But if she was a follower, that was about as much as I could deduce. A follower employed by whom? By those in the CIA Truslow had warned of, the so-called Wise Men? Or by people associated with Vladimir Orlov-who knew of the existence of the gold and knew that I was on its trail?
They-her employers-knew I’d gone into the Bank of Zurich. Knew I’d emerged empty-handed…
Empty-handed, yes, but with a solid morsel of knowledge now. The name of a German in Munich who had been the recipient of some five billion dollars.
Now it was my turn.
“Mol,” I said as quietly as I could. “You have to get out of here.”
“What-”
“Keep your voice down. Act as if nothing’s wrong.” I smiled, as if at some witticism. “We have company. I want you to leave.”
“But where?” she asked, frightened.
“Go grab our bags from the left-luggage claim near the main train station,” I whispered, and thought for a second. “Then go to the Baur-au-Lac, on Talstrasse. Every cabbie in Switzerland knows where it is. There’s a restaurant there called the Grillroom. I’ll meet you there.” I handed my leather portfolio to her. “Take this with you.”
“But what if-”
“Move!”
Frantically, she whispered in reply: “You’re in no shape to handle anything dangerous, Ben. Your hands-your dexterity-”
“Go!”
She glared at me, then without warning turned and stormed down the street. It was a clever piece of playacting; an observer would think we had had a tiff, so natural was Molly’s reaction.
The redhead looked up sharply from her newspaper, her eyes following Molly, turning to me, then returning to the paper. Clearly she had decided to stay with me, her chief quarry.
Good.
Suddenly I spun around and vaulted down the street. In my peripheral vision I could see that the red-haired woman had dropped her newspaper and, abandoning all subtlety and pretense, was running after me.
Just up ahead was a narrow, alleylike service street, into which I abruptly turned. From Barengasse behind me I heard shouts, and the woman’s footsteps. I flattened myself against a brick wall, saw the red-headed woman in the olive suit lunge into the alley after me, saw her draw a gun, and I pulled out my Glock and fired off a round at the woman.
There was a groan, an exhalation. The woman grimaced, spun awkwardly forward, then regained her balance. I had shot her somewhere in the upper leg, the thigh perhaps, and now without a moment’s pause I leapt forward, firing away at her, no, not directly at her, really, but around her, circumscribing her head and shoulders, and momentarily thrown off balance, she contorted her body, twisting left and right, then, regaining her center of gravity, she leveled her gun at me, aiming for just an instant too long, and-
– her hand snapped open as a round from my gun sank into her wrist, and her gun clattered to the floor, and then, in one headlong rush I was upon her, slamming her to the pavement, my elbow smashing into her throat, pinning her down with my left hand.
For a moment she was still.
She had been wounded, in her thigh and her wrist, and the blood had soaked darkly through the olive silk fabric in several places.
But she was immensely strong, for all that, and of wiry build, and she reared up with a sudden surge of strength, almost knocking me off balance, until my right elbow cracked once against the cartilage in her throat.
The woman was actually younger than she had earlier appeared, perhaps in her early twenties, and she was a woman of extraordinary strength.
With one swift, sure motion, I grabbed her gun-it was a small Walther-and stuck it in the breast pocket of my suit.
Thus disarmed, and obviously in great pain, the would-be assassin moaned, a low, guttural animal sound, and I turned my pistol toward her, aiming precisely between her eyes.
“This gun holds sixteen rounds,” I said very quietly to her. “I fired off five. That leaves eleven.”
Her eyes widened, but in fiery defiance, not fear.
“I will not hesitate to kill you,” I said. “I assume you believe me, but if you don’t, it’s of no serious concern. I will kill you because I have to, to protect myself and others. But for the moment I would rather not.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, as if conceding.
I could hear sirens now, growing louder, almost here. Did she think the arrival of the Swiss police would provide her with the opportunity to escape?
But I remained poised to fire, knowing that this woman was a professional and was probably possessed of a homicidal courage, and was surely being paid an enormous amount of money for her valor besides.
She would do almost anything. But she would, I calculated, rather not die if she did not have to. It is a human instinct, and even this killer had human instincts.
I had to move her as far away from the street as possible, so that neither of us could be seen. “Now,” I said, “I want you to get slowly to your feet. Then I want you to turn around and walk slowly. I will direct you. If you make the mistake of doing anything I haven’t instructed you to do, I will not hesitate to fire.”
I pulled back, lifted my elbow from her now-bruised throat, and, the Glock aimed steadily at the center of her forehead, watched as she very slowly, and in obvious pain, struggled to stand.
Then she spoke her first word to me. “Don’t,” she said in an accent of indeterminate European origin.
“Turn,” I replied.
She turned around slowly, and I did a quick body search with my free hand. I found nothing, no second gun or even a knife.
“Now, move,” I said, shoving the gun against the back of her head, prodding her to move faster.
When we had come to a dark, deserted alcove toward the end of the block, I shoved her suddenly into it, keeping the Glock trained on the back of her head. Then I said, “Face me.”
She turned slowly. Her face was set in a look of dour recalcitrance. Up close, it was a square, even mannish face, but not unattractive. She took pains with her appearance, whether out of vanity or out of concern for her cover. She wore eyeliner of deep blue and eye shadow of a very pale blue mixed with a barely detectable glitter. Her round, pouting lips had been carefully painted with crimson lipstick.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She said nothing. There was a slight twitch below her left eye, but apart from that, her face remained frozen.
“You’re in no position to hold out,” I said.
Her left cheek twitched, but her eyes regarded me with boredom.
“Who hired you?” I said.
Nothing.
“Ah, a genuine professional,” I said. “They’re so scarce these days. You must have been paid a great deal.”
A twitch; silence.
“Who’s the blond man?” I persisted. “The pale one.”
More silence.
She glanced at me, as if about to speak, then off into the distance. She was quite good, really, at concealing her fear.
For a moment I considered threatening her again, and then I remembered that there were other ways to learn what I wanted to learn. Other resources; other talents. I had forgotten the very thing that had brought me here.
The gun pointed steadily between her eyes, I moved closer.
I was at once greeted by that flow of indistinct sound I’d grown to recognize, that jumble of syllables and noises, but it was, strangely, what I now know to be the “audible” thoughts of someone who was not in fear. And in a language I did not recognize.
Her left cheek was twitching out of tension, but not out of fear, an emotion we experience quite differently. This woman had been shoved into a dark alcove with a semiautomatic weapon pointed directly at her, and yet she was not afraid.
There were various drugs the clandestine people administer their agents to keep them calm and collected, a veritable pharmacopoeia of beta-blockers and anxiolytics and such that over the years had been found to keep field agents calm yet focused. Perhaps this woman was under the influence of something like that. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was preternaturally calm, one of those peculiar human specimens, sociopaths or whatever they are, who do not experience fear the way the rest of us do, and who are therefore eminently suitable for their strange line of work. She had capitulated to me not out of fear, but out of a very rational calculus. She planned, I would bet, to surprise me at a moment when my defenses were relaxed.