Death and Deception

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Death and Deception Page 27

by Seeley James


  So far no one had seen his signal. Which allowed me to relax a little. The possibility of Zafar setting me up for a sniper’s bullet was no big deal if it was me holding the IR-reading binocs. But all afternoon the watch had been manned by several of the bright-faced kids in the Brotherhood. They’d put their faith in a couple old Kevlar helmets they owned. I hadn’t worked up the courage to tell them it wouldn’t even slow a round from the Russian SVLK-14. We were set up a mile from the tunnel’s probable entrance—only half the rifle’s range.

  The Brothers scarfed down the takeout Jenny brought for them. She was thoughtful like that. I figured we could all go hungry until I killed Mr. Baldy at point-blank range. That would work up my appetite. But her mothering instinct won out and the Brothers were happy about it. I took my vegetarian sandwich. Jenny assured me it was good for my digestion on a mission like this. I walked off to take the lonely watch for Zafar.

  I trained my binoculars on the wall above us from behind a large rock outcropping. A thousand vertical feet of rock covered in patches of ice faced me. The climb would be a serious technical climb. I had training. The Rangers didn’t consider you ready for war until you could climb Everest, dive the Mariana Trench, and walk the Sahara without water. While Danny assured me that he, Fiona, and Mark were rated for AI7 climbs—the most dangerous rating for Alpine ice with overhangs—he never mentioned M13. M for mixed ice and rock. The climb would require transitions from two different disciplines, not to mention double the equipment. Ice and mountaineering axes are different beasts. Same for pitons and ice screws. It was going to be ugly.

  Mercury slid in next to me, his back against the rock. This is gonna be special, homie. Ima bet on you to die here at the rock. Bullet goes right through your forehead, through your brainpan, out the back, and three feet into the dirt behind you.

  Bored gods have a bad habit of wagering on the outcome of mortal lives. Not a lot to do after your believers wander off.

  I said, Thanks for the warning. So, you’re telling me Zafar is setting me up?

  Mercury said, Guess I shouldna mentioned that part, huh. Well, in that case, Ima bet on you dying on the cliff, bro.

  I said, Why all the hostility? Is something bothering you? Are the other gods being mean to you again?

  Don’t patronize me now. He worked kinks out of his neck and shoulders. It’s not cuz Saturn’s laughing like a hyena. Remember when you were upside down, suspended between heaven and hell and I asked you if you’d tell Jenny about me?

  I said, Uh. Yeah.

  Mercury said, And do you remember what you said?

  I might’ve committed to telling her, yeah, I said. I’m getting around to it. I’m gonna … when I’m ready.

  “Well, now’s a good time because it’s cold,” Fiona said. She was suddenly sitting where Mercury had been an instant earlier. “You can eat it whenever you want. It’s just that the ants are coming for it.”

  I looked at my sandwich, half-eaten on a wrapper lying between us in the dark. Fiona took the binocs out of my hands while I picked up the food. I wasn’t worried about the ants. I doubted they liked rubbery tofu either. I picked out a slice of avocado and wondered if the spinning wheel of yin and yang ever landed on steak.

  “Ever wonder how the Knights knew which road you were on this morning?” Fiona offered.

  “Blanket surveillance, spotters in a church steeple, bribed store owners, spyware on someone’s phone.”

  “Or an insider,” she said. “You walked right past Cherry and Rafael this morning.”

  People offering extraordinary statements without evidence puts me off. At the same time, any good cop will tell you the best clues drop out of nowhere. I kept an open but suspicious mind.

  “Back in El Remate,” I said, “you told Danny to be on the winning side. What did you mean by that?”

  “I don’t remember saying that,” she spluttered. “Might have been encouraging him.”

  “You like tofu?” I traded the binocs for the sandwich.

  She looked at the sandwich like it was a snake. “I had the bratwurst.”

  I fought back a tinge of jealousy. “Why Cherry? Is the Brotherhood only big enough for one beautiful woman? Or do you have—”

  That’s when it flashed. Zafar’s IR beam. Dead in front of me.

  I marked it on my visor’s mapping software and measured vertical distance to the base. Eight hundred feet up a seam littered with frozen streams and dry rock ledges. Of course they put the entrance in the most inaccessible crevice on the mountain. When I trained the binocs on the opening, I could see Zafar himself. He looked at me through the scope of a wicked looking SVLK-14 Sumrak, the current record-holding rifle for distance. It was set up in a defensive position. The Knights intended to defend the tunnel with deadly force.

  Zafar waved.

  At the risk of giving myself away, I waved back. Zafar looked happy for a second, then moved back from the entrance into the dark.

  It was time to make the final decision: Was it a trap?

  He had a rifle that could’ve killed me before I knew he was there, yet he hadn’t fired. That was as close as I could get to confirmation of his good intentions.

  I ran back down the hill, Fiona on my heels, deeper into the trees where the others sat around a fire. The Brothers stood when I entered the circle. Their eager faces filled with anxiety as the upcoming fight became as real as road rash. As Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The realization that they were going up a dangerous ice-covered cliff at night into the camp of a heavily armed enemy was that punch in the mouth.

  CHAPTER 49

  Only four of us were rated for ice climbing, Mark, Danny, Fiona, and me. Jenny and the others would wait until we could tell them more about where the tunnel came out.

  We geared up with ice axes, mountaineering axes, crampons, ice screws, pitons, helmets, stiff boots, belts covered in carabiners, and enough dry-coated rope to rig a clipper ship. Our pistols and rifles went on last. The Sabel Visors turned the moonless night into day, which gave the team a measure of confidence.

  We staked out four Brothers as shooters to cover our ascent from the base. Danny put the guy whose name I still didn’t know in charge. Their HK417s had an effective firing range just short of the distance to the cave. They were at the mercy of the sniper rifle on high ground, yet they committed to their fate with grim determination. I visualized their weapons against the target in my head. They’d have to use their rifles like mortars to get a bullet to land inside the cave, but the attempt might scare off the enemy long enough to help us out. Maybe.

  I mapped out our route for Danny, Fiona, and Mark. It was directly below the cave entrance and involved several icy sections. Danny didn’t like the idea of climbing ice until I pointed out how much quieter it is than hammering a piton into rock.

  We could make out a few carabiners left by the Knights from their previous climbs. They had a much better route technically. It swung wide to the left, using more rock and less ice. My path had a sixty-foot-wide overhang halfway up that could prevent detection and cover us should we need to retreat. But it would be a bitch to climb. Ice hanging from the bottom of a rock has a bad habit of falling off when you bury your axe in it.

  We set out hiking over scree made of rocks the size of our feet. Like running up a two-hundred-foot sand dune only with a fifty-pound pack and ten-pound grains of sand beating on your boots. We were warmed up when we reached the base of the cliff. Fiona and Danny did well. Mark looked like our weakest link. They met my observing gaze and turned up their determination.

  Our first encounter was a seventy-degree rock slope that we climbed quickly and efficiently. It led us to our first encounter with ice. A seep had formed a crevice which, under different circumstances, would have been a beautiful frozen waterfall of sixty feet. Layer upon layer of ice had formed in the alternating cold and warm of spring. I went first.

  My left ice axe went in, followed by
my right. I tested my weight, pulled up, and slammed the toe of my boot hard into the ice. I tested my weight before repeating the act with my right foot. Arching my back for leverage, I repeated the maneuver until I stopped and turned in an ice screw. It held our first carabiner and rope. Danny followed, offset a few feet. Then Fiona. Mark brought up the rear.

  Despite having comms in our ears, we moved silently. There was nothing to say and every axe swing was critical to survival. We saved our concentration for the task at hand. The others were good climbers, moving only after planting a solid toe in the ice, keeping their heels flat, and not moving their feet the way they would on rock. We finished the ice section and gathered on a slope. I looked them over. No signs of overexertion. We were going at the right pace.

  The next rock section was vertical. We pinged in a minimal number of pitons to keep the noise down. There was a seam that ran right up my path most of the way. I reached a six-inch ledge covered in ice and looked for a place to sink an ice screw.

  That’s when Fiona cried out, “Watch me.” The technical term when a climber feels their grip loosening and a fall could be possible. Mark was her belayer. I heard him grunt as he checked his grip on the rope. I looked down. A split second later, she called out, “Falling.”

  And she did. She fell twenty feet, teabagging Mark as she did. She kept her legs bent like a pro and didn’t push off the wall. She twisted as she fell, then slammed into the rock below Mark’s position. She quickly said, “I’m good.”

  Her breathing contradicted her report. Her heart rate had to have gone sky-high because nervousness reverberated through the comm link. I considered sending her home, but that would cut my team in half since there was no way to safely return without belaying each other. I told them to take a minute.

  Checking on her made me see the sharp rock and slick ice below us. And far below that, the ground. We were one mistake from dying. I felt my heart rate spike.

  Mercury floated in the air next to me. It’s a mind game, homie. Panic is contagious. If you catch it, all y’all fall to your death.

  I said, Does that mean you bet on me to survive the climb?

  Mercury said, Most of it, yeah. I gotcha, brutha.

  I said, You bet on me to make it most of the way?

  Mercury said, Oh no you don’t. I’m not going to let you trick me into telling you the future. I’ll tell you this, though: if you get calm right now, you’ll get off this mountain alive. If’n you don’t, then I gotta take all four of you down the river. You know what I’m saying? So get it together and act like a leader.

  Mercury ferries the dead to the underworld in his spare time. But I got what he was telling me. The difference between living and dying is determined by attitude.

  “Mark, did she hit her head?” I asked in the comm link.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “This isn’t a ‘think’ situation, Mark.” I used my commanding baritone. “Get your head where your partner needs it. She called for you to watch her. Did you?”

  “Yes, sir. She fell feet-first. She did not hit her head. Her shoulder hit first, her knees second, then she had her feet out for a solid stop.”

  “I said I’m fine,” Fiona snarled. “Climbing.”

  We resumed our ascent. Danny and I worked our way forward on the ledge to a sheet of ice fifteen inches thick. We worked our way up that to the underside of the overhang. We assembled beneath it in a place where, a million years ago, a chunk of rock the size of an office building fell away. Under better conditions, it would’ve been a great picnic spot. No ants.

  I started the upside-down climb, stemming my way up a corner to a crack that offered finger grip for the transition. The others watched. If I fell to my death, they would take a different route. If I made it, they would follow using the same holds and moves. I moved across sideways to where the underside of the ledge was shortest.

  Everything went by the book until I reached the lip and had to transition from upside-down, to vertical. The only way I could do it was to let my feet and weight swing out below, holding on with nothing more than my fingertips. I made the mistake of looking down. Six hundred feet of open air below me. If I fell, I’d bounce off a nearly vertical incline covered in jagged rock. It would take weeks to recover all the pieces of flesh left behind.

  Mercury wouldn’t let me die like that. I hoped.

  I took my feet off the rock and let my body pendulum out over the deadly drop. I waited until my swinging slowed and my body hung still before making my next move. With a big, one-handed pullup, I managed to get an axe into the ice above and do another pullup. A third and fourth were required before my feet found anything to cling to. To my left, a smooth sheet of ice at a forty-five-degree angle offered a staging area for the last assault on Mr. Baldy’s cave. I moved over a bit and secured myself before giving the others the go-ahead.

  One by one, they made the perilous journey to join me. Danny refused a hand from me. There was something the size of a cigarette stuck to his helmet. It was barely visible, yet something about it set off alarms in my head. I tried to brush it off, but he turned to pull Fiona up. She took the assist. Mark brought up the rear.

  Just as Mark reached the ledge but before he secured his position, Mercury whispered in my ear. Take a big step to your left and take Danny with you. NOW!

  I heard a thump and a whoosh as I followed my abandoned deity’s order. I grabbed Danny’s wrist, took as big a step left as I dared, slammed my crampon into the ice, moved without testing my weight, and yanked him with me. He looked surprised, scared, and angry all at the same time. We stood toe-to-toe, three feet to the left of where we’d stood an instant earlier. His expression turned to pure rage.

  A falling body hit Danny in the head and knocked him over the edge into the darkness below.

  Instinctively, I knew the falling body was the corpse of Zafar Muhadow. It had been thrown from above. I don’t know how I knew that other than its human form was unmistakable as it caught Danny at terminal velocity, around 120 mph, and took him over the edge. There was only one Knight likely to be used as a projectile to kill me, Zafar. What didn’t register in that split-second as Danny’s belay rope flew over the edge, was why or how Danny seemed to know what was happening before I did.

  Danny’s body slammed hard into the wall below us.

  The weight tried to yank me over with him. I held fast to the ice axe in my left hand.

  I knew he was dead. A man doesn’t survive getting hit with 160 pounds of falling human and survive. I tugged at the rope. Even it had no life left.

  That didn’t stop Fiona from screaming into the comm link. “Danny! Danny! NO! Danny, say something!”

  I let her keep trying for a few seconds, then started pulling him up. Mark reached around Fiona and helped. After ten lengths of rope went by, she grabbed hold and helped.

  Danny was dead, all right. The angle of his neck told us as we pulled him into view. His glassy eyes made his condition certain. Mark tied the corpse to a separate ice screw.

  “You did this!” Fiona pushed me. “You were supposed to be standing there.”

  She pushed me again. It took me a couple cycles to process her words as she swung an axe at my head. I caught her hand. She fought against me. Her crampons loosened in the ice. She yanked the axe free and reared back for a deadly, overhand blow. My weight shifted. I grabbed my ice axe, still buried in ice, to stop myself from falling over.

  Her backhand momentum, combined with her grief, sent her backpedaling into thin air. She fell.

  Mark and I watched as the first piton below the shelf popped out. The rope tensioned to the next safety point. We were watching what climbers call a zipper fall. Fiona’s falling weight popped the second at the lip. Her third point popped out as well. None of them had been fully secured. She’d been in a hurry and Mark hadn’t noticed her sloppy work. The net result was that Fiona’s fall was about to pull him over with her. He planted his feet, hoping to catch her fall, which probably w
ouldn’t work given her momentum and the fact he hadn’t secured himself yet.

  Suddenly, what Fiona and Danny were up to crystalized in my mind. The cigarette-sized device on his helmet. The fear and anger on his face. Her anger at me for yanking Danny into my position. Danny was Ephialtes, the traitor.

  I slammed my razor-sharp crampon into Fiona’s rope an inch from Mark’s boot, severing it instantly. Her scream echoed all the way down to where she cratered at the bottom.

  Mark looked at me like I was a crazed killer.

  I held my ice axe to his throat and said, “Were you in on it with them?”

  “What?” His eyes were wide as a watch face.

  “They signaled the Knights. That falling body was meant for me.” I leaned down and pulled the IR transmitter off Danny’s helmet. The size of a cigarette, but a known device to most operators.

  Mark stared at it for a long time before looking up at me. His shock and disgust appeared believable. But did I trust him enough for the rest of the climb?

  He turned to the ledge and threw up.

  That gave me the trust I needed. I said, “Mission scrubbed.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Hours later, the Austrians released me with the warning not to leave the area. They were not happy and suspicious of the whole story. No cave entrance could be found at the position I gave them. A helicopter with a bright beam found nothing but rocks on a vertical slope. They let me watch the video feed live. But they agreed to let the Hero of Paris continue consulting with the conference’s security teams. The investigation into the climbing disaster would continue immediately after the G20 meetings.

  I had to admire Mr. Baldy’s thoroughness. He managed to position a rock over his entrance without leaving a trace. Which pissed me off even more. Not only had he slaughtered fifteen academics, he’d also killed Zafar, the only decent Knight I’d met—and I was no closer to stopping him.

 

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