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this. I was here. He was here.”
    The older policeman spoke rapidly on the walkie-talkie, and soon they were joined by another officer, stolid and barrel-chested. “Perhaps I am easily confused, so let me try to understand. You race through a busy street, and then through the underground shopping arcade. All around you, people are shot. You claim that you are being chased by a maniac. You promise to show us this man, this American. And yet there is no maniac. There is only you. A strange American spinning fairy tales.”
    “ Goddammit , I’ve told you the truth! ”
    “You say a madman from your past was responsible for the bloodshed,” the rookie said in a quiet, steely voice. “I see only one madman here.”
    The older policeman conferred in Schweitzerdeutsch with his barrel-chested colleague. “You were staying at the Hotel St. Gotthard, yes?” he finally asked Ben. “Why don’t you take us there?”
    Accompanied by three policemen—the barrel-chested one walking behind him, the rookie ahead of him, and the older policeman close by his side—Ben made his way through the underground arcade, up the escalator, and down the Bahnhofstrasse toward his hotel. Though he was not yet cuffed, he knew that this was merely a formality.
    In front of the hotel, a policewoman, whom the others had clearly sent ahead, was keeping a custodial watch over his luggage. Her brown hair was short, almost mannish, and her expression was stony.
    Through the lobby windows, Ben caught a glimpse of the unctuous Hotelpage who’d attended to him earlier. Their eyes met, and the man turned away with stricken look, as if he’d just learned he’d toted bags for Lee Harvey Oswald.
    “Your luggage, yes?” the rookie asked Ben.
    “Yes, yes,” Ben said. “What of it?” Now what? What more could there be?
    The policewoman opened the tan leather hand luggage. The others looked inside, then turned to face Ben. “This is yours?” the rookie asked.
    “I already said it was,” Ben replied.
    The middle-aged cop took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and used it to lift an object out of the satchel. It was Cavanaugh’s Walther PPK pistol.

Chapter Three
    Washington, D.C .
    A serious-looking young woman strode briskly down the long central corridor of the fifth floor of the United States Department of Justice Building, the mammoth Classical Revival structure that occupied the entire block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. She had glossy dark brown hair, caramel-brown eyes, a sharp nose. At first glance she looked part-Asian, or perhaps Hispanic. She wore a tan trench coat, carried a leather briefcase, and might have been taken for a lawyer, a lobbyist, maybe a government official on the fast track.
    Her name was Anna Navarro. She was thirty-three and worked in the Office of Special Investigations, a little-known unit of the Justice Department.
    When she arrived at the stuffy conference room, she realized that the weekly unit meeting was already well under way. Arliss Dupree, standing by a whiteboard on an easel, turned as she entered and stopped in mid-sentence. She felt the stares, couldn’t help blushing a little, which was no doubt what Dupree wanted. She took the first empty seat. A shaft of sunlight blinded her.
    “There she is. Nice of you to join us,” Dupree said. Even his insults were predictable. She merely nodded, determined not to let him provoke her. He’d told her the meeting would be at eight-fifteen. Obviously it hadbeen scheduled to start at eight, and he would deny ever having told her otherwise. A petty, bureaucratic way of giving her a hard time. They both knew why she was late, even if nobody else here did.
    Before Dupree was brought in to head the Office of Special Investigations, meetings were a rarity. Now he held them weekly, as a chance to parade his authority. Dupree was short and wide, mid-forties, the body of a weight lifter in a too-tight light gray suit, one of three shopping-mall suits he rotated. Even