will not take me alive!"
"There are far easier ways, if that's what we wanted to do. Please, let us in let us speak with you, if only for a minute. You can keep your weapon trained on us."
"For what purpose do you want to speak with me?"
"We need your help in defeating them."
A pause. Then a short, sharp bark of derisive laughter. "In defeating Sigma? You cannot! Until just now I thought one could only hide. How did you find me?"
"Through some damned clever investigative work. But you have my utmost admiration: You did a good job covering your tracks, I must say. A damned good job. It's hard to relinquish control of family property. I understand that. So you used a fictio juris. Remote agency. Well designed. But then you've always been a brilliant strategic thinker. It wasn't for nothing that you got to be Trianon's Directeur General du Departement des Finance."
Another long silence, followed by the scrape of a chair from inside the apartment. Was Chardin preparing to show his face after all? Ben glanced down the hall apprehensively, saw Anna carefully sliding one foot after another along the ledge while clinging to the parapet with both hands. Her hair blew in the wind. Then she was out of his line of sight.
He had to distract Chardin, keep him from noticing Anna's appearance at his window. He had to keep Chardin's attention.
"What is it you want from me?" came Chardin's voice. His tone seemed neutral now. He was listening; that was the first step.
"Monsieur Chardin, we have information that could be invaluable to you. We know a great deal about Sigma, about the inheritors, the new generation that has seized control. The only protection for either of us is in knowledge."
"There is no protection against them, you fool!"
Ben raised his voice. "Goddamn it! Your rationality was once legendary. If you've lost that, Chardin, then they've won anyway! Can't you see how unreasonable you're being?" In a gentler tone, he added, "If you send us away, you'll always wonder what you might have learned. Or perhaps you'll never have the opportunity "
Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking from inside the apartment, followed immediately by a loud crash and a clatter.
Had Anna made it through a window into Chardin's apartment safely? A few seconds later he heard Anna's voice, loud and clear. "I've got his shotgun! And it's trained on him now." She obviously spoke for Chardin's benefit as well as Ben's.
Ben strode toward the open door and entered the still-darkened room. It was hard to see anything but shapes; when his eyes adjusted, after a few seconds, he made out Anna, dimly outlined against a thick curtain, holding the long-barreled gun.
And a man in a peculiar, heavy robe with a cowl rose slowly, shakily to his feet. He did not appear to be a vigorous man; he was indeed a shut-in.
It was plain what had happened. Anna, plunging through the window, had leaped onto the long, ungainly shotgun, pinioning it to the floor; the impact must have knocked him over.
For a few moments, all three of them stood in silence. Chardin's breathing was audible heavy, nearly agonal, his face shadowed within his cowl.
Watching carefully to make sure Chardin didn't have another weapon concealed in the folds of his monk like garment, Ben fumbled for a light switch. When the lights went on, Chardin abruptly turned away from them both, facing the wall. Was Chardin reaching for another gun?
"Freeze!" Anna shouted.
"Use your vaunted powers of reason, Chardin," Ben said. "If we wanted to kill you, you'd already be dead. That's obviously not why we're here!"
"Turn and face us," Anna commanded.
Chardin was silent for a moment. "Be careful of what you ask for," he rasped.
"Now, dammit!"
Moving as if in slow motion, Chardin complied and when Ben's mind grasped the reality of what he saw, his stomach heaved and he nearly retched. Nor could Anna disguise her shocked intake of breath. It was a horror beyond imagining.
They were staring into an almost featureless mass of scar tissue, wildly various in texture. In areas it appeared crenellated, almost scalloped; in other areas, the proud flesh was smooth and nearly shiny, as if lacquered or covered in plastic wrap. Naked capillaries made the oval that had once been his face an angry, beefy red, except where varicosities yielded coils of dark purple. The staring, filmy gray eyes looked startlingly out of place two large marbles left on a slick blacktop by a