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René said, “Shall we try this again?”

Evan looked at him. “No more croissants?”

René took a few steps toward the bathroom, the men locked in position around him. They moved effortlessly, maintaining a practiced standoff distance. The movement of the air brought a whiff of expensive-smelling cologne. Dex kept a clear route to the door, ready to whisk René to safety the instant something went down.

René regarded the caulked-over crack in the frame above the door. His smile spread his lips flat to the sides, his face slightly off kilter on his skull.

Folding his arms, he drummed his fingers on the fine tweed of his blazer sleeve. “I’ll allow you your temper tantrum,” he said. “After all, it’s not like you’re going anywhere.”

Evan said, “Are we in Switzerland or Liechtenstein?”

René blinked and then blinked again. “Why not Romania or Russia?”

“The outlets,” Evan said. “The C plug behind the desk puts us in Europe and knocks out the UK. But the J in the bathroom is only used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.”

“Well traveled, are you?”

Evan stood by the foot of the bed, tense on his feet. “Are we gonna keep answering questions with questions?”

René turned to Dex. “I like him.”

Evan waited, his gaze steady. The front man grimaced, showing a mouthful of gold-capped teeth, the grill both ridiculous and menacing at the same time. He had lush curly hair tamped down by a purple Dorados de Chihuahua cap featuring a mustachioed baseball wearing a sombrero.

At last René pivoted back to face Evan. “Graubünden,” he conceded.

The easternmost canton of Switzerland.

Evan hadn’t been here before but had stayed in neighboring Ticino. After he escaped, he would get across the border to Liechtenstein. He had a papers guy in Triesenberg who lived in the cellar of an eighteenth-century parish church. Once Evan was set up with a new passport, he’d hightail it to Vienna, lie low, make his way back to the States. Then he’d intercept the Horizon Express and free Alison Siegler.

René said, “I hope we can agree that you’re helpless here. You’re outmanned, outgunned, and overpowered to an extent you’re not even aware of yet. Your surrendering to these realities is inevitable.”

Evan considered. Then he feinted at the group, nothing more than a twitch of his shoulders. The front man jerked away so fast he lost his footing and stumbled. The other two narcos had their shotguns up instantly.

Evan said, “Nothing is inevitable.”

The third shotgun rose, trembling, and for a moment Evan thought the front man might just be nervous enough to pull the trigger accidentally. René rested a hand on his shoulder. “Easy, Manny.”

At this range, aimed at Evan’s head, the less-lethal shotgun might prove to be not so less-lethal.

René alone remained unshaken. He continued as if there’d been no interruption. “You’re a very difficult man to track.”

Evan looked past the three shotgun bores at René. Dex stared back from the rear, a head taller than the others, his face as expressionless as ever. Just another casual conversation.

“Why are you interested in me?” Evan asked.

“I’m not interested in people. I’m interested in bank accounts.” René peered out from the stretched mask of his face. “Your bank account in particular.”

Account. Singular.

Evan said nothing. René was talking, and there was no advantage in stopping him.

“I know that you hold assets worth twenty-seven million dollars in an account in Zurich.”

Privatbank AG didn’t house the lion’s share of Evan’s money. When Evan was operating as Orphan X, Jack had stocked accounts for him the world over and taught him how to hide behind financial veils, how to wire money invisibly from offshore account to offshore account. The cash was printed by the Treasury and shipped directly to areas of nonreporting. It was as untraceable as Evan himself — at least he’d thought it was. Both he and his bank account seemed to have suffered a sudden bout of visibility.

“We managed to persuade one of the managers there to turn over account information,” René said. “Your client profile — or lack of one — caught our interest. You seem like someone whom no one will miss.”

René’s eyes gleamed. Clearly he enjoyed this part of the dance. His nose was ruddy, spider veins clutching the edges of his nostrils. It looked as though he’d dabbed cover-up over them. A vain man.

“As you’d probably guess,” he continued, “there aren’t a lot of people you can steal twenty-seven million dollars from without anyone else caring. But you happen to be one of those people.”

“You assume you have a handle on who you’re dealing with,” Evan said.

“A drug or arms dealer,” René said. “Everything about you fits the profile. No footprint, digital or otherwise. Conversant in violence. Familiar with detention.”

He waited for Evan to confirm or deny.

When it became clear he would get no response, he continued, “So you worked your illicit trade and made a fortune, if a small one — fortunes not being what they used to be. And then what? You started atoning for your sins? Wiping out the likes of Hector Contrell. Is that what you’re interested in now, Evan? Atonement?”

“Actually, lately it’s been flower arranging.”

René pretended to smile. “I’m always curious about the ways people fool themselves. In fact I admire it. I wish everything weren’t so bare to me. I’m a straightforward man. I like money. More money than one can make honestly. So when my coffers needed replenishing, the question I asked myself was, why deal with drugs or weapons and all the danger that goes with them? Why not go right to the source? So that’s what I did. I looked for a bank account like yours, built up over years of sweat and toil but not linked to anything respectable.” His skin quivered, the smile finding its footing. “Ripe for the taking.”

He seemed to want Evan to compliment him on this ingenious ploy.

Instead Evan asked, “How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t easy. Cooperative bank managers are hard to find in Switzerland, but I have a gift for creating … leverage.” He tasted the word and liked it. “Then came the persistence to even attempt to follow your wires. Most of them zigzagged off into the World Wide Web, ping-ponging around the globe, and then—poof. We were about to give up when we had a stroke of luck. A data-mining program matched the precise amount of a particular wire made from your account to an online purchase registered by an auction house halfway around the world that same day.”

“The katana.”

“Yes. Your samurai sword. An odd choice of toy. Do you know how many other transactions of $235,887.41 were conducted on September seventeenth?”

“None.”

“Five, actually. But the other four were easily eliminated from consideration. Because we had the starting and ending points of your payment, all your magical machinations in the middle were for naught.”

The smug set of René’s face brought to mind a Jack saying: Someone who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room rarely is.

Evan made a note to attune his payment procedures by adding a few cents to each transaction in the future.

He pictured that gray Ford Transit van springing up in his rearview mirror as he’d neared the Norfolk FedEx office. The same FedEx to which the Seki auction house had shipped the sword. The van hadn’t been tracking him, not yet; it must have been patrolling the block, waiting for a signal from inside that the package had been claimed.

René seemed pleased by the specifics he held in his plump palm, but everything attached to that wire was cut-bait ready. Evan’s bank account was as end-stopped as the 4Runner, registered under a false identity nestled inside a confusion of front companies. He just had to keep his head level, follow his training protocols, choose his moment.