her strength.
Twenty-five feet before Strasser’s house there was a security booth on
the sidewalk. The guard was a stooped old man with wispy white hair and
a drooping mustache, a blue cap perched almost comically atop his head.
If ever there were a serious incident on the street, this guard would be
useless, Ben thought. Still, it was best not to alert him, so the two
of them continued their determined stride as if they belonged here.
They stopped before Strasser’s house, which was surrounded, like most of
the houses on this street, by a fence. This one was of dark-stained
wood, not wrought iron, and it was no higher than Ben’s chest. It was
purely ornamental and seemed to send the message that the inhabitant of
this house had nothing to hide. Anna unlatched the wooden gate, pulled
it open, and they entered a small, well-kept garden. From behind they
heard footsteps on the pavement.
Nervously, Ben turned. It was the security guard approaching, maybe
twenty feet away. He wondered whether Anna had an alibi prepared; he
didn’t. The guard smiled. His dentures were ill-fitting and yellow. He
said something in Spanish.
Anna muttered, “He wants to see our identification.” To the old man she
said, “jComo no, senor!” Certainly.
The guard reached into his jacket, oddly, as if to offer identification
of his own.
Ben noticed a slight movement across the street, and he turned to look.
There was a man standing across the street. A tall man who had a ruddy
face, a thatch of black hair going gray, and thick wheat-field eyebrows.
Ben felt a jolt of recognition. The face was horribly familiar.
Where have I seen him before?
Paris the rue des Vignoles.
Vienna. The Graben.
And somewhere before that.
One of the killers.
He was aiming a gun at them.
Ben shouted, “Anna, get down!” He flung himself onto the concrete
garden path.
Anna dove to her left, out of the line of fire.
There was a spit, and the guard’s chest erupted, a gusher of crimson,
and he fell backward to the flagstone sidewalk. The ruddy-faced man
raced toward them.
They were trapped inside Strasser’s yard.
The assassin had shot the guard! Ben and Anna had ducked, and the poor
guard had been caught in the line of fire.
Next time the killer would not miss.
Even if I could run, Ben thought, it would be toward the killer.
And both of them were unarmed!
He heard the man shout in English, “It’s O.K.! It’s O.K.! I’m not
going to shoot!”
Ruddy-face had his gun at his side as he raced toward them.
“Hartman!” he yelled. “Benjamin Hartman!”
Ben looked up, startled.
Anna screamed, “I’ve got a gun! Back off!”
But the ruddy-faced man still did not raise his weapon. “It’s O.K.! I’m
not going to shoot!” The man flung his gun to the pavement in front of
him, his hands outstretched. “He was about to kill you,” the
ruddy-faced man said as he ran up to the body of the old man. “Look!”
Those were the last words the ruddy-faced man spoke.
Like a mannequin twitching with incipient life, the ancient guard moved
an arm, yanking a slim, silenced revolver from his trousers, and
pointing it at the ruddy-faced man who stood over him. There was a phut
and then a soft-nosed slug slammed into his forehead and blew out the
back of his skull.
What the hell was going on?
The ancient guard now began to sit up, even as blood still dribbled from
his shirt front, He had been wounded, perhaps mortally, but his firing
arm was absolutely steady.
An impassioned bellow came from behind them: “No!”
Ben turned to see another man, stationed by an oak tree, at a diagonal
from them: their side of the street, but twenty yards to their left.
This man was holding a large rifle with a sniper scope, a marksman’s
special.
The ruddy-faced killer’s backup?
The barrel was directed in their general direction.
There was no time to escape its deadly aim.
Immediately, Ben heard the blast of the high-powered rifle, too
paralyzed with fear even to flinch.
Two, then three bullets hit the ancient guard in the center of his chest
and he slumped back to the ground.
Once again they had been spared. Why? With the scoped rifle, there was
no way the sniper could have missed his intended target.
The man with the rifle a man with glossy black hair and olive skin raced
over to the crumpled, bloodied body of the watchman, ignoring them.
It made no sense. Why were the gunmen so intent on killing the old
guard? Who was their real target?
Ben stood up slowly, and saw the man reach inside the jacket of the old
man’s uniform, and pull out another weapon: a second slim automatic
revolver, silencer screwed on to the barrel.
“Oh, dear God,” Anna said.
The olive-skinned man grabbed a fistful of the guard’s wispy white hair
and tugged at it, and it came off in one floppy piece, like the pelt of
a rabbit, revealing the steel-gray hair underneath.
He yanked at the white mustache, which came off just as easily, then
grabbed at the loose skin of the old man’s face, lifting off wrinkled,
irregular patches of flesh-colored rubber.
“Latex prostheses,” the man said. He pulled off the nose, then the
wrinkled bags under the old man’s eyes, and Ben recognized the smooth,
unlined face of the man who had tried to kill him in front of Jurgen
Lenz’s house in Vienna. The man who tried to kill them all in Paris.
The man who killed his brother.
“The Architect,” Anna gasped.
Ben froze.
Gaped, disbelieving, but it was true.
“He was going to kill you both when he got within point-blank range,”
the man said. Ben focused on his tawny skin, oddly long lashes, and
square jaw. The man spoke with a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. “Which
he would easily have done, since his appearance deceived you.”
Ben recalled the odd gesture, the image of the frail old man reaching
into his jacket, the almost apologetic expression.
“Wait a minute,” Anna said. “You’re “Yossi.” From Vienna. The Israeli
CIA guy. Or so you pretended.”
“Dammit, tell me who you are!” Ben said.
“My name isn’t important,” he replied.
“Yeah, well it is to me. Who are you?”
“Yehuda Malkin.”
The name meant nothing. “You’ve been following me,” Ben said. “I saw
your partner in Vienna and in Paris.”
“Yeah, he screwed up and got spotted. He’d been following you for the
entire last week. I was doing backup. You may as well know: your
father hired us, Ben.”
My father hired them. For what? “Hired you … ?”
“Max Hartman bought our parents’ way out of Nazi Germany more than fifty
years ago. And the man who was killed wasn’t just my partner. He was my
cousin.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Goddamnit to hell. Avi
wasn’t meant to die. It wasn’t his time. Goddamnit to hell.” He shook
his head hard. His cousin’s death evidently hadn’t sunk in, and right
now he wouldn’t let it it wasn’t the moment. He looked hard at Ben, saw
the confusion playing across his face. “Both of us owed your father
everything. I guess he must’ve had some kind of in with the Nazis,
because he did that for a bunch of other Jewish families in Germany
too.”
Max ransomed Jews bought their way out of the camps? Then what
Sonnenfeld said was true.
Anna broke in, “Who trained you? You’re not American-trained,” The man
turned to her. “I was born in Israel, on a kibbutz. My parents moved
to Palestine after they escaped from Germany.”
“You were in the Israeli army?”
“Paratrooper. We moved to America in ’68, after the Six Day War. My
parents were fed up with the fighting. After high school I joined the
Israeli army.”
“This whole CIA ruse in Vienna what the hell was it about?” Anna
demanded.
“For that, I brought in an American comrade of mine. Our orders were to
spirit Ben away from danger. Get him back in the States, and under our
direct protection. Keep him safe.”
“But how did you …” Anna started.
“Look, we don’t have time for this. If you’re trying to interrogate
Strasser, you’d better get in there before the cops show up.”
“Right,” Anna said.
“Wait,” Ben interrupted. “You say my father hired you. When?”
The man looked around impatiently. “A week or so ago.” He called Avi
and me, told us you were in some kind of danger. Said you were in
Switzerland. He gave us names and addresses, places he thought you
might turn up. He wanted us to do what we could to protect you. He
said he didn’t want to lose another son.” He looked around quickly.
“You were almost killed on our watch in Vienna. Again in Paris. And
you sure had some kind of close call here.”