“Um… no. I’m alone here…”
“Very well, then. They’ll be wheeling you to a room in a little while, and then you’re to stay put and sleep. Don’t try to get up. Right now, you need to remain immobile. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
The hospital noises drifted away as he closed his eyes, and soon he was back in a stilted dreamland, his last memory before he slipped into complete unconsciousness an image of a diagram and rows of numbers that made no sense to him, as alien as an artifact of an ancient, forgotten civilization.
“I’m telling you, he was clean. There was nothing on him.” The caller spoke in soft tones, his voice never rising above the level of a murmur.
“Then what was he doing at a private bank? At that hour? Are you absolutely sure?”
“We searched every inch of him. There was nothing — no notes, no flash drive, nothing. Look — he’s an attorney. He specializes in asset protection, right? Is it possible that his visit to the bank pertained to business?”
“Anything’s possible, but we aren’t paid for speculation. We need to be sure he doesn’t know anything that could compromise our effort. We’re far too close to implementation.”
“Then let me terminate him. Problem solved.”
“Not necessarily. If he talked to someone… no, we can’t just finish him. We need to continue surveillance and see what he does next. I don’t need to remind you how devastating it would be if we were discovered.”
“So we maintain our watch,” the speaker said resignedly.
“Correct. He likely doesn’t know anything, but this makes me nervous.”
“Do you have anyone working on getting inside the bank?”
“We’re pulling out all the stops. With any luck, we’ll know what he was doing there by tomorrow. But that’s not a guarantee — if we can’t find a point of weakness with the staff, we may never know.”
“Well, the good news is that he didn’t have anything on him.”
“Yes, he may be ignorant of the plan. But we need to be sure.”
“It shouldn’t be much longer, should it?”
“We’re only days away.”
“At which point it won’t matter. The world will have bigger problems than what one attorney may or may not know.”
“But until that point, he’s your top priority. That hasn’t changed.”
“I understand. He’s not going anywhere. The hospital is going to hold him for at least twenty-four hours, and probably longer. So for the near term, he’s neutralized.”
“Report back to me if anything changes.”
“As always,” the speaker said, and then disconnected. An announcement boomed from the overhead public address system, calling for a crash cart in the emergency room. The man surveyed his surroundings, eyeing the waiting patients, and then moved back into the hospital corridor, his green surgical scrubs making him as anonymous as any of the other staff hurrying to attend to their duties, everyone focused on their preoccupations and uninterested in the young orderly.
At the end of the wing he spied an exit sign over a doorway, and in a minute he was outside, disappearing around a corner, his work at the hospital, at least for the moment, concluded.
THIRTY
Truth Hurts
Jeffrey awoke at one a.m., the squishing sound of a nurse’s rubber soles against the hallway vinyl floor tiles as distinctive a sound as a cat yowling in heat. He opened his eyes and gazed around his private room. The chair and rolling table at the far end were illuminated by faint, ghostly moonlight from the window, the bluish-white luminescence leaking through the blinds and coloring everything with a spectral glow.
He groped at the side of the bed and found the control, then raised the back until he was sitting up. His head hurt, but not nearly as profoundly as earlier, which he took as a welcome sign that he was mending. He understood the concept of a concussion, having had a minor one as a child in a fall from a tree — his brain had been bruised, the fluid that surrounded it inadequate to the job of protecting it after a certain amount of force.
Jeffrey squinted in the dark and was relieved to note that his vision wasn’t blurry anymore, which was further indication that the trauma was receding. He couldn’t be sure, but given his progress, he might be released tomorrow. That heartened him, although he had no intention of trying to catch the last of the conference — while he wanted more than anything to believe that the mugging had been random, his instinct knew better. He had been knocked unconscious literally seconds after leaving the bank. Difficult to believe that was coincidence. Fortunately, he’d heeded his brother’s instructions and left everything in the box, so any search would have come up empty. Which was probably the only reason he was still alive. They had no idea what he knew, if anything.
The irony was that he had no idea what he knew, either. The endless columns of numbers meant nothing to him. If someone had threatened him at gunpoint to spill the beans, at best he would have been able to say that he’d seen a nonsensical spreadsheet and an unintelligible diagram.
A lance of pain stabbed through his neck, and he reached up and felt where they’d stitched his head, a tiny shaved area around the wound where stubble prickled his fingertips as he gingerly probed the lump. How the hell was he supposed to save the planet if he didn’t know what specifically was going to happen, or who was going to do whatever it was, or how? And how was he supposed to prevail against an adversary that could pick him off on the streets of Zurich at will, and who knew his every move?
Which stopped his racing thoughts dead. How were they tracking him? The obvious method was the cell phone — but he hadn’t taken it with him to the bank. Which implied that they’d put him under physical surveillance, further complicating his predicament. So now he’d have to become an expert at ducking a professional surveillance team. Good luck with that, he thought morosely.
They’d left his credit cards and identification, which implied they could track the cards whenever he used them. As to his passport, most opportunistic muggers wouldn’t have taken it, preferring to do a quick cash grab and then run before they were seen, so his assailants had stuck to that script. That was somewhat of a relief, although he could have easily gotten a replacement passport in a few days through the embassy, so not a meaningful break.
His head swam with the implications of trying to go off the radar so he could track down the contacts his brother had directed him to. Dumping the cell would be easy, but losing a pro team would not, and he hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about it.
But he would need to figure it out. And quickly. He couldn’t stay in Europe for very long without triggering alarms, and unfortunately all three of his objectives were there.
So now he had to evade detection, interrogate a hostile Nazi, and get to the scientific researchers in France or Italy — all while seeming to be going about his innocent business.
And stay alive.
That last bit would be perhaps the most difficult if he failed in any of his objectives. He had no doubt that he would be earmarked for execution the moment he slipped up — there would come a point where he posed more of a danger to his stalkers than knowing whom he’d talked to would compensate for, and judging by his brother’s death, nothing would stop them once they’d decided he needed killing.
He looked at his watch, and an ugly idea occurred to him as he checked the time — the muggers had also neglected to take his Rolex, which struck him as odd, and the suspicion that it could also have a tracking device in it flitted through him. He’d have to do something about it. For now, he assumed they knew where he was, so there was no point.