The hours after the attack in the Amsterdamse Bos were as unreal as a dream. Just as the last six months or the last twenty-four hours didn’t seem real. Seth wandered through Amstelveen streets until he found a men’s clothing store. The clerk had been shocked at his appearance, but shock turned to dismay when Seth explained that he had been mugged.

Which was true in its own way.

“I am so ashamed,” the shopkeeper kept saying. “This is not like Holland at all. We are a peaceful people.” The man kept apologizing as he helped Seth select a new wardrobe, then took him by the hand down the street to a luggage shop owned by a friend. Seth had to force money on the man for the two pieces of luggage he bought Back at the clothing store, he put his new wardrobe in the suit bag. He placed his dirty coat and clothes into the shoulder bag, all carefully wrapped to conceal the ugly but effective Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum.

He repeated the scene with a sympathetic woman at the small commercial hotel near the train station. She clucked over him like a mother hen, insisting that she press the wrinkles from his newly purchased clothes. And like the clerk, apologized for the violence because, after all, “This is not America, where things like that happen all the time.”

Following a long bath and refreshing nap, he hired a taxi to take him to Schiphol Airport and wait as he retrieved the painting and the rest of Rebecca Weinstock’s money from the locker where he had left them. Rom the international telephones at the airport, Seth managed to leave a message for George Stratton. The incident in Amstelveen convinced him that it was time to stop the solo act Seth described the attack in the Amsterdamse Bos, and his travel plans to Zurich. He didn’t mention his possession of the painting or his appointment with Jacob Yost There had to be something left with which he could bargain.

And after that, he had drunk the hot chocolate the hotel desk clerk had brought up to him, and sunk into the crisp, clean sheets. He slept a ragged sleep, haunted by recent scenes of dead people who all eventually wore his face.

His decision the next morning to cancel his flight to Zurich and take the train instead was an easy one. He didn’t want to risk a search turning up his gun. And trains were harder to watch: no security gates controlling the crowds, no single queues for boarding, no centralized boarding areas. And they were easier to get off. Which was why Seth had taken a local train with stops every twenty or thirty minutes.

Still, he felt as if he should have done more.

But what? It was hard to run from people when you didn’t know who you were running from. Hard to hide from danger when you didn’t know its face. How had they found him? The question continued to hammer away at him. The telephone call from the airport? He ruled that out. There was no way they could have known he would use that telephone.