the escalator up into the rush-hour clamor of a London afternoon, his right hand, clawlike, gripping the worn rubber rail. The Uzbek was deep inside himself, curled up inside his thoughts like a cat in a closet.
In the final seconds of his life the old man, perhaps sensing Dalton closing in, turned sharply, his blue lips tight, his cheekbones jutting out, his milky eyes widening. Dalton showed his teeth in what he quite mistakenly imagined to be a disarming smile and put four subsonic .22s into the old man’s lungs, the man’s shocked breath a short, sharp puff of peppermint and whisky straight into Dalton’s face.
The chuffing crackle of the Ruger, the silenced muzzle pressed hard up against the man’s woolen vest, was no louder than a dry cough, barely heard above the shuffling din of the crowds, the roar of the subway, and the rattle-clank-rattle of the ancient cast-iron escalator. Four in the lungs looks a lot like a fainting spell to anyone passing by, and everyone did just that.
The Uzbek’s clothes reeked of Turkish tobacco. His teeth were too large and unnaturally white, like little slabs of plastic, the gums a lurid pink. Baltic work, very likely. Dalton had seen enough of that sort of Stalinist dentistry in the blackened mouths of bloated corpses all over Kosovo.
He caught the man’s body as it fell, holding the Uzbek up, pasting a worried look on his sharp-planed, cold-eyed face for the benefit of the other people on the escalator, all of whom glanced quickly away, avoiding involvement of any kind, flowing easily around the two of them like water over stones.
Dalton dead-walked him to a nearby bench, kneeling down in front of him as if he were offering roadside assistance, keeping his pale blue eyes fixed on the man’s face. Dalton was ashamed of feeling not much of anything as he watched him struggle for one more breath, watched his cheeks blooming pink, and then fading slowly to gray.
The Uzbek, his coal-black magpie eyes fixed on Dalton’s, had said something with his final breath, a prayer, a curse, a question, but Dalton spoke no Uzbek, and the man did not try to say it again in English, so although they were quite close together, locked in this obscene intimacy, the old courier died alone.
When the Marylebone crowds thinned out Dalton set the Uzbek gently back on the bench, put a copy of The Times on his lap, and arranged him into a plausible counterfeit of sleep. Then he stood up, tucking the Ruger into a copy of Hello magazine with the skull face of Victoria Beckham scowling from the cover, and walked out of the tube station and into the crowds on Harewood Row, under a hazy twilight sky filled with blue and gold light, an evening, as it happened, very much like this evening in Vienna five years later.
Lasha Seigel, in the office on the fifth floor of the Volksbank, tightened the focus of her lens and clicked another digital shot of Dalton pausing at the top of the escalator, time-marked it, and hit SEND.
This time Dalton felt a second and much stronger ripple of unease. Something about this evening in Old Vienna was . . . not right. He paused for a moment, looking to his left to glance at a poster advertising a Senegalese rapper-poet named Goebe.
Galan’s mark, the tell— a slash of blue marker on the lower left-hand corner—was there, as required by the protocols. Its presence stated that, in Galan’s professional view, it was safe to go forward to the contact point. Of course, Dalton had been told that kind of thing many times before, and sometimes it had even been true.
The fact that his meeting was with Issadore Galan, an ex-Mossad agent now running the agenzia di spionaggo for the Carabinieri in Venice, made it important to push his luck. Galan disliked face-to-face meetings and avoided them unless he had something to say that could not be safely said in any other way.
Dalton pulled in a breath, let it out slowly. If Galan had made a tradecraft error here in Vienna—as unlikely as that was—there was only one way to confirm it.
He paused for a moment, gathering himself, taking in the city.
Vienna, like most aging harlots, was at her best in the twilight: Baroque façades lined the Ring District, richly detailed five- and six-story wedding cakes in pink and cream stone, coffer-roofed, every available inch of wall surface covered in gilded nymphs, onyx satyrs,