The Zero Hour

CHAPTER ONE

Prisoner number 322/88-he was known to the prison authorities as Baumann, though that was not his name at birth-had been planning this day with meticulous precision for quite some time.

He rose from bed very early and, as he did every morning, peered through the narrow barred window at the verdant mountainside that glittered emerald in the strong South African sunlight. Turning his gaze, he located the tiny, shimmering patch of ocean, just barely visible. He took in the distant caw of the seagulls. He could hear the jingling of chains worn by the most dangerous convicts as they tossed and turned in their sleep, and the barking of the Alsatians in the kennels next to the prison building.

Dropping to the cold concrete floor, he began his morning ritual: a series of limbering stretches, one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups. Then, his blood pumping vigorously, he showered.

By the standards of the outside world, Baumann’s solitary cell was cramped and narrow. But it had its own shower and toilet, a bed, a table, and a chair.

He was in his early forties, but might have been taken for a decade younger. And he was strikingly handsome. His hair was full, black, and wavy, only slightly sprinkled with gray. His closely trimmed beard accentuated a jaw that was strong and sharp; his nose was prominent but aquiline, beneath a heavy brow; his complexion was the olive so prevalent in Mediterranean countries.

Baumann might have been mistaken for a southern Italian or a Greek were it not for his eyes, which were a brilliant, clear, and penetrating blue, fringed by long eyelashes. When he smiled, which was rarely and only when he wanted to charm, his grin was radiant, his teeth perfect and brilliantly white.

In his six years in Pollsmoor Prison he’d been able to achieve a level of physical training he could never have otherwise. He had always been remarkably fit, but now his physique was powerful, even magnificent. For when he wasn’t reading there was little else to do but calisthenics and hwa rang do, the little-known Korean martial art he had spent years perfecting.

He changed into his blue prison uniform, which, like everything he wore, was stenciled with the number 4, indicating that it was property of his section of Pollsmoor Prison. Then, making his bed as usual, he began what he knew would be a long day.

Pollsmoor Prison is located just outside Cape Town, South Africa, on land that was once a racetrack and several farms. Surrounded by high stone walls topped with electrified razor-wire fences, it is a rolling landscape of palm and blue gum trees. The warders and their families live within the prison walls in comfortable apartments, with access to recreation centers, swimming pools and gardens. The four thousand prisoners normally incarcerated here are kept in conditions of legendary squalor and severity.

Pollsmoor, one of only eleven maximum-security prisons in South Africa, never had the fearsome reputation of the now-defunct Robben Island, South Africa’s Alcatraz, the rocky island off the Cape Peninsula coast isolated by icy, ferocious waves. But it succeeded Robben Island as the repository for those South Africa considered its most dangerous criminals, a group that included first-degree murderers and rapists-and, once, political dissidents who battled apartheid. It was here that Nelson Mandela completed the last few years of his quarter-century prison sentence, after Robben Island was closed and converted into a museum.

Baumann had been moved here in a van, in leg irons with twenty others, from Pretoria Central Prison, immediately following his secret trial. To most of the boers, or warders, and all of his fellow inmates, prisoner number 322/88 was a mystery. He almost always kept to himself and rarely spoke. At supper he sat alone, quietly eating his rotten vegetables, the maize and cowpeas glistening with chunks of fat. During exercise periods in the yard, he invariably did calisthenics and hwa rang do. After lockup, rather than watching a movie or television like everyone else, he read books-an enormous and peculiar range of books, ranging from histories of the atomic bomb or of the international oil business to biographies of Churchill or Nietzsche, an exposé of a recent Wall Street scandal, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and a treatise on sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance architecture.

The other prisoners (called bandiete or skollies) smoked contraband zolls, long homemade cigarettes wrapped in brown paper, while Baumann smoked Rothmans. No one knew how he had got them. He never took part in the smuggling schemes of the others, nor joined in their escape attempts, which were usually amateurish and always failed, ending in capture or, most often, death.

Nor was he a member of any of the numerous gangs, which, with the encouragement of the prison officials, controlled the inmate population. These were rigid, highly stratified organizations, controlled by governing councils called krings. They engaged in ritual killings, beheadings, dismemberment, even cannibalism. They were hostile to nonmembers, whom they called mupatas, or sheep.

Once, a few days after Baumann had arrived at Pollsmoor, one of the gangs dispatched their most vicious lanie-a leader serving a long sentence, whom everyone knew to avoid-to threaten him in the exercise yard. The lanie was found brutally murdered-so horribly mangled, in fact, that the men who discovered him, all hardened men, were sickened. Several inmates were unlucky enough to witness the act, which was done quickly and efficiently. The most terrible thing about it was that even in the thick of the struggle, there was no visible change in Baumann’s glacial demeanor. Afterward, no one would ever admit having seen the killing. Baumann was treated with respect and left alone.

About Baumann, it was known only that he was serving a life sentence and that he had recently been reassigned from kitchen duty to the auto shop, where repair work was done on the prison officials’ cars. It was rumored that he had once been employed by the South African government, that he used to work for the state intelligence and secret service once called the Bureau for State Security, or BOSS, and now called the National Intelligence Service.

It was whispered that he had committed a long string of famous terrorist acts in South Africa and abroad-some for BOSS, some not. It was believed that he had been imprisoned for assassinating a member of the Mossad’s fearsome kidon unit, which was true, although that had merely been a pretext, for he had been ordered to do so. In truth, he was so good at what he did that he frightened his own employers, who much preferred to see him locked away forever.

A boer had once heard that within BOSS Baumann was known as the Prince of Darkness. Why, the warder could not say. Some speculated it was because of his serious mien; some believed it was because of his facility at killing, which had been so vividly demonstrated. There were plenty of theories, but no one knew for certain.

In the six years he had been imprisoned here, Baumann had come to know the place extremely well. He had become so accustomed to the smell of Germothol disinfectant that it had become a pleasant part of the ambience, like the salty sea air. He was no longer startled by the whoop of the “cat,” the siren that went off without warning, at odd moments, to summon guards to an incident-a fight, an escape attempt.

At half past nine in the morning, Baumann entered the auto shop and was greeted by the warder, Pieter Keevy. Baumann rather liked Keevy. He was basically a good sort, if a bit slow on the uptake.

The relationship between boer and bandiet was a strange one. Warders were famously cruel, to the point of sadism-yet at the same time, touchingly, they desperately wanted to be liked by the prisoners.

Baumann was aware of this vulnerability and took advantage of it whenever possible. He knew that Keevy was fascinated by Baumann, wanted to know about his life, where he came from. Baumann duly provided the guard with morsels from time to time-morsels that piqued Keevy’s curiosity without ever satisfying it. He liked Keevy because it was so easy to manipulate him.

“We’ve got a new one in for you boys today,” Keevy announced heartily, clapping Baumann on the shoulder. “Food-service lorry.”

“Oh?” Baumann replied equably. “What’s wrong with it, baas?”

“Don’t know. They’re saying it smokes whenever they shift gears.”

“White smoke?”

Keevy shrugged. “Thing sort of shifts with a bang.”

“I see. Probably drinking up transmission fluid, too. Not a big deal. Probably a bad vacuum modulator.”

Keevy cocked an eyebrow and nodded sagely as if he understood. “Bloody pain in the arse.”

“Not really, Piet. And we’re almost done with the chaplain’s car.” Baumann indicated the small black Ford sedan he’d been working on for the last few days.

“Let Popeye do it,” Keevy said. “Popeye” was the prison nickname for Jan Koopman, the other skolly who worked in the auto-repair shop. “Like I said, it’s a food-service lorry. We wouldn’t want to miss any meals, now would we?”

Baumann chuckled at the warder’s pathetic attempt at humor and replied dryly: “I’d hate to miss out on another ear.” This was a reference to a time when Baumann, tucking into his maize and cowpeas at supper a few weeks ago, discovered a large, hairy, filthy pig ear.

“Oh!” Keevy gasped as he exploded with laughter. “Oh-the hairy ear!”

“So why don’t I ask Popeye to take a look at the lorry, while I get the chaplain’s car out of here.” Keevy was still laughing, silently and helplessly, his large round shoulders heaving.

Popeye, whose shoulder boasted a large, crude tattoo, which signified he’d knifed a warder, arrived a few minutes later and sullenly obeyed Baumann’s directions. He was actually larger than Baumann and weighed a good deal more, but he knew enough to be afraid of his coworker and did what he was told.

As Baumann opened the trunk of the chaplain’s car, he furtively glanced over at Keevy, who was by now taking a drag on a cigarette. Sure enough, as he did every morning after he lit his cigarette, Keevy lumbered to the door and went off to get a mug of coffee and take a ten- or fifteen-minute break with the warder at the next station.

Standing at the trunk of the car, Baumann called over to Popeye, “Could you check out this fucking tailpipe? Think it’s got to be replaced?”

Popeye came over and knelt down to inspect the tailpipe. “Shit, what the hell are you talking about?” he said belligerently, seeing nothing wrong with it.

“I’ll show you,” Baumann said quietly as he reached down with both hands, grasped Popeye’s chin from behind and above, and, with a sudden, violent shake from side to side, pulled the chin upward to a forty-five-degree angle. It was all over in a few seconds, and there was not even time for Popeye to cry out before he slumped, dead, to the concrete floor.

Baumann quickly dragged the inert body across the floor to the glossy cinnamon-red tool cabinet. He opened it, removed the shelves of drill bits, wedged the body inside, and turned the lock. He glanced back at the door. Old reliable Keevy still hadn’t returned from his break. At least five minutes remained before Keevy would be relieved by the next guard. Always there was a routine: human beings thrive on routine.

Baumann reached deep into the trunk of the chaplain’s car and lifted a section of the tan carpeting that lined it. Behind the flap of carpeting were the latches he had installed during the last few days of work on the car. He opened the latches and pulled back the false wall, which he had installed and camouflaged by gluing the carpet liner over it.

Behind the panel was a concealed compartment between the trunk and the car’s backseat, just big enough for him to crawl into. All of this he had accomplished while doing the requested bodywork on the car. Keevy, who paid no attention to Baumann’s work, suspected nothing.

He climbed into the trunk and positioned himself in the compartment. As he was about to pull the panel closed behind him, he heard the approach of a heavy set of footsteps. He struggled out of the space, but too late. Standing a few feet away, his mouth gaping, was Keevy.

Keevy was not supposed to be here, and it saddened Baumann. “What the fucking-” Keevy said in a funny, strangled little voice, trying to comprehend what Baumann was doing. In one hand he held a clipboard, which Baumann now realized the guard had absentmindedly left behind before taking his break.

Baumann chuckled to himself and gave Keevy a radiant, endearing smile. “Trunk’s coming apart,” he explained to the guard as he casually crawled out, swung his feet around, and stood up. “With what they pay that poor old man of the cloth, it’s not surprising.”

But Keevy, suspicious, shook his head slowly. “Coming apart?” he said stupidly.

Baumann put an arm around the warder’s shoulders, feeling the soft flesh yield like a bowl of quivering aspic. He gave him a comradely squeeze. “Look,” he whispered confidingly. “Why don’t we keep this between you and me?”

Keevy’s eyes narrowed with greed. His mouth was slack. “What’s in it for me?” he said at once.

“Oh, quite a lot, baas,” Baumann said, his arm still around Keevy’s shoulders. “A pig’s ear, for one thing.”

He smiled again, and Keevy began to chortle. Baumann laughed, and Keevy laughed, and Baumann made his right hand into a fist, and in one simple motion swung it back and then slammed it into the hollow of Keevy’s armpit with enormous force, crushing the brachial nerve, which is wide at that point and close to the surface.

Keevy collapsed immediately.

Baumann caught him as he sagged and crushed Keevy’s trachea, killing him at once. With some difficulty, he pushed the body underneath a workbench. In a few minutes, he had installed himself within the hidden compartment in the chaplain’s car and tightened the latches. It was dark and close in there, but there wasn’t long to wait. Soon he could hear the footsteps of another prison official entering the shop.

With a loud metallic clatter, the blue-painted steel doors, which led to the vehicle trap and the courtyard outside, began to lift. The car’s ignition was switched on; the engine was revved exactly three times-signifying that all was according to plan-and the car began to move forward.

There, a minute or two went by, during which time the guards in the vehicle trap carefully inspected the car to make sure no prisoner was hiding in it. Baumann was thoroughly familiar with how they inspected vehicles, and he knew he would not be caught. The trunk was opened. Baumann could see a tiny sliver of light appear suddenly at a gap where the panel met the trunk’s floor.

He inhaled slowly, noiselessly. His heart hammered; his body tensed. Then the trunk was slammed and the car moved forward.

Out of the vehicle trap. Into the courtyard.

Baumann could taste the exhaust fumes and hoped he would not have to remain here much longer. A moment later, the car again came to a halt. He knew they had arrived at the prison gates, where another cursory inspection would be done. Then the car moved on again, soon accelerating as it merged with the main road to Cape Town.

Clever though he was, Baumann knew he could not have orchestrated his escape without the help of the powerful man in Switzerland who for some reason had taken a keen interest in his liberty.

The car’s driver, a young man named van Loon, was an accountant in the office of the prison commandant as well as a friend of the chaplain’s. The young accountant had volunteered to pick up the chaplain, who was arriving on a Trek Airways flight from Johannesburg to D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town, in the chaplain’s own newly repaired car.

By prior arrangement with Baumann, however, van Loon would find it necessary to make a brief stop at a petrol station along the way for refueling and a cup of coffee. There, in a secluded rest stop out of sight of passersby, Baumann would get out.

The plan had worked perfectly.

He was free, but his elation was dampened somewhat by the unpleasantness with the warder in the auto shop. It was unfortunate he had had to kill the simple fellow.

He had rather liked Keevy.

CHAPTER TWO

Several hours earlier, at eight o’clock on a rainy evening in Boston, a young blond woman strode brusquely across the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel and toward the bank of elevators.

The set of her pretty face was all business, her eyebrows arched, her lips slightly pursed. She wore the uniform of an affluent businesswoman: a navy-blue double-breasted Adrienne Vittadini suit with padded shoulders, an Hermès scarf, an off-white silk blouse, a simple strand of pearls and matching mabe pearl earrings, black Ferragamo pumps, and, under one arm, a slim cordovan Gucci portfolio. In the other hand-somewhat incongruously-she grasped a large black leather bag.

To the casual observer, the woman might have been a high-powered attorney or an executive returning from a dinner with clients. But a more thorough inspection would have revealed tiny details that punctured the illusion. Perhaps it was her too obviously dyed, shoulder-length ash-blond hair. Perhaps her restless blue eyes, which betrayed a discomfort with the hotel’s modern glass-and-marble opulence.

Whatever it was that didn’t fit, the concierge glanced up at her, back down to the petty-cash-disbursement sheet before him, then back again to the beautiful blond woman for the briefest instant. Then he inclined his head slightly to one side and caught the eye of one of the hotel’s security people, a woman who sat in a large comfortable armchair feigning to read The Boston Globe.

Security arched her eyebrows a fraction to signal that she, too, was suspicious-or at least amused-then smiled and gave the tiniest shrug, invisible to anyone but the concierge, which said, Let her go, we can’t be entirely sure.

The Four Seasons did all it could to discourage call girls, but in uncertain cases such as this, it was far better to err on the permissive side rather than risk offending a legitimate hotel guest.

The blond woman entered a waiting elevator and got out on the seventh floor. When she reached room 722, she let herself in with a key.

About twenty minutes later, a well-dressed man in his mid-fifties unlocked the same door. Although he was not an especially handsome man-he had a high, speckled forehead, beaky nose, large pouches under his eyes, fleshy jowls-there was about him the patina of prosperity.

His face and hands were deeply tanned, as if he often sailed the waters off St. Bart’s, which he did. His hair was silver and neatly combed. His navy blazer was well tailored and expensive, his tie from Ermenegildo Zegna, his tasseled loafers polished to a high sheen.

Entering the room tentatively, he glanced around, but the only evidence of the woman was the clothes hanging neatly in the closet. The bathroom door was closed. He tingled with enormous anticipation.

In the exact center of the king-size bed an envelope had been placed. He reached across the bed and retrieved it. On its front was his name in large, loopy script. The note inside contained a simple set of instructions, which he read and immediately began to follow.

With trembling, clumsy fingers, he placed his briefcase on a desk and started undressing, dropping his jacket and then his pants in crumpled heaps on the gray carpet beside the bed. Fumblingly, he unbuttoned his shirt and then slipped off his monogrammed silk boxer shorts. He stumbled twice trying to remove his socks. Momentarily alarmed, he looked up to make sure the drapes were drawn. They were. She had, of course, taken care of every detail.

As he knelt in the corner of the room, naked, he felt his half-swollen member throb fully, almost painfully, to life, arching away from his body, proud and distended and flushed.

He heard the bathroom door open.

When the woman emerged, he did not turn to look: he had been ordered not to do so. In her black patent-leather boots with heels, the blond woman was just under six feet tall. Her body was covered entirely in a skin-tight black cat suit of four-way-stretch PVC, a wet-looking material made of a plastic substance bonded to Lycra. Her black gloves went to her elbows; the mask over her eyes was of thin black leather.

Silently, with fluid movements, she approached him from behind and placed a blindfold on him, the soft sheepskin against his eyes, the supple leather on the outside, its closure made of elastic. It looked like an oversize pair of goggles.

As she fastened the blindfold, she touched him gently, caressed him, wordlessly reassured. She placed a gloved hand under each arm, lifted him to his feet, and guided him over to the bed, where he knelt again, his engorged phallus compressed tightly between his abdomen and the side of the bed.

Next, she placed handcuffs on his wrists and clicked them shut. For the first time, she spoke. “It’s time for your hood,” she said in a husky contralto.

He inhaled deeply and quaveringly. His shoulders hunched with anticipation. He could sense her towering over him, could smell her leather gloves and boots.

She removed his blindfold, and now he was able to look at her. “Yes, mistress,” he said in a soft, childlike whisper.

The hood was made of leather, too, form-fitting and lined with rubber. It had no holes for eyes or mouth, only nose holes for breathing. His eyes widened in fear as he took in the severity of this piece of apparatus. She slipped it over his head, heavy and cold and stifling, and he trembled with mixed terror and excitement.

She pulled the hood’s collar tight, adjusted it, pulled the zipper down at the back, and fastened the zipper’s tag end to the collar with a loud click.

The man was now overwhelmed with delicious fear. An icy, sickening terror lodged itself in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to vomit, but was afraid to do so, for it would suffocate him.

He felt his breath catch somewhere deep in his throat, just above the lungs. He gulped, gasped for air, forgetting for an instant that in this hood the only way he could breathe was through his nose, and he panicked.

He whimpered, trying to scream, but unable to.

“You’ve been bad,” he heard her admonish him. “I like looking at you, but you’ve been a bad boy.”

Control your breathing! he told himself. Regular, rhythmic! Through the nose-breathe! But the panic was too powerful; it overwhelmed his feeble efforts to take control of his body. He gulped for air, but his mouth tasted only the rubber, now warm and damp. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his face in the darkness, and trickled, hot and salty, into his gasping mouth. Even when he somehow managed to compel himself to breathe through his nose, snorting in stingy, leather-smelling nosefuls of air, he knew he remained on the very precipice of losing control entirely.

Yet at the same time-such a peculiar, wonderful blend of the deepest terror and the most extraordinary tingling arousal!-he could feel his penis throb with excitement, as if it were about to explode.

And then-and then!-he felt the sting of her leather riding crop on the backs of his thighs, teasing and painful. And-my God!-even a sting on the head of his very penis!

“I’m going to keep you on my leash,” he heard from very far away. “You certainly haven’t behaved properly, not at all.”

He whimpered again, then moaned, and he realized he was gyrating his pelvis to some imagined rhythm, waving his butt at her, a coy offering.

“I’m going to flog the skin from your back,” she said, and he knew she meant what she was saying, and he could barely contain himself.

The woman could see that he was on the verge of climax. And she hadn’t even yet applied the device that was sold in medical supply houses as the Wartenberg Neurological Stimulator. From her black bag she withdrew a medical instrument that resembled a pinwheel at the end of a scalpel handle. Radiating out from the small-diameter pinwheel were dozens of sharp pins. She ran the instrument lightly across his legs and up to his chest.

His moans now came in waves, plaintively; he sounded to her very much like a woman nearing orgasm.

With her left hand she lightly grasped his testicles and caressed them; with the other hand, she ran the pinwheel over the backs of his legs, the backs of his knees. She moved her left hand up to the shaft of his penis and began slowly to pump, knowing it would not take much time at all. He was already throbbing, rocking back and forth, moaning. Now she ran the pinwheel up the crack of his ass, up the center of his spine, all the while masturbating him vigorously, and even before the pinwheel reached the sensitive skin at the back of the neck, he started to come, spasming and bucking, moaning, moaning.

“Now,” she said, as he collapsed onto the bed, “I’m going to your wallet to take what I deserve.” So blissed out was he that he didn’t even hear what she said, but it made no difference; he had utterly ceded control.

The blond woman got to her feet and briskly walked over to the desk where he had left his briefcase. She popped it open-he hadn’t locked it, rarely did-removed the glinting gold disk, and dropped it into her black leather toy bag, where it disappeared among the whips and crops and restraints.

She looked over at the bed and saw that he had not moved: he was still slumped over the side of the bed, still breathing hard and deep, the sweat pouring off his chest and his back in glistening streams, darkening the pale-green bedspread beneath him. The dark, damp border around him reminded the woman of the snow angels she and her sisters used to make years ago by lying prone in the new-fallen New Hampshire snow and waving their hands and feet. Then another, very different association: the even, wet border around the man also looked a little like the crude white paint tracings you sometimes see around dead bodies at crime scenes.

Quickly, she bent over and retrieved his wallet from the seat pocket of his pants, withdrew four fifty-dollar bills, and slipped them into her portfolio.

She returned to her spent client and caressed him. A submissive must always be brought back to earth slowly and gently. “Turn around and kneel in front of me,” she ordered with quiet authority. He did so, and she unlocked his handcuffs. Then she unzipped the leather hood, tugging at it with great effort until it began to slide off.

His silver hair stood up in crazed, sweaty clumps, and his face was deep crimson. He blinked slowly, his pupils adjusting to the light, his eyes coming slowly into focus.

She patted his hair flat. “What a good boy you’ve been,” she said. “Have you had a good time?”

His only reply was a faint, weak smile.

“Now I’ve got to run. Call me next time you’re in town.” She ran her fingers lovingly across his cheek, over his lips. “What a good boy you’ve been.”

Down the block from the Four Seasons, a gleaming black van was parked. The blond woman tapped on the mirrored, opaque passenger’s side window, which was then lowered a few inches.

She removed the golden disk from her leather bag and placed it in the outstretched palm.

She hadn’t even seen anyone’s face.

CHAPTER THREE

The flashing turret lights atop the cruisers pulsed blue and white along most of the block of Marlborough Street. Five patrol cars were double-parked on the narrow street, roiling the rush-hour traffic all the way to Massachusetts Avenue and infuriating the already short-tempered Boston drivers.

A dozen or so residents of this normally staid Back Bay neighborhood (although “neighborhood” wasn’t an accurate description of these connected rows of nineteenth-century town houses whose inhabitants did everything they could to avoid one another) leaned out of their bay windows and gawked like children at a schoolyard fistfight. Very un-Back Bay.

But the presence of all these police cruisers, unusual in this proper stretch of Marlborough Street, promised that something fairly exciting might actually be going on here. Sarah Cahill double-parked her aged Honda Civic and walked toward the building, in front of which stood a beefy young uniformed patrolman holding a clipboard. She was wearing jeans, running shoes, and a Wesleyan sweatshirt-hardly professional attire, but after all, she had been in the middle of making dinner for herself and her eight-year-old son, Jared. Spaghetti sauce: her hands reeked of garlic, which was too bad, because she’d be shaking a lot of hands. Well, she thought, screw ’em if they don’t like garlic.

The responding officer, the guy with the clipboard, couldn’t have been out of his twenties. He was crew-cut and pudgy and awkward and was joking with another cop, who was laughing uproariously and had traces of doughnut sugar on his face.

Sobering momentarily, the crew-cut officer said, “You live here, ma’am?”

“I’m Sarah Cahill,” she replied impatiently. “Special Agent Cahill, FBI.” She flashed her badge.

The patrolman hesitated. “Sorry, ma’am. You’re not on my admit list here.”

“Check with Officer Cronin,” she said.

“Oh, you’re-” He gave a crooked smile, and his eyes seemed to light up. He looked her up and down with unconcealed interest. “Right. He did mention you’d be here.”

She signed her name and returned the clipboard to him. She smiled back and pushed ahead through the front door, her smile disappearing at once. From behind she could hear a whispered comment, then loud laughter. The crew-cut cop remarked loudly in his foghorn voice: “I always thought Cronin was an asshole.” More laughter.

Sarah got into the elevator and punched the button for the third floor, overcome by irritation. What the hell was that supposed to mean-a jibe at Peter Cronin for having had the bad taste to marry an FBI agent? Or for having had the bad taste to divorce her? Which hindbrain instincts were these two chuckleheads responding to, raunchy sexuality or hatred of the feds?

She shook her head. The elevator, a musty, old-fashioned Otis with an accordion gate inside that shut automatically, provoked a moment of claustrophobia. The grimy mirror inside reflected her image duskily. She quickly took out her new M.A.C. coral lipstick (a shade called Inca) and reapplied it, then, with her fingers, combed her glossy auburn hair.

She was thirty-six, with a sharp nose, wavy shoulder-length hair, and large, luminescent, cocoa-brown eyes, her best feature. She was not, however, looking her best at this moment. She looked a wreck, in fact; she wished she’d taken the time to change into a suit, or any outfit, for that matter, that would garner some respect from the hostile audience she was about to face. The Bureau, finicky about the way its agents dressed, would not look kindly on her attire. Well, screw the Bureau too.

The elevator door opened, and she took a deep breath.

The door to 3C was open. In front of it stood a uniformed officer she didn’t know. She identified herself and was admitted to the apartment, which was crawling with homicide detectives, photographers, patrolmen, medical examiners, an assistant district attorney, and all the other usual guests at a murder scene. Crime scenes are supposed to be orderly and methodical, but, for all the police department’s lists and rules and procedures, they’re inevitably chaotic and frenzied.

Sarah elbowed her way through the jostling crowd (someone was smoking, though that was strictly verboten) and was halted by someone she didn’t recognize, a homicide detective from the look of him. He stood before her, blocking her entry, an immense monolith. Fifties, a hard drinker, balding; tall, muscular, spiteful.

“Hey!” he boomed. “Who the hell are you?” Before she could reply, the detective went on: “Anyone who’s not on the list I’m going to issue a fucking summons, you understand? Plus, I’m going to start asking you all for reports.”

She sighed, contained her exasperation. She produced her leather-encased FBI badge, and was about to speak when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Sarah.”

Peter Cronin, her ex-husband, told the other detective: “Sarah Cahill, from the FBI’s Boston office. Sarah, this is my new boss, Captain Francis Herlihy. Frank, you okayed this, remember?”

“Right,” Herlihy conceded sullenly. He looked at her for a moment as if she’d said something rude, then pivoted toward a gaggle of non-uniformed men. “Corrigan! Welch! I need some evidence bags. I want that Hennessey’s bottle and the drinking glasses in the sink.”

“Hello,” Sarah said.

“Hello,” Peter said. They exchanged polite, frosty smiles.

“Look, we can’t seem to turn up any of the deceased’s friends or relatives, so I’m going to have to ask you to identify the body.”

“I was wondering why you invited me here.” Peter never did her a favor, either personal or professional, unless there was something in it for him.

“I also figured we could help each other out on this.”

Captain Herlihy turned back toward Sarah as if he’d forgotten something. His brow was furrowed. “I thought the feds didn’t do murder, except on Indian reservations or whatever the hell.” A little, sardonic smile, then: “Thought you guys just went after cops.”

“Valerie was my informant,” Sarah said curtly.

“She screwed cops?”

“OC,” she said, meaning Organized Crime, and didn’t elaborate.

As Herlihy walked off he said, “Don’t let her touch anything or fuck anything up, got it?”

“Do my best,” Peter told his boss. As he led her toward the body, he remarked sotto voce, “Captain Francis X. Herlihy. Grade Double-A asshole.”

“A gentleman and a scholar.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a favor to me he’s letting you in here. Says a friend of his on the job shook down a gay bar in the South End last year and you guys jammed him up or something.”

Sarah shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about it. I don’t do police corruption.”

“Lot of the guys aren’t so happy you’re here.”

She shrugged again. “Why so crowded?”

“I don’t know, bad timing or something. First time in five years I’ve seen everyone respond at once. Everyone’s here but the Globe. Place is a fucking three-ring circus.”

Peter Cronin was in his mid-thirties, blond, with a cleft chin. He was good-looking, almost pretty, and was not unaware of his effect on women. Even during their short-lived, tumultuous marriage, he’d had several “extracurricular activities,” as he blithely put it. No doubt there was a woman right now sharing his apartment who was wondering whether some bimbo-no, some other bimbo-would be attaching herself to Peter like a limpet this evening.

As he pushed through the crowd with one hand, murmuring his hail-fellow-well-met greetings to his fellow cops, he asked: “How’s my little buddy?”

“Jared’s probably watching Beavis and Butt-head even as we speak,” she replied. “Either that or Masterpiece Theatre, I’m not sure which. You’re not the primary on this, are you?”

“Teddy is. I’m assisting.”

“How was she killed?”

“Gunshot. This is not a pretty sight, I should warn you.”

Sarah shrugged, as though she’d visited thousands of murders, though in fact, as Peter knew, she’d seen no more than a dozen, and they always sent a wave of revulsion washing over her.

She had never been to Valerie’s apartment before-they’d always met at bars and restaurants. This studio apartment, with its improvised kitchenette off to one side, had once been an upstairs parlor in some nineteenth-century industrial magnate’s town house. Once this room had been done up in opulent high-Brahmin style. Now the walls and ceilings were covered with mirrors, a high-tech bordello. The furnishings were cheap, black-painted. A worn mustard-yellow bean-bag chair, a relic of the seventies. An old tape deck and a towering set of speakers whose cloth was fraying. Valerie’s home looked the way it was supposed to look, like the lair of a hooker.

“Here you go,” Peter announced. “The body snatchers have come and gone. The ME on call is Rena Goldman. She looks like a resident, but she’s a real doc.”

“Where is she?”

“Over there, talking to your pal Herlihy.”

Valerie Santoro lay on her back, sprawled on her enormous bed. The black coverlet was encrusted with her dried blood. One hand was splayed back coyly as if beckoning one and all into her bed. Her hair was shoulder-length and dyed ash-blond; her lips bore traces of lipstick. Sarah felt her stomach lurch, looked quickly away. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s her. Okay?”

CHAPTER FOUR

In the small parking lot adjacent to a petrol station, the Prince of Darkness located the rented four-wheel-drive vehicle, a Toyota Double Cab with four seats, a canvas cover over the back, and a long-distance fuel tank. A tent was strapped on to the roof rack, and in the back were a gas stove and lamp, a change of clothes, and a pair of sunglasses. A sticker on the back identified the car’s owner as Imperial Car Rental of Cape Town. If anyone happened to stop him for any reason, he’d just be another poor fool on a camping tour of the desert.

He felt the hood. It was warm, which told him the car had not been here long. This was good.

Looking quickly around the lot, he assured himself that no one could see what he was doing. Then he knelt to the ground beside the Toyota’s door and felt underneath the frame until he came upon a smooth, newly soldered patch. Baumann pushed at it until the ignition key slid out from beneath the soldering.

A few blocks away he parked the car next to an international telephone box and removed a handful of one-rand coins from the glove box. He dialed a long series of numbers, fed the coins into the slot, and in twenty seconds had an international connection.

A man’s voice answered: “Greenstone Limited.”

“Customer service, please,” Baumann said.

“One moment, please.”

There was a pause, a few clicks, then a male voice said: “Customer service.”

“Do you ship by air?” Baumann asked.

“Yes, sir, depending on destination.”

“London.”

“Yes, sir, we do.”

“All right, thank you,” Baumann said. “I’ll call back with an order.”

He hung up the phone and returned to the Toyota.

It was almost dusk when he passed through Port Nolloth, on the Atlantic Coast. From there, he headed northwest. Asphalt-paved highways became gravel roads and then dirt paths, which ventured feebly across the parched savannah. A few kilometers down the road, a forlorn cluster of huts sprang up. Beside them nattered a scraggly herd of goats.

When he passed the last hut, he checked his odometer. After traveling exactly four and a half kilometers farther, he pulled to a stop and got out.

The sun was setting, immense and orange, but the air remained stiflingly, staggeringly hot. This was the Kalahari, the great sand veld thousands of kilometers broad. He had just crossed the South African border into Namibia.

The border between Namibia and South Africa is for the most part unmarked, unguarded, and unfenced. It bisects villages where tribes have lived for centuries, oblivious to the outside world. Crossing back and forth between South Africa and its neighbors-Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique-is simple. Thousands of Africans cross in either direction every day.

Wearing his dark sunglasses, Baumann stood beside the vehicle, drinking greedily from his flask of cold water and enjoying the eerie, otherworldly landscape: the cracked, dry riverbeds, the high ocher and russet sand dunes, the gray-green shrubs and the scrubby acacia bushes. The heat rippled up from the striated expanse of sand.

For ten minutes or so he enjoyed the silence, broken only by the high whistle of the wind. Mere hours ago he had been looking through a narrow, barred window at a miserly patch of sky, and now he was standing in the middle of an expanse so vast that, as far as he looked in any direction, he could see no signs of civilization. He had never doubted he would taste freedom again, but now that it was here, it was intoxicating.

The noise came first, almost imperceptibly, and then he could make out the tiny black dot in the sky. Slowly, slowly, the dot grew larger, and the noise crescendoed, until, with a deafening clatter, the helicopter hovered directly overhead.

It banked to one side, righted itself, then swooped down for a landing. The sand swirled around him in clouds, raining against the lenses of his sunglasses, stinging his eyes, bringing tears. He squinted, ran toward the unmarked chopper, and ducked down beneath the whirring blades as he approached the fuselage.

The pilot, in a drab-green flight jacket, gave him a brusque nod as he hopped in. Without a word, the pilot reached down to his left side and pulled up on the collective pitch control lever, which resembled the arm of an emergency brake. The helicopter rose straight up into the air.

Baumann put on the headphones to block out the sound and leaned back to enjoy the flight to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia and the site of the country’s only international airport.

Baumann had not gotten much sleep the night before, yet he was still alert. This was fortunate. For the next few hours he would need to remain vigilant.

CHAPTER FIVE

Valerie Santoro, call girl and entrepreneur, had been a beautiful woman. Even in death her body was voluptuous. She’d worked hard to maintain it for her clients. Her breasts were pert, too perfect: she’d obviously had silicone implants. Only the face was Sarah unable to look at: part of the forehead was missing. Dark blood was caked around the irregular-shaped chunk removed by the bullet at the point of exit. Inconsistent, Sarah knew, with suicide.

The pale-blue eyes looked challengingly at Sarah, regarding her with contemptuous disbelief. The lips, pale and devoid of lipstick, were slightly parted.

“Not a bad-looking babe,” Peter said. “Check out the bush.”

Her pubic hair had been shaved into the shape of a Mercedes-Benz emblem, a perfect, painstaking replica. Who had done this for her?

“Classy chick, huh? The snitch’s snatch.”

Sarah did not answer.

“What’s the matter, lost your sense of humor?”

The photographer from the ID unit was hard at work with his Pentax 645, snapping still photos of the crime scene and the body “in cadence,” as they call it-in sequence, in a grid, providing a photographic record designed to anticipate all of a jury’s questions. Every few seconds some part of her-her right cheek; her left hand, loosely curled into a fist; a perfectly oval breast-was illuminated by the camera’s lightning.

“What was the name of that call-girl service she worked for again?”

“Stardust Escort Service,” Sarah replied distantly. “The poshest call-girl business in Boston.”

“She used to brag she was doing the mayor, or the governor, or was it Senator-”

“She had an impressive clientele,” Sarah agreed. “Let’s leave it at that.”

“Ah, yes.” Peter laughed mordantly. “Eat like an elephant, shit like a bird.” It was the old police refrain: the FBI always asks questions, sucks up information, never gives it out.

In truth, Sarah owed her ex-husband a debt of gratitude for putting her in touch with Valerie Santoro, who’d turned out to be a valuable FBI informant. About a year and a half ago, Peter had mentioned a call girl he knew named Valerie Santoro, who’d been hauled in on a drug bust and “jammed up” by the locals, and wanted to deal.

Prostitutes, because of their unique access, make good FBI informants. But you always have to be careful with them; you can never direct them to commit prostitution, or the case is blown. Everything must be done subtly, many things left unsaid.

Sarah had invited her to lunch at the Polynesian Room, a horrifying pink shrine to bad taste on Boylston Street. Val’s choice. The restaurant’s interior was blindingly pink and scarlet red, decorated with golden dragons and fake-oriental gargoyles. Some of the booths were upholstered in early 1960s red leatherette. Val preferred to sit at one of the straw booths fashioned in the shape of a sampan. Here and there were potted, dried palms spray-painted green.

She was five foot eight, had honey-blond hair, long legs. She ordered a White Russian and the Pu Pu Platter. “I may be good for nothing,” she said, “but I’m never bad for nothing.” She had a client who owned a lounge in Chelsea that was used for drug-trafficking and money-laundering. She figured Sarah might be interested. Another client of hers, one of the highest elected officials in Massachusetts state politics, had mob ties.

So a deal was struck. Following standard procedure, Sarah drafted a memo to get Valerie Santoro into the Bureau’s informant bank, requested an informant number and a separate file number. This was a system devised to keep the informant’s identity confidential and yet ensure she got paid.

Valerie heard enough gossip-enough boasting from the men she serviced, who needed to impress her-to allow Sarah to wrap up several major organized-crime cases. She’d been worth all the White Russians the government had ever bought her.

Running an informant, Sarah had been told by a potbellied good-old-boy supervisor in her first office, in Jackson, Mississippi, is like having a mistress on the side: she’s always giving you trouble, always wanting something. Never put them on retainer, or they’ll spin, invent information, keep you on a string. They bring in a nugget, it’s evaluated, and then they get their chunky nut.

At Quantico they gave lectures on running informants, on what motivates them (money, greed, a desire for revenge, even once in a blue moon a flash of conscience), on how to develop your relationship with them. Unlike local law-enforcement agencies, which are perennially strapped for cash, the FBI has plenty of money to dispense for informants. You’d get as much as five thousand dollars to “open” an informant, more if you were courting a major player. You were encouraged not to be stingy. The more generous you were with the cash, the more dependent upon you the informant became.

You were warned about how tangled the relationship inevitably became. You became a proxy authority figure, a parent or a sibling, an adviser. By the end of the relationship, it was like a love affair gone sour. You wanted to throw them away, never see them again. Yet you had to wean them, or they’d keep calling.

Most of all you had to protect your informants. They placed their lives in your hands; the game you were inducing them to play was often dangerous.

Sarah snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Was there forced entry?”

“No sign of it.”

“But you printed the door anyway.”

“Sure.”

The photographer, snapping away, called out to Peter: “You check out the hood ornament?”

“Classy broad, huh?” Peter replied.

“Place doesn’t look ransacked,” Sarah said. “Probably not a burglary. Any neighbor report the gunshot?”

“No. A friend of hers called 911, reported her missing, didn’t give a name. District office determined she lived alone, got the key from the apartment building supervisor. Who, by the way, wasn’t exactly grief-stricken about this. Wanted her out of the building.”

“Well, now he’s got what he wants,” Sarah said with a grim half-smile. “Where’s the ME-what’s her name, Rena something?”

“Rena Goldman.” Peter beckoned to a woman in her early forties, with long gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a long, pale face, no makeup. She wore a white lab coat. She and Sarah, both wearing surgical gloves, shook hands.

“Do we know anything about time of death?” Sarah asked the medical examiner.

“Lividity is fixed, so it’s at least eight hours, and she hasn’t been moved,” Rena Goldman said. She consulted a small, dog-eared spiral notebook. “No evidence of decomposition, but there wouldn’t be any in this cool weather. She’s out of rigor, so it’s got to be at least, say, twenty-four hours.”

“Semen?”

“I don’t see any, not at first glance anyway. I can tell you for certain in a couple of hours.”

“No, there probably won’t be any,” Sarah said.

“Why not?” Peter said.

“Apart from the fact that Val always, but always, made her clients use condoms-”

He interrupted: “But if it was a rape-”

“No signs of that,” the medical examiner said.

“No,” Sarah echoed. “And it sure wasn’t a client.”

“Oh, come on,” Peter objected. “How the hell can you say that?”

With a slightly chewed Blackwing pencil, Sarah pointed to a folded pair of glasses on the bedside end table. The frames were heavy and black and geeky.

“She told me she never saw clients at her apartment. And she wasn’t wearing these when she was killed. They’re too ugly to wear regularly-I certainly never saw her in them. She wore contacts, but you can see she didn’t have them in, either.”

“That’s right, now that you mention it,” Rena Goldman said.

“Of course, it may have been a disgruntled client who tracked her down at home,” Sarah said. “But she wasn’t on a business call. She fought, didn’t she?”

“Oh, yeah. Defense wounds on the body. Contusions on the arm, probably from warding off blows.” Goldman leaned toward the body and pointed a thin index finger at Valerie’s head. “Wound across the face. A curved laceration about half an inch wide, with diffuse abrasion and contusion approximately one inch around, extending from the temple to the zygoma.”

“All right,” Sarah said. “What about the gunshot?”

“Typical contact gunshot wound,” Peter said.

Rena Goldman nodded and tucked a wisp of gray hair behind one ear.

“The hair’s singed,” Peter said. “Probably a big gun, wasn’t it?”

“I’d guess a.357,” the medical examiner said, “but that’s just a guess. Also, there’s stippling.” She was referring to fragments of gunpowder embedded around the point of entry, indicating that the gun was fired at close range.

Sarah suddenly felt nauseated and was relieved that she had no more questions to ask. “Thanks,” she said.

Rena Goldman nodded awkwardly, turned, and drifted away.

In the “efficiency” kitchen area a few feet away, a handsome young black man, attired in a double-breasted Italian blue blazer and foulard tie, gingerly placed an empty beer can into a paper evidence bag. Peter’s partner, Sergeant Theodore Williams, was the best-dressed cop on the force. A few years younger than Peter but unquestionably the better homicide investigator.

Next to him at the Formica kitchenette counter stood a tech from Latent Prints, a round-shouldered, older black man, delicately applying with a feather brush the fingerprint powder the techs liked to call “pixie dust” to a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. Sarah watched him lift a print from the bottle with a clear plastic Sirchie hinged lifter.

“So who kills a call girl?” Peter asked. “A john?”

“I doubt it,” Sarah said. “She told me she only did outcalls, mostly hotel rooms.”

“Yeah, but these mirrors…” he began.

She sighed. “Who knows? She did have a personal life. But a sex life, outside of work? I don’t know. A lot of these girls hate sex. What about her little black book?”

“Nothing. A date book, that’s all. Purse, wallet, cigarettes. A fucking arsenal of makeup in the bathroom. Some Valium and a couple of tabs of speed. A Port-a-Print. But no little black book.”

“A what?”

“Port-a-Print. One of those things they use in department stores or whatever to imprint your credit card, you know? I guess she took Visa, MasterCard, and Discover.”

“Most call girls do these days. Though they still prefer cash.”

“Bad form to have the wife doing the bills and discover a Discover Card charge for a blow job.”

“Which is why you used to pay cash, right?”

“Touché,” Peter replied, unperturbed.

CHAPTER SIX

A Latent Prints technician sat on the floor of the dark bathroom wearing foolish-looking orange plastic goggles. An eerie orange light emanated from the Polilight, a heavy, compact gray-and-blue box attached to a flexible metal tube that, using liquid optical technology, emits light in various hues: white, red, yellow, orange. Shone obliquely, it is used to check for fingerprints on walls and other hard-to-inspect areas.

“Anything?” Sarah asked.

Startled, the tech said: “Oh. Uh… no, nothing.” He got to his feet and switched on the light.

More mirrors here, Sarah noted: the medicine cabinet above the sink, and another one, strangely placed, low and directly across from the toilet. Newly, and maladroitly, installed. Both mirrors were dusted with splotches of the gray pulverized charcoal and volcanic ash used to lift prints. In a few places, the gray was overlaid with smudges of Red Wop powder to bring out more ridge detail.

She watched him dust an area of one of the mirrors. “You know,” she said, “a little Windex’ll get those real clean.”

The tech turned around, confused, not getting her joke, but at that moment a voice boomed from just outside the bathroom threshold: Frank Herlihy.

“Is that the famous twenty-thousand-dollar paperweight I keep hearing about?”

“This is it, sir,” the tech said gamely, patting the Polilight as if it were a buddy.

“Oh, Ms. Cahill again. Can we help you with anything?” His tone professed sincerity, but his beefy red face betrayed no desire to help.

“I’m fine,” Sarah said.

“Hey, Carlos, what’s up?” Herlihy said bluffly. “Fuming tank explode on you again?”

The tech laughed and shook his head. “No, sir, but I was up all night charting prints, and then at six this morning the prick pled.”

Herlihy laughed gutturally, malevolently. “You know, Carlos, I’d be careful with that Polilight, there. Semen fluoresces, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t want the little lady here to see how much you jerk off.”

Carlos snorted, and Sarah excused herself, her attention suddenly distracted. She stood outside the bathroom and looked in. Her eyes narrowed. “The mirror,” she said, returning slowly to the bathroom.

“Huh?” asked Carlos.

“It’s that mirror,” she said. More to herself than to Herlihy or Carlos, she murmured: “It’s in a weird place, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re sitting on the toilet, you can see yourself in it. That’s odd. Why would you…”

“Thanks so much, Ms. Cahill,” the homicide captain said with a nasty inflection. “Any other observations I can pass on to the deceased’s interior decorator?”

She flashed the captain a contemptuous look and went on, aloud but to herself: “Most women wouldn’t want to look at themselves sitting on the toilet. Two medicine cabinets…” Sarah approached the mirror. Carefully grasping the mirror’s edges with her gloved fingers, she pulled at it. It popped off, as she expected it would. Behind it was a crude plywood compartment, in which sat a small, grimy Rolodex.

Sarah cast a glance at Captain Herlihy. “Well, now,” she announced. “The little black book. Could I get some help here, please?”

Astonished, Carlos from Latent Prints helped Sarah tug at the plywood compartment until it too came off, revealing a plaster-and-sheetrock grotto in which sat several neatly wrapped stacks of fifty-dollar bills, unremarkable except that each bill had been cut precisely in half.

“Anyway,” Sarah said to Peter, “she operated in a cash economy.” They emerged from the elevator into the lobby of the apartment building, lit with a garish, stuttering fluorescent light.

“That was almost five thousand dollars,” he said. “With the missing half-bills, I mean. Tells me drugs.”

“Or organized crime.”

“Maybe. Nice work on the mirror thing.”

“Damn, I’m good.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Actually, it wasn’t rocket science,” she said. “We busted a drug dealer in Providence last year who hid his telephone answering machine in a secret compartment built into the floor.”

“Take credit when it’s thrown your way, Cahill. Your friend sure did have an impressive clientele. You have any idea?”

“Yes,” Sarah admitted.

“What was it, five or six CEOs in Boston and New York. Two United States senators. One circuit court judge. How much you bet it had something to do with one of them?”

Someone entered the building, not a face either one recognized. They fell silent. Outside he added, “You liked her, didn’t you?” He nodded to the officer with the clipboard, clapped him on the shoulder.

They stepped into the dark street. “Kind of. Not my kind of person, really. But a good sort.”

“Whore with a heart of gold.”

Sarah looked around for her car, but couldn’t locate it, forgot where she’d parked it. “Bronze, maybe. She really took a liking to me. Practically lived for our meetings. Lonely girl-sometimes she’d call five times a day. It got so I had to duck her calls.”

“She tell you anything that might indicate, you know… a client she was afraid of, someone who knew she was ratting for the FBI, something like that?”

“No.”

“But you have theories.”

“Maybe,” Sarah said.

“Care to share?”

“Not yet. But I will, okay? I need a copy of the Rolodex.”

“Well, we own all that, you know.”

“Yeah, and without FBI cooperation you don’t have dog shit.”

Peter gave a strange half-smile. His face reddened. When he was angry, his face flushed like litmus paper. “If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have met her.”

“Probably not,” she conceded. “But that still doesn’t change-”

“I mean, I took a chance introducing you two, you know. Given your record with informants-”

“Fuck off, Peter,” she snapped.

He beamed as he turned away. “Give the little guy a hug for me, huh?”

She spotted her Honda Civic a moment later, being dragged by a tow truck. And she’d taken the standard precautions against towing: placed her FBI calling card on the dashboard, next to the blue bubble light.

“Shit,” she said, realizing there was no point in running; it was too far down the block already. But she was able to make out a small violet sticker on the tow truck’s bumper:

PRACTICE RANDOM KINDNESS & SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY

CHAPTER SEVEN

Just after midnight, Sarah Cahill unlocked the front door to her Cambridge house. The only light came from the parlor at the front of the house, where the babysitter, Ann Boyle, snoozed in the La-Z-Boy recliner, the Boston Herald tented over her wide bosom.

Ann Boyle, broad and sturdy, with blue-rinsed curls and small, tired eyes, was at sixty-seven a great-grandmother and a widow. She lived in Somerville, the working-class town that bordered Cambridge, and had taken care of Jared since he was small. Now that Jared was eight, she came over much less frequently, but Sarah’s hours were so unpredictable that it was important to have Ann on call.

She woke Ann, paid her, and said good night. A few minutes later she could hear the cough of Ann’s ancient Chevrolet Caprice Classic starting up. Then she went upstairs to Jared’s bedroom. She navigated the cluttered floor by the dim yellow glow of the night-light and narrowly averted demolishing her son’s latest project, a desktop basketball hoop he was constructing with a Styrofoam cup for a hoop and a square of foam core as the backboard.

On the shelf above his bed a platoon of stuffed animals kept watch, including a pig he’d named Eeyore and a bear, Coco, who wore a pair of Carrera sunglasses. Another bear, Huckleberry, kept him company in the bed.

Jared was sleeping in a tie-dyed T-shirt he’d picked out at the flea market in Wellfleet and Jurassic Park dinosaur pajama bottoms. His brown hair was tousled. His breathing was soft and peaceful. His eyelashes were agonizingly long. On his wrist was a soiled yellow rubber band imprinted “Cowabunga!”

She sat there on the edge of the bed, staring at him-she could stare at him for hours while he slept-until he suddenly murmured something in his sleep and turned over to one side. She kissed him on the forehead and went back downstairs.

In the kitchen, Sarah took a highball glass from the cabinet. She needed something to lull her to sleep. Whenever she was called out of the house for work she came back wired. But Scotch had its costs, and she was growing less tolerant of awaking with even a mini-hangover. She set the glass down and decided to microwave a mug of milk instead.

While the microwave oven whirred, she straightened up the kitchen. All the supper dishes were still on the kitchen table; the spaghetti sauce still sat parched in a pot atop the stove. She’d asked Jared to clean up, and of course he hadn’t. Ann should have done it, but probably hadn’t been able to tear herself away from the TV. She felt a wave of annoyance, which merely compounded her foul mood.

Just seeing Peter could depress her, whatever the circumstances. Certainly there were times when she missed having a lover and partner around, and a live-in father for Jared.

But not Peter. Anyone but Peter, whom she’d come to loathe. What had seemed roguishness in the early days of their relationship had revealed itself as simple malice. He was a coarse, self-centered person, and she had only discovered that too late.

Not only did Jared sense her contempt for her ex-husband, but he seemed to feel the same way. There was an odd distance in the boy’s attitude toward his father, who behaved with his eight-year-old son like a Marine drill sergeant. Peter probably imagined this was the only manly way to bring up his son, whom he saw just once a week. The court-ordered custody terms allowed Peter to take Jared one weekend day a week, which usually turned out to be Saturday. Jared dreaded the visits. When Peter did come by, sometimes accompanied by his bimbo de jour, he would take Jared to breakfast at a diner and then to watch the pro boxing at Foxboro, above the track, or to his gym in the South End to learn how to fight. Saturdays with Daddy were always sports-related. It was the only way Peter could reach out to his son.

Jared was a creative, lively kid, sometimes moody, and intensely intelligent. Recently he was obsessed with baseball-collecting baseball cards, reeling off baseball statistics. Sarah was afraid this was some misguided attempt to snag his father’s approval. Bright and intuitive though Jared was, he still hadn’t figured out that whatever he did, it would never be enough. He wanted a father, but in Peter he’d never really get one, and the faster he learned that, the better for him.

A month ago, Sarah found herself recalling, Jared had arrived home late one Saturday afternoon after a day with his father, in tears and visibly bruised. One of his eyes was swollen shut. Sarah gasped and ran out to the street to flag Peter down before he drove off in his clattering AMC Pacer.

“What the hell did you do to him?” she shouted.

“Oh, calm down,” he’d replied. “I threw him a left hook and he forgot to duck, is all. I was trying to show him you gotta use your elbows to absorb the blow.”

“Forgot to duck? Peter, he’s a child!”

“Jerry’s got to learn how to take his lumps. It’s good for him.” To Peter, Jared was always “Jerry” or “little buddy.”

“Don’t you ever do that to him again!” she said.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do with my son,” Peter said. “You got him taking piano lessons and writing poems, for Christ’s sake. You trying to raise a faggot?” And he gunned the engine and took off down the street.

The microwave beeped, then insistently beeped once more. The milk had boiled over, spilling inside the oven. She mopped up the mess with paper towel, removed the milk skin from the mug with a spoon, and stirred in a little maple syrup.

Then she put on some soft chamber music (the Beethoven piano trios, which, with the Schubert piano trios, she played more than anything else-something else Peter liked to mock her for) and sat in the La-Z-Boy.

She thought of Valerie Santoro, not posed on her bed in the indignity of death, but alive, beautiful, and remembered the last time they’d met. She had talked about quitting “the business,” something she talked about quite a lot recently and getting a “high-powered” job on Wall Street. She’d begun to ask for more and more money so she could quit working-realizing that she was near the end of her career as a call girl and the money wasn’t coming in the way it used to.

Valerie Santoro, rest in peace, was a user who thought she’d finally found her sugar daddy, her ticket out. She affected to disdain the money Uncle Sam gave her, while at the same time angling desperately to get more of it.

Sarah, for her part, had found her own ticket out, or at least up. A good informant boosted your stock immeasurably, but an informant like Val, with access to some of the high and mighty, the high rollers and the mafiosi, was truly a prized commodity.

Now her prized racehorse was dead, and something about the murder didn’t make sense. Prostitutes were more prone to be victims of violence, even of murder, than the run of society. But the circumstances didn’t indicate she’d been killed in the line of her particular kind of duty. It was unlikely that rough trade had been involved.

The cash Valerie had hidden behind the dummy medicine cabinet-the almost five thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills, cut in half-was persuasive evidence that Val had done a job for someone.

But for whom? If it was Mafia-related, why had the money been left there? Wouldn’t whoever killed her have known about the cash and taken it back? If she’d been killed by elements of organized crime because they’d discovered she was informing for the FBI, where had the money come from? Had she been killed because she’d been an informant?

The FBI normally doesn’t concern itself with homicide, but a case that involved the murder of an FBI informant was a clear-cut exception.

Peter Cronin hadn’t called his ex-wife to the crime scene just to identify a body, and certainly not out of generosity. Well, informants weren’t the only ones who did horse-trading. If Peter wanted access to the FBI’s databases, he’d have to pony up some pieces of evidence himself, like the Rolodex and the address book. He’d deal; he had little choice.

At two in the morning, Sarah climbed the stairs to her third-floor bedroom, got into the extra-long T-shirt she liked to sleep in, and got into bed. Visions of the crime scene flashed in her mind like a gruesome slide show, with snatches of remembered conversation as a disjointed sound track, and not before a good hour of tossing and turning was she able to fall into a fitful, troubled sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Seven kilometers outside of Geneva, Switzerland, at a few minutes before noon, a late-model, cobalt-blue Rolls-Royce limousine pulled off a small, tree-shaded road not far from Lac Léman and came to a halt at a high wrought-iron gate. Embedded in a stone pillar before the gate was a keypad and speaker. The driver punched in several numbers, and when a voice came over the intercom he identified himself. The iron gate swung slowly inward, and the limousine maneuvered along a macadam-paved access road, through a narrow allée of apple trees that went on as far as the eye could see. At once, the magnificent grounds of an enormous, secluded estate came into view.

The vehicle’s sole passenger was Baumann, dressed impeccably, yet casually, in a tweedy sport coat of black-and-white Prince of Wales plaid over a navy-blue crewneck sweater and white shirt. He had shaved off his beard, and his dark wavy hair was combed straight back, which gave him the appearance of a prosperous young Genevois banker on holiday. He seemed quite relaxed.

Late the previous evening he had been flown into a small, unmarked airstrip outside Geneva. He had journeyed from Cape Town without having legally crossed a single national border-and, therefore, without a trace in any computer records anywhere.

In Geneva he stayed at the Ambassador Hotel, on the Quai des Bergues on the Rive Droite, overlooking the crystal-clear waters of the Rhône and the Pont de la Machine. A suite had already been reserved for him, in the name of a British merchant banker, whose passport he was also given. As soon as he had entered the room, he had jerry-rigged the door to ensure that no one could enter uninvited without enormous commotion. Then he took a long hot shower, and passed out. Late in the morning he was awakened by a call from the concierge, who told him his car was waiting.

Now, languidly staring out the window of the Rolls, he took in the manicured grounds. Hundreds of perfectly trimmed golden yew hedges stretched before him. The grounds, which seemed to go on forever, occupied some fifty acres of prime Lac Léman real estate.

From this distance, he could just make out the thirteenth-century castle that belonged to his host. The castle (restored and renovated most recently in the late 1980s) was said to have once been the home of Napoleon III.

The present owner and occupant of this enormous estate, another sort of Napoleon entirely, was a man named Malcolm Dyson, an American expatriate financier, a billionaire, about whom the world knew very little.

In the last few months, however, Baumann had steadily put together a sketchy portrait of the legendary, reclusive Malcolm Dyson. The confines of Pollsmoor Prison had given him unlimited time for his research, and the prison library had yielded a small amount of public-record information. But the best network of resources by far had been the prison’s inmates, the petty crooks, the smugglers, the shady dealers.

The American newspapers had christened Malcolm Dyson the “fugitive financier,” a phrase now fastened to his name like a Homeric epithet. He had made a fortune on Wall Street, in bonds and commodities and by playing the stock market brilliantly. In the mid-1980s, Malcolm Dyson was one of Wall Street’s most glittering tycoons.

Then, in 1987, he had been arrested for insider trading, and his vast corporate empire had come tumbling down. All of his U.S. assets had been confiscated.

After his trial, and before he was slated to be sent off to prison, he fled to Switzerland, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. He and his late wife had lived in Switzerland ever since, rebuilding his empire from the ground up. Now, at seventy-two, Dyson was one of the richest men in the world, controlling assets estimated at several hundred billion dollars. Yet he could never return to the United States, nor travel to any country from which he might be extradited, or he would promptly be thrown in prison for the rest of his life. So he remained a prisoner of sorts, but in the most lavishly gilded of cages.

He lived in a Swiss Xanadu, a restored thirteenth-century castle he called Arcadia. More significantly, however, Malcolm Dyson had become a major trader in commodities and the world currency markets. He was widely rumored to have come close to cornering the world’s supply of gold and platinum and to have major holdings in gem diamonds and strategic minerals such as titanium, platinum, and zirconium, which were vital in the defense and space industries. Dyson’s corporate empire, which was sometimes called “the Octopus,” had in the last few years outgrown the other leading diamond and precious-metals firms that made up the cartel whose offices were located in Charterhouse Street in London, just off High Holborn and Farringdon Road. His holdings were by now larger than those of the other precious-metals behemoths, including De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., the Anglo American Corporation, Charter Consolidated, the Mineral and Resources Corporation, and Consolidated Gold Fields Ltd. He was enormously wealthy, but beyond that he was an enigma.

The limousine came to a stop at a tall hedge, into which was carved a topiary gate. Standing in front of the gate was a tall man in his late thirties, with a high forehead and receding hairline, wearing rimless spectacles. He wore a dark-gray sack suit. He was clearly an American.

He approached the limousine and opened the door. “Welcome,” the man said. “I’m Martin Lomax.” He shook hands and ushered Baumann into the dim labyrinth of an English hedge maze. The path wended maddeningly through acute angles and around cul-de-sacs. Baumann permitted himself a smile at Dyson’s affectation. He wondered what other sort of eccentricities Malcolm Dyson would entertain.

Then the tall hedges gave way to an open area of immaculate jade-green lawn, bordered by brightly colored flowers-lavender, nepeta, agapanthus, daylilies, roses, honeysuckle, euphorbia-in wild and lush profusion.

Lomax led Baumann through this meticulously tended garden and through another opening in the winding hedge, then stopped. There were faint sounds of gurgling, plashing water. Baumann’s curiosity was piqued. He took a few steps forward and entered the verdant, shaded stillness of another garden. At the exact center of this garden was a swimming pool, an irregular oval of smooth rocks that looked almost natural.

In a wheelchair nearby, next to an ancient, crumbling sundial, sat Malcolm Dyson, speaking on a cellular telephone. He was a small, rumpled man, almost rotund. His head was round and almost completely bald. There were dark liver spots at his temples and on the backs of his gnarled hands. He was wearing a loose, open-necked white muslin shirt that resembled a tunic. His legs were covered by a plaid wool blanket; his shoes were comfortable Italian leather loafers.

Whoever Dyson was speaking with was obviously making him angry. He concluded the conversation abruptly by flipping the phone closed. Then he looked straight across the garden at Baumann and gave a warm, engaging smile.

“So at last I meet the famous Prince of Darkness,” Dyson said. His voice was high, throaty, adenoidal. Only his eyes, steely gray, did not smile.

There was a high mechanical whine as Dyson urged his electric wheelchair closer to Baumann, but it was only a symbolic gesture; he stopped after a few feet.

Baumann approached, and Dyson extended a round, speckled hand. “Mr. Baumann,” he announced with a chuckle and a dip of his head. “I assume you know who I am.”

Baumann shook his hand and nodded. “Certainly, Mr. Dyson,” he said. “I do know a bit about you.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“I’ve recently had some spare time to do a little research.”

Dyson chortled, as if to share Baumann’s joke, but Baumann was not smiling. “Do you know why you’re here?” Dyson asked.

“No,” Baumann admitted. “I know that I’m not sitting in Cell Block Nineteen in Pollsmoor Prison. And I know that you made the arrangements for my jailbreak. But to be entirely honest, I have no idea why.”

“Ah,” Dyson said, arching his brows as if the matter hadn’t before occurred to him. “Right. Well, I hoped we might have a little talk, you and I. I have sort of a business proposition for you.”

“Yes,” Baumann said mildly, and then gave one of his brilliant smiles. “I didn’t think it would take you long to get around to that.”

CHAPTER NINE

Early the next morning, Sarah arrived at the FBI Boston field office and took the photocopies of Valerie Santoro’s handwritten Rolodex cards to the counter where the computer searches were done. A young Latino clerk-trainee named Hector took the sheets and squinted at Sarah amiably. “You want these run through NCIC?”

The FBI’s computerized National Crime Information Center database is used by police whenever they stop a motorist, to check for stolen vehicles, cash, and guns, as well as fugitives, missing children, and missing adults. It would also tell her which of Val’s clients had criminal records or warrants outstanding.

“Right,” she replied. “And Intelligence and Criminal. And of course FOIMS. See if we get a hit.” FOIMS, the Field Office Information Management System, was the FBI’s main database.

The Boston office of the FBI occupies four floors of an enormous curved modern building called One Center Plaza. Sarah’s cubicle was located on the building’s fifth floor, where the Organized Crime and drug squads shared space. The vast expanse of floor was covered in tan wall-to-wall carpeting. Long blue partitions separated small office areas known as pods, two or three desks equipped with telephones, walkie-talkie radios, and, on some desks but not all, computer terminals. The younger agents tended to be computer-literate, unlike their older colleagues, who left the computer-search headaches to the folks in Indices, at the other end of the floor. Next to her desk was a paper shredder.

Apart from the usual equipment, Sarah’s desk held her Sig-Sauer pistol in its holster in a small green canvas bag (a pistol was standard issue in both drugs and OC), her pager, and a few personalizing touches: a framed photograph of her parents sitting on the couch at home in Bellingham, Washington, and a framed snapshot of Jared in his hockey uniform, holding a stick, smiling broadly, displaying his two large front teeth.

The atmosphere was quiet, yet bustling. It could have been any private corporation in the country. The FBI had moved here a few years ago from the John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building across the street, where the whole Boston office had been crowded onto one big open floor, noisy and boisterous and gregarious, and you could hear what everyone else was doing at every moment.

She returned to her desk, gazed for a moment out at the Suffolk County Courthouse, leafed through the photocopies of Val’s appointment book that Peter had had made.

The entries were brief and unrevealing. Val did not record the names of her clients, just times and places. On the night she was murdered, she’d had two appointments, one at eight o’clock at the Four Seasons, the other at eleven o’clock at the Ritz. It wasn’t out of the question that one of these two “clients” had followed her home after an assignation and murdered her. The possibility couldn’t be ruled out.

Had Valerie Santoro been murdered because someone had discovered she was an FBI informant? If so, was it one of her clients? Valerie’s information had helped Sarah make two major OC cases; quite likely she’d been the victim of an organized-crime hit.

Sarah was one of a handful of women in the Boston office, and for some reason she hadn’t become friends with any of the others. Her closest work friend was her partner and podmate, an immense grizzly bear of a man named Kenneth Alton, who was speaking on the telephone. He waved at her as he sat down. A computer junkie who’d gone to MIT, Ken had long hair, hippie wire-rimmed glasses, and a great protuberant belly. He probably weighed over three hundred pounds and was always on a diet, always sipping Ultra Slimfast milk shakes. He wasn’t exactly what the public expected to see in an FBI agent, and he’d never make management. But he was valued for his extraordinary computer skills, and so his idiosyncrasies were tolerated. J. Edgar was probably spinning in his grave.

Sarah had been with the FBI for almost ten years. Her father had been a cop who hated being a cop and had urged his only child to avoid law enforcement if it were the last job on earth. Naturally, she went into law enforcement and married a cop, in that order.

Though for the last several years she’d been working Organized Crime in Boston, her main interest was in counterterrorism, where she’d developed something of a reputation within the Bureau while working the Lockerbie case.

A Pan Am jumbo had exploded in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, at 7:03 p.m., resulting in the death of 270 people. The FBI launched SCOTBOMB, the largest international terrorist investigation ever, conducting fourteen thousand interviews in fifty countries.

Sarah was a single mother-Peter had moved out by then-living in Heidelberg, Germany, with a sick infant. Jared, then four months old, had developed a bad case of bronchiolitis. Neither baby nor mother got any sleep. The first several weeks in Heidelberg Sarah spent in a state of complete sleep deprivation. It was a trying, exhausting time, but it was where she had made her bones within the Bureau.

She’d been assigned to interview the friends and families of U.S. soldiers who’d been stationed at the base at Heidelberg to see whether any might have been targets. The days were long; they usually weren’t done until nine at night. The Army provided a command post and a secretary for dictating reports.

Each investigator was assigned one victim. You had to follow up all connections to that victim, all friends, even casual contacts. In the process, you couldn’t help digging up dirt. One victim had been cheating on his wife, another was in financial trouble, another was using drugs. Were any of these problems connected to the bombing?

Sarah became a sponge, soaking up information, rumors, overhears. It soon became apparent that the answer was not in Heidelberg.

The important forensic work was going on elsewhere. Sarah began to hear details through Bureau channels. The bomb had consisted of a plastic explosive and a timing device concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder, which had been placed in a Samsonite suitcase. The suitcase was traced to Air Malta flight KM-180, from Malta to Frankfurt, then transferred as unaccompanied luggage to Pan Am 103A from Frankfurt to Heathrow. There it was transferred to container AVE-4041 on Pan Am 103.

Then she learned that a fragment of a green circuit board, part of the timing device, had been identified.

Sarah asked and received permission to do some digging into the matter of timing devices-who used what, what had been used where. This was pure scut work, and it wasn’t her “ticket,” as they say in the Bureau, but she had gotten reluctant approval to search.

All the intelligence on timing devices was on-line at the Bureau. There was a match. The circuit board was similar to one used in an attempted coup in Togo in 1986. It was also similar to one seized at the Senegal airport in 1988.

That was her contribution, and although it turned out to be crucial, at the time she had no idea where it would lead.

But the timer was eventually traced to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier Limited, Telecommunications. In 1985, it turned out, twenty of these timers were sold to Libyan intelligence.

And the case was cracked. Her file reflected a “contribution above and beyond.”

But when her Heidelberg tour was done, she found that there were very few Counterterrorism slots in the United States open and none in Boston, which she still considered home-and where, by the terms of her custody agreement with Peter, she had to live. So she’d requested a transfer to Organized Crime, and there she’d been ever since.

She called a few informants, worked a few leads. For almost two hours she filled out forms, wrote up a few 302s, or interview reports, did the paperwork that takes up most of an FBI agent’s work, got caught up. She called the airport and talked to a member of an FBI surveillance team on a case that was all but wrapped up.

Then a thought occurred to her, and she picked up the phone. Fortunately, Ted answered the phone; Peter was out of the squad room.

“Can you pull Val’s phone records, or should I?” she asked.

“Already did.”

“You’re kidding me. You got a subpoena that fast?”

“I’ve got a friend at New England Telephone Security.”

Sarah shook her head, half in disgust and half in admiration. “I see.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you feebees always play by the rules,” Ted replied. “Phone company’s impossible to deal with through channels anymore, you know that.”

“So what’d you find?”

“According to her local phone records, at three forty-four in the afternoon of the day she was killed, she received a three-minute call.”

“So?”

“So she wasn’t at home at the time. Between three and quarter after four, she was at a salon on Newbury Street called Diva. Take a look at her appointment book. Both her hair stylist, a guy named Gordon Lascalza, and her manicurist, Deborah something, placed her there then.”

“You’ve never heard of answering machines?” Sarah said.

“Oh, there’s messages on her answering machine, all right,” Ted replied. “Three messages. One from the owner of the Stardust Escort Service, a Nanci Wynter. Her madam. And two from creditors-Citibank Visa and Saks. Apparently she didn’t like paying her bills, or she was short of funds, or both.”

“And?”

“None of them remotely approached two minutes. Also, they were received between five o’clock and six-thirty. They also match up with her phone records.”

“So you’re saying that Val came home after her haircut and manicure,” Sarah said, “played her answering machine, and rewound, right?”

“Exactly,” Ted said.

“And whoever called her at three forty-four that afternoon and left a long message-we don’t have that message, because it was recorded over by later messages.”

“Right.”

“But you know who placed the call, right? From the phone records?”

Teddy hesitated. He was not a good liar. “According to the phone records, that three-minute phone call Valerie Santoro got on the day she was killed came from a cellular phone, a car phone. Registered to a limousine-rental agency. The limo company has twenty-some cellular phones in its name, probably all installed in the cars it rents out.”

She nodded, sensed he was holding back. “Did you already talk to the limo company, or should I?”

An even longer pause. “Uh, I did already.”

“And?”

“All right, the phone call came from a limo rented for two days by a guy named Warren Elkind, from New York City.”

She hesitated. “Know anything about the guy?”

“Nothing.”

“Do me a favor. Forget to mention to Peter you told me about this guy, huh?” There was a long silence. “Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m here. All right. Understood,” Teddy said reluctantly.

“Thanks, Teddy. I owe you. Oh, and one more thing.”

“Now what?”

“Can I have the tape?”

“The what?”

“The tape from Valerie’s answering machine.”

“You asking me to get it transcribed? Or copied?

“I want the original.”

“Shit, Sarah, why are you doing this? It’s in the evidence locker already-”

“Because we have jurisdiction. She’s one of our informants.”

“It’s not going to do you any good, Sarah-I already told you what’s on it.”

“Can I borrow it for a little while anyway?”

He sighed. “I’m hanging up before you ask me for anything else.”

“Ms. Cahill? Excuse me.” Hector, the database trainee, approached her awkwardly. He was holding a long sheet of computer paper and smiling bashfully. His face looked like that of a child who’d accomplished something for which he knew he’d be praised.

“We got six hits,” the trainee said.

Sarah perused the computer printout. The six names had little in common. One was a United States senator whose name had come up in a bribery investigation. Another was a professor at Harvard Law School who specialized in defending celebrities; he was probably being watched for no other reason than that someone high in the Bureau disliked him. A third was a well-known construction executive tied to the Mob; then there were two lowlifes who’d done time for drug trafficking.

And there was Warren Elkind: a prominent New York banker, the chairman of the Manhattan Bank, the second-largest bank in the country. The accompanying biographical information indicated that he was a leading fund-raiser for Israel and had been the target of numerous threats from Palestinian and Arab groups.

Sarah called the Ritz and asked for the security director.

“Is there a problem?” he asked in a pleasant baritone.

“Absolutely nothing involving the hotel,” she reassured him. “We’re looking for someone we believe stayed there four days ago. I’d like to get a list of all hotel guests from Monday night.”

“I wish we could do that, but we’re very protective of our guests’ privacy.”

Sarah’s tone cooled slightly. “I’m sure you’re aware of the law-”

“Oh,” he said with a tiny snort, “I’m quite familiar with the law. Chapter one hundred forty, section twenty-seven, of the Massachusetts General Law. But there is a legal procedure that has to be followed. You’ll have to get a subpoena from Suffolk District Court and present it to our keeper of records. Only then can we release documentation.”

“How long would that take?” she asked dully.

“After you get the subpoena, you mean? It takes several days for us to go into our records. A two-week register check will take at least three days. And then you’ve got to make sure the scope of the subpoena is specific enough. I doubt any judge will issue a subpoena for the names of all hotel guests that stayed here on any given night.”

Frustrated, Sarah lowered her voice and asked confidentially: “Is there any way we can speed things up a bit? I can assure you the hotel will not be involved in any way-”

“Whenever the FBI comes here asking for the names of our guests, we’re involved, by definition. My job is to protect the security of our guests. I’m sorry. Bring me a subpoena.”

The second call she placed was to the Four Seasons, and this time she decided to take a different tack. When she was put through to the accounting department, she said: “I’m calling on behalf of my boss, Warren Elkind, who was a guest at your hotel recently.” She spoke with the glib, slightly bored assuredness of a longtime secretary. “There’s a problem with one of the charges on his bill, and I need to go over it with you.”

“What’s the name again?”

Sarah gave Elkind’s name and was put on hold. Then the voice came back on. “Mr. Elkind checked out on the eighteenth. I have his statement here, ma’am. What seems to be the problem?”

CHAPTER TEN

“I see you collect pictures,” Baumann said.

“You know something about art, I take it?” Malcolm Dyson asked, pleased. The word “pictures,” as opposed to “paintings,” seemed to indicate that Baumann was not entirely ignorant about the art world.

The conversation had been relocated to the main house, whose walls were crowded with paintings, mostly old masters but a few contemporaries, from the marble-tiled entrance hall to the immense Regency dining room-even, Baumann observed, in the washroom off the conservatory. A Rothko nestled between a Canaletto and a Gauguin; canvases by Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, Twombly, and Miró jostled against a Correggio and a Bronzino, a Vermeer, a Braque and a Toulouse-Lautrec. An astonishing collection, Baumann saw, but grotesquely jumbled together. A collector with a lot of money and no taste.

Hanging above a Louis XIV gilt console table in a hallway-poorly lighted, Baumann thought, and ineptly displayed-was a Nativity by Caravaggio. In one corner of the sitting room, oddly juxtaposed, were Antonella da Messina’s Ecce Homo and a Modigliani. Only after they had moved into the library did a switch go on in Baumann’s head, and he suddenly realized what many of these paintings had in common. The Caravaggio had disappeared thirty or so years ago from the oratory of a church in Palermo, Sicily; Ecce Homo had been looted by the Nazis from the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Much of the art in Dyson’s collection had been obtained on the black market. The stuff had been stolen.

They sat in the library, an enormous, high-ceilinged, dimly lit chamber lined with antiquarian books and paneled in mahogany. It smelled strongly, and not unpleasantly, of fireplace smoke. Dyson had boasted that he had purchased the library in its magisterial entirety-from the books to the vaulted ceiling-from a baronial estate outside London.

The floors were covered in antique Persian carpets, over which Dyson had navigated his wheelchair with some difficulty. He sat behind a small writing table; Lomax, taking notes on a yellow pad with a silver ballpoint pen, sat beside him. Both of them faced Baumann, who was sunk into a large, plump armchair upholstered in green-and-white-striped taffeta.

“Just a passing familiarity,” Baumann said. “Enough to know that the Brueghel used to live in a gallery in London. And the Rubens-Baccanale, is it?-vanished from a private collection in Rome sometime in the seventies.”

“Baccanale it is,” Dyson said. “Very good. The Brueghel’s called Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery-very special, I’ve always thought.” He sighed. “Most of the Renoirs are from Buenos Aires; the El Greco came from Saarbrücken, as I recall. The Vermeer, I’m told, came from the Gardner in Boston, but what do I know? The Dalís were picked up in Barcelona, and the Cézanne… Marty, where the hell’d the Cézanne come from?”

“A private collection outside Detroit,” Lomax answered without looking up from his notes. “Grosse Pointe Farms, I believe.”

Dyson extended his hands, spread them out, palms up. “Don’t get me wrong, Baumann. I don’t put on my cat-burglar togs and rip off the stuff myself. I don’t even commission the heists. They just come to me. Black-market dealers around the world must just figure me for an easy mark-man without a country and all that.”

“But not without a checkbook,” Baumann said.

“Right,” Dyson said. A housekeeper appeared with a tray of coffee and smoked salmon sandwiches, served them, and noiselessly vanished. “I mean, let’s face it,” Dyson went on, “I’m not exactly going to just show up at Sotheby’s Important Old Masters sale, am I? Not if I want to stay out of Leavenworth or wherever the hell it is the U.S. government wants to stash me. Anyway, stolen art’s a bargain-stuff goes for maybe seven or ten percent of the crazy prices they hold you up for at Wildenstein or Thaw or Christie’s-”

“I assume you didn’t break me out of Pollsmoor to talk about art, Mr. Dyson,” Baumann interrupted. “You had a ‘business proposition.’”

Dyson regarded Baumann for a long moment over his reading glasses, his eyes steely. Then his face relaxed into a smile. “I like a fellow who’s all business,” he said to his assistant.

Dyson’s cellular phone trilled on the table in front of him. He picked it up, flipped it open, and barked: “Yes?… Good God, what time is it there?… Does Mr. Lin ever sleep?… All right.” He pushed a button to sever the connection. Looking directly at Baumann, he went on: “The Chinese are going to take over Asia, believe you me.” He shook his head. “So they say you’re the best in the world.”

Baumann nodded curtly. “So I’ve been told. But if I were really so good, I wouldn’t have spent the last six years in jail, would I?”

“Too modest,” Dyson said. “My sources tell me BOSS screwed up. Not you.”

Baumann shrugged but did not reply.

“You were instructed to take out a member of the Mossad’s assassination unit, the kidon. Someone who was getting under Pretoria’s skin. Only it turned out the guy you whacked was some big-deal case officer-what’s the term, a katsa? Do I have this right?”

“More or less.”

“And then there’s lots of diplomatic fallout between Tel Aviv and Pretoria. Which sort of threatened to screw up Pretoria’s A-bomb program, which relied on Israel’s cooperation. So you get locked away. Life sentence. Spare them any embarrassment. Right?”

“Roughly.” Dyson had the basic idea right, and Baumann was uninterested in correcting the details. The salient fact was that this enigmatic billionaire had gone to great trouble to extract Baumann from prison, and men like this did not do such things out of humanitarian impulses.

About two months earlier, Baumann had been visited in his cell one afternoon by a priest, who, after a few moments of aimless chatter about Baumann’s religious faith, had leaned close and whispered to the prisoner that a “friend” from the outside wanted to aid his escape. The patron, a man of great resources, would be in touch soon through confederates. Baumann would be reassigned to the auto-repair shop at once.

Baumann had listened without comment.

A few days later, he had been transferred to auto repairs. A young fellow from the prison commandant’s office came by a month or so after that, ostensibly to discuss a problem with his car’s ignition system, but really to let him know that things were now in place.

“Now then,” Dyson said, opening a folder that Martin Lomax had slid before him. “I have a few questions for you.”

Baumann merely raised his eyebrows.

“Call it a job interview,” Dyson said. “What’s your real name, Mr. Baumann?”

Baumann looked at Dyson blankly. “Whatever you’d like it to be. It’s been so long I really don’t remember.”

Lomax whispered something to Dyson, who nodded and went on: “Let’s see. Born in the western Transvaal. Only son of tobacco farmers. Boers. Members of the Nationalist Party.”

“My parents were poorly educated and hardly political,” Baumann interrupted.

“You left the University of Pretoria. Recruited there to BOSS-what’s it called now, the Department of National Security or something, the DNS?”

“It’s been renamed again,” Lomax said. “Now it’s the National Intelligence Service.”

“Who the hell can keep track of this shit?” Dyson muttered. He went on, almost to himself: “Trained at the Farm as an assassin and a munitions expert. Top marks at the academy and in the field. Service loaned you out to various friendly spook services.” He glanced at the sheaf of notes. “Says here you’re single-handedly responsible for some fifteen documented terrorist incidents and probably a good many more undocumented ones around the world. Your cryptonym within the service was Zero, meaning you were top dog or something.”

Baumann said nothing. There was a tentative knock on the library door, to which Dyson abruptly shouted: “Come!” A tall, thin man in his late forties entered, bearing a sheet of paper. His face was sallow and concave. He handed the paper to Lomax and scurried from the room. Lomax scanned the paper, then handed it over to Dyson, murmuring: “St. Petersburg.” Dyson glanced at it and scrunched it into a ball, which he tossed toward a burgundy leather trash can, missing it by a few feet.

“In 1986, you were hired, on a freelance basis, by Muammar Qaddafi to bomb a discotheque in West Berlin. Bomb went off on April 5. Killed three American soldiers.”

“I’m sure whoever did it,” Baumann said, “had been assured by the Libyans that no American military would be present that night. Always better to do one’s own intelligence work.”

“If I wanted to hire an assassin, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, they’d be lining up out the door all the way to Paris, you know,” Dyson said. “Guns for hire are cheap and plentiful. You fellows, on the other hand-rare as hen’s teeth. You must have been quite in demand.”

“I was, yes.”

“Says your native language is Afrikaans. But you usually speak with a British accent.”

“A reasonable facsimile,” Baumann replied.

“But persuasive. How the hell old were you when you did Carrero Blanco?”

“Hmm?”

“Luis Carrero Blanco.”

“I’m afraid I don’t recognize the name.”

“The hell you talking about? Luis Carrero Blanco, the president of Spain under Franco. Blown up in 1972. The Basques claimed credit, but they’d really hired some mysterious outsider. A professional assassin who got a quarter of a million dollars American for pulling it off. That wasn’t you?”

Baumann shrugged. “I wish it had been.”

The old man furrowed his brow and shifted in his wheelchair. He looked puzzlingly at Lomax, then back at Baumann. “If you’re trying to conceal something from me, I’d advise you to-”

“Now I’ve got a few questions for you,” Baumann interrupted, raising his voice ever so slightly.

Annoyance flashed in Dyson’s gray eyes. He scowled.

“How many people were involved in the operation to extract me from Pollsmoor?”

“That’s my business,” Dyson replied curtly.

“I’m afraid not. It directly concerns me and my welfare from now on.”

Dyson paused for a moment and then relented. He turned to Lomax, who said: “Two.”

“In all? Including the phony priest and the chap in the prison commandant’s office?”

“Just those two,” Lomax repeated with irritation. He inclined his head toward his boss for an instant, saw Dyson nod, and said quietly: “They’re both dead.”

“Excellent,” Baumann said. “All loose ends tied?”

“Professionally,” Lomax said.

“Let’s just hope,” Baumann said, “that whoever did the wet work was more professional than whoever’s in charge of security here at whatever this is called… Arcadia.”

Lomax compressed his lips into a thin line. His eyes flashed with anger, his face reddened.

“Look, goddammit,” Dyson said, his voice choked with fury. “You should be eternally grateful-you should damn well kiss the ground I wheel on for what I did to break you out of that hellhole.”

At this, Baumann rose slowly to his feet. He smiled wanly and turned to leave. “I do appreciate your assistance, Mr. Dyson,” he said, “but I didn’t ask for it. If I’m not satisfied that you have taken the necessary basic precautions to ensure that I am not traced, then I must refuse to have anything more to do with you.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Dyson called out.

“Mr. Dyson, you’ve presumably brought me here because of my proficiency at the type of work you want me to do on your behalf. I suggest that we respect each other’s areas of expertise. Now, please tell me how the arrangements were made.”

Dyson told him about how his people contacted certain officials in South Africa and paid them off. Baumann nodded. “All right. I’ll listen to what you propose. But I should warn you that I may well not accept. It all depends on the nature of the job you want done, and the amount of payment you’re prepared to offer.”

Dyson backed up his chair by pushing at the writing table, rattling the inkwell and the Meissen urn. “Do you seriously think you have much choice?” he said. “You’re a goddam international fugitive now. And I know your whereabouts!”

“Yes, you do,” Baumann agreed equably, looking around the room. “And the same could be said of you.”

Dyson stared furiously at Baumann. Lomax visibly stiffened and slowly lowered a hand toward the concealed pistol Baumann had observed in the garden.

Baumann went on as if he hadn’t seen this: “And I’m certainly familiar enough now with the security here, the weakness and the permeability. Anytime I wish, I can pay you a return visit. Or come to call at your corporate offices in Geneva or Zug. You obviously know some of the particulars of my background, so I’m sure you don’t for a moment doubt my ability to hunt you down.”

Dyson put a restraining arm on Lomax. “All right,” he said at length. Lomax glowered. “I’m sure we’ll be able to come to some happy agreement.” His expression eased somewhat. “We Americans call it ‘getting to yes.’”

Baumann returned to the armchair and settled into it. He crossed his legs. “I hope so,” he said. “Six years in prison can make one long for something productive to do.”

“You understand that what I want you to do must be done in absolute secrecy,” Dyson said. “I can’t stress that enough.”

“I have never advertised my accomplishments. You don’t know even one small part of the work I’ve done.”

Dyson fixed him with a stare. “That’s the way I like it. I must not be connected to this in any way, and I intend to take measures to ensure that.”

Baumann shrugged. “Naturally. What is it you want done?”

Martin Lomax, who knew every last detail of the plan his employer had been brooding about for months, returned to the library about half an hour later. He understood that Dyson wished to close the deal in private, as Dyson always did.

When he entered, discreet as always, the two men appeared to be finishing their conversation.

He heard Baumann speak just one word: “Impressive.”

Dyson gave one of his odd, cold smiles. “Then you’re interested.”

“No,” Baumann said.

“What, is it the money?” Lomax found himself asking, a tad too anxiously.

“The fee would certainly be a consideration. Given the risks to my life it would entail, I’d certainly be better off back at Pollsmoor. But we will discuss finances later.”

“What the hell are you-” Dyson began.

“You have spelled out your conditions,” Baumann said quietly. “Now, I have mine.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Crime Lab, Kowalski,” said a man’s voice.

“Michael Kowalski? This is Special Agent Sarah Cahill in the Boston office.”

“Yup.” He made no attempt to hide his impatience.

“You’re an acoustic engineer, is that right?”

Kowalski sighed. “What’s up?”

She leaned forward in her chair. “Listen, do you guys know how to… unerase tapes?”

The phone line was silent for a long time. She gestured hello with her chin at Ken Alton, who was getting up from his desk and heading toward the break room.

Finally, Kowalski spoke. “Audio, video, what?”

“Audio.”

“No.”

Sarah could hear his hand covering the phone. There were muffled voices on the other end of the line.

“Hello?” she said.

“Yeah, I’m back. Sorry, I’m raked. All right, you got an audio tape you accidentally erased over or something? Not likely we’re going to be able to bring it back for you. No way. That tape’s gone. Sorry.”

“Thanks.” Sarah glumly put down the phone and said, “Shit.”

She found Ken sitting at a table in the break room, drinking a Diet Pepsi and eating a Snickers bar. He was reading one of the William Gibson novels he constantly toted around. She sat down beside him.

“I liked the old one better,” she said.

He closed his novel, using the Snickers wrapper as a bookmark. “The old what?”

“Break room. Across the street. The rats always snarfed your brown-bag lunch if you left it out. I miss the rats.”

“Was that Technical Services you were talking to?”

“Right.”

“Warren Elkind blew you off, eh?”

“He wouldn’t even take my call-not after he heard it was about Valerie Santoro’s murder. I guess I’m really reaching now.”

“Hey, don’t take it so hard,” Ken said. “Life sucks, and then you die.” He bit his lower lip. “Technical Services is pretty good. If they can’t do something, it usually can’t be done.”

“Great,” she said bitterly.

“But not necessarily. Are you really serious about this?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, turning to look at him. Her phone rang, and she ignored it.

“Well, there’s a guy I went to MIT with. A real genius. He’s on the faculty there now, an assistant professor or something. Electronics engineer. I could give him a call if you want.”

“Yeah, I’d like that. Hey, have you ever done a full-scale search of the computerized central files?”

“Sure. Why?” The Pepsi machine hummed, then rattled.

“Warren Elkind. I want to see if his name comes up anywhere. How do I do it?”

“You make the request through Philly Willie. He sends it on to Washington, to the professional searchers at headquarters. The correlation clerks are excellent.”

“I want to find all references to Elkind. Can they do it?”

“They use software called Sybase, which is pretty good. Only question is whether they’ll let you do it. Costs a lot. What makes you think Phelan’s going to authorize it?”

“Warren Elkind is one of the most powerful bankers in America. He’s also been a target of terrorist threats. If I leave things the way they are, we have one dead prostitute and one rich banker. No connection. A big, fat goose egg. But if we can do a fully cross-referenced search, it’s possible we’ll turn up something someplace we wouldn’t have thought to look. Some investigation somewhere, some lead somewhere-”

“Yeah, but Phelan’s just going to tell you about how the Bureau’s file clerks cross-reference better than any file clerks in the world. If it’s not in Elkind’s file now, what makes you think a computer search is going to yield anything more?”

“You’re the computer nerd. You figure it out. I want an all-out, interagency search. CIA, DIA, NSA, INS, State, the whole shebang. Stuff that our people don’t necessarily cross-reference.”

“Go talk to Willie.”

“He’s just going to say, ‘Sarah, this isn’t Lockerbie.’”

“Well, it isn’t.” He took a huge mouthful of Snickers and, chewing, smiled wickedly. “But ask anyway. You think Elkind killed your informant?”

She sighed. “No. I mean, anything’s possible, I wouldn’t rule it out. But there’s something… I don’t know, sort of off about her death. A five-thousand-dollar payoff… and murdered hours after servicing one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. Something’s not quite right.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Malcolm Dyson, Baumann thought, was faux-casual yet tightly wound; shamblingly relaxed yet ferociously observant. And he had made a point of keeping Baumann waiting a good half hour while he changed for dinner; where he was having dinner, whether in or out, the old billionaire hadn’t volunteered. He guarded his personal life like a state secret.

Dyson’s only revealing comment had been an aside, uttered as a liveried butler escorted him into a cherrywood elevator and up to his personal quarters. “I’ve learned,” he’d said apropos of nothing, “that I don’t even miss the States. I miss New York. I had a nice spread in Katonah, thirty-four acres. Town house on East Seventy-first Street that Alexandra put endless time into redoing. Loved it. Life goes on.” And, with a dismissive wave: “New York may be the financial capital, but you can goddam well pay the rent out of a shack in Zambezi if you want.”

Dyson reappeared in the smoke-redolent library, wearing black tie and a shawl-collar dinner jacket. “Now, then. Your ‘conditions,’ as you call them. I don’t have all day, and I’d prefer to wrap this up before dinner.”

Baumann stood before Dyson. For a few moments he was silent. At last he spoke. “You have outlined to me a plan that will wreak terrible destruction on the United States and then the world. You want me to detonate a rather sophisticated explosive device in Manhattan, on a specific date, and disable a major computer system as well. I am now privy to your intent. And you, like me, are an internationally sought fugitive from justice. What makes you think I can’t simply go to the international authorities with a promise to divulge what I know of your plan, and strike a bargain for my freedom?”

Dyson smiled. “Self-interest, pure and simple,” he replied phlegmatically. “For all intents and purposes, I am beyond reach here. I’m effectively protected by the Swiss government, which receives enormous financial benefit from my corporate undertakings.”

“No one is beyond reach,” Baumann pointed out.

“You are a convicted murderer and terrorist,” Dyson said, “who broke out of a South African jail and went on the lam. Why do you think they will believe you? It’s far more likely you’ll simply be rounded up and returned to Pollsmoor. Locked up in solitary. The South Africans don’t want you talking, as you know, and the other governments of the world sure as hell don’t want you at large.”

Baumann nodded. “But you’re describing a criminal act of such magnitude that the Americans, the FBI and the CIA in particular, will not rest until they locate the perpetrators. In the aftermath of such a bombing, the public pressure for arrests will be enormous.”

“I’ve selected you because you’re supposed to be brilliant and, most important, extremely secretive. Your job description is not to get caught.”

“But I will require the services of others-this is hardly a job I can do alone-and once others are involved, the chance of secrecy dwindles to nothing.”

“Need I remind you,” Dyson said hotly, “that you’ve got talents you can use to make sure no one talks? Anyway, the FBI and the CIA, and for that matter MI6 and Interpol and the fucking International Red Cross, will all be looking for parties with a motive. Parties who claim responsibility for such an act, who have some agenda. But I want no credit, and as far as the world knows, I have no agenda. Whatever my legal troubles in the United States, I have all the money anyone could ever want and much more. Much, much more. Beyond, as they say, the dreams of avarice. After a certain point, money becomes merely abstract. I have, you see, no financial motive.”

“I can see that,” Baumann agreed, “but there are flaws in your plan I can see already-”

“You’re the expert,” Dyson exploded. “You’re the goddam Prince of Darkness. Iron out the wrinkles, straighten out the kinks. Anyway, what sort of flaws are you referring to?”

“For one thing, you say you’re unwilling to give up operational control.”

“If I want to call it off, I need to be able to reach you-”

“No. Too risky. From time to time I may contact you, using a clandestine method I deem safe. Or I may not contact you at all.”

“I’m not willing-”

“The point is nonnegotiable. As one professional to another, I’m telling you I will not compromise the security of the operation.”

Dyson stared intently. “If you-when you contact me, how do you plan to do it?”

“Telephone.”

“Telephone? You’ve got to be kidding me. Of all the sophisticated ways-”

“Not landlines. I don’t trust them. Satellite telephone-a SATCOM. Surely you have one.”

“Indeed,” Dyson replied. “But if you plan on calling me through satellite transmissions, you’ll need a portable-what are they called-”

“A suitcase SATCOM. It’s the size of a small suitcase or large briefcase. Correct.”

“I have one I use when I’m out of telephone range, or on my boat, or whatever. You can take that.”

“No, thank you. I’ll get my own. After all, how do I know the one you’d give me isn’t bugged?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dyson said. “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

“You want to keep track of my whereabouts-you’ve made that clear. How do I know there isn’t a GPS built into the receiver?” A Global Positioning System, Baumann did not bother to explain, is a hand-held device that can be modified to transmit an inaudible signal as a sub-carrier of the audio signal transmitted over satellite link. It would enable the receiving party to determine within a few meters the precise location of the party using the portable SATCOM.

“In any case,” Baumann went on, “I don’t know where you acquired your portable unit. It’s simple technology these days for a government intelligence agency, using a sensitive spectrum analyzer, to identify the characteristic emissions from a particular transmitter and map its location. Just as the CIA, a few decades ago, followed certain automobiles of interest in Vietnam from space by picking up their unique sparkplug emission patterns.”

“That’s the most far-fetched-”

“Perhaps I’m being overly cautious. But I’d much rather procure my own, if you don’t mind. It’s an expenditure of approximately thirty thousand dollars. I assume you can afford it.”

Baumann’s tone made it eminently clear that he would do as he pleased, whether Dyson minded or not.

Dyson shrugged with feigned carelessness. “What else?”

“You are offering me two million dollars. Unless you are prepared to multiply that figure, there’s no sense in our talking any further.”

Dyson laughed. His even false teeth were stained yellow. “You know what the first rule of negotiation is? Always bargain from strength. You’re standing on quicksand. I sprung you; I can burn you in a second.”

“That may be true,” Baumann conceded, “but if you had another alternative, you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to pull me out of Pollsmoor. I wouldn’t be standing here before you. There are indeed other professionals who could do the job you describe-but you will get only one shot at it. If it fails, you will never have another chance, I can assure you of that. So you want the best in the world. And you’ve already made that decision. Let’s not play games.”

“What do you want? Three million?”

“Ten. Money for you is, as you say, abstract. Theoretical. To you, another five million is a telephone call before your morning coffee.”

Dyson laughed loudly. “Why not fifty million? Why not a billion, for Christ’s sake?”

“Because I don’t need it. In a dozen lifetimes, I could never need that kind of money. Ten million is enough to buy me protection and anonymity. This will be the last job I do, and I’d like to live the rest of my life without the constant fear of being caught out. More important, though, any more than that is a risk to me. The basic rule in my circles is never to give anyone more than he can explain. I can explain, by various means, a fortune of ten million dollars. A billion, I cannot. Oh, and expenses on top of that.”

Dyson stared, his steely-gray eyes penetrating. “Upon completion.”

“No. One-third up front, one-third a week before the strike date, and the final third immediately upon completion. And before I do anything, the money must begin to move.”

“I don’t have ten million dollars in cash sitting around, stashed in my mattress or something. You make a withdrawal of that magnitude, you’re inviting all kinds of scrutiny,” Dyson objected.

“The last thing I want is wads of cash,” Baumann said. “Much too easily traceable. And I don’t want you to be able to grab my money.”

“If you set up an account in Geneva or Zurich-”

“The Swiss are not reliable. I don’t want my funds impounded. I know for sure that at some point in the future, some small part of this will come out. I need plausible deniability.”

“Caymans?”

“I don’t trust bankers,” Baumann said with a grim smile. “I have dealt with far too many of them.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“The payment must be put in the hands of someone we both trust to serve as a go-between.”

“Such as?”

“There is a gentleman we both have met in the Panamanian intelligence service G-2.” Baumann spoke his name. “As you may or may not know, during the American invasion of Panama, Operation JUST CAUSE, his family was inadvertently killed.”

Dyson nodded.

“He was always anti-American,” Baumann went on, “but since then, you’d be hard pressed to find someone with a greater hatred for America. He has a motive to cooperate with both of us.”

“All right.”

“He will act as our executive agent, our go-between. You will issue him a letter of credit. He’ll be unable to touch the money himself but he’ll be authorized to release it according to a schedule we work out. He approves the transfer of funds, and the Panamanian bank disburses them. That way, he can’t abscond with the money, and neither can I. And you’ll be unable to withhold it from me.”

For a long while, Malcolm Dyson examined his manicured fingernails. Then he looked up. “Agreed,” he said. “A very intelligent plan. Your knowledge of the financial world is impressive.”

Baumann nodded modestly and said, “Thank you.”

Dyson extended his hand. “So when can you begin?”

“I’ll begin my preparations as soon as I have received my first installment of the funds, my three point three million dollars,” Baumann said. He took Dyson’s hand and shook it firmly. “I’m glad we were able to come to an agreement. Enjoy your dinner party.”