by Fritz Galt
Maybe she could take refuge down there.
Time was short. Fumbling in the dark, she shuffled down stone steps past a flickering torch. Beside it was a narrow opening in the granite wall. With some effort, she could squeeze through.
People were smaller in the past. Scraping the stone walls on both sides, she eased sideways through the crack.
At the end, a dark, empty grotto stood before her. The echo of her tiny grunts returned immediately from the far wall. It was a dungeon, no larger than a handball court.
Footsteps pounded close behind.
A pinprick of sunlight faintly defined a row of stout columns, the only place to hide.
Running to them, she chose the fourth column and pivoted around behind it. Its chipped surface felt rough, like the bark of a tree.
Suddenly, the footsteps behind her slowed to a cautious prowl.
She edged further around the column, her buttocks rubbing against the cold stone. Then she caught her breath. There, etched in the pillar before her, were Lord Byron’s initials.
Lines of the epic poem, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” suddenly came back to her.
There are seven pillars of Gothic mould,
In Chillon's dungeons deep and old,
And in each pillar there is a ring,
And in each ring there is a chain.
The poem was based on a true story. A clergyman had been chained for four years to the fifth pillar for his radical reformist beliefs.
Now she was a prisoner, facing that pillar.
The man eased into the chamber and came to a halt. All she could hear was his labored breathing.
She held her breath and tried to quiet her wildly pounding heart.
A single, keyhole-sized window above her had brought the prisoner his only light, and hope.
A metallic click resounded in the dungeon. The release of a gun’s safety.
She closed her eyes. Spare her life. For Mick. She swallowed hard. Unless, of course, he was with that damned broad.
She imagined being shackled for life to the pillar, knowing that he was out there mindlessly screwing some wench.
In that case, don’t spare her life. She’d rather die.
If she ever got out of there alive, she vowed to find out the truth about Mick, good or bad.
Her heart began to race anew. She shut her eyes and squeezed her arms and legs taut. She held her breath and yearned to be free.
She heard the scraping noise of footsteps. They were receding back down the narrow crack in the wall.
The man was leaving.
She released her breath. Her legs began to quiver. They felt like rubber.
Pivoting slowly, she grasped the pillar. She couldn’t wait to get out of that cold, empty chamber.
All it took was a minute or two longer. The Prisoner of Chillon had waited for four years, watching his brothers die beside him. She could wait another few minutes.
Dried sweat stung her cheeks. There wasn’t a single sound to be heard. It felt like waiting in a coffin.
She couldn’t hold out much longer.
Pushing away from the column, she stumbled across the dungeon floor. She pressed into the opening and followed the light.
The courtyard looked like paradise. Though tiny and completely enclosed, it felt like the most enormous space she had ever seen.
An indignant voice carried across the drawbridge. The ticket taker was harassing the man in sweat pants.
He must have retraced his steps in order to rethink his options.
If he thought about it, he would search the castle more thoroughly. And he wouldn’t buy a ticket.
Her only escape route was up a wooden staircase at the far end of the courtyard.
She scurried past the gate and dashed for the stairs.
There, several elderly Oriental tourists were climbing down at the end of their tour. She didn’t have time for courtesy, and sent them sprawling to either side, mounting the steps three at a time. Just before she ducked inside, she saw the man return to the courtyard.
He spotted her.
Damn.
It was dark inside the castle. She groped the ancient masonry walls and stumbled forward until she found more stairs. It was a narrow set of well-worn stones that led up to a lighted room. She found an iron railing and hauled herself up.
What would Mick do in such a circumstance? Climb, fight or hide?
He rarely put his life at risk. He had learned to drive a desk with perfection. Spies didn’t run around escaping danger anymore. But look at her. What a sorry excuse for a spook.
In a small room at the top, a tiny aperture looked out on the shoreline. There was no way to climb out, and there was nowhere to hide in the room.
She had to move on.
The only exit led to a dressing room where medieval gowns hung from pegs. For a brief moment, she considered trying to disguise herself.
She headed for the next doorway, where she met an influx of schoolchildren.
Behind her, the man had just pounded to the top of the steps.
Stumbling into the next chamber, she found more children peering down circular holes in a wooden bench. They were ancient toilets that emptied directly into the lake three floors below. Would Mick flush himself out the castle toilet?
Children cried out and bodies crumpled to the floor behind her. The assailant was closing in fast.
After several more turns, she came to a room with a high-beamed ceiling. The room was a cross between a ballroom and an armory.
Pointed Gothic windows illuminated small alcoves where ladies could rest between dances.
But this was no dance.
Armor, axes and spears lined the gray and white checked walls. She could grab a spear and gore the man.
But could she stop a bullet?
Without thinking, she grasped an axe with both hands and stood, pivoting, in the middle of the room.
Through the stone casements on one side was the courtyard. She turned the other way. Brilliant sunlight reflected through an arched doorway.
That looked promising. Axe in hand, she sprinted to the opening.
Suddenly outdoors, she came to a screeching halt. She was three floors above the lake on a small wooden balcony. There was no escape.
Footsteps slapped into the ballroom. She spun about to the lake and the axe suddenly flew out of her hands.
Several seconds later, she heard it splash in the water.
“Natalie!”
A frightened voice called up from far below.
A motorboat rocked in the waves mere feet from where the axe had splashed. Barbara stood beside the skipper, shouting, “Jump!”
Who was Natalie supposed to be, James Bond?
Then she heard a muffled spit, and a piece of wood splintered beside her head. The guy was firing at her.
Okay. She would do it.
She threw a leg over the balcony and twisted her body. Her foot missed the railing, and suddenly she was falling sideways.
Air rushed past her and blood pounded in her ears. She was weightless.
Now what?
Glancing over her shoulder, she saw sunlight on the surface. She shut her eyes.
Clawing the air, she tried to turn upright. Instead, she was turning upside down.
At the last instant, she tucked in her head and curled into a ball.
Her back hit the water like a concussion grenade, knocking the air out of her. That was followed by a gush of bubbles, then silence. She opened her eyes. She was in a murky green aquarium.
Her lungs were empty.
She stretched her arms out and pulled for the surface.
The distant hum of a propeller turned into a clear whining buzz.
She broke the surface and gasped for air, inhaling droplets of water.
White foam washed over her. The boat was going to ram her.
Coughing, spluttering and snorting water from her nose, she cleared her lungs and dove several yards below the surface.
&
nbsp; She didn’t have much air and had inhaled too much water. She was turning delirious. She needed to pause and take account of her circumstance. Above her, the turbulence had subsided into small waves that lapped in quick succession.
Her waterlogged shoes were pulling her downward. She couldn’t afford to be too far from air. So she kicked them off. Thrashing at the water with her arms and bare feet, she returned to the surface.
She sucked air into her lungs and coughed immediately.
The view was a blur, so she wiped the water from her eyes.
The motorboat had spun to a standstill, and she was in its wake.
“Quick. This way,” Barbara called.
Natalie’s coughing persisted, and she couldn’t respond.
A pair of strong hands pulled her over the stern onto a varnished wooden deck.
“Thanks,” she croaked through chattering teeth.
The boat’s captain responded briefly, then fell to the deck beside her.
Barbara had opened the throttle and they were pulling away.
Natalie grabbed the sun-soaked vinyl cushions and looked back.
A large spreading wake separated them from the castle’s sheer face. From the balcony, the assailant fired a few errant shots. In the next room over, tiny faces stared down at her through round holes.
She closed her eyes. How had she ever gotten down out of that castle? She was either a klutz or a stuntman. In either case, it was a miracle.
At last she opened her eyes.
Barbara was handing the helm back over to the captain. A bullet still occasionally hit the deck.
The castle was just a blob in the distance.
“Damn him,” Natalie said.
“Damn who?” Barbara asked, sliding across the deck to her.
“Damn Mick.” She slumped against the hot cushion. “He wouldn’t get chased down like that. And he wouldn’t have made such an incompetent boob of himself. Wasn’t that the most uncoordinated, humiliating thing you ever saw?”
She looked to Barbara for sympathy, then realized she was appealing to an aerobics instructor.
In retrospect, it was amazing that she hadn’t split her head open or been struck by a bullet.
“Actually, Mick wouldn’t have gotten into such a situation in the first place,” Natalie mused, “because he would have been too preoccupied with that other woman.”
“Aren’t you mad at the man with the gun?” Barbara said.
“Damn him, too,” she said, remembering how the man was rifling through her jeans in the locker room. “I wonder what he was after.”
“How about this?” Barbara said. She reached into her hip pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.
“How did you get that?”
Barbara grinned and leaned back, enjoying the warm breeze that whistled over the speeding boat. “I pinched it before class.”
Natalie squinted in the sunlight at the round, impish face. “I suppose I should ask you why you were going through my pockets.”
“I also took this,” Barbara said, and handed her Mick’s watch.
“Thank you.” She grabbed the watch and flipped it over. Her inscription to Mick reflected harshly in the sunlight, “With love forever.”
They were only words.
She studied the aerobics instructor’s bland smile that seemed to hold back volumes of information. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
Barbara lifted an index finger to her lips and shook her head adamantly.
“A personal question?” she insisted.
Barbara’s look of resolve softened.
Natalie felt like saying, “Who the hell are you really, Barbara, and what’re you trying to do with me?” But she was playing a role. She was playing the cheated wife. In fact, she was the cheated wife.
“Tell me. You saw her. What did she look like?”
“Who are you talking about?”
“You know. The woman who stole my husband.”
Barbara looked her up and down. “She is no different from you. Only…”
“Only what.”
“Only she seemed to adore him.”
That hurt.
Natalie stared at the young woman. Was she there just to inflict mental pain? What in her fresh features were her shadowy purposes?
“I’m afraid I’m too big a burden for you,” she said at last. “All I need are some clothes, and I’ll be on my way.”
“No, I insist. We must take care of you.”
“And who, exactly, do you mean by ‘we’?”
Barbara turned away and faced the shoreline.
“I’m sorry,” Natalie said. “No more questions.”
The motorboat churned north past Montreux.
The fifty-meter Helvétie III steamer was just pulling into port. Like a ship torn in two directions, it had two flags. A French flag with its blue, white and red horizontal stripes fluttered on the bow, while a stout white Swiss cross ruffled over the stern.
With her back to the castle and the French border, she needed to leave the resorts and castles and motorboats behind and join the real world where international agendas mixed. If she had any hope of uncovering the truth behind Mick and Alec’s disappearance, she would have to start somewhere with cosmopolitan character, an international community and a complex society where dark forces operated and where she could hide. She would have to go to the patron city that lent its name to the lake.
“Can this boat go all the way to the far end of the lake?” she asked.
Barbara relayed the question to the man behind the wheel.
He nodded without looking back.
Barbara smiled at her and placed a hand on her knee. “So,” she said in her personable, chatty way. “We go to Geneva.”
Chapter 9
Lake Geneva was serene and Natalie began to feel its calming effects.
Seagulls soared on black wingtips behind the motorboat, and the hot noonday air pressed against her face. She would accept whatever her future held.
The boat sped past the Hostellerie du Lac where she and Mick had made impassioned love with abandon the night before. They had even explored several practices they had never tried before. It was all hard to put out of her mind.
They glided past villas facing the sunny south, past grassy beaches and children floating peacefully on inflatable mattresses.
Soon the tall trees of Vevey’s waterfront edged into view. From the large Trois Couronnes hotel, Henry James had written about society forcing the demise of the unconventional American, Daisy Miller.
Like Daisy, she didn’t care about social taboos. She was fighting a just and sacred war.
Vevey had seen its share of literary figures. And the sound of Charlie Chaplin shepherding his grandchildren during the final decades of his life still echoed down Vevey’s ancient streets.
Such an idyllic life.
The coastline turned rural with Switzerland’s customary verdant fields separated by stone walls. White houses and small roads adorned the rounded fields like Christmas tree trimming. A poorly fitting toupee of a patchy green forest crowned each hill.
The sweet-smelling fields and sparkling lake disappeared into a sunny haze before them.
Natalie unfolded the computer printout that Barbara had rescued from her pants. The former coroner Dr. Laudier had most likely been killed for the information it contained.
She had to assume that Barbara had already read it, so she didn’t try to cover the words. She squinted and turned her back to cast a shadow over the faint, dot matrix type.
My name’s Alec Pierce. Contact my brother at the Hostellerie du Lac in Montreux. Hit my head. Inhaled water. Tell him the bastard’s from the Proteus organization of Morocco. A jihad. (unintelligible) Speaks English, French, Spanish, Arabic. He’ll track thinking Lucerne. Dear Allah, I can’t breathe.
She had no idea that Alec and Mick were involved with some jihad, and the poor man’s last words made absolutely no sense. What did Lucerne, a city in ce
ntral Switzerland, have to do with anything?
If only she had read and discussed the transcript with Mick before making love with him.
She knew she didn’t need to punish herself with “if onlys,” but, the transcript was useless without some explanation. And without knowing who the victim was talking about, she couldn’t find Mick.
Three impressive buildings, a château, a palace and a Gothic cathedral, stood over the tile roofs of Lausanne. If it weren’t for the threads of thin bridges connecting its three steep hills, the city would never have grown past the fishing village of Ouchy.
Without her marriage to Mick, she never could have become who she was, nor achieved all that she had done in her life. He was basically an honest man, not like that creep on the phone. Could she ever swallow her pride and forgive her husband for his indiscretions?
They passed lake steamers gathering at Lausanne’s customs building. Boats from France unloaded hordes of commuters and tourists. The terminal sat on a romantic park sprinkled with statues, fountains, flower gardens and couples passing among the wispy linden trees.
So many people mixing together in the world. So much opportunity for the chance love affair.
What was she thinking about? Mick had dumped her. It was over.
But a tiny voice in the back of her mind reminded her that Mick had been abducted, which was not exactly the same thing as straying from his marriage vows.
She thought back to her conversation with the chameleon on the phone, his voice changing from accent to accent.
Did that bastard know how to speak “French, Spanish, Arabic?”
She wouldn’t be surprised. He could have easily come from the “Proteus organization of Morocco.” He could be a terrorist from some lunatic jihad. He certainly made Mick look like a saint.
How odd. He had made no ransom demand for Mick and asked for no publicity. In her limited experience, a kidnapper usually tried to extort money. In her fairly broader experience with terrorists, the goal was large-scale publicity for their cause.
He hadn’t seized the moment when his credibility was firmly established to do either. If he truly had anything to say, he would have told her then and there. Instead, all he bothered to do was to joke, mock her and tell her not to report the incident.