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 shirt front 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. Somethings 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 Clock.
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 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 aufl”
“Er lebt, er steht!”
“Nem, nimm den Verdachtigen!”
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 welter!”
“Polizei! She 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