In other words, she resumed texting Janson,

Porto C diver hunting doc to terminate.

She went back for dessert, chose two dishes of flan and a double espresso. Returning to her table, she sent another message:

PC diver dove again. Unit called ?sar? Iboga friend—doc enemy.

She spooned up the flan and stirred sugar into the espresso. Then she thumbed into her phone:

?Next?

SEVENTEEN

Where next, Boss?” Mike asked.

The Rolls-Royces were whining down to stop as Ed parked the Embraer outside Jet Aviation���s fixed base operation terminal in Zurich, Switzerland.

“Leave the aircraft here and have it serviced. You guys fly home commercial. Catch up on your sleep.”

“Home? Wouldn’t mind seeing the house, mow the lawn.”

“Spray the roses,” said Ed. “Pat the cat—when do you want us back?”

“Quintisha will find you.”

Janson’s pilots knew better than to ask where he was going.

All week Paul Janson had been calling in markers from former friends and foes from his long years at Consular Operations. Spies, bankers, state ministers, criminals, and law officers owed him favors and often their lives. Ironically—and very conveniently—there was much overlap between the CatsPaw Associates corporate security consulting business and the Phoenix Foundation. His two organizations fueled each other.

The family of experts Janson had gathered served both sides, often unknowingly.

The information miners, the eyes and ears who brought him word of a derelict agent, also alerted him to paying jobs and dug up information to perform those missions. The money managers who held the IRS at bay and kept the nonprofit side both solvent and legitimate could move cash and dispense payments where needed. Facilitators, specialized operators, computer wizards, and hackers, all were put to work on various aspects of the hunt for Iboga, Iboga’s rescuers, and the elusive doctor whom Janson was starting to think of, ruefully, as Fleet-Footed Flannigan.

The CatsPaw Associates machine was operating at full bore. Results, however, were disappointing. The accountants were making some progress on where Iboga had hidden Isle de Foree’s millions. But in a fruitless week of polling the clandestine world Janson’s people had found nothing about who had dispatched the Harrier jump jet that rescued Iboga and nothing about where the dictator had gone.

The freelance researchers coordinated by the home office had pointed out what Janson already knew: In a world that contained more than one hundred thousand “superrich” fortunes of over $30 million, plenty of individuals could afford to buy an elderly Harrier. And complex aircraft support systems were not necessary if they intended to fly it only once and ditch it in the sea when they were done with it.

An intriguing hint came from a recording in the Gulf of Guinea Maritime Security database of a radio exchange that had occurred the night before Iboga’s defeat on Pico Clarence. Supertanker watch officers hailing each other as their vessels passed close in the dark a hundred miles off Gabon were interrupted by a thunderous noise. One officer, who had served in the Royal Navy, identified the never-forgotten sound of a Harrier storming down to a vertical landing. On their radars they spotted a large ship, a freighter or another tanker, on which a Harrier could have landed. But the ship showed no lights and did not answer their calls.

Janson speculated that if the Harrier had night-fighting capability it could have joined the ship by flying offshore from Gabon, a former French colony. That ship could have steamed within Harrier range of Isle de Foree when Iboga made his escape the following afternoon. Janson ordered CatsPaw to canvas aviation officials in Gabon. But the fact was the nation had many remote airstrips where the Harrier could have jumped off after flying in from Angola or Congo, coming and going in complete secrecy.

So while the CatsPaw Associates and Phoenix Foundation machines continued to grind away and Jessica Kincaid hunted for the doctor, it was time for “the boss” to disappear. Time to go back to what he did best, alone.

He had Jet Aviation’s limo run him over to the main passenger terminal. He wandered around the terminal until he felt comfortably un-���followed. Then he boarded the train to Zurich, where he roamed the underground shops of the Hauptbahnhof. Only when he was absolutely sure he was not being followed did he leave the train station. From the station plaza he rode the escalator up to the Bahnhofstrasse and cut through a neighborhood of narrow, tree-lined side streets.

He crossed a shallow branch of the Limmat on the Gessner Bridge and onto Lagerstrasse. Lagerstrasse paralleled the enormous railroad cut that brought the sleek trains into the center of the city. Four blocks on, he entered the lobby of a low-rise commercial building beside the tracks, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and knocked at the door of a freight-forwarding business.

In the outer reception room he gave his name.

This gained him admittance to an inner reception room.

An iris scan confirmed that he was expected.

A receptionist led him to a back office where the floor vibrated at a fine pitch set by the trains whisking past the building. A clerk wordlessly handed him a Tyvek polyethylene envelope and left Janson alone, closing the door behind him. Janson locked it.

He dumped the contents of the envelope on a bare table and carefully examined the paper and plastic that supported a legend he had not used for several years. The identity package for security-services executive “Adam Kurzweil” was so meticulously assembled that the crisp new Canadian passport was accompanied by its expired predecessor, which Janson recalled he had last used to enter Hungary. The new one had the latest radio frequency identification chip issue encoded with Kurzweil’s particulars and a biometric profile designed to slide Janson past the scanners. It was a reminder, not that he needed it, that in the post-9/11 decades when transportation security employed ever more sophisticated digital technology, one had to pay for the best countermeasures to stay ahead of the game. Happily, the best was still found in this nondescript building on Lagerstrasse.

He emptied his wallet into the Swiss Post Priority envelope they had supplied, and addressed it to a cell phone shop on the nearby Uetlibergstrasse. A CatsPaw Associates private shell corporation owned a nonparticipating interest in numerous such shops in Europe and Asia. The investments bought the key codes to their front doors, mail drops, and exclusive access to safes in their cellars.

He refilled his wallet with the new passport, driver’s license, medical insurance cards, credit cards, dog-eared family photographs, and business cards—both Adam Kurzweil’s, which were expensively embossed, and several that Kurzweil would have received from sales prospects.

He walked back to the train station, posted the envelope, bought an expensive carry-on shoulder bag, two changes of clothing, a tan raincoat, and a windbreaker. He left the station and boarded a tram. He got off at the Stampenbachplotz stop and walked to the Hotel InterContinental. He left his distinctive raincoat in the men’s room and walked out into the streets, where he eventually hailed a taxi to a residential neighborhood. He walked some more, removed his necktie, folded it and his suit jacket into his shoulder bag, put on the windbreaker, and rode a tram to the industrial Oerlikon quarter.

He walked from the Oerlikon tram station out of the central district of shops and cafés, passed factories old and new, and at the end of a cobblestone alley knocked on a windowless steel door. He stepped back and unzipped his windbreaker to let the cameras have a good look. To his surprise, the door was opened personally by the man he had come to see.