Farm.”
She laughed. “Or in Rome.”
Exiting the mall, she began taking left turns at random. The odds that anyone other than a surveillant would stay behind them for three such turns were beyond astronomical.
“You do get to see more of the sights this way,” she said blithely.
“People don’t consider the benefits of being a fugitive.”
Another quick turn and Charlie’s side mirror showed only the town of Avenches shooting aft. The chalets became specks, then disappeared altogether behind a mountain of fir trees laden with snow.
As Alice drove up the rugged Bernese Oberland, Charlie scanned the sky. The Cavalry sometimes deployed unmanned aerial vehicles-UAVs, remotely piloted, miniature aircraft equipped with cameras sharp enough for their operators to view a driver’s face from ten thousand feet up. Some UAVs carried laser-guided missiles capable of turning the road into a crater and the BMW into shiny gravel.
Alice smiled. “Given their small size and high altitudes, the odds of spotting a drone aren’t too good.”
Charlie sat back, admitting, “The odds are probably better that I’ll discover a new planet.” A moment later, he resumed scanning. “It’s harder to just do nothing.”
On their descent from the mountains, wispy, low-lying clouds dissipated, revealing a valley dotted with toylike chalets, Alpine ski slopes, and cows whose bells blended into a single mesmerizing chord. The slopes converged at Gstaad’s central village, a congregation of rustic Helvetian buildings, many with bright red geranium-filled window boxes. Factor in the fairy-tale turrets and horse-drawn sleighs and Gstaad was less believable than the Disneyland version of an old-world Swiss hamlet. After just a week, Charlie dreamed that he and Alice would stay for the rest of their lives.
As she nosed the car into a parking spot behind the train station on Hauptstrasse, the sun dipped behind a pair of soaring peaks, bronzing the entire valley.
They proceeded on foot through an empty alley to the Promenade, Gstaad’s main street, where the only vehicles permitted were horse-drawn. The alley was another in Alice’s bag of countersurveillance tricks. Pick out the surveillants
Among the boutiques, galleries, and cafes on the Promenade was Les Freres Troisgros, a tavern whose grilled bratwurst was good enough to persuade Charlie to stay in Gstaad even without Alice. The tavern’s large front windowpane reflected no one behind them in the alley.
“We good?” Charlie asked.
“We are or they are.” Alice pushed open the door, surrounding them with the aromas of roasting meat and ale. She led the way inside with circumspection in place of her usual buoyancy. If she saw or sensed anything wrong, she wasn’t saying, not in a barroom with a hundred eyes upon them, all aglow in candlelight-Les Freres Troisgros had no electric lights. A collection of big smoke-darkened stones held in place by ancient beams, it had changed little from the seventeenth century.
Charlie fought the compulsion to stare at the jolly and ruddy faces. He worried he’d come here once too often.
He and Alice received their takeout orders without being shot at or otherwise imperiled. But on the way out, in the smoky mirror behind the bar, he caught a glimpse of a ruddy middle-aged man wearing a black beret. The man was staring at them as he snapped open a cell phone.
“Ghost, I think,” said Alice, taking Charlie’s hand in hers.
“Because of the beret?”
“Yeah.”
“Over-the-top for a pro, right?”
“One would hope.”
The question became: Who was he calling?
Not someone who followed them to the car. At least as far as Charlie or Alice could tell.
Letting Alice ride shotgun-in point of fact, 9mm pistol-Charlie drove away from the village, managing the winding mountain road up to a secluded cream-colored chalet. In the dwindling sunlight, the structure blended in with the towering pines.
With a stern gaze at a field blanketed with a fresh snowfall, Alice said, “Hit teams love snow. With a few thermal-insulated, arctic-terrain ghillie suits and rifle wraps, you can turn a clearing like this into an excellent ambush site.”
“Great.”
“A euro says we’re home free, though.” She cracked a smile.
“I love you” almost slipped from his lips for perhaps the twentieth time that day, but all he said was, “You’re on. And good luck.”
Just tell her, he urged himself. Why the hell not? As soon as they parked.
He pulled onto the mountainside ledge they called the parking deck. From here it was a two-minute walk through woods up to the chalet. While she climbed out of the car, he ratcheted the parking brake and turned off the engine. He heard and felt stuttering thuds from above the trees. A white medevac helicopter, common enough in winter resort areas.
The helicopter slowed to a hover directly overhead, plunging the clearing around the BMW into darkness.
Charlie felt an all-too-familiar icy terror.
“Blast,” Alice said. “I owe you a euro.”
4
Snow and twigs and pine needles swirled in the rotors’ wash. In the general ruckus, it was useless for Charlie to shout to Alice.
Not that there was anything she needed to be told. Letting the takeout containers fall to the snow, she shot a hand toward the Sig Sauer tucked into the rear waistband of her jeans.
Doors on both sides of the helicopter’s cabin slid open. The waning sun showed four men in silhouette, bracing themselves on taut ropes anchored within the helicopter. Gaining a foothold on the craft’s skids, the men let their rope ends drop to the ground, giving the helicopter the appearance of a giant mosquito. In unison, the men jumped, arcing outward and rappelling down, ropes screaming through the carabiners on their harnesses. They wore thick white jumpsuits with red crosses, as a team of paramedics might, along with ski masks. All were built like they’d spent plenty of time in the weight room.
They converged on Alice so quickly that she barely had a chance to raise her gun. On his way down, the first man dealt her a swift, steel-toed boot to the cheekbone, costing her her hold on the Sig. The next two, still attached to their ropes, tackled her, driving her into deep snow on the passenger side of the BMW.
Charlie flung himself onto the car’s hood, intent on recovering Alice’s gun.
She wriggled free, regained her feet, and spun two hundred degrees, gaining force and leverage and delivering a kick to the nearest jaw. The man sagged, dangling from his rope.
For better or for worse, Alice Rutherford’s nature was to fight. She would have taken on ten such men. She had her hands full with two now, one corralling her from behind, the other spraying her in the face with a tiny aerosol can. She went limp, falling into the first man’s arms.
As Charlie slid off the passenger side of the BMW’s hood, he caught sight of a pistol capped by a silencer, pointed at him by the fourth man, who shouted something. The chop of the rotors made it impossible to hear what. Charlie guessed, “Freeze!”
And what choice did he have?
Alice and the first three men-including the one she’d KO’d-rose into the air, as if levitating. Arms extended from the helicopter’s cabin, hauling them in. The door snapped shut and the ship appeared to fall upward into the sky.
Like that, she was gone, with only a faint whir as evidence that the helicopter had been present. And then it was just the breeze whispering through the bare branches.
