The pub was on Avenue de France, across the street from the Sécheron rail station. He’d canvassed the area for three solid hours searching for Deadmarsh but had not seen him again. Given the direction his suspect had been walking, Sanderson’s best guess was that he’d been heading for the train station. If so, the American—or Israeli or whatever the hell he was—would be miles away by now. Nevertheless, Sanderson had opted for a stool at the front of the pub in order to watch passersby through the big bay window. It had been the briefest of encounters, but there was no doubt in his mind—it had been Deadmarsh. And even if he’d gotten away, Sanderson recognized the larger positive that overrode this setback—his narrow assumption had been dead on target. The man was a killer, and he had come here to undertake a political assassination. Which meant he’d be back.

But what to do about it? he mused.

Sanderson saw three options. He could call Sjoberg and explain that he’d tracked Deadmarsh to Geneva. The AC might give his sighting the credence it deserved, but the more likely outcome was that Sjoberg would reject the political assassination scheme, deem Sanderson deranged, and order him home. Alternatively, he could slip the news to Elin Almgren and let her run things up the chain of command at SÄPO. This, however, was equally problematic. Almgren was already assisting him outside formal channels, and the first thing her superiors would do would be to verify things with Sjoberg, or perhaps Anna Forsten, either of whom would certify Sanderson to be an unhinged cannon. In both cases there was some chance of getting proper surveillance in Geneva, but more likely a pair of men with a soft-sided wagon to retrieve Sanderson himself.

The third option, of course, was to hunt down Edmund Deadmarsh himself. The drawback of this was obvious enough. What if he succeeded? The man was a highly trained killer and presumably armed. And while Sanderson had spent his early years on the force in some of Stockholm’s toughest quarters, the man he was hunting was easily half his age, and—something that had not escaped his eye—in superb physical condition. He remembered the gray eyes that kept moving, the way he’d positioned himself in the car to see yet not be seen. Today Sanderson had spotted Deadmarsh from behind the darkened windows of a bus. Tomorrow such an encounter might easily be reversed, and given his present circumstances—unarmed and without backup—Sanderson would not be an odds-on favorite in any confrontation. If he somehow cornered Slaton his only option would be to call the police and plead, in the most rational terms he could muster, for them to arrest a man for an assassination that had not yet occurred.