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