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man still clutching onto his progressive youth. The code, though, was the same.
    “Riverrun, past Eve.”
    “And Adam’s,” he answered. “Who are you?”
    “New, that’s what. Alan Drummond. And you, I believe, are Sebastian Hall.”
    “What happened to Mendel?”
    “Temporary placement, until they found me. Rest assured that I’m here to stay.”
    “Okay.” Milo paused. “This isn’t just a call of introduction, is it?”
    “Please. I don’t do those. I’m right to business.”
    “Then let’s get to it.”
    This Alan Drummond, his new Voice of God, told him to go to Berlin, to the Hotel Hansablick. “The instructions are waiting for you.”
    “You know I’m in the middle of something.”
    “I should hope you are. Just take a few days.”
    “No clues?”
    “I think you’ll find it self-explanatory.”
    Two hours later, in a suburb north of Lugano, he transferred the paintings to a garage he’d rented the week before and secured with a combination lock. Because of their weight, it took a while. There was a single fluorescent light overhead, and in its surreal glow he took a moment to examine the paintings uncovered. It was a shame, because according to the plan he’d cobbled together only two of them would return to the world. He lit another Davidoff and tried to decide which would survive and which would not, but couldn’t. Count Ludovic Lepic and his two daughters gazed back accusingly because they believed they would never be seen again, and perhaps that was true. Degas had immortalized them in oils nearly a century and a half ago, and at some point a master of industry had picked them up and his estate had hung them for all to see. Next week, with a bit of gasoline and this Zippo, they, or two others, would vanish, as if they had never been.
    He locked up and drove on, leaving the Swiss southern Alps for the industrial Lombardy plains. The air outside his window was cold and clean, but in the late-night Italian darkness he could see nothing of the peaks behind him. It was past midnight when he reached the wet, tungsten-bright streets of Milan, and on Viale Papiniano he wiped down and abandoned the VW. He caught an hour-long night train to Bergamo, then a shuttle bus to Orio al Serio Airport, which had an eight-thirty flight to Berlin, the earliest one in the region. He’d left his last tote bag in a Zürich Dumpster before joining his crew for the job, and now carried only what filled his pockets—his pills, Davidoffs, passports, cash and cards, cell phone, and a single keyless key ring with a small remote. He boarded with his Sebastian Hall passport and took a seat over the wing beside a tired teenaged boy. He popped two Dexedrine to stay awake. Once they were in the air, the boy said, “Vacation.”
    “Excuse me?”
    The teen, an Italian with impeccable English, grinned. “Thesong you’re humming. ‘Vacation,’ by the Go-Go’s.” He was clearly proud of his knowledge of a song forgotten by most people by the time he was born.
    “So it is,” Milo admitted. Then, despite the drugs rattling his nerves and the flash of those answering-machine voices laughing in his head, he passed out.

3

    They’d called in early November to ask if he’d be interested in returning to the field. “Your record is excellent, you know.” That had been Owen Mendel, full of baffled praise—baffled because he didn’t know why this excellent Tourist, who’d even moved on to six years of administration, had been kicked off the Company payroll. Mendel had obviously been left with a severely edited file. “It’s up to you, of course, but you know what kind of budgeting pressure we’re under these days. If we could get some experienced people like you in the field, we just might make it.”
    A nice sell. The Company wasn’t doing him a favor; he was the Good Samaritan.
    He’d known, from the moment he heard Owen Mendel’s voice, exactly what would follow. Yevgeny had prepared him. “You’ll say