“They won’t shoot,” Anna said, a wish expressed as a declaration. “They know it’s Lenz’s helicopter.”

  A voice from the back, cultivated and precise: “Quite so. Did you suppose that Lenz had no passengers waiting for him, Ms. Navarro?”

  They weren’t alone.

  “A friend of yours?” Ben asked Anna quietly.

  They both turned around and saw the passenger crouched in the rear compartment, a white-haired but vigorous-looking man wearing large glasses with translucent flesh-toned frames. He was immaculately attired in a King Edward-style Glenn Urquhart suit, a crisp white shirt, and a tightly knotted olive silk tie.

  In his hands was a short-barreled automatic weapon, the one inelegant touch.

  “Alan Bartlett,” Anna breathed.

  “Toss me the gun, Ms. Navarro. My gun is trained on you, and yours is hardly in position. I’d very much regret having to squeeze the trigger, you know. The discharge would surely blow out the windshield and possibly damage the fuselage as well. Which would be unfortunate, since we’ll be needing this vehicle as a means of conveyance.”

  Slowly, Anna let the Uzi slide to the floor, and pushed it toward Bartlett. He did not lean over to retrieve it, but seemed satisfied that it was out of her reach.

  “Thank you, Ms. Navarro,” said Bartlett. “My debt of gratitude toward you only grows. I don’t know that I adequately expressed my thanks for your having located Gaston Rossignol for us, and so swiftly. The wily old bird really was poised to cause us a great deal of trouble.”

  “You bastard,” Anna said in a low voice. “You evil, manipulative son of a bitch.”

  “Forgive me, I realize this is hardly the time or place for a fitness report, Ms. Navarro. But I must say, it’s terribly unfortunate that, having given us such excellent service, you’ve started to undo all the good you’ve achieved. Now, where is Dr. Lenz?”

  Ben answered for her: “Dead.”

  Bartlett was silent for a moment. There was a flicker in his gray, expressionless eyes. “Dead?” His grip tightened on his automatic rifle as he digested the information. “You idiots!” His voice flared abruptly. “You destructive idiots! Vicious children seeking to ruin something whose beauty you could never comprehend. What gave you the right to do that? What made you think this was your decision to make?” He fell silent again, and was visibly shaking with anger when he resumed. “Damn you both to hell!”

  “After you, Bartlett,” Ben snapped.

  “You’re Benjamin Hartman, of course—I’m sorry we meet under these circumstances. But then I have only myself to blame. I should have ordered you killed at the same time as your brother: that shouldn’t have taxed our capabilities. I must have grown sentimental in my old age. Well, my young lovers, I’m afraid the two of you have left me with some difficult decisions to make.”

  Faintly reflected in the windshield of the cockpit was the wide barrel of Bartlett’s assault weapon. Ben kept his eyes on it.

  “First things first,” Bartlett went on, after a pause. “I’m going to have to rely upon your piloting skills. There’s a landing strip outside Vienna. I’ll direct you to it.”

  Ben glanced again at Bartlett’s automatic weapon and toggled up the battery switch.

  There was the clicking sound of the spark plugs firing, then the whine of the starter motor, which gradually deepened. It was fully automatic, Ben realized, which would make it much easier to fly.

  In ten seconds there was ignition, and the engine thundered to life. The rotors began turning.

  “Belt yourself in tight,” Ben murmured to Anna. He pulled up on the collective’s twist grip with his left hand, heard the sound of the rotors slowing.

  Then some kind of horn sounded, and the engine slowed.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Bartlett asked. “Because if you don’t, you’re of no use to me at all. I needn’t spell out what that means.”

  “Just a little rusty,” Ben replied. He grabbed the throttles, the two sticks that came down from the top of the windshield, and pushed both of them forward.

  Now the engine and both the tail and the main rotors roared again. The helicopter lurched forward, then yawed left and right.

  Ben abruptly yanked back on the throttle: the helicopter came to an abrupt jarring halt. Both he and Anna pitched forward against the restraint belts; Bartlett, as Ben had hoped, was hurtled against the metal grid that backed the cockpit.

  Even as he heard the clatter of the assault rifle smashing into the partition, Ben unbelted himself and sprang into action.

  Bartlett, he could see, had been temporarily stunned by the impact; a rivulet of blood descended from his left nostril. Now, with the suddenness of a leopard, Ben hurled himself around his seat and pounced on Bartlett with both hands, slamming the man’s shoulders to the grip-textured steel flooring. Bartlett put up no resistance.

  Had the impact of the partition knocked him unconscious? Was he already dead?

  It was too risky to make any assumptions.

  “I’ve got an extra set of restraints on me,” Anna said. “If you can bring his wrists together …”

  Within moments, she had manacled both his hands and legs, leaving her old employer trundled in the back like a rolled-up carpet.

  “Jesus,” Anna said. “There’s no time. We’ve got to get a move on. The guards—they’re on their way!”

  Ben pushed the two sticks forward, then twisted the collective up while maintaining his grip on the cyclic. The collective controlled the helicopter’s lift; the cyclic controlled its lateral direction. The helicopter’s nose moved to the right, the tail to the left, and then it started rolling out of the bay and onto the snow-covered lawn, coolly illuminated by the moonlight.

  “Shit!” Ben shouted, pushing the collective down to reduce power, trying to stabilize the craft.

  Slowly he pulled the collective up, adding power slowly, and felt the aircraft getting light.

  He pushed the stick forward an inch or two, felt the nose pitch down, then added a bit more power with the collective.

  They were rolling now.

  The helicopter taxied forward across the snow.

  The collective was now halfway up.

  Suddenly, at a speed of twenty-five knots, the chopper jumped into the air.

  They’d lifted off.

  He pulled back on the stick to gain more power, and the nose went right. They kept rising.

  Bullets clattered against the cabin.

  Several guards were running, their submachine guns pointed at the helicopter, shouting.

  “I thought you said they wouldn’t shoot at Lenz’s helicopter.”

  “Word must have got out about the good doctor,” Anna said. “Hey, better to travel hopefully, right?” She thrust the barrel of her Uzi out the open side window and fired off a burst. One of the guards fell to the ground.

  Then she fired another, more sustained burst.

  The other guard was down.

  “O.K.,” she said, “I think we’re all right for a little while.”

  Ben brought the collective back past center, and the nose corrected.

  Higher, then higher still.

  They were directly above the Schloss now, and the craft felt more stable. Now he could fly it like an airplane.

  Ben became aware of a sudden movement, and just as he turned, he felt a jabbing, searing pain at the base of his neck and shoulders. What he felt had some resemblance to the sensation of a pinched nerve but a hundred times worse.

  Anna shrieked.

  From the hot moist breath near his face, Ben realized what had happened. Bartlett, his arms and legs shackled, had thrown himself at Ben, attacking him with the only thing left at his disposal—his jaws.

  A guttural vocalization, like the growl of a jungle creature, rose from Bartlett’s throat as he sank his teeth farther into Ben’s exposed neck and shoulders.

  As Ben released the collective in order to grab hold of Bartlett, the helicopter started to yaw perilously to one side.

  It wasn’t over! Anna knew that to fire her gun at him would be to risk killing Ben. She seized handfuls of Bartlett’s lank white hair and pulled with all her might. Pulled until the hair came out, exposing bloodied pink ovals of scalp.

  And still Bartlett would not let up.

  It was as if he were directing all his vital force into his jaws, pushing his teeth down into Ben’s flesh with the muscular strength of his entire body.

  It was all he had left. A wounded animal’s one chance to survive—or, at least, to ensure that his enemy did not.

  Ben, obviously convulsed by agony, pounded at Bartlett’s head with his fists, but to no effect.

  Was it possible—to have come so far, survived so much, only to be destroyed in the midst of escape?

  Bartlett was maniacal, insensible to pain—a man of elegance and supernal ambition now reduced to the most elemental posture of any vertebrate. He could have been a hyena on the Serengeti plains, sinking his incisors into another creature, hoping that only one of them would make it to another day.

  Even as his mouth vised on Ben’s neck and shoulders, Bartlett’s body was writhing, flailing, thrashing—kicking at Anna with both feet, jolting her out of position, weakening her grasp on him. A blast of cold air suddenly filled the helicopter. Bartlett’s wild, eel-like movements had kicked open the door on Anna’s side.

  Another violent movement of his jarred the pedals, which controlled the tail rotors, and the helicopter began to rotate left, first spinning slowly and then more swiftly. As the centrifugal force gained in power, Anna began to slide precariously toward the open door. She clawed at Bartlett’s face, her nails in his flesh providing her sole purchase. What she was doing sickened her, but it was the only way: she dug deeper, harder, forcing her finger into his orbital cavity.

  “Open wide, you son of a bitch!” she shouted, gouging into the yielding flesh until, at last, with a blood-curdling scream, Bartlett released his mandibular grip.

  What happened next was a blur: both Anna and Bartlett were thrown toward the open door, toward the yawning drop to the earth far beneath them.

  Then she felt an ironlike grip on her wrist. Ben’s hand had shot out, grabbing her, holding her back as the helicopter continued to spin at a forty-five degree incline and Bartlett, bellowing, finally succumbed to gravity and slid out of the helicopter.

  His bellows became fainter as he plunged to the Schloss far below them.

  But would the helicopter follow him down? Unlike an airplane, a helicopter that had moved beyond the limits of correct angular position would simply drop like a stone. And the rotating helicopter continued to tilt, horrifyingly, as the loss of lift became sickeningly apparent.

  Regaining proper position would require both hands and feet. Ben frantically adjusted the cyclic and the collective as his feet worked the pedals, coordinating the tail rotor with the main rotor.

  “Ben!” she yelled, only just managing to latch the door. “Do something!”

  “Jesus!” he roared over the straining rotors. “I don’t know if I can!”

  The helicopter suddenly plunged, and Anna’s stomach lurched upward, but she noticed that even as it fell, it was starting to right itself.

  If it righted itself in time—found the angle required for lift—they’d stand a chance.

  Ben manipulated the controls with furrowed intensity. Viscerally, they knew that the rotorcraft had only seconds remaining before the descent velocity became unrecoverable: any wrong decisions would be fatal.

  She felt it before she saw it—felt the lift before she saw, from the horizon line, that the helicopter had returned to even keel.

  For the first time in a long while, she experienced a small but growing abatement of panic. Deftly, she tore off a piece of her blouse and pressed it to the area of Ben’s lower neck that had been attacked. The area was deeply grooved with tooth marks, but the compression wounds left very little blood, which was fortunate. No major vessels had been breached. Ben would need medical attention before too long, but it wasn’t an emergency.

  Now she looked down out of the window. “Look!” she called out. Directly below them she could see the toy-model castle surrounded by its serpentine fence. And at the base of the mountain a dense crowd of people was surging, streaming.

  “That’s them!” she shouted. “It looks like they got out!”

  They heard an explosion from below, and a great crater suddenly appeared in the ground next to the Schloss.

  A small section of the ancient stone fortress nearest the blast crumbled like a fragile confection of spun sugar.

  “The dynamite,” Ben said.

  They were more than a thousand feet up now, cruising at 140 knots. “The idiots dynamited the mouth of the cave. Way too close to the building—look at what the explosion’s done. Jesus!”

  She saw what looked like a white cloud forming near the summit of the mountain, rolling like dense fog down the mountainside.

  A white cloud of snow, a great wave, the avalanche a cruel fact of nature in the Austrian alps.

  It was a strangely beautiful sight.

  Apart from scores of children who managed to flee the grounds of the Schloss, there were no survivors.

  Thirty-seven people around the world, many of them great men and women, all of them leaders in their field, were shocked to read the obituaries of the Viennese philanthropist Jürgen Lenz, in the avalanche that buried the Alpine Schloss he had inherited from his father.

  Thirty-seven men and women, all of whom were in remarkable health.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  A gleaming throwback to a more elegant age, the Metropolis Club occupied the corner of a handsome block on East Sixty-eighth Street in Manhattan. It was a grand McKim, Mead & White building from the late nineteenth century, adorned with limestone balustrades, trimmed with intricate modillion courses. Inside, the curved wrought-iron railings of the double staircase led past marble pilasters and plaster medallions to the spacious Schuyler Hall. Three hundred chairs were now assembled on its black-and-white harlequinade floor. Ben had to admit, for all his misgivings, that it wasn’t an inappropriate venue for his father’s memorial service: Marguerite, Max Hartman’s executive assistant for twenty years, had insisted on organizing the event and her efforts were, as always, beyond reproach. Now he blinked hard and looked at the faces in front of him, until the collectivity came into focus as individuals.

  Seated in all those chairs was a curious community of mourners. Ben saw the careworn faces of older men from New York’s banking community, grizzled, jowly, stoop-shouldered men who knew that banking, the profession to which they had devoted their lives, was now changing in ways that exalted technical competence over the cultivation of personal relationships. These were bankers who had made their biggest deals on the fairways—gentlemen of the green who glimpsed that the future of their industry belonged to callow men with bad haircuts and doctorates in electrical engineering, callow men who did not know a putter from a nine iron.

  Ben saw the elegantly attired leaders of major charitable causes. He made fleeting eye contact with the executive director of the New-York Historical Society, a woman who wore her abundant hair in a tight bun; her face looked slightly stretched, in a diagonal that ran from each corner of her mouth to an area behind each ear—the familiar sign of a recent face-lift, marks of the surgeon’s crude craft. In the row behind her, Ben recognized the white-haired, navy-suited head of the Grolier Society. The soigné president of the Metropolitan Museum. The neo-hippyish chairwoman of the Coalition for the Homeless. Elsewhere were provosts and deans of several major educational institutions, each keeping the others at a careful distance, each regarding Ben somberly. In the first row was the charismatic national director of the United Way charities, slightly rumpled, his brown basset-hound eyes looking genuinely moved.

  So many faces, dissolving briefly and then resolving into particularity once more. Ben saw striving couples, tight-bodied wives and soft-bellied men, who had helped secure their position in New York society by enlisting Max Hartman’s support in their ceaseless fund-raisers for literacy, AIDS, freedom of expression, wildlife conservation. He saw neighbors from Bedford: the softball-playing magazine mogul with his trademark bold-striped shirt; the slightly tatty-looking, long-faced scion of a distinguished old family who once directed an Egyptology program at an Ivy League university; the youngish man who had launched, and sold to a conglomerate, a company that made herbal teas with colorful New Age names and progressive box-top homilies.

  Worn faces, fresh faces, familiar ones and strange ones. There were the people who worked for Hartman Capital Management. Prized clients, like good old Fred McCallan, who’d dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief once or twice. Former colleagues of his from his days teaching in East New York; newer colleagues of his from the job he’d just taken at an equally poor high school in Mount Vernon. There were people who had helped him and Anna in their time of need. Above all, there was Anna, his fiancée, his friend, his lover.

  Before all of these people, Ben stood before a rostrum at the raised platform at the end of the hall and tried to say something about his father. In the previous hour, a very fine string quartet—one that Max Hartman had helped sponsor—had played an adagietto by Mahler, adapted from his Fifth Symphony. Erstwhile business colleagues and beneficiaries of Max had evoked the man they knew. And now Ben found himself speaking, and wondering as he spoke, whether he was really addressing the assembled or himself.

  He had to speak of the Max Hartman he knew, even as he wondered how much he ever did know or could know him. His only certainty was that it was his task to do so. He swallowed hard and continued speaking: “A child imagines that his father is all-powerful. We see the pride and the broad shoulders and the sense of mastery and it’s impossible to think that this strength has limits. Maybe maturity comes of recognizing our error.” Ben’s throat constricted, and he had to wait a few moments before resuming.