"What else?"

"That is all."

"So why did this Kaya guy hire you to-"

She let out a shuddery breath that didn't sound much like her at all. "I am tired, Perry."

"Yeah, well, I'm really sorry about that, but if it weren't for you killing these people, my family and I wouldn't be in this situation, so I think I'm ent.i.tled to some kind of explanation, don't you?"

She reached up and switched off the overhead light. We sat in the darkness for a long moment, rocking back and forth with the motion of the train, and finally she spoke again.

"In a past life," Gobi said, "Armitage helped people buy things."

"What kind of things?"

"Weapons." Gobi gestured with her hand, a so-so gesture. "He was, how do you say, tarpininkas . . . a go-between?"

"So why did your guy Kaya want him dead?"

"Bad blood."

"They were related?"

"Former partners. They dealt with the same fringe groups. Third world dictators. African warlords. Providing them with the weapons they needed. When Armitage went legitimate ten years ago, Kaya began to worry about his old partner's discretion."

"So Kaya hired you to kill Armitage, Monash, and Paula?"

"Not hired," Gobi said.

"Why do you keep saying that?" I was trying to keep my voice down in the sleeping train compartment, but it wasn't easy. "If they're not paying you to kill all these people, then why are you doing it?"

She didn't answer, not even when I finally got tired of waiting, reached for her arm, and pulled her toward me. Her head lolled sideways, and in the light of a pa.s.sing railway trestle, I saw the whites of her eyes rolled back in her head. A seizure, at the worst possible moment. She never seemed to have them at any other time.

"Gobi?" Her skin felt cold, clammy, and when I tried to shake her, her limbs were loose, without any resistance in the muscles or the joints.

I touched her face and felt something sticky and wet.

At first I thought maybe it was sweat. Then I looked at my fingers and saw they were red. Blood was trickling from her nose and the corner of her lips, covering her chin and neck. She had already soaked the whole front of her T-shirt.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," I said, lifting her limp body. "Gobi... What the h.e.l.l?"

Her mouth fell open and she made a clicking noise. There was still a lot of blood coming from her nose, and maybe her mouth too. Out of nowhere I thought about what the guy with the beard, Swierczynski, had said to us last night.

The bullet is already in your head.

I tried to think clearly about what was happening. The blood didn't make sense. She hadn't been shot back in St. Mark's Square, and there was no way she was really walking around with an actual bullet in her head.

I picked up her wrist and felt her pulse. It was irregular, and when I watched her chest rise, her breathing seemed shallow and labored.

"Look, I don't know what to do here," I said. "Is there an injection or something I can give you?"

Her eyes flicked toward me silent and helpless. When she still didn't say anything, I reached down and started digging through the canvas tote she'd dragged from the locker back at the Venice train station. Inside were our fake pa.s.sports and doc.u.ments, two bottles of water, a silk scarf, sungla.s.ses, a Eurail map and train schedule, a thick bundle of euros, a tube of lipstick, and a few bullets rolling around. No medicine, no messages, no clues.

At the very bottom, my hand came across a key tucked into one of the seams. It was a big chunk of bra.s.s, and at first I thought it was the room key from Venice. Then I realized there was a different tag on it completely. It read, in total: Hotel Schoeneweiss, Zermatt I dropped the key back in her bag, poured some water on the scarf, and tried to wipe some of the blood from her face, zipping up her jacket to cover the stained shirt. I guess I knew where we were heading after all.

Next to me, Gobi had started to tremble.

25. "Everybody Daylight"

-Brightblack Morning Light I awoke without realizing that I'd fallen asleep. The train was slowing down, the rhythm of its wheels changing, sloughing off speed, drawing me from sleep so deep, it felt like waking up from anesthesia or hypnosis. I'd been hypnotized once at a party, and coming out of it had felt like this, blurry and unpleasant. I'm going to begin counting back from ten, and when I get to one you'll be fully awake . . .

I sat up. My mouth was dry, and getting my eyes completely open was probably going to require a couple of toothpicks and a whole lot of caffeine.

We were pulling into the station. The video screen at the front of the car said we were in Zermatt. I glanced around, immediately on guard for anybody who might have been watching us, but the only other pa.s.sengers on this side of the compartment were a pair of hippie backpackers, a guy and a girl slouched side by side under a heavy Hudson Bay blanket, their sleeping bodies shifting together, keeping time with the train's still diminishing velocity.

Next to me, Gobi slumped pale and motionless against my shoulder. Sometime during the night she had finally stopped trembling and slipped into a kind of shallow doze. I had a foggy memory of changing trains, getting off the TGV in the middle of the night, helping her through some desolate border checkpoint at three a.m., past two midnight-shift porters leering at us from behind a closed magazine kiosk, muttering something in broken, learned-from-TV English about a boy bringing his wh.o.r.e home after a rough night. From there we'd boarded a Swiss regional, handing our pa.s.sports and tickets to a listless-looking official, who'd stamped them and shoved them back.

Now we'd come to a complete stop, the first rays of sun spiking down from the Alps, filling the compartment with brittle orange light that I wasn't remotely prepared for.

"Wake up."

"Ugh?"

"We're here." I moved my arm, and Gobi stirred reluctantly toward consciousness, making a gravelly noise in her throat. Standing up, I lifted under her arm, pulling her down the aisle and guiding her down the steps to the main platform until she started to support her own weight. Outside the air was sharp and glacial and smelled faintly like pine trees-an almost painfully clean smell. I slipped the sungla.s.ses over Gobi's eyes to cover as much of her face as possible, and hauled her out into the daylight.

The terminal clock said it was just past seven a.m. Outside the station, the first early skiers and tourists were already on their way to the slopes. The main drag had no actual cars, just these little diesel vehicles and electric mini-taxis shuttling people past chalets and still closed alpine shops full of overpriced watches, postcards, and cuckoo clocks. A decorative red and green banner blowing in the wind over the street advertised some kind of festival: ClauWau Fest!!-25a27 Nov I handed one of the drivers a twenty-euro bill from Gobi's bag and asked him to drive us to the Hotel Schoeneweiss.

"Wohin?" He gazed at me blankly, a grizzled middle-aged man in a golf cap with windburned hangdog jowls, watery gray eyes, and a gunslinger's mustache hanging off his upper lip.

"Is there a problem?" I asked, trying to support Gobi's head without making it look like that's what I was doing.

"There is no such hotel in Zermatt, mein Herr."

"There has to be." I held up the key that I'd found in Gobi's bag so he could read the label. "Look."

The driver inspected the key for a long moment and gestured gloomily for us to climb in.

At the far end of the main street, past all the other inns and shops, the taxi pulled up in front of a small wooden storefront that seemed to be built directly into the side of the mountain itself. The shop window was full of dusty wine bottles. The hand-carved sign above the low arched door read VINOTHEKE-WEINE-SPIRITUOSEN.

"Looks like a liquor store," I said. With its low, cavelike entrance and folksy decor, it looked like where Bilbo Baggins might drop by for a bottle of eiswein. "Are you sure this is it?"

The driver grunted and pointed above it, to an even smaller row of windows above the wine and spirits shop. A tiny hand-carved shingle no bigger than a license plate was creaking back and forth in the breeze: SCHOENEWEISS.

I looked at the darkened front door. "Where do we check in?"

"The Hotel Schoeneweiss never has any guests."

"Sounds like a great place," I muttered, and when I opened the back door to help Gobi out of the cab, she slouched over sideways and tumbled forward into my arms. I barely managed to catch her, and when I did, I saw how much worse she'd gotten.

Her half-lidded eyes were glazed and gla.s.sy, like she'd forgotten how to blink. Her cracked lips hung slightly parted, and at that point I honestly couldn't tell if she was breathing or not. Her nose and mouth had started to bleed again, not much, but enough to drizzle down over her chin. I knelt down over her and glanced back up at the driver.

"Is there a hospital around here?"

The driver took one glance at Gobi, decided that he'd done his part for the cause, and hit the gas and sped off, leaving us there at the end of the street. The enormity of my bad decision-making-my misplaced trust in others and myself-settled over me like one of those smallpox-infected blankets that the U.S. Cavalry supposedly handed out to the Plains Indians. Why hadn't I just taken my chances with the Italian police?

Some bleak inner-Perry gave voice to my darkest suspicions: Because they would have arrested you, and she would have died, and your family would never have been found.

The cold reality of it shot through me, a steel instrument tapping a raw nerve. Every second that I hesitated, every moment that I let slip away, meant that my dad and mom and Annie were getting that much closer to- To death. You know it. That's exactly the word.

I was trying to decide if I should just start looking around for some kind of emergency clinic somewhere when a cold hand gripped the back of my neck, thumb and forefingers pinching the tendons there, and a sharp bolt of pain shot down both arms just before they went completely numb.

The German voice in my ear was calm, almost a whisper.

"Let me see her."

26. "Hurt"

-Nine Inch Nails "Let me guess," I said. "Kaya?"

The man standing behind me didn't answer. I put him mid-to-late-thirties, handsome in a sloppy kind of way. He was wearing brown wool pants with a faded flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, with a two-day stubble and thick black hair that tumbled across his forehead. He had quick, searching eyes and the kind of sharp upper lip and chin that could have made him a late-night movie star from the fifties, except right now he didn't seem to give much of a s.h.i.t what he looked like at all.

"Help me get her inside," he said, in that same low German voice. And then, touching Gobi's chin gently, turning her head: "It is all right now, Zusane. I'm here."

We carried her inside the empty wine store, a cramped rectangle of darkness that looked as if n.o.body had bought champagne or anything else here in years. As we walked past the front counter with its hooded cash register, I noticed that each shelf held exactly one row of bottles, enough to give the outward appearance of a well-stocked market. Not only were most of the bottles empty, but they were covered in about an inch of dust.

In the back, the shop gave way to a set of double doors that opened onto a narrow stairwell. I was holding Gobi's legs and the guy took her arms, backing his way carefully up the steps while I did my best to keep her feet from dragging.

"How long has she been like this?" he asked.

"Since last night." I looked up at him. "Who-"

"Through here." At the top of the stairs we stepped through a doorway into a blinding expanse of light. In contrast to the gloomy booze shop below, the second floor was a spotless pine-floored room with a back wall that was one gigantic mirror.

It took me a second to realize that it was a gym.

We carried Gobi past weights and barbells, an arrangement of parallel bars, beams, tumbling mats, even a pommel horse, with a floor-to-ceiling climbing wall occupying the wall behind it. Boxing gear-heavy bags, throwing dummies, speed bags-dangled from the ceiling. The far end was dedicated to all kinds of increasingly dangerous-looking martial arts stuff, sparring gloves and masks and projectile weapons, swords, knives, and an enormous padlocked gun rack gleaming with enough well-oiled automatic firepower to blow this corner of Switzerland off the map. The c.u.mulative effect was like taking an evolutionary speed-tour of the ultimate adolescent revenge fantasy, from "first I'll get strong" to "then they'll be sorry." Taken in all at once, it was more than a little disturbing.

"Where do you keep the nuke?" I asked.

Ignoring me, the man opened a door on the opposite side of the gym. Inside, I glimpsed the residential decor, marble floors, a long leather sofa, steel and gla.s.s end tables, recessed light fixtures. I thought I heard a Hawaiian steel guitar playing somewhere softly inside.

"Stay here."

"Now hold on-"

He took Gobi inside and shut the door in my face.

27. "99 Problems"

-Jay-Z Which was very uncool.

I wandered restlessly around the gym, checking out all the black iron and chrome and not really seeing any of it, thinking of all the things that had gone wrong so far and waiting for the guy to come back out. When he didn't, I went back to the other door leading back downstairs, but the handle wouldn't budge. Apparently on top of everything else, I was now locked inside the biggest, most lethal workout room in the universe.

My empty stomach swung open its vaults with a growl that wasn't so much hunger as an overall complaint about conditions in general. Sometime in the middle of the night I'd gnawed on some strangely shaped Bavarian chocolate cookie that came in a purple plastic egg, and chased it down with two cans of some sticky-sweet German energy drink, but when was the last time I'd eaten real food?

What about your parents and Annie? You think anyone's giving them anything?

My thoughts circled back to the three of them, locked up wherever they were, and I felt a little ashamed for thinking of myself and my problems. I hoped they were at least giving them bathroom breaks. Annie in particular used to get weird whenever she had to hold it, like on long trips in the car.

Thinking about that, the three of them but Annie especially, I felt a piercing blade of anger at Armitage and what he'd done. What kind of sc.u.mbag does something like that to a little girl? For twenty-four hours, I'd equated George Armitage with a record deal and rock superstardom. Now all that was gone forever-it had never really existed in the first place-and I was glad he was dead.

Unless his being dead was going to cost my family their lives.

Don't think about it, a voice inside my head suggested.

Except, that technique hadn't been working any better lately then it ever had. Instead, I found myself gazing at the locked rack of machine guns, pistols, and rifles, row upon row of them gleaming like the black grin of war itself.

That was when the door opened and the guy came back out.

"Perhaps we should start with introductions." He was wiping his hands off with a towel, flexing his fingers, making big, muscular-looking fists, the kind that seemed to come with double the normal number of knuckles and veins. "I know who you are, but you do not know me. My name is not Kaya. I do not know who this Kaya is."

"No offense," I said, "but I really don't care much about the whole meet and greet right now. The only reason I'm even here with Gobi now is that she thought maybe we could find-"

"Your family," the man said, "yes. You are referring to Phillip and Julie Stormaire and your twelve-year-old sister, Annie, last known residence, one-fifteen Cedar Terrace, East Norwalk, Connecticut, whereabouts currently unknown."