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Page 70.

"But there were two people," Rick said. "Otherwise why would both doors be open?"

"And why run? Or whatever this is all about. She had the package with her—and it's not in the car." Romain searched the glove compartment—nothing. He popped the trunk, but found nothing except a spare wheel, and the standard tools for changing tires.

Rick searched around the car for footsteps. He found two sets of tracks. One was Hannah's, coming from the passenger side. He recognized her smaller, softer boots. The other was a man's large shoe size, with heavy sole tread like hiking boots.

Rick squatted down, recalling military field intelligence training. "Whoever he was, there was a man driving. The steps are even, so they were moving in tandem. They were moving fast, because the fronts of the feet are digging in—almost like a run."

"Run from what?" Romain asked, standing behind Rick. "Run toward what?"

"Wish I knew." Rick rose. "Look, we have to split up. I'm going after her. I need the backpack."

They walked back to the car. Rick shouldered the backpack, which contained the Euros he and Hannah had lifted from the dead Yolo's car near Verdun.

Romain handed him the pistol. "I think you'll need this more than I will."

"Thanks." Rick accepted the gun, holster and all, and dropped it into the backpack. "I'll have it if I need it." If he encountered police, he could always drop it by the wayside. The gun culture existed here, but not anywhere as strenuously as back home.

There was only one cellphone in the car, and he didn't suggest Romain give that up.

He shook hands with Romain. "Good luck."

Romain said, "I will drive forward to Larochette. That's on the CR118. I advise you to stay close to the road. Depending on what I find there, if anything, I'll slowly head back toward you."

"Good. Maybe we'll meet somewhere in between. My greatest hope is to have Hannah with me safe and sound."

Romain made a face. "I will keep an open mind about her. Meanwhile, my biggest hope is to have the package. I will keep in touch with PAX and see if they can meet me. We'll need all the help we can get." He handed Rick a plastic water bottle. "You'll need this. And this." He added a small white store sack with candy bars, nut bars, and a few packaged sweet rolls."

"Okay—Eddi." It was a Luxemburgish endearment—a cute, shorter way of saying the French adieu—literally, 'go toward God,' as in the Spanish adios.

They shook hands once more. Rick started off in the direction of Hannah's abandoned car.

Behind him, Romain gunned the Audi and took off on the CR118 in the direction of the small towns of Breidweiler, Chrisnach, and Larochette.

Rick took a last look at the white car. He hoped to find any clues he might have overlooked before. Out of luck, he closed the two doors one by one, walking around the car. No sense letting the elements trash it.

As he walked around the back, something caught his eye on the ground. He squatted down and pushed leaves and debris out of the way. There, in the wet black soil where it had fallen, was a key with a tag on it. The key itself was a small brass one—nothing unusual. Looked like a locker key, if anything. Attached to it by a plastic halter—like a police handcuff—was a round plastic token. Rick examined it closely. The token promised fun and sex at the Klub Kolibri in Wiltz. Looking more closely at the key, he found a tiny number punched into it by an engraving machine in an art deco-like script: 39.

Why Wiltz? What could that possibly have to do with Hannah and the invisible hand of global corporations?

Wiltz was a town in northwestern Luxembourg, quite far from here. He vaguely recalled the name from a book about the Battle of the Bulge, fought across Luxembourg during the bitterly cold winter of 1944-5 as Hitler made his last effort to throw the Allies back to the Atlantic—for no discernible reason other than just what it was—a final, roaring, violent death struggle of a primordial monster called Nazi Germany. It was through the tortured greenery of the Ardennes mountains and forests that Hitler's tanks had struck in lightning-quick arcs to outflank France's Maginot line further east, thus opening a titanic world war; and it was in the Ardennes Forest to the west of here, around Bastogne and Wiltz, that the Hooked Cross staged its Wagnerian, desperate finale amid operatic death music. In fact, the titanic struggles of Napoleon I around 1800, of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I against France's Emperor Napoleon III in 1871, and then World War I early in the Twentieth Century, had all seen their armies winding through these deep, tortured canyons. People had been killing people here since before history was written. Here we go again, Rick thought.

The stream banks were mossy in dark lush green glistening with moisture. The scene was not much changed since the glaciers melted ten thousand years ago. In places like this, fierce cave bears hunted the great-antlered aurochs in these regions, and humans found safety in caverns while saber tooth cats prowled after trundling mammoths—all extinct except for the humans, who now hunted each other in cars, with books and guns.

Sunlight filtered down from cliffs high above, reaching a dusty kind of twilight. Beyond the car, at the very bottom of a fissure in the volcanic earth dating eons back, a stream of water ran—green, cold, buzzing with insects. The water crisscrossed and spattered among moss-covered rocks.

Across the stream, Rick spotted a footprint—a woman's, dug into the soft black mud after she'd jumped over mossy rocks in the gurgling, tumbling stream and landed on the opposite bank.

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