Her ass covered, she took the elevator to the chief of station’s office, knocked, and entered.

“What do you have?” he asked, looking up from his desk.

“Lots,” she told him, laying the envelope in front of him. “But the best part is a list.”

“What kind of list?”

“A list of accounts in half a dozen offshore banks, and deposits made to those accounts by Herr Simoni.”

“You mean the mook with the Korans? The eBay guy our friends blew away?”

She smiled brightly, and nodded.

The COS opened the packet, and looked at the top page.

“That’s sort of an executive summary,” Madison Logan told him. “Eyes Only. Just the good parts.”

The COS grunted, his brow furrowed.

Deposit $8,400

Account #98765A4

Bank Hapoalim

Tel Aviv

10-05-04

Deposit CH72,900

Account #87612342

CBC Bank & Trust, Ltd.

Cayman Islands

9-02-04

Deposit 2,342

Account #3498703

HSBC Bank

Jebil Ali Free Zone

9-22-04

Deposit $25,000

Account #3698321W

Cadogan Bank

St. Helier, Jersey

12-20-04

Deposit £31,825

Account #0000432189

Singel Bank Privat

Geneva

1-27-05

There had been a lot of second-guessing after the fuckup at Simoni’s apartment. The yahoos from the BfV had managed to kill a man whose capture would have been invaluable.

But that was then, the COS thought, and this was now. The list in his hands was gold. He looked up with a satisfied smile. “This is excellent work, Madison. Really, excellent! What does Spagnola think?”

A hapless look came over her. “I’m afraid he hasn’t seen it yet, sir.”

“What?”

“No. He, uhhh, well, I think he left early. A ski trip or something.”

The sooner Wilson got out of town, the safer he’d be. It had taken only a day for the wire transfer to clear between Hong Kong and St. Helier. He would have paid almost any amount for transportation to Kampala. But this was Bunia. A failure to bargain would seem suspicious. So he negotiated for five minutes with the man offering a ride in his beat-up Renault.

They got to Entebbe in the evening, too late to fly anywhere Wilson wanted to go. There was, however, a Kenya Airlines flight at five thirty in the morning, connecting to Zurich via Nairobi and Amsterdam.

At the driver’s suggestion, he spent the night at the Speke Hotel, an old-world relic with comfortable beds, good security, and a wireless Internet connection. The driver spent the night in the courtyard of the hotel, sleeping in the backseat of his car.

Wilson ate dinner in his room, then trawled the Internet for news of Bobojon and Hakim. Using different search engines, he looked for February or March news reports from Kuala Lumpur and Berlin, mentioning anyone named Bobojon or Hakim. Nothing. So he tried it again, omitting the names, and looking instead for reports from the same cities using the words “terrorist” and “arrest.” There were dozens of stories, but only two could be considered “hits.”

The first was a short article in Dawn, Malaysia’s biggest English-language newspaper. The story was dated February 24, and recounted the recent arrest of two men at Kuala Lumpur’s Subang Airport.

Sources identified one of the arrested men as Nik Awad, an alleged liaison between Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM) and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). The second man, traveling on a Syrian passport, was not further identified. Police said the second man attempted to commit suicide at the airport, but was prevented from swallowing a poison capsule.

Both men were detained under provisions of the Internal Security Act. Police are said to be investigating a terrorist plot to attack an American military base in Sumatra.

Wilson read the story three times. The salient facts were three: the time frame, the venue, and the suicide attempt. Late February was about the time he’d dined with Hakim, just before he set sail for Odessa; Hakim had been on the way to Kuala Lumpur; and the suicide attempt, well, it could only be him.

The second story was on the CNN website. It was a March 1 report, datelined Berlin. An antiterrorist investigation had ended in a shootout at the suspect’s apartment. An agent of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Clara Deisler, thirty-one, had been killed. The suspect, killed in an exchange of gunfire, was a “guest worker” with links to Islamist groups in Bosnia and Lebanon. The investigation was continuing.

Wilson searched for a follow-up, using Deisler’s name, but all he found were German newspaper articles with the same date as the CNN report. There was no follow-up. Which was strange. Two people had been killed in a gun battle in downtown Berlin. One was a terrorist; the other – a woman, no less – was a government agent. And then… nothing.

So the story was being suppressed.

But was it Bobojon? Wilson couldn’t be sure, but it seemed likely. Among other things, it would explain the phony message left for him in Draft mode. The Germans had Bobojon’s computer. Which probably meant that the CIA did, too. How long, then, before they found out about the Cadogan Bank?

The answer was anyone’s guess. For all Wilson knew, the feds could be watching the bank already. But he doubted that. The FBI and the CIA were bureaucracies like any other, except they were secret. This enabled them to conceal a lot of their blundering. But 9/11 made their modus operandi obvious: They moved slowly, fucked things up, and demanded more “resources.”

Still, they had a lot of resources, so it wasn’t as if you could ignore them.

So the question was: What would he do if he were in their shoes? He thought about it for a moment, and decided that the first thing he’d do was block wire transfers out of the Cadogan account. With so much at stake, “Francisco d’Anconia” would then be expected to contact the bank. At that point, his whereabouts might be traced, or the feds would try to lure him to Jersey.

Before they could do that, though, they’d need to know about the Cadogan Bank, and then they’d have to get the bank’s cooperation.

Did they? Had they? Wilson couldn’t be sure.

He got into Zurich a little after eight the next evening, after traveling nearly fifteen hours. Grimy and exhausted, he contented himself with a snack at a gyro joint in an alley off the Niederhof, where the city’s tourist traps were concentrated. This done, he walked along the quay beside the river, his eyes on the swans, then crossed a footbridge into the old town, where he found a room at the wildly expensive Hotel Zum Storchen.

The next morning, he wandered the streets until he found the vast Jelmoli department store, just off the elegant Bahnhofstrasse. There, he bought new clothes and a leather suitcase. Returning to the hotel, he took a long, hot shower that amounted to a kind of exfoliation. The fire and stink of Bafwasende, the chaos and grime that was Bunia, washed from him until all that was left was the ghost shirt that was his skin, and the injunction:

When he checked out, half an hour later, the girl at the reception desk didn’t recognize him – and then, when she did, she giggled. Clad in Armani, Bragano, and Zegna, he seemed, almost, to have stepped off the cover of GQ. Walking to the Bahnhof, he took the first train to the airport, and rented a car.