the back of the house, as the sirens grew louder.
Crawl, don't walk. The Architect knew that the effort to maintain orthostatic blood pressure in his head would be made much more difficult by standing erect, when there was as yet no absolute need to do so. It was a rational decision, and his ability to make it was almost as reassuring as the Clock he had retained in an ankle holster.
The front door was open, the hallway deserted. He crawled, in a standard infantry crawl, indifferent to the wide smear of blood he was leaving as his shirt front draped against the blond flooring. Every yard seemed like a mile to him. But he would not be deterred.
You're the best. He was seventeen, and the drill instructor told him so, in front of the entire battalion. You're the best. He was twenty-three, and his commanding officer at Stasi had said so in an official report that he showed young Hans before forwarding it to his superior. You're the best. These words from the head of his Stasi directorate: he had just returned from a "hunting trip" in West Berlin, having dispatched four physicists-members of an internationally distinguished team from the University of Leipzig-who had defected the day before. You're the best a top-level Sigma official, a white-haired American in flesh-toned glasses, had spoken those words to him. It was after he had stage-managed the death of a prominent Italian leftist, shooting him from across the street while the man was in the throes of passion with a fifteen-year-old Somali whore. But he would hear those words again. And again. Because they were true.
And because they were true, he would not give up. He would not succumb to the nearly overpowering urge to surrender, to sleep, to stop.
With robotic precision, he moved hand and knee and propelled himself down the hallway.
Finally, he found himself in a spacious, double-height room, its walls lined with books. Lizardlike eyes surveyed the area. His primary target was not present. A disappointment, not a surprise.
Instead, there was the wheezing, sweating weakling Strasser, a traitor who, too, was deserving of death.
How many more minutes of consciousness did the Architect have left? He eyed Strasser avidly, as if extinguishing his light might help to restore his own.
Shakily, he rose from the floor into a marksman's crouch. He felt muscles in his body trying to spasm, but he held his arms completely still. The small Clock in his arms had now acquired the weight of a cannon, yet somehow he managed to raise the firearm until it was at the precisely correct angle.
It was at that moment that Strasser, perhaps alerted by the old-penny odor of blood, finally became aware of his presence.
The Architect watched the raisin-like eyes widen momentarily, then fall closed. Squeezing the trigger was like lifting a desk with one finger, but he would do so. Did so.
Or did he?
When he failed to hear the gun's report, he first worried that he had not executed his mission. Then he realized that it was his sensory awareness that was beginning to shut down.
The room was swiftly darkening: he knew that brain cells starved of oxygen ceased to function-that the aural and optical functions shut down first, but that sentience itself would soon follow.
He waited until he saw Strasser hit the ground before he allowed his own eyes to close. As they did so, there was a fleeting awareness that his eyes would never open again; and then there was no awareness of anything at all.
Back in the hotel room, Ben and Anna rifled through a stack of papers that they'd hurriedly purchased at a newsstand on the way. Chardin had referred to an imminent development. And the "fancy-dress forum" in Austria that Strasser had mentioned chimed with an item they'd recently come across: but what was it?
The answer was within their grasp.
It was Anna who came across the item in El phi's, Argentina's leading newspaper. It was another brief article about the International Children's Health Forum a convocation of world leaders to discuss matters of pressing mutual concern, especially with respect to the developing world. But what caught her eye this time was the city where the meeting was to be held: Vienna, Austria.
She read on. There was a list of sponsors among them, the Lenz Foundation. Translating from the Spanish, she read the article out loud to Ben.
A shiver ran down his spine. "My God," he said. "This is it! It has to be. Chardin said