The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel

by Michael Yudov

  “D’accord.”

  Every case ends eventually, as does every mission. This one was a bit of both, well maybe a lot of both, but it was the one we were trapped in at the moment, so…

  I kissed her on the nose, and scrambled out of the bag, and into my gear. Trying to be as quick as I could be, because the danger factor in the ‘Bedroom’ of the tent had become literally explosive. I was through the zippered flap that constituted the bedroom ‘door’ before I’d even done up my zipper properly. Almost.

  Ronnie was just waking up as I passed through her ‘territory’ on my way to the Main Flap. Or doorway. Whatever.

  She blinked a few times, leaning up on both of her elbows, as I made my way to the outside. I called out a soft ‘good morning Colonel’ as I passed. Evie was nowhere in sight. I made a bet with myself that she’d already checked the new perimeter control system she’d talked about last night.

  As I emerged from the warren of ‘flaps’, I found Evie, sitting on a plastic folding chair under another ‘flap’. This one was the full width of the tent, and came with roll-up & tie, drop-down mosquito netting on the three exposed sides. All three had been dropped and secured. I was still in the damn tent. The front panel of netting had a zipper setup in it that made up the entry/exit portal. Portal sounded better than flaps.

  At least the roof of this final ‘room’ of the tent was high enough for me to comfortably stand upright. I held my ground while I finished tucking and tightening and all that. Evie was polite enough to wait until I was fully dressed before acknowledging my presence.

  “Good morning Jeffry. Sleep well?”

  “Good morning, Evie, and yes, I did in fact sleep well. The Alpine air agrees with me.”

  In truth, I was still tired from the day before, and every little ache and pain that could creep in, had. What I needed was steak and eggs, followed by a good night’s sleep on a firm mattress. Like that was going to happen.

  “Liar. You look like hell. The water is almost boiled for the coffee, air dried and vacuum packed strips of beef would be your best bet this morning. Out of what we have at hand, I mean.”

  “Swell, on all counts.”

  “The latrine has been established behind that large tree just over there on the right. The paper is there too.”

  “You went out to get the morning paper? You’re a prince.”

  I didn’t wait for an answer, I just went and used the facilities. For our situation, they were well done. There was a hole in the ground, deep enough to indicate soft earth, and a small shovel sitting next to the pile of dirt that had come out of the hole. You get the idea.

  When I got back I picked one of the chairs that Evie had placed around a small fold-up table. Sort of like the old card tables our parents would keep in a closet somewhere until needed. Poker night. But this one didn’t have a green felt top, it was white Formica.

  As I sat down it felt like the weight of the world sat down with me. Not on my shoulders, but right next to me, just letting me know it was there. Having chosen a chair next to Evie, the next step was to be morning-polite, which I found difficult, except when I was working. Then it was all work, wasn’t it?

  “How’s your active perimeter monitoring system today?”

  She gave me a sarcastic face, and then laughed. She had a good sense of humour, Evie did. It never bothered her to laugh at herself. I always thought that was a healthy sign.

  “It’s doing fine, thank you. And it works very well.”

  Then she got pretty serious. She turned her head a bit towards me, but kept watching the area outside the tent.

  “Jeffry, I’ve got a problem with what I’ve pieced together about all this bloody gear. Feel like hearing it now?”

  “Why not.”

  “Okay. I think the water’s ready. I’ll get us a cup of coffee. In yours?”

  “Just lots of sugar.”

  “Right.”

  She was out and back in through the door with two coffees in a couple of minutes. We were still working on the depletion of the old stock paper cups, so it was a bit hot to hold on to, but it tasted just right.

  The general greyness was changing from dark grey with wisps of cloud to the first crack of light coming over the mountains on the other side of the valley. All that could be seen between the mountains was a lake of clouds. Underneath that were roads and homes and people, but if you didn’t consciously think about it, it looked like a fantasy land, somewhere between the borders of Middle Earth and Mordor.

  Evie got settled back in her chair and we both took sips of the coffee, blowing across the top of the paper cups, trying not to scald ourselves. But it tasted like the best coffee I’d ever had. Evie had brought me a hunk of something wrapped in several layers of wax paper. I opened it up, and voila!, air dried beef. I sipped and munched while she laid out this ‘big picture’ she’d visualized. It was scary.

  The way she’d figured it, the suits were almost the perfect soldier for a covert ops mission. The head gear she’d used the night before went with the suits, and in addition to supplying night vision and infrared vision, they had a flip-down cover that was supposed to be as bullet-proof as the rest of the outfit. A small pair of oxygen tanks with webbing that held them onto both front thighs also fed the webbing section at the mouth with fresh air when none was available. The flip-down cover for the headgear covered the mouth piece as well. Then it was all topped off with the jet pack. Add the weapons that we had found, including the short-tube launcher, and the selection of machine pistols and sniper rifles, we were looking at the unstoppable man. With the right training, any exceptional soldier would be almost unstoppable.

  Any dolt off the street could accomplish an awful lot with just the suits and launchers, no head-gear, or jet-packs.

  And instead of falling into the hands of a dolt, they had been sold to ‘Enrico’s people’. Just the suits, though, and some automatic weapons. Not the full setup. But we had one now. Between Evie and I we’d managed to grab the components for one complete suit. Jet pack and all. The true test of this gear was yet to be fully experienced.

  The crack of light that had tipped the mountains on the other side of the valley was turning into a flood of light, bathing our side of the valley in bright sunshine. Morning was here.

  Therese came out of the tent just moments before Ronnie. She was dressed in the jeans and tee-shirt from yesterday. She was rumpled, sleepy eyed, and her hair was a mess, and if there had been another man within sight, he would have fainted with desire. I just catered to her.

  “Therese, good morning. Would you like a coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She grabbed the next to last chair and sat down with Evie and I. Ronnie went to get hers while I stepped out of the tent and poured two more coffees from the pot on the Coleman. One for each of them. They were both suitably thankful. Therese was acting like her normal self. Maybe she thought there was more between us than there was. Maybe she was confident that she would get me in the end, whatever it was, she had gotten over her huff from being rebuffed just a few minutes ago. The young are nothing if not flexible.

  We all sat quietly then, watching the Alpine sunrise. The shadows were being chased down our side of the valley now, and soon the sun would be shining directly on the cloud cover in the valley. It may disperse it, probably before ten or eleven AM. Underneath that cloud cover was a winding road leading back down into the clouds. At the bottom of the valley was a small but pretty town sitting beside a lake. This was a favourite spot for day trips and short traveling vacations. It made a nice stop on one’s tour. ‘And then there was this lake beneath the clouds, wow! You had to enter from a mountain pass that took you above the clouds before you started back down and re-entered them. Wow!’, I could hear it now.

  That voice was always the voice of an American tourist for me. The quintessential traveler. The one that most people despised.

  The whole bunch of us sat resting and drinking coffee, I was the only one eating. Th
ere wasn’t much in the way of breakfast supplies, but there was a rod and reel. Maybe they liked fresh trout for breakfast. Why not, the English ate Kippers. Ugh.

  There had been no discussion about anything as we sat there drinking our coffee, and basking in the glow of the Alpine forest morning we found ourselves in.

  Finally, I checked my watch, it was time to roll. Speaking of rolling.

  “Evie?”

  “Yes, Jeffry?”

  “Just out of curiosity mind, where’s the ‘Rover parked?”

  “Well done, if I say so myself that. I pulled into the forest to our left. I stuck to the meadowed areas as much as I could, and weaved in and out between the trees. It’s about a five-minute walk from here, completely hidden by the woods.”

  “From the air as well?”

  “You bet.”

  “Ronnie?”

  “Yes, Jeffry?”

  “Have you been able to make any connection between the grey men and Ted’s bank?”

  “No. I’ve thought about it from as many angles as I could, but no. The only connection we can make is such a tenuous one. The grey men have an arm in the banking trade. So, if this manager, La Forge, spoke freely about it, it may have come to the ears of someone who we’d rather not have knowing about it. But! Does it strike you that any Swiss bank manager would talk about something like this? Not likely. It might reflect back on him and his ability to manage his own internal affairs. I don’t think he talked. So, that means we’re still on.”

  “Your contact man, the one who doesn’t like me. Did he know?”

  “No, he didn’t. And he might have been more predisposed to friendship if you hadn’t cut him with a knife and dropped him on the floor with.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. It was my personality disorder that screwed it up. Let me tell you something Ronnie. That man is a trouble for you. He may even be compromised. He sure didn’t want any fast exits from our side.”

  “That’s exactly what you did though.”

  “I did that because he was stalling for time. Why would he do that?”

  “I can’t think of any reason at all.”

  “Precisely. It’s very important to do what you know is right, not what is expected, necessarily. I believe he knows more than we think he does. That makes him dangerous. Right now, we don’t want anyone else in on the rest of the job. I’ll handle that if you and Evie are up to your parts.”

  “That’s why we’re here. We’re going in this morning, and Ted hasn’t had any withdrawal abilities since the day before yesterday. Before we landed. We have to hope for a spot of luck. If Ted is short of cash, we’ll see him today.”

  “That would be excellent, but our chances are slim, I have to tell you. It’s been a while now, three weeks, as I recall, since Ted was captured on tape at an ATM, withdrawing money. He took out five hundred francs and hasn’t been seen since. How far can you get on that?”

  “Not everyone throws money around the way you do, Jeffry.”

  I conceded that was true, without mentioning my ‘inheritance’. I stood up and stretched, long and hard, then bent over and touched my toes, with my feet wide spread. Well, I was ready.

  “Okay. Departure in five minutes. Evie let’s go get the ‘Rover, shall we?”

  “Righto!”

  She popped up out of her chair, ready for action. Ronnie looked around at the campsite. I jumped in before she could say something silly, like, ‘How will we pack all of this in five minutes’, or some such.

  “We leave the campsite just as it is. Take only our own belongings, and the ones we ‘liberated’ from the safe house. We’re going to dump the ‘Rover as soon as we can. That means just outside the first town we come to that has a car dealer.”

  Evie was already gathering the gear set up on top of the picnic cooler. The first thing she’d done was to deactivate the perimeter monitoring system. Then it was all going back into the black rucksacks, component by component. She really had a thing for the ‘Super Tech’ stuff we’d snaffled. I called her name as I went out the door/flap of the netting, and she quickly finished and joined me. I was walking generally to the left, which is where she’d said she parked the ‘Rover.

  It turned out that we had to climb a little bit. The hill was sloping fairly gently where we were, but by the time we got to the ‘Rover, the altitude was showing on both of us. We were breathing harder than we should have been, and it had only been parked five minutes away.

  During the walk, Evie had taken the lead and then run off to the right a couple of times to collect the transmitters from the monitoring system. I opened the driver side door and climbed behind the wheel. Parking this in the dark must have been a bitch. No, Evie had had the night vision contraption with her. Either way, she was parked just ten feet from a drop of about two hundred. Straight down. She hadn’t seen it the night before, glasses or no. When she saw it this morning her eyes almost popped out of her head.

  “Shit! I didn’t see that!”

  “Never mind. All’s well that ends well. Let’s just get on with it and see if we can end it well.”

  She got in on the passenger side and strapped in. I chose to forego that option while I was driving us away from the ridge.

  “You might want to wait a minute or two before you buckle up Evie.”

  “Okay.”

  No questions, she just unbuckled the strap. As I wove through the trees in Four-Low, I relaxed the further we were from the drop. The problem with the kind of cliff we were leaving behind is that it was dirt, not stone. That meant that any significant change, like a small truck, which the ‘Rover could be, weight wise, might be enough to trigger a slide, or open up any pockets under the ground near the edge. Commonly caused by the fall of a large tree due to erosion. The root system often stayed when the tree went over, causing small pockets as they ‘biodegraded’, which were then enhanced and expanded by water seepage and erosion. It could be dangerous around the edge of that kind of cliff. That’s what made me drive without a belt. A quick exit could have been called for, but it wasn’t. I pulled up to the campsite after dropping Evie off just across the meadow. She had to collect the other two transmitters. The gang was ready, and we started piling our few things into the ‘Rover, along with the military materiel we’d brought along in case war broke out overnight.

  Ronnie opened the back door and climbed in. Two minutes later she was brushing her hair, and freshening up in general. Therese went to sit in the front, but I asked her to take a rear seat, Evie was going to have to take over the driving shortly.

  Her answer to that was that when Evie needed to drive she could sit in the driver’s seat, until then, she was sitting in the front. Women. I caught a glimpse of a smile on Ronnie’s lips, which vanished as soon as she saw me looking in the rear-view mirror.

  The ride through the trees was bumpy, but a piece of cake for the ‘Rover. We met up with Evie on the other side of the meadow. She opened the back liftgate and stowed the monitors and transmitters, then hopped in the back with Ronnie.

  About ten minutes later we were into the main area of the campground, and then we were passing the few utility buildings near the entrance, and then we hit the road. Not one person, that’s how many we met while on our camp-out. I turned back the way we’d come and flipped on all the lights I could find as we descended into the clouds. Clouds are different than fog, they’re lighter, so even though you can’t see through them from above or below, when you’re in one it’s not so bad. You can see for a long enough distance so as not to hit anything if you’re driving well to begin with.

  It was still coming on with the strong dawn now, and I didn’t expect to meet anyone coming up the road except perhaps for a delivery truck or two, and you could hear those coming as well as see them.

  I came down the mountain in a much more civilized manner than I’d exhibited on the way up. Subsequently, it took longer to get back to town.

  About an hour and a bit later we were sitting in a coffee shop, havin
g coffee, of course, and croissants. The rest of the gang was treating this well, and pulling their weight at the same time.

  I had dumped the Range Rover in the forest not far from where we were. It was on the beaten track, just beside a jogger’s trail. The ‘Rover was a good vehicle, and I didn’t want to deprive the family that owned it any more than I had too.

  Evie had made sure that there were no obvious traces of our occupation of the vehicle. while Ronnie and I had made a cache of our gear in a similar type of ‘cultivated forest’ a few towns away. Unless blind luck played a role, we would find our gear just where we had left it when we went back, which would be soon. The coffee shop was down the street from a car dealer’s lot. Audi, naturally. I wish I could have spotted a Range Rover dealer, but we needed new wheels, and quick.

  I finished my espresso and put the diminutive cup upside down on the little saucer that came with it. Force of habit. In the near and middle east, that was the custom when you had drunk your fill, you turned the cup over so that on the constant passes made by the tea or coffee person, they would know not to automatically refill your cup when you weren’t looking.

  “Alright, it’s time to get a vehicle. Evie, you’re probably the one with the least exposure, and I’m paying cash for these new wheels. I think it would look better if you were with me. Just in case of trouble.”

  “Fine.”

  She finished her own cappuccino, and copied me with the little empty cup. Maybe she knew first hand, maybe she didn’t copy me. Evie was turning out to be quite a solid addition to the team, despite my original misgivings.

  “I’m set.”

  Each of the girls had taken time to freshen up in the ladies’ room, with good results. I had washed up, and even combed my hair, courtesy of Therese. She seemed to have a hair brush for every occasion in her purse, and a man’s pocket comb. She was almost certainly a Girl Guide in her youth. A Brownie at the very least, but if there was potential trouble of any kind, Evie was the pick. She didn’t have a description of any kind on the air, unless that idiot from the American covert ops centre gave it to the Zurich Police after the affair at the Pub the night before. The Modus Operandi would have looked the same. Victims dead from a head wound, and left stripped of their outer clothing. It might take a few minutes or a few days, depending on how effectively the story was spiked yesterday morning, but the connection would be made. It just depended now on when, and whether or not our authority would cover us for additional bodies being left strewn around the city. Killers just disappearing into the city around them, their city, would definitely piss off the Zurich Police Force. That’s why I took Evie. She hadn’t been part of the Pub action.