Janson tucked his Glock into his front trouser waistband before he stood up and wandered to the rest rooms, which were off a short hallway extending from the far corner of the main dining room. As he approached, he felt a sharp pang of adrenaline: before him was another dark-suited man, his posture identical to those at the bar. This man was clearly neither a diner nor an employee of the restaurant. He was another guard of Lakatos’s, stationed there for such an eventuality. Janson walked into the marble-floored bathroom, and the man—broad-chested, tall, his face a mask of bored professionalism—followed him in. As Janson turned toward the sinks, he heard the man lock the door. That meant that they were alone. Yet an unsilenced gunshot would only summon the others in Lakatos’s employ, who were also armed. Janson’s pistol was not the advantage he had hoped. The imperative of visual concealment ruled out the possibility of aural concealment: the bulk of a silenced gun could not have been secreted undetectably in an ankle holster. Now Janson walked to the urinals; in the stainless steel of the knob, he could make out a distorted reflection of the burly guard. He could also make out the long cylindrical shape of the man’s weapon. His weapon was silenced.

There would be no need to wait for Janson to leave the Palace Hotel; Janson could be dispatched where he was.

“What’s he paying you?” Janson asked, without turning around to look at the man. “I’ll double it.”

The guard said nothing.

“You don’t speak English? I bet you speak dollars?”

The guard’s expression did not change, but he put away the gun. Janson’s very defenselessness suggested a better approach: now the man removed a two-foot loop of cord with small plastic disks on either end serving as handles.

Janson had to concentrate to hear the whisper-quiet sound of the man’s jacket stretching as he extended his arms, preparing to loop the garrote precisely around Janson’s throat. He could only applaud his would-be executioner’s professional judgment. The garrote would ensure not only a soundless death but a bloodless one. In a restaurant like this, particularly given the alcohol consumption patterns in Central Europe, it would take little creativity to escort him out. The guard might well drag him out more or less upright, propping him up with a powerful arm around his shoulder: a sheepish grin, and everyone would assume that the guest had simply imbibed too much Zwack Unicum, the spirit of choice at the Palace Hotel.