SIX HUNDRED MILES to the west, in the Basque town of Vitoria, an Englishman sat amid the cool shadows of the Plaza de España, sipping coffee at a café beneath the graceful arcade. Though he was unaware of the events taking place in Zurich, they would soon alter the course of his well-ordered life. For now, his attention was focused on the bank entrance across the square.

He ordered another café con leche and lit a cigarette. He wore a brimmed hat and sunglasses. His hair had the healthy silver sheen of a man gone prematurely gray. His sandstone-colored poplin suit matched the prevailing architecture of Vitoria, allowing him to blend, chameleonlike, into his surroundings. He appeared to be entranced by that morning’s editions of El País and El Mundo. He was not.

On the pale yellow stonework a graffiti artist had scrawled a warning: TOURISTS BEWARE! YOU ARE NOT INSPAIN ANY LONGER! THIS IS BASQUE COUNTRY! The Englishman did not feel any sense of unease. If for some reason he was targeted by the separatists, he was quite certain he would be able to look after himself.

His gaze settled on the door of the bank. In a few minutes, a teller called Felipe Navarra would be leaving for his midday break. His colleagues believed he went home for lunch and siesta with his wife. His wife believed he was meeting secretly with his Basque political associates. In reality, Felipe Navarra would be heading to an apartment house in the old town, just off the Plaza de la Virgen Blanca, where he would spend the afternoon with his mistress, a beautiful black-haired girl called Amaia. The Englishman knew this because he had been watching Navarra for nearly a week.

At one-fifteen Navarra emerged from the bank and headed toward the old town. The Englishman left a handful of pesetas on the table, enough to cover his tab along with a generous tip for the waiter, and trailed softly after him. Entering a crowded market street, he kept to a safe distance. There was no need to get too close. He knew where his quarry was going.

Felipe Navarra was no ordinary bank teller. He was an active service agent of the Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Fatherland and Liberty) better known as ETA. In the lexicon of ETA, Navarra was a sleeping commando. He lived a normal life with a normal job and received his orders from an anonymous commander. A year ago he had been directed to assassinate a young officer of the Guardia Civil. Unfortunately for Navarra, the officer’s father was a successful winemaker, a man with plenty of money to finance an extensive search for his son’s killer. Some of that money now resided in the Englishman’s numbered Swiss bank account.

Among the terror experts of Europe, ETA had a reputation for training and operational discipline that rivaled that of the Irish Republican Army, a group with which the Englishman had dealt in the past. But based on the Englishman’s observations thus far, Felipe Navarra seemed a rather free-spirited agent. He walked directly toward the girl’s flat, taking no security precautions or countersurveillance measures. It was a miracle he’d managed to kill the Guardia Civil officer and escape. The Englishman thought he was probably doing ETA a favor by eliminating such an incompetent agent.

Navarra entered an apartment building. The Englishman walked across the street to a bakery, where he consumed two sugared pastries and drank another café con leche. He didn’t like to work on an empty stomach. He looked at his watch. Navarra had been inside for twenty minutes, plenty of time for the preliminaries of a sexual liaison.

Crossing the quiet street, he had an amusing thought. If he telephoned Navarra’s wife, a redhead with a fiery Basque temper, she would probably do the job for him. But, strictly speaking, that would be a breach of contract. Besides, he wanted to do it himself. The Englishman was happy in his work.

He entered the cool, dark foyer. Directly in front of him was the entrance to a shaded courtyard. To his right was a row of post boxes. He mounted the stairs quickly to the door of the girl’s flat on the fourth floor.

A television was playing, a senseless game show on Antena 3. It helped to cover the minimal sound the Englishman made while picking the lock. He entered the flat, closed the door, and locked it again. Then he padded into the bedroom.

Navarra was seated at the end of the bed. The woman was kneeling on the floor, her head moving rhythmically between his legs. Navarra’s fingers were entwined in her hair, and his eyes were closed, so he was unaware of the new presence in the room. The Englishman wondered why they were making love to a game show. To each his own, he thought.

The Englishman crossed the room quickly in three powerful strides, his footfalls covered by the sound of the television. A knife slipped from a sheath on his right forearm and fell into his palm. It was the weapon of a soldier, a heavy serrated blade, with a thick leather-bound grip. He held it the way he had been trained at the headquarters of his old regiment on a windswept moorland in the Midlands of England.

The natural inclination when stabbing a man is to do it from behind, so that the killer and victim are never face-to-face, but the Englishman had been trained to kill with a knife from the front. In this case it meant the element of surprise was lost, but the Englishman was a creature of habit and believed in doing things by the book.

He moved a few feet forward, so that he was standing behind the girl. Her hair spilled down a long,V – shaped back. His eye followed the line of her spinal column to the slender waist, to the rounded child-bearing hips and curved buttocks.

Navarra opened his eyes. Frantically he tried to push the girl out of the way. The assassin did it for him, taking a handful of her hair and tossing her across the room, so that she skidded along the hardwood floor on her backside and toppled a standing lamp.

Navarra, without taking his eyes from the intruder, reached backward across the rumpled sheets and beat his palm against a twisted pile of clothing. So, he had a gun. The Englishman stepped forward and took hold of the Basque’s throat with his left hand, squeezing his larynx to the breaking point. Then he pushed the man down onto the bed, settling atop him with one knee on his abdomen. Navarra writhed, struggling for air, the look on his face a combination of panic and utter resignation.

The Englishman thrust the knife into the soft tissue beneath the Basque’s rib cage, angling upward toward the heart. The man’s eyes bulged and his body stiffened, then relaxed. Blood pumped over the blade of the knife.

The Englishman removed the knife from the dead man’s chest and stood up. The girl scrambled to her feet. Then she stepped forward and slapped him hard across the face.

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

The Englishman didn’t know quite what to make of this woman. She had just watched him stab her lover to death, but she was acting as if he had tracked mud across her clean floor.

She hit him a second time. “I work for Aragón, you idiot! I’ve been seeing Navarra for a month. We were about to arrest him and take down the rest of his cell. Who sent you here? It wasn’t Aragón. He would have told me.”

She stood there, awaiting his reply, seemingly unashamed of her nudity.

“I work for Castillo.” He spoke calmly and in fluent Spanish. He didn’t know anyone called Castillo-it was just the first name that popped into his head. Where had he seen it? The bakery? Yes, that was it. The bakery across the street.

She asked, “Who’s Castillo?”

“The man I work for.”

“Does Castillo work for Aragón?”

“How should I know? Why don’t you call Aragón? He’ll call Castillo, and we’ll straighten this mess out.”