Ben’s mind swirled with questions. “Where did my father go?”
“I don’t know. He said Europe, but he didn’t specify, and it’s a big
continent. He said he’d be out of contact with everyone for months.
Left us a pile of money for travel expenses.” He smiled grimly. “A
whole lot more than we’d ever need, frankly.”
Anna, meanwhile, was leaning over Vogler’s body and had taken a weapon
from a nylon shoulder holster. She unscrewed the silencer, put it in
the jacket of her blazer and tucked the gun into the waistband of her
skirt so it was hidden by the jacket. “But you didn’t follow us here,”
she said, “did you?”
“No,” he conceded. “Strasser’s name was on the list Max Hartman gave
me, along with his address and cover identity.”
“He knows what’s going on!” Ben said. “He knows who all the players
are. He figured I’d eventually track Strasser down.”
“But we were able to tail Vogler, who wasn’t much concerned about being
followed himself. So once we knew he was flying to Argentina, and we
had Strasser’s address …”
“You’ve been watching Strasser’s house for the last couple of days,”
Anna said. “Waiting for Ben to show up.”
He glanced around again. “You guys ought to move it.”
“Right, but first tell me this,” she went on. “Since you’ve been doing
surveillance: did Strasser just recently return to Buenos Aires?”
“Apparently so. Back from some vacation, it looked like. He had a lot
of luggage.”
“Any visitors since his return?”
The man thought a moment. “Not that I saw, anyway. Just a nurse who
got here maybe a half hour ago …”
“A nurse!” Anna exclaimed. She looked at the white station wagon that
was parked in front of the house. The car was emblazoned with the words
permanencia EN CASA. “Come on!” she shouted.
“Oh, man,” Ben said, following her as she rushed to the front door and
rang the bell repeatedly.
“Shit,” she groaned. “We’re too late.” Yehuda Malkin stood back and to
one side.
In less than a minute, the door slowly came open. Before them stood an
ancient man, withered and stooped, his deeply tanned, leathery face a
mass of wrinkles.
Josef Strasser.
“tQuien es este?” he said, scowling. “Se esta metiendo en mis cosas ya
ll ego la enfermera que me tie neque revisar.”
“He says his nurse is here for his checkup,” Anna said. She raised her
voice. “No! Herr Strasser stay away from this nurse, I warn you!”
A white shape came into view behind the German. Ben said, “Anna! Behind
him!”
The nurse approached the door, speaking quickly, chidingly it seemed, to
Strasser. “/Vamos, Seftor Albrecht, vamos para alia, que estoy apurada!
iTengo que ver al proximo paci ente tod avia
“She’s telling him to hurry up,” Anna told Ben. “She’s got another
patient to see. Herr Strasser, this woman isn’t a real nurse I suggest
you ask her for her credentials!”
The woman in the white uniform grasped the old man’s shoulder and pulled
him half toward her in one violent gesture. “jYa mist no she said,
“vamos!”
With her free hand she grabbed the door to pull it closed, but Anna bent
forward to block the door’s arc with her knee.
Suddenly the nurse shoved Strasser aside. She reached into her uniform,
and in one swift motion took out a gun.
But Anna moved even more quickly. “Freeze!”
The nurse fired.
At the same moment, Anna spun her body sideways, slamming Ben to the
ground.
As Ben rolled to one side he heard a gunshot, followed by an animal like
roar.
He realized what had happened: the nurse had shot at Anna, but Anna had
dodged out of the line of fire, and it was the Israeli protector who had
been hit.
A red oval appeared in the middle of the man’s forehead, and there was a
spray of blood where the bullet exited his skull.
Anna got off two quick shots, and the fake nurse arched backward and
then slumped to the floor.
And suddenly, for the briefest moment, everything was quiet. In the
near-silence Ben could hear the distant singing of a bird.
Anna said, “Ben, you O.K.?”
He grunted yes.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, turning to see what had happened. Then she spun
back around toward the doorway.
Strasser, crouched on the floor in his pale blue bathrobe, shielding his
face with his hands, keened and keened.
“Strasser?” she repeated.
“Gott im Himtnel,” he moaned. “Gott im Hitnmel. She ha ben mein Leben
gerettet!” Good God in heaven. You saved my life.
Images. Shapeless and unfocused, devoid of significance or definition,
outlines blurring into plumes of gray, disintegrating into nothingness
like a jet’s exhaust tracks in a windy sky. At first, there was only
awareness, without even any defined object of awareness. He was so
cold. So very cold. Save for the spreading warmth on his chest.
And where there was warmth, he felt pain.
That was good. Pain was good.
Pain was the Architect’s friend. Pain he could manage, could banish
when he needed to. At the same time, it meant he was still alive.
Cold was not good. It meant that he had lost a great deal of blood.
That his body had gone into shock to lessen the further loss of blood:
his pulse would have slowed, his heart beating with lessened force, the
vessels in his extremities constricting to minimize the flow of blood to
non vital parts of the body.
He had to do an inventory. He was on the ground, motionless. Could he
hear? For a moment, nothing disturbed the profound silence within his
head. Then, as if a connection had been established, he could hear
voices, faintly, muffled, as if inside a building … Inside a house.
Inside whose house?
He must have lost a great deal of blood. Now he forced himself to
retrieve the memories of the past hour.
Argentina. Buenos Aires.
Strasser.
Strasser’s house. Where he had expected Benjamin Hartman and Anna
Navarro and where he had encountered… others. Including someone armed
with a marksman’s rifle.
He had taken several gunshots to the chest. Nobody could survive that.
No.” He banished the thought. It was an unproductive thought. A
thought such as an amateur might have.
He had not been shot at all. He was fine. Weakened in ways he could
compensate for, but not out of the running. They thought he was out of
the running, and that would be his strength. The images wavered before
his mind, but for a brief while he was able to fix them, the images,
like passport photos, of his three targets. In order: Benjamin Hartman;
Anna Navarro; Josef Strasser.
His mind was as thick and opaque as old crankshaft oil, but, yes, it
would function. Vet again, it was a matter of mental concentration: he
would assign the injuries to another body–a vividly conceived
doppelganger, someone who was bloodied and in shock but who was not he.
He was fine. Once he had gathered his reserves, he would be able to
move, to stalk. To kill. His sheer force of will had always triumphed
over adversity, and it would again.
Had an observer been keeping a close watch on Hans Vogler’s body, he
might possibly have detected, amid this furious gathering of mental
fortitude, the barest flicker of an eyelid, nothing more. Every
physical movement would now be planned and measured out in advance, the
way a man dying of thirst in a desert might ration swallows from a
canteen. There would be no wasted movement.
The Architect lived to kill. It was his area of unexampled expertise,
his singular vocation. Now he would kill if only to prove that he still
lived.
“Who are you?” asked Strasser in a high-pitched, hoarse voice.
Ben glanced from the nurse-impostor in her blood-drenched white uniform,
sprawled on the floor, to the assassin who had almost killed them both,
to the mysterious protectors his father had hired, both now lying
murdered on the red clay tiles of the patio.
“Herr Strasser,” Anna said, “the police will be here any moment. We
have very little time.”
Ben understood what she was saying: the Argentine police weren’t to be
trusted; they couldn’t be here when the police arrived.
They would have very little time to learn what they needed from the old
German.
Strasser’s face was deeply creased and striated, etched with countless
crisscrossing lines. His liver-colored lips stretched downward in a
grimace, and they were wrinkled too, like elongated prunes. Seated on
either side of his creviced, wide-nostri led nose were deep-sunk dark
eyes like raisins in a ball of dough. “I am not Strasser,” he
protested. “You are confused.”
“We know both your real name and your alias,” Anna said impatiently.
“Now tell me: the nurse–was she your regular one?”
“No. My usual nurse was sick this week. I have anemia and I need my
shots.”
“Where have you been for the last month or two?”