“Ladies, I’ve got to take care of some business, but go right ahead and enjoy,” he said, leaning to accept light pecks and a squeeze of the thigh from Minz before heading toward the room beyond the bar where the lavatory was. En route he stopped to greet Frau Leber, who was looking particularly potted tonight. He did not know her dinner mate, introduced as a retired French general; Morgan nodded attentively and memorized the name—Ambrose Xavier—in case it might become of use.

In the men’s room, he locked the door, then leaned against it before removing the small alpha pager from his pocket. Morgan thumbed a hot-button combination on the miniature keyboard, activating the modem; within thirty seconds he had signed onto a wireless message network and initiated a transmission that launched him as an anonymous, encrypted user on the system—not an easy feat actually, and one that required a rather large program on not one but two different servers. Fortunately, placing the programs on the servers had been assisted greatly by Morgan’s ownership of the company. Morgan cared little for the exact mechanics of the program, though he had a rudimentary notion of how it worked. In every area but art he tended to focus exclusively on results. Even in art, it took a great deal to interest him.

The matter he had come to the rest room to check on, for example, interested him a great deal.

A line of messages to a Yahoo e-mail account appeared on his screen. Most were products of list-serves, purposely cluttering the account. Several were dummies posted at random to make things difficult for anyone who might be trying to pry into his business. (There were several candidates who might undertake such despicable activities, including three different agencies of the United States government and one international firm that was a continual source of difficulty.) He opened each message, lingering as if actually reading them. Finally, he reached the one he actually wanted.

“Hemingway was a jerk.”

Silly and innocuous certainly, and nothing to do with anything.

Except that it meant his man, Elata, the painter, the forger par excellence whom he had turned into a detector of forgeries par excellence, had gotten the document he needed and was en route to Zurich.

Danke, Herr Elata. Ausgezeichnet.

He had expected the message. He had also expected the e-mail three arrows later, though this one he had hoped not to receive.

“The eyes are the gateway to the soul. But sometimes even the soul gets lost.”

This had been sent by one of his deputies in Paris. It meant that Interpol—the eyes—had spotted Elata and trailed him, but had lost the scent along the way.