the Ghost's high-handed way with information filled her with frustration and a deep sense of unease. She studied the man's face, half-admiring its complete opacity. What precisely did he know? What wasn't he telling her?
And why?
Chapter Eleven
St. Gallen, Switzerland
Ben Hartman had spent the last two days traveling. From New York to Paris. From Paris to Strasbourg. At Strasbourg he had taken a short commuter flight to Mulhouse, France, near the borders of Germany and Switzerland. There he had hired a car to drive him to the regional Aero port Basel-Mulhouse, very close to Basel.
But instead of crossing into Switzerland, which was the logical point of entry, he instead chartered a small plane to take him to Liechtenstein. Neither the charter operator nor the pilot had asked him any questions. Why would an apparently prosperous-looking international businessman be seeking to enter the duchy of Liechtenstein, one of the world's centers of money-laundering, in a manner that was undetectable, and frankly irregular, avoiding official border crossings? The code among them was understood: don't ask.
By the time he had arrived in Liechtenstein, it was almost one in the morning. He spent the night in a small pension outside Vaduz, and then set off in the morning to find a pilot who would be willing to cross the Swiss border, in such a way that his name would appear on no manifests or passenger lists.
In Liechtenstein, the plumage of an international businessman-the Kiton double-breasted suit, the Hermes tie, and the Charvet shirt-was protective coloration, nothing more. The duchy distinguished sharply among insiders and outsiders, among those who had something of value to offer and those who had not, among those who belonged and those who did not. It was emblematic of its clannishness that foreigners who sought to become citizens had to be approved by both the parliament and the prince.
Ben Hartman knew his way around places like these. In the past, that fact had filled him with moral unease, his permanent, ineradicable air of privilege burning like the mark of Cain. Now it was merely a tactical advantage to be exploited. Twenty kilometers south of Vaduz was an airstrip where businessmen with private jets and helicopters sometimes disembarked. There he had a conversation with a gruff, older member of the ground maintenance crew, referring to his requirements in terms that were both vague and unmistakable. A man of few words, he looked Ben over and scrawled a phone number on the back of a manifest ledger. Ben tipped him generously for the recommendation, though when he called the number, he reached a groggy-sounding man who begged off, saying he had another job today. He did, however, have a friend, Gaspar Another call. It was afternoon before he finally met with Caspar, a dyspeptic middle-aged man, who sized Ben up quickly and spelled out his exorbitant terms. In truth, the pilot made a handsome living flying businessmen over the border into Switzerland without leaving a trace in the computers. There were times when certain drug lords or African potentates or Middle Eastern operators needed to do some banking in both countries without the authorities watching. The pilot, who seemed to wear a perpetual sneer, assumed that Ben was up to something similar. Half an hour later, preparing for their departure, Caspar had learned of a storm over St. Gallen and wanted to cancel the flight, but several more hundred-dollar bills had persuaded him otherwise.
As the light twin-engine propeller plane bounced through the turbulence over the eastern Alpine ranges, the taciturn pilot became almost voluble. "There's a saying where I come from. Es 1st besser reich zu leben, a/5 reich zu sterben." He chuckled. "It's better to live rich than to die rich ..."
"Just fly," Ben said dully.
He wondered whether his precautions were overly elaborate, but the truth was that he had no idea what the reach was of the people who had murdered his brother, or who had assigned the man he'd known as Jimmy Cavanaugh to try to kill him in Zurich. And he did not intend to make things easy for them.
In St. Gallen, Ben had hitched a ride with a farmer delivering vegetables to the markets and restaurants. The farmer surveyed him with bafflement; Ben explained that his car had broken down in the middle of nowhere. Later on, he rented a car and drove to the remote farming community of Mettlenberg. If the flight had been bumpy, the drive wasn't much better. The rain poured down, sheeting the windshield of