The man had had plenty of opportunity to kill him and escape without being seen. Yet he had just continued his clumsy surveillance. Seth sneaked a look at the man across the café again. He was amateurishly trying to hide behind a copy of the Neue Zuricher Zeitung. Ridgeway read the headlines from across the room.

Suddenly Seth knew what he had to do. Letting his fork drop abruptly on his plate, he fumbled about in his pockets for currency to cover his meal, dropped the money on the table, then swiftly got up and walked across the room. Quickly, Seth plunged his right hand into the deep pocket of his ski parka and found the grip of the Magnum. He grabbed it and slipped his index finger through the trigger guard, curling it around the lithe coldness of the trigger.

Seth heard the man’s newspaper rattle loudly and saw the expression of surprise and confusion on the man’s face as he caught sight of him approaching. Startled, the man knocked over the cup of tea he had been nursing as he made an effort to rise.

“Don’t bother getting up,” Seth said in German, as he held up his left hand in a stop gesture. The man froze, half in, half out of his seat. “Go ahead, sit back down,” Seth said.

Then, in a lower voice, Seth continued. “I have a very powerful handgun in the pocket of my coat.” He watched the man’s look flicker down to Seth’s concealed hand, and immediately his eyes widened with fear. “It’s pointed at you and will tear a hole in you the size of a dinner plate if you so much as think of doing something I haven’t first told you to do. Have you got that?”

The man nodded coolly. “What do you want?” His voice was calm, confident. He might be an amateur at tailing people, Seth thought, but he had an uncanny calmness when faced with danger. Only people who had faced danger and survived were capable of that.

“I should be asking you that,” Seth said. “And since I have the gun, why don’t you go first?” He pulled out the chair opposite the man and sat down.

The man nodded. “Hand me your wallet,” Seth commanded. The man’s hand moved quickly toward his coat pocket. “Slowly! Slowly,” Seth said. “Don’t pull any surprises from your pockets.”

The man nodded calmly, his head tilted slightly to one side, and pulled a slim leather wallet from his inside coat pocket and slid it across the table. He then leaned casually back in his chair and looked appraisingly across the table as Seth, using only his left hand, opened the wallet on the table and began to sort through its contents. There was currency, the equivalent of less than one hundred dollars in Swiss francs, the card key to a parking lot, a collection of credit cards, and a Swiss driver’s license in the name of Jacob Yost. Seth glanced sharply at the man across the table.