And because they were true, he would not give up. He would not succumb to the nearly overpowering urge to surrender, to sleep, to stop.

  With robotic precision, he moved hand and knee and propelled himself down the hallway.

  Finally, he found himself in a spacious, double-height room, its walls lined with books. Lizardlike eyes surveyed the area. His primary target was not present. A disappointment, not a surprise.

  Instead, there was the wheezing, sweating weakling Strasser, a traitor who, too, was deserving of death.

  How many more minutes of consciousness did the Architect have left? He eyed Strasser avidly, as if extinguishing his light might help to restore his own.

  Shakily, he rose from the floor into a marksman’s crouch. He felt muscles in his body trying to spasm, but he held his arms completely still. The small Glock in his arms had now acquired the weight of a cannon, yet somehow he managed to raise the firearm until it was at the precisely correct angle.

  It was at that moment that Strasser, perhaps alerted by the old-penny odor of blood, finally became aware of his presence.

  The Architect watched the raisin-like eyes widen momentarily, then fall closed. Squeezing the trigger was like lifting a desk with one finger, but he would do so. Did so.

  Or did he?

  When he failed to hear the gun’s report, he first worried that he had not executed his mission. Then he realized that it was his sensory awareness that was beginning to shut down.

  The room was swiftly darkening: he knew that brain cells starved of oxygen ceased to function—that the aural and optical functions shut down first, but that sentience itself would soon follow.

  He waited until he saw Strasser hit the ground before he allowed his own eyes to close. As they did so, there was a fleeting awareness that his eyes would never open again; and then there was no awareness of anything at all.

  Back in the hotel room, Ben and Anna rifled through a stack of papers that they’d hurriedly purchased at a newsstand on the way. Chardin had referred to an imminent development. And the “fancy-dress forum” in Austria that Strasser had mentioned chimed with an item they’d recently come across: but what was it?

  The answer was within their grasp.

  It was Anna who came across the item in El País, Argentina’s leading newspaper. It was another brief article about the International Children’s Health Forum—a convocation of world leaders to discuss matters of pressing mutual concern, especially with respect to the developing world. But what caught her eye this time was the city where the meeting was to be held: Vienna, Austria.

  She read on. There was a list of sponsors—among them, the Lenz Foundation. Translating from the Spanish, she read the article out loud to Ben.

  A shiver ran down his spine. “My God,” he said. “This is it! It has to be. Chardin said only days remained. What he was talking about has to be related to this conference. Read me the list of sponsors again.”

  Anna did so.

  And Ben started to make a few phone calls. These were calls to foundation professionals, people who were delighted to hear from one of their contributors. Slipping into a familiar role, Ben sounded hale and hearty when he spoke to them, but what he learned was profoundly dismaying.

  “They’re great people, the folks from the Lenz Foundation,” Geoffrey Baskin, programs director for the Robinson Foundation, told him in his dulcet New Orleans accent. “It’s really their baby, but they just wanted to keep a low profile. They put it together, footed most of the bill—it’s hardly fair that we’re getting any of the glory. But I guess they wanted to make sure it had an international feeling. Like I say, they’re really selfless.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” Ben said. His kept his tone upbeat even as he felt a rising sense of dread. “We may be partnering with them on a special project, so I just wanted to get your sense of them. Really nice to hear.”

  Dignitaries and leaders from around the world would be gathering in Vienna, under the auspices of the Lenz Foundation …

  They had to get to Vienna.

  It was the one place in the world they shouldn’t be showing their faces, and the one place where they had no choice but to go.

  Anna and he paced the hotel room. They could take precautions—precautions that now came as second nature: disguise, falsified identities, separate flights.

  But the risks seemed much greater now.

  “If we’re not just chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, we’ve got to assume that every commercial flight into Vienna is going to be scrutinized very carefully,” Anna said. “They’re going to be on full alert.”

  Ben felt the flicker of an idea. “What did you say again?”

  “They’re going to be on full alert. Border control isn’t going to be a cakewalk. More like a gauntlet.”

  “Before that.”

  “I said we’ve got to assume that every commercial flight into Vienna …”

  “That’s it,” Ben said.

  “What’s it?”

  “Anna, I’m going to take a risk here. And the calculation is that it’s a smaller risk than we’d otherwise be facing.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m going to call a guy named Fred McCallan. He was the codger I was supposed to go skiing with in St. Moritz.”

  “You were going to St. Moritz to go skiing with a ‘codger.’”

  Ben blushed. “Well, there was a granddaughter in the picture.”

  “Go on.”

  “More to the point, though, there’s a private jet in the picture. A Gulfstream. I’ve been in it once. Very red. Red seats, red carpeting, red TV set. Fred will still be at the Hotel Carlton there, and the plane will probably be at the little airport in Chur.”

  “So you’re going to call him up and ask for the keys. Kind of like borrowing someone’s station wagon to pick up groceries, right?”

  “Well …”

  Anna shook her head. “It’s true what they say—the rich really are different from you and me.” She shot him a look. “I mean, of course, just me.”

  “Anna …”

  “I’m scared as shit, Ben. Bad jokes come with the territory. Listen, I don’t know this guy from Adam. If you think you can trust him—if that’s what your gut is telling you—then I can live with it.”

  “Because you’re right, it’s the commercial flights they’ll be watching …”

  Anna nodded vigorously. “So long as they’re not coming from places like Colombia, private flights get pretty much a free pass. If this guy’s pilot can move the Gulfstream to Brussels, let’s say …”

  “We go directly to Brussels, assuming nobody’s onto the IDs Oscar made for us. Then transfer to Fred’s private jet and fly to Vienna that way. That’s the way the Sigma principals travel. Chances are, they’re not going to be expecting a Gulfstream with two fugitives on board.”

  “O.K., Ben,” Anna said. “I call this the beginning of a plan.”

  Ben dialed the number of the Hotel Carlton and waited a minute for the front desk to connect him.

  Fred McCallan’s voice boomed even through the international phone lines. “My God, Benjamin, do you have any idea of the hour? Never mind, I suppose you’re calling to apologize. Though I’m not the one you should apologize to. Louise has been devastasted. Devastated. And you two have so much in common.”

  “I understand, Fred, and I …”

  “But actually I’m glad you finally called. Do you realize they’re saying the most preposterous things about you? A guy called me up and gave me an earful. They’re saying that …”

  “You’ve got to believe me, Fred,” Ben said urgently, cutting him off, “there’s no truth to those reports whatever—I mean, whatever they’re accusing me of, you’ve got to believe me when I say that …”

  “And I laughed in his face!” Fred was saying, having talked over Ben’s interjection. “I told him, maybe that’s what you get from your creepy English boarding schools, but I’m a Deerfield man myself, and there’s no way on God’s green earth that …”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence, Fred. The thing is …”

  “Top-seeded in tennis, I told him. You were, weren’t you?”

  “Well, actually …”

  “Track and field? I was a track and field man myself—did I ever show you my trophies? Louise thinks it’s ridiculous that I’m still boasting about them fifty years later, and she’s right. But I’m incorrigible.”

  “Fred, I’ve got a really, really, really big favor to ask.”

  “For you, Benny? You’re practically family, you know that. One day you might actually be family. Just say the word, my boy. Just say the word.”

  As Anna said, it was the beginning of a plan, no more. But foolproof would take more time than they had. Because the one thing that was certain was that they had to make their way to Vienna as fast as possible, or it would be too late.

  Unless it was, as Chardin had suggested, already too late.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The hotel was in Vienna’s seventh district, and they had selected it because it appeared to be suitably anonymous, catering mostly to German and Austrian tourists. Traveling to Brussels in uniform as David Paine, Ben arrived first, by several hours; Anna, using the Gayatri Chandragupta alias for one last time, had traveled on a separate flight, connecting through Amsterdam. McCallan’s pilot, a genial Irishman named Harry Hogan, was perplexed by the odd garb of his guests, and further perplexed that they’d refused to tell him in advance where they planned on going, but the old man had been vehement in his instructions: whatever Ben wanted, Ben would get. No questions asked.

  Compared to the luxury of the Gulfstream, and the open-faced companionability of Harry Hogan, the hotel seemed drab and depressing. All the more so because Anna hadn’t arrived yet: they agreed that traveling together from the airport was a risk best avoided. They’d travel separately, and by different routes.

  Alone in the room, Ben felt caged and anxious. It was noontime but the weather was foul; rain spattered against the room’s small windows, deepening his sense of gloom.

  He thought about Chardin’s life, about the incredible ways in which the governance of the Western world had been molded and directed by these corporate managers. And he thought about his father. A victim? A victimizer? Both?

  Max had hired people to watch out for him—minders, baby-sitters, for God’s sake. In a way, that was typical of the man: if Ben wouldn’t let old secrets stay buried, then Max would try to control him his own way. It was both infuriating and touching.

  When Anna arrived—they were sharing the room as Mr. and Mrs. David Paine—he embraced her, placing his face next to hers and feeling some of his sense of anxiety ebb.

  Feeling grimy from the long flight, they each showered. Anna took a long time, emerging from the bathroom in a terry-cloth robe, her dark brown hair combed straight back, her skin glowing.

  As she went to her suitcase to pick out clothes, Ben said, “I don’t want you to see Lenz alone.”

  She didn’t look up. “Oh, is that right?”

  “Anna,” he said, exasperated, “we don’t even know who Jürgen Lenz really is.”

  Holding a blouse in one hand and a navy skirt in the other, she turned to face him. Her eyes flashed. “At this point, it doesn’t matter. I have to talk to him.”

  “Look, whoever he is, we can assume that he was at least involved in the murder of eight old men around the world. My brother, too. And it’s a plausible assumption that he’s become a principal in a conspiracy that, if Chardin is right, has no real outer bounds. Lenz knows my face, and now he no doubt knows where I’ve been. So it’s a fair assumption that he knows I’ve been traveling with you, which means he may well have seen a photograph of you. It isn’t safe for you to go see this man.”

  “I’m not disputing that, Ben. We don’t have the luxury of choosing between the safe thing and the dangerous thing: whatever we do at this point will involve danger. Even doing nothing. Besides, if I’m killed shortly after asking him questions about a series of murders around the world, he’d immediately be the focus of suspicion—and I seriously doubt he wants that.”

  “What even makes you think he’ll see you?”

  She set the clothes down on the edge of the bed.

  “The best way to play him is not to play him.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this.”

  “This is a man who’s used to being in control, used to manipulating people and events. Call it arrogance or call it curiosity, but he’ll want to see me.”

  “Listen to me, Anna …”

  “Ben, I can take care of myself. I really can.”

  “Obviously,” he protested. “It’s just that—” He stopped. She was looking at him strangely. “What?”

  “You’re the protective type, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know about protective, exactly. I’m just—”

  She approached him, examining him as if he were an exhibit in a museum. “When we met, I just assumed you were another rich, spoiled, self-centered preppy.”

  “You were probably right.”

  “No. I don’t think so. So was that your role in the family—the caretaker?”

  Embarrassed, Ben didn’t know how to reply. Maybe she was right, but for some reason he didn’t want to say it. Instead, he drew her close. “I don’t want to lose you, Anna,” he said quietly. “I’ve lost too many people in my life.”

  She closed her eyes and hugged him tight; both of them were agitated, nervous, exhausted, and yet as they embraced a moment of calm passed between them. He inhaled her delicate floral scent, and something in him melted.

  Then, gently, she withdrew. “We have a plan, and we’ve got to follow it, Ben,” she said, her voice soft but resolute, and she dressed quickly. “I have to make a pickup at the DHL office, and then make a business call.”

  “Anna,” Ben said.

  “I’ve got to go. We can talk later.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” said Officer Burt Connelly. He had been on the 166 Virginia highway patrol for only six months, and he still wasn’t accustomed to the sight of roadside carnage. He felt his stomach heaving, scurried to the side of the road, and vomited. A splash got on his crisp blue uniform, and he wiped it off with a tissue. Then he tossed the tissue out, too.

  Even in the low light of the early evening, he could see only too clearly the blood spattered across the windscreen and the man’s head on the dashboard. It had been severed from the body and horribly flattened by the impact—the “second collision,” as they called it, which was the collision of the passenger inside the crashed vehicle itself.

  Connelly’s partner, Officer Lamar Graydon, had been on highway patrol for more than a year. He’d seen a few gruesome accidents before, and he knew how to keep his lunch down.

  “It’s a bad one, Burt,” Graydon said, walking over and patting his partner’s back. A sort of weary bravado played in his brown eyes. “But I’ve come across worse.”

  “Did you see the guy’s head!”

  “At least there’s no little kids involved. Let me tell you, last year, I was at an accident scene where a baby got ejected through the open window of an Impala, thrown thirty feet in the air. Like a goddamn rag doll. Now, that was horrible.”

  Connelly coughed a few times, and straightened up. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that guy’s face … I’m O.K. now. Ambulance on the way?”

  “Should be here in ten minutes. Not that he’s feeling any pain.” Graydon nodded toward the decapitated accident victim.

  “So what’s the situation here? SVF?” Statistically, a single-vehicle fatality was the most common sort.

  “Not a chance,” Graydon said. “No guardrail does that. This is what happens when you slam into one of those Kenworth car haulers, and there are plenty of ‘em on this highway. With monsters like that, the back hangs low, and it’s one flat steel edge—like a blade. If you’re behind one of those things and it stops short, either you duck or it takes your head off. I’ll betcha that’s what you’re looking at.”

  “Then what happened to the other guy? Where’s the goddamn truck?” Connelly was starting to regain a sense of self-possession. Oddly, he even felt a little hungry again.

  “Looks like he decided not to stick around,” Graydon said.

  “Well, are we going to find it?”

  “I’ve radioed it in. Dispatcher’s got the info. Between you and me, though, I wouldn’t bet money on it. Thing to do right now is try to ID the guy. Search the pockets.”

  Though the top of the red Taurus was smashed in, the door on the driver’s side opened easily. Connelly put on latex gloves before rummaging through the headless man’s pockets; that was procedure when clothing was blood-soaked.

  “Give me a name, and I’ll radio that in, too,” Graydon called out.

  “Driver’s license says Dupree, Arliss Dupree,” Connelly said. “Lives on Glebe Road, in Arlington.”

  “That’s all we need to know,” Graydon said. “And you don’t have to freeze your ass off, Burt. We can wait in the patrol car now.”

  The building that housed the Lenz Foundation was, Bauhaus style, all glass and marble. The lobby was flooded with light, furnished simply with white leather chairs and sofas.

  Anna asked the receptionist to call the office of the director. That he was at the foundation she’d already verified with an earlier phone call.

  “Who shall I say wishes to see Dr. Lenz?” she inquired.

  “My name is Anna Navarro. I’m an agent with the U.S. Department of Justice.”

  She’d earlier considered and rejected the idea of approaching him under some false alias. But as she’d told Ben, she’d decided that the best way to play him was not to play him. If Lenz did even a cursory background check, he’d learn of her outlaw status. But would that make him less likely to see him, or more? If their theories about Alan Bartlett were correct, Jürgen Lenz might already know a fair amount about her. But he wouldn’t know—couldn’t know—precisely what she had learned, and might have conveyed to others. She had to rely upon his curiosity, his arrogance, and, most of all, his desire to control the situation. He would want to know whether she posed a threat to him, and he would want to assess that himself.