasse, just a few yards from our hotel, lay the answer to what had happened to more than ten billion dollars in gold stolen from the former Soviet Union, the answer to the enigma of Sinclair’s death. In a few hours, quite likely, we’d be much closer to solving the mystery. I wished it were morning already.

On the end table next to the base of the lamp was the International Herald-Tribune the hotel had left for us in the room. I picked it up and idly scanned the front page.

One of the articles, a one-column piece on the right-hand side of the page, was headed by a photograph of a face that was by now quite familiar. Although I was not surprised to see the notice there, its contents were ominous.

Last KGB Chief

Is Found Slain

in Northern Italy

BY CRAIG RIMER

WASHINGTON POST SERVICE

ROME-Vladimir A. Orlov, the last head of the Soviet intelligence agency the KGB, was discovered dead by local police at his residence 25 kilometers from Siena. He was 72.

Diplomatic sources here revealed that Mr. Orlov had been in hiding in the Tuscany region of Italy for several months since his defection from Russia.

Italian authorities confirm that Mr. Orlov was killed in an armed attack. His assailants have not been identified, but are believed to be either political enemies or members of the Sicilian Mafia. According to unconfirmed reports, Mr. Orlov may have been engaged in illicit financial operations before his death.

The Russian government refused to comment on Mr. Orlov’s death, but in a statement released this morning from Washington, the newly appointed head of the CIA, Alexander Truslow, said: “Vladimir Orlov presided over the dismantling of the greatest agency of Soviet oppression, for which we must all be grateful. We mourn his passing.”

I sat up in bed, my heart pounding along with my throbbing head, hands, and arms. The adjacent article concerned the new leader of Germany. “Vogel,” the headline read, “Embraces American Ties.”

It began: “Chancellor-elect Wilhelm Vogel of Germany, whose recent landslide election occurred just days after the German stock market crash plunged the nation into widespread panic, has invited the newly confirmed head of the CIA, Alexander Truslow, to Germany for consultations on how best to ensure stable U.S.-German relations. The new intelligence chief accepted the invitation immediately as his first official state visit, and is believed to be flying to Bonn for a meeting with the chancellor-elect as well as Mr. Truslow’s German counterpart, the director of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or the German Federal Intelligence Service, Hans Koenig…”

And I knew that Truslow was in danger.

It was the juxtaposition.

Vladimir Orlov had warned about hard-line Russians seizing his country. What was it that my British correspondent friend Miles Preston had said about a weak Russia being necessary for a strong Germany? Orlov, who with Harrison Sinclair had tried to save Russia, was dead. A new German leader had been vaulted into power in the wake of a weakened, straitened Russia.

Conspiracy theorists, of whom (as I’ve said) I’m not one, like to write and talk about neo-Nazis, as if all of Germany wanted nothing more than a return to the Third Reich. It’s nonsense, absolute foolishness-the Germans I came to know, eventually to like, during my brief sojourn in Leipzig, were nothing like that. They weren’t Nazis, or brownshirts; they weren’t swastika-wearers, or anything of the sort. They were good, decent, patriotic people, no different in essence from the average Russian, the average American, the average Swede, the average Cambodian.

But the point wasn’t the people, was it?

Germany, man, Miles had said. The wave of the future. We’re about to see a new German dictatorship. And it won’t happen accidentally, Ben. It’s been in the planning for a good long time.

In the planning…

And Toby had warned of an impending assassination plot.

And then a light went on, a flash of illumination in the murky darkness, a brief moment of insight.

It was the picture of the slain Vladimir Orlov that did it. He had talked about the American stock market crash of 1987.

A stock market “crash,” to use your word, is not necessarily a disaster to one who is prepared for it. Very much the opposite; a group of savvy investors can make huge profits in a stock market crash…

Did the Wise Men, I had asked, make money in the stock market collapse?

Certainly, he had replied. Using computerized program trading and fourteen hundred separate trading accounts, calibrating precisely with Tokyo’s Nikkei and pulling the levers at exactly the right time, and with the right velocity, they not only made vast sums of money in the crash, Mr. Ellison, they caused it.

If the Wise Men had caused the significant-yet, at the same time, relatively benign stock market crisis of 1987-

– had they done the same in Germany?

There was, Alex had warned darkly, a cancer of corruption in CIA. A corruption that included gathering and using top-secret economic intelligence from around the world to manipulate stock markets, and thus nations.

Could this be?

And could, therefore, there be a darker motive for Chancellor-elect Vogel’s invitation to Alexander Truslow to visit Germany?

What if there were protests in Bonn against this American spy chief? After all, neo-Nazi demonstrations were in the news constantly. Who would be all that surprised if Alexander Truslow were slain by German “extremists”? It was a perfect, logical plan.

Alex, who must certainly know too much about the Wise Men, about the German stock market crash…

It was nine o’clock in the evening in Washington by the time I reached Miles Preston.

“The German stock market crash?” he echoed gruffly as if I had taken leave of my senses. “Ben, the German crash happened because the Germans finally formed a single, unified stock market, the Deutsche Börse. It couldn’t have happened four years ago. Now tell me: What brings about this interest in the German economy all of a sudden?”

“I can’t say, Miles-”

“But what are you doing? You’re in Europe somewhere, am I right? Where?”

“Let’s just say Europe, and leave it at that.”

“What are you looking into?”

“Sorry.”

“Ben Ellison-we’re friends. Level with me.”

“If I could, I would. But I can’t.”

“Look here-all right, fair enough. If you’re going to stay with it, at least let me help you. I’ll ask around, dig around for you, talk to some friends. Tell me where I can reach you.”

“Can’t-”

“Then you call me-”

“I’ll be in touch, Miles,” I said, and terminated the call.

Only then did I begin to have an inkling.

For a long while I sat there, on the edge of the bed, staring out the window at the elegant view of the Paradeplatz, the buildings glinting in the sunshine, and I was momentarily paralyzed with a great, dull terror.

FORTY-THREE

I didn’t sleep; I couldn’t.

Instead, I placed a call to one of the several lawyers I knew in Zurich, and was fortunate enough to find him in town, and in his office. John Knapp was an attorney specializing in corporate law-the only practice duller than patent law, which pleased me. He had been living in Zurich, working for an outpost of a prestigious American law firm, for five years or so. He also knew more about the Swiss banking system than anyone I knew, having studied at the University of Zurich and supervised quite a few less-than-reputable secret transactions for some of his clients. Knapp and I had known each other since law school, where we were in the same year and section, and we occasionally played squash together. I suspected that deep down he disliked me as much as I disliked him, but our business dealings frequently brought us together, and so we both faked an easygoing, boisterous comradeship so integral to male friendships.

I left a note for the sleeping Molly, telling her I’d be back in an hour or two. Then, in front of the hotel I got into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the Kronenhalle on Ramistrasse.

John Knapp was a short, slim man with a terminal case of short man’s disease. Like a chihuahua trying to menace a Saint Bernard, he swaggered and affected imperious gestures that were faintly ridiculous, cartoonlike. He had small brown eyes and close-cropped brown hair speckled with gray, cut in bangs that made him look like a dissolute monk. After all this time in Zurich, he’d begun to take on the local coloration and dress like a Swiss banker, he wore an English-tailored blue suit and burgundy-striped shirt that probably came from Charvet in Paris; certainly his woven silk cuff links did. He’d arrived fifteen minutes late-almost certainly a deliberate power move. This was a guy who’d read all the books on power and success and how to do a power lunch and how to get a corner office.

The bar at the Kronenhalle was so crowded I could barely squeeze through to get a seat. But the patrons were clearly the right sort of people, the Zurich glitterati. Knapp, who liked high living, collected places like this. He regularly skied at St. Moritz and Gstaad.

“Jesus, what happened to your hands?” he asked as he shook my bandaged right hand a little too firmly and saw me wince.

“Bad manicure,” I said.

His look of horror transformed instantly into one of exaggerated hilarity. “You sure it’s not paper cuts from your exciting life of thumbing through patent applications?”

I smiled, tempted to unleash my arsenal of put-downs (corporate lawyers are especially vulnerable, I’ve learned), but said nothing. It’s important to keep in mind, I think, that a bore is someone who talks when you want him to listen. And in any case, within a moment he’d forgotten all about the bandaged hands.

After we’d gotten through the preliminaries, he asked, “So what the hell brings you to Z-town?”

I was drinking a Scotch; he made a point of ordering a kirschwasser in Schweitzerdeutsch, the Swiss dialect of German.

“This time, I’m afraid, I’m going to have to be a little circumspect,” I said. “Business.”

“Ah-ha,” he said significantly. No doubt he’d heard from one or another of our mutual friends that I’d done time in the Agency. Probably he thought that was the key to my legal success (and, of course, he wouldn’t be so far off). In any case, I figured that with Knapp it was better to be mysterious than to give a bland cover tale.

I pretended to relent a bit. “I’ve got a client who has assets here he’s trying to locate.”

“Isn’t that sort of outside your line of work?”

“Not entirely. It’s related to a deal my firm is putting together. If you don’t mind, I can’t say a whole lot more than that.”

He pursed his lips and grinned, as if he knew more about what I was alluding to than even I did. “Let’s hear it.”

So high was the ambient noise level here that the thought of trying to read his mind was preposterous. I did try in a few instances, leaning toward him, focusing as hard as I could, but nothing. Still, there was nothing I wanted to know from him that he wouldn’t say aloud. To say nothing of how banal, how mind-numbingly and teeth-achingly dull Knapp’s thoughts surely were.

“How much do you know about gold?”

“How much do you want to know?”

“I’m trying to track down a deposit of gold made to one of the banks here.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know.”

He snorted derisively. “There’re four hundred banks registered here, big guy. Almost five thousand branch offices. And there’re millions of ounces of new gold coming into Switzerland every year, from South Africa or wherever. Good luck.”

“Which ones are the biggest?”

“The biggest banks? The Big Three-the Anstalt, the Verein, and the Gesellschaft.”

“Hmm?”

“Sorry. The Anstalt’s what we call Credit Suisse, or Schweizerische Kreditanstalt. The Verein is the Swiss Bank Corporation. The Gesellschaft is the Union Bank of Switzerland. So you’re looking for gold deposited in one of the big three, only you don’t know which one?”

“Right.”

“How much gold?”

“Tons.”

“Tons?” Another snort. “I doubt it seriously. What are we talking about here, a country?”

I shook my head. “A prosperous enterprise.”

He gave a low whistle. A blond woman in a pale green, tight-fitting, spaghetti-strap outfit glanced over at him, mistakenly thinking she was being admired, then quickly looked away. Presumably she had no interest in a dissolute monk in a blue suit. “So what’s the problem?” he asked, draining his kirschwasser and snapping his fingers at the waiter to signal for another. “Someone misplaced the account number?”

“Stay with me for a second,” I said. I was beginning to sound like Knapp, and I didn’t like it. “If a significant amount of gold were shipped into Zurich and placed into a numbered account, where would it go, physically?”

“Vaults. It’s an increasing problem for the banks here, actually. They’ve got all this money and gold to stash, and they’re running out of space and the municipal laws won’t permit them to put up taller buildings, so they have to burrow underground like gophers.”

“Under the Bahnhofstrasse.”

“Exactly.”

“But wouldn’t it be more convenient to sell the gold here, put it into liquid assets? Deutsche marks, Swiss francs, whatever?”

“Not quite. The Swiss government is terrified of inflation, so they have limits on the amount of cash foreigners can keep. There even used to be a limit of a hundred thousand francs on foreign accounts.”

“Gold doesn’t earn interest, right?”

“Of course not,” Knapp said. “But come on, you don’t bank in Switzerland to earn interest, for Christ’s sake. Their interest rates are, like, one percent. Or zero. Sometimes you have to pay for the privilege of keeping your money here. I’m not kidding. Lots of the banks charge something like one and a half percent for all withdrawals.”

“All right. Now, you can tell by looking at gold where it’s from, isn’t that right?”

“Usually. Gold-the sort of gold that central banks use as their monetary reserves-is kept in the form of gold ingots, usually four hundred troy ounces per bar. Usually ‘three nines’ gold, which means it’s 99.9 percent pure. And usually it’s earmarked, stamped with numbers and assay numbers, the ID and serial numbers.” The waiter came with his kirschwasser, and Knapp took it without acknowledging where it had materialized from. “For every ten bars of gold that are poured, one is assayed, by drilling holes in six different locations on the bar, taking a few milligrams of shavings, and assaying it. Anyway, yeah, most gold bars you can tell where they’re from.”

He chuckled, sipped his drink thoughtfully. “You should try this stuff. You really get to like it. Anyway, the gold market is a funny, high-strung thing. I remember when the gold market went crazy not too long ago. The Soviets were trying to sell a shipment of gold bars here, and someone noticed that some of the bars had czarist eagles on them. The gnomes flipped out.”

“Why?”

“Come on, big guy. This was back in Christmas 1990. Gold bars with Romanoff eagles on it! The Gorby government was in the process of going down the tubes and was selling off the last of its gold! Scraping the bottom of the barrel! Why else would they be dipping into the czarist reserves? So the price of gold shot up fifty bucks an ounce.”

I froze in mid-sip, felt the blood rush to my head. “Then what?” I asked.

“Then what? Then nothing. It turned out to be an elaborate hoax. A pretty sophisticated bit of financial disinformation on the part of the Sovs. Turned out they’d mixed a few old czarist bars in the pile deliberately. Watched the market go haywire, as they knew it would, then unloaded their gold at the higher price. Pretty clever, huh? The Sovs weren’t total numbskulls.”

I thought in silence for a moment. What if it hadn’t been disinformation? I wondered. What if… But I couldn’t make any sense of this. Instead, I set my glass down and continued, as unflustered-seeming as possible: “So can gold be laundered?”

He paused a moment. “Yeah… sure. You just melt it down-re-refine it, re-assay it, get rid of the earmarks. If you’re trying to be secretive about it, it’s sort of a pain in the ass to move it around and get it done, but it’s possible. And it’s cheap. Gold’s completely fungible. But Ben, I don’t get this. You’re looking for a huge load of gold that belongs to one of your clients, and you don’t know where it is?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that. I can’t be too specific. Tell me this: When you talk about the secrecy of Swiss banking, what does that mean? How difficult is it to penetrate the secrecy?”

“Whoa,” Knapp said. “Sounds a little cloak-and-dagger to me.”

I glared at him, and he replied, “It ain’t easy, Ben. Some of the most revered words in this town are ‘the principle of confidentiality’ and ‘the freedom of currency exchange.’ Translation: the inalienable right to hide money. That’s their reason for being. Money is their religion. I mean, when Huldrych Zwingli launched the Reformation of Zurich by chucking all the Catholic statues into the Limmat River, he made sure first to salvage the gold from the statues and give it to the town council. Thus giving birth to Swiss banking.

“But the Swiss-well, you gotta love ’em. They’re mad about secrecy, unless it benefits them to break confidentiality. Mafiosi, drug kingpins, corrupt third-world dictators with briefcases full of embezzled funds-the Swiss protect their secrecy like a priest in a confessional. But don’t forget, when the Nazis came during the war and started putting pressure on them, suddenly the Swiss got real accommodating. They gave the Nazis the names of the German Jews who had Swiss accounts. They like to spread this myth that they stood up to the Nazis, real steadfastlike, when they came to grab the Jews’ money, but no way. Unh-unh. Okay, not all the banks, but a lot. The Basler Handelsbank laundered Nazi money, and that’s a documented fact.” His eyes were roaming the crowd as if he were searching for someone. “Look, Ben, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

I nodded, traced a pattern in the condensation on the side of the glass. “Well,” I said, “I have a name.”

“A name?”

“A banker’s name, I think.” A name, I didn’t say, that Orlov had thought in connection with the gold and Zurich. “Koerfer.”

“Well, all right,” he said triumphantly. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? Dr. Ernst Koerfer’s the managing director of the Bank of Zurich. Or, at least, he was, until a month or so ago.”

“Retired?”

“Died. Heart attack or something. Although I wouldn’t swear for the fact that he had a heart. A real son of a bitch. But he ran a tight ship.”

“Ah,” I said. “Do you know anyone who’s at the Bank of Zurich now?”

He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Come on, big guy. I know everyone in Swiss banking. That’s my job, man. The new managing director there is a guy named Eisler. Dr. Alfred Eisler. If you want, I can make a call, set up an introduction for you. You want that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.”

“No problem.”

“Thanks, big guy,” I said.

Procuring a gun in Switzerland proved to be more of a challenge than I’d anticipated. My contacts were limited, virtually nonexistent. I was afraid to contact Toby or anyone connected with the CIA; there was no one here I trusted. If absolutely necessary, I could reach Truslow, but that route was to be avoided: how could I be sure that the channels of communication hadn’t been penetrated? Far better not to call him. Finally, after bribing a manager of a sporting goods and hunting supply store, I got the name of someone who might be able to “help” me: the manager’s brother-in-law, who ran, of all things, an antiquarian bookshop.

I found it a few blocks away. Gilt letters in the window, in old-style German Fraktur script, read:

BUCHHÄNDLER ANTIQUITÄTEN UND MANUSKRIPTE

A bell mounted on the door jingled as I entered. It was small and dark and redolent of mildew and dankness and the vanilla smell of ancient, crumbling bookbindings.

High black metal shelves, overcrowded with haphazard stacks of books and yellowed magazines, took up virtually every available square inch of floor space. A narrow path between the shelves led back to a small, chaotic-looking oak desk piled high with papers and books, at which sat the proprietor. He called out, “Guten Tag!”

I nodded a greeting and, peering around as if searching for a particular volume, asked the shopkeeper in German: “How late are you open?”

“Until seven,” he replied.

“I’ll be back when I have more time.”

“But if you have just a few minutes,” he said, “I have some new acquisitions in the back room.” He got up, locked the front door, and placed a Closed sign in the window. Then he led me back to a tiny, cluttered room piled high with crumbling leather-bound books. In several shoe boxes he had a pitifully small selection of guns, the best of them being a Ruger Mark II (a decent semiautomatic but only a.22), a Smith & Wesson, and a Glock 19. I chose the Glock. It is a gun that has had more than its share of problems, or so my Agency friends tell me, but I’ve always liked it. The price was exorbitant, but this was Switzerland, after all.

Throughout dinner at the Agnes Amberg on Hottingerstrasse, neither one of us brought up what was weighing so heavily on each other’s minds. It was as if we both needed to take a tension break and be ordinary tourists for a little while. With my hands bandaged I found it difficult, and not a little painful, to cut into my fowl.

Follow the gold…

I had a name now, and a bank. I was several steps closer.

Once I had a direction, a path, I might come closer to learning why Sinclair was killed-that is, what conspiracy had to be covered up. Whether my midnight epiphany would be borne out.

We sat in glum silence. Then, before I could say anything, Molly said, “You know, this is a place where women didn’t get the right to vote until 1969.”

“What about it?”

“And I thought the medical profession in the U.S. didn’t take women seriously. I’ll never say that again after the doctor I saw today.”

“You saw a doctor?” I said, although I knew. “About the stomach thing?”

“Yep.”

“And?”

“And,” she said, folding her white linen napkin neatly, “I’m pregnant. But you knew that.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I knew that.”

FORTY-FOUR

We could barely make it back to the hotel, Molly and I. There is something about the joy-and the terror-of discovering you are creating a human being that can be quite arousing, and that night we were both certainly feeling amorous. Although Laura had been pregnant with our child, I hadn’t known that while she was alive. So this was a first for me. And as far as Molly was concerned-well, for years she’d been sounding so antiprocreation that I fully expected her to be morose and even talk about getting rid of the child or something awful like that.

But no. She was thrilled, overjoyed. Did it have something to do with the recent loss of her father? Probably, but who really knows the workings of the unconscious mind?

She was tearing the clothes off me before we had the hotel room door closed. She was running her hands across my chest, under my belt to my buttocks, and then sliding them around to the front, all the while kissing me wildly. I responded with no less passion, tugging at her cream silk blouse, fumbling impatiently with the buttons (a few of which popped off onto the carpet), and reaching in to stroke her breasts, her nipples, which were already erect. Then, remembering my burned and bandaged hands, I instead used my tongue, licking in tighter and tighter concentric circles toward her nipples. She shuddered. With my shoulders and upper body-my throbbing arms averted like pegged lobster claws-I pushed her backward onto the enormous sleigh bed and fell on top of her. But she would not be dominated so easily. We tussled, wrestled with an aggressiveness I’d never before seen in our lovemaking but found I was enjoying immensely. Even before I entered her, she was moaning and groaning with pleasure, and anticipated pleasure.

And afterward, as they say, we lay there enjoying the sweatiness and stickiness and muskiness and the warm glow, stroking each other, talking quietly.

“When did it happen?” I asked. I remembered when we made love, shortly after I’d become telepathic, and we were both so aroused that she hadn’t put in her diaphragm. But that was too recent.

“Last month,” she said. “I didn’t think anything would happen.”

“You forgot?”

“Partly.”

I smiled at her subterfuge, not at all resentful. “You see,” I said, “people our age try and try and try to conceive, buying ovulation kits and books and all that. And then you go and forget to put in your diaphragm once, and it happens by accident.”

She nodded and smiled enigmatically. “Not entirely by accident.”

“I wondered.”

She shrugged. “Should we have talked about it in advance?”

“Probably,” I said. “But that’s okay with me.”

Another pause, and then she said: “How’s the burn?”

“Fine,” I said. “Natural endorphins are great painkillers.”

She hesitated, as if screwing up her courage to say something important. I could not help hearing a phrase-horrible thing he used to be-and then she spoke.

“You’ve changed, haven’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know. You’ve become what you swore you’d never be again.”

“It’s the right thing, Mol. There really wasn’t any choice.”

Her reply was slow and sad. “No, I guess not. But you’re already different-I can feel it. I can sense it. I don’t need telepathy to see that-well, it’s as if all those years in Boston have just been wiped away. And you’re back in the thick of things. And I don’t like it. It scares me.”

“It scares me, too.”

“You were talking in the middle of the night.”

“In my sleep?”

“No, on the phone. Who were you talking to?”

“A reporter I know, Miles Preston. Met him in Germany in my early CIA days.”

“You asked him something about the German stock market crash.”

“And I thought you were fast asleep.”

“You think that has something to do with Dad’s murder?”

“I don’t know. It might.”

“I found something.”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember your saying something when I was drifting off in Greve.”

“I think I now understand why Dad left me that letter of authorization.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember the document left to me in his will? There was the title to his house, and the stocks and bonds, and that bizarre financial ‘instrument,’ as the lawyers kept calling it authorizing me to have all the rights of beneficiary, foreign and domestic?”

“Right. And?”

“Well, that would have been pointless for any domestic accounts, which automatically go to me anyway. As for foreign accounts, where banking laws vary so widely, a letter like that would come in handy.”

“Especially with a Swiss account.”

“Exactly.” She got up from the bed and walked over to the closet, opened a suitcase, and soon retrieved an envelope. “The financial instrument,” she announced. She foraged a bit longer and then produced the book her father had for some reason bequeathed me, the first edition of Allen Dulles’s memoirs, The Craft of Intelligence.

“What the hell did you bring this for?” I asked.

She didn’t reply. Instead, she returned to the bed and set both items down carefully on the rumpled sheets.

Next, she opened the book. The predominantly gray jacket was immaculate, and the spine of the book cracked as she opened it to the middle. It had probably been opened a few times before. Maybe just once, when the legendary Mr. Dulles had taken out his Waterman fountain pen and written on the title page in blue-black ink in his neat script: “For Hal, With deepest admiration, Allen.”

“This was the only thing Dad left to you,” she said. “And for a long time I wondered why.”

“As did I.”

“He loved you. And although he was always sort of frugal, he was never cheap. And I wondered why he’d leave you just this book. I knew his mind pretty well-he was a game player. So when they let me pack up my things, I collected all the documents Dad left me, and I decided to take this along and look through it carefully for any kind of markings-that’s the sort of thing he’d do for me when I was young, mark books up for me so I’d make sure not to miss the important passage. And I found it.”

“Hmm?”

I looked at the page she was indicating. On page 73, which dealt with codes and ciphers and cryptanalysis, the phrase “Pink Code” was underlined in the text. Next to it, scrawled lightly in pencil, was “L2576HJ.”

“That’s his seven,” she explained. “And definitely his two. And his J.”

I understood immediately. “Pink Code” really meant the Onyx Code; Dulles had clearly wanted not to give away the actual name. The Onyx Code was a legendary World War I codebook that the Agency had inherited from the U.S. Diplomatic Service. It was still kicking around, though rarely used, since it had long ago been cracked. L2576HJ was a coded phrase.

Hal Sinclair had left Molly the legal means to access the account.

He had left me the account number. If only I could decrypt it.

“One more,” she said. “The page before.”

She pointed. At the top of Page 72 was a series of numbers, 79648, which Dulles had cited as an example for the general reader of how codes work. It was underlined lightly in pencil, and next to it Sinclair had penciled “R2.”

R2 referred to a codebook of much more recent vintage, which I’d never used. I assumed that 79648 was another code that would translate into a different series of numbers (or perhaps letters) when the R2 code was applied.

I needed code information from within the CIA, yet I couldn’t risk disclosing my whereabouts. So I placed a call to an Agency friend from Paris days who had retired some years ago and was teaching political science in Erie, Pennsylvania. I had saved his ass twice-once on an all-night stakeout that had gone bad, and once bureaucratically, by clearing his name in the subsequent investigation.

He owed me big, and he agreed without hesitation to place a call to a trusted friend of his, still in the Agency, and ask him, as a favor to an old friend, to take a quick stroll over to the cryptography archives one floor below. Since any codebook three quarters of a century old was hardly a matter of national security, my friend’s source read to him a series of codes. He then placed a call to the pay phone outside the hotel and read them to me.

And finally I had the account number in hand.

The second code, however, was a tougher nut to crack. The book wouldn’t be stored in the crypto archives (the Crypt, as it was called), since it was still active.

“I’ll do my best,” my friend in Erie said.

“I’ll call back,” I replied.

We sat in silence. I glanced through Dulles’s memoir. He had begun the section “Codes and Ciphers” with that famous stern dictum from Henry Stimson, the secretary of state in 1929: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

He was wrong, of course, and Dulles took pains to point that out. Everyone in the spy biz reads everyone else’s mail, and anything else they can. Maybe, though, spies aren’t gentlemen.

And I wondered what the hell Henry Stimson would have declared about whether gentlemen read each other’s minds.

I called Erie back an hour later. He answered the phone on the first ring. His voice was different, strained.

“I couldn’t get it,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Had someone gotten to him?

“It’s deactivated.”

“Huh?”

“Deactivated. All copies withdrawn from circulation.”

“As of when?”

“Yesterday. Ben, what’s this all about?”

“Sorry,” I said, my chest tightening. The Wise Men. “I’ve got to run. Thanks.” And I hung up.

The next morning we walked along Bahnhofstrasse, a few blocks from the Paradeplatz, until we found the correct street number. Most of the banks were headquartered in the upper levels of the buildings, above the fashionable shops.

Despite its grandiloquent name, the Bank of Zurich was small, family-owned, and very discreet. Its entrance was concealed on a small side street off Bahnhofstrasse, next to a Konditorei. A small brass plaque said simply B. Z. et Cie. If you had to ask, you had no business knowing.

We entered the lobby, and as we did, I sensed a movement behind us. I turned quickly, tensing, and saw that it was only someone, probably a Zuricher, passing by. Tall, quite thin, in a dove-gray suit, he was no doubt a banker or shopkeeper going to work; I relaxed and, my arm around Molly, entered the lobby.

But something stuck in my mind, and I glanced back again, and the shopkeeper was gone.

It was the face. Pale, extremely pale, with large, elongated yellowish circles under the eyes, pale, thin lips, and thin blond hair combed straight back.

He looked strikingly familiar, there was no doubt about it.

And for an instant I remembered the rainy evening of the gunfire on Marlborough Street in Boston, the tall, gaunt passerby…

It was him. My reaction time had been dismayingly slow, but now I was quite sure. It was him. The same man in Boston was now here, in Zurich.

“What?” Molly asked.

I turned back, continued into the bank. “Nothing,” I said. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

FORTY-FIVE

“What is it, Ben?” she asked, frightened. “Was someone there?”

But before she could say anything further, a male voice came over the intercom, asking us to state our business.

I gave my real name.

The receptionist responded, with the barest hint of deference, “Come in, please, Mr. Ellison. Herr Direktor Eisler is expecting you.”

I had to give John Knapp credit; he obviously had some clout around here.

“Please be sure you have no metal objects on your person,” the disembodied voice implored. “Keys, penknives, any significant number of coins. You can place anything for safekeeping in this drawer.” A small drawer now jutted out of the wall. We both divested ourselves of coins, keys, and whatnot, and placed them in the drawer. An impressive and thorough operation, I thought.

There was a faint hum, and a set of doors in front of us were electronically unlocked. I glanced up at a twin set of miniature Japanese surveillance cameras mounted near the ceiling, and Molly and I passed into a small chamber to wait for the second set of doors to open electronically.

“You’re not carrying, are you?” Molly whispered.

I shook my head. The second set of doors opened, and we were met by a young, plain blond woman, a little chunky, wearing oversize steel-rim glasses that would probably have been fashionable on anyone else. She introduced herself as Eisler’s personal assistant, and led us down a gray-carpeted corridor. I made a quick stop in the restroom and then joined up with the two women.

Dr. Alfred Eisler’s office was small and simple, paneled in walnut. A few pastel watercolors in blond wooden frames adorned the wall, and not much else. None of the decorating touches I had expected-no Oriental rugs, grandfather clocks, mahogany furniture. The director’s desk was a simple, uncluttered glass-and-chrome table. Facing the desk were two comfortable-looking white leather armchairs of Swedish modern design and a white-leather-upholstered couch.

Eisler was fairly tall, about my height, but somewhat portly, wearing a black wool suit. He was somewhere in his forties, with a round, jowly face, deep-set eyes, and large protruding ears. Deep lines were scored around his mouth, across his forehead, and in the furrow between his eyebrows. And he was completely bald, shiny-bald. Eisler cut an arresting if somewhat sinister figure.

“Ms. Sinclair,” he said, taking Molly’s hand. He knew who the proper center of his attention should be: not the husband, but the wife, the legal heir to her father’s numbered account, according to the provisions of Swiss banking law. He gave a slight bow. “And Mr. Ellison.” Eisler’s voice was a low, growly basso profundo; his accent was a mélange of Swiss-German and high-Oxbridge English.

We sat in the white leather chairs; he sat facing us on the couch. We made introductions, and he had his secretary bring in a tray of coffee for each of us. As he spoke, the lines that creased his brow deepened even more, and he gesticulated with his manicured hands in a manner so delicate, it seemed almost feminine.

He smiled tautly to signal that the meeting had begun; what was it, his expression asked, that we wanted?

I pulled out the authorization document signed by Molly’s father and handed it to him.

He glanced at it and looked up. “I trust you desire access to the numbered account.”

“That’s correct,” Molly said, all business.

“There are a few formalities,” he said apologetically. “We must confirm your identity, verify your signature, and such. I assume you have bank references in the United States?”

Molly nodded haughtily and produced a set of papers on which was all the information he needed. He took them, pressed a button to summon his secretary, and handed the papers to her.

Not five minutes of idle chat went by-about the Kunsthaus and other must-sees in Zurich-before his phone buzzed. He picked it up, said, “Ja?” listened for a few seconds, and replaced the receiver in its cradle. Another taut smile.

“The miracle of facsimile technology,” he said. “This procedure used to take so much longer. “If you would-?”

He handed Molly a ballpoint pen and a latex clipboard on which was a single sheet of Bank of Zurich letterhead, and asked her to write out the account number, in words-her numerical signature-on the thin gray line at the center of the page.

When she had finished writing the account number that her father had encoded so elaborately, he summoned his secretary again, handed her the paper, and chatted a bit longer while her handwriting was optically scanned, he explained chattily, compared with the signature card faxed from our bank in Boston.

The phone buzzed again; he picked it up, said “Danke,” and hung up. A moment later his secretary returned with a gray file folder marked 322069.

Clearly, we had passed the first hurdle. The account number was correct.

“Now,” Eisler said, “what precisely can I do for you?”

I had deliberately chosen the seat closest to him. I leaned forward, focused.

Cleared my mind. Took advantage of the moment of silence. Focused.

It came. German, naturally, a tumble of phrases.

“Please?” he said, watching me sitting with head bent and brow furrowed.

Not enough to go on. I had learned German, had gone through intensive language training in it at the Farm, but he was thinking too quickly for me.

I couldn’t do it.

I said, “We’d like to know how much is in the account.”

I leaned toward him again, tried, focused, tried to isolate from the flow of German something, anything I could understand, grab on to.

“I am not permitted to discuss particulars,” Eisler said phlegmatically. “In any case, I do not know.”

And then I heard a word. Stahlkammer.

Unquestionably, that was the word that leapt out at me. Stahlkammer.

Vault.

I said, “There is a vault attached to this account, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” he admitted, “there is. A rather sizable one, in fact.”

“I want access to it at once.”

“As you wish,” he said. “Certainly. At once.” He rose from his couch. His bald head glinted in the pinpoint lights recessed in the ceiling. “I assume you have the combination access code.”

Molly looked at me, signaling that she was out of her element.

“I believe it’s the same as the account number,” I said.

Eisler laughed once and then sat down again. “I really wouldn’t know. Although for security reasons we would certainly discourage our clients from doing that. And in any case, it’s not the same number of digits.”

“We may have it,” I said. “I’m quite sure we do-somewhere. My wife’s father left us quite a collection of papers and notes. Perhaps you can help us. How many digits are in the code?”

He glanced down at the file. “I’m afraid I can’t say.”

But I heard it, a few times, a number he thought but was defiantly not saying, articulating somewhere in the speech center of his brain… “Vier”…

Four digits, did that mean?

I said, “Might it be a four-digit code?”

He laughed again, shrugged: this game is fun, his body language said, but now we are all through.

“There is a numbered account, which we administer and service,” he explained patiently as if to a slow child. “You are permitted by law to withdraw or transfer those funds, as you wish. But there is also a vault-in effect, a safe-deposit box, which we are charged with keeping safe. But we do not have access to it. We never do, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. As the late Mr. Sinclair stipulated, in order to open the vault, an access code is required.”

“Then you can provide it to us,” Molly said, summoning all of her hauteur.

“I’m sorry, but I cannot.”

“As legal heir to his account, I request it.”

“If I could, I would gladly give it to you,” Eisler said. “But under the terms of the arrangement set up here, I cannot.”

“But-”

“I’m sorry,” the banker said with finality. “I’m afraid it is not possible.”

“I am the legal heir to all of my father’s estate,” Molly said indignantly.

“I am deeply sorry,” Eisler said, unperturbed. “I very much hope you did not come all the way here from-Boston, is it?-to learn this. A simple phone call would have saved you the time and expense.”

I sat in silence, barely listening to this exchange, absently unzipping my leather portfolio.

And then I heard it again:… “Vier”… and then a string of other numbers. “Acht”… “Sieben”… I watched him studying the file, and then, in sequence and quite distinctly, it came:

“Vier… Acht… Sieben… Neun… Neun.”

“You see, Ms. Sinclair, this is,” the banker said aloud, “a double-passkey system, designed-”

“Yes,” I interrupted. Shuffling through the notes in my portfolio, I feigned examining one sheet closely. “It’s here. We have it.”

Eisler paused, nodded, then examined me suspiciously. “Excellent,” he said as I spoke the numbers. “By the terms established by the owners of the account, now that you have accessed it, this account is altered from dormant to active status-”

“Owners?” I interrupted. “There is more than one?”

“Yes, sir. It is a double-signature account. As legal beneficiary, your wife is one of the owners.”

“Who’s the other one?” she asked.

“That I cannot disclose,” Eisler said, at once apologetic and disdainful. “Another signature is required. To be perfectly truthful, I don’t know the identity of the other owner. When the second owner presents us with the access code, the sequence of numbers is inputted into our computers. The co-owner’s signature is encoded in the database, and when the proper code is entered, the signature is printed out graphically. This is our bank’s security system to ensure that no bank personnel can be implicated in the event of a claim against us.”

“So what does that mean?” Molly demanded.

“It means,” Eisler said, “that you are legally permitted to inspect the vault and to ascertain its contents. But without the authorization of the second owner, you may neither transfer nor withdraw the contents.”

Dr. Alfred Eisler escorted us into a cramped elevator down several flights. We were descending below Bahnhofstrasse, he explained, and into the catacombs.

We emerged into a short gray-carpeted corridor, a cage lined with steel bars. At the end of the corridor stood a beefy security guard in an olive-green uniform. He nodded at the bank’s director, then unlocked the heavy steel door.

None of us spoke as we passed through the door, down another steel-bar-lined corridor, until we reached a small enclosed area marked Sieben. Steel bars comprised three walls of the cage. The other wall was entirely metal, made of some sort of brushed chrome or steel. At its center was an enormous steel wheel with six spokes, evidently the mechanism by which the metal wall could be caused to open.

Eisler pulled a key from the ring attached to his belt and unlocked the cage.

“Please sit, if you would,” he said, indicating a small gray metal table in the center of the cage at which were two chairs. In the center of the table was a beige desk phone without any buttons, and a small black electronic keypad.

“The stipulation of the account,” the banker said, “is that no officer of the bank is permitted to remain in this area while the combination is being accessed. Enter the digits of the access code slowly, checking the digital readout to be sure you have not made a mistake. If you have, you are permitted a second try. If that fails, the electronic locking mechanism will seize. Access will not be permitted for at least twenty-four hours.”

“I see,” I said. “What happens after we enter the access code?”

“At that point,” Eisler explained, pointing toward the six-spoked wheel, “the inner vault will electronically unlock, and you then turn the wheel. It’s much easier than it looks, fear not. And the vault door will open.”

“And when we’re done?” Molly asked.

“When you are finished examining the contents, or if there are any problems, please call me by simply lifting the handset.”

“Thank you,” Molly said as Dr. Eisler left.

We waited a moment until we heard the second steel door shut.

“Ben,” Molly whispered. “What the hell do we-”

“Patience.” Slowly and carefully-my gauze-wrapped fingers had little dexterity-I entered 48799, watching as each number appeared in red electronic digits on the small black panel. When I had entered the final 9, there was a mechanical whooshing sound, as if a seal had been broken.

“Bingo,” I said.

“I can barely breathe,” Molly said, her voice choked.

Together we walked over to the wheel and turned it. It moved easily in our hands, gliding clockwise, and a large section of the steel wall jutted open.

Weak fluorescent lights illuminated the interior of the vault, which I saw was remarkably small, disappointingly so. The uneven, brick-walled inner chamber was maybe five feet by five feet. It was entirely empty.

And at second glance I realized that our eyes had been deceived by an optical illusion.

What at first had appeared to be the vault’s brick inner walls, roughly seamed and scored, could now be seen, as our eyes adjusted to the insufficient light, to be something else entirely.

They were not bricks. They were bars of gold, dull yellow, with a reddish tinge.

The cavernous vault was filled-almost entirely, floor to ceiling-with gold bullion.

FORTY-SIX

“My God,” Molly whispered.

I could only gape. Tentatively, almost gingerly, we advanced into the vault toward the walls of solid gold. They did not glitter or glimmer, as one might have imagined. The overall coloration was a dull, mustardy yellow, but upon closer inspection I saw that some of the closely packed bars were a bright butter-yellow (new, and almost one hundred percent pure), and some were reddish-yellow, which indicated copper impurities: they had probably been cast from melted gold coins and jewelry. Each bar was stamped at its end with large serial numbers.

Were it not for the deep yellow hues and mellow patina, these gold bars might have been bricks, neatly stacked bricks, of the sort you could find at any construction site.

Many were scarred and dented; these had probably been in existence in Russia for a century or more. Some, I knew, had been stolen from Hitler’s armies by Stalin’s victorious troops; most had been mined in the Soviet Union. The edges of several of them were notched: assay marks. The newer bars were of a trapezoidal formation, but by far the majority were rectangular.

“Jesus, Ben,” Molly said, turning to me. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide. “Did you have any idea?” For some reason, she was whispering.

I nodded.

She went to lift one of the bars up, but failed. It was too heavy. With two hands she managed to hoist it. After a few seconds she put it down on top of the others. It made a dull thud. Then she sank her thumbnail into it.

“It’s the real thing, isn’t it?” she said.

I nodded mutely. I was nervous, naturally, and excited, and scared, and my bloodstream coursed with adrenaline.

There’s a famous remark made by Vladimir Lenin: “When we are victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities in the world.”

Wrong on several counts.

More apt was the gripe by the Roman poet Plautus, two hundred years before the birth of Christ: “I hate gold; it has persuaded many men in many matters to do evil.”

Quite right.

I was disturbed from my reverie by the sight of Molly sinking to the concrete floor, her back against the wall of gold bullion. The vitality seemed to have drained from her body. She had not fainted, but she appeared woozy.

“Who’s the other owner?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“A guess?”

“Not even that. Not yet.”

She wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged them to her chest. “How much?”

“Hmm?”

“Gold. How much gold is here?” Her eyes were closed.

I surveyed the chamber. The stack was about six feet tall. Each bar was nine inches long, three inches wide, and an inch thick.

It took me quite some time, but I counted 526 stacks, each six feet high. Which was 3,156 linear feet. Which was… 37,879 gold bars.

Was I calculating right?

I remembered reading an article once about the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. I called it to mind. The Fed’s gold vault, which is half the length of a football field, holds something like 126 billion dollars worth of gold if you calculate it at the market price of $400 an ounce. I didn’t know what gold was selling for when Orlov and Sinclair raided the Soviet national treasury, but $400 an ounce sounded about right, for the sake of calculation.

No. That wouldn’t do it.

All right. The largest gold compartment in the Fed’s vault contained a wall of gold ten feet wide by ten feet high by eighteen feet deep. Which was 107,000 bars. Worth seventeen billion dollars.

My head swam with fevered calculations. The volume here was about a third of that.

I returned to my original calculation of 37,879 gold bars. Gold was now selling at not $400 an ounce, but more like $330. Okay. At $330 per ounce, one gold bar, of four hundred troy ounces, was worth $132,000.

Which brought us to…

Five billion dollars.

“Five,” I said.

“Five billion?”

“Right.”

“I can’t even conceive of that,” Molly said. “It’s sitting here, stacked up-I’m leaning against it-and I can’t conceive of five billion dollars-and all mine-”

“No.”

“Half of it?”

“No. It belongs to Russia.”

She fixed me with a cold stare, then said: “You’re no fun.”

“You’re right.”

“He said ten,” I interrupted.

“What?”

“There’s maybe five billion here. Orlov told me ten billion dollars.”

“Then he was wrong. Or lying to you.”

“Or half of it is gone.”

“Gone? What are you getting at, Ben?”

“I thought we’d finally found the gold,” I mused aloud. “And we found only part of it.”

“What’s this?” she said, startled.

“What?”

Sandwiched in the crack between two vertical stacks of gold, at floor level, was a small square ecru envelope.

“What the hell-?” she said, tugging at it.

It came out easily.

Her eyes wide, she turned the blank envelope over, saw that there was nothing on either side, and gingerly tore open the flap.

It was a blue-bordered card-a Tiffany’s correspondence card, from the look of it-which bore the name Harrison Sinclair in capital letters at the top.

Something was written at the center of the card in her father’s hand.

“It’s-” Molly began, but I interrupted.

“Don’t say it aloud. Show it to me.”

Two lines.

The first was: “Box 322. Banque de Raspail.”

The second was: “Boulevard Raspail, 128, Paris 7e.”

That was all. The name and address of a bank in Paris. A box number, presumably a safe-deposit box. What for? What was this supposed to mean? Boxes, literally, within boxes: that was what this whole matter had come to.

“What-?” she said.

“Come on,” I said impatiently, pocketing the card. “Let’s have another chat with Eisler.”

FORTY-SEVEN

“A dead man,” according to Plutarch’s Lives, “cannot bite.” It was, I believe, John Dryden who centuries ago wrote: “Dead men tell no tales.”

Wrong, both of them. Hal Sinclair continued to tell tales long after his funeral, tales that remained mystifying.

The brilliant old spymaster Harrison Sinclair had surprised hundreds of people in his six decades on this earth-friends and associates, superiors and subordinates, enemies around the world and at Langley. And even after his death, it seemed, the surprises, the twists and reversals, did not stop. Who would ever have expected as much on the trail of a dead man?

By the time Molly and I had had a rapid whispered conference, Eisler’s personal assistant was waiting in the corridor outside the vault. We had summoned her and demanded immediately to see the director.

“Is there a problem?” she asked, her face radiating concern.

“Yes,” Molly said but did not elaborate.

“We will be glad to help in any way,” she said, escorting us into the elevator and up to Eisler’s office. She was all business, but her Swiss reserve had melted somewhat: she chirped familiarly, as if we’d all become old friends in the last hour.

Molly conversed with her politely, while I kept silent. In my right front pocket I fingered the Glock.

Getting it into the bank, through the metal detectors, was no mean feat, and for that I must acknowledge my CIA training. A casual acquaintance of mine from my Agency days, Charles Stone (whose extraordinary saga is no doubt familiar to you), once described to me how he had smuggled a Glock pistol through an airline security gate at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The Glock is predominantly, though not entirely, composed of plastic, and Stone (rather ingeniously, I think) disassembled the gun into its components, placed the small metal parts into a sticky shaving kit and the larger metal parts into the frame of a garment bag-both of which went through the luggage X-ray machine-and the plastic pieces on his person.

Unfortunately, Stone’s technique wouldn’t have worked here, because I didn’t have the luxury of dealing with both a metal detector and a luggage X-ray. Everything had to be on my body, and the gun would unquestionably have set off the alarms.

So I’d devised my own method, taking advantage of an anomaly in all metal detectors. These machines are nowhere near as sensitive at their extremities as they are at the center of the field. And the Glock is made up of a relatively small amount of steel. What I did, therefore, was to attach the pistol to a long nylon cord affixed to my belt and running through a small hole I’d cut in my right-hand front trouser pocket. The gun dangled in my right pant leg, close to my shoe; I held it steady by keeping a hand in my pocket and gripping the cord as I passed through the metal detector gate. Essentially, I was kicking the gun through the detector at the perimeter of the magnetic field, where it is so attenuated that it can detect virtually nothing. Naturally, as I went through, I was almost catatonic with fear that the trick wouldn’t work, that my attempt to spoof the metal detector would somehow go wrong. But I passed through without incident, and by stopping off in the restroom shortly thereafter I had been able to retrieve the small pistol and place it comfortably in my pants pocket.

Dr. Eisler, who appeared even more perturbed than his assistant, offered us coffee. We politely declined. His brow wrinkled in concern as he sat down on the sofa opposite us.

“Now then,” he said in his gravelly yet refined voice. “What seems to be the problem?”

“The contents of the vault,” I said, “are incomplete.”

He glared at me a long, long time, then shrugged imperiously. “We know nothing of the contents of a client’s vault. We are obligated only to maintain all security precautions, all-”

“The bank is liable.”

He gave a dry laugh. “I’m afraid not. And in any case, your wife is merely the co-owner.”

“A rather large quantity of gold,” I said, “seems to be missing. Rather too much to misplace. I’d like to know where it might have gone.”

Eisler exhaled through his nostrils and nodded kindly. He seemed to be relieved. “Mr. Ellison-Ms. Sinclair-surely you both understand that I am not free to discuss any transactions-”

“Since it was made on my account,” Molly broke in, “I have the right to know where it was moved to!”

Eisler hesitated, nodded again. “Madam, sir. In the case of numbered accounts, our responsibility is to permit access to anyone who fulfills the requirements stipulated by the person or persons who have established the account. Beyond that, in order to protect all involved, we must maintain total confidentiality.”

“We are talking,” Molly said steely, “about my account. I want to know where the gold went!”

“Ms. Sinclair, confidentiality in these matters is a tradition of our nation’s banking system and one which the Bank of Zurich is compelled to observe. I am awfully sorry. If there is anything further we can do-”

In one smooth motion I pulled out the Glock and aimed it at his high, broad forehead.

“This pistol is loaded,” I said. “I am fully prepared to use it. Don’t”-I released the safety when I saw him begin to slide his foot to the right, ever so subtly, toward what I now saw was a silent alarm button at the base of his desk, a few inches away-“don’t be so foolish as to hit the silent alarm.”

I moved closer, so that the barrel of the pistol was barely an inch or two from his forehead.

I hardly had to concentrate now, his thoughts were flowing so discernibly now. I could pick up on a great deal: rushes of thought, mostly in German, but with the occasional patch of English as he readied to speak sentences, objections, declamations of outrage.

“We are, as you see, desperate,” I said. My expression let him know that desperate though I was, I retained full composure and was prepared to shoot at any moment.

“If you are so foolhardy as to shoot me,” Eisler said with astonishing equanimity, “you will accomplish nothing. For one thing, you will not leave this room. Not only will the gunshot be audible to my secretary, but there are motion sensors in this room that-”

He was lying; that much I could pick up. And he was understandably scared: this had never happened to him before. He continued: “Even assuming I were to give you the information you seek, which I will not, you will certainly not make it out of the bank.”

On that, I concluded, he seemed to be telling the truth; but it did not take extrasensory perception to realize the logic in what he was saying.

“I am prepared, however, to call an end to this idiocy,” he went on. “If you put down this gun and leave at once, I shall not report this. I understand that you are desperate. But you gain nothing by threatening me.”

“We’re not threatening. We want transaction information pertaining to the account which rightfully, by American and Swiss banking laws, belongs to my wife.”

A few beads of sweat began to run down his forehead, starting at the smooth bald crown of his head and coursing across the deeply grooved parallel lines inscribed there. I could see that his resolve was weakening.

I heard a rush of thoughts, some angry, some pleading. He was going through an agony of indecision.

“Has anyone removed gold from this vault?” I asked quietly.

Nein, I heard distinctly. Nein.

He closed his eyes, seeming to brace for the shot that would end his life. The sweat came down in rivulets now.

“I cannot say,” he said.

No one had removed any gold. But…

Suddenly, I had a thought. “There was other gold, though, wasn’t there? Gold that wasn’t moved into the vault.”

I held the gun steady, and then moved it slowly closer until the end of the barrel touched his damp temple. I pressed it against the skin. It compressed with an easy elasticity, forming tiny stretch marks all around the barrel’s end.

“Please,” he whispered. I could barely hear him.

His thoughts were coming fast and jumbled now, incoherent; I could not make them out.

“An answer,” I said, “and we will leave you.”

He swallowed, closed his eyes, and then opened them again. “A shipment,” he whispered. “Ten billion dollars worth of gold bullion. We received it all here at the Bank of Zurich.”

“Where did it go?”

“Some of it was moved into the vault. That is the gold you saw.”

“And the rest?”

He swallowed again. “Liquidated. We assisted in its sale through gold brokers we deal with on a confidential basis. It was melted down and then recast.”

“What was the value?”

“Perhaps five… perhaps six…”

“Billion.”

“Yes.”

“It was converted to liquid assets? Cash?”

“It was wire-transferred.”

“Where?”

He closed his eyes again. The muscles around them tightened as if he were praying.

“I can’t say.”

“Where?”

“I mustn’t say.”

“Was the money wired to Paris?”

“No… please, I cannot-”

“Where was the money wired?”

Deutschland… Deutschland… München…

“Was the money wired to Munich?”

“You will have to kill me,” he whispered, his eyes still closed. “I am prepared to die.”

His resolve surprised me. What possessed him? What sustained him in this foolish resolve? Was he attempting to call my bluff? By now he had to know, surely, that I wasn’t bluffing. Or if I was, with this gun at his temple, what sane man would take the chance that I was bluffing, that the gun wasn’t loaded? He would rather be killed than violate Swiss banking confidentiality!

There was a faint liquid sound, and I saw that he had lost control of his bladder. A dark spot spread in a large irregular area across the crotch of his pants. His fright was genuine. His eyes were still closed, and he was frozen still, paralyzed with fear.

But I did not let up; I couldn’t.

Compressing the barrel still harder against his temple, I said slowly: “All we want is a name. Tell us where the money was wired. To whom. Give us a name.”

Now Eisler’s entire body was racked by a visible tremor. His eyes were not just closed, the lids were squeezed tight, screwed up in little wrinkled knots of muscular tension. The sweat poured down his face, across his jawline, down his neck. Sweat darkened the lapels of his gray suit and spotted his tie.

“All we want,” I said, “is a name.”

Molly watched me, her eyes brimming with tears, from time to time wincing. The scene was too much for her to stand. Stick with it, Mol, I wanted to say. Hang in there.

“You know what name I want.”

And within a minute I had a name.

He remained silent. His lips trembled as if he were about to weep, but he did not. He did not speak.

He thought.

He did not speak.

I was about to lower the gun, when another question occurred to me. “When was the last time funds were transferred to him from this bank?”

This morning, Eisler thought.

He squeezed his eyes tighter. Droplets of perspiration rolled down his nose, onto his lips.

This morning.

And then I said, lowering the gun, “Well. I can see you are a man of steel will.”

Slowly, he opened his eyes and looked directly at me. There was great fear in them, of course, but there was something more. A glint of triumph, it seemed; a flash of defiance.

Finally, he spoke. His voice cracked. “If you will leave my office at once-”

“You haven’t talked,” I said. “I admire that.”

“If you will leave-”

“I do not plan to kill you,” I went on. “You’re a man of honor; you’re doing your job. Instead, if we can agree that this never happened-if you agree not to report this, and agree to let both of us leave the bank undisturbed, we will call an end to this. We will leave.”

I knew, of course, that the moment we left the bank he would call the police-in his position, I’d have done the same thing-but this would buy us a few much-needed minutes.

“Yes,” he said. His voice cracked again. He cleared his throat. “Leave here immediately. And if you have any sense at all, which I seriously doubt, you will leave Zurich at once.”

FORTY-EIGHT

We strode quickly out of the bank and then accelerated to a run down Bahnhofstrasse. Eisler seemed to have abided by his agreement to let us out of the bank (for his own safety and that of his employees), but by now, I calculated, he had certainly called in both bank security and the municipal police. He had our real names, though not our cover names, which was an encouragement, but it was probably only a matter of hours-if that long-before we were apprehended. And once the Wise Men’s forces knew that we were here, if they didn’t already-but I didn’t want to think along those lines.

“Did you get it?” Molly asked as we ran.

“Yes. But we can’t talk now.” I was hyper-alert, keeping a close watch on all passersby, searching for that one face that I recognized, the washed-out face of the blond would-be assassin I’d first seen in Boston.

Not here.

But a moment later I sensed that we once again had company.

There are dozens of different techniques employed to follow a man, and the really good operatives are seldom caught. The problem for the blond man was that I had “made” him, in surveillance argot: I’d recognized him. Except in the loosest sort of tail, he couldn’t hope to follow me unnoticed. And indeed, I didn’t see him anywhere near us.

But, as I was to learn soon, there were others, tails I didn’t recognize. In the crowded foot traffic of Bahnhofstrasse, it would be difficult if not impossible to spot a tail.

“Ben,” Molly began, but I gave her a fierce look that shut her up at once.

“Not now,” I said under my breath.

When we came to Barengasse I turned right, and Molly followed. The plate-glass storefronts provided a good reflecting surface for me to study who was following us, but no one seemed conspicuous. They were professionals. It was likely that since the moment I’d spotted him as we entered the bank, the blond man was determined not to be seen. Others, confederates, were now in play.

I would have to flush them out.

Molly let out a long, quavering sigh. “This is crazy, Ben. This is just fucking dangerous!” Her voice grew softer. “Look, I really hated seeing you hold a gun to that guy’s head. I hated seeing what it did to him. Those things are so vile.”

We walked along Barengasse. I was keenly aware of pedestrians on either side of us, but wasn’t yet able to get a fix on anyone.

“Guns?” I said “They’ve saved my life on more than one occasion.”

She heaved a heavy sigh. “Dad always said that, too. He taught me to shoot a gun.”

“A shotgun or something?”

“Handguns. A.38 and a.45. Actually, I was pretty good at it. An ace, if you must know. Once I was able to hit the bull’s-eye on one of those police silhouette target things at a hundred feet, I put down my dad’s gun and never fired it again. I also told him never to keep one in the house again.”

“But if you ever have to use a gun to protect yourself or me-”

“Of course I’d do it. But don’t ever make me.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Thanks. But was all that necessary with Eisler?”

“Yes, I’m afraid it was. I have a name now. A name and an account that will likely tell us where the gold disappeared to.”

“What about the Banque de Raspail in Paris?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what that note’s supposed to mean. Whoever was meant to see it.”

“But why would my father have left that note there?”

“Don’t know.”

“But if there’s a safe-deposit box, there has to be a key, right?”

“Generally, yes.”

“So where is it?”

I shook my head again. “We don’t have it. But there must be a way of getting into the box. But first, Munich. If there’s any way of intercepting Truslow before anything happens to him, I’ll find it.”

Had we eluded them?

Doubtful.

“What about Toby?” Molly asked. “Shouldn’t you notify him?”

“We can’t risk contacting him. Or anyone at CIA now.”

“But we could use his help.”

“I don’t trust his help.”

“How about trying to reach Truslow now?”

“Yes,” I said. “He may be on his way to Germany. But if I can stop him-”

“What?”

In mid-sentence I swiveled around toward a public telephone on the street. It was far, far too risky to place a call to Truslow’s office in the CIA, of course. There were other ways, however. Even on short notice; even improvised on the spot. There were ways.

Standing on the street, Molly next to me, I kept a close watch on my surroundings. No one-yet.

With the assistance of an international operator I called a private communications facility in Brussels, whose number I, of course, was able to recite easily. Once connected, I entered a sequence of numbers, which shifted the call to a rather complicated telephone switch-back system, a dead-end loop. The next call I direct-dialed would appear, in a trace, to originate in Brussels.

Truslow’s executive assistant took my call. I gave him a name that Truslow would immediately recognize as signaling me, and asked him to pass it on to the director.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the assistant said. “At this moment the director is aboard a military aircraft somewhere over Europe.”

“But he’s accessible by satellite link,” I insisted.

“Sir, I’m not permitted-”

“This is an emergency!” I half shouted at the assistant. Truslow had to be reached, to be warned against entering Germany.

“I’m sorry, sir-” he replied.

And I hung up. It was too late.

And then I heard my name.

I turned toward Molly, but she hadn’t said anything.

At least I thought I heard my name.

Quite an odd sensation. Yes, definitely my name. I glanced around the street.

There it was again, thought, not spoken, unquestionably.

But there was no man anywhere near us who could possibly-

Yes. It wasn’t a man at all, but a woman. My pursuers were equal-opportunity employers. Very politically correct.

It was the lone woman, standing at a newsstand a few feet away, seemingly absorbed in a copy of Le Canard Enchainé, a French satirical newspaper.

She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, with short reddish hair, wearing a no-nonsense olive business suit. Powerfully built, from what I could tell. No doubt she was very good at her job, which I suspected was to do more than simply follow.

But if she was a follower, that was about as much as I could deduce. A follower employed by whom? By those in the CIA Truslow had warned of, the so-called Wise Men? Or by people associated with Vladimir Orlov-who knew of the existence of the gold and knew that I was on its trail?

They-her employers-knew I’d gone into the Bank of Zurich. Knew I’d emerged empty-handed…

Empty-handed, yes, but with a solid morsel of knowledge now. The name of a German in Munich who had been the recipient of some five billion dollars.

Now it was my turn.

“Mol,” I said as quietly as I could. “You have to get out of here.”

“What-”

“Keep your voice down. Act as if nothing’s wrong.” I smiled, as if at some witticism. “We have company. I want you to leave.”

“But where?” she asked, frightened.

“Go grab our bags from the left-luggage claim near the main train station,” I whispered, and thought for a second. “Then go to the Baur-au-Lac, on Talstrasse. Every cabbie in Switzerland knows where it is. There’s a restaurant there called the Grillroom. I’ll meet you there.” I handed my leather portfolio to her. “Take this with you.”

“But what if-”

“Move!”

Frantically, she whispered in reply: “You’re in no shape to handle anything dangerous, Ben. Your hands-your dexterity-”

“Go!”

She glared at me, then without warning turned and stormed down the street. It was a clever piece of playacting; an observer would think we had had a tiff, so natural was Molly’s reaction.

The redhead looked up sharply from her newspaper, her eyes following Molly, turning to me, then returning to the paper. Clearly she had decided to stay with me, her chief quarry.

Good.

Suddenly I spun around and vaulted down the street. In my peripheral vision I could see that the red-haired woman had dropped her newspaper and, abandoning all subtlety and pretense, was running after me.

Just up ahead was a narrow, alleylike service street, into which I abruptly turned. From Barengasse behind me I heard shouts, and the woman’s footsteps. I flattened myself against a brick wall, saw the red-headed woman in the olive suit lunge into the alley after me, saw her draw a gun, and I pulled out my Glock and fired off a round at the woman.

There was a groan, an exhalation. The woman grimaced, spun awkwardly forward, then regained her balance. I had shot her somewhere in the upper leg, the thigh perhaps, and now without a moment’s pause I leapt forward, firing away at her, no, not directly at her, really, but around her, circumscribing her head and shoulders, and momentarily thrown off balance, she contorted her body, twisting left and right, then, regaining her center of gravity, she leveled her gun at me, aiming for just an instant too long, and-

– her hand snapped open as a round from my gun sank into her wrist, and her gun clattered to the floor, and then, in one headlong rush I was upon her, slamming her to the pavement, my elbow smashing into her throat, pinning her down with my left hand.

For a moment she was still.

She had been wounded, in her thigh and her wrist, and the blood had soaked darkly through the olive silk fabric in several places.

But she was immensely strong, for all that, and of wiry build, and she reared up with a sudden surge of strength, almost knocking me off balance, until my right elbow cracked once against the cartilage in her throat.

The woman was actually younger than she had earlier appeared, perhaps in her early twenties, and she was a woman of extraordinary strength.

With one swift, sure motion, I grabbed her gun-it was a small Walther-and stuck it in the breast pocket of my suit.

Thus disarmed, and obviously in great pain, the would-be assassin moaned, a low, guttural animal sound, and I turned my pistol toward her, aiming precisely between her eyes.

“This gun holds sixteen rounds,” I said very quietly to her. “I fired off five. That leaves eleven.”

Her eyes widened, but in fiery defiance, not fear.

“I will not hesitate to kill you,” I said. “I assume you believe me, but if you don’t, it’s of no serious concern. I will kill you because I have to, to protect myself and others. But for the moment I would rather not.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly, as if conceding.

I could hear sirens now, growing louder, almost here. Did she think the arrival of the Swiss police would provide her with the opportunity to escape?

But I remained poised to fire, knowing that this woman was a professional and was probably possessed of a homicidal courage, and was surely being paid an enormous amount of money for her valor besides.

She would do almost anything. But she would, I calculated, rather not die if she did not have to. It is a human instinct, and even this killer had human instincts.

I had to move her as far away from the street as possible, so that neither of us could be seen. “Now,” I said, “I want you to get slowly to your feet. Then I want you to turn around and walk slowly. I will direct you. If you make the mistake of doing anything I haven’t instructed you to do, I will not hesitate to fire.”

I pulled back, lifted my elbow from her now-bruised throat, and, the Glock aimed steadily at the center of her forehead, watched as she very slowly, and in obvious pain, struggled to stand.

Then she spoke her first word to me. “Don’t,” she said in an accent of indeterminate European origin.

“Turn,” I replied.

She turned around slowly, and I did a quick body search with my free hand. I found nothing, no second gun or even a knife.

“Now, move,” I said, shoving the gun against the back of her head, prodding her to move faster.

When we had come to a dark, deserted alcove toward the end of the block, I shoved her suddenly into it, keeping the Glock trained on the back of her head. Then I said, “Face me.”

She turned slowly. Her face was set in a look of dour recalcitrance. Up close, it was a square, even mannish face, but not unattractive. She took pains with her appearance, whether out of vanity or out of concern for her cover. She wore eyeliner of deep blue and eye shadow of a very pale blue mixed with a barely detectable glitter. Her round, pouting lips had been carefully painted with crimson lipstick.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She said nothing. There was a slight twitch below her left eye, but apart from that, her face remained frozen.

“You’re in no position to hold out,” I said.

Her left cheek twitched, but her eyes regarded me with boredom.

“Who hired you?” I said.

Nothing.

“Ah, a genuine professional,” I said. “They’re so scarce these days. You must have been paid a great deal.”

A twitch; silence.

“Who’s the blond man?” I persisted. “The pale one.”

More silence.

She glanced at me, as if about to speak, then off into the distance. She was quite good, really, at concealing her fear.

For a moment I considered threatening her again, and then I remembered that there were other ways to learn what I wanted to learn. Other resources; other talents. I had forgotten the very thing that had brought me here.

The gun pointed steadily between her eyes, I moved closer.

I was at once greeted by that flow of indistinct sound I’d grown to recognize, that jumble of syllables and noises, but it was, strangely, what I now know to be the “audible” thoughts of someone who was not in fear. And in a language I did not recognize.

Her left cheek was twitching out of tension, but not out of fear, an emotion we experience quite differently. This woman had been shoved into a dark alcove with a semiautomatic weapon pointed directly at her, and yet she was not afraid.

There were various drugs the clandestine people administer their agents to keep them calm and collected, a veritable pharmacopoeia of beta-blockers and anxiolytics and such that over the years had been found to keep field agents calm yet focused. Perhaps this woman was under the influence of something like that. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was preternaturally calm, one of those peculiar human specimens, sociopaths or whatever they are, who do not experience fear the way the rest of us do, and who are therefore eminently suitable for their strange line of work. She had capitulated to me not out of fear, but out of a very rational calculus. She planned, I would bet, to surprise me at a moment when my defenses were relaxed.

But no one is entirely without fear.

Without fear we are not human. We all experience some degree of fear. Fear keeps us alive.

“His name,” I whispered.

I squeezed my finger against the blue metal trigger ever so slightly, but obviously, and told myself that if it came to it, I would without a doubt have to kill this woman.

Max.

I heard, quite distinctly, in that crystalline timbre, one very clear syllable. Max. A name, I assumed. A name that was understandable in any language.

“Max,” I said aloud. “Max what?”

Her eyes met mine, with insouciance, not fear or surprise.

“They told me you could do this,” she said, speaking at last. Her accent was European. Not French, but-Scandinavian? Finnish, or Norwegian…? She shrugged. “I know very little. That was why I was hired.”

I recognized her accent now. Dutch, or perhaps Flemish.

“You know very little,” I agreed, “but you can’t possibly know nothing. Otherwise you’d be of no use. You have been given instructions, code names, and so on. What is Max’s last name?”

I heard, again, Max.

“Try me,” she said with a hint of impertinence.

“What is his last name?”

She replied, pursing her lips slightly, “I don’t know. I’m sure Max isn’t his real name anyway.”

I nodded. “I’m sure you’re right. But who is he with?”

Another shrug.

“Who hired you?”

“You mean, what company name is on my weekly paycheck?” she came back with a smirk.

I leaned closer, until I could feel her breath hot against my face, the Glock still pointed at her, my left hand pressing her against the brick wall.

“What is your name?” I asked. “That I assume you know.”

Her facial expression was unchanged.

Zanna Huygens, she thought.

“Where are you from, Zanna?”

Back off, motherfucker, I heard. English.

Back off.

She spoke English, German, Flemish. Probably one of the Flemish hired killers that the world’s espionage agencies like to employ as freelance talent. The CIA used the Dutch and the Flemish, not just because they were good, but because they had a natural facility in many languages, which made it easy for them to blend in anywhere in the world, to submerge their true identities.

Something else I didn’t understand. A floating phrase, repeated several times: the name the name the name the name

the name motherfucker the name give me the name

the name give me the name

“I don’t know anything,” she spat out at me, tiny gobbets of saliva stinging my face.

“You’ve been told to get a name out of me, is that it?”

A twitch of her left cheek; a sere pucker of her perfect crimson lips. Then, having considered for a moment, she spoke.

“I know you’re some kind of freak,” she said. Without warning her words began to gush forth, in a prim, singsong Flemish accent. “I know you were trained by the CIA. I know that somehow you have this weird thing, this thing where sometimes you can hear the voices inside the heads of other people, inside the minds of people who are afraid, I don’t know exactly how, or why, or where this thing came from, or whether you were born with it…”

She was yammering, jabbering away almost mindlessly, and suddenly I knew what she was doing.

She was talking nonstop, filling her brain’s speech center with word after word that was probably rehearsed, because if you keep talking, your brain is too busy producing the thoughts that lead to vocalized speech, too busy to be intruded upon, to be read.

“… or why you’re here,” she blathered on, “but I know that you’re supposed to be ruthless, bloodthirsty, and I know that you’re not going to return to the U.S. alive, but I can probably be of some help to you, and please, please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, I was doing a job, and I didn’t fire directly at you, you’ll notice, please-”

Was she really pleading? I momentarily wondered. Was that fear in her eyes? Had the anxiolytic worn off, or had the stress and terror finally sunk in, and as I inhaled, thought how to respond, she abruptly jammed her hands in my face, her sharp nails grasping at my eye sockets, screaming shrilly, deafeningly, and slammed her knee upward into my groin, all of this happening in one bewildering, frightening instant, and I reacted, a little late, but not entirely too late, by steadying the gun, my bandaged, clumsy finger poised on the trigger, and the would-be assassin jolted my hand, certainly trying to dislodge the gun, but it didn’t dislodge the gun at all; instead, it caused me to pull back instinctively, thus giving the trigger the slightest squeeze, and the woman’s head exploded, and with a liquid sound the air was expelled from her lungs and she sank to the ground.

Calmly, I reached down, frisked her, searching for but not finding any documentation, any papers or wallets of any kind except a small billfold that contained a small amount of Swiss currency, probably just enough to get her through her morning’s assignment, and then I ran.

For a long, awful, excruciating moment, as I searched for Molly in the Grillroom at the Baur-au-Lac, I knew she was dead. I knew they had gotten to her. As had happened once before, I had survived their onslaught but the others had gotten my wife.

The Grillroom is a clubby, comfortable place with an American-style bar, a large stone fireplace, and businessmen sitting at tables lunching on their émincé de turbot. I was decidedly out of place there, bedraggled and blood-spattered as I was, and I drew a number of hostile, disapproving looks.

And as I turned to leave, a young woman in the uniform of a waitress hurried up to me, and asked, “Are you Mr. Osborne?”

It took me a moment to remember that that was my cover. “Why do you ask?”

She nodded shyly, handed me a folded note. “From Mrs. Osborne, sir,” she said, and stood there expectantly as I opened it. I gave her a ten-franc note, and she hurried off.

The blue Ford Granada in front, the note said in Molly’s handwriting.

FORTY-NINE

Munich was dark by the time we arrived, a clear and crisp evening twinkling with city lights. We had retrieved our bags from the left-luggage depot in the Hauptbahnhof in Zurich, and got the 15:39 train, which arrived at 20:09 in Munich’s Hauptbahnhof. There was a momentary fright aboard the train when we crossed the German border, and I braced myself for passport control. There had been plenty of time for our false passports to be faxed to the German authorities, particularly if the CIA put a priority on it, which I would bet it did.

But times have changed. The old days, when you would be startled awake in the middle of the night, your train compartment door violently slid open, a German voice barking: “Deutsche Passkontrolle!”-those days were ancient history now. Europe was unifying. Passport checks were seldom.

Exhausted yet tense, anxious, wired, I tried to sleep on the train, but could not.

We changed some money at the Deutsche Verkehrs-Bank office at the train station, and then I made hotel reservations for the night. The Metropol, with the unique advantage of its location directly across from the Hauptbahnhof, was booked solid. But I was able to book us a room at the Bayerischer Hof und Palais Montgelas, on Promenadeplatz, in the city center-inordinately expensive, but any port in a storm and all that.

From a pay phone I placed a call to Kent Atkins, Deputy Chief of Station, CIA, in Munich. Atkins, an old drinking buddy of mine from Paris days, was, as I’ve said, a friend of Edmund Moore’s-and, more important, was the one who had given Ed Moore documents warning of something “ominous” in the works.

It was about nine-thirty by the time I called Atkins at home. He answered on the first ring.

“Yes?”

“Kent?”

“Yes?” His voice was sharp, alert, but it sounded as if he had been asleep. One of the vital skills you acquire in the business is the ability to snap awake, be perfectly attentive in a split second.

“Boy, you’re asleep early. It’s barely nine at night.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Father John.”

“Who?”

“Père Jean.” An old, inside joke; a reference I hoped he would remember.

Long silence. “Who is-oh, God. Where are you?”

“Can we meet for a drink or something?”

“Can it wait?”

“No. Hofbraühaus in half an hour?”

Atkins replied quickly and sarcastically: “Why don’t we just meet in the lobby of the American embassy?”

I got it, and smiled to myself. Molly looked at me with concern; I nodded reassurance.

“See you at Leopold,” he said, and hung up. He sounded distraught.

Leopold, I knew-and he knew that I knew-meant Leopoldstrasse, in Schwabing, the section to the north of the city. That meant the Englishcher Garten, a logical meeting place, and specifically, the Monopteros, the classical temple built in the early part of the nineteenth century, on a bluff in the park. A good place for a “blind date,” as we spooks call it.

Instead of taking the U-bahn directly from the train station, which had certain risks, we exited the station and strolled a bit, circuitously, to Marienplatz, the always-crowded central square of the city, overpowered by the Gothic monstrosity of the New Town Hall, its gray gingerbread façade illuminated frighteningly at night, and on the southwest corner a rather barbarous modern department store building, which utterly destroyed the kitsch-Gothic unity of the square, awful though it was.

In some ways Germany hadn’t changed since last I saw it. I was reassured to see a crowd waiting bovinely at a flashing red Don’t Walk sign on Maxburgstrasse, where not a single automobile was in sight and the whole bunch could have crossed without anyone noticing, but laws were laws. One young man hopped up and down on alternating feet, desperate with impatience, like a horse champing at the bit, but even he wouldn’t violate the social etiquette.

Yet in significant ways Germany had changed drastically. The crowds in Marienplatz were louder and more threatening than the usually polite evening throngs there. Neo-Nazi skinheads lurked in spiteful little gangs, hurling racial epithets at passersby. Graffiti covered quite a few of the otherwise-tidy Gothic buildings. “Ausländer raus!” and “Kanacken raus!”-“Foreigners get out,” in varying degrees of derogation. “Tod allen Juden und dem Ausländerpack!”-“Death to the Jews and the foreign hordes.” “Deutschland ist stärker ohne Europa”-“Germany is stronger without Europe.” There were attacks on the former East Germans: “Ossis-Parasiten!” Inscribed in Day-Glo pink on the front of an otherwise elegant restaurant, an evocation of an earlier time: “Deutschland für Deutsche,” “Germany for the Germans.” And one plaintive cry: “Für mehr Menschlichkeit, gegen Gewalt!” meaning “For more humanity, against violence.”

Dozens of homeless people slept on cardboard flats above grates. Many storefronts were boarded up, plate-glass windows were smashed and unrepaired, and many businesses seemed to be dying. “Wegen Geschäftsaufgabe alle Waren 30% billiger!” one sign read: GOING OUT OF BUSINESS ALL GOODS 30% OFF.

Munich seemed a city out of control. I wondered whether the entire country, which was in its biggest economic crisis since the days before Hitler’s rise to power, was like this.

Molly and I took the U-bahn from Marienplatz to Müncher Freiheit and made our way through the Englischer Garten’s asphalt tracks, by the artificial lake, the Chinese Tower. We quickly located the Monopteros, which has always reminded me of a bulimic Jefferson Memorial, all gawky columns and scrolled capitals. We circled it in silence. In the sixties the Monopteros was a hangout for street people and protesters and the like. Now it seemed to be a rendezvous point for teenage boys and girls in American college sweatshirts and black leather jackets.

“Why do you think the money was wired to Munich?” Molly asked. “Isn’t Frankfurt the financial capital of Germany?”

“Yes. But Munich is the manufacturing center. The industrial capital as well as the capital of Bavaria. The real city of money. Sometimes Munich’s called Germany’s secret capital.”

We were early, or, rather, Atkins arrived late, in his antique Ford Fiesta, little more than sheaths of rust held together by duct tape. He had the radio blasting, or maybe it was a tape: Donna Summer doing the old post-disco classic “She Works Hard for the Money.” In Paris, I remembered, he’d had an embarrassing affinity for discothéques. The music died only when he keyed off the ignition and the car sputtered to a stop fifty feet from where we stood.

“Nice car,” I called out as he approached. “Very gemütlich.”

“Very crappy,” he returned unsmilingly. His face showed great strain, the same anxiety I had heard in his voice. Atkins was in his mid-forties, lithe, with a mane of prematurely white hair contrasting with heavy dark brows. He had a long, thin face and virtually no lips, but he was good-looking all the same. He was also gay, which for a long while made career advancement difficult for him (the upper echelons in Langley have become enlightened only very recently).

Atkins had aged quite a bit since I had last seen him in Paris. He had deep circles under his eyes, which told of nights of insomnia. He hadn’t been a worrier when I knew him in Paris, but something was obsessing him now, and I knew what it was.

I began introducing him to Molly, but he would have no social pleasantries. He reached out a hand and gripped my shoulder.

“Ben,” he said, alarm in his eyes. “Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of Germany. I can’t afford to be seen with you.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

“Vier Jahreszeiten,” I lied.

“Too public, too vulnerable. I wouldn’t even stay in the city if I were you.”

“Why?”

“You’re PNG.” Persona non grata.

“Here?”

“Everywhere.”

“So what?”

“You’re on the watch list.”

“Meaning?”

Atkins hesitated, glanced at Molly and then at me, as if asking for permission to proceed. I nodded.

“Cauterization.”

“What?” In Agency lingo, a compromised or identified agent is “cauterized” for his own protection by being swiftly yanked out of a hostile situation and taken into safety. But more and more often the term is used with irony-meaning the apprehension of an agent by his own employers when he’s deemed to be dangerous to the organization.

Atkins was telling me that orders had been disseminated throughout the world that I was to be brought in by any Agency official who chanced to encounter me.

“It’s a D-Sid.” A DCID, or Director of Central Intelligence Directive. “Orders cut by some muckety-muck at the Agency named Rossi. What are you doing here?” Atkins was moving quickly now, probably an unconscious fear reflex. We kept up with him; Molly was forced into a kind of half-walk, half-sprint. She only listened, allowing me to do all the talking.

“I need your help, Kent.”

“I said, what are you doing here? Are you out of your mind?”

“How much do you know?”

“They warned me you might surface here. Have you gone private or something?”

“I went private when I quit and went to law school.”

“But you’re back in the game,” he prodded. “Why?”

“I was forced into it.”

“So they all say. You can never quit.”

“Bullshit. For a while, I did.”

“You were put through some sort of superclassified experimental program, they say. Some sort of research program designed to enhance your usefulness. I don’t know what that means. The rumors are vague.”

“The rumors are barium,” I said. He got my reference: “barium” is a KGB-inspired term for false information that’s given to suspected leaks in order to detect them, much the same way barium is used in gastroenterology.

“Maybe,” he said. “But you’ve got to go to ground, Ben. Both of you. Disappear. Your lives are in jeopardy.”

When we had gotten to a deserted spot, a copse of trees by a dirt path, I stopped. “You know Ed Moore’s dead.”

He blinked. “I know. I talked to him the night before he was killed.”

“He told me you were scared to death.”

“Moore exaggerated.”

“But you are scared, Kent. You’ve got to tell me what you know. You gave Moore documents-”

“What are you talking about?”

Molly, sensing his reticence, announced: “I’m going to take a stroll. I badly need some fresh air.” Her hand grazed the back of my neck as she walked off.

“He told me, Kent,” I continued. “It never went any further than me, I promise. We don’t have the time for this. What do you know?”

He bit his thin lower lip, frowned. His mouth was a straight line, an arc tilted downward. He consulted his watch, a fake Rolex. “The documents I gave Ed were far from conclusive.”

“But you know more now, don’t you?”

“I have nothing in writing. No documents. Everything I’ve learned is ears-only stuff.”

“That’s often the most valuable intelligence. Kent, Ed Moore was killed over this. I have some information that might be useful-”

“I don’t want your goddamned information!”

“Listen to me!”

“No,” he said. “You listen to me. I talked to Ed a few hours before the fuckers made him commit suicide. He warned me about an assassination conspiracy.”

“Yes,” I said, my stomach tensing. “Against whom?”

“Ed had only bits and pieces. Speculation.”

“Who?”

“Against the only guy who can clean the Agency out.”

“Alex Truslow.”

“You got it.”

“I’m working for him.”

“I’m glad to hear it. For his sake and the sake of the Company.”

“I’m flattered. Now, I need some information. Recently, a large sum of money was wired to a corporate account in Munich. The Commerzbank.”

“Whose account?”

Could I trust him or not? I had to rely on Ed Moore’s good judgment. I plunged ahead. “Are you with me or not?”

Atkins took a deep breath. “I’m with you, Ben.”

“The recipient’s name was Gerhard Stoessel. The corporate account belongs to Krafft A.G. Tell me everything you know.”

He shook his head. “You got that wrong. Boy, you got something all screwed up.”

“Why?”

“Do you know who Stoessel is?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Christ! Haven’t you been reading the papers? Gerhard Stoessel is the chairman of Neue Welt, an enormous real estate concern. Believed to own and/or control most of the commercial real estate in unified Germany. More to the point, Stoessel is the economic adviser to Wilhelm Vogel, the chancellor-elect. Vogel’s already named him finance minister in the Vogel government. Wants Stoessel to rebuild the shattered German economy. He’s known as Vogel’s Svengali, sort of a financial genius. But as I said, you got something really screwed up.”

“How?”

“Vogel’s real estate company has no links whatsoever to Krafft A.G. Do you know much about Krafft?”

“That’s part of the reason I’m here,” I said. “I know it’s a huge arms manufacturer.”

“Only the biggest arms manufacturer in Europe. Headquartered in Stuttgart. Way bigger than the other German defense companies-Krupp, Dornier, Krauss-Maffei, Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm, Siemens, and let’s not forget the Bayerische Motorenwerke. Bigger than Ingenieurkontor Lübeck, the submarine makers; or Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg, AEG, MTU, Messerschmitt, Daimler-Benz, Rheinmetall…”

“How do you know Stoessel has no links with Krafft?”

“It’s the law. There was a ruling some years back by the Federal Cartel Office, when Neue Welt tried to acquire Krafft. The cartel office decided the two companies can’t have anything to do with one another, that a merger would create an uncontrollable giant. Did you know the word cartel comes from the German Kartell? It’s a German concept.”

“My information is right,” I said.

All this time I had been straining, while talking and listening, to pick up what I could of Kent’s thoughts. Here and there something would come through. Each time it confirmed for me what I already knew, that he was telling me the truth, at least as he knew it.

“If-if your information is right, and I won’t ask where you got it, I don’t want to know-that’s damned convincing proof that Stoessel’s company has somehow, secretly, acquired Krafft!”

I turned to make sure Molly was within view; she was: she was pacing back and forth.

What this all meant, I thought but didn’t say, was that the Bank of Zurich had funneled billions of dollars to a German corporation, the largest real estate firm combined with the largest munitions manufacturer… which was behind Wilhelm Vogel, the next chancellor of Germany… the next leader, functionally, of Europe.

I shuddered, not wanting to consider the ramifications of this, but not able to stop myself. The consequences, I knew at once, were even worse than I had suspected.

FIFTY

“Could it have been a bribe?” I asked. “Stoessel’s known as a Mr. Clean type,” Atkins replied. “Those are the types who most often take bribes.”

“All right, I’m not saying he wouldn’t take a bribe. But the fact is that all campaign financing in Germany is scrutinized incredibly closely these days. That’s to keep these industrial giants from controlling the politics. There are any number of ways to secretly channel money, but there isn’t a corporation that would dare. German intelligence keeps a close watch. So if you have proof-documentary proof-of this, that’s political dynamite.”

What was I to say? I had no documents. All I had was the thoughts in Eisler’s head that I’d received. But tell that to Atkins!

“All the more reason,” I said, “why billions of dollars or deutsche marks surreptitiously channeled into the country would be enormously valuable to a candidate. But I don’t get it. I thought Vogel was a moderate, sort of a populist.”

“Let’s walk,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Molly. We began to walk, and, keeping her distance, she followed.

“All right,” Atkins said, bowing his head as he walked. “The German economy is in a disarray it hasn’t seen since the 1920s, right? Riots in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, Bonn-all the major cities, and in many of the smaller ones as well. Neo-Nazis are all over the place. There’s a wave of violence sweeping the country. You with me?”

“Go ahead.”

“So now the Germans have this big election. But what happens a few weeks before election day? A massive stock market crash. A complete and utter catastrophe. The German economy-well, you can see it; you’ve heard it-is in ruins. A wasteland. It’s in a depression that’s in some ways worse than the Great Depression in the U.S. in the thirties.

“So the Germans panic. The incumbent is thrown out, of course, and the new face is elected. A man of the people. A man of honor-a former schoolteacher, a family man-who’s going to turn it all around. Save Germany. Make it great again.”

“Yes,” I said. “The way Hitler came to power in 1933 in the midst of the Weimar disaster. Are you suggesting Vogel is secretly a Nazi?”

For the first time, Kent laughed, more a snort than a laugh. “Nazis-or, really, neo-Nazis, to be precise about it-are repellent. But they’re extremists. They don’t represent anywhere close to a majority of the German electorate. I think the Germans get a bum rap for that. Yes, Hitler did happen. But that was years ago, and people change. The Germans want to be great again. They want to reclaim their status as a world power.”

“And Vogel-?”

“Vogel is not who he says he is.”

“What does that mean?”

“This was what I was trying to dig up when I couriered those documents to Ed Moore. I knew he was a good man, someone I could trust. Outside the Agency. Outside whatever’s going on. As well as a specialist in the politics of Europe.”

“What did you dig up?”

“I was transferred here a few months after the Berlin Wall came down. I was assigned to debrief KGB agents, Stasi, all those guys. There were rumors-only rumors, mind you-about Vladimir Orlov having moved huge amounts of money out of the country. Most of these low-level guys didn’t know diddly-shit. But when I tried to call up information on Orlov, I found that his whereabouts were marked ‘unknown’ in all the data banks.”

“His location was protected by CIA,” I said.

“Right. Odd, but okay. It happens. But then I debriefed one KGB guy, a fairly highly placed officer in the First Chief Directorate who-I think the guy was desperate for money, frankly-began gassing on about some file he’d seen on corruption in the CIA. Right, sure. Is the CIA corrupt? Does the Pope shit in the woods? A group of officials, I forget the name. It’s not important.

“But here’s what got me thinking: This KGB guy told me about some American plan-some CIA plan, he claims-to manipulate the German stock market.”

I just nodded and felt my heart thud against my rib cage.

“In October 1992 the Frankfurt Stock Exchange agreed to create one centralized German stock exchange, the Deutsche Börse. Given the interconnectedness of Europe, the way all the European currencies are linked now through the European Monetary System, a failure in the Deutsche Börse would devastate all of Europe, the guy says. Especially in this day of program trading and portfolio insurance, computer trading gone berserk. There weren’t any circuit breakers in the German market. Computers were programmed to sell automatically, triggering massive sell-offs. Plus, it was a time of great currency instability, ever since the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, was forced to raise interest rates. So the rest of Europe had to follow suit. That hurt stock market valuations. Anyway, the details aren’t all that important. Point is, this KGB guy says there’s a plan under way to undermine and destroy the European economy. The guy was a financial whiz, so I listened to him. He said all the levers are already in place; all it would take is the swift and sudden infiltration of capital-”

“Where is this guy, this KGB guy?”

“Measles.” Kent smiled sadly and shrugged. That’s a killing that’s meant to look like a death from natural causes. “One of his own, I assume.”

“Did you report this?”

“Of course I did. It’s my job, man. But I was told to drop it. Drop all efforts to investigate this; it’s disruptive to German-American relations. Don’t waste any more time on it.”

Suddenly I noticed that we were standing in front of Atkins’s old rust bucket Ford Fiesta. We had made a large loop, though I was concentrating so hard I hadn’t noticed. Molly joined up with us.

“You boys done?” she said.

“Yep,” I said. “For now.” To Atkins I said: “Thanks, buddy.”

“Okay,” he said, opening the car door. He hadn’t locked it; no one, no matter how needy, would take the trouble to steal such a vehicle. “But now take some advice, Ben, please. You too, Molly. Get the hell out of the country. I wouldn’t even spend the night here if I were you.”

I shook his hand. “Would you mind giving us a lift to the city center?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Last thing I need is to be seen with you. I agreed to meet with you because we’re friends. You’ve helped me through some tough times. I owe you. But take the U-bahn. Do me a favor.”

He got into the driver’s seat and put on the seat belt. “Good luck,” he said. He slammed the door, rolled down the window, and added: “And get out of here.”

“Can we meet again?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Stay away from me, Ben, or I’m a dead man.” He turned the key in the ignition, smiled, and added: “Measles.”

Taking Molly’s arm, we started down the path toward Tivolistrasse. Kent’s engine failed to turn over the first two times he tried, but the third time took and the car roared to life.

“Ben,” Molly began, but something was bothering me, and I turned around to watch Kent back his car up.

The music, I remembered.

He’d shut the car off with the music blasting, that Donna Summer stuff. The radio, he said. But now the radio was off.

He hadn’t turned it off.

“Kent!” I shouted, vaulting toward the car. “Jump out!”

He looked up at me, surprised, smiling uncertainly, as if wondering whether I were attempting some sort of joke.

That half-smile disappeared suddenly in a flash of white light, an absurd, hollow pop like a piñata shattering, but it was the windows of Kent’s Ford Fiesta, then a tremendous, thundering explosion like a clap of thunder, a sulphurous blaze that went amber and blood-red, run through with great leaping tongues of ocher and indigo flames, then a column of ashen cumulonimbus thunderclouds out of which sprayed oddments of the car high into the air. Something struck me in the back of the head: the face of his fake Rolex watch.

Molly and I clutched at each other in mute terror for a second, and then we ran as fast as we could into the gloom of the Englischer Garten.

FIFTY-ONE

At a few minutes after noon we reached Baden-Baden, the famous old spa resort nestled in woods of pine and birch in Germany’s Black Forest. In our rented, gleaming smoke-silver Mercedes 500SL (outfitted with burgundy leather upholstery, it was just the sort of car an ambitious young diplomat with the Canadian embassy would drive), we had made very good time. It had taken just under four hours of frantic yet careful driving on the autobahn A8 west-northwest of Munich. I was dressed in a conservative yet stylish suit that I had picked up off the rack at Loden-Frey on Maffeistrasse, on my way out of the city.

We had spent an agonized, sleepless night at our hotel on Promenadeplatz. The terrible explosion in the Englischer Garten, the horrific death of my friend: the images and the terror had lodged themselves in our minds. We comforted one another and talked for hours, each trying to allay the other’s fears, trying to make sense of what had happened.

We knew it was now imperative to find Gerhard Stoessel, the German industrialist and real estate baron who had received the wire transfer from Zurich. He was at the center of the conspiracy, I felt sure. Somehow I would have to place myself in proximity to Stoessel and receive the conspirator’s thoughts. And I would have to reach Alex Truslow, in Bonn or wherever he was, and warn him. Either he should leave the country, or he’d have to take appropriate security measures.

Early in the morning, having given up the battle to get some badly needed sleep, I called a financial reporter for Der Spiegel, whom I had known slightly in Leipzig.

“Elisabeth,” I said, “I need to track down Gerhard Stoessel.”

“The great Gerhard Stoessel himself? I’m sure he’s in Munich. That’s where the headquarters of Neue Welt are.”

But he wasn’t in Munich, as I had learned after some preliminary calling. “What about Bonn?” I asked.

“I won’t ask why you want to reach Stoessel,” she said, sensing the urgency in my voice. “But you should know that he is not easy to get to. Let me make some calls.”

She called back twenty minutes later. “He’s in Baden-Baden.”

“I won’t ask your source, but I assume it’s reliable.”

“Very much so.” Before I could ask, she added: “And he invariably stays at Brenner’s Park Hotel and Spa.”

In the nineteenth century Baden-Baden had swarmed with European nobility; it was there that, having lost everything at the Spielbank casino, Dostoyevski in despair wrote The Gambler. Now Germans and other Europeans went there to ski, play golf or tennis, watch the horse races at Iffezheim Track, and partake of the mineral-rich baths fed by artesian wells deep beneath the Florentiner Mountain.

The day had started out overcast and quite cold, and by the time we approached Brenner’s Park Hotel and Spa, surrounded by a private park by the Oosbach River, a chill drizzle had begun to fall. Baden-Baden seemed a town accustomed to grandeur and festivity; the tree-lined Lichtentaler Allee, with its vibrant adornments of rhododendrons, azaleas, and roses, was its centerpiece, its great promenade. But now it looked forlorn and deserted, resentful and furtive.

Molly waited for me in the Mercedes while I entered the hotel’s spacious and quiet lobby. I had traveled such a distance in these last few months, I reflected. So much had happened to me, to both of us, since that rainswept March day in upstate New York when we laid Harrison Sinclair’s coffin in the ground, and here we were, in a deserted German spa in the Schwarzwald, and once again it was raining.

The uniformed desk clerk who appeared to be in charge of the registration desk was a tall young man in his mid-twenties, towheaded and officious. “May I help you, sir?”

“Ich habe eine dringende Nachricht für Herrn Stoessel,” I said as importantly as possible, holding in one hand a business-size envelope. I have an urgent message for Mr. Stoessel.

I introduced myself as Christian Bartlett, a second attaché with the Canadian consulate on Tal Strasse in Munich. “Will you please give him this letter?” I said in my heavily accented but still serviceable German.

“Yes, of course, sir,” the clerk said, reaching for the envelope. “But he is not here. He is gone for the afternoon.”

“Where is he?” I slipped the envelope in my breast pocket.

“The baths, I believe.”

“Which one?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

There are really only two leading spas in Baden-Baden, both on Romerplatz: the Old Baths, also called the Friedrichsbad, and the Caracalla-Therme. At the first one I came to, Caracalla-Therme, I went through my routine, and was met by blank stares. There was no Herr Stoessel here, I was told. One of the older attendants, however, had overheard the conversation and said, “Mr. Stoessel doesn’t come here. Try the Friedrichsbad.”

At the Friedrichsbad, the attendant-bulky, sallow-faced, and middle-aged-nodded. Yes, he said. Mr. Stoessel was here.

“Ich bin Christian Bartlett,” I told him, “von der Kanadischen Botschaft. Es ist äusserst wichtig und dringend, dass ich Herrn Stoessel erreiche.” It is urgent that I reach Stoessel.

The attendant shook his head slowly, with mulelike truculence. “Er nimmt gerade ein Dampfbad.” He is taking the steam. “Man darf ihn auf gar keinen Fall stören.” He has instructed us not to disturb him.

The attendant was, however, awed and impressed by my imperiousness, and perhaps by my foreignness, and agreed to escort me into the private thermal steam bath where the great Herr Stoessel was. If it really was a matter of urgency, he would see what he could do. We passed white-uniformed stewards carting silver trays of mineral water and other cold drinks, and others carrying stacks of thick white cotton towels, and finally reached a corridor that seemed to be off limits to the other employees.

Outside the steam room sat a wide, potato-faced man in a gray security officer’s uniform, sweating profusely and visibly uncomfortable. He was obviously a bodyguard.

He looked up as we approached and snarled: “Sie dürfen nicht dort hineingehen!” You can’t go in there!

I looked at him, surprised, and smiled. In one lightning-fast motion I pulled my gun from my front pocket and slammed the butt against the side of the bodyguard’s head. He groaned and slumped to the ground. Whirling the gun back the other way, I caught the attendant on the back of his head, with the same result.

Moving quickly, I dragged both bodies into a nearby service alcove and out of sight, then closed the doors to close the area off. The attendant’s white uniform slipped off easily. It hung on me, but it would have to do.

I grabbed an empty tray from the stainless steel counter and several bottles of mineral water from a small refrigerator, and ambled casually to the steam room door. I gave it a hard tug and it came open with a loud hiss.

The steam swirled about me, thick and opaque like absorbent cotton, an undulating scrim. The room was unbearably hot, stifling, the steam sulfurous and acrid. I could taste it. The vaulted walls were tiled in white ceramic.

“Wer ist da? Was ist los?” Who’s there? What’s going on?

Through the gauzy mist I could just make out a pair of corpulent, reddened, nude bodies. They rested on a long stone bench, on white towels like carcasses in a slaughterhouse.

The voice came from the body nearest me, hairy-chested and round. As I advanced through the dense clouds, holding the tray aloft, I could make out his prominent ears, his balding dome, his large nose. Gerhard Stoessel. I had studied his photograph in Der Spiegel that morning; there was no question it was him. I couldn’t quite see who his companion was, except that it was another middle-aged man, hairless, with short legs.

“Erfrischungen?” Stoessel barked out. Refreshments? “Nein!”

Wordlessly, I backed out of the chamber, closing the door behind me.

The bodyguard and the attendant were still unconscious. Swiftly and deliberately, I paced the corridors outside the steam bath until I found what I wanted: a windowless door located at what would have been the rear of the chamber. It was the maintenance crawl space that I knew had to be there, in which the spa’s workers could do repair work on the steam pipes. It was not locked; there was no reason for it to be. I opened it and quickly, nervously, ducked into the low-ceilinged space. It was completely dark. The walls were slimy with moisture and mineral deposits. Momentarily losing my balance, I reached up to steady myself and accidentally grasped a scalding-hot pipe. Only with great effort was I able to restrain myself from bellowing in pain.

As I crept along on my knees, I spotted a pinhole of light and moved toward it. The caulk fitting around a steam vent, where it entered the bath area, had come loose in one place, letting in a dot of light-and muffled sound.

After a minute or so my ears became sufficiently accustomed to the poor sound quality, and I could recognize phrases, then whole sentences. The conversation between the two men was of course in German, but I was able to understand much of what I heard. Crouched in the darkness, my hands braced against the slimy concrete walls, I listened with horrified fascination, overcome with fear.

FIFTY-TWO

At first there were just isolated phrases: Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German Federal Intelligence Service. The Swiss Intelligence Service. The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French counterespionage organization, the DST. Something was said about Stuttgart, and an airport.

Then the conversation grew more fluid, more expansive. A scornful voice-Stoessel’s? the other man’s?: “And for all their assets, their sources, their databases, they have not a clue as to who this secret witness is?”

I could not hear a reply.

And a wafted phrase: “To ensure victory…”

And: “The confederacy.”

And: “If a united Europe is to be ours.” Then: “Such an opportunity comes along once or twice in a century.”

“Full coordination with the Wise Men…”

The other man, who I now decided was Stoessel: “-at history. It is sixty-one years since Adolf Hitler became chancellor and the Weimar Republic was no longer. One forgets that at the beginning no one thought he would last the year!”

The other replied angrily, “Hitler was a madman! We are sane.”

“We are not burdened with ideology,” came Stoessel’s voice, “which is always the downfall…”

Something I could not hear, and then Stoessel replied: “So we must be patient, Wilhelm. In a few weeks you will be the leader of Germany, and we will rule. But to consolidate our power will take time. Our American partners assure us of their restraint.”

You will be leader of Germany… The other man was, had to be, Wilhelm Vogel, the chancellor-elect!

My stomach turned over.

Vogel, I was sure it was Wilhelm Vogel, made a noise, some sort of muffled objection, to which Stoessel responded, loudly and quite clearly: “… that they will watch and do nothing. Since Maastricht, the conquest of Europe has been made enormously easier. The governments will fall one by one. The politicians are not leaders anyway. They will look to the corporate leaders, because industry and commerce are the only forces capable of governing a unified Europe. They have no vision! We are visionaries! We can see much farther, beyond tomorrow and the day after. Beyond the immediate concerns of the day.”

Another demurral from the chancellor-elect. Stoessel said: “A global conquest that is quite simple, because it is based on the profit motive, pure and simple.”

“The defense minister,” Vogel said.

“Will be easily done,” Stoessel replied. “He wants the same thing. Once the German army is restored to its proper glory…”

Another muffled remark, and then Stoessel went on. “Easily! Easily! Russia is no longer a threat! Russia is nothing. France… you are old enough to remember the Second World War, Willi. The French will curse and complain, bluster about a Maginot line, but they will capitulate without a struggle.”

Vogel seemed to object again, for Stoessel replied querulously, “Because it is in their best economic interests, why else? The rest of Europe will roll over, and Russia will have no choice but to roll over as well.”

Vogel said something about Washington and a “secret witness.”

“He will be found,” Stoessel said. “The leak will be found and plugged. He assures us it will be contained.”

Vogel said something about “before then,” and Stoessel said, “Yes, precisely. In three days it will happen… Yes. No, the man will be assassinated. It will not fail. It is orchestrated. He will die. It is not to worry.”

There was a noise, a thump, which I realized was the door to the steam bath being opened.

Then, very distinctly, Stoessel said: “Ah, you are here.”

“Welcome,” Vogel said. “I trust your flight into Stuttgart was uneventful.”

Another thump; the door was closed.

“… wanted to tell you,” Stoessel’s voice came again, “how grateful we are. All of us.”

“Thank you,” said Vogel.

“Our heartfelt congratulations to you,” Stoessel said.

The newcomer spoke to them in fluent German, but with a foreign accent, probably American. The voice was a resonant baritone, and somehow familiar. The voice of someone I’d heard on television? On the radio?

“The witness is scheduled to appear before the Senate committee on intelligence,” the newcomer said.

“Who is it?” Stoessel demanded.

“We do not yet have a name. Be patient. We have obtained access to the committee’s computer banks. This is how we can be sure that this secret witness will be testifying on the subject of the Wise Men.”

“And on us?” Vogel said. “Does he know about Germany?”

“Impossible to know,” the American said. “Whether he-or she-does, or doesn’t, our link to you is a simple one to make.”

“Then he must be eliminated,” Stoessel said.

“But without knowing the witness’s identity,” the American said, “it is impossible to know who to eliminate. Only when the individual appears-”

“Only at that moment-?” Vogel interrupted.

“At that moment,” the American said, “it will be done. This I can assure you.”

“But they will take measures to protect the witness,” Stoessel said.

“There are no protective measures adequate,” the American went on. “Do not be concerned. I am not. But the pressing concern now is one of coordination. If the hemispheres are apportioned-if we have the Americas, and you have Europe-”

“Yes,” Stoessel interrupted impatiently, “you are speaking of the coordination between the two world governing centers, but that is easily accomplished.”

It was time to move.

As quietly as possible I turned around, awkward in this cramped space, and crept back to the door. I listened for any footsteps, and when I was sure no one was passing by, I quickly opened it and returned to the hallway, which now seemed grotesquely bright. There were dark mud stains on the knees of my white cotton pants.

I ran around to the entrance to the steam room, found the tray of bottled water, and yanked open the door. A large cloud of opaque steam swirled before me as I stepped into the chamber. Stoessel seemed to have shifted somewhat; he had moved to the right. The man I now identified as Vogel had not moved from the spot on the bench he was on earlier. The last arrival sat farther down the bench from Vogel, to the chancellor-elect’s right, out of my range of sight.

“Hey,” the American said, still in German. “No one comes in here, you understand me?” The voice was increasingly, maddeningly familiar.

Stoessel excoriated me in German: “Enough with the refreshments! Leave us alone! I gave instructions to be left alone!”

I stood there, not moving, letting my eyes adjust to the opaque steam. The American seemed to be a middle-aged man, I couldn’t tell for sure, and he was in better physical condition than the two Germans. Then a gust of air from somewhere nearby wafted the sulfurous clouds, an eddy parting a clear patch in the steam. The face of the American, swirling before me, was instantly recognizable, and for a moment I could not move.

The new Director of CIA. My friend, Alex Truslow.