opened from within. “This is the end of our little trip together,” he
said.
Now Laemmel grunted. “Do you think you are any safer outside of this
building?”
Ben stepped into the shadowy alleyway, feeling the cool air against his
flushed face. “What the Polizei do is not your personal concern,” he
said, keeping his gun drawn.
“Die Polizei?” Laemmel replied. “I do not speak of them” He spat.
An eel of fear thrashed in Ben’s belly. “What are you talking about?”
he demanded urgently. Ben gripped the gun in both his hands and raised
it to Laemmel’s eyes. “Tell me!” he said with furious concentration.
“Tell me what you know!”
There was a sudden exhalation of breath from Laemmel’s throat, and a
warm mist of crimson spattered Ben’s face. A bullet had torn through
the man’s neck. Had Ben somehow lost his grip, squeezed the trigger
without realizing it? A second explosion, inches away from his head,
answered the question. There was a shooter in position.
Oh, Christ! Not again!
As the guard crumpled face forward, Ben lunged down the dank alley. He
heard a popping noise, as if from a toy gun, then a metallic
reverberation, and a pockmark suddenly appeared on the large Dumpster to
his left. The shooter had to be firing from his right.
As he felt something hot crease his shoulder, he dove behind the
Dumpster: temporary refuge, but any port in a storm. Out of the corner
of his eye, he saw the movement of something small and dark a rat,
displaced by his arrival. Move! The ledge of the cement wall that
separated the bank’s back lot from that of its neighbor was at shoulder
height; Ben stuck the gun in the waistband of his trousers and, with
both hands, lifted himself up an dover. A short pathway now separated
him from Usteristrasse. Grasping the revolver, he fired wildly, in
three different areas. He wanted the shooter to take cover, believing
he was under fire. He needed the time. Every second now was precious.
There was return fire, and he could hear the slugs hitting the concrete
retainer, but Ben was safely on the other side.
Now he charged, pumping his feet down the alley to Usteristrasse, fast.
Faster. Faster still! “Run like your life depends on it,” his track
coach would tell him before competitions. Now it did.
And what if there were more than one shooter? But surely they wouldn’t
have had enough warning to put a whole team into position. The thoughts
jostled and collided in Ben’s mind. Focus, dammit.
A brackish smell cued him to his next move: it was a breeze from the
Sihl River, the charm less narrow waterway that branched off from the
Limmat at the Platz-promenade. Now he crossed the Gessner Allee,
scarcely looking at the traffic, hurtling in front of a taxicab whose
bearded driver honked and cursed at him before stepping on the brakes.
But he’d made it across. The Sihl, banked with a declivity of blackened
cinder blocks, stretched before him. His eyes scanned the water
frantically until he fixed on a small motorboat. They were a common
sight on the Sihl; this one had a single passenger, a plump,
beer-swilling man with sunglasses and a fishing pole, though he was not
yet fishing. His life jacket made his already bulky proportions look
even bulkier. The river would take him to the Sihlwald, a nature
preserve ten kilometers south of Zurich, where the riverbanks flattened
out in the woodlands and became furrowed with brooks. It was a popular
destination among the city’s inhabitants.
The plump man peeled plastic wrap from a white-bread sandwich, then
tossed the plastic into the waters. A notably antisocial act by Swiss
standards. Ben threw himself into the water, fully clothed, and started
to swim toward the boat, his clothing impeding his powerful crawl
stroke.
The water was frigid, carrying the bone-chilling cold of the glacier
from which it originated, and Ben felt a stiffness seep through his body
even as he propelled himself through the slow-moving current.
The man in the motorboat, pushing the sandwich into his face, slurping
from his bottle of Kronenberg, was aware of nothing until the small
motorboat tilted abruptly leeward. First two hands were visible, the
fingers faintly bluish from the cold, and then he saw the man, fully
dressed, pull himself up and into the boat, river water sluicing down an
expensive-looking suit.
“Was 1st das!” he shouted. He dropped his beer in alarm. “Wer sind
She?”
“I need to borrow your boat,” Ben told him in German, trying to stop his
teeth from chattering from the cold.
“MeI Raus!” Get out! The man picked up his sturdy fishing pole and
brandished it with intended menace.
“Your choice,” Ben said, and then sprang toward the man, tipping him
over into the water, where he bobbed comically, buoyed by his life
jacket but sputtering with indignation.
“Save your breath.” Ben pointed toward the nearby Zollstrasse bridge.
“The tramline will take you wherever you need to go.” He reached over
to the engine throttle and turned it way up. The engine coughed, and
then roared, the boat gaining speed as it headed south. He would not be
taking it all the way to the Sihlwald, the forest preserve. Half a mile
down the river bend would do it. Lying flat against the grip-textured
fiberglass floor of the boat, he was still able to see the taller
buildings and storefronts along the Sihl, the immense Migros department
store, a bland, boxy structure; the sooty spires of the Schwarzenkirche;
the intricately frescoed walls of the Klathaus. Ben knew that he’d be
vulnerable to any marksmen in position, but also that the chances of
their having anticipated his movements were slim. He felt for the
envelope in his jacket pocket, and the waxy enclosure crackled
reassuringly. He assumed it was waterproof, but this wasn’t the time to
make sure.
The motorboat moved faster, taking him beneath the algaed masonry of the
Stauffacherstrasse bridge. Another fifth of a kilometer remained. Then
came the unmistakable sounds of a major expressway, the whizzing noise
of tires spinning along smooth-worn asphalt, of air against the
carriages and contours of trucks and automobiles, the occasional bleat,
treble and basso, of horns, the meshing gears of a hundred vehicles
moving like the wind. It all fused into a white noise that rose and
fell in intensity, the aural vibrations of industrial transportation
blended into a mechanical surf.
Ben veered the thrumming motorboat toward the gently sloped retaining
wall, heard the scrape of its fiberglass hull against brick as he
brought it jerking to a halt. Then he sprang from the boat and toward
the roadside gas station where he’d left his rented Range Rover, only
minutes from the Nationalstrasse 3, the concrete river where he would
merge into the swiftly coursing traffic.
Turning the steering wheel to change lanes, Ben felt a twinge in his
left shoulder. He reached over with his right hand and rubbed it
gently. Another twinge, sharper this time. He took his hand away. His
fingers were sticky, maroon with congealing blood.
Matthias Deschner was in the same seat in front of Suchet’s desk that he
had occupied just an hour before. Suchet, behind the desk, was hunched
forward, his face tense.
“You should have warned me in advance,” the banker said angrily. “We
could have stopped him from accessing the vault!”
“I had no advance notice myself!” Deschner objected. “They only
contacted me yesterday. They demanded to know whether I was sheltering
him. Preposterous!”
“You know full well the penalty for noncompliance in such matters.”
Suchet’s face was mottled with rage and fear.
“They made it very clear,” Deschner said tonelessly.
“Only just now? Then they only just learned of your possible connection
to the subject?”
“Certainly. Do you think I had any idea what these brothers were
involved in? I knew nothing. Nothing!”
“That excuse has not always been successful in sparing the Teutonic
neck, if I may speak historically.”
“A distant relative asked me for a favor,” Deschner protested. “I
wasn’t apprised of its larger significance.”
“And you didn’t inquire?”
“Members of our profession are trained not to ask too many questions.
I’d think you’d agree with that.”
“And now you expose us both to danger!” Suchet snapped.
“As soon as he showed up, I was called. I could only presume they
wanted him to access the vault!”
There was a knock at the door. Suchet’s secretary entered, holding
aloft a small videocassette. “This just came for you from Security,
sir.”
“Thank you, Inge,” Suchet said sweetly. “A messenger will be arriving
momentarily. I’d like you to seal the tape in an envelope and give it
to him.”
“Very good, sir,” the secretary said, and she left the office as quietly
as she had come.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
In a modern eight-story building on Schaffhausserstrasse, not far from
the University of Zurich, three men sat in a room filled with high