The lane had gone completely dark, its target and hostage figures fixed in position. A lighted red sign high on the back wall was blinking the words:
AUTO TIMEOUT
Ricci slowly lowered the gun and slid it into his leather.
“Yeah,” he said. “Done.”
Quiet hung over the room, as rife in the air as the smell of discharged ammunition.
“Tom, we need to talk,” Nimec said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Here’s fine.”
“It might be better to do our old usual tonight. Sit down in my pool room over a couple of Cokes.”
“Here’s fine,” Ricci repeated, his tone no more expressive than his features.
Nimec almost felt as if he’d phoned one of those automated customer service lines and gotten stuck on the starting option. He studied the rough, jutting angles of Ricci’s face and shrugged.
“There’s some general stuff I’d like to cover,” he said. “With me going to Africa, it’ll be you in charge—”
“And Thibodeau,” Ricci said. “He’ll make sure I remember to pull the store gate at night.”
Nimec inhaled, exhaled.
“Thought I rated better than that sort of comment,” he said. “You were gone a long time. I know what it took for you to leave. How much it took out of you to come back without finding our man. But we have to put it away for now. Move on.”
Ricci nodded, seeming to look straight past Nimec at some point several feet behind him.
“Sure,” he said in his null, automatic tone. “Got anything to mention besides?”
Nimec considered whether to push ahead. Though Ricci had returned from his alligator hunt three months ago, it mostly felt as if he were still elsewhere. And that sense of his continued absence just intensified when you tried stepping close to him.
Finally Nimec shook his head.
“Maybe later,” he said, and glanced at his wristwatch. It was almost eight P.M. “I’m driving on over to HQ. There’re lots of odds and ends that need wrapping up before my trip, and I might as well get some things done while the building’s quiet. You want to stay, work in some more practice, that’s fine with me. I won’t worry about you pulling the gate afterward.”
Ricci stood without moving and watched as Nimec turned to leave the room.
“Pete,” he said.
Nimec paused near the door, looked at him.
Ricci nodded toward his darkened shooting lane.
“I’ve got a question,” he said. “Strictly about procedure.”
“Go ahead.”
“That hostage situation before the timeout,” Ricci said. “If you’re in my place when it comes up, how would you handle it?”
Nimec thought about it a second, then shrugged again.
“Hope to God I never have to find out,” he said.
The personal ads appeared on the first Thursday of every month in newspapers throughout Europe. Although each entry was different from the preceding month’s, its content would be identical to those printed on the same date in various countries and languages. In Italy the personals ran in l’Unita. In Germany, Die Zeit. The London Times carried them in Great Britain, Liberation in France, El Mundo in Spain, and De Standaard in Belgium. Because Cyrillic script had to be avoided out of practicality, the ads were placed in English versions of Hungarian, Czech, and Russian papers — the Budapest Sun, Prague Post, and Moscow Times, respectively. Also for practical reasons, the Greek daily chosen to print them was the German-language Athener Zeitung. As in eastern European nations, the character sets unique to Greece’s alphabet would interfere with a consistent application of the simple code embedded within the messages. And a code without fixed rules amounted to no code at all.
For some time now the recipient of these secret contacts had rented a luxury suite in a restored nineteenth-century home on the Gran Vía in central Madrid. Built as a manor for relatives of the second Bourbon Restoration king, Alfonso XII, it was now occupied by an apartment hotel of four-star excellence and high discretion, appropriately named La Casa Real — The Royal House. This was the busiest part of the city, and he had once explored the idea of settling into the quieter but equally lavish Barrio de Salamanca east of downtown. Both had residences to his liking, and cost was not a factor. His sole concern about Gran Vía had been the dangerous number of eyes that might slip onto him. In the end, however, his instincts snarled at the soft faces of the pijos, or children of affluence, who dallied in the bars and cafés of the latter neighborhood, and he had decided it would be better to hide in full view at the city’s center than to hear their bleating voices and smell the mother’s-milk stink coming off their pores.
La Casa Real held a further advantage of convenience for him. It was a short walk west to the green line Metro station or east to the Iglesia de San Jose on Calle de Alcalá. Past the church on that same street was the circular Plaza de Cibelles, where its statue of the Roman fertility goddess Cybele — known as Rhea to the Greeks — sat in her stone chariot hitched to stone lions on a stone island from which her naked stone cherubs, their forever-young, never-innocent faces bloated like the faces of dying cats, poured their bowls of water into the surrounding fountain pool. There at the lower rim of the fountain he could bear right into Paseo del Prado and then cross the green toward the great old art museum, where he would admire Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death in its ground-floor Flemish gallery, only paces beyond the Puerta de Goya entrance.
These past days as September rain clouds arrived to douse the summer heat, he had been drawn to another destination at the corner of Calle del Arenal and Calle de los Boradores, in the ancient district north and west of Gran Vía — Iglesia de San Ginés, whose bell tower struck its Sunday calls to worship mere hours after the Joy Eslava discotheque in its shadow had its last call for drinks, and the Saturday-night crowds that flung heatedly across its dance floor emptied, staggering and shuffling, onto the streets. With the lens of his digital camera, he had photographed the church from every angle to capture its solid ledges and brickwork, the architectural repetitions that hinted at that deep-rooted Moorish tendency to hold fast, the forceful and domineering thrust of the tower’s spire. Back in his suite, he had used the images for detailed reference as he sketched out plans for a wooden scale model of the church.
Without any previous experience, Kuhl had scrupulously crafted three such models during his extended hibernation. The gothic Saint Jean Cathedral of Lyon was his first; if his goal was to task himself, he would move with audacity to capture a resplendent citadel of heaven, an archbishop’s throne. The next church he had built was the Basilica of Santa Croce, where the bones of Galileo, the seeker of answers accused of heresy, and Machiavelli, the seeker of power banished for conspiracy, lay entombed. His most recently completed model was the Church of Saint Thomas, in Austria. The small, severe building was a relatively undemanding bit of work for him, but he had known that in advance, having mastered his woodcraft long before the project was undertaken. And the church’s cloistered austerity had seemed a perfect expression of his circumstances as one year of withdrawal and cover made a slow passage into another.
A man who hungered for action, Siegfried Kuhl had needed to remain dormant. It was an adaptation that ran against his innermost grain, and he had often thought of surfacing to face the Sword operative whose seething cathexis of revenge had made his pursuit of Kuhl a constant threat. But Kuhl had been advanced a handsome sum to vanish from the face of the earth, with additional payments of one million dollars a year deposited to a numbered Swiss account in monthly installments. A soldier of fortune by self-definition, he was bound to honor this contract — and his sponsor’s exceptional reach of imagination, his resourcefulness, was no less an inducement than the monetary retainer. There was in him nothing of the mediocre or the common. His mannered delicacy en-framed a hot rebellion against the boot of order that Kuhl recognized and found impressive. While the payments toward their unwritten agreement continued, he would stay out of sight, and attempt to stanch the dreams of combat bleeding into his mind.