appeared, carrying a digital clipboard. She displayed it to Abdil like a hostess showing the maitre d' of a fine restaurant a map of tables.
'Suite 647 will suit our friend's tastes,' Abdil said with a smile.
Ten minutes later, Conrad was shown his room. While considerably smaller than Abdil's penthouse, it didn't lack for amenities, including a young woman on his bed in nothing but a Miami Dolphins jersey.
'I'm Nichole,' she said in an American accent. 'What's your story?'
'Tired,' he said, and decided it was best for everybody if she did the talking. 'Tell me yours.'
She was an American who had arrived in Gstaad a few months earlier after the Super Bowl with her boyfriend the professional football player. He'd left, she'd stayed. Blah, blah, blah.
Conrad concluded there was no way he could decline the present that Abdil had offered him. He didn't want to offend his host or make it appear that the nubile Nichole was anything less than a sexy vixen worthy of a royal harem.
'So which Dolphin am I competing against here?' he asked her.
'All of them.' She giggled and pulled off her jersey.
19
Midas finally emerged from his bluestone kabbalah tank after six hours. He found Natalia in the bedroom, propped up on a pillow naked and playing with her BlackBerry. Natalia was his London mistress whenever Mercedes wasn't around, which at this point was for good.
'We have the private dining room at Roka reserved at nine o'clock,' Natalia said. 'I've got six friends coming. Two artists, three actors, and a fashion designer.'
'We're not going anywhere tonight,' Midas said flatly, and climbed into the bed.
She put the BlackBerry on the night table, revealing her full inviting breasts to him. 'I'm still going to Paris, yes? I can't miss Mercedes's funeral. Every fashion icon in Europe will be there, and so will the press.'
'I'm not taking you to Paris for the funeral of my official girlfriend,' Midas said. 'How would that look? Her father and family will be there. You can frolic with your friends another time.'
Natalia seemed on the verge of pouting but thought better of it. 'How long before we can go out together, just the two of us?' There was a slight demand in her voice.
'A week,' he said, and she brightened considerably and kissed him voraciously. He felt himself respond in spite of his tiredness but still found himself distracted. 'Tell me, have you news from any of your friends?'
Her friends were other Russian 'it' girls prancing around the planet with billionaires and politicians of almost every nationality. Natalia, at twenty-six, had become a more formidable spymaster than his old superiors at the KGB.
She picked up her BlackBerry and said, 'Little Nichole has a new friend in Gstaad.'
An alarm rang in Midas's head, but he didn't know why. 'Who's in Gstaad again?'
'Abdil Zawas. I think Nichole and the girls are stir-crazy. Like you, he doesn't get out often enough.'
He ignored the displeasure in her voice. 'That happens when you're on the international global terrorist watch list, like Abdil,' he said. 'Who is Nichole's new friend?'
'Some guy named Ludwig,' she said, and showed him a picture that Nichole had sent her.
Midas sat up, grabbed the phone, and stared at the picture. He then used the phone to call Vadim, who sounded groggy when he picked up.
'I need you to get to Switzerland,' Midas told him. 'I've found Yeats.'
20
The next morning Conrad woke up at the Sultan's Palace to find a handwritten note from Nichole on the pillow next to him. She had gone snowboarding on Videmanette Mountain and wanted to meet up at Glacier 3000 for lunch at two p.m. He looked at the clock and saw that it was already ten. He had slept over twelve hours.
There was a continental breakfast with a newspaper on the table. He put his feet into the slippers waiting at the bottom of his bed and tied on a robe. Then he poured himself some hot coffee from a silver pot and sat down at the table to look at the copy of the French daily Le Monde.
There was a picture of Mercedes on the front page with a headline: monday services in france for mercedes le roche, 32.
He found a smaller picture of himself on the jump on page eight. How on earth could Nichole not know he was a fugitive? He had to pray she hadn't seen it or never bothered to read a newspaper. He took comfort that the latter was more than probable.
Conrad figured Midas would have to show up at the funeral to put on a brave public face. Which gave him the perfect window: While Midas was in Paris at the funeral, Conrad would hit the bank in Bern.
Conrad put down the paper and saw that an envelope had been slipped under his door. He walked over and picked it up. Inside were architectural blueprints for the bank in Bern, marked up in French. An attached note from Abdil, written neatly in a female hand, instructed him to come up to the penthouse to meet with a Ms. Haury.
Conrad had no idea who Ms. Haury was, but he knew he had to keep moving forward and stay a step ahead of the Alignment, Interpol, and everybody else who was after him now. He had to get whatever was inside Baron von Berg's safe deposit box in Bern. It was his only bargaining chip.
He opened a closet filled with made-to-measure suits for him from Milan's Caraceni. The fabrics, fit for a prince, seemed to be cut from another world and fit perfectly.
A tailor would have had to work at gunpoint to pull this off so fast. Considering it was Abdil who had placed the order, Conrad could only wonder.
The two security guards posted outside his door escorted him down the hallway to the elevator. As they ascended to the penthouse, Conrad realized he couldn't have taken the elevator down to the lobby even if he'd wanted to.
The only way out of this palace was up.
Abdil's penthouse looked completely different in the full light of day. Conrad could have sworn it was fully refurnished, even the sculptures and art on the walls. Now it looked like a corporate boardroom of palatial proportions.
But there was no Abdil, only a curvy blonde standing next to the huge conference table, on which sat an ornate brass safe deposit box with a stainless steel door sporting four shiny brass dials and a brass keylock.
'I'm Dee Dee,' the woman said, 'the American CFO of Abdil's collectibles division. I understand from Mr. Zawas that you want to make a withdrawal from your box at the Gilbert et Clie bank in Bern.'
'That's right,' Conrad said, looking at the box with the four shiny brass dials. 'I suppose it's too much to hope that this is the box in question.'
'I'm afraid so,' she said. 'But the box you'll be opening will almost certainly be of this type. Take a seat.'
Conrad sat down in a thronelike leather chair and listened to the polished Dee Dee explain the history of the box as if she were showcasing it on the Home Shopping Network.
'Any Swiss box with a number in the seventeen hundreds at Gilbert et Clie is among the most precious antique boxes in the vault,' she told him. 'That's because it's a triple-lock box. Very unusual. Only a few were manufactured in 1923 by Bauer AG in Zurich. Extremely rare.'
Conrad touched the brass and steel box. It was only about three inches wide, two inches high, and seven inches long. Just how big was the secret Baron von Berg hoped to hide in such a small box?
'I see only two locks on the door,' he said. 'The four-dial combination lock and the keylock next to it.'
'That's all you're supposed to see,' she told him. 'The distinctive combination lock you can't miss. It has four
