Then he heard a man’s voice coming from down the hall, the tone frantic. After a moment, Ben realized that the voice was coming from the answering machine, but he couldn’t make out what it was saying.

  He took a few steps closer, then placed the barrel of the revolver against the old man’s head. “Don’t move.”

  The old man’s head fell forward, lolling on his chest.

  Ben grabbed the arm of the wheelchair with his free hand and spun it around.

  The old man’s chin was on his chest, the eyes wide and staring at the floor. Lifeless.

  Ben’s body flooded with panic.

  He felt the food on the plate. The eggs and sausage were still warm.

  Apparently Rossignol had died just moments ago. Had he been killed?

  If so, the killer could be in the house right now!

  He raced down the corridor from which he had come, and the telephone rang again. In the study, he looked at the caller ID screen: the same long series of digits, beginning with 431. Where was the call from? The numbers were familiar. A country in Europe, he felt sure.

  The answering machine came on.

  “Gaston? Gaston?” a man’s voice shouted.

  The words were in French, but spoken by a foreigner, and Ben could make out few of the heavily accented words.

  Who was calling Rossignol, and why?

  Another ring: the doorbell!

  He raced to the back entrance, which he’d left partially open. No one was there.

  Move it!

  He stepped outside and ran around the side of the house, slowing when he got near the front. From behind some tall shrubbery, he could see a white police cruiser passing slowly by, patrolling the neighborhood, he guessed.

  A low wrought-iron fence separated Rossignol’s yard from the neighbor’s. He raced to the low fence, and leaped over it into the neighbor’s yard, which was roughly the same size as Rossignol’s, though not as ornately landscaped. He was taking an enormous chance of being spotted by anyone in the neighbor’s house, but no one called out to him, there were no shouts, and he kept running, around the far side of the house and out to Hauserstrasse. A hundred feet or so down the street was the Rover. He ran to it, leaped in, and keyed the ignition. It roared to life.

  He made a quick U-turn and then drove down the steep street, deliberately slowing his pace to that of a local driving to work.

  Someone had just tried to call Rossignol. Someone calling from a place whose telephone number began 431.

  The digits tumbled around in his brain until something clicked.

  Vienna, Austria.

  The call had come from Vienna. These men have successors, heirs, Liesl had said. One of them, Mercandetti had told him, resided in Vienna: the son of the monster Gerhard Lenz. With Rossignol dead, it was as logical a lead to follow as any. Not a certainty—far from a certainty—but at least a possibility. A possible lead when there was a paucity of leads.

  In a few minutes he had arrived in the heart of the city, near the Bahnhofplatz, where Jimmy Cavanaugh had tried to kill him. Where it had all begun.

  He had to get on the next train to Vienna.

  The Austrian Alps

  There was a soft knock on the door, and the old man called out irritably, “Yes?”

  A physician in a white coat entered, a short, rotund man with round shoulders and a potbelly.

  “How is everything, sir?” the physician asked. “How is your suite?”

  “You call this a suite?” Patient Eighteen asked. He lay atop the narrow single bed, fully dressed in his rumpled three-piece suit. “It’s a goddamned monk’s cell.”

  Indeed, the room was simply furnished, with only a chair, a desk, a reading lamp, and a television set. The stone floor was bare.

  The physician smiled wanly. “I am Dr. Löfquist,” he said, sitting in the chair beside the bed. “I would like to welcome you, but I must also warn you. This will be a very rigorous and difficult ten days. You will be put through the most extensive physical and mental tests you have ever had.”

  Patient Eighteen did not bother to sit up. “Why the hell the mental?”

  “Because, you see, not everyone is eligible.”

  “What happens if you think I’m crazy?”

  “Anyone not invited to join is sent home with our regrets.”

  The patient said nothing.

  “Perhaps you should take a rest, sir. This afternoon will be tiring. There will be a CAT scan, a chest X-ray, then a series of cognitive tests. And, of course, a standard test for depression.

  “I’m not depressed,” the patient snapped.

  The doctor ignored him. “Tonight you will be required to fast, so that we may accurately measure plasma cholesterol, triglycerides, lipoproteins, and so on.”

  “Fast? You mean starve? I’m not starving myself!”

  “Sir,” the doctor said, rising, “you are free to go any time you wish. If you stay, and if you are invited to join us, you will find the procedure to be lengthy and quite painful, I must be honest. But it will be like nothing you have ever experienced in your long life. Ever. This I promise you.”

  Kesting did not conceal his surprise when Anna returned several hours later with an address; and in truth Anna shared a measure of that surprise. She had done what she’d determined to do, and it had worked. After a few readings of the Rossignol file, she had come up with one name that could be of help: that of a Zurich civil servant named Daniel Taine. The name recurred in several different contexts, and further inquiries had confirmed her intuition. Gaston Rossignol had been Taine’s first employer, and, it appeared, something of a mentor. In the seventies, Taine and Rossignol were partners in a limited liability venture involving high-yield Eurobonds. Rossignol had sponsored Taine’s application to the Kifkintler Society, a men’s club whose membership included many of Zurich’s most powerful citizens. Now Taine, having made his small fortune, served in various honorific capacities in the canton. He was someone with precisely the sort of access and resources to ensure that his old mentor’s plans ran smoothly.

  Anna had dropped in on Taine at his home unannounced, identified herself, and laid her cards on the table. Her message was simple. Gaston Rossignol was in serious, imminent danger.

  Taine was visibly rattled, but closemouthed, as she expected. “I cannot help you. He has moved. No one can say where, and it is no one’s concern.”

  “Except the killers?”

  “Even if there are such assassins,” Taine spoke with a display of skepticism, but he acceded too readily to her stipulation, “who’s to say they can find him if you cannot. Your own resources are obviously considerable.”

  “I have reason to believe they’ve already made headway.”

  A sharp glance: “Really? And why is that?”

  Anna shook her head. “There are certain matters I can only discuss with Gaston Rossignol himself.”

  “And why do you suppose anyone would want to kill him? He is among the most admired of Zurichers.”

  “Which explains why he’s living in hiding.”

  “What nonsense you speak,” Taine said, after a beat.

  Anna stared at him levelly for few moments. Then she handed him a card with her name on it, and her numbers at the Office of Special Investigations. “I will return in an hour. I have reason to think your own resources are pretty considerable. Check me out. Satisfy yourself as to my bona fides. Do whatever will help you to see that I am who I say I am, and that I’m representing myself accurately.”

  “How can I, a mere Swiss citizen …”

  “You have ways, Mr. Taine. And if you don’t, your friend does. I’m quite sure you’ll want to help your friend. I think we understand each other.”

  Two hours later, Anna Navarro paid a call to Taine at his place of work. The ministry of economic affairs was located in a marble building constructed in the familiar late-nineteenth-century Beaux Arts style. Taine’s own office was large, sunny, and book-lined. She was ushered in to him immediately upon her arrival; the dark-paneled door closed discreetly behind her.

  Taine sat quietly behind his burled walnut desk. “This was not my decision,” he stressed. “This is Monsieur Rossignol’s decision. I do not support it.”

  “You checked me out.”

  “You have been checked out,” Taine replied carefully, hewing to the passive voice. He returned her card to her. “Good-bye, Ms. Navarro.”

  The address was penciled in small print, in a blank space to the left of her name.

  Her first call was to Bartlett, updating him as to her progress. “You never cease to amaze me, Ms. Navarro,” he’d replied, a surprising note of genuine warmth in his voice.

  As she and Kesting drove to the Hottingen address, he said, “Your request for surveillance was approved this morning. Several unmarked police cars shall be engaged for the purpose.”

  “And his telephone.”

  “Yes, we can have a tap in place within hours. An officer at the Kantonspolizei will be assigned to listen in at the Mutterhaus.”

  “The Mutterhaus?”

  “Police headquarters. The Mother House, we call it.”

  They headed steadily uphill on Hottingerstrasse. The houses became larger and nicer, the trees denser. Finally they came to Hauserstrasse, and pulled into the driveway of a low-slung brownstone house set in the middle of a nicely landscaped yard. She noticed there were no unmarked police cruisers anywhere nearby.

  “This is the correct address,” Kesting said.

  She nodded. Another Swiss banker, she thought, with a big house and a nice yard.

  They got out and walked to the front door. Kesting rang the bell. “You do not mind, I hope, if I lead the interview.”

  “Not at all,” Anna replied. Whatever “international cooperation” meant on paper, that was the protocol and they both knew it.

  After waiting a few minutes, Kesting rang again. “He is an old man, and for some years he has been wheelchair-bound. It must take him time to move around his house.”

  After a few minutes more, Kesting said, “I cannot imagine he goes out very much at his age.” He rang again.

  I knew this was too easy, Anna thought. What a botch.

  “He may be ill,” Kesting said. Uneasily he turned the doorknob but the door was locked. Together, they walked around to the back door; it opened readily. He called into the house, “Dr. Rossignol, it is Kesting from the Public Prosecutor’s office.” The “Dr.” seemed purely an honorific.

  Silence.

  “Dr. Rossignol?”

  Kesting stepped into the house, Anna following. The lights were on, and she could hear classical music.

  “Dr. Rossignol?” Kesting said more loudly. He ventured forward into the house. Soon they found themselves in the dining room, where the lights were on, and a tape deck played music. Anna could smell coffee, eggs, some kind of fried meat.

  “Dr.—Oh, dear God!”

  Horrified, Anna saw what Kesting had seen.

  An old man sat in a wheelchair at the table, before a plate of breakfast. His head was on his chest, the eyes fixed and dilated. He was dead.

  They’d gotten to him too! That in itself didn’t surprise her. What stunned her was the timing—so soon before their arrival, it had to be. As if they knew the authorities were coming.

  She tasted fear.

  “Dammit,” she said. “Call an ambulance. And the homicide squad. And please, don’t let them touch anything.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A squad of crime-scene officers from the homicide squad of the Zurich Kantonspolizei arrived within the hour and took video and still photographs. The victim’s house was dusted carefully for fingerprints, particularly the front and back doors and the three windows that could be accessed from the ground level. Anna asked the specialist to print both Rossignol’s wheelchair and all exposed skin on the deceased’s body. Elimination prints were taken from Rossignol himself before the body was removed.

  Had the Americans not taken such an interest in Rossignol prior to his murder, even requesting surveillance, the old man’s death would certainly have been treated as a natural occurrence. Gaston Rossignol had been ninety-one, after all.

  But instead an autopsy was ordered, with special attention paid to the ocular fluid. The postmortem would be done in the facilities of the University of Zurich Institute of Legal Medicine, as was standard, since Zurich had no medical examiner.

  Anna returned to her hotel. Exhausted—she hadn’t slept on the plane, had decided against taking an Ativan—she drew the curtains, got into an oversize T-shirt, and climbed into the bed.

  She was jarred awake by the telephone. Momentarily disoriented, she thought she was back in Washington, that it was the middle of the night. She glanced at the phosphorescent dial of her watch and saw that it was two-thirty in the afternoon, Zurich time. She picked up the phone.

  “Is this Miss Navarro?” a man’s voice asked.

  “That’s me,” she croaked, then cleared her throat. “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Sergeant Major Schmid from the Kantonspolizei. I’m a homicide detective. I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

  “No, no, I was just dozing. What’s up?”

  “The fingerprints have come back with some interesting results. Can you find your way to police headquarters?”

  Schmid was an affable man with a wide face, short hair, and ridiculous little bangs. He wore a navy blue shirt and had a gold chain around his neck.

  His office was pleasant, light-filled, sparsely furnished. Two blond-wood desks faced one another; she sat at one, he at the other.

  Schmid toyed with a paper clip. “The fingerprints were run at the Kriminaltechnik. Rossignol’s prints were eliminated, leaving a number of other prints, most of them unidentified. He was a widower, so we assume they belong to his housekeeper and a few others who worked at his house. The housekeeper was on duty overnight, until this morning, when she made his breakfast and then left. They must have been watching the house and saw her depart.”

  “He didn’t have a nurse?”

  “No,” Schmid said, bending the wire paper clip back and forth. “You know, we now have a computerized database of fingerprints just like yours.” He was referring to the Automated Fingerprint Identification Service, which stored a bank of millions of prints. “The prints were scanned in, digitized, and sent by modem to the central registry in Bern, where they were run against all available databases. The search did not take long. We got a match very quickly.”

  She sat up. “Oh?”

  “Yes, this is why the case was assigned to me. The prints belong to an American who was detained here just a few days ago in connection with a shooting in the vicinity of the Bahnhofplatz.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An American named Benjamin Hartman.”

  The name meant nothing to her. “What do you know about him?”

  “A fair amount. You see, I questioned him myself.” He handed her a file folder containing photocopies of Hartman’s U.S. passport, driver’s license, credit cards, and his Swiss police records with mug shots.

  She examined the copies closely, fascinated. Could this be her man, the killer? An American? Mid-thirties, an investment banker for a financial firm called Hartman Capital Management. A family business, she assumed. That probably meant he had money. Lives in New York City. Here on a Swiss ski vacation, he had told Schmid.

  But that could be a lie.

  Three of the remaining Sigma victims had been killed during the time he was here in Zurich. One victim had lived in Germany, which was a train ride away, so that was a possibility. Another was in Austria; also possible.

  But Paraguay? That was a long plane flight from here.

  Yet the possibility could not be ruled out. Neither could the possibility that he was not working alone.

  “What happened on the Bahnhofstrasse?” she asked. “He shoot someone?”

  The paper clip Schmid was worrying snapped in the middle. “There was gunfire along the street and in the shopping arcade beneath the Bahnhofplatz. He was questioned in connection with that. Personally, I don’t think he was the shooter. He insists someone tried to shoot him.”

  “Anyone killed?”

  “Several bystanders. And, in his account, the guy he insists tried to shoot him.”

  “Hmm,” she said, puzzled. A bizarre tale: How much of it was true? Who was this guy? “You let him go?”

  “We had no basis on which to hold him. And there was some string-pulling from his firm. He was instructed to leave the canton.”

  Not in my backyard: Was that the Zurich approach to law enforcement? Anna wondered sourly. “Any idea where he is now?”

  “At the time, he claimed he was planning to go to St. Moritz. The Hotel Carlton. But we’ve since learned that he never checked in. Then, yesterday, we received a report that he’d reappeared in Zurich, at the Handelsbank Schweiz. We tried to bring him in for further questioning, but he escaped. Another misadventure, accompanied by shooting. It follows him around.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Anna said. “Do you have a way of finding out whether Hartman is staying at some other hotel in Zurich, or anywhere else in the country?”

  Schmid nodded. “I can contact the Hotel Control in each of the cantons. Copies of all hotel registration forms go to the local police.”

  “How current are they?”

  “Sometimes not so current,” Schmid admitted. “At least we can tell where he was.”

  “If he checked in under his own name.”

  “All legitimate hotels require foreigners to show their passports.”

  “Maybe he has more than one passport. Maybe he’s not staying at a ‘legitimate’ hotel. Maybe he has friends here.”

  Schmid looked mildly annoyed. “But you see, I’ve met him, and he didn’t look to me like someone who carries false passports.”

  “Some of these international businessmen, you know, have second passports from places like Panama or Ireland or Israel. They come in handy sometimes.”

  “Yes, but such passports would still have their true names on them, right?”