Someone unseen by him or by Stratton could have shadowed him. Unlikely. His neighborhood in Playa Del Rey didn’t lend itself to hiding strangers well. It was not an anonymous street.

Stratton? He had told Stratton’s man—the one keeping a vigil at Seth’s house in Playa Del Rey—that he was going to Amsterdam. But that would mean that—

A chill spread through his body like ice water. Suppose Stratton’s man, or the man he had assumed was Stratton’s, worked for someone else?

“Brown?”

The man in Amsterdam Seth had initially assumed worked for Stratton turned out to be a priest. A priest working for whom? Why was a priest involved?

“A small, powerful group within the Vatican…far, far bigger thing than you realize… the blessings of the Pope…”

Ridgeway heard the priest’s last words, the implications staggered him.

“Things—and people, you see, are not always what they seem There are people in high places within both your government and my church who are not what they seem.”

The words ran like a refrain through his fear. Who were not what they seemed? Was Stratton something other than he had represented himself to be? Or was the priest? Or Rebecca Weinstock?

And who was involved? Stratton said the people who had killed Rebecca had been Zhirinovsky’s people inside the KGB. So whose interests were they looking after? Just his? Russia’s?

“We’re a group charged with trying to root out the worst of the abuses, the political struggles and power plays.”

So what did they want with a painting by an obscure Nazi artist?

Seth shook his head as the thoughts twisted around each other. Every time he answered one question, two or three arose to take its place. It was as if he—

Seth was suddenly aware of a man who had stopped in the train corridor outside his compartment. The man was about six feet tall, his build hidden under a long wool coat. A long woolen coat, Seth thought, bulky enough to conceal almost any kind of weapon. The man’s hair was light brown and there was nothing remarkable about his face save a nose that looked as if it had been broken badly at least once. Their eyes met for an instant The man nodded a polite acknowledgment, then turned his back on Seth and stood in the passageway looking out the window at the rail yard.

Startled, Seth got to his feet and pulled his new shoulder bag from the overhead rack and set it on the seat He replayed the man’s look again in his mind. Was it a look of recognition, or merely the courtesy of one stranger acknowledging another? Did the man know him? Did he recognize the man? Seth tried to remember the past days, trying to single out a face from the crowds he had drifted through in airports, on the street, at the train station. But the man’s face remained that of a stranger.

But that was why men like this were always selected as killers and spies. The nondescript make the best killers because they are hard to remember, hard to spot in a crowd. Was this man a killer? Was this a killer sent to finish off the jobs botched in Los Angeles and Amsterdam?