sanity, was that Liesl had probably been dead when the cabin had burst
into flames.
Oh, Christ!
By now he had put together how it had happened; it all made a chilling
kind of sense. The squeaking he had heard in the middle of the night,
which had incorporated itself into his terrible dream, had come from the
valve of the propane tank being turned all the way open. The cabin had
quickly filled with the odorless propane–he had already stepped outside
by then–which was intended to overwhelm, put to sleep, then kill the
occupants of the cabin. To cover up the evidence, a timed fuse had
somehow gone off. Certainly it hadn’t taken much to ignite the highly
flammable gas. The accident would be ascribed by the local authorities
to a faulty propane tank, not an uncommon hazard in rural areas.
And then whoever had done it had gotten into his truck and stolen away.
By the time Ben returned to the Range Rover a matter of seconds, really,
after the explosion the cabin was pretty much gone.
She had not suffered. She had surely been either asleep or dead before
her little cabin became an inferno.
He couldn’t stand to think of it!
For four years Liesl and Peter had lived there, lived their lives in
hiding, surely always fearful, but fundamentally undisturbed. Probably
they could have gone on living there for years.
Until Ben had shown up in Zurich.
And brought out these zealots, in effect luring Peter to his death.
And led these faceless, anonymous zealots to Liesl, the woman who had
once saved Peter’s life.
Ben was beyond grief. He no longer felt the sharp stab of guilt,
because he was numb. He felt nothing anymore. The shock had turned him
into a cadaver, driving through the night, staring straight ahead, a
machine without emotions.
But as he approached the darkened city, he began to feel one single
emotion: a slowly growing, burning anger. A fury at those who had
targeted innocent and good people who’d done nothing wrong but come
across a bit of information by accident.
These killers, and those who directed them, remained faceless in his
mind. He could not picture them, but he was determined to unmask them.
They wanted him dead; they intended to frighten him into silence. But
instead of running away, instead of hiding, he had made up his mind to
run toward them, though from a direction they could not anticipate. They
wanted to operate from the shadows; he would shine light on them. They
wanted to conceal; he would expose.
And if his father was one of them … He needed to dig into the past
now, to excavate, to learn who these murderers were, and where they came
from, and above all what they were hiding. Ben knew the rational
response was to be frightened, and though that he certainly was, his
fear was now subordinate to his rage.
He knew he had crossed some line into an obsession beyond any
rationality.
But who were these faceless attackers?
Men who had been mobilized by the board of the corporation Max Hartman
had helped set up. Madmen? Fanatics? Or simply mercenaries, hired by
a corporation that had been founded, decades ago, by a group of
prominent industrialists and high-ranking Nazis–among them his own
father–who were now trying to conceal the unlawful origins of their
original wealth? Cold-blooded mercenaries without any ideology except
the profit motive, the almighty dollar, the Deutschmark, the Swiss
franc… There were layers upon layers of interlocking possibilities.
He needed cold hard information.
Ben vaguely remembered being told that one of Switzerland’s great
research libraries was at the University of Zurich, in the hills
overlooking the city, and that was where he now headed, the logical
place to begin digging up the past.
Washington, D.C.
Anna watched queasily as the flight attendant demonstrated the flimsy
thing you put over your nose and mouth to help you breathe if the plane
goes down. She’d once read an article in one of those on-line magazines
that said that nobody had ever survived an emergency water landing of an
airplane. Never. She took a pharmacy bottle of Ativan from her purse.
It was beyond the expiration date, but she didn’t particularly care.
This was the only way she was going to make it across the Atlantic.
She was startled to hear her I.C.U-issue StarT ac trilling from deep in
the recesses of her purse. Government-standard crypto telephony and
hardly bulkier than the usual consumer model. She’d forgot to turn it
off.
She pulled it out. “Navarro.”
“Please hold for Alan Bartlett,” she heard in a lightly accented
Jamaican voice.
She felt a tap on her shoulder. It was a flight attendant. “I’m sorry,
ma’am,” he said. “You’re not allowed to have any cellular phones turned
on during the flight.”
“We’re not flying yet,” Anna pointed out.
“Agent Navarro,” Bartlett said. “I’m glad I caught you.”
“Ma’am,” the flight attendant persisted, “airline regulations forbid you
from using cell phones once the aircraft has left the gate.”
“Sorry, this’ll just be a minute.” To Bartlett she said, “What have you
got for me? I’m on a plane to Zurich.”
“Ma’am,” the flight attendant said loudly, exasperated.
Without looking at him she took out her Justice Department ID with her
free hand and flashed it at him.
“We lost another one,” Bartlett said.
Another one? So soon? The murders were accelerating.
The flight attendant drew back. “My apologies, ma’am.”
“You’re kidding me,” Anna groaned.
“In Holland. A town called Tilburg, a couple of hours south of
Amsterdam. You might want to change planes in Zurich and go there.”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to Zurich. It’s a simple matter for me to
have the FBI legal in Amsterdam request an immediate autopsy. This time
at least we can tell them exactly what poisons to screen for.”
“Is that right?”
“I’m on my way to Zurich, Director. I’m going to catch myself a live
one. Dead men don’t talk. Now, what was the name of the Tilburg
victim?”
Bartlett paused. “A certain Hendrik Korsgaard.”
“Wait a minute!” Anna said sharply. “That name wasn’t on my list.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Talk to me, Bartlett, dammit!”
“There are other lists, Agent Navarro,” Bartlett said slowly. “I was
hoping they wouldn’t prove … relevant.”
“Unless I’m greatly mistaken, this is a violation of our understanding,
Director Bartlett,” Anna said quietly, her eyes darting around to verify
that she wasn’t being overheard.
“Not at all, Ms. Navarro. My office works like any other, by a
division of labor. Information is edited accordingly. Your
responsibility was to find the killers. We had reason to believe that
the names on the list I gave you, from the clearance files, were being
targeted. We had no reason to believe that… the others were in
jeopardy as well.”
“And did you know where the Tilburg victim resided?”
“We didn’t even know he was still living. Certainly, all efforts to
locate him were in vain.”
“Then we can rule out the possibility that the killers have simply
gained access to your files.”
“It’s gone far beyond that,” Bartlett said crisply. “Whoever’s killing
these old men, they’ve got better sources than we do.”
It was not much past four in the morning by the time Ben located the
Universitatsbibliothek on Zahringerplatz. The library wouldn’t open for
another five hours.
In New York, he calculated, it was ten at night. His father would
probably still be awake he usually went to bed late and arose early,
always had and even if he were asleep, Ben wasn’t much concerned about
waking him. Not anymore.
Wandering down the Universitatstrasse to stretch his legs, he made sure
his cell phone was switched to the GSM standard used in Europe and
placed a call to Bedford.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Walsh, answered.
Mrs. Walsh, an Irish version of Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca, Ben had
always thought, had worked for the family for over twenty years, and Ben
had never got past her haughty reserve.
“Benjamin,” she said. Her tone was strange.
“Good evening, Mrs. Walsh,” Ben said wearily. “I need to talk to my
father.” He readied himself to do battle with his father’s gatekeeper.
“Benjamin, your father’s gone.”
He went cold. “Gone where?”
“Well, that’s just it, I don’t know.”
“Who does?”
“No one. A car came for Mr. Hartman this morning, and he wouldn’t say
where he was going. Not a word. He said it would be ‘a while.” ”
“A car? Was it Gianni?” Gianni was his father’s regular driver, a
happy go-lucky sort whom the old man regarded with a certain distanced
affection.
“Not Gianni. Not a company car. He’s just gone. No explanation.”
“I don’t understand. He’s never done that before, has he?”
“Never. I know he packed his passport, because it’s gone.”
“His passport? Well, that tells us something, doesn’t it?”
“But I called his office, talked to his secretary, and she knew nothing