I kept walking. The light was fading from the sky, and it wasn’t yet five o’clock. At this time of year, almost no one left work before nightfall. In the dark, I might be able to drag him behind his car, depending on where he was parked. But unless it were especially late and deserted, there was a worrisome chance that the person whose car was parked next to us might choose just that moment to head home, too. Plus, even the relatively clueless tend to be somewhat vigilant in parking lots at night. I could overcome that with Jannick, but if there were other people in the area, they’d likely be more watchful than I wanted.

Morning offered the opposite range of risks and benefits. On the one hand, people arriving at work are distracted by thoughts of the morning meeting, the day’s tasks, what messages might be waiting for them. And parking lots aren’t threatening in the morning, so no one pays any attention to their surroundings in them, anyway. But unless Jannick showed up for work very early indeed, it was hard to see how I could count on the privacy I needed. And then there were all the windows of all the buildings…even aside from the possibility of one of Hilger’s men lurking behind one of them, if just one person happened to be looking out at the parking lot at the wrong moment, there would be an eyewitness to the decidedly unnatural manner of Jannick’s demise. Hilger and I hadn’t discussed what would happen if Jannick’s death was a success but its manner a failure. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to take the chance.

I walked another mile or so down East Bayshore, getting a feel for the area, its rhythms and rituals, what fit in and what might seem subtly out of place. My sense was that the neighborhood was transitional-office buildings on the south end, a new IKEA and shopping mall at the other, a trailer park and long-term storage facilities in between. Blending wasn’t the problem here. The problem was access, and control.

I thought about using light disguise to enter Jannick’s building. There might be opportunities inside-a restroom, a fitness facility, a closet. Somewhere Jannick’s guard would be down and I could hold him long enough to do things the way they needed to be done. But I hated to create a connection between myself and the place where he worked, especially if that’s where he was going to die.

I walked back to the Mercedes, cutting once again through the parking lot on the way. Jannick’s car still wasn’t there. It was dark now, but there was a lot of light from streetlamps. I was going to have to find a better place.

I drove back to Jannick’s house. Still no car. Then back and forth again. I used slightly different routes each time, and after five such trips, I started to feel I had a reasonably good feel for the layout of the streets, the patterns of traffic. Within that layout and those patterns, there would be possibilities. There always were. Sometimes I recognized them immediately; sometimes I had to sleep on it first, and let my subconscious work the problem.

Sleep. I needed to get up early tomorrow to make sure I could catch Jannick before he left for work. And the time zone shifts were getting to me. It was time to call it a day.

I stopped at a phone booth in a gas station and checked the Yellow Pages, where I found a hotel called the Stanford Park. Menlo Park, the next town over. I called and was glad to hear they had a vacancy, a king room with a fireplace. No smoking, the clerk said apologetically, perhaps in response to the Japanese accent I was using. No problem, I assured him. No smoking was fine. It was only available for two nights? That would be fine, too. I didn’t plan to be in town any longer than that.

I purged the car nav system before checking into the hotel, then had an excellent dinner at a place called Café Borrone, about a mile down the road: salad, lasagna, and a wonderful Napa Valley Cabernet called Emilio’s Terrace, which, as globalization would have it, I had discovered a year earlier in Bangkok. The restaurant itself was a lively place, a bigger, smoke-free, California version of some of the Left Bank cafés I liked. There was a huge independent bookstore next to it, Kepler’s, and after dinner I strolled among its offerings for a while, watching the people, absorbing details. Everyone looked so prosperous and satisfied and well intentioned. I felt like some secret foreign matter among them, a virus in the system, a germ in an operating room.

I asked one of the employees, a pretty woman named Cynthia, about Internet access. She directed me to the public library, less than a quarter mile away. I strolled over and checked the bulletin boards. Nothing.

The last thing I did before falling into an exhausted sleep was fire up my old cell phone and check its voice-mail account. There was a message from Delilah. “Don’t push me away like this,” she said. “Call me, please.”

I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had to stay focused. I had to be who I always was.

15

I GOT UP at five o’clock the next morning, showered, shaved, fueled up on eggs and coffee in the hotel’s restaurant, and went out. Unlikely that Jannick, or anyone else, would get to work this early, but still I drove past his parking lot to start with. It was deserted. Next, I stopped at a Starbucks in the shopping center at the other end of East Bayshore. I ordered a Venti Latte, wondering why they couldn’t just call the damn thing a large, and dumped the contents in a drain a little ways from the store. It was the cup I needed: first, because I’d noticed that just about everyone in Palo Alto walked around attached to a Starbucks coffee, and carrying one of my own would make me look natural. Second, and more important, I didn’t know how long I might have to wait for Jannick, and although no one was likely to pay attention to a quietly parked Mercedes, they might be discomfited by the sight of a man repeatedly stepping out of it to urinate on the curb.

I drove by Jannick’s house. There was still no car in front, but my guess was that it was in the garage. The sun was just coming up, and the house was dark. I drove down to OPM and parked in my spot. I couldn’t see his house from here, but I’d catch him when he pulled onto Page Mill.

While I waited, listening to a woman named Alisa Clancy on a radio show called Morning Cup of Jazz, I wondered who Jannick really was. A guy with an aptitude for technology? And where did his ambition come from? Did he miss his home in the Netherlands, or was this place, with its yoga-supple people and clean and prosperous streets, his home now?

One thing I didn’t ask, though nor could I deny it, was whether he had a family. Of course he did. The house was too big, and too suburban, for anyone to live in it alone. And his car, a Volvo S80, had kids written all over it. But the less I knew about all that, the better. It’s one thing to recognize something intellectually. It’s quite another to see it-no, watch it-with your own eyes. The last time I’d gotten too close to the family of a target, in Manila, I’d frozen and damn near died. In unguarded moments, I still thought of the little boy whose father I’d taken. I wasn’t going to go through that again.

I waited. No one disturbed me. I had to leave the engine off because if the car were running it might have attracted attention. The interior got cold, but the parka helped. The Venti cup proved handy.

At just past seven-thirty, someone on a bicycle came down Christopher and made a left onto OPM. He was wearing a white helmet and a fluorescent-yellow windbreaker, something designed both for warmth and to be visible to cars. I eased down in the seat a bit and watched through the windshield, thinking it was someone out for his morning exercise. But as he got closer, I realized Christ, that might be him. I’d been so fixated on the Volvo I was waiting for that it took me a moment to adjust. He passed me, not even giving the Mercedes a second look. I was going only on a bunch of out-of-date photos, but the shape of the face, the glasses…I was pretty sure it was Jannick.