by Fritz Galt
Three-meter swells beat back the speedboat, pitching it from one watery crater to the next.
Driven back by the storm, the gunman fired a final volley. Bullets drilled a line of holes in the sails. Then he spun away from the Celeste.
The freshwater lake had begun to swallow the sloop. Cookware and cushions washed against Alec’s legs.
He cupped his hands and yelled to Omar, “Get back up here and help me man the pumps.”
Omar tried to drag his soaked body back on deck. He was exhausted from his battle and coughing up water.
“If you don’t mind,” he called, stretching out a hand for help.
Alec launched onto the slick foredeck. He landed with a splash beside Omar, who still hung halfway off the ship.
“I’m not doing so well,” the young man said.
“Join the club.”
Alec pulled him the rest of the way onto the deck.
Omar’s hoarse whisper barely carried above a thunderclap and the roaring waves. “Did you believe the story I told you before the storm?”
“Forget the story. We’re sinking.”
Omar persisted. “The jihad wants to force you out of the accelerator laboratory.”
“You explained that already.”
“They’ve selected you as their main target,” Omar said. “The Proteus Jihad’s after you personally.”
Alec gripped him more fiercely. “Okay, so who exactly is in this jihad? And how can I stop them?”
“That’s the problem,” Omar said, his voice barely rising above the storm. “He’s only one person, but he’s everywhere.”
Then the young man’s eyes widened as he stared beyond Alec. “Allahu Akbar!” God is great!
Alec looked up. Two immense walls of water converged on the boat.
The Celeste’s mast complained, then popped like a twig under saturated sails.
The heavy timber and canvas crashed down on them in a veil of white.
Chapter 2
Mick Pierce watched the beam of a warning beacon penetrate the downpour. It cast a pale yellow reflection off the crashing waves of Lake Geneva. Then, like a searchlight, it crept across the façades of Montreux, Switzerland.
When it reached into the restaurant where he sat, it cast a shadow over his young wife.
Natalie pushed her dinner away.
For all intents and purposes, their vacation to the south of Switzerland was over.
According to a radio broadcast, police had discovered a sailboat used by Mick’s half-brother Alec. The sailboat was badly damaged and authorities had yet to find her crew.
Natalie was on the verge of exploding.
“Okay, let it all out,” he said.
She lined up her silverware neatly, then let him have it with both barrels. “Your job doesn’t give you and your brother enough excitement, does it? You’ve got to play weekend warrior as well.”
“Hey, don’t look at me. Alec is the fool out in the storm.”
She would have none of it, and stared at the crashing waves.
Sure, diplomats rarely mixed well with spies. Natalie was a State Department official at the American Embassy in Bern, while he and Alec worked undercover for the CIA. And sure, they approached problems from different angles.
But the truth was that after the Cold War had ended, the spying game in Europe no longer was exciting, and it certainly wasn’t hazardous. It was mainly bureaucratic, with an occasional report thrown in for thrills.
Her remark cut deep because it was true.
Her baby-blue eyes peered into the blackness, searching for a windblown sail, flotsam from a wrecked ship or even a flailing arm.
Unfortunately, the only thing she would see that evening would be surf pounding the shoals. The lake consumed everything else.
Maybe her accusations weren’t aimed at him or the spying game. Maybe they were wild, futile swipes at the sudden, arbitrary turn of events.
He waited for her to turn back to him, to look into those eyes that could see straight through him, that could search him and scour him clean and after all that still love and accept him.
In profile, she looked more desirable than ever. Her formfitting dress caressed and gently restrained her lusty curves. Her chic Parisian attire, her modishly waved auburn hair and her adolescent expressions were more than the youthful indulgences of a thirty-four-year-old woman. She was in full rebellion against the pain and suffering that she had witnessed and endured in their overseas postings.
Only an extraordinary event like that evening’s could expose the chinks in her armor.
He had watched her successfully climb the diplomatic ladder with increasingly difficult assignments. She had pursued American Government objectives in many critical theaters abroad from Lisbon to La Paz to Belgrade to Taipei, advancing the front line of democracy. She had hurdled all the obstacles that the department could throw in her way, and still kept her resolve.
Eight years his junior, she had achieved everything on her own. And where was he? At a dumpy job in Bern, a golden cage for old spies.
The woman who owned the inn was clearing dishes.
“This lake is mostly peaceful,” the owner told a couple behind him. “But it can be a killer.”
The couple shook their heads in dismay, then stood to leave.
Mick looked at Natalie. She may have heard the woman, but she was still turned away, watching rain rinse the last glimmer of daylight against the hilly, washboard shoreline.
Visiting one of the world’s most beautiful countries was one thing. Living there was quite another.
Sure, he and Natalie had scaled the spiral staircases in all the towers of old Reformist churches, called out drunkenly in the snowy Old Town of Zurich at Christmastime, plodded through the cow dung of the Emmental with its massive sloping farmhouse roofs, sipped coffee beside Appenzeller farmers with their single earrings and backward ways, hiked the old Roman passes in the eastern Romansch-speaking areas and skipped rocks across pristine alpine lakes.
Then, after all that was over, what?
He sensed movement. Natalie was turning toward him, her chin defiant, her light blue eyes moist like those of a wounded animal.
Outside of the office, they had shared every possible minute together. They had picnicked by the Rhine Falls, made love in mountain huts that had no running water, munched bread, cheese and salami on dizzyingly high trails above U-shaped valleys with glaciers crackling above them, skied down bald mountain faces within view of Liechtenstein, and devoured bratwurst, knackwurst and rösti and swilled great local beer by the mug.
They could always live as if it were a dream, until reality set in.
Natalie was right about Switzerland, and about him. And, sadly, the conflict was unavoidable.
The country lacked the excitement that he had thrived on throughout his career. The government wasn’t teetering on the brink of collapse. In fact, few Swiss citizens actually bothered to learn the name of their president on any given year.
There was no class warfare, no historical secret that hadn’t already been exposed and sanitized, no corruption that brought the revenge of the masses or the bullet of a madmen, no spiraling inflation, no enemy looming on the border, no hunger, no disease, no addictive nationalism, no poisonous ideology, no ideologies whatsoever.
It was almost as if Switzerland had sunk into the ultimate state of entropy, where even the barbers and hairdressers had nothing to talk about.
He studied the palms of his hands, grown soft from deskwork. He would have liked to sail through a storm.
Instead, he merely commanded a desk, double-checked his agency’s fiscal records, made sure that his numerous visiting superiors were well-accommodated, took lunch breaks shopping for valves to fix the office sink, tasted and compared regional wines and reported on them under the topic of agricultural output.
Worse, he had become an elitist, an effete who abhorred stepping out of civilization and traveling among the unwashed throngs of Italy a
nd France, much less Spain or Portugal or Greece. Heaven forbid if someone sent him back to America with its crime-ridden streets, heavy-handed foreign policy and plundering of the world’s resources.
He had grown altogether too brooding. And introspection didn’t suit his personality.
Natalie spread her fingers on the linen tablecloth, and he reached across to hold her hands. It was the middle of the summer, and they were cold.
“Your hands feel like ice,” he said.
“So do yours.”
Switzerland had turned him into a wimp, a bank clerk behind iron bars, a pensioner sitting all morning in a well-kept city park, an activist for a clean environment where spitting or littering or idling a car or farting were punishable by fines, or worse: deportation.
He looked above her at a black-and-white photograph on the wall. It was a simple snapshot of a cow complacently grazing in a meadow, her udder full and a tag stapled to her ear.
He was that cow.
He used to think he was a man of action. And he still did—a man of computer keyboards, of rapid-fire memos, of fingernail files, of telephone calls, of pencils and erasers. Mostly erasers.
Meanwhile Natalie had blossomed in the large garden of diplomacy that flourished in Bern and Geneva with their many missions and world organizations. She traveled professionally, she met, she engaged, she represented, she negotiated. She was involved.
Watching from the confined space of the CIA Station in Bern, he had felt her slip away from him emotionally, physically, intellectually and spiritually. The more involved she became with her work, the more he saw how little he was able to accomplish. Not only couldn’t he compete with her job, he couldn’t compete with her at anything.
The competition between them wasn’t her fault, of course. Theirs was a story of two strong personalities, two different stages of life and two opposing professions. It was a necessary evolution, gradual, erosive and seemingly inevitable.
A dried-up CIA desk jockey would no longer be enough for her, or for her budding career.
The storm-warning beacon swung back to shore. It strafed a row of wind-battered willows. Like a flashbulb, it captured beheaded geranium stalks, their flower heads tumbling in the wind down the Rue des Fleurs.
“That’s it.” She slapped the table. Silverware bounced off their plates. “It’s over.”
He jumped in his seat and suddenly returned to the present. He rubbed his high Pueblo cheekbones, trying to bring life to his weathered face.
“Over?”
She looked at him curtly. “He’s gone.”
He closed his eyes. She was talking about Alec.
What a pain Alec was. Mick’s younger half-brother had left Geneva on a borrowed yacht that morning. Not unusual for Alec, who loved to sail. The day before, he had promised to phone Mick upon his return, but still no call. Again, not unusual for Alec to forget calling.
Okay, so they had heard the disturbing, if incomplete, news on the radio that the Celeste had been found wrecked and capsized.
But Alec knew how to swim.
“We can’t just sit here,” Natalie said, interrupting his thoughts. She remained composed, but her tone was increasingly desperate.
He attempted a note of decisiveness. “We’ll call his apartment once we finish dinner.”
She threw her napkin down, ready to leave.
“Damn it, I’m still eating.” He grabbed his knife.
Her expression went slack as she looked at the blade.
“Now, what are you going to do with that?”
He let the knife slip to his plate where it landed with a clatter. “Okay, I’ll call the police again.”
“That isn’t enough.” Her jaw was set. “That won’t bring him back.”
“Well, what do you propose we do? If he’s lost in the storm, we can’t play God. Should I swim out there in the middle of the night?”
“Mick,” she said softly. “What I’m saying is, how can you be so calm? This is your little brother we’re talking about.”
Calm? He was calm?
He examined her elegant jaw line, her prominent, rounded forehead, her eyes betraying more than a hint of panic.
He was more than panicked. He was drowning in despair.
“I guess I’m afraid,” he admitted. “I’m afraid that everything in our life is coming to an end.”
At that moment, twin beams of a car’s headlights raked the front of the restaurant. A crass blue light flashed through the downpour.
“Oh great. It’s the police,” she said under her breath. “They found his body.”
A door flew open. Rain pattered on the outdoor awning. Two wet boots stomped on a mat.
For the first time that evening, Mick focused on the possibility that Alec might actually be dead. He fingered his glass of white Vaudois wine. His brother’s life was more fragile than the stem of his wine glass. Alec had survived many mishaps in his life, but all it took was one slip for everything to end.
“This is it,” he finally conceded.
A young man in a dripping mackintosh blustered into the foyer. Mick recognized the cake pan hat.
He was a gendarme, the police.
The young man was asking a disconcerted waitress for “Monsieur Pierce.”
Mick stood up and extended a hand to his wife. Her arm felt stiff as he escorted her to the foyer.
“I’m Mr. Pierce,” he told the gendarme.
The gendarme’s self-confident expression disappeared in Mick’s imposing shadow.
“You’ll have to come with me.” There was a tremble in his voice.
Natalie intervened. “I’m Natalie Pierce, with the American Embassy in Bern. This is my husband Mick. What’s the trouble?”
The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed perceptibly. “I’m not arresting you,” he assured her. “I need you to identify a body.”
A body.
Mick felt his wife sway back against his hands. All sounds receded.
The smell of fresh rain on the man’s rubbery coat reminded him of Taos rainstorms, when he would race his younger half-brother across the high New Mexican plain to the school bus stop.
Suddenly Alec was real again. Tall, slim, blond-haired, handsome. And dead.
The man excused himself and turned to the waitress. “May I use your phone?”
The young woman pushed the black house phone his way.
Mick strained to hear the two sides of the conversation.
A minute later, Mick turned to his wife with the scoop. “He’s a local cop. And since we’re diplomats, he needs federal authority.”
“God, this could take all night,” she said.
“Let’s wait in another room.”
He dragged her back to the now-empty restaurant, where they pulled out chairs and sat looking at each other across a table.
Bottles clinked together as a waiter pushed a cart over the wooden floor toward them.
“Two cognacs, please,” Mick said.
“Certainement.” The waiter picked out a bottle and filled two snifters. He swirled the drinks until the amber liqueur clung to the sides. “Santé.”
“Thanks,” Mick said. “Chambre cinq.”
The waiter jotted the room number on a tablet, and left.
Natalie held her glass in both hands, but didn’t drink. Perhaps the vapors were enough.
Mick downed it all in one warm, soothing gulp.
“Will it end like this?” she said at last, mostly to herself. “On a rainy night in Montreux? In a sailboat?” Her look challenged him to explain the final, cruel irony.
Alec wasn’t just Mick’s younger sibling. He had been their constant, if shadowy, companion on numerous covert assignments on three continents. From civil insurrections to open warfare, Alec and Mick had used their CIA training on the Camp Peary proving grounds to kick holes in the plans of rulers and renegades that threatened to destabilize the world.
“A boating accident seems trivial after a life like his,” he said. “
Besides, things don’t just happen to Alec.”
From facing firing squads at extermination camps to shielding himself from nuclear blasts, Alec had always managed to escape with his life and complete his mission.
Mick knew his brother well. Alec didn’t actively court danger, unless it was a means to an end.
Things didn’t happen to Alec. He made things happen.
Although different agencies employed them, Natalie had worked closely with Alec in Switzerland. As the science and technology officer at the embassy in Bern, she had expended considerable effort developing relations with CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory just a short drive north of Geneva. Her goal was to hammer out a formal, and advantageous, relationship with CERN.
Alec worked in the laboratory as a “security advisor” to the embassy’s liaison team. This had placed him in close contact with her, as well as with the greatest scientific minds in the world. And he had brought her the contacts and insights that she needed to put her on the threshold of formal relations with CERN.
The Bern assignment had come as a welcome relief to Mick after a particularly harrowing tour in Asia. However, instead of rejuvenating him, his job had worn him down, and he found his career hitting a brick wall. Their jaunt to Montreux might well be their final test. If the relaxing environment couldn’t work its magic on them, nothing could.
That night had been anything but relaxing.
He felt the alcohol envelop his face like a furnace. It did unpredictable things to him, thanks to his mother’s Pueblo Indian blood.
He wiped a napkin over his perspiring upper lip and muttered an expression his Irish-American father often used: “You aren’t drunk so long as you can hold onto a blade of grass and keep from falling off the face of the earth.”
He had often felt that way when the CIA dropped a tough assignment in his lap. He was tanking up before all hell broke loose.
But this time was different.
This one struck too close to home. Alec’s life didn’t hang in the balance. This time, it was over.
As rain streamed down the windowpane, it seemed as if an artist were washing away a beautiful painting.