Not yet convinced of his good fortune, Slaton waited and watched. He saw a fifth man pry himself from the driver’s seat of the lead car. He stepped to the curb, leaned on the driver’s door, and lit a cigarette—a man settling in to wait. Slaton had no doubt that these were embassy cars, but which embassy? After a brief internal debate, he opted for the direct approach.

He walked straight up to the driver, and said in English, “Excuse me, do you know where the bus to Valais stops?”

The man looked at him and shrugged.

“Où le bus est au Valais?” Slaton prodded in French.

“No, no. I do not know,” the man replied in brusque English.

“Okay.”

“Ask bellman,” the driver suggested, more to get rid of Slaton than to help him.

“Yes, a good idea.” Slaton turned toward the hotel entrance.

The man had not said enough for Slaton to place the accent. It could have been Iranian, he thought, but possibly something else. Less equivocal was what he’d seen on the car’s front seat, yesterday’s edition of Abrar, the Farsi-language daily.

At the hotel’s entrance Slaton passed between twin stone flowerpots that welcomed guests with bursting waves of yellow and violet, not to mention the most pleasant of fragrances. Inside he found a gilded and ostentatious place, a property that was certainly, as was common along Quai du Mont Blanc, steeped in historical significance. Here, Slaton supposed, the leaders of past ages had dined well over petty arguments, and signed evening treaties in advance of midnight trysts. As such, it was the kind of place that would appeal to their contemporary counterparts who, in spite of the intervening centuries, would pursue their diplomacy in the same enduring manner.

For Slaton it all made perfect sense, and he smiled inwardly at his turn of good luck.

He had just stumbled onto Ibrahim Hamedi’s advance security party.

*   *   *

The Hawker 800 touched down smoothly on runway 23 at Geneva International Airport. It was, as business jets went, a generic item. There were no corporate fin flashes or flags of state emblazoned on the tail, no billionaire’s initials cleverly incorporated into the aircraft’s registration number. It was simple, white, and anonymous. The craft shunned the left high-speed turnoff that led to the passenger terminal, instead slowing for a hard right turn toward the corporate ramp on the airfield’s less traveled northern side. The sleek jet was guided to a stop by a waiting ground crewman, and chocks were put in place as soon as the parking brake was set. At the end of its two-thousand-mile journey the plane came to rest, as a curiosity, no more than a hundred yards short of the French border.