Mostly bouncing from limb to limb but occasionally managing to swing himself closer to the trunk, Fisher crashed through the tree, picking up plenty of bruises and scratches but no serious injuries. He managed to arrest his fall ten feet from the ground. Hanging from the lowermost limb, he waited for his body to stop swinging, then dropped the remaining distance.

He raced across the side street behind the foundry, rue Barbourg, then zigzagged his way through alleys while keeping the lights of the soccer stadium in view. Three minutes after dropping from the tree, he was standing at a ticket booth outside the main entrance, and a minute after that he was in the stadium itself, along with five thousand cheering fans who'd come to see the match starring the home team, the Jeunesse Esch. He took a few moments to consult a Plexiglas board showing the stadium's layout, then found a bathroom and ducked into a stall, where he changed clothes. A quick stop at a souvenir shop and he had a Windbreaker and baseball cap bearing the team's distinctive black and yellow logo. Finally, he made his way around the field to the east-side exit, then across the frontage road and down another embankment into some trees.

The CFL train station was now out of the question; upon realizing they'd lost him at the foundry, it would be the first place they'd stake out. The same with Esch-sur-Alzette. They would assume he'd look for the next easiest mode of escape, namely a bus or rental car; with the town's population less than twenty-seven thousand, Hansen and his team would have little trouble scouring stations and agencies. Fisher needed distance, as much and as quickly as he could manage.

Fisher got out his iPhone and called up Google Earth. To the east were three towns within three miles: Rumelange, Kayl, and Tetange. Fisher chose the latter. It had a train station and the intervening terrain was mostly farm fields and forest. After downing an energy bar with a few gulps of water, he started running.

ITtook him forty minutes to reach Tetange's western outskirts. From there it was a quarter mile stroll to the station. His luck was holding. He bought a ticket on the night's last train heading north and, after a brief stop in Bettembourg, he was on his way toward the city of Luxembourg--and a youth hostel full of, predictably, young tourists and their even younger children. On the plus side, Luxembourgian hostels were rarely fully occupied, so he had a communal room to himself and, most important, no credit card was required.

He made his bed, then opened his rucksack and removed its contents and went about checking supplies. The SC he'd taken off Ames was gone, disassembled and tossed into a river during his jog to Tetange the night before. The rest of his delicate gear seemed undamaged, tucked safely away in Aloksaks. He would need to restock his staples, but a few quick stops to military surplus, hardware, and hobby shops would do the trick. Of course, with any luck by dawn tomorrow he'd have all the gear he needed for the foreseeable future.

He repacked everything but his clothes and stuffed all of those into a garbage bag, except for a pair of dark khaki trousers, a long-sleeved navy rugby shirt, and a pair of brown loafers. Finally, he shaved, showered, re-dressed, and left, tossing the garbage bag into the Dumpster behind the hostel. It was almost nine, so he had an hour to kill.

In contrast to most of the rest of the city, the hostel itself was contemporary in design, with a stark white-stucco and glass facade; it lay situated between the Pfaffenthal Viaduct, an elevated, arched train overpass, and a park of labyrinthine and concentric hedgerows.

The city of Luxembourg started in the fourth century as nothing more than a Roman watchtower at the intersection of two roads and remained that way for another six hundred years before the construction of the Lucilinburhuc, or Little Fortress. Over the next three centuries Lucilinburhuc morphed into Luxembourg. For Fisher, who had spent a good portion of the last eighteen months traveling Europe, Luxembourg epitomized Old World charm, with rolling cobblestone streets, some barely wide enough to accommodate two cars; winding rivers and moats; and steeply sloped and spired rooflines.

Fisher got to the meeting place, a shop-lined alleyway on rue de l'Eau, a few blocks from the Grand Ducal Palace, an hour early, then found a small restaurant with a terrace overlooking a park and ordered breakfast. He hadn't eaten a real meal in two days, so he asked for uitsmijter--bread, Gouda cheese, Ardennes ham, and fried eggs--along with quetsche tort, all followed up by two cups of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee.

He felt better, both physically and mentally. He had some breathing room, some time to think and plan before Hansen and his team would reappear. Whether they would be able to track him here on their own, he didn't know, but he was doubtful: He'd paid for his CFL ticket using cash and an Emmanuel credit card; he'd changed out of his black and yellow Jeunesse Esch -fan outfit before reaching Bettembourg, and both the train and the station at Luxembourg had been all but deserted.

Fisher sipped at his third cup of Yirgacheffe, then checked his watch.

Almost time.

TENminutes later a slight man with blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses came beetling through the park toward the restaurant. Of course, "beetling" wasn't exactly right, was it? Fisher thought. Vesa Hytonen's movements were more birdlike. Somehow Hytonen managed to exude both furtiveness and inconspicuousness at the same time. To passersby he was, Fisher suspected, just another funny little man--a cloistered scientist or a persnickety librarian, someone you found momentarily interesting but almost immediately forgot. If Vesa ever decided to graduate from information cutout to full-fledged agent or intelligence operative, the espionage world might never be the same.

Of Finnish and Belgian descent, Vesa was, in fact, a scientist--a biochemist--but he also held postdoctorate degrees in European literature and African history and had begun tinkering in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, both of which were, according to Vesa, merely hobbies to help pass the time.

When he reached the edge of the park, Vesa gave no sign that he'd seen Fisher but rather turned left down the block, bird-walked his way around a couple of pedestrians, then into a bookshop. He emerged carrying a newspaper in his right hand and headed down the block away from Fisher. Vesa dropped the newspaper. When he retrieved it, he folded it lengthwise and stuffed it into his outside jacket pocket with the top headline showing. Fisher got up and followed. After twenty minutes of dry-cleaning, Fisher decided neither of them was being watched. He gave Vesa the all clear signal--a simple scratch of the ear while they waited, with some other pedestrians, at a crosswalk--then broke off. They met back at the City Central Park and sat down on a bench near a fountain.

"Good to see you again, Vesa," Fisher said.

Hytonen darted his eyes to meet Fisher's for a moment, then bobbed his head. "And you, and you."

"What do you have for me?"

"I've been told that the man you're interested in will in fact be at his Vianden home for the next three days."

The man in question was a man named Yannick Ernsdorff. An Austrian in his mid-fifties, Ernsdorff had until ten years earlier worked as a legitimate, if ruthless, investment banker in Vienna. Why and exactly how Ernsdorff had chosen the profession that had occupied him in recent years was anyone's guess, but he had become the go-to financial manager to the underworld's uberwealthy. What Einstein and Planck were to physics, Ernsdorff was to the sheltering and laundering of money. To even get the Austrian on the phone, prospective clients had to have a minimum net worth of one hundred million dollars.