“This week’s Time magazine,” Seth replied weakly.

“Over on the wall.” The proprietor pointed toward the magazine rack. “At the top, nearly all the way to the left.”

Seth searched for the familiar cover as he walked toward the rack. He cast an anxious glance toward the front door of the shop, fearing that at any minute the men who were looking for him would burst in to finish what they had started seven thousand miles west of here. He spotted it from halfway across the store, slotted in between Der Spiegel and the International Herald Tribune.

Moments later, having purchased a small disposable lighter along with the thin international edition of Time, Seth stepped back into the almost warm night. He walked a handful of paces and turned to look in the window of the tobacconist’s shop. The proprietor was already dialing the telephone.

Was he cooperating with Yost? Was this part of the security arrangements? Yost had been specific about which magazine to purchase and where and when it should be purchased. The man must be a friend.

But as Seth turned away from the shop and continued his climb up the steep hill, he couldn’t help but wish that he knew for certain to whom the tobacconist’s call had been placed.

It would have been a pleasant night, he thought as he walked along, if there weren’t men out there in the darkness looking for him, offering a bounty to the taxi driver or hotel clerk who knew where he was. He loosened his coat again as the steep climb wrung perspiration from his body. He passed first one construction site and then another as he approached the next “x” that Yost had marked on the tourist map.

Seth paused for a moment at one construction site, using the klieg lights to check his map. It was the same here as in the colder regions of the United States, he mused. Construction workers had to labor overtime at night while the weather was good to make up for delays caused by inclement conditions. Turning around in a complete circle, he could see at least six new buildings, all decked out in the bright jewelry of electric lights, their skeletons crawling with workers.

Seth now directed his attention back to the map. He found Yost’s next “x” just up ahead and to his left, then pressed on, the noise of the grit under his feet drowning in the animal rumbles of heavy machinery that reverberated from the new building next to him. He quickly covered the next block and crossed the street to the Heim Platz. Half a dozen people milled about in the small concrete square, waiting for the tram that stopped here. He milled about with them, scanning the windows of nearby buildings, trying to guess which of them might be spilling light shed by Jacob Yost Senior’s apartment lamps.

At precisely 7:40, Seth walked to the trash receptacle at the curb. He lit the disposable lighter and held it near the cover of the magazine as if he were trying to read the date. Then he tossed the virgin copy of Time into the rubbish can.