International Netherlands Group Bank. Which you perhaps once knew as Nederlandsche Middenstandsbank."
"What can you tell me about it?"
"Beautiful new central office in Amsterdam. So energy-efficient, nobody can bear to work there. Second-largest bank in country. And Amsterdam women - the most beautiful women in the whole world."
"Grigori," Janson began.
"You must meet Gretchen. Play around-the-world with Gretchen, I guarantee you'll rack up frequent flier miles on your back. Or hers. Gretchen is friend of Grigori. Friend of all weary travelers. Out calls only, but very reasonable prices. You tell her you are friend of Grigori. I give you her number. Easier to remember than wire transfer codes to ING. Ha!"
"I'm not convinced we've hit a wall here. If you can identify the bank, can't you narrow it even further?"
"Very difficult," said Grigori, biting cautiously into his scone, as if it might bite back. In a tone of troubled confession, he said, "Cook not really make scones. Cook say she makes scones. I know she buy premade from Sainsbury's. One day I saw plastic shrink-wrap in the bin, so, so. So bag is out of cat. I not say anything. Everyone must feel they have victory, or nobody happy."
"Let's focus on making me happy. You said getting account info would be difficult. 'Difficult' doesn't mean impossible. Or is there somebody else you'd recommend for the job?"
His bearlike host looked injured. "Nothing impossible for Grigori Berman." He glanced warily around him, then spooned a generous amount of strawberry jam into his cup of tea and stirred. "Must not let butler see," he said in a low voice. "This Russian way. Mr. French would not understand. It would shock him."
Janson rolled his eyes. Poor Grigori Berman: a prisoner of his household staff. "I'm running out of time, I'm afraid," he said.
With a hangdog look, Berman stood and padded heavily back to the RS/6000 workstation. "This very boring," he said, like an overgrown child dragged away from his toys and forced to work on his multiplication tables. Meanwhile, Janson established a direct connection with the Bank of Mont Verde via his tri-band PDA.
Fifteen minutes later, Berman, sweating with concentration, suddenly looked up and turned around. "All done." He saw the device in Janson's hand. "You change private key now?"
Janson pressed a button and did precisely that.
"Thank God!" He sprang to his feet. "Otherwise I break down and do the bad, bad thing - today, tomorrow, next month, in middle of night while sleepwalking! Who can say when? To have private key and not put to personal use would be like ... " He adjusted his trousers.
"Yes, Grigori," Janson interjected smoothly, "I've got the general idea. Now talk to me. What have we found out about the payer?"
"Is great joke," Berman said, smiling.
"How do you mean?" Janson demanded, suddenly alert.
"I traced the originating account. Very difficult, even with sardine key. Required nonreusable back-door codes - burned through valuable property to push through. Just like American pop song, 'What I Did for Love,' da?" He hummed a few bars as Janson glared. Then he reverted to the matter at hand. "Reversed asymmetric algorithm. Data-mining software go on hunt for pattern, search out signal buried in noise. Very difficult ... "
"Grigori, my friend, I don't need the War and Peace version of this. Cut to the chase, please."
Berman shrugged, slightly miffed. "Powerful computer program does digital equivalent of triathlon competition, Olympic level, no East German steroids to help, but still identified originating account."
Janson's pulse began to race. "You are a wizard."
"And all a great joke," Berman repeated.
"What are you saying?"
Berman's smile grew wider. "Man who pay you to kill Peter Novak? Is Peter Novak."
As he arrived with his small convoy at the training camp, Ahmad Tabari felt a glimmering of relief. Traveling hopefully, he had long known, was overrated. Despite the many hours he had spent in a meditative trance, it had been a long journey and felt like one. The Caliph had made his way first by air to Asmara, in Eritrea. No one would have expected to find the head of the Kagama Liberation Front there. Then he had taken a highspeed boat north along the Red Sea coast to land in the Nubian deserts of northern Sudan. A few hours after landing, his Sudanese guides had taken him on the long and bumpy tracks through the desert, up to the camp near the Eritrean border. Mecca was only a few hundred kilometers to the north, Medina only the same distance farther. It pained him to