Still … they had all the legal justification they needed to storm the villa. And what if it turned out that, while they were all sitting here watching the house, one of the city’s leading citizens was inside being murdered? The outcry would be enormous; it would be an international incident, and it would all be on her shoulders.

  Heisler interrupted her thoughts. “I want you to walk by that car and look at the man’s face,” he said. It seemed an order, not a request. “Make absolute certain you don’t recognize.”

  She agreed, wanting to see for herself.

  “I need a weapon,” she said.

  Heisler handed her his gun. “You took this from floor of car. I must have left it. I did not give it to you.”

  She got out of the car and started walking toward Lenz’s villa.

  The front door of Lenz’s house came open.

  Two men were standing there, talking. One older, one younger.

  Lenz and Hartman.

  Lenz was alive, she saw with relief.

  The two men shook hands cordially. Then Hartman started down the path toward the street.

  And suddenly a light inside the Peugeot went on, and the man got out of the driver’s seat, a trench coat draped over his right arm.

  That was when she saw the man’s face for the first time.

  The face!

  She knew the face. She had seen it before.

  But where?

  The man with the trench coat over his arm closed his car door as Hartman reached the street, not five yards away.

  Just for an instant she saw the man in profile.

  It stirred an old memory.

  A profile shot. She had seen a profile shot of this man. Front and side views. The association was unpleasant, one of danger.

  Mug shots. At work. Fairly poor-quality photos of this man, front and profile. A bad guy.

  Yes, she had seen the photos once or twice in the Weekly Intelligence Briefing.

  But they weren’t mug shots, strictly speaking; they had been surveillance photographs taken at a distance, magnified to the point of graininess.

  Yes.

  Not an ordinary criminal, of course.

  An assassin.

  The man was an international assassin, and an extraordinarily accomplished one. Little was known about him—only fragmentary bits of evidence had ever been gathered; as to his employers, assuming he wasn’t a freelancer, they had nothing at all. But the evidence they had suggested someone of uncommon resourcefulness and range. She flashed on another photograph: the body of a labor leader in Barcelona, whom he was believed to have slain. The image had lodged in her memory, perhaps because of the way blood ran down the victim’s shirtfront like a neck tie. Another image: a popular political candidate in southern Italy, a man who had been leading a national reform movement. His death was originally attributed to the Mafia, but had been reclassified after snippets of information implicated a man they knew only as the Architect. The candidate, already under threats from organized crime, had been well protected, she recalled. And the assassination had been brilliantly engineered, from the perspective not merely of ballistics but of politics as well. The politician was shot dead while in a brothel staffed by illegal immigrants from Somalia, and the awkward circumstances ensured that his supporters could not transfigure his death into martyrdom.

  The Architect. An international assassin of the first order.

  Targeting Hartman.

  She tried to make sense of it: Hartman’s on a vendetta, she thought. And the other man?

  Oh, my God. Now what do I do? Try to apprehend the killer?

  She held the transmitter to her lips, depressed the Talk button.

  “I know this guy,” she told Heisler. “He’s a professional assassin. I’m going to try to take him out. You cover Hartman.”

  “Pardon me,” the man called out to Ben, striding quickly toward him.

  Something seems wrong with this guy, Ben thought. Something’s off.

  The coat folded over his right arm.

  The rapid pace at which he was approaching.

  The face—a face he had seen before. A face he would never forget.

  Ben slipped his right hand under his left jacket lapel, reached for the cold hard steel of the gun and was afraid.

  She needed Hartman alive; Hartman dead did her no good.

  The assassin was about to take out Hartman, she was certain. Everything was suddenly one complex calculation. As far as she was concerned, it was better for Hartman, her suspect, to flee than to be killed. In any case, she’d have to leave the pursuit of Hartman to the others.

  She raised Heisler’s Glock.

  The assassin seemed unaware of her. He was focused only on Hartman. She knew from her training that he had fallen victim to the professional’s greatest weakness: target fixation. He’d lost a sense of situational awareness. Big cats are most vulnerable to hunters precisely when they’re tensing to pounce.

  Maybe that would give her the advantage she needed.

  Now she had to suddenly break his concentration, distract his attention.

  “Freeze!” she shouted. “Halt, goddammit!”

  She saw Hartman turn and look at her.

  The assassin jerked his head slightly to the left but didn’t turn to see where the shout had come from, didn’t shift his catlike gaze away from Hartman.

  Anna aimed directly at the middle of the assassin’s chest, at the center of his mass. It was a reflexive gesture for her; she had been trained to shoot to kill, not to wound.

  But what was he doing now? The hit man had turned back toward Hartman, who, she suddenly saw, had his own gun out.

  The Architect had his target in his sights; he assumed that whoever had just shouted wasn’t an immediate threat, but in any case he had made his own calculation. To turn around and engage her—whoever she was—was to lose his target, and he was unwilling to do that.

  Suddenly the assassin began to turn—

  She’d figured him wrong.

  His movements were as preternaturally smooth as a ballet dancer’s. Pivoting on the balls of his feet, he turned one hundred and eighty degrees, his gun extended and firing all the while, in precise intervals of a fraction of a second. The gun scarcely bucked in his powerful grip. Only when she turned to look did she realize what he had accomplished. Good God! A moment before, there were four armed Vienna policemen who had drawn a bead on him. Every one of them had now been shot! Each one of his shots had hit its target. The four policemen were down!

  It was a breathtaking execution, displaying a level of skill she had never encountered in her life. She was filled with sheer terror.

  Now she heard panicked noises, the gasping and lowing of the incapacitated gunshot victims.

  The man was a professional; he had determined to eliminate all impediments before turning back to his target—and she was his final impediment.

  But as he spun toward her, Anna had already aimed. She heard Hartman shout. Now it was her turn to focus single-mindedly, and she squeezed the trigger.

  Bull’s-eye!

  The hit man tumbled to the ground, his gun clattering off to one side.

  She’d dropped him.

  Was he dead?

  Everything was chaos. The suspect, Hartman, was tearing away down the street.

  But she knew the street was blockaded in both directions by the police. She ran toward the downed man, scooped up his gun, and continued running after Hartman.

  Amid the screams of the surviving gunshot victims, she heard shouts in German, but they meant nothing to her.

  “Er steht auf!”

  “Er lebt, er steht!”

  “Nein, nimm den Verdächtigen!”

  Down the block, Hartman had run directly into the clustered team of surveillance experts, all of whom had their weapons out and aimed at him, and she heard more shouting—

  “Halt! Keinen Schritt weiter!”

  “Polizei! Sie sind verhaftet!”

  But a noise coming from behind her, from where the assassin lay, attracted her attention, and she turned around just in time to see the assassin stagger into his Peugeot and yank the door behind him.

  He was wounded, but he had survived, and now he was getting away!

  “Hey,” she shouted to anyone, everyone, “stop him! The Peugeot! Don’t let him escape!”

  They had Hartman; he was surrounded by five Polizei. For now she could safely ignore him. Instead, she lunged toward the Peugeot just as it roared to life and barreled straight toward her.

  On the few occasions when she’d permitted herself to replay in her mind her close encounter with the Lincoln Town Car in Halifax, she’d fantasized that she’d a gun in her hands and could fire at the driver. Now she did, and she squeezed off shot after shot at the man. But the windshield only pitted and spider-webbed in small areas, and the car kept bearing down on her. She threw herself to one side, out of the way, just as the Peugeot thundered by, tires squealing, down the block past two empty surveillance cars—their drivers and passengers all on the street now—and out of sight.

  He’d gotten away!

  “Shit!” she shouted, turning back to see Hartman with his hands up.

  Shaken, she ran down the block toward her newly apprehended suspect.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Patient Eighteen was slowly jogging on a treadmill.

  A snorkel-like device came out of his mouth, connected to two long hoses. His nose had been clamped shut.

  Taped to his crepey, concave bare chest were twelve wires that fed into an EKG monitor. Another wire sprouted from a small device clamped onto the end of a forefinger. He was sweating and looked pale.

  “How are you doing?” said the doctor, a tall gray-faced man.

  The patient could not talk, but he gave a trembling thumbs-up.

  “Remember, there’s a panic button right in front of you,” the doctor said. “Use it if you need to.”

  Patient Eighteen kept jogging.

  The doctor said to his short, rotund colleague, “I think we’re at maximal exercise capacity. He seems to have crossed the respiratory exchange ratio—he’s over one. No signs of ischemia. He’s strong, this one. All right, let’s give him the rest of the day off. Tomorrow he’ll begin the treatment.”

  For the first time all day, the gray-faced doctor allowed himself a smile.

  Princeton, New Jersey

  The grand old Princeton historian was working in his study at Dickinson Hall when the telephone rang.

  Everything in Professor John Barnes Godwin’s office dated from the forties or fifties, whether it was the black rotary-dial phone or the oak card-catalog drawers or the Royal manual typewriter (he had no use for computers). He liked it that way, liked the way the old things looked, the solidity of objects from the time they made things out of Bakelite and wood and steel and not plastic, plastic, and plastic.

  He was not, however, one of those old men who lived in the past. He loved the world today. Often he wished his darling Sarah, his wife of fifty-seven years, were here to share it with him. They had always planned to do a lot of traveling when he retired.

  Godwin was a historian of twentieth-century Europe, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize whose lectures had always been immensely popular on the Princeton campus. Many of his former students now occupied positions of great prominence in their fields. The chairman of the Federal Reserve had been one of his brightest, as were the chairman of WorldCom, both the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the United States ambassador to the UN, countless members of the Council on Economic Advisers, even the current chairman of the Republican National Committee.

  Professor Godwin cleared his throat before answering the phone. “Hello.”

  The voice was immediately familiar.

  “Oh yes, Mr. Holland, good to hear your voice. We’re still on, I hope?”

  He listened for a moment. “Of course I know him, he was a student of mine … Well, if you’re asking for my opinion, I remember him as charming if a bit strong-headed, very bright though not really an intellectual, or at least not interested in ideas for their own sake. A very strong sense of moral purpose, I always thought. But Ben Hartman always struck me as quite reasonable and levelheaded.”

  He listened again. “No, he’s not a crusader. He just doesn’t have that temperament. And he’s certainly no martyr. I think he can be reasoned with.”

  Another pause.

  “Well, none of us wants the project disrupted. But I do wish you’d give the fellow a chance. I’d really hate to see anything happen to him.”

  Vienna

  The interrogation room was cold and bare, with the standard furnishings of police interrogation rooms everywhere. I’m becoming an expert, Ben thought grimly. The one-way observation mirror, unsubtle, and as big as a bedroom window in a suburban house. The wire mesh over the window overlooking a bleak inner courtyard.

  The American woman sat across the small room, in a gray suit, coiled on the metal folding chair like a clock spring. She had identified herself as Special Agent Anna Navarro of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations, and flashed an ID card to prove it. She was also a serious beauty, a real stunner: wavy dark brown hair, eyes the color of caramel, olive skin; tall and slim and long-legged. Nicely dressed, too—a sense of style, which had to be rare in the Department of Justice. Yet she was all business, not a hint of a smile. No ring, which probably meant divorced, because women this gorgeous were usually snatched up early, no doubt by some gallant fellow government investigator with a square chin who’d wooed her with tales of his bravery in apprehending miscreants … until the stress of two high-powered government careers had taken its toll on the marriage …

  In the folding chair next to her sat a bruiser of a cop, a beefy guy who sat silent and brooding and chain-smoking Casablanca cigarettes. Ben had no idea whether the cop understood English. He’d only said his name: Sergeant Walter Heisler of the Sicherheitsbüro, the major-crimes squad of the Viennese police.

  Half an hour into the questioning, Ben became impatient. He’d tried being reasonable, tried to talk sense, but his interrogators were implacable. “Am I under arrest?” he asked finally.

  “Do you want to be?” Agent Navarro snapped back.

  Oh, good God, not this again.

  “Does she have the right to do this?” Ben asked of the hulking Viennese cop, who just smoked and stared at him bovinely.

  Silence.

  “Well?” Ben demanded. “Who’s in charge here?”

  “As long as you answer my questions, there’s no reason to arrest you,” Agent Navarro said. “Yet.”

  “So I’m free to go.”

  “You’re being held for questioning. Why were you visiting Jürgen Lenz? You still haven’t explained properly.”

  “As I said, it was a social visit. Ask Lenz.”

  “Are you in Vienna for business or pleasure?”

  “Both.”

  “You don’t have any business meetings lined up. Is that the way you normally travel on business?”

  “I like to be spontaneous.”

  “You were booked for five days at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, but you never showed up there.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Why do I doubt that?”

  “I have no idea. I felt like seeing Vienna.”

  “So you just showed up in Vienna with no hotel reservations.”

  “As I said, I like to be spontaneous.”

  “I see,” said Agent Navarro, clearly frustrated. “And your visit to Gaston Rossignol, in Zurich—was that business as well?”

  My God, so they knew about that, too! But how? He felt a wave of panic.

  “He was a friend of a friend.”

  “And that’s how you treat a friend of a friend—you kill him?”

  Oh, Christ. “He was dead when I got there!”

  “Really,” Navarro said, clearly unconvinced. “Was he expecting you?”

  “No. I just showed up.”

  “Because you like to be spontaneous.”

  “I wanted to surprise him.”

  “Instead he surprised you, huh?”

  “It was a shock, yes.”

  “How did you get to Rossignol? Who put you in touch with him?”

  Ben hesitated, a beat too long. “I’d rather not say.”

  She picked up on it. “Because he was no mutual acquaintance or anything like that, was he? What was Rossignol’s connection to your father?”

  What the hell did that mean? How much did she know? Ben looked at her sharply.

  “Let me tell you something,” Anna Navarro said dryly. “I know your type. Rich boy, always gets whatever he wants. Whenever you get yourself in deep doodoo, your daddy saves you, or maybe the family lawyer bails you out. You’re used to doing whatever the hell you want and you think you’ll never have to pay the bill. Well, not this time, my friend.”

  Ben smiled involuntarily, but he refused to give her the satisfaction of putting up an argument.

  “Your father is a Holocaust survivor, is that right?” she persisted.

  So she doesn’t know everything.

  Ben shrugged. “That’s what I’m told.” She certainly wasn’t entitled to the truth.

  “And Rossignol was a big-deal Swiss banker, right?” She was watching him closely now.

  What was she driving at? “That’s why you and all those Austrian cops were staked out in front of Lenz’s house,” he said. “You were there to arrest me.”

  “No, actually,” the American woman said coolly. “To talk to you.”

  “You could have just asked to talk to me. You didn’t need half the Vienna police force. I’ll bet you’d love to pin the Rossignol murder on me. Gets the CIA off the hook, right? Or do you Justice Department guys hate the CIA? I get confused.”

  Agent Navarro leaned forward, her soft brown eyes gone hard. “Why were you carrying a gun?”

  Ben hesitated, but just for a second or two. “For protection.”

  “Is that right.” A statement of skepticism, not a question. “Are you registered to carry a gun in Austria?”