This career had made him very wealthy. It had also made him a lot of enemies. He intended to enjoy the former and frustrate the latter.

All the windows, up and down, were electronically protected. Though he could not see the devices, Quinn knew that the doors would be, as well. That was the inner ring. The outer ring was the wall. It ran right around the estate without a break, topped with two strands of razor-wire, the trees inside the park lopped back to prevent any overhanging branches. Something else, glinting in the occasional ray of wintry sunshine. A tight wire, like piano wire, running along the top of the wall, supported by ceramic studs; electrified, linked to the alarm system, sensitive to the touch.

Between the wall and the house was open ground-fifty yards of it at the closest point, swept by cameras, patrolled by dogs. He watched the two Dobermans, muzzled and leashed, being given their morning constitutional. The dog handler was too young to be Bernhardt.

Quinn observed the black-windowed Mercedes 600 leave for Bremen at five to nine. The walking refrigerator-freezer ushered a muffled, fur-hatted figure into the rear seat, took the front passenger seat for himself, and the chauffeur swept them out through the steel gates and onto the road. They passed just below the branch where Quinn lay.

Quinn reckoned on four bodyguards, maybe five. The chauffeur looked like one; the refrigerator-freezer, definitely. That left the dog handler and probably another inside the house. Bernhardt?

The security nerve center seemed to be a ground-floor room where the staff wing joined the main house. The dog handler came and went to it several times, using a small door that gave directly onto the lawns. Quinn surmised that the night guard could probably control the floodlights, the TV monitors, and the dogs from within. By noon Quinn had his plan. He descended from his tree, and returned to Oldenburg.

He and Sam spent the afternoon shopping, he for a rental van and a variety of tools, she to complete a list he had given her.

“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I could wait outside.”

“No. One vehicle on that country lane in the middle of the night is bad enough. Two is a traffic jam.”

He told her what he wanted her to do.

“Just be there when I arrive,” he said. “I suspect I may be in a hurry.”

He was outside the stone wall, parked in the lane, at 2:00 A.M. His high-roofed panel van was driven close enough to the wall for him to be able to see over it clearly when he stood on the van’s roof. The side of the van, in case of inquiry, bore the logo, created in masking tape, of a TV aerial installer. That would also account for the telescoping aluminum ladder fixed to the roof rack.

When his head came over the wall he could see by the light of the moon the leaf-bare trees of the park, the lawns running up to the house, and the dim light from the window of the guard’s control room.

The spot he had chosen for the diversion was where a single tree inside the park grew only eight feet from the wall. He stood on the roof of the van and swung the small plastic box on the end of the fishing line gently ’round and ’round. When it had enough momentum he let go the line. The plastic case curved out in a gentle parabola, went into the branches of the tree, and fell toward the ground. The fishing line jerked it up short. Quinn paid out enough line to leave the box swinging from the tree just eight feet above the turf of the park, then tied off the line.

He started the engine and ran the van quietly down the wall a hundred yards, to a point opposite the guard’s control house. The van now had steel brackets bolted to its sides, something that would perplex the rental company in the morning. Quinn slotted the ladder into them so that the aluminum structure jutted high above the wall. From its topmost rung he could jump forward and down into the park, avoiding the razor-wire and sensor cord. He climbed the ladder, attached his escape rope to the topmost rung, and waited. He saw the loping shape of a Doberman cross a patch of moonlight inside the park.

The sounds, when they came, were too low for him to hear, but the dogs heard them. He saw one stop, pause, listen, and then race off toward the spot where the black box swung from its nylon line among the trees. The other followed seconds later. Two cameras on the house wall swiveled to follow them. They did not return.

After five minutes the narrow door opened and a man stood there. Not the morning’s dog handler, the night guard.

“Lothar, Wotan, was ist denn los?” he called softly. Now he and Quinn could hear the Dobermans growling, snarling with rage, somewhere in the tree line. The man went back, studied his monitors, but could see nothing. He emerged with a flashlight, drew a handgun, and went after the dogs. Leaving the door unlocked.

Quinn came off the top of the ladder like a shadow, forward and out, then twelve feet down. He took the landing in a paratroop roll, came up and ran through the trees, across the lawn, and into the control house, turning and locking the door from the inside.

A glance at the TV monitors told him the guard was still trying to retrieve his Dobermans a hundred yards up along the wall. Eventually the man would see the tape recorder hanging from its twine eight feet above the ground, the dogs leaping in rage to try to attack it as the recorder uttered its endless stream of growls and snarls at them. It had taken Quinn an hour in the hotel room to prepare that tape, to the consternation of the other guests. By the time the guard realized he had been tricked, it would be too late.

There was a door inside the control room, communicating with the main house. Quinn took the stairs to the bedroom floor. Six carved-oak doors, all probably to bedrooms. But the lights Quinn had seen at dawn that morning indicated the master bedroom must be at the end. It was.

Horst Lenzlinger awoke to the sensation of something hard and painful being jabbed into his left ear. Then the bedside light went on. He squealed once in outrage, then stared silently at the face above him. His lower lip wobbled. It was the man who had come to his office; he had not liked the look of him then. He liked him now even less, but most of all he disliked the barrel of the pistol stuck half an inch into his earhole.

“Bernhardt,”said the man in the camouflage combat suit. “I want to speak to Werner Bernhardt. Use the phone. Bring him here. Now.”

Lenzlinger scrabbled for the house phone on his night table, dialed an extension, and got a bleary response.

“Werner,” he squeaked, “get your arse up here. Now. Yes, my bedroom. Hurry.”

While they waited, Lenzlinger looked at Quinn with a mixture of fear and malevolence. On the black silk sheets beside him the bought-in-Vietnam child whimpered in her sleep, stick-thin, a tarnished doll. Bernhardt arrived, polo-neck sweater over his pajamas. He took in the scene and stared in amazement.

He was the right age, late forties. A mean, sallow face, sandy hair going gray at the sides, gray-pebble eyes.

“Was ist denn hier, Herr Lenzlinger?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” said Quinn in German. “Tell him to answer them, truthfully and fast. Or you’ll need a spoon to get your brains off the lampshade. No problem, sleazebag. Just tell him.”

Lenzlinger told him. Bernhardt nodded.

“You were in the Fifth Commando under John Peters?”

“Ja.”

“Stayed on for the Stanleyville mutiny, the march to Bukavu, and the siege?”

“Ja.”

“Did you ever know a big Belgian called Paul Marchais? Big Paul, they called him.”

“Yes, I remember him. Came to us from the Twelfth Commando, Schramme’s crowd. So what?”

“Tell me about Marchais.”

“What about him?”

“Everything. What was he like?”