by Fritz Galt
Natalie dialed a number that she frequently called in Geneva.
“Rebecca Dupine, please,” she said.
She handed the phone to the young woman and whispered, “Ask her which country uses number 28 on their license plates. Don’t give her my name.”
Barbara nodded and swung her loose blonde locks away from the receiver. “Allo?”
A brief conversation in French ensued, and Barbara got her answer. She set the phone down triumphantly. “She said ‘Algeria.’ I didn’t even give your name.”
“Algeria,” Natalie repeated. Morocco’s neighbor and number one enemy had abducted Mick.
Barbara composed herself and took Natalie’s hand. “There’s someone who’d like to meet you.”
“Who even knows I’m here?”
“I couldn’t resist telling him about you and your problem. He promised to help.”
Natalie had wanted to seek out help on her own terms, not have people come to her. “What can he do?”
“You will find him very resourceful. He’s also a bit of a—what do you call it? A lady killer.”
“Don’t worry. I can look out for myself.”
Barbara sat back and appraised Natalie’s appearance. “I think with a few touches here and there, he will go for you.”
“I’m not looking for a lover, and I don’t need a makeover, thank you.”
“What I’m saying is this.” Barbara looked at her directly. “He doesn’t simply go for a woman’s personality. If you want him to help you and not turn his back on you, you need to follow his wishes. Every one of them, if you know what I mean. You have to be prepared for anything. Otherwise, he’s touchy. I’ve seen him blow cold and dump a woman like that.” And she snapped her fingers.
Then why bother with him? But Natalie smiled appreciatively. “Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind.”
Suddenly, the doorbell chimed.
She looked up with alarm.
“That must be him,” Barbara said, and smiled reassuringly. She trotted to the entryway and leaned on the intercom button.
Natalie could hear a man clearing his throat. “Hello. Anaïs?”
Barbara gave Natalie a sideways glance.
“Your name isn’t Barbara?” Natalie whispered.
“My deception didn’t last long, did it?” She leaned against the buzzer. At the bottom of the marble staircase, a door clicked open.
“His name is Khalid. I think you’ll like him. He’s one of Alec’s friends.”
A handsome, dark-skinned man in a black turtleneck and checkered blazer appeared at the top of the stairs. He clutched a wilted daisy and gave Anaïs a whimsical smile.
“Sorry,” he said, and placed the flower over one of her ears. “I came late as usual.” He sent two kisses flying over her shoulders.
“Au contraire.” she said. “Please come in, and I’ll introduce you to Alec’s sister-in-law, Natalie.”
He turned to Natalie. “I’m very happy to meet you.” He started for a handshake, caught her eye and displayed a look of unexpected pleasure. Then he seemed to change his mind. He raised her hand to his lips and gave a wet peck that landed on her wedding ring.
“Come in.” Anaïs showed her two guests into the living room.
Perhaps too shy to look at Natalie directly, Khalid perched on the edge of the sofa and waited for Anaïs to say something.
“I met Khalid through my British acquaintance, Sir Trevor O’Smythe. Khalid looks after my welfare.”
“Oh, I see,” Natalie said, not seeing anything. She thought Anaïs had said that Khalid was Alec’s friend.
They distributed themselves like daubs of paint on the white furniture.
“I owe a debt of gratitude to your brother-in-law,” Khalid said to Natalie, words suddenly bubbling out. “He found me a job where he works. I’m an engineer barely surviving in a city awash in diplomats.”
“So you work at CERN?”
“That’s right. It wasn’t easy for me to get the job. After all, as you can see, I’m not European. However, it helps to ‘network.’” The young man laughed, his beautiful set of teeth sparkling.
“Where are you from?” she inquired.
“I’m from Morocco. My family lives in a town outside Casablanca.”
That was perfect. He was Moroccan, and the transcript warned about a Moroccan. Her sly little Swiss friend may have delivered her right into the hands of the enemy.
“Thank you for asking,” he continued. “Naturally, I’m proud of my native land.”
“I’ve never been there,” she said.
“Oh, what a pity,” he said in a charming, European way.
“I’m sure Natalie has traveled to far more places than the two of us have,” Anaïs said. “After all, she is a diplomat.”
Khalid’s tanned face blushed to a darker shade. “You understand, of course, that I was only joking about diplomats.”
“No offense taken,” she said.
The young engineer still looked uncomfortable.
“Listen,” Natalie said. “I’m interested in learning more about CERN. Perhaps you, as an engineer, could answer my more technical questions.”
“I’m not much of an engineer,” he confessed.
“Oh, come now. I don’t believe that.”
He couldn’t be working at the world’s greatest laboratory if he didn’t have some qualifications.
“Of course,” he continued, “I know nothing that Alec couldn’t answer himself.”
“That’s the problem,” Anaïs said, suddenly choking on her words. “Alec is missing.”
Khalid frowned and started to stare a hole through the carpet. “I haven’t seen him, personally, since Friday,” he said.
“It’s on all our minds,” Natalie explained.
“Oh, madame, I’m extremely sorry.”
He implored Natalie with his eyes, but she didn’t feel like meeting them. So he turned to Anaïs, who, by that point, was a mess.
“Naturally I will help.” He rose to his feet, ready for action.
“Thank you, Khalid,” Anaïs said softly. “I was counting on your help.”
“I stand ready.”
Natalie had to take up the offer. She stood up and Khalid spun around. “You can help us by answering some questions.”
“Please ask me.”
“However, now is not the time,” she said, indicating Anaïs.
Her hand fell on his broad shoulders. She felt the tight weave stretch as he turned toward their distraught friend.
“Then we’ll talk later,” he said. “Perhaps we can set a date after work.”
“A date?”
He became flustered. “By that, I mean a rendezvous.”
“A rendezvous?”
“By that, I mean a—” He seemed to notice her for the first time, and fixed his dark, penetrating eyes on her. “A date.”
“Tonight?” she asked.
“Of course, tonight.”
“Then I accept,” she said.
Like two neutral atoms brought together by an unknown force, they shook hands.
Then the Moroccan bid adieu, spun around and shot out the apartment, the door bouncing off the heel of his loafers.
Natalie sat down slowly, her heart racing.
What the hell had she just done? She felt like she had opened a door into a dark room filled with lizards and serpents, and the tantalizing unknown.
Chapter 15
Mick sat in brilliant sunlight on the back steps of Sir Trevor O’Smythe’s villa. He bent over to lace his pair of fur-lined boots.
In addition to Trevor, the hiking party consisted of Zafina, the dark-haired man named Yashito and a scrawny, ageless Swiss Bergführer, a mountain guide.
Mick drove a ski pole into the rocky dirt and joined the group.
The guide had picked out a route that led around huge boulders and generally traversed the mountainside. At one point, they crossed a large field of brilliant wildflowers.
Mick pause
d to admire a rare, star-shaped Edelweiss. Above him, pipits soared in the wind and warbled their pipe-like song.
Then he heard a scraping noise and looked up. A pair of striped-faced antelopes called chamois skittered across the rocky slope.
Within half an hour, the hiking party emerged on the steep face of Mount Allalin itself. Their route would take them under the cables of a ski lift.
The old guide silently uncoiled a rope that he had been carrying and payed it out to the others. Mick was next to last to grab it, just before Zafina.
“Rock field…between that station…and us,” Trevor said, breathing heavily in the thin air. He grinned at Mick. “Hope you’re ready for this.”
Mick glanced up at a gondola station that clung to a promontory several hundred feet above them.
“Piece of cake.” He wiped off the sweat that dripped off his face.
Swinging from three cables, a series of gondolas climbed up from the valley floor. He estimated that there were two stations above him before skiers reached the glacier.
The guide probed the shale and granite rubble, then found a foothold and shifted his weight onto the rocks. Step by step, the party traced his route upward.
After a hundred feet, they reached an embankment that blocked their upward progress. At the foot of the small cliff was a ledge that diminished into a narrow crack in the side of the mountain. They had reached a dead end.
Trevor sat on the ledge and pulled a flask from his rucksack.
“Care for…a peg…Yashito?”
The small man in sunglasses hunkered down beside him, but declined to drink.
“Down the hatch,” Trevor said.
“If you didn’t drink like a blowfish,” Yashito said in lightly accented English, “you wouldn’t have failed us. CERN has voted to allow in the Americans.”
“I never let alcoholic refreshment impair my faculties,” Trevor asserted, regaining his breath. “We simply ran out of time. We didn’t anticipate CERN agreeing so quickly.”
Mick stood next to the guide, who had begun to hammer steel pitons into the rock face. Between clanging hammer strokes, he picked up most of the conversation.
“I have only this afternoon to talk,” Yashito said. “I must offer you a way to save face.”
“Fire away,” Trevor said. “Save my face.” He took another swig.
“The Americans have already begun their secret research. You could redeem yourself by stopping their experiment. Our industry simply cannot let one country dominate the market.”
“Do you really think those room-temperature superconductors will work?”
Yashito nodded, his expression deadly serious.
Superconductors? What the hell were they talking about? And what did that have to do with anything?
“How fast is superconductivity really advancing?” Trevor asked with skepticism. “Where is the instantaneous communication? Where are the floating trains? The super-small transformers?”
“I’m only talking about computers,” Yashito said simply. “I’ll make it easy for you. Either halt the experiment or get us the research data.”
“How is that easy? Look, I’m a broker. I don’t run a stable of scientists. I’ve only got my one man at CERN. I’d need an army of scientists for what you’re proposing.”
“I’m not here to negotiate. I’m here to tell you our decision.”
“Yashito,” Trevor said, and patted the man on the back. He gave Mick a significant look. “I have some news for you that’ll make your blood run cold. What if I told you that we have within our grasp the opportunity to make the ultimate kill?”
“Your methods are of no interest to me,” Yashito said.
“No? I’m talking about brokering something that’ll both clear the Americans out of CERN and restore my deeply shattered credibility.”
“I don’t care about your saving face. All we want is the experiment destroyed or the lab results.”
Sir Trevor O’Smythe paused, and during that interval the heat seemed to dissipate from the conversation. “Do you remember old Mohammed Boudiaf?”
“I never heard of him.”
“December, 1991. Islamic Party wins nearly half the seats in the first round of Algeria’s parliamentary elections.”
Yashito shook his head.
“The army forces the president to resign and nullifies the election. They install a puppet state council headed by Mohammed Boudiaf.”
“And so?” Yashito said, still uninterested.
“The fundamentalist party is rendered illegal and its leaders are thrown into prison. All political activities are banned at the more than ten thousand mosques in Algeria. More than forty thousand citizens die in the turmoil. If you were an Islamic fundamentalist, how would you stop the new dictator?”
Mick could have finished Trevor’s story.
“Six months later, in front of television cameras and a packed auditorium in Annaba, Mohammed Boudiaf, President of Algeria, is cut to pieces in a deadly hail of automatic gunfire.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I own the assassin,” Trevor breathed in Yashito’s ear, just loud enough for all to hear. “And I’ll bag you the President of the United States.”
Yashito turned abruptly, his eyes filled with horror. “You won’t kill the American president.”
Mick gnawed his lip. If it weren’t for Zafina’s taut form between him and Sir Trevor, he would have driven the scheming bastard off the cliff.
“I’ve just learned through my sources,” Trevor continued, “that the president is coming to CERN for the final signing.”
Mick felt an icy current trickle down his spine. Trevor’s contacts were good. Damned good.
Mick hadn’t even heard that President Damon was coming to Geneva. And he worked at the embassy!
“If you kill the president, you’ll ruin us,” Yashito responded, measuring his words. “The Japanese yen is too weak, and our economy couldn’t handle the shock. You won’t kill the president.”
Yashito stood and wiped his palms on his pants, leaving a visible streak of sweat. His eyes revealed more than a trace of panic.
For his part, Trevor sported a reassuring grin. “I will honor my contract.”
He stood and gave Yashito another fraternal slap on the back that sent the man leaning out over the precipice. Trevor laughed and yanked the man back by his collar.
“Come along, old chap. Let’s complete our little tramp.”
Natalie dropped to the couch with a thud. She had to take control of her new life.
In the mirror, she studied what looked like a brazen broad who ate men for lunch. And she didn’t look very contrite.
But every minute wasted was a minute lost until she found Mick, and she had to use all the weapons in her arsenal.
Then questions came to the fore. Mick was a spy, but was he leading a double life? Was she just his cover? Where did his heart really lie?
Anaïs’ round face was still concentrating on a single thought. “Perhaps we should start by searching Alec’s flat.”
“Good idea,” Natalie said. “But how can we force our way in?”
“I rarely go there, but I do have a key.”
Natalie had to laugh. It was time to ease up on the undercover crap.
Anaïs disappeared into the kitchen and then reemerged with a jar. “I worried about him, so I kept a key,” she explained. She lifted a bag of flour out and found an unlabeled key. “He lives in the Old City.”
Natalie knew the place.
The Rhône River entered Lake Geneva near Montreux to the east and issued from the southwest corner of the lake, dividing Geneva into two “banks.” Alec lived on the far side, the Left Bank.
“Come. I’ll drive,” Anaïs said.
Despite Sir Trevor O’Smythe’s poor diet and ill health, he was still agile.
Mick watched the old man’s technique before following him up the rope. Beneath the floppy, outmoded lederhosen flexed thick bands of mus
cle.
Mick wedged his boots against the rock, grasped the rope and leaned back over open space. Then, hand over hand, he hauled himself up, walking perpendicular to the granite wall.
At the first piton, he leaned forward, carefully placed the tip of his boot on the steel, unclasped the safety harness from the rope and swiftly refastened it above the piton.
One by one, the group cleared the vertical face and stood, knees bent for balance, on slightly sloping, and unanchored, gravel.
“Fifty feet to go,” Trevor said, gasping, and the group set forth in line. They remained tethered together for safety and, effectively, for captivity.
Mick skittered over the rubble that engineers had dynamited to create a flat foundation for the gondola station.
With his back bent and perspiration prickling his neck, he conquered the last stretch of slope in step with the others.
Thighs burning, he unshackled from the rope and joined the group that had dropped to the ground in the shade of the station.
“So, what can you tell me about this American experiment?” Trevor asked Yashito, who sat on the slope just below them.
“You told me you’re not a scientist,” Yashito said.
“Well, try me. How could a particle accelerator possibly advance the study of superconductivity?”
“Particle irradiation,” Yashito said.
“What, blow the thing to smithereens?”
“Trevor, I’m not sure you’re the person to handle this assignment.”
As Yashito stared at the basin below, Trevor raised a boot behind the man’s back. He grinned at Zafina, but he didn’t kick out.
Yashito rotated his head and shoulders, stretching and relaxing.
“Exactly what kind of results do you want?” Trevor asked. “Let’s get specific.”
“We want to know if the experiment is successful. Do they produce the superconducting film that meets their specifications? And what are its characteristics?”
“You want me to steal the film?” Trevor suggested.
“No, not the film. They’re irradiating a variety of substrates on which the film will be crystallized.”
“I’m afraid this is a bit over my head.”
“Okay, I’ll try to explain. The substrate will be a blueprint for creating all the thin film and circuitry in the future.”