He climbed in front, started the engine and spun the heater knob to full. Rubbing circles in the fogged left and right windows, he surveyed the area around him. He saw an empty parking spot immediately to the right. In the distance, others that had been vacant were now filled by morning commuters. Otherwise, everything looked as it had when he’d arrived six hours ago. The heater blew for five minutes before starting to make a difference. In the backseat he changed clothes, trading the rumpled attire in which he’d slept for the khaki trousers, button-down shirt, and designer tie. He stopped at the train station restroom, and at a washbasin Slaton did his best to revive his coarse appearance. By six-thirty he was waiting on the platform, a ticket in one hand and a newspaper in the other. He stood with ten other commuters who in aggregate could not have matched him more perfectly. A train slid to a stop right on schedule—the Swiss being timekeepers of the world—and the crowd shuffled aboard in an orderly fashion.

Slaton was increasingly alert. His eyes flicked across every person, and in the tight confines of the car he backed against a bulkhead and shifted his stance regularly to alter his vantage point. He was sure he had separated cleanly from Stockholm, and then Zurich. But Geneva was something else. In Geneva he might well be expected.

The run to the city took twenty-seven minutes, the train shouldering to the shore of the serene lake while the massive form of Mont Blanc roused in the distance, its snowcapped peak struck brilliant in the new morning light. No one around him seemed to notice the spectacle. He watched young professionals tap their phones in the name of urgent business affairs, while their older counterparts probed newspaper financials, presumably to calculate how much more or less they were worth on this glorious morning.

Slaton scanned Le Courrier, a French-language local paper. French was one of his better languages, and used widely in Geneva—no surprise as Switzerland’s westernmost city was virtually enveloped by her sister state. On the front page he saw an article regarding a speech in which the Israeli prime minister had strongly urged the United Nations to take a harder line on the “pariah state” of Iran. Slaton saw nothing in Le Courrier about the recent shootings in Stockholm, nor anything about Anton Bloch’s identity, which had certainly been verified by now. That the police were holding this out of the headlines did not surprise Slaton, yet he knew it was a risk for whoever had taken over for poor Inspector Sanderson. He wondered briefly what the little detective was doing right now. Was he still involved in the case on some level? If so, Slaton hoped the ice blue eyes were not boring into Christine, but rather darting over old files and endless camera footage, losing focus as they tried to match unmatchable fingerprints.