'Or killers.'

  'He was making sure I understood everything he knew so I would be ready for the fight. I might be exhausted; I might end up being the one who was hunted down. I might not have a gun when I needed it. I needed to know a great many things. He taught me all the skills he had. Why would he do that if I was going to come for him someday?'

  'I don't know, but he knows what happened. He and Giancarlo are keeping the truth from you. You need to face that if you're ever going to find out what really happened.'

  'I know, but I won't touch them. I won't! Not unless they killed Robert, and I don't think they did. It just doesn't make sense.'

  *

  Kate was moving about the hotel room on crutches when Malloy arrived late that evening. Ethan offered him a drink and this time he accepted. 'Scotch and soda, if you've got it.'

  Whilst the ice crackled, Malloy settled in a comfortable chair. 'I had a long look at what they've taken from Chernoff's computer. There's quite a bit of material that is going to produce good intelligence. We're going to be able to figure out her key contacts, and at least some of her finances. The trouble is at this point we're racing against time. I mean if we find a telephone number that takes us into a network of phones, we have to get to it before the owners ditch them. Otherwise, we just end up chasing shadows and picking apart aliases.'

  Ethan handed him his drink. 'So we're two steps from locating the guy - and still three or four days from knowing anything?'

  Malloy took a sip of his drink. 'We could get lucky, but that's all it would be. Carlisle hasn't shown up, at least not as Carlisle, but if he wired money to Chernoff late last year, or contacted Ohlendorf in the past couple of months we might turn up one of his aliases.'

  'If this guy is smart he has to know he's in trouble,' Ethan answered.

  'I think he's known he was in trouble for several months. That's why he came after us.'

  'But the whole world wasn't looking for him,' Ethan said. 'If your people link him to Chernoff, he's going to have to crawl into a hole. Once that happens nothing you get from Chernoff is going to take you anywhere close to the guy.'

  'I know.'

  'So what's the plan?' Kate asked.

  'I found some files in Dale's computer before I cleaned it. If nothing else I turned up a set of decent surveillance photos of the guy. What they're publishing in the annual report doesn't give us very much. With these we can at least make an ID on him. He pulled a memory stick from his pocket and handed it to Ethan. 'They were taken in Paris three years ago.'

  'So our ghost gets out now and then?' Kate asked as she swung over on her crutches and stood behind Ethan.

  'He was having a meeting with Hugo Ohlendorf,' Malloy told them as Ethan slipped the key into his computer. 'Dale's people were tracking Ohlendorf, but they did the follow up on Carlisle for the ID.' He pointed at the screen as the files came up. 'Those other folders are for you as well. Once Dale had a name, he put together a dossier on Carlisle. I'm not sure there's anything there we don't already know, but sometimes all it takes is the right eyes looking at something.'

  'I'll take anything you've got,' Ethan said as he opened the picture file and hit the Slide Show prompt. The first photograph showed Carlisle and Ohlendorf sitting at an outdoor cafe. Carlisle it seemed had banished his working class roots, looking every bit the social equal of Hugo Ohlendorf.

  'A good looking guy,' Malloy remarked.

  The third photo came on screen and Malloy glanced at Kate, who stood frozen behind Ethan, staring at the screen as if stricken. 'What's the matter?' he said.

  Ethan turned from the computer screen as well. Kate's eyes were fixed oddly on the screen as the sequence ran but she said nothing. 'What is it?' Ethan asked. His voice betrayed his concern. As well it should. Kate looked like she was having a stroke.

  'It's. . . Robert,' she whispered.

  'What? What are you talking about?' Ethan asked.

  'That's not David Carlisle we're looking at. It's. . . Robert Kenyon.

  Kate's face grew oddly serene as she seemed to come to terms with the fact that she was looking at her first husband some eight years after his presumed death on the Eiger.

  'Cut the rope,' she whispered at last and only then did Malloy see the first tear forming. 'One of them said something. I didn't really understand. What about her? What do we do with her? Something like that. And Robert said: Cut the rope. I was groggy from hitting my head, but I knew Robert couldn't have said something like that. I mean. . . I just didn't believe it.'

  'It answers a lot of questions,' Malloy said as he began reviewing the odd pieces of evidence that had never made sense.

  Finally Ethan stirred. 'It raises a lot more.'

  'Not really,' Malloy told him. 'Think about it. Robert Kenyon makes a foolish investment and loses everything - including Kate's money. Who are the beneficiaries of the bankruptcy? His life-long friends. They didn't take the money, they funnelled it - at least most of it - into new accounts in David Carlisle's name. The guy managed the impossible: he died and he took it with him.'

  'So what happened to Carlisle?' Ethan asked.

  Malloy shook his head. 'David Carlisle was a mercenary in the Balkans in 1994. That's the last official record of him anywhere until 1997 when he became Kenyon's successor on the Council of the Paladins. My guess is he got killed and is buried somewhere in Serbia or Bosnia. Kenyon just took his identity because they looked something like each other.'

  'Robert climbed out that night,' Kate said, her eyes still fixed on the man she had married almost eleven years ago. 'By the time the moon was up he had got to the Traverse of the Gods. He probably made the summit by three or four that morning and was off the mountain before dawn.'

  'I don't get it,' Ethan said. 'Why would Kenyon give up his identity?'

  Malloy waited for Kate, but she had no theory. 'There's only one good reason,' he said. 'He was in trouble. Whatever it was, he had time to make financial arrangements, so it sounds to me like some kind of investigation into his activities.'

  'Six months,' Kate said. 'That's how long it took for the two of us to fall in love and get married. That's how much time he had.'

  'The acquisition of the company was in that same time frame,' Malloy remarked.

  'I understand the bankruptcy scam,' Ethan said. 'He needed money and he didn't want to leave a paper trail, but why involve Kate? Why get married?'

  Malloy looked at Kate. Her tears were gone. 'Every magician knows the key to a successful illusion involves distracting the audience at the critical moment,' Malloy told them. 'In this case the distraction was the Eiger, more exactly Kate's bad luck with it. A well-publicised honeymoon climb to beat the mountain? What could be better? And when it failed, when the two Austrian climbers described watching Kate, her husband, and their guide going over, that was supposed to be all anyone would talk about. Kate's bad luck with the mountain.'

  'So the climbers were just supposed to be witnesses?' Ethan asked.

  'They weren't just witnesses,' Kate answered.

  'But they were hired because they had no criminal record - no known association with you or Kenyon or for that matter your guide. The idea was they would report the thing and show people the spot where they could reasonably expect to find two bodies. When no one found Kenyon's body - well that kind of thing happens on the Eiger.'

  'Robert probably only learned what had happened to me a couple of days later,' Kate said.

  'And when he heard the story you were telling it was actually better than what he had planned, so there was no need to eliminate you.'

  'By then I had told Giancarlo everything. Giancarlo listened to my story without batting an eye, and then he promised me, promised, he would find Robert's killer if it was the last thing he ever did.'

  'He was in on it,' Malloy told her. 'He and Luca and Jack Farrell, Hugo Ohlendorf and Jack Farrell's father — all the active paladins.'

  'So what do we do about it?' Ethan asked. 'I mean we still don't know how to find the guy.' He looked at Kate. 'We are going after him, aren't we?'

  'Definitely,' Kate told him, her jaw grinding. 'We are definitely going after this man.'

  'Well, we still don't know how to find him,' Ethan muttered.

  'Giancarlo will tell me where he is.'

  Berlin, Germany

  1936-38.

  There had always been plenty of drinking. It came with the literary life, the need to socialise after hours of poring over texts. With money and a social schedule to keep, it got worse instead of better.

  Himmler noticed Dr Rahn's behaviour early in 1937, not long after his first promotion, and he made sure Rahn was notified that he had been seen acting in an unseemly manner. In the summer of that year Rahn published his second book, Satan's Minions. There were problems with the proof, improvements and 'clarifications' that Rahn flatly rejected. When the changes went through anyway, in accordance with the official view about racial purity, Rahn said nothing more publicly about the changes but, in private amongst friends, he seethed with anger. That made his being watched essential. And there was that title to his book, as well. Explain as Rahn might that Satan was the light bringer to the world, a Promethean figure, there was, inevitably, the concern that Rahn had intended an oblique barb at Hitler's Reich ... or worse, Himmler's SS.

  It was time for a reality check for Dr Rahn and, when September came, Himmler had him sent to Dachau to work as a guard until December. He came back chastened and obedient, but then Himmler had reviewed a number of disturbing reports about his behaviour at the camp - remarks made in confidence to another guard that bordered on treason - and it became necessary to tap his phones and open his mail.

  In January of 1938 one of Himmler's aids remarked that Dr Rahn had not submitted a Certificate of Racial Origin. Everyone joining the SS from 1935 on had been obliged to submit the form. Dr Rahn, of course, had been recruited. There had been none of the usual requirements to fulfill and no one had thought to ask about the racial purity of the Reich's new golden boy. Was there a problem? Himmler's subordinate would not back down. There was no problem so long as he provided a certificate! Himmler said he would make sure Dr Rahn was informed of the situation. Papers were pushed through. The request was made politely but firmly. Rahn, the prima donna, said he would take care of it. He then proceeded to ignore the request, as he had all the others.

  Berlin, Germany

  Fall 1938.

  In the spring of 1938 Hitler effected the annexation of Austria. That it was accomplished without a shot being fired had the effect inside the Reich of confirming Hitler's policies and silencing forever the feeble voices of protest and moderation. The move into the east was not aggression but reunification. Austria and Germany were not two nations, but one. As if to confirm this, fate cast two teams of climbers onto the impregnable north face of the Eiger in July of that year, one Austrian and one German. After racing up the better portion of the rock, the teams tied their ropes together just under the summit and finished their climb as a single team. To commemorate the triumph, the Führer shook the hand of each man and took the occasion once more to speak of Germany's destiny and of course Aryan supremacy.

  In an act that was hardly noticed by the outside world but was celebrated with great pomp within the Reich, Hitler moved the Lance of St. Maurice from the Schatzkammer Museum in Vienna to the cathedral of Nuremberg, where it had once lain as part of the insignia of the Holy Roman Empire. Thought by some to be the spear that had pierced the side of Christ, the Lance of St. Maurice was believed to have been discovered in Jerusalem by the mother of Constantine. Its storied history placed it in the hands of such warrior kings as Attila the Hun, Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and even Napoleon. The legend went that whoever possessed this lance held the fate of the world in his hand. By taking the Lance back to Nuremberg, Hitler was in effect reclaiming the authority of the long defunct Holy Roman Empire and placing himself in the glorious tradition of the warrior kings who had carried the spear of destiny from triumph to triumph.

  Once the relic had been installed at Nuremberg, Hitler ordered Himmler's leading historians and scholars to prepare a detailed history of the Lance, confirming with scholarly scrutiny the wild legends associated with his exquisitely preserved relic. Himmler naturally turned to his best man. In a tediously documented treatise Dr Rahn concluded that Hitler's newly acquired artifact, though undoubtedly possessing a long history within the European houses of royalty, was produced in the Carolingian period - from the time of Charlemagne, some eight centuries after Christ. The Lance of Longinus, kept in the Vatican, he wrote, was of far greater antiquity and possessed as well a more credible provenance. That lance, he explained, was very likely the relic pilgrims to Jerusalem in the seventh century had reported seeing. It had gone to Constantinople after Jerusalem fell to the forces of Mohammed. Inexplicably broken, its tip had come to Paris with the Crown of Thorns via Venice when Baldwin II of Constantinople had sold a number of sacred objects to Louis IX in the thirteenth century to finance the crumbling defences of his empire. Though venerated for centuries it vanished following the outbreak of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. The body of that same spear head had been captured by the Turks in 1452 and was sent to Rome in 1492 when Sultan Bajazet presented it to Pope Innocent VIII.

  Also a contender for authenticity, Rahn noted - and perhaps mostly likely to be genuine - was the so-called Lance of Antioch, found and then lost again during the first Crusade. That spear, he wrote, may well have left Jerusalem only a few decades after the Crucifixion.

  A thorough man, Himmler read Rahn's report before he passed it on to Hitler. Once he realised, with a dawning sense of horror, that Rahn had dismissed Hitler's precious relic as a medieval forgery, he had no choice but to have the report rewritten by certain of Dr Rahn's subordinates. As a matter of prestige he kept Rahn's name attached to the document, but ordered the historian to be sent to the SS-run work camp in Buchenwald.

  Only an impassioned plea by Colonel Bachman had convinced Himmler to let Dr Rahn serve as prison guard rather than enter the camp as an inmate.

  Elise had first seen the change in Rahn at the 1936 Olympics. Everyone had been in such a famous mood that summer - except Rahn. At first she credited it to his tendency for moodiness. She had seen the same deadness in his eyes when he ran his hotel. After the thrill of his sudden fame, a bit of depression was understandable. Only it did not pass away. She saw him laughing sometimes, but there was no happiness in it, and even when he looked at Sarah, whom he adored, he seemed wistful and melancholy. His wit got sharper. The cynicism that comes of middle age grew more fixed and cruel. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things esoteric. But gone was the man's passion.

  There were more women after that summer, too. Some very horrid stories, to be honest. Elise listened to Bachman's edited narration of the gossip he had heard and even seen, and she tried not to be shocked. She said it was all the consequence of too much to drink, and Bachman must encourage him to cut back, but secretly she knew the alcohol was only the trigger. Rahn's problems ran deeper than that.

  After his tour of duty at Dachau in the late fall of 1937, he had tried hard to be the old Otto, but trying was all he accomplished. His cheerfulness was excessive and oddly timed. He talked about writing not one book but four or five of them at once. He had even dipped back into a novel that he had begun years earlier. Nothing came of his plans of course, and his desperately bright smiles turned leaden again after a season. He seemed to age, his hair to thin, his skin to go ashen. He gained weight. He was still a handsome man, but at thirty-four he was quite suddenly middle-aged. He and Bachman no longer seemed so very different from one another. They began to fit together like the odd old men who sat together sometimes in the dreariest cafes, even down to the detail of their sagging shoulders.

  In her own youthful fit of passion Elise had said once she wanted to think of Rahn forever sitting in the grass beneath the ruins at Montségur, she at his side, as they listened to the wind and imagined it to be the voices of those martyred for their faith. That was no longer what she thought about when she thought of Otto Rahn. Life had got close and messy. She remembered him getting sick from too much to drink. She sometimes thought of him in France as the hotel keeper. In her nightmares she could imagine him standing guard at a detention centre. On the better days he was the stodgy scholar addressing the Berlin ladies about Satan, who, as it turned out, had suffered bad press in Rome but was actually a quite fascinating fellow. . .

  When she looked for the causes of his ruin she always thought about Bachman. That probably was not fair. Rahn had made his own choices, but he had been such a free spirit, so excited about. . . everything. How had he lost it? The answer was clear - if not exactly fair and accurate. Bachman had attached himself to Rahn's vitality and then sucked the life out of him, turning him in the process as grey and old as himself. Elise had fallen in love with him, but in the end Bachman had won Rahn's soul. The evenings they spent with him, the Sunday meal Rahn almost always attended so he could see Sarah, this was Bachman showing off his latest conquest: the tamed and broken adulterer.

  Bachman would have been shocked to know her thoughts. He was really very fond of his friend. He never spoke a bad word about him, and he was genuinely worried when Rahn's actions got him in hot water with Himmler. Once, in a fury of concern, he had said of Rahn, 'All that intelligence! Why can't he see he's destroying himself?' He had been talking about a report Rahn had filed with Himmler that had got him exiled to the Buchenwald detention centre, but he might have said it about a dozen other incidents as well.