Seth was taking no chances. He unzipped the shoulder bag and worked the Magnum from its concealment in the middle of his old clothes. He placed it on the top, where he could get to it easily, and then pulled the unzipped edges of the bag together. He sat down next to it and pretended interest in the International Herald Tribune.

The man didn’t move, but instead stood in the corridor with his hands in his pockets for a moment before taking one hand out and reaching into the open front of his coat, where Seth couldn’t see. Was he reaching for a weapon? Seth’s hand jerked into the shoulder bag beside him and quickly found the Magnum. His fingers closed around the wooden stock, the index finger curling on the trigger.

The man’s other hand came out of his pocket. Moments later, the man started to turn sideways. Seth tensed, ready to bring the Magnum out. As the man finished turning, Seth saw he had a package of American cigarettes in one hand, a disposable lighter in the other.

The man noted Seth’s gaze and smiled. He held the pack up to offer Seth one. Feeling foolish, Seth shook his head and smiled back, the courtesy of one stranger to another. The man took out a cigarette, placed it in his mouth, and lit it. He then walked through the pale blue cloud of smoke toward the end of the car.

Heart pounding, Seth slumped in his seat and closed his eyes. He felt the sweat trickling down his forehead. He opened his eyes and wiped at the sweat. The corridor was filled with pale blue cigarette smoke, like the remains of a vanished magician.

He was seeing demons where there were none, shadows where there was only light.

Christ! He was getting paranoid!

Then for an instant, he was back in a patrol car at Manchester and 89th Place and it was dark and scary and the night was filled with death and the veteran behind the wheel had only half laughed when he told Seth: “Listen, kid, just remember you’ve gotta be paranoid when everybody’s out to get you.”

Seth remembered not laughing at first.

Suddenly the train jerked and groaned as it slowed to a stop at the platform.

NINETEEN

Zoe looked at the night and its lights through half-closed lids as George Stratton drove a rented Volvo skillfully through the snowy Zurich streets. In back sat a man introduced as Gordon Highgate.

Though her eyes were heavy with fatigue, pain, and the accumulated weight of the last six months, she was too excited to sleep. The last two hours swarmed in her head, a montage of color and emotion: fear and exhilaration, victory and pain, the desperate sprint from confinement, panic at unknown hands—dark night, freedom, relief.

They had taken her in a van to some sort of office where they had allowed her to call Seth.

Seth failed to answer her phone call. Three times, and each time she got the answering machine. Where was he, she wondered, then realized it was ten hours earlier in Los Angeles; it was only eleven in the morning there. So she called his office at UCLA. There was no answer.