The simple life he and Christine had built in Virginia was gone, and certainly unrecoverable. Now he was racing across Switzerland, his vehicle acquired by way of coercion, and once again being hunted by the authorities. With terrible suddenness, the past year had fallen to little more than another assignment, a temporary operation, pleasant as it was, that had come to its natural conclusion.

Had life in America really been any different? he wondered.

Not a day had gone by when he hadn’t lied to keep up the legend of Edmund Deadmarsh. The sounds of fireworks and cars backfiring still stiffened his spine. He invariably kept a ready supply of cash in their home, and without fail filled the tank on the Ford when it was half full—the Ford because it had twice the horsepower of the Honda. In Virginia he’d taken the same precautions he always had, the lone difference being that he cared about his partner in a very different way.

Her parting words drummed in his head.

If you kill this man in Geneva … don’t ever come back to me.

Against this was Nurin’s countering promise—the assassination of Hamedi was his only chance to return to a normal life. Catch-22. If he killed the man, Christine would leave him. If he didn’t, Slaton would have no life to go back to. It was a collision of ultimatums, a mathematical equation that seemed unsolvable. All he could do was keep looking, keep moving to find a better angle. Like the sniper he was.

Find the perfect shot.

And so Slaton drove onward, the Rover pointed west at a measured pace as he traversed the left half of Switzerland.

Chapter 37

THIRTY-SEVEN

His eyes opened instantly to a sharp noise.

Slaton immediately tensed, but didn’t move other than to shift his gaze toward the uncorrelated motion, a dark silhouette behind the Rover’s frosted side window. Someone was outside, very close, their hands low and out of sight. That was always the most important thing—the hands. Slaton kept still, and soon the shape sank lower and disappeared. He heard a car door close, a cold engine labor to life.

The car parked in the adjacent spot began to back out.

He rose to an elbow, his breath going to vapor. He was laying in the Rover’s cargo area, wrapped in the heavy sleeping bag and with the rear seats folded down. Slaton had arrived in the waning minutes of Thursday, exiting the A1 at Mont-sur-Rolle, and from there traveled no more than three hundred yards south. He’d parked in a small lot outside the Rolle train station, choosing a tight spot between a panel van and the big Mercedes sedan that had just pulled away. Rolle was centered midpoint along the curved northern shore of Lake Geneva, roughly twenty-five miles from the city of Geneva. Today Slaton would close that gap.