Stunned, she sat back on the bed.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.
“I really can’t get into it.”
“If it concerns the business we’re both working on—”
“It doesn’t. Not this. Those bastards!”
“What happened?”
“Please,” she exclaimed. “Let me think!”
“Fine.” Looking irritated, Ben took his digital phone from the pocket of his jacket.
She thought: No wonder “Phil Ostrow” had called her late at night—when it was too late to call the American embassy and check out his bona fides. But then who was it she’d met with at CIA station?
Was it in fact CIA station?
Who were “Ostrow” and “Yossi”?
She heard Ben speaking quickly in French. Then he fell silent, listening for a while. “Oscar, you’re a genius,” he finally said.
A few minutes later, he was talking on his phone again. “Megan Crosby, please.”
If “Phil Ostrow” was some kind of impostor, he had to be an enormously skilled actor. And what was he doing? “Yossi” could indeed have been Israeli, or of some other Middle Eastern nationality; it was hard to tell.
“Megan, it’s Ben,” he said.
Who were they? she wondered.
She picked up the phone and called Jack Hampton again. “Jack, I need the number of CIA station.”
“What am I, directory assistance?”
“It’s in the building across the street from the consular office, right?”
“CIA station is in the main embassy building, Anna.”
“No, the annex. A commercial building across the street. Under the cover of the Office of the United States Trade Representative.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. CIA doesn’t have any cover sites outside of the one right in the embassy. That I know of anyway.”
She hung up, panic suffusing her body. If that hadn’t been a CIA site where she’d met Ostrow, what was it? The setting, the surroundings—every detail had been right. Too right, too convincing?
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she heard Ben say. “Jesus, you’re fast.”
So who was trying to manipulate her? And to what end? Obviously someone, or some group, who knew she was in Vienna, knew what she was investigating, and knew which hotel she was staying in.
If Ostrow was some kind of impostor, then his story about the Mossad had to be false. And she had been the unwitting victim of an elaborate scam. They’d planned to kidnap Hartman—and have her deliver the “package” right into their clutches.
She felt dazed and lost.
In her mind she ran through everything, from “Ostrow’s” phone call, to the place she’d met him and “Yossi.” Was it really possible the whole thing had been an elaborate ruse?
She heard Hartman say: “All right, let me write this down. Great work, kid. Terrific.”
So the Mossad story, with all its rumors and undocumented whispers, was nothing but a tale spun by liars out of plausible fragments? My God, then how much of what she knew was wrong?
And who was trying to mislead her—and to what end?
What was the truth? Good God, where was the truth?
“Ben,” she said.
He held up an index finger to signal her to wait, said something quickly into his phone, then flipped it closed.
But then she quickly changed her mind, decided not to reveal to Ben anything of what she’d just found out. Not yet. Instead, she asked, “Did you learn anything from Sonnenfeld?”
Hartman told her about what Sonnenfeld had said, Anna interrupting every once in a while to clarify a point or ask for a fuller explanation.
“So are you saying your father wasn’t a Nazi, after all.”
“Not according to Sonnenfeld, at least.”
“Did he have some inkling as to the meaning of Sigma?”
“Beyond what I said, he was vague about it. And downright evasive when it came to Strasser.”
“And as to why your brother was killed?”
“Obviously he was killed because of the threat of exposure. Someone, maybe some group, feared the revelation of those names.”
“Or of the fact this corporation existed. Clearly someone with a major financial stake. Which tells us that these old guys were—” Suddenly she stopped. “Of course! The laundered money! These old guys were being paid off. Maybe by someone controlling the corporation they’d all helped form.”
“Either paid off, as in bribed,” Ben added, “or else they were receiving an agreed-upon distribution, a share of the profits.”
Anna stood. “Eliminate the payees, then there’s no more wire transfers. No more big paydays for a bunch of doddering old men. Which tells us that whoever’s ordering the murders stands to gain financially from them. Has to be. Someone like Strasser, or even your father.” She looked at him. She couldn’t automatically rule it out. Even if he didn’t want to hear it. His father might have been a murderer himself—might have blood on his hands, might have been behind the murders at least.
But how to explain the intricate deception of Ostrow, the false CIA man? Might he have been somehow connected to the heirs to some vast hidden fortune?
“Theoretically, I suppose, my father could be one of the bad guys.” Ben said. “But I really don’t believe it.”
“Why not?” She didn’t know how far to push him on this.
“Because my father already has more money than he knows what to do with. Because he may be a ruthless businessman, and he may be a liar, but after talking with Sonnenfeld, I’m coming to think that he wasn’t fundamentally an evil man.”
She doubted Hartman was holding anything back, but surely he was hampered by filial loyalty. Ben seemed to be a loyal person—an admirable quality, but sometimes loyalty could blind you to the truth.
“What I don’t get is this: these guys are old and failing,” Hartman continued. “So why bother hiring someone to eliminate them? It’s hardly worth the risk.”
“Unless you’re afraid one of them will talk, reveal the financial arrangement, whatever it is.”
“But if they haven’t talked for half a century, what’s going to make them start now?”
“Maybe some sort of pressure by legal authorities, triggered by the surfacing of this list. Faced with the threat of legal action, any one of them might easily have talked. Or maybe the Corporation is moving to a new phase, a transition, and sees itself as peculiarly vulnerable while it’s happening.”
“I’m hearing a lot of conjecture,” he said. “We need facts.”
She paused. “Who were you talking to on the phone just now?”
“A corporate researcher I’ve used before. She found some intriguing background on Vortex Laboratories.”
Anna was suddenly alert. “Yes?”
“It’s wholly owned by the European chemicals and technology giant Armakon AG. An Austrian company.”
“Austrian …” she murmured. “That is interesting.”
“Those mammoth technology firms are always buying up tiny tech startups, hoping to snag the rights to stuff their own in-house research scientists haven’t invented.” He paused. “And one more thing. My friend in the Caymans was able to trace a few of the wire transfers.”
Jesus. And her guy at the DOJ had turned up nothing. She tried to conceal her excitement. “Tell me.”
“The money was sent from a shell company registered in the Channel Islands, a few seconds after it came in from Liechtenstein, from an Anstalt, a bearer-share company. Sort of a blind entity.”
“If it came from a company, does that mean the names of the true owners are on file somewhere?”
“That’s the tricky part. Anstalts are usually managed by an agent, often an attorney. They’re essentially dummy corporations that exist only on paper. An agent in Liechtenstein might manage thousands of them.”
“Was your friend able to get the name of the Anstalt’s agent?”
“I believe so, yes. Trouble is, barring torture, no agent will release information on any of the Anstalts he manages. They can’t afford to sabotage their reputation for discretion. But my friend’s working on it.”
She grinned. The guy was growing on her.
The phone rang.
She picked it up. “Navarro.”
“Anna, this is Walter Heisler. I have results for you.”
“Results?”
“On the gun that was dropped by the shooter in Hietzing. The prints you asked me to run. It matched a print, a digitized print, on file at Interpol. A Hans Vogler, ex-Stasi. Maybe he doesn’t expect to miss, or doesn’t expect us to be there, because he wears no gloves.”
Heisler’s information was nothing new, but the fingerprints would be a valuable piece of evidence.
“Fantastic. Walter, listen, I need to ask you another favor.”
“You don’t sound surprised,” Heisler said, miffed. “I said he was ex-Stasi, you understand? Former East German secret intelligence service.”
“Yes, Walter, I do understand, and I thank you. Very impressive.” She was being too brusque again, too businesslike, and she tried to soften her approach. “Thank you so much, Walter. And just one more thing …”
Wearily: “Yes?”
“One second.” She covered the phone’s mouthpiece and said to Ben, “You still haven’t reached Hoffman?”
“Not a word. No answer there—it’s bizarre.”
She removed her hand from the mouthpiece. “Walter, can you find out for me whatever you can about a private investigator in Vienna named Hans Hoffman?”
There was silence.
“Hello?”
“Yes, Anna, I am here. Why you ask about this Hans Hoffman?”
“I need some outside help here,” she replied, thinking quickly, “and his name was given to me—”
“Well, I think you may have to find someone else.”
“Why is that?”
“About an hour ago a call came in to the Sicherheitsbüro from an employee of a Berufsdetektiv named Hans Hoffman. The woman, an investigator in Hoffman’s office, came to work and discovered her boss dead. Shot at point-blank range in the forehead. And, curious—his right forefinger was cut off. Can this be the Hoffman you’re talking about?”
Ben had stared in disbelief when Anna told him what she’d learned. “Christ, it’s as if they’re always just one behind us, whatever we do,” he murmured.
“Maybe ‘ahead of us’ is the more accurate term.”
Ben massaged his temples with the fingertips of both hands, and at last he spoke in a quiet voice. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“How do you mean?”
“Sigma has obviously been killing its own. Those victims you’re trying to find—they all have something in common with me, a shared enemy. We’ve observed the pattern—frightened old men going into hiding in the twilight of their lives, living under aliases. It’s a virtual certainty that they have some idea what the hell’s going on. That means our only hope is to establish contact with someone on the list who’s still alive, who can talk. Someone with whom I can establish common ground, a conduit of sympathy, enlist his help for reasons of his own self-protection.”
Anna stood, paced the room. “That’s if there is anyone alive, Ben.”
He stared at her a long while, saying nothing, the resolve in his eyes wavering. She could tell that he longed to trust her every bit as fervently as she hoped she could trust him. Softly, hesitantly, he replied: “I have a feeling—it’s just a feeling, an educated guess—that there may be at least one still alive.”
“Who’s that?”
“A Frenchman named Georges Chardin.”
She nodded slowly. “Georges Chardin … I’ve seen the name on the Sigma list—but he’s actually been dead for four years.”
“But the fact that his name was in the Sigma files means Allen Dulles had him vetted for some reason.”
“Back in the fifties, yeah. But remember, most of these people have been dead for a long while. My focus was on the ones who had fallen victim to the recent spate of killings—or who were about to. Chardin isn’t in either category. And he’s not a founder, so he’s not on your incorporation document.” The Sigma list contains more names than just the original incorporators. She looked at Ben hard. “My question is, how did you know to ask about him? Are you holding out on me?”
Ben shook his head.
“We don’t have time to play games,” Anna said. “Georges Chardin—I know him as a name on paper. But he’s no one famous, no one I’d ever heard of. So what’s his significance?”
“The significance is his boss, a legendary French industrialist—a man who was one of the incorporators in the photo. A man named Émil
Ménard. In his time, one of the greatest corporate titans. Back in 1945 he was a grand old man; he’s long dead.”
“Him I know. He was the founder of Trianon, generally considered the first modern corporate conglomerate, correct?”
“Right. Trianon is one of the biggest industrial empires in France. Émil Ménard built Trianon into a French petrochemical giant that made even Schlumberger look like a five-and-dime.”
“And so this Georges Chardin worked for the legendary Émil Ménard?”
“Worked for him? He just about did his breathing for him. Chardin was his trusted lieutenant, aide-de-camp, factotum, whatever you want to call him. He wasn’t just Ménard’s right-hand man, he was practically his right hand. Chardin was hired in 1950 when he was only twenty, and in a few short years the greenhorn changed the way the cost of capital was accounted for, introduced a sophisticated new way of calculating return on investment, restructured the company accordingly. Way ahead of his time. A major figure.”
“In your world, maybe.”
“Granted. Point is, in very short order, the old man trusted his young protégé with everything, every detail in running his vast enterprise. After 1950, Émil Ménard didn’t go anywhere without Chardin. They say Chardin had all the firm’s ledgers memorized. He was a walking computer.” Ben produced the yellowed photograph of the Sigma group and placed it in front of Anna, pointing out Émil Ménard’s countenance. “What do you see?”
“Ménard looks pretty haggard, to tell the truth. Not well at all.”
“Correct. He was pretty seriously ill at that point. Spent the last decade of his life fighting cancer, though he was an incredibly formidable man right up until the end. But he died with the supreme confidence that his corporation would remain strong, continue to grow, because he had such a brilliant young Directeur General du Département des Finance—basically, his chief financial officer.”
“So you’re speculating that Ménard would have trusted Georges Chardin with the secret of the Sigma enterprise as well?”
“I’m virtually certain of it. No doubt Chardin was completely in the background. But he was Ménard’s shadow every step of the way. It’s inconceivable that Chardin wouldn’t have been completely privy to the
substance of Sigma, whatever its objectives and methods. And look at it from Sigma’s point of view: in order to stay alive, regardless of its true purpose, Sigma had to keep bringing in new recruits to replace the original founders. So Chardin is bound to have played a significant role, likely as a member of its inner council—Ménard would have made sure of that.”
“O.K., O.K., you’ve got me convinced,” Anna put in impatiently. “But where does that get us today? We already know Chardin died four years ago. You think he might have left files, papers, or something?”
“We’re told that Chardin died four years ago, sure. Right around the same time that my brother, Peter, arranged his fake death. What if he did something like what Peter did—arranged to disappear, go into hiding, escape the killers he knew were after him?”
“Come on, Ben! You’re making all sorts of assumptions, jumping to unwarranted conclusions!”
Ben replied patiently, “Your list indicated that he perished in a fire, right? The old ‘burned beyond recognition’ ruse? Like my brother? Sorry; won’t get fooled again.” He seemed to recognize the skepticism in her face. “Listen to me! You said it yourself. We have a string of old men who were killed presumably because somebody viewed them as a threat. Sigma, or its heirs or controllers. So let’s think this out: why might a bunch of old guys in the twilight of their lives be considered a serious enough threat to be murdered?” He stood up, began to pace. “You see, the mistake I was making all along was in viewing Sigma as merely a front organization, a false corporation—instead of a genuine one.”
“How do you mean?”
“It should have been so obvious! I can give you a hundred instances from my Wall Street days. In 1992, one guy ousted another rival to become the sole CEO of Time Warner, and his first order of business was what? To purge the hostiles from the board of directors. That’s what management does. You get rid of your adversaries!”
“But the Time Warner guy didn’t kill his opponents, I assume,” she said dryly.
“On Wall Street we have different techniques for eliminating enemies.” Ben gave a twisted smile. “But he eliminated them all the same. It’s what always happens when there’s an abrupt change in management.”
“So you’re suggesting there’s been a ‘change in management’ at Sigma.”
“Exactly. A purge of what you might call dissident trustees.”
“Rossignol, Mailhot, Prosperi, and the rest—you’re saying they were all dissidents? On the wrong side of the new management?”
“Something like that. And Georges Chardin was known to be brilliant. No doubt he saw it coming, and so he arranged to disappear.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. But it’s still all in the realm of wild speculation.”
“Not quite,” Ben said softly. He turned to face Anna directly. “Beginning with the time-honored principle ‘Follow the money,’ I hired a French investigator we’ve used before at Hartman Capital Management. A wizard named Oscar Peyaud. We’ve used him for due-diligence work in Paris, and every time he blows us away with the speed and quality of his work. And the size of his bill, but that’s another matter.”
“Thanks for keeping me in the loop about what you were doing,” Anna said with heavy sarcasm. “So much for being partners.”
“Listen to me. A man can’t live without some form of financial support. So I got to thinking, what would happen if you could track down the executor to Chardin’s estate—see in what form he left his assets, how he might have retained access to them.” He paused, took out a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. “An hour ago this arrived from Paris, from Oscar Peyaud.”
The page was blank except for a brief address:
Rogier Chabot
1554 rue des Vignoles
Paris 20
Anna looked up, at once puzzled and excited. “Chabot?”
“Georges Chardin’s alias, I would bet. I think we have our man. Now it’s just a matter of our getting to him before Sigma does.”
An hour later, the phone on Walter Heisler’s desk rang. A cycle of two short rings: an internal line. Heisler was drawing deep on a cigarette—he was working through the third pack of Casablancas of the day—when he picked up, and there was a two-second pause before he spoke: “Heisler.”
It was the tech from the small room on the fifth floor. “Did you get the bulletin on the American, Navarro?”
“What bulletin?” Heisler slowly let the warm smoke plume through his nostrils.
“Just came in.”
“Then it’s probably been sitting in the message center all morning.” The Sicherheitsbüro message center, operating with what he regarded as third-world inefficiency, was a bane of his existence. “What’s up, then? Or do I need to find out by listening to the news on the radio?” This was how he had taken to formulating the complaint. Once he really did find out the whereabouts of a fugitive from a local radio station, the messengers having misplaced the morning’s faxed bulletin somewhere en route to his desk.
“She’s a rogue, it seems. We’ve been used. The U.S. government has a warrant out for her. Not my department, but I thought somebody should give you a heads-up.”
“Christ!” Heisler said, and let his cigarette drop from his mouth into his mug of coffee, heard the quick sizzle of the quenched butt. “Shit! A fucking embarrassment.”
“Not so embarrassing if you’re the one who brings her in, eh?” the tech said carefully.
“Checking out of Room 1423,” Anna said to the harried-looking clerk at the front desk. She placed her two electronic key-cards on the black granite counter.
“One moment, please. If I can just have your signature on the final bill, ja?” The man was weary-looking, and fortyish, with slightly concave cheeks, and dirty-blond hair—dyed?—combed forward, flat against his skull, in a seeming attempt to simulate youth. He wore a crisp uniform jacket of some sort of brown synthetic, with slightly fraying epaulets. Anna had a sudden vision of him as she imagined he became after hours—dressed in black leather, heavily spritzed with musky cologne, haunting nightclubs where the dim light might help him get lucky with a schöne Mädchen.
“Of course,” Anna said.
“We hope you enjoyed your stay, Ms. Navarro.” He typed numbers on a keyboard, and then looked up at her, showing a toothy, yellow-tinged
smile. “Apologies. It’s going to take a few moments to bring the records up. A problem in the system. Computers, right?” He smiled wider, as if he had said something witty. “Wonderful labor-saving devices. When they work. Let me get the manager.” He picked up a red handset, and said a few words in German.
“What’s going on,” asked Ben, who was standing behind her.
“A computer problem, he says,” Anna murmured.
From behind the counter, a short, big-bellied man emerged in a dark suit and tie. “I’m the manager, and I’m so sorry for the delay,” the man said to her. He exchanged glances with the clerk. “A glitch. It’s going to take a few minutes to retrieve the records. Phone calls, all of that. We’ll get it for you soon, and then you can take a look and make sure it looks right. Wouldn’t want you billed for the phone calls in Room 1422. Sometimes happens with the new system. Miracle of modern technology.”
Something was wrong, and it wasn’t the computer system.
The manager was jovial and reassuring and effusive, and yet, despite the lobby’s slight chilliness, Anna noticed the beads of sweat on his forehead. “Come and sit in my office while we get this straightened out. Take a load off your feet, yes? You’re off to the airport, yes? You have transportation arranged? Why don’t you let the hotel car take you—our compliments. The least we can do for the inconvenience.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Anna said, thinking that she recognized the type well from her years of investigations—the type of person whom tension made talkative. The man was under orders to detain them. That much was clear.
“Not at all. Not at all. You come with me, and have a nice cup of coffee. Nobody makes it like the Viennese, yes?”
Most likely, he hadn’t been informed why, or whether they were dangerous. He must have been instructed to notify security, but security must not have arrived yet, or he wouldn’t be so anxious. She was checking out of the hotel prematurely. Which meant … well, there was more than one possibility. Perhaps she—he? they?—had only recently been targeted. In which case, preparations would not be fully in place.
“Listen,” she said. “Why don’t you just figure it out on your own time and send me the bill? No biggie, huh?”
“It will be just a few minutes,” the manager said, but he was not looking at her. Instead, he was making eye contact with a guard across the lobby.
Anna looked at her wristwatch ostentatiously. “Your cousins are going to be wondering what happened to us,” she said to Ben. “We’d better get a move on.”
The manager stepped around the counter, and placed a clammy hand on her arm. “In just a few minutes,” he said. Up close, he smelled unappetizingly of grilled cheese and hair oil.
“Get your hands off me,” Anna said in a tone of low menace. Ben was startled by the sudden steel in her voice.
“We can take you wherever you want to go,” the manager protested, in a tone that was more wheedling than threatening.
From across the lobby, the security guard was reducing the distance between him and them with long, fast strides.
Anna hoisted her garment bag over her shoulder and headed for the front door. “Follow me,” she said to Ben.
The two made their way quickly toward the entrance. The lobby guard, she knew, would have to confer with the manager before pursuing them outside of the building.
On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, she looked around carefully. At the end of the block, she saw a police officer speaking into a walkie-talkie, presumably giving his location. Which meant that he was likely the first on the scene.
She tossed her bag to Ben, and headed straight over to the policeman.
“Christ, Anna!” Ben snapped.
Anna stopped the policeman, and spoke to him in a loud, official-sounding voice. “You speak English?”
“Yes,” the cop said uncertainly. “English, yes.” He was crew-cut, athletic, and seemed to be in his late twenties.
“I’m with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Anna said. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, do you understand? The FBI. We’re looking for an American fugitive from justice, and I’ve got to ask for your help. The woman’s name is Anna Navarro.” She flashed her OSI badge quickly while holding his gaze; he would see it without really looking at it.
“You say Anna Navarro,” the policeman said with recognition and relief. “Yes. We’ve been notified. In the hotel, yes?”
“She’s barricaded herself in her room,” Anna said. “Fourteenth floor. Room 1423. And she’s traveling with someone, right?”
The policeman shrugged. “Anna Navarro is the name we have,” he said.
Anna nodded. It was an important piece of information. “I’ve got two agents in place, all right? But as observers. We can’t act on Austrian territory. It’s up to you. I’m going to ask you to take the service entrance, on the side of the building, and make your way to the fourteenth floor. Are you O.K. with that?”
“Yes, yes,” the policeman said.
“And spread the word, O.K.?”
He nodded eagerly. “We’ll get her for you. Austria is, how do you say, a law-and-order place, yes?”
Anna shot him his warmest smile. “We’re counting on you.”
A few minutes later, Ben and Anna were in a taxicab en route to the airport.
“That was pretty ballsy,” Ben said quietly. “Going up to the cop that way.”
“Not really. Those are my people. I figured they’d just got word, or they would have been better prepared. Which means they had no idea what I look like. All they know is that they’re looking for an American, on behalf of the Americans. No way of knowing whether I’m the one to pursue or the one in pursuit.”
“When you put it that way …” Ben shook his head. “But why are they after you anyway?”
“I haven’t exactly figured it out, yet. I do know that somebody’s been spreading the word that I’ve gone rogue. Selling state secrets or whatever. The question is who, and how, and why.”
“Sounds to me like Sigma is going through channels. Using real police through manipulation.”
“Does, doesn’t it?”
“This is not good,” Ben said. “The idea that we’re going to have every cop in Europe on our ass, on top of whatever psycho-killers Sigma has on the payroll—it’s going to put a crimp in the game plan.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Anna said.
“We’re dead.”
“That’s a little harsh.” Anna shrugged. “How about we approach this thing one step at a time?”
“How?”
“Ben Hartman and Anna Navarro are going to book a flight from Graz, about a hundred and fifty kilometers south, to Munich.”
“And what are we going to do in Munich?”
“We’re not going to Munich. The thing is, I already put a trace on your credit cards. That’s a genie I can’t put back in the bottle. You use any card under your name, and it’s going to sound an immediate alarm in Washington and God knows what branch offices we’ve got.”
“So we’re screwed.”
“So we use that. I need you to focus, Ben. Look, your brother prepared travel documents for him and Liesl, in case they needed to take off incognito. As far as we know, the IDs are still good, and the credit card ought to be functional. John and Paula Freedman are going to book tickets from Vienna on the next available flight to Paris. Replacing Liesl’s photo with mine won’t be a problem. A couple of generic-looking Americans, among tens of thousands who come in and out of the airport every day.”
“Right,” Ben said. “Right. I’m sorry, Anna. I’m not thinking clearly. But there are still risks, aren’t there?”
“Of course there are. Whatever we do has risks. But if we leave now, the chances are good that they’re not going to have photographs in place, and they’re not looking for Mr. and Mrs. Freedman. The main thing is to stay calm and stay smart. Ready to improvise, if need be.”
“Sure,” Ben said, but he didn’t sound it.
She looked at him. He somehow seemed young, younger than he’d been; the cockiness was gone, and he needed, she sensed, some reassurance. “After all you’ve been through, I know you’re not going to lose your head. You haven’t yet. And right now, that’s probably the most important thing.”
“Getting to Chardin is the most important thing.”
“We’ll get to him,” Anna said, gritting her teeth in resolve. “We’ll get to him.”
Matthias Deschner pressed both hands to his face, hoping for a moment of clarity in the darkness. One of the credit cards that Liesl’s boyfriend
had, through his offices, established and maintained, had finally been put to use. The call was pro forma: because the account had not been used in quite some time, it fell to a clerk in a credit-security department somewhere to place a call and ascertain that the card had not gone missing.
Peter had provided for the automatic payment of the annual fee; the name, telephone number, and mailing address involved a corporate entity that Matthias had set up for him; all communications went to Deschner, as its legal representative. Deschner had felt quite uncomfortable with the whole thing—it seemed legally dubious, to say the least—but Liesl implored him for his help, and, well, he had done what he had done. In retrospect, he should have run, run in the opposite direction. Deschner believed himself to be an honorable man, but he had never had illusions of heroism.
Now a dilemma had arisen for a second time in a matter of days. Damn that Ben Hartman. Damn both the Hartman boys.
Deschner wanted to keep his word to Peter and Liesl—wanted to even though they both were now dead. But they were dead, and with it his oath. And there were now larger considerations.
His own survival, for one.
Bernard Suchet, at the Handelsbank, was too smart to have believed him when he said he’d been completely ignorant of what Peter Hartman was involved in. In truth, it was more a case of not wanting to know, of believing that what he did not know could not hurt him.
That was no longer true.
The more he thought about it, the angrier he became.
Liesl was a lovely girl—he got a lump in his throat when he thought about the necessary past tense—but it had been wrong of her, all the same, to have involved him in her affairs. It was an abuse of familial loyalties, was it not? He imagined himself carrying on a conversation, an argument, really, with his deceased cousin. It was wrong of her, so very wrong. He never wanted any part of her crusade. Had she any idea of the position she put him in?
Her words returned to him: We need your help. That is all. There is nobody else we can turn to. Deschner remembered the luminous clarity of her blue eyes, like a deep reservoir of alpine water, eyes whose righteousness seemed to expect equal righteousness in everyone else.
Deschner felt the beginnings of a throbbing headache. The young
woman had asked for too much, that was all. Probably of the world, and certainly of him.
She had made enemies of an organization that murdered people with the simple indifference of a meter maid dispensing parking tickets. Now Liesl was dead, and it seemed quite possible that she would take him with her.
They would learn that the card had been activated. And then they would learn that Dr. Matthias Deschner had himself been notified of this fact but failed to report it. Soon there would be no more Dr. Matthias Deschner. He thought of his daughter, Alma, who in just two months would be getting married. Alma had talked about how much she was looking forward to walking down the aisle with her father by her side. He swallowed hard and imagined Alma walking down the aisle alone. No, it could not be. It would be not just reckless but actively selfish of him.
The throbbing behind his eyes was undiminished. He reached into his desk drawer, removed a bottle of Panadol, and dry-swallowed a bitter, chalky tablet.
He looked at the clock.
He would report the credit activation call. But not immediately. He would wait for several hours to pass. Then he would call.
The tardiness could be easily explained, and they would be grateful for his having volunteered the information. Surely they would.
And just maybe the delay would give the Hartman boy a running start. A few more hours on this earth, anyway. He owed him that much, Deschner decided, but perhaps no more.