“It’s the reality. Dulles, you see, believed in the ‘network.’ It’s the key to understanding his life’s mission. A network was an array of individuals—a whole, a complex configuration, that could have an influence vastly greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a striking thing to contemplate. As I say, it always comes down to the crooked timber of humanity.”

  Anna raised an eyebrow. “It sounds a little frightening.”

  A vein pulsed on Bartlett’s temple. “It is a little frightening, and perhaps more than a little. The nature of these networks, after all, is that they are invisible to those who are not part of them—invisible even to some who are. And they also have a tendency to survive the individuals they initially comprise. You could say they take on a life of their own. And they can have powerful effects on the organizations that they invade.” He adjusted his French cuffs again. “I talked of spider’s webs. There’s a curious parasitic wasp, very tiny, of the genus Hymenoepimecis —a clever little creature that stings a spider into temporary paralysis, and lays its eggs in the spider’s abdomen. Soon the spider goes back to work, as if nothing had happened, even as the larvae grow inside him, nourished on its fluids. Then, on the night that the larvae will molt and kill the spider, they chemically induce it to change its behavior. On this night, the spider is induced to spin a cocoon web, useless to the spider but necessary for the larva. As soon as the spider has finished its work, the larvae consume the spider and hang the pupal cocoon in the special web. It’s quite extraordinary, really, the parasite’s fine-grained manipulation of the host’s behavior. But it’s nothing compared to what we humans can devise. That’s the sort of thing I think about, Ms. Navarro. Who’s inside of us? What forces might be manipulating the apparatus of civic governance into building a web that will serve their own purposes? When will the parasite decide to consume the host?”

  “O.K., I’ll play along,” Anna said. “Let’s say half a century ago, some dark conspiracy stings us, in effect—implants something that’s going to grow and cause damage. Even if all that’s so, how would we ever know?”

  “That is an excellent question, Ms. Navarro,” Bartlett replied. “Webs are hard to see, aren’t they, even when they’re big. Have you ever walked into an old basement or storage area in a dim light, seeing nothing in the gloom? Then you switch on a flashlight, and suddenly you realize that the empty space over your head isn’t exactly empty—it’s filled with layers of cobwebs, a vast canopy of glassy filaments. You direct the beam in another direction, and that canopy disappears—as if it were never there. Had you imagined it? You look straight up. Nothing. Then, directing the beam at just the right off-angle, focusing your eyes on some intermediate point, it all becomes visible once more.” Bartlett’s gaze searched her face for comprehension. “People like me spend our days looking for that one odd angle that brings the old webs into view. Often we look too hard, and we imagine things. Sometimes we see what’s really there. You, Ms. Navarro, strike me as someone not prone to imagine things.”

  “I’ll accept that at face value,” Anna replied.

  “I don’t mean to imply that you lack imagination—only that you keep it under tight control. No matter. The point is simply that there were alliances forged among some individuals with considerable resources. That much is part of public history. And as for what became of this? I only wish we knew. All we have are these names.”

  “Three names,” Anna said. “Three old men.”

  “I’d direct your particular attention to Gaston Rossignol. He’d been quite a powerful Swiss banker in his heyday. The most prominent person on the list, and the oldest.”

  “All right,” she said, looking up. “The Zuricher. I assume you’ve prepared a background file on him.”

  Bartlett opened a desk drawer, withdrew a file festooned with classificatory warning stamps, and slid it to her across the desk. “It’s fairly extensive, aside from the obvious lacunae.”

  “Good,” Anna said. “I want to see him before they get to him, too.”

  “Assuming you can locate him.”

  “He’s lived his entire life in Zurich. As you say, there’s a field of gravitation there. Even if he’s moved, he would have left behind friends, family members. Tributaries leading to the source.”

  “Or moats, protecting a fortress. A man like Rossignol has powerful friends, highly placed ones, who will do whatever they can to protect him. Friends who are, as the French say, branché. Powerful and pluggedin. They have the ability to remove him from the grid of visibility, the bureaucratic files and computer records. Do you have some clever subterfuge in mind?”

  “Nothing like that. Subterfuge is what they’ll be on guard against. Rossignol has nothing to fear from me. If his friends and confederates are as well informed as you suggest, they’ll realize that and spread the word.”

  “So you’re envisaging a simple ‘I come in peace’?” The words were wry, but he looked intrigued.

  Anna shrugged. “Some version of that. I suspect the best route will be the most direct one. But I’ll find out soon enough.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m taking the next flight I can catch to Zurich.”

  Mettlenberg, St. Gallen, Switzerland

  A little over five hours later, Ben Hartman sat in his rented Range Rover in the staff parking lot of the Regionalspital Sankt Gallen Nord, watching people coming and going: doctors, nurses, hospital workers. The powerful engine idled softly. Fortunately, there weren’t many people, even at a few minutes after five o’clock, the end of the workday for the office workers. Twilight was beginning to fall, and the outside lights were starting to come on.

  From Zurich he had called the hospital and asked for Dr. Margarethe Hubli. He was put right through to Pediatrics, where he asked, in English, whether she was in.

  Yes, he was told; would you like to make an appointment to see the doctor? The nurse’s English was halting but comprehensible.

  “No,” he’d said, “I really just wanted to make sure the doctor was in the hospital. My child is ill, and I want to know whether you had a pediatrician on call in case we need one.” He thanked the nurse and, after finding out how late Dr. Hubli worked, hung up.

  Liesl was scheduled to be in the hospital only until four in the afternoon. He’d been waiting here over two hours; already she was more than an hour late in leaving. Ben was certain she had not yet emerged from the hospital. Moreover, he had spotted her Renault parked in the lot. He figured she was the sort of dedicated doctor who worked long hours and paid little attention to schedules.

  He might be sitting here for quite some time, he realized.

  The document of incorporation that Peter had referred to wasn’t in the vault, so where else might it be? He had said he’d hidden it away safely. Was it possible that Liesl was telling the truth, that she really didn’t know where it was? In that case was it possible that Peter had concealed it somewhere among his possessions in the cabin without Liesl knowing?

  She’d answered too quickly when he’d asked her whether Peter might have hidden something there. She knew something she wasn’t telling.

  He had to go to the cabin.

  Forty minutes later, Liesl came out of the Emergency entrance.

  She was talking to someone, bantering. She gave a wave good-bye and zipped up her leather jacket. Then she half-walked, half-ran to her car, got in, and started it up.

  Ben waited until she’d gone some distance down the road before he pulled out of the lot. She wouldn’t recognize the Range Rover and would have no cause for suspicion, apart from her normal cautiousness. Still, it was better not to alarm her.

  At a travel bookstore in Zurich he’d bought a map of the canton of St. Gallen and studied the roads in the area. Both Peter and Liesl had mentioned living in a “cabin,” which likely meant that it was situated in a forest or woods. There was one wooded area about eight kilometers from the hospital, roughly north-northwest. The only other one within a two-hour drive was forty kilometers away. That was quite a distance, on back roads, for someone who had to go to work every day—sometimes even had to return to the hospital quickly in emergencies. More likely the cabin was located in the closer woods.

  Having committed the roads in the area to memory, he knew that the next turnoff wasn’t for two kilometers. But if she stopped somewhere along the road and turned off, he stood a chance of losing her. All he could do was hope she didn’t.

  Soon the road rose steeply, following the hilly topography of this part of Switzerland. It enabled him to look far ahead, and he was able to spot what he determined was her Renault, stopped at a traffic light. At the next intersection was a highway marked 10. If she took a left onto 10, she was heading toward the forest he had scoped out. If she took a right, or went beyond 10, he’d have no idea where she was going.

  The Renault turned left.

  He accelerated and reached the intersection with 10 just a few minutes after she had. There were enough other cars on the road that he wasn’t too obvious. He felt sure she still had no idea he was tailing her.

  The four-lane highway went parallel to a set of railroad tracks, past several immense farms, great fields that went on as far as he could see. Suddenly she turned off, a few kilometers before he expected she would.

  Once he turned onto the narrow, winding road, he realized that his was the only car behind her. Not good. It had gotten dark, and the road was barely trafficked, and she would soon realize he was following her. How could she not? If she did, she would either slow down to see who it was behind her or, more likely, try to lose him. If she began driving strangely, he would have no choice but to show himself.

  Luckily, the twisty road helped to conceal him, as long as he stayed at least one bend behind her. Now they passed a sparsely wooded area that gradually became denser. From time to time he would see the flash of her headlights, appearing and then disappearing around the bends. This enabled him to follow her at some remove, to let her gain considerable distance on him, just in case she had noticed the Rover.

  But a few minutes later he could no longer see her headlights.

  Where had she gone? Had she pulled off the road? He accelerated, to see whether she had herself sped up, but after a kilometer he saw no trace of her.

  She had to have turned off into the woods, though he didn’t seem to have passed by any roads or paths that led into the forest. He stopped, made a U-turn—no cars were coming in either direction—and reversed course, slowing down to look for any turnoffs.

  It wasn’t easy; it had gotten quite dark.

  Soon he spotted what could barely be called a road. It was a dirt trail that looked like a footpath, but upon closer examination he saw tire ruts.

  He turned onto it, and saw at once that he would have to drive slowly. It was just wide enough for the Renault, but there was not quite enough clearance for the Range Rover. Twigs and branches scraped the sides of the car. He slowed down even more: the noise might attract her attention.

  The St. Gallen map had told him that the forest he had entered was not large. It surrounded a small lake—a pond, actually—and there appeared to be no other road that led into or out of the woods.

  Good.

  Assuming the map was accurate.

  The path came to a fork, and he stopped, got out of the car, and saw that one branch of the road dead-ended a hundred feet ahead. The other branch, deeply rutted, continued. He turned down that path and navigated with some difficulty, wondering how Liesl’s Renault could make it if the Range Rover was having such trouble.

  It was not long before this path, too, came to an end.

  And then he saw the Renault.

  He parked his vehicle beside it, and got out. By now it was fully dark, and he could see nothing. Once the car’s engine was shut off there was mostly silence. Rustlings now and again that sounded like small animals. The chirp and twitter of birds.

  His eyes became accustomed to the dark, and he could make out another path, even narrower, canopied with branches. Ducking down under one, he entered, losing his footing a few times, his hands held out before his face to shield his eyes from the twigs.

  He saw a glow, and came upon a clearing. In it was a small cabin built of split logs and rough white plaster. There were several glass windows; it clearly wasn’t as rustic as it appeared. A light shone from inside. This was the back of the cabin; the entrance had to be on the other side. Treading softly, he approached the cabin and made his way around to the front, where he expected the entrance to be.

  Suddenly there was a metallic click. He looked up with a jolt.

  Liesl was standing before him, pointing a gun.

  “Stop right there!” she shouted.

  “Wait!” Ben called back. God, she was fearless, coming right out to confront the interloper. A split-second was all it would take for her to kill him.

  “It’s you!” she spat out with sudden realization. “What the hell are you doing here?” She lowered the gun.

  “I need your help, Liesl,” he said.

  In the oblique moonlight her shadowed face seemed contorted with rage. “You must have followed me from the hospital! How dare you!”

  “You’ve got to help me find something, Liesl, please.” He had to make her listen.

  She whipped her head from side to side, frantic. “You have—compromised my security! Goddamn you to hell!”

  “Liesl, I wasn’t followed.”

  “How can you possibly know? Did you rent this car?”

  “In Zurich.”

  “Of course. Idiot! If they were watching you in Zurich, they’ll know you rented the car!”

  “But no one followed me here.”

  “What do you know?” she snapped. “You’re an amateur!”

  “So are you.”

  “Yes, but I am an amateur who has lived with the threat of death for four years. Now please, get out. Go!”

  “No, Liesl,” he said with quiet finality. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The cabin was simple yet cozy, low-ceilinged, book-lined. Peter had built the bookshelves himself, Liesl said proudly. The floor was wideboard pine. There was a stone fireplace, a neat stack of split logs piled next to it, a wood stove, a small kitchen. The whole place smelled of smoke.

  It was cold; she lit the wood stove for some heat. Ben took off his coat.

  “You’re hurt,” Liesl said. “You’ve been hit.”

  Ben looked at himself, saw that the left shoulder of his shirt was stiff with dried blood. Oddly, it hadn’t been painful—stress and exhaustion had somehow rendered him insensate to the injury, and he’d put it out of his mind during the long drive through the mountains.

  “I’m sure it looks a lot worse than it is,” Ben said.

  “That depends,” she said, “on what it looks like. Remove the shirt.” She spoke like the doctor she was.

  Ben undid the buttons of his white pinpoint Oxford cloth shirt. The fabric adhered to the top of his left shoulder, and when he tugged, there was a warning twinge of pain.

  Liesl took a clean sponge, soaked it with warm water, and wet the area. Then she carefully peeled the shirt from his wounded shoulder. “You’ve been incredibly lucky: a bullet creased you, no more. Tell me what happened.”

  As Liesl tended to his wound, Ben recounted the events that happened only hours before.

  “There’s debris here. It must be cleansed carefully, or there will be the risk of infection.” She sat him next to the sink, poured some boiling water from a kettle, and left it to cool in a porcelain bowl. She went away for a few minutes and reappeared with a quantity of gauze and a yellow plastic bottle of antiseptic.

  Ben found himself wincing as she carefully washed the area, then wincing again as she daubed it with cotton saturated with the brown-colored antiseptic. “Cleaning it hurts worse than getting it did,” Ben said.

  Liesl applied four strips of medical adhesive tape to secure the sterile wound dressing in place. “You won’t be so lucky next time,” she said dryly.

  “What I most need right now isn’t luck,” Ben said. “It’s knowledge. I need to understand what the hell is going on. I need to get a fix on Sigma. They sure seem to have a fix on me.”

  “Luck, knowledge—trust me, you’ll need both.” Now she handed him a shirt. A heavy shirt of knitted cotton. One of Peter’s.

  Suddenly the reality of the past few days, the reality he’d tried to hold at bay, reared up and he felt a surge of vertigo, panic, sorrow, despair.

  “I’ll help you put it on,” she said, alert to the anguish that played across his face.

  He had to regain his composure, he knew, if only for her sake. He could merely guess at her own wrenching pain. When the shirt was on him, Liesl stared at him for a few moments. “You’re so alike. Peter never told me. I think he never realized how alike you are.”

  “Twins never recognize themselves in each other.”

  “It was more than that. And I don’t mean physically. Some people would have said that Peter was aimless. I knew better. He was like a sail, something that’s slack only until it captures the wind. And then it possesses the force of the wind.” She shook her head, as if frustrated by her fumbling attempts to communicate. “I mean that Peter had a larger sense of purpose.”

  “I knew what you meant. It’s what I admired most about him, the life he came to create for himself.”

  “It was a passion,” Liesl said, her eyes sad, gleaming, “a passion for justice, and it infused every aspect of his being.”

  “‘A passion for justice.’ Those aren’t words that mean much in the world of asset management,” Ben said bitterly.

  “A world you found stifling,” Liesl said. “It was suffocating you by degrees, wasn’t it, just as Peter said it would.”

  “There are quicker ways to die,” Ben said. “As I’ve had reason to learn of late.”

  “Tell me about the school where you taught. In New York, Peter said. I’ve been to New York a couple of times, as an adolescent, and once, later, to a medical conference.”