Jobs for children; jobs for third-rank embassy staff.

Number five, January 2008: Now this one is sensitive. Name’s Lorenzo Peroni, high-scale arms dealer based in Rome. I’ll text you the details. He’s meeting with a South Korean buyer named Pak Jin Myung in Montenegro. I want you on top of him from when he leaves his apartment on the eighth until he returns on the fifteenth. No, don’t worry about mikes, we’ve taken care of that. Just keep up the visual, hone your camera work.

As it turned out, Pak Jin Myung was no arms buyer but one of Peroni’s many mistresses. The resulting photographs were more appropriate for English tabloids.

So it went. One more impotent surveillance in Vienna, the order to mail a sealed manila envelope from Berlin to a Theodor Wartmüller in Munich, a one-day Paris surveillance, and a single murder, at the beginning of the month. That order had been sent by text message:

L: George Whitehead. Consider dangerous. In Marseille for week starting Thurs.

George Whitehead, patriarch of a London crime family, looked about seventy, though he was in fact closer to eighty. No bullets were required, just a single push in the hotel steam room. His head cracked against the damp wall planks; the concussion knocked him out for life.

It hardly even felt like murder.

Others might have been pleased by the ease and inconsequence of these assignments. However, Milo Weaver-or Sebastian Hall or Mr. Winter-could not relax, because the ease and inconsequence meant only one thing: They were onto him. They knew, or they suspected, that his loyalties did not lie entirely with them.

Now this, another test. Get some money together. Ideally, twenty million, but if you can only get five or ten we’ll understand.

Dollars?

Yes, dollars. You have a problem with that?

Stefan, perhaps because of nerves, began to tell them about a beautiful girl he knew in Monte Carlo, a dancer who earned an excellent living having sex with animals, which Stefan believed to be the secret French vice. That, too, ruined Milo’s inner sound track, and he told the German to shut up. “Give Radovan the gun.”

Stefan handed it over.

Giuseppe said, “Just about there.”

Milo checked his watch; it was nearly four thirty, a half hour before closing time.

Giuseppe drove through an open gate and across gravel to where three Swiss cars were parked in front of the museum, a nineteenth-century villa once owned by Emil Georg Bührle, a German-born industrialist who had earned part of his fortune selling arms to Fascist Spain and the Third Reich. He left the van idling. A middle-aged couple left the museum, and behind their van, beyond the stone wall, more couples moved along the sidewalk on Sunday outings.

“The four I said, okay? They’re close to the front. We don’t have time to shop around.”

“Ja, Tante,” Stefan said as they stretched black ski masks over their heads. Giuseppe remained behind while the others climbed out. Radovan clutched the Beretta against his thigh, and the three men crunched over gravel to the entrance.

When scouting this and four other museums the previous week, Milo had noted the lack of real security, as if it had never occurred to those responsible for the E. G. Bührle Museum that someone might love art a little too much, or just want some easy money. There were two guards in the front, retired Swiss policemen who didn’t even carry sidearms. It was Radovan’s job to neutralize them, and he did so with gusto, shouting in his heavy accent for them to get on the floor as he waved his pistol around. Perhaps sensing that this was a desperate man, they sank immediately.

Stefan pulled the ticket clerk out from behind her counter and forced her down beside the guards as Milo checked for patrons. There were only two left-an elderly couple in the first room. They stared at him, baffled.

While Radovan kept watch over his prisoners, Milo and Stefan took out their wire cutters. The first snip set off a piercing alarm, but this was expected. Ten minutes, he had figured, minimum. A Monet, a van Gogh, a Cézanne, and a Degas.

With their heavy glass covers, the paintings were unwieldy, so it took both of them to hustle each to the van, while Radovan paced menacingly. Seven minutes into it, Milo tapped Radovan’s shoulder. They all withdrew.

Giuseppe laid on the gas.

This, of course, was the easy part. Four paintings worth over a hundred and sixty million dollars in less than ten minutes. No corpses, no injuries, no mistakes. Face masks, the minimum of conversation, and a white van out of town.

Giuseppe kept to the speed limit while behind him Radovan and Stefan slipped the burlap bags over the paintings and chatted about details of the job, the way they might discuss pretty girls they’d met on vacation. The expressions on the guards’ faces, the ticket clerk’s admirably shaped ass, the old couple’s strange air of ease as they watched the robbery take place. Then, without warning, Stefan leaned forward and vomited.

He apologized, but they’d all been through enough jobs to know there was often one person whose nerves finally took control and emptied him completely. There was no shame in it.

Giuseppe got them out of Zürich proper by a confusing sequence of turns he had charted out beforehand. Only once they’d reached the eastward road to Tobelhof did the rigor relax, and for a brief minute they had a peaceful view of the forest rising toward the peak of Zürichberg. A moment of naiveté, as if this peace could be theirs. They passed through Tobelhof’s scattered farms, and by the time they reached the urban landscape of Gockhausen, the feeling was gone.

They reentered the forest on the far side of the town and took a left onto an unused dirt road where, a half mile in, a VW van and a Mercedes waited for them in a clearing. They got out and stretched. Radovan gave a Serbian curse of glee-“Jebute!”-before they transferred the paintings to the VW. Giuseppe doused the interior of their white van with a canister of gasoline.

Milo removed a soft leather briefcase from the trunk of the Mercedes. Inside was six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of used euro bills in small denominations, divided into three Tesco grocery bags. If asked, he would have explained that they’d been liberated from a drug dealer in Nice, but no one asked. He distributed the bags and shook their hands. He thanked them for their good work, and each told him to call whenever he had another job. Milo wished Radovan luck with his mother. “It took a long time,” said Radovan, “but I’ve finally got my priorities straight. This money will pay for whatever she needs.”

“You sound like a good son.”

“I am,” he said without a hint of modesty. “As soon as a man loses touch with family, he might as well put a bullet in his own head.”

Milo gave him an appreciative smile, then shook his hand, but Radovan wouldn’t let go.

“You know, Tante, I don’t really like Americans. Not since they bombed my hometown. But you-you, I like.”

Milo wasn’t sure how to take that. “What makes you think I’m American?”

A big grin filled Radovan’s face. It was a familiar one, that knowing and vaguely condescending smile prevalent among Balkan men. “Let’s just say your German accent is lousy.”

“Maybe I’m English. Or Canadian.”

A laugh popped from Radovan’s mouth, and he slapped Milo’s arm. “No, you’re American, all right. But I won’t hold it against you.” He reached into his pocket and handed over Milo’s worn passport. He winked. “Sorry, but I like to know who I’m working with. Tschüss.”

As Milo watched the Serb proudly join the others at the car, he thought how lucky they both were. Had he lifted something that could have connected Milo to his real name-not this Sebastian Hall passport-Radovan wouldn’t have made it out of this forest, and he didn’t feel up to killing anyone today.