The Abominable: A Novel

perhaps he does know. It’s hard for me to tell. Pasang knows only the general outline.”

“What the hell are we talking about?” I managed to say.

“Why we have to climb onto the North Col tonight,” said the Deacon.

“Tha’s absurd,” I slurred. “I’m too tired to climb into anything but a sleeping bag.” We’d recovered five more eiderdown bags at the Camp III cache. They were lashed to the outsides of the rucksacks we’d stupidly left a quarter of a mile from here in deep snow, back at the base of the North Col.

“I also agree that we should climb to the North Col tonight, Mr. Perry,” said Pasang. “Allow Lady Bromley- Montfort and Captain Deacon to explain.”

She turned her tired face to our former infantry captain. “Do you want to explain, Richard?”

“I’m not sure I know enough,” he said, and his voice sounded almost as tired as mine had. “I mean, I know the who and when and why, but I’m not certain about the what.”

“But you admitted to knowing—and perhaps working for—our friend who writes a lot of cheques but who prefers gold,” said Reggie.

The Deacon nodded wearily. “Knowing something about what he’s up to, yes,” he said. “I work for him— with him—only from time to time.”

I said, “Would you two mind speaking in goddamned English?” Perhaps it came out a little sharper than I’d meant it to.

Reggie nodded. “My cousin Percival had the reputation, as I presume you have all heard, of being a wastrel, a disappointment to his family, a discredit to his country during the War—he never enlisted, never fought, and spent all of the War in Switzerland or other safe places, including, his mother was ashamed to admit, the peaceful parts of Austria. Cousin Percy seemed only one short step away from being an active traitor to Great Britain. And as a final touch, Percival was known both in England and on the Continent as being a debauched playboy. And a deviant. A homosexual, to use that new word.”

There was nothing to say to that, so we all kept our mouths shut.

“All those appearances were false,” said Reggie. “Artificial. Prepared. Deliberate.”

I looked to the Deacon for an explanation—severe mountain lassitude with delusions for Reggie, perhaps— but his gray eyes were intent on her face.

“My cousin Percival was an intelligence agent before, during, and after the War,” said Reggie. “First for His Majesty’s Secret Service, then for British Naval Intelligence, and finally for…well, for a private network of agents run by someone very high up in our government.”

“Percy was a fucking spy?” I said, too exhausted even to notice my language.

“Yes,” said Reggie. “And young Kurt Meyer—who was not a mountain climber— was one of Percy’s most deeply embedded and most valued Austrian contacts. Eight months before the two met up in the Tibetan village of Tingri, northeast of here, Meyer had been forced to flee Austria. He fled east—then further east—eventually into China and then south, to Tibet.”

“This is a very long way to flee,” Jean-Claude said.

“He had a pack of German monsters after him,” said Reggie. “Tonight you’ve seen what those monsters can do.”

“What did Meyer have—and give to Percy in Tingri—that the Germans need back so badly?” asked the Deacon. “That’s the one part of the puzzle I don’t have.”

“Neither do I,” said Reggie. “All I know is that our national futures—France’s as well as Great Britain’s, Jean-Claude—may depend upon it.”

“It sounds like that leaves me and the United States out,” I heard myself say. My voice sounded almost angry.

Reggie looked at me. “It does, Jake. Leave you out, I mean. I’m sorry you ever got involved, but I didn’t know how to keep you from coming along with your English and French friends. Whatever the rest of us—or whoever joins me, that is—do next, I think you should curve around the glacier valley to the southeast and head for Serpo La into India. That is the safer and more direct of the two eastern passes. With a lot of luck and traveling light, you can be in Darjeeling in three weeks or so.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.

“The Germans will not pursue you, Jake,” continued Reggie. “They have no interest in you. None whatsoever. They’ve come back here for the second straight year because they were unable to retrieve what Kurt Meyer had, what he gave to my cousin Percy, and because they think there’s one chance in a hundred that the five of us may have found it. Or that they can find it themselves somewhere up on the mountain.”

“They killed thirty Sherpas, thirty men,” I say, blinking away tears of sheer fury and frustration, “to get back…what?…some goddamned blueprints for a dreadnought or plans for some more effective reciprocating airplane machine gun or some such goddamned nonsense?”

Reggie shook her head. “These Germans, however many there are of them—I’m convinced there were only seven of them last year, under the command of Bruno Sigl, and that they did see, or even make, Percival and Meyer fall, somewhere on this mountain. But for whatever reason, Sigl and whoever was with him weren’t able to retrieve the item Meyer had been trying to get into British hands. Into my British agent cousin’s hands. Just remember that these Germans don’t represent the Weimar Republic, don’t represent Germany. Yet. But they may someday… all of these monsters who follow that monster named Hitler…and whatever Meyer was trying to give to Percy was something that can hurt them. Hurt him, their leader. And that’s all I care about.”

I was too tired to follow that.

“All I know,” I said, “is that if we climb up to the North Col again, we’re trapped. Like rats. Even if there are only four or five Germans, they have guns—we don’t. They have rifles. What’s the effective distance of your ’scoped Lee-Enfield, Richard?”

“Effective range is somewhere above five hundred yards,” said the Deacon. “Maximum range is somewhere around three thousand feet.”

“The better part of a mile,” I said.

“Yes,” said the Deacon. “But not terribly accurate at that extreme range.”

I ignored his footnote. “Accurate enough to pick us off the North Col or even the low parts of the North Ridge without their shooter even climbing onto the Col,” I said.

The Deacon shrugged. “Probably. Depending upon wind and weather conditions.”

“Well, the goddamned wind and weather conditions haven’t exactly been friends to us so far,” I cried.

No one responded.

Finally Jean-Claude said to Reggie, “I agree with Jake that it would be folly to surrender our lives for the sake of a machine gun or dreadnought design that other spies will certainly steal someday anyway. Besides, we’re not currently at war with Germany. I have already given three brothers, two uncles, and five cousins to fighting les boches, Reggie. You would have to assure me that whatever Herr Meyer stole from the Germans or Austrians is, first of all, unique, irreplaceable, and, second of all, truly something which the survival of my country as well as yours might hinge upon.”

Reggie sighed deeply. It was the only time I ever saw her close to tears. “I can’t be certain of the second thing, Jean-Claude. But I can guarantee that whatever it was that took the better part of a year for Meyer to try to hand off to Cousin Percy, it was unique. That much Percival himself assured me of before he headed off to his death here last year. It was not anything as banal as the plans for a new machine gun or bomb.”

“So Percy admitted to you last year that he was a British spy,” I said. I didn’t know if it was a question or not.

Reggie smiled slightly. “I’d known that for years, Jake. Percy loved me. I’ve told you that we were more brother and sister than mere cousins. We’d played together as children, climbed in the Alps and the foothills of the Himalayas together as adults. He had to let me know that he was not a traitor to England…or even a decadent playboy, for that matter.”

“But you don’t even know,” I pressed, “what Meyer had and carried with him across all of eastern Europe, the Middle East, and China…all the way into Tibet? Something so important that your cousin was ready to give his life for it, but you don’t have a clue as to what it is?”