“What do you know,” I asked, “about a German assassin code-named Max?”
“Describe him.”
I did.
“The Albino,” Sinclair replied immediately. “That’s what we used to call him. Real name is Johannes Hesse. Hesse was the Stasi’s leading wet-work specialist until the day the Berlin Wall came down.”
“And then?”
“Then he disappeared. Somewhere in Catalonia, en route to Burma, where a number of his Stasi comrades had secured refuge. Went private, we figured.”
“Hired by Truslow,” I said. “Another question: You expected the Wise Men to search out the gold?”
“Naturally. I wasn’t disappointed.”
“How-”
He smiled. “I hid the account number in several places, places I knew they’d look. The safes in my office and at home. My executive files. Encrypted, of course.”
“To make it plausible,” I said. “But couldn’t someone clever enough find a way to transfer the money out at a great remove? Undetectably?”
“Not the way the account was set up. Once I-or my legal heirs-accessed the account, it became active, and Truslow could transfer the money. But Truslow would have to go to Zurich personally-and thereby leave his fingerprints.”
“Which is why Truslow needed us to go to Zurich!” I said. “And why-once we’d activated the account-Truslow’s people tried to have me killed. But you must have had a reliable contact in the Bank of Zurich.”
Sinclair nodded wearily. “I need to get to bed. I need my sleep.”
But I continued: “And so you had him. You had his ‘fingerprints,’ as you put it.”
“Why did you leave the photograph for me in Paris?” Molly asked.
“Simple,” her father replied. “If I were tracked down and killed here, I wanted to make sure someone-preferably you-showed up here and found the documents I’ve concealed in the house.”
“So you have the proof?” I asked.
“I have Truslow’s signature. It wasn’t so bold of him-his people were watching Orlov, and as far as he knew, I was dead.”
“The old woman-Berzin’s wife-told me to find Toby. She said he’d cooperate.”
Sinclair had begun to slow down, his eyelids drooping. His head began to nod. “A possibility,” he said. “But Toby Thompson tumbled down a steep flight of stairs at his home two days ago. The report is that his wheelchair caught on a corner of a rug. I seriously doubt it was an accident. But in any case, he’s dead.”
Molly and I were speechless for a good twenty or thirty seconds. I didn’t know what to feeclass="underline" do you grieve for a man who killed your wife?
Sinclair broke the silence. “I’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning with Pierre La Fontaine to make some rather pressing financial arrangements in Montreal.” He smiled. “Incidentally, the Bank of Zurich has no idea how much gold is in the vault. Five billion dollars’ worth was deposited. But a few gold bars are missing-thirty-eight, to be exact.”
“What happened to them?” Molly asked.
“I stole them. Had them removed and sold. At the going gold rate, I netted a little over five million dollars. Given how much gold is in that vault, no one’s going to notice what’s missing. And I think the Russian government owes it to me-to us-as a commission.”
“How could you?” Molly whispered, aghast.
“It’s only a tiny fraction, Snoops. Five million bucks. You’ve always said you wanted to open a clinic for poor kids, right? So here’s the money to do it. Anyway, what’s a paltry five million compared with ten billion, right?”
We were all exhausted, and before long Molly and I had fallen asleep in one of the spare bedrooms. The linen closet held bedsheets that were clean and crisply ironed, if somewhat mildew-smelling.
I lay down beside her for a brief nap, after which I planned to draw up a plan of action for the next day. But instead, I slept for several hours, and I was awakened from a dream that had something vaguely to do with some sort of machinery that thumped rhythmically, like a perpetual-motion machine, and by the time I bolted upright in the moonlight that streamed in through the dusty windows, I knew that my dreams had been shaped by a noise from outside. A noise that began faintly grew steadily louder.
A regular thumping. A whump-whump-whump sound that was somehow familiar.
The sound of chopper blades.
A helicopter.
It sounded as if it had landed somewhere very near. Was there a helicopter pad on the property? I hadn’t seen one. I turned to look out the window, but it faced out onto the lake, and the helicopter sounded as if it were off to one side of the lodge.
Racing out of the bedroom to a window in the hallway, I spied what was unmistakably a helicopter lifting up off a small bluff on the property. It was, I could just barely see, an asphalt-paved helicopter pad, which I hadn’t noticed earlier in the day. Was someone arriving?
Had someone arrived?
Or-and the thought jolted me-had someone just left?
Hal.
Flinging open the door to Hal’s bedroom, I saw that the bed was empty. It was, in fact, made: either he had made it before he left (unlikely) or he hadn’t slept at all (far more likely). Next to his closet was a small, neat pile of clothes, as if he had left in some haste.
He was gone. He had obviously arranged this surreptitious middle-of-the-night departure, deliberately without telling us.
But where had he gone?
I felt someone’s presence in the room. I turned: Molly stood there, rubbing her eyes with one hand, pulling idly at her hair with another.
She said: “Where is he, Ben? Where’d he go?”
“I have no idea.”
“But that was him in the helicopter?”
“I assume so.”
“He said he was going to meet with Pierre La Fontaine.”
“In the middle of the night?” I said, running to the telephone. In a few moments I had Pierre La Fontaine’s telephone number. I dialed it; it rang for a long time before it was answered, by La Fontaine, in a sleepy voice. I handed the phone to Molly.
“I need to talk to my father,” she said.
A pause.
“He said he was meeting you in Montreal later this morning.”
Another pause.
“Oh, God,” she said, and hung up.
“What?” I asked.
“He says he’s supposed to come here to see Hal in three days. They had no plan to meet in Montreal, today or any other day.”
“Why was he lying to us?” I asked.
“Ben!”
Molly held up an envelope addressed to her, which she’d found under the pile of clothes.
Inside was a hastily scrawled note:
Snoops-forgive me and understand please-I couldn’t tell you two-knew you’d try with all your might to stop me, since you’d already lost me once-later you’ll understand-I love you-
Dad
It was Molly who, knowing her father’s idiosyncrasies so well-his scrupulous record keeping-eventually found the thin brown accordion file in a drawer in the room Hal had been using as his study. Among miscellaneous personal documents he’d evidently needed in his seclusion-records of bank accounts, false identity papers, and so on-was a slender sheaf of papers that, taken together, told the entire story:
Apparently, Sinclair had rented a post office box in St.-Agathe under a false name, and in the past two weeks or so he had received a number of documents.
One of them was a photocopied schedule of a public, nationally televised hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The hearing was to take place tonight, in Room 216 of the Hart Office Building, the United States Senate, in Washington.
One item on the schedule was circled in red ink: an appearance at seven this evening-barely fifteen hours from now-by an unspecified “Witness.”
I knew then.
“The surprise witness,” I murmured aloud.
SIXTY-SIX
Molly let out a cry.