the button to test the airflow and was rewarded with a short hiss. He took a breath; the air was cool and metallic tasting. He closed his eyes and the water enveloped him.
Silence.
He sat still for a moment and listened to the ticks and pings of debris washing over the BMW, then opened his eyes. His headlamp beam was a cone of white before him. He checked the windows but saw only darkness and occasional bits of swirling sediment and plant matter. In which direction had the car settled? He pressed his hand first against the passenger-side window, then the driver’s side; here he felt more pressure against the glass. He scooted back to the other side, lifted the handle, and put his shoulder to the door. It burst open. Fisher tumbled out and landed on his side, buried up to his collarbone in mud. Loosened by the impact, his headlamp slipped off his head and slipped away. He snagged it, settled the straps back on his head, and cinched them down.
He started swimming.
The current, combined with his paddling, doubled his submerged speed. With his vision narrowed to what the cone of light from his headlamp illuminated, he had the sensation one got on an airport’s moving walkway. With no fixed references to latch on to, his brain was telling him he was swimming at a normal pace, but his body knew otherwise. Counting seconds in his head, Fisher swam hard for a minute, then turned left on the diagonal, aiming for the Rhine’s western shore. After another two minutes he felt the current suddenly slacken, and he knew he was clear of the main channel. He felt something soft slide over his chest and belly, and it took him a moment to realize it was mud. The bottom was rising. Twenty feet, he estimated. He was perhaps thirty feet from the bank. He had no fixed plan, but knew he needed to surface close to land, close to cover, lest he be spotted by rescue boats or an onlooker.
The current changed again and he felt his body spiraling left into some kind of vortex. His kicking feet touched mud, and then the water was calm again. He angled upward. The light increased. The surface came into view. Using his hands like flippers, he backpedaled in the water, slowing down until he was hovering a few feet below the surface. Directly ahead he could see trees: fuzzy broccoli shapes silhouetted against the sky. There was a gap between them. An inlet. He turned over, dove to the bottom, and swam on, using only his feet, arms spread wide, until he felt his fingers trailing over soil walls. The inlet continued to narrow and bottom out until his chest was scraping the bottom. He rolled onto his back and used his heels to wriggle forward until his head broke the surface. He blinked his eyes clear and found himself staring at tree branches, so close he could have reached out and touched them. He was right: an inlet. Shaped like an elongated V, it was at least two hundred feet deep. At its midpoint was a wooden footbridge. Someone was standing on it. No, two people. A man and a woman with their backs to him — watching the show in the main channel, he assumed. Moving with exaggerated slowness, Fisher reached up and removed the OmegaO’s mask.
It was ten long minutes before the couple moved on, crossing to the southern bank of the inlet and disappearing from view. Fisher rolled back onto his belly and began crawling.
At what he assumed was the end of the inlet, he instead found a choke point of dead branches and fallen logs draped by low-hanging boughs. On the other side of the natural dam he found a knee-deep creek enclosed in a tunnel of yet more undergrowth and trees. He followed the creek for a half mile, pushing deeper inland, occasionally glimpsing houses and cul-de-sacs through the trees until finally, after forty minutes of plodding through the water, he saw a raised concrete bridge ahead. He heard the rush of traffic, heavy enough that he realized he was near a major road.
He moved to the bank and found a comfortable place to sit down. He shrugged off his backpack, rummaged around until he found the Aloksak containing his iPhone; he pulled it out and powered it up. After tapping into a nearby wireless network, he called up the map feature and pinpointed his location. He was on the northern outskirts of Wei?enthurm, the town across the Raiffeisen Bridge from Neuwied. The bridge ahead of him was part of the L121—Koblenzer Strasse. As the crow flies, he was less than a mile from where he’d gone off the Raiffeisen but almost twice that in the water and on foot.
He checked his watch. It was almost four o’clock. Three hours until nightfall.
17
Having been out of contact longer than he’d anticipated, Fisher, upon landing at the Madrid Barajas International Airport, took a taxi downtown to the first touristy landmark that came to mind, the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales on Plaza de las Descalzas. The forty-minute drive gave him time to do some passive dry-cleaning. The driver, whom Fisher felt certain had been rejected by a Spanish demolition-derby show, made countersurveillance an easy task as he weaved in and out of traffic, ignored the speed limits, and showed a love for impromptu turns and narrow, one-way streets. By the time they reached Plaza de las Descalzas, Fisher was beyond certain he’d picked up no tails.
The previous night, after sitting on the bank of the inlet for five hours, he had waded out beneath the Koblenzer Strasse bridge, then walked north through farmers’ fields and down riverside hiking trails to Andernach, two miles north of Wei?enthurm. By the time he found an appropriately anonymous hotel, the Martinsberg, his clothes were dry and he was presentable enough to arouse no suspicions from the night clerk. Once in the room, he first called the Frankfurt Airport’s Iberia desk and booked a late-morning flight to Madrid; his second call was to a local limousine company to arrange for a pickup. Both of these reservations he made using yet another pair of Emmanuel’s clean passports and credit cards. Unless he was recognized between Andernach and the airport, he would be leaving behind an ice-cold trail.
After a hot shower and a late room-service supper, Fisher spent ten minutes probing his rib cage until satisfied nothing was broken, then took four 200 mg tablets of ibuprofen and went to sleep. He awoke the next morning at eight, found a local address for a DHL office, and took a taxi there, returning thirty minutes later with a box and packing materials. He packed up his non-airport-friendly gear and weapons, sealed the box, and addressed it to the DHL office in Madrid and left it at the hotel’s front desk for pickup.
Now, just before noon Madrid time, he found himself standing before the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales. He paid the driver, waited for the car to squeal around the corner and out of sight, then walked four blocks southeast to an Internet cafe on Calle de la Montera.
Fisher got signed in, left his passport at the counter as requested, then found an open computer cubicle and sat down. There was a draft message in his Lycos mailbox. It read simply:
21 Calle de la Concepcion Jeronima
Apartment 3B
Key, baseboard
This would be another safe house. Fisher memorized the address, deleted the message, and was out the door and in a taxi two minutes later. It wasn’t until the car pulled onto the narrow street that Fisher realized the apartment faced the building housing Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation.
As advertised, beside the door to apartment 3B Fisher found a loose baseboard, and behind it a key that opened the apartment door. Inside there was nothing. Where the German safe house had all the charm of a hotel chain, this studio apartment was completely empty, save for a familiar-looking keypad lock on the bedroom door. He punched in the correct code and pushed through. Inside was, of all things, a red beanbag chair sitting before an LCD television. On the floor next to the chair was a speakerphone. Fisher typed in his pound/asterisk code, and sixty seconds later Grimsdottir appeared on the monitor.
“You’re alive,” she said simply.
“So it appears. They were tipped off, Grim.”
“What?”
“You heard me. If Hans Hoffman hadn’t grown a conscience, they would’ve been on me when I walked out of the winery.”
