LITMIR.BIZ

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his ruthlessness in hunting down his fellow man. He was in his seventies himself now and by his own admission not much was swinging these days. Wolfli was still a very dangerous hunter of humans; but rather than loping through the shadowy corners of Europe like a wolf as he had in his youth, he now plodded along like the hound he resembled, and used his very well-trained nose to ferret out his prey.

      Wolfli let his juniors do the running.

      His back office looked like a tiny eighteenth-century European salon. He hunched over his desk, peering through a flex-necked jeweler’s magnifying glass as he performed delicate surgery upon the innards of a 1978 vintage Rolex Sea Dweller diving watch.

      Watch repair was a front, but Pirmin Wolfli was a genuine artist. He considered it occupational therapy. The craftsmanship, precision and rightness of a Swiss instrument gave him some hope that the human race was capable of doing at least one thing correctly. It relaxed him, and he was currently under incredible levels of stress. The little bell above his door rang and a tall, beautiful, blonde, buxom woman walked in.

      Daniela Winter was his personal assistant both in the shop and in the Wolf’s other line of business. The Wolf took in her perfect carriage and her perfectly tailored charcoal pantsuit. Ninety minutes of a very strenuous style of yoga before dawn every morning and very subtle cosmetic surgeries over the past decade had left Winter at some un-guessable age ranging somewhere from a possible late thirties to an unthinkable fifty. She had once been runner-up in the Miss Switzerland pageant. Winter never mentioned it because it might give a clue as to her real age. The Wolf smiled. He was one of the few people who knew it.

      “Pirmin.” Winter was one of the few people on Earth who addressed the Wolf by his first name, and only in private. She spoke in High German. “We have a problem.”

      The Wolf gently lifted out a tiny brass flywheel and frowned at the corrosion. The old diving watch had salt-water damage. “I am beset by them.”

      “I fear the Americans may have become involved.”

      Wolfli set the tiny wheel on the felt in front of him. The operation he was currently running was the most delicate, dangerous and had the highest stakes of his career, and quite possibly anyone else’s on Earth. “Are you sure?”

      “It seems very likely.” Winter made a face. “Ferraris thinks it is the FBI. Circumstantial evidence supports his idea.”

      It was very likely that one day soon either Winter or Ferraris would inherit the Wolf’s position. Ferraris had the bad taste to be openly in competition for it and to make misogynistic innuendo behind Winter’s back. “Well.” The Wolf peered over his glasses. “Ferraris does bench-press more than you.”

      Winter smirked.

      “What do you think?” the Wolf inquired.

      “It does not smell like the FBI.” Winter waved a casual hand. “To me anyway.”

      The Wolf smiled again. Winter was from the central canton of Fribourg. High German was her first language but any Swiss who met her would laugh and say, “That one is Italian!” by temperament. Wolfli himself was from the southernmost canton of Ticino and he had grown up speaking Italian. Winter was the first woman the Wolf had ever recruited and trained. “And what is it that you smell, Dani?”

      Winter’s nose wrinkled. “Cowboys.”

      The Wolf nodded. The United States was an amazing place, and the FBI and CIA were marvelous organizations. The best of their kind in the world. However, during the seventies and the Vietnam conflict, and the eighties when their President Reagan had decided to win the Cold War, the prime of the Wolf’s fieldwork, the CIA had cemented its cowboy reputation among its fellow nations. It remained a nickname for them to this day in some circles.

      The few occasions when the Wolf had been forced to take action against agents of the United States, either personally or by proxy, he had outmaneuvered and eliminated them with ease. They had never suspected him or even known of his organization, and he had left their superiors blaming the Soviets or other hostile players. The Americans were good, but in the Wolf’s experience few of them were chess players, and none were watchmakers. Of course, it was a relatively new century now and everything got better with practice. “CIA?”

      “I don’t know. Ferraris described it as ‘renegade, but with extreme precision.’”

      The Wolf snorted. Ferraris was a Geneva man and, as Swiss went, very French in style. “Surely you do not suspect private contractors?”

      “I do not know. I cannot put my finger on it, but I do not like anything about what I am hearing.”

      The Wolf sighed wearily. If the Americans knew what was really going on, all hell would be breaking loose. However, Hell’s fire and chaos appeared to remain confined in Gehenna, for the moment. This led him to believe that the Americans had stumbled upon the side effects. Nevertheless, he could not afford to have them bumbling around. A United States intervention could be catastrophic. The question was, like the watch in front of him, was it repairable?

      “Where are these cowboys now?”

      “Ferraris reports they have gone dark.”

      “We know their line of inquiry?”

      “Yes, in fact they were very useful in that regard.”

      “They will reemerge. Pick your team. Have them standing by.”

      “At once, I will—”

      “Have Ferraris lead it.”

      Winter controlled her facial expression but the room went as cold as her name.

      “You will act as controller, in the field,” the Wolf concluded.

      The room warmed a degree or two. Winter loved fieldwork, and field commander on an assignment of this magnitude was huge. However, putting Winter in charge of Ferraris hinted at a possible hierarchy to come. “As you say.” Winter lingered a moment by the door. “Pirmin?”

      “Yes, my dear?”

      “Do I have permission to exercise the fight-fire-with-fire protocol?”

      The Wolf bent over his work. The die was cast. “Yes.”

       CHAPTER SIX

      The War Room, Stony Man Farm

      Kurtzman and Huntington Wethers pored over databases based on Lyons’s search criteria. The initial search had brought up thousands of files. The obvious conclusion was that the world was a violent place. Kurtzman trawled North, Central and South America while Wethers worked North Africa and the Middle East. They’d been at it through the night. Akira Tokaido looked up from his workstation and laughed. “Data dump from Japan! Godzilla size! Who wants it?”

      Wethers let out a long breath. “Sometimes, I hate him.”

      Kurtzman stared at his vast folder of not much. Besides the recent attacks in Mexico, the Americas were yielding nothing save cartel killings and the usual South American sicko horror. The United States was loaded with anomalous killings, crimes and misbehaviors, but nothing quite rang true to Lyons’s criteria. Kurtzman smiled at his map. “I’ll take it.”

      “Transferring now!”

      Kurtzman watched file upon file descend upon him courtesy of the Farm’s resident young hacker. In Kurtzman’s experience a great deal of Japanese crime could be considered anomalous. They had a very different culture. Part of that culture was a code of silence when it came to violent crime. It was also an open secret that Japanese authorities cooked their books to make their nation appear to be a nonviolent industrious island paradise. Kurtzman sent the files to his main west screen of the drive-in-size monitor and hit his translation software.

      Hunt Wethers tapped his display. “Here.”

      “Where?”

      “Israel.

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