If not, there was a long way to go before they splashed into a sea so mild that it probably wouldn’t hurt. Warm probably. Beautiful too. Molten bronze in the waning light.
“Hypoxia,” Drummond shouted over the gale. He rubbed sleep from his eyes.
“Is that what this is? That’s not good, is it?”
“Correct.”
The incoming air chilled the cabin. Charlie’s thoughts began to clear.
“Why not?”
“It affects people differently, but in all cases it’s brought about by a reduction in oxygen.” Drummond unfastened his seat belt. “Either the cabin needs to be properly pressurized or we need supplemental oxygen.”
Charlie looked out a porthole. No longer any sign of Bream.
Wobbly, Drummond started into the cockpit, reaching for the W-shaped yoke in front of the empty pilot’s seat. He toppled, his forehead cracking into the yoke. He fell sideways, landing on the other seat, and lay motionless.
The plane started to dive.
“Dad!”
No response.
“Come on!”
Nothing, not even as the buzz of sky rushing past built to a holler. Charlie wanted to get up and rouse Drummond, but he remained seated. His limbs wouldn’t respond to his will.
Adrenaline rocketed through him.
Still, he couldn’t move.
42
Bullets bit into Alice’s parka, creating a cloud of ice, fabric, and goose feathers. When the cloud dissipated, it appeared as if she’d been replaced on the dimly lit bus shelter bench by a rag doll, her head hanging grotesquely in one direction while her body slumped the other way, flattening against the sidewall housing a Christmas movie poster.
Having pretended to let her go, Walt and Frank emerged from behind the snowy woods across the otherwise deserted rural road, intent on confirming the kill and reclaiming the Glock, as well as the cash.
Halfway across the street, they realized they had not shot Alice but a mannequin made of packed snow, and adorned with her parka, jeans, and hat.
“I’ll let you live,” she called out to them from the thick woods behind the bus shelter. “You’re just going to have to put down your weapons and then slide them to me along the pavement.”
Walt flipped the selector on his silenced gun to an automatic setting and sent a torrent of bullets in the direction of her voice. Brass casings shimmered in the scant light as they arched over his shoulder and tapped onto the icy asphalt.
For this reason, when Alice had called to them, she’d pressed her tongue flat against the base of her mouth and pushed the sound from her abdomen through her larynx in the direction of her palate. This manner of throwing one’s voice tricks listeners into believing the voice is emanating from a greater height than it actually is.
She fired back, once.
Walt lay dead on the street long before the report had finished resounding through the bare woods.
The muzzle flash having revealed her position, Frank whirled, firing.
She dove headlong toward the bus shelter. The metal sidewall offered a measure of protection. One of Frank’s bullets sparked against it, cracking the glass over the movie poster so that it appeared to be a jigsaw puzzle of Santa Claus.
Alice returned fire. Her bullet struck Frank’s right wrist. His gun clattered against the ice, bouncing toward her.
“Good job, Frank,” she said, springing to her feet. She stepped out from behind the bus shelter. “Now, what I really want is your coat.” She had only her T-shirt and underwear to counter the well-below-freezing night. “Unbutton it, shake off one sleeve at a time, then toss it to me.”
Gritting his teeth against the pain of his wound, the hulking Italian complied.
Before daring to pluck the overcoat off the road, she wedged her gun against Frank’s kidney. With her free hand, she patted him down, turning up his switchblade as well as a satphone and, an unexpected bonus, Mercedes keys. She pocketed the lot, saying, “As if the bus driver was going to have change for a hundred-euro bill.”
The big man gripped his injured wrist and moaned.
“That’s what you get for trying to kill me.”
She prodded him into the woods until they were out of sight of any passing motorists. About twenty yards in, she kicked his knees out from under him. Toppling forward, he attempted to break his fall with his bad arm. He came to rest on his side in a pile of snow, sticks, and dry leaves.
Squatting beside him, Alice pressed the muzzle of her gun against the base of his skull. “I don’t want to shoot you again,” she said. “And I won’t if you tell me who hired you-”
He rolled to his left, at the same time launching his steel-toed boot at her face.
She ducked, slashing his ankle with the side of her hand, breaking bone.
With a scream, he leaped to his good foot and threw a roundhouse that eluded her parry, hitting her jaw like a truck.
The world flickered. She dropped against frozen ground.
He sat astride her stomach, trying to wrest the gun free of her grip, leaving her no choice but to pull the trigger.
The shot snapped his head backward. Hot blood lashed her. He thumped into the snow and lay still, the angle of his head oddly similar to that of the mannequin in the bus shelter.
Admittedly not one of the six billion most patient people in the world, CIA case officer Blaine Belmont had paced perhaps five miles in his office at the American embassy in Geneva until, finally, a cable from a deputy director of operations authorized payment of $1,000,000 to Carlo Pagliarulo. As soon as the Italian gave up the goods, the funds would be wired to him.
But now Belmont was unable to reach him. Fighting to keep the exasperation out of his voice, he instructed the techs to triangulate Pagliarulo’s cell phone.
Two hours later, the CIA officer stood over the Italian’s corpse about fifty feet into a wooded area on the road to La Vernaz, an hour east of Geneva.
“Not the end of the proverbial road,” Belmont told his team, if only to boost his own spirits. The snow mannequin in the bus shelter and the pair of bodies were almost as good as videotape of what had taken place there. Unfortunately, Rutherford could be anywhere by now.
Within twenty minutes, things were looking up. Belmont flipped open his phone to watch two-day-old National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency KH-13 satellite overpass footage of Pagliarulo hauling an unconscious young woman from a black SUV to the small La Vernaz farmhouse that had been rented a week beforehand by a man named Hans Baehler.
The landlord, whom Belmont’s people woke as they raced by car to the farmhouse, said that Baehler had paid cash and seemed like a nice person in his e-mails, which turned out to be untraceable. Belmont would have been surprised to hear anything different.
At the isolated farmhouse, the CIA team found ample traces of both Rutherford and Pagliarulo, along with the body of helicopter pilot and all-around German thug Lothar von Gentz, apparently stabbed to death with a light switch wall plate.
There were no signs of current life in the farmhouse, though. Nor would there be, in all probability, until the landlord found a new tenant.
“Shit,” Belmont said.
