had two-man teams on him twenty-four seven while he was in the Zurich area. They even went to the trouble to shoot some surveillance photos on the street.”
Essen reached to an inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a trio of surveillance pictures and showed them to Alex.
The pictures told her what she had already surmised. John Sun was Peter Chang. Or maybe Peter Chang was John Sun. Or maybe it was an equation that she hadn’t quite mastered yet. But the surveillance photos confirmed to her that she and Maurice Essen were discussing the same man. She was certain.
“Ever seen him?” Essen asked.
“I’m not sure,” she lied.
For several seconds she stared blankly and coldly at the image of the man she had danced with until 2:00 a.m. two nights earlier, whose arms had held her, and who had given her a friendly platonic kiss on each cheek in the lobby of the Ritz when he had escorted her back to the hotel.
“I really can’t say,” she said.
“Of course not,” Essen said. “Well, to use an expression I once learned in America, he’s a slippery SOB, this John Sun, so I hope you’re not helping him if you want our help. In Switzerland he apparently ‘made’ his watchers, an experienced counterterror team, and slipped them. He went in and out of a department store on the Hilden- strasse in Zurich. Or at least he went in because no one saw him come out. It was there that he vanished.”
“Why are you interested in him?” she asked. “From what you’ve said, he didn’t break any laws. Not yet by your accounts, anyway.”
“Our initial focus had been more upon Yuan than his custodian,” Essen said. “What exactly had Yuan been up to in Switzerland that would land him in a glacier with lungs filled with smoke? So the Swiss tried to determine who Yuan had been and what his mission had entailed. An informer told them that Yuan had been in Europe to effect a transfer of cash for some bill of goods. The Swiss police hadn’t known whether it was drugs, weapons, or maybe jewelry. The informer hadn’t known. There was plenty of speculation to go around, and it went in several unsubstantiated directions.”
Conspicuously absent so far, Alex noted, was any mention of the high-ticket
“Two atypical murders in Geneva took place within twenty-four hours of Sun’s disappearance from Zurich,” Essen said. “One victim was an old crook named Laurent Tissot, a Swiss. The other was a man known as Stanislaw Jurjeznicz, a Pole. Sun somehow had moved about the country like a phantom. Just as his surveillance team had not known anyone who could disappear so quickly, they had never seen a diplomat who could have slipped in and out so fast. So when they ran a check on his passport, they discovered it was one of those mysterious ‘Made in China’ specials. It dead-ended into the Beijing computers. The passport was real but the owner wasn’t. Not quite, anyway. And the two dead men in Geneva-the Swiss national and the Polish national, both with ties to the underworld-had links to a shady deal gone sour. The Swiss then went through all their street surveillance cameras in the significant parts of Geneva, including bank ATMs, and connected ‘Sun’ with the time and place. That, in turn, connected Sun to Yuan and possibly to two murders.”
“With respect,” Alex said, “what you’re presenting is a highly circumstantial case.”
“That’s right,” Essen said politely. “So, I’ll ask you again, maybe as a hypothetical, do you think you might have seen or encountered the individual we know as John Sun?”
“I see a lot of people every day,” she said. “Nothing stands out.”
“This man would stand out. Of course,” Essen said with a slight sigh, a tiny decent into anger as he answered, “keep something in mind. We have established that the Switzer and the Pole knew each other, did business with each other, based on the accounts of respected informants. So any information you can give us in return, particularly on the whereabouts of ‘Sun’ would be of infinite interest, particularly if he can be located on Swiss soil where he can be brought in for questioning. We consider Sun highly dangerous. This is evident, in consideration of the deaths of the Pole and the Switzer.”
“I understand,” she said. “If there’s a time at which I can help you with this, I’ll be pleased to do so.”
“Of course,” Essen said. “Good day, Ms. Alex. We’ll appreciate your cooperation in the future.”
“Of course,” she said.
Essen rose, gave her a curt old-world bow, and returned in the direction he had come. The seat next to her remained empty.
She stared for several minutes out the window as the landscape of southeastern France flew by. There were moments in life-messages, acquisitions of knowledge-that were made up of too much stuff to be digested whole.
This was one. Or maybe this was several of them, all jammed together. Eventually, she steepled her fingers before her and thought deeply. Just in terms of Peter, which way should she proceed? What if Peter had murdered two men in Switzerland to cover his own crimes or something even more devious?
Alert him that Interpol was on his trail?
Alert Interpol that Peter would be joining her in Geneva?
Run the whole thing past Mark McKinnon, hope he was sober enough to make a correct decision, and proceed on his instructions?
Every potential step had something right with it and something wrong with it.
To alert Interpol was to betray Peter, who had saved her life.
To ignore Interpol was to betray the working relationship she sought to develop for this and future cases. Did professional loyalties trump personal gratitude? Or was it the other way around?
Alex pondered.
Do nothing? Always an option for the fainthearted or the unduly cautious. But doing nothing was sometimes the wisest route. She brooded.
Reality check. Back to Square One: her assignment was
A question like that should have been a slam dunk. But instead, she had no answer. She had the funny sense of not knowing Peter Chang at all, or maybe knowing him all too well. She wasn’t sure which.
The train arrived exactly on time in Geneva in mid-afternoon. As planned, she checked into the Grand Hotel de Roubaix in Geneva as late afternoon was fading into evening. She had dinner at the hotel, went out for a walk, returned, bolted her door, and did a final check for email.
Finally she made a decision.
No bolt of lightning would illuminate the whereabouts of
She went back to her computer. She typed an email to both Mark McKinnon in Europe and her boss Mike Gamburian back in Washington, inquiring by name about Laurent Tissot and Stanislaw Jurjeznicz. She wrote:
I don’t know. It might be nothing, but I’d appreciate anything you have on either of these two. Their names have surfaced. Alex. Geneva
She felt clever and compromised at the same time. Like Peter on the subject of Yuan and perhaps on the subject of The Pieta of Malta, she had not exactly told a lie. She had instead declined to tell the complete truth.
She waited for a few minutes. She found a cognac in the hotel’s overpriced minibar, and poured herself a double.
Then the email account flashed again with an incoming message. Something back fast from Gamburian, who must have been at the tail end of a long business day. No hits on the Pole, but there was some preliminary stuff on Tissot. After a stint in the Swiss Army, he was a career shady character, but mostly an arms merchant. Tissot was not an outright crook, but usually in the gray area of the law and the dark gray area of ethics and morality. Gamburian finished,
More details to follow,
I’ll try to boot up an entire file tomorrow a.m. in DC. Cheers, stay safe.
She wrote back and thanked him. But now she was exhausted. Absolutely and positively. She shut down her laptop, made sure the door to her room was bolted, set up her weapon again, and settled into bed, her mind still
