of bullets pocking the walls. The porter’s screams became even louder,
more frantic, and the gunfire came closer, and then came the racing
footsteps of the gunman, and Ben put on a burst of speed. Straight ahead
was the door to the stairway, and he quickly rejected it he didn’t want
to be a prisoner in a stairwell with an armed killer after him. Instead
he whipped around the corridor to the right, saw an open room door, a
housekeeping cart in front of it, and he leaped into the room, swinging
the door shut behind him. His back pressed against the door, he gasped
for breath, wondering whether the killer had seen him enter the room. He
heard muffled footsteps racing by: the killer had passed. He heard the
porter shout, calling someone; he didn’t sound as if he’d been wounded,
which was a relief.
A cry from inside the room! He saw a small, dark-skinned maid in a
light blue uniform cowering in the corner of the room.
“Quiet!” Ben hissed.
“Who are you?” the maid gasped, terrified. She spoke in heavily
accented English. “Please don’t hurt me!”
“Quiet,” Ben repeated. “Get down. If you keep quiet, you won’t get
hurt!”
The maid flattened herself against the carpeting, whimpering in abject
terror.
“Matches!” Ben said. “I need matches!”
“The ashtray! Please the desk, next to the television!”
Ben found them and located the smoke heat detector mounted on the
ceiling above him. He stood on a chair, lit a match, held it to the
coil. In a few seconds he could hear the Klaxon of a fire alarm
sounding in the room and in the corridor outside a rasping metallic
shriek caterwauling at regular, rapid intervals. The sound was
everywhere! Shouts and screams came from the hall as hotel guests ran
from their rooms. In another few seconds, water began spraying from the
sprinkler system in the ceiling, drenching the carpet and bed. The maid
screamed again as Ben turned and opened the door, quickly looking out in
either direction. The hall was chaos: people running about, some
huddled in bafflement, gesturing this way and that, yelling to one
another as water spewed from the sprinklers all along the ceiling the
length of the corridor. Ben ran out of the room, joining the frenzied
crowd in a rush to the stairwell. He knew, from the height of the main
staircase that led into the hotel’s front entrance, that the stairwell
had to have its own exit onto the street or back alley.
The stairwell door opened onto a dark corridor, illuminated only by a
flickering, buzzing fluorescent ceiling fixture, but it was enough light
to make out the double doors of the hotel kitchen. He raced toward it,
pushed the doors open without stopping, and saw the inevitable service
entrance. He reached the door, felt the flow of cold air from the
outside, slid open the heavy steel bolt, and pulled the massive door
open. A ramp led down into a narrow alley crowded with trashcans. He
propelled himself down, and, with fire engine sirens sounding in the
distance, disappeared into the dark alley.
Twenty minutes later he came to the tall modern building overlooking the
Danube canal, on the far side of the Stadtpark, a characterless American
hotel that was part of an international chain. He strode purposefully
through the lobby to the elevators, a hotel guest who obviously
belonged.
He knocked on the door of Room 1423.
Special Agent Anna Navarro cracked open the door. She was in flannel
nightgown, her makeup was off, and yet she was luminous. “I think I’m
ready to cooperate,” Ben said.
Anna Navarro fixed Hartman a drink from the honor bar: a toy bottle of
Scotch, a little green bottle of mineral water, a few miniature cubes of
ice from the tiny freezer. She was, if possible, even more businesslike
than she’d been at the police station. Over her flannel nightgown she’d
cinched a white terry-cloth robe. Probably it didn’t help, Ben
reflected, having a strange man in the close quarters of her hotel room
when she was dressed for bed.
Ben took the drink gratefully. It was watery. She was not a drinker.
But shaken as he was, he needed a drink badly, and it did the job.
Despite the sofa on which he sat, the room was not set up for visitors.
She started to sit facing him, on the edge of the bed, then rejected it
in favor of a big wing chair, which she pulled out at an angle to the
sofa.
The plate-glass window was a black pointillist canvas. From up here,
Vienna was neon-lit, its lights twinkling under the starry sky.
Navarro leaned forward, crossed her legs. She was barefoot, her feet
slender and high-arched, delicate, the toenails painted.
“It was the same guy, you think?” Her abrasive edge was gone.
Ben took another sip. “Definitely. I’ll never forget his face.”
She sighed. “And I thought at least I’d seriously wounded him. From
everything I’ve heard, this guy’s incredibly dangerous. And what he did
to those four policemen–astonishing. Like an execution machine. You
were lucky. Or maybe I should say you were smart–sensing something
wasn’t right, using the porter to confuse him, putting our friend off
balance, buying yourself time to escape. Well done.”
He shrugged in self-deprecation, secretly pleased by the unexpected
compliment. “You know something about this guy?”
“I’ve read a dossier, but it’s incomplete. He’s believed to live in
England, probably London.”
“He’s British?”
“Formerly East German intelligence–Stasi. Their field agents were
among the most highly trained. Certainly some of the most ruthless.
Seems to have left the organization a long time ago.”
“What’s he doing living in England?”
“Who knows? Maybe avoiding the German authorities, like most of his
ex-colleagues. What we don’t know is whether he’s an assassin for hire,
or whether he’s in the employ of some organization with diverse
interests.”
“His name?”
“Vogler, I think. Hans Vogler. Obviously here on some sort of job.”
Some sort of job. / am next. Ben felt numb.
“You said he might be in some organization’s employ.”
“That’s what we say when we haven’t figured out the pattern yet.” She
pursed her lips. “You might be in some organization’s employ, and I
don’t mean Hartman Capital Management.”
“You still don’t believe me, do you?”
“Well, who are you? What are you really up to?”
“Oh, come on,” he said heatedly. “Don’t tell me you guys don’t have a
god damned file on me!”
She glared. “All I know about you are isolated facts without a logical
explanation tying them all together. You say you were in Zurich when
suddenly someone from your past pops up and tries to kill you and
instead gets killed himself. And then his body disappears. Next thing
I know, you’ve entered Switzerland illegally. Then your fingerprints
turn up all over the house of a banker named Rossignol, who you claim
was dead when you got there. You carry a gun, though where you got it
and why you won’t say.”
Ben listened in silence, letting her go on.
“Why were you meeting with this Lenz, this son of a famous Nazi?”
Ben blinked, unsure how much to divulge. But before he could formulate
a reply, she spoke again. “Here’s what I want to know. What does Lenz
have in common with Rossignol?”
Ben drained his Scotch. “My brother …” he began.
“The one who died four years ago.”
“So I thought. He turned out to be hiding from some dangerous people.
He didn’t know who they were, exactly; I still don’t know. Some
conclave of industrialists, or their descendants, or maybe CIA
hirelings, maybe something else entirely who knows? But apparently he’d
uncovered a list of names ”
Agent Navarro’s caramel eyes grew wide. “What kind of list?”
“A very old one.”
Her face flushed. “Where did he get this list?”
“He came across it in the archives of a Swiss bank.”
“A Swiss bank?”
“It’s a list of board members of a corporation that was founded in the
last days of the Second World War.”
“Jesus Christ,” she breathed. “So that’s it.”
Ben drew a folded, grimy square of paper from his breast pocket and
handed it to her. “Sorry, it’s a bit soiled. I’ve been keeping it in
my shoe. To keep it out of the hands of people like you.”
She perused it, frowning. “Max Hartman. Your father?”
“Alas.”
“Did he tell you about this corporation?”
“No way. My brother came across it.”
“But wasn’t your father a Holocaust survivor ?”
“And now we come to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
“Wasn’t there some physical mark a tattoo or something?”
“A tattoo? At Auschwitz, yes. At Dachau, no.”
She didn’t seem to be listening. “My God,” she said. “The string of
mysterious homicides every single name is here.” She seemed to be
speaking to herself, not to him. “Rossignol… Prosperi… Ramago …
they’re all here. No, they’re not all on my list. Some overlap,