The Eighth Day (42 page)

“Excellent,” Danny remarked.

“Nine pounds—quite portable.” The dealer hefted it. Tossed it from one hand to the other. “Pistol grip. And, of course, the clip is inserted at the base of the butt—which is perfect for night work.”

“Why?” Danny asked.

“Because you can reload without looking. All in all, it’s a nice, compact assault rifle.” He laid it down upon the counter.

“How much is it?”

The man reached for his reading glasses, which hung from a cord around his neck, and settled them on the bridge of his nose. “U.S.?” he asked.

Danny nodded.

The gun dealer turned to a computer that rested on a small desk behind the counter. He tapped at the keyboard for a few moments and waited. Finally, he turned back to Danny and said, “Two thousand, two hundred, and eighty-one dollars.”

“Well,” Danny said, hesitating. It often took him days to decide whether or not to buy a particular sweater. The idea of splurging on an Uzi—

“I’ll take it,” he said, and pulled out his wallet.

The dealer’s delight was apparent. Then he sighed. “But first,” he said, “we have the paperwork.”

Danny frowned. “ ‘The paperwork’?”

“Yes, of course. You must have a permit.”

“Since when?”

The dealer shrugged. “I think it is a few years now.” Seeing his customer’s disappointment, the dealer looked worried at the prospect of losing the sale. “This is a problem?”

Danny wasn’t sure what to say. Thought hard. Fast. “It’s supposed to be a birthday present. For my father-in-law. He’s a collector, and—I’m going back to the States in the morning.”

“I see . . .”

They stood there for a moment, looking at one another. Finally, Danny asked, “Is there any way we could expedite it?”

The dealer looked confused.

“I’ve got my passport and everything,” Danny told him, “so if we filled out the paperwork, and I paid you for the gun, you could file the papers and send them wherever they have to go. And when they came back, you could just . . . mail them to me.”

“Yes, but I need a letter from the responsibles in your own country, saying that you are not crazy, not a criminal—”

“I can get that. It’s not a problem. I could fax it to you.”

The dealer looked uncertain. “It’s very irregular,” he said. And paused. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “if we rounded it off?”

Danny frowned. “You mean, make it twenty-five hundred?”

The dealer shrugged. “Yes. And then, if you rounded
that
off . . . what would
that
be?”

“That would be three thousand dollars.”

“Exactly!”

Danny thought about it. Finally said, “You gift wrap?”

TWENTY-FOUR

The clerk wrapped the Uzi in plastic foam and eased it into a cardboard box fitted with stiff cubes of polystyrene. Then he wrapped the box and the ammunition clip in brown paper and tied up the parcel with white string.

It could have been someone’s laundry.

On the way back to his hotel, Danny thought hard about how he was going to get into the Tawus Holdings meeting. He supposed he could take a cab to the Baur au Lac with the Uzi wrapped up, just as it was, then rip the package open in the men’s room and storm the meeting.

Except he’d never get that far. Knowing that Danny was in Zurich, Zebek would have his people staked out all over the Baur au Lac’s grounds. So, if he was going to get in, he’d need a cover of some kind. Or a disguise.

Arriving at the Seefeld, he took the stairs two at a time to his room and called the Baur au Lac, asking for Mounir’s room. By now, he knew the number by heart. If he could just get through to the old man, he might be able to meet him somewhere else. Give him the floppy with Rolvaag’s report and catch the next flight out. But no. That would be too easy. The telephone rang and rang, its unanswered double bursts as mournful as a foghorn.

So . . . no miracle. It was up to him—just him and his friend, the tightly wrapped Mister Uzi.

Which meant that he’d need a disguise. Something to get him into the lobby. (The gun would get him into the meeting.) Thinking about disguises, he remembered the way Remy Barzan had reacted—or, more accurately, how he’d
not
reacted—to “the soldiers’ ” arrival. It wasn’t until they’d started shooting that Barzan realized they were there to kill him.

The truth was, people saw the uniform—not the person wearing it. Unfortunately, there weren’t any uniforms walking around the Baur au Lac. Only the doorman, and Danny couldn’t get that close. The only people
he’d
seen were businessmen and golfers.

The image of the golfers sitting on the patio went off in his head like a cartoon lightbulb. The thing about golfers was: they carried golf bags. And golf bags were more or less ideal for taking an automatic weapon through the lobby of a world-class hotel. Danny thought back to the golfers on the patio. They’d been wearing little hats—which was good—and sunglasses would not have been out of place.

He glanced at the clock: 2:43. Tucking the Uzi box under his arm, he made sure that he had the floppy disk with the dendrochronologist’s report. Then he ran downstairs to ask the blonde where he could buy some golf equipment.

“Very nice, sir! And if I may say so, sir, it’s gratifying to see a young man, such as yourself, embracing the game with such enthusiasm.” The dark-haired salesman took a step back and sighed contentedly.

For his part, Danny was aghast, gawking at himself in a three-way mirror in the Sporting! section of the Jelmoli department store on the Bahnhofstrasse. Golf clothes were about as far from his natural style as one could get. And yet here he was: Golfman, decked out in fawn-colored knickerbockers, argyle knee socks, and black-and-white saddle shoes. Above the waist, a gold polo shirt with a moiré pattern lay open at the throat, hooked by one of the stems of Danny’s new Ray*Bans. Completing the ensemble were a Scottish driving cap, which concealed Danny’s buzz cut from public view, and a suede golf glove stuffed insouciantly in his rear pocket.

“Will there be anything else, sir? Rain suit? Umbrella?”

“No, this ought to do it.”

With his hunter-green Gore-Tex golf-bag trimmed in premium cowhide, the outfit was at once convincing—“Hey, Mabel, get a loada this guy!”—and outrageously expensive. The bag held a minimal collection of Jelmoli’s least expensive clubs, the woods shielded from harm by knitted covers. Danny had selected the bag for one feature: the inner framework holding the clubs separate from one another lifted out so that the interior of the bag could be cleaned. Danny intended to scrap that framework to make room for the Uzi.

“I think I’ll wear it out,” Danny said. “I’m teeing off in an hour.”

“Of course. May I wrap up your other clothing for you?” The salesman took Danny’s Visa card and carefully folded his blue jeans and sweatshirt, depositing them in a box that looked as if it cost more than they did.

Danny thought about dealing with the Uzi then and there—just going into the dressing room, unwrapping it, and putting it into the golf bag. But he decided against it. There were undoubtedly surveillance cameras in the store, and he couldn’t afford a hassle with Jelmoli’s security people. So he just signed the credit-card slip and took off.

The Baur au Lac was only a short walk up the Bahnhofstrasse, but he felt like a stork, dressed as he was and carrying a golf bag. Better to arrive by taxi. He found a rank of cabs on a side street. The driver popped the trunk, put the golf bag inside, and laid the box with the Uzi beside it. Then he held open the rear passenger door.

Danny spotted the first of Zebek’s sentries at the end of the hotel’s drive. Gaetano, looking worried and very focused. He peered into the taxi as it passed but didn’t give Danny—in sunglasses and golf cap—a second look.

Nor did anyone else. Stepping out of the cab at the entry to the lobby, he tipped the driver, recovered his golf bag and package, and sauntered past a bulky Italian man loitering near the door.

On his way past the front desk, Danny noticed a gilt-framed placard on a standing easel:

Novartis Pharma A.G.

Jungfrau Room—L 1

2:15 p.m.

Tawus Holdings

Winterthur Room—L 2

4 p.m.

Continuing past the desk to a polished oak door with a brass plaque marked
HERREN
, Danny went into the men’s room and closeted himself in a stall. Leaning the golf clubs against the door, he sat down with the box from the gun shop and stripped away the paper. Lifting the Uzi from its foam compartments, he clapped the ammo clip into the grip, just behind the trigger. It made a satisfying
thunk
, just as it did in the movies. Then he pulled the clubs from the golf bag and propped them up against the door to the stall. Next came the bag’s interior cage, which he removed and placed on the back of the toilet, along with the box containing his old clothes. Finally, he lowered the gun into the bag, rearranged the clubs, and flushed.

Re-emerging in the lobby, he suffered a surge of adrenaline that made him want to bolt. But he didn’t. He walked calmly to the elevator, repeating the soccer mantra of his youth:
Tranquilo, tran-QUIL-o . . .
A swarthy man in a black business suit joined him in what seemed like an interminable wait for the elevator. Danny punched the elevator button again and again, glancing around for an indicator that might show which floor it was on. But there was none. Finally, the doors swept open with a soft chime and a bellhop emerged, wheeling a gold cart piled high with Tumi luggage.

The journey from the lobby to level one, where the businessman got out, was a joke. It seemed to take about a minute—which isn’t very long, really, unless you’re holding your breath. Which Danny was, however inadvertently. The elevator chimed. The businessman exited. The doors slid shut. Danny took a deep breath.

Tranquilo.

His plan (if you could call it a plan) was pretty straightforward. Get off at the second floor. Dump the clubs and crash the meeting—locked and loaded (whatever that meant.) Tell everyone to
shut the fuck up and freeze
!

That’s what Bruce Willis would do.

A soft chime announced his arrival on level two. The doors slid open. Sitting in a chair next to the closed double doors of the Winterthur Room, directly across from the elevator, was the muscular rectangle that Danny thought of as the Brow.

They saw each other in the same instant, but it took the Brow
one, two, three
seconds to grasp the fact that the Beau Brummel who stood before him was, in fact, the punk artist he was supposed to kill. The first second was consumed by a check-it-out glance that ended in bemused dismissal—followed, a second later, by a bloom of shocked cognition. The third second ended with the Brow levitating in his chair—just as the doors to the elevator closed.

Danny had no idea which button he’d pushed, but when the doors opened again, he saw from the numbers outside the rooms that he was on Level Three. He stuck a foot into the door and leaned out, looking up and down the corridor. At either end of the hallway was a stairwell, marked by a lighted green sign showing a stick figure running down an outline of white stairs.

Dumping the golf clubs onto the floor of the elevator, he pulled the Uzi out and tossed the golf bag aside. The gun felt cold and dense in his hands. It gave off an oily, metallic smell. And even though it was
his
gun, the unfamiliar way it looked and felt and smelled sent a little zigzag of alarm through his heart.

He stepped back.
Tranquilo.

The doors whooshed shut, and a wave of claustrophobia crashed against his gut.
What am I doing!?
He couldn’t believe it. The gun. The clothes. The situation. He shook his head, trying to throw off the trapped sensation that he felt, but it didn’t work. The air was thick, the elevator tiny, the gun in his hands ever so heavy.
What am I doing what am I doing?
There was a sizzling noise in his head, as if he had a fuse running from ear to ear.
What if something goes wrong? It’s a machine gun. What if there’s a massacre? What if I kill ’em all?
Panic zoomed around the inside of his skull like a roach trying to escape a smoldering pan.

Ding!
The little chime went off in his head like a hand grenade.

When the doors opened, the Brow was standing outside the Winterthur Room, talking urgently into a cell phone. Seeing the Uzi even before he noticed who was holding it, he paused. Said,
“Ciao.”
Let the phone drop and put his hands in the air.

In his peripheral vision, Danny caught the motion of men running toward him from either end of the corridor, where they must have been manning the stairways. But their pace slowed all at once, then stopped entirely when they saw what he was holding. “Stay,” he said, as if ordering a not-so-obedient Labrador to wait at the corner. Then, using the Uzi as a pointer, he motioned the Brow to precede him into the Winterthur Room.

Zebek sat at the head of a long wooden table, its polished surface gleaming in the afternoon light. Around the table were nine elderly men, dressed as Zebek was, in dark business suits. In the center of the table, lying on its side, was a curved knife with a jeweled haft. “Sorry about this,” Danny said, shoving the Brow away from him.

Each of the men had a glass of water on the table before him, along with a closed blue folder and an expensive-looking pen. The folders were embossed in gold with the words
TAWUS HOLDINGS.
These, then, were the Yezidi Elders, and Danny saw that three of them, including Sheik Mounir, had laptop computers in front of them.

“Sheik Mounir,” Danny said, “I need to speak with you.” His voice sounded hollow, as if he were speaking in a room without echoes.

“Call security,” Zebek ordered, nodding toward the beautiful Paulina. She reached for her cell phone.

“I’ll blow your arm off,” Danny told her.

She put down the phone.

“And if you go for the gun in your purse,” he added, “I’ll blow your head off.”

Now she looked hurt. Folded her hands in her lap. Pouted.

One of the Elders asked a question of Mounir in Turkish. Mounir shook his head. Turning to Danny, he asked. “Do I know you?”

“I came to your house—in Uzelyurt, remember? A couple of weeks ago.” In the corner of his eye Danny saw the Brow inching closer. “Don’t,” he ordered, and swung the Uzi in an arc that ended at the big man’s chest.

The Brow froze.

Danny turned back to Mounir and removed his cap. “You had me kidnapped,” he told him. “The guy with the basketball shirt—and the other guy. They took me to your grandson. To Remy. I’m sure he told you.”

Mounir peered out at him from within the nest of wrinkles around his eyes. Danny could see the wheels turning. The old man was remembering Danny’s visit and what had happened afterward: the kidnapping and interrogation, followed by Remy’s acceptance of him. “Ohhhh, yes, of course,” the old man muttered, talking as much to himself as to anyone else. “But, Remy—”

“I know,” Danny said.

Zebek chuckled. Turning to Paulina and the Brow, he said something in Italian. Paulina did a double take, giggled, and swiveled in her seat to look up at Danny. The Brow swore and, to Danny’s surprise, stepped toward him, ignoring the Uzi that was pointed at his chest. Before Danny could warn him off, the big Italian reached back, as if he were going to throw a baseball, then pivoted into a roundhouse slap that sent the American crashing into the wall.

It seemed like the room lights dimmed and flared as Danny staggered and fell. Seeing the Brow jerk a handgun out from under his jacket, Danny warned him once—“Don’t!”—then pulled the trigger on the Uzi.

Click!

Paulina giggled.

Click click click!

Zebek laughed. Even the Brow smiled as he reached down and took the Uzi from the American’s hands. “It won’t shoot with the safety on,” Zebek explained.

“My bad,” Danny acknowledged, and, getting slowly to his feet, launched himself at Zebek. The move took everyone by surprise, including Danny, who hit Zebek three times in the face, sending him sprawling out of his chair. Dropping a knee into his chest, Danny was about to hit him again when the Brow dragged him away by the collar of his polo shirt.

“Get him out of here!” Zebek gasped. “He’s a lunatic!”

The Brow began to pull Danny toward the door when Mounir’s voice rose above the jabber of the other Elders. “I will hear him,” he announced.

Still on the floor, Zebek couldn’t believe his ears. “What!?” Clambering to his feet, he pounded on the table and began to argue in a language Danny didn’t understand.

“I said, ‘I will hear him.’ ”

Zebek spoke again, his words as unintelligible as their meaning was obvious. He was warning Mounir against something.